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Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. It is episode 1100, and that is a number that I did not think that I would get to. I don't think I've done 1,100 of anything apart from these podcasts. As is tradition, I've put together a list of lessons that I've learned from the show and from writing and reading and life over the last six months. Since the last one of these that I did, I'm going to go through them today. So let's get into it. First up, I started thinking about obsession and why no one understands obsession. I think literally no one understands why obsession is the way it is. Discipline, motivation, and obsession are three words that get thrown around quite a lot. And I think most people misunderstand all three. And because of that, they miss some very big lessons about how life actually works. So here's the simplest way to separate those three out. Discipline is I will make myself do the thing. Motivation is I want to do the thing. And obsession is I can't not do the thing. So all three produce the same outcome, right? The thing gets done, but the internal cost couldn't be more different. And the difference is primarily around friction. So discipline is friction accepted. You don't want to do the thing, but you do it anyway. You lean on effort, willpower and routines and environment and design and past patterns and habits and drag yourself over the line. It's mostly under your control, which is why it's so reliable. If you're willing to pay the price, discipline will always show up. But the problem is that the price is high. Discipline is really expensive, burns energy, creates resistance, feels heavy. It works, but it's a grind. And motivation is friction reduced. You want to do the thing, so the resistance drops. You still need effort, but you need less of it. Motivation comes from desire, circumstance and novelty and identity and community and emotion. You can try to kind of manufacture it with goal setting or visualization, community support and celebrating micro wins, or Me and Alex Hormozi compilation videos and heavy metal music. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it doesn't, right? Motivation is unreliable because it's kind of downstream of how you feel. When your mood dips, motivation just fucking evaporates. It's useful fuel, but you can't build a life that depends on it. And obsession is friction inverted. So remember, we've got discipline, friction accepted, motivation, friction reduced, and obsession is friction inverted. You don't need to make yourself do the thing. You can't avoid doing it. You don't push. Instead, the work sort of pulls you toward it. It invades your thoughts. It follows you into the shower, into the car, into bed. And when you're tired, it doesn't disappear. Obsession is kind of like motivation's poltergeist big brother who just never stops haunting you. And because you can't switch it off, that's why obsessions with negative pursuits like politics or porn or a toxic ex can be so destructive. The reason that obsession is so powerful is simple. It's basically permanent free motivation and discipline. You get output without negotiation and you get action without having to tap into any willpower. It's the fuel source equivalent of hitting a superstar in Super Mario. So this is why obsession produces such disproportionate results. In a short window of time, people look at the output and assume superhuman discipline, when in reality, if you're obsessed, the work felt almost unavoidable. People admire discipline and envy motivation, but very few understand obsession. And because they don't understand it, they waste it. So here, I think, is the part that people miss. Obsession isn't a personality trait. It's a state, which means that it can't be summoned on command. You can't decide to be obsessed. It appears when curiosity, identity, reward and meaning sort of all accidentally align some weird celestial bodies. And when it appears, it doesn't last forever, which is a tragedy. Obsession is a non renewable fuel source. When it leaves, you don't get it back on demand. In future, it will take you so much more effort to get even partially close to this obsessive level of output. So use your free fuel while it's available. Which is why the correct response to a positive obsession isn't to suppress it or balance it or apologize for it. It's to surrender to it. So if you're currently obsessed with something positive, my advice is to kind of let it crawl inside of you and wear your skin and stare out through your eyes. Like if you can't stop watching lifting videos and spend all of your time thinking about diet and training, now isn't the time to be balanced in the gym. Or if your sleep is wrecked because you're ruminating about a business idea that you can't wait to launch. And then this isn't the time for you to seek calm. You're allowed to go full on demon founder mode with it. Serial obsessives, as far as I can see, move from intense project to intense project, making huge progress while the tide is with them, so that when the obsession inevitably fades, something important's happened already. The rails for their Future behavior. Get laid down. So. So by the time that your obsession wanes, you have built the patterns and routines and skills and habits that allow you to keep going when the fuel is no longer free. So I started going to the gym when I was 18 because I was obsessed with gaining muscle. And I researched protein shake formulations and dreamt of going to Gold's Gym in LA and skipped nights out partying to stay in my bedroom and read the misc forums on bodybuilding.com like the most autistic excuse for not going on a night out ever. Nearly 20 years later, I'm still training, and not really even because I'm that disciplined or motivated now, but just because an old obsession of mine fossilized into my identity. And being honest, this is true for my meditation habit and my research for podcast guests and the productivity systems that I've got and my desire to build businesses. What once obsessed me has now just simply become me. What often looks like discipline today is just the echo of someone's past obsessions. This is a quiet reframe that people basically never say out loud. Discipline sometimes isn't the starting point. It's just the residue. So what? It's what remains when obsession cools down and settles into routine. So if you're lucky enough to be obsessed right now, I think you can stop trying to moderate it into something respectable. You can stop worrying about whether it looks excessive and you can stop pretending whether you're supposed to feel balanced. Balance is what you can enjoy later, and obsession is what you get to embrace now. Basically, as far as I can see it, most people never get an obsession worth anything. So if you have one, don't waste it. And the more that I think about this, and I look at a lot of the guys that I've met who appear to be super disciplined, and they're absolutely crushing it in life. And they've got. Their systems are so dialed and you look from the outside and think, holy shit, this person is just a machine. What you don't realize is that in the past, they had no choice other than to do that thing. They were completely obsessed with it. It consumed their life. And now the like the cooled heart of the dying star that's left over the brown dwarf of their previous huge furnace is the life that they still have. The thing that obsessed them became their identity. And