SOLVED with Mark Manson - No Regrets, The Case Against Empathy, and Is AI Coming for Us All?

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

This week, we dive headfirst into the messy, uncomfortable topic of regret. From the aches and grays that come with hitting a new decade to the deeper realizations about relationships, selfish mistakes, and missed opportunities, we unpack how regret shapes who we are. And there's a twist: what if regret isn’t something to fear or avoid? What if it’s a tool for growth? I share my own stories of taking people for granted, self-destructive habits, and the lessons I’ve learned about self-forgiveness and choosing your regrets wisely. We also tackle some fascinating questions about whether empathy is actually good for society. Is it always a good thing, or can it sometimes lead us astray? To round things off, we share our thoughts on AI and its impact on creativity and human connection. Enjoy. Chapters 01:14 The F*ck of the Week: No Regrets? 19:36 Brilliant or Bullsh*t: Is Empathy Always a Good Thing? 40:45 Q&A: Is AI coming for us all? Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: https://markmanson.net/breakthrough Theme song: Icarus Lives by Periphery, used with permission from Periphery. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content. The books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, it gives you specific personalized direction.

So check it out. You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose. That is purpose. Dot app. Mark, I joined the club. Oh, which one? I just turned 40.

Oh, shit. And I'm not. This isn't fishing for some celebration here. I completely forgot. No, no, no, no. You wish me on my birthday. No, no, no. I remembered on your birthday.

I completely forgot. I was like, we're going to use Drew's birthday as a cold open. And then I forgot. Yeah. I didn't forget. I've actually been reminded that I'm 40 every day since I've been 40. How is it? How have your 40s been?

It's been, what, a week now? It's been a week. It's been a week. The entire week leading up to my birthday, I'm not shitting you. My back hurt. Just preparing you. It's just getting your body is getting you ready for what's ahead. So my back hurt.

My hair, I'm sure, got gray hair. It just keeps getting grayer and grayers. Everybody is pointing out. It does that. It also, though, too, I don't know about you, but I don't really do the whole, I sit down at the first of the year and I don't really do much of that. But birthdays, I kind of sit back and look back at the year behind the year ahead where I've been, where I've come from.

It's the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Manson. How would you rate 39? Was it, was it an A year, a B year? What was it? It was, this was one, it was a mixed bag year, for sure.

We've done a lot of work, you know, professionally we've done, doing a lot of work. We've had a lot of ups and downs with that. Sure. You know,

and just personally things happen to. I felt like my, like my mid 30s were like, man, this is, I'm like, I'm winning. And, you know, we talked previously

on an episode about like, I always got to keep in mind like, eh, there's something around the corner. Life has a, whenever you just like, feel like you're winning for too long, Life has a way of reminding you who's boss.

It was not in like a fatalistic catastrophic way by any means, but I was just reminded of some things and it kind of made me be grateful. Also though, it started to make me think about like maybe what I would have done differently up to this point. Okay. Which is what I kind of want to, that's what I want to talk about today for the fuck of the week. Regret. Regret.

Are you a man of regret? I think the older I get, the less I am. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a man of very few regrets. You are. We've talked about this. You and I just personally, we've talked about this before. And you're fucking weird, man. I don't have like the regret bone, the shame bone. I have very little of it. It's like you're like, oh, I would have done this differently. But then you just move on. Yeah. You move on. I was like, yeah, I fuck that up. All right. I dwell on shit. One thing I've started to notice, though, is that I'm, I'm getting better at choosing my regrets, I think. Okay. I think anyway. That's fair. I, well, I do think it's probably.

not good to have zero regrets. But, you know, my approach to it was always, and I remember I actually wrote about this years and years and years ago, like very early in my career. I wrote that part of who you are as a person, part of your identity is all of your past experiences. So if there is any past experience that you wish never happened, you're essentially wishing for a part of yourself to not exist. And that just strikes me as incredibly unhelp. Like, why would I ever wish a part of myself to not exist. Yeah. That's just like a losing proposition.

So to me, it just, from the get go, it just seems emotionally, mentally imperative to find a justification or a silver lining for any and every experience I've had. That said, too, I've just, I've never been the sort of person that beats, like, I don't know, like, things roll off me pretty easily. Yeah. If I have a superpower, it's probably that. It's crazy. Like, I looked up some of the, you know, the surveys they've done on regret.

And people regret education, things, you know, decisions they made around education, their careers, romance, parenting, self-improvement, leisure activities. I wish I would have traveled more, that sort of thing. I don't know. None of those really land for me. And I don't know. Do any of those when I pop, when I read those off, do they pop up for you like, oh, I wish I would have done that differently? No. I'm the kind of the same for those. But it is, you know, there's.

is that cliche that that the most most regrets are the things that you haven't done right yeah and regrets of omission not yes commission right yes and um i i definitely have always taken that the heart and been like i would rather regret doing something and falling on my face than regret not trying at all so i try to keep that in mind but i don't know i to me it's i feel like a lot of people's regret. Like, there was a thing that went super, super viral 10 or 12 years ago. It was like a hospice nurse wrote the five most common regrets of the dying. It turned into a book and a TED Talk and all this stuff. Everything was, you know, I spent too much time at work. I didn't spend enough time with loved ones. I fought over stupid things, you know, got sucked up in the drama and things.

