Mark Manson - The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

Full transcript: Mark Manson on London Real

3:27 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Mark Manson, the American self-help author, personal development consultant, entrepreneur and blogger. Your work has been featured by major publications and broadcasters, including Time, CNN and BBC News. And your blog articles are read by millions of people each month.

3:45 Your first book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a f***, is a New York Times bestseller with over 6 million copies sold, and your new book, Everything Is F***ed, is a counterintuitive guide to the problems of hope. Mark, welcome to London Real. It’s good to be here. Good to have you here. First of all, how is this city treating you?

4:03 What do you think of the city? How does it feel compared to, say, New York where you live, you know, this first time I’ve been to London, and it’s sunny and beautiful outside, so I think that by itself is like pretty welcome, but I like London. It’s really not like, I like walking around London. You can feel the history. Yeah, it’s kind of steeped in it, right?

4:24 Yeah, and you just came from Australia, right? And yes, kind of touring the world. It’s doing a world tour. Wow, okay, let’s talk about how your life’s changed in the last few years. Sure, as you know, before The Subtle Art which is orange, by the way.

4:38 Just people don’t know you hadn’t written a book, right? What’s it like to go from that to this book, you know? New York Times bestseller for Jesus years, right? Six million copies. I mean, most authors are probably super envious of you.

4:55 You know, you become famous, you’re writing books with Will Smith. You know, what’s that like as far as a life adjustment? I don’t know. I mean, in totality, like when we sit here right now and look back on it, it feels very surreal and it feels sudden, but it’s weird, because when you’re going through it, it’s even though it happened quickly over the course of three years, like it still felt gradual, you know, like for instance, with The Subtle Art, when it started taking off a few months after it came out, I kept, I kept telling my, my emails recalls from my publisher, my editor, saying, like, oh, we sold this million copies or this many copies this week, or we’re about to hit 1 million.

5:43 And in my head, I keep telling myself, I’m like, okay, well, yet, you know, this is it’s temporary. I’m having a good run at it, but you know, it’s gonna drop off, and you know, now we’re three and a half years into it, or something. I think he was number one last week, still. So, so it’s to me, it’s just the entire time I’m sitting there, I’m like, okay, well, well, don’t get too invested in it, don’t get too attached to it, because it’s likely it’s not gonna last, but it just keeps lasting.

6:14 So it’s actually been a very strange experience for me, and it was the same thing with the Will Smith thing, you know. So, so he came. His team reached out, and I had some conversations with my agent, and she was very honest. She, as an agent should be, she was like, look, most celebrity books don’t happen. Most of them, it’s a lot of talking.

6:36 So, like, don’t get too excited. And so I really went into it without expectations, kind of like, all right, well, would be cool to hang out with Will Smith, but we’ll see what happens, and we’re writing it like it’s actually happening. You know, so it’s, I think from the outside, it looks like this, like huge. It’s like, it’s like Mark jumped on a roller coaster. Look at him go, you know.

6:59 But from the inside, it’s this very strange kind of uncertain experience. Okay, I’m not knowing if what you’re experiencing is actually real, right? We’re gonna last? Okay. And because of your Buddhist background and everything in the book, they’re kind of pre-trained to handle something like this.

7:18 Well, my mind kind of automatically goes that way anyway. Like, I think some people have the opposite reaction, you know? It’s their book takes off, and, like, well, it’s about damn time the world knows how brilliant I am, you know? And I think that gets people in a lot of trouble, because at some point you’re not gonna be on top. I always, I’ve always had the opposite reaction, of, like, you know, I don’t know if this is such a great thing.

7:47 I don’t know if this is gonna last, you know? Enjoy it for the moment, but don’t get too wrapped up in it. You know, I’d rather be too humble than to follow myself. Yeah, and so I try to err on excess humility. What’s been the coolest thing that’s happened on the back of this book?

8:05 I mean, I know you met Will Smith, hanging out with Pele, you know, but what have been that one, like, single moment where you’re like, wow, this is kind of crazy? Yeah, I think so. There are a lot of exciting moments like that, like meeting Pele, but honestly, like, the best moments are the stories that I get from people. So I, I did an event in Australia a few days ago, and it was funny, because it’s I did, I did like a little meet-and-greet before the event, and this young woman, about 20 years old, she comes in with her parents, and she starts talking to me.

8:44 She’s like, oh, I’m a big fan, whatever, and the mom starts talking to me, and she’s like, yeah, she made, made me read your book, blah, blah, blah, and, and, well, like the, the father, he’s probably mid-sixties, like big, like man’s man, you know? He’s like old-school Australian dude, and he’s just balling, like he’s just crying, and and then the mom said, oh, he’s already emotional, and she said, she said he just, he’s a cancer survivor, and when he was going through chemo, he read your book over and over again, and he’s just like sobbing in front of me. So it’s moments like, happy to answer your question.

9:27 You know, it’s moments like that, that, it, it that feels so much more powerful. Like, look, I’m proud of the New York Times list, and I’m proud of millions of copies or whatever, and it’s great having money, but it’s moments like that that then I’m like, oh f***, I really did something. Yeah. What? Why do you think it, it pops so much, the book?

9:55 It’s a good question. I think it’s a confluence of a lot of things. You know, I would love to take credit for all of it, but I think it’s, you know, the joke I make is, I’ll take credit for the first million, but, you know, everything past that, it’s like, I have no idea what’s happening. I think it’s a combination of a lot of things. I think part of it is, I did nail the message, and I nailed the tone and the style.

10:26 Like, I think it really, for the self-help genre, I think it really is a unique, new style that people were very hungry for. On top of that, I think just the timing. You know, one thing I noticed was, when there’s been a lot of political problems, I know here in the UK there’s, with Brexit and everything, in the U.S. you have Trump. Australia has had a lot of problems. I know I started noticing a lot of these countries, when the political problems would kind of flare up, sales would go up.

11:00 So I think there’s something about this moment in the world where people are, you know, in the airport, they’re like, wow, I really wish I didn’t give so much of a f***. I really wish I cared less. So it’s, it’s great title, great marketing. The book’s really good, but it’s also, them, kind of, design guides that we’re in right now. People are overly anxious, overly upset, and they understand that they’re more anxious and upset than they should be about things.

11:28 Yeah, yeah, because there’s a lot of like tribalism and divisive nough sand people kind of angry, and then there’s social media, which heightens it, and then people feel disconnected from social media, and maybe people can’t put their finger on it, but they know that they need something to stop feeling that way. Yeah. And then I guess your book comes up, and it seems like it’s a good solution, and the title kind of implies that. Yeah, right. Yeah, and I think it’s that title in particular, The Subtle Art, it seems to play very well, like on Instagram, for instance.

12:05 Like, I think it’s, I managed to make self-help cool. You know, so most people who buy self-help books, you’re not like showing them to all your, you know, like, oh, hey, check it out, I got relationship problems, you know? Like, well, it’s, it’s there’s a little bit of shame industry that’s mocked easily. Yes, and though it helps a lot of people, but a lot of people point the finger, or real good at that in Britain as well. Yes.

12:30 So, yeah, your book has a way of kind of mocking yourself while you’re doing it, or yeah, I think there’s an edginess to it, right? You know, where people are like, yeah I’m gonna stop giving a f***, you know? And then they like snap a picture with themselves with, like, they’re, they’re excited to snap a picture with it, right? And that’s, you know, my goal even going back to my blogging days, you know, my goal was always, I always felt self-help had gotten a little bit, a little bit too airy-fairy, you know?

13:07 Everything just be positive, just follow your dream, you know? Like, everything with it. I think there needed to be a correction. There needed to be a little bit more pessimism, incentives in the self-help world, and so I very much saw my role as, like, I want to bring that, and I think I just underestimated how much of a demand for that there was, right? Even though it’s not necessarily a pessimistic or cynical book.

13:33 It’s, yeah, it’s actually, but it kind of calls people on their BS and says, this is what’s, you have to do. It’s gonna take hard work. Yeah, but let’s be honest about what it is. Yeah, and it’s a different way of looking at things. Yeah.

13:46 I’ve actually, I’ve started calling it pessimistic self-help, but, but pessimism more in like a philosophical sense, and that, like, I genuinely think, like, humans, like, we suck. Like, humans, like we just, we kind of suck at things, you know? Like, we’re not we’re not very rational, we’re not objective at all, we’re very selfish and prejudiced, and you know, all these things that psychology has been showing us for decades, and so I would, I was kind of living in that psyche research, doing my blog, and then, meanwhile, I’m like looking at the self-help industry, and it’s like, it’s like oh yeah, if you, if you just believe in yourself, you know, everything’s gonna go great.

14:26 It’s like, well, no, you’re gonna be a narcissist, you know? If you just believe everything you think, like, that’s narcissism. So I see it as, it’s like, let’s start at, and as you said, being honest about our flawed nature. Our brains are not optimized. We didn’t evolve for truth or happiness.

14:49 We evolved for survival, and so a lot of the mechanisms in our psychology that helped us survive make us unhappy and make us irrational or unobjective, and so that should be the starting point for any self-improvement. Yeah, so simple but very powerful way to start. Yeah, you once said your mission is to help people create better problems. Yes. It just sounds kind of cool when you first hear it, you know?

15:17 You’ve all said problems never stop. They get exchanged or upgraded, and then the real problem that you’re ever gonna have is the lack of problems. Yes. That’s a pretty interesting statement. Most people, maybe if they think about it, makes sense, but people would have a hard time coming up with that on their own.

15:33 Mm-hmm. How do you come up with that? And then is that a Buddhist thing and is that something you were always interested in? There’s definitely Buddhist influence in my work. You know, I, I was very into the Buddha stuff in my early 20s, and and it was very powerful for me.

15:50 I think I’ve kind of drifted away from it a little, so the influence is there but I’m not beholden to it. Why were you drawn to Buddhism? I think, I, that’s a really good question. It just, this, gonna sound so cliché, it just made sense. Like, it’s the opposite of Americanism.

16:13 Certainly it really is. I, I just, I had a number of, so I grew up, we were talking about this before the interview started, I grew up, I grew up in Texas, and I mean, technically, I grew up in Austin, Texas, but this was the ’80s, and this was, it was outside Austin, so it was Texas. It was like horses and cowboys and Jesus and, like, the whole shebang. What is Texas for people that don’t know? What is it, though?

16:38 How do you explain it to the world? What is Texas in the eighties? It’s big hats and conservatism, man. Oh yeah, and tough guys, and you know what else? Religion.

16:47 Yeah, I mean, it’s big trucks and you know, the way I described it, if you’ve seen the movie or the TV show Friday Night Lights, like, that’s actually based on where I grew up. You know, it’s like the high school football game. Friday night is the center of the community’s existence. And I was just this intellectual, kind of contrarian kid who never, from a very early age, didn’t feel like I fit in. You know, it’s like, you, where I grew up, it, you were punished for being too smart.

17:23 You know, is the old, like, oh, you think you’re smart, using big words, you know? And they’d like kind of push you around for it, you know. So I didn’t, I went to church. I had to go to church all the time, but I, you know, I didn’t really believe in religion, so I had a very kind of, like, just angry, frustrated adolescence, and so I used a lot of drugs, and any particular kind. Well, I mean, kind of most of them, but I had I had a few powerful psychedelic experiences.

18:01 Okay, and I think most people who have done psychedelics, or know about psychedelics, like, understand that sometimes you kind of tap into these, like, this broader consciousness, and so that happened, and I was like, oh s***, there’s something more, you know, here there’s something more to life or the universe or whatever, and so I became very interested in religion. I started reading about other religions and studying other religions, and then I came across Buddhism, and it, it just made sense. You know, there’s no Big D who’s judging you.

18:35 You know, it’s, it’s life is you, you’re attached to everything, and that attachment removes you from the reality of that. Everything is one, and there is no good and bad. There just what is. Yeah. I read Siddhartha when I was a kid.

18:51 Yeah, so that was like, blew me away, and I still had a hard time getting my head around it, because I’m this punk kid living the American dream. Yeah, really opposite of what I was seen on TV. Yes. So I remember being so confused. Yeah, but I mean, it was again the first seed I had of what that was.

19:06 Absolutely. And so then I started, I started meditating, just kind of dabbling, and I noticed that meditation was the only thing that kind of made me feel kind of that transcendent experience on the psychedelics. Like, if I meditated for a long time, I would start to feel, look, like a little bit of that. Okay. And so I was like, oh well, that that’s what I’ve been looking for, you know?

19:28 So I spent a few years really into it, interested, and reading a lot, and you’re talking about, we were talking about Cambridge earlier, in Boston, so I was a member at the Cambridge Zen Center, and I would go and do Zen-like retreats, doing Zen meditation and reading a bunch of books. So for meditation was popular. Yeah, this was ah for okay, so it was like if you were kind of into the hippie dippie alternative lifestyles, you know, people knew it and talked about it, but it wasn’t like today, where, yes, because there was no YouTube and no apps, and, yeah, there’s no Headspace and really seek it out.

20:06 And yeah, and then, oh yeah, okay, so, alright, so that planted the seeds. A lot of these ideas, even your upbringing in Texas, had a lot to do with the Atlas. Yeah, and it’s actually one of the things that surprised me about the new book when I was writing it, is that there were a few times where I was writing something and I was like, wow, that’s that’s that’s a Jesus thing, you know? Like, I, there’s a chapter in there where I talk about kind of unconditional forgiveness and love, and I’m like, sitting there writing, I’m like, this is totally Jesus thing.

