Just Do The Simple Sh*t That Works | Mark Manson x Rich Roll

there's probably been more good advice shared on the internet in the past 15 years than the rest of human history combined even people who by and large have ridiculous positions and beliefs about most things will occasionally share a really good piece of information so it's there's a mental struggle of sifting through all the information out there what does effective self-help actually mean how should we think about things like ambition success and happiness well here to separate Brilliance from [ __ ] is Mark Manson returning for a second appearance on the podcast Mark is best known

as the mega bestselling author of The subtle art of not giving a [ __ ] and is the host of the newly ascendant podcast of the same inescapable name when we're rewarded for believing something our brain will find a way to believe it some new fangled seminar in a big theater with 5,000 people and some Guru who's got some new method that's going to like change this and that in your life overnight all those things feel very special but ultimately what works is very boring today we take aim at the self-help industrial complex the gurus

that populate it our respective perspectives as participants in this economy and the various principles that govern our decisions as content creators we also discuss Mark's Health Journey the key role identity play in the context of personal change and tons more as Mark would like to say life advice that doesn't suck I've believed a lot of dumb things in my life that got me here sometimes you got to go through some of those dumb beliefs or like a weird phase right to kind of like learn the lesson and get to the right spot nobody's got it

all figured out and definitely don't listen to people who claim they're going to save you and claim they have it all figured out cuz those people never do [Music] it's good to see you thank you for doing this yeah of course and I thought as I shared with you a moment ago like I Just Want to Have Fun okay you know what I mean [ __ ] your books [ __ ] your back story you're a smart guy let's just [ __ ] around and have a good time I love it also it's a low

lift you know and I've been accused of being a little too serious on my podcast so a little levity we'll fix we'll fix that right up and part of the lift aspect of it is and I'm sure I want to you know I want to talk to you about your podcast is it's daunting when you have somebody coming on your show who's accomplished and has written books and you want to be prepared and the amount of like research and preparation it's great because I get to learn about these people and read their books and I

feel very nourished in that but you know I've been doing this 12 years like it's a lot right it's a lot and so it's kind of nice to just sit with someone and it's like I don't have to worry about that well and and you've kind of contended with this a little bit in the shorter you know kind of lifespan of what you've been doing so I feel like I mean to give listeners context I've been podcasting for almost a year it'll be a year in about six weeks and uh yeah the the the learning

curve of interviewing so the funny thing about that is that I often find that the interviews that I prepare less for end up being better in some ways because there's more genuine curiosity I don't feel like I'm trying to like construct the conversation as much but I think so much of it too just comes down to guas chemistry a lot of it is because if you don't have the chemistry like if you connect it'll have its own flow and Rhythm and you'll be fine if you don't and you have to do a lot of the

heavy lifting then you got to you have to kind of like resort to the preparation that you've put in but this is something I'm playing with right now because I think I've historically always prided myself on the amount of time that I invest in each person and generally it pays off like it's it's good like and I think it's showing the guest respect like they're coming and they're giving their time and you're going to pay them back for that by by you know rising up as much as you can to their level and then sharing

it with your audience that's the bargain right but there's a cost to that which is if you're so prepared you're never going to be surprised and when they tell the story they've told before you've already heard it so you kind of like you're glazing over and you're not really present and so you're not responding you're just sort of thinking about what's coming next because you you kind of anticipate what they're going to be saying yeah and so I do think it's better to be less prepared and I think the pride that I put into my

preparation was just a mask for insecurity and fear sure you know like am I going to be able to like be out on you know the tight RPP without a net yeah and I've been doing this so long and it's like it always works out you know for better I mean they're not all home runs but like you know I should be able to have enough confidence at this point that it's going to be okay we were talking before we went live about how competitive the podcast space has gotten and how the the stakes keep

getting aned up right and if you think about it I think research is the lwh hanging fruit conversation right when there's not many podcasts then you can out research other podcasters and that's kind of your Edge but in this day and age in 2024 every big podcaster has a research team has an assistant has people summarizing I don't have those things okay well that's more that's more about my those are my yeah but those are that maybe I should though because th that speaks to my control issues more than anything else um I read I

mean I read every book uh cover to cover no but uh I do think that is that's something that anybody can do it's really just a matter of putting the hours in I think having flow chemistry reading the person in the moment knowing how to direct the conversation somewhere new get the guest talking about something that they haven't thought about before nobody's asked them before I think that's like that's actually a a rare skill I think that's a much more difficult skill than say reading somebody's entire yeah yeah I'd agree with that I'd agree with

that well I think what's interesting about your show and you've kind of you're in a you're in a sort of reinvention of it already at this point is that you're bringing everything that you do to the first of all like why did you start a podcast and uh yeah let let's just start there okay like what led you to decide like okay I'm going to jump into The Fray here into this crowded Marketplace it's increasingly more and more competitive and harder and harder to stand out I I will give you the short version and if

you want to go deeper on any part I'm happy to uh the short version is the first seven years in my career I was an internet guy I was a blogger primarily and uh actually dabbled in podcasts back in 2011 2012 but everything I did back then it was posting online trying to build an audience posting on social media Etc I did that very well I built an audience I got a book deal the book which is the subtle art not giving a [ __ ] came out in 2016 blew up Beyond I think pretty

much anybody's expectation including my own and I think when that happened I accidentally started thinking I was an author and I was like oh well this is the most successful thing I've ever done therefore this is just what I should do all the time and so I wrote a bunch of books over the next four or five years and I mean I like writing I like books but in hindsight I didn't love being an author that wasn't what I initially started doing and a few years ago I I got burnt out I took some time

off and I made an agreement with myself which is I'm going to go back to work but I'm going to pay very close attention to what's fun and what just kind of feels like an obligation in some shape or form and I started doing that and what I realized was all the internet Stuff felt fun and all the author Stuff felt like an obligation and I canceled a bunch of contracts I gave a bunch of money back and I decided I'm like I want to be an internet guy like I love making content I love

the media business I love building a team scaling content and a podcast is something that you know my team and I we had talked about for five six years but it always just got put on the back burner because there's another book deal got to write another book got to go out with Will Smith got to write Will's book you know like so when the table was cleared it's like okay let's finally do the podcast because that's just it's part of what I find fun what I think is really fresh and interesting about your show

is that you're bringing all of that kind of Internet sensibility into the podcast space you're doing it with a level of Integrity that kind of belies the savviness of how the internet works yeah and it's this fine line that you walk between that that kind of value based Nuance Associated advice that is kind of your trademark but also is just truth right while also understanding and appreciating like what works on the internet yeah you know what I mean totally and you seem to have struck a bargain that that works like you're not participating in the

clickbait economy you're doing the content the way that you want to do it but it has that veneer or that sensibility like it's all with the understanding of like I know how to do this so that it so that it traffics in the discourse of what's happening and this is something that I struggle with lot I probably have a reductive view of it because I think like well I'm doing this long form stuff and it's complicated and it's nuanced and blah blah and the Internet isn't interested in this like if I want to grow I

have to go out and be you know a heterodox you know lunatic and and create these insane thumbnails and titles and you know if I'm not going to do that well I just have to like be at peace with the fact that like it's not going to catch the wave of what the algorithm wants to share with people but you've seem to figure this out like The Best of Both Worlds uh I don't know about that I mean I appreciate that that's very kind of you to say there's a balance first of all of how

much do you chase the algorithm and how much do you really just try to stay completely true to what you want to put out I always see those two things as there's a VIN diagram you know there's the what you want to make and then what the world wants to see and I try to stay in the overlap of those two circles and if you get out of one of those two circles for too long then mhm you're either going to be you know on an island by yourself or you're going to turn into uh

you know some inter whatever crazy person has sabotaged their own career lately uh we all know the type it is a fine line to walk it's a little bit of a tight RPP to walk but you know I I think I've benefited a lot from just there's been a pent up demand over a lot of years of people wanting something like this from me and it not being there but I'll say too you know coming into this space I also have the advantage of I've been on everybody's show I'm friends with half the big podcasters

in this space and coming into it I really am being conscious of like I want to do do it different like reflect what made you know what people like about my writing I wanted to be reflected in the show itself as well so more casual more laid-back that's it's actually something that we're trying to lean more into now yeah noticed I've noticed that like you've sort of played around with having guests on while also understanding that your audience wants to hear from you and they want to get something out of it rather than oh it's

going to be a long conversation with somebody I've heard of who wrote a book that I probably should read right totally and and you kind of flip that equation the way you position it and set it up it's like we're going to answer a question today and to answer this question I have this person here who's going to help us but it's not necessarily the bright hot white Spotlight on the guest in the way that these shows typically kind of totally Orient it and that and that works really well for you I think yeah so

far and even now you're kind of moving away from that right like I I like the new the new version of it I think that that suits you really well thanks we've worked really hard on that the last few months I think the idea now is that we're moving to more of a segment based show so there's that question each episode right like that fundamental question like what's the [ __ ] of the week like what what are you worrying about too much this week or what do you wish you cared more about this week

and uh and then we've got a a second segment called brilliant or [ __ ] where we break down debunk bad studies surveys memes you know Trends going on or talk about maybe something that's brilliant that most people haven't heard of uh and then we answer audience questions and the ideaas is we're going to bring guests back soon and the IDE is instead of it being about like you know hey Rich you know you just had a new book tell us about you know whatever you've been working on it it's the guests can join us

and do the segments with us yeah so we've got predefined topics in segments and then they can they pop in they have to adhere to your format basically yeah exactly I like it I like the one not the most recent one you did but the one right before that about self-help I think there's a lot that we could like unpack in that the selfhelp junkies um yeah but before we get off the kind of podcasting thing I mean I think did you see Tim Ferris Blog the other day on this everything that he brought up

in that are all things that I've thinking about as somebody who is part of this world where you're doing long form interviews with authors and all different kinds of people in this competitive sort of space where there's more and more people doing that um how do you distinguish yourself and what's happened over the last you know five or seven years is that obviously publishing houses know that the way to get their books sold is to get their authors on podcast this is the new book tour uh and so the casting industry has basically become an

