The Secret To Happiness That No One Tells You | Mark Manson

And I think this is a problem with a lot of people who are very unhealthy. My idea of a healthy meal was just anything with a vegetable in it. When I drank tonight, I only had two drinks instead of five, so that's healthy. So, you know, it's just like your definition. I only had half a pizza instead.

Of a whole pizza. Exactly. Hey, Marcus, so great to have you on the Doctors Pharmacy podcast and see you again. It's been a while, and you've gone through some massive life changes. Pretty amazing. And, you know, for those of you who don't know Mark, he kind of at 32 hit this wild success point, writing this book called the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, which stirred up a lot of controversy. It was hard to get published with that title. And I actually wanted to write a book called what the Fuck Should I Eat? But they wouldn't let me. They made me call it what the Heck Should I Eat? So the whole premise of your work has really been, sort of contrary to a lot of what generally has been out there around self-development, self-help, what we believe about ourselves, how we live our lives, how we think about creating a vision for our lives. And it's really, you know, I just trying to understand the origins of this because, you know, looking back to your history, you were a young kid, you were kind of struggling, you kind of had a blog, you were learning how to kind of deal with women and, you know, part of this whole pickup artist scene that was kind of, it's kind of a strange scene. Sure. And you kind of morphed into kind of an awakening that allowed you to kind of think about how to be happy without focusing on being happy or something like that.

So, the way I would, if I had to give an elevator pitch for my philosophy or my work, it would essentially be that I felt very strongly, say 15 years ago, that the Personal development, self-help industry over indexed for positivity. It was all about feeling good all the time. And I think it began the mistake that feeling good meant you were feeling better, whereas you can easily delude yourself in the feeling good when you're actually not better, you're actually worse. And so I strongly believe, and I've strongly felt my entire life, that getting better means getting more honest. getting more honest about yourself, getting more honest about the world, getting more honest about your relationships. And getting honest is not always does not always feel good.

No, it's not always easy.

It's not always easy. In the short term, it often hurts, but in the long term, it makes both you, other people and everybody better. So, that's like the crux of my philosophy.

Don't lie to yourself for others.

Yeah, just don't, don't Just try, don't lie to yourself. And I think I have a line in one of my books that it's like self-improvement is just a constant process of lying to yourself less. And we all lie to ourselves. We all bullshit ourselves. We all buy into beliefs and stories that make ourselves feel better. It's just human nature, it's part of it. And so I kind of see, I'm on this constant crusade to Not lie. To fight that back, yeah.

You know, what you're saying is so important, it's so true. And the most pernicious lies are the ones we tell to ourselves.

Yes.

The fact that we can't look honestly at ourselves, look in the mirror at our behaviors, our choices, our thinking, not question our thoughts. I mean, it's really remarkable how locked into lying our society is. It's just a continuous parade of lies to ourselves and others. without realizing the consequences to our happiness and our well-being. I have a friend, Lauren Zander, who basically is a life coach, started the Hendel Group, and she really helped me kind of stop being a liar.

It's hard.

It's really freaking hard.

I think it was the Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. He said, As a species, we did not evolve to perceive truth. We evolved to perceive what helped us survive.

Yeah.

And so on a very fundamental basis, our brain lies to us.

Yeah.

Because it helps us survive and reproduce. But it doesn't make us psychologically healthy.

No.

So, you know, it's interesting. I've kind of reading this book, which is literally opposite of what you're talking about. It's called 48 Rules of Power, which is basically looking historically at societies and cultures that have had to deal with intrigue and courtesans and hierarchy and monarchies and currying favor and rising up in the ranks. It's from Machiavelli, who knows who. And it's fascinating because there is something to be said for understanding human nature and how to work with human nature. The book's not about power over people. It's about how to not be powerless in your life and understand how people and humans actually engage most of the time. But one of the things that struck me when I first met you was story that your wife told when I said, so how did you guys meet? How did you fall in love? What's your story? You know, we had dinner in New York. And Fernanda, your wife, was, was, you call her Faye, I guess, was, was, said something really striking to me. She says, well, he was like the first honest man I'd ever met. And, and he was honest. When he was honest with me, it was what I didn't want to hear. It was something that I was like, you know, I wanted to hang out and be together. And he was like, I'm out of here. I'm in New York and I don't know, this is my life and I'm not sure. And like, we'll see how it goes. And I was like, wow, you know, that's sexy.

Yeah.

You know, and that's a very different tact than we normally take. Like the whole pickup artist thing is the opposite of that. It's more Machiavellian. How do you kind of contort yourself and shape yourself into somebody or something in the way you look and the way you speak and how you talk.

To people to get what you want out of somebody. That's, there's actually, yeah, there's a really nice connection between all those things. because the pickup artist community industry, it optimizes for power. And optimizing for power means you're not optimizing for healthy relationships and you're not optimizing for happiness. And you're often being dishonest in the process. Whereas my belief very fundamentally in that industry, I just felt very disgusted by the whole thing. And I was like, you know, Being honest, maybe it doesn't always get you the girl you want, but the ones you get, you end up being so much happier with them. And it ends up being such a better relationship. And you actually are compatible with each other and she actually understands you and you actually understand her. But going through that process, it isn't always pleasant. The example I often use in talks is that it's, you know, when I started dating my wife, you know, like most women, she would, we'd be going out for a date night or whatever, and she'd put on an outfit and.

She'D walk out and she'd be like.

How do I look? And you're like, you don't look good in that outfit. Exactly.

I would tell her that. And she would get so pissed off.

But don't ask me. But it's funny because it's, you know, early in our relationship, she really hated that. And she was like, why do you have to, like, can't you just lie and say, like, I look great? And I was, I was like, no, I'm not gonna do that. But now it's, if she walks out and we're about to go out and she looks amazing, and I tell her, you look amazing tonight. She absolutely gorgeous. She knows I'm being honest. She knows I'm not bullshitting her, right? And so it's like that compliment hits, you know, 10 times as hard. And so I just think that, like, that's just a fundamental aspect of life that, like, you can't really fully appreciate or enjoy the good things in life without being honest and open to the bad things.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's, we're often afraid of the outcome. I know for me, you know, as a kid and my stepfather was a rageaholic. I mean, I don't know if I've told this on the podcast, I might have, but I was like, my mother married, my stepfather moved to Canada, I was seven years old and he was like a clean freak. And back in those days, in the 60s, back then, I'm really old, sorry. We didn't have those kitchen sink, you know, you know, garberrators or whatever you call them, disposals. And so I had to throw out some soup and the way we would do it is throw it down the toilet. And my mom said, go take this pot of whatever leftover soup and throw it down the toilet. And so I went in there and I threw it down the toilet. I flushed the toilet. I came out, he was standing there. He was like big barrel chested guy, booming voice. He was like, did you wash your hands? And I'm like, no. Because I didn't go to the bathroom. And he went into a rage and he threw me against the wall. Literally threw me across the room. like almost like a football smash against the wall. It was the most terrifying experience, a little seven year old kid. I was really little. I'm not like six foot three now, but I was like a little shrimpy kid. And then my mother, sort of in order to keep the peace, would always say to me, Don't tell your father this. Don't tell your... And my grandmother would do it, she'd say, I give you $5. Don't tell your mother I gave you $5. So it was like this embedded thing growing up in order to manage people's emotions and not have to deal with the effects on you. In other words, their reaction, which you can't control. Don't tell them the truth, manipulate them to try to keep the peace. And I became a people pleaser, which is a liar.

