C (2:18)

And I think maybe a marathon might be a short term goal, but when people think about what they really want, how would you help someone figure that out?

A (2:27)

Right?

C (2:27)

Is it Something that they've absorbed from parents, friends, Instagram, or how do you really look in and figure out where do I want to go?

B (2:34)

What I find with people is that it's this process of finding what actually matters to you and what is actually going to be meaningful in your life. It's less of going out and seeking it. You know, there's this term in self help of finding your purpose, which I personally believe is a little bit of a misnomer because I don't think purpose is necessarily found. It's not like it's hiding under a rock somewhere and you have to go pick up the right rock and be like, oh, my purpose? I found it. I think the actual experience of it is that it's more revealed. Like it's already there, it's already in you. You're already doing the thing or experiencing it in some way. The problem is that there's all these layers of obligations and distractions and social pressures that you are also pursuing and doing. And so what I find is that it's about stripping away those layers of social obligation, social duty, distraction, compulsions. Find the things that you know for a fact are not meaningful and feel like a waste of time and stop doing those and then see what's left.

C (3:36)

And are some of those trying to keep up with the Joneses, if you will, things that kind of pull you in a direction of your peers beyond just what other people say to do?

B (3:46)

Yes, the whole keep up with the Joneses phenomenon is at its core a very meaningless and unsatisfying form of motivation. I do think it is naturally human, right? We do care what the people around us think about us, that's fine. But if you are using that as the basis of all of your ambition and motivation, the way I would describe it is you're using a very poor fuel source. It's like you're like putting the shittiest version of gasoline into your car. And so if you start having engine problems or the transmission gets busted, you shouldn't be surprised. Whereas if you find something that is a little bit more mission driven, that has a deeper significance to you, that you believe very strongly is going to help the people around you or help the world, that's like putting like really high grade gasoline into the car.

C (4:34)

We've probably both been in this situation, but whether we find the thing we want to pursue or not, it feels good to know you're making progress. And so you have some metric like how am I doing? And an easy metric is like, how am I doing? Relative to my peers, how much money do I have? Which I assume you would say are probably not the things you should be grading yourself on. So how do you get out of that mindset but still give yourself some metric to feel like you're making progress?

B (4:57)

It's funny because in business you learn that you have to be very careful what you measure because you will naturally start optimizing for that metric. And so if you pick a poor metric to optimize for, you're gonna end up with a bad business. I would say the same is true for life. If you pick a poor metric to optimize for, you're gonna end up in a life that you don't really enjoy or don't really like. So I think the important question is, what are you optimizing for and why are you optimizing for it? And generally speaking, like approval of others or some sort of status game or competition, Again, they're inevitable. You're gonna play em no matter what. But that can't be the primary thing that you're optimizing for. One of the ways I often describe it in my talks is like the way you stop giving a fuck what other people think is by finding something more important than what other people think, you're never gonna stop caring what they think. But if you can find something that matters so much to you that you're willing to be disliked, or you're willing to take less money, or you're willing to maybe be laughed at or embarrassed a little bit, that's actually what winning is. That's where you want to be.

C (5:57)

When you said that, it just made me think of having kids. So I have two kids and never more have I been like, oh, I don't really care about going to the event because I'm taking my daughter get ice cream. You know, like, I have this thing that kind of feels so much more exciting than a lot of these things that maybe used to be interesting. Do I need more money or do I want more time? I'm not saying kids are the answer to everyone's problems. And I'm sure you could present an alternative for someone who isn't interested in having kids or is earlier in their career or maybe doesn't have kids anymore, or has kids, but they're gone, they're out of the house.

B (6:26)

Yeah.

C (6:26)

What are other things that people can root themselves in that feel better than the social pressure that they can care about more?

B (6:34)

So it's interesting if you look at the psychological research of where does a sense of purpose come from? What are the ingredients? What are the boxes you have to check in your life to feel a deep sense of purpose and meaning in what you're doing. In my opinion, there's kind of three key ingredients. So the first one is you need to find something that you are uniquely positioned to do. Either it's a talent that you have, it's a unique experience or background that you have, it's a certain privilege or opportunity that has been given to you, but it's something that is uniquely you, that you really feel like, okay, I'm one of the only people in the world that is in a position to do this thing. That's number one. Number two is you need to find a way to give it to the world, make other people's lives better, add value to people around you. And then the third piece is that it needs to be something that you're willing to sacrifice for, that you're willing to give up other things for, that you're willing to pass up on the conference or the event, or that you're willing to take a pay cut or maybe not get the best opportunity. And I feel like if you can nail all three of those things, that's what generates that deeper sense of purpose. That sense of this is the thing that's more important than all the other things. What's interesting is that if you think about it, parenthood, I actually think the psychological mechanisms for purpose probably evolved from parenthood, because if you look at being a parent, by definition, you are the only person in the world that is your child's father. So there's nobody who else who can do it for you. Second, you are definitely sacrificing and struggling and giving up part of your life to make somebody else's life better, right? So it's like children are kind of the baked in vehicle for purpose in our lives, but you can still find that through many other avenues. So it can be through charity activism, starting a company, volunteering in your community, being a good family member, a good friend. There's a lot of ways that you can kind of achieve the same thing. But those three variables always need to be in place.

C (8:32)

When you first started saying this, I heard you've got this talent, you're uniquely positioned. And I could just imagine people listening, thinking, God, that's a high bar. Like, I'm the best in the world at something. You know, I'm. I'm an Olympic level athlete at some skill. And then right at the end, you said, it could be charity, it could be being a good friend. It's like you could be an excellent listener. So your purpose could be that for your community. You are the person that helps people get through things. It doesn't mean you have to go and be Tony Robbins and help millions of people get through things. And so I feel like there's this thing where you look at purpose and ambition and sometimes it gets caught up and you have to change the world.

B (9:10)

Yeah.

C (9:10)

And you're like, how do I become, you know, an Elon Musk, a Bill Gates, you know, a Steve Jobs.

B (9:15)

Yeah.

C (9:15)

Is that necessary?

