The Rich Roll Podcast - The (Not So) Subtle Art Of Mark Manson: The Truth About Self-Help, Transformation, & Life Advice That Doesn’t Suck

Episode Date: January 6, 2025

Mark Manson is a renowned author and cultural critic, known for “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck”—a global phenomenon that has remained on the NYT bestseller list for an unprecedented 328 weeks.   This conversation explores the paradox between genuine growth and modern self-help culture. We discuss Mark’s dramatic transformation, his contrarian views on personal development, why being intelligent often hinders change, and how the most effective solutions in life are typically the boring ones no one wants to hear about.   In today’s metrics-driven landscape, he reveals how to navigate content creation with integrity.   Mark is endlessly insightful. This one is profound and irreverently fun. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors:  Nordic Track: Take 10% off any purchase of $999+ with code RICHROLL 👉nordictrack.com/rich-roll Squarespace: Use the offer code RichRoll to save 10% off your first purchase  👉Squarespace.com/RichRoll AG1: Get a FREE bottle of Vitamin D3+K2 AND 5 free AG1 Travel Packs 👉drinkAG1.com/richroll Calm: Get 40% off a Calm Premium subscription 👉calm.com/richroll. Bon Charge: Use code RICHROLL to save 15% OFF boncharge.com Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange

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when you're ready to launch, visit squarespace.com for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, visit squarespace.com slash richroll to save 10% on your first purchase. There's probably been more good advice shared on the internet in the past 15 years than the rest of human history combined. Even people who, by and large, have ridiculous positions

and beliefs about most things will occasionally share a really good piece of information. So there's a mental struggle of sifting through all the information out there. What does effective self-help actually mean? How should we think about things like ambition, success, and happiness? Well, here to separate brilliance from bullshit is Mark Manson.

Returning for a second appearance on the podcast, Mark is best known as the mega best-selling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, and is the host of the newly ascendant podcast of the same inescapable name. When we're rewarded for believing something, our brain will find a way to believe it. Some new-fangled seminar in a big theater with 5,000 people and some guru who's got some new method that's going to change this and that in your life overnight. All those things feel very special, but ultimately what works is very boring. Today we take aim at the self-help industrial complex, the gurus that populate it,

our respective perspectives as participants in this economy, and the various principles that govern our decisions as content creators. We also discuss Mark's health journey, the key role identity plays in the context of personal change, and tons more, as Mark would like to say, life advice that doesn't suck. I believe a lot of dumb things in my life that got me here.

Sometimes you got to go through some of those dumb beliefs or like a weird phase, right, to kind of like learn the lesson and get to the right spot. Nobody's got it all figured out. And definitely don't listen to people who claim they're gonna save you and claim they have it all figured out, because those people never do. It's good to see you. Thank you for doing this. Yeah, of course. And I thought, as I shared with you a moment ago, like, I just want to have fun.

Okay. You know what I mean? Fuck your books, fuck your backstory. You're a smart guy. Let's just fuck around and have a good time. I love it. Also, it's a low lift, you know? And I've been accused of being a little too serious

on my podcast. So a little levity, right? We'll fix that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll fix that right up. And part of the low lift aspect of it is, and I'm sure I wanna talk to you about your podcast, is it's daunting when you have somebody coming on your show

who's accomplished and has written books and you wanna be prepared and the amount of like research and preparation, it's great, because I get to learn about these people and read their books and I feel very nourished in that, but I've been doing this 12 years, like it's a lot, right? It's a lot. And so it's kind of nice to just sit with someone

and it's like, I don't have to worry about that. And you've kind of contended with this a little bit in the shorter kind of lifespan of what you've been doing. So I feel like, I mean, to give listeners context, I've been podcasting for almost a year. It'll be a year in about six weeks. And yeah, the learning curve of interviewing. So the funny thing about that is that I often find

that the interviews that I prepare less for end up being better in some ways. Because there's more genuine curiosity. I don't feel like I'm trying to like construct the conversation as much. But I think so much of it too just comes down to guess chemistry. A lot of it is.

Cause if you don't have the chemistry, like if you connect, it'll have its own flow and rhythm and you'll be fine. If you don't and you have to do a lot of the heavy lifting, then you have to kind of like resort to the preparation that you've put in. But this is something I'm playing with right now because I think I've historically always prided myself

on the amount of time that I invest in each person. And generally it pays off, like it's good. And I think it's showing the guests respect. Like they're coming and they're giving their time and you're gonna pay them back for that by rising up as much as you can to their level and then sharing it with your audience. That's the bargain, right?

But there's a cost to that, which is if you're so prepared, you're never gonna be surprised. And when they tell the story they've told before, you've already heard it, so you kind of like you're glazing over, and you're not really present. And so you're not responding,

you're just sort of thinking about what's coming next, because you kind of anticipate what they're gonna be saying. And so I do think it's better to be less prepared. And I think the pride that I put into my preparation was just a mask for insecurity and fear. Like, am I gonna be able to like be out on the tightrope without a net? And I've been doing this so long and it's like,

it always works out for better. I mean, they're not all home runs, but like, you know, I should be able to have enough confidence at this point that it's gonna be okay. We were talking before we went live about how competitive the podcast space has gotten and how the stakes keep getting entered up, right? And if you think about it,

I think research is the low hanging fruit conversation. When there's not many podcasts, then you can out research other podcasters and that's kind of your edge. But in this day and age in 2024, every big podcaster has a research team, has an assistant, has people summarizing. I don't have those things. Okay. Well, well. That's more about my, those are my, yeah, but those are, maybe I should though, because that speaks to my control issues more than anything else.

I read, I mean, I read every book, cover to cover. No, but I do think that is, that's something that anybody can do. It's really just a matter of putting the hours in. I think having flow chemistry, reading the person in the moment, knowing how to direct the conversation somewhere new, get the guests talking about something

that they haven't thought about before, nobody's asked them before. I think that's like, that's actually a rare skill. I think that's a much more difficult skill than say reading somebody's entire. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'd agree with that. I'd agree with that. Well, I think what's interesting about your show

and you've kind of, you're in a sort of reinvention of it already at this point, is that you're bringing everything that you do to the, first of all, like, why did you start a podcast? And yeah, let's just start there. Okay. Like what led you to decide like, okay, I'm gonna jump into the fray here

into this crowded marketplace that's increasingly more and more competitive and harder and harder to stand out. I will give you the short version. And if you wanna go deeper on any part, I'm happy to. The short version is the first seven years of my career, I was an internet guy. I was a blogger primarily and actually dabbled in podcasts back in 2011, 2012. But everything I did back then, it was posting online, trying to build an audience, posting

on social media, et cetera. I did that very well. I built an audience. I got a book deal. The book, which is the subtle art, not giving a fuck, came out in 2016, blew up beyond, I think, pretty much anybody's expectation, including my own. And I think when that happened, I accidentally started thinking I was an author. I was like, oh, well, this is the most successful thing I've ever done. Therefore, this is just what I should do all the time.

And so I wrote a bunch of books over the next four or five years. And I mean, I like writing, I like books. But in hindsight, I didn't love being an author. That wasn't what I initially started doing. And a few years ago, I got burnt out, I took some time off, and I made an agreement with myself, which is, I'm going to go back to some time off, and I made an agreement with myself, which is, I'm going to go back to work, but I'm going to pay very close attention to what's fun and what just kind of feels like an obligation in some shape or form.

And I started doing that and what I realized was all the internet stuff felt fun and all the author stuff felt like an obligation. And I canceled a bunch of contracts. I gave a bunch of money back. And I decided, I'm like, I want to be an internet guy. I love making content. I love the media business. I love building a team, scaling content. And a podcast is something that,

you know, my team and I, we had talked about for five, six years, but it always just got put on the back burner because there's another book deal. Got to write another book. Got to go out with Will Smith. Got to write Will's book, you know, like, so when the table was cleared, it's like, okay, let's finally do the podcast because that's just, it's part of what I find fun. What I think is really fresh and interesting about your show is that you're bringing all of that kind of internet sensibility into the podcast space. You're doing it with a level of integrity

that kind of belies the savviness of how the internet works. And it's this fine line that you walk between that kind of value-based, nuance associated advice that is kind of your trademark, but also is just truth, right? While also understanding and appreciating like what works on the internet. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Totally. And you seem to have struck a bargain that works. Like you're not participating in the clickbait economy. You're doing the content the way that you wanna do it, but it has that veneer or that sensibility. Like it's all with the understanding of like, I know how to do this so that it traffics in the discourse of what's happening.

And this is something that I struggle with a lot. I probably have a reductive view of it because I think like, well, I'm doing this long form stuff and it's complicated and it's nuanced and blah, blah, and the internet isn't interested in this. Like if I wanna grow, I have to go out and be, you know, a heterodox, you know, lunatic and create these insane thumbnails

and titles and if I'm not gonna do that, well, I just have to like be at peace with the fact that like it's not gonna catch the wave of what the algorithm wants to share with people. But you've seemed to figure this out, like the best of both worlds. I don't know about that. I mean, I appreciate that.

That's very kind of you to say. There's a balance, first of all, of how much do you chase the algorithm and how much do you really just try to stay completely true to what you want to put out. I always see those two things as there's a Venn diagram, you know, there's the what you want to make and then what the world wants to see. And I try to stay in the overlap of those two circles. And if you get out of one of those two circles for too long, then you're either going to be on an island by yourself or you're going to turn into some inter whatever crazy person has sabotaged their own career lately.

We all know the type. It is a fine line to walk. It's a little bit of a tightrope to walk. But I think I've benefited a lot from just there's been a pent up demand over a lot of years of people wanting something like this from me and it not being there. But I'll say too, coming into this space, I also have the advantage of I've been on everybody's show. I'm friends with half the big podcasters in this space. And coming into it, I really am being conscious of like, I wanna do it different, like reflect what made,

what people like about my writing. I want it to be reflected in the show itself as well. So more casual and more laid back. It's actually something that we're trying to lean more into now. Yeah, I've noticed that. I've noticed that. You've sort of played around with having guests on

while also understanding that your audience wants to hear from you and they wanna get something out of it rather than, oh, it's gonna be a long conversation with somebody I've heard of who wrote a book that I probably should read, right? And you kind of flip that equation. The way you position it and set it up,

it's like, we're gonna answer a question today and to answer this question, I have this person here who's gonna help us, but it's not necessarily the bright, hot white spotlight on the guest in the way that these shows typically kind of- Totally. Orient it. Yeah. And that works really well for you, I think. Yeah, so far. And even now shows typically kind of. Totally. Orient it. Yeah.

And that works really well for you, I think. Yeah, so far. And even now you're kind of moving away from that. Yeah. Right? Like I like the new version of it. I think that that suits you really well. Thanks. We've worked really hard on that the last few months.