adjunct of the publishing industry and it's become really easy to just book guess reactively based upon incoming pitches right so I I get a dozen pitches a day every book all the gallies all that kind of stuff and you can just say yes yes yes no and uh and I think I would probably plead guilty to kind of just being lazy and falling into that and a lot of these people are amazing like you want to get them on and and even knowing like oh I know if I get this person on they're going to

be on all the same shows that are kind of similar to me I'm still willing to enter into that bargain but I think it's gotten to the point where it's kind of a drag you know what I mean like it is yeah and as exciting as it is to have the opportunity to talk to some of these people many of which are like luminaries and it's cool to meet them at some point you have to decide like what is your show about and what is your point of view if you're going to distinguish yourself from

everybody else you need to be pretty clear on that and start getting more proactive about the people you really want to get and summon the kind of courage and willingness to say no to some of those fancy people so that you are you know kind of defining yourself a little bit differently to stand out yeah I think that is definitely something I mean even before I jumped into this podcasting space I could sense that from the outside every show is kind of becoming the same show and somebody needs to differentiate somehow and I think everybody's

feeling that and unless you're willing to do like just an insane number of episodes like some people do you really need to sit down and think like okay what makes me different and it's funny because before we settled on this format another one that we considered is you know maybe we do take all those guests maybe we do take you know just the the book tour of authors that come through come to LA and come on your show and then they come over to my house and they do my show and then they go up

to LS and they do his show and then they go down the some of them are transparent about it and some of them are KY about it like they don't want to tell you that they just came from so and so's house and then right after you they're going to that other guy's house I'm like dude I get it man I've launched a book I get it I get it I don't begrudge the authors that that's what you should be doing so one of the things that we considered because we did a couple of episodes

so like Cal Newport his book came out in March and I I actually think he came to my house right after right after coming to I think I think he did your show and then he immediately came over did my show but it was funny because I read his new book and I actually I disagreed with a lot of it and so and it's funny because it's the only only guest interview I did I've done on my entire show that I was nervous about I was like I'm going to do the whole interview about the

things I disagree with him about and and basically try to get him to convince me it's I to this day I think it's the best interview I did of all the interviews I mean well I'm now retired from interviews so it's my best interview of all time of of the or 26 that I did it it actually turned out great and it's like one of our best episodes and so we thought about like we talked about like maybe that's our format maybe it's just instead of like you know having Cal Newport come on and deliver

his greatest hits that he just gave to you and gave to huberman and gave to Lewis and everybody else maybe I'm the guy who's like okay so I got six things in your book that I disagree with let's get into them right and like that could be a show format um but then ultimately I decided I was like I don't want to be I'm not a like I'm a pretty like chill yeah then then you're just going to be in Conflict all the time yeah how does that that's not my personality I don't I don't

like arguing with people and it puts a lot of pressure on me CU then I feel like I need to be right right and the funny thing with cow was like he came on and he actually like explained and and identified you know things that I had missed or or that I hadn't considered he actually like won me over on pretty much all the points um it was very satisfying for me as well but I was like yeah I don't want to pursue that but I think that could be a great show right the broader

point being if you're going to have someone on your show who's doing all the shows like figure out a different approach right right either don't do it or if you're concerned about distinguishing yourself like have an angle that's going to make it different or just do what Tim's doing which is just he's not taking those guests anymore right so he yeah he he calls it the 9010 rule which basically means like the top 10 of the fancy people or whatever like he'll do that 10% of the time it was only guess that 90% of his

audience would recognize or 10% right less than 10% more than 90% less than 10% so it's like either somebody insanely popular like Hugh Jackman or yeah like somebody totally obscure or Lebron James or whatever or some like an expert that nobody's ever heard of yeah yeah have you seen what Daniel Tosh is doing with his podcast he's great he's hilarious but um he'll have on like his first episode was with his wife gynecologist like you know like just like totally off the the program you know what I mean like and you have to be gifted

and charismatic and entertaining to bring on like an ordinary person and create something compelling out of that I think totally yeah we we've run into this with uh YouTube videos where I've tried to take fans with specific problems in their lives and do a video around that problem like helping them get through that problem and it was funny because before we shot the videos I was really anxious and self-conscious about like okay can I actually get this person to change on camera like if I try to help this person and they it doesn't do anything

like I'm going to look like an idiot yeah but it was funny because that was actually the easy part like we got great results from everybody the problem was is that the average person is just not very fun to watch or listen to for more than 10 seconds at a time so and so we had to we had to kind of scrap that idea but um the other thing that that we kind of share is that we both live in Los Angeles we're both like I guess technically you know quote unquote part of the kind

of self-help economy right while also kind of being allergic to it at the same time um it's this like acknowledgement that like I yes this is what I do but also like I can't stand these people and most of these books are terrible like and like what am I like Naval gazing over like what am I doing right and so I'm just curious like how do you think about uh how you kind of you know navigate and comport yourself in this sort of ecosystem in terms of like how you show up how you share how

you write how you podcast like trying to put out something that's good while also recognizing that you know you're you're kind of in it just like all these other people that um you might you might have issues with I don't know how to say that any anymore clearly I love joking that I'm I'm a self-hating self-help Guru I just love playing with that idea I hate the idea that anybody is like a self-help Guru and I and I and I find most of this industry distasteful I mean psychology itself like academic psychology itself You could

argue that a large percentage of it is not scientific already and then you look at the amount of Life advice that is delivered with complete negligence of the psychological literature and like we're not even unscientific we're just like off entirely so I struggle with it sometimes it's actually been interesting it's been harder moving to LA because you're I'm surrounded by it all the time um other places I've lived nobody really talks like this nobody like it's not part of like an everyday conversation here in La you can't go anywhere with somebody talking to you about

like their energy or the the universe and you know whatever the [ __ ] Crystal they're wearing around their neck you know it's just like it's it's a constant here and um I guess there's kind of two I have two reactions or two thoughts about it is one is I try to be I try to be respectful and not demeaning towards the individual like I understand there's a lot of dumb things I've believe throughout my life uh and a lot of those dumb things actually help me in the short term and I had to eventually

like move past them so like I I try to be very empathetic of that like everybody has their own process and you know not everybody like spends nearly as many hours as I do on this stuff and it like that's fine the second thing I try to remember too the that I just find amusing is that generally all the like the woooo people the woooo California people they all assume that I'm in on it too so like they all like they'll talk to me as if like well you get you're you're a friend you're an

ally yeah it's it's uh it's like my spirit animal was talking to me last night like but you you understand what I'm saying right like sure sure whatever you were you were uh I I loved the uh The Exchange you were having on the recent podcast about self-help and this kind of obsession that you see in Los Angeles around self-help uh it it's sort of an identity as much as as anything else is and I think it's an interesting kind of like thread to pull on here because I'm of two two minds on the one

hand it's a population of people who are interested in growth uh but at the same time like anything once it you know calcifies around an identity it becomes sort of antithetical to the growth right like people become stuck in this kind of attachment to you know who they are where they're actually not progressing or growing they're just kind of like stuck in this analysis paralysis or kind of hster wheel of like reading a bunch of books and going to a bunch of conferences uh but not actually putting any of the like if you took any

piece of the advice that they're inundating their their brains with it would probably work pretty well yeah but it's just it's just going from one to the next to the next to the next and then where's the actual like method of incorporating it into your life so I grew up in the Bible Belt in Texas and I grew up going to church three times a week everybody around me was extremely religious most of the people I would say did not walk the walk you know they' go to church twice a week and go to Bible

study and quote all the verses to you but they kind of just still live like a normal human like did all the terrible things that most humans do uh didn't didn't have a self-consciousness about their actions or their behaviors or how it fit into their kind of ethical principles um since moving to La I don't see much difference here it it reminds me very much of where I grew up it's church and religion in in just a secular cont it's a secular religion and you just replace god with growth um you replace the holy spirit

with energy frequencies it's the same [ __ ] and the funny thing is is you know people instead of church they go to a seminar um instead of praying they meditate do yoga um instead of doing a potluck Charity Dinner they you know do a mastermind and most most of them still behave exactly the same afterwards yeah I mean I think in in many ways it's a it's a reaction to the decline of communitybased you know sort of spiritual Gatherings religious gatherings whatever your Doctrine might be uh and it's not surprising because I think as

human beings you know we're we're hardwired to you know find comfort in a tribe and we want to be part of something that totally that is not just bigger than us but you know speaks to kind of the unanswerable questions of what it means to be human absolutely and and so I don't and I don't want people to take this wrong way like I'm not I'm not denigrating this I guess what I'm denigrating is like the lack of self-awareness because it's the people in Texas I grew up with they knew what they were doing they

knew they were going to church they knew they were worshiping God they knew they were you know reading the Bible but [ __ ] up each week and not doing it right you know there was a self-awareness about it and an honesty about it what I find here and with the self-help space in general is that there's not that awareness there's not that honesty and in fact there's a little bit of an arrogance a little bit of a spiritual narcissism of like well I did you know 12 meditation Retreats and an iasa trip and my