20:38 I’m like, man, I haven’t thought about Jesus in, like, 20 years, you know? And but it was interesting, because writing this new book, one of the unexpected, we can talk about this later, but one of the unexpected side effects is that it kind of, it gave me a little bit of respect for the Christianity I grew up with that maybe I hadn’t been giving it before when I was younger because I was angry. But yeah, the, the Buddhist stuff, that’s kind of the Buddhist thing kicked off my interest in philosophy, my interest in psychology, trying to understand people, you know, relationships, interactions.

21:19 A lot of that started around that same time, of, like, because I, it’s, I think what happened to me was I had this, this set of experiences where I’m like, wow, my brain does not work the way I thought it worked, you know? There’s a lot of stuff going on up here that I was not aware of, and I want to understand that, and so, you know, I started reading, like, Carl Jung and Freud, and took some philosophy courses at school, and it, like, that’s kind of where everything began, or at least I started to get kind of serious about it. Okay, for myself.

21:54 Yeah. Okay, well, like, a lot of these messages have come up on this show, you know, before, and I’d love to, like, talk about them, but first, like, for people that have never heard of your stuff before, you know, if you want to help people create better problems, they’re gonna say, well, I don’t, don’t want this guy around. What do you mean by that? So my argument in all my work is that dissatisfaction is it’s an innate part of our psychology. Like, there’s no, you’re never, there’s no amount of money or success or love that you’re ever gonna achieve where you’re like, cool, I’m done, I got it, you know?

22:34 Everything. Every experience that you produce in your life, or that you achieve in your life, your mind will find flaws. There are, there will be unexpected or unintended consequences of that success or that love, or whatever, and so basically the problems never go away. Problems are an inherent part of our existence. And yet we walk around in this world of, one day I’m going to retire and then there’s no problem.

23:01 Yes. I’m gonna get married and then I won’t have relationship problems. When I get rich, I won’t. Yeah, and yet we have this narrative in all heads and in the media and in the culture that it’s the opposite of that. Yeah.

23:12 It’s a, it’s a trick that are like a magic trick that our brain keeps doing on us, and we never figure it out. You know, it’s like, it’s like, think of all, if I just get that promotion, like everything’s gonna be fine, right? And your brain’s like, yeah, it’s gonna be fine, it’s gonna be fine, like, keep working, keep working. Then you get the promotion, and within, like, two days you’re like, okay, well, I need another promotion now, you know? And it just keeps going.

23:33 And so what, since every form of success is gonna produce its own problems, the point that I make is that what we should actually shoot for is let’s just find the problems that we enjoy having. You know, so because that ends up actually being a, what feels meaningful in our life, because we, we actually need problems. It’s the, it’s the fact that I have problems in my life and I work on them and I improve upon them, that is actually what gives my life a sense of meaning.

24:08 You know, if everything is just great and I’m just, like, kicking it with piña coladas at the beach, you know, like, that’s not meaningful. That doesn’t feel, it gets old. It feels very shallow and superficial. Yeah, so we see that with rich housewives, people that retire, people that have made it. Then their problem is no problems, right?

24:27 And then their mind has to create sets to work, creating problems. So that’s why you get, you know, rich housewives who you know, just gossip about each other all day, or, you know, old retired people who lose their minds because they didn’t get a discount at their favorite restaurant. You know, it’s like that. It’s it doesn’t matter what, where you are in life. Like, your mind will generate a certain amount of problems, like perceived problems in your existence.

24:57 Yeah, and so the thing that makes, say, you know, getting upset, if the biggest problem in your life is that you know, you don’t get a discount at your favorite restaurant, like, that’s a bad problem. That’s not a meaningful problem. It’s not, there’s no benefit to having that problem. It makes you, it makes you more, that’s a problem that makes you more kind of stuck within yourself. So a good problem is a problem that feels meaningful, that helps yourself and helps others, connects you with other people, and that actually, like, serves a higher purpose.

25:36 So the point I make in Subtle Art is, like, the reason like people with money have money problems, people without money have money problems. It’s just that you would rather have the money problems of having money than not having money. You know, so it’s a better problem. That’s why you want to make money. It’s cuz you’d rather have the problem of, like, you know, what do I invest in, then, like, how am I gonna eat?

26:01 Like, that’s so, it’s the problems don’t go away. You just improve upon the problems. You just find better problems. You trade in your low-level problems for higher-level problems. I think in Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, he said problems are like gas in a gas chamber.

26:16 He’s like, whatever you, and they are, they fill up the room. Yes. So, and that’s, I mean, so I thought of that when I was reading your book. Yeah, just like, okay, this is interesting. So everyone needs to accept you’re always gonna have problems, yes, even when you don’t have any, you’re gonna go find them, and then you’re gonna magnify them to overcome your headspace.

26:34 You have to say, whether you’re arguing about count or that claim, grandparent could be thinking, I have to raise this grandkid, and they are such a big pain, but I’ve got to spend my life trying to make them a real great human. Yeah, and both of them could stress them out, but one they would probably agree is a better problem. Sure, sure. Because I mean, and you, it’s as simple as you could just ask these people, it’s like, if you ask that person, are you proud of being upset that you didn’t get the discount at the restaurant?

27:01 You know, they’d say no. You know, it’s like, oh yeah, I was probably, it’s kind of a silly thing to get upset about, or whatever, whereas if you ask somebody, like, are you proud of raising your grandson? You know, everybody’s gonna say yes. So it’s like, that’s, it’s that hindsight, because emotions only exist in the present. You know, you don’t, it’s when you look back into the past the only thing that you recognize is the meaning.

27:25 You know, so it’s like we all have past experiences that we look back on that we can see that we got very emotionally worked up about something that was not meaningful, and we tend to feel like that was really stupid, we shouldn’t have gotten worked up about it, whereas there are other things that it’s like, yes, I got emotionally worked up, but it was a very meaningful experience. It was a very important problem, and I’m glad I got upset about it. I’m glad I worked on it.

27:49 I’m glad I struggled. I’m glad I wasn’t happy, you know. And so that’s what we want to go for, because if the state of our nature is that we are just always going to experience problems, then we need to, the question then becomes, how do we find meaningful problems? Right. I did a planning session with my wife the other day, right here in the office, where she came in on a Sunday, and we just did this once.

28:13 It’s not like I’m a genius on this, but I did it on the whiteboard 2020, 2030, 2040, 20, all the way up to 27, to 28, and I said, here, honey, we’re dead, and I was trying to plan our future, and she started crying, and I was like, oh my god, but we were trying to plan like when the kids are gonna be this, and what we’re going to do, but I just listening to you, I thought, should we be planning the problems that we want to have in the future? So, here, one of the kids will be out, so now we’re gonna have to find new problems or new challenges. Is that the way we should kind of think about our future?

28:42 Finding out the problems that we want to have, because that way you kind of come to the terms that you’re always gonna have them, as opposed to, we’ll have the house then, and then everything’s gonna be great. Then, yeah, yeah, I think it’s a better heuristic. I don’t know, the same way, it’s like I love doing those exercises too, but you kind of, you learn that it’s like, okay, you write stuff out for 10 years, 20 years, but you know that it’s like most of it you’re not gonna end up, you know, you’re gonna change it as the years goes on, go on, but kind of the point is that it just gives you direction.

29:12 I think the same thing is true of, like, choosing your problems. So I think it’s what you mentioned is a great example. So, you know, at some point your kids are gonna grow up and move out. That’s gonna be a problem, and so you won’t have a problem. You won’t have a problem, you know?

29:28 So you can have all this empty time, all this extra time without meaningful problems to solve or meaningful things to kind of engage you, and so I think it’s it’s important ahead of time to think about, okay, what can I find that will feel meaningful to kind of fill that void. I’ve got a friend who’s a sports psychologist, and he said that one of the most important conversations he has with athletes, he said, even when they’re like 24, 25, he says, like, you need a retirement plan, because it’s your one injury away. This thing that you’ve been doing since you were three years old, that you’ve been known for your entire life, that is making you millions of dollars within the next 10 years, most likely it’s gonna be taken away from you.

30:14 And so you are an identity existential crisis waiting to happen, and so you need to start thinking now, of like, who are you gonna be when you don’t have baseball or don’t have football? What are you gonna do with your time? What are you, what’s gonna get you up in the morning, you know? And it’s sometimes, it’s called negative visualization, of, like, imagining future calamities so that you’re better prepared for them emotionally when they do happen, or if they happen.

30:46 Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. 200 years ago we were living in a world of scarcity, and now we’re living in a world of abundance. How does that affect the way we have to live today? I mean, now we’ve got too much food, too much media. Yeah, like too much everything.

31:03 And now so what does that mean? I think, I think we live in a very interesting time, and I think a lot of what we’re experiencing as political polarization, you know, a lot of frustrated frustration at social media and tech companies and corruption, all this stuff. I think a lot of that is at its root, the, that, you know, for most of human history it was all about more, you know. If, if you learned more than the next guy, you would have an advantage. If you were able to do more or have more opportunities, you know, that’s what got you ahead.

31:43 I think today that’s reversed. I think today what gets you ahead is knowing how to focus on less, you know, knowing how to cut through the bulls***, knowing how to ignore, like, okay, those opinions aren’t valid or aren’t helpful. That’s probably not true. These are the two things I should focus on. Like, it’s very few people have that skill right now, and I feel like that is that’s the skill that’s gonna get you ahead right now, because one of the things I’ve been talking about on my tour is I think there’s a lot to be said that, like, the human mind has a bandwidth limit.

32:21 There’s only a certain amount of information we can process, and once you exceed that bandwidth limit, our minds start taking shortcuts, and those shortcuts basically look like prejudice, stereotypes, bigotry, irrational beliefs, narcissism. And so if you’re consuming too much stuff, and it’s not nutritious information, your brains gonna start taking all these shortcuts, and it’s gonna make you worse off. And so I think the real challenge today is about finding those, you know, fine, find the 20% that produces the 80 result, or the 20% that, you know, represents 80% of what’s actually going on.

33:07 And that’s the Subtle Art of Not Giving a f*** about most things and using the things to give a f*** about. Yes. Find the handful, you know, find the handful of people that truly matter and really cultivate those relationships. Find the handful of causes or issues that really matter and focus all your energy on them, and find the few amounts of information sources or media that are really, really helpful and beneficial for both you and the world, and then just cut out all the bulls***, and find the few values that are important to you, and the few metrics, yes, that are important to you and focus on those, and don’t focus on the hundreds out there.

33:48 Yes, you could always find someone on Instagram who’s better at you. Oh yeah. Those, that’s hard. I think, I think one of the jokes I make in Subtle Art is, I said, like, I don’t care how good you are at something, there’s an 11-year-old on YouTube who’s bad. Like, that’s just the world we live in, you know?

34:05 So it’s hard to it’s hard to, I mean, this kind of, this kind of gets into what I talk about in the second book, which is, like, you know, back in the day we kind of lived in these smaller communities. We didn’t have a lot of communication with, you know, we didn’t know what people in New York and London were doing. You know, it’s like we had our little neighborhood in our little city, and and so if you were, like, the guitar player in your town, like, that was your identity.

34:37 That’s where you got meaning, that’s where you were, that’s how you were validated, how, what a lot of your relationships were based on. And I think being exposed to everything, and now you go online and there’s some eight-year-old who’s better than you, you know? It kind of robs us of those identities and those sources of meaning for ourselves, and you know, it’s again, it’s the unseen negative side effect of being globally aware. Yeah, because it’s weird, cuz in one way YouTube and Instagram, like for example, I know I have a lot of people come on there that are into physical movements, you know, and the fact I have a hand-balancing teacher who does one-arm handstands.

35:19 I mean, the fact is now you can see so many people doing these physical movements that 10 years, 20 years ago you thought would be nearly impossible. Yeah, and by seeing that they’re possible, everyone does them. All, yeah, like the learning curve is just climbing of just human possibilities of movement, and that’s one of the great things that globalization, maybe, because learning is happening fast if you’re super inspired by people pushing the envelope, but then the downside is that now you’re constantly comparing yourself with all these people.

35:45 Yes. And the band, with the Dunbar number, like none of that stuff is what we’re used to. Well, it wasn’t, and this is, it’s a multi-faceted paradox, because as you pointed out, it’s the technology is has large informational and material advantages, but there are emotional disadvantages, you know? And that’s kind of what the new book is about, is that there’s something about even though we are smarter, safer, healthier, better off in most ways than we were 20, 30 years ago, emotionally we are desperately Cline for a sense of meaning or a sense of hope.

36:22 Mental illnesses are rising in most developed places in the world. People, pessimism is at all-time highs, polarization issues, people, like loneliness, is a huge issue. You know, so it’s, there’s a weird asymmetry that comes with a lot of this technology, like the same way we benefit from learning all this amazing stuff on YouTube, there’s a certain, it destroys our sense of community. It removes it, it makes it more difficult to kind of satiate ourselves emotionally, then, you know, it used to be, it’s like, if you wanted to go learn something, like, you went, you went, went sat in a room with 20 people and took a class, you know, and, like, that built a sense of community, since a purpose you developed relationships.

37:10 Everything feels very meaningful, you know? It’s like you can learn all this great, you can go online, learn all this great stuff and be smarter than you ever would have been otherwise, but you’re isolated. Yeah, and there’s millions of other people doing it too, so it doesn’t feel meaningful. There’s nothing validating you in particular for it, and so it all starts to feel a little bit pointless at a certain point, and you think that is the root of a lot of this division and tribalism.

37:38 Do you think it’s just as these human-animal and maybe as a global species, when this stuff starts happening up here, that it has deep-seated, like, problems, and we start lashing out like you said. Yeah, paradox of choice. We’re too many decisions, decision fatigue, and then you start becoming, like you said, bigoted, or yeah, racist, or these kinds of things, because that, that literally is your mind trying to take a shortcut. Right. You know, it’s like when you are, when everything you do, you have hundreds of options.

