EPISODE #932 Great Relationships Start with You & Hard Truths Gary John Bishop

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. I'm filming today's episode from a different room than I normally do because I'm doing some construction at the main labs. We'll call it studio, whatever you want to call it, where I record the show, usually today's episode, as I promised, I'm going to tell you guys why you should listen before you listen so that you know it's worth your time. One of the biggest upgrades you can make in your life is upgrading your relationships. And this is one of the things you say. What do you mean, upgrading your relationships? There's a lot to it, and I wrote about some of this in Game Changers. You'll get the world's most successful people. They usually figured out a way to have a community or partner or partners that support them. So I thought, why not find an expert out here for us who's really, really strong and understands that. And our guest today is one of those guys. He doesn't believe that happy relationships come from the things that you might think they come from. He thinks that it isn't from 50, 50 effort. It's not from compromise. It's not from molding yourself into whatever your partner wants. It's about some hard truths. And I really, really like that perspective. So with no further ado, let's a conversation with Gary John Bishop, the New York Times bestselling author of the Unfucked book series and his urban philosophy. Welcome, Gary.

Awesome. Thanks for having me.

Dave, why do you go by Gary John Bishop instead of just Gary Bishop?

When you Google Gary Bishop, you get a mass murderer.

Oh, that's probably really bad for Mandy. When you Google for Asprey, you actually get extremely expensive jewelry in London, which is much better than a mass murderer. So that's probably for the best, right?

Yeah. So I've included one of my middle names in there just to kind of make sure I'm separate and distinct.

All right. And you are from Scotland, but you're a Floridian now. Why'd you move to Florida?

I used to be a musician, so, you know, I had to. You know, I made a few albums and toured a bit and had some fun doing that back in the heady days of the early 90s. And I just kind of ended up meeting someone and getting married, and here I am.

There's a question I've been dying to ask you and some of the Upgrade Collective members in our live audience want to ask you as well.

Yeah.

Is it possible that the entire unfucked series is bullshit. And it's just your accent that was the secret to relationships.

Well, maybe, maybe I'm not, not against the idea. There's nothing quite like getting told to get your shit together by Shrek. So, you know, I don't have a problem with it, but there is some good wisdom in there and some good philosophy. So if you, if you can include both, I think it tends to penetrate a little better.

I think you hit that one right on the head. And you're not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, but you look at ontology. Can you even talk about what ontology is?

Yeah. Ontology is the study of the nature of being. So you are a human being, and you're a very different human being to the one that was born. And you're very distinctly, you know, as a human being. And that kind of Persona, if you like, was produced as a result of certain things in your life. So what you're left with is basically default ways that you are, or in other words, default ways of being. And I'm fascinated by those. I'm captivated by them. And when you start to distinguish a human being through the lens of being, a lot of it makes sense. Like, it just makes sense. There's a logic to a human being that, that when you understand their ways of being, it's not challenging at all to understand.

So if that's ontology, which is a nature of being, you also look at phenomenology, which is phenomena different from the nature of being.

Right.

So where's all this coming from? That, like, this seems extremely cerebral. But your books are very readable. Right. So how did you get into this weird kind of, of esoteric stuff?

Well, it was, I mean, I started to work on myself, you know, 12, 15 years ago in some of the work. I did, some workshops I did, you know, reading. But, but it was around ontology. It was around that phenomenon. And, and it just got me into it. It got me fascinated by specifically those, those kind of windows of philosophy. They're fascinating, you know, and, and the more that I read and the more that I understood, you know, it really was an eye opening for me. Like, I started to make sense to myself and, and I could really connect with it for myself and other people. And so now it's just, you know, it's my passion. It's, it's, it's, you know, I love giving people something that might be philosophically deep but in a language that they can embrace fully. And I feel as if that's a big part of what I Do.