Shaman said that I've reached this next level and so you know you should listen to me like yeah yeah really like uh cuz you look like the same [ __ ] person I've known the last two years right like nothing has changed you're literally making the same mistakes you made three years ago the garments the entire might change a little bit exactly exactly uh a new tattoo or two but um so I I don't mean to as you said there is a I do believe there's a fundamental like human drive towards Community spiritual practice all

these things um there's nothing wrong with that what I find here is I describ it to a friend recently as I said uh California is an incredibly conformist place but the Conformity involves not thinking you're conforming yeah it's like one of the most conformist places I've ever lived that's analogous to the group think that is like heterodox thinking right like all the all the heterodox thinkers are lack of self-awareness that all of their heterodoxy falls into like one very narrow Lane yes it it's if you're compulsively contrarian then you're not contrarian right you're just picking

the other side of every bet which I feel like a lot of people built careers in podcast and YouTube just being compulsively contrarian going to get in my daily ag1 this is a habit I started maybe I don't know six or seven years ago tastes great 75 vitamin and minerals packed into every scoop and it's energizing good for your body super simple super easy super convenient particularly when I'm on the road when I'm traveling when I'm moving around a lot I keep the travel packs everywhere I go so they're always within Arms Reach and that

way I know that uh I'm doing what's best for my body on The Daily so if you're looking to establish a new healthy habit this year try ag1 for yourself it's the perfect way to prioritize your Wellness that's why I've been partnering with ag1 for so long and right now ag1 is offering new subscribers a free 7 $6 gift when you sign up you'll get a welcome kit a bottle of D3 K2 and five free travel packs in your first box so make sure to check out drink a1.com SLR to start your new year on

a healthier [Music] note we're brought to you today by Bond charge which is this really cool company that makes a fantastic broad line of evidence-based holistic wellness products they make everything from Blue blocking glasses to red light therapy devices to EMF shielding products and tons more are you ready to elevate your Wellness journey of course you are so go to bonch charge.com rroll use code Rich Roll a checkout for 15% off their entire range of Wellness [Music] tools we're in like a like this Guru sphere right particularly in the self-help you know world where there

are outsized personalities out there who are commandeering like very large audiences and a significant mind share um amongst you know a vast population of people who are probably genuinely looking for good advice and guidance at some period in their life in which they need it but back to like kind of what YouTube and the internet rewards it rewards hot takes contrarianism heterodox thinking uh certainty conviction you know Charisma all of these things none of which necessarily are related to truth veracity and you know good advice right so you as somebody who who I know thinks

about like how do I provide good advice and do it with Integrity you're out there not competing but you know you're you're in a world in which you know those other people are out there for better or worse sure who are motivated not by values necessarily but more and more by metrics like growth and you know with growth that means platforming people who might be not the best people to platform under the rubric of like just asking questions and all of that kind of thing like you know let me tell you what they don't want

you to know and you know everything you've ever been told is a lie and you know this is like what works right and I don't know if it's a willful blindness or a lack of self awareness or maybe just I don't give a [ __ ] like it doesn't matter as long as I'm growing and more and more people are paying attention to me yeah I have mixed feelings about this because I think it's good for the world actually let me start with a caveat and then I'll go into my mixed feelings so the the

caveat of all of this is I want to say that as this is simultaneously having the the guru feere as you put it I really like that word uh is exploding right self-helping is bigger than it's ever been it's become mainstream essentially there is an unprecedented wealth of genuinely good mental health and physical health information that's been become available in the last 10 15 years that was never available in all of human history like there's probably been more good advice shared on the internet in the past 15 years than the rest of human history combin

combined so that's mixed in with all this stuff and it's often very very frustrating to as a consumer to parse the good from the bad even people who by and large have ridiculous positions and beliefs about most things will occasionally share a really good piece of information so it's it's like there's a mental struggle of sifting through all the information out there so I want to put that on the table first and then that relates to my mixed feelings in the following way which is ultimately I I feel like it's a good thing to let

two opposing narratives into the public sphere and let them kind of combat each other and because a lot of times the conventional narrative does end up being full I mean how how much nutritional information over the past 20 years you know that was conventional turned up to be absolutely terrible and and horrible for people you know uh a decade later right so it's like the conventional wisdom does get overturned frequently and so you do want that you do want it to be free and available for people to attack and combat and offer alternative theories and

yeah even if occasionally they're hairbrained you know sure whatever that I think is fine and I do think it does cause a lot of stress and strife among the population and among consumers it makes our lives a little bit more complicated as it puts more responsibility on us to figure out what we're consuming and whether it's good or not what I do worry about is is is to your point the over indexing of Crazy Town let's call it I've kind of come to just as somebody who's observed online media my entire adult life and tried

to like really kind of track it and understand why certain audiences behave certain ways I've kind of come to the conclusion that perhaps the most chronically online population in the world are the Crazy Town conspiracy theory people they're more engaged they're more vocal um if they like you they'll watch everything they'll like everything they'll comment on everything and so I think as creators I think there are a lot of people in our industry who you know they'll dip their toe in that pool in the Crazy Town pool and they'll get that flood of Engagement and

that feels good it's like especially I mean when you've been say grinding through 20 episodes and you're at this plateau and like nothing's really popping off or performing well and you're like man what I what are we doing wrong like what could I be doing better and all a sudden one just like shoots off like a rocket you're like man I should do more of that so I get where it comes from I understand where it comes from I don't think most of them realize what they're doing I think they're just kind of their dopamine

mechanism has been hijacked it's like a it's like a casino it's like a you know it's like a slot machine and then you win and then suddenly you have this euphoric you know reaction of course you're going to chase you're going to chase that that Dragon totally so you bet a little bit more and then a little bit more and then a little bit more and then you go bankrupt right and I think there's we've seen the Creator audience version of that multiple times where somebody dips their toe in Crazy Town gets that huge bump

and engagement and traffic they like oh maybe I'll go back for seconds and oh maybe I'll go back for thirds maybe I'll have this Looney Tune guys on my podcast and have a two-hour conversation with them and see how that goes right and then the next thing you know he's just like well the more time you spend with those people you're gon to start like believing you know what they're saying and then before you know it you become a mouthpiece for those ideas yourself I think you know what you just said I think you pointed

out the difference between you and me and a lot of these other people in the space which is I fundamentally believe and I think I I think you share this belief which is that we don't believe what's true we believe what we're incentivized to believe like as human beings there's just so much like as somebody who's studying psychology we are so good at bullshitting ourselves that when we're incentivized like when we're rewarded for believing something our brain will find a way to believe it and I think the people I see falling into this trap that

we're talking about I think are the people who have a little bit of an idealistic view of truth of like I'm just having conversations I'm just trying to find the truth and if I'm honest with them and if I have an honest conversation eventually the truth will come out and they don't realize that your belief or your definition of what's true can get Warped by the incentives that are placed around you there's a really famous quote I forget some congressman from years and years ago but he said it's uh the quote is something like uh

I think it was up in Sinclair I don't know anyway he said it's impossible to get a man to believe that he's doing something evil when his paycheck depends on it that is up in Sy it is up yeah yeah I mean it's really a two-prong thing on the one hand we're we're much more easily manipulated than than we want to believe and that's true of everybody no matter how smart you are and perhaps the more smart you are the more easy the Mark you are yeah secondarily our capacity for denial and kind of defense

mechanisms around what we decide we want to believe is more powerful than we want to accept can we dig into that that first one cuz I love that I noticed this so early in my career a lot of people don't know this I started out as a dating coach and one of one of the things I noticed very early on is that the hardest clients were the super smart guys because the smarter a person is the more they can rationalize whatever they want to believe like a smart person can come up with a million excuses

not to do something and all of them sound like really good excuses like completely valid whereas like somebody who's just average intelligence maybe they'll give one excuse and then you like disarm that and they're like okay maybe you're right I should go do this you know and with highly intelligent people there's you can kind of seduce Yourself by saying like well I'm so smart at these other things I've got I've got all these degrees I like made all this money doing this other thing I can keep my head on straight where whereas actually you are

probably more susceptible because as your beliefs warp towards your incentives you're going to be so good at constructing narratives and stories to justify those yeah that intelligence turns on itself yeah yeah I mean this is a thing in y also like the smart person is a real tough customer when it comes to getting on board with the 12 Steps it's like yeah I mean the smarter you are you walk in you're like and somebody says like you need to show up here every day and like stand at the door and shake hands with everyone and

say hello it's like [ __ ] you you know you need to make coffee you're trying to outthink and outsmart all of these things and say well what does this have to do with you know drinking or not drinking or you know I don't understand why I would have to make an inventory like in my mind okay I've done the inventory in my mind why do I have to write it down like I'm I'm smart enough I I got it right and all of these things become antagonists to the recovery process and make you know

intelligence the enemy of the growth that you seek yeah are you David Foster Wallace fan yeah yeah have you ever seen his interviews about going to AA a bunch of them yeah he talks about that first of all like dude has the biggest brain on the it's like so smart but it's like imagine a but he never would really admit that he had a problem he would say that he was going for research yeah of course of yeah re research yeah my friend took me you know all this sort of stuff I think um listening

to him talk about it and write about it in a couple places it's so funny cuz he talks about that about how as a literary author it killed him that every AA lesson was essentially just a cliche right like yeah and he was like he would be like no no no you guys you guys have to like no we need to discuss this you know he like start trying to talk about it like as if he was a philosophy Professor yeah like he's bringing his gigantic brain into this and wants to break down the epistemics

of the entire you know underpinnings of this really the problem then and then he goes out and gets drunk exactly because the problem is your lizard brain it's not your it's not your you know philosophy brain right right right and then you know the the the self- delusion part too has sort of antecedants in in recovery as well like I I know well like the power my own power to create denial uh when it comes to something that I want to do you know I can come up with some pretty good arguments about why it's

just fine yeah you know and so if that's the case then what's happening in you know the guru sphere or the kind of you know digital information landscape at large with somebody whose dopamine mechanism is getting lit up and then realizes that not only are the incentives to move more in in that direction like the pot of gold is real yeah for doing that yeah speaking of intellectualizing addiction I'd love to talk to you about this I've been playing with the idea I mean I don't know if there there's any value in it of like

going to a meeting so I'm in this weird gray area and maybe it's not a gray area but on the one hand as you know I quit drinking two years ago um the more distance I get from qu the more I look back and realize how big of a problem it was and the more I look at my people in my family and my family history and every and I'm like okay this is this is like this is feeling like alcoholism like this is It's alcoholism Mish and then I was talking to a friend who's