yeah, sure, I said you can't engineer obsession. I do think that's true. You can certainly lay the ground, the foundations for it. But the other thing is, some people are more obsessive than others. I. That's something that I've been blessed or cursed with, that I have a slightly obsessive personality. Not wash my hands all the time obsessive, but struggle to switch off obsessive. And I'm going to guess if you're watching this show that you do too. What that means is you are going to probably like a serial monogamist. You're going to bounce from obsession relationship to obsession relationship. And if you dampen it down too much, if you don't fully allow it to kind of take over your life, at least to whatever level is healthy, or even maybe a little bit beyond the level that's healthy, you're going to miss out on free motivation and free discipline. And then at the end of it, because this isn't going to last forever, right? Obsession isn't going to. It's a non renewable fuel source. You can't bring it back when you want to. Once that's cooled off, if you haven't allowed it to kind of take over your life fully, what you end up with is a world where you fought against the thing you wanted to do to stop it from being so all encompassing or like unrespectable. And then once it's finished and you don't have it anymore, you didn't gain the momentum and the identity that allowed you to kind of flow through it afterward so that it then became the way that you show up. I'm just a guy that goes to the gym. I'm just a guy that build businesses. I'm just a guy that meditates or whatever. So yeah, I think that's. I just, I love this, I love this idea. I love the fact that obsession gets a really bad rap. And in many ways it can be horrible, especially when it's pointed toward politics or pornography. But if it's pointed towards something that's actually good, you should allow it to kind of take over your life. And then once it's finished, everyone will look from the outside and oh my God, dude, how do you, how do you train so much? You know, you like, really consistent with your training. You must be really disciplined, must be so motivated. And you're like, not really, man. Like, I just used to be obsessed with this and now it's kind of who I am. All right, next one, the paradox of self awareness. So everyone understands that actions are more important than words, right? You are what you do, not what you say you'll do. And there's this line from Hamlet. Thus conscience does make cowards of us all. I never read any Shakespeare. I can barely remember even going through it in school. But I can remember across this line again and did a deep dive on what it means. Thus, conscience does make cowards of us all. This line comes from Hamlet, and it's usually misheard as an insult. It's as if Shakespeare is sort of sneering at morality, saying that ethics soften us or thought drains courage from the body. I don't think that's what's happening. Shakespeare isn't attacking goodness. He's pointing at self awareness and naming its cost. It's in the to be or not to be soliloquy. And Hamlet isn't really weighing life versus death. He's circling a more practical question. Why do humans hesitate to act even when action would clearly relieve their suffering? Like why do we endure situations we don't want? And why do we tolerate lives that we could, in theory, change? Well, pain isn't the only obstacle, imagination is. And by conscience, Shakespeare means something closer to consciousness. It's the ability to think ahead, to judge ourselves, to simulate futures before they arrive. It's to see the consequences coming and experience them emotionally in advance. And unfortunately, that ability cuts both ways because the very capacity that makes you reflective and ethical and intelligent also makes you hesitant. We imagine worst case scenarios so vividly that we treat them as if they're already real. So courage isn't defeated by fear, it's defeated by simulation. We rehearse embarrassment, loss, rejection and moral failure in advance. And then our bodies respond as if those things have already happened. Your heart rate rises, your muscles tighten. Avoidance feels sensible, and inaction feels like safety. Hamlet describes what follows. Thought, he says, puzzles the will. Thought puzzles the will. Reflection drains us, not because thinking is bad, but because it multiplies potential outcomes faster than our actions can deal with them. Right. I think that's so cool. Thinking isn't bad itself, but it's able to generate more realities than our actions can solve. Animals don't suffer this, right? They just act when a threshold is crossed. Humans linger. And by the time that the moment to move arrives, we feel as if we've already lived through its inevitable failure. So we wait. This is the deepest psychological point that I think Shakespeare is making. And I'm aware that a guy that basically didn't read Shakespeare is just reverse engineering what I think he said. But I do think that this is a cool interpretation. Right? Our intelligence doesn't just protect us, it also inhibits us. We learn quickly from mistakes that we make, but we almost never feel the cost of mistakes that we avoid. The humiliation of speaking and failing leaves a scar. But the decades long erosion of never speaking leaves nothing that you can point to. Which explains why people stay in the wrong job, the wrong relationship, the wrong version of themselves for years. Not because they don't know better, but because action demands stepping into an unrehearsed future. Hamlet names the real enemy, which is uncertainty, right? Not pain or effort, but just the unknown. Our minds would rather endure a familiar misery than gamble on an unfamiliar freedom. Even suffering becomes tolerable once it's predictable. But people would rather spend years in misery than risk a few days of pain. And this is why modern life, despite being safer than any previous era, often feels more paralyzing, right? Because our nervous systems evolved to avoid death and lions, and now we use it to avoid embarrassment and misjudgment and reputational damage and identity fracture. And here's the final uncomfortable implication Shakespeare leaves hanging. Self awareness is not a pure good, right? Beyond a certain point, self awareness actually inhibits agency. Less reflection can mean more peace. Less certainty can mean more movement. Less conscience can sometimes mean more life. Courage isn't about thinking clearly, it's about moving while things are still unclear. You know, there's that famous line, the unexamined life is not worth living, but a life can be deeply examined and still never lived. This paradox of self awareness, the fact that the deeper you think sometimes the less you're able to act. If your mind is able to generate realities more quickly than you are able to come up with solutions or move through them, you kind of have this weird cost benefit imbalance or maybe like a cost profit, your balance sheet is offset where the overheads are higher than the revenue. And this sort of puts you in a negative equity in terms of your ability to move forward. And that can freeze you in place. You don't want to do something because you think, look at all of the ways that could go wrong. And the more ways it could go wrong, the less ability I'm going to have to act. And what if this thing occurs and that thing occurs and over time conscience makes cowards of us all. It's weird because most people probably need to be more thoughtful. They