I think the idea now is that we're moving to more of a segment based show. So there's that question each episode, right? Like that fundamental question, like what's the fuck of the week? Like, what are you worrying about too much this week? Or what do you wish you cared more about this week? And then we've got a second segment called Brilliant or Bullshit,

where we break down debunk bad studies, surveys, memes, trends going on. Or talk about maybe something that's brilliant that most people haven't heard of. And then we answer audience questions. And the idea is we're gonna bring guests back soon. And the idea is instead of it being about like, you know, hey, Rich, you know, you just had a new book,

tell us about, you know, whatever you've been working on. It's the guests can join us and do the segments with us. So we've got predefined topics in segments, and then they can- They pop in, they have to adhere to your format. Exactly. Basically, yeah. Exactly.

I like it. I like the one, not the most recent one you did, but the one right before that about self-help. I think there's a lot that we could like unpack in that. The self-help junkies, yes. Yeah, but before we get off the kind of podcasting thing, I mean, I think, did you see Tim Ferriss's blog the other day on this?

Everything that he brought up in that are all things that I've been thinking about as somebody who is part of this world where you're doing long-form interviews with authors and all different kinds of people in this competitive sort of space where there's more and more people doing that, how do you distinguish yourself? And what's happened over the last five or seven years is that obviously publishing houses know

that the way to get their books sold is to get their authors on podcasts. This is the new book tour. And so the podcasting industry has basically become an adjunct of the publishing industry and it's become really easy to just book guests reactively based upon incoming pitches. So I get a dozen pitches a day, every book, all the galleys, all that kind of stuff.

And you can just say, yes, yes, yes, no. And I think I would probably plead guilty to kind of just being lazy and falling into that. And a lot of these people are amazing. You wanna get them on and even knowing like, oh, I know if I get this person on, they're gonna be on all the same shows that are kind of similar to me.

I'm still willing to enter into that bargain. But I think it's gotten to the point where it's kind of a drag, you know what I mean? It is, yeah. And as exciting as it is to have the opportunity to talk to some of these people, many of which are like luminaries and it's cool to meet them.

At some point you have to decide like, what is your show about and what is your point of view? If you're gonna distinguish yourself from everybody else, you need to be pretty clear on that and start getting more proactive about the people you really wanna get and summon the kind of courage and willingness to say no to some of those fancy people so that you are, you know, kind of defining yourself a little bit

differently to stand out. Yeah, I think that is definitely something. I mean, even before I jumped into this podcasting space, I could sense that from the outside, every show is kind of becoming the same show and somebody needs to differentiate somehow. And I think everybody's feeling that. And unless you're willing to do like just an insane number of episodes, like some people do, you really need to sit down and think like,

okay, what makes me different? And it's funny because before we settled on this format, another one that we considered is, maybe we do take all those guests. Maybe we do take just the book tour of authors that come through, come to LA and come on your show, and then they come over to my house and they do my show, and then they go up to Louis and they do his show,

and then they go down to Tom. Some of them are transparent about it, and some of them are cagey about it. They don't wanna tell you that they just came from so-and-so's house and then right after you, they're going to that other guy's house. I'm like, dude, I get it, man. I've launched a book.

I get it. I get it. I don't begrudge the authors. That's what you should be doing. So one of the things that we considered, cause we did a couple of episodes. So like Cal Newport, his book came out in March. And I actually think he came to my house right after

it. Right after coming to me. I think he did your show and then he came over to my show. But it was funny because I read his new book and I actually, I disagreed with a lot of it. And so, and it's funny because it's the only, only guest interview I did, I've done on my entire show that I was nervous about. I was like, I'm going to do a whole interview about the things I disagree with him about. And basically try to get him to convince me. To this day, I think it's the best interview I did

of all the interviews. I mean, well, I'm not retired from interviews, so it's my best interview of all time, of the 25 or 26 that I did. It actually turned out great. And it's like one of our best episodes. And so we thought about, like we talked about like maybe that's our format. Maybe And so we thought about, like, we talked about,

like maybe that's our format. Maybe it's just, instead of like, you know, having Cal Newport come on and deliver his greatest hits that he just gave to you and gave to Huberman and gave to Lewis and everybody else. Maybe I'm the guy who's like, okay, so I've got six things in your book that I disagree with. Let's get into them, right?

And then like, that could be a show format. But then ultimately I decided, I was like, I don't wanna be, I'm not a, like I'm a pretty like chill guy. Yeah, then you're just gonna be in conflict all the time. Yes. Yeah, how does that feel? And that's not my personality. I don't like arguing with people.

And it puts a lot of pressure on me because then I feel like I need to be right. And the funny thing with Cal was like, he came on and he actually like explained and identified, you know, things that I had missed or that I hadn't considered. He actually like won me over on pretty much all the points. It was very satisfying for me as well,

but I was like, yeah, I don't wanna pursue that. But I think that could be a great show. Right. The broader point being, if you're going to have someone on your show who's doing all the shows, like figure out a different approach. Right. Right.

Either don't do it or if you're concerned about distinguishing yourself, like have an angle that's gonna make it different. Or just do what Tim's doing, which is just he's not taking those guests anymore. Right. So he, yeah, he calls it the 90-10 rule, which basically means like the top 10

of the fancy people or whatever, like he means like the top 10 of the fancy people or whatever, like he'll do that 10% of the time. It was only guess that 90% of his audience would recognize or 10% less than 10%. More 90% less than 10%. So it's like either somebody insanely popular like Hugh Jackman or, yeah, like somebody totally obscure or LeBron James or whatever, or like an expert that nobody's ever heard of. Have you seen what Daniel Tosh is doing with his podcast?

He's great, he's hilarious, but he'll have on like his first episode was with his wife's gynecologist. Okay. He's like, you know, like just totally off the program. And you have to be gifted and charismatic and entertaining to bring on like an ordinary person and create something compelling out of that, I think.

Totally. Yeah. We've run into this with YouTube videos where I've tried to take fans with specific problems in their lives and do a video around that problem, like helping them get through that problem. And it was funny because before we shot the videos, I was really anxious and self-conscious about like,

okay, can I actually get this person to change on camera? Like if I try to help this person and they, it doesn't do anything, like I'm gonna look like an idiot. But it was funny because that was actually the easy part. Like we got great results from everybody. The problem was, is that the average person is just not very fun to watch or listen to for more than 10 seconds at a time. And so we had to kind of scrap that idea.

The other thing that we kind of share is that we both live in Los Angeles. We're both like, I guess, technically, quote unquote unquote part of the kind of self-help economy, right? Well, also kind of being allergic to it at the same time. It's this like acknowledgement that like I, yes, this is what I do, but also like I can't stand these people and most of these books are terrible. And like, what am I like navel gazing over like, what am I doing?

And so I'm just curious, like, how do you think about how you kind of navigate and comport yourself in this sort of ecosystem in terms of like, how you show up, how you share, how you write, how your podcast, like trying to put out something that's good while also recognizing that, you know, you're kind of in it, just like all these other people that you might have issues with.

I don't know how to say that any more clearly. I love joking that I'm a self-hating self-help guru. I just love playing with that idea. I hate the idea that anybody ishating self-help guru. I just love playing with that idea. I hate the idea that anybody is like a self-help guru. And I find most of this industry distasteful. I mean, psychology itself, like academic psychology itself, you could argue that a large percentage of it is not scientific already.

And then you look at the amount of life advice that is delivered with complete negligence of the psychological literature. And like, we're not even unscientificate. We're just like off entirely. So I struggle with it. Sometimes it's actually been interesting. It's been harder moving to LA because you're, I'm surrounded by it all the time. Other places I've lived, nobody really talks like this. Nobody like, it's not part of like an everyday conversation. Here in LA, you can't go anywhere with somebody

talking to you about like their energy or the universe and whatever the fucking crystal they're wearing around their neck. You know, it's just like, it's a constant here. And I guess there's kind of two, I have two reactions or two thoughts about it. One is I try to be respectful and not demeaning towards the individual. I understand there's a lot of dumb things I've believed throughout my life and a lot

of those dumb things actually helped me in the short term and I had to eventually like move past them. So like I try to be very empathetic of that. Like everybody has their own process and you know, not everybody like spends nearly as many hours as I do on this stuff. And it like that's fine. The second thing I try to remember too that I just find amusing is that generally all the like the woo woo people, the woo woo California people,

they all assume that I'm in on it too. So like they all like, they'll talk to me as if like, well, you get it. You're a friend, you're an ally. Yeah, it's like my spirit animal was talking to me last night and like, but you understand what I'm saying, right? Like sure.

Sure, whatever. Sure. Sure, whatever. You were, I love the exchange you were having on the recent podcast about self-help and this kind of obsession that you see in Los Angeles around self-help. It's sort of an identity as much as anything else is. And I think it's an interesting kind of like thread

to pull on here because I'm of two minds. On the one hand, it's a population of people who are interested in growth, but at the same time, like anything, once it calcifies around an identity, it becomes sort of antithetical to the growth, right? Like people become stuck in this kind of attachment to who they are, where they're actually not progressing

or growing. They're just kind of like stuck in this analysis paralysis or kind of hamster wheel of like reading a bunch of books and going to a bunch of conferences but not actually putting any of the, like if you took any piece of the advice that they're inundating their brains with, it would probably work pretty well.

But it's just going from one to the next to the next to the next. And then where's the actual like method of incorporating it into your life? So I grew up in the Bible Belt in Texas and I grew up going to church three times a week. Everybody around me was extremely religious.

Most of the people, I would say, did not walk the walk. They'd go to church twice a week and go to Bible study and quote all the verses to you, but they kind of just still lived like a normal human, like did all the terrible things that most humans do. Didn't have a self-consciousness about their actions or their behaviors or how it fit into their kind of ethical principles. Since moving to LA, I don't see much difference here. It reminds me very much of where I grew up.

It's church and religion and just a secular context. It's a secular religion. And you just replace God with growth. You replace the Holy Spirit with energy frequencies. It's the same shit. And the funny thing is, is, you know, people, instead of church, they go to a seminar. Instead of praying, they meditate, do yoga. Instead of doing a potluck charity dinner,

they, you know, do a mastermind. And most of them still behave exactly the same afterwards. Yeah, I mean, I think in many ways, it's a reaction to the decline of community-based, sort of spiritual gatherings, religious gatherings, whatever your doctrine might be. And it's not surprising because I think as human beings, we're hardwired to find comfort in a tribe

and we wanna be part of something that is not just bigger than us, but speaks to kind of the unanswerable questions of what it means to be human. Absolutely. And so I don't, and I don't want people to take this the wrong way. Like I'm not,

not denigrating this. I guess what I'm denigrating is like the lack of self-awareness because it's the people in Texas I grew up with, they knew what they were doing. They knew they were going to church. They knew they were worshiping God. They knew they were,

you know, reading the Bible, but fucking up each week and not doing it right. You know, there was a self-awareness about it and an honesty about it. What I find here and with the self-help space in general is that there's not that awareness. There's not that honesty. And in fact, there's a little bit of an arrogance, a little bit of a spiritual narcissism. I was like, well, I did, you know, 12 meditation retreats and an ayahuasca trip

and my shaman said that I've reached this next level and so, you know, you should listen to me. And he's like, yeah, really? Like, cause you look like the same fucking person I've known the last two years, right? Like nothing has changed. You're literally making the same mistakes you made three years ago.

