Mark Manson: How to Get Ahead of 95% of People
In this extensive interview, bestselling author Mark Manson discusses the psychological mechanisms behind procrastination, the "law of avoidance"—the tendency to avoid tasks that threaten one's self‑identity—and how the gap between desired outcomes and self‑perception fuels resistance and self‑sabotage. He argues that striving for 100 % productivity is unrealistic; instead, granting oneself grace while maintaining disciplined boundaries creates a paradox that ultimately sustains long‑term performance. Manson shares personal stories of sudden bestseller success, the ensuing existential void, burnout, and how he learned to say no to projects that aren’t fun. He emphasizes playfulness, rascality, and a light‑hearted spiritual outlook (referencing Alan Watts and Osho) as tools for navigating life’s absurdity. The conversation shifts to modern information overload, likening it to the industrial food revolution, and proposes an "information diet" with concrete phone‑use rules, app blockers, and algorithm‑feedback techniques. Manson explains how environmental design—nudges, location choices, and habit‑stacking—can replace willpower. Finally, he explores the promise and pitfalls of AI in personal growth, describing his "Purpose" AI product that challenges users, the "yes‑man" nature of generic chatbots, and the potential for AI to democratize high‑quality therapeutic insight once it matches top human coaches. Throughout, he balances optimism about technology with caution about over‑optimization, advocating for adaptable identity, playful resilience, and intentional media consumption.
Chapters
You're never gonna be 100% productive on a regular basis. Willpower is really, really inefficient. It's gonna fail you. You're gonna run out of it. You're gonna fall back into your default state. What the research actually shows, what discipline is, is that—
Mark Manson is the number one New York Times bestselling author of "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck," teaching psychological principles that have improved the lives of millions of people over the last 20 years. 90%, 95% of us deal with hardcore procrastination, especially college students.
We will avoid things in our lives in proportion to how much it threatens our identity. The larger the gap between what we want to accomplish and how we actually see ourselves, the more of that resistance we're going to experience. This is why people will not only avoid failing at something, but they will self-sabotage something that might make them successful. There's just like an order to your life that happens when you have that big dream or that big goal.
Mm-hmm.
What happens when you accomplish that dream? Let's find out.
90%, 95% of us deal with hardcore procrastination, especially college students.
Right.
Big one for them. Do you have a sense after writing so many books and going so deep into this topic, like you, James Clear, Cal Newport, even people here in Austin that I know, it's like everybody's trying to master the perfect mechanical system, like the mental model of how to be this excellent human being. For me, and I'm curious how you feel, a lot of it seems to be just giving yourself grace for your imperfections. But there's a paradox because if you give yourself too much grace and you're like, "Well, I'll get to it later," that's what feeds the procrastination dragon, in my opinion. Can you explain the duality there?
I think it's just a truth that you're never gonna be 100% productive on a regular basis. Like, you'll have a, every once in a while, you'll have a day where you're like, "Wow, I crushed it today." Yeah. Nobody is gonna nail 30 out of 30 days in a row, right? Like everybody has down days, everybody is tired.
What about David Goggins?
Life happens, man. It doesn't matter who you are, what sort of like practices, protocols you have, whatever. It's like everybody's gonna have bad days, everybody's gonna slip up. And so I do think it's in those moments you slip up that like your attitude or approach to the question really matters because If you look at that and you just treat it as a failure of like, oh, I didn't do the right thing, I don't have the right system installed or whatever, what you're gonna end up with is just this like over-regimented, highly inflexible system in your life where it's like everything needs to be planned, everything needs to be coordinated. You're gonna need like a team of people at all times just to like live.
Yeah.
And that's just not realistic. For anybody. So it's like in those moments where you slip up, you know, it's like, okay, maybe you didn't sleep well last night. Maybe you had a fight with your wife, you know, or maybe your mom got sick, or maybe one of your best employees just left and you're kind of freaking out of like how you're gonna handle this.
Mm-hmm.
That's very normal. It's very human. Giving yourself that grace to be imperfect, to not optimize everything, that is paradoxically optimal.
Yeah.
Because it helps you, it sustains you through that down period in a more healthy way. And it lets you bounce back quicker and with more energy. If you give too few fucks, right? If you just like let everything go, then nothing happens. And my natural disposition is to like, "Hey, fuck it." Like I let everything go, right? So it's like, I've had my work throughout my life has been learning how to know I need to actually like, I need to draw a line in the sand and like hold the line on this thing because if I let it go past that, I'm just gonna be a sloth on my couch, you know, playing video games until 4 in the morning.
Is that what potentially drove your model for the law of avoidance? 'Cause I could see how that would be embedded in your A's, C's, T's, and G's in your DNA. When did this law really come online for you to the point where you felt like you've embodied it?
The law of avoidance is that we will avoid things in our lives in proportion to how much it threatens our identity. And so, there are a lot of ways you can avoid things. Procrastination is one, apathy, over-analysis is actually another one, right? It's, you can, I like to say often that researching more is a smart person's way of avoiding.
Ha, that's true.
It's blaming others is another way of avoiding, you know, saying like, "Oh, I can't do it. I need to find a good coach," or, you know, "My coworkers suck, so, you know, there's nothing I can do about it. I'm not gonna be productive." Hmm. So there's all these ways that we kind of wiggle out of the responsibility of like actually accomplishing what we want to accomplish. And the bigger the thing we want to accomplish, or by bigger, I mean like the more, the larger the gap between what we want to accomplish and how we actually see ourselves, the more of that resistance we're gonna experience. And so this is why people will self-sabotage. This is why people will not only avoid failing at something, but they will self-sabotage something that might make them successful, right?
Mm-hmm.
They finally meet a great partner who makes 'em really happy, and they'll find a way to fuck it up 'cause they're like, this is too big of a leap from like how I see myself. You know, they don't see themselves as being worthy of love or affection or whatever. And so they like find a way to fuck it up.
Yeah.
Or somebody like offering an employee like a huge opportunity to like really level up, make a bunch more money. Sometimes they'll find ways to fuck it up. And it's because it's just, it clashes too much with how they see themselves. It's my argument, you know, I think traditional self-help will like kind of pump the rah-rah, you're amazing, believe in yourself, like all that sort of stuff. I actually think that there's some issues with that or like there's some own—
Yeah, same. Let's go into that later.
Okay.
That's good.
Yeah, there's some dangers around that.
I agree.
The argument I make is that actually you should just hold your identity as lightly as possible. You should just decide like, I don't really know who I am. Do I deserve to make this much money? I don't know. Let's find out. Do I deserve to be loved in this way? Who's to say? I don't know. Let's try it, right?
Yeah.
'Cause it's like, if you can kind of hold yourself loosely like that, you become much more adaptable. And then you, there's nothing to protect, right? There's no ego that's being threatened when some great new thing comes down the road.
