How to Find Your True Path in Life (ft. Robert Greene)

Robert Greene in studio in the flesh. You are  actually one of our most requested guests. Is that right?

Yeah, for the past year. Who's the most requested? Dr K, the gaming psychologist.

Don't even know who that is,  wow. Have you had him on? I have not.

I've contacted his people, but he- What's so amazing about Dr K? Well, he's a psychiatrist who  targets mental health for gamers. That's a lot of your audience?

I guess so. A lot of YouTubers. I guess so.

It's The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck  podcast with your host, Mark Manson. So, my first question for you is actually  quite selfish. As a younger author I find your career so fascinating because you  have this long history of successful books, but it really seems like there's this resurgence  of interest, especially in The 48 Laws of Power over the last few years.

It seems like Gen Z is  discovering Robert Greene and you're getting this whole second wave of attention. I'm curious what  that experience has been like, what your thoughts on that are, and whether you feel like you have  any control over that or if it just happened? Well, I don't know.

It's probably a confluence  of things. Who knows why things happen in this world? It's complex and it's mysterious, but I  would say social media has played a huge role in it because back 10 years ago or so, nobody really  knew who I was.

I had no Instagram. I was a little bit on Facebook, but I hadn't really gotten into  social media at all. I was very scant on Twitter, and so I think a lot of it is about five years ago  some fan said, you've got to get on social media, and he took over and he did it himself  for me, and we ended up having to fire him because he was a control freak, but he's a  nice guy, but he just wanted to run my empire.

He would call it my empire. He'd say, your  legacy, I'm going to protect your legacy as if I'm dead or something. So, I got rid of him.

Anyway, suddenly it started growing. I have this guy, Stanley, who's my assistant who puts clips  and he's very good at choosing certain clips, and so a lot of it is social media  giving me a presence. Up until recently, I could walk down the street, nobody knew who  the hell I was, and suddenly people started recognizing me because of this.

It just exploded.  Even in places like London or Paris, its like got this international reach was incredible. And  so, I have to thank social media for that, for paying my mortgage and all the other things  like that.

But then, why has it resonated now? And I think young people are dealing with a  world that's so much more chaotic and confusing. Some of it has to do with the conditions of  the world that we're living in, which is, as I said, much more chaotic than it was maybe  10, 15 years ago.

Some of it has to do with the parenting issues, how differently they have been  raised and the culture that they're entering. And so, because of that feeling, kind of very  lost and confused, The 48 Laws of Power gives you a grounding in the dark, harsh aspect of  life, because I don't know, I'm not Gen Z, so it's hard for me to generalize. Of course, it's  ridiculous to generalize, but a lot of them feel maybe they've been a little bit sheltered from  that harsh aspect of life.

I know when I was 21, if I can remember back that far, I entered the  work world out of college and I was a liberal arts major, ancient Greek and Latin. You can't  get any more irrelevant subject than that. My first job was a real job, because I had many  different, my first real job was at Esquire Magazine.

I was the lowest editor there, an  editorial assistant. It was like mind-blowing. I couldn't believe power games that were going  on, because nothing in college prepared you for that.

All the egos of the writers and the  editors, the celebrity, the weirdness. I once edited an article by John Irving, the writer. He turned in a travel article about Vienna, because I was the travel editor.

It was such a  bad article. It was like, go to this cafe, turn right and then go here, and then turn left and  go, it was like that kind of writing. I edited, totally made it like a narrative, and I got  essentially fired because of that, or got demoted.

I had outshone the master, law number one. So,  it was this rude awakening into this is what the world is really like. I had to school myself  very quickly, and then with my 50 different jobs, I learned over time, this is how the world is. 

Young people are going through that but times 10, because the world is even more confusing. They're  not used to dealing with all of these egos to all the political games. So, I think, I can't  say for sure, but I think these are some of the components that go into this revival of the  book.

