How To Use The Subtle Art Of NOT GIVING A F*CK To Get Ahead of 99% Of People | Mark Manson

What up guys, I'm super excited to be joined by the former blogger turned three-time number one New York Times bestselling author Mark Manson. Mark made the leap from struggling blogger giving men relationship advice to becoming a thought leader in the self-help space with a twist by sharing the subtle art of not giving a fuck with millions of people around the world. Mark joins me in this episode to wrestle with the idea of self-help and why the books, the videos, and the conferences aren't actually changing many people's lives. We talk about the problem people struggle with the most, implementation.

It's easy to get fired up, but it's super hard to stay fired up for two days, two weeks, or even two months, let alone two years, two decades. Mark shares three universal principles that will help you avoid spiritual entertainment and actually start changing your life. And we reveal what you should be doing to make sure the five ideas and people you spend the most time with are actually getting you the results you need. If you've got one nugget of wisdom you can implement from this episode, please, my friends, leave a review.

It's the best way to support the podcast so we can help other people just like you reach their full potential and become legendary. I'm Tom Bilyeu, and welcome to Impact Theory. You have your finger on something that I am haunted by, which is that people are lost, they're scared in life, they've got a negative voice running on repeat. When they get into self-help, they make no lasting changes whatsoever.

What's the answer to that? And how does the subtle art of not giving a fuck play into all this? Start with easy questions. I don't know.

Well, you know, a question that I've been, I've been in this industry for 15 years now, and I've written thousands of pages worth of content, and I've recorded tons of videos, done hundreds and hundreds of interviews like this. So most of my careers, I've existed in the theory. I did a little bit of coaching early in my career, but I've kind of hit this point where, you know, you can only talk about anxiety so many times before you just start repeating yourself. And so I've kind of come back to this question of implementation.

Like, why do people read 12 books and then not change any of their behaviors? Why do we watch, you know, 20 YouTube videos and understand exactly what the perfect morning routine should be, and then we sleep till 930, you know? So I've been trying to think of clearly, like, whatever, the information's not the problem. There's something about the format that nobody has solved yet.

But I think really the only intervention that kind of consistently achieves behavioral change is a good therapist over many years. Like, that has a high hit rate. Pretty much everything else, like, you're batting 10, 20%. What is it about therapy you think that works?

I think it's the intensity and consistency of it. And I also just think it's, you know, you're paying $100 a session. There's only so many weeks you can show up and have a therapist basically tell you the same thing until you're like, okay, I should probably go do that. Whereas, like, you don't have a book.

People aren't reading the same book week after week. They're not watching the same video week after week. Or I think maybe just having somebody in the room, like, telling it to them has more impact in some way. So back up a little bit.

The problem with therapy is it's not scalable. It's expensive. There's limited accessibility to a large percentage of the population. There's a bunch of credentials.

You've got to go to school for years to become an accredited therapist. So I've been thinking about, like, what is a way, how do we solve the implementation problem? How do we make it easier for people to implement behavioral change, whether it's through apps, whether it's through, you know, video courses, you know, whatever. That's kind of, like, become the problem I'm asking myself.

I'm, like, zeroing in on at this stage of my career. How did you change? So you've always had pretty dramatic change from anybody that's read your book or seen the now movie. Yeah.

Very hesitant, I've got to tell you. Thank you. How did you change? Was it therapy?

Therapy was helpful. So I did therapy in my 20s for a few years, and that was helpful. I think one thing that I'm particularly good at is I'm very good at, like, changing my mind about things. Like, I don't get too attached to aspects of my identity.

Like, it doesn't, I don't feel committed to, like, oh, this is how people see me, so I need to behave that way. How the hell does you pull that off? I don't know. I'm, like, we could dig into that.

Probably a combination of nature and nurture, but I think I've been good throughout my life of, like, being willing to look at myself and be like, well, maybe I'm not an author. Maybe I just, like, had a good book. Let me go do this other thing now. Are you doing that?

Yeah. Is it a real conversation? Yeah. Interesting.

Given how many books you sold, I think people are going to be shocked to hear that. Yeah. Approaching 20 million. Yeah, if you add them all up, yeah.

That seems like a fair thing to do. Yeah, I'm very proud of that, and it's a very, obviously, a very important part of my life, but I don't necessarily see that as who I am, right? What do you see as who you are, or do you avoid that kind of statement? I avoid that statement.

Interesting. So that you don't get trapped? Yes. And then I like to think of it as, like, I'm an author right now, and if at one day it stops being useful being an author, I will stop being an author, right?

I think there's other identities or labels that I have adopted a little bit more permanently, like, I'm a husband, or I'm a friend, or I'm a son. Like, those are labels that I don't see myself relinquishing anytime soon. Personally, I think it's just the ability to kind of, like, swap labels within my identity, and I think being able to observe myself do that is what kind of allowed me to write well about these topics. That's really fascinating to me, because I think a lot about how do you get people to actually make the change.

And at first, I'm just telling people, okay, here's what you do. There's this thing. I think one of the big things is people have, it's too full. They have an inability to build desire, so they just don't want anything in their life, not badly enough to keep pushing through, and then they don't know how to use identity statements to hold themselves accountable.

And as I would teach people, okay, I'm just going to walk you through what I do. I can't swear that it's going to work, but this way I actually didn't, so I know it worked at least once. And the more I would tell people and tell people and tell people and see many people tread water and not be able to make that progress, I was like, am I just hyper-malleable? Yeah.

In that, is this my superpower? Is there something in the way, to your point about, I don't know if it's nature, nurture, a combination, whatever, but I find it very easy to point myself at something new, run a process, and that process then angers me emotionally. So, for instance, when I was at Quest, everybody just assumed I was going to be doing the nutrition thing for the rest of my life. And I was like, no, I've always wanted to do the film thing, but even when I went from film to then focusing on nutrition, or entrepreneurship is the more honest answer, that was pretty easy for me to do and say, okay, I'm going to tie something I care deeply about to this thing, because it needs to be something bigger than myself.

But again, as I left Quest in the impact theory, I was like, okay, this is now a process, I know how to run this, I have to take people that I care about deeply, associate them with the mission of building this thing, and then I'll be able to push through the difficulties. So, you're not tapping out and just saying, well, I'm a hyper-responder, everybody else can, you know, go deal with it themselves. You're trying to crack that nut. What do you think is the thread that you're going to pull on?

It's a combination of a couple things. And one part of that you alluded to, which is the desire. You know, I do think there are ways to manipulate our level of desire or our level of motivation, I guess kind of the emotional aspect of, like, feeling fired up about something. I think most people, it's not hard for them to get fired up about something for a few days.

It's once you get to, like, week two that most people tap out. And so, I think there's a lot of, I think people underestimate how influenced we are by our surroundings and our environment. And I think to make some of those early changes sustainable, you have to do a lot of interventions within your environment, whether that is, you know, throwing all the junk food out of your fridge, making it easier to get out of bed in the morning, putting an alarm clock on the other side of the room, or surrounding yourself with the right people that will help, that will make it easier to implement the desire to change, right? Like, fundamentally, we are, most of our psychology is driven, most of our happiness is driven by our relationships and the reasons that we are receiving social validation.

And so, if you are receiving social validation from people for bad behaviors, then one of the most effective things you can do is surround yourself with people who are going to validate you for better behaviors. Like, one thing I've been saying a lot that's been resonating with people is that, you know, there's all this talk about, like, I wish I didn't care what people think, or I wish I didn't need validation from others. But that's impossible. Like, we're social creatures.

We're always going to need validation. Instead of trying to not be validated by others, we should be validated by better people and for better reasons. So, if the validation that you find yourself seeking from others is hurting you, then you need to find people that that social validation is going to help you. You know, and the most banal cliche example is, like, joining a gym, right?

Like, go join a CrossFit class or something. It's like, what CrossFit has done that is so genius is that they have found a way to leverage social validation into exercise. So, the people who have hated exercise their entire life, suddenly they're in an environment where a bunch of really nice, encouraging people are rewarding them for doing hard things. And I think that is probably at, like, the base level, like, the most fundamental way to kind of rewire what you care about or what you want in your life is to align yourself with social groups that are going to reward you for wanting those things.

Dude, I think that's so often. So, I still do get asked by parents a lot. You know, my kids are really headed down the wrong path. How do I get them to turn around?

I mean, sometimes it's, you know, really heavy shit, drugs, whatever. And setting aside, like, the addiction aspect for a second, my answer is always there's only one path I know of that is as close to guaranteed work as humanly possible, and that is to kidnap them, take them to a deserted island full of people that they want to earn the respect of. And if you drop them into a group where they can't escape because it's going to suck and they're not going to have anywhere to turn other than these people to get their validation, to get their respect, and if they want their respect, no matter how crazy or difficult the thing is that they ask them to do, they will do it. And that, like, just knowing what I know about human psychology and the way that the human animal moves as a social creature, like, they are going to embed themselves in that group and adhere to the norms of that group.

They have to be very thoughtful about what group you embed them in because they probably ended up doing the drugs or whatever because they got embedded in a group of people that were doing dumb shit and they wanted their respect. And it goes back to the song I took a pill in Ibiza, you know, so Avicii would think I was cool. It's like, we do a lot of dumb things so that people will think that we're cool. But to your point, you can flip that around, but it becomes hard to cobble those people together.

Now, one thing that was really useful for me was books. So treating books as if they were those friends. So I know you've heard the quote, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. I think you're the average of the five people and ideas you spend the most time with.

So way better if you can get around a peer group that will reinforce it to be a hundred times more impactful. But what do you think about the ability for books to give you the ideas that you can anchor yourself around? Yeah, I think, look, ideas are necessary, but they're not sufficient. And it's my buddy there at Sivers has this great quote where he says, like, if intellectually understanding something was enough, we would all be billionaires with sixbacks.

And it's clearly it's not, you know, so you need the ideas, but the ideas only get you halfway there. And and I think with the Internet, ideas have been proliferating. You know, it used to be a lot of these ideas that you and I are discussing right now. You 20 years ago, you had to be a professor at a psychology department doing research to know these things.