You know, the garments, the attire might change a little bit. Exactly, exactly. A new tattoo or two. So I don't mean to, as you said, I do believe there's a fundamental human drive towards community, spiritual practice, all these things. There's nothing wrong with that. What I find here is, I described it to a friend recently, as I said, California is an incredibly conformist place, but the conformity involves not thinking you're conforming. It's like one of the most conformist places

I've ever lived. That's analogous to the group think that is like heterodox thinking, right? Like all the heterodox thinkers are lack of self-awareness that all of their heterodoxy falls into like one very narrow lane. Yes, if you're compulsively contrarian then you're not contrarian. Right. You're just picking the other side of every bet. Which I feel like a lot of people have built careers in podcasts and YouTube just being compulsively contrarian.

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But back to like kind of what YouTube and the internet rewards, it rewards hot takes, contrarianism, heterodox thinking, certainty, conviction, you know, charisma, all of these things, none of which necessarily are related to truth, veracity and, you know, good advice. Right? So you, as somebody who I know thinks about like,

how do I provide good advice and do it with integrity? You're out there, not competing, but you're in a world in which those other people are out there for better or worse, who are motivated not by values necessarily, but more and more by metrics, like growth. And with growth, that means platforming people

who might be not the best people to platform under the rubric of like just asking questions and all of that kind of thing. Like, let me tell you what they don't want you to know. And everything you've ever been told is a lie. And this is like what works, right? And I don't want you to know. And everything you've ever been told is a lie. And this is like what works, right? And I don't know if it's a willful blindness

or a lack of self-awareness, or maybe just I don't give a fuck. Like it doesn't matter as long as I'm growing and more and more people are paying attention to me. Yeah, I have mixed feelings about this because I think it's Good for the world Actually, let me start with a caveat and then I'll go into my mixed feelings so the the caveat of all this is I want to say that as

This is simultaneously having the the guru sphere as you put it. I really like that word Is exploding right self-help is bigger than it's ever been. It's become mainstream essentially there is an unprecedented wealth of genuinely good mental health and physical health information that's been become available in the last 10-15 years that was never available in all of human history. Like there's probably been more good advice shared on the internet in the past 15 years than the rest of human history combined. So that's mixed in with all this stuff.

And it's often very, very frustrating to, as a consumer to parse the good from the bad. Even people who by and large have ridiculous positions and beliefs about most things will occasionally share a really good piece of information So it's it's like there's a mental struggle of sifting through all the information out there So I want to put that on the table first and then that relates to my mixed feelings in the following way, which is Ultimately, I feel like it's a good thing to let two opposing narratives into the public sphere and let them kind of combat each other. Because a lot of times the conventional narrative does end up being full.

I mean, how much nutritional information over the past 20 years that was conventional turned up to be absolutely terrible and horrible for people a decade later. So it's like the conventional wisdom does get overturned frequently. And so you do want it to be free and available for people to attack and combat and offer alternative theories. And yeah, even if occasionally they're harebrained,

sure, whatever. That I think is fine. And I do think it does cause a lot of stress and strife among the population and among consumers. It makes our lives a little bit more complicated as it puts more responsibility on us to figure out what we're consuming and whether it's good or not. What I do worry about is, to your point,

the over-indexing of crazy town. Let's call it. I've kind of come to just as somebody who's observed online media, my entire adult life and tried to like really kind of track it and understand why certain audiences behave certain ways. I've kind of come to the conclusion that perhaps the most chronically online population in the world are the crazy town conspiracy theory people.

They're more engaged, they're more vocal. If they like you, they'll watch everything, they'll like everything, they'll comment on everything. And so I think as creators, I think there are a lot of people in our industry who, you know, they'll dip their toe in that pool, in the crazy town pool, and they'll get that flood of engagement. And that feels good. It's like, especially, I mean, when you've been, say, grinding through 20 episodes and

you're at this plateau and like nothing's really popping off or performing well and you're like, man, what am I, what are we doing wrong? Like, what can I be doing better? And all of a sudden one just like shoots off like a rocket. You're like, man, I should do more of that. So I get where it comes from. I understand where it comes from. I don't think most of them realize what they're doing.

I think they're just kind of- Their dopamine mechanism has been hijacked. It's like a casino. It's like a slot machine and then you win. And then suddenly you have this euphoric reaction. Of course you're gonna chase that dragon. Totally. So you bet a little bit more and then a little bit more

and a little bit more and then you go bankrupt, right? And I think there's, we've seen the creator audience version of that multiple times where somebody dips their toe in crazy town, gets that huge bump and engagement and traffic. And they're like, oh, maybe I'll go back for seconds. And oh, maybe I'll go back for thirds. Maybe I'll have this Looney Tune guys on my podcast

and have a two hour conversation with them and see how that goes, right? And then the next thing you know, he's just like set his house on fire. Well, the more time you spend with those people, you're gonna start like believing, you know, what they're saying. And then before you know it,

you become a mouthpiece for those ideas yourself. I think, you know what you just said, I think you pointed out the difference between you and me and a lot of these other people in the space, which is I fundamentally believe, and I think you share this belief, which is that we don't believe what's true, we believe what we're incentivized to believe.

Like as human beings, there's just so much, like as somebody who's studied psychology, we are so good at bullshitting ourselves that when we're incentivized, like when we're rewarded for believing something, our brain will find a way to believe it. And I think the people I see falling into this trap that we're talking about,

I think are the people who have a little bit of an idealistic view of truth, of like, I'm just having conversations, I'm just trying to find the truth. And if I'm honest with them, and if I have an honest conversation, eventually the truth will come out. And they don't realize that your belief

or your definition of what's true can get warped by the incentives that are placed around you. There's a really famous quote, I forget some congressmen from years and years ago, but he said it's, the quote is something like, I think it was Upton Sinclair, I don't know. Anyway, he said, it's impossible to get a man to believe that he's doing something evil

when his paycheck depends on it. Right, that is Upton Sinclair. Okay, it is Upton Sinclair, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's really to get a man to believe that he's doing something evil when his paycheck depends on it. That is up in Singularity. Okay, it is up in Singularity. Yeah, I mean, it's really a two pronged thing. On the one hand, we're much more easily manipulated than we wanna believe. And that's true of everybody, no matter how smart you are. And perhaps the more smart you are,

the more easy the mark you are. Secondarily, our capacity for denial and kind of defense mechanisms around what we decide we want to believe is more powerful than we want to accept. Can we dig into that that first one? Because I love that. I noticed this so early in my career. A lot of people don't know this. I started out as a dating coach and one of the things I noticed very early on is that the hardest clients were the super smart guys. Because the smarter person is, the more they can rationalize whatever they want to believe.

Like a smart person can come up with a million excuses not to do something and all of them sound like really good excuses, like completely valid. Whereas like somebody who's just average intelligence, maybe they'll give one excuse and then you like disarm that and they're like, okay, maybe you're right. I should go do this, you know? And with highly intelligent people, there's, you can kind of seduce yourself by saying like, oh, I'm so smart at these other things.

I've got all these degrees. I like made all this money doing this other thing. I can keep my head on straight. Whereas actually you are probably more susceptible because as your beliefs warp towards your incentives, you're gonna be so good at constructing narratives and stories to justify those. That intelligence turns on itself.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is a thing in recovery also. Like the smart person is a real tough customer when it comes to getting on board with the 12 steps. I could see that. It's like, yeah, I mean, the smarter you are, you walk in, you're like, and somebody says like, you need to show up here every day and like stand

at the door and shake hands with everyone and say hello. It's like, fuck you. You need to make coffee. You're trying to outthink and outsmart all of these things and say, well, what does this have to do with drinking or not drinking or, I don't understand why I would have to make an inventory, like in my mind, okay, I've done the inventory in my mind.

Why do I have to write it down? Like I'm smart enough, I got it, right? And all of these things become antagonists to the recovery process and make intelligence the enemy of the growth that you seek. Yeah, are you David Foster Wallace fan? Yeah. Yeah, have you ever seen his interviews about going to AAA?

A bunch of them, yeah, yeah, yeah. He talks about that, because first of all, like dude has the biggest brain on the planet. It's like so smart, but it's like, imagine a guy- But he never would really admit that he had a problem. He would say that he was going for research. Yeah, yeah, of course, like, imagine a guy. But he never would really admit that he had a problem. He would say that he was going for research. Yeah, yeah. Of course, yeah, research, yeah.

My friend took me, you know, all this sort of stuff. I think listening to him talk about it and write about it in a couple of plays, it's so funny because he talks about that, about how as an literary author, it killed him that every AA lesson was essentially just a cliche, right? Like, and he was like, he would be like, no, no, no, no,

you guys, you guys have to like, no, we need to discuss this. You know, and he'd like start trying to talk about it, like as if he was a philosophy professor. Yeah, it was like, he's bringing his gigantic brain into this and wants to break down the epistemics of the entire, you know, underpinnings of this. The problem is- And then he goes out and gets drunk.

Exactly, cause the problem is your lizard brain. It's not your philosophy brain. Right, right, right. And then, the self-delusion part too has sort of antecedents in recovery as well. I know well, like the power, my own power to create denial. When it comes to something that I wanna do,

I can come up with some pretty good arguments about why it's just fine. And so if that's the case, then what's happening in, the guru sphere or the kind of, digital information landscape at large with somebody whose dopamine mechanism is getting lit up and then realizes that not only are the incentives to move more in that direction, like the pot of gold is real for doing that.

Yeah. Speaking of intellectualizing addiction, I'd love to talk to you about this. I've been playing with the idea. I mean, I don't know if there's any value in it of like going to a meeting. So I'm in this weird gray area and maybe it's not a gray area. But on the one hand, as you know, I quit drinking two years ago. The more distance I get from quitting, the more I look back and realize how big of a problem it was, and the more I look at my people and my family and my family history and everything, and I'm like, okay, this is feeling like alcoholism.

It's alcoholism-ish. And then I was talking to a friend who's a recovered alcoholic, and I was talking to him about this, and I was like, I'm starting to wonder if I'm an alcoholic. And then he kind of laughed and he was like, well, if you have to wonder. He's like, nobody who's not an alcoholic ever wonders if an alcoholic like asks himself or herself that question. Yeah, exactly.