38:07 It’s just overwhelming, and it’s fatiguing, you know? And so at some point you have to start developing principles or heuristics to kind of narrow down your selections of, like, what you’re gonna pursue or spend your time on or pay attention to. And so, you know, when people fall into prejudice and bigotry, like, that is what their mind is doing. They’re like, well, you know what, we’ve got a hundred options, but this is way too hard, so let’s just decide that these sixty are bad, no matter what, you know, because then at least that makes it, the load becomes easier on our minds.

38:43 I personally think, having spent the last few years researching this, I really think social isolation and loneliness is kind of the root cause of a lot of what we’re experiencing, as, like, a post-truth world or political polarization, or just people being upset. I think the fact that it’s so much harder to get out of the house, have meaningful face-to-face relationships, and even have those face-to-face relationships where both people are present, they’re not on their phones, they’re not, like, texting or whatever, you know, have that kind of awkward, uncomfortable interaction that ultimately generates that sense of meaning and identity and purpose. I think the lack of that, the way that we emotionally compensate for it, is going online and just being idiots, and yeah, and it probably is gonna get worse before it gets better, because what you talked about in the second book, especially, is taking personal responsibility, and yeah, going in and, you know, taking ownership of all these things, and that’s a hard thing to learn how to do.

40:01 I feel like it’s gonna take time. Yeah, I’m, it’s funny, I’m not, I’m pessimistic in the short term. I’m optimistic in the long term. Okay, I agree. I think it’s gonna get worse before it gets better.

40:13 I think, you know, the big argument in the second book about hope is that ultimately, it’s, it’s we all need some hope, you know? We, we need hope to kind of function well psychologically, and the more, the more we struggle with meaning or purpose in our lives, the more hope we look for to kind of compensate for that. But the point I make in the book is that when you, when you’re putting all of the meaning in your life into your hopes, when you’re like, let’s say everything you live for is the hope that, you know, some policy will pass in your country or that you’ll get your dream job or whatever, what you do is you make yourself very vulnerable to just, like, an existential crisis, because when things don’t go your way, when life hands you, you’re asked to, when something, when something unexpected pops up, if all of your hopes are in that one basket, and that basket gets yanked away, like, you’re lost.

41:18 You’re just completely lost. And so the book is all about how we need to be very careful of what we hope for, because it’s, it’s kind of this blind, this blind faith in our hopes and just constantly doubling down on our hopes, that actually causes all these problems in the first place. You know, we need to hold our hope slightly, be skeptical of them. Yeah. I had Jordan Peterson in here, and he says we shouldn’t pursue happiness, we should pursue meaning.

41:48 Absolutely. Yeah, and that’s good, and that’s, that’s, that’s what you talked about. Yeah, it’s funny, I agree. So, like, this, the psychology side of what he talks about, like, I totally on the same page, and I think a lot of his popularity, like, we’re both experiencing a lot of popularity because I think we’re two of the only people in this space that are talking about that. It’s like, no, you need struggle, you need challenge, and besides, there’s no such thing as a life without struggle or challenge, so, like, get used to it.

42:24 So you might as well find something meaningful to struggle for. Like, that is your job. That’s the ultimate responsibility of, like, being kind of a grown, functioning human. I had an AI guy in here last week, Dr Ben Burtt Cyl, who runs a company called Singularity, and that’s a really smart guy. Yeah, he’s like, well, Brian, we’re gonna, you know, we’re gonna upload our consciousness to the cloud, and we’re not gonna have any problems.

42:45 Okay, I’ve been hanging out with Jordan Peterson and reading your books, and I’m like, but we’re gonna need, we need struggle to have identity as humans, and he’s like, what are you talking? Yeah, Brian, no, we don’t. Like, you’re just gonna be up there in some cloud dream, you know, being a superhero wherever you want to be, and that’ll be the next evolution of human consciousness. We don’t have to worry about problems, and part of me just thought, that’s crazy, but then part of me thought, you know, maybe I should listen to what he says.

43:08 Maybe, maybe this is the ultimate evolution of human beings, but I always think that we will have problems. Well, he should read the last chapter of the new book, cuz I talked about AI, and basically what I say is that if we do end up with a cloud consciousness, there will be tribal civil wars programmed into the cloud, so that we all feel that we have something meaningful to fight we’re in the cloud. You know, like, it’s just, it’s, I mean, I don’t know, maybe there, he probably knows way better than I do, but I like the argument that I make is that it’s, again, this is a fundamental function of our psychology, like that we evolved this for a very specific, we evolved to have tribal fights, and, like, hopes for some kind of utopian future.

43:55 You know, like, this is, this is this is what got us here. The problem is, is that now our technologies advanced to such a point that I make the argument that, you know, we’re not mature enough to kind of deal with it. It’s like handing a bazooka to a four-year-old. You know, you just like really hope he doesn’t press the trigger. Like, that we’re kind of very quickly arriving at that point as a culture as a species, and so my hope, and I use that word very deliberately, is my hope is that the technology, the AI advances far enough to kind of pull the gun away from the baby and be like, you know, let me show you how to use this responsibly, or maybe just keep it away from us entirely, right?

44:44 Otherwise it could just escalate to these really big problems. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Be interesting to see what happens there. You know, you mentioned about having people really lonely these days, and I get it, and even though we’re connected, and I think that’s why, honestly, things like this, these long-form discussions where you get to have a real conversation. We were talking about Eddie Hall earlier, yeah, though, you know, the World’s Strongest Man, and you know, I had a two-hour conversation with him where he really got emotional about like his mom and his grandma.

45:11 It, she died on her deathbed, and he promised her that he would do this thing, and I think people spend two hours with him and they’re like, wow, I feel like I spent time with a human and I connected again, as opposed to the Instagram feed, or the Facebook thing, and the memes, and then, allow, I don’t feel connected. So it’s weird, in the fact that I think that’s why long-form is interesting to people, because they feel that human connection again. I don’t know, what do you drive?

45:34 Wow, I absolutely think about this a lot, because it’s, you know, I’ve blogged for 11 years now, and I remember early in my career, so I’ve always written very long articles, 20, 30 page articles, and early in my career people always like, man, you got to write shorter articles, man, like people don’t have the attention span. And I’m like, it’s funny, because the longer the articles get, the more successful they are, you know? Like, the more they get shared, and I think it’s, I think that is an effect of it.

46:04 It’s again, it’s kind of when you present people with long-form content, and again, this is assuming it’s really good and engaging, but like when you present people long-form content, you’re helping them cut out all that noise and distraction that we were talking about earlier, where you’re helping them only give a f*** about something that seems like very important, you know, because it’s like I could spend, I could spend three hours on YouTube watching like 40 different videos, and some of them will be good, some will be bad, but the whole time I’m having to, like, make decisions and figure out, is this worth watching or, like, no, I don’t really like that, go back to this one, whatever. Or I could put on a video like this and just know it’s like, alright, you know, next two hours, like, I’m set, and it’s like there’s something we’re leaving about that.

46:55 Yeah, that people like, yeah, very much so. Look, I wanted to get into a lot of the IP here, and you have a ton of it, so we’re gonna try to get through a lot of it, but you know, I was thinking about when you talk about values in here and it’s just an exercise for people to think about what are your values, and then to start to question yourself with like, are those values serving you, and will they serve you in the future? But the only reason we’re actually sitting here talking today is because I had that crisis about eight years ago, and I was, I moved to London to be a banker.

47:26 I was the best, greediest banker you ever met for nine years of my life. I was a great banker, but funny enough, in 2010 I actually took a meditation course, Transcendental Meditation, and I meditated twice a day, 20 minutes a day, just like they teach you, and about a month later I realized how I could see Brian Rose, and I was like, you’re just a grumpy old unhappy [expletive] because you thought money was the solution to all your problems, and even though I’m this MIT-trained mechanical engineer, I couldn’t see that I was acting irrationally, because I was, when you got enough money you’re gonna be happy, when I heard of money you’re gonna be happy, and maybe that’s the American dream, my twisted version of it. I won’t throw my whole country down the, yeah, down the river, but I was living with those values, and I was also becoming depressed.

48:13 I was drinking myself to death. I had almost died from an overdose back in the day in New York City. You know, I’d gotten over the drugs, but I still was repeating the same behavior, and again, I’d like to think I’m fairly smart, but I shouldn’t see this thing in front of me, Mark, and it wasn’t until I finally did the meditation where I was just like, oh, this isn’t making you happy, so stop doing it. Yeah, and then when I stopped doing it, I was off for about nine months.

48:36 I started London Real, and then I started really creating my value set. Okay, we know money doesn’t bring you happy. I’m happiness. So what will bring you happiness? Yeah, it took me a few years, but once I started doing this, I realized wow, creating something for other people, connecting to other people.

48:51 I started watching my own life and I was happier. I started having friendships. My addictive behavior started dropping off. Like, it was really apparent to me. So maybe you can talk about this whole concept of values, because again, if I had maybe read your book 20 years ago, right, and maybe I could have been more proactive in that, it maybe not, maybe I had to hit rock bottom.

49:11 Yeah, I mean, a lot of people do. You know, it’s that, that is part of the process, but for me I didn’t have. So I’m, I’m actually counterpoint to that. I didn’t have a rock bottom moment. The way I kind of came to this whole subject is, I was a little bit of a self-help junkie in my teens and early adulthood, and I kind of, if there was a checklist of everything you’re supposed to, you know, start your own business, travel the world, date lots of, like, really sexy women, you know?

49:46 It’s like I was just going through and, like, yeah, man, I’m just knocking all these boxes off, like just killing it every year. I’m like, hmmm, just like rocking this stuff, and I got to, like, 27 or 28, and I’m like, getting towards the end of that checklist, and fear started to set in. First of all, cause it’s like, okay, well, f*** I need more stuff to check off, but then I also kind of realized that it was just a game that I had been playing, you know, like, I realized I looked back at over the last 10 years and I realized that so much of it didn’t really feel meaningful, that it was like some itch in my brain that I was scratching, and that it, that H never really went away.

50:32 Like, you scratch it, and then it’s just, you want to find something else to check off the list. And so I actually, I had this very difficult kind of extended period of, well, that didn’t work. Like, that didn’t, I mean, I had fun, so I, it wasn’t that I was miserable or unhappy. Like, I had a lot of fun, but I realized that fun isn’t the same thing as, is a good life, you know? I, 10 years of fun, but it wasn’t it wasn’t meaningful, and so then I started asking myself, what is meaningful?

51:06 Like, what feels meaningful, and and essentially I came back to this idea of, like, wow, it’s, if you’re measuring success, if my measurement of success, or you know, pretty, your example, you, if your measurement of success is making a lot of money, and that’s a bad measurement, you can spend your whole life succeeding and feeling awful, feeling like it was all pointless. So you got to get the measurement right first. You got to find the right yardstick to measure your life by.

51:38 If you got the wrong yardstick, you’re just, you’re gonna end up the wrong person. And so then I started thinking about, okay, how do you find the right yardstick? Like, what is a good measurement of a good life? And I realize that that’s, you know, there’s probably some principles that define that, helping others create creating something, but for every individual it’s gonna be very different, very different, and so it has to be an individual process and so this is everything I just described.

52:11 Is why the Subtle Art of Knocking f*** was written. Like, I understood that people, people have to go through this personal process of how am I measuring success in my life, and regardless of if I’m achieving it or not, is that a good measurement? Is that a good metric? Should I change it, and then if I do, how, and I realize that if you write a book about values and re-evaluating your values, nobody’s gonna buy it. So I call it giving a f***.

52:42 You know, it’s like what are you giving a f*** about, and should you be giving a f*** about it? Because I, it’s kind of a way to trick people into thinking about these questions that are very difficult, very, like, uncomfortable, and so eventually, it, and I guess it’s, it’s also part of, you know, you asked me earlier, like, why is it so successful? And I think most of my fans, when, when I hear them talk about it, they always say, like, you know, it’s, oh, it’s real, you know, it’s honest.

53:16 And I don’t necessarily think other self-help material is dishonest or not real. You know, I think, I think what they really mean is that it, it asks way more important questions. You know, it’s like, if you want to make money, there are a million books out there that will show you how to make money, but if you want to know whether you should want to make money or not, there are not many books out there. And so I think that’s what makes it different, or feel like more real to people.

53:46 You said everyone has different values, but we could probably be pretty sure that if your value is making money and being famous, you’re probably gonna end your life, maybe not happy. Yeah, I mean, there are some fundamental core human values that do make people up. Yeah, give their life meaning, right? I’m sure there’s people out there that maybe no, I don’t believe that’s true. I don’t believe anyone out there that if they just made tons of money their whole life, that would be enough.

54:14 So I think there are people who enjoy money more than others, and I think there are people who enjoy fame more than others, but I think, but that’s not the same thing as being happy. Yeah, and like, again, this, like, this was huge for me, and it’s, and it’s a huge concept in both of the books, of, like, enjoyment. It’s not the same thing as happiness. Like, you can feel great, but you’re not happy, you know? It’s usually inversely correlated.

54:40 Yeah, well, yeah, and you’re enjoying yourself. It actually just means that the happiness, a meaning, is about to go. Yeah, and when you’re doing something grueling that has meaning, the happiness comes later. Yes, yes, or it, and even in a weird way, you start to enjoy the gruel, you know? But it’s, s*** what was I talking about?

55:06 I just lost the crisper seconds. About, oh, I was, I know, we’re talking up what we were talking about, pleasure or, oo, happiness. Pleasure. Yeah, yeah. So whether people have the same values or not, so I think there are a few core human-like, they’re at its core, we all want the same things.