Or you had to pay a lot of money for a very expensive seminar to learn these things. These days, it's social media and everything. These ideas are everywhere. They're extremely cheap and almost free.

So it's like anybody who has any intellectual interest is going to collect and consume a lot of very good ideas pretty quickly. I think the power that hasn't been tapped into yet is using the Internet, solving the implementation side, which means solving the validation side, you know, and using the Internet to kind of do what you were just describing of like finding communities, finding that desert island group of like, OK, these are my people. We're together for this explicit reason. We want to improve ourselves in this way.

We come from similar backgrounds, maybe have similar traumas or issues. You know, how do we organize that? How do we how do we get people into the how do we leverage the social pressure of the Internet in a positive way instead of the negative way, which is how it's mostly been used up until now? That's kind of like where my brain is all the time now.

So that to me is largely a function of adopting a certain value system. Do you have and I love that if you're going to try to squirm out of this, do you have like as close to a universal subsects? It'll never be the totality, but a universal subset of values that if people adhere to these, it's going to move their life forward. I get it.

Most people won't be able to adhere to it. But is there like a small handful of things you're like, everybody should have these? I so I thought I'm not going to squirm out. I like it.

I thought about this. It is hard to say. Obviously, it's hard to say anything universally. But I had to say to me, there's probably three universal principles that I think are just effective for the entire human species.

It's like just how we're wired. First one is radical responsibility. It's like taking ownership of everything that happens in your life, even if it's not your fault, even if it's tragic, even if it's completely unfair and unjust. You still have to take responsibility for your response to it and you have to take responsibility for how you're going to deal with that challenge or setback.

Responsibility is so important because it empowers you psychologically, like as long as you're blaming something around you and you might even be completely correct that it is their fault. But as long as you're like existing in that mind space, you are disempowering yourself from actually doing anything to improve your situation. So guaranteed. It's that's kind of in my opinion.

I call it the prime belief, but it's like nothing else really works until people kind of like flip that switch. I'm like, OK, I need to take responsibility for this. What do you say to people that push back that say I was screwed over? Like, how can you even say this?

It's fault and responsibility. So this is a very popular part of our book. But fault and responsibility are two different things. We tend to associate them because it's, you know, if you hit me with your car, you're at fault.

And so now you owe me something. That's how our legal system works. That's how our social systems kind of work. But so I think our natural instinct is to think, you know, well, I just screwed up childhood because this person traumatized me.

So somebody's got to come fix it for me. Right. Like somebody else messed up my life. So somebody else needs to come fix it.

And that's like, again, you may not be you may be factually correct, but nobody's showing up to fix your life for you. At a certain point, like you have to decide it doesn't matter what's happened. I'm the only person who owns my own future. Many people might own my past, but only I own my future.

So I need to explicitly take responsibility for making sure it's a good future. Second principle is radical acceptance. So everybody's our natural inclination is to seek pleasurable experiences, emotions and avoid unpleasurable experiences, emotions. And I think the most psychologically healthy thing to do is to simply accept all emotional experiences, regardless of whether they feel good or feel bad.

Why accept? You just mean don't fight back, don't resist, don't avoid, don't deny, don't suppress. And there are some people that suppress positive emotions as well, which is, you know, that's a whole tangent, but it does happen. But basically, you know, the pithy elevator pitch for this is that there's there's no such thing as a good or bad emotion.

There's only good and bad responses to emotions. So you can you can respond to joy in a very unhealthy way. A lot of people respond to joy in a very unhealthy way. I mean, you go get shit face with a bunch of your friends and, you know, wake up in a ditch somewhere.

That's interesting. That's interesting. You know, a lot of people develop when they feel good, they develop a strong sense of entitlement. They feel they're owed certain things because they're so happy or they feel so good.

So that would be an unhealthy response to positive emotions. But yeah, it's a lot of people. If there's kind of like a template for the average email that I get in my inbox, it's basically this. If the person says, you know, X, Y and Z are happening in my life right now.

I feel really bad. How do I stop feeling bad? And my response is always the same is you don't stop feeling bad. You feel bad and you find a way to respond well despite feeling bad.

Like it's if you try to stop feeling bad, not only are you going to distract yourself and get sucked down a bunch of rabbit holes, but you're actually probably going to make yourself feel worse. Right. It's like when you wish you didn't feel guilty, you just feel more guilty. When you get angry at yourself for being angry, you just get even more angry.

Like it's a spiral that starts happening. So radical responsibility, radical acceptance. And shit, I'm blanking on the third. I have a video about this.

I've been there so many times in interviews. I will never say the number like three, whatever. Because then people like those are two. I think those are really huge.

So responsibility, acceptance. I'll throw a third one into the mix. It's what I call the only belief that matters. It's tough to wrangle this as a value.

But I would say progress becomes the value. And then this is the mechanism. That's hilarious. I think I call it like radical growth, which is basically your motivation for everything you do should be to improve the lives of yourself and others.

And yeah. Tell me why and others. I think people will get why they should work on progress themselves, which is, to quote Tony Robbins, a foundational pillar to human happiness, which I really agree with. But why others?

Because helping others gives our life meaning. You know, you can improve yourself all day, every day. But what I find is that people who are very, very absorbed in just improving their own lot in life, it starts to feel a bit pointless at a certain point. You know, it comes back to that.

That's so weird to me. That's so true. It comes back to the fact that like we're fundamentally social animals. And so most of what we derive meaning and happiness from is our relationships.

And so people who improve themselves a lot, they eventually kind of arrive at this point. So, OK, I kind of divide improvement up into two. There's two categories. One is the bad to OK and one is the OK to great.

And I think this is something that gets lost in our industry a lot is that there are a lot of people who come to us because they feel bad and they just want to feel OK. And there are a lot of people who come to us because they feel OK, but they want to feel great. And those are two very different problems with in many ways are two completely different conversations. And I think a lot of advice that is intended for the OK to great people is misinterpreted by the bad to OK and vice versa.

And so I think if you are trying to go from bad to OK, then, yeah, you should focus on yourself. Like it's the old like put your oxygen mask on before you put on the mask of others. But if you're in the OK to great, then a very big component of that is like, OK, if my life's great, what's the point if I'm not sharing that with people? If I'm not using all of the amazing skills and tools and wisdom that I've developed within myself to help bring other people along.

And so I think it ultimately we need to, you know, a complete life is motivated by both. So meaning and purpose for sure, a big part of it. What I have found is whenever somebody's striving to do something great, there is a moment where it gets difficult. You were saying this is, I almost interrupted you because it's so terrifying.

I think you're so right that most people give up about week two. And if you think about the amazing things you've done in your life and I think about the things I've done in my life, it's like it's not even year two. It's like you're 10 and you're starting to get somewhere. And the difference between the second week and the second decade is so terrifying.

So I talk to people a lot about the success is a game of attrition. Most people just quit and they quit because they feel badly about themselves. At some point, something gut checks you about are you good enough, smart enough, worthy, whatever. And people come up wanting they've got the negative voice in their head.

They don't have the right value system, whatever. But they implode because they've got the negative voice. It's running unchecked. They don't have a way to anchor themselves, which I would say the thing to anchor yourself around is improvement itself.

It's like you're getting better. To your point, though, if you don't understand how to take a group of people that are real to you that you love and say, okay, the thing I'm going to do is going to be of service to that. And I just saw a YouTube short today from Michio Kaku of all people. It was really interesting.

And I disagree with him so violently. And he was saying that we made a mistake 50 years ago and we're still paying the price. And the mistake is that we think of the human mind as a computer, but the problem is the human mind has no operating system. And I was like, are you for real?

Like, what are you talking about? Like, that is running from an evolutionary standpoint. You were propelled so hard to go be of service to people. And when I say it out loud, it sounds really cheesy, but I'm like, you're destined for misery.

If you cannot figure out how to serve people and do something awesome for other people, and this is going to be a weird example, but I think it will make sense. So I discovered anime in my 40s and I went all in for like 18, not less than 18 months, like eight months. I was watching so much. It was amazing.

I was getting up really early in the morning. I was watching an hour or two of anime, a day, seven, a week. It was awesome. And I learned the art form and all of that.

Once I had the art form locked in, I couldn't allow myself. I couldn't enjoy spending a bunch of time on it, even though I like it. Because I was like, I no longer need to do that to serve other people. Now, I needed to master anime as an art form because for me to get a growth mindset out of scale, I need to do it through entertainment.

Anime has become the dominant form of entertainment for young people, so I was like, I really need to understand this. But the second I was like, oh, I get the art form, like all that passion and joy that I had and feeling like, yes, I'm moving myself forward. I'm making progress by sitting and watching. It went away.

And I was like, this is where most people live. Is they're in that post moment where they're doing something, but they don't know why they're doing it. It's not associated to helping people and as soon as I was like, I'm not going to be fighting for myself. I'm going to fight for somebody else.

And I was like, fuck, I can go crazy. I've got way more endurance, way more energy. But I had to learn, oh, this is a conscious process of saying, okay, quest isn't going to be about money. It's going to be about saving my mom and my sister because I'm overly obese and I want to help them.

Impact theory isn't going to be about building, you know, this big thing. It's going to be about these kids that I watch just get devoured by the inner cities. And I was like, if I could sneak a growth mindset in when they're young, then I could actually do something. Once I made that switch, then I was like, okay, I can fight forever.

But without that, yeah. It's funny, you and I were talking about kids a little bit before we went live and we're both at that age where all of our friends either have little kids or having kids, having second kids. And it's interesting, so many of my friends, particularly fathers, that they had weight loss goals or work goals or, you know, wanted to do more networking or start a new business or whatever. And they put it off for years and all of a sudden that kid shows up and it's like a switch goes off and then they actually develop, they actually make a bunch of those changes.