Yeah, there's so much there. One thing I was feeling when you were speaking was this fixation, you know, Carol Dweck calls it like the fixed mindset. There's a playfulness and curiosity from you that seems like maybe it's something ineffable that I'm trying to describe, but you have a joyfulness and not, you don't have sarcasm, although sometimes you do, but sarcasm doesn't lead your entry point like a JP Sears or someone like that. For you, I get like there's this almost Alan Watts-esque energy which by the way, I know your viewpoints on Alan Watts and we all know that he was an alcoholic and he left— Yeah, I love him. Life early. It doesn't take away from the message, right? Sometimes the messenger is imperfect. Same with Osho.
And I kind of like that he was an alcoholic because I feel like there's actually a wisdom in that.
Yeah, okay, well then let's go into this because he had this beautiful montage about rascality. And I love it because man, if there was one deceased person, maybe I'll do it with AI, that I could interview, it would be Alan Watts. I'd love to interview Alan Watts. And he said that having rascality doesn't mean that you're like a vagrant or you're just a mean-spirited person. It means that you're joyful and playful and you go against the grain just to experience the joy of life. And I really love that. Do you associate with that in your current level of identity? Do you associate with rascality in some way?
Play is like a very important thing to me. 'Cause I think, I don't know if you remember way back in the day, I don't know if they still have this, but I remember on like OKCupid and like Plenty of Fish, like the old dating sites.
Oh yeah.
Back in the 2000s. I don't know how old you are.
Sure, 45.
Okay, so yeah, you were, I don't know if you ever messed around with those sites back in the day. I did.
Yeah. They were abject failures.
Yes.
It didn't go well for me either. No, no, no.
So I remember, I don't remember if it was OKCupid or Plenty of Fish, but I remember I remember they had a religion section on your profile and they asked 2 questions. So it was, the first question is, what is your religion? So you could do Christianity, Judaism, Islam, whatever, or atheism. And then the second question is, how seriously do you take it? And there were a bunch of different options of like, Whoa. It's the most important thing in my life. And then at the bottom was, I'm laughing about it. And I just remember, like, you know, I think on my profile I said, "I'm an atheist and I'm laughing about it." Because, and that, like, I'm laughing about it, like, I actually see that as kind of a spiritual belief, right? Like, this life is so absurd in that, like, it makes no sense.
Yeah.
Like, there's nothing about this that makes any sense. The fact that, like, you and I are speaking into electrons and somebody in, like, Ghana is listening to this, right?
Right.
Like, that makes no sense.
Yeah.
And the fact that we're on like this tiny speck that's like hurtling through space and we're just an aggregation of atoms that have like come together and decided that we're gonna call ourselves Mark, like, makes no sense.
Yeah.
And I find that funny. Like, I think if you can find the playfulness in all of this,, right? Like no matter what your religious background is or your spiritual beliefs, like if you can just kind of find the playfulness of everything, I think it predisposes you to just handle life better.
Yeah.
You know, like it's not even about being resilient, although it helps with that, you know? And it's not even about like being happy, although it helps with that. Like it's just, I always try to remind myself like when I'm like really in the shit, and like things are really going wrong, just kind of reminding myself like how ridiculous this whole situation is. Like just life itself is.
Yeah.
And finding the playfulness in it and finding like, even finding like the weird kind of twisted dark thing that like you can kind of chuckle about. 'Cause I don't know, I just like, to me, that's probably the closest thing I have to any sort of religious belief. That it's, we're here to laugh about it. And so when I, and what you're referring to, you know, so we recently did a podcast episode about meditation. And by the way, I've meditated hundreds, if not maybe a couple thousand hours in my life. Like I used to take it very seriously.
Yeah.
But one of the things I said on that podcast is like, there's a weird pattern among like some of the great, gurus and leaders who brought meditation and Eastern spirituality to the West. And that is that they're like addicts, alcoholics, sexual abusers, like con men, you know, like real integrity issues.
Yeah, yeah.
Like very real deep personal issues.
"Wild Wild Country" fucked me up.
Yeah, dude.
When I learned about Osho, I was like, I don't know if I could share his messages anymore.
Right, but then, It's also like, do you need the messenger to be a saint for there to be value in it? Like, I still love so many of the things that Alan Watts said.
Me too.
I'm definitely not gonna take marriage advice from him, right? But like, or parenting advice, but like some spiritual wisdom, you know, like some ideas about consciousness and like what we're all doing here. Hell yeah, you know? So it's—
How do you hold the two worlds then? It seems like there's playfulness and then there's also maturity and responsibility. Like, you know, if Lady Liberty was here and one was kicked up, we wouldn't have any. But how do you go about balancing that in your life?
So I think you can find ways to make the responsibilities in your life fun. You know, you can gamify things, you can do things with people, you know, you can, Even play little games with yourself. Like, I don't know, it's just, you don't—
Yeah.
Boring things don't have to be boring. It's just like humor and playfulness is simply a matter of perspective. And you can kind of choose to see the absurdity in things and laugh about them and remind yourself that like, this is temporary.
With everything that you've been through and how many people you've served, I assume at this point, the onslaught of writing and speaking and podcasting and, You've got to be able to have a practice for you that is ironclad, that just downregulates your entire neural system. Is that something that you don't waver on at all, the way you care for Mark?
I wish I could come in here and confidently say, "Yes, I always put myself first." Not really.
Okay.
So, and by the way, that's not a prescription. It's just that like, I, My natural state is very low-key.
Yeah.
So I'm like, I drink caffeine all day. I'm constantly stimulating myself, kind of like pushing myself. So there's a part of me that enjoys the rush. And so I find like, I mean, I do care about my health. I do have some basic routines that are like, good for me. But I'm definitely not one of those guys who's like, here's my 8-step morning routine and here's my protocol for recharging after a long day of podcasting. I'm much more on the side of like, yeah, dude, everything's hard. So just find the hard that you like.
It seems like you give yourself grace for not being perfect. It's like the ultimate permission slip for just neurosystem downregulation.
Totally, 'cause there's a little bit a paradox or like a trap, I think, where it's like, and it's tricky, right? 'Cause it's like, okay, let's say I decide I wanna like really improve my health and I wanna start optimizing some things.
Hmm.
There's a certain amount of that that is, I'm definitely gonna see an improvement, right? Like there's 80/20 principle. Probably the first few things I do, there's gonna be like a drastic change. Next batch of things I do, probably marginal change, but it's like twice as much effort. And then you can kind of get caught in this trap of like, "Well, I'm still not doing everything I could do." And then you start actually creating stress around your protocol to de-stress yourself. You're like, "I didn't get 8 hours of sleep last night." Yeah. Like, "I need to fix my bedtime routine." I'm like, "My Oura Ring is saying that like my HRV is this, so like I need to change all these things," right? And it's like the stress of doing that actually makes it more difficult to accomplish what you're trying to do, which is chill out and relax and be at peace with yourself.
That's cool that you need caffeine. Did you say you need it to kind of feel the rush?
Yeah.
I'm slanted hypervigilant. I don't know, you know, call it being born to a bipolar mom or whatever you wanna do. There's like an imprint in me where I just kind of run hot and I actually can't even drink caffeine 'cause it'll turn me into a— whack-a-mole, like a squirrel who's trying to find a nut on cocaine.
That's kind of what I feel like.
But it leads to this really powerful thing for me. Your work, if you're watching on YouTube and Spotify, "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck." Why couldn't you actually put the U? Just wasn't marketable?