So, to me, they were all like pretty obvious. I'm not saying I don't struggle with those things. do, but there's nothing like coming out of left field. There's nothing like, oh, wow, I never expected somebody to regret that. It's like, yeah, we're, we tend to take things, like, we're human. We take things for granted. We get upset over, like, petty, stupid things. We probably work too much and don't spend enough time with loved ones, you know. So I don't know if I have regrets around that, but it's like, I don't know. I definitely look at past behaviors and even current behaviors, and I'm like, yeah, that could be, that could have been done better. Yeah. So, do Do you have any regrets at all then?

I mean, everybody does. That's kind of my point here is much like the fucks we give. You have to give a fuck about something. You have to regret things in your life because everything you do has a cost to it, right? Yes. Yeah. I struggle, again, I struggle with this question a lot because of what I just said about the identity. Like, it's like all the mistakes I've made me who I am today.

So it's like the bar for me to actually genuinely regret something is extremely high. Because to me, what regret means is like if you could go back and undo it, you would. So there's very, very, very few things in my life that if I could go back and undo it, I would. My biggest embarrassments, my biggest failures, the tragedies and traumas and stuff, I wouldn't take those back. The only things that I can think of that if I could go back. and undo them, I would, tend to be times that I was really selfish or disrespectful to people I cared about. So there are, you know, I was kind of a drunk, narcissistic, selfish young man in my late teens

and early 20s. And I was kind of a dick to a number of people in my life and many of whom I cared deeply about. So there's some experiences around that that I'm like, yeah, if I could go back and not say that thing or not do that thing, that would have been, I would do that. Yeah, I think when I was thinking about this, again, like looking back on my life on my birthday or whatever, I was thinking of the embarrassment thing you brought up, right? And I used to, that used to really eat at me. Like, oh, I did this stupid thing 10, 20 years ago. That doesn't so much anymore. I think what I found was a little bit more clarity around, like I said, choosing, choosing.

my regrets. Yeah. And very similar to you, too. It's usually around, it's been around relationships. What I found, though, too, is that a lot of the regrets that I have have a common theme that kind of underlying, underlie all of them. It's been a theme of taking people for granted in my life. Yes, yes.

That's probably, that's the biggest regret I have around just about anything. I've lost big chunks of money doing stupid things. I've done dumb, dumb things where I put myself in danger or other people, whatever. It's the relationships that I've taken. for granted. It started like with grandparents when my grandparents started passing away. Right. Like that was kind of the first like, oh shit, you know. My grandma's not, my, my first grandparent died when I was 16. Yeah. And until the funeral, I didn't even really realize that she was gone. You know what I mean? And I was like, God, I took her for granted that

whole time. But when you're that age too, it's like, I get that, but then I continue to do it away into my adult life. Yeah. Ex-girlfriends, you know, other family members, my parents, It's funny because I'm the same. It's the taking for granted slash disrespect of other people. Like, I'll give you an example. I cheated on my girlfriends when I was young. And when I look back at that experience, on the one hand, if I'm only evaluating, you know, my life and my development and my growth and everything, I don't necessarily regret that because it's like I learned. I fucked up my relationships and I learned lessons from those things.

and I had to learn how to be a better partner and more committed and more honest. And I kind of had to go through some of those experiences to figure my shit out. Yeah. What kills me is when I think back to my girlfriends, how they didn't deserve that. Yes. How I really did care about them and I like was so blatantly disrespectful towards them. You know, the 40-year-old mark is horrified by my behavior. whereas, you know, the 20-year-old Mark, you know, was just kind of doing his thing.

Okay. I think we found a little pocket of regret there for a little smidge. Just a little smidgin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely, yeah, the taking for granted and like the bad behavior was part of it. The other kind of theme I saw running throughout all of this, though, too, was I took them for granted because in a way that I was, like, looking for some. something else. Something quote unquote better, you know, whether it was a family member or, you know,

ex-girlfriends or whatever it was. It was like, oh, I was behaving poorly because I was looking for something else. Yeah. And not like the biggest thing I actually do regret was not like appreciating what I had right in front of me, which was so much now that I realized that as I get older. Yeah. I had so much that was just like right in front of me. But isn't some of this just being a wise old man and looking back at your-

I was a question I was going to have for you too. Yeah. Like how much of this is... Because I think some of this is just being young. Like when you're young, you do take everything you grew up with for granted. And you do just kind of assume it's always going to be there. And you do assume that there's something better out in the world than whatever you got stuck with, you know, growing up with. And I certainly relate to that and that it's taken me a long time to come around and really appreciate a lot of

the people and things that I grew up with. So I hear you. I hear you. Now we sound like two old men sitting on a porch. Back in my day. I mean, yeah. Yes, that's true. And there is just some of it.