B (9:16)

No. And I think what you're describing is it's a side effect of living in the social media age or the Internet age, which is, I think we are vastly over indexed on the global and we're under indexed on the local. So people really underestimate the things that are unique to themselves. You could be somebody, let's say, for instance, a friend of mine grew up in the foster care system and he ended up becoming successful in his adult life. But he spends a lot of time and energy assisting, helping with various charities, helping with foster kids, mentoring them. That's something that he feels very uniquely positioned to do given his background. So he knows where they came from and he got out of it and he created a good life for himself. So when he turns back, he's like, okay, I'm in a very unique position here. He's not the richest guy in the world. He's not the smartest guy in the world. If you saw him in the grocery store, there's nothing notable about him. But he has this unique background and this unique challenge that he overcame. And then that becomes the unique thing about himself.

C (10:17)

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C (12:35)

Someone need to be to even process that they found this thing? Like, you know, I know you talk a lot about honesty. Is there a point where you're like, in order for me to figure this out, I have to start being honest with myself about what I want because I've been, I guess, trained by society.

B (12:47)

To not yeah, again, I think it's more purpose isn't found, it's revealed. It's like recognizing that all the things that you thought were important actually aren't. Or maybe they are only important for a short period of time and the satisfaction you get from them runs out. It's not sustainable over the long run. For instance, I ran into that in my own career. My career blew up in the late 2010s, suddenly became this huge bestselling author. All my dreams that I had had since my early twenties. One by one the boxes started getting check and it was hugely satisfying for like two years. And then one day you wake up and you're like sitting in your nice house with a nice bank account, all these people saying these great things about you on the Internet and you're like, oh, now what?

C (13:38)

Money doesn't solve all the problems.

B (13:40)

No, it definitely doesn't. It definitely doesn't. This happens a lot. It's actually a little bit of a well known phenomenon in Hollywood. Like people who become really famous and successful too quickly. Quincy Jones used to call it altitude sickness because it's like climbing a mountain. If you go straight to the summit, you get sick, you can die and fall back down. The only way to do it healthily is to kind of go up gradually and acclimate as you go. And I think you see this a lot with very successful founders and creatives and artists and people who kind of blow up and experience an intense amount of success in a short period of time or at a very young age. It kind of throws you into this existential crisis of like, okay, I just did all the things I was supposed to do, but I still feel like the same schmuck who, like, can barely get out of bed in the morning, like, doesn't know what to do with himself. Right. So it's a very real phenomenon.

C (14:33)

So what happened? I feel like you're not.

A (14:35)

You're out.

C (14:36)

You got out of your bed. You're here today.

B (14:37)

Yeah, yeah. So I had two reactions. I will say one was the unhealthy reaction and one is the healthy reaction. And so I'll start with the unhealthy react, which was the first reaction, which was, holy shit, this is all happening. This may not last. So I should probably say yes to everything and just ride this wave. This could be my 15 minutes. This could be my moment. People are throwing contracts in front of me with very large dollar figures on them. I should probably just say yes and sign them all. Regret, prevention. So I did that and what happened is I just very quickly ended up back into the social obligation or the social pressure game of just like pleasing the people around me. It's like, well, I said I was going to do this thing. I said I was going to do this tour, so I got to go do this tour. And I said I was going to do this special projects for Amazon. So I got to do this project. And I kind of created, I think, the same cage that most entrepreneurs, including myself, were like, motivated to go into entrepreneurship to escape, which is like owning your own time and having your own agency. Like being a high agency person who can do whatever they want and make decisions for themselves. I went into a multi year period where it was just like every day was kind of pre planned and there were expectations on me that I had to fulfill. And so I became very miserable and very unhealthy and very overworked and burnt out and everything. That led to the second reaction, which is like, why don't I just stop everything? Why don't I just take a sabbatical and like not work for a few months? Because I don't know what's up from down anymore. I don't know what in my life is actually me and what is like some external pressure that I bought into. My original intention was to take the first quarter of 2022 off. I got two months into that quarter and I was like, this is definitely not enough time. I definitely needed a lot more time. So I ended up taking the first six or eight months of 2022 off. I spent a lot of that actually, like in kind of this, like just this confusion of like not knowing what I wanted, who I was, what I was supposed to do by saying no to everything. Very slowly, like, I opened up space to start missing things. And the things that I started missing were actually extremely simple. It was all the stuff that I did back when I started my career, back when I was 21. It was like, it got very absurd actually. So just to tell you a funny story, during this period where I was, quote, unquote, not working, I started having so many ideas for blog posts, I started playing with creating pseudonyms. I'm like, you know what? I'm gonna create a substack with a pseudonym. I'm gonna write a big blog post and it's gonna be really cool. And then I'm gonna create a brand around it, and then maybe I'll start the newsletter. And like, I started like mapping out this like three month plan under this pseudonymous substack that I was gonna create. And I'm like, wait a second, I already have that business. I've been building it for 15 years. Like, what am I doing? And so it's one of those funny things that you eventually just kind of remember who you are. And I started to remember why I got into this business in the first place. I love ideas, I love writing, I love communicating. And so it was like, just do that. Fuck all the contracts and the publishers and the international tours and just write some shit online. Start there.

C (17:48)

I'm curious how important other people were for you to make this discovery. And I bring it up because when I First started this podcast, I told some friends, and I was like, I'm gonna start this podcast. It's gonna be all about me going down these rabbit holes to optimize various aspects of your life. And they're like, well, yeah, of course you are. And I'm like, what do you mean? I've been trying to figure out what I should do with my life for 20 years now. I give you this idea. And the overwhelming feedback from every single person was like, this is you. This is what you should be doing. And I was like, well, it would have been nice if you told me 20 years ago, but it took me a long time to even find the thing. But to a lot of my friends and family, it was so obvious.

B (18:25)

Yes.

C (18:25)

And I'm curious how much talking to others can help you figure out what you want versus just looking inside.