It's actually, I think it's FTC regulations.
Oh, you can't swear on a cover.
Yeah, there's 7.
We all know the word.
There's 7 curse words. Yeah, you're not allowed to say.
Got it.
You're not allowed to like, put publicly.
Yeah, I love that you talked about the identity being, well, maybe, maybe not, right? My identity can flex and bend. And I love this because your website's on the screen right now, markmanson.net. You said that the most important, meaningful things in your life are also the most procrastinated upon. Success threatens identity just as much as failure. Boom. I mean, so that seems like a falsity when I read it, But then when I really feel into it, success and failure, it's either the person that you talked about getting the big bonus, they maybe are afraid of success. What if they make it and then what if they have to have new friends around them? Or what if they fail?
Right.
So it makes sense now that I really digest it and let it grok. But anybody that reads that consciously might be like, well, I'm not afraid of success. I would love to have more money. But there's a deeper aspect that I'd love you to expand. And that is how the unconscious mind actually works with the conscious mind on top of it. There's this liminal space that NLP calls the critical factor.
Yeah.
And the thicker our critical factor, which is all of our unconscious beliefs, our crunchiness, John Demartini, whether you resonate with him or not, says it's really just a matter of perception, which I agree with. What's your understanding of how the beliefs of, oh my God, I'm gonna be successful and I'll fail, or I'm gonna be successful and unconsciously I'll have to have new friends. Can you unpack that a little bit more?
The success thing people don't like to hear. For sure, especially really ambitious people who are striving. I've been in rooms where I've talked about, so like one of the most depressed periods of my life was when my book hit number one everywhere and was selling millions of copies. And it really blindsides you because you're just like, I'm supposed to be happy right now.
Wow.
And when people hear that, they're like, oh yeah, but that's not gonna happen to me. Like, sure, you and your goals or whatever., but me, when I accomplish my thing, I'm gonna be happy, right? Because that's what all of our brains keep telling us. The thing that happens is that like, I think there's two levels that this happens on. One of them that you already alluded to, which is if you become extremely successful very quickly, it has social repercussions, it has emotional repercussions, right? Like that success, it doesn't just come with more money, it comes with more responsibility.
Yeah, yeah.
It comes with more expectation.
Mm-hmm.
It comes with people looking at you differently and treating you differently. And it's not all good ways too, right? It's sometimes, you know, it can create more envy. It can make the people around you feel insecure around you, right? People that used to be very comfortable with you suddenly now are being really weird and censoring themselves and not sharing what they actually think. So there's a lot of that stuff that goes on, but There's a deeper layer that happens as well, which is that in many ways, hoping for something is much more satisfying than actually having it, right? Like when I wanted to be a New York Times bestselling author, that dream sustained me for years. It got me out of bed in the morning. It kept me working late into the night. It kept me problem solving on weekends. Working my ass off, feeling good about what I was doing. I had something to work towards. I was making progress every day. There's just like an order to your life that happens when you have that big dream or that big goal. What happens when you accomplish that dream? Well, it is very exciting and you do celebrate and like every, people are happy for you for a short period of time.
Yeah.
But then you wake up one day and you don't have a dream or a goal anymore. And not only that, but you start looking at the dream and goal you accomplished and you're like, wait a second, this didn't solve all these other problems. You know, like I'm still arguing with the wife over something stupid. And like, you know, I've still got this weird shit going on with my parents and, you know, I still gotta find a place to live. And, you know, it's—
Mm-hmm.
There's all this other stuff going on in your life, all these other insecurities and doubts and, and issues that are completely unaffected. And then on top of that, you don't have this dream or goal to get you outta bed every morning. And so there's this like deep sense of loss and loss of identity, right? Of like, I don't know what to do anymore and I don't know why I should do anything anymore.
Cool.
And the worst part about that is that it, you don't feel at liberty to complain to anybody about it, right? Because it's everybody who sees you, they're like, "Oh man, everything's going right for this guy. You must be so happy. Everything must be so amazing." You don't wanna be the asshole who's like, "My dream's gone and I don't know what to do with myself." You know, you feel like, you know that meme of, I think it's Woody Harrelson who's like crying and wiping away tears with $100 bills?
Mm-hmm.
You feel like that guy, right? It's like nobody wants to hear it. Nobody wants to hear a super successful person complaining.
Yeah, oh my God. When I listen to you, I'm like, well, look, I'd like to have books like you. I want these things. I'm moving towards these things in my life. But I learned a long time ago, and I wonder how this resonates with you now from your vantage point of already achieved it. It's like my greatest goal with this podcast and my question I'm gonna ask you is to get out of any cycles that get me out of love. And when I say love, I don't mean just like the guitars around the fire. I mean like the practical and the esoteric parts of love. And I find that most people that are with us, they all have cycles that they're stuck in. Mental cycles, behavioral cycles, addiction cycles, whatever. There's just some kind of washing machine that's happening for all of us.
Right.
And I believe, I'm curious what you believe from your vantage point after achievement, to speak to us that are still working on achievement. How do we actually embody authentic joy and really actually be that to which we say we are or to which we say we desire on the process, on the road to achievement? In other words, how can we maintain authentic joy in the process where we climb the mountain?
It's a great question. I think a lot of the issue lies in the fact that people who don't know how to embrace that authentic joy in the moment.
Yeah.
And this kind of gets back to what like Alan Watts or Osho would say in this situation. It's like, you can have it right now. You can just decide, you know, authentic joy, it's a perspective and you can take it in any moment. But what so many of us do is that we defer that. We say like, okay, I can have that joy once I accomplish XYZ.
Yeah.
And then kind of a lot of the problems that I was just talking about is like, what happens is you accomplish XYZ and you're still not experiencing authentic joy. You're still deferring it in some way because you never learned how to take the perspective in the first place.
Yeah.
And so you feel kind of robbed, you know? You're like, oh my God, I just worked my ass off for 10 years and I'm still not happy. Like, what the hell? What did I do wrong, you know? And that's not to say that like achievement's not great and, you know, success and money is not like, it's great.
Yeah, these are good.
Big fan, big fan. But you really can access that authentic joy in any moment. And I would argue that like being able to access that in the process of achieving things is actually key and foundational. And I think that's one of my big epiphanies. So to give a little bit more context on kind of my journey with this, you know, book blew up, became this huge bestseller. I was kind of like lost in the existential crisis of like, oh my God, what am I gonna do?
Did you have any feeling that that was gonna happen at all?
No.
You had no idea?
Completely blindside.
Truthfully, nothing in your body was like, it's gonna blow up?
No.
Okay.
And the funny thing is, the one person who called it was my wife. And I was like, "Wow, she must really love me." Like she kept saying, she's like, "This is gonna be massive." I don't know, women are oracles at times. She was like, "This is gonna sell millions of copies." And I'm like, "Babe, that's really sweet of you, but no book sells millions of copies." Like, I'm like, "There's like 3 books a year that sell a million copies." And she's like, "No, I think it's gonna sell millions of copies." So she called it. I thought it would do well, but I thought it was the sort of thing, at the time I was blogging and I had some like online courses and stuff.