People who are not alcoholics, that doesn't occur to them. Exactly. So. And yet it is a self-diagnosed thing. Like it's not for anybody else to say. Totally. So I'm in this weird place where I'm like, am I, is this like an identity?

Like, should I make this part of my identity? Like if I start drinking again, is this, am I bullshitting myself? Like, is it gonna get bad again? Right? So I don't know. I'm in like, there's a lot of confusion in my life

at the moment around this. Yeah, you're in like this weird liminal gray zone with the whole thing. Well, we talked a little bit about this when I was on your show, the joke came up around like, is a good alcoholic one who is just, who can figure out a way to continue

to be an alcoholic and drink, or is a good alcoholic one who realizes he needs to stop and get sober. And I could sense like you're kind of like trying to feel like where you fit into this whole thing as I was kind of sharing my story. And I think, well, a couple of things. First of all, if you really wanna know the answer,

go out and do some more research. You know, go out and start drinking again and see what happens. You know? You can always do that. We have you on the record. So, you know, when I wake up- I'm not encouraging you to do that.

But maybe you- When I wake up in a ditch. And this is another kind of like a thing. It's like, well, maybe you need to go out and drink some more. If you're not sure, if you're not committed or you don't think that this program of recovery is for you, like go out and see what happens out there. And then, you know, we're always here if you want to come back.

Right. So that's an option. The second thing is on that subject of good alcoholics, when you reflect back on your own past and your family history, maybe they were good alcoholics who were good at masking it or keeping it just enough under control that they could kind of still live their lives and be functioning alcoholics, which doesn't mean they're not alcoholics,

it just didn't progress to the state in which it becomes the kind of dramatic stuff that we talk about. I can't answer that for yourself. This is really just between you and you. And I would say, does it really matter whether you decide to label yourself an alcoholic or not? If you think that you had a problem with a substance

that was antithetical to the person that you want to be, you've taken this huge first step of saying no more and not doing it anymore. But then you have to contend with emotional sobriety. Like what you've accomplished is abstinence. And we also talked about this too, like your workaholism, right? And I said, did your workaholism increase

once you stopped drinking? And you said, yes. And I'm like, yes, because that discomfort inside of you is looking for something to latch onto, to feed it, right? And so it's choosing work right now, which just tells me there's something there for you to examine within yourself that perhaps could use a little bit of healing.

And the 12 steps is really good for that. It's good for self-awareness. It's good for kind of understanding your character defects and your patterns and, you know, how your unhealthy relationship with this substance or however it manifests, workaholism, is interfering with that kind of better version of yourself that you're aspiring to inhabit. Yeah. That's the other thing that's gotten me thinking too, because ironically, back when I drank, I never considered myself like a very compulsive person.

But since I stopped drinking, I've noticed that my behavior in a lot of, not just work, but in a lot of different areas has become much more compulsive. That like I feel- Because the alcohol was the solution to the problem, not the problem, right? It was a salve to the compulsivity or whatever, the discontentment inside of you that's driving compulsive behavior.

But does compulsiveness get solved or does it just get redirected? Well, it can be solved. Like, I don't know, like there's the whole kind of like dialogue around like, can you actually be healed or are you just always in recovery? And let's just set that aside for now. Certainly the compulsivity can be held at bay

by healing what's beneath the drive to be compulsive in the first place, which is, you know, a psychological examination of self and figuring out like what is causing that. Sure. And perhaps that could be healed. That process of self-examination and healing is a way of, it speaks to like kind of the white knuckling

versus surrender, right? Like if you're an abstinent and you have this compulsive tendency and you're just kind of like holding on to the edge of the table and like, I hope I'm not compulsive today or I'm gonna go work all day so I don't act out in other ways.

Like you're not really well, you know what I mean? Like that's not engaging in your own feeling. That makes sense to me because, you know what I mean? Like that's not engaging in your own feeling. That makes sense to me because, you know, when we had this conversation before, the thing that didn't land for me was that healing, the compulsivity, because it's now I'm thinking about analogous to like anxiety, right?

So like, if you, let's say you have a very highly anxious person, somebody who's very anxious, they're probably always going to be anxious. Like the anxiety doesn't go away, it gets managed and there's a comfort that develops in the managing of it. So it's like the healing isn't going from anxiety, like lots of anxiety to zero anxiety,

the healing is going from lots of anxiety that's unmanaged to anxiety that's comfortably managed. Does that make sense? Yeah, coping mechanisms and strategies. Yeah. And so I imagine it sounds like what you're saying is like that process is analogous to the compulsivity. I think so, but I think there is a freedom and a liberation that you can

experience. And I think that there is a spiritual mystical aspect to it as well, like this idea of letting go rather than holding on and trying to manage something that's unmanageable and saying, instead, I give up, I'm letting go of all of this, I'm turning this over to whatever it is that's unmanageable and saying, instead I give up, I'm letting go of all of this, I'm turning this over to whatever it is that's more powerful than me. And- Spirit animals. Yeah, like what, yeah, exactly.

You could be to your, you know, yeah, like, like the Ayahuasca Road Runner or whatever it is in your case, it doesn't matter. And those are qualitatively two different experiences. Well, it's funny, because it's the compulsivity that's showing up in other areas of my life. I would say it's not harming my life. A lot of it's just like silly. Like it's just like, like I play more video games than I used to. And my wife pointed it out. And she's like, yeah, you're playing a lot of video games like the last year. I'm like, huh? Well, yeah, because usually when I used to go out and drink,

like I used to go out and drink. So now I just sit at home and play a bunch of video games. And so it's- And there's nothing inherently wrong with that unless you're using that to not deal with something else. Right, if I'm not sleeping. You're like, you don't wanna, you have a discomfort or like, you don't wanna be around your wife or something

like you're running, you're using it to run away from something. Totally. I guess what I'm talking about is just that there's a lot more nervous energy inside me than I knew, cause I was drunk or hung over half the time. And now that that's gone, it's like, oh yeah, I got a lot of nervous energy going on. And like, I kind of like constantly feel

need to be doing something. And, and when you just sit still and do nothing, what is the internal experience? That's a good question. You know, okay. So this gets into meditation. I used to meditate a lot when I was young and I kind of got away from it.

And I've had this conversation a lot, especially here in LA, when people ask me, why don't you meditate? And my reply is always, I just haven't seen a reason to in the last five or six years. I think this is a good reason to. I actually, now that I think about it,

because I used to meditate pretty intensely in my twenties and then I just kind of moved away from it. I think that would be a good experiment is like, start doing like some longer meditation sessions and see, see if it's different, see if it feels different. It's in the steps. Is it? It's one of the steps.

Meditation. Sort of given short shrift in the rooms, but like, yeah, I mean, technically it's one of the steps and a sort of condition of the alcoholic is a constitutional restlessness that speaks to a lack of emotional sobriety when you're not actively engaged in like doing these things to be in the solution, right?

And those things are like the personal inventory and gratitude and service and, you know, all the like, like none of these things are like revolutionary things as David Foster Wallace would give you an earful on, but for whatever fucking reason it works. Of course. And so the not David Foster Wallace doesn't ask questions about why it works. They just do it because it moves their life forward

in a positive direction. And this ties back into the self-help junkie thing. And this has always been my argument, which is that what works is very boring and it hasn't changed in 10,000 years. It's just that we forget or we avoid or we deny or we get bored. And so some newfangled seminar in a big theater

with 5,000 people and some guru who's got some new method that's gonna like change this and that in your life overnight, that feels both there's a complexity to it and complexity, we tend to associate complexity with something valuable. And then two, it's shiny and new. And three, there's a lot of like social proof involved. It's like, oh, there's 5,000 people here, it must work.

So all those things feel very special, but ultimately what works is very boring, which is sit in silence, practice gratitude, acts of service. Yeah, call somebody who's having a hard time. Eat healthy, exercise. Yeah, eat healthy, get sleep, exercise, all of that. But we all suffer from terminal specialness, right? It can't be this.

I've done that and I still feel like shit. So it must be the $5,000 seminar and I'm special and that person's special. And I'm gonna go behind the velvet rope and I'm gonna get the special answer that only the special people get, right? And there's a halo effect with that. It almost doesn't matter what the person says

just because you've spent the money and there's a lot of drapery and dressing around it. Like perhaps that will get you to do something you wouldn't ordinarily do, but the tail on that is very short, right? Like the half-life, you know, dissipates immediately because most of those are premised on some form of motivation, inspiration and positive psychology.

And I know you have a lot to say about that, but the greater point is you're just running from one thing to the next under the delusion is you're just running from one thing to the next under the delusion that you're engaging in your growth when in fact you're running away from deep down what you know works. It's just, it just sucks to do it and it's boring and it's not fun.

Well, you know, it's funny. I have a very complicated relationship with Tony Robbins and he probably doesn't know who I am, so that's fine. But it's funny because for years I looked at his seminars. I've never been the one, but I have a lot of friends who have gone and they would describe them to me and I'm like, that is so ridiculous. Like this arena with all this like crazy shit going on and fireworks and light shows and all this stuff.

And as I've gotten older, as I've talked to more and more people who have like gone to his things, what I realized is that most of the time in his seminar, it's not, there's not teaching, there's not lectures. I mean, there are some of those things. Most of the time spent at his seminar, you're doing one of two things. You're either dancing to music or you're socializing with the people around you. They build in exercises for you to socialize and meet the people around you and to connect with them and build friendships. And as I've gotten older, I've realized I'm like, most of the people who probably go to his seminars and report that

it was life changing or they feel so much better, like 80% of it is probably the dancing and socializing. Like if you think about your average depressed person, what's true about them? They don't go outside, they don't have enough relationships, they don't have enough going on in their life, they don't move their bodies. And so you put them in this environment, there's a lot of stimulation, they're meeting people, they're talking to people, they're being vulnerable for the first time in years, they're making a new friend, they're dancing more than they've danced since they were like 18 years old. And after five days, they leave, they're like,

oh my God, I'm a new person. And it's like, that's actually where the vast majority of the value is. But if you advertise a seminar of dancing and talking to people, A, nobody would sign up and B, they definitely wouldn't pay $5,000 for it. So it's almost like this, this like genius packaging of the whole point of that seminar is not him and it's not what's on stage.

It's not the theories, it's not the ideas, which I mean, a lot of them are totally fine and normal. The bulk of the value is the fact that you're just there moving your body, talking to people, being vulnerable. Building relationships. That's so interesting. Yeah, I know a lot of people who have not only gone, like they go and go and go again, right?

And these are successful people that are friends of mine that I like a lot. I've never gone and I just like, I see him, I see what's happening and I'm like, I just, there's something inside of me that thinks like, first of all, is this guy even a human being? Like, there's something like alien about this guy. Me too, me too.