And I think it's just another example of what you're talking about is suddenly that reason shows up and it's like, oh, I, you know, I couldn't lose weight for myself, but I don't want to be, you know, I want to be able to play with my kid. I don't want to be obese and, you know, running out of energy when my kid is running around. So I better lose weight and it's like suddenly they do. I want to come back to really quick though, the word and, you know, we said we should all, everything should be motivated by improving lives of ourselves and others.

I think the and is important because what I find is that generally people are very, people are naturally very good at one or the other, but not both. So there are a lot of people who are naturally very good at helping others and focusing on others and worrying about others and taking care of others, but they're bad at taking care of themselves and they neglect themselves, they sacrifice themselves too much. Developing, being able to bridge those two things and like square what feels contradictory at times where it's like you're taking care of yourself and you're taking care of the group and you're taking care of your loved ones like all at the same time. You're finding the win-win-win in each situation.

I think that is the rare skill that we should all be aiming for, but it takes us, it takes everybody a long time to get there. Yes, and usually after a lot of years of suffering, what's going to be really interesting in a modern context is birth rates decline just precipitously and more and more people aren't having kids. I think about this a lot. So I've consciously decided not to have kids and I'm very aware of the fact that people come to me for advice and despite your protestations about not going on stage and telling people to do this, that is exactly what I do and I feel supremely confident, fluently perhaps, but the one thing that I'm really careful about is you need to be real thoughtful if you're going to not have kids.

And I think that the default answer for people should be to have kids and it's a little bit like that, the fence thing, I forget what it's called, it's like you are wandering through space and you come upon a fence, your default assumption should not be I don't know why it's there so let's tear it down. You should be like, I need to figure out why it's there before I tear it down. And that's what I feel about not having kids is literally just yesterday, so we have the same impact at your university and a person asked me a question and I was startled by the question and it was like, I sit in bed and I stare at the ceiling, I don't want anything, I can't even work up the outrage when somebody wrongs me, I just, I don't care. And I was like, whoa.

So I was like, hey, let me ask what may sound like a random question. Do you have kids? And they're like, no. And I was like, I am not surprised.

So I was like, I don't know your age, I don't know if this is right advice for you, but let's talk about having kids is nature's way of going, I'm going to give you meaning and purpose, I'm going to give you something to fight for, something to die for, something ultimately to live for. And when people don't have that, like for me, it was very conscious. I was like, I have to be very careful because kids are instant meaning and purpose. And I was like, I found that through my work and it's deeply fulfilling and I have an amazing relationship with my wife, it's deeply fulfilling.

But I was like, we had a really honest conversation about, it's a very dangerous game because we now are going to forever have to find our meaning and purpose in something other than the sort of prepackaged, like here you go. And so when I was answering this person's question, I was like, okay, you have to evaluate your own life. I honestly feel nervous saying the following, but I actually believe that it's true for enough people that this is worse than out loud, which is you might want to consider having kids. Find somebody that you love, build a strong relationship first and old-fashioned like that.

But like do that, have kids. You may be startled to your example of how all of a sudden getting out of bed is easy because you're thinking about somebody else. And I think people ignore that to their own peril. Yeah, I think it's where we've developed a culture, which this is one of those things that in many ways is great, but there's some negative side effects that I don't think have completely sunk in.

But like we've developed a culture where it is mainstream and widely okay to think about your own mental health first, to think about your own priorities, to think about your own happiness and figure out what kind of life you want to make. And obviously that's a great thing in a vacuum. But to your point, there's kind of a hidden cost to that, which is once you're given the freedom and the opportunity to think very deeply about who you're going to be and how are you going to be happy and how are you going to find meaning in the world, suddenly nothing is given to you. Suddenly you have to kind of conjure it out of thin air.

The way I described this in subtle art was like 100 years ago, life was objectively worse. It sucked. You were probably a subsistence farmer somewhere. You're probably in a war or famine or depression.

But when you're living 100 years ago, it was always very, very clear what your purpose was, what the goal was, what the meaning in your life was. It was to survive, don't get shot, don't get killed, and grow enough food to feed yourself and your family. And so everybody woke up every day knowing exactly what they were going to do that day, knowing exactly what had to be done or else the consequence was potentially death. And so I think a lot of these existential questions that we wrestle with in the 21st century of like, who am I?

Why am I here? What am I supposed to be doing? These are luxuries. These are very, very first-world problems.

And in many ways, we've traded physical struggle for psychological struggle. That is the hidden cost of our comforts and freedom that we've earned for ourselves over the past five, six generations. So fascinating. This is a very weird time of, I think it was you that said it.

It's like when you've been just awash in abundance forever, there's a real distortion that happens. Are you watching The Last of Us? I've played the games, some weeks ago. Okay, so you know the story.

It's very fascinating to watch the story of people who go from the normal life that we all know to you are one rabbit kill or deer kill away from dying and like what that does and how it is clarifying, but also breaks down trust because now there's so much competition between people for like very scarce resources. But it's really clarifying. And when I think about where society is going, certainly here in much of the less, definitely in the US, it's like it gets to be a very precarious tightrope when you don't have to think about other people. You can build a life where you're staying at home and you're supposedly just awash in opulence and everything's great and easy.

You have this profound sense of unease and something isn't right and people don't really have a sense of how to cobble that together. You've mentioned it a couple times already in this interview, but I want to put a point on, you say that people's, I think you said happiness, is most tied to their relationships. How do we do relationships well? Is it a bunch of people?

Are there certain, like you need romance, you need friendship, whatever? Just more easy questions, I see. I like softballs. I like softballs.

Come on. I definitely don't think the answer is quantity. And I think that, well, I mean, actually we have a lot of research showing that the answer to the relationship question is not quantity. Like in fact, it seems that there's a thing called the Dunbar number which shows that we actually seem, close friendships, we seem to max out around five or six.

So it's definitely quality over quantity. And I think not only is it quality over quantity, but quantity can actually distract from quality. I just moved here from New York. We were talking about that earlier.

One of the constant struggles in New York City is that there's always so much going on and there's so many people that you can meet and hang out with that nobody actually ends up being satisfied with their social lives. It ends up being this kind of constant churn of friends and acquaintances and you might meet somebody and you really like them. You're like, man, we should hang out. We should get together.

And eight months will go by before you see them again just because both of your schedules are so hectic and crazy and there's so much other stuff going on. There's a few things going on. One is there needs to be some sort of alignment in terms of values and worldview. So you need to have something in common.

You need to care about the same thing. Something. It doesn't need to be everything, but there needs to be something that you both believe, that you both care about. This is true for friendships and romantic relationships.