It's a good description. One of the big things you talk about is getting outside your head, which funny enough is one of the laws in my book Game Changers where I looked at 450 high performing people statistically analyze what they all do, or at least most of them do as best practices. And one of those happened to be get outside your head. What do you mean about how to get outside your head?

Yeah, so there are, there are a couple of things. So you got to start with the notion that you basically spend your entire life in the confines of your internal dialogue. So something some monologues like observational, sometimes it's back and forth with yourself. But I don't, I don't think many people really, really notice the nuances of that and that you're constantly shaping not only your own experience, but you know, without being too woo woo, but your own reality. Right. I mean you, you're in a situation, yet it's different for all of us than what's shaping my experience. And so I want people to start noticing some of those loops. So some of those default ways that continually come up that are sometimes hard to track because we're so entranced by the notion that we're circumstantial, that there's circumstances. And this is why I am not like I'm on autopilot and it's getting applied to every situation or circumstance that I walk into. So that growing awareness to me is the beginnings of really start to get out of your head and get into some kind of life that you're more attracted to or drawn to.

So someone's listening to the show right now and they're thinking, oh man, I might be inside my head, but I don't know what ontology or phenomenology is. What do I do right now to get outside my head?

Yeah, I think you have to first look at the areas of your life that you feel as if don't work as well as they can do and zero in on those because there's something at play that goes beyond the circumstance. You know, we all use the term like, you know, a self limiting belief, but you actually don't know what your self limiting beliefs are. You live them, you are them. So if you look at an area of your life that's not working, you'll see there's a certain way that you are there. It's given by some fundamental view of what you're engaging with. And so all your answers are coming from that view, that perspective, if you like. So that's when I start, people on that pathway of you got to question your own wisdom. You got to question what you've come to believe to be true. Not necessarily so that you don't believe it anymore, but actually to start a question that there could be, in fact, other views, other aspects, other ways for you to engage with this area of your life. You know, a lot of your stuckness in life comes from a very distinct place.

There's a lot of biohackers out there who are doing breath work. Like holotropic breath work. Helped me a lot in the early days to literally get outside my head because you're floating around in the room or they're doing, you know, mushrooms or LSD microdosing or, you know, a bunch of different drumming and all those sorts of things. How much does your definition of get outside your head to improve your relationship revolve around those kinds of practices?

And none of those practices. But I think if you engaged with some of the stuff that I say, that you'd actually get a pathway for yourself whether you're doing those things or not.

They're not necessary.

No, no. It's a growing sense and awareness of not only who you've become, but why you've become in the impact of all of that. Like, how is that playing out in your life? And it's not just your junk. It includes, like, what you've come to believe. Like I said, come to believe to be true or what's possible. You'll see that you're constantly bumping up against what you've come to believe.

So we all have, at least in my view of reality, a lens that we see the world through. And the lens is colored by your time in the womb and by early childhood experiences and all this stuff we saw our parents do and then whatever happened. Time we asked someone on a date and all sorts of bullies and just weird crap.

Right.

When people are finally done getting outside their head and looking past that lens, what's usually left?

I think that's a brilliant question. I think if you can see your Persona and what it does, you'll be in the presence of nothing.

What was the single biggest. Well, I'm gonna say flaw in your lens that you've discovered in your own life. Like, what was one thing in your relationship that you thought was absolutely true that turned out to be total bs?

That who I am is defined by how hard I work. Like, I come to relate to myself as this kind of guy, and I realized I'm not necessarily that guy. Like I could be that guy. And I, in many ways and by default. But what I really started to get fascinated by was, okay, and what else? Like, you know what? How can I play with us? How can I experiment with us? How can I explore my own human beingness from this place? And that's been a lot of what I. What I want to talk about.

So if you're not defined by working really hard, what are you defined by?