Like most of my friends who are into his stuff, they've like spent an absurd amount of money and they've gone to like 15 events. But when I asked them why, you know why they say, they don't go for him. They go for, because it's like- The community, the connection. They made a bunch of friends at the seminar

and they all keep in touch. And then they're like, I'm gonna go to the one in August. Oh, you should go too. because it's like the community, the connection. They made a bunch of friends at the seminar and they all keep in touch and then they're like, I'm gonna go to the one in August. Oh, you should go too. Okay, yeah, let's all go again, you know? And they do it again and it becomes church. And it's funny because again, this comes back to the self-awareness thing.

There's nothing wrong with it. As long as everybody knows the game they're playing, right? And where I have ethical issue with it is that, I mean, I imagine Tony knows the game that's being played, but most of the attendees don't, and then he gets the credit, right? You know, the attendees are like, oh, I've done three Tony Robbins seminars, changed my life.

I love it, it's amazing. Great, why did you love it? Oh, well, you know, Tony this and that, and I learned this and blah, blah, blah. It's like, that's actually not what made you happy. Like, this is actually what, like all of the research, all the good research that we have on human happiness shows that this is actually what made you happy.

Right, was taking place like in the unconscious part of the experience. In the hall outside, you know, outside the convention center. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I really, I struggle with it because I, again, like I have lots of friends who've benefited from it tremendously and speak super highly of the experience and of Tony.

And then I hear him speak and it's just, there's always an upsell. There's always like the use of language is very consciously deployed and the right name is dropped at the right moment and all this. It's like, it all feels very contrived and I'm left thinking like, who is this guy? Like I never see, and maybe it's not like

I'm paying attention to his stuff, so maybe I'm just missing it, but like where's the vulnerability on his part or like I don't get a sense of authenticity, I guess is what I'm saying. Yeah, I agree with the contrived thing. I mean, I've only seen videos of his seminars, but anyway, that's an epiphany I had recently that I kind of came around on.

So I've come, like there's like a begrudging respect. What he's built is incredibly powerful. It is incredible. It's not for me to judge. I don't know. Like it's, it's helped a lot of people. It's secular church and it's like, and look, even if he is a little bit contrived or a little bit aggressive with the, like the aggressive upselling bugs me too.

But I mean, he built a secular church for people who needed church and not saying everybody needs church. I'm just like using that figuratively, but like need, they need a social group. They need, you know, some sort of higher purpose. They need something to look forward to, you know, he built that and he like marketed it in a way and provided content in a way that, I don't want to say use the word trick is a strong word, but like convince people that that's what they were going for. And really, you know, it's the old like, you seduce them with candy and then you switch it out for broccoli in the last minute.

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for $20 off your annual membership. membership. If you were to like look directly to camera and speak to the person who's feeling lost in their life right now or without direction or feeling like they're lacking opportunity or skills or the mindset to achieve the dreams or ambitions that they have. But they do have like a lot of free time. And that free time is spent on YouTube and listening to podcasts and stuff. Like what's the litmus test for that person

to draw that distinction between somebody who's offering advice, who might not have their best interest at heart, versus somebody who's like, this is good. You should subscribe to this channel and listen to this person. Like, do you have like sort of rules or guideposts for trying to help that person

who might not have the savviness to make that distinction themselves? I think ultimately it comes down to a couple kind of mental principles that you have to adhere to. Develop a habit of questioning your own assumptions, being willing to question the things that you're excited about or interested in. Not putting anybody on a pedestal, like nobody's going to save you. Nobody's got it all figured out.

And definitely don't listen to people who claim they're going to save you and claim they have it all figured out because those people never do. That's a good heuristic right there. It's just, it's like index for humility. And also their relationship with like certainty versus, versus like nuance. Yes. but I should also note here too that like

And this is something that I try to repeat quite often on my show is that Even the biggest experts in the world like Nobel Prize winning psychologists Their shit gets like, you know, fails the replication. Right. You were talking about this the other day. Like so much of this stuff is like a coin toss. It's crazy, dude. There are these massive meta-analyses of all of the therapeutic modalities, right?

CBT, DBT, IAFB, like psychodynamic, everything. Like they've gone through dozens and dozens of therapeutic modalities going back decades, a century. They've run it through hundreds of studies, tens of thousands of patients. They've tracked who's benefited the most, you know, which therapeutic modality works best for which problems, which one is most consistent, which one is the easiest to implement. Almost all of, like, the best ones come back with a 40% hit rate.

You know what a placebo hits at? 30%. Mm-hmm. That's after 150 years of psychological research. We've gone from 30%. It's hardly confidence inspiring. 30% to 40%. So it's- Well, and betwixt and between all of these modalities,

the real driver is just going to talk to somebody, right? Like, okay, that can take many shapes and forms, but that alone is the most important piece in the whole puzzle. In fact, they've actually, in a lot of those meta-analyses, they compared various therapeutic modalities to simply talking to a friend. And talking to a friend performed just as well.

Is that true? In some cases, it performed better than some of the therapies. Like a lot of this is just to come back to the point of like, of humility. Like it's, we don't know. And like I said, you know, at the top of the show, I believe a lot of dumb things in my life that got me here, right? And sometimes you gotta go through some of those dumb beliefs

or like a weird phase, right? To kind of like learn the lesson and get to the right spot. So- And you have to be allowed to do that without, without like sort of having to weather judgment or a bunch of people attacking you for it. Totally, totally. And I mean, at this point,

I've been doing this about 15 years and I'm sure you've gone through this as well. There are a lot of things that I wrote and published and hung my hat on eight, 10 years ago that today I'm like, ooh, no, no. Well, I mean, to me, yes, of course, right? But to me, like, if you're not feeling that, then you haven't grown at all, right?

Like you should, that's appropriate. Like that's the way it should be. Exactly. So what is something that you've changed your mind on perhaps since your last book came out or the last time that we sat down? Recently, it's hard for me to like place when certain beliefs changed. But I can say one of the things, and a lot of the beliefs change slowly, but I will say

one of the biggest ones that has changed as time has gone on is I think early in my career, I had a little bit of a naive belief that with enough effort and focus and the right tools, anybody can kind of change any aspect of themselves. If you want to be a morning person, if you want to change careers and go into this, if you want to like stop having panic attacks And go do this and say you know start a skydiving career like all these things I Think when I was younger, I had a little bit of an idealistic belief about

people's malleability in the power of personal development and And just discipline and hard work. And I think as I've gotten older, and this is a combination of two things, one is observing myself and my own fucking thick skull over the last 15 years, but also observing a lot of friends, family, fans,

audience members, people I've coached, and also just having a much better understanding of the scientific literature. A very significant portion of our personalities is genetic and it's baked in. And it's a fact. And to me, this is actually a very liberating thing because I think, like a lot of people don't like hearing this. They don't like hearing like, oh, if you're an anxious person at 18, you're probably going

to be an anxious person for the rest of your life. Not always, but very likely. They don't like hearing that. But coming back to the surrender point you were making earlier, to me, this is actually liberating because it's, I think when you believe that anything about yourself can and should be changed and made better, there's an immense amount of pressure you put on yourself. And then when you fail to make that change, or when you don't get the progress you're looking for,

you really beat yourself up about it. Yeah, you just levy all kinds of self judgment on yourself. Exactly. And I have found this realization a little bit freeing in the way of like, this is who I am. This is part of who I am, right? It's like the same way some people are born athletic or unathletic or with really great eyesight

or terrible eyesight or, you know, with big feet or small feet or they can jump high or they can't jump high. You know, it's like some people are born anxious and they're unanxious. And all of the things that are like considered, I guess, bad, you know, like let's take anxiety, stick with anxiety as an example. You know, we've kind of this industry writ large

has just decided anxiety is bad. You shouldn't be anxious. We should find ways to make you stop being anxious. Well, anxious people, they notice problems sooner. They notice details better. They're much more conscious about their environment, they can be much more observant of the people around them. Like there's a lot of benefits that come with

high conscientiousness and neuroticism, which is associated with anxiety, like that like we don't think about, we don't talk about. Well, it's a survival mechanism, like hypervigilance that is born out of probably, being reared in a household or an environment that had aspects of it that were unsafe, that demanded that you be paying attention

and that you kind of be in a state of fight or flight at all times for your own survival. It's just that later on in life, you don't need that defense mechanism anymore. It's hardwired into you. And so the question then becomes, like if it's chronic, yes, it's good, it has its advantages. You are gonna do all the things that you just said,

but in a chronic state, it's gonna impair your health and it's gonna derail you in all kinds of different ways. So how can you not just manage it, but kind of unravel it and create new kind of neural pathways by going into that, whether it's IFS or like some other, there's all kinds of modalities for doing that, right? A variety of them, there is a way to maybe not completely graduate from that state, but to-

You can soften the edges and you can definitely, yeah, if it's a chronic thing that is debilitating in some way, you can definitely bring it back from that. You can soften it, but it's never gonna go away. There's a certain amount of who you are. Like there's like a center of gravity, right? Or there's like a gravitational level, right? Like you can push it a little bit away, you know, you can make marginal differences, but you're never going to go from like being a highly anxious person to a, just a non-anxious person. Like that just, it's very rare. But I think your ability to navigate personal change

is improved when you kind of take ownership of your kind of default state, right? Like this is who I am, and this is what I have to work with, right? I'm not gonna change my eye color or suddenly get drafted into the NBA out of the blue, but I can stop drinking, I can lose 40 pounds. Totally.

You know, I can do all these other things. So I think, I think it goes both ways. Like I hear what you're saying, but I also think people don't really acknowledge that there is more latitude than they might imagine in other areas of their life. Yeah, 100%. So it's like, and this almost comes down to like

which audience you're speaking to, right? Like if I think the self-help industry as a whole probably overestimates how much could be changed and how much should be changed, right? And I think the non-self-help audience probably underestimates how much can be changed and how much should be changed. It's interesting, I heard a quote from a psychiatrist once who said that somebody asked him about

overdiagnoses, medication being overdiagnosed. And he said, you know, it's, this is going to sound paradoxical, but the population is simultaneously overdiagnosed and underdiagnosed. And what he meant was he said, overall, there is, if you take the population of people who actually have a condition, they are underdiagnosed. But if you take the overall population of everybody, they are overdiagnosed. And that's because the majority of people

who are taking a medication, they're taking it for something that they probably shouldn't be taking it for. But the people who actually need the medication, not enough of them are taking it. So it's like- Yeah, no, I get it. It all comes down to who goes to the medication, not enough of them are taking it. So it's like- Yeah, no, I get it. It all comes down to who goes to the psychiatrist. Yeah, I mean, there's another kind of parallel

in this mental health context, which is there's never been more awareness of mental health. And that's such a good thing. Like we're acknowledging all of these kind of conditions and how they impact us in variety of ways. And that gives us the ability to heal and grow and live more expandedly, right? At the same time, there's an identity attachment

to a lot of these diagnoses that are then kind of used or weaponized to say, well, I can't do that because I have this thing, right? Or the world needs to accommodate me and I don't need to like try to address this because that's the responsibility of everybody else. 100%. So I think this is a really good, important distinction.