B (18:34)

What you described, I think is very common. And that was common in my place, in my situation as well. It's funny, because I've gone through that with my wife. You know, my wife has kind of gone through a large career transition, and she spent a few years feeling very lost. And it was funny because the entire time I was like, this is the thing you love. You should just do that. And she was like, no, I can't do that. No, I'd have to take classes, I'd have to get certified. I'd have to find clients. I'd have to do this. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, you would. And then, sure enough, it's like, three years later, she realizes she's like, oh, I should have done this the whole time. So it's like, because the people who are very close to you and they love you, they have a strong sense of who you are, but they don't feel pressured by all of that social pressure that you feel. All that baggage that we carry of, like, the things that we feel like we need to prove or the guilt that we'll feel if we don't do this certain thing. And, like, all the stuff that kind of clouds us from seeing what we actually want to be doing, our best friends or our family members, they don't see that. They just see the thing you love.

C (19:37)

Even if they have that same problem themselves. Yes, Correct. I have a good friend, and when it comes to travel, points, smiles, all this stuff, I am a crazy person. And, like, this is not the forum today for that. But I have a friend who's very similar. And I'll be faced with some ridiculous decision that seems like I'm way too optimizing And I'll text this friend of mine and he'll be like, oh, just do this. I'm like, how is that so easy? And then, not even kidding, the next day he'll send me a thing that's almost the same question. And he's like, I'm really struggling. I'm like, why don't you just do the thing you told me to do yesterday? Like, it was so easy for him to tell me what to do when it wasn't him, even though he's just like me.

B (20:16)

Yeah, but you see this in all areas of life, right? Like, how many times has a friend come to you for relationship advice and you're just like, this is very obvious. You know, you should say this or go do this. Right. It's very simple and easy for somebody on the outside. But, like, when you're in it and you're wrapped up in all the emotions and fears and guilt and insanity, it's easy to lose sight of what actually matters.

C (20:40)

I'm going to take the example you just gave of a friend and relationship advice. And I feel like I'm now at an age where, you know, you've seen your friends get married, now you're seeing some of them get divorced. And there are always some cases where you're like, you hear about a divorce, you hear why it ended, and you're.

A (20:55)

Like, well, that was obvious.

C (20:56)

And then I've had friends be like.

A (20:57)

Well, why didn't you tell me that.

C (20:59)

Five, ten years ago if you thought.

A (21:00)

This wasn't going to work?

C (21:01)

And people just hate being honest with friends. Like, people hate giving feedback that's going to let people down.

B (21:07)

Yes.

C (21:07)

I know you believe in honesty. I'm curious how strongly you believe in it and how we can get better at having honest conversations with people.

B (21:15)

It's funny because I'm going through this exact situation right now where close friends of ours are, looks like they're about to get divorced. And my wife and I, we. We're not surprised. Let's just put it that way. Like, we. We could have. If you told us two years ago that this was going to happen, we would have been like, yeah, that tracks. It is awkward because I think with very sensitive perspectives like that, I think opinions like that should be opt in, not opt out. Let's say you and I are super close friends. I've never met your wife, but let's say we're super close friends. And I think, like, something's really fucked up in your marriage. I don't think it's Necessarily right for me to just be like, hey, Chris, dude, this is a mess, man. Like, get your shit together. I think it needs to be a little bit more of a, hey, man, it seems like you guys are struggling. If you ever want my perspective, let me know. And then it becomes an opt in thing and. Because when you just go push that opinion on people, a lot of people feel very defensive. Like, they need to be in a space where they're ready to hear it. Otherwise they're going to be defensive, maybe feel blindsided, they're going to feel overwhelmed, like, they're not going to be prepared to hear it. It's, I think, very emotionally sensitive stuff like that. Like, you have to kind of let them acknowledge that they're in the right headspace to talk about it. And then on top of that, some of them just don't want to go there. Right? Like, some of them's like, look, man, I know my shit's a mess, and I know you know my shit's a mess. But, like, I'm here to play golf. I'm not here to talk about this right now.

A (22:38)

That's fair.

B (22:39)

I'm here to get away from that. I don't need to talk about it here.

C (22:43)

And that's probably extreme or a deep answer or a conversation you can have with a friend. But I find that all too often we've evolved to a place where always being kind and saying yes, even when it's very superficial, it's kind of how we're supposed to operate. And my wife gives me a lot of crap because we'll be at some event and someone will be like, hey.

A (23:04)

Do you guys wanna, like, grab dinner next week?

C (23:05)

And I'll be like, honestly, no. Like, and I'll do it in a kinder way than that. But it's like, honestly, next week's busy.

A (23:12)

And, like, we have a lot. We eat dinner at 5 o'.

B (23:14)

Clock.

A (23:15)

Like, we're just not gonna do it.

C (23:16)

But so many people are like, yeah, that sounds fun.

B (23:18)

Like, let's.

A (23:18)

Let's plan on it.

C (23:19)

And it's not just like flaky, fake kind of get together. I just find that it's just so much easier to just be really upfront about how you feel. And this is probably a stereotype, but I find that a lot of my friends from Israel are just very blunt.

B (23:33)

Yes, Israelis are super blunt.

C (23:35)

And I love it. Yeah, I'm like, you know, you would tell somebody, but what do you think of this shirt? They're like, that shirt sucks. You should get rid of it. Why did you buy it in the first place? But so common in our culture, it's like, that's great. You look awesome. And I'm like, is this helping us?

B (23:47)

Yeah, I'm with you on stuff like this. I actually really relish that bluntness. I lived in New York for a long time, and it's one of the things I kind of miss about. People in New York are much more open and blunt. Here in California, everybody's your best friend all the time. Everybody wants to see you all the time. And then, of course, you never see them again. But maybe if we can go down a little rabbit hole or a side path. I spent some time in Russia back in 2011, learned a little bit of Russian, spent most of a summer and part of a spring there. And Russians are very uncomfortably blunt. Like, it's just the level of honesty is just. It is absolutely jarring, especially as a Westerner. And it was really interesting. I remember talking to a Russian friend about it. They kind of explained to me, they're like, look, in the Soviet Union, nobody had anything. And if you said something to somebody that could get you in trouble, like, that person could literally get you killed. They just go to an authority and they say, hey, Chris said this thing. Next thing you know, you're off to the gulags, right? So trust was the only currency in that society. And so everybody had to be completely transparent as much as possible at all times. And so it really developed this culture of just blunt honesty, disagreeableness, willingness to disagree, like, contradict each other or say, no, that's stupid. I don't think that. Whereas in the west, you have so much freedom of opportunity, like, you never know which person you meet is gonna be like a life changing force, is gonna be your next customer, your next business partner, your next client who's gonna introduce you to the person who's gonna sell you your next house, right? So it's like you want everybody to like you, and so you develop all these fake niceties, maintain these weak links to a wide range of people, because there's basically very little downside of being dishonest, but there's a lot of upside. I thought that was really fascinating.