It's selling five times more than it ever did 20 years ago, so it's insane. Crazy. I feel like cynicism travels on the internet faster than it does in real  life, and I think as a generation that grew up on social media and grew up on the internet, what  I detect from Gen Z is just an embedded cynicism about the world and- Is that right?

. . .

skepticism, and I could see why a book  about power appeals to that. It's like, well, this book's going to just cut through  the bullshit and actually tell me what's going on. The appeal makes sense.

But, I'm not a cynical person. I know people think of the book as cynical, but I don't  really think of it as cynical, because cynical is basically leaning into all the bad things in  life, et cetera, and it's not very realistic because not all life is bad. There are bad people  out there.

I just think the book is realistic. For sure. Because, I'm not a cynical person at heart.

I'm actually got, unfortunately,  more of a romantic naive streak, and I think in some weird way that comes out in the book. It's interesting. You and I have met in person a few times now, and I imagine the image that  people get from reading your books versus- How they see me.

. . .

how you actually are in person. Do you get people assuming that you're trying  to pull puppet strings and manipulating them? If I'm five minutes late for a meeting, it's  not because of the traffic, it's because I'm playing some kind of weird game on them.

They're like a small 27 or whatever. I've told this story before, but when I met 50  Cent for the first time before we ever thought of writing a book together, he later told  me he was a little bit intimidated by this. He expected an older man.

He expected like  Henry Kissinger to show up when we first met, and then he was surprised, maybe even a little bit  disappointed that I wasn't like that. Of course, I had the same impression about him. I was  expecting someone really mean and intimidating and thuggish, and he was the sweetest, gentlest,  nicest person you could ever imagine.

But, people expect this, that everything I do  is a power move, but it's not true. Do you just see that as the cost of the success  of the book? Because I get this with my fuck books.

People make assumptions about me, and  then they meet me in person. They're like, oh, you're not like that at all. Well, you do give a fuck, don't you?

Of course. No, I'm just kidding. But, you're outing me,  Robert.

You're outing me. Exactly, sorry. You can start being mean to me  now, you got to show people.

There's a theatrical element to the social world, which I embrace and I  think is fun and interesting, and it's part of The 48 Laws of Power. So, when you enter the world,  you're not yourself. I think it's something, a mistake people make.

They have no distance  between their inner self and their public self, so they enter the work world and people are different  and weird and stuff, and they take it personally, and I try and strike to people, it's not personal,  it's a game. People are wearing masks. It's like something from the 18th century where people are  in costumes and they're in theater and they're performing.

People are constantly performing.  Well, I'm performing as well. And so, if people have this image of me as this dark, sinister  figure, sometimes I don't mind.

I might lean into it a little bit. I might give that out,  that impression, because I enjoy that. I enjoy playing that role sort of thing.

I don't have a  problem with it, but it's not really who I am. Tell me about, in your book, Mastery, you talk  about finding your life task, and from what I know about you and from the bits and pieces I've  read about you and talked to you, you seemed to know pretty early on that you wanted to be an  author. You seem just built to be a writer.

What was your process of searching and discovering  and finding what you consider your life task? My story was fairly clear. Like you, it goes up  and down.

It's never like a straight path. Of course. But, when I was very young, I loved writing.

I believe I wrote something  like a novel when I was about nine years old. Oh, wow. And it was about our early humans first entering the scene, walking  in the savannas of Africa, I'm nine years old, and it's told from the point of view of a vulture  who's watching them.

I'm sure it's terrible. But, for a nine-year-old, that's impressive. The concept, yeah.

It's very impressive. I was really obsessed with vultures and I did little sculptures of vultures, so you kind  of see the dark side already there when I'm nine years old. And so, I love words, just the sound of  words, the sensuality of words, the weirdness of, I never took language at its face value.

I thought  there's something strange that we speak in words, that we have these symbols that we take  for granted, that we talk so smoothly, but they're not, they're weird, that these little  squiggles that mean something that have a sound attached to them. As a child, I thought this  is really strange. I was obsessed with words.

I played with words. I still do that to this day.  I love palindromes and word games and such.