Yes, right? Absolutely.

It's just being a liar. I'm a nice guy, I'm helping everybody, I'm saying yes. I'm like, no, I'm just a liar to myself because I don't want to do this friggin thing. I'm a liar to whoever I'm talking to. And it was really embedded in sort of who I was. and unlearning that was not easy. And for you, I'm wondering, how did you get that epiphany where you were like, this isn't the way to go? Because you went from basically being trained in how to lie by one culture to flipping to going, I'm going to be involved in radical honesty.

Well, it's interesting because I think my childhood was kind of the inversion of yours. I grew up in a dysfunctional family of People pleasers. So... People pleasers? Yes. So both of my parents are extremely non-confrontational. Both my parents are people pleasers. And there would be situations in my house when I was a kid where it was like, clearly mom is pissed off at dad and clearly dad can't stand mom, but nobody's saying anything. Everybody's just smiling. You can smell it in the air. Everybody's smiling and pretending everything's okay. And the amount of tension and discomfort that there was, And so I became, and this is, my dad has told me this much later, but, you know, I became the truth sayer in the family. So I would be the one in the family who would walk into the room and be like, you're that little shit disturber. Yeah, I was like, why are you mad? Like, why are you mad at her? I'm not mad.

I'm not mad.

I don't know what you're talking about. I'm like, no, clearly you're mad. You're not talking to her. You know, so I would be the one who'd stir up all this shit. And I think, you know, as a kid, I was trying to adapt to, my family, like keep my family together and functioning.

That's existential because if you're a kid and your survival depends on these two grown-ups and they're a shit show who.

Are burying their heads in the sand and ignoring everything. So it was a survival mechanism, but I think it has served me well. I mean, essentially my career is being that truth sayer of being going into the pickup industry and being like, hey guys, you're a bunch of manipulative fucks. Like, you need to be honest. Like, not only is this, this, like, questionably unethical, but, like, you. If you want to ever have a happy, healthy relationship and not be a raging misogynist, like, you need to start being honest with women.

Right?

And I went to the self-help industry, and I'm like, guys, you can't. It's not gonna be unicorns and rainbows all the time. Like, I don't care how many meditations you do or, like, how much as you say.

Yeah.

How much you microdose? Like, life's gonna suck sometimes, and we should.

Actually be honest about that.

And, even in the full Lotus position.

It still fucking sucks. So, you know, it's like that's essentially what I get paid for.

But, you know, the truth is that, like, life for all of us has its moments.

Yes.

You know, ups and downs, joys, peaks and valleys. And you're not saying it's not about having all of that. You're just saying, like, just don't pretend that everything is perfect all the time and deny yourself the experience of reality, which actually is kind of better. I had a friend once when I was in college and we were walking along in this beautiful country road and she says, Mark, sometimes you're happy and the rest of the time you're growing.

That's a nice way to put it.

And I'm like, oh, okay. And you know, the lying thing is so key. I really did that consciously and unconsciously in all my relationships until the last one. And literally the first I was so committed after my last divorce to kind of really get honest. And when I met my current wife, I literally day one, I just said everything. I'm like, yeah, here's who I am, here's what I got, here's what I don't got, here's what's not working, here's my crazies, here's my family, here's all the skeletons. This is just what it is. Here it all is. Take it or leave it. Just let you know. And good thing is she stuck around. And she knows that I'm straight. And it's a, It's such a relief because I don't have to pretend anything.

Well, the way I talked about it in my dating book is I said that what it does is it polarizes responses. So what most people do when they date is they try to be middle of the road in everything. They try to never have a controversial opinion because they want everybody they date to like them. But because they don't have anything that stands out or that is exceptional or unique about them, they don't develop strong attraction with anybody that they go out with. Whereas when you introduce honesty like you did with your current wife and you lay everything out on the table. And it's vulnerable. It's completely vulnerable and what you do is you polarize the reaction. So a certain percentage of women are gonna look at what you laid out on the table and they're like, Ooh, that's not. I'm outta here. That's not for me. I'm outta here. Thanks, but no thanks. But a small percentage of women are gonna be like, oh wow, no, this is exactly what I want. And so then the attraction actually becomes so much stronger and it's a very authentic attraction. You're not trying to, there's no gamesmanship, there's no one-upping, there's no, you know, people pleasing.

Yeah, so you kind of recognize this in your late 20s and you kind of woke up to kind of the bullshit that you were living in your life.

And.

You started to kind of just write this blog and it kind of took off and a lot of people resonated with this message, which was sort of counterintuitive. But you've been extremely successful doing it and have helped a lot of people think differently about how to look at making their lives better in a kind of a contrary way. I kind of followed your trajectory and being young and having that much success can kind of fuck with your head a little bit.

Yeah, for sure.

And you went through a period of burnout. You kind of had this kind of meteoric rise. Everybody on the planet was reading your book. I was actually very mad because I would walk into every airport and see it everywhere. And when I was writing my, you know, 50 New York Times bestsellers, like just struggling to get them to stay on the list. And I'm like, what's going on with this guy? And then, and yet, there was a dark side to it for you.

Sure.

Um, and, you know, you got unhealthy, you weren't taking care of yourself. You were living life that, you know, wasn't actually what you wanted. and I wonder kind of what it took for you to kind of look at yourself and see where you were kind of asleep and maybe even sort of lying to yourself about what was going on.

Yeah, so there's two aspects to this. There's kind of like the professional side of it and then there's like the health side of it. I'll start with the professional. We can go into that.

Yeah, I want to get to the health side.

So, because they are very related. so on the professional side, I think it was just too much too fast. You know, like, I think our, the way our brains seem to function is like, we, we tend to feel best. Like, I think most people, if they get a 10 raise each year, you know, they're like, oh, that was a good year, you know? And if it's 20 or 25, like, wow, this is a really good year. You know, you went from living your.

Mom'S house to being in a penthouse in New York, right? Right.

And when it, when it's 10,000 in one year, your brain just kind of explodes. Like, you don't really know. It takes multiple years for your brain, your identity to catch up to the reality of like, okay, this has happened. And I think the result is a lot of things, you know, like imposter syndrome, insecurity, you know, I definitely kind of felt like, okay, this thing just really took off like a rocket. I don't totally understand why this might be my 15 minutes. So let me just say yes to everything. because I'm young, I don't have kids, like, what else am I going to do? So I did say yes to everything and I ended up burning myself out. I ended up doing a lot of things that like I didn't totally love doing.

So you were lying and you were saying yes and you meant no.

Exactly. I did not. I was not aware of my it's ironic because all these things are in the book itself. I lost sight of my own values and what I cared about. Yeah. And I didn't know what to not give a fuck about. And so I started saying yes to everything. I started people pleasing within the company.

You started giving a fuck.

I gave too many fucks. And it got me into a lot of trouble. So that was kind of the professional side. And I burnt myself out and I ended up reaching a point where I'm like, you know what? I really just need to stop everything for a while and get back in touch with myself and what I want to do and what I enjoy doing and what I care about. So that was kind of a wild ride professionally. On kind of like a personal side and a health side, I think what, you know, there's this question that people ask all the time is like, does money change you? And I don't think money changes you. What money does is it takes the guardrails off who you already are. So if you have self-destructive tendencies, But you're kind of broke or you depend on a corporate job and you need to make your boss happy. Those are guardrails that kind of like maybe keep you a little bit in line because there's really bad repercussions if you get out of line. As soon as a bunch of money falls on you, it's like those guardrails are gone. You can kind of do whatever you want. I had a lot of bad habits, bad lifestyle habits, some self-destructive tendencies, and It like the guardrails were gone. And so I got started going out all the time, ate all the things, drank almost all the time, traveled way too much, partied way too much. And like, don't get me wrong, some of that I don't. There's a certain amount of that I don't regret. But I think the thing was, is that I lost control and back to the lying thing I was lying to myself about. not being in control about it. So I became extremely unhealthy and I actually hit a point, I was writing two books in 2018, was it 2018? Yeah, 2018. I was writing two books simultaneously.