Hmm.
And so in my mind, and it was doing pretty well. And so in my mind, it was like, okay, this book's gonna come out, you know, hopefully I make a bestseller list, I'll promote it for a few months.
Yeah.
And then I'm gonna go back to my career, you know, back to the incremental, you know, 5% gain here, 10% gain here that I was used to. And so when it blew up, it just kind of like shattered everything in my world. And then the next thing that happened is like all these other opportunities came down the pipeline. Massive book deals, movie deals, TV deals. Will Smith wanted me to write his book. And I'm in that moment, I'm like a little bit of imposter syndrome of like, okay, this might just be, I might have just won the lottery. So like—
Yeah.
I should just say yes to everything, not really paying attention to like how aligned I am with it in terms of like my actual interest in doing it. So I just started signing a bunch. I'm like, that's a lot of zeros. Let me sign that contract. My thinking was like, you know, I'm 30, this may never come around again.
Yeah.
I'm young, I don't have kids, I got time. Like, let's go for it. And so I did that and then I, proceeded to completely burn myself out. And after all those projects, after the burnout, I took about 6 or 8 months off. And in that time off, what I, the agreement that I made with myself was I'm not gonna say yes to anything that's not fun. That's it. That's the only rule. When I go back to work, that's the only rule I have. If it's not fun, I say no.
Yeah.
If I'm not enjoying it, if I'm not gonna be excited about it, I'm gonna say no. Obviously, you can't be super rigid. Obviously, everything, again, coming back to the original point, even your dream job, it's gonna suck someday. You're gonna have off days and there's gonna be certain little things that you're like— Oh, for sure. You know, this sucks. But overall, I'm not gonna say yes to projects I'm not excited about. And I think it's, that genuine excitement and alignment of like, this is fun, I'm excited to be doing this, this feels like play. Like, as long as I'm aligned with that, everything else is figureoutable.
But I love what you're saying. Don't you think that a clear identity and an awareness of who you really are in your core is the only predication of being aligned?
I actually think the cause and effect can go in reverse, right? 'Cause it's like, even if you don't, so I came out of that sabbatical, like really having no idea what I wanted to do. And so that's why I made that agreement. It was just like, just do what's fun, right? And so I came back and like slowly but surely I'm like, okay, well let me try making some videos. I'm like, that was fun, let's keep doing that, right? It's like, okay, let's go do some speaking gigs. Like do a couple workshops. Eh, not really fun, let's not do that.
What wasn't fun about those?
I don't know, I just didn't love it.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
I didn't try to dwell too much or worry about it too much.
Was it a somatic thing where you were like, "Yeah, this doesn't feel right," or?
It's just not as fun as the other stuff.
Yeah. You know? Okay.
And I turned down, I canceled a big book contract 'cause I'm like, "I'm not excited to write this." Publisher thought I was, my agent thought I was insane. She's like, "You realize you have to give this money back, right?" And I was like, "Yeah." But what's the point in working so hard if you don't arrive at a point in your life where you stop doing things you don't wanna do? Like, that's the whole point of working hard is so you can have that life.
I think that's why most of us do it.
Yeah.
'Cause we feel like, I love what you were talking about when you get there and you realize that my rent, my parents, my responsibilities, It's all still there. I interviewed Tom Bilyeu and he told us this story. They deposited like, I don't know, 9 figures in his account. And he's like, "I felt the same." Yeah. I felt this, the founder of Quest Nutrition.
Yeah, yeah.
And I thought to myself, how is that possible? It took me a moment to like grok what this dude was saying, but I get it because I keep hearing these stories from people that have, let's say, accomplished the top of the mountain. And the person, my grandma dropped this wisdom on me, Mark, a long time ago. And grandmas are very wise.
Yeah.
I was like 20 years old. I'm like, I'm gonna move to Hawaii and I'm gonna find myself and I'm gonna go surfing. And she's like, well, Josh, wherever you go, there you are.
Yeah.
Just planted that in my consciousness. And I thought to myself, here I am 45, you know, 25 years later, sharing that quote with you. We get these people that come into our lives. And I think that's why podcasts are so, massively growing is because we are craving real wisdom. That's why the podcast is called Wellness and Wisdom, because I'm like, God, there's so much information out there and knowledge.
Right.
Look at all these books, right? Like, there's so many books. The core of it all is like, how do we decipher what is the true signal of wisdom above the static of just information and education? I know that's a very meta question for you, but have you had a certain mentor or someone you love really course correct you to where, you know, you might be sitting there 20 years later quoting them.
I've had a number of things like that in my life that I feel like there's some lessons that you can't understand until you live it.
Yeah.
Yeah, and this is kind of, to me, this is part of this success thing. Like, 'cause when I think about like, okay, if 25-year-old Mark was listening to this podcast and hearing me say all these things, Of course I'd be like, "Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's not gonna happen to me," right?
Mm-hmm.
I think some things you just have to live it that you don't really understand. You know, you probably had to go to Hawaii to see that your grandma was right.
I did.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like you can't just sit and intellectually understand it. You have to go experience it.
Yeah.
So there have been a number of things like that. You know, my dad told me a number of things early in my career. That stuck with me and like, I guess the profundity of it has like compounded over time as I've gotten older. One of the things that he told me, I remember really early on in my career, I was, I tried a number of businesses, but like really the only thing that took off was like a dating relationship advice business.
Hmm.
And I was blogging about it and I had some eBooks and stuff and I was like really working hard and studying the psychology and the research and like, coming up with new frameworks and ideas and stuff. And I remember I had this one piece that I was very, very proud of and it did pretty well for me. And like 3 weeks later, one of the biggest names in my market had a piece of content and it was the exact same idea, exact same framework, and he was taking credit for it. And it just wrecked me. Like, I, to the point, it was one of the only times I actually thought about quitting. 'Cause I'm like, this is so unfair. Like, why even try? Right? Like, his audience is 100 times bigger than mine. Like, what? I'm never gonna beat that. And I remember I got on the phone with my dad and was kind of talking through it with him. And he was listening and he told me, he said, "You know, Mark, there are two ways to get rich in this world. One is to get really good at finding golden eggs. And the other is to—" become a goose that can lay golden eggs. He said, most people spend all their lives looking for golden eggs, but if you can become a goose, you'll never worry if somebody comes and takes one of your eggs, 'cause you can just go make another one.
Hmm.
And it made me feel a little bit better at the time, but like, as I've gotten older and progressed through my career and my life, there's just so much truth in that. Of like, if you can find a way to just generate value for yourself, then you're never gonna feel possessive or a scarcity mindset around so many different things in life.
Man, I can, thank you for sharing that. I can feel your dad's wisdom through you right there. In the same impact that my grandma shared with mine, I think there's, there's a loss of eldership being heard in the world. We live in an era of extremely high tension, high stakes marketing where people can put out a message because their team researched it. And I just, something that's been weighing on my heart, I'm curious how you see it, has been a space for eldership to really be heard. 'Cause there's so many people, it's like that phrase from Swingers, "He's the guy behind the guy." Yeah. Vince Vaughn said that. There's so many people that don't have a website, they don't have a platform, but they have probably 20x impact from their way of being, what they've learned and embodied, that they could be producing for the world at scale. How do you make sense of that in where we are, I guess, from a societal standpoint of how do we create space for elders to be heard and to be seen that aren't good marketers like so many people on Instagram?