So, words obsessed me, and obviously I  wanted to be a writer. I thought when I was 18 and in my drug days that I would be a  wild novelist. That was my real dream.

I still am kind of a failed novelist, so to speak. And so I tried, as I've told people before, I tried many different types of writing. I tried  journalism.

I hated it. I failed at it. It wasn't a good fit.

I tried writing novels, bumming around  Europe with a backpack. I failed at that. I came back to LA, tried to be a screenwriter, I failed  at that.

These weren't fits for me because I have a weird mind and I'm also a control freak, and  I didn't have any control in Hollywood. And so, I lucked into The 48 Laws of Power by meeting this  man in Italy. We were there to start a new media school for Benetton, some weird project like that. 

It was a meaningless venture. It really was about being in Italy and having good pasta and espresso  and wine. It wasn't about getting anything done if you know the Italians- [inaudible 00:12:06].

This is the land of Machiavelli. And so, Jost  and I, the man who did that, we bonded over it. One day I'm in Venice, Italy, because it  was near Venice and we were walking he said, do I have any ideas for a book?

And The  48 Laws of Power just, it was almost like I vomited out of me. I improvised, the  gist of it actually, I told him a story, the story that opens the book. I said, this is how  I'd illustrate it.

He said, that's fantastic. I'll pay you to live while you write the book, because  I was very poor. And so, I found my way in this circuitous manner to what I was really meant  to do.

But, the lesson, I think for people, because I get so many emails people telling me, I  don't know what my life's task is. I can't figure out what my purpose is. Can you help me?

And there  are signs, I believe everybody has signs, and these signs come out. A lot of them are negative  signs, which you're not paying attention to, things that you hate, things that frustrate you. So, you're in music, it isn't quite working.

You feel a little bit uncomfortable. It's not a fit.  So, you make the wise decision that it's not for you, you get out.

Other people, they maybe feel  that frustration, but they don't go there. They go, oh, I've already trained as a musician. I  got to stick with it.

They go, and then they burn out. They're 30 years old and it's not working for  them. They go, what's my life's purpose?

I have no idea. You've got to listen to the signs. Sometimes  the signs are physical.

They're literally in your body, you literally feel frustrated. You  literally feel like you're swimming against the tide. It's not working for you.

You get up in  the morning, you're not interested in this. So, the negative is very important, but also there's  the positive. So, for me, the negative was I actually hate office politics, which is  very ironic for me who wrote that.

I can't stand working for other people, and so I have to  work for myself. I have to be an entrepreneur. I have to write books, I have to have control.

But then, there are the positive signs. There's the signs of things that you love, that you're  passionate about. They generally show up when you're very 6, 7, 8 years old.

And so, I tell  people, you've got to go through that process. You have to reconnect with the child inside of you,  because children are dreamers. Every child thinks, I'm going to be president, I'm going to write a  great novel, I'm going to do this, that or the other, and then those dreams slowly get squeezed  out of them.

But, you have to return back to that. You have to have a little bit of that expanse  of quality, that little bit of imagination, even a little bit of naivete, and go back to who  you were and go back to the things that excite you in a way that you can't even explain. The negative feedback thing.

One thing I notice in a lot of people, there's  this narrative around grit, persistence, hustle culture. What I noticed with a lot of people is  when they start running into that resistance and it doesn't feel right, it feels painful. The first  thing they tell themselves is like, oh, well, I just need to toughen the fuck up and keep going  because this is what all my heroes did, is they just kept fighting through it.

And I think it's  so much more nuanced than that, of understanding when to push through and when to let go. Well, the subtle art should be actually the title of your next book, because it is subtle,  it is nuanced. Life is not so obvious.

So, sometimes grit and persistence is the right  way. So, for me, writing, I failed at all these different aspects. I didn't give up.

I didn't  say, all right, my parents wanted me to go to law school, wanted me to settle down, wanted me  to take these awful television jobs that I had, and I've had the worst television job you can  imagine. I won't even say that. They want me to settle down.