need to spend more time, be less rash, act less impulsively. But there is a cohort of people that are the opposite. And the people like me, and maybe you too, and they're the people who think more than they should. Talk themselves out of more things than into them and, and actually move more slowly. They get less done in life due to their thought than more. Now they'll make way fewer mistakes. And that's great. But again, the mistake of omission is different to the mistake of commission. So people make commission errors if they don't think enough. People make omission errors if they think too much. Like if you overthink, decide not to go up and speak to that girl that's been in the cafeteria at work for six months, she gets a boyfriend, would have been the perfect partner for you, and you decide to not make the move because you've talked yourself into and out of it so many times. Minds. Your mind's ability to show you what could go wrong is greater than your actions ability to fix it. In reality, that is an omission error. But we don't see it in the same way because it's not as obvious. For instance, I chose to not bring a number of guests on this podcast in 2024, and maybe that's leaked out of me in a couple of other vlogs or whatever, but I didn't make a big song and dance about it. I basically never spoke about it. I'm never going to get credit for the things that I didn't do. And in the same way you never pay a cost for the things that you don't do. I mean, look, if you leave a person to bleed out on the side of the street without calling the ambulance, that's a kind of omission error. But it's pretty obvious. A much more quiet omission error is I was scared of building the business because my mind taught me all of the different ways that stuff could go wrong. So I didn't do it. And I'll never know the pain of not fulfilling my dreams, but I avoided the pain of failure. And the pains of failure are much more prevalent in our mind than the pain of Fuck. What if this doesn't go well? So there's this great audiobook from Tony Robbins. It's 30 years old. George Mack sent it to me. I don't even know how to find it. I'll try and find it and put it in the links, but it's basically an hour and a half worksheet. Awaken the Giant Within. But it's an audiobook and all he does. It's basically one long exercise to try and front load the pain as much as possible. Look at what this situation you're in now has cost you in the past. Look at what it's costing you right now, and look at what it will cost you in the future. And he tries to get you to sit in the discomfort as much as possible. It's horrible, it's awful exercise. It's like the mental equivalent of an ice bath. And then he gets you to try and do the opposite. Look at what would have happened in the past if you'd made the change that you want to, that you think is right. If you'd improved this thing, look at what would be happening now and look at what would happen in the future. And he tries to sort of get you to use. He calls it the Pain pleasure principle. Motivate your behavior through pain and pleasure and the type of pain that you can front load with. Look at what not starting this thing has cost you in the past and now in the future you have to be much more conscious. Like the commission, errors come naturally to us, but the omission errors are much more hidden. So you need to kind of, you need to do an exercise, you need to consciously bring omission errors in. Like, fuck. Like I've always wanted to be a stand up comedian. I've always just wanted to do. I've always. I want to do an open mic. I just really want to do an open mic. And you've put it off for decades. You never did it, you never closed that loop. And you might hate it. Here's the other thing, the thing that you're putting off from doing, you might absolutely hate. But at least once you realize, whether you like it or you don't even go up and speak to the girl in the cafeteria and find out she's got horrible breath and she's an asshole. There you go, loop closed. You don't need to think about it. But the what if after the fact will kill you. But the what if before the fact is really hard to determine. So yeah, I think thus conscience does make cowards of us all. That is my year seven fourth grade assessment of Shakespeare. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. A quick aside, most people think that they're dehydrated because they don't drink enough water. Turns out water alone isn't just the problem, it's also what's missing from it. Which is why for the last five years, I've started every single morning with a cold glass of element in water. Element is an electrolyte drink with a science backed ratio of sodium, potassium and magnesium. 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The dark night of the soul has a positive side. So there's a quote from Rogan. The worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you. The saddest that you've ever been is the saddest you've ever been. The hardest you've ever worked is the hardest that you've ever worked. Shock, Horror. The tough times aren't fun in the moment for the same reason that no one ever believes that they're living through a golden era, right? The golden years, interestingly, only ever seem to exist in the past because it's only with the benefit of hindsight that we know all of our worries were a waste of time. But when you're going through it, all of your concerns are still open loops. They're all things to fear. In retrospect, you see that you had the ability to handle whatever your problems were and that there was nothing to be bothered about. Which suggests that if you've just come out of the hardest period of your life, this seems like a cause for celebration, right? Because you now have a new workload level that's been unlocked. Every new challenge that you go through shows you a new territory that you were scared of but survived. Each time that you break a new limit, you now know that you have the capacity to handle more than you ever did before. It's kind of like inverse PTSD or workload exposure therapy, and it teaches you, oh, I've been here before and I didn't die. This is okay. Joe was making some pithy comment about misgendering a blue haired barista and said, if that's the worst thing that's ever happened to someone. The worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you. That is a big deal. And it kind of is a big deal. You could imagine some person had been created in a lab and raised by robots and they'd never endured any discomfort and they go outside and they feel the wind on their skin. I mean, maybe it would be nice, but let's say it was a strong wind or maybe it was a strong wind with some leaves in it and sand or whatever. That to them might be absolute agony because their level of sensitivity has been tuned down an awful lot. And I think the same thing can happen psychologically too to people that, wow, I've not really ever been through much difficulty that all of this stuff has been snowplowed out of my way and then I've arrived in the world and fuck, it's harder than I thought it would be. But the opposite is also true. Which means if you are the sort of person who regularly seeks out discomfort or discomfort, seeks you, seeks you out and you have to push back against it each time that you do something that you couldn't previously believe that you had in the locker, this is a new level that you have just got to that teaches your body. I've been here before and I didn't die. This is okay. For