C (25:31)

Did that change anything about how you operate in this society?

B (25:35)

So what I found my time in not just Russia, but Eastern Europe in general, what I found is that people are much colder. On the surface, people are very prickly. But then once you get to know them and once they like you and trust you, they're extremely warm because the relationships become very authentic. When you're friends with a Russian, you know they're not bullshitting you if they say, like, you're a great guy. I love spending time with you. We should hang out more often. Like, they're being honest because you just had four other Russians say the opposite to you. So, like the one who says that to you, you're like, wow, I really like you too. You know, it's like, it's refreshing, it's liberating in a certain way. I was always kind of on the honesty train to begin with, but like, spending that time in that part of the world, I definitely came back with a sense of like, okay, in my personal life, I really, really want to try to be more bluntly honest as much as possible.

C (26:28)

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C (28:42)

I have a hypothesis as to why it feels harder to be bluntly honest. And it's a little bit that we at least I am very bad at evolving friendship. A lot of my closest friends, you know, my wife and I had this conversation. It's like, if you could reevaluate your best friends now, would they really be your best friends? Are we good at deciding who are the best friends that I want now, or are we clinging on to our high school best friend? Or like, you know, the person that we were in a fraternity together, when in reality, if I could objectively describe, like, who my best friend would be today, it might be someone else. But it's really hard, I think, as an adult to be like, let's go make best friends. We're working from home a lot. We're with our family a lot. We're not just constantly exposed to new people at school, maybe earlier parts in our career where we're kind of in this mix of a bunch of young people who just graduated. So I'm curious what you think, but my hypothesis, it's harder to make new friends that are probably closer aligned to what you want. So we're stuck with a lot of friends that maybe we're not as close to or want to be as close to as maybe we used to, or maybe the friends we love don't live near us. And so we're just kind of of in this messy world of friendship that might make it harder to be honest because we're dealing with legacy friends or distant friends, and it's hard to make new friends.

B (29:55)

The friendship question is really interesting, and I feel like it's funny because being in the personal development space for 20 years now, friendship was never a big topic. Like, I remember running friendship content back, like in 2013, 2014, and it was just crickets. Like, nobody cared, nobody wanted to read about it. And then Post pandemic, it has exploded. So much friendship content that we post now goes viral and we actually just did a massive four and a half hour podcast on the research behind friendship and why all these things you're describing, why they seem more common now, why people seem to be struggling to make friends or keep friends. And it was really interesting because I think it's a combination of two things. So one is, one aspect of it is kind of timeless, and then one is much more modern, much more unique to this period and age. So the timeless piece is that when you look at both quality and quantity of friendships, there's kind of a U curve. So it's very high. When you're young, you have lots of friends and you feel very close to them when you're young and you have lots of friends and you feel very close to them when you're old. And what do those two things have in common? You don't have jack shit to do. You have very few obligations, you don't have tons of social pressures. You don't have a career that you're trying to build. You're not schlepping your kids to school and back twice a day. You have a lot of free time. It's middle age. You see this bottoming out right around 40, which is you and I are right in the trough of it. And a lot of it is just because of all of those competing obligations and interests, right? Like you just said earlier, having your daughter made you realize most of the other stuff you cared about didn't seem important anymore. Friends are just part of that, right? It's like if you have a choice between spending an extra hour with your daughter or an extra hour with, with a friend, chances are you're probably going to choose your daughter more often than not. So all that stuff, kids kick in, people's careers are peaking, you have all sorts of financial obligations, your parents are getting older, so you're having to go back and visit home and take care of different family things more often. Life gets very complicated and you feel stretched in all these different directions. And so not only do you have less time for friendships, all of your peers have less time for friendships. And, and when you do see each other, unless you happen to share the same things that you both really, really care about, you're probably not going to have much in common. It's harder to find the people who are like, locked in on the same things that you care about. So that's timeless. That's always been around and we're just kind of in this period of like, okay, friends are a little bit hard, Most of the people you're going to hang out with are going to be either parents of your kids, friends, or people with similar careers or people at work or whatever. The thing that's unique to now, which has just complicated everything so much more, the three things work, school and church. So work more people than ever working at home so they're not running into people every day. School, fewer people are having kids. So school, either you're the student or you're a parent of a student, right? You go to your kid's school, you meet the other parents, find out they live two blocks from you, your kids are the same age. Awesome. We should get together. We should have the kids play together, right? So fewer people are having kids. And then on top of that, there's more homeschooling, there's people are moving around. Much more people are moving kids from one school to another much more frequently complicates all that. And then obviously church and religion is kind of at an all time low, so people aren't meeting each other at those places. So it's just like people aren't in places that you really make friends or meet people, see people consistently. Everybody is kind of traded in these community third spaces for TikTok and YouTube and podcasts like us.

C (33:28)

Well, I'm not gonna say just turn this off. But, but is there, is there an answer? Like, what should people be doing? I mean, the answer is probably not have kids, send them to school, go to church and like get a job in person.