I mean, that's another lesson I've just learned about being a human being is that there's just some shit. You just have to learn on your own. And there's no way of getting around that. Yeah. I mean, I don't, again, to me, regret is like a very sure. strong word. For example, I, probably the closest thing that doesn't involve other people that I would potentially regret is it took me, I think, way too long to get on the health bandwagon. I had a lot

of very self-destructive habits when I was young and that persisted well into my 30s. And I was very cavalier about them. My brain is just very good at justifying whatever I want. And that worked against me with a lot of these self-destructive behaviors, I always found ways to justify them. And so my health got a little bit out of control in my 30s. And now that I have gotten my shit together, and I do have healthy habits, and I'm sober and I'm eating well and sleeping well and exercising and everything, I'm like, oh, why the fuck did I wait so long? I'm definitely having an experience of like, what if I did this 10 years ago? What if I went to half as many parties and drank half as much booze and instead spent that time in the gym. And it's,

I try not to dwell on that too much because it just, I don't know, I don't think it's very productive, but that pains me a little bit to think about, for sure. But do I regret it? I don't know, man. I have a lot of great fucking times. Yeah. Yeah. You do learn some crazy shit when you're. Yeah. And you've talked before too about like, you know, people say, I wish I wouldn't have spent so much time at work. And you were like, well, you went all in when you're in your 20s for years and you were not balanced and you don't regret that. You know, that sort of thing. So I think there's pockets of that where if you apply it in certain cases, you're okay. The health thing, though, that's a very, very common one that older people cite too.

Like, I regret how taking care of my health. Absolutely. And so I think there are just a handful of those. Like, if you ever get on a plane and there's somebody who looks like Yoda, like switch seats with whoever sit next to them. and talk to them about this kind of thing, because you will be blown away at what they come up with. Well, you know what's funny about that one, too? As you probably remember, when I turned 30,

we crowdsourced an article from the audience. I basically asked everybody in the audience. I said, if you're over 40, what do you wish somebody told you at your 30th birth? Like, what's your best piece of advice for somebody turning 30? And the number one piece of advice was, don't wait to get your health in order.

Yeah. Because by the time you're in your 40s and 50s, In some cases, it's too late or it's going to be too hard or it's, you know, whatever. And I fucking just completely disregarded that. It's like literally like 98% of my audience told me the same thing. And I was like, yeah, I'm good. Yeah. Yeah.

And it goes back to, it goes back to, we've talked about this before, but taking care of your health is all these little tiny things. Yes. And those, that takes a very, very long time to build that bank up, that bank of health, if you will. It does. And I think in my case, the, the issue was a lack of clear measurement. So it's, I fell victim to my own ability to delude myself and convince myself that I was being

healthy when I, I know today I was not being healthy at all. So it's, it's, you know, living under a little bit of delusion for a while. But then again, it's like, I don't know how I would have snapped out of that any other way, right? So it's hard to regret something that I don't know. how I would have changed. Like, it's not like, it's not like I had a realization when I was 30 of like, dude,

you're fucking up your health and you're lying to yourself and you're doing all these wrong things and you drink way too much. And then I kept doing it. It's like, no, I just never had that realization. Yeah. I just, yeah, I was out to lunch, so to speak. Well, okay, if somebody is out there

just wallowing and regret. Yeah. I don't know, reframe. I don't even know what the language around this would be. In my experience, the people who are like really hung up on regrets, it's one of two things. Either it's a very traumatic or tragic experience that they just are really having a hard time letting go of. And to me, that's like a more of a grieving issue. Or their actual issue is just a very deep

self-loathing and lack of self-worth. And that it manifests through constantly being preoccupied by all the things that they did wrong or they could have done better or that they fucked up or missed opportunities or whatever. So the symptom is the is the regret, but the real issue is just like this general loathleen of oneself. Yeah. Yeah, I think like you said, just having a bias towards doing things and just going for it. Yeah. That'll go a long ways. And this is going to sound really cheesy. So get your your, your, cheese hats ready. Self-forgiveness goes a long way. Okay, yeah. I know that that just like sounds so banal and but it really is true. Like you just everybody fucks up. Everybody misses opportunities.

Everybody takes people and things for granted. Everybody has parts of themselves that they're not satisfied with or that they don't love or that they wish was different. I think where we really get in the trouble is when we start telling ourselves that we shouldn't feel that way. that were like, well, Drew's completely happy with himself and didn't fuck up his opportunities. You know, it's like, no, we all have stuff that we feel like we missed out on or that we didn't do right. And so there's no reason to judge yourself for it. It's just like a normal part of the human condition. And much in the same way, like we fuck anything up and we have to, you know, people in our lives mess things up and we forgive them.