Everything's Fucked and the Will Smith Book.

Yeah, which I don't ever recommend doing.

Doing two books at once or writing somebody else's book?

Doing two books at once. And I had speaking tours, I was just overloaded, I was incredibly unhealthy, I gained a ton of weight, I was drinking all the time, and I was sitting in my office writing one day and I started getting chest pains and my family has a long history of heart disease. And so I was like, I'm 35. I can't be having, like, this can't be happening now.

I can't be having heart disease.

Yeah.

I'm like, this is too early. Like, this is too soon. And so I went to some doctors, I got tests, you know, it turned out everything was fine. But, you know, the doctor, being a good doctor, was like, you know, have you been stressed lately? Like, what are your lifestyle habits like? And he kind of just gave me a wake up call. Like, he was like, you know, this, the trajectory you're on is, like, not a good one, right? Especially given your family history.

Yeah.

And so I, I, I had a little bit of a wake up call around my health and, and realizing that, like, I need to get this figured out because it's like, There is a lot of stuff in my family. I ended up doing a genetic test, discovered I have hemochromatosis. I have a double E4 gene.

Oh.

The APOE4.

E4, that's an Alzheimer's risk gene, yeah. Yeah, so it's like... And hemochromatosis is where you store too much iron. It can over time just basically cause all your organs to rust, so it's not a good thing.

No, no, it's not. And then at that point, I got a bunch of blood work done as well. you know, I was like pre-diabetic I was like massively overweight. I think I was like 42% body fat or something like that.

Men should be 10 to 20.

Yeah. Yeah.

So just for those listening.

Yeah.

So I was, I was a train wreck. And so that, that started a long, a long process of kind of like getting my, my together health wise.

And what was that like for you? Because all of a sudden you kind of, you know, had a set of beliefs. You had to change, you know?

Yeah.

And changing beliefs is not hard. And part of your work is really about how do we look at our beliefs?

Yes.

And see where they're leading us. Because our beliefs are the things that make us make the choices we make.

Right.

And believe it and do the things we do and act the way we act. And they're often interrupted, interrupting the values we have. So totally our beliefs and values don't.

Always kind of lie. It, the hardest part. was not only did I have, I guess, bad beliefs or inaccurate beliefs around health, I was also unaware of how bad or inaccurate my beliefs were. And I think this is something that.

Like — Tim Ferriss: you: could have called me, Mark.

I should have. Well, I didn't know you at that point, but in hindsight, I should have. I think looking back, and I think this is a problem with a lot of people who are very unhealthy and that they struggle with to get healthy is that their baseline understanding of what is healthy is just completely skewed or off, right? So it's like my idea of a healthy meal was just anything with a vegetable in it. In my head, I was like, well, I ate a salad for dinner, even though that salad had probably 1500 calories, right? But in my head, I didn't understand anything about calories. I didn't understand anything about macros. All I understood was I ate a salad, so that's healthy. and, you know, when I drank tonight, I only had two drinks instead of five, so that's healthy. So, like, it. So, you know, it's just like your definition.

Like, half a pizza instead of a whole pizza.

Exactly. So it's. It's. It. A lot of it is just, like, a very skewed expectation of, like, or understanding of, like, just what is healthy in the first place.

Yeah.

And it's. And it's hard to, you know, like, I grew up in Texas. I grew up... Bubba's and barbecue. Bubba's and barbecue, fast food every other night. Like, you know, so in my head, I'm like looking at the people I grew up with and the people in my family.

I'm like, well, I'm healthier than that person. Like... Well, that person was only 450 pounds.

I'm like, oh, 350. So I must be a good idea. It's exactly what it is, right? And it was the same with the drinking too. It's like, well, you know, my friend over there is like face down in a ditch and I'm still like standing upright. So I'm like, I'm not that bad, right? so a lot of it is just like, what is your reference point? And my reference points were so bad that I, again, I lied to myself. It made it easy to lie to myself and be like, well, I'm being healthy.

Right.

So I, you know, initially, I, I, I kind of, like, I did, like, the half-assed uneducated version of getting in shape, you know, started going to the gym, started eating 1500 calorie salads, started having three drinks instead of five.

Yeah.

You know, and that I lost like five or £10 or whatever, but like, and then I plateaued and I got stuck. And of course I like felt completely lost and like, I don't understand. Why am I like, why am I not losing more weight? I'm being healthy. So there was there was definitely a there was there was early on there there needed to be like an education process in terms of just getting good reference points.

How did you get there?

I eventually, so a friend of mine, actually a friend of a friend is a health coach. And so they connected me to him and he just, I mean, he just told me the blatantly obvious, which is, he'd be like, so take me through your weekend. What did you do? What did you eat? What did you drink? And I went through everything and he was like, okay, well, yeah, that's not healthy. What was on the salad? Yeah, that's not healthy, dude. That's not a healthy meal. So he kind of set me straight with that. The other thing he did is, which was huge, was he got me tracking.

Yeah, sure.

And it's coming back to the line thing.

Right, the can't live without, I ate 14 cookies from the OreO package.

Yeah, you're like, well, this has protein, I think it's healthy. And then you load it into your macro tracker and you're like, oh my God, what did I do? So tracking was a huge part of it.

So support, tracking, accountability. Getting basic, basic fundamental knowledge that you might not have had that you think, you know, you know, most of us, you're educated, you went to college, you think it should be kind of common sense and common knowledge, but most people have no clue about what it takes to create health.

It is... I mean, I don't envy you in your industry because I think the message that gets to people ends up so skewed. Like, I think the message that gets to people is like, I gotta do this crazy diet, I gotta like, work out six times a week. I gotta like, you know, hire all these people and do all these things. And it's actually, there's just some like very fundamental basic things that if you do them every single day, it's just consistency. Yeah. That it kind of like 80% of it takes care of itself.

And, and you lost 65 pounds.

So, yeah, I mean, it was, it was, that was over five years. So it was fits and starts and.

You know, and knows epic.

So that's and rebounds and then, you know, back again. And so the thing I tell people, because, you know, people always ask me, they're like, oh, what did you do as if I did one thing? And it I will say that the struggle, the biggest struggle is the mental side. It's it's the knowing when I was bullshitting myself, knowing when I was deluding myself, knowing, you know, knowing when I was cutting corners and being honest with myself about that and then trying to understand why I was doing those things. Like, why was I lying to myself so I could eat more pizza?

And did you have a process for that? Because, you know, most of us have extremely thick armor against being able to kind of have insight about our own behavior, our own lies, and our own self-deceptions. It's very hard to kind of turn the mirror on yourself.

Yeah.

How did you do that?

Again, accountability is huge. you know, having some sort of coach or trainer or- Electric shock collar. Shock collar partner, you know, it's like, I gotta give credit to my wife. Like, she's much better about the food side of things than I am. And there are many, many times where she was like, you realize that's not healthy, right? You know what I'm like, ah, come on. It's got some green in it.