I had to have the persistence to  go, no, I'm going to do this. I'm going to stick with it. I have faith in myself even though  I got very depressed.

But also, sometimes persistence could be exactly the wrong thing. And the key is, the key to everything in life is knowing what you really truly love, what  you were meant to do, why you were born, why you're a different individual. I know  it sounds like a cliche, but everybody, your DNA is unique.

There's never going to be  another Mark Manson. The way your brain is wired, the way your parents raised you, your early  experiences, you are unique. And so, that is where your power lies, and connecting to that  is the source of everything in this world.

So, if you connect to it, if you know who you are, you  know what you love, you know what you were meant to do, and it's not a cliche, it's actually very  real, then that persistence will become an actual positive thing in your life because you'll know  I can't keep kicking against a wall here. It's not what I was meant to do. I got to get out.

So, I was 25, 26 years old. I was in New York working in journalism. I had a meeting with an  editor after I wrote an article, and I didn't know what the meeting was for, and he was kind of an  alcoholic.

He was on his second or third martini at lunch, and he basically said, Robert, you're  not a good writer. You're not going to make it in this world. You need to go to business school. 

You're not disciplined. You're all over the place. You don't understand your audience.

And so, I  could have said fuck you, I could have stayed in journalism and I'd probably be dead by now. I'd  probably be an alcoholic, because it wasn't right. But, I listened to it and I go, there's something  true there.

It isn't right. It isn't a good fit. I'm hitting against a wall.

I got to get out and  I got to try something else. But, if you don't know who you are, if you don't know what marked  you as a weird person when you were a child, then you're lost in life. You have no radar.

One thing that I tell people all the time is I ask them, what's the form of pain that you  enjoy that most people can't tolerate? And you don't mean in a kinky way? No, not in a kinky way.

It could be. Well, we don't judge here, it's a [inaudible 00:18:29] podcast, but- Just wanted to clear that up. Keep it at PG-13, Robert.

I'm sorry. What is the challenge or struggle  that you relish? I know for me, and I imagine it's similar for you, when I am  in the hole with a book, when I'm just deep in a mess of a draft and I'm agonizing through  it, I'm laying awake at night, you know what- I'm going through it right now.

You know what I'm talking about. There's still kind of a sick part of me that likes it.  There's something thrilling about it.

And I think most people, they can't stomach it. Whereas, in  music school, I remember the moment I decided to drop out of music school. I remember I was  practicing four to six hours a day on top- What did you play?

Guitar. So, I was practicing four to six hours a day on top of all my classes. And  I remember I went into one of my private tutors and tried to play a song for him, and he just  looked at me and he's like, you know what your problem is?

You don't practice enough. And that  was the moment I was like, I'm done. I can't.

And was the practice painful,  but not in a good way? Correct. It was drudgery, and to  me that was a very profound lesson.

Because, I loved performing and I loved getting  attention because I could play some song or some solo, but I didn't like practicing. And  musicianship is actually practicing. It's all practicing.

It's 99% practice, 1% performance. So, it was a very painful lesson of, you think you  like this, but you don't actually like it. Wow, that's very interesting. 

Well, when you love something, when you have that connection like I'm talking  about, then the practice, you enjoy it. You enjoy learning, because you enjoy the process of  getting better and you can feel your brain kind of tingling and things are happening inside. And  I tell people, if you have found the right path, if you are like an artist or creative and  you feel frustrated and you feel blocked, that's a good thing.

That little bit of  pain, that little bit of frustration, it's often a signal that you're actually on  the verge of turning into the right direction, because it's a signal that things aren't  quite working out and you're listening to it. But, if you get anxious and you don't listen  to the frustration and you can't be creative, you can't go into it. But, you'll learn at a much  higher rate and you'll enjoy because anything, as I said in Mastery, everything involves a degree of  pain, a degree of practice, a degree of drudgery.

There's nothing that's going to come easy in life.  So, any skill that you're going to learn is going to involve that. And if you're not connected to  it in a deep late way like you weren't with music, you're never going to learn fast enough and  you're just going to burn out too early.