Like if your best friend screws up and, you know, you don't, you probably don't have that hard of a time forgiving them or letting them, like letting it go with them. Yet so many of us struggle to do that with ourselves. Yeah. That's definitely getting older. That was one of the lessons I've learned as well, too, is that like self-compassion, self-love, self-forgiveness. Yeah.

is a skill you have to develop because you can't always get that from outside. And I think a regret is a big part of that. People are looking for some sort of outside solution. It's just not there. All right. We'll be right back. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk.

Habaniero? More like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. All right, we're back. So brilliant and bullshit. Brilliant or bullshit, Mark? This is going to make me sound like a real asshole. Oh, I'm here for it.

I'm here for it. Mark, is empathy, brilliant or bullshit? Is empathy? bullshit. It's empathy bullshit. Yeah. Let's do, we'll put that a giant full screen quote. Empathy is bullshit.

Drew Bernie. Yeah. 2024. The man turns 40 and he's just decided that he is no empathy. I am full on get off my lawn. Crappy old man at this point. There's, there's, okay. This is a serious question.

It is a serious question. So people who, I think people who are not psychology nerds. Yeah. realize that this is actually a very legit question. Actually, like, he goes back to pre-psychology even. I mean, there's a deep philosophical argument behind a lot of this. And we found this article recently. It was from, we found this on CNN.

The title of the article is empathy is on the rise in young people. Here's how to build yours. So there's an assumption right there, obviously, that, you know, empathy is good. And we do take that for granted these days. We take it as a given that empathy is a good thing. Yeah. Just some quick stats on this, though. From 1979 to about 2009, they've monitored, they've measured this in different surveys.

And it seems that empathy has gone down from 1979 to 2009 and younger people. Okay. Teens, early 20s, that sort of thing. This includes both cognitive empathy, which is being able to understand someone else's perspective, and also emotional empathy, which is feeling concerned. for others and feeling like you can feel how they feel. That's what we think of as empathy. Okay.

Anyway. So from 2009 to 2018, though, they measured a measurable increase in empathy among this population. Same population or a young population? A young population. Yeah. They haven't followed the same. Gen Z, basically.

Yeah. Yes. So what you're telling me is our generation is the least empathetic generation in the population. Well, okay. So if you look back in the data, it kind of waxes and wanes a little bit. But there has been a noticeable increase in the last 15 years or so. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. How's that working out for us? Well, that's what I want to talk about, right? So where is that getting this? You know, they, they, I looked up the paper here to the actual paper and, you know, they, they posit there's a few different causes for this, you know, increased social connectivity through social media or all these different communication technologies we have now. collective responses to economic hardship was one of theirs too like a 2008-2009 like I'm not sure about that one yeah these are speculative from the paper changes in the social norms that probably goes back also to just cultural connectivity increased awareness of social issues again through news media social media communication technology one I found pretty interesting too was loneliness and social isolation they found a correlation between respondent to were more lonely, we're also more empathetic. So I wonder if it just, you know, they have a lot of time to sit around and think about,

oh, God, I'm lonely. This other person must be lonely and that must suck or it must suck to be ostracized or or maybe highly empathic people have a higher need for social interaction and intimacy. That can be very well too. And so even though they are interacting with lots of people, they feel lonely. Right. Yeah. But the, the argument that's kind of implied in this is, you know,

Empathy is a good thing and the title of this article is that here's how to build yours. Here's how to have more empathy. What do you think? Is empathy always a good thing, Mark? Ten years ago I would have said yes. There's a great book by Paul Bloom called Against Empathy, which I was triggered when I saw that title. It came out probably 2016, 2017 or something. I think it's right in there, 2018.

It's 2016 or 18, yeah. And I remember being like, what the fuck? And actually, it's a great book. It's really fascinating. And he basically convinced me with the book. Like, he won me over. And I do think that the key distinction is what you made. It was cognitive empathy versus emotional empathy.

That's one from me. You know, I do think it's important to be able to cognitively or rationally, put yourself in the other person's shoes, so to speak. Like, imagine what life would be like if you, We're a Ukrainian refugee or whatever. That's very useful, I think. The emotional empathy, to me, it's like, what I took away from it is that it can cut both ways. Because depending on who you are empathizing with and why you're empathizing with them,

like any other emotion, empathy can blind you or bias you. And so the results can be very mixed. Yeah. The same way people justify awful things with love or care or compassion. you can justify a lot of awful things with empathy. And so it seems to me that it's like just empathizing with a person or population is not sufficient on its own. There needs to be like some sort of like rational placement or contextualization to have around it. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's Paul Bloom, that's one of his big arguments throughout the book. it narrows your focus. He calls it the spotlight effect. And so your empathy is kind of like a spotlight going around. Like what should I, who or what should I empathize?

That's confusing because there's another spotlight effect in psychology, which is when you assume that people are paying more attention to you than they actually are. Yeah. So the empathy, a highlighter, a highlighter. Yeah. It's a pink highlighter that you just color people with. Yeah. So, yeah, you can, it can blind you to, you can get, what you see this all the time now, people glom on to one single issue or one group of people.