55:26 Like, there, there are, coming back to, like, what feels meaningful, I think it’s the same handful of things that make our lives feel meaningful. It’s relationships, helping other people, and creating something. There’s probably one or two others that I’m not thinking of right now, but those are like the core ones. It’s like loving relationships, building something, and helping other people, altruism. Like, those are fundamentally the things that, like, if you do it today, you will be proud.

56:01 You will look back with pride for the rest of your life. Whereas, like, money, it’s like, wow, you know, it depends how you got the money. If, if you got it because you built something, then you might be proud of it, but it’s like if you just got it for no reason, that it’s like it’s not gonna feel meaningful, therefore it will stop making you happy. It, at a certain point you’ll have, you always need more of it. So, so within that, those kind of three, for those three fundamental core values, of like relationships, building something, and helping people, I think we all have our own variations, you know?

56:41 It’s like you, you, there are things about your personality, you, you love talking to people, you love learning about people’s lives, so it’s like this feels right for you. There’s probably plenty of people out there who are very introverted or don’t like dealing with cameras and all this stuff, and, you know, it’s like this wouldn’t work for them. They’ve got something else that works for them. For me, it’s writing. You know, it’s like there’s just something.

57:04 This comes back to choosing good problems. So it’s like I enjoy revising the same page eight times and making it better and better and better, you know? It’s most people, that’s awful. Like, they, it’s so tedious and agonizing, and the anxiety of trying to come up with something, or not knowing if what you wrote is good or not. Like, if there are a lot of people who try to write and it’s just this agonizing experience for them.

57:35 For me it just, it feels the problems of writing just feel like very invigorating to me. Is there any upside to doing something even when you don’t see the point of it? You know, like your kung fu master, be water, or kick a tree a thousand times, and even though you don’t see purpose, there’s some evolution there. You know, I think I mean, I think with kids probably, you know, cuz it’s, kids aren’t going to. Kids don’t see, like, four chess moves ahead, you know, so they don’t understand why making their bed in the morning is important.

58:13 It’s not until you reach a certain age and have lived a certain amount of life that you get that it’s like little moments of care and self-respect, like, have a nonlinear payoff. I think as an adult, it’s, you all, there always needs to be some sort of meaning behind it to find high-quality problems. Yeah, okay, I actually am introverted, and that’s what makes this a child interesting, because I got to fight my demons every day. Used to be really hard. I mean, I used to be anxious all day before I meet someone, so, like, but for me, I know I have to force myself there, because I need to get better at it.

58:53 So in a weird way, but that feels meaningful. Yeah, it totally does, and that, and that is so you. I think that’s one thing, you helping yourself is another, you know, helping others, but also helping yourself, right? Growth, growth and that kind of thing. Yeah, I’m talking about emotions, cuz I think in the first book you say how they’re overrated.

59:11 Yeah, man, but what do you mean by that? I think we put too much emphasis on them, you know. So it’s, people oftentimes, people will be like, you know, well, I skip work, but I was really pissed off, cuz you know, somebody said something to me, so whatever. You know, it’s like, well, it doesn’t matter. You’re pissed off, like, you have an obligation, you have a commitment, you know, you got to show up even if you’re pissed off.

59:43 Like, the world doesn’t stop because you’re pissed off, and I think the more we in Dolch our emotions in and see them as valid justifications for certain behaviors, we actually create worse problems for ourselves. Okay, and you get into that in the second book a little bit more about that, and I want to get into it for sure. Just want to get the rest of the stuff in this book, Dunn’s, but you’re moving to the next one. A few other things you say: failure.

1:00:12 You have, everyone has to just get used to failure, because that’s the way forward, you know, and just getting people into that. And then you talk about this law of avoidance, so the more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it. Yeah, again, it’s like when our most popular guest on the show is this guy called the fifty billion dollar man. He’s a high-performance coach in his 70s, was a castle in Scotland, and he basically yells at people like your grandpa would, and tells you that you’re not man enough, you got to step up, and he’s one of our most popular guests.

1:00:39 I feel like your book has tendencies in there, because you’re telling people what they don’t want to hear, you know, what they need to do, you here in order to become the person they want to become. And that’s what he does, you know, and he’s surprisingly popular, and everybody first sale, how dare you have him on the show, but then the numbers show that everyone’s watching. And I feel like you’re doing the same thing. You’re telling people hard truths, which is threatening your identity.

1:01:03 The more you avoid it, yes, okay, yes, explain that to people, as most people will be like, oh, that’s not true, the reason I’m not doing this is because, oh, I don’t like it. Yeah, well, they’ve got some justification. I mean, it’s the law of avoidance is. I always found it interesting that people often avoid success with the same amount of anxiety in justification as they avoid failure, and often those two things are actually, they’re the identical thing.

1:01:33 It’s, you, what you’re really avoiding is risk. You’re avoiding some great potential change in your life. And so I think it’s the thing, the common thread between those two things, being afraid of your success just as much as you’re afraid of your failure. You know, a lot of people are afraid of success because they feel like, I don’t deserve it. You know, if you really dig down deep enough, it’s like they’ve got something in their history, like, yeah, I don’t deserve to be a successful person, or I don’t deserve to be loved, or, you know, I don’t deserve to be you know, be happy.

1:02:05 So really what that fear is, is it’s a fear of not being who they see themselves as today. You know, what, really, what they’re afraid of is that they’re comfortable with their beliefs about themselves, and the idea that maybe they do deserve to be happy, and they’ve been wasting in the last twenty years is like, that’s actually more frightening than, you know, not doing any, or than not doing anything. You know, they’d rather just keep being the same person.

1:02:35 There’s an inertia to our identity. I talked about this in the second book, like there’s, there’s an inertia to our beliefs about ourselves, and the longer we’ve held them, the more afraid we are of potentially altering them or changing them. What do you tell people that are just paralyzed with fear, and they’ll even admit to you yeah, you’re right, Mark. It probably is even fear of success, which sounds counterintuitive to human being. Yeah, cuz logically doesn’t make any sense.

1:03:03 Yeah. What do you tell people to do when they’re in that fear? Is it about digging down in to the person, unwrapping the layers like we talked about in the second book? I think it’s, I mean, it can be helpful to understand where the fear comes from, but I don’t think that’s sufficient in and of itself. You know, ultimately the only way fears are overcome is by different actions.

1:03:28 And I think generally when you get somebody who’s like petrified and afraid, there’s one of two things going on. Either their expectation for what they want to do is so massive and grandiose that it just feels impossible, and so they’re, they’re just petrified of, like, well, I can’t do all that, that’s impossible, like it’s so much. And so with them, it’s, it’s about breaking it down into, like, smaller steps, kind of bringing the expectation back to earth, like, hey, you don’t have to be the next Steve Jobs.

1:04:04 You can just create a cool app. Let’s start with that, you know? Like, it so that’s one case that happens a lot. Another case is, actually, people are afraid of doing a small thing, but it’s because they have unrealistic beliefs about the repercussions of that small thing. So they think that you know, they think that if they do, say, put a video on YouTube and nobody watches it, that it’s like they’re screwed.

1:04:37 They’re a laughingstock. Like, nothing’s gonna work. Like, they, they have unrealistic perceptions of the consequences of failure. Yeah, they think, think the consequences are, like, 100 times larger than actually. Yeah.

1:04:51 It’s funny, I, you hit the gong earlier here at London Real, and we hit it when our students join our academy, and yeah, I take hundreds of people around the world through these eight-week courses, and I get them to do things they don’t want to do. And usually the first part is put yourself on video to introduce yourself to the group, and then I, I get people to do vlogs just to talk about their ideas in their IP. Most people are terrified. Even successful business people are terrified, and again, it’s that latter one.

1:05:15 It’s like they don’t, they think all the friends are gonna hate them, the world is gonna fall apart. They put the video up, and then when they actually do it, they all come back and say, wow, if some people were actually supportive, and yeah, the world didn’t end, and, like, it was all that. You know, yeah, so I agreed. Ultimately about taking action. Yeah, it’s to get through that figure, and it’s kind of one of the hacks that I talked about in the new book is, like, if an action feels impossible, just keep breaking it down until it feels possible.

1:05:45 So it’s like, okay, I want to lose twenty pounds. Well, that feels impossible. That’s, that’s really intimidating. Okay, well, how about I just go to the gym once? Well, okay, that’s doable.

1:05:55 I’ll go do that, you know, and then you do that once, and then it’s like, alright, well, that wasn’t so bad. Like, I could do that again. Just keep doing that, you know? Like, worry about the twenty pounds later. And so it’s, we in a function of our mind to is that when we, when we are afraid, we tend to exaggerate what we’re afraid of, because it justifies us being afraid, if that makes sense.

1:06:20 Yeah. I want to wrap up the first book, get on to the next book, but any other major pieces here that we need to cover, the subtle arts? Well, we all die, but you know, yeah, and that’s interesting, because this is what I found fascinating, because Mark mentions death at the end of this book, and then it opens up the Everything Is F***ed with death. Yeah, which I thought was really interesting. Yeah, first of all, no one’s talking about death much, and so I think it’s really refreshing that you’re talking about it.

1:06:50 Actually, we had a guy on named Steven Jenkins who’s got a book called Die Wise, who spent, I think, ten years in palliative care, and I think he literally watched like two or three thousand people died, and he was here to just totally dice and chop up any concept I had or death. Was I kept saying, oh, my relationship with death, and he was just like, would you just stop death? It’s death. And then there’s a great book called The Denial of Death. Yeah, and all of that stuff.

1:07:19 So talk to me about how this great Cell are not getting the bulls*** everyone’s happy kind of book. With you gets into this death, and then you open up this book. Yeah, so tell me about the human relationship with death and how it plays into everything else that is going on. I think it’s first of all, it’s one of the only things that we will all experience, you know? So it’s crazy that it’s not discussed more.

1:07:43 I think it’s also probably the only thing that we’re all afraid of. You know, it’s just one of the most universal human experiences, and so I think it’s impossible, or not, not. I think that demands that it be talked about. Secondly, I think when we, when we come back to talking about this value, what is valuable, what is a meaningful life? I don’t think you can properly address that question without imagining death, without imagining what it would be like to not be alive.

1:08:16 You know, there’s a lot of popular articles and stuff that have gone viral about, you know, deathbed regrets, and on the deathbed and all this stuff. And I think the reason that resonates so much is because it’s, it’s only by thinking about that situation of like, oh crap, if I’m on my deathbed, and I and I think about what I’m doing today, how would I feel about that? You know, like, that gives a sense of clarity about our decisions that is often hard to achieve.

1:08:46 You know, just in the thinking about it in the present moment. So in terms of just being a self-development tool, I thought it was incredibly powerful. The only thing about death, it’s been incredibly powerful in my life. I’ve had a number of, unfortunately, I’ve had a number of family members and peers die. Ida, one of my classmates when I was in high school, got cancer, and so, as 14-year-olds, we watched this kid just like disintegrate in front of us, and then when I was, I talked about in the book when I was 19, I had a friend drown at a party and, and now that that’s actually one of most powerful experiences in my life.

1:09:31 And so I always thought it was strange, because people would ask me, they said, what was your big aha moment? You know, what was the bit? And I was like, well, if my big aha moment was, I watched my friend drown and then I spent the next six months being like, wow, I’m wasting my life, you know? Like, that was my aha moment. It’s, there’s something, but there was something so clarifying about it.

1:10:06 So that’s why I got it made it in the Subtle Art. The reason I opened up with it in Everything Is F***ed. There’s two reasons. One is that Everything Is F***ed, a book about hope, is essentially about where, how do we generate a sense of meaning in our lives? Well, how do we find, why do we find certain things meaningful and not other things?

1:10:32 And so death is the logical starting point for that. It is this recognition of our own mortality, and, like, I need to do something that feels important so that when I die I feel good about it, or not feel good about it, but it’s like I don’t have regrets. I don’t, you know, whatever. So I needed to start at that point for that reason. The other reason I wanted to start there is that, again, a perspective thing.

1:11:00 I think one of the problems that I talk about in the new book is that so much of our culture right now is catastrophizing small things. You know, so it’s like Trump tweeted this, and, and, you know, it’s like two million people lose their f***ing minds. Boris Johnson did this, like 2 million people lose their mind. You know, it’s like, okay, guys, I get that you, you can disagree with them, they can even be bad people, whatever, but like, like, let’s chill out and keep perspective of what’s really going on.

1:11:35 And so I wanted to open the book with kind of the darkest, most hopeless scene that I could, so it opens with a Holocaust story, and then it goes into a discussion of kind of the meaninglessness of any individual human life in the scope of the universe. You know, it was just a very dark and bleak opening of, like, okay, so this is what this is reality. You know, let’s get off Twitter. Like, this is reality. This is what we’re all dealing with here, and let’s build brick by brick.

1:12:08 Let’s build something out of that. It’s an interesting place to start. You know, we talk about psychedelics, so we’re making a movie about some experiences I have with ayahuasca last year, and you know, when I had a mid-powerful ceremony. I mean, it just [expletive] kid dissolved me about 20-25 times over and just showed how insignificant I was and the whole grand scheme of time in the university. Yeah, and that, like, I was worried about my own death, and like, in the jungle every day, all these bugs and animals, the cycle of life.

1:12:36 And funny enough, back to this guy in Scotland that yells a lot. He says the same kind of thing. Like, your life is so nothing. He says, in the cosmos of time you’re nothing but a fart in the wind, is what he says. So he said, why not take action?

1:12:48 And yeah, I don’t think that’s what he uses it for. So absolutely, you’re trying to get people to, I guess, just sober up, get some perspective, say, okay, let’s start somewhere fresh. What we can all agree on is we’re here, we all have the same common experience. Yeah, what are we going to do between now and then? They’ll give us meaning.

1:13:06 Yes, I’ll give our lives a sense of meaning, a sense of purpose. Okay. And you go on to say that the opposite of happiness is not despair and pain. It’s hopelessness. Yes, which is interesting, because I, I definitely had some nihilistic tendencies, probably still do.