It's funny, like that might be a business opportunity, right? Or just like—
It's a white space.
Yeah, just go find a bunch of like, really wise, smart 70-year-olds and put a camera in front of them and ask them questions.
That sounds like a good project for an AI scrub. That's a beautiful way to use AI.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree with you though. You know, our culture is social media driven at this point. Social media is predominantly teenage and young adult driven.
Yeah, yeah.
And the messages that break through are generally not, accurate, not nuanced, oversimplified, regurgitated, right?
Mainly regurgitated. They're trained to, well, this hook works, so do this way. And I fell into that trap and I'm like, ugh, I don't wanna do that.
Yeah, it's an ecosystem issue. And I don't know exactly how to solve that. I mean, I agree with you. I think podcasts are like kind of a saving grace of, of our media moment.
There's less space to hide. In an hour, you're gonna kind of feel out who somebody is.
And by the way, it's like, I'm super bullish on podcast's future influence on politics. I think we saw this a little bit in the last election, but it's just like, 'cause if you think back like 10, 20 years ago, it's just like all these smear ads and like short 5-second clips taken outta context and then blasted across every like, news cable channel, right? If you can actually just get leaders sitting down, talking for 2, 3 hours with zero edits, it's like you get an accurate picture of like, okay, who is this person? What do they know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I agree with you. So then in this world of quick bites and dopamine, I know you've gone super deep into your work. I'm sure you've interviewed neuroscientists and people at the highest level of how the brain works, right? What fascinates you the most about dopamine? 'Cause at the core of what you're describing, it's really a dopamine-serotonin, Nir Eyal calls it the variable reward system. So it's like every time on social, you don't know what you're gonna get. So there's this extra catecholamine of hormone surge where you're like, oh, that little green button or that little red button, it's always gonna be variable. How do we take back our self?
Yeah.
How do we take back our dopaminergic system so that we're not a slave to these devices?
I draw an analogy. I think food is actually a great analogy here. So if you look at the history of food, you know, diets didn't really exist until maybe 100 years ago, probably more like 60, 70 years ago.
Yeah.
And that's because previous to 75 years ago, everything was just, everybody grew their own food. Everything was locally produced, locally sourced. You know, it's like if, If you didn't live somewhere that had strawberries in September, like you just didn't eat strawberries, right? What happened in the mid-20th century is you get industrialized food production. So you get this massive surplus of low-quality shitty food that is suddenly very cheap and accessible to everybody everywhere.
Mm-hmm.
So for the first time in human history, everybody has access to more food and more variety of food than, they've ever had in history. And so that, it's only then that you get nutritional diets that emerge, right? Because it's in, back when food was scarce, it was insane to ask yourself, what should I eat and not eat, right? You just ate whatever was there. But when there's, you go into a supermarket and there's like 800 choices of Pop-Tarts, suddenly you have to like start thinking like, okay, what am I gonna eat? Like, what should I stop eating?
Yeah.
And then of course, this is where you start seeing heart disease and diabetes and obesity, like, all start taking off, right? So it's the surplus of calories that, and also the surplus of low-quality calories that suddenly forces the population to develop an understanding of a nutritional diet of like, okay, what am I putting into my body? What am I not putting into my body? How do I make these choices? Set boundaries around certain things for myself. And so that I can be physically healthy.
Mm-hmm.
I think we've reached the same thing with information. So as of about 15 years ago, for the first time in history, we hit a place where there is an astronomical surplus of information, most of it low quality. And what's happening? The exact same thing that happened when there was a surplus of low quality calories. People are overindulging. And they're overindulging on the junk food equivalent of information. And so the same way you had to develop a nutritional diet to counterbalance or attempt to counterbalance the surplus of calories, we need to develop an information diet or an attention diet to counterbalance the massive surplus of stimulation and information in our lives. And so I've written a few articles about it. It's really just being, again, like a nutritional diet. You have to be extremely conscientious and aware of the choices you're making.
Yeah.
Setting clear boundaries of like, okay, I'm not gonna follow accounts like that. I'm not gonna listen to these people on this topic. Like, I'm only gonna get news from these sources. I'm only gonna trust like verified experts on these topics. These are the 6 people I follow who make me feel good and add value to my life. And these are the 8 people that, just make me feel sad and depressed and hate my life. So I'm gonna stop following them. You know, like you have to kind of do an audit of what is your information diet from time to time and cut out all the junk food and like really double down on the healthy, nutritious stuff.
I literally just did that.
Yeah?
I have like 100K+ that follow me, but I follow 3 people now.
Nice.
I had to like do an A-Bot to unfollow 'cause I couldn't, it was like thousands of people. And every time I was trying to unfollow, Instagram would be like, "You can't unfollow that many people." So they're making us informationally fat by design to keep us on platform. I'm not here to 100% villainize technocrats. I think there's some beautiful inherent good. You and I wouldn't even be sitting here if it wasn't for these channels. So I'm not, you know, there's a duality there.
Just like industrial food is like a net positive for the world, right? It's like we don't have a billion people starving to death anymore. Same is true with the information environment, but it brings its own costs and setbacks.
For us to put in the guardrails, and I don't know if you've written about this yet, so, you know, in software and in life and in dietary, I mean, all aspects of being, there's guardrails of safety. Otherwise, we'd always be throwing strikes in the gutter. We'd always be like in the trenches. What is 1 or 2 or 3 really important guardrails for you when it comes to not getting obese from information?
Hmm. Being very conscious about when I have my phone with me and when I don't.
I love that you said that first. I think that's probably universal.
That's—
The phone.
That is step number one, right? Like everything else that comes after this is downstream of that. But it's don't take your phone to the bedroom. Don't look at it first thing in the morning. Don't look at it, don't have it with you during important meetings or when you're doing deep work. There's all sorts of research that shows like just having the phone on the table in front of you reduces your attention span, makes you more distractible. So it's like just out of sight, out of mind. Like if you're at a dinner, keep your phone in your pocket or in your bag, leave it in your car, whatever. It's, there's all sorts of, there's just attention pollution that comes with the phone. To begin with.
That's a great phrase. It really is.
It's, I wrote—
Attention pollution.
I wrote an article, oh my God, probably 2017, 2018. It didn't go viral, but it's, you know, sometimes you make a piece of content that you're super proud of, but it's like, you know, it doesn't do super well.
Yeah.
So one of those for me was I wrote an article called "Smartphones Are the New Cigarettes," and I compared it to having a smartphone, like if you're at a dinner or something, and somebody at the table is on their phone while everybody's talking. I said, that's the equivalent of like somebody pulling out a cigarette and like smoking while everybody's eating. Like, it just—
Yeah.
It's just disrespectful.
It is, yeah.
Because it's not only is the person on the phone completely tuned out and not paying attention and not connecting, but it's also distracting everybody else, right? It's like your eyes keep getting drawn to it. Maybe they're like showing a picture or a meme or something and it's like interrupting everybody. So it's just— Yeah, boundaries around the phone, first and foremost. You can do it at the app level, right? So a number of people, you can either just delete certain apps from your phone, you know?