There needs to be alignment somewhere on a deep value. At the same time, it seems to be beneficial if there's also a little bit of not just difference, but opposites. introverts tend to play really well with extroverts and vice versa um you know the extrovert needs somebody to listen to all their bullshit and the introvert needs somebody to listen to all day so um you know so it works out well um so there are certain personality traits that tend to complement each other well and i think that's what we describe as chemistry you know when you sit with somebody and it's just like it just works it's because you have like complementary personality traits that kind of what are the things you think people need to agree on um so actually so my friend near i all had this great thing uh and he's not a relationship guy he's just a friend he actually i don't know if he's been on your show so he's uh his whole thing is about attention and distraction um but i was hanging out with him once and his theory was he said um so there's five things i think let's see i'm doing it again so i'm doing it again i think i i think i can get it i think i can get it uh so uh religion so okay cleanliness religion politics kids and uh oh shit i think goals i'll say like life goals it's probably something else yeah i did not see that one coming so he said he said if you get all five you're probably bored because you agree on everything if you get four you're that's probably like the optimal spot three you're okay but you're probably fighting a decent amount and it's less than three it's like it's not gonna work because you just don't align on enough things um so i think it's the things that people need to really align align on is like lifestyle habits which i guess is cleanliness okay that yeah that's that's the one thing my wife and i fight about so we have four out of the five yeah me and my wife like kids politics religion like you know you probably need to be aligned on more of those things than not um because it's yeah i mean you can there are couples that disagree politically disagree you know different religions but it's like there needs to be enough overlap that like it kind of keeps them binded together um so we've got shared values we've got complementary but different personalities um and then the crazy thing is so if you look at like research on friendships in particular uh i've been really interested in this because we're both at that age where i think it's it's hard to make friends because everybody's so busy all the time um if you look at the research on friendship like the number one fact you know they talk about all these things similar values um you know similar hobbies or behaviors or interests or whatever the but the number one factor that that never gets talked about is simply exposure it's like you tend to become friends with or develop relationships with people you see all the time and that i think that's just such an underrated thing and this kind of comes back to the the environment piece of like putting yourself in an environment around people that you want to validate you in a positive way or who you want to be more like um you know there's a certain amount of value of just seeing the same type of people day after day after day like there's like an unconscious bond that starts forming whether you want it to or not so how do people go back and instructing that is it just not whoever you work with that's gonna be that or well i think we you know we run into this a similar paradox of choice especially these days with remote work and everything right like everybody's working from home then now you now you get even more choice in terms of like who you spend time with um also default isolation yep just something i definitely worry about we when we so we did about 18 months where no one came in the office we actually had employees start saying hey can we come back now yeah because they were feeling so isolated that wasn't everybody there's still people you know three years later they're like no no i don't want to come back yet so yeah yeah um isolation i think forcing yourself to get out it's funny because you know as somebody who's been self-employed his whole career a lot of the problems that that i faced in my 20s it's interesting like it's interesting to see the world going through it which is like i had to learn how to force myself out of the house because it's what you discover is that when you work in the same room that you sleep and you watch tv and you like do whatever your interests are and you work out like it becomes very hard to leave that room at a certain point and so you have to find you like invent reasons to make you leave um i i guess i you know my answer your question is just i i think i'm bullish on communities over the next 10 20 years like i just think without with as you point out with fewer kids with less religion and with more remote work you know like that those three things are probably the biggest reasons that people physically go to the same place over and over and over again and so i think we're just out of psychological need we're gonna have to reinvent that in some way just around other activities or behaviors you know the gym class the crossfit class is a perfect example like what does that look like in all these other verticals you know like book clubs uh you know pickleball like everybody's playing pickleball and honestly i think it's hearing about it's mostly just because we want to go see the same five people like you need to go see the same five people over and over again like that's just part of being kind of a psychologically stable person let's talk about the most powerful force in wealth building compounding there's a reason people talk about this forever you put an asset to work it generates more of itself over time the curve bends way in your favor every serious wealth builder knows how compounding works most gold owners though have completely opted out of it monetary metals changes that equation 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the point refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use head to quince.com slash impact pod for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in canada too that's quince q u i n c e.com slash impact pod for free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com slash impact pod yeah it's interesting the idea that the most severe form of punishment you can put a human through is isolation make them be by themselves that's really weird as somebody who likes to be alone but always in my control and all that so i get that it's a very artificial way but i just i so enjoy being by myself i'm startled i accept the truth of it trust me it's not me going oh it wouldn't happen to me but i'm startled that that really is the most brutal form of punishment that you can put a human through it's very strange you just gotta imagine no internet yeah yeah no internet would be rough that is for sure yeah but the the fact that the human mind will begin to hallucinate if it isn't seeing other people i'm sorry what like that's so that your brain has such a hunger to have people to interact with that it will make them up in order to scratch that itch that's really that's surreal to me yeah i mean it's it puts it on the same level as like food or yeah breathing no for sure we don't consider it the same way it's interesting it really hits me as okay this is super super important sex drive is another one that like people are very i think are quick to not think about how fundamental a drive that is yeah um you know for guys it's it's harder to forget because you realize oh i don't control my erection yeah and you realize whoa like nature put this out of my conscious reach like that is such a deeply embedded drive that it's like there is michio kaku there's a self-routine running my brain that's like you're going to want what i you know evolution tell you you're going to want that's crazy and so when you've got that kind of thing like pushing you to move forward if people don't take that time to understand it recognize how important it is and this is something that my wife and i tell people in relationships a lot like if you want a long lasting relationship you've got to keep having sex yeah because so often especially people have kids you have bed death yeah and so you become basically like roommates and with the amount that i work like that's always the danger for me that i will just get so stressed and there's so much going on and i'm sure it's just driving my testosterone i just don't feel like it yeah and so there have been times where lisa and i have had to be like okay like this is a real thing like we have to be committed to this and we can't let whatever but like we try not to let a week go by where we don't have sex ideally more than once so it's like and look that's me speaking in my 40s you've been very generous to put me at your age this whole episode which is not true but like that you know you really really have to be thoughtful yeah i want to go back to romantic love before we started rolling you said that you were a convert because i said i'm a huge believer in love and marriage and you said i'm a convert um one what made you think in the beginning not for me and then what changed your mind i so my emotional background is avoidant attachment and basically commitment so i struggled quite a bit in romantic relationships to maintain romantic relationships because you were afraid they would reject you so you first uh yeah i mean that's fundamentally like the kind of the way an avoidant attachment works is it's a deep in spirit of being hurt and so you you protect yourself by finding reasons to push people away um and most of those reasons are going to be irrational or imagined um so that that was most of my early relationships um when did you become consciously aware of that i think probably towards the end of my relationship with my college girlfriend um i i developed an awareness you know with my first series girlfriend i was just a bad boyfriend but i had so little awareness i didn't even realize i was you know because we all justify our decisions and actions and so you know i kind of walked out of that one thinking i i was like rosy and gold and she was the terrible one and you know as until i look back i'm like no i was an idiot but it was with my college girlfriend i you know i got to like the back half of that relationship um it was about two and a half years and i just realized like wow i'm really not good to her like i really care about her but i'm not a good boyfriend and and i had to it was difficult to kind of admit that to myself and and then i started investigating why that was like why why am i like responding in these weird emotional ways and doing shitty things that are um you know like just causing drama for no reason um and so that's i started reading a lot about relationships and when i stumbled across attachment theory it was like oh shit yeah that's me that's that's it right there um and so at that point you're like i'm maybe because of this i'm not interested in pursuing something or um so the thing so the thing about avoiding attachment is is you have a fundamental uh just anxiety and fear around intimacy and romance and it's that manifests itself in various ways but you know it's we we experience the emotion first and then we justify it later and so in my younger years i found all sorts of reasons to justify this you know it's just i really high sex drive i'm polyamorous i uh you know my lifestyle is just i'm always gonna be on the road and working really hard so i'm never gonna have time to like settle down and commit you know it's like i started kind of telling myself all these stories about myself um that made me think that i am not the type of person who settles down with one partner for a long period of time uh as i got older and started to understand a little bit more about my baggage and my childhood and trauma and things like that i started to realize that maybe some of that's not entirely true and i need to work on myself uh and then it was when i met my wife that i i still had some of those narratives going on but it was funny it was like i was with her for one year two years and normally in the exact same spots that historically i had kind of freaked out and tried to get away or caused a bunch of drama or cheated on her or whatever i'm hitting that same like i guess landmark with my wife and i'm like hmm i still have a lot of anxiety like i don't want to go anywhere like i want this is where i want to be and i think it forced me to kind of work through a lot of stuff within the relationship with her there's desire again this is exactly why i'm always when somebody fails to get what they want in life while there is a long road to hoe i'm always like you just don't want it badly enough to figure those things out because in that moment if you were like i did her but not as much as i want to go be free or go get laid or whatever and this is this is where i think a lot of people fall down certainly guys is the thrill of the hunt the thrill of convincing someone that um you know maybe a week ago you didn't even know to sleep with you is really intoxicating yeah and to pretend that that isn't like a drug-like thing is what's going to get you in trouble because it is so different to pursue that versus pursuing a long-term committed relationship this is one thing i always thought okay i have i have set myself up well for a long-term relationship because i thought about the nature of relationships since i was a teenager and so like what phases do they move through neurochemically and so like early love is very different than you've been married for five years and you know those things shift and change and so it becomes about understanding how they're going to change and having a meta desire that's over that so for me the meta desire that overrides everything in my marriage is i want to see what a life looks like when you share it with somebody yes and that the good the bad the ups and downs but that idea really speaks to me and so even though i really enjoyed the early years where it was there was a sexual freedom if you will i could be with whoever i wanted um i was i waited so when i decided to propose my wife as i was telling you i made a pros and cons list and that was on there like am i okay that this is the last person i'm ever gonna sleep with and running that math i was like yeah like i recognize it as a sacrifice i'm not pretending that i'm not giving something up because i very much am but the thing that i get this idea of being able to share my life with her and grow with her and we were in her she was 21 when we met i was only 24 so it was like you know we were pretty pretty early so it's like i went i was broke at the time so it's like there's no like oh i already made it now i'm finding somebody so i was like wow we're really gonna like do this together and dream together and build together and all that stuff and so it was like talking about okay things are gonna change like this i remember as we were in the grips of the cocaine-like effects of that when you first realize you're in love yeah just insane i was like this feeling will change it's gonna turn into something else and we have to be ready for that we have to communicate through that we have to navigate through that um but if we handle it well i have a feeling there's something on the other side of this that's really gonna