instance, I just came back from this tour in Australia and the opening night was two and a half thousand people in Sydney, which is the second biggest audience I've ever been in front of. And the theater is so fucking huge. It is so scary. This big sprawl. It's like imax. Imagine looking out at an audience of people and they're wrapped around you. It's basically, there's no part of my vision that doesn't have people in it. And it's even angled like a fucking IMAX screen. And I'd run the show a bunch of times in Austin, Texas first, but I hadn't done it in front of a big audience. There's a difference between doing it in an intimate 50 person comedy club in Austin, Texas and in front of two and a half thousand people, you know, maybe one third of which have been brought along as friends or partners of people who love the show. So it's a way colder audience with huge 100 foot high ceiling. It's totally different environment and I'd never run this show apart from in this small comedy club in Austin. James goes out before me and does an entire three minute segment which is just calling different things Gay. And I had to. As opposed to me going out with warm audience, he had really sort of put me on the back foot. All of this stuff was like, fuck. Like, this is so hard. They just felt really, really difficult. And that is now the new. I thought this thing was going to destroy me, and I got through it. Wow. Well, the next time that I do it, maybe the sound cuts out halfway through. At that same show, the sound guy decided to trigger the end of show sequence halfway through. It's the first time that's ever happened to me in New York. The people who came to the New York show, I. The entire venue sound cut out, apart from the onstage monitors for like three minutes. That's the first time that that's ever happened to me. And it doesn't matter whether you're on stage or not, but, you know, the heaviest weight that you've ever lifted is the heaviest weight you've ever lifted. Each time that you break a new pr, each time that you do something that's difficult, each time that you go through a situation which is tough, yes, it sucks. And obviously you don't want to lean into accumulating more of those than is necessary. But especially if it's something around your chosen pursuit, if it's around work, if it's around difficulty, skill acquisition, stuff like that, you know that you have that in the locker, you know that you can survive that, and it's cool. And I basically think inverse PTSD workload exposure therapy is a good way to alchemize something that you could see as really toxic and bad and difficult and actually realize, wow, this is kind of a gift to my future self. Look at how hard you can work. Look at how much you can endure. Look at how skillfully you were able to get through this thing. And on the other side of it, that's. That's your new level. You know that you can do that too. All right, six lessons about choosing a life direction. First one, James Clear. It doesn't make sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it. If you don't want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire to crave the result, but not the process is to guarantee disappointment. I think that is so fucking good. It doesn't make sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it. If you don't want to live the lifestyle, then release yourself from the desire. So a lot of the time people might think, I want to become a Touring rock star, go. Okay. You crave the result. Touring rockstar, do you want the process? Do you want the lifestyle to get there? And then the lifestyle of being there, too? To become a touring rock star, you're going to have to play guitar in your bedroom, on your own, with no one listening and no promise of whether or not it's going to work for like a decade, right? That you're going to have to learn all of the scales, you're going to have to learn to write music, you're going to have to find bandmates and learn mastering and recording and bouncing tracks and fucking, you know, all of this stuff. Do you want that? Do you want to have calluses on your fingers? And then the lifestyle of actually even being there. You're going to be on the road away from your friends and your family for six months of the year. Every single year. You're going to be in a smelly tour bus for the first half of your career because you're not going to have made it unless you break through with, like, Gangnam Style or some shit. And then, okay, is that what you want? Is that really what you want? Do you want something? And are you willing to do what it takes to get it? Because if it's not both, it doesn't matter. Next one. Outward complaints aren't a good gauge of internal suffering. Just because someone carries it well doesn't mean it isn't heavy. Just because someone carries it well doesn't mean it isn't heavy. This is an Oliver Berkman line, and I often think about this. You know, the challenge of somebody that looks competent, or if you're the responsible one in your friend group, you're the one that is listening to Huberman podcasts and trying to optimize your sleep. And maybe you've gone to therapy and you're doing meditation, you're trying to be balanced and regulated and all of these things. Typically, to your friends around you, that means, well, you know, like Leanne, she's always got it together. Like Leanne doesn't. She doesn't need help. Like, she's. She's always good. But you don't understand if this person is bearing even more weight than everybody else around them, but just carrying it well, holding onto it, not breaking down. And again, it goes back to the Rogan thing of the worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you if you are carrying a heavier weight than someone else, but you just know that your capacity to lift it is Greater. That doesn't mean it isn't heavy, it just means that you're doing a really good job at keeping it quiet. Your life does not need to be easier, it needs to be simpler. I think this is such a true rule. Your system is designed to handle stress and challenge, but not complication. So think about it. You probably handle hard things pretty well, but you feel overwhelmed when they become messy. So don't attribute to difficulty something that can be explained by complexity. Your system is designed to handle stress and challenge, but not complication. If you think about the times when you felt very overwhelmed, I'm going to guess that it's rarely because of one pathway of thing being too intense. It's typically because you have one thing that's pretty intense and then your mum gets ill or your partner has an argument with you, or there's an issue with your house, or the power goes out or you lose your job or whatever. It's the complexity that really wrecks us. You are able to handle stress and challenge, but the complexity, the complication is when stuff gets really difficult. And yeah, don't attribute to difficulty something that can get explained by complexity. And obviously the solution here, the implied solution, is if you're feeling overwhelmed, look at how you can reduce down complexity as opposed to intensity. Or if you've got lots of things and it feels really complicated and complex, just attack one at a time. You're not going to be able to fix your relationship and get the power back on in your house and complete that presentation for what it's like. Okay, I just need to triage this. What is the number one problem? And I'm just going to go through them sequentially as opposed