Like, you know, it's mint chocolate chip ice cream.

It's green. It's green. There must be a vegetable. Mint's a vegetable, right? so, like, you know, and then, then I'd load it up into the tracker, and, you know, it's way more about systems than it is willpower. Like, if you're relying on willpower, you're just kind of. Because willpower is, is, it's very finite, and it comes and goes. And. But if you have the systems in place, you know, it's like, if you're, if the only groceries that are showing up to the house are, like, good ingredients, right? Like, if. the meals that you have planned for the week are like the macros are already counted before you plan them.

You just make it hard to make a mistake because you change your environment. Exactly.

Exactly. You just put like, you know, you just put like kids gloves on everything. Like just make it so easy a five-year-old could do it. That's basically.

Yeah, I think it's actually I wrote a book called the 10-Day Detox Diet. In there, I talked about how behavior change happens and part of it is, you know, really focusing on changing your default environment. So house has to be a safe zone. Like the other night, I had a lot of stress happen and something was like really a big deal. And I was like, I want to pint of ice cream right now. And I'm like, in this, and there was no ice cream in the freezer. And I'm like, oh, I don't know what to order. I went to order online and then it said, you had to order a salt and straw, you had to order five pints of ice cream. And I'm like, no, I'm not gonna do it.

No, not worth it.

But like, if the home was a safe zone, zone. Yeah. And you have your workout equipment, you have your tennis shoe, whatever. Like, sure. You make it so that it's, it's automatic. I think that's really important. But the, you know, the bigger issue really is, is, is this sort of, I would say to my patients, not what are you eating? It's what's eating you. So, you know, what was driving you to that behavior? And how did you tackle that demon? Because that's the mental part.

Yeah. Yeah.

Because I went to eat, exercise. I mean, that, that, you know, despite all the nutrition controversies and all the sort of diet books. It's pretty basic what works. I can tell you as a doctor doing this for years, eat real food, move your body, get enough sleep, you know how to relax a little bit. It all works out.

I noticed, so, and I'm glad you asked that because this, you know, it took probably two or three years into this process for me to even get to the point where I could, like, reasonably have an answer to that question because it was I think what I didn't appreciate is that how unconscious, like food is such a primal thing and it's like such an unconsciously driven thing. Like I never stopped, my whole life I never stopped and thought like, why do I crave pizza right now? Or like, why do I, you know, want to have a drink? And what I noticed is that the two big drivers for me were anxiety and boredom that I tended to eat junk or drink if I was bored, or I would eat junk or drink if I was anxious about something and worried about something. And the anxiety was actually kind of the easier thing to deal with. Once I was aware of it, I could kind of channel it a little bit better. The boredom was actually harder for me because that started to get into social life and identity. I realized that a lot of my social life was built around food and alcohol.

Yeah.

And to decouple that meant I had to give up a significant part of my social life, which meant that, like, I didn't see certain friends as often. I, you know, I I very much. I took a lot of Pride. I kind of had the identity of, like, the party guy. You know, if you invited me to the wedding, I'd be the first on the dance floor and the last one off. And it's because I was drunk.

And.

When I stopped drinking, I was like, I had to give that up. I'm like, okay, I'm not the party guy. I'm not gonna be the guy who closes the bar with you every night. I'm the guy who's gonna go home at 10:30 'cause he's tired. And that sucked. There was a little bit of an ego death sort of thing that had to happen there. So the boredom was actually a much harder solve for me.

Yeah, because it's like you're filling empty space where you have to be with yourself. and then.

And.

Well, it made me realize, too, Mark, that, like.

Like, this was.

This, like, hurt when I realized it. And so I was like, you know, if I need to eat and get drunk with this person to have fun, then I don't like this person, right? Like, they're not actually my friend. That's true. Like, that was very upsetting to realize. And.

And. And. And. And.

And.

And. And. And.

And.

And.

And. And.

And.

And. And.

And. And. And. And. And. And. And. And.

And. And. True, because you're only as healthy as the five healthiest of the five friends you're hanging out with the most. Totally. And I think, what are their behaviors, what are their habits? So I was at a wedding, for example, this weekend, and there was no alcohol. It was alcohol-free wedding. And the food was amazing, and there was yoga classes, and we danced, and we played, and we did all kinds of great stuff. But it didn't require us to kind of rely on all that stuff to actually have an extraordinary time that we were having. We had like cake contests and all kinds of fun, you know, things that people engaged in that were really beautiful, that were bonding that weren't about being checked out or zoned out or drunk or fucked up. Or fucked up, right. And I think, you know, so for example, you could have, you know, a dinner party at your house where you control the food, where there's no alcohol, where you know, you have a different experience. So I think there's ways for people to kind of still kind of have the things that they care about, right?

Yes.

Social connections and I say, well, you know, I can't go out, but maybe, you know, being in a bar every night is not your, is not going to end up well for you in your life.

It's, it is true. But I, I will say that that transition, that was one of the most difficult things. It's interesting. I did a YouTube video a couple years ago about quitting drinking because I, I.

Did you completely quit?

I completely quit. I, I originally quit as part of the weight loss.

Yeah.

You know, I was just gonna do a couple months to lose some extra pounds. And it was such a profound shift mentally, emotionally, physically, that I just kept going and I haven't, I now wonder if maybe I was like a highly functional alcoholic for a number of years. I don't know the answer to that question. But I did a YouTube video maybe a year ago about quitting and it went viral and got a few million views. the most common comment was from people saying was from former alcoholics saying, I quit drinking. It's the best thing I ever did. I still have not found a social life outside of it. It's the one thing I miss is I used to have all these friends. I used to go out with them all the time. I'd go to the bar. I knew half the people there. And they don't know it's very hard to recreate that outside of it. and part of it for me too that I've noticed is that without alcohol, my personality is different. I'm much more introverted. My interests are narrower, which was a total curveball, completely unexpected. It actually caused marriage problems.

Really?

Because I stopped enjoying things that I used to enjoy that had nothing to do with alcohol, and I became interested in other things. So we used to go to a lot of shows and I kind of...

You mean like concerts or... Shows, concerts.

Plays, musicals, and I kind of realized...

You didn't like them. Unless you were drunk.

Yeah, I was like, I think I used to just go have a couple whiskeys and think I liked it, you know? Or I'm much more into like physical activity now. like, I don't really enjoy sitting around and watching a TV show, binging a TV show like the way I used to. And, you know, so it's just like, yeah, it just, it, it disrupts.

You just have to recreate, though. I mean, you have to recreate that. And other consumers, fans who you want to do fun stuff with, like, go on a ski trip or 100% hiking or go play pickleball or, which is a big thing in Austin.

Yeah, yeah, it's everywhere. But I guess, I guess what I'm doing, I, I'm just putting out a PSA to people of, like, this is an unexpected thing that happened. Like this was actually a very unexpected challenge related to this.

Yeah.

To the health challenges.

Because you do, if you drop the friends and the people who are actually harming you in your life by, you know, kind of encouraging the engaging behaviors that, let's go eat that sheet cake for tonight and watch, you know, six hours of Netflix.

Yeah.