be better than cocaine which nobody tells you like this is the other thing i just think well first of all you alluded to something that was very very major for me and i think this is true for a lot of men in particular is i think men tend to overestimate the significance of the hunt the chase the sexual conquest i do think you know obviously there's it is very enjoyable and it's fun and it's almost a sport um and i think once i read but i think a lot of men over because they receive so much social validation and because they have scripts running that tell them that that's what makes them high status or important or desirable um they tend to put way more meaning into it than there actually is you know an epiphany for me and i was definitely one of those guys so an epiphany for me was when i realized exactly what you were just saying is that basically the hunt is it's a glorified hobby like it's just it's almost a sport and it's the same way like you can love basketball and like make it the center of your life but it's still just basketball like it's never going to be more than just basketball you know and it's the same thing with dating a bunch of people and hooking up with a bunch of hot girls and getting all that validation from that and meanwhile there is a certain level of depth of meaning when you've shared a decade with somebody and you've been through the best times and the worst times with that person you've had joy with that person you've had pain and fear with that person and you're still with them and they've watched you grow through that and you've watched them grow through that like that is so rare and special and it is you can't replicate that in any other way and once that clicked for me that like wait a second this thing that i've been spending all these years focusing so much on was oversold to me was like over heights and this thing that most people complain about which is marriage is totally undersold to me like the joy and the meaning and the impact of like you know seeing my wife accomplish something in her business that she's been working three years towards and you know i and watching her stress through it and giving her support and giving her advice like watching her succeed in that moment like it's so much more impactful and meaningful than like the best one night stand i ever had like it's not even on the same you know you're like you're not even in the same territory when you compare those two things i you know i that revelation was like so profound for me uh and i'm a little bitter that like that message isn't like i started wondering like where was this message when i was 20 right like because when i was 20 the message was no dude you need to bang as many girls as possible and never settle down and you know because that's like what a high status alpha male does or you know whatever the thing was back then and uh and that was fun for a couple years but like it doesn't serve you well long term uh and so i have been i'm glad that i'm glad to hear you're you're on the same page it's i have intentionally kind of been an advocate for classical monogamy in marriage because i think it is in this day and age it's underrated yeah long-term relationships for sure it's the most gratifying thing i've ever done and i say that as somebody who's had the kind of worldly success that most people you know fight and die for and i'm just telling you like nothing even comes close yep and no matter how successful you are at least in my experience it's not like the negative voice goes away it's not like oh it's just up and to the right like it's still that jagged you know cliff of like whoa it's working no nothing's working you know is it gonna last is it is it forever like there's so much like whipsawing when you're trying to matter obviously i could have gone off and retired and just been wealthy and spent money but i i played that thought out and it was very obvious to me that i would not be able to be happy fulfilled that's the right word i wouldn't be able to be fulfilled and so i was gonna have to go back um but in all of that which is amazing and it's important and people need to do it but in all of that nothing has given me what my wife and it's it's a gestalt of things because it's the moment where she looks at me like i'm powerful and that it makes me feel so good the moments where i am completely broken in front of her and she's there and it's like i'm here i don't think less of you for this moment in fact if anything i'm honored to be needed and that you show me this and you put all of that together it's fucking unreal to this day if she walks into a room and i'm not expecting her like i'll oh like i get i don't get butterflies but it's like i'm so happy to see her that and that's we're in the same house all the time like we basically never leave the house but if she walks into a room and i'm not expecting her it just makes me happy yeah you know you mentioned like the butterflies and the cocaine like effect of that early romance where it's just very very intense emotions um it does go away but the thing if it is a healthy solid relationship the thing that kind of it segues into is almost like a calm ever-present satisfaction and that is in many ways so much better you know like it's it's it's not as exciting it doesn't get your adrenaline going you're not having sex three times a day anymore but that's fine it but there's just this like peace you know it's like she comes down for breakfast and you're just like huh like a little smile pops on your face and like it just feels good all the time um and it's yeah i can't i can't recommend it enough like there's and it comes back to right like the subroutines thing um like there's a reason why marriage exists in every culture across human history yeah sure humans were not monogamy isn't not everybody's monogamous all the time there's plenty of cultures that you know people have sex with other people or maybe people stray for a little bit but pair bonding which is settling down with one partner for a long period of time that is pretty universal to the human experience and uh i don't think that's an accident what do you think about the modern mating crisis by the right way to sum it up like what the hell is going on now and how do we reverse the trends i think there's two issues happening simultaneously one is just a classic paradox of choice you know when you've got an app that you know if i can set up five dates you know in the next hour um why why it removes the stakes and so if it doesn't go well it's kind of like whatever um i'll just find somebody else i think there needs to be a little bit you need to feel like you're losing something if if it doesn't go well to like kind of motivate you to open up and put in the effort to like see if there's a connection there so i think that's part of it i think the other part of it is that i think generally people don't you can't really settle into a a healthy relationship well hold on let me it's harder to settle into a healthy relationship until you've kind of gotten yourself figured out and i think why'd you hesitate to say that uh well i was originally gonna say you can't but i don't think that's true really you think you can be dysfunctional and get into uh no no no i well so let me define figure yourself out but you can be dysfunctional and functionalize yourself within the relationship that's like a high wire act but it's incredibly hard but some people pull it off uh just the same way like you know high school sweethearts will get married and against my recommendation yeah i don't recommend it but some of them pull it off uh and they end up living a very happy healthy life um generally speaking so there are large amounts of large amounts of people will be accepted but as a general principle i think it is hard to settle into a long-term committed relationship until you have figured out your own identity a little bit figure out what you're doing with your own life first uh before you can share that with somebody else and i think as the world gets more complex that process of identity formation which usually traditionally happens in like the age 16 to 24 range that is a long game so it's taking people longer and longer young people longer longer to kind of figure out who they are who they want to be what they're going to do with their life and i think most people want to figure that out before they figure out who they're going to be with long term and so the more uh complexity is introduced to the identity formation process the the harder it's going to be for people to commit or decide like like if i don't know who i am or what i'm doing in my life how am i ever going to know if you're right for me you know so i i imagine it's those two things kind of happening simultaneously yeah going back to the five things that nirayal was talking about one of the things that i think people where most people fail it's going to be one of two things either selection which i think is the biggest problem and i remember for a long time i thought i'm just so good at relationships and then one day it really hit me oh my wife is a ninja and she lets things roll off her back she doesn't get wound up about stuff and so you know all my highfalutin tactics would not work on somebody that was like overly reactive emotionally unstable or whatever so it's like i was like okay selection is a big part of this and then values is to your earlier point i think one of the most overlooked things i think people need to overlap i've always called it roughly 80 like if you have 80 of your values aligned you're gonna be good but then understanding what your different personality um strengths are so look i'm a little skewed on this because my wife and i work together and you certainly do not to be high functioning but i find that the things that allow us to work together have served us incredibly well in our relationship which is that we have we're good at very different things and so i'm big vision i can handle a ton of stress i can think well through a storm of just everything going wrong and then my wife once it's like we know what we're doing then she's just going to be completely religious she will never fool herself it's like this is doable this is not this is how we're gonna get it done and so you put us together and there's no wrestling for control both of us are able to follow the other person the right that person's the right person to lead but overall it's like okay i'll set the strategy whether it's for the business or for the family and then she's like the the reality check of what we can do and how we can do it and once we learned to say out loud you're good at this yeah i'm good at this i'm bad at this you're bad at that like once we laid all that out we were like do we all agree on this because if we don't let's have that debate so that it can be a known thing so when we get into a situation it's like hey you're the right person to follow you're way better at thinking through this kind of problem than i am cool go forth prosper you've got rules set up all this stuff but without the alignment values without acknowledging where we're strong where we're weak why we work well together without wanting each other to win and wanting to be a team we never get anywhere and i find that especially now essentially i wasn't headed this this way when i brought this up but part of the problem that i see now is when you have a breakdown of gender roles now it's like you don't even need those to be the roles but you need roles like you need it's like absolutely mod soccer if you've ever seen little kids play soccer they just swarm around the ball and everybody runs in a big clump whereas once you get to the professionals it's everybody has a role they know exactly what they do and they do it to a t and i think the same is true in marriage i don't care what your roles are but make sure you know who's doing what i agree and i don't think you shouldn't be limited to the gender roles but you shouldn't you shouldn't also be limited to like 50 50 everything like it's people personalities excel at different things so you find who's better at what within the relationship and you maximize that i think you touched upon like kind of the key piece of advice that i find myself giving these days to young people who ask about dating and relationship stuff which is it's i think these days it's all about filtering uh getting really really good at screening early on because the the system is essentially different it's completely different than it was even 10 15 years ago you know back in the old days you were limited in how many people you could meet so when you did meet somebody you liked you would put in a lot of effort to make it work and maybe overlook some incompatibilities or problem areas to like you know you're like well i don't know i'm gonna meet no one like this one so i better make it work right so a lot of people i think probably ended up in some relationships but most people ended up in the relationship they wanted whereas today you just you have this absolute glut of opportunities the problem is sifting through it and i think most people's approach to uh to dating is is antiquated it's still held over from the way people did it 20 years ago which is like get to know each other don't say anything that's too off-putting you know don't rock the boat at all don't act like a weirdo and i think today if you have way more opportunities than you can capitalize on but it's the bottleneck is actually figuring out who you're compatible with then it's probably optimal to actually be a weirdo yes who asks some controversial off-putting questions on the first date yes maybe upsets a few people maybe doesn't get called back every time because when you do find somebody who aligns with your values then it's like you know immediately like okay this is the person that i invest my effort into and all those other people i don't have to waste weeks texting with them or being ghosted or not hearing back or whatever like so i think it's the skill that needs to be learned in the dating world is actually quite confrontational with the values conversations like what do you believe what are your political views what are your religious views do you want kids like things that historically you were never supposed to talk about on a first date i think we should normalize getting it out there it's interesting man so my wife and i got together in 2000 and that was the play so i had gotten to the point where i'd broken up with somebody that by my definition went a little crazy and i did not enjoy that experience and so i was like okay my then chick i was just trying to take out to be quite frank uh who ends up being my wife but i was like okay she's legally obligated to leave the country because she's from england she was only going to be at the time that we went on our first station to be there for another eight weeks so like this is amazing uh legally obligated to leave i don't have to worry about like her turning into a station i was like oh yeah this is wonderful and so on the date i was like i'm going to be aggressively myself because i have no fear of loss whatsoever and so i was just like this is who i am this is what i'm into and she was like this is the weirdest day i've ever been on in my life and as like a brit who really grew up in an era where it was like very proper and you didn't talk about that kind of stuff she was freaked out but she was like this was awesome