a recovered alcoholic and I was talking to him about this and I was like I like I'm starting to wonder if I'm an alcoholic and then he kind of laughed and he was like well if you have to wonder yeah he's like nobody who's not an alcoholic ever wonders only an alcoholic like asks himself or or herself that question ex people who are not alcoholics that doesn't occur to them exactly so and yet it is a self-diagnosed thing like it's not for anybody else to say totally so I'm in this weird place where I'm like

am I is this like an identity like should I make this part of my identity like if I start drinking again is this am I bullshitting myself like am I is it gonna get bad again right so I don't know I'm in like there's a lot of confusion in my life at the moment around this yeah you're in like this weird Lial Gray Zone with the whole thing well we we talked a little bit about this when I was on your show the joke came up around like is a good alcoholic one who is just

who C who can figure out a way to continue to be an alcoholic and drink or is a good alcoholic one who realizes he needs to stop and gets sober and I could sense like you're you were kind of like trying to feel like where you fit into this whole thing um as I was kind of sharing my story and I think well a couple things first of all if you really want to know the answer go out and do some more research yeah you know go out and start drinking again and see what happens

you know you can always do that we we have you on the record so you know when I wake I'm not encouraging you to do that but like and this is another kind of like a thing it's like well maybe you need to go out and drink some more if you're not sure if you're not committed or you don't think that this program of recovery is for you like go out and see what happens out there and then you know we're always here if you want to come back right so that's an option the second

thing is uh on that subject of good alcoholics when you reflect back on your your own past and your your family history maybe they're good alcoholics who were good at masking it or keeping it just enough under control that that they could kind of still live their lives functioning alcoholics which doesn't mean they're not alcoholics it just didn't progress to the state in which it becomes you know the kind of dramatic stuff that we talk about right I can't answer that for yourself this is really just between you and you and I would say does

it really matter whether you decide to label yourself an alcoholic or not if you think that you had a problem with a substance that was um antithetical to the person that you want to be you've taken this huge first step of saying no more and not doing it anymore but then you have to contend with emotional sobriety like what you've accomplished is abstinence sure and we also talked about this too like your workaholism right and I said I said did your workaholism increase once you stop drinking yes and you said yes and I'm like yes

because that that discomfort inside of you is looking for something to latch on to to feed it right and so it's choosing work right now which just tells me there's something there for you to examine within yourself that perhaps could use a little bit little bit of healing and you know the 12 steps is really good for that it's good for self-awareness it's good for kind of understanding your Character defects and your patterns and you know how your unhealthy relationship with this substance or however it manifests workaholism um is interfering with that kind of better

version of yourself that you're aspiring to and have it yeah yeah that that's the other thing that's gotten me thinking too because ironically back when I drank I never considered myself like a very compulsive person but since I stopped drinking I've noticed that my behavior in a lot of not just work but in a lot of different areas has become much more compulsive that like I feel because the alcohol was this solution yes to the problem not the problem right it was a salve to the compulsivity or whatever the discontentment inside of you that's driving

compulsive Behavior but does compulsiveness get solved or does it just get redirected well it can be solved like I don't know like there's the whole kind of like dialogue around like can you actually be healed or are you just always in recovery and let's just set that aside for now yeah certainly the compulsivity can be can be held at Bay um by healing what's beneath the drive to be compulsive in the first place which is you know a psychological examination of self and figuring out like what is causing that sure and perhaps that could be

healed that process of of self-examination and and and healing is a way of it speaks to like kind of the the white knuckling versus surrender right like if you're abstinent and you have this compulsive tendency and you're just kind of like holding on to the edge of the table and like I hope I'm not compulsive today or I'm going to go work all day so I don't act out in other ways like you're not really well you know what I mean like that's not engaging in your own feeling that makes sense to me because you

know when we had this conversation before the thing that didn't land for me was that healing the compulsivity cuz it's now I'm thinking about it analogous to like anxiety right so like if let's say you have a very highly anxious person somebody who's very anxious they're probably always going to be anxious like the the anxiety doesn't go away it gets managed and there's a comfort that develops in the managing of it you know so it's like the healing is isn't going from anxiety like lots of anxiety to zero anxiety it the healing is going from

lots of anxiety that's unmanaged to anxiety that's comfortably managed does that make sense yeah coping mechanisms and strategies yeah and so I imagine it sounds like what you're saying is like that Pro process is analogous to the compulsivity I think so but I think there is there is a freedom and a Liberation that you can experience and I think that there is a spiritual mystical aspect to it as well like this idea of Letting Go rather than holding on and trying to manage something that's unmanageable and saying instead I give up I'm letting go of

all of this I'm turning this over to whatever it is that's more powerful than me and uh spirit animals yeah yeah like what yeah exactly you could be to your you know yeah like like uh the iasa Road Runner or whatever it is in your case it doesn't matter and those are qualitatively two different experiences well it's funny cuz it's the compulsivity that's showing up in other areas of my life I would say it's not harming my life it's a lot of it's just like silly like it's just like like I play more video games

than I used to and and my wife pointed it out and she's like yeah you're playing a lot of video games like the last year and I'm like huh well yeah because usually when I used to go out and drink like I used to go out and drink so now I just sit sit at home and play play a bunch of video games instead so it and there's nothing inherently wrong with that unless you're using that to not deal with something else if I'm not sleeping you don't want to you have a discomfort or like

you don't want to be around your wife or you know something like you're running you're using it to run away from something totally I guess what I'm talking about is just that there there's a lot more nervous energy inside me than I knew because I was drunk or hung over half the time and now that that's gone it's like oh yeah I got a lot of nervous energy going on and like I kind of like constantly feel need to be doing something and uh and when you just sit still and do nothing what is the

internal experience that's a good question you know okay so this gets into meditation I used to meditate a lot when I was young and I kind of got away from it and I've had this conversation a lot especially here in La when people ask me why don't you meditate and I my reply is always I just haven't seen a reason to in the last five or six years I think this is a good reason to I actually now that I think about it cuz uh I used to I used to meditate pretty intensely in my

20s and then I just kind of moved away from it I think that would be a good experiment is like start doing like some longer meditation sessions and see see if it's different see if it feels different it's in the steps is it it's one of the steps meditation sort of given short shrift in the rooms but like yeah I mean technically it's one of the steps and a sort of condition of the alcohol poic is a constitutional restlessness that speaks to a lack of emotional sobriety when you're not actively engaged in like doing these

things to be in the solution right and those things are like the personal inventory and gratitude and service and you know all the like like none of these things are like revolutionary things as as as David Foster Wallace would would give you an earful on um but for whatever [ __ ] reason it works you know and so the not David Foster Wallace doesn't ask questions about why it works just do it because it moves their it moves their life forward in a positive direction and this ties back into the self-help junkie thing and this

has always been my argument which is that what works is very boring and it hasn't changed in 10,000 years it's just that we forget or we avoid or we deny or we we get bored and so some new fangled seminar in a big theater with 5,000 people and some Guru who's got some new method that's going to like change this and that in your life overnight that feels both there's a complexity to it and complexity we tend to associate complexity with something valuable and then two it's shiny and new and three there's a lot of

like social proof involved you know it's like oh there's 5,000 people here it must work so all those things feel very special But ultimately what works is very boring which is right sit in silence have practice gratitude ask a service yeah call somebody who's having a hard time eat healthy healthy get get sleep exercise all that but but we all suffer from you know terminal specialness right it can't be this yeah I've done that and I still like feel like [ __ ] so it must be the $5,000 seminar and I'm special and that person's

special and I'm going to go behind the Velvet Rope and I'm going to get the special answer that only the special people get right and there's a halo effect with that it almost doesn't matter what the person says just because you've spent the money and there's a lot of totally drapery and dressing around it like perhaps that will get you to do something you wouldn't ordinarily do but the Tale on that is very short right like it the half-life you know dissipates immediately because most of those are premised on some form of motivation inspiration and

positive psychology and I know you have a lot to say about that but the greater point is you're just running from one thing to the next under the delusion that you're engaging in your growth when in fact you're running away from deep down what you know works it's just it just sucks to do it and it's boring and it's not fun well you know what's funny I have a very complicated relationship with Tony Robbins and he probably doesn't know who I am so that's fine but it it's funny because for years I looked at his

seminars I I've never been the one but I have a lot of friends who have gone and they would describe them to me and I'm like that is so ridiculous like you know this arena with all this like crazy [ __ ] going on and fireworks and light shows and all this stuff and as I've gotten older as I've talked to more and more people who have like gone to his things what I realized is that most of the time in his seminar it's not there's not teaching there's not lectures I mean there are some

of those things most of the time spent at his seminar you're you're doing one of two things you're either dancing to music or you're socializing with the people around you like they build in exercises for you to socialize and meet the people around you into connect with them and build friendships and as I've gotten older I've realized I'm like most of the people who probably go to his seminars and report that was life-changing or they feel so much better like 80% of it is probably the dancing and socializing like it's if you think about your

average depressed person what's true about them they don't go outside they don't have enough relationships they don't have enough going on in their life they don't move their bodies and so you put them in this environment there's a lot of stimulation they're meeting people they're talking to people they're being vulnerable for the first time in years they're making a new friend they're dancing more than they've danced since they were like 18 years old and after 5 days they leave they're like oh my God I'm a new person M and it's it's like that's actually where

the vast majority of the value is but if you advertised a seminar of dancing and talking to people a nobody would sign up and B they definitely wouldn't pay $5,000 for it so it's almost like this this like genius packaging of the whole point of that seminar is not him and it's not what what's on stage it's not the theories it's not the ideas which I mean a lot of them are totally fine and normal the bulk of the value is is the fact that you're just there moving your body talking to people being vulnerable

build relationship that's so interesting yeah I know a lot of people who have not only gone like they go and go and go again right and these are successful people that are friends of mine that I like a lot I've never gone and I I just like I see him I see what's happening and I'm like I I just there's something inside of me that thinks like first of all is this guy even a human being like there's something like alien about this guy me too me too like most of my friends who are into