Ooh, sorry to interrupt you. Shout out to Brick. They're one of our partners. You just tap your phone on the Brick and it blocks your apps.
That's awesome.
I love that.
Yeah, so app blockers, there's like, you can set timers for your apps now of like, I only wanna do 30 minutes. So my wife does 30 minutes of Instagram a day. That's like her time limit. And just doing that has like increased her mood and happiness significantly.
I bet.
So you can do that within the app. I would say like if you are gonna be on social media, just be very conscientious. Like these days, it's not followers don't, like following doesn't matter as much these days because 90% of what you're getting fed on your algorithm is not people you follow or, it's nobody you've ever heard of.
Yeah, yeah.
So you have to, I think of it as like training your own algorithm. So you have to like teach your algorithm what to serve to you. And so I think the thing that most people don't realize or they miss is that you need to give your algorithm feedback. So if you look at a piece of content or watch a piece of content and you think it's bad, don't leave a comment. If you leave a comment, that's teaching your algorithm, hey, show me more of this. I'm gonna engage with this. Don't leave a comment, don't like, don't share it, don't send it to somebody and be like, look how stupid this person is, 'cause you're just gonna get more of that. So you should actually do the opposite, which is most apps now, there's like a, if you click the three dots, you can say not interested in content. Don't like it, yeah. Yeah, don't show me anything like this. Do that aggressively. Anything that comes up on your feed that you're like, this is stupid, this is not, interesting, it's not adding value, this person is probably wrong or not a credible figure. Give the feedback to get it off your feed.
What you're speaking to reminds me of this specific number, and I might get the source wrong, but it's we get 150 high-tension decisions every day. It's like why Steve Jobs would always wear the same outfit. I think it's the Dunbar number. I'm not totally sure about that. Something else.
Dunbar number or something, but yeah, it's called ego depletion.
Okay, ego depletion. So if we only get, if we're these fallible human beings on a rock spinning in the middle of outer space that you described, then how do we give ourselves grace and actually stack the environment? This is more of like a tactical question for you. How do you and we stack our environment? You already talked about the phone. Are there any other ways in which we can fortify and build a moat around our sovereignty, around our health, around our beingness? And I feel like the reason I'm asking you that is because everything else that modernity brings is like a hook that steals us away from our vitality and from our creative expression.
Yeah.
So what's your moat look like and what do you recommend as a moat around our sovereignty, our way of being?
I think people drastically underestimate how much responsibility you need to take for your own environment. So I think one of the most common misunderstandings is really what self-discipline is. Like most, I think most people assume that a very disciplined person is just like white-knuckling through everything, right? Like getting up at 5:30, drinking their smoothie, going running 6 miles, doing a cold plunge. Like they just assume that everybody's like David Goggins and just white-knuckling through the whole thing.
Yeah.
That's not true. Most of us can't do that. Like willpower is really, really inefficient in terms of like really, really willpower evolved for high important short-term actions, right? So it's like you really have to get this thing done in the next 2 hours, right? Or like there's a really important presentation tomorrow morning at work and you need to like work through the night to get it done. Like that's really all willpower is designed for. Anything past a day, 2 days, it's gonna fail you. You're gonna run out of it and you're gonna fall back into your default. Yeah. State. What the research actually shows, what discipline is, is that like we are very much creatures of our environments, of the inputs that we're receiving from the environment around us. And so really what discipline is, in my opinion, is consciously setting up your environment in a way so that it strategically nudges you towards the behaviors and actions that you want to be taking.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
And a lot of this is as simple as, you know, I don't know if we had gone live yet, but we were talking about, you know, where you live here.
Yeah.
You know, you're way outside of town. You know, you've got the woods back here. You've got all these beautiful hills around here. You know, it's like that is probably a very conscious decision on your part.
Absolutely.
Because that has all sorts of downstream effects in terms of like what you're gonna be nudged into doing. I lived in New York City for 8 years. And as soon as I left, I lost like 30 pounds. Why? Because the only thing to do in New York City is just eat and drink.
Plus you're just around this white chatter noise 24/7.
You're stressed all the time.
I'm always tripped out when people live in New York. I'm like, how?
You're stressed out all the time.
8 years.
You're eating amazing food every night. You're having unbelievable cocktails. There's always a party to go to. There's always a concert. There's always a show. It's never-ending. And it, like, quite literally started destroying me. And so it's by removing yourself from the environment, you remove yourself from all the incentives and nudges around you. How does this play out on, like, a micro scale? It could be as simple as, like, don't go to the grocery store when you're hungry. Order your groceries ahead of time, like, right after you eat.
Yeah. Yeah.
You know, like, or even better, like tell an AI what sort of nutrition plan you wanna be on, have it map out everything that you should buy from the grocery store, and then just blindly copy and paste it into Instacart or whatever. Like, don't even, remove your own decisions from the process as much as possible.
Yes.
You know, like there's all these like little hacks and tricks and little things that you can do. You know, one of the things that, I did, so I have a little home gym at my place in LA and I wasn't using it enough. And so one of the things I did is I started putting all my shoes in the gym and it was basically like I couldn't put my shoes on to go anywhere until I walked into my gym.
Yeah.
And then it's like once you walk into your gym, you're like, well, I feel like an asshole if I don't work out. So it just like, it gave me that nudge of like, okay, now I have to be in my gym every morning. Anyway, so I might as well like take 20, 30 minutes and do a little workout.
Dude, these little hacks, they're not little.
No.
You know what's funny about human life that I laugh at? Since we mentioned Alan Watts earlier, just like the absurdity and also the beauty of everything, the littlest choices for me make the most significant impact. Like the biggest one that I've been noticing this week, I'm gonna raise my hand and say I haven't been doing it, I have been doing a lot of coding with AI.
Yeah.
Because I'm super advanced and I'm compared to most people advanced, but compared to a lot of people, I'm like newbie.
Right.
I have noticed that I'll get up and like before I even work out, I'll go into coding. This week has been the most stressful, the most gnarly.
Dude, I'm in the same boat.
Friction with my wife, like just today. And I'm like, I'm sorry. I'm like, I don't know why I'm being such an asshole. Oh, it's 'cause Mark just said this on the, podcast and I literally already knew it, but I wasn't doing it. So my question for you is, in the rise of AI, and you have an app that I'd love for you to share too.
Yes.
Which is different than just like some bot or GPT telling you to eat, you know, protein in the morning. This is a totally different thing that you've built, okay? It's a synthesis of a culmination of all your books and work, which is incredible. Like, it's like basically they're getting you in their pocket, which I think is pretty cool. Have you felt this? With the rise of AI, even being the founder of an application utilizing AI to give people a different quality of life, like what is the current for you? I feel pulled to it, but I also feel repelled by it.
Oh, dude.
Where are you at with this?
I feel like we're about to have a group therapy session here. Like everything is—
Well, that's what this podcast is for me. It's like PhD education and therapy.