and so she had a great time and she was like cool well if you're going to be that open and honest about who you are like here i am and so from the jump we were like oh i actually know who you are you actually know who i am like i didn't fake it i can't believe this is true i read her some of my terrible poetry on the first day and uh i was just like yeah like this is me the weirdnesses and all of it and i was like man when a woman like tries to tell me that she only has eyes for me i'm like forget it there's no way you don't find brad pitt attractive this is like peak fight club and i was like i don't buy it for one second and to be honest that makes me insecure if you're trying to tell me that you don't find him attractive then i'm just like fuck like what do i have to do like is my hair okay like but if i know that you're like oh i find plenty of people attractive but i i'm into you and so i'm committed to this relationship and i'm like okay word i don't have to be so paranoid and so that was how we were talking on the first date she was just like wow this is like really crazy but to your point it established right away maybe i'm not the person for you maybe this isn't gonna be interesting for either of us and i learned that i actually don't i can't believe it's true but it is i don't enjoy sex no matter how hot the person is if i'm not interested in who they are as a person even if i'm like this is the one i stand 100 but i still want to think you're interesting yeah yeah for sure i love i love the attraction thing uh i sometimes describe it as like a lot of people's a lot of people's conception of what commitment is is actually just like north korea of your emotions right like it's just because you're married to somebody doesn't mean that you're you stop being human like it's like if i see a hot woman she's a hot woman like nothing changed about how hot she is like she's still hot the only thing that changes is you're you're still physically attracted a lot of people but you're consciously choosing each and every day to be with this person and i actually think like once you if you get to a place where each person admits that it actually makes the community event even more powerful because you can actually have conversations about what you think is attractive who you think is attractive but you're still choosing to be together and and so it becomes more meaningful and if you're doing it right in my opinion your significant other feels to the core of their existence you're into them you find them attractive you're not swayed it's not like oh because i find them attractive that in any way shape or form i feel that that even remotely competes in the same league with how i feel about you and sharing your life and all that like forget yes she's attractive hot whatever but it really it really this is gonna sound so silly when i finish the example but it's true i felt seen and understood by my wife we were once at a pool party at the roosevelt hotel all places here in a way like not like some weird party and these two women went topless started making out and i didn't notice and so my wife is having me on the show she's like yo you have to see this and i was like i'm so in love with you right now like the fact that you because most the cliche goes that had i looked my wife would be offended and she would hit me and be upset for the rest of the day and my wife was like making sure i didn't miss it and i was like oh that's so cool and so stuff like that is is the reward that you get yeah when you really think about okay i'm gonna share my life with this person they're gonna share their lives with me we're gonna give up a lot to be with each other relationships are a big compromise they need to be worth it yeah and so when you go out of your way to go okay what would make being in a relationship with this person worth it and i really believe that one of the because nature only has two levers to yank on pleasure and pain and if we are more likely to keep to have kids and have kids that live long enough to have kids by being a united front and helping each other out then there's going to be some pleasure in doing that and so what lisa and i realized very early on is one i want you to win i want to see good things happen for you yeah i want you to feel and just know the depth of my love and so i'm going to externalize it and so i made a rule with myself very early on that every time i thought a compliment i would say even though sometimes it'd be super awkward we'd be in the middle of like hey what are we gonna do this weekend and i'm just noticing her hair is like damn your hair looks really beautiful and or she'd say something like now this happens a lot she's really fucking good at business and so she'll say something i'm like oh my god like that is so smart i'm like hold on i just need to say i don't distract this but i need to say i'm very impressed and you know and it's just like when you do that enough enough enough and you're just like i need you to really feel at a visceral level how much i'm into you impressed by you love you and willing to protect you like on and on and on it really turns into something amazing but this isn't the message this isn't what the cool kids say no no and it's not only is it great for her it makes her feel loved and it's good for you too it's like by express by noticing and expressing those things you are reinforcing the experience of appreciating those things brother people need to hear preach that is so important you know it's i it's the little things that add up over time and i think you know as you what you just said about complimenting is is such a minor thing but like you can never stop doing it um you mentioned the sex thing already saying i love you like even even if we have a huge fight we make a point to tell each other that we love each other like mid-fight and i i think it's really important to do that because it's when emotions get high and you're feeling hurt and you're feeling afraid and you're angry like all sorts of crazy things start going through your head and it just it like grounds you and it brings you back to like okay like it's gonna be fine we're in this together like this is part of it this is fights happen right um yeah i think it's it's there's an accumulation of small things throughout relationship that add up into something magnificent and not easily seen and i think romance gets so much of attention because in romance it tends to be a few big things there's grand gestures there's this insane trip we took to hawaii or whatever and it was so romantic and and those are very obvious and memorable experiences and also very observable from the outside you know what you're saying about complimenting your wife like that's not very observable from the outside to most people but that is that feeling that you two generate with each other and maintain over years and years and years that's what gives it power right like that's what makes it so special uh so i want to go back to something you said really fast because i want people to hear this so badly uh you were pointing out that me saying that's my wife is reinforcing in myself yes how i feel about my wife did you give me the chills you said that this is like one of my advanced tactics yeah the reason that i feel the way i feel when she walks in the room is because i've taken the time to reinforce myself yes even now telling you the story that when my wife walks in a room i get happy reinforces that when my wife walks in a room i get happy yeah and i i thought early on um every time i have the impulse to criticize instead of doing that i'm going to compliment her it's always going to be real i'm never going to say something i don't actually mean or don't actually feel and it doesn't mean that i never criticize but it does mean that when you have those little like why'd you leave the plate there or whatever kind of comments it's like you know what thank you so much for making that meal for me or you know something and that little switch makes such a big difference it's funny because it kind of comes back to well i think when a lot of people think about like what is a good relationship they focus more on the damage control it's like how do you fight well or how do you not resent each other or you know how do you keep the sex life alive but it's so much of it is doing those little positive things like finding things to be grateful for expressing that gratitude uh reminding yourself of what you like in each other complimenting each other regularly like there's there's a certain amount of there's a practice on that side as well that is probably under discussed no doubt talk to me about fighting well i've heard that stat and i will tell you that i've lived it that the couples that stay together the longest are the ones that learn how to fight well yeah yeah it's john gotman's got some great research uh that he basically he took hundreds and hundreds of married couples put them in a room explicitly asked them to talk about whatever they fought about most recently basically got them fighting in a room and then he would watch their behavior and kind of like coded it and and then track those couples over decades and then after he saw how many of them stuck together and how many of them divorced he kind of like backwards engineered like what the successful couples were doing correctly and what was super interesting that he found was that successful couples don't actually resolve a lot of their fights they don't necessarily they're not trying to compromise all the time sometimes successful couples they're just like yeah we agree to disagree and we have this fight every month but whatever like it's just kind of like a thing we do i think it's fighting is inevitable there are there's some tactical things that you can do better or worse you know it's blame so gotman's got he goes on the four horsemen of the relationship apocalypse i think one's blame one's stonewalling uh one is here i go it's four things the fourth one i have for you though contempt contempt and that's like oh yeah if you see a couple that rolls their eyes which i think is the example he is if they roll their eyes at each other it's like 98 percent they'll be divorced in a year or something i mean it's like a just startling result and yeah that man you can't let that creep in this goes back to you've got to want your partner to win yes and one thing my wife and i learned man this this has really worked well for us is to speak when fighting to speak in insecurities so because if you're getting your backup as my wife would say if you're really annoyed about something the odds that someone has triggered an insecurity of yours borders on 100 oh yeah and so now it's like okay if you can identify instead of wanting to win where you're crafting clever arguments if you can identify okay this is making me mad because of this and i'm feeling insecure about that it diffuses the fight so fast one you stop arguing what we call arguing at the level of the tea because the biggest fight we ever got in my mind is going to be tired of hearing this the biggest fight we ever got in was over a cup of tea and i realized this isn't about the cup of tea what is this about and that's when i realized oh shit i'm insecure about this and once i said that and i was like this is going to be such an abrupt left turn because we were arguing like screaming at each other and i was like this is going to be super weird but i just like the fact i can say the reason i'm upset is because i'm insecure about this and she was like whoa and for her it was like the sixth sense and the movie just played in reverse and she played the whole thing back now understanding what i was actually worried about and i was like i'm so i did not realize like i had not pulled it into my conscious mind that that's what was driving my behavior but now that i stop and think about it it's that yeah and we've carried that with us now for 20 years that's a great tactical tool of just like labeling where the fear or the anger is coming from on a deep level um you also alluded to what i think is probably the most important kind of mindset thing which is uh i think a lot of couples see the relationship itself as a power struggle uh that if their partner is getting too much attention or affection or is getting more attention and affection than they are then that's unfair it should be equaled out and so they try to bring the partner down a notch and so that they can come up a notch and it's that is almost by definition a toxic like what a toxic relationship is and it's instead you should see it as again a team it's like us versus the world right and if you're winning if you're winning right now that's good for me right and hopefully one day i'll be winning too and you'll be happy for me and vice versa um but it's hard for a lot of people because i think a lot of people's romantic relationships gets it gets intertwined with uh a lot of their trauma and deep insecurities from earlier in their life and so it's it's hard for them if they are being triggered in one of the ways that you just described it's very hard to see somebody who's triggering you as on your team and so until that perception is resolved it's going to be difficult to not see the relationship itself as a power struggle and that really scares me and that's the part of the modern dating scene that freaks me out the most is when i hear the most the most popular voices they certainly are not giving good advice in my opinion but the most popular voices they they make it sound like dating is a thing i've never seen or heard of before because it sounds like a battle it's adversarial it's like me versus you uh how do i uh keep you from taking advantage of me and how do i maximize what i can get out of you it is so like i'm on their team like for a second i'm just gonna be like okay there this is where young people are right now i'm with you i love you i want to see good things for you but i'm telling you if you go into this with an adversarial mindset you will lose every time oh you're screwed and so even so i really i want to have more of these people on the show yeah it puts me it makes me feel very fatherly in like a weird way where i'm like no no like trust me like there's something beautiful on the other side of this but if you're coming at it like that but i want them to lay out the hardship i want them to be like yo bro you don't understand what it's like out here uh with dating apps and hypergamy and all this stuff and like guys are getting the shaft and they just can't be taken advantage of anymore and these girls are all on uh only fans and so it's like okay let's let's lay out all the brutality because clearly something's happening because it really has become dysfunctional you've got declining sex rates you've got marriage in the toilet fatherlessness i mean it's just it's not an ideal bundle of things so it's like okay how do we start teasing some of these things out and i'm just arrogant enough where i'm like i really think even in this crazy environment the path forward is still the first state that you and i were talking about yes which is okay i've had to do a lot of work to actually be interesting i've had to do a lot of work to understand like oh i want to know about you i want to hear about you and i'm going to take you to a place that one makes you feel good makes you feel safe is intriguing and i'm asking you questions maybe you haven't even asked about