B (33:38)

So this is the tricky thing, and we talked about it on the episode. Right now, the conventional advice is like, get out, go to events, get in person more often. And you're actually seeing this. So live event industries and stuff like conferences, concerts, Even stuff like CrossFit gyms, like all these things are booming right now. And there's just this incredible demand for people to get out of the house and just be in a room with a bunch of other people doing the same thing at the same time. And that's fine. Like, that's nice. There's nothing wrong with that. The problem is, is that there's no stakes involved, right? So it's like the reason you really become friends with somebody isn't just because you're like in the same room listening to the same music at the same time. It's because you both care about the same thing. There's some sort of commonality or some sort of, you're both invested in the same thing. It could be something as significant as both of your kids go to the same school. It could be something as superficial as like, you're both obsessed with golf, you become golf buddies and generally what you see, or this is kind of more my theory, but it's not. The one commonality where a friendship really starts happening is when you hit the second commonality. So you meet a parent of your kid's friend at your kid's school, you have one thing in common. But unless you find that second thing, like you're both in the tennis, or you both love to watch basketball, or you're both entrepreneurs and business owners, it's that second thing that it's like, oh, we should be friends. And I think people just focus on finding that first thing without paying attention to finding the second one.

C (35:12)

Funny, I've never heard that explanation. But I've recently gone to a few conferences for people who are real big travel points miles nerds. And the people that I connected to the most and who I'm texting back and forth after are the people who also have kids that are in the like 3 to 7 year old range and are trying to manage the fact that they love doing this side hobby, they have their family responsibilities and often a job. And it's like, how do you compete with this? Because they share this obsessive deal chasing personality, but also want to spend time, like they actually value the time with their kids. So there's like this dual alignment with these people. Okay, so I'm going to link to that episode. Because it's long enough. I looked at like somewhere around three hours, right?

B (35:54)

Pushing five.

C (35:55)

Okay, okay, so I'm going to link to that episode. It is a long one, but I think there's a lot there. And in fact, one thing I did do was in the new podcast you've done, you have these guides that you can download and I downloaded one of them last night. I was like, oh, I wonder, like, is it a bunch of bullets? And I was like, no, it's like 50 pages. Yeah, it's almost like a masterclass and a book in one. So I'll link to that one. There's a handful more. I thought you were doing it monthly now it looks like you're doing it twice a month.

B (36:21)

We're trying to scale up to twice a month. The content beast always needs to be fed. But the original intention was like, instead of doing say four or six podcasts a month, each an hour long, let's do one insane deep dive that's three to five hours once a month. And then because we're doing, the team is doing so much research to prep for that deep dive. What we're doing is we're just taking all the research, summarizing it, adding all the citations and everything, and then packaging it into a PDF so that people who listen to the episode can go back and reference what we're talking about and where it came from.

C (36:57)

I've had a lot of requests to do that. So now you are going to. People are like, hey, do that thing Mark does. I really like that. But I want to go back to that point where you say around your 40s, you're at the bottom of this trough and it feels like life is hard. And I think there's a moment and I know my wife and I are kind of experiencing it. You have young kids, you've got work going on, you've got a lot of responsibilities. Your parents are getting older, you've got their health, you've got so many competing demands. And I think for some people, it's easy to feel like I have it awful, like life is out to get me. Things are terrible. And I'm curious, is life just hard and that's okay? Is life actually not that hard and we just feel like it's hard? How should someone in that state be looking at things? Because there is the perspective of we still have it pretty good. We are in this country, we have food by all means. Like, things are really good, but life can feel really hard. And I'm curious what you would say to people who are feeling like life's hard, even though objectively maybe it's better than average.

B (37:54)

Life is always hard. You could be the wealthiest, most successful person in the world. It's going to be hard. Every level of financial success is difficult. Let me put it this way. It's hard to work a lot. It's also hard to not work. It's hard to have a big family. It's also hard to not have any family. It's hard to have lots of hobbies and interests. It's also hard to not have any hobbies and interests. Like any path you choose is going to be hard in some shape or form. And so again, the key is to choose the hard that you particularly enjoy or you're predisposed to, or that you handle or manage very well. The other thing about this is, you know, a lot of my work recently I've been talking a lot about trade offs because I kind of view the world through the lens of everything as a trade off, no matter what you do. Having a kid is a trade off. You're giving up a lot to raise that child. Not having a kid is a trade off. You're also giving up a lot to not have that child. What seems to be true, though, is that our brain is not very well suited to. To keeping both sides of each trade off in mind at the same time. So when we're suffering or struggling, we tend to be very focused on what we're giving up in all the choices that we've made. It's like, I don't have any time, I'm stressed, I'm not sleeping well, my boss is a dick. And we're not thinking about all of the positive things that we opted into that necessitated those sacrifices.

C (39:22)

Right?

B (39:22)

We don't think about the fact that you're actually living out your dream career, or that you are raising a family that you always wanted, or that you are getting better at something that is extremely difficult and requires failing many, many times over. Similarly, when we're really locked into the things that we want in life, when we think five years ahead, 10 years ahead, and we start thinking about, like, well, I want to have a bigger house and I want to get really good at badminton and I want to have another kid and I want to move to the east coast, like, we're thinking about all of the positive sides of the trade offs and we're not thinking about the sacrifices of the trade off. And the truth is, is that if you want the positive side of something, you also need to want the negative. You can't only want one side and pretend the other side doesn't exist. Similarly, if you don't want the negative side, it means that you have to also not want the positive side. You can't just be like, well, I don't want to change diapers, but I want to have a kid. Like, it just. It kind of doesn't work.

C (40:18)

Yeah, I was at this dinner with a bunch of creators and someone's like, what are your ambitions with growth? Do you want to build your podcast as big as, you know, Diary of a CEO or your show? Like, how big do you want to get? And right now, at my stage in life, I'm like, I really don't want to have a big team. I feel that in the past, when I've ran teams and my wife works with me and she's ran teams, like, we really take on the ownership of the happiness of the people around us. And so if we had 10 people working for us, that'd be really stressful. And it would be really hard for both of us every day of the week to not be thinking about, how do we make this thing bigger so that their success that's tied to it is greater? And we're at a stage in life where we have two young kids. I'm like, we just don't want that mental overhead every day of the week. But it's hard to, you know, it's hard to look at this guy. Why is that thing ten times more successful? Or why is this friend of mine 10 times wealthier? And I definitely have talked to people that make much more money, but they're killing themselves. They don't enjoy it. And so I think to your point, it's really important to say, do I actually want their life? It's easy when someone gives you the Warren Buffett example, when they're like, do you want Warren Buffett's wealth? But you have to be as old as he is? And you're like, no, no, no. Yeah, but it's harder when it's like, do you want your friend who works 40% more and makes 40% more? And the trade off is harder to see as so. So uniquely different.