1:13:21 I’m back in my day, and it’s not a very nice place to be when you wake up in the morning and say, what’s the f*** point of any of this? Yeah, and I think that’s one of the reasons I really am grateful for what I do every day, because I don’t feel like that, and that’s why I used to feel when I had the wrong values. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, because it’s really what your life is, is it is a just an aggregate of your actions. What are you spending your time on each day?

1:13:45 And if you’re spending your time on things that ultimately have no permanent meaning in the face of the infinite, then yeah, it’s like, why get up? Why do it? You know, well, might as well drink a bunch and do some drugs and you know, whatever, cheat on my wife. Like, you just, everything starts to become a fair game, because it’s like, well, this is pointless. I think it’s, I’ve actually been surprised.

1:14:18 So I, one of the, in the first chapter I’ve got this thing I call the uncomfortable truth, and I make a joke about it. It’s something I’d write on a coffee cup, but it’s just like incredibly bleak. Should I write, I read this? So the uncomfortable truth, I think I get this right, is one day you and everyone you love will die, and beyond a small group of people for an extremely brief period of time, a little of what you say or do will ever matter. This is the uncomfortable truth of life.

1:14:47 Yep, and you go on to say that everything we do is a distraction from this uncomfortable truth. Yeah, every, everything you say or do is an avoidance of this inevitable truth. And I say something like, we are, we are, we are dancing specks on a tiny blue dot. We imagine our own importance. We invent our own meaning.

1:15:12 We are nothing. Enjoy your coffee. And I’ve actually been shocked how many people actually highlight that section and put it on Instagram. I thought out of everything in the book, like, that would, like, I really wrote this book expecting to lose people. But it is the only way to follow up a book like, exactly right.

1:15:34 It’s just alienate you, you know? Sell nine million copies. Alienate the mall. Pretty. I’ve actually been surprised how many people have kind of like posted that section, and I, and I really do think that it’s, and this kind of gets back to the earlier point about, they’re just being too much stuff, too much stimulation, and we need to, like, learn how to, like, narrow and focus.

1:15:54 I think, again, a product of that abundance is that it’s easier than ever before to get lost or sidetracked in something that’s not very meaningful or doesn’t feel meaningful. And so I think that’s why we see, you know, in the book I talk about rises in the rates of depression, anxiety, people younger and younger ages experiencing depression, anxiety, suicide. Rates are going up, especially for young people. Like, it’s, I think a lot of it is, is just that it’s either people are more easily sidetracked into kind of meaningless stuff, or there’s just so much in front of them that they, they don’t know how to decipher meaning from it.

1:16:38 Okay, so you start off and you kind of basically clear the slate. Hopefully people read that, and they hopefully just, like, go, everything down to zero, and I’m guessing what you want them to do is now start adding back the things that are important. Yes. Is that what your thought was there? Yes.

1:16:59 It’s, you know, the first half of the book is actually just, it’s more of, we’re gonna start at zero. In your mind, needs to create hope and meaning somehow, and so I kind of take people through how the mind does it. You know, so it’s talked about the two brains, the thinking brain, the feeling brain, talk about that. Sure. All right, so what are these two brains, and how come they don’t really talk to each other or understand each other very well?

1:17:29 So, I, yeah, they, I’ve got this thing in my work where it’s like, I come up with these silly metaphors to kind of, these very complex psychological concepts. And so I’ve got the thinking brain, the feeling brain, and the way I, I guess you could say, the description of mental health is like you’ve got these two brains in your head. Thinking brain thinks in terms of, like, logical, rational thought. It’s very conscious. Feeling brain is, like, impulsive desires, emotions.

1:18:00 It’s very unconscious most of the time, and it’s, it’s almost like two people stuck in a car together that speak different languages, and so our goal in terms of, like, being mentally and emotionally healthy individuals is getting those two people to learn how to communicate well. Get your thinking brain to become adept at recognizing emotions when they’re happening and interpreting those emotions in good ways, and then getting your feeling brain to recognize and respond appropriately to what’s happening, to what the thinking brain is proposing, or, do you know, suggesting? Okay.

1:18:45 And most of us are on an emotional brain rollercoaster. Or the emotional brain is, oh, well, the emotional brain is driving the car. Okay, we like to think it’s the other way. We like to think that the thinking brain is driving the car, and the feeling brain is kind of this, like, obnoxious kid in the passenger seat, but it’s really the child’s driving the car. And then what does that mean, or what does that look like, then, in our life?

1:19:06 Everything is being decided based on feelings. Yeah, well, and we reverse engineer that. Motivation is decided by audience. Okay. So we’ve all had this experience of, like, I know I should get up at 6:00 a.m. and go to the gym.

1:19:22 I know that’s the right thing to do, but I don’t do it. Every day comes and I don’t do it. You know, so we, we have that. That’s an example of the feeling brain. The thinking brain has one idea, like, this is what we should do, but the feeling brain is just not doing it.

1:19:37 It’s like, no, doesn’t feel good, not going there. And so the part of the job of the thinking brain is to find a way to make that feel good. Like, this is why habits don’t stick. It’s ‘cuz it’s not about doing it. It’s not about willpower.

1:19:51 You got to find a way to make the result enjoyable. Yeah, you know, you got to find a way to make the gym feel good. Yeah, once it feels good, you don’t need any willpower. You just get up and go do it, you know? So that’s that’s actually, so I talked about self-discipline is actually very much an emotional process, and that’s what I mean by that.

1:20:13 It’s you have to kind of negotiate with your emotions to get yourself to do something, because if it doesn’t feel good, you’re not gonna do it more than a couple times, ya know. It’s really well said. I mean, yeah, if you talk to like an addict, it’s like, that’s like the white-knuckle concept. It’s like, all right, so I’m an alcoholic, I’m not gonna drink for a day or two. You could probably white-knuckle it.

1:20:38 Yeah, but you don’t see an emotional upside, so you’re not gonna stop, because the drinking feels too good. Yeah, now the day where maybe you’re hitting rock bottom, and then your emotional upside says, wow, if I’m a sober person, okay, my kids are gonna respect me, I’ll respect myself, I can do all these things. Like, the day that began emotionally appealing to you, you might have a chance, but until it does, you’re never gonna have a children. That’s right.

1:21:01 And it’s funny, because I, it’s, it’s actually funny you bring that up, because I think in an original draft I think I even used AA as an example. Like, it gets criticized a lot because it’s not scientific, and but it works for a lot of people, and I think the reason it does work is that ultimately it just puts them in a context where quitting is more pleasurable than drinking. You surround yourself by groups of people who have lived your same experience, who relate to you, and who, ideally, you respect, and you, once you stop drinking, you’re gonna earn their validation and approval.

1:21:45 They’re gonna cheer for you, they’re gonna applaud for you, they’re gonna recognize you in front of groups of people. You’re gonna get friendships, community, all these things that you probably didn’t have before. And at a certain point it’s like, that the scale tips, and it’s like, suddenly it’s like, wow, it’s more pleasurable not to drink than it is to go get hammered again. Yeah, you know, ya know. I, any road to addiction recovery has to have that somewhere, and I think that’s in there for a.

1:22:11 And there’s other ways of doing it. You know, I’ve had my own struggles, and it was that kind of rock-bottom thing where I had to just finally realize, actually, it’s more pleasurable to not do those, they can identify with these things, and then there’s only way it’s sustainable. You talk about values also in this book, and you also talk about, like, when you change value systems, that there’s this mourning period. You know, what the attraction happens, and maybe you can talk about that, because yeah, I, I struggled to go from the banker values to the London Real values, and it was a, it was hard.

1:22:43 It took me five years. It sucks. Yeah, that’s why. I mean, it, the signs of the writing was on the wall for me for five years, and I still didn’t do anything about it, because I didn’t. Again, back to identity.

1:22:54 I didn’t. I was too scared to maybe become this new person that had new values. Maybe you could talk about that. Yeah, so it’s, I think there’s kind of this false sense that change is this cathartic, glorious experience, you know, and it, and I actually argue that it’s quite the opposite, because any change in values is by definition, so first of all, if you don’t really change your values, you’re not really changing, you know? You can change within the same yardstick of your values, and that can feel good.

1:23:33 It’s like you go from not having money to having a lot of money, that can feel good, if you’re the artist six money, but changing, getting rid of the money yardstick and replacing it with another, that is a very disorienting, painful, difficult experience, because what it does is it calls in the question everything you spent the last 10, 20 years doing. What’s interesting is that when you, when you put that and install that new yardstick, it’s new, so you don’t have reference experiences. You know, you, you had to build up four or five years of London Real experiences of having these conversations, working with clients and people, and see the great effects that you were having.

1:24:17 Like you had to go through that to really cement that. It’s like, okay, I got the right yardstick. Totally. I, every year I would look myself in the mirror and say, what are you doing? Like, everybody says you’re an idiot.

1:24:29 Nobody wants to watch your stuff. This doesn’t make any money. Yeah, honestly, I literally look at my AB once the mirror, and the only reason that kept going is cuz I said, are you happier? Yeah. Are you having greater friendships?

1:24:39 Yeah. There’s something, you better do it another year. And the next year I’d have a same conversation. Yeah, it was still no money. Everyone thought I was stupid and crazy, and that was like three, four years in a row, until I didn’t have to ask that question.

1:24:51 Yeah, yeah. I went through something very similar when I was kind of coming out of that period in my 20s. You know, I stopped partying, I met my wife, I settled down in New York, like, everything, all the superficial stuff that I had kind of been living off of. I got rid of it, and I was like, I really want to dedicate myself to a serious writing career, and I would be, I would get so nostalgic. Like, I would just be like, man, you know, maybe I can, maybe I can, like, tell her I’m going on a business trip, and just, like, go to Ibiza or something and just, like, f***ing go full bore for, like, four days and come home.

1:25:29 You know, I’m like, God, no. But then I’d be a liar. Like, I don’t want to be a liar, you know? So I really struggled with it, and I struggle with, like, do it, am I, am I selling that settling-down good? It’s getting married good.

1:25:40 Like, am I really that type of guy? Maybe I’m just one of those guys it’s kind of off on his own forever. And yeah, it took years, and it was the same thing. I would actually when I would, like, be very honest with myself, and sometimes it would be helpful to write it out, because I would sit there, I’d be like, you know, I’d be having one of these urges to go back to my past identity, and I’d be like, well, am I happy in my relationship? I’m like, yeah, I’m, relationship’s great.

1:26:04 Like, my, happy in my city. Yeah, city’s great. It’s my career going well? Yeah, career’s kicking ass. I’m like, what the hell am I not happy?

1:26:11 You know, like, what am I complaining about? So yeah, there’s this, you feel lost for a while, you know? There’s this transition period, right, where you don’t, the new identity or the new yardstick doesn’t feel correct yet, but you also know the old one’s not right. See, so you just feel kind of empty, and so this is a very disorienting, painful process, changing values. It’s just, it’s it’s not fun, and if it’s fun, you’re not really changing them.

1:26:44 And what’s interesting is that when you get on that other side, is it, to me, what I noticed is that it felt like it was the same, is the same emotion as like a breakup. It reminded me of, like, old breakups that I had, where it was like, I would miss my former self. Like, I’d go through these weird, like, I didn’t want to go back to my former self, but I would miss him. Hmm. And I’d be like, man, I miss that guy.

1:27:10 We’d have some good times, you know? And I get, like, sad, you know? Like, I’m getting sad just talking about it. It’s funny. It’s just like you would, like, an old relationship.

1:27:20 I remember this, or an old friendship, right? You know, it’s like, it’s like an old best friend that you lost touch with, or had a falling out with, you know? Like, you get a little bit misty-eyed. You’re like, man, like, you know, I mean, do you ever experience that? Were you like, man, I f***ing killed it in that bank, man?

1:27:35 Like, you ever have that moment? Sometimes I cut over it now. I got processed it enough for, yeah. I kind of, I also, I’ve told the story to myself so many times, there’s, I just remember the bad stuff, and that’s the other thing. Well, that happens too.

1:27:50 Yeah. One thing I will say about Wall Street and the finance people, and I was thinking about this before I talked to you today, is that they’re very clear about why they’re there. Yeah, it’s like everyone kind of has to admit, after three drinks on the Friday night, that why are you here? To make as much f***ing money as possible. Not, it’ll save the world.

1:28:07 Not to save the hamsters. Not to be your friend. Not to do meaningful work. So in a weird way, it’s actually they at least know their values, whereas if maybe you’re at an advertising company or blah blah, you can convince yourself you’re doing good for the world when in fact you’re not. Yeah, so in a weird way they’re very honest.

1:28:24 So that means when you finally agree that that’s not working for you, you know you better get the hell out of there. Yeah, yeah, so in a weird way, that’s maybe why I know. Yeah, to go back. But so what you’re saying is, for people, is be prepared to do the work. If you’re gonna change your values, there’s a grief period.

1:28:40 Okay, there’s a breakup period, okay, and there’s a lot of, Omo, they come a lot. You’ll be angry at your former self for a while. You’ll be embarrassed about your former self. You’ll miss your former self, you know? You, you go through that same range of emotions about it, and I think that’s normal, ya know.

1:28:56 I’ve done that before. Self-concept, which we’re kind of talking about a little bit now, but, like, our concepts of ourselves are based on all of these strange layers that have happened over our life, and you said something you kind of briefly went over earlier. It was a great statement, is that our identities are some of our actions, right, and experiences? Yeah, our identities are the aggregation of our emotions over time, and, and it’s or our experiences over time.