his stuff they've gone they've like spent an absurd amount of money and they've gone to like 15 events but when I ask them why you know why they say they they don't go for him they go for cuz it's like the community the con they made a bunch of friends at the seminar and they all keep in touch and then they're like I'm going to go to the one in August oh you should go too okay yeah let's all go again you know and they do it again and it's it becomes church and it's funny

because again this comes back to the self-awareness thing there's nothing wrong with it as long as everybody knows the game they're playing right and where I have ethical issue with it is that I mean I imagine Tony knows the game that's being played but most of the attendees don't and then he gets the credit right you know the attendees is like oh I've done three Tony Robin seminars changed my life I love it it's amazing great why did you love it oh well you know Tony this and that and I learned this and blah blah

blah it's like no it's that's actually not what made you happy like this is actually what like all of the research all the good research that we have on human happiness shows that this is actually what taking place like in the in the unconscious part of exp outside you know outside the convention center yeah yeah that's interesting yeah I really I struggle with it because I again like I have lots of friends whove benefited from it tremendously and speak super highly of the experience and of Tony and then I hear him speak and it's just

there's always an upsell there's always like the the use of language is very consciously deployed and the right name is dropped at the right moment and all this it's like it all feels very contrived and I'm left thinking like who is who is this guy like I never see and maybe it's not like I'm paying attention to his stuff so maybe I'm just missing it but like where's the vulnerability on his part or like I don't get a sense of authenticity I guess is what I'm saying yeah I agree with the contrive thing I mean

I've only seen videos of his seminars but um anyway that that's an epiphany I had recently that I kind of came around on so I've come I've come like there's like a begrudging respect what he's buil is incredibly powerful it is incredible it's not for me to judge I don't know like it's it's helped a lot of people so it's secular church and it's like and look even if he is a little bit contr rived or a little bit aggressive with the the the aggressive upselling bugs me too but I mean he built a secular

church for people who needed church and not saying everybody needs church I'm just like using that figuratively but like need they need a social group they need you know some sort of higher purpose they need uh something to look forward to you know he built that and he like marketed it in a way and provided content in a way that I don't want to say us where trick is a strong word but like convince people that that's what they were going for and really you know it's the old like you seduce them with candy and

then you switch it out for broccoli at the last minute so Squarespace has been a longtime partner of the show and what I love about it is it just demystifies everything about what's required to make a website you don't need to be a designer you don't need to know how to code everything is right at your fingertips they make it super simple and they've got these unbelievably beautiful templates to choose from that are oriented around whatever your needs may be whether you need a simple landing page or a full-on online shop snap cocle pop Squarespace

has the tools you need to launch your business including e-commerce templates and inventory management so make that website you got it click the link in the description below for a free trial and when you're ready to launch use offer code Rich Roll to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain the new year is upon us everybody's thinking about how to get healthier how to lose weight how to eat more nutritiously and we have the perfect solution for you it's called the plant power meal planner it is our digital platform that provides

literally thousands of plant-based recipes created by nutritionists and chefs that are easily customizable based on your preferences and your individual needs it's been a tremendous success for our audience it's also quite affordable like the price of uh Starbucks a week or something like that with grocery delivery with access to nutrition coaches and so much more and now for the holiday season we have a special offer for those of you who still have yet to explore the plant power meal planner right now you can get $20 off in annual membership when you use the code power

20 at checkout so it's a new year a new you and everybody needs inspiration in the kitchen the plant power meal planner is absolutely extraordinary in supporting you in achieving your health and fitness goals so to learn more and to sign up go to meals. roll.com and use code power20 for $20 off your annual [Music] membership if you were to like look directly to camera mhm and speak to the person who's feeling lost in their life right now or or without direction or feeling like they're lacking opportunity or skills or the mindset to achieve the

dreams or Ambitions that they have and um but they do have like a lot of free time and that free time is spent on YouTube and listening to podcasts and stuff like what's the lpus test for that person to to draw that distinction between somebody who who's offering advice who might not have their best interested heart versus somebody who's like this is good you should subscribe to this Channel and listen to this person like do you have like sort of rules or guidepost for trying to help that person uh who might not have the savviness

to make that distinction themselves I think ultimately it comes down to a couple kind of mental principles that you have to adhere to um develop a of questioning your own assumptions being willing to question the things that you're excited about or interested in um not putting anybody on a pedestal like nobody's going to save you nobody's got it all figured out uh and definitely don't listen to people who claim they're going to save you and claim they have have it all figured out cuz those people never do that's a good humoristic right there it's just

is like index for humility and also their relationship ship with like certainty versus versus like Nuance yes but I I should also note here too that like and this is something that I try to repeat quite often on my show is that even the biggest experts in the world like Nobel prize winning psychologist their [ __ ] gets like you know fails to replication all you were talking about this the other day like like so much of this stuff is like a coin toss it's crazy dude there are these massive meta anal of all of

the therapeutic modalities right CBT DBT ifb like psychodynamic everything like they've gone through dozens and dozens of therapeutic modalities going back decades a century they've run it through hundreds of studies tens of thousands of patients they've tracked who's benefited the most you know which therapeutic modality works best for which problems which one is most consistent which one is the easiest to implement almost all like the best ones come back with a 40% hit rate you know what a placebo hits at 30% mhm that's after 150 years of psychological research we've gone from 30% it's hardly

confidence inspiring 30% to 40% so it's well and and and betwix and between all of these modalities the real driver is just going to talk to somebody right like okay that can take many shapes and forms but but but that alone is the most important piece in the whole puzzle in fact they've actually in a lot of those meta analyses they compared various therapeutic modalities to simply talking to a friend and talking to a friend perform just as [Music] well when compared yeah in some cases it perform better than some of the therapies like a

lot of this is just to to come back to the point of like uh of humility like it it's we don't know and like I said you know at the top of the show I've believed a lot of dumb things in my life that got me here right and sometimes you got to go through some of those dumb beliefs or like a weird phase right to kind of like learn the lesson and get to the right spot so and you have to be allowed to do that without without like sort of having to weather judgment

or a bunch of people attacking you for it totally totally and I mean at this point you know I've been doing this about 15 years and I'm I'm sure you've gone through this as well like it's there are a lot of things that I wrote and published and like hung my hat on 8 10 years ago that like today I'm like oo no no well I mean to me yes of course right but to me like if you're not feeling that then you haven't grown at all right like you should that's that's appropriate like exact

that's the way it should be exactly so what is something that you've changed your mind on perhaps since your last your last book came out or the last time that we sat down recently it's hard for me to like place when certain beliefs changed but um I I can say one of the things and a lot of the beliefs change slowly but I I will say one of one of the biggest ones that has changed as time has gone on is I think early in my career I had a little bit of a naive belief

that with enough effort and focus and the right tools anybody can kind of change any aspect of themselves you know if you want to be a morning person if you want to change careers and go into this if you want to like stop having panic attacks and go do this and you know start a skydiving creat like all these things I think when I was younger I had a little bit of an idealistic belief about people's malleability and the power of personal development and uh and just discipline and hard work and I think as I've

gotten older and this is a combination of two things one is observing myself in my own [ __ ] thick skull over the last 15 years but also observing a lot of a lot of friends family fans audience members people I've coached and also just having a much better understanding of the scientific literature a very significant portion of our personalities is is genetic and and it's baked in mhm and it's a fact and to me this is actually a very liberating thing because I think like a lot of people don't like hearing this you know

they they don't like hearing like oh if you're an anxious person at 18 you're probably going to be an anxious person for the rest of your life not always but very likely they don't like hearing that but coming back to the surrender point you were making earlier to me this is actually liberating because it's I think when you believe that anything about yourself can and should be changed and made better there's an immense amount of pressure you put on yourself and then when you fail to make that change or when you don't get the progress

you're looking for you really beat yourself up about it Levy all kinds of self judgment on yourself exactly and I have found this realization a little bit free in the way of like this is who I am this is part of who I am right it's like the same way some people are born athletic or unathletic or with really great eyesight or terrible eyesight or you know with big feet or small feet or they can jump high or they can't jump high you know it's it's like some people are born anxious and they're unanxious and

and all the things that are like considered I guess bad you know like let's take anxiety stick with anxiety as an example you know we've kind of this industry RIT large has just decided anxiety's bad you shouldn't be anxious we should find ways to make you stop being anxious well anxious people they notice problems sooner they notice details better they're much more conscientious about their environment they can be much more observant of the people around them like there's a lot of benefits that come with high conscientiousness and neuroticism which is associated with anxiety like that

that like we don't think about we don't talk about well it's a survival mechanism like hypervigilance that is born out of probably you know being reared in a household or an environment that had aspects of it that were unsafe that that demanded that you be paying attention and that you kind of be in a state of fight or flight at all times for your own Survival it's just that later on in life you don't need that defense mechanism anymore it's hardwired into you and so the question then becomes like if it's chronic yes it's good

it has its advantages you are going to do all the things that you just said but in a chronic state it's going to impair your health and it's going to you know it's going to derail you in all kinds of different ways so how can you not just manage it but kind of unravel it and create new kind of neural Pathways by going into that you know whether it's ifs or like some other there's all kinds of modalities for doing that right a variety of them there is a way to maybe not completely graduate from

that state but to you can soften the edges and you can definitely yeah if it's a chronic thing that is debilitating in some way you can definitely bring it back from that you can soften it but it's never going to go away there's a certain amount of who you are like there's like a center of gravity right or there's like a gravitational level right like you can push it a little bit away you know you can make marginal differences but you're never going to go from like being a highly anxious person to just a non-anxious

person like that just it's very rare but I think your ability to um navigate personal change is improved when you kind of take ownership of your your kind of default state right like this is who I am and this is what I have to work with right I'm not going to change my eye color or you know suddenly get drafted into the NBA out of the blue but I can stop drinking I can lose 40 pounds you know I could do all these other things so I think I think it goes both ways like I