I'm glad you brought it up because it's, the underlying thing might not be able to be changed but your attitude, beliefs and behaviors around it can absolutely be changed. So it's like maybe the fundamental anxiety is not going to be changed, but your reaction to it, your beliefs about it, your narratives that you tell yourself about it, those can absolutely be changed. And that by itself can make it totally livable. Right? So I think there's a lot more of that. Like that's actually kind of the healthy version of self-help, but it's not a sexy thing.

It's not, nobody wants to hear that. I get emails from people who will say something like, you know, I'm in med school and I hate all the coursework and I can't focus and I don't wanna study, but I really wanna be a doctor. What should I do? I'm like, you don't wanna be a doctor. You actually don't wanna be a doctor.

Yeah, you don't wanna be a doctor. You're trying to convince yourself that you want something that you don't actually want. Exactly, and they're like, well, no, but maybe if I study more and I like just try harder and if I learn some productivity tips, then maybe I'll start liking it. I'm like, no, no, no, you don't understand.

They like the idea of being a doctor. Exactly. But they don't actually like what being a doctor is. And so that's a very practical example of just like, this is who you are. You are a person who doesn't like studying medicine. So therefore you should probably not be a doctor. Yeah. We kind of talked about this when I was on your show, this idea of like willingness. like studying medicine. Therefore you should probably not be a doctor.

We kind of talked about this when I was on your show, this idea of like willingness, like what are you willing to do, right? To achieve your goal. And if you're not willing to do it, maybe it's not the right goal for you. And there's this trope around willingness that I think creates a lot of confusion,

which is like, well, just be willing to be willing or something, you know, like, and it's like, what is willingness? Like you can't compel anyone else or yourself to be willing to do something that you don't actually, it's like asking somebody to want something that they don't actually want, right? Willingness is like, it's like a gift from God.

Like if you're graced with some willingness to suddenly do something you ordinarily wouldn't wanna do, where does that come from? It's internally driven. I don't know where it comes from, but it's not something that you can just summon out of like grit or discipline. I associate it with giving up.

Like, what are you willing to give up? Like a willingness to do something means you're okay with the costs and sacrifices involved and I think this idea that you should just be willing to do anything for your goal, essentially what you're saying is you're willing to give up everything for your goal. And I think there's very few things in life that you will feel that way about or that you should feel that way about. Like some goals you shouldn't be willing to give up everything.

So I don't know. It's funny. I had a little, I gave a little spiel about David Goggins on my show a month ago and we like posted a little short. It was funny because all the Goggins on my show a month ago and we like posted a little short. It was funny because all the Goggins fanboys came after me. First of all, I love David Goggins. I'm like huge fucking fan. That dude, like the amount of times I've been in the gym and like heard his voice in my head when I'm like getting that last rep in. He was going to carry the boat.

He was going to carry the boat. You know, I love that he exists and I love what he does. And I think he's just, he's an amazing influence. But I also, from an intellectual point of view, I find him fascinating because there are millions of people like myself who admire the hell out of him. Yet I watch him, I'm like, I would never in a million years fucking live like that. Like that is insane to me.

Like the dude's like running on like broken feet and like. But he always, to his credit, he always says like, don't do what I'm doing. No, yeah. He's very quick to like, tell people not to emulate him. So I'm bringing this back to the willingness thing because I find his story interesting

and I find his mindset interesting because it's the lengths that he's gone to to do the things that he's done. You have to be willing to give up everything. You literally have to be willing to give up everything. And if you read his books and learn his story, he did hit a point in his life where he kind of had nothing. So fuck it.

I might as well give up everything for this goal. And I feel like he's just kind of like stuck in that mode. Cause like, I look at my life, right? Like when I was young, I had nothing. And when I started my first business, I was like, I've got nothing. So I will literally give up everything. I started working 16 hours a day, broke up with my girlfriend. I moved in with my mom.

Like I literally gave up everything. No social life, nothing. And then I built the business I wanted. But that was easy because I didn't have anything. I look at my life now, I'm trying to process this now. Got a mortgage, I've got a wife, I've got aging parents, I've got a great group of friends, I've got very comfortable, I have assets,

I have a really nice life. There's actually a lot of shit I don't wanna give up anymore, you know? Well, this is the dilemma of success. And I think at the crux of this is this idea that it's, listen, willingness, surrender, all of these things, it's easier when you have nothing to lose and you have nothing going on, right?

Like what's the big deal with surrender? Like you got, like you're gonna go back to the homeless shelter? Like, you know what I mean? Like, what are we actually wagering here, right? And then as a result of that willingness that you demonstrated and that depth of surrender where you just let go of like every idea you thought would serve you and allowed yourself to be guided in a new and different way.

It's that energy and that sensibility and that commitment that delivered you to this place of success. But what happens, and I suffer from this, is that when you arrive there, then you convince yourself that it was you all along. You're in the driver's seat, you're in control. And it's once again, like self-will run riot. So the self-will run riot is what created all the problems

that led to me losing everything and having to surrender in the first place. And you get amnesia when you become successful because the ego starts to have free rein again, and convinces you that you're a genius or whatever it is, right? And so it becomes more difficult than to be in that place of surrender

because now you have a lot to wager, right? Like letting go is a much trickier feat because you're like, I don't wanna let go. Like everything's really good, right? And this is like where I'm at right now. Like I have to remember like what got me here and what got me here wasn't my ego or anything else. It was like being in that state.

And when I start to take it back, that's like when it all begins to like crumble and go away anyway. So the more you hold onto it, the less likely you are to be able to sustain it anyway. And it's not yours to hold on to anyway. And everything's shifting and changing always. Yeah. Do you worry about that in the context of audience? I try not to. Yeah. I'm an athlete. I'm competitive. Like I look at the stuff and I'm like, that fucking guy.

And like, why is this happening? And like, how come this? Like I can be that person very easily. And so I try to like immunize myself from all of that because I have no control over it. The only thing I have control over is like what's coming out of my mouth right now. And everything else is none of my business,

but it is my business, right? This is like how I'm paying my bills and obviously the better everything does then the more people I can hire and the more, you know, like all of that kind of stuff that comes with living in the modern world. Have you knowingly said something on air and put it out that you knew was gonna lose audience.

Like what was- Oh yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How was that process for you? That was uncomfortable. Like I struggle with like giving too many fucks about what other people think. And I want people to like me.

I'm a people pleaser by nature. And I'm not trying to like stir up controversy or put content out that's gonna be divisive. I wanna put out content that's helpful and is evergreen. But I've put out some stuff that I knew like, oh, well, this is gonna be polarizing. And it's going to definitely lead to a bunch of people like walking away from me.

But I had conviction over my you know, my values around it and I feel fine about it, it's fine. Yeah. You know, I don't care about that. I would say those have been the hardest points in my career. It's only happened a few times. The last time was actually with COVID. I wrote a number of things about it super early on,

like late February, early March, like, Hey, this is a thing, like get ready, blah, blah, blah. And people were like, dude, you're the give-a-fuck, like, why are you writing? I'm like, cause it's, this is coming and nobody's talking about it. I was like losing my mind. So you were early in that.

I think my first news was- Well, you went like, so hold on a second. You came to my house in 2000, oh, that was the year before, 2019. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cause then you went to Australia. And I was like, you weren't in Australia when it started. Okay, yeah.

No, no, but yeah, that was one time. By the way, you're a big deal here in Australia. It's a whole other level, bro. It's insane. They love you in Australia. I'm excited. I think I even texted you, do you wanna, cause I went there a couple months

after you went there and it's just like every bookstore was just an entire wall of your books. It's just orange everywhere. It's just like insane. Couldn't get away from it. I'm actually going back, plug for my speaking tour. I lied, I said I wasn't gonna plug anything. I said I have nothing to promote.

I actually, now that you bring it up, Rich, I have a speaking tour in Australia in November. I'm gonna be speaking at the opera house. So that gives you an idea. I can barely fill a small nightclub here in the States, but I go down there and they give me the fucking opera house. It's pretty fucking good there, isn't it? Yeah, I love it.

I love it. So, yeah. November 4th. Okay, November 4th. Sydney, Australia. Mark Manson.net for tickets. That's cool, the opera house. Have you done that before?

No. That's pretty cool. No, I actually I quit speaking a couple years ago. You know, back to that whole if it's not fun, I'm not going to do it. And then my publicist down there reached out and she was like, you know, we were thinking about putting together another tour for you. Your book is still number one everywhere. And yeah, I was like, okay. And then she mentioned the opera house. I was like, your book is still number one there. Yeah, as of like six months ago, four months ago. That's so crazy, dude.

It's stupid. Is it just an abstraction for you at this point? I mean. Yeah, I don't even know. It's still on the times list. It's like 328 weeks or something. Still, it's this week. It's still on.

The first one, subtle art, is still on the New York Times bestseller. It's like it's it's six and a half years if you add up all all the time It's been on the list. It's like six and a half years Wow. Yeah, I don't know like honestly at this point I mean don't get me wrong. I think it's a good book Yeah, but like I think it's probably it's more like winning the lottery or something like I I look at it Obviously, I think it's a really good book. I don't think it's that like winning the lottery or something. Like I look at it, obviously I think it's a really good book. I don't think it's that much better than say, you know, your other average bestselling self-help book,

but just the result, the magnitude of the result, it's just like so insane. James Clear is having a similar experience right now, right? Have you guys gotten on the phone and talked about your shared experience with this? I mean, how many years has Atomic Habit's been up there? I think he's at like 250 weeks or something. So his book came out, it's really interesting actually.

His book came out almost exactly two years after. And then if you kind of look at the trajectories, they're pretty similar. His took a little bit longer to blow up, but I think it blew up even harder than mine. I think he just hit 10 million copies. I haven't talked to him in a while, but it's interesting because one of the last conversations I had with him was when Atomic Happens was going insane and he had just had his second kid and he was writing the follow-up and he was like super stressed and he's doing all this speaking and stuff.

And he asked me, he asked me a really good question. It was very smart of him. He said, because like I said, I'm like kind of two years ahead on the same train. You're like one of the only guys who could like give him grounded advice on that. Yeah. And so he asked me, he was like, if you could go back two years ago, what would you do differently? And I was like, I would say two things. I'd say no to a lot more stuff.