to in parallel. The more that I think about that rule that your system's designed to handle stress but not complication is the more true it is. So try and simplify stuff wherever possible. Another one. You need fewer inputs, not more. The answers you seek are in the silence you're avoiding. The answers you seek are in the silence you're avoiding. Shameless rework of. The magic you're looking for is in the work you're avoiding. But this is a different pathway. And I don't think that. I don't think that it's the same solution. A lot of the time you do need to work harder and you're trying to dress it in whatever outfit you can so that you don't need to lean in and do the work. And that's great and important and maybe for most people is true. But after a While once you've got the I work hard muscle embedded, you then realize that because you're working so hard, you're not listening to fleeting thoughts. You've maybe pushed your intuition to one side. You're not able to tap into your gut as well. You don't actually know what you like because you're in so much chaos and busyness and complication. It's a little bit hard for you to tap into that inner sense. And that's when you need to use a different fuel source. The answers you seek are in the silence. You're avoiding. You'd also say the answers you seek are in the showers. You're avoiding. I think shower thoughts underrated. Toilet thoughts overrated. Saw a tweet the other day. Some guy said that if you sit on the toilet for too long with your ass hanging out that you get hemorrhoids. Don't know if that's true, but shower. No one's ever had a problem with too long of a shower, so longer showers. The answers you seek are in the silence. You're avoiding another one. Don't fall into the trap of mourning a life that you can still live. Don't fall into the trap of mourning a life that you can still live. Basically, if you are the sort of person that's regularly surprised at how well things go, maybe that's a good indication that you're allowed to believe in yourself more. So many people, as far as I can see, have this premeditated resentment for the life that they don't think they're going to be able to exist in. They don't think that they're going to be able to live this life, but they still have the opportunity to. And a lot of these people, the overthinkers, the ones who conscience makes a coward of, they have all of the skills to be able to fix this thing. They can go and get this thing done, but they're overthinking. Their fear is getting in the way of them believing it. And it's almost like they're trapped inside of a prison. They're the prisoner and the prison guard, and they've got the keys on them at the same time, like, if things go well, you can probably believe in yourself more. And if you still have the opportunity to live a life, I think it's a really bad idea to get resentful and sad about the fact that you're not living it. It's like it's right in front of you. Just go and do it. And then the final one, simple Steps to a better Life to improve your life, focus on what you like instead of what you dislike and focus on people who focus on what they like instead of what they dislike. And this just becomes more and more true, especially as I get older, which might be me trying to offset the sort of natural entropy toward grumpiness, but I just like being around people that are enthusiastic about stuff. There are two categories of friends typically that you spend time with. One are people who want to talk about shit that they're fired up about. Really excited. This is something that's so cool. I've got to show you this thing. And then did you see what did today? Did you see that thing? I don't know, man. I just. I really like being around people that are positive. Again, the one tattoo that I have on my body is on the inside of my wrist and it says smile. Because I was trying to remind myself at 23 to stop being such a miserable bastard, which might just be being British, I don't know. However, I like offsetting that. I like being around people that make me more fired up. Maybe there is someone out there who is too enthusiastic and needs to be around a bunch of British people to, you know, bring that down. Come and be my friend. I'll fucking bring you back down to earth. But yeah, I think be around people who talk about what they like, not what they dislike. And to make your life better, also focus on what you like instead of what you dislike. So yeah, there's some lessons about choosing your life direction. In other news, Shopify powers 10% of all e commerce companies in the US. They are the driving force behind Gymshark and Skims and Aloe and Nutonic. Which is why I partnered with them. Because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class. Their checkout is 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. And with shop pay, you can boost conversions up to 50% better. Basically, you didn't get into business to learn how to code or build a website or deal with the inventory stuff. Bull on the back end. You just want to get down to creating and promoting an awesome product. And Shopify takes all of the mess off your hands and allows you to focus on the job you actually came here to do designing and selling the thing that you love. So upgrade your business and get the same checkout that we use with Nutonic. With Shopify right now, you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com/modernwisdom all lowercase. That's shopify.commodernwisdom all right, next one. The fuck you family. So I started thinking a lot about why the fathers that I know seem to have a different kind of confidence about themselves. And I think it's because of this concept that I can't unsee anymore. So fuck you money is a meme, but it's also a truth, right? Fuck you money. There's an amount of wealth that you can achieve when the typical restrictions and conventions no longer apply to you. You don't have to suck up to gatekeepers. You don't need to do things that you don't want to do. And in extreme situations, you basically don't even need to follow the law because you can just pay people off. Similarly, fucky freedom is kind of downstream from fucky money, but can also be achieved through cultivating a lack of resilience and reliance on other groups. There's no restrictions on where you can travel to and when and for how long. You don't need to show up to work on time or work at all. And if. If you're sufficiently well structured, you don't even need to care about the state of the economy or the power grid or the wider world. This is the. I live in Dripping Springs on a ranch that's got completely independent power with solar. Solar panels and a ton of guns. And it's. It's Tucker Max. This is Tucker Max. I'm talking about Tucker Max there. But I then started thinking about a different type of fuck you liberation, which is significantly cheaper and more accessible and more common and maybe even more powerful. And this is the fuck you family. So a lot of the fathers that I've spoken to have told me about how their priorities were completely changed when they started a family. All of the previous status games that they played seemed petty. The games that they used to go through in an attempt to impress people in power or those with status seemed juvenile and shallow. Much of their anxiety around whether different people and groups liked them or thought that they were cool just sort of evaporated because the only people they needed to care about impressing were asleep under their roof