hear what you're saying but I also think people don't really acknowledge that there is more latitude than they might imagine in other areas of their life yeah 100% so it's like and this this it almost comes down to like which audience you're speaking to right like I if I think the self help industry as a whole probably overestimates how much could be changed and how much should be changed right and I think the non- self-help audience probably underestimates how much can be changed and how much should be changed uh it's interesting I heard a quote

from a psychiatrist once who said that uh somebody asked him about um overdiagnoses medication being overdiagnosed and he said you know we it's is this going to sound paradoxical but the population is simultaneously overdiagnosed and underdiagnosed and what he meant was he said said overall there is if you take the population of people who actually have a condition they are under diagnosed but if you take the overall population of everybody they are overdiagnosed and that's because the majority of people who are taking a medication they're taking it for something they probably shouldn't be taking it

for but the people who actually need the medication not enough of them are taking it so it's like yeah no it all comes down to who goes the psych there there's a yeah I mean there's a there's another kind of parall in this mental health context which is there's never been more awareness of mental health and that's such a good thing like we're acknowledging all of these kind of conditions and how they impact Us in variety of ways um and that gives us the ability to heal and grow and live more expanded right at the

same time there's an identity attachment to a lot of these diagnoses that are then kind of used or weaponized to say well I can't do that because I have this thing right or the world needs to accommodate me and I don't need to like try to address this because that's the responsibility of everybody else 100% so I I think this is a really good important distinction I'm glad you brought it up because it's the underlying thing might not be able to be changed but your attitude beliefs and behaviors around it can absolutely be changed so

it's like maybe the fundamental anxiety is not going to be changed but your reaction to it your beliefs about it your narratives that you tell yourself about it those can absolutely be changed and that by itself can make it totally livable right so I think there's a lot more of that like that's actually kind of the healthy version of self-help but it's not a sexy thing it's not nobody wants to hear that I get emails from people who uh who will say something like you know I'm in med school and I I hate all the

coursework and I can't focus and I don't want to study but I really want to be a doctor what should I do I'm like you don't want to be a doctor you don't want to be a doctor you don't want to be a doctor you're trying to convince yourself that you want something that you don't actually want exactly and they're like well no but maybe if I study more and I like just try harder and if I learn some productivity tips you know then maybe I'll start liking it I'm like no no no you don't

understand they they like the idea of being a doctor actually like what being a doctor is and so that that's a very practical example of just like this is who you are you are a person who doesn't like studying medicine so therefore you should probably not be a doctor yeah we kind of talked about this when I was on your show this idea of of like willingness like what are you willing to do right to achieve your goal and if you're not willing to do it maybe it's not the right goal for you yeah and

there's this Trope around willingness that I think creat a lot of confusion which is like we just be willing to be willing or something you know like like and it's like what is willingness like you can't compel anyone else or yourself to be willing to do something that you don't actually it's like asking somebody to want something that they don't actually want right willingness is like it's like a gift from God like if if if you're graced with some willingness to suddenly do something you ordinarily wouldn't want to do where does that come from it's

internally driven I don't know where it comes from but it's not something that you can just summon out of out of like grit or discipline I associate it with giving up like what are you willing to give up like a willingness to do something means you're okay with the cost and sacrifices involved and I think this idea that you should just be willing to do anything for your goal entally what you're saying is you're willing to give up everything for your goal and I think there's very few things in life that you will feel that

way about or that you should feel that way about like some goals you shouldn't be willing to give up everything so I don't know it's funny I uh I had a little I gave a little spiel about David gogin on my show a month ago and we like posted a little short it was funny cuz all the Goggins Fanboys came after me first of all I love David Goggins I'm like huge [ __ ] fan that dude like the amount of times I've been in the gym and like heard his voice in my head when

I'm like getting that last rep gonna carry the boats he's gonna carry the boats you know I I I love that he exists and I love what he does and I I think he's just he's an amazing influence but I also from an intellectual point of view I find him fascinating because there are millions of people like myself who admire the hell out of him yet I watch him I'm like I would never million years [ __ ] live like that like that is insane to me like the dude's like running out like broken feet

and like but he always to his credit he always says like don't do what I'm doing you know he's he's very quick to like tell people not to emulate him so I'm bringing this back to the willingness thing because I find his story interesting and I find his mindset interesting because it it's the lengths that he's gone to to to do the things that he's done you have to be willing to give up everything like you literally have to be willing to give up everything and and if you like read his books and learn his

story he did hit a point in his life where he kind of had nothing so [ __ ] it I might as well give up everything for this goal and I I feel like he's just kind of like stuck in that mode cuz like I look at my life right like when I was young I had nothing and when I started my first business I was like I've got nothing so I will literally give up everything I started working 16 hours a day I broke up with my girlfriend friend I moved in with my mom

like I literally gave up everything no social life nothing and then I built the business I wanted but that was easy because I didn't have anything I look at my life now like I start like trying to process this now got a mortgage I've got a wife I've got you know aging parents I've got a great group of friends I've got like very comfortable I have assets I I have like a really nice life there's actually a lot of [ __ ] I don't want to give up anymore you know well this is the Dilemma

of success and I think at the Crux of this is this idea that it's it's it listen willingness surrender all of these things it's easier when you have nothing to lose and you have nothing going on right like what's the big deal with surrender like you got like you're going to go back to the homeless shelter like it's like you know what I mean like what are we actually wagering here right and then as a result of that willingness that you demonstrated and that that depth of surrender where you just let go of like every

idea you thought would serve you and you know allowed yourself to be guided in a new and different way it's that energy and that sensibility and that commitment that delivered you to this place of success but what happens and I suffer from this is that when you arrive there then you convince yourself that it was you all along you're in the driver's seat you're in control and it's once again like self-will run Riot so yeah the self-will Run Riot is what created all the problems that led to me losing everything and having to surrender in

the first place and you get amnesia when you become successful because the ego starts to you know have free reign again you know and convinces you that uh you're a genius or whatever it is right and so it becomes more difficult then to be in that place of surrender because now you have a lot to wager right like letting go is a much trickier feat because you're like I don't want to let go like everything's really good right yeah and this is like where I'm at right now like I have to remember like what got

me here and what got me here wasn't my ego or anything else it was like being in that state and when I start to take it back that's like when it all begins to like crumble and go away anyway yeah so the more you hold on to it the less likely you are to be able to sustain it anyway and it's not yours to hold on to anyway and everything shifting and changing always yeah do you worry about that in the context of audience I try not to yeah I'm an athlete I'm competitive like I

look at the stuff and I'm like that [ __ ] guy and like why is this happening and you like you know and like how come this like I can you know I can be that person very easily and so I try to like immunize myself from from all of that because I have no control over it the only thing I have control over is like what's coming out of my mouth right now right and everything else is none of my business um but it is my business right this is like how I'm paying my

bills and obviously the better everything does then the the more people I can hire and the more you like you know all that kind of stuff that that comes with living in the modern world have you knowingly said something on air and put it out that you knew was going to lose audience like what was oh yeah definitely yeah yeah how is that for you that was uncomfortable like I I struggle with like giving too many [ __ ] about what other people think and and uh I want people to like me I'm a people

pleaser by nature and I'm not trying to like stir up controversy or put content out that's going to be divisive I want to put out content that's helpful and is Evergreen um but I've put out some stuff that I knew like oh well this is going to this is going to be polarizing um and it's going to it's going to definitely lead to a bunch of people like walking away from me but I I had conviction over you know my values around it and I feel fine about it it's fine yeah you know I don't

care about that I would say those have been the hardest points in my career it's only happened a few times um the last time was actually with Co I wrote a number of things about it super early on like late February early March like hey this is a thing like get ready blah blah blah and people are like dude you're the give a [ __ ] like why are you right I'm like cuz it's this is coming and nobody's talking about it I was like losing my mind so you were early in that I think

my first news well you went like so hold on a second you came to my house in 20 oh that was the year before 2019 yeah yeah cuz then you went to Australia and I was like you weren't in Australia when it started okay yeah no no but yeah that was that was one time by the way you're a big deal here in Australia you're it's a whole other level bro it's insane yeah they love you in Australia I'm excited I think I even texted you want cuz I went there a couple months after you

went there and it's just like every bookstore was just an entire wall of your books and like it's just like insane couldn't get away from it I'm actually going back plug for my speaking tour uh I I lied I said I wasn't going to plug anything I said I have nothing to promote I actually now that you bring it up rich uh I I have a speaking tour in Australia November I'm going to be speaking at the opera house so that gives you an idea like I I can barely fill uh you know a a

small nightclub here in in the States but I go down there and they give me the [ __ ] Opera so it's pretty [ __ ] good there isn't it yeah I love it I love it so yeah uh November 4th okay November 4th syney markmanson.net for tickets um that's cool the opera house that did you have you done that before no that's pretty cool no I actually I quit speaking a couple years ago um you know back to that whole if it's not fun I'm not going to do it uh and then my publicist

down there reached out and she was like you know we were thinking about putting together another tour for you your book's still number one everywhere and yeah I was like okay okay and then she mentioned the opera house I was like H your book is still number one there yeah as of like six months ago yeah four months God that's so crazy dude it's stupid is it just an abstraction for you at this point I mean yeah I don't even know it's still on the times list it's like three 328 weeks or something still it's

still this week I can't it's still on the first one subtle art is still on the New York Times best it's it's six and a half years if you add up all all the time it's been on the list it's like six and a half years wow yeah I don't know like honestly at this point I mean don't get me wrong I think it's a good book but like I think it it's probably it's simar like winning the lottery or something like I I look at it obviously I think it's a really good book I

don't think it's that much better than say you know your other average bestselling self-help book but just the the the result the magnitude of the result is just like so V like it's so insan James CLE is having a similar experience right now right have you have you guys gotten on the phone and talked about your your shared experience with this I mean his but how long how many years has has Atomic habits been up there I think he's at like 250 weeks or something so his book came out it's really interesting actually his book