And they say, why aren't you caring, why aren't you as empathetic and caring about this? And it's like, well, why aren't you as empathetic and caring about this to all these other things going on? Yes. Not that we should be, like, not that we should, not that we can, not we have the capacity. The issue is, is that it's not sufficient, right? So, yes. We're starting to get into the we're starting to approach a lot of social issues that have been going on lately because I think Part of the problem is that a lot of people who empathize deeply with

People like victims or Populations they seem to feel that that is sufficient it's like okay well this bad thing happened to this person So I'm really upset and you should be really upset too and it's like it kind of ends there right right right? Feels like you've done something. Whereas like, well, what actually happened? Right. And I think that this can backfire in a lot of cases. So perfect example is the George Floyd.

Yeah. Protests in the fallout from that from 2020. Right. Right. So for people who are not familiar, George Floyd was a African-American man, was murdered by a police officer, was caught on camera. There were massive protests against police brutality in 2020. a huge firestorm of racial debate and arguments and there were calls to defund police and put body cameras on every cop in the country and all these things.

And that outrage is understandable. The empathy that came, I mean, I saw the video. I thought it was horrifying. The empathy is completely understandable. But it's interesting that we're about four and a half years removed from that. And there's actually a thing now that some researchers are calling the George Floyd effect, which is since the George Floyd protests and all the outrage towards police, police are much less likely to arrest or subdue people out in public. And as a result, the murder rates and the violent crime rates have gone up in certain communities, predominantly African American communities.

And so the people who have actually suffered the most from the George Floyd effect are the very people that everybody had empathy for in the first place. Exactly, right? And so it's, it's, again, it's like the emotion, the emotion's valuable, right? Like it's, especially when you have this like outpouring of outrage and this sense of injustice and everybody's upset

and they want to make things better. Like that is valuable. It just needs to be channeled in the right direction. and when you don't channel it in the right direction, it can actually unwittingly make things worse. Right, right. Okay, so you are kind of getting at the emotional empathy versus cognitive. Yes. Then there.

And Paul Bloom makes the argument, he's not, the title is against empathy, but he's not like, I don't hate empathy. He's like, I just think it's overrated. Paul Bloom hates you. Right. Yeah. Like Paul Bloom is a psychopath. That was actually, that was probably the first title he wanted. He submitted that first.

Yeah, and the publisher was like, you know, yeah, maybe we changed those. Let's redirect. But he does make a case that cognitive empathy where you can understand somebody, but you don't necessarily have to put yourself in their shoes or feel a certain way. You just need to be able to understand them. Now, I should say there's some psychologists who think, can you really cognitively understand somebody without having some emotional component to it too? I kind of maybe not.

I don't know. Yeah. But the point still remains that this whole cognitive empathy is kind of the basis for what we now call effective altruism. Yes. Made famous by Peter Singer, made infamous by Sam Bankman Fried. I'd say too. But there's this rational side to our brain that he thinks we need to use alongside our empathy to make sure that we're effectively channeling all of these emotions, all of this empathy into the right direction and making sure that we're using our, our, higher reasoning powers to make sure the good we want to come can actually come.

Yeah. What do you think of that? I mean, that's a big thing to bite off and chew. I agree with the principle that the limiting factor is understanding the second and third order effects, understanding the downstream effects of the empathy and making sure that you're not acting out in such a way that is going to backfire or, or, um, you. work against you. The problem is, and I, like, I never really got the effect of altruism thing just because it's, once you get past like the second order effects of anything, it's just

the complexity becomes overwhelming. Right. And people's, uh, biases kick in that it's just like, there's such a fog of war to understand what is actually going to have the biggest long term impact and what's not. That I've just always been very skeptical that you could objectively measure that sort of thing. And in my observation is that any like really serious attempts to quantify that sort of thing of like what's going to create the greatest good for the greatest amount of people leads you into a very absurd place very quickly. You know, like all like like like from what I understand there's a whole subset of effective altruists who basically came to the conclusion that since there was like a 0.01%

chance that super intelligent AI would just destroy humanity that all of their efforts should be put into preventing super intelligent AIs, which like that just strikes me as completely nonsensical, right? Like, um, or like, like, uh, the, the, we all have two kidneys. Like, you shouldn't have one of your kidneys because you don't need it. And that the, the, the risk of dying from the kidney transplant surgery is so low. And yet the, the outsized return you get for donating your kidney is so high. Yeah. It goes to some ridiculous places pretty quickly. Yeah, it does. Like none of us should have both of our kidneys. It's a moral for us.

We're going to put that quote under the first one. So Drew Bernie. None of us should have two kidneys. Empathy is bullshit. Drew Bernie, no one should have two kidneys. Well, okay, okay. So, I mean, that is part of the argument. We're barely staying on the rails here.