Well, most people are defined by how they feel in any given moment. So I don't. I don't define myself by that. Like, I feel lots of different ways. Some of them are empowering, some of them aren't empowering. Some of them I prefer, Some of them I don't. And I also. There's a lot of ways that I feel that I have literally no say in it. Like, you know, I find myself irritated. You know, I'm not somebody who's like, let me get some irritation on today, right? Go into the world and get pissed off at people or something. But that happens. So what it comes down to is that I fully embrace all that's here, and then everything else is just a function of my willingness to intervene with that and express something new about this that I've never quite expressed yet.

Okay, you have a gift for words because you're an author like me, and you have only one sentence to define yourself. What would it be?

Compassion and honesty. Whether you like it or not.

There you go. I like that a lot. So after you work through a lot of your garbage and you stopped doing that, which is the title of your other book, that's what you're left with, which is. Which is really cool. All right, let's get into relationships. I want to know a little bit about you, because when people are going to take relationship advice from you, they know what kind of a guy you are. So say you're pretty solid. And there's three parties in a relationship, and I'm not talking about those throuples or anything like that. What are the three parties in a relationship? The way you talk about them.

So there's you, there's the other person, and then there's this third item called the relationship, which is not you nor them. And that part, after a while, tends to get pushed aside. It becomes like this game of observation between you and the other person, how they're doing, how you're doing. They could be doing better, I could be doing better. But there's no one really tending, what is it that keeps this thing going? Like, what is it and again, we tend to rely on maybe how someone looks or maybe some behavioral characteristic or perhaps you know, again, how you feel. Right. Which is not always consistent in a relationship. Right. Like if you, if you've been married to someone for two years or 20 years, there's usually a difference in how you feel between those two poles. Right. You don't, you're usually not wallowing in the same stuff. 10 years, 15 years, it's different stuff. So, yeah, I'm somebody who like starts to. When you, when you take it apart. I notice that my relationship works. When I work on my relationship, which sometimes isn't always doing exactly what my partner wants me to do or how my partner wants me to be. But I really see it as a. Like, that's my responsibility to tend and make sure that this union is a strong one.

In my, my last book on fasting, I, I made the analogy of the human body is not really a real thing. In that during the course of this interview you shed some cells, you made some new ones. So you're really more like an eddy going through matter. It's just a slow moving Eddie that you can't really see because you identify as the Eddie. Right. All the carbon in you won't be there next year. So a relationship is pretty much the same thing because there's all sorts of inputs to the relationship and it changes constantly over time. So you can look at that as a separate thing from either person. How many people actually do that or do most people identify as their relationship?

Well, you know, there's a reason why you persist. Like, what is it that persists about this phenomenon called you? What causes it to move from one moment to the next? Like, how come you wake up tomorrow as you. Like what? Like why come you can't wake up tomorrow as somebody else? Right. But you always wake up as you. And it's a chain of language. Like you persist in language, moment to moment to moment to moment to moment. And so does your relationship. So very often you'll find people want to work on what's broken, what doesn't work. Let's work on what doesn't work. Now that can be fine, but that can end up becoming base camp. So now what? The only thing we talk about is what doesn't work, which goes from moment to moment to moment to moment to moment. Therefore, nothing's getting. There's no life getting breathed into this thing. There's no context for empowerment in it. And it's critical to keep your eye on that stuff. You must have your eye on what's going on between you and I. And as I like to say, one of the things that's important to me as a human being is this is love. Like, it's important to me. I started to really realize that that's my job. And I'd spent a lot of time waiting for somebody else to deliver it. You know, a lot of time in my life waiting for somebody to provide, show me the love. Right? Even say that. And I got that. No one, I got to express it. I got to actually bring it to the table because it's important to me. And so that was part of the shift when I started to really get my ability to shift and move and influence not only the quality of my life, but the quality of my relationships.

What's the best way to blame your partner?

Just be right.

You what?

Just be right. Just be right. You know I'm right.

Just be right.

Yeah, I'm right.

You doubled down on that one, didn't you? So what's the role of blame in relationships?

You know, I think part of the deal is with relationships, you know, you can't help but manifest your past and your relationships. You can. It's coming up. The more you can identify it and always.