There you go. Yeah, man. I've been going very hard on AI for the past year, and same thing, it's health habits have slipped.
Yeah.
Sleep habits have slipped.
I don't like it.
Wife is complaining. I'm not present. I'm like always distracted. It's funny, the funny thing with AI, and this is like, I feel like I'm starting to finally figure this out. It feels so high leverage. Like every time you're using AI, you're just so blown away by how much it can do and how quickly it can do it. It's unreal. That for me personally, like, I always feel like if I'm not using it, I'm wasting time in some way. And so I feel like in every moment, every free moment, every nook and cranny of like a minute I have, I should be like talking to Claude and telling it to code something. And the thing is though, is that like, probably 80% of the things that I do with, like with Claude, it's really exciting in the moment, but like after a week I don't really use it anymore. Or like it's, or it kind of breaks or like, I'm like, okay, well that was a cool idea, but it's actually not as useful as I thought it was gonna be. It breaks down. Right? So it's like, there's just like so much maintenance and upkeep and like trying new things that like, in the moment you feel like you're getting 100% productivity out of it. But when you actually like stop and look back over the past month, you're like, okay, actually like, 50 or 60% of that was just a waste of time. And so there's like an illusion of productivity and high leverage, but the reality is that you're actually just like burning hours and hours and hours of your time and tons of attention on a lot of stuff that's like actually not that useful long-term.
Yeah.
And then meanwhile, your wife's griping at you and you haven't worked out in a week and like—
Yeah.
Yeah, so that's been story of my life. That's a recent realization that I had. I've had.
Same.
That said, I just like, I'm so bullish on the potential of AI, especially in like the personal growth and wellness space. Because, so if you look at the statistics around therapists, counselors, and coaches, it's a little harrowing in a lot of different ways. So first of all, just supply and demand. For every therapist and coach that is available to work with people, there's approximately 1,600 people who want to have access to one and don't.
Damn.
So that's like right out of the gate, you're just like, there's a massive supply-demand imbalance, which of course makes everything super expensive. You're paying hundreds of dollars just per session, which obviously like locks thousands, millions of people out. Yeah. There's that issue. Second issue is when you actually, like, look at outcomes of coaching and therapy, what you find is 80% of the outcomes are being driven by the 20% best therapists and coaches, right?
Yeah.
And it's like, and a lot of people who have been to therapy, like, this is the thing that doesn't get talked about, 'cause, like, the thing that everybody's always like, "You should go to therapy. Everybody should go to therapy." Yes, in the broad abstract sense, that is true. The problem is, is that your average therapist or even a below average therapist is not very good. Like, they're not, statistically, they're unlikely to help that much. And then it's very hard as a consumer to determine, to really know, it's like, is my therapist good? Like, do they know what they're doing or are they just like going through the motions here?
Mm-hmm.
So there's that issue as well. So I'm just, I'm incredibly bullish on AI in terms of like once it reaches parity with some of the best therapists and coaches in the world, you're just gonna have this mass distribution of amazing advice and care for millions and millions of people who've never had it.
Ooh.
And so chances are a lot of people listening to this have gone to ChatGPT, asked some personal life questions, maybe had like a therapy, quote unquote therapy session with it. Maybe had some mixed results. I started noticing this a little bit more than a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago. A lot of my friends told me that they were like, we're starting to use ChatGPT as a therapist or a coach. And so I started messing with it. And the first thing that I noticed was, it's what everybody's noticed about ChatGPT at this point. It's a yes man. It's like anything you tell it.
Yeah.
You could be like, hey, ChatGPT, I robbed the bank and left my wife. You know, "what state should I move to?" And ChatGPT would be like, "Oh wow, that must be stressful. Let me help you out with that." Like, you know, there's just like zero pushback.
Right.
On anything.
Yeah.
And even if you tell it to push back, it'll push back like once or twice and then it, and then it just starts agreeing with everything again. And so as somebody who has been in this industry my entire career, who's literally made his entire living on like, telling people uncomfortable things that they need to hear. Like, I strongly believe that 99% of growth is uncomfortable. It comes from either noticing something that you were blind to previously or having somebody or something push back on a belief in a way that forces you to reevaluate your assumptions.
That's my favorite one, what you just said.
Yeah, so I looked at it and I'm like,, you know, if somebody could build an AI that could do that, like, holy shit, that's gonna be so valuable. So I went, I found a co-founder. My co-founder, he's been building AI products for over 10 years, and we started working on it. And so it's called Purpose. And yeah, the goal is that it is challenging. It like, it points out things. It is optimized to point out things that you might be missing. And it's funny too because it's like the biggest complaint that we get from users. Like people will sign up, they'll talk to it for like 10 minutes and then we'll get an angry email being like, "Your AI is mean to me." We're like, "Mean how?" And they're like, "Well, it told me I was wrong and that I'm the problem." And I'm like, "All right, I think it's working the way we expected." Yeah, good job. Yeah.
Right, right, right. Oh my gosh, okay, so this is cool. It lowers the playing field so that somebody can get in there for less than they would go buy lunch, basically.
Yeah.
Especially in LA or New York.
Yeah.
And then once they get in, this is where the trust factor for me comes into play because, you know, all these platforms, I believe Claude is the same T's and C's that GPT has. Anything I'm putting in there, it can be held and used against me, yeah?
Yep.
In these big platforms. What's your take on that with Purpose?
So we anonymize all data. There is a memory system built in because it's, for this use case, I think memory's hugely important.
It needs to remember the person.
Right, and it's like if you have a conversation, you know, I don't know, about your childhood and something your dad did when you were 8, you know, like, it should know that, right? If you come back a month later and wanna talk again, like, it should remember that. So there is memory built in, but all the data is anonymized. All of it is like, Privacy is a huge priority for us for exactly the reason that you're saying.
Yeah.
There's certain things about, I mean, not even just for people's comfort and wellbeing. We've heard from a lot of users that, so when we first launched, we just had a normal login screen and you could use your Apple ID or whatever. As soon as we launched, we got a bunch of emails from people who were like, "Hey, can you log me out and actually let me hide this app in different ways on my phone?" Because it turned out that they're sharing phones with their partner or a family member.
Right.
And they're like, "I don't want this person to be able to get into my— We share an account, we share an email. I don't want them to be able to get into my account." And we're like, "Oh, shit, we never thought about that." Right. So, we've added all sorts of protections and securities around that as well. It is like privacy security is like top priority. Guardrails, coming back to guardrails. Guardrails is another one. It's like, it's definitely, I definitely don't think AI is at the point where it should be like clinically diagnosing people or like recommending therapeutics to like people with like really chronic serious issues. I tell people, I joke, I'm like, it's the, our AI is like built for like high quality problems. It's like if you're clinically depressed or like have bipolar or something like—
Yeah.
You should go see a professional face-to-face and Purpose will tell you that and help you find that professional. But like if you're working through a breakup or a career change or having a hard time at work or something, we're for you.
This is really good. To me, what's been missing has been just somebody that people can trust. In their life. It's like that having a friend, or I even talked about it earlier, how do we give the mentorship and the elders a platform? I mean, that's inherently, whether you know it or not, not to label you, but I am, you know, you're— I'm getting old, Josh Trent. You're an elder. You're in your 40s, right?