Yeah. Let me see if I can get us back on the train here just a little bit. So the case that Bloom makes against, empathy. One of them, we've covered a little bit of this. It narrows your focus a little too much on single issues or a handful of issues when there's all sorts of issues going on. It doesn't scale very well. Like empathy causes you, again, narrows your focus, causes you to focus more on a single person rather than the thousands of people that are suffering. It's how our brains are wired. Or it causes you to stereotype very plainly. That's another one. That it, that's kind of the basis

for in-group, out-group thinking is empathy. Because you're going to empathize with one group over the other, just naturally you have a natural inclination for that. And it is human nature that we naturally empathize with people who look and think and act like us and come from the same place we come from. So it's, again, if you are, if you're against things like racism and prejudice and nationalism and all these things, then, you know, baseline empathy is actually potentially empathy is not only the solution of those problems, it is also the cause of those problems.

Yeah, another one too, your empathy is easily manipulated. I thought that was an interesting one that he brings up in the book. Totally. Yeah. As a writer, 100%. Right. Empathetic responses depend on prior. Give me two pages.

I'll make you empathize with anybody. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's very easily manipulated because it's an emotion, a deep emotion that we feel. Can I give you an example? Okay. this piss me off. There is a new trend going on, particularly on Netflix, but I think it started with all the

podcast, like all the murder, whodotid podcast. So Netflix is getting in on it. And now Netflix is producing all these like murder mystery shows and shows about serial killers and all this stuff. And I've watched a few of them. And it's really bugging me what they do. They did this with the recent Menendez brother. one and they did it with the Jeffrey Dahmer one and it like it makes me sick which is that

they show the murder like they show the the murderer and the murder and it's like horrendous and horrific and you you're just absolutely disgusted and then you get like episode three three or four and the next like the next 50% of the show is completely written to make you empathize with the murderer yeah so you start seeing how horrible their childhood was and how oh they he was And his dad was this horrible person. And it's like it they spend multiple episodes like getting you to feel so sorry for him and maybe he was actually the victim and all this stuff. And to me, it's a really sick use of the audience's empathy because I think particularly in a case like of somebody like Jeffrey Dahmer, like I actually don't think we should empathize with him. I think it's it is the ethics of getting people to empathize with Jeffrey Dahmer.

is a very questionable thing. I don't think... I can't believe you had to say that, but yeah, you're right. Yeah, like, I don't know how those writers and directors sleep at night. Yeah.

It's sick. And there are, again, because empathy is a powerful tool and getting people to empathize with certain actions and behaviors and people and helping them find justifications or explanations

for those heinous behaviors. I don't think that's necessarily a really good thing that we should be like broadcasting the millions of people within society. So that's a perfect example where I think empathy is used terribly. And it also just makes the shows bad. Yeah. Like I don't buy it. Right.

You know, like I've watched a few of them now and every single time I get halfway through and I'm just like, I don't buy this. Yeah. This just feels, it feels too contrived. It's like, we're doing the both sides thing. you know, I'm not, I'm not here for that. Maybe I'm old. Maybe I've aged out of this demographic, but anyway, what you were saying made me think

of that of just like how easy it is to manipulate what the audience feels and what they care about and by dictating the narrative around what happened. Right. Yeah. And what the justifications were for something. Something similar is happening and you have a connection with this as well in El Salvador, right? Yeah.

To Kelly has had a. come out, people are railing against, he's thrown gangsters or suspected gangsters in jail in mass, right, hundreds of thousands of them. And people are like, you're mistreating them. And he had to come out and say, look, most people in El Salvador eat beans and rice every day. I'm not going to worry about what criminals are eating in prison right now. Okay, I have other things to think about. So it's like, that's a misdirection of empathy too, I think, as well. That's another great example. So for people who are unaware, we shot a YouTube video in El Salvador. It will be coming out by the end of this year.

And part of the reason was I actually wanted to go talk to the people in the neighborhoods, the poor neighborhoods where the gangs controlled everything and where there was just immense amounts of violence as recently as a few years ago. And yeah, I mean, regardless of what you think about him or his politics, like he has a point, which is, I think the outside world has been so focused on the potential human rights violations of the mass incarceration there, that there, they're missing the forest for the trees. Right.

And they don't realize, like, I think Buceli himself even said it. He said, some say I wrongly imprisoned thousands. I think I freed millions. Right. Because it's like you have a country of five million who no longer lives in fear. They're no longer afraid to go outside. They can take their kids to school, like do all the normal things. So anyway, that video is coming soon.

Yeah, yeah. Just a little teaser. Yeah, a little teaser. We'll be on the YouTube channel. That's right. What else? Anything else about empathy? Are we, I'm not as extreme as you drew.

I'm not going to say it's bullshit. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to call it. Okay. Here's, I'm just putting words in your mouth. No, no, no, no, no. Empathy has its place.