1:29:26 I mean, it’s, it’s more complicated than that. The short version is, like, we go through life, we have experiences, to each experience we have an emotional reaction to the emotional reaction, we write a narrative explaining, justifying that emotional reaction, and then our identity is kind of our collection of our narrative. It sounds like a mess. It is a mess. We’re all mess, and the emotions that we have when we are children are kind of processed differently than when we’re older.

1:29:58 Yes, and so to really sometimes understand who we are, is it important to kind of go back and try it? For some people, it can be okay, especially if there’s, like, some ugly stuff back there, because he, it helps with self-acceptance for a lot of people. One way to think about it is, so all these narratives, all these, we have all these experiences, and then we kind of create narratives for those experiences. I describe it, it’s like a ball of yarn. You know, when you’re, when you’re young, your ball’s really small.

1:30:27 You haven’t had many experiences. So if, let’s say, you had a traumatic experience when you’re like three years old, well, your three-year-old thinking brain is really underdeveloped, so the only narrative it knows how to create is, like, I’m a bad boy, like, nobody loves me, and so that becomes, like, one of the core narratives inside the ball of yarn. And then as your life goes on, your ball expands and expands, so you have all these narratives on top of it that are much based on that original narrative.

1:30:58 And so to get back to that original narrative, sometimes you have to, like, peel back all these other narratives that you’ve told yourself that you use to justify your self-loathing and your self-hatred for years, and, and then finally you get back to that core experience, and at least recognizing that it’s there, I think, is liberating for a lot of people, but it doesn’t answer the question of what do you do, right? Different and I think that gets confused a lot, like, those are two very different processes. One is self-understanding, like, why, why do I feel this way?

1:31:39 Why do I act this way, and that does have value, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the what do I do question, right? Because what you do is ultimately, it’s the same thing. You have to take action. Yes. Tick to it to change, grow, and you can understand it all you want, but if you don’t take the action, you don’t change the ball, or you don’t chase the ball of yarn.

1:32:01 You know, we’ve talked about trauma on this show quite a lot. I’ve had a really good guy on named Dr Gabor Maté, who talks about trauma. Yeah, he said something I kind of surprised me. I’m curious what you think, but he said, you know, trauma isn’t what happens to you. It’s the fact that you didn’t process that.

1:32:15 Yes, and I always thought that was interesting. So it’s like, okay, you got sexually abused when you were a kid and you didn’t tell anybody, you know? So it got kind of encapsulated, and, like, you said you created some narrative in your head of, I’m a bad boy, or something. Then it got locked in time, and you never got to actually do it, whereas maybe if you got to, like, talk about it, and, well, I wouldn’t necessarily become trauma well, because when you talk about it, you create a better narrative, right?

1:32:39 Talking about it helps you. Like, what processing is is actually creating, coming up with a narrative that’s closer to reality, which is like, you didn’t deserve it, you were a victim, you know, it’s life’s not fair, it’s not your fault, you know, all those types of things. Like, that’s a healthy kind of narrative to justify that experience, not justified, but, like, explain that experience. Yeah, so if you don’t get that help in creating that narrative, then yeah, you create the unhealthy narrative, which is like, you know, I deserved it, or whatever, and then that follows you for your whole life until you go back and rewrite that narrative.

1:33:20 Okay, so you think it’s important that people should just know that that’s the case, just to understand themselves, necessarily go back and peel all those layers off or not? Necessary, no, but it helps. It helps, but there’s, there’s a trap. Sometimes people get obsessed with going back and playing with their ball of yarn, you know, and that’s just, at a certain point, it becomes navel-gazing. Yeah, you got to go live.

1:33:42 My, so my parents got divorced when I was seven, and that always comes up in my ayahuasca experiences, and I think it actually, it definitely changed my behavior for the rest of my life. Yes, I kind of blocked the world out, and like, if you can hurt me, I’m not gonna let anyone else hurt me. But then, back to Viktor Frankl, I mean, literally, I was in an upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood where nothing bad happens. My parents never yelled at each other.

1:34:04 Like, it is nothing really bad about that, but for me it was like, I might as well have been in Auschwitz or something. Yeah, like, horrible. And again, I guess that comes back to people like, you’ll take whatever problem there is, and it’ll just become your problem, especially if you’re an angry teenager. Yeah, because I think at that age, we’re not equipped well to, in our brains, especially at that age, our brains have not developed enough to have that broad perspective, you know?

1:34:32 It’s like your parents do feel like tyrants, and you do feel oppressed, and it’s like that all seems reasonable at that age. And so if you hang on to those narratives, that will contain, we’ll go through it. You know, you have to do the work as an adult to kind of re-evaluate those things and be like, all right, yeah, I was pretty well off, actually. You’ve got these great three laws of emotions. You call them Newton’s three laws of emotion.

1:34:58 There’s only, just go through those so people kind of think about them, sheriff’s ball, why Newton’s three laws, and why throw these in there? I was just trying to be cute. Advice, right? I mean, it’s so, I, everything that we’re talking about, the ball of yarn, identity, emotions, how all this, in a place like, I basically use Newton’s three laws of emotion to kind of just explain these things. So I think the first one is, like, for every action, there’s an emotional equal and opposite emotional reaction.

1:35:32 I think the second one is, your identity is proportionate to your emotion over time. Yeah, well, I have the second one, self-worth equals to some of our emotional time, which I kind of talked about, and then identity will stay your identity until a new experience acts upon it, kind of like an object at rest will stay at rest, exactly. Till yeah, so it’s all just kind of a playful, and then I used Newton, because Newton was a fascinating guy. He’s a very miserable, angry person, and even though he achieved all the success you can achieve in life pretty much at that time, and so I kind of use him as an example to kind of illustrate these concepts, because it’s like what we’re talking about, it’s like we’re really into the weeds here, and it’s, it’s, I think again, if there’s something that I do well, it’s like taking a lot of these very difficult, complicated, uncomfortable concepts and writing them in a fun way that people can both understand, but they also enjoy reading about, you know?

1:36:32 Yeah, and can remember and take action on. Yeah, so action, there’s an equal opposite emotional reaction. Talk about that, because you said, like, someone does you wrong and you get angry, and then you kind of hold that anger, yeah, until it gets resolved, and if it doesn’t get resolved, then you kind of walk around with that. Yeah, what we have as humans, we have this mechanism in our brains of everything should be equal. I mean, you could call it justice, really, but it’s like, you know, it’s like if I hate you, your immediate impulse is gonna be to hit me back, or to, like, that I should be punished, or whatever.

1:37:07 If I give you a gift, like, your immediate reaction’s gonna be like, oh, he’s such a nice guy. Like, you’re gonna want to give something back too. It’s just this kind of reciprocation that is a very fundamental instinct of our lives. Well, it’s, people are unfair to each other. People do things to each other, and in life, it’s unfair, so naturally we develop kind of these imbalances in how we see the world.

1:37:28 So it’s like, if you, you know, I got picked on a lot when I was, when I was younger, and so for a long time I kind of carried this anger in the world of, like, well, you know, f*** everybody, I know better than them. I don’t show you. Yeah, I had kind of this attitude, and it’s that it comes from that imbalance, and it took me a long time to kind of equalize that, to understand it’s like, how will you, know, the people who were hitting me and beating me up, like, they had pain, and they were taken out on me, and, you know, they suffered too.

1:38:02 And so again, it comes back to like going back and rewriting those narratives, understanding, understanding your life in a different way. And then now something makes you angry. The point is, now you try not to have the action. You know, for every action, you, you can not have that emotional reaction. Know, the emotion will happen, will happen.

1:38:21 You know, the advice I always give is like, you can’t control emotion, you control behavior. So don’t judging your emotions just makes it worse. So like, if I become angry, then I’m angry, like, that’s just stupid. I think you don’t just be angry, you know? But it’s handle the anger.

1:38:36 Well, you know, it, that’s what it comes down to. Okay, so don’t let that lead to just the wrong actions. Yeah, don’t let it, don’t let it linger, and don’t, you know, don’t do anything stupid. Okay, gotcha. And then your identity is gonna state, your identity on new experience acts upon it.

1:38:50 That’s what understanding your values, so it’s, it’s kind of what we were talking about. If you, so your value of money being like the chief value in your life, you talked about kind of hitting rock bottom. Like, the only way that value changes is when you experience something that’s contrary to that value. So it’s like in your head, you’re like, if I make a ton of money, everything’s gonna be great, but then you make a ton of money, and everything’s not great.

1:39:19 In fact, there’s all sorts of problems that you didn’t expect or that are much worse than you expected, and so that forces you to reevaluate your yardstick, to maybe say, maybe my yardstick’s wrong. So you need those contrary experiences to, to do that revaluation. If you never get that, if you’re just constantly rewarded for making money, there’s never any problem, then there’s no reason for you to reevaluate your measurement. Yeah, what are the main action steps you want people to take after they read something like this?

1:39:54 Quit Twitter. You know, it’s, this is a much more philosophical book. So I would put it this way: Subtle Art was very much about helping people ask better questions of themselves and their own values. This book is, is help. I think it’s much more about getting people to ask questions about how they see the world, and what they think is maybe right or wrong in the world.

1:40:25 It’s it’s very much a book to help people get a better grasp of where their values come from, and whether those values are serving themselves or other people or not. So it’s, you know, I don’t like to be the guy who’s like, go out and do X, Y, Z. I like to be the guy who asks you a question that makes you think for a long time, and so my hope is that’s what they get out of it. Okay. You also talked about in here how kind of the whole economy now is very feelings-based, and then how that spreads to, like, digital and, and the Internet.

1:41:05 I mean, what is, what should people just know about that, that they’re cut, their feelings are constantly being manipulated. Manipulated. Yes. Okay, it kind of comes back to what we were talking about earlier about abundance you know, this, the same way, like, look back in the ’50s and ’60s, the economy moved into office buildings. You know, everybody was sitting at a desk pushing papers around, eating frozen dinners, and by the time we get to the ’70s we made a discovery, which is that if you sit in an office all day eating frozen dinners, like, your body goes to hell.

1:41:45 You know, diabetes, heart disease, all these things. And so in the around the ’80s we developed a fitness culture and a nutrition culture. People, like Arnold Schwarzenegger showed up, and they’re like, hey, you need to go to the gym, you need to pick up something heavy, you need to eat right, you know, eat fruit, vegetables. So we developed kind of an ethos around that, recognizing that too much comfort and satisfaction for our bodies is actually unhealthy.

1:42:09 It makes us weaker. It makes us more fragile. I think we’re going through that same thing with our minds right now. I think all of the innovation from our technology, social media, and everything, it’s junk food for our brain. It feels really good, but there’s very little nutritious value, and it also makes our mental and emotional health weaker, more sensitive, more fragile.

1:42:34 And so I think we need to develop a culture of, I call it, informational nutrition, of paying attention to what information we’re consuming, making sure we’re consuming information of, like, high quality, high nutritional value, and then also consciously exercising our mind, than our emotions, in a controlled way, to make sure that we stay resilient, that we stay strong, and that we don’t get knocked over by the slightest thing that comes by. Yeah. I put all my students on a little media diet, which I actually got from Tim Ferriss, from The Four-Hour Workweek.

1:43:13 Yeah, and it changed your life a lot. But yeah, I remember when I first read that, I was like, little media diet. And I remember when I was a banker, I would, like, only check my email, like, twice a day. And yeah, but I put my students on it, and it’s just shocking for them. Yeah, I just, I give them an hour a day of everything, that, yes, Netflix and Facebook and all that, and just see what that’s like.

1:43:31 Yeah, it’s, it’s powerful. It is. People come back and they’re like, Brian, I didn’t realize I was addicted to news. Like, one of my students had, like, 10 news apps, and they were just jacking from app to app, you know, just writing off the information of the world’s problems that will never have anything to do with them. Yeah.

1:43:48 All right, so you’re just telling people to just try to take a step back, think about all these things that are happening, think about your death, think about what your values are, you know, unwrap who you are as the human being. That’s it. And yeah, that’s it. Not much. Right?

1:44:04 What’s it been like, publishing the second book, you know? After the first, you know, what’s been that whole experience? Like, yeah, f***ing hell, yeah, it’s, it’s crazy. You know, well, first of all, the external pressure for this book was so much more, right? You know, publishers, media, everything, even fans.

1:44:27 Like, just the, the expectations were so high, you know? So there was a lot of pressure to like live up to that. And then internally, kind of speaking of narratives and like identity, yeah, you know, internally, I’m kind of going through this extended freakout of, like, am I one-hit wonder? Am I, like, did I get lucky? Is this book good?

1:44:50 Like, you know, and it, it was incredibly stressful, and, you started down a couple paths and scrapped them. Right. Yeah, which is, it says a lot. Yeah, cuz you know you could have just said, let me just get this done. Yeah, maybe I’m judging myself.

1:45:06 Let me publish this, but you have a good core feeling. Yeah, when something’s right or wrong. I think you were talking with Lois House, and you were like, I was gonna write a book about men’s experiences and masculinity, but you’re like, I don’t think that was the book I should be writing. Yeah, but that’s, you know, a lot of people aren’t that self-aware. Yeah, and it’s funny, because when Subtle Art blew up, like, one of the first things that the publisher came to me with was, like, you know, you should do Subtle Art for teens, Subtle Art for parents, Subtle Art for teachers.

1:45:35 You know, like, do a whole Chicken Soup for the Soul type thing, and you know, I’m sure I’m gonna make a lot of money. Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, they got these dollar signs in their eyes, and I thought, I was like, hey, you know, I can’t. Yeah. I just, I can’t do that.

1:45:52 Doesn’t feel right. So for me, ultimately, what I returned to with this book is, I needed to, you know, with all my writing there’s kind of two things that drive me. One is, I ask myself what do I think the world needs to hear that is not being said enough. And then, too, I need to challenge myself, you know? I need to, I need to write something that challenges me, like, kind of deals with whatever I’m going through at that moment.