I'm getting old, I'm 42.
Okay, you're 42. So at some point in your 50s and 60s, you will have amassed so much information and knowledge that you'll be able to disseminate and articulate the wisdom. And so to me, it seems like a logical evolution for all of us that are here, 'cause it's here, we can't get rid of it. I think I fought it for a while, the whole AI thing, 'cause I didn't want it to be here. But that's like me going outside and being in the rain and being like, "I don't wanna be wet." It's like, it's here, so we can't change it.
It's so here.
How might you, if you were to look forward in your life and still being able to do the things that you love and say yes to the things that are fun, how do you see purpose and AI, not just for you even, but for all of us, being a way in which we can give the elders, or the elders in training a platform, but also make sure that it's held in a sacred container.
Yeah.
Because with information becoming ubiquitous, you know, courses are down, everything's down from what it used to be. Like teaching is essentially, you can go to a GPT.
Yeah.
How might you see that playing out? I guess honestly, 3 years is good enough. We can't even predict what's gonna happen more than 3 years. But in the next 3 years, how might you see AI being a place where where real wisdom can be shared and can be held in a sacred way.
I personally think that within 10 years, most educational markets are gonna bifurcate and there's really just gonna be two things. There's gonna be AI, anything informational, anything, any facts you need to know, any frameworks you need to understand, any perspectives you need to like work through, AI is gonna handle that. And then everything else will be in person. I think those, that's basically the two options you're gonna get.
That feels true. We're already seeing it.
Yeah, it's already moving that direction. And I think it's all the informational demand will be met with AI and then all of the emotional and social demand will be met in person.
Well, this is why Tony Robbins is so popular. I mean, he's an incredible speaker as well, 40-year veteran of help, but he has his demons. He has his things that he's worked through in his life. And I think if we can get to a place where AI can be a shepherd of not just wisdom, but also truth, like this person, Mark isn't, Mark is not a perfect being. Mark shares about his insecurities or his fights with his wife because he's on AI too much. Like what I'm asking you is— Yeah. What do you think leadership looks like now in the world to really be a leader and to be a trustworthy leader in the era of AI? Back in the day, you could have just had a pulpit and a program and been like, well, this is the way it is, y'all. But now it's different.
It's funny 'cause I feel like he's kind of making a comeback, Tony. And I actually think he's gonna thrive in this new era because, you know, back in the day, it used to be like, you were the guy on stage because you knew something, you knew information most people don't know.
Right.
Like, that's why you were on stage. I think that's gonna go away. I think what's gonna happen is in the future, the reason you're on stage is because you know how to create a container to give people the experience that they need to experience or they want to experience. And I think in the entertainment world, you know, that's obviously like, that's already happening. But like, I think in the educational world, and I think this is, Tony already does this very well, It's not like if I host an event or a workshop, right? It's not gonna be me on stage lecturing people. It's gonna be like, hey, okay, you guys already know all my frameworks 'cause you all have my AI and you've been talking to it.
Mm.
Now we're here to implement. Now we're here to like actually live it and see what it feels like and see what comes up for you and support each other as we like work through it, right? And so whether that's in-person exercises or like group therapy, Sessions or different practices, challenges that we do together like that. I think you're gonna see a lot of that sort of stuff start to happen because it's, I mean, you and I both know, everybody listening to this knows, like you can read about something until you're blue in the face, doesn't mean you can actually go do it.
You mentioned something earlier that one of the ways people procrastinate is by over-researching anyways.
Exactly, exactly.
We're getting to an era where AI's pushing us back to analog. That's what I feel.
Yeah.
If you look at Gen Z and even what's the generation before, I don't even know, they're very digital. They've lost the art of analog and just like being with another human being. And so what I'm most excited about, man, is the container to which you speak. And before we say goodbye, I would love for you to give a real definition from your expertise of like, what is an actual container? Because in the spiritual world, It could mean fucking anything. A container, it's like, what does that even mean? So what's the pragmatic approach to really creating a container, whether you're a speaker, a coach, or just somebody that cares about another human being?
Yeah, I mean, you can create a container for a single conversation. Like we're here right now, the container here is we're on a podcast together called Wellness and Wisdom, and there's certain topics that you generally talk about and all that stuff. A container, it's simply a set of limitations and expectations, right? So it's, you decide beforehand, hey, we're all gonna come together in this room. This is the reason we're here. This is what we're gonna do while we're here. And these are the things we're not gonna do while we're here, right? And it could be for a more formal event, right? It could be scheduling out like, okay, we're gonna have these sorts of talks and interactions and we're gonna do these exercises. Then we're gonna go have lunch and like, this is the intention we all have for being here. In a more informal way, right? Like you can, let's say you need to have like a serious, uncomfortable conversation with somebody you care about, right? Like you can set the container of saying, "Hey, I'd love to talk to you about our relationship. Is there a time where like you have 20 minutes to sit down and like kind of go deep or like think, be very thoughtful about?" Yeah. What we're gonna talk about.
Yeah.
And that just sets expectation for the person. That allows them to opt in to a situation where, like, they know where the boundaries are and they know, like, what's about to happen. And so much of our experiences, it's funny too, like, I think so much conflict just comes from, like, not setting expectations.
Agreed.
Of just, like, blindsiding somebody with a question or a conversation in a context that, like, not expecting it, not prepared to have it. Whereas if you kind of like just set the container, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Of like, hey, every Thursday night we sit down and just check in with each other, you can get so much more headway.
Man, for me, what I was feeling when you were describing that was a container is really just an intention that's spoken and felt. And then everything that happens in that space is a vibrational or aligned match. Yeah. For that. And I think we've all been in containers. I know you have, 'cause you spent time in New York where it feels like a jail. Somebody sets a container, but then they don't uphold the container. So that's, anyways, that's for another podcast. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for being here, man. I'm glad that it worked out. Really beautiful work you're doing.
Thanks, man.
And I love the practicality that you bring. There's a lot of esoteric babble in the world, especially in my lane, wellness and wisdom. I've had on some guests where I'm like, oh, and then I've deleted it.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, because I realized that it was so esoteric that it couldn't actually land here in the 3D. And one of the things I really respect about your work is you take these very large concepts and you're able to boil it down to simplicity, which I think for my life's work as well, and the mark of a great teacher is somebody that can do that. So thanks for being my guest, man.
Thank you.
Appreciate you being here.
Thanks, dude.
Y'all share this podcast. Share this podcast with somebody who is stuck in loops. Mark, how many people have you seen that have read your books and written into you that are just in loops, like cycles? Oh my God. Just deep cycles.
Thousands.
We don't have to stay there is what I got from this podcast. I think we all can feel that. So head over to liberatedlife.com, pick up the copy of "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck," and also its counterpart, "Everything Is Fucked." I love that. This came after, right?
Yep.
Okay. Y'all share this podcast. I'm wishing you love, wellness, but most importantly, I'm wishing this to you and me too, and our families and everybody with us. I'm wishing you peace and power. I do not believe you can have true power unless it comes from peace. We'll talk with you guys next week. Peace.
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