yourself and not in a way so i can get one over on you or dunk on you or whatever by the end of it i want you to be like damn like i never saw myself in that way and just show people how rad it feels when somebody is they're sincere because you can't bullshit people yeah but you're sincerely trying to elevate them and find interesting things and you're not playing a game it's like i'm gonna tell you exactly what i think yeah but it's so i don't necessarily think this is a modern thing or not super modern like i think this strain of advice this scene relationships is a power struggle this message it's been cyclical like every generation has had an iteration of it uh you know my generation it was the pickup artist thing in the 90s there was a thing called the rules uh i think the generation before that it was a man from mars woman from venus like there's just this every 10 12 years there's a new version that pops up and they look at whatever people's frustrations are in the dating market at that time they use that as a justification for these unhealthy relationship behaviors why is it the crush why is the power struggle the thing that lets people cope i well so if you are a insecure person who has been hurt deeply uh whether it be through rejection or a dysfunctional family or whatever i think one of the most fundamental feelings that you have is disempowerment you feel like you don't have control over your own life so when somebody shows up and starts telling you uh you know relationships are a power game you need to follow these tips to take control and like win back your power from men or from women it's a very appealing message for that person because that person's never experienced a healthy relationship they don't know what a healthy relationship feels like they've only experienced unhealthy relationships which are power dynamics and they've been on the losing end of those power dynamics so step one in their head is to get on the winning side of that power dynamic and what usually happens is they do get on the winning side of that power dynamic at some point they use the advice they go get laid or they go get a girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever they've exercised their power and taking control and they realize that that's not fulfilling at all like okay now i'm i'm getting sex and i have a partner but it's not enjoyable like we fight all the time it feels very empty and meaningless it's very stressful it's not adding anything to my life um and so they some will make the jump to the healthy relationships but not all of them do but it's so i just think with every generation you know right now we have gen z is coming of age and you know just like the millennials before them there's there's gonna be a massive amount of demand for this type of content material and i think like millennials they'll run its course you know in five years most of gen z is gonna try a bunch of this stuff and realize that it didn't make them happy it didn't really work they're gonna mature a little bit and they'll end up back in healthy relationship land and then the general you know five six years after that the generation under them when we're all in vr headsets or whatever like there's gonna be some dude standing up saying like this is what you gotta do you gotta win the pussy back like all this stuff and we're just gonna go through it all over again so um i do think you know there are some interesting observations about the dating market in terms of it is not the struggles that men and women go through are not symmetrical and this is something like i read so i started my career in dating advice so like i started writing about this stuff like 2008 and the asymmetry in dating problems is uh is part of the problem because women only see the problem that women have they don't see the problem that men have and so it's very easy for women to be like wow men have it so easy they can just you know send dick pics to 100 women and you know whoever the one that responds only that works yeah right it's like the one that responds is like you know he'll actually go out with her whereas men only see the men's problems they don't see the women's problems so they think oh wow women have it so easy they just like post a hot picture and they get like all these uh stamps fawning over them all the time right and they don't understand that like women don't understand that men have the issue of to to be effective in the dating market as a man you have to be willing to be rejected a lot like that is just a fact that you're gonna have to make your peace with at some point and women don't see that and what men don't see is that if you're a woman if you're an attractive woman you're gonna get a lot of attention from a lot of men that you don't want attention from and that is also something you're gonna figure out how to deal with and i think what because the two problems on each side uh well i think on the men's side they see the women's problem and they're like that's not a problem i would love that problem and but they don't understand that it is actually a problem like you filtering effectively is is a very difficult problem for a lot of women and a lot of them struggle with it quite a bit and i think women you know women say like man i i wish i could message 20 guys and get responses and you know like i wish i had more control over who i actually got to talk to uh but they don't they don't see the rejection side of it they don't see just like the constant they don't see the rejection side of it bruising your self-esteem takes you know when message after message goes on unreplied to so it's um it's not easy for anybody and it never has been easy for anybody i think that's another narrative that is very easy to sell it's very easy to say like you know back in your parents generation they just did this and it was so easy and it's like well no they they also struggled with these issues it looked a lot different it in many ways it was less complex but that doesn't mean it was any easier yeah i very much agree so i had no game with women whatsoever like none it's probably good that i didn't find that community i was a little before the pickup artist time um but i luckily i knew a guy that was really good with women uh and by then i was so fed because i was the guy that everyone tells you not to be so i would show up on date one with literal flowers and literal custom written poetry i once asked a girl out in a poem like custom in for her and she rejected it no date like i'm just like oh god but i could not understand why they weren't working it was everything that i was told women were into yeah and so it's the i live the nice guy thinks i was never a dick about it but i was starting to be like i don't understand why this isn't working like i'm these are good poems like what the fuck's the problem and that was very surprised thankfully i turned inward and was like i'm doing something wrong that is very clear to me i don't know what it is i don't understand it i'm doing something wrong so i went and i was very successful and i was just like what are you and he's like oh be an asshole and i was like oh my god and it was one of i just i was like okay i know that isn't true i know that's not the path forward because these are people and nobody wants to be with an asshole so what is it that women are drawn to that's led this to be the cliche and that's when i realized oh he's willing to walk away so what he means is aloof isn't quite the right word but it has to be that like i'm self-assured i don't need you i might want you but i don't need you and so it creates a far more interesting dynamic and thankfully i've been so bad with women there was this my crush in high school every time we would date she would break up with me because she's like you're different when we're together and i just could not understand what she meant now what she meant was when we were not together i was myself we'd get together and i was afraid i'd lose her so i was starting cautious and all that and so i i too young couldn't make it yeah so in my book models i actually that was the term i used was non-neediness and it's like the root of attraction and it's and i think what happens is a lot of the toxic advice you know for men the toxic advice is basically teaching them how to be an asshole it's basically a guy saying you know you've been on the losing end of the power struggle here's how to be on the winning end of the power struggle not realizing that it's the power struggle itself that is the problem yes and so you know for me non-neediness is let's take the let's take the part of being an asshole that benefits you which is not being needy and and then let's like lose the asshole part let's be respectful and non-needy how about that and to me that's like if you can figure out how to do that like develop the skill set to be non-needy and respectful of people which being respectful requires the willingness to hear no and be rejected and not be but heard about it uh you know if you can get to that point then you're pretty much set and go be awesome at something yes because you're gonna get your own self-respect this is something i worry a lot about is that people just aren't earning their own respect if you don't earn your own respect that's gonna drip off of you and you're gonna have a very hard time convincing somebody else to respect you if you haven't figured that out so being awesome is something you care about ideally being awesome is something you care about that the kind of woman you're trying to attract would also care about that goes a long way even if you can't line that up like at least be really focused and attentive on something that matters to you that you're passionate about like people i know have heard this before it's like there's something about hearing someone talk about what they're passionate about even if you don't care about it even if you don't know about it when somebody's like really into something they're able to convey that's like whoa they light up you realize they have a life beyond you that that they're more integrated in some way that makes them very attractive i know you said that you're attracted to women who are ambitious yeah which i thought was interesting tell me more about that i don't know where that comes from it's just something i noticed over the years dating a lot of women like i i was never able to like i dated a number of women who were beautiful happy to be like a traditional like cook dinner for you when you get home make the bed for you you know take care of the house make my life easy like a very very old-fashioned like you know uh 1950s leave it to beaver type housewife and i would get so bored so fast and and there was nothing you know there's nothing wrong with them it's just the way they were and they're really nice nice women but i found that i i need a woman who is very smart and very motivated in the world to do something in the world like that's just it turns me on more than anything and um and i just learned that about myself like everybody that doesn't make it right or wrong it's just different and i do think one of the problems that people have you know i do think you need to this is why you shouldn't well it's not that you shouldn't marry your high school sweetheart it's just it's not odds are against you odds are against you is because you do need to be exposed to a certain number of people and value systems to really really know and understand like what you mesh well with and and and what what excites you in a partner and um and so i do for people who have not had enough dating experience to really have clarity around that i do think it's useful i think the bad version of that advice is you need to date around enough to have enough sex with enough people that you like get it out of your system like that's kind of the bad version of that advice uh the reason that is the bad version of that advice is because sex is not something you get out of your system it's it's a behavior that you you know you condition within yourself so if you if you start conditioning yourself to want to have sex with a lot of people then you're only going to keep wanting to have sex with a lot of people like it doesn't work in reverse um so it's it's you don't think that people get fed up and there is that emptiness that you were talking about before um i don't think so i think it's kind of like it's very similar to uh you know so back in the 60s and 70s they used to have this form of therapy where like if you had anger issues then you like scream into a pillow and beat the crap out of the pillow and that was supposed to like release your anger right like it's this concept of like it's in the research they call it the hydraulic theory of emotion or or uh impulse and the idea was like you just get the anger out and then you won't be angry when you go home well what what turns out that actually happens is the more you scream into that pillow and punch the pillow the more you're kind of the same way you're like training yourself when you compliment your wife to compliment your wife more you're training yourself to like scream and punch pillows more and so you're actually reinforcing the emotion you're trying to get away from practicing being angry and so i've seen so many young men be like well i met this woman that i'm crazy about but you know i've only slept with like i've only had like five sexual partners and that doesn't seem like it's enough i should have more than that before i settle down with somebody so i'm gonna i'm gonna like put like get rid of this really great relationship that makes me happy so i can go fucking five anonymous strangers that i'm never gonna think about i care about again and it's like somehow that seems like a very rational decision to a lot of young men and i say this as i used to be a young man that this seemed very rational to um i can on being on the other side of that i can tell you it's not a rational decision and having a lot of friends and just knowing a lot of men who have made that choice like it is not the correct choice you are actually just reinforcing the behavior that you want to get out of your system so um um so that's the bad version of that advice the good version of that advice is you need to date enough to understand what makes you happy right like as you said like a lot a lot of us have predefined scripts or assumptions about like what a good partner is things that our parents told us things that our church or our teachers or community told us and we don't actually know until we've actually gone out and dated those people and i think what most people experience is that you finally date that person who in your head was the perfect 10 and you get a month into it and you're like this isn't a 10 this is like a 6 like i'm actually not that happy here and that's that's a very important thing to realize and understand about yourself yeah lisa and i've always used the analogy of finding somebody that you really can jam with and be into for a long period of time isn't like two puzzle pieces coming together it's like two ripped pages with all these intricate jagged little edges and finding somebody that you line up with enough of those you're like oh this is like really gonna fit yeah is it's i don't think there's one person for everybody i think that there's probably a large number of people that you can meet no matter where you live you can find this kind of person but they're