Robert, what about reconnecting with that life  task and going back and finding that? Because, I think you talk about a lot of the negative  signs. I think people can get stuck.

Everything's just a negative sign. They're like, and they  completely forget. Mark, you said that you got disconnected from that at one point and you  kind of by chance, stumbled back into it.

Robert, it sounds like you always knew you wanted to be a  writer of some kind. There are a lot of people who just, they feel like, they don't even know what  that is to begin with. So, can you talk a little bit more about uncovering that connection to your  life task, going back to childhood or whatever?

It is a good question because a lot of people,  they only know the negative, they only know. And then, you kind of beat up on yourself, and  then you start doubting yourself and you think, well, maybe there's nothing that I'm really good  at. Maybe I just need to go make a lot of money, which I'm not against making money.

I'm not  telling people to say, oh, I'm meant to be a poet, which you can't make a living off of. You  have to be able to put food on the table if you're supporting a family, et cetera. So,  being able to make a living is important, but you don't have to compromise completely on  that.

So, fighting that positive element, well, the first thing you have to do is it's  a process, and people are so impatient. They are so unused to being, to introspecting. And  being able to introspect is a very powerful tool.

And what that means is you have to be able to  examine yourself. And in our culture, we're so outer directed. We're so directed towards what  other people are doing, toward the social world, that the idea of who am I, what was I like as a  child, what do I really love?

Is alien to people. I can't understand that because I've always,  I'm a very introspective person, but a lot of people have a hard time with that concept, and I  encounter that when I try and counsel them. So, I tell people, you have to be patient.

It's  not going to come in a light, a flash of, wow, I was meant to be a sculptor. Here I go. So,  you've got to be patient.

You got to take a book and you have to make a journal. I think it works  for a lot of people, and you have to start going through this process. And I tell people, look for  the signs of things that excited you, that excite you in a way that you can't even really control.

Because, we live in a culture that is so damn rational. Everything is an algorithm. Everything  is generated by data, but this is a feel.

This is not data, this is a feel. This is an intuition.  This is something that excites you in an intuitive way, and there's no algorithm in the world that  I could invent or any genius could invent to help you find that.

It's a feel. It's subtle.  It's inside of you, but if you can't go inside of yourself, if you're so not into looking into  who you are, all the advice in the world will be useless.

And I tell people that I can't help you  unless you're willing to go through that process. And some of that examining is tough. Some of  it is, I had a rough childhood.

I had these fantasies, but they weren't necessarily positive.  You're going to come upon negative things, and I had a lot of negative things in my childhood too. So, you have to be willing to go through that digging.

You're like an archeologist with your  own past. You're digging in there looking for the signs, and they're there. When you were five  years old, four years old, you were naturally excited by certain things.

The other thing I tell  people is, we've got to get away from this idea of intelligence as just being intellectual. There's a  book I recommend to a lot of people, I've probably over recommended it by Howard Gardner, called  The Frames, The Five Frames of Intelligence. I'm probably, I'm always misquoting it, but it's  something like that.

You'll find it. And he's basically a neuroscientist. He's a scientist of  some sort.

And he said, there are five forms of intelligence. There's a mathematical intelligence  to do with patterns, it's often related to music. There's a social intelligence that has to deal  with dealing with people.

There is kinetic intelligence, which is moving the body, sports  or dance or whatever. There's word intelligence. There's that kind.

There's another one,  I can't remember what it is, imagery or something like that. Every brain has that natural  inclination towards one of these intelligences, and you have that as well. I compare it to a grain  that's inside of you and that you have to move with that grain.

You have to find it. And it's one  of these forms of intelligence, you have it. Yes, you can have two, but if you have two or three,  it starts, I don't know, you're going to get a little bit lost.

You're a polymath. Maybe  you're a genius or maybe you're just confused, but you've got to find that one thing. And if  it's sports, if it's dance, that's intelligence.