1:46:24 And so I, after kind of an extended freakout, I got back to those principles that I have followed my entire career. And that’s what came out, and I feel great about it. Like, I’m very proud of it. It’s very different, like I said. It’s, it’s kind of like, Subtle Art is a self-help book with a little bit of philosophy in it.

1:46:47 This is like a philosophy book pretending to be a self-help book, and, and I’m okay with, you know, some people haven’t liked that. Some people loved it more than the last book, but it’s ultimately, I’m proud of it, and, and I’m like, now that it’s out, I’m very quickly arriving at a place where it’s like, okay, you know, it can be whatever it’s gonna be. It doesn’t need the hits, a certain sales mark, or, yeah, whatever. It really has to be something you’re proud of, because also, ten years from now, I mean, you never know what the hell’s gonna happen, you know?

1:47:20 It’s like, you look at some of the greatest movies that we watch today. Yeah, they were flops a lot of times. Like, no one cared. And if you ever go back and look at the Best Picture for the Academy Awards, I got serious. Oh yeah, it’s, I’ve never heard of some of those movies.

1:47:34 So it’s like you have to kind of think in the long game and what you’re happy with. Yeah, I found this one had much more IP that I could really sit there and digest. Yeah, than Subtle Art Salar. I mean, I got the feeling you were saying, and I, and I think it was a great first book, because you’re like, oh, I get your style, I get your feeling, you know? But with this one, I could really go and say, oh, there’s this, and there’s this, and it’s more stuff for me to walk around really thinking about.

1:47:58 Yeah, I think people who read a lot, I generally prefer the new one, what I’ve noticed. And then people who are kind of casual readers prefer Subtle Art, but it’s, it’s been interesting to see. And yeah, I mean, it’s like, it’s like two different kids. It’s like, alright, well, you know, you’re smarter but you don’t sell as many, but I still love you, and here you know, you sell a lot, but you know, it’s, love you. Like, it’s, it’s, I don’t, I don’t, I feel like a proud parent of two kids that are doing two different things.

1:48:31 And so, just like, all your friends would ask you, when’s the third date? I like how you put that. The publicist told me to ask you that. They’re just relentless. I, unless you want to go back with my Subtle Art for teenagers.

1:48:49 Yeah, like I’m, I’m not even done with my Smite or my promotion to her, and already asking this, but it’s, hey, it’s the problem of success. Right, right. Higher quality problem. Exactly. High quality problems.

1:49:02 So, but I guess you’re a writer, though. Yeah, you are a writer, so you will be continued to write. Yes. Okay. That is, it’s what I’m passionate about, and I think it’s what I’m best at.

1:49:13 So how do you write, and how would you advise someone to start writing, or should they not? I, I think anybody who wants to start writing should, you know, it’s how do you start writing? It’s one of those funny questions, where it’s like, the way you start writing is you start writing. I think the problem is more that people have is removing expectation and judgment from the process. Right.

1:49:41 Writing is very difficult in a way that, like, I think a lot of other creative mediums aren’t, and that it’s, it’s extended, it’s long-term. Like, you have to sit with it, for, if it’s a book, months or years, you know? If it’s an article, weeks at a time. And so you kind of go through this emotional rollercoaster with it. Or, like, you know, there are entire weeks where I wake up and I’m like, this book is s***, nobody’s gonna read it.

1:50:07 What the hell am I doing? You know, and then a week later I’m like, this is brilliant, I’m gonna change the world, like, I’m the smartest guy ever, you know? And it’s one thing, like, what I’ve learned over the years is you don’t, not to trust either of those. You know, it goes back to the Buddhist thing. It’s like, I don’t know if it’s good or not, and it doesn’t matter.

1:50:26 You just write it because it, it feels true, you know? So I just tell people, it’s like, just try to remove those barriers. You know, Hemingway said the first draft of everything is s***. It’s true. You know, the magic’s in the revision.

1:50:43 And yet, but you knew to abandon those other projects that didn’t, it weren’t your second book, and you knew to pursue this. So how do you know that it’s a good question. I knew it because I could tell after a while that the intention was coming from the wrong place Okay, that’s really well said. Yeah, yeah, it’s the closest thing I have to doing this. We make documentary films, and I think Martin Scorsese said it, that if you don’t throw up at the first cut, the first run, something’s wrong.

1:51:15 Yeah, and like, I know exactly how he feels. And you know, we screen them here in the creation process. We get like 30 people over and screen them, and, like, I usually feel sick. Yeah, the first time I see it, cuz, like, you had all these grand ideas and grand visions, and you shoot it, and you put it back in, and you’re like, this is an absolute dog s***. And then, I guess, a week or two will go by.

1:51:37 I was just stressing out, and then, like, you’ll be like, oh my god, this is great, it’s gonna be, like, and then you, again, it’s like this, and then it’s just struggle, and it’s just an emotional process. There’s a deadline, because you got your movie premiere, and then it’s just like, it’s got to be done. And then, you know, my wife has watched me the whole time, and, oh, you always make something great. I’m just like, no, no, you understand, this is bad.

1:51:59 This time it’s bad. And this is, like, and then at the end I’m, it’s different. Yeah, you know, the end, I usually produce something that, when I’m there, I’m like, okay, alright, this is, this is pretty good. That’s what I usually think at the end. Yeah, it’s pretty good.

1:52:12 So it’s such a weird thing, and it extends, at least for me, you know, maybe for you too, it extends past even when it comes out. You know, so I’ll go through weeks where I’m like, like, man, maybe I shouldn’t have written that that way, or maybe, you know, I wish I could change that chapter. And then couple months later, I’ll just be kind of flipping through, and I’ll read a section, I’m like, no, it’s f***ing good. What was I thinking? You know, it’s just, it’s like anything, when the closer it is to you emotionally, the harder it is for you to actually tell what it, what it looks like.

1:52:47 You know, right? Like, I, I’m probably the last person to know what’s good and what’s not in my own work. You have editors you trust. Yeah, and you trust, yes, is that a group of people that have been around with you, around you for a while, or publishers? Or how do you get feedback?

1:53:04 I have a great, I have a great relationship with my editor, and I think that’s really important, is finding an editor who, like, gets you and your vision and your ideas, and then, yeah, I’ve got, I’ve got some close friends, very smart people, and who I trust to give me, like, honest feedback. That’s very important as well. My wife’s a great critic. Like, she’s, there have been chapters in the process of both books, there have been sections and chapters where she’s just like, that’s not good.

1:53:36 Like, I don’t like it, you know? And that’s, you need to hear that. Yeah, you really need to hear that. So advice for people, the right is, do it for the right reasons. If you’re gonna do it, understand it’s going to be a very difficult project.

1:53:48 Yeah, I mean, Tim Ferriss says it’s the loneliest time when he’s writing a book. It is, man. It’s isolating and stressful, which, those two things in conjunction, it’s like it’s a bad recipe. You know, I end up, I sleep poorly when I’m writing a book, I eat poorly when I write a book. You know, there are moments in the process where I’m like, why do I do this again?

1:54:13 Like, why would you ever do this? But yeah, I would say, you know, so understand it’s a long-term process. Don’t necessarily trust your overall emotions about it. Understand that first drafts are always s***. So the goal of the first drafts is just to get the ideas out.

1:54:33 The goal of the second draft is to make it coherent. It’s to make it, to basically get it to a place where you think it’s interesting and good. And then the goal of the third, fourth, fifth draft is to get it to a place where you were like proud to show it to people. You know? And I think part of the problem is that people start with the first draft with the proud to show of the people, and it’s like you can’t.

1:54:56 You nobody can write a first draft that comes out polished. They take too long and try to write it so it’s polished, and then they can’t get the idea out, and they get lost in the minutiae, and, oh, and then it becomes overwhelming, and, okay, and they freak out, and then they avoid writing. Write. Okay, that’s good advice. Yeah, personal habit for you every day, that’s non-negotiable, something you do every day that just keeps you not giving a f***, or, you know, gives your life meaning?

1:55:25 I tried to read every morning, and I notice when I lose track of that, I’m, I’m much more distracted and in kind of feeling lost in my, in terms of my ideas and whatever project I’m working on. You know, I tried it. I try to do, like, some serious reading first thing in the morning, for at least 30 minutes, like academic stuff, philosophy, research. I just find it, like, wakes my brain up. Well, in, in it, and it keeps me excited about discovering things, you know?

1:56:03 It, when I go into my workday, you know, whatever I’m writing or working on, it, like, me, it puts an excitement there, of like, yeah, I got, I got [expletive], I got a share, you know? I’ve got ideas, I’ve got stuff I think it’s important, so because you’ve just read something that’s strong or powerful or well thought. Yeah, sometimes it’s just pure inspiration, like I’m reading a great book. Sometimes it’s, it’s ideas I pull from the book, or research that I find in the book, that I’m like, yeah, this is good stuff.

1:56:30 Like, it kind of, but I’ve noticed that my ideas, when I’m reading a lot, look for this way. When I’m reading a lot, I never run out of ideas of what the right ever. It’s when I, that when I feel like when I start to run out of ideas, I noticed it’s because I haven’t been reading much. So I took I try to keep that as a habit. Okay, if I were to ask five of your friends what’s Mark’s superpower, how are you able to get things done, to write these books, do everything you do, what would they say it is?

1:57:05 Well, I think, I think, I don’t think my work ethic is particularly, like, stands out in any way. I think if I have a superpower, I think what it is, is that I’m able to take a lot of complex information that maybe is not even immediately, like, you don’t even notice it’s related immediately, and I can condense it very well into stories and simple lessons. Yes, relate to that. People can easily understand, and a tone that they can relate to. That’s a big thing, right?

1:57:45 Absolutely, where it’s fun, and a little irreverent, and a little in your face when it needs to be. Mm-hmm, and that kind of thing. Yeah, how how was the tone received? As some people can’t get over the Fox. Yeah, what do you think about that?

1:58:02 Don’t give a f***. It’s, it’s actually really interesting to me, because I mean, I don’t see what the big deal is, honestly. Obviously, yeah, but I, I’ve actually, people are surprised. Like, I’ve thought a lot about profanity, cuz I’ve gotten the criticism for so many years, cuz you’ve been using it for a long time, or cuz that book. Yeah, always.

1:58:27 When I started, I started blogging in 2008, you know, and it’s like, I want to write the way I talk. Yeah, that’s the beauty of the concept of blogging. Yeah, you were a writer that grew up on blogs. Exactly. Meant you didn’t have publishers and deadlines and consequences.

1:58:42 Yeah, created a new style, and so it’s so really about, like, the ethos around blogging is very much like, it should be raw and unfiltered, and so that’s where I come from. And I think in, in more the conventional media world, like journalists and academics and stuff, there’s, there’s very much a regimen of filtering that’s supposed to happen. There’s like a certain sheen of professionalism you’re supposed to put on things, and, you know, kind of winks that you’re supposed to do to each other, and I just don’t come from that world.

1:59:13 Like, I’m just like, alright, well, we’ve got a [expletive] consciousness car, and your thinking brain’s an [expletive], you know? Like, that’s just how I write my stuff. And I think most people love it, because it is relatable. It feels like it’s very approachable. But then a lot of people, you know, older folks struggle with it.

1:59:35 Sometimes it’s hard for them to kind of get over it. But the people, the biggest problem with that I’ve noticed is kind of the traditional media types. I actually had a really negative, I think the most negative review I’ve had was for the new book. It was here in London, the London book review, and the guy caught it. It was so funny, cuz the guy called me.

1:59:57 He said, he said, Manson is like the local drunk who spent too much time in the philosophy section at the bookstore. I was reading that and I started laughing, cuz, cuz, a, it’s completely accurate. It’s like that is me in a nutshell, and is it? It totally is. And then, be like, I was kind of gobsmacked.

2:00:18 I was like, I was like, dude, like, don’t you get it? Like, that’s why I sell 9 million books. Is because, and I can’t tell you how many people have come up to me at events, they’re like, I love your stuff, I read all your work, you’re like the friend in a bar who has had a few drinks and, like, gives amazing life, like, gives the best advice, you know? And I’m like, yeah, that’s what I’m going for, you know? Like, that’s who I am.

2:00:41 That, that is who I am, that, that I’m a guy in the bar who spent too much time in the philosophy section. I mean, I’m proud of that. Yeah, and because your success, like, almost every single writer on the planet is envious. I mean, that is true. Yeah, I mean, because those numbers are stuff that people dream of.

2:01:00 I mean, people spend their whole lives trying to write a best-seller, or, yeah, thinking to sell a million copies. So that way, it immediately makes you an easy target, right? You know, especially if you’re a reviewer at, like, some highfalutin London newspaper, and London is like, this guy puts [expletive] his file, and he sells, all ok, and he’s American. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even worse, he’s American, you know?

2:01:25 So it’s that, that’s the other thing. You know, again, back to better problems. Like, you, the bigger success, the bigger the target on your back. So it’s, it’s, I’ve started experiencing I mean, coming from blogging, I’ve always gotten criticism, but I’ve started getting criticism on, like, higher profile levels, you know, more public levels than I ever did. You know, nobody cared who I was five years ago, but now, now I’m like, people will, like, rip into me.

2:01:58 I’m like, newspapers and stuff, so, you know, it comes with the territory. One of my guests, named Grant Cardone, criticism is a sign of success. He said, I want more. Yes, no, it’s true. You know, I’ve, my wife is a, she’s Brazilian, but she has a YouTube channel, and it blew up last year.