That's not exactly good for you. And it does leave a gap. And I can imagine it's painful, but on the other side of it, I think it's really about being intentional in terms of how you rethink what's possible. I want to kind of take a little bit of a different direction, challenge you a little bit, because your whole shtick is like, I'm not really into self-help, it's all kind of bullshit, and it all gives the wrong messages. And I think rather than being against self-help, you're just saying the typical self-help advice isn't that helpful. And that your work is really is about self-help, but in a different way with kind of a contrarian view. And for example, you have like these five ideas that can change your life, which sound super depressing and are kind of like, you know, like humans suck, so try to suck less or pain is inevitable. You know, like suffering is optional. There's embedded in these five things though, there's a lot of wisdom and it's kind of tongue in cheek and it kind of gets you to take a funny look at at the sort of the beliefs that we're attached to that keep us suffering.

Yes.

Right?

So can you kind of unpack that a little bit and kind of tell us really how we can help ourselves as opposed to the current sort of positive everything's great and if you just meditate and say enough mantras and, you know, have enough kale smoothies in the morning.

Have your kale smoothies in the morning. Then everything will be perfect. So I often joke that, I write self-help for people who hate self-help. So it is still self-help, but it is, you know, it's kind of the contrarian self-help. So those five ideas, I might get them wrong. You know, first one is humans suck, try to suck less. I think this, there's in traditional self-help, there's kind of this false idea that we are born perfect and we are corrupted through the tragedy of life and that it's about getting back to our, you know, healing our inner child and getting back to our, perfect nature and all this stuff. And it's like, actually, if you look at any biology or evolutionary psychology, it's like humans are a fucking mess and we are an incomplete project. And a lot of our suffering and pain and imperfections are very much baked in by evolution. Like they're a feature, not a bug, of our psychology. And so we just need to accept that and accept that we are fundamentally imperfect. our minds are imperfect, our bodies are imperfect, and we're just doing the best that we can to adapt to our environment. So I think that's a much healthier starting place of like, okay, how can you adapt better to your environment or be a more adaptable and functional human being rather than rediscovering your inner perfection or whatever.

I mean, it's kind of like the Wabi-Sabi idea, right? Like the imperfection and the perfection in the imperfection.

He's in the imperfection. Totally. Thanks.

The second one was pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

Suffering is optional. So this is just like Buddhism 101, that life is pain, essentially, that any sort of attachment or desire is there's a pain associated with it. And the minute you deny that that pain exists or try to avoid that pain or try to pretend that that pain shouldn't be there, that's when you create suffering. There's an allegory from the Buddha that I love, which is called the Two Arrows. So he said that whenever you were struck by an arrow, you're actually struck twice. So the first strike is the arrow piercing your skin and the physical pain that's associated with it. But the second pain is when you ask yourself, why was I the one struck with the arrow? What did I do to deserve it?

Psychological, yeah. It's kind of like a cold plunge, right? You get in and it's a sensation, right? It's a sensation. And there's an idea we attach that sensation that it's bad and that it's going to hurt us. I mean, if you stand there long enough, yes, you'll die of hypothermia. But basically, I took one yesterday night and I got in there, I'm like, okay, this is a sensation.

It is.

My choice to suffer from the sensation is a choice.

Exactly.

Right.

And I think that's a really empowering thing because, you know, whatever happens to your life, we are, I mean, I think I do this, I mean, most people do this, you end up in the sense of sort of a deeper level of suffering than you need to because you're stuck in sort of a belief about the meaning you attach to what happens.

Absolutely.

So, oh, you know, my ex-wife Mia, who you met, and you know, we split up and you wrote a book called Love is Not Enough. We deeply loved each other, but, you know, we just weren't a fit.

Yeah.

And, and, you know, and I ended up having all these beliefs that were causing me to, to suffer. I mean, it was painful to split up, but the suffering went on for a lot longer than needed because I held on to all these beliefs about it. I wasn't good enough. I'm never gonna find anybody again. I'm too old. I'm whatever, you know, like, I, she was the person who had the best, you know, relationship with my life to today, you know, like, all these things kind of we're in, and I'm never going to find this again. And all these things kind of caused this unnecessary suffering, which turned out to be completely untrue. And I would have saved myself so much misery if I had just kind of realized that.

You just stopped telling yourself stories.

But it's the meaning we attach to things and events that cause the suffering. And then the question is, what causes us to attach that meaning? And how do we get to the root of that? And the beliefs that are underneath that.

Meaning we create, the meaning-making machines that we are. What's the also so dangerous is that we often forget that we, like you spun up a bunch of stories about a painful event in your life. We all do that. It's human nature. But what happens most of the time, especially when we're young and we haven't developed enough self-awareness, is that we spin up these stories that cause us to suffer and then we forget that they're stories. We just live with them for decades, assuming that that's just that's just the way the world is.

That's right. It gets written in ink, not pencil.

Exactly, exactly. And so, I think the fundamental thing that therapy does is help people realize that their stories are just that, stories.

And breaking that pattern is what sets you free. It's getting free of those constraining beliefs, those limiting beliefs that actually are the reason you suffer. It's not the event itself.

Totally.

Gab Ormati has been on the podcast, said it's not the trauma that causes the problem, It's the meaning we make from what happens to us, right?

Absolutely.

So the same event can happen to two different people and have totally different effects on them throughout their whole life because of the meaning we attach to it. And that's a very powerful thing. I actually once heard this anthropologist talk about these societies where they had really incredible cultures, where there was a lot of love, where they were highly functional, where it kind of worked. And they had four criteria that she noticed they all adhered to. First was to to show up, like everybody showed up to us to be present. Those aren't that hard, but harder than ever now.

These days, it's.

Attention robbing culture. The third was, and this is kind of goes along with your honesty thing, tell the truth without blame or judgment. So that's a harder one to do, but telling the truth is hard and then doing without blaming somebody or judging somebody is also really hard.

Extremely yeah.

And the fourth one is the hardest. And this goes to the suffering part, which is be open to the outcome. So if you told this woman who you thought was amazing that you met in Brazil that is now your wife, that gee, you weren't really that available in this moment. You kind of liked her, but you had to be open to the outcome. She goes, See you later, buddy. You're a jerk. Or she was like, oh my God, I fell in love with this guy. He told the truth. But you didn't know which one was gonna happen. And the reality is that when you tell the truth, you always meet reality as opposed to some fantasy or imaginary thing that's happening that's not really true. And you have a much more authentic life because you're actually meeting what is as opposed to what you're trying to construct to be or how you're going to try to control that outcome. So it's really powerful. So I think getting that is important. The next of the five rules here is everything you believe will one day fail you, this is how you grow.

This is very similar.

That sounds very freaking depressing.

But this is very similar to what you were just talking about, right?

You're happy or you're growing.

I mean, every belief is a story and every story is incomplete and slightly inaccurate. And really what knowledge is and growth is just replacing inaccurate stories with slightly less inaccurate stories. You know, it's the stories that you and I believe today that have helped us so much get through our past struggles will one day fail and create our future struggles, and then we'll have to update our stories again. And so that's just kind of- Tim.

Ferriss: and we're gonna need constant software updates?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We just need to be patched all the time. But I truly believe that that is like you never figure out the capital T truth in life, you just become slightly less wrong.

And so having this kind of perspective, you think, does it help you avoid the pain of the disappointment of failure?

I think so, because failure just illuminates the areas of your life that you were wrong, that your stories were inaccurate, so you can update them. But also, I think it's just a much better starting point to assume that everything you believe in your life is already wrong and that they just need to be updated with better, more accurate versions of the story. But also, when you believe that, you're not going to hold on to a story as being irrefutable capital T true, because that's when the real suffering starts, is when you refuse to update one of your stories or one of your beliefs. because you're like, no, this has to be true. There's nothing else can be more right than this. And now that forces you to lie.