Absolutely. And I think it has this place in, especially in your personal relationships with people, one-on-one situations or smaller groups. Yeah. That's what we evolved the empathy for. That's where it's supposed to, like, you know, that's our evolutionary past probably, that's how empathy is. evolved. It's kind of been hijacked though lately, I think. Yes. I think that's a really good point

is that it's empathy is it's optimized for the small and local and the people close to you. And it's best used there. And it's best used there. And I think maybe a side effect of our technology is that it's empathy has been inflated and amplified and spread a little bit too much and too far. Yeah, I don't know. We definitely sound like two 40 year olds. Yeah, we do. You do. Embracing it. That's the other thing about getting older. You're just like, yep.

You're like, fuck them. Fuck them. All right, we'll be right back. There's more to life than finding the perfect car. But finding the perfect car can help you get the most out of life. Like the SUV that handles everything from drop off to off road. And the car that hulls groceries and hockey teams. Or the van that's gone from just practical to practically family.

Whatever you want. Wherever you're going, start your search at autotrater.ca, Canada's car marketplace. All right, we're back. What are the questions, Drew? What are the people want to know? The people want to know. This one came in from YouTube. Mark, what are your thoughts on chat GPT and AI in general? An increasing commodification of the creative process, like using it to write essays, song lyrics, that sort of thing. What's your take on AI in 2024, Mark? This is a great question. So I use AI quite frequently.

I believe you do as well. The team uses it quite a bit. I think when anytime you look at like a major technological leap, something get something that used to be scarce gets commoditized becomes abundant. And then something new create, it becomes scarce, right? Like I don't think anytime people start freaking out about a new technology that, They always freak out about the thing that used to be scarce and it's going to become abundant. They never think about the new scarcity. And I think what AI is going to do is it's going to make creativity very abundant.

It's going to make it easier and more accessible to most people. The time that it takes to go from idea to execution is drastically going to get reduced. And I generally think that anybody who is a creative, first of all, if you're not messing around with it and trying to use it, you're dumb. You're already behind that. You're already behind. And then two, I think it's just, it's going to make creatively talented people even better. I don't think it's going to replace creativity.

I just think it's going to make the creative people even better. But what I'm excited for, and this is something I've actually been asking myself this a lot since chat GPT broke out. It's like, what is the new scarcity going to be? And I have a theory about this. I think AI is actually going to. put a premium back on in-person connection and relationships and community in particular. Because we've already seen, you know, information is already commoditized. Information is already free and abundant and there's like probably too much of it.

There's like so much bad information. Like we could actually probably deal. We'd probably be better off if we had a little bit less information. Pretty soon we're going to have something similar with creativity. Like it's just any anything that you want to be entertained by or. any crazy idea you have, it's going to be out there. There's going to be some version of it available. What's going to be hard to find is people that you connect with, people that you feel

like you're part of something, people that you relate to. And I actually think there's, I've got a little pet theory around this, which is I think we're going to end up with two internets. And I think of them as human internet and machine internet. So the machine internet is basically anytime you just want to solve a problem or know a fact or get feedback on something, you're just going to go ask the AI. You're like, you know, read these five books and summarize for me and 10 bullet points and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the AI will do that pretty much instantaneously. And that's great because then it's a tool.

It's going to help you and it just makes your life better. But there's no emotional sustenance in that, right? Like, I could go to chat GP. Let's pretend chat GPT is like 10 times better than it currently is. And let's say it's good enough to write like a Pulitzer Prize winning novel. I could go and ask it, hey, write me a Pulitzer Prize winning novel about this, this and this with these themes and whatever. I could read it and be like, this is a really good novel. But it's going to lack, because I know it's a machine and it's not a human, there's going to be some sort of missing piece there.

I'm not going to feel like I'm relating to the author. And I personally believe very strongly that a huge percentage of why we like art is because of the person behind it. If that wasn't true, then it wouldn't bother us that like Michael Jackson was a pedophile. Or it wouldn't bother us that, you know, I don't know, Leo DiCaprio doesn't sleep with a girl over 25. Right. Like, it's, we care about those things because we attach people's art to the person. And that's human nature and that's never going to change. I think the example that a lot of people refer to, which is indicative, is that computers have

been better than humans at chess for over 20 years now. Yeah. And there are tons of chess tournaments for software. Like software developers enter their software into chess tournaments, and they have, they compete the exact same way that humans compete to see which software is the best chess software. Nobody watches those. Yeah, who gives a shit. Nobody gives a shit.

Nobody knows who won. Nobody cares. Everybody knows that Magnus Carlson is the best chess player in the world. And he has been for the last 12 years. He has millions of followers online. He has tons of fans. He's made millions of dollars, right? Why?

Because he's the best human player. And that's what we care about. We care about who is the best human chess player. So I think we're the second internet is going to be the human. And that is where we go to connect with people, where we go to relate to people, to hear drama and stories and judge each other and do all the human things and be parts of communities and and ideally see each other more in person. Because AI is going to solve all the abstract informational stuff or most of it for us. So what it can't solve is that human-human-human relational. Right.

Well, okay, a lot to unpack there. Yeah. One, I think I'm already starting to use the internet that way I've found anyway. I don't, I really don't even use Google anymore. I use perplexity. Have you been using perplexity? I've not messed with perplexity. It's pretty sweet.