B (41:36)

Yeah. I mean, I would even point back to the Warren Buffett example and say, okay, this is a guy who basically spends 12 hours a day reading. By all accounts, was a completely absent deadbeat father, had one marriage that fell apart, doesn't really seem to have any interests or hobbies outside of investing or business. You know, if you ask me, like, if I'm willing to take that trade off, I wouldn't take it.

C (41:59)

You might not Even take it 25 years ago, you know, like. No, no.

B (42:03)

Even when he was. Yeah, when he was my age. Right. Like, I probably wouldn't take that. We do this when we compare ourselves to others as well. Right. It's easy to look at somebody outside of yourself and invest, envy their success. But do you also envy their sacrifice? Do you wish you could give up the things that they could give up? Chances are no. And if you don't, then you don't actually envy them because you're not making a proper comparison.

C (42:22)

I think one of the moments that we face constantly throughout our lives that make life feel hard is having to make hard decisions. I feel like you probably have at least some framework or advice for people that struggle at making decisions. If we want to focus it to one kind of archetype, someone who's kind of thinking through the decision too much. And I have some friends who their struggle with decisions is they make them so fast that sometimes they regret them. My problem is I make them so slow. If you've looked into this, it's like you actually have a better outcome, but you're not as happy with it when you spend too much time on the decision making. So both for me and anyone listening, how do you make decisions? Or what have you learned about decision making and psychology that makes it better?

B (43:04)

I think where people get led astray is decisions should be primarily motivated through your personal values. I think people tend to make decisions based on status markers, external signifiers, kind of arbitrary metrics. We were talking about metrics earlier. You just unconsciously ascribe to some metric that is just completely arbitrary and bullshit, like how big your house is or what neighborhood you live in, or how much your car costs, whatever. Those tend to be poor decision making. Generally, what you want to rely upon in your decision making is, like, get very clear on, like, okay, what are the things that I deeply care about? What are my primary personal values? What am I optimizing for in my life? Is it time and agency? Is it contribution to the people around me? Is it my relationships? Is it building something incredible for the world? Figure that out. And then all of the decisions should kind of flow downstream of that.

C (43:58)

And do you have some sort of cadence at which you, like, check in with yourself or with your wife about how are we doing on these things? We care about what's going on in our lives. How am I tracking?

B (44:07)

Yeah, Ironically, I like to use New Year's as a time to do this. It's funny, because New Year's is generally a time that people set goals. I'm not a huge fan of goals. There's nothing wrong with goals. I just think goals are, like, massively overrated in terms of how much attention and importance people put on them. And I think values are very underrated. So I usually use this time of year to kind of sit down and assess. Look back at the past year. What are all the things that I did that felt like a really good use of my time? What are all the things I did this past year that felt like a very poor use of my time? What would I like to spend more time doing, less time doing? What do I feel like accurately reflected my values and what I care about? What do I feel like didn't accurately reflect it? And then make adjustments, like iterative adjustments in the next year. You know, don't throw everything out and try to become a new person in January. But, like, find two or three adjustments, like, okay, going into 2026, I'm going to stop work at 5pm no matter what and be home for my family. Or in 2026, I'm going to get up half an hour earlier and do my workouts in the morning because I realize that it's easier for me to skip those if I'm putting them off to the evening. Whatever it is that should become the basis of your goals. And generally those small iterative changes are much easier to achieve than waking up on January 1st and being like, I want to lose £40 or I want to become fluent in Mandarin by June, you know, or whatever people, whatever goals people set.

A (45:32)

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C (46:44)

Thank you so much for being here today.

A (46:46)

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C (47:00)

And for people who check in later and they're like, I didn't hit my goals right? Like this is probably one of the challenges with goals. It's like if you set them too ambitious, you know, you don't get far, but then you fail and people are like, gosh, nothing's going my way. It's all my fault. It's not me. Someone else caused this problem, but they kind of feel like the victim in this scenario.

B (47:17)

Yeah.

C (47:18)

Any advice for people who feel like when they're too ambitious, they always get let down and it's always their fault and they're kind of not taking responsibility for what happens?

B (47:24)

First of all, I feel like people have a pretty poor understanding of just how to set good goals to begin with. And then I also think people also misunderstand, like, what role goals serve. So setting goals. Well, I think it's fine to have a big, ambitious goal, but, like, you don't just set that huge ambitious goal and then go on with your life as if nothing happened. You need to take the big, ambitious goal and then break it down into sub goals and sub steps. Let's say it is super important to me to learn Mandarin this year. By the end of 2026, I want to be able to be conversationally fluent. Right? Don't just set that goal, but, like, actually break it down. Say, okay, where should I be at month six? Where should I be at month three? Where should I be at February 1st? Okay, now how can I guarantee that I get to there by February 1st? What's the first week in January going to look like? What's the second week in January? So you start breaking it down like that. Make everything very measurable, very observable. There's the smart goal thing. That's the way to approach it. Same thing. If it's weight loss or whatever. Don't just be like, I want to lose 25 pounds. It's like, okay, what does that actually necessitate? Losing 25 pounds in three months? Okay, that means I need to burn this many calories per day to burn this many calories per day. This is the adjustments that I make to my diet starting tomorrow. The second piece. I think people just don't have a great conception of what goals actually do. Goals really just set direction. There's nothing magical about the goal itself. Losing 25 pounds isn't going to make you happy. It's not going to make you a different person. You're not going to, like, have a new life when it happens. All it does is it sets direction for your behaviors. And I think the biggest mistake that people make is they set a big goal. They set off in the direction towards the goal. They hate the direction, they're miserable on it. So they fail. And then they get mad. They, like you said, they blame themselves. They're like, I'm such a loser. I didn't achieve my goal, when actually the whole purpose of the goal was to show you that that's not the direction you should be going in. You don't like that. You don't like where that road goes, so why are you walking down it? Half of the value of goals is just showing you which direction is good for you and which direction isn't. And so if I set a goal and I get a week or two into pursuing it, and I'm like, wow, this sucks. I actually have zero interest in Mandarin, and then I quit, that's a success, because I learned something about myself, and I learned something about what matters to me and what doesn't. You actually shouldn't achieve most of your goals because most of your goals are probably set erroneously.