How do you update the software? Because it's really hard to do that. Are there practical ways that you found to actually help people do this? Because it sounds great when we're talking about it. Sure, great. Everything is going to fail. You got to update your beliefs. You're going to grow as a result. you know, we've all experienced that, but it's usually with a lot of misery.

Yeah.

So you're talking about somehow recognizing this is going to take the misery out of it and help you just kind of, you know. Yeah. Seize the opportunity. I think, you know, I, I found that, you know, even those things are rough sometimes when shitty things happen. I go, okay, this is a moment for me to pay attention.

Yeah.

And I can either keep repeating the.

Same stupid or update my, update my software program.

Yeah. Yeah.

I think dialogue with smart and open people who care about you and who don't judge you, I think is absolutely crucial. Because it's like the thing about stories is that they, they're verbal in nature. Like you, at the very least, I think journaling or like writing out your thoughts and feelings on a subject and kind of playing with what could be true or what might not be true, I think that's kind of a minimum starting place because you need to play with the language around your beliefs and discover the language around your beliefs. But I think having really good, open, compassionate people in your life is absolutely fundamental. Ideally, it's a partner, a friend, a family member, but at a minimum, it's a therapist or a coach, somebody who can kind of look at your story and be like, well, what if this was true and not that? Right?

Yeah, it's really, it's so true. I think this is critical because if you don't have a process, it's hard to get there. And the first process you mentioned was something actually I did because after, you know, I left my last marriage, I was like, I'm never going to do this again. And I don't care what I have to do. Even if it's never being with anybody again.

Yeah.

And I, and I work with a coach. And what I had, she made me do was every day I had to write down all the stupid my head was saying, my lower self, like, just all the drivel that goes on between my ears that I just had to be fully honest about that I'm embarrassed to even say out loud, nonetheless, write it down and send it to somebody to read. I had to do that and religiously investigate my own beliefs and thinking and lower self. And then at the same time, I had to try, which wasn't always easy, to call in my higher self to tell a different story about the truth, to try to get to the truth. And sometimes it was my higher lower self which is the trickster that thinks it's the higher self. Your lower self that thinks it's the higher self. I do breath work and yoga and I'm enlightened or whatever. I mean, listen, I was a yoga teacher before I was a doctor, so I'm not just a parody of a yoga teacher. So just to be clear, but I love yoga. It happens a lot. It happens a lot. But the second thing was really, in addition to doing that, was I recently started working with another coach and I asked for a 360. which is for those who don't know what it is, it's basically I picked 10 people in my life from work, personal life, and it was all anonymous. And they got to talk to my coach and they got to completely unload all their perceptions of me, their views of me, their beliefs about me, their experiences, interactions with me, what it meant, how it occurred to them. And, you know, it's amazing. It was, was a little bit painful for me, actually, because I didn't realize how I occurred to other people.

Yeah.

And one of the feedback I got was that people didn't feel like I was interested in them.

Interesting.

And.

They felt like I was more kind of obsessed with myself and I would talk about myself and they were right. And I kind of looked at what that was and I kind of went all the way back into when I was about 18 and I really had no friends growing up. I mean, I was one kid that I think was autistic that was my friend. He had like Asperger's or something.

Yeah.

And another guy was, you know, we played cards and stuff, but basically I was pretty lonely and isolated and disconnected. And I thought nobody liked me because I wasn't interesting. And then I decided that in order to be liked and be accepted, I had to become interesting. And what I realized it did was it made me talk more about myself in a way that made me look good. I went on this great trip. I had this great experience. Look who I met. Look at this fun shit I'm doing. Whatever, right? And it really occurred to me that I really was very, I'm very interested in people and I really do care. And I have relationships where that shows up. but I realized that I needed to focus on being interested more than interesting. But that's what was driving, and I wouldn't have really known that unless I'd gotten all this feedback from all these people that I care about and love. And it was really helpful in changing that belief.

That's a great example of updating a story. I did a seminar years and years ago where they had us do this exercise, which has stuck with me ever since. Whenever you have that negative drivel, or just self-loathing going on in your head.

I call my inner asshole.

The inner asshole. So, it was a really cool exercise. Honestly, I forget who taught it to me or where it came from, but basically you take three sheets of paper, first sheet of paper, you just write out all of those horrible things that you're feeling about yourself. Or it could work with somebody else as well if you're really pissed off at somebody else. First sheet of paper is just like all the negative awful shit. Second sheet of paper is you write all of the counterarguments and the positive things in the like the sunny side and like, you know, hey, he didn't mean it or you didn't mean it, you have good intentions, you know, you're just, you're misunderstood, you're actually very compassionate, all this stuff.

Like, right? Take the opposite position.

Take the, like Byron Katie talks about, right? Take the complete opposite position. And then the third sheet of paper is the truth.

That's good.

You try to find where the truth is between the first two sheets.

That's good. I mean, in a way, what you're saying to people is like inquire about yourself in a disciplined, regimented way. And two, find people who you can, who love you, who know you, who you can ask to be fully honest with you, and you can say to them, like, I really want your feedback. And no matter how difficult it might be, I'm here to listen to it. I'm not gonna react.

Yeah.

And I'm gonna just try to receive it. And that's a scary thing to do.

It is.

But it's so freaking liberating, because then you go, wow, I didn't know that I was acting like that or doing that or seeming like this or.

Yeah.

People thought I was this or that. I'm like, you know, and, of course, you know, people are going to project whatever they project and meeting whatever they make. on you based on their own sets of beliefs and attitudes. And I think I've learned that a long time ago, you've got to be cautious about when people give you feedback because it's coming from their own, you know, stuff.

Right.

Yeah.

And that's another thing happening with 18. I, I was backpacking in Canada and I was, I was by myself and I was, I was sleeping on the river camping out by in the Spry River in Banff and working at a gas station, walking six miles each way back and forth to work every day to pump gas. and get some groceries. And I found this other camp with this guy, this older British guy who was just kind of mean, and he would just make fun of me and kind of insult me and ridicule me. And I was just, it was just devastating. And I realized in that moment it was like an epiphany. I said, okay, either when people are doing that, it's because it's their shit that they're projecting onto me, or there may be something I should look at and I should be grateful for that feedback even though it comes in a nasty package. And then it's an opportunity for me to look at myself and grow. And that really helped me kind of shift and not be so much at the whim of what everybody was thinking. But this process is really, I really love it. Okay, next one is something called you Deserve Happiness. Sorry.

You don't deserve happiness.

Let's redo that. The next one of your five, five simple ideas to change your life is you do not deserve happiness. In fact, you don't deserve anything. That doesn't seem right.

I would say the most, you and I were having this whole conversation around stories, the way we spin up stories, the way we suffer because of our stories, the way we need to update our stories. I would say the most common story that our brain naturally spins up is you deserve this or you don't deserve that. And it goes both ways. And I think the strength of the deserving story tends to be proportional to the intensity of the emotion. So it's like the more we're hurt, the more intense the story we tell ourselves of either I didn't deserve this or I did deserve this or this person deserves that. And the truth is, is that in most cases, like the deserving thing is, it's a very, like, I think in a legal construct, it makes a lot of sense, right? It's like you rob a gas station, then you deserve some sort of punishment. But on an emotional level, if you.

Rob a drug store in California, you don't deserve punishment. Is that how the law is now?

I don't know what the fuck the law is these days.

Shoplift, you know? Yeah, it's fine.

You know, so the point I'm making, that there's like a legal level that you can make, there's the deserving story or the deserving argument. But I think on a personal level, it's just over the years, the conclusion I've come to is to just eliminate as many of these deserving stories as possible.