Kobe Bryant, my idol, because I love basketball,  he was as intelligent as, he's a Michelangelo on the basketball court. It's intelligence. Parents  like to say, well, no, you've got to go to law school.

You've got to be this. You've got to be an  academic and blah, blah, blah. No, it's whatever is that grain of your brain that is natural,  and you've got to find that.

And so, don't think in terms of I want to be this specific job or  whatever. Think in terms of what is that natural form that my brain veers towards? And now, if you  know that you are somebody who has a mathematical abstract, mechanical-like brain, let's go into  that.

Let's go deeper now. Let's find if you're an engineer or if you're a musician or okay, but  you got to go back and you got to dig. I could go on for hours about some of the processes that I go  through with people, that should give you an idea of some of the positive things that you can do.

But, it is a process. That's what I like about it. It's not the lightning bolt,  like you said.

It's not. . .

No. And it also never completely ends. It's not like- No, for sure.

You don't just find the thing and you're  like, cool, I'm set. There's, every five, 10 years something happens in your life or  you evolve or you change a little bit, or- Definitely. .

. . your preferences change.

So, it's a perpetual thing for sure. Some people, they get tired of the thing they've been doing for 10, 15, 20 years, and then they  go try something different. And I often counsel, you don't want to go like, you're a  writer and now, oh no, I'm going to be, I don't know, choose something totally  irrelevant from that, whatever.

A programmer or something. You should go off in a different direction within writing or something. And so,  you get bored.

And the boredom either means I've got to change my job, or it means I have to  change something within my job and I prefer the something within my job. So, how I personally  deal with it is every book that I write is on a completely different subject. I never repeat the  same book twice.

I'm onto something that is not, the book I'm writing now people are going to be  shocked, because it's completely different from anything I've ever written, so I don't get  bored. I'm constantly challenging myself. Cool.

We will be right back. You've probably  heard of, seen or read this book. I'm Mark Manson, the author of said book.

After I became a New  York Times bestseller, I wanted to do something else that wasn't just writing another book, so  I launched Your Next Breakthrough. It's a free email newsletter with no gimmicks and no bullshit.  Just a five minute read each week with one idea, one question, and one exercise that could spark  your next breakthrough.

Over a million people are already signed up, so just click below  to get in on the action for free. All right, we're back. So, Robert, we do a segment that Drw  and I love called Brilliant or Bullshit, which is we take recent scientific research surveys,  new theories, things that have become popular or become talked about, and we discuss whether we  think it's brilliant or whether it's bullshit.

So, we want to include you on this round. We want to  hear your opinion. We have something selected.

So, for this Brilliant or Bullshit, Robert, we're  talking about Peter Pan syndrome. Now, there's a lot of talk about how men are checking out.  They're not getting jobs, not getting educated, not committing to long-term relationships.

Sitting at home playing video games, watching porn. Playing video games, vaping, watching porn. There's a female version of it too called the  Cinderella Syndrome, but the Peter Pan syndrome is really in the zeitgeist more and more.

And  actually there are some recent studies that are trying to quantify this and label it a, I wouldn't  say diagnosable syndrome, but they do call it a syndrome and they suggest therapy for it. What I  would like to ask you, first of all, do you think calling it a syndrome is brilliant or bullshit?  I think I know what you would think about that, but what do you think the main drivers really are? 

Is there a problem of prolonged adolescence? What the drivers of that prolonged adolescence  should we be therapizing it so much to? Well, syndrome, that's a bit of bullshit.

It's a  bit like, people like to talk about things these days because everybody's an individual. Everybody  has their own childhood, their own background, their own reasons for wanting to stay in  adolescence. And there are plenty of people in my generation, particularly in my generation,  who got stuck in adolescence and are still stuck there.

So, it's not necessarily endemic just  to Gen Z. It's a phenomenon that has existed, I'm not saying forever, certainly not.  But, since the reign of popular culture, probably since the 1950s, the Peter Pan phenomena  has become more and more pronounced.

And what was the second part of the question? What do you think is driving it? Oh, right.