C (49:52)

I forgot what the business framework is. But, like, set your goals so that you'll only achieve, like, 70% of them so you can push yourself. But it's not just that you might not achieve them because you set them too aggressively. They just might be in the wrong direction.

B (50:03)

Yes.

C (50:03)

They might not be things that you realize you care about. And it's okay to cut bait on those goals.

B (50:08)

Right.

C (50:08)

And treat them as experiment.

B (50:09)

And you also. Sometimes you overshoot things. Sometimes you undershoot things. I set a goal when I was losing weight. You know, I wanted to get down to 15% body fat. And basically what I found was that once I got down to, like, 18 or 19%, going any further, I was miserable. I was like, this sucks. I'm hungry like, 24 7, and I'm already in good shape. I already look good. What am I doing? This is so dumb. Right? So then I'm like, I'm good. I was very overweight previous to that, So I accomplished 80% of the goal. But what I discovered is that the optimal point for me personally was 80%. The goal that I originally set was actually suboptimal for me. You only find that out as you're on the path pursuing it.

C (50:51)

I feel like a lot of what we talked about, whether it's figuring out what you care about, figuring out your purpose, figuring out your goals. I feel like it's helpful to talk to people about these things.

B (51:02)

Yeah.

C (51:03)

They're not commonplace in our vernacular, with friends at dinner. You know, you sit down at dinner, you're like, what's everybody up to this week? Not, like, how are you guys feeling about the things you said you were gonna do and you're failing at? Or, like, you know, how does everybody feel about the direction they're taking with Their life now, is it really what you wanted? For people who are right now in a kind of motivated state of like, I want to make sure I'm living the life I want, who probably aren't going to have the conversations about it at dinner tonight, maybe they will with their partner. But where would you suggest someone go? Or how would you suggest they start having these conversations with others?

B (51:38)

It's a really great question. I have personally found that you kind of have to find people who are open or thinking about this stuff in your life. Finding friends who are aware of the same things, thinking about the same things, and open to talking about them. Bare minimum, you should be able to talk to your partner about these sorts of things as well. But I also think it's the sort of thing you can kind of schedule or set expectations with people. I had a group of guy friends that we called it a mastermind, but it started with business stuff, but after six months, it really just turned into, what are you doing? I think I'm fucking up. I don't know if I like this. What do I want to do with my life, my career? So it is really just finding people on that same path and then setting expectations up front. But it is a hard conversation to have. It's funny because I started a second company this year and one of the big things that we looked at was kind of solving this issue. It's interesting, when you look at survey data right now, there is kind of a purpose crisis, a meaning crisis, you could call it. It's something like almost two thirds of the American population, adult population, like, feels like they lack purpose in their daily life. Similarly, majority of them feel like a lack of meaning in the work that they do. I looked at this from more of like a mental health and a scaling perspective, and there's survey data that shows that over a hundred million people are using ChatGPT as a therapist or asking these sorts of questions to ChatGPT. And if you go talk to ChatGPT, it gives you shit answers. In my opinion. It's kind of just fluffs you up and validates you and tells you you're great and like, whatever you propose to it. You know, I could go to ChatGPT and be like, I think I'm gonna quit my business and become a pirate. ChatGPT would probably be like, ARR, that's a great idea, matey. You know, like, that's even if you.

C (53:21)

Give it the prompt of like, hey, just shit on all my ideas. Yeah, like, push me hard and I'll be Like, what do you think of reordering this thing? And they're like, that's a great idea. I'm like, no, no, no, you're not. You're not supposed to tell me everything I want to do is good.

B (53:33)

Yes, exactly. It's a bit of a yes man. So I became very excited and passionate about this issue about a year ago and I found a co founder who's coincidentally also was in a kind of a crisis of purpose. He had started sold an AI company and then went on sabbatical and kind of had this whole like, shit, what am I going to do with the rest of my life type moment. And then he and I met and we started talking about this. And basically what we did is we built an AI that is specifically optimized towards these deeper questions, towards these questions of like, okay, that's great that you're doing that, but like, why are you doing that? Is that serving you? Do you think there's maybe a connection between this path that you're pursuing and these relationship issues that you reported having a few weeks ago? Do you want to talk about that? Maybe we should go over your decisions again because maybe you're not the saint here that you thought you were. And it's been a lot of work to build an AI that can actually do that, but we've got it to the point that it does. We launched it just at the end of the year, this past month. So I'm super excited about that because I just feel like AI allows us to scale those conversations across the population because there is so much friction in having them in our day to day lives. Like, it's not the sort of thing you can just roll up at lunch and be like, hey, Chris. My whole life feels like a fraud. I don't know what to do with myself. You know, like, it just like people kind of will stare at you like deer in headlights and not know what to say. So the app is called Purpose. Ironically, that's kind of been my biggest focus point over the past year.

C (55:04)

And two questions. One, can anyone just go use it?

B (55:06)

Yes.

A (55:07)

Okay.

C (55:07)

And how do you think tools like what you've built play in with kind of more traditional therapy?