Entitlement.

Yeah, because if you spin up stories saying that you deserve great things, sure, that can motivate you, can make you feel good, but it can also make you entitled, it can make you narcissistic, it can make you you know, it can justify a lot of bad behavior towards other people. If you spin up stories saying that you don't deserve things, well, now you're minimizing yourself, you're limiting yourself, you're making yourself more insecure. You know, it's like, how about just don't have the story in the first place? Like, do I deserve to be happy? I don't know.

Right.

Like, some days I'm happy, some days I'm not. Do I deserve that? I don't. Who the fuck knows, right?

Yeah. Does it matter?

No.

Just do the good thing.

Yeah.

I mean, I think, I think, you know, it reminds me when I was in college, and I don't know why at least all these stories are coming.

To me when you're talking. So I don't know.

I've never, we're revisiting your, your, your forlorn youth. It was really, like, form things. And I was sitting, I was sitting on the floor of my best friend's apartment, like, get a little, you know, room in college. And he's, he, you know, we were both kind of hippies and, you know, backpacking. He says, Mark, you know, if you have a place to sleep, if you have some clothes to wear and you have some food to eat. Everything else is gravy. And I'm like, you know, you're kind of right. And so anything else that comes is just a gift or a blessing and not an entitlement.

Totally. And it's, I think that's very liberating. It's very important too, because this kind of gets back to the Kahneman thing, and this gets back to the reference point thing, is that human psychology is such that our reference point for what is good or bad is always changing. It's always shifting upward. The more our life improves, the more our baseline of what we expect of ourselves increases. That's a perfect example of you've got food, you've got shelter, you're healthy, you're young. Why do you need anything else?

Why are you whining?

Why are you whining? Why do you feel like you deserve anything else? Again, the deserving story is a dangerous story because often our set points of what is a good life and what is bad life are just completely irrational and based on status games, power struggles, silly frivolous shit that doesn't really matter.

Yeah, it's so true. Okay, your last simple idea to change your life is everything you love will one day be lost. This is what makes life meaningful. and I wrote a book called Young Forever about longevity, and in the research for the book, there's a lot of scientists talking about this idea of longevity escape velocity, which means that the science will continue to evolve so fast that we'll keep extending our life faster than our rate of aging, which means we will never die. And I'm actually having dinner tonight with Brian Johnson, who's whole mission in life is don't die. Literally, he's got a whole brand called Don't Die. And when I think about that, I mean, yes, I would love to have another 60, I don't know, 100 years of incredibly vigorous, healthy life.

Sure.

And do whatever I want to do. As long as I can be heli skiing at 100, I'm good. But it's that sense that it's all going to go away that makes it so precious. Like every morning I wake up with my wife.

Yeah.

And I'm like so excited to see her. And every day I'm like, oh my God, this is a gift because I know how precious and fleeting this is and one day it's not going to be there.

Right.

And so it makes me value and savor every moment in a way that actually makes life way more enjoyable.

Yeah.

So I don't like the idea of not dying.

I don't, I'm glad to hear you say that. I'm actually curious because I want to.

Be long lived and healthy, but I think I want to die.

I'm on the same, 100% on the same page, like I would be, I would love to live to 200. That sounds great, but like, you know, at some point I want to get off the boat. And it's because of this. It's because I, meaning and value is driven by scarcity. And if as soon as something stops being scarce, we stop appreciating and it stops feeling meaningful. And so I just, I don't think our, Our psychological mechanisms are built to live in a post-scarce existence. I feel like this is when the writer in me starts getting really excited. I start imagining a sci-fi novel of a person who realistically can't die. To me, it seems to me that that would be an incredibly bleak existence. like, nothing would seem worthwhile. Nothing would seem important. No relationships would seem worth. Like, he. That person would not feel inclined to speak to anybody because everybody you speak to is gonna die at some point. So why create a relationship if you're just gonna lose it? And there's just gonna be an infinite amount of future relationships. Like, there's no. There's nothing special or unique about that. So I think, like, it. It calls in the question is, like, what? What becomes scarce if death is solved and can anything be meaningful in a post-death existence? And I'm not sure that it can.

Yeah, we don't know. Who knows? Maybe.

I'm curious, do you think that a longevity escape velocity is possible?

Listen, if you talk to my grandmother, who was born in 1900, and you told her there were going to be men walking on the moon and we were going to have these super computers in our pockets that, you know, had all the features that our iPhone has that we could interact with an intelligent source like ChatGPT that would tell us anything about anything.

Yeah.

In three seconds, you know, she would probably go, there's no freaking way that's possible.

Yeah.

I mean, they weren't even cars or telephones or electricity or toy flush toilets when she born, right?

Yeah.

And so I don't know is the answer. There are certain things scientifically that I've talked about in my book, certain things that allow us to do epigenetic reprogramming, essentially taking your cells that are old and reprogramming back to a younger you through something called Yamanaka factors. And there's a lot of research going on around this. Aging research is in its infancy around longevity because it wasn't even considered something worthy of research or study.

Yeah.

The only reason it's getting any attention now is because a lot of billionaires are just really wanting to live a long time.

So they're like, yeah, they don't want to die.

So they just want to, like, figure it out. And so there's, like, literally billions of dollars, you know, from Google and Alto slab and Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman and all these guys are just pouring billions of dollars, and I think it's great because we're learning so much. But I, I think it may happen. But listen, if I could if I could take a pill or get a gene inserted into me that would take me back to my mid-30s when I was the peak of my mental and physical performance.

Sure. That would be great.

If I could, my biological age is 39 now, but my back age is like 139. So, if I could get my back to be back to 39, I'd be great. I'm with you there. I'm all for all that stuff, but I think it's more about the meaning and I think the values we have. So, just to kind of close up a little bit, I think, I want to put you on this stuff out a little bit because your work is about kind of poking fun at all the positive psychology self-help stuff and how it's not really that helpful. But you're not against people actually thinking about how to create a philosophy and values, that creates meaning in their life that's different from the typical self-help advice. So how do we as human beings start to create kind of a value system for ourself that we can live through and with and in that allows us to be fully expressed? Because for me, I don't know what your philosophy is on this, but my belief is that our souls came here to get free, that we we came here to be fully expressed human beings in the purest expression. You know, like Dalai Lama, I don't know if he's enlightened or not enlightened, but like, I was at a conference with him on longevity and he was on stage and he was all these muckety-mucks and Nobel Prize winners and this and that, and he just was like, looking around, he's like, I gotta pee! And he like gets up and he like runs off the stage and goes and pees, you know, like not trying to be anybody, pretend to be anything, and just fully expressed, present human being.

Yeah.

I mean, that question about like, what do we value, what is worth improving? I feel like that's the question of our time. And I think as you accurately put it, you know, my goal isn't to overthrow the self-help industry or debunk the self-help industry. It's really just to like realign it around healthier questions, you know, and analogous to what we were talking about with like the diet stuff, it's like, you know, most of what gets sold in my industry is the equivalent of a fad diet. And I'm trying to be the guy who's like, no, no, it's actually just really basic questions that philosophers and religions have been asking for 2,000 years that we all need to ask ourselves. And even if you're not religious, even if you don't want to meditate tons of hours, these are really simple questions that I think in this day and age we should all be asking ourselves and thinking really hard about.