I've heard it's great. It's like AI for Google, basically. Yeah. It kind of like you put it in a question. It gives you the answer. And it gives you the citations, you know, so you can click into those. So that's a cool way to use. kind of the AI internet right now.

But then what I've also noticed too, and this is something I wanted to ask you about, should we all be investing in Reddit, you think? What for? Because that's the human side of the internet. I think that's the early human internet that I think you might be talking about. Because now, like you just said, if I want to go and I want to find out, okay, oh, God, should I have kids or not? I'm going to go to Reddit for that because there's threads of people who've done it.

There's people in their 60s, 70s are on there, people in their 20s. Sure. still thinking about it and everybody in between. That's kind of the human internet. That's how I'm starting to use the internet more. I would say I think it's all social media. So I really think you're going to have the social media. Yeah.

And then you're just going to have the AI. Which already, the social media is already the internet for a lot of people. It really is. It really is. And it's funny too because I get on social media to find new information or hear about new things. And then I go to Google. or an AI to verify and learn more about it and like see, is this true? Like, who said this or, you know, did this actually happen?

So, yeah, I'm kind of already using it as like two separate internets as well. But I really do think, I just think the social media companies, yeah, they're pretty well positioned, aren't they? You can hate on them as much as you want, but they are where the human internet's going to live. And we, you know, I think we will eventually appreciate that. Yeah. I think you're absolutely right, though, about social connection being the new scarcity.

And you're already seeing that as well. Chess, you said that, the chess events, like live chess events where people play, they're hugely popular right now. Chess is more popular than it's ever been. And we can't, there's nobody on the planet who can beat the best chess computers. Yes. It's insane. Yeah.

AIs can write songs. You can put in all sorts of parameters be like, write me the next pop hit of 2024 or whatever it is. And they can probably put you out something that's going to be, it would be close to it. Live music, though, is also at an all-time high. There's probably a little bit of like revenge. Sure.

Live music stuff from the pandemic, but still. Right. Live music venues are doing as best that they have touring artists. That's how they're making all their money right now because people want that. I have a friend in London who runs like a, little record label on live event music. Yeah. And all of my other friends in England are like, oh, God, we need this so bad.

And London, London has great music. Yeah. The social connection scene there is just, it's just now starting to flourish. It's insane. Yeah. The other thing, too, that I think I sent this to you recently, dating apps are becoming a little bit less used. You did send that to me, that people are leaving dating apps.

We might talk about this in another episode at some point, but I want to make the point here about how, you know, as soon as like chat, CBT came online and then, you know, all these other tools that were kind of already around, they started getting repurpose for all these different, all different things that people do. One of them was here, use AI to improve your, your dating profile on these apps. And I think people were just like, Jesus Christ, are you serious? And so actually now, like on Eventbrite, live events, live dating singles events are more and more. popular than they ever have been. So I think I think the trend is already there. I don't think it's a prediction you're making. I think it's already happening. Yeah. Yeah. I believe it. It's, it's in my experience too, I mean, you know, when when chat GPT first came out. Yeah. I kind of had the same fear. I think I even tweeted this at one point. I like joked. I was like, okay, how long do I have before I'm out of a job?

Yeah. And I was like, I think I can make it to 2030. But honestly, the way the last two, you know, the more I use it, the less convinced I am that it's going to replace anybody. I just think it's, I mean, the phrase that's going around Silicon Valley to my understanding at the moment is you're not going to be replaced by an AI. You're going to be replaced by somebody who knows how to use the AI. Yeah. And I've definitely found that to be true. That it's if I tell, we were actually joking earlier that if you, if you tell Chat, GPT to like write something in the style of Mark Manson. It is awful.

It is like the worst half-ass parody of my work that you've ever seen. But, but I use chat GPT all the time to help research. I use it to come up with title ideas. I use it to come up with segment ideas. Like it's super useful as a tool. And so, yeah, big ups on AI. Yeah, I think this is one of those where we need to just embrace it. Don't fight it so much.

I get the pushback. I do understand the knee-jerk reaction to it. But it is, it's like a huge unlock for us. I think if we need to not be so scared about it. Yeah. Not be so scared of it so we can use it in better ways. Yeah. I agree.

Yeah. Cool. Well, that's our show. This was not produced by an AI. It was not. This was produced by two humans. Or was it? The wisdom of the week, Mark.

This one comes from Mason Coooo. who said, this goes back to the regret. Mason Cooney said, regret for wasted time is more wasted time. I really like that. Well said. Yeah. Well said.

That's it. We'll be back next week. Please like and subscribe. And if you have a question, feel free to submit it. You can comment on YouTube or email us at podcast at markmanson.net. We will be back next week. And maybe, just maybe, we might be more empathetic next time.

The subtle art of not getting a fuck podcast is produced by Drew. Bernie. It's edited by Andrew Nishimura. Jessica Choi is our videographer and sound engineer. Thank you for listening and we will see you next week.