B (55:14)

I think they're complimentary and supplementary. It's funny. Where I've landed on this is like, I think there are some things that AI can do that is just much better than therapy. And I don't think therapists will ever be able to compare. For example, the AI never forgets anything about you. It is always patient. It's always available. It's never going to shame you, judge you, condescend to you. It's never going to project its own ideas onto you. It's available at 4am when you're having a meltdown. So there are those aspects that I don't think therapy will ever be able to scale or replicate effectively. On the therapy side, there is something very core about the humanity of it. I do think there is something fundamentally healing about a human being sitting in front of you, listening to you, watching you weep like a child and still accepting you and being compassionate and being present. I don't think AI will ever replace conventional therapy or counseling or anything, but I do think it can scale much more broadly. It's something like, I think 40% of the population literally has no access to mental health care. So yeah, it's like literally hundreds of millions of people. Even if they want a therapist, either they live in the middle of nowhere or they don't have the money, they're not insured or whatever it is.

C (56:30)

So, and that's just in this country.

B (56:31)

That'S just this country that doesn't even count, like the billions of people worldwide who are dealing with trauma and all their bullshit and don't have access to anything. So I do think the AI mental health space is going to be massive and very excited to be a part of it.

C (56:45)

Yeah, I think the most interesting thing is that it seems like the barrier to finding a mental health professional. Scheduling a meeting, finding availability, deciding if you're gonna pay for it. That's not a 10 minute task. So if you're really struggling with something or you wanna have a conversation with someone, you could just do it now. And if you feel like you need both components, you could do both.

B (57:04)

And not to mention too like, even if you do find the right therapist, it takes like four sessions for them to learn about your background, understand your values, figure out all of your emotional nuances, like really have a good understanding of your personality and all the stuff been through. Whereas like in the app we've built an onboarding experience that is really designed to give the AI strong understanding of your personality and your values within the first 10 minutes or so. Everybody who goes who signs up is immediately receiving personalized advice. Even before you've said anything to the purpose AI, it already has an understanding of what your personality is, what your values are based on geolocation, like what your cultural background, your gender, what part of the world you live in, your age, like probably some of the things that you're going through. So you're already starting just from the first message. You're already starting on, like, session four in many ways.

C (57:56)

One thing you said, I want to quickly jump back to before we wrap is you talked about there's so many people who lack meaning from the work they do. And I just want to clarify because I have a family friend who doesn't love his work, doesn't find a lot of meaning in his work, but finds a lot of meaning in the things he can do in life that his work allows him to do because it's not that stressful, it's not that demanding, and. And it pays him a living wage. And I just want to make sure people don't necessarily get the wrong impression. But is it okay to lack meaning from the professional career job you have that makes your income and have that meaning and that purpose outside of your work?

B (58:33)

I think so. I think this is something that gets overrated, particularly by our generation. It's actually really interesting. So there are surveys that have been done for a long time asking people how important it is that their job feels meaningful. And for the boomers, they didn't really care. They just wanted money. And then Gen X, it was a little bit more. They wanted it to be a little bit more meaningful. And then for millennials, it was actually the most important factor for our generation. What's fascinating is that with Gen Z, it's kind of going back to, no, dude, just pay me. So it seems to be kind of this weird aberration with our generation of like, no, I want to change the world and I want to be a force for good, and everything I do needs to matter. And. And the truth is that that's probably not realistic for 100% of the population. And it is totally fine to just have a job. I would say it's way more important to not hate your job than necessarily to love your job. The cliche is that if you love your job, you'll never work a day in your life. That's a high bar to clear. And I don't think everybody's going to necessarily clear it. But if you don't hate your job and if you like the people you work with and it pays you decently and that pay allows you to go pursue the things you do really care about, you can totally have a great life doing that.

C (59:47)

And that job that if you love, you'll never work a day of your life. I assume you love what you do, I love what I do. That doesn't mean it's not hard. And that doesn't mean there are days you don't want to do it.

B (59:55)

It still sucks like 20% of the time. Yeah, there's like, there are definitely days you're like, oh, God, I don't have to do this again.

C (60:03)

You even feel bad because you're like, I'm doing this thing that a lot of people maybe would want to do. But like you said, all lives are hard, all work is hard. So I think a good place to end is if someone is like, wow, we talked about a lot today and I would love to move the needle forward.

A (60:19)

What do you think?

C (60:20)

One next step for someone listening to kind of make progress towards being happier with where they are doing something they love, kind of building their community would be, let's not go down with you.

B (60:35)

I would implore people replace your goal setting exercises with value setting exercises. This year. Just try it for a year. I think people will find a lot of leverage out of that. So the first episode we did of this all podcast was the Values episode. And there is a free PDF guide that comes along with that that has info and links to a bunch of different questionnaires and stuff you can take to identify your core values and what matters most to you. And I would encourage people to maybe sit for a few hours with their values this New Year's instead of necessarily sitting down and thinking about their goals specifically. I think that will be high leverage for a lot of people.

C (61:09)

This might sound like the most naive question, but how would you define for someone who's like, okay, so values, in my mind, it's, oh, what is something I care about? But is there one level deeper of a definition that'll kind of get the gears moving?

B (61:20)

It is one level deeper. So it is personal. Value is like a motivating principle that underlies the things that you actually care about. Right? So let's say most of your goals revolve around money. It's not necessarily that you care about money. Your value is like, what that money is doing for you. It's security. Could be security. For some people, it's security. For some people, it's status. For some people, it's providing for their family. So, like, you can have two people who are obsessed about money, but for completely different reasons, and that's because they have different values. And what's interesting is that once you identify the value, you realize that there are a lot of ways to fulfill that value. There's ways to pursue status that don't require you to, like, be working all the time and making more money. There are ways to provide for your family that don't require paying for everything all the time. So it's it frees you up to think about the strategies that you're employing in your life rather than kind of being enslaved to them.

C (62:11)

I think that gives people a lot of thoughts. People can go check out that episode. We'll link to that episode in the series for solved. Where else can people go to find purpose and anything else you're working on?

B (62:21)

So Purpose is available at Purpose App. There's a seven day free trial. Try it out. I think people will be blown away once they start talking to it. And then of course my stuff, there's the Solve podcast which we've referenced and then my stuff is all@markmanson.net, i have a newsletter I send out twice a week. It's also free to subscribe to so check that out as well.

C (62:39)

Awesome. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me here.

B (62:42)

Thank you. It's great chatting.

A (62:43)

Thanks.