not on every street corner that's for sure and so if you find it it's like i'm not interested in like constantly looking for the next model and that was one thing that i said to lisa when we got together i was like you never and i mean never have to worry about me ditching you and upgrading to a younger version of you i'm like that's not my scene that's not the you know experiment that we're running together here it's like i want to know what it looks like to build a life together and so we don't even joke about the word divorce it's not even on the table it's not an option we wouldn't say if it was loveless or one of us was abusive but it it's like since we know how to avoid that then it's like that's just not even on the table and it really does create a far more interesting dynamic but yeah when you've got and i did i ever think i need to bang more chicks no i did not but i will say it became so for a long time i wanted to save myself for marriage and then i realized that no longer strikes me as a good idea and so then it was like okay i did want to have a certain amount of experience i didn't have a number in my head where i was like i need to hit that number but i was like i don't want to marry the first person i sleep with that is for sure yeah i do think some amount of sexual experience is probably good to have but i think the way it gets framed for a lot of young men is just it's silly um you know have enough sex to know what you like and don't like and date enough people to know what you like and don't like and then if you find a great person that it feels great go with it it's interesting how much at least for me personality plays in everything the loneliest i have ever been in my life was in the middle of having sex with somebody i didn't care about i couldn't even be like and we won't like basketball like there was nothing and i was like this is really boring and it was so ironic to me to be like i'm literally inside your body and i feel completely alone like so weird so yeah that was never going to be the path that i ended up on yeah but yeah i think the potential for awkwardness of one night stands is also under discussed especially among men and young men like it's there's there's still so much validation and self-esteem that is like wrapped up in in sex and for men in particular that it's also really fun it is fun and it can be super fun like i've had a lot of one night stands that were a blast great memories and and i've had a lot of one night stands that were terrible and super awkward and completely disconnected and embarrassing and it's but you know people don't talk about that side of it it's like the the enjoyment of a one night stand you know the hit rate is is not that high again your most awkward one night stand most awkward it's been a long time man i don't know you know there's just a number of well it's usually alcohol is involved first of all um you know there are a number of instances of you know waking up the next day next to a girl that i don't really remember anything about her not particularly attracted to her and you just kind of wonder like why am i here but then you know i was so young and immature at that time that you know the the significance of like yeah i got laid you know kind of outweighed all that other stuff but you know if i'm being honest as an older as an old man uh if i'm easy cheap since you're much younger than me if i'm looking back and being honest uh in a vacuum it was not uh it was not an enjoyable experience uh and it probably wasn't for her either but this is this is so this is back in the pickup artist industry this is what i always used to say it would make guys really really uncomfortable which is men come to that industry for for the approval of women they stay for the approval of men that's interesting because i think a lot of the guys like look every guy wants to have some sexual experiences every guy wants people to have a little bit more power and options in stating life but the men who obsess over it and like really kind of become compulsive about it it's it's never about the women it's about it's about the approval from other men and it's it's it took me a long time to kind of figure that out about myself uh and i think and it was an important realization uh and i think it's just something that needs to be said especially the guys who like that sort of content and consume a lot of it like you're not consuming all that content for the women you actually said something that i wrote down along these lines about what people are actually pursuing life i think this is really interesting this is a paraphrase but people care about who they're with what they're pursuing and what people think about them that's 80 to 90 percent of life yeah that's razor sharp insightful yeah it's it's i think we like to imagine that our happiness and meaning is tied up in all these like very complicated philosophical issues and at the end of the day it's like who are you spending time with what are you working on and how are you treating yourself like are you taking care of your health or not and if you can nail those three things yeah you're like 80 90 percent away there like all the other stuff is just window dressing and what do you think about from a buddhist perspective of detaching letting go not being so obsessed around those if they're so all-consuming and and i agree with your earlier assessment that you're never going to not care about what other people think you probably shouldn't even try to not care but it can become all-consuming and very pathological yeah so how do the buddhists have the right answer to that like what what is the way to put that in this proper place i am not a strict philosophical buddhist you know i think you had a zen teacher you are exactly the only person i know with a zen teacher i mean i i studied buddhism and practiced buddhism for a number of years but it's funny i don't consider myself a buddhist i consider myself influenced by buddhism i see a lot of the buddhist insights as like tools right so to me non-attachment is it's a tool or it is a uh it's kind of like a mindset or approach of just reminding yourself of like yes social validation it can make you happy or unhappy but like don't ever forget that it's not really real like these are just these are just uh chemicals firing in your brain and as you said like subroutines of of our our consciousness and um you know whether the the friends i had dinner with last night didn't laugh at my jokes like what whether that matters or not you know it's all in my head um so i think that's a useful perspective to be able to access at certain moments to kind of keep yourself stable and sane i i think buddhism takes it to an extreme where it's like nothing matters like there's nothing exists it's all imagined um and that may be true but i don't find that very practical when you're like trying to live in la and have a career and have a family so as you consider yourself influenced by buddhism i consider myself influenced by daoism and for quite some time actually called myself a daoist uh that led me to exploring buddhism looking at it i'm far more familiar with daoism than i am buddhism but the i really looked at the idea of non-attachment completely letting go and the irony is i think that they are right that all the suffering really does stem from i want this thing and that thing can be i wanted this outcome from this moment i wanted the christmas to go better i wanted the joke to be funny whatever but it's an attachment to a thing a desired outcome whatever and when i look at my own suffering it is always tied to that but i when i project my life out where i live a monastic life just like wow i really i would give up some suffering i wouldn't suffer as much that is for sure but also the depth of the joy the honor of being able to put myself in the arena and see what i can accomplish yeah and the bad news is that you know for all i've accomplished i set my sights higher and higher which you have warned people not to do uh but i enjoy that quest because i have a very healthy understanding that the most likely outcome is failure yeah and so i'm like okay i'm i'm continually ratcheting this up at some point you try to climb a mountain so high you die it's like this hey and that ever says literally that are the bodies of people that have tried um so i'm aware of that but even in the face of that i find myself wanting to embrace the challenge of mountain climbing over the it would still be a challenge the challenge of a monastic life that feels to me like tapping out you get an amazing reward for it yeah but it doesn't feel like making the most of this human experience i think it sounds i think you and i align on this um it's funny i have a friend who's a meditation teacher and like pretty intense buddhist and i've talked to him about this before and the point i always come back to is is like look 2500 years ago you weren't giving up a whole lot by going and sitting in a cave and staring at a wall for 10 years like there wasn't much happening outside of that cave either right so um whereas these days like yeah there's there's a huge there's a bounty of complexity and amazing culture and society and everything um i think to me the way i have kind of i guess integrated the buddhist wisdom into my own approach to what you just described is i think the wisdom that it lends is when you're climbing that mountain don't forget that it's just a mountain and you chose to climb it you can you can choose to stop climbing at any time to me that's what non-attachment means you know i think it's and in buddhism they're very explicit about this that when you when you get very good at non-attachment or even achieve enlightenment you don't stop suffering you just stop being attached to that suffering or identifying with that suffering it's like suffering just becomes yet another sensation that passes like a cloud um and so nothing actually practically changes outward in your life it's simply the the mental constructs i guess you could say it's the realization that everything is simply a mental construct that is arising and falling and falling in your consciousness uh you know i love the the old insane where they say before enlightenment chop wood carry water after enlightenment chop wood carry water and i i relate to that on i guess a much less profound or spiritual level you know just growing older and more successful like i look at my ambition in my 20s and maybe you relate to this but my ambition in my 20s it was very driven by like i need to prove something like i have to i need to make a bunch of money i need to be successful i need to like show that i'm smart and i'm doing something cool and great and impress a bunch of people and then you achieve a bunch of those things and you realize that none of it really sticks or makes you happy and and now it's like now i just i want to achieve things just because it's fun to achieve things it's fun to create things in the world it's fun to improve lives and like there's no need to prove something there's nothing i'm trying to show to myself or to anybody even not to yourself um yeah it's like you said i really resonate with you know it's like i'm investing i'm gonna do over the next couple years i'm gonna do a bunch of stuff with my youtube channel i completely recognize that it may end up not being worth it it may not go nearly as well as i wanted to or hope that it will and i'm comfortable with that whereas i think 10 years ago that that would have been mortifying that idea you know if like a book coming out and not doing super well like that would have been mortifying 10 years ago or even five years ago you know now it's kind of like well that's just i'm gonna have a long career and i'm not gonna hit home run every time so um and it's actually very similar to what we were saying about you know when you're insecure you see everything as power struggle and you want to get from the losing side to the winning side and then once you're on the winning side you realize the real way to win is to stop the power struggle and just opt out of the game all together and i think it's the same with kind of a pursuit of success you know when you've experienced no success you just want to get to success you don't really care how uh but then once you get to success you're like wow i don't feel any different and so then you just realize that the construct of success is completely made up and you've been torturing yourself for 10 years for no reason success is such a mixed bag because i think you will agree that the money's real it's very powerful but it cannot change how you feel about yourself and people think it's going to make them feel cool and it doesn't and all of your insecurities i remember when it literally for me was imminent i spent god knows how long building companies but the day that the money hit was like all in one refreshing my banking up and i was like oh wow uh what's the mark to end quote wherever you go there you are it's like however much money you have there you are it's like it didn't matter and i was like oh god thankfully i already knew that so it was not like some big surprising moment but i thought this is how people really spiral out of control because they're expecting in that moment for you know something to change and for the world that more colors or something it's like oh i'm in this new class and everything's ever but money really does buy cool shit and you can do amazing things it's actually really interesting hearing you talk about will smith people don't know you wrote ghost wrote wrote no your name's in the thing co-wrote his um autobiography and that the fact that you've been able to see firsthand how somebody of like his stature moves through the world it's pretty interesting yeah but you said yes but i'm glad it's not my life yeah and that i thought put a pretty interesting point on it yeah i think there's an optimal level of fame and i'm probably pretty close to it already maybe a little bit past it um i would not want to be as famous as him um the the money i mean sure i'll take will smith money like i have no complaint about will smith money i don't need will smith money but that's not the problem it's i definitely think you know the curve of happiness to fame is is a bell curve and um of declining utility so it peaks and then goes back and i think there's actually very large costs on like far on the other side um that yeah i don't like you lose privacy you there's security concerns there's all sorts of stuff you know um i think i think the optimal level of fame is probably where both of us are at you know it's like you get recognized on the street just enough to like make your day but it never interferes with your life yeah i feel invisible yeah still which is lovely but every now and then yeah someone will come up and it's like oh yeah that feels good yeah it's cool brother i'm so into what you're doing i can't wait to see what you do on youtube where can people follow you uh follow me on youtube mark manson or markmanson.net i like it all right everybody if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care please let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress you know what you need to do you need consistent nutrition we all do you need vitamins probiotics greens we all know that we should be doing more of it when your morning gets chaotic you skip it when you 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