And then two is I would have spent more time on the second book. I would have, I wouldn't. Because I think I remember you sharing that you had to rush certain aspects of it. Yeah, honestly, I think looking back, I think there was a little bit of a imposter syndrome going on.

You know, the velocity and the magnitude of the book success was just like so outside the realm of, again, anybody's expectations that there was a there was a big piece of me that was just like, this is a fluke. Like this is this is a fluke. This isn't going to last, right? So let's just ride this wave while it's here. Which motivates you to say yes to everything because you think like you're having your 15 minutes or whatever.

Exactly. So it resulted in like a scarcity mentality and I started, yeah, I just started saying yes to too much stuff. And I mean, the other thing too is, is like, the level of opportunities that show up are so much sexier. Like it's easy to say no to opportunities that aren't really opportunities. But then it's like when things show up and they're like really sexy and exciting, it's really hard to say no, you know, it's like when a TV producer shows up and he's like, I wanna do a scripted series based on your life.

I want you involved. And I'm like, hey. How do you say no to that? Especially when you're like a 30 year old dickhead who hasn't done anything. So it's, there was just a lot of stuff like that that I think I had to learn the hard way that it's it's a there's not Most of the time there's no there there. It's just kind of empty calories and then B

You know I think I lost sight of of my own values and What I cared about and what got me into this business in the first place like what I love doing and the things I wanted to work on and You know my own ideas and my and my own, the things that I was excited about. So I lost track of that for a couple of years and I'm proud of the second book. I think it's a really great book. There are a lot of things I think that are actually better about the second book than

the first one. But in hindsight, I wish I had taken way more time with it and told people to fuck off a little bit more. Yeah. And maybe appreciated that you actually had more leverage than maybe you thought that you had given what had happened. Totally. To like slow it down a little bit.

Totally. That has been a lesson as well of like, you know, there's this transition that comes in, I think every career, you know, early in your career, you have to say yes to everything. And then there's an awkward transition at some point where you have to start learning how to say no. What I didn't realize is that you skipped the awkward, you went right from the no, what I didn't realize is that there's another level above you where, you know, it's, it's because like in internet world, like blog land, I'd gotten really good at saying no to, you know,

you know, this, some random dude is launching his podcast, wants me to be episode one. And I'm like, eh. Right, that's different from like jump on my private jet and fly to Shtad and like hang out at this whatever with these people that you have heard of. Exactly, exactly, exactly. So I'd like learn that lesson all over again.

And yeah, just being, becoming more aware of my own leverage. Yeah, just kind of standing up for myself. I mean, like, yeah, I don't want to do that. Speaking of standing up for yourself, you've been on this health journey. In addition to quitting drinking, you lost 40 pounds? Or is it more now? If you go from like peak, my wife, my wife's Brazilian.

So we call it peak Gordo. If you go from peak Gordo to now, or the lowest I got, which was maybe beginning of this year, it was almost 60. It was about 55 pounds. Wow. Yeah. And the drinking was a huge part of that. It was a huge part of that. But it's honestly, this comes back to the compulsive conversation, right?

Like I learned in that process that I had a much more compulsive relationship with food than I thought I did. Yeah. We don't realize, I think this is a human thing, like the extent to which we use food to like medicate our emotional state. And it's only like when you've,

okay, I'm not drinking anymore. Now I have like a greater hyper awareness of like how I try to, you know, tampen my moods through various different things. And so suddenly you're like, I would have never thought that food and emotion had anything to do with each other until after I was sober for a while,

and many years into sobriety and realized like, oh, I'm just using food in the same way. And it wasn't until I got super fat that I even thought about looking at that. Yeah, that was honestly the hardest part. The exercise, the habits and everything. I mean, that's hard, don't get me wrong. Like, you know, getting on a, hiring a trainer

and showing up every week and doing the thing, like, that's hard. And it takes work. And, but eventually you build those habits, you find the thing that works for you, you find the thing that you enjoy, you find the, your workout buddy or your, your coach or whatever. Like those things can all be kind of figured out within a few months and you can be on your way. And I guess that kind of got me through the first phase, like maybe say the first 20, 25 pounds. But then I kind of got stuck and started having some rebounds, you know, would put a bunch

of weight back on really quickly. And yeah, it forced me to take really hard to look at the psychological side My relationship with food the emotions I was numbing For me, it was a lot. I had a lot of social and identity Issues in this both with alcohol and food, you know It was a huge part of my social life both were a huge part of my social life both I kind of saw myself as the guy who's up for anything. Like, yeah, I'll eat Thai Indian, like five star restaurant, you

know, street food, whatever I'm up for anything, you know, I'm, I'm easy. I'm, I like everything. Like it's like, I was, I kind of saw myself as that person. And it was the same with the drinking. It's like any party I'm up for, I'll be the first one there. I'll be the last one to leave. I'll dance all night. Yeah, you wanna do shots, I'll do a shot with you. Like I was always that guy. And I didn't realize I was that guy. I didn't realize that that was like an identity

that I had built at some point in my life. And that I had to like kill that part of myself. That it's like, you're not that guy anymore. But that only came up once you hit that plateau after 25 pounds and started rubber banding a little bit and realizing like, oh, if I really wanna do this, there's a bigger play here, which is like my whole identity of who I am.

This was like year three. So, if you, I've tracked my weight now for six years and if you look at the chart, it's kind of like this downward wave. It's kind of like when the stock market's crashing, it goes down and then there's like, boop, it bumps back up and then it goes down again and it bumps back up. So it's been a really long process, but yeah, the psychological stuff was the toughest.

And then I guess kind of the third phase, because then that I dropped probably another 15, 20 pounds. But even after that, even after I lost 40 pounds, I was still like, I think 27, 28% body fat, and I was stuck. And I'm like, okay, I've got the right habits. I got, you know, I'm like, I'm not drinking anymore. I'm traveling way less. I'm sleeping better, I'm doing all the

things. What the hell? And it was at that point I went and got a bunch of blood work done and then I saw the damage. Like the autopsy. Just your LDL and your APOB and all that kind of stuff. My hormones were all fucked up. It was ugly.

Got a good functional medicine doctor, started working with a clinic, like, changed a bunch of stuff, like cut, you've cut even more out of the diet and like got, now the blood works good. So. Yeah. And it's taken years. Yeah, six, five to six years.

Five to six years. Like all good things. Five to six years, yeah. There's no shortcuts. And it's still a struggle sometimes. Uh-huh. What was the hardest sort of food thing that you had to overcome?

Burgers, man. Burgers are good. Oh my God, I love a burger. Honestly, the sweets is, it's not, I'm not a huge sweets guy. Me neither. I can pass it. It's greasy stuff.

Oh my God, a good burger dude. So as somebody who's like so steeped in psychology and human behavior and you've studied all this stuff, you've written about it, like what were the tools that you found most effective or perhaps least effective in your like quiver of all this stuff that you've been kind of simmering in for decades that was beneficial

or perhaps not beneficial along this way. Cause you're really, you're putting it to the test. Basically you're trying to like walk your talk in a really hard way where you're very challenged. That's a great question. I almost wish there was like a list and I would like give out like one to five star ratings for each. Each technique.

This is a future video maybe. Each technique or tactic or whatever. If I was to do that, the five star thing is just tracking. Not just tracking, but gamifying it a little bit. First of all, just the tracking, one of the most impactful things, and again this comes back to like the most impactful things are usually boring, and there are things that are not sexy and people don't like hearing them, but like tracking every piece of food, weight every morning, every rep, every workout, how many steps, everything.

Track all of it, all the time. What happens is, you know, when you're compulsive with food like all compulsivity you you bullshit yourself you lie to yourself you make up stories You're like, oh, well, I I worked really hard this morning. So I deserve this this burger or Like, you know, I had a great workout. So Yeah, I can have a little bit of cake tonight or whatever and you know, it's not that many calories When you track everything you're like, know, it's not that many calories. When you track everything, you're like, okay, first of all, that workout. No getting around it.

Yeah, that workout sucks. Yeah, that workout was terrible. You know, second of all, yeah, that cake was 800 calories. So you know, you're bullshitting yourself on both sides, you know, so that was massively, massively impactful because it's the only thing that keeps you honest. And probably the least valuable thing, you know, I had a, there was a period there where, um, kind of, I think initially discovering the compulsivity, there was a little bit of this like, like what's the emotion driving, you know, and that was, it was useful to identify

the emotion. But then I tried to go to the next layer, which is like, okay, well let's say there's like some sort of wound or something going on and, you know, talk to some people about that. And they're like, well, tell us about your child. You got all this shit about like what mom cooked and what she didn't cook and all this stuff. And anyway, after like a couple of months,

I'm like, this is completely pointless. Yeah, I mean, there's no bottom to that rabbit hole. Exactly. And at some point it's like, what's moving me forward? And it's like, whether it's the burger, whether I crave the burger because mom never made burgers or because she brought McDonald's, like it doesn't matter. The point is, the burger's off the menu. Exactly.

So what are we going to put in place? It doesn't fucking matter. So, but yeah, it's honestly the keeping you honest with yourself and being conscious to related, you know, not everybody has to go, have you done a glucose monitor? I have, yeah. So that was interesting just in noticing like how different foods affect me differently. And it was interesting, my wife and I, we did it at the same time and it was like, we'd both eat the same thing and then she would would have a different- Completely different reaction.

Yeah, it's super interesting to do that. I also noticed like what happens when I eat too late during like what my levels are like throughout the night when I'm asleep, which is wild. I think it's important to pair that with a lot of education because the gamification aspect of it incentivizes you to like keep that thing flat all the time, which isn't, which then in order to keep it flat,

you have to eat like high fatty foods and all these other things that actually aren't good for you. So it can drive unhealthy food choices, but I think just wear it for like 10 days or 14 days and just like, wow, look at that. Like you just, you just see things that, cause it's not intuitive, you know, you wouldn't know that this is happening.

And the interesting thing for me too, was days that I would feel lethargic or that I would need a nap, have an afternoon crash or whatever. It helped me connect a lot of dots that way. You're wearing a garment too. I am wearing a garment. It's legit.

Yeah. This is all real. It's crazy you're wearing a garment. I know. a garment. So it's legit. Yeah. This is all real. It's crazy you're wearing a garment. I know. Like when you came to my house in 2019, I was like, I would not have imagined you wearing a garment. No, no. Yeah, that was me.

That was probably close to my peak weight. I was a big boy. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't say you look like an entirely different person because your hair is different and stuff like that, but like you look better, man. Your skin looks better.