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

he's doing all his speaking and stuff and he asked me he asked me a really good question was very smart of him he said uh because like I said I'm like kind of two years ahead on the same train you're like one of the only guys who could like give him grounded advice on this yeah and so he asked me he was like if you could go back two years ago what would you do differently and I was like I would say two things I'd say no to a lot more stuff and then two is

I would have spent more time on the second book I would have I wouldn't because I I think I remember you sharing that you you had to rush certain aspects of it yeah honestly I think looking back I think there was a little bit of a impostor syndrome going on you know the vity and the magnitude of the book success was just like so outside the realm of again anybody's expectations that there was a there was a big piece of me that was just like this is a fluke like this is this isn't going to

last right so let's let's just let's ride this wave while it's here which motivates you to say yes to everything because you think like you're having your 15 minutes orever so it resulted in like a scarcity mentality and I I started um yeah I just started saying yes to too much stuff and I mean the other thing too is is like the level of opportunities that show up are so much sexier like it's easy to say no to opportunities that aren't really opportunities but then it's like when things show up and they're like really sexy

and exciting uh it's really hard to say no you know it's like when a TV producer shows up and he's like I want to do a scripted series like based on your life you know like I want you involved and I'm like hey you know like how do you say no to that right especially when you're like a 30-year-old [ __ ] who hasn't done anything so it it's there was just a lot of stuff like that that I think I had to learn the hard way that it's it's a there's not most of the

time there's no there there it's just kind of empty calories and then B um you know I think I lost sight of of my own values and what I cared about and what got me into this business in the first place like what I love doing and the things I wanted to work on and you know my own ideas and my own you know the things that I was excited about so uh I lost track of that for a couple years and I'm proud of the second book I think it's a really great book there

are a lot of things I think that are actually better about the second book than the first one but um in hindsight I wish I had taken way more time with it and told people to [ __ ] off a little bit more yeah and maybe appreciated that you actually had more leverage than maybe you thought that you had given what had happened to like slow it down a little bit totally that that has been a lesson as well of like you know there's this transition that comes and I think every career you know early

in your career you have to say yes to everything and then there's a awkward transition at some point where you have to start learning how to say no what I didn't realize is that you skipped the awkward you went right from the no what I didn't realize is that there's another level above you where you know it's it's cuz like in Internet world like blog land i' gotten really good at saying no to you know you know this some random dude is launching his podcast wants me to me to be episode one I'm like right

that's different from like jump on my private jet and fly to schad and like hang out at this whatever with these people that you have heard of exactly exactly exactly um yeah so I'd like learned that lesson all over again and and yeah just being becoming more aware of my own leverage yeah just kind of standing up for myself being like yeah I don't want to do that um speaking of standing up for yourself uh you've been on this health journey in addition to quitting drinking you lost 40 lbs or is it more now if

you go from like Peak my wife my wife's Brazilian so we call it Peak Gordo uh if you go from Peak Gordo to now or the lowest I got which was maybe beginning of this year uh it's almost 60 it's about 55 pounds yeah wow yeah and the drinking was a huge part of that it was a huge part of that but it's honestly this comes back to the com compulsive conversation right like I learned in that process that I had a much more compulsive relationship with food than I thought I did yeah we don't

realize I think this is a human thing like the extent to which we use food to like medicate our emotional state and it's only like when youve okay I'm not drinking anymore now I have I have like a greater hyper awar Wess of like how I try to you know tampen my moods through various different things and so suddenly you're like I would have never thought that food and emotion had anything to do with each other until after I was sober for a while many years into sobriety and realize like I'm just using food in

the same way and it wasn't until I got super fat that I even thought about looking at that yeah that was honestly the hardest part the exercise the habits and everything I mean that's hard don't get me wrong like you know getting on a hiring a trainer and showing up every week and doing the thing like that's hard and it it takes work and but eventually you build those habits you find the thing that works for you you find the thing that you enjoy you find the your workout buddy or your your coach or whatever

like those things can all be kind of figured out within a few months and you can be on your way and I guess that kind of got me through the first phase like the maybe say the first 20 25 pounds but then I kind of got stuck and started having some rebounds you know would put a bunch of weight back on really quickly and and yeah it forced me to take a really hard look at the psychological side my relationship with food the emotions I was numbing uh for me it was a lot I had

a lot of Social and identity issues and this both with alcohol and food you know it was was a huge part of my social life both were a huge part of my social life both I kind of saw myself as the guy who's up for anything like yeah I'll eat Thai Indian like five-star restaurant you know street food whatever I'm up for anything you know I'm I'm easy I'm I like everything like it's like I was I kind of saw myself as that person and it was the same with the drinking it's like any party

I'm up for I'll be the first one there I'll be the last one to leave I'll dance all night yeah you want to do shots I'll do a shot with you like I was always that guy and I didn't realize I was that guy I didn't realize that that was like an identity that I had built at some point in my life and that I had to like kill that part of myself it's like you're not that guy anymore but that only came up once you hit that Plateau after 25 pounds and started rubber banding

a little bit and realizing like oh if I really want to do this there's a there's a bigger play here which is like my whole identity of who I am yeah this was like year three so um you know if if you you know I've tracked my weight now for six years and if you look at the chart you know it's kind of like this downward wave you know it's kind of like a a when the stock market's crashing like you know it's it goes down and then there's like Boop it bumps back up and

then it goes down again and it bumps back up and um so it's been a really long process but yeah the psychological stuff was the toughest and then I guess kind of the third phase cuz then that that I dropped probably another 15 20 pounds but even after that even after I lost 40 lbs I was still I was still like I think 27 28% body fat and I was stuck and I'm like okay I got the right habits I got you know I'm like I'm not drinking anymore I'm traveling way less I'm sleeping better

you know I'm doing all the things what the hell and it was at that point um I went and got a bunch of blood work done and it then I saw the damage like the the autopsy your LDL and your and all that kind of stuff my hormones were all [ __ ] up like it was ugly you know got a good functional medicine doctor start working with a clinic like changed a bunch of stuff like cut you cut even more out of the diet um and like got now the blood works good so yeah

and it's taken years yeah six six years like all good things five to six years yeah there's no shortcuts and it's still a struggle sometimes uhhuh what was the hardest sort of food thing that you had to overcome Burgers man burgers are good oh my God I love a burger honestly the sweets is it's not I'm not a huge sweets guy NE I can pass I can pass it's greasy stuff oh my God a good burger dude so as somebody who's like so steeped in Psychology and human behavior and you know you've studied all this

stuff you've written about it like what were the tools that you found most effective or perhaps least effective in your like quiver of all this stuff that you've been kind of simmering in for decades that was beneficial or perhaps not beneficial along this way because you're really you're putting it to the test basically you're trying to like walk your talk sure in a really hard way where you're very challenged I that's a great question I almost wish there was like a list and I would like give out like one to five star ratings for each

each t is a future video maybe each technique or tactic or whatever um if I was to do that the the five star thing is just Tracking not just tracking but gamifying it a little bit um first of all just the the the tracking one of the most impactful things and again this comes back to like the most impactful things are usually boring and the things that are not sexy and people don't like hearing them but like tracking every piece of food wait every morning every rep every workout how many steps every everything track all

of it all the time what happens is you know when you're compulsive with food like all compulsivity you you [ __ ] yourself you lie to yourself you make up stories you're like ah well I I worked really hard this morning so I deserve this this burger or uh like you know I I had a great workout so yeah I can have a little bit of cake tonight or whatever and it you know it's not that many calories when you track everything you're like okay first of all that workout no no getting around it yeah

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

go to the next layer which is like okay well let's said there's like some sort of wound or something going on and you know talk to some people about that and they're like well tell us about your child you got know all this [ __ ] about like what mom cooked and what she didn't cook and all this stuff and anyway after like a couple months I'm like this is completely pointless like I mean that there's no bottom to that rabbit hole you know and at some point it's like what's what's moving me forward you

know and it's like whether it's the burger whether I crave the burger cuz Mom never made burgers or because she brought McDonald's like it doesn't matter the Burger off the menu exactly like it so what are we going to put in place it doesn't [ __ ] matter so but yeah it it's honestly the keeping you honest with yourself uh and being conscious too um related I you know not everybody has to go have you done a glucose monitor I have yeah so that that was interesting just in noticing like how different foods affect me

differently and it was interesting my wife and I we did it at the same time time and it was like we'd both eat the same thing and then she would have a different completely different reaction yeah it's super interesting to do that I also noticed like what happens when I eat too late during like what what's my levels are like throughout the night when I'm asleep which is wild I think it's important to pair that with a lot of Education because the gamification aspect of it incentivizes you to like keep that thing flat all the

time which isn't which then in order to keep it flat you have to eat like high fatty foods and all these other things that actually aren't good for you so it can drive unhealthy food choices but I think just wear it for like 10 days or 14 days and just like wow look at that like you just you just see things that because it's not intuitive you know you wouldn't know that this is happening and the interesting thing for me too was days that I would feel lethargic or uh that I would need a na

have an afternoon crash or whatever um it helped me connect a lot of dots that way of like you're wearing a Garmin too I am wearing a gar legit yeah this is all real it's crazy you're wearing a Garin I know like when you came to my house in 2019 I was like I would not have imagined you wearing a gar no no that that was me that was probably close to my Peak weight I was a big boy yeah I mean I wouldn't say you look like an entirely different person because your hair is

different and stuff like that but like you look better man your skin looks better obviously your weight and all that kind of stuff but you just look you come across like you're more comfortable in your own skin yeah a lot of it is just being healthier like the it it pisses me off like this is this is one I think this is if there is anything that I've really [ __ ] up in my adult life in terms of this self personal development and everything like I've always been really good from a very young age