or in the bed next to them, because to their kids, these dads were the coolest, richest, strongest, most heroic person on the planet. And that gave them a very powerful type of liberation. It seems to me that much of what young men get up to are surrogate activities until they finally get a family. This isn't to say that all fathers become Placid soy boy hippies or that having kids neuters your ambition. But it definitely seems to open up a new level where they care far less about the opinions of others. And ultimately, what's the point in having fuck you freedom if you never say fuck you? I really think that the aggressive business chasing, capitalist meritocratic society thing, which I'm all in favor of and have benefited from, obviously, and love, is playing off the fact that the longer people put off having a family, the more they find activities that replace that same dynamic inside of them. It's the obsession with body or aesthetics or sport or business or wealth creation or status or travel or whatever. That's not to say that any of these things can't be good, obviously, but if you were to have the family, I think that you would find a lot of those. It would be like going around trying to eat a shit ton of different foods that were all nutrient sparse when there was a nutrient dense food that you could go to that would satisfy a lot of those ambitions more quickly. Does that make sense? It's basically the source that you could go to like the most pure version of this, the condensed, like concentrated, weapons grade version of a lot of what you're looking for, to me, seems to be on the other side of a family. I mean, look, the. Is this hypocrisy? I don't think it's hypocrisy. It's much. It's closer to dreaming, right? It's. I am totally open to the fact that I might be completely wrong and I'm gonna have a family and my drive is gonna go up through the roof and maybe I'm gonna be more miserable and maybe I'm gonna care more about the opinions of others. And what a fucking amount of humble pie I'm gonna have to eat if that's the case. I'm just going off what I've seen with other people. I'm going off what I've seen with the fathers around me and stuff. Maybe I've done a postmortem incorrectly. Maybe I will live to eat my words, but I don't know. Maybe this is just a fucking pipe dream. Maybe it's a pipe dream for me that there's some level of personal development available on the other side of kids. Also not saying that you should only have kids as a selfish way to bypass the work that you need to do to care about the opinions of others. Just intriguing thoughts. I'm just. I just. I'm like a. I'm a sommelier. I'm just offering you some. Ooh, just some intriguing thoughts for you there. Or maybe just totally wrong ones, I don't know. All right, next one. I fucking love this idea. I absolutely love this idea. The curse of psychological strength. Everyone has a limit, right? And an end to the amount of discomfort that they can cope with. And this is obvious. Physically, some people can lift more and run further than others. But how much emotional pain or upset or disappointment that a person can endure is subtler, harder to detect. It's not apparent in the size of someone's arms, but in the capacity of their nervous system. It's not a weight that you can see on a squat rack. It's their ability to carry a heavy emotional load. And this psychological strength can be a good thing because you're able to handle more than most. You don't balk at pain, you keep pushing through regardless of how you feel. But too much strength can be a weakness, and high performers are particularly vulnerable to this trap. Psychological strength is rewarded almost everywhere. In the gym, it's discipline. In business, it's grit. In public, it's composure. You become the person who can handle it, who doesn't complain, who pushes through when others would quit. Basically, your ability to ignore how you feel and keep moving forward earns admiration, builds your career and creates momentum. But what you are praised for in public, you often pay for in private. Relationships don't reward endurance. They require attunement. And if your default strategy in life is to absorb discomfort and override warning signs, you will do exactly that. When someone repeatedly hurts you, you'll rationalize it, reframe it, decide that it's your job to make it work. And the stronger you are, the longer you can stay. What looks like strength from the outside becomes self abandonment on the inside. You've trained yourself to believe that struggle is noble and difficulty is meaningful. So when love feels destabilising, it doesn't register as a warning. It feels like a challenge. And challenges are your thing. But a relationship isn't a marathon to be endured. It's a place to feel safe. And the qualities that make you formidable in the arena can quietly make you miserable in your own living room. Let's say that you're dating and you feel like a side character in your own relationship. You put them first, they put you sixth. The rupture is regular, the repair is absent. Lower resilience, less stubborn. People would have broken long ago and said, I'm out. But not you. You're the David Goggins of psychological suffering. Forget carrying the boats, you'll carry the whole fleet forever. In these situations, you're faced with a much tougher problem. Not how much can you tolerate, but how much do you want to tolerate. Perhaps this is what you had to do as a child. If your needs weren't noticed, your sadness gets ignored, or your feelings didn't matter then you became accustomed to pushing through disconnection in order to make those relationships function. If child you learns I need to work hard to be loved, then adult you believes, if I'm not loved, I just need to work harder. You achieve 10,000 hours of ignoring your own needs. You can't tell people how you feel without first worrying about how it will make them feel. You unconsciously believe that suffering is the price of connection and that silent subjugation is noble. You basically think, I should be able to tolerate the intolerable in order to make this work. And when you try to connect with someone who doesn't see your needs, you don't notice this person isn't attuned to me. Instead, you sense this relationship pattern feels familiar. This must be what love is. You have been trained at your core that your needs don't matter. So you always must work to prove your worth. And importantly, if you don't have to work for it, you think that you can't trust it. So you push away people who are easy, ready and open, and instead you pursue those who are distant, difficult and disconnected. I have to prove that I'm worthy of loving is a theory that becomes addictive and completely disorienting. The psychological strength that once enabled you has now entrapped you. The capacity to endure emotional pain without protest is what happens when your nervous system learns that discomfort is safer than confrontation and in totality. This obscures your ability to understand what you do and don't want to tolerate. Perhaps your ego doesn't want to admit defeat and shame spirals in this way. If you believe you are the problem, you also have to be the solution. So you stay, you tolerate, you try harder. But just because you're suffering doesn't mean that you're noble. It just means that you're suffering. No one is going to congratulate you on your deathbed with a medal for never making a fuss. No one is going to thank you for quietly lifting weights that