And you didn't pull this out of your ass. I mean, you were deeply steeped in the research around a lot of this, and you talk about a lot of the studies that reflect the underlying reasoning behind your thinking, like the marshmallow test or the Stanford Prison Experiment or studies by Marty Siegman about learned helplessness or the happiness research by Daniel Kahneman, the Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. So flow theory and all these attachment theory and the list goes on, but you're not just kind of just randomly like kind of being a dick and saying, all you self-help people are idiots. But it is, there's a lot of great science. And often the science contradicts common sense.

It does. It does. It does. It's, we are, again, this comes back to, you know, humans suck, try to suck less. We're not optimized for, like, truth, we're optimized for self-preservation. And part of that self-preservation is ego preservation. And so being aware of those mechanisms is extremely important to maintain our mental health. and our happiness. So yeah, and I just try to find fun and creative ways to express those ideas to people.

You know, what's really kind of cool in this moment in history is the psychedelic revolution. There was this psychedelic revolution in the 60s and actually the CIA was responsible for it. They were literally doing, I don't even know the story, but there's a great book called, I mean a movie called the Magic Bus and it was basically about Ken Kesey who was one of the CooCoo's Nest and he got a grant to go write this book at Stanford in Palo Alto. And he didn't have any money. And there was ongoing experiments there by the CIA on LSD. And so they would pay him to go take acid and other people take acid. And then they'd put him in a lab and they'd watch what happens. He's like, man, this stuff is great. And so he basically thought it was the next greatest thing. So he took a bus around the country and basically gave everybody LSD and went out and met Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert who became R. D. Laing, and then Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and then came back and kind of created the lithium-chloride acid test in Menlo Park, where the Grateful Dead basically was the house band.

And they had, I didn't realize it started that way.

Yeah, it was basically a CIA started the psychedelic revolution. And that's pretty funny. And now we're undergoing the second renaissance where there's real research going on. A lot of the things you're talking about are based on, and the suffering that we have is based on the beliefs that we have about our ego and our small self and the survivalist sort of software that's programmed into us that has us as separate entities, as separate beings that have to protect and defend ourself and have to lie and steal, do whatever the hell we have to do to get ahead and to make sure we don't die, right? But psychedelics are really an interesting compound because a set of compounds because they basically shut off the ego. Yeah. It's what they do. Like when they look at brains of meditators who've been meditating for 40 years on MRI and they look at brains of people who are on psychedelics, the same part of the brain gets shut off, which is this ego part that is called the default mode network.

Yep.

And I'm actually having Michael Pollan on tomorrow on the podcast. Oh, cool. Nice. Well, not tomorrow. You guys listening? It's not really tomorrow. It's just tomorrow I'm recording it. Yeah, yeah. Mark gets how it goes. Anyway, to me it's really exciting because it's a way to shortcut a lot of the suffering that people have. And we're seeing it as a far more effective treatment for depression, for anxiety, for PTSD, for all kinds of addiction, many, many things that people are suffering with on a mental level that prevent them from actually even being able to get to do the things you're talking about. So I think I love your kind of actually optimistic nihilistic philosophy.

Yes.

That's a good way to put it.

And I like that combined with some of the new tools and treatments that are going to be available that really help people get free. And that's, that's real, I think to me what your work has been about was about, geez, you know, all these things that people are trying to get free and be happy, they don't freaking work.

Yeah.

Yeah, people are selling a lot of books, but the reason your book caught on is because it hit a chord in people that they kind of realized it was all BS and they need to think about it differently. So it's so great that you're out there doing this. You didn't mean to be you, you know.

Do any of us.

No.

And you kind of, you got sideways a little bit, caught up in it, and I'm glad to see you back healthy and fit and looking amazing. I would love to help people learn how they can kind of connect more to your work.

Sure.

I mean, there's your book, obviously, the subtle art of not giving a fuck. There's your other book, which is Everything is Fucked, but it actually has a hopeful title in it as well.

It's a book about hope.

Yeah, it's a book about hope. It's like, okay, everything's fucked, but let's be hopeful. But you also have a lot of online content, markmanson.net, but you've got courses and podcasts. So tell us where people can learn more how to kind of get into what you're doing.

Sure. So obviously the books, I have a podcast called the Subtle Art and Not Giving a Fuck podcast, comes out every Wednesday and a free newsletter every Monday morning. I just share, it's called youd Next Breakthrough and I just share a couple ideas, a question and a challenge for all the readers each Monday. And then I share, I invite readers to send their experiences from the challenge in and then we post them in the next Monday's newsletter. And so we've We were up over a million people now.

That's amazing.

We've had over 11,000 breakthroughs. So check it out. It's a free newsletter. Just go to markmanson.net. It's right there.

Like a midwife for transformation. I love that. Okay. So last question is, what are you most excited about now in your life?

So I'm doing, I'm actually doing a series of kind of documentary style YouTube videos around the intersection of culture and mental health. so we've shot four of them. We're going to start releasing them. I don't know when this is coming out, but we're going to start releasing them in October of this year.

Yeah.

So it's just out in Hungary. Hungary has the most alcoholics per capita in the world.

Really?

So we did a whole investigation of, like, what are the historical and cultural reasons behind that? Portugal has the highest.

Paprika causes alcoholism.

Paprika. It's all the goulash.

Goulash.

Who knew? Portugal has the highest rate of anxiety disorders in the world. So we went to Lisbon and spent a week there and talked to a bunch of psychiatrists, Portuguese psychiatrists. They have those fried donuts that everybody eats.

I love how your mind just immediately goes to food.

Your brain is just immediately like, what do they eat in that country? And then we've already posted one of South Korea. South Korea has the highest suicide rate in the developed world. So we did one on that as well.

So this is like the opposite of the blue zones. These are the gray zones.

Yeah, well, it's, you know, every culture, I mean, everywhere has its mental health issues, right? Every country has its mental health crisis. But what's interesting is that it manifests in different ways in different cultures. So what's so exciting about this project is just going and trying to understand why it manifests in this way in this country. Like, what is it about the history, the politics, the economics.

And are you figuring it out? And then are you hoping to kind of provide insights about how they can get some relief?

I mean, I develop theories and ultimately it's like there are practical takeaways for everybody, right? So in the case of South Korea, the wars that happened throughout the 20th century, generated in like a pressure cooker of a culture that resulted in this mental health crisis. And so it's like, people can draw parallels to their own life, right? 'Cause it's like we all have pressures on us for certain things and there's all, like we all have traumas or catastrophes in our own lives. So ultimately the goal is to give people takeaways. But for me, it's just as like a psych nerd and somebody who loves to travel has just been like... So much fun.

It's so much fun. I love that. I love this. Let me go on a trip around the world and look at people's mental health and do cool shit about it. Exactly. I love that. I actually want to create a show like that called Race to I called, you know, Food is Medicine Show, where we go around the world and, and like kind of Anthony Bourdain meets Dr. Hyman. Yeah, that'd be great. But it's, I'm excited about thinking about how we kind of show what's going.

On in the world and people learn.

Because food wise, yeah. I mean, just America's so ethnocentric in every particular way. So I think half, I think more than half the population, you have a passport.

Yeah.

So, Mark, it's really great to have you on the podcast. I could talk to you forever.

Yeah.

I can think we'll continue talking for a long time.

Forever. Maybe. If we solve, if we solve, if we get longevity.

If everybody's thin and happy, then we don't have any work to do. We can just sit on the beach in Malibu and watch the sunset.

It works for me, man.

All right. Well, thanks for being here. And everybody check out Mark's work and Thanks for listening to the podcast. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here.