Well, as I said, everybody's going  to be different. I know that's not a good answer for you, but I think a lot of it is, it's a  very strange time to be a male, to be a boy, to be a man. It's a very confusing time.

And so,  I think that's a lot of the source of it. Because when I was growing up, I'm sounding like I'm 100  years old. When I was 30, I hated hearing that stupid expression.

Back in my day. When I walked 12 miles to school in the snow.  Anyway, there was this, being a male, it was obviously a positive.

because it was a very  male oriented culture, but there was no sense of confusion about it really, although some people  were confused and there's nothing with that. But, there were icons in sports, in movies, the  rugged masculine hero, but in all aspects of life. I remember as a kid, I'm so old that as  a three-year-old, I can remember John F.

Kennedy on the television, and I was fascinated by  him. I thought this was, he was a man who was very commanding. He was the president.

But,  there was also a weird kind of softness to him, like a strange poetic side to it that drew me in.  There were these icons, and so you didn't feel, you wanted to grow out of adolescence. You  wanted to become a man.

You wanted to enter the world and follow in the footsteps of  some of these people that you admired. But, now it's like being a man, being a male,  being a masculine, it is almost ugly, it's dirty. It's almost like something you have to  wipe off your skin, toxic masculinity, but there's something you have to say  about testosterone.

It can turn ugly, but it drives you. It makes you do things. It's  got a positive element.

It gives you ambition. It makes you go out and do things. 12,000 years  ago it made you go hunt mastodons and kill them with your other members.

There should be  positive things about being a man. And so, then I don't want to stay in adolescence. I don't  want to stay in this little cocoon with my mommy and my daddy and my home playing games.

I want  to go out in the world. I want to conquer. I have ambition.

I think the root of the problem is that  there's no kind of positive masculinity out there, and so it doesn't give people an incentive to get  out of that little kind of adolescent cocoon. I agree 100%. It's funny, we were joking around  about Dr K at the beginning of the show, but I think one of the reasons why he's become so  popular is there's this whole demographic of young men who are kind of checked out and they're  playing video games all day, and he's one of the only popular mental health voices that's speaking  directly to them saying, hey, you're playing too many video games.

Let's talk about it. How can  we get you back out in the world? I definitely see a big portion of my audience is younger men. 

I definitely have noticed this over recent years, and I'm becoming a little alarmed by it. I agree  that there's a lack of clear role models. There's not a roadmap.

It's not obvious to a 17-year-old  male who to be, who they want to grow into, and that's difficult and confusing. And then,  I think the ease of checking out today is- Exactly. .

. . so much.

I struggle. I'll download a game on my  phone and I'll be lost for two hours. Still?

Yeah, it's tough, man. And I've got a fully developed prefrontal  cortex. Imagine an 18-year-old.

He's fucked. So, I really sympathize with a lot of the young guys  today, and I definitely see it as a problem. It does seem to be a growing problem.

The syndrome  thing makes me uncomfortable, and I'm curious what your thoughts are on this. There seems to be a  little bit of a recent tendency to medicalize everything, and especially things that were just  not normal behavior, but not necessarily abnormal behavior, say 20 or 30 years ago, either. Like what?

Like the Peter Pan syndrome. I remember when I was  in college, me and my friends, we used to go out with this guy who was around, he was a divorced  guy, around 50, ton of fun. Awesome dude.

And we used to go out to the parties and clubs with him.  And we used to joke like, oh, it's Peter Pan over there, but he was in this phase of his life. He  had just gotten out of a marriage and he was- Well, you can be a functional Peter Pan.

Totally. There are a lot of people out there who are,  people like Bill Clinton was a functional Peter Pan. I see them all the time.

It's the  boomer generation. I'm a little bit younger than that. It's full of very functional  Peter Pans.

I'm a functional Peter Pan. Very true. It's very true.

I've been accused of the same as well. Well, this is exactly my point, is that until I  guess a few years ago, this was just something that you would casually talk about in conversation  or like, oh, he's a bit of a Peter Pan. He still goes out to clubs and he's 50.