I was very interested in relationships I read tons of books and I got into psychology and I started going to therapy when I was like 20 and I did meditation Retreats like I've been all over all this stuff like the mental and the emotional side of it I've been all over it the physical side I was always a wreck and I and when I was young like most young people who have terrible physical habits I poo pooed it you know I would hear podcasts of people being like well you need to do this every morning

and blah blah blah it this is this is going to increase your mood and I was like ah [ __ ] that [ __ ] I was out drinking till 4:00 and I'm up at 8 and I'm grinding and I'm working and I feel fine and there was a little bit of like a Defiance in me and that works when you're 27 and have a insane metabolism but uh when I got to 37 it started having chest pains you know waking up cold sweats in the middle of the night you know like just going off

the rails healthwise I was like okay maybe I should look into this and then now that I've done it I'm like oh my God I feel so much better all the time I have so much energy I'm so much happier why didn't anybody tell me yeah yeah why did anybody tell me right where were you rich it's your authority issue is part that's part of the problem you know it's like it's it's these things that you know can be superpowers also become our greatest enemies you know what I mean and I don't know why it's

wired that way but it is yeah it's like these things that Propel us you know in this great Direction and then we become kind of overly enamored with that as a strategy and we become blind to kind of because every there's there's two sides all of these things always yeah the best thing about somebody is also the worst thing usually and that's definitely true in my case I I'm I hate being told what to do so um and that's that's most of My Success can be due to that and most of my failures can be

due to that well right it's that's the way it goes right it's sort of like uh you know I mean somebody like you know like take Lance Armstrong like seven tour to France titles also all of this other you know egregious behavior on there well why couldn't you just like win the titles without the it's like no these things cannot be they go they don't happen without each other you know I want to end on uh on some thoughts around like the nature of human habit change uh I spent a lot of time thinking about

this and I'm always curious like as some again like you're just marinating in this stuff so when you think about somebody who can successfully make a change maybe they just hear the information and they're like great got it and then they go do it and they improve their lives versus the person who struggles and struggles and struggles and I know there's no easy answer to this it's not a reductive thing but do you have any kind of thoughts on what differentiates those those two people why can some people change and and other people find it

so difficult that's a great question I have found I'm going to I'm going to make up a term here I found that some people seem to have have identity flexibility which what I mean by that is is some people seem to just naturally for whatever reason whether it's they grew up that way or they're born that way or they learned it at some point in their life they Define themselves very Loosely and they're comfortable with that looseness like they don't they don't get super attached to how they see themselves and I've noticed that a lot

of other people are very attached to how they see M themselves and their identity is very rigid they're like well this is who I am this is how I've always been and you know I can't change it you can't tell me to change it you know whatever I've just noticed that people with that identity flexibility it's much easier for them to kind of remove the Lego block from their their identity and replace it with a different one there's not as much friction for them there's not as much psychological I mean there's psychological Fallout for everybody

but there there's less for them and there's like a little bit of an alacrity to it and I actually I mean this is the biggest thing that I personally took from all my years studying Buddhism is is you know the central theme of Buddhism is that the the identity doesn't exist it's all an illusion it's all made up it's all just you're just you put these Lego blocks here and called it yourself and you can take those blocks away or get rid of him at any time you just forgot how or never learned how and

so that's my observation that's really insightful and I think that's right and it makes me think about what drives somebody to be so attached to how they see themselves in the world and what allows somebody to kind of be flexible and hold Loosely to that and what is behind attachment other than fear like we attach on to things to give us a sense of control and safety right so somebody who you know doesn't have that kind of fear is probably somebody who's more likely to kind of like let go and be in that allowing space

I would say that that's one reason it's I would say it's our identity attachments probably were created to fulfill our needs and one of those needs is survival so like probably the most rigid attachments are trauma related in some way it's like a defense mechanism to trauma and so you're just terrified of removing that piece of your identity because then everything's going to go wrong again but like I would say that there's a lot of identity attachments that are perfect you know it's like I'm very attached to my identity as a husband than my wife

you know and I probably should be right like I shouldn't be able to just throw that away at any time um so I like some identity attachment is good and and healthy but again I think it's just the the flexibility or or how glued together everything is um it's good to not hold on to those things too tightly yeah and do you think that that is teachable like the the letting go or the unclutching of these things that we hold on to in that way I do I do think it's teachable I do think it's

a skill I think serious meditation SL Buddhism you know not the silly five minute app you know those are fine you know the app meditations are fine but like serious introspection and meditation I think it gets at that I think really really good therapy gets at that I think journaling can get at that I think it's a skill that can be developed but I also think like like most skills some people have a talent like there there are some people who have a talent for it yeah I'll throw this in here too I've seen people

who are so good at it that it causes them problems because they're just like floating in the wind all the time from to next without any kind of yeah they're new person every other month and it's like whoever they're dating at the time right well it's the Spectrum right on both sides of these things I mean in truth yes like of course your identity as a husband and a father like you want to hold on to that but in reality you know back to this Buddhist idea our identity is just a story yes it's a

story We Tell ourselves and for the most part it's a story that was constru Ed unconsciously we didn't even participate in the construction of it it just sort of occurred and it's basically an assemblage of memories of experiences that our brain selects without our agency and decides these are important right yeah and it's like why is it choosing these like you've had billions of experiences and memories and and the brain is selecting these things and then creating a through line to create a narrative yeah right and and we're convinced that that narrative is the definition

of who we are and it's intractable yes when in truth we could pick another memory or we could say why or we could take that memory and put it to the test and say is that really true do we have other experiences that would challenge that like and I think it's sort of like tracking with you know diet and fitness like maybe and that's journaling but that's like journaling intentionally like let's deconstruct this story is there is there a possibility that there's a another story that's that's maybe more true or equally true and not for

nothing like our memories are highly unreliable they're just like prisms of like things that happen that like for the most part are so loosely related to any kind of like objective truth yeah and it's to bring it back to the I guess my story it took years of struggling with food and alcohol to even realized that I had that story of like oh I'm the fun party guy oh I'm up for any dinner or Afterparty or whatever oh yeah I'll do shots with you like I created that story probably in adolescence as a way to

get Social approval like that was one way for me I noticed that I could drink more than most people and handle my liquor and I could eat more most people and like feel fine and that made me easy to be around and fun to be around and so I did more of it and that story got written and I didn't even realize it got written and then when I was 40 I had to be like oh [ __ ] I got this story like I can't I can't be the dinner party guy anymore like I

got to be something else and then you know so you remove it and then I to to me there's a little bit of pain and grief with removing it like you you miss it kind of like you miss an old friend but then the hard part is like finding what's what can you put put in its place you know like what what's the new story I can write so going to have friends again right well what I would say yeah yeah I don't think it's like a it's like a vacuum that needs to be filled

I think I think it's more like the way that Richard Schwarz at internal family systems would look at it which is like uh this is one facet of your identity that developed when you were very young as a way of you know kind of feeling connected to other people in the world and now you can see you can give it a name like hey party guy char yeah right you were awesome like thank you like you you really helped me make friends and we had a lot of good times together but like I'm cool with

people now like I can go out and have fun and I get to decide when I want to do that and people seem to like me and and so you know you can settle down yeah I don't need you to like like I real like you're there and I love you you know but like you can kind of like ride in the back seat for a while and uh and like honor that part of who you are without like shame or guilt or judgment and just say like I've you know I've grown out of it

like I don't need I realize you were trying to protect me you had my best interest at heart but like now I have a different you know part of me that serves that in a way that's healthier yeah another way that I think about it sometimes too is our stories are strategies and you know Party Guy Mark was my strategy to get my Social needs met and now Party Guy Mark is gone so I need a new strategy that doesn't necessarily mean I need to like find a new identity it's just like I need to

find other things to do with people that doesn't involve drinking yeah and gets you to stop playing video games yeah yeah maybe play a few few are you good with like I I have a sense like my instinct is that you know something else that we share is like I I can be pretty reclusive yes you know like I'm at home I come here I go back home because this is my social life outside of my family and it's very nourishing like even though like we've done three p like other than these three podcasts and

like one dinner party that we were at together that is a sum total of our relationship yeah but like I feel like you're a friend and I think even like after that dinner it was like hey let's hang out and then and I was well- intended in that but like did I call you no did you call me no we never did anything together you know like I suck at that I don't know if you rely on your wife for social life but I I definitely do yeah I do but I I think I'm at

an age now where I need to be much more proactive about my friendships so I've been yeah I'm we're in the same boat dude we're the same boat we could be accountability buddies like let's let's hang out out of obligation as supposed to hey I have to go see rich rich our scheduled social time is coming up we have a play date can we bring a microphone ah [ __ ] all right all right this is unraveling I think we need to end this now so our our play date episode is is rapid thank you

for listening our we'll just bring we'll bring microphones but we won't attach them to our recorder just so we feel safe we'll just we'll just walk around the Venice boardwalk with like unattached sure mics boy oh man uh yeah maybe I need to go back to that therapist who used to be in your building all right we're ending this thanks buddy that was awesome thanks dude appreciate it cheers markmanson.net at the subtle art of not giving a [ __ ] podcast on YouTube and all the places right yep cool peace out all right thanks cheers

that's it for today thank you for listening I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation to learn more about today's guest including links and resources related to everything discussed today visit the episode page at Rich roll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive my my books Finding Ultra voicing change in the plant power way as well as the plant power meal planner at meals. Rich roll.com if you'd like to support the podcast the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple podcast on Spotify and on YouTube and

leave a review and or comment this show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast running wild and free to check out all their amazing offers head to Rich roll.com slss sponsors and sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful and finally for podcast updates special offers on books the meal planner and other subjects please subscribe to our newsletter which you can find on the footer of any page at Rich roll.com Today's show was produced and engineered

by Jason ciolo the video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistant by our creative director Dan Drake portraits by Davey Greenberg graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel siss and thank you Georgia Wy for copywriting and website management and of course our theme music was created by Tyler payot Trapper Patt and Harry mathys appreciate the love love the support see you back here soon peace plants namaste [Music] he [Music]