should have never been yours to carry. The answer is, isn't less resilience, but less denial. Because a boundary isn't an intellectual decision. It's an emotional limit. And if you can't feel it, you can't enforce it. Psychological strength doesn't always make you strong. Often it just makes you stay too long. And you risk one day waking up in a life that you built entirely around what you were willing to tolerate. And then you finally break. I think this is so important, especially for hard charging, type A, insecure, overachiever, thoughtful, reflective, empathetic people. The assumption that if this isn't working, it's my job to fix it is noble. It's a good thing. You should take responsibility. You should try to help other people. You should try to work through things as opposed to just quitting. But there is a limit. And what you're praised for in public, you pay for in private. This kind of psychological strength. You know, I had Andy Stumpf on the show and he told me this story about how as a Navy Seal, he had basically built his entire identity around being someone who never quits. And that caused him to stay in a marriage that sounded really destructive for a decade longer than he should have done. At the same time, that r relationship advice subreddit Just leave Them went From I think 10% or 15% to 50%. It doubled or tripled in the space of a decade and a half. Go to therapy, ticked up a little bit. But like, try to work through it, explain your emotions. All of these things trended down. So two things are true at once. That some people are pulling the rip cord and unable to go through discomfort. I just don't think that that's you. If you're listening to this show, if you're into the wisdomverse, modern wisdom y stuff, I don't think that's you. I get the sense that you're the sort of person who holds themselves in emotional situations far longer than they should do, that always has this sense that someone's mad at them, that they've maybe they could be doing more, they should be doing more. They take responsibility and carry weights that aren't theirs to bear. Like walking around with everybody else's luggage and then wondering why your shoulders hurt all the time. Yeah, I just. I fucking love this idea. It's one of the best things that I've seen. And I'm particularly interested in things that are advantages that we pay a price for. Psychological strength is something almost always, almost everybody wants more of. But look at how it can be damaging and destabilizing because you can't turn it off. Fuck your feelings, just work harder is a great philosophy. If you want to do it in the office or in the gym, it doesn't matter if I'm tired. It doesn't matter if I'm sick, it doesn't matter if I don't feel up to it. I'm just going to get through it, right? Unless you're obsessed. Obviously the same thing isn't true around your kitchen table. Like your capacity to withstand emotional discomfort and just keep moving should be domain specific at different levels. In the gym should be very, very high. In the office should be very, very high. In your relationships and your friendships should be lower. Maybe with your family should be a little. You know. I think it's a consideration that a lot of people need to think about because we praise this as such a universal good, which it almost certainly is. I'm trying to find the situations where it shouldn't be used or it gets used too much. So I think that's one of them. Before we continue, I wish someone had told me five years ago to stop overthinking nutrition and just find something that works. I've simplified mine down to one scoop a day and it's made hitting my nutritional bases an awful lot easier. AG1 includes 75 vitamins, minerals, probiotics and whole food ingredients. And that is why I've been drinking it every morning for over five years now. And they've taken it a step further with AG1 Next Gen, the same one scoop ritual, but now backed by four clinical trials. In those trials, AG1 was shown to fill common nutrient gaps, boost healthy gut bacteria by 10 times, and improve key nutrient levels in just three months. They've been refining the formula since 2010, 52 iterations and counting. And I love the next gen because it's more bioavailable. It's clinical validation, which is unbelievably rare in the supplement world. The older I get, the more I realize that the small stuff compounds and this is one of the smallest things I do that makes a massive difference. If you're still on the fence, they've got a 90 day money back guarantee in the US so you can buy it and try it for three months and if you do not like it, they'll just give you your money back. Right now you can get a free AG1 welcome kit that includes a bottle of D3K2 AG1 flavor sampler and that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.commodernwisdom that's drinkag1.com Modern Modern Wisdom all right, next one. I've been thinking about the dark side of Monk mode. So Monk Mode has grown to huge popularity over the last few years as a self improvement strategy, especially for men. Maybe on the Internet. You have seen these videos about Monk Mode retreating from the world to focus on the three eyes of introspection and isolation and improvement. And it's been Talked about since 2014 was the first time I read of it on the Illimitable man blog. He says Monk Mode is a temporary form of men going their own way. By cutting yourself off from the rest of the world for a while so that you can fine tune your focus and calibrate your direction and confront yourself, you acknowledge your weaknesses and then you formulate a plan of action to deal with them. So the focus is on minimizing your time contribution to social obligations and junk activities because these consume so much of your time while yielding little to negligible increases toward your social market value. Right? Monk Mode is a serious commitment that shouldn't be half assed. You're either doing it or not. It'll be a struggle in the beginning, but once you fully engaged it, it becomes a beneficial, productive and dare I say, even addictive lifestyle. So that's from the original blog post in 2014. And look, for all that I can criticize it. I've gone full Monk Mode tons of times throughout my life with really great success. All of 2017, all of 2018, mid 2019, basically straight through Covid until 2021 when I moved out to America. I've cut out alcohol for 2,000 days. In the last eight years I've done 500 days without caffeine, over 2,000 sessions of meditation, five years of daily gratitude journals, over 300 sessions of yin yoga, 500 hours of Stu McGill's big three to try and rehab my back. This just sounds like the recipe for a very autistic breakfast. I'm aware. But this is all done as well in a bedroom in Newcastle upon Tyne in the uk. Sat on my own, usually first thing in the morning. Okay, I've done the Monk Mode thing right? There's my those are my credentials. And almost all of the most important progress that I ever made was facilitated by a concentrated period like this. However, Monk Mode's reliable effectiveness, especially for men, especially for men that are prone to a bit of introspection and isolation creates a huge problem. And the dark side is the final two words from that blog post that I read. Addictive Lifestyle. The problem is Monk Mode justifies a retreat from your life, a retreat from risk taking and adventure, and repackages it as self development. It makes you feel Noble in isolation, but it does that so effectively that it can become