2:02:19 It started doing really well, and she started getting some of her first, like, kind of troll comments, and she got upset about it, and I told her, I was like, look, if you’re not getting trolled, I would be more concerned that you’re not getting trolled, because if you’re not getting trolled, that means you’re not reaching enough people yet. Yeah, and you’re not delivering a message if you’re not strong enough. Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, you just, yeah, you’re not doing anything of real consequence.

2:02:49 Yes, if you’re not getting trolled. Exactly. Exactly. It’s like, it’s like the rule of the 21st century. What was the best day of your life, and the worst day of your life?

2:03:02 You mentioned that death earlier. Yeah, best day of my life was a wedding day. I know it’s cliché, what is true, why you know, it’s funny, I never, it’s one of those things you don’t understand till you go through it, but and obviously people have a very wide range of wedding experiences, but ours was fantastic for a few reasons. One, it was in Brazil. It was in, like, a remote beach in Brazil, which actually turned out to be great, because it was, like, a nice filter of, like, anybody who travelled that far, you know, I was like, really loves us.

2:03:41 It was really excited to be there. So we didn’t get a lot of, you know, a lot of weddings have that experience of, like, you got cranky family members or people who don’t really want to be there, but they’re there. So we had a small group, and everybody was very excited, and I just think what I realized, it was such a high, and I, and it took me a while to figure it out, but it’s like it’s the only day of your life, other than your funeral, probably, where everybody on the planet, or most, some people on the planet, who love you are in the same place at the same time, actively loving you.

2:04:19 And it was like, it was better than any drug I’ve ever had, and I didn’t want it to end. Of course it ended, like that, but, if you know, like, twelve hours goes by in like 20 minutes, but I didn’t want it to end, and I was actually legitimately shocked, and because I was, again, I was the party guy, so I didn’t know if I ever wanted to get married. I didn’t know if I, everyone, settle down. But afterwards I was shocked at, like, how powerful it was. Wow.

2:04:46 Yeah, was it also a symbol of your full transition from that party guy, the guy that had changed? Yeah, has changed values. That’s some of it. I think so. You know, my vows were very much about that, about how, so speaking of the experience contrary to your values, is you need to have a contrary experience to change your values, you know?

2:05:10 I think meeting my wife was kind of did that for me. It is. I didn’t know I could be with somebody who, like, I would never want to not be with them, you know? Like that. And then when I met her, like, that just kind of threw a monkey wrench into everything that I kind of understood about myself.

2:05:32 And so, and then I noticed, as, you know, as, because we were together for four years before we got married, you know, as my commitment to her grew, you know, I’d spent my whole life afraid of commitment because I’d gotten hurt when I got young, you know? So as my commitment to her grew, it was like it was actually very liberating, and it made me a better person. Like, it just, it was very healing in a lot of ways. And so kind of like what you were saying earlier, by the time I got to the wedding, I was like, like, man, how could I ever, like, why would I ever think of not getting married?

2:06:15 Like, why would I never, never commit to somebody like this? This is crazy. I can’t believe I used to think that way, you know? Like, I didn’t recognize myself from, like, five years prior. So it was, she has been a very transformational force in my life, which is great.

2:06:32 I mean, it’s awesome. I get to, like, wake up with this person who made me a better person, like, every day. That’s, f***ing great. I never heard a wedding described that way, you know? There’s cell, you know, in India, like, the wedding is the big thing.

2:06:46 Yeah, it’s like, kind of like the drug, you know? I’m just like, everyone can be happy. Yeah, yeah. So that makes sense. Yeah, what you’re saying, we’re stay, if your life problem.

2:07:00 Yeah, probably, when Josh died, when I talked about it at the end of Subtle Art, yeah. Yeah, I can’t think of worse than that. Yeah. One of my friends died of cancer when I was, in, still in the city as a banker, and it was really hard to watch him waste away, and I was a godfather to one of his daughters, and the only thing I could take about it, from the whole end of the experience, was that he, he was teaching me a lesson. You know, he taught me a lesson that, like, life is short, and life is fleeting, and I probably sowed the seeds of this show.

2:07:36 You know, I was before, cuz I think it was just, like, I remember I went to his funeral on a Sunday, and I took the Monday off, and I never took off from work, and I think I was just thinking, like, okay, guess what? You know, life is short. Is this really what you want to do? You know. So I always, you know, it’s always tragic experiences, but they teach you, they do teach you these lessons, you know?

2:07:54 The people that leave you, that kind of sacrifice, it’s huge. Yeah, it’s huge, and I feel like it’s a way to honor them. You know, it’s easy to take, cuz I know if I died, I would want everybody I care about to take a powerful lesson from it, you know, to be a better person because of it. You know, so it’s, it’s, it felt very honoring to do that. You know, when I started changing after his death, it was like it felt good.

2:08:34 Yeah, that’s the best way to honor that is to change your behavior. Yeah, if you can actually do that, that’s, that’s pretty powerful. Yeah, what’s scary? It’s funny, the first thing that popped into my mind, and I think this is probably residue of all the anxiety that came after the success of some of our first thing, probably. My mind is irrelevant.

2:09:05 I think there’s, you know, I worked so hard for so long to build this platform, to have this voice, to have this relationship with my readers, and everything, that it’s, it’s the thought of losing it is, like, very scary. And I think, to part of it, I think part of it’s definitely egotistical. I think part of it’s, you know, there’s no way to experience that amount of success and not get a little bit attached to it. Not, you know, you don’t want it to go away.

2:09:51 So I think there’s a piece of me, like, clinging to that a little bit. It’s like, oh yeah, I don’t want to be relevant. Where it’s like, no, you’re not going to be relevant. It’s just, you’re not always gonna sell 8 million, folks. You know, it’s like this is a one-time deal.

2:10:03 Enjoy it, you know? It’s like, so when I, when I’m a little bit more sober-minded and self-aware, I remember that it’s like, you know, enjoy it, but it’s, it’s a one-time thing. But it’s nice to know that you’re human, and that the author of these two books can be honest and say, even my human brain can get caught up in this, even though I know it doesn’t mean anything. Yeah, the long cosmos of time and all that stuff. But yeah, I mean, a lot of people ask me, and I always find it, I’m always surprised, but people, a lot of people come up to me, and they’re like, they’re like, to use, do you struggle with the stuff you write about?

2:10:38 And I’m like, that’s why I [expletive] Road. You know, it’s like, I’m like, I am dealing with this every day, you know? It’s, it’s, but I, I think there’s, there’s kind of this perception of, you know, if you wrote it, it means you got it. Figure it out. It’s like, no, no, I got the same problems, buddy, and that’s, that’s exactly why I wrote this book, to fix my own s***.

2:11:05 It’s not about you. Thought it was about you. No, no, I’m just fixing my own s***. What, some, we’d be surprised to learn about Mark Manson? Some guilty pleasure or something you do?

2:11:17 Oh, no. Guilt, good big metalhead. Okay, like, really, really intense metal, and what like, who, like death metal, you know, like Meshuggah, and yeah, man, I like a big metalhead. Lamb of God, good stuff. And then I’m a gaming nerd.

2:11:43 I’m good. Do games, art. Yeah, that, that’s, I would say guilty pleasure, but it’s not really guilt. Like, there’s nothing wrong with being a gaming nerd. It’s just, it’s kind of my advice to you, you know?

2:11:54 It’s like, whenever I’m anxious or stressed or unhappy, I start playing a lot of games. What’s your game of choice? Well, it’s funny, because I haven’t played much. I’ve been so busy with this stuff. I haven’t played in a while, but I like RPGs, role-playing games.

2:12:14 Okay, okay. You said guilt. You don’t do guilt. Is that you tried to just not have that enter your brain? I think, I think you should only feel guilty if you did something wrong, and I think there’s nothing wrong with liking what you like, and I think that’s true for everything.

2:12:36 Yeah, guilt’s a certainly stupid feeling. It really is. People do stupid things. Yeah, why are you doing that? Why are you gonna see your parents because they feel guilty?

2:12:44 It’s like you just made that whole interaction toxic, ya know? What, so maybe I’m a sociopath. I don’t know. No, no, I’m with you. Okay.

2:12:53 What keeps you awake at night? You worry about this world, or is the point of these books to get us to just maybe not worry about it, or focus on ourselves? I, I worry about it some. I’m more worried about how much everybody’s worrying about it, you know? I think, I think we all need to dial it back a little bit.

2:13:19 You know, it’s like we’ve been on ten pretty much non-stop for the last three years. I, you know, dial it back to, like, a seven, you know? It’s like, seven. So I get a seven. Ten, like, the constant ten, every day.

2:13:35 I don’t get it, so I know I don’t, I don’t worry. I mean, there are problems in the world, but I don’t lose sleep over it. I mean, mostly it’s just boring, everyday stuff. Quotidian s***, you know, just have my floors redone is f***ing hell, that kind of stuff. So we’re gonna make it as a species, probably.

2:14:01 Okay. And the message of this book is that everyone needs to basically shut off all the social media and work on yourself, and stop worrying about what other people are doing or blaming people for this and that, and to go in, in a little bit, so informational nutrition, be skeptical of your own hopes, and seek out meaningful problems. Those would be kind of the big three. Yeah. Yeah, no, Mark, I always ask a few questions at the end.

2:14:37 I’m gonna ask you, if you could pick up a magic phone and ring up 20-year-old Mark at BU, at MIT fraternity party, probably hanging out with the Delta guys, give some advice to that young man. What would you tell them, based on what you know now? I would tell him start therapy sooner. You know, I was very hung up. I had a lot of insecurities around, again, because of my adolescence in Texas and everything.

2:15:17 I, most of my insecurities were around being liked, being social, and particularly being liked by women. I put way too much energy into that. I mean, I did some good things that came out of it, and I developed good social skills and all this stuff, but, like, way too much energy, and I started doing therapy, I think, 23 or 24, and it really, it was helpful. I should have stuck with it longer. I should have started sooner.

2:15:56 So yeah, I think that, yeah, it’s good advice. One thing I find, I’ve, I’ve had some of the guys from the pickup space on here before. One thing I do say you know, people can talk all they want and talk rubbish about guys in the pickup space, but what they end up usually doing is a lot of self-development work and rapid, accelerated time. You know, a lot of guys go into that space to pick up women and soon find out, a year or two, that they want to work on inner game, and then they find out that, oh, it’s just all these problems I have, my inner insecurities, and they end up, four or five years later, evolving massively.

2:16:30 Yeah, whereas people that don’t go in that space because they’re like, I don’t need to pick up, they stay in a real weird static place. Yeah, it’s that whole, man, I could do a whole interview just on that kind of community and industry. Yeah, but it’s, in what I always called it, self-help in disguise. You know, to the people who were a little bit scared of it or wary of it, I was like, 80% of it, it was like really well-intentioned guys who need to figure their s*** out.

2:17:00 And, you know, and then 20 percent were maybe a little bit more malicious or bad apples, but most of it was just like really good dudes who had a lot of insecurities and were trying to get work through them, and a lot of great, really successful guys came out of that space who are doing really cool things now. Yeah, because they go into the fear. Yeah, about going into the fear. Oh, absolutely. I mean, wow, in willingness to embarrass yourself, and yeah, take a risk.

2:17:31 Yeah, absolutely. All fears that identify who you are as a person, and back in the day would get you beat up by the rest of the monkey clan. Yeah, we’ll talk about that next. The second question: best advice you ever received, could be writing advice or from a parent, Look, you know, biggest take away from me today is, is the problems, you know?

2:18:20 You’re always gonna have problems your whole life. That’s just the case, and we’ve created these little narratives in our mind, and we were fed them through movies and everything, that, you know, when you work till 65 and you retire and everything’s fine, and you get this and everything’s fine. The truth is you’re always going to have problems, so why not have the most high-quality problems, the ones with meaning? That’s big, and also your brain will create problems if you don’t have them, yes, even though you can’t necessarily identify it, but all of us can probably think back to a time in our life when we created a bunch of nonsense, also known as drama, right?

2:18:51 When we doesn’t actually have something of meaning. And then if we look back on the really hard times in our life, we’ll look back at them fondly, because we did something really hard and we made it through, and that’s what we’re most proud of, you know? Counter-intuitively, so this is really powerful stuff. People need to grab these books. So the latest one, of course, Everything Is f***ed, although it is a very, very hopeful book.

2:19:13 Yeah, and of course, Subtle Art of Not Giving a f***. If you want to actually see if we can sell more copies of that, maybe that’s possible. Both really good, in both very different books. No, and again, I would say to anybody out there, really think about your value system. Yeah, I just think that’s so important.

2:19:29 Even to have, like, something we did as a company about a year ago, here’s, we said what are our values and our mission statement, and we hadn’t done it in a few years, and we struggled for months and months and months. It really makes you ask, like, why are we here? And then every decision is, is it based on your values? And that’s what is gonna make you have those high-quality problems. Yeah, and when you don’t do that, you’re gonna find out you got these crappy problems, like, why are we doing this stupid stuff with stupid people?

2:19:54 That’s because you don’t have the values. So I wish, personally, I mean, look, everything happened for a reason at the right time, but me not really asking myself what my values were got me to 40 years old, basically alone, drinking myself to death, unhappy and depressed. You know, and it took a rock bottom incident, really, or a meditation incident for me to get out and ask those questions. So yeah, I think if people can really think about what their values are, which is what these books talk about, it’ll help.

2:20:21 Absolutely. Thanks so much, Mark. I enjoyed this a lot, and yeah, I look forward to the third child. I never that happens, but super excited. People can find these on Amazon, bookstores everywhere, blog as well.

2:20:35 How do people find your blog? markmanson.net. All right, good stuff, man. Until next time, where we’ll talk about the art of pick up. Look, wishing you all the best, and thanks for doing all this stuff. I appreciate it.

2:20:47 Thanks, Ben. Fine, appreciate me. Thank you.