Obviously your weight and all that kind like that, but like you look better, man. Your skin looks better. Obviously your weight and all that kind of stuff, but you just look, you come across like you're more comfortable in your own skin. Yeah. A lot of it is just being healthier. Like it, it pisses me off. Like this is, this is one, I think this is, if there is anything that I've really fucked up

in my adult life in terms of this self personal development and everything. I've always been really good from a very young age. I was very interested in relationships. I read tons of books and I got into psychology and I started going to therapy when I was like 20 and I did meditation retreats. I've been all over all this stuff, like the mental and the emotional side of it. I've been all over it.

The physical side, I was always a wreck. And when I was young, like most young people who have terrible physical habits, I poo-pooed it. I would hear podcasts of people being like, well, you need to do this every morning and blah, blah, blah. This is going to increase your mood. And I was like, ah, fuck that shit. I was out drinking a little four and I'm up at eight and I'm grinding and I'm working and I feel fine.

And there was a little bit of like a defiance in me and that works when you're 27 and have a insane metabolism. But when I got to 37, it started having chest pains, you know, waking up cold sweats in the middle of the night, you know, like just going off the rails health-wise. I was like, okay, maybe I should look into this. And then now that I've done it, I'm like, oh my God, I feel so much better all the time. I have so much energy.

I'm so much happier. Why didn't anybody tell me? Yeah, why didn't anybody tell me? Where were you Rich? Well, it's your authority issues. It's part of the problem. Totally. You know, it's like, it's your authority issues, it's part of the problem. Totally. It's these things that can be superpowers

also become our greatest enemies. You know what I mean? And I don't know why it's wired that way, but it is. It's like these things that propel us in this great direction. And then we become kind of overly enamored with that as a strategy. And we become blind to kind of,

cause everything there's two sides to all of these things always. Yeah. The best thing about somebody is also the worst thing. Usually. And that's definitely true in my case. Yeah. I hate being told what to do.

So, and that's most of my success can be due to that. And most of my failures can be due to that. Right. That's the way it goes, right? It's sort of like, you know, I mean, somebody like, you know, like take Lance Armstrong, like seven Tour de France titles, also all of this other, you know, egregious behavior on there, why couldn't you just like win the titles

without the, it's like, no, these things cannot be, they don't happen without each other, it's like, no, these things cannot be, they don't happen without each other. I wanna end on some thoughts around like the nature of human habit change. I spent a lot of time thinking about this and I'm always curious, like, again, like you're just marinating in this stuff. So when you think about somebody

who can successfully make a change, maybe they just hear the information and they're like, great, got it. And then they go do it and they improve their lives versus the person who struggles and struggles and struggles. And I know there's no easy answer to this. It's not a reductive thing, but do you have any kind of thoughts on what differentiates those two people? Why can some people change

and other people find it so difficult? That's a great question. I have found, I'm gonna make up a term here. I found that some people seem to have identity flexibility, which what I mean by that is, is some people seem to just naturally, for whatever reason, whether it's they grew up that way or they're born that way

or they learned it at some point in their life, they define themselves very loosely. And they're comfortable with that looseness. Like they don't get super attached to how they see themselves. And I've noticed that a lot of other people are very attached to how they see themselves. And I've noticed that a lot of other people are very attached to how they see themselves and their identity is very rigid.

They're like, well, this is who I am. This is how I've always been. And, you know, I can't change it. You can't tell me to change it, you know, whatever. I've just noticed that people with that identity flexibility, it's much easier for them to kind of remove the Lego block from their identity and replace it with a different one. There's not as much friction for them, there's not as much psychological, I mean there's psychological fallout for everybody, but there's less for

them and there's like a little bit of an alacrity to it. And I actually, I mean, this is the biggest thing that I personally took from all my years studying Buddhism is the central theme of Buddhism is that the identity doesn't exist. It's all an illusion. It's all made up. It's all just, you're just, you put these Lego blocks here and called it yourself and you can take those blocks away

or get rid of them at any time. You just forgot how or never learned how. And so that's my observation. That's really insightful. And I think that's right. And it makes me think about what drives somebody to be so attached to how they see themselves in the world and what allows somebody to kind of be flexible

and hold loosely to that. And what is behind attachment other than fear, like we attach onto things to give us a sense of control and safety, right? So somebody who doesn't have that kind of fear is probably somebody who's more likely to kind of like let go and be in that allowing space. I would say that that's one reason.

I would say it's our identity attachments probably were created to fulfill our needs. And one of those needs is survival. So like probably the most rigid attachments are trauma related in some way. It's like a defense mechanism, the trauma. And so you're just terrified of removing that piece of your identity because then everything's going to go wrong again. But like, I would say that there's a lot of identity attachments that are perfectly, you know, it's like, I'm very attached to my identity as a husband to my wife, you know, and I probably should be right. Like I shouldn't be able to just throw that away at any time. So like some identity attachment is good and healthy, but again, I think it's just the

flexibility or how glued together everything is. It's good to not hold onto those things too tightly. Yeah. It's good to not hold on to those things too tightly. Yeah, and do you think that that is? Teachable like the the letting go or the unclutching of these things that we hold on to in that way. I do I do think it's teachable. I do think it's a skill. I think Serious meditation slash Buddhism, you know, not the silly Serious meditation slash Buddhism, you know, not the silly

Five minute app, you know, those are fine, you know, the app meditations are fine, but like serious Introspection and meditation. I think it gets at that. I think really really good therapy gets at that. I Think journaling can get at that. I Think it's a skill that can be developed, but I also think like most skills, some people have a talent, like there are some people who have a talent for it. I'll throw this in here too. I've seen people who are so good at it

that it causes them problems. Because they're just like floating in the wind all the time from one thing to the next. They're a new person. Without any kind of ballast. Yeah, they're a new person every other month. And it's like whoever they're dating at the time. Right, well, it's the spectrum, right?

On both sides of these things. I mean, in truth, yes, like, of course, your identity as a husband and a father, like you wanna hold onto that. But in reality, back to this Buddhist idea, our identity is just a story. It's a story we tell ourselves. And for the most part,

it's a story that was constructed unconsciously. We didn't even participate in the construction of it. It just sort of occurred. And it's basically an assemblage of memories of experiences that our brain selects without our agency and decides these are important. Yes. Right.

Yeah. And it's like, why is it choosing these? Like you've had billions of experiences and memories and the brain is selecting these things and then creating a through line to create a narrative. Yeah. Right. And we're convinced that that narrative

is the definition of who we are and it's intractable. Yes. When in truth, we could pick another memory that that narrative is the definition of who we are and it's intractable. When in truth, we could pick another memory or we could say why, or we could take that memory and put it to the test and say, is that really true? Do we have other experiences that would challenge that? Like, and I think it's sort of like tracking with, you know, diet and fitness, like maybe,

and that's journaling, but that's like journaling intentionally, like let's deconstruct this story. Is there a possibility that there's another story that's maybe more true or equally true? And not for nothing, like our memories are highly unreliable. They're just like prisms of like things that happen that like for the most part are so loosely related to any kind of like objective truth.

Yeah. And it's, to bring it back to the, I guess, my story, it took years of struggling with food and alcohol to even realize that I had that story of like, oh, I'm the fun party guy. Oh, I'm up for any dinner or after party or whatever. Oh yeah, I'll do shots with you. I created that story probably in adolescence as a way to get social approval. That was one way for me,

I noticed that I could drink more than most people and handle my liquor and I could eat more than most people and feel fine. And that made me easy to be around and fun to be around. And so I did more of it. And that story got written and I didn't even realize it got written. And then when I was 40, I had to be like,

oh, fuck, I got this story. Like, I can't be the dinner party guy anymore. Like I gotta be something else. And then, you know, so you remove it. And then to me, there's a little bit of pain and grief with removing it. Like you miss it, then to me, there's a little bit of pain and grief with removing it. Like you miss it, kind of like you miss an old friend, but then the hard part is like finding,

what can you put in its place? You know, like what's the new story I can write so that I can have friends again? Right. Well, what I would say, yeah. I don't think it's like a vacuum that needs to be filled. I think it's more like the way that Richard Schwartz at Internal Family Systems would look at it,

which is like, this is one facet of your identity that developed when you were very young as a way of kind of feeling connected to other people in the world. And now you can see, you can give it a name like, hey, party guy Charlie, right? You were awesome, like thank you. Like you really helped me make friends and we had a lot of good times together.

But like, I'm cool with people now. Like I can go out and have fun and I get to decide what I wanna do that. And people seem to like me. And so, you can settle down. I don't need you to like, I realize like you're there and I get to decide what I wanna do that and people seem to like me. And so, you know, you could settle down. Yeah. I don't need you to like, like I realize like you're there and I love you, you know,

but like you can kind of like ride in the back seat for a while and like honor that part of who you are without like shame or guilt or judgment and just say like, I've, you know, I've grown out of it. Like I don't need, I realized you were trying to protect me. You had my best interest at heart, but like now I have a different part of me that serves that in a way that's healthier.

Yeah. Another way that I think about it sometimes too is our stories are strategies. And party guy Mark was my strategy to get my social needs met. And now party guy Mark is gone. So I need a new strategy. That doesn't necessarily mean I need to like

find a new identity. It's just like, I need to find other things to do with people that doesn't involve drinking. Yeah. And gets you to stop playing video games. Yeah, yeah. Maybe play a few. Are you good with like, I have a sense,

like my instinct is that, you know, something else that we share is like, I can be pretty reclusive. Yes. You know, like I'm at home, I come here, I go back home. Yeah. Because this is my social life.

Oh yeah. Outside of my family. Yeah. And it's very nourishing, like, even though like we've done three podcasts, like other than these three podcasts and like one dinner party that we were at together, that is a sum total of our relationship.

But like, I feel like you're a friend. And I think even like after that dinner, it was like, hey, let's hang out. And then, and I was well intended in that, but like, did I call you? Did you call me? No, we never did anything together. You know, like I suck at that.

I don't know if you rely on your wife for social life, but I definitely do. Yeah, I do. But I think I suck at that. I don't know if you rely on your wife for social life, but I definitely do. Yeah, I do. But I think I'm at an age now where I need to be much more proactive about my friendships. So I've been, yeah. We're in the same boat, dude. We're in the same boat.

We could be accountability buddies. Let's hang out out of obligation as opposed to, I have to go rich rich our scheduled social time is coming up. We have a playdate Can we bring a microphone? So our playdate episode is is rapid. Yeah We'll bring microphones we won't attach them to a recorder just so we feel safe We'll just we'll just walk around the Venice Boardwalk with like unattached shirt mics Yeah, well maybe I need to go back to that therapist you used to be

All right, we're ending this. Thanks, buddy. That was awesome. Thanks, dude. Appreciate it. Cheers. markmanson.net, the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast on YouTube and all the places, right? Yep. Cool.

Peace out. All right. Thanks. Cheers. This episode was brought to you today by NordicTrack and iFit. Head on over to nordictrack.com slash richroll to experience personalized fitness. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation.

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