hard to bring yourself back out. And that means if you already have a tendency to live a sheltered, routinized, unsocial life, you are encouraging yourself to sort of abscond further away from ever building a real life support network, which is actually the thing that you need most in the long run. The reason that you're doing all of this work, the isolation, the introspection, the improvement, is to reintegrate to society and be effective. But it's so addicting that a lot of the time people who do Monk mode just never reintegrate. And I saw this with a friend like 15 years ago who was competing to go into a bodybuilding competition. He already was introverted and socially shy. And then his upcoming fitness competition justified 8pm bedtimes and militant routines and rejecting all social invites. And the competition came and went, but the routine didn't change and it took years for him to re venture out into some sense of normality. This is largely a personal reflection too, right? The allure of perpetually working on yourself is very high and improvement is rewarding. But if you're not careful, you can spend the rest of your life focused on isolation, introspection and improvement at the expense of the actual reason that you did Monk mode in the first place, which is to be able to show up in the world in a better way. Bill Perkins says delayed gratification in the extreme results in no gratification. With Monk mode, you practice in private so that you can perform in public, but private practice in the extreme results in no public performance. So basically, don't obsess for too long in solitude for personal growth, or you'll struggle to reintegrate. And the solution is, I think, periodize. Set a deadline for your Monk mode to end. Three to six months is a really good sweet spot in my experience. You can do longer if you've never done it before. You can do shorter if you're sort of more developed on your journey. But yeah, man, I really fucking earned my stripes, right? Doing the isolation, the introspection and the improvement. The more that I did it, the harder it was to integrate. Which I guess is the fourth I. Isolation, improvement, introspection. But then the fourth one, which is the one that you're actually here, is integration. Like how do I bring what I've learned in private back across into the public? I am trying to make myself a better person so that I can function more effectively in the world, be more successful in my business, move along in my career, make better friends, find a partner that I love, you know, just function in the world in a better way. But it does repackage isolation as nobility. And again, if you've got that predisposition, if you're the sort of person who tends to spend time on their own already, this is going to push you in a direction to already moving in. It's going to exaggerate your predispositions as opposed to correcting the imbalances. And yeah, look, I love Monk mode. I think it's great. Just no one that's either done a video on it or tried to create a fucking course on it has talked about the challenge of reintegration publicly because it's way less sexy. And this is the fucking problem with almost everything. All of the different things that I've talked about today, psychological strength, the self awareness. Everybody will want to extol the virtues of why it's great. And it is, given that I'm basically trying to dispel comforting myths about commonly held personal development strategies. That's basically what this lessons episode is. Sorry if I've fucking ripped the rug out from underneath you. This is also why when I talk about this stuff, especially on the Internet, it doesn't ever happen at the live shows, I think because people, they're able to see it in totality whilst they're focused and not at four times speed. Or maybe they're just too scared to fucking criticize me. I don't know. On the Internet, people hate having their comforting illusions pulled out from underneath them. So there will be a ton of criticisms about my criticisms. Easy for you to say. You've already da da da da da da da. I'm like, hey, dude, I'm not saying that these things, psychological strength, being self aware, the opportunity to like isolate yourself and work on yourself. I'm not saying that these things aren't good. I'm warning you of some of the side effects that come along for the ride that no one wants to talk about. The reason no one wants to talk about it is it's anti memetic. It's inherently unmotivating, right? To talk about the fragility of obsession is an anti memetic idea because people want to believe that their obsession will carry them through or that discipline and motivation will be all that they need because they can't engineer their obsession. I'm just here to tell you, in my experience, that's not the way it is at all. And I'm sorry. And if I could change it, I would But I think that this is a much more important conversation to talk about. All right, that was a bit dark. Let's do some interesting differences between the sexes. So I've been researching sex differences. I found some spicy ones. Your guy friend is attracted to you and he thinks that you're attracted to him too. So a study of Americans finds that in platonic couples, the men are far more likely than the women to find their friend sexy and far more likely to think that she finds them attractive too. Indeed, a man's assessment of how much his female friend fancies him matches how much he fancies her. And it is unrelated to how she really feels. So shock, horror. Men are prone to wishful thinking. Also, there is a well understood failure of cross sex, mind reading, the male overestimation and female underestimation of attraction. But your guy friend is attracted to you, ladies, and he thinks that you're attracted to him too. Nearly half of your guy friends are trying to sleep with you as a woman. So William Costello polled 527 heterosexual and bisexual people and asked the question, are opposite sex friendships ever truly platonic? 81% of women said yes. Only 58% of men said yes. So women were three times more likely than men to say that their friendship was purely platonic. Half of guy friends in the platonic friendship are trying to sleep with you. And this is why dudes, when their girlfriend says, you know, he's no, he's just nice, he's just, I'm sorry, ladies, we, we understand how that works. We understand how men's minds work and you understand how women's minds work. Right? But not only are guys more attracted to you than you are to them, they think that you are as attracted to them as they are to you. And you don't know either of these things. So I, that's an uncomfortable one. There's double standards over infidelity. So according to recent polling, both sexes think it's worse for a husband than a wife to have an affair, which is sort of the opposite of the traditional double standard. So 53% of men say it's always morally wrong for a married woman to have an affair. But 61% of men say it's always morally wrong for a married man to have an affair. So 53% of men say it's wrong for a woman. 61% of men say it's wrong FOR a man. 56% of women say it's always morally wrong for a married woman to have an affair, and 70% of women say it's always morally wrong for a married man to have an affair. So it's. What's interesting here is both men and women judge men more harshly for infidelity, and women judge both men and women more harshly. Like, what's that, 9%? More so 61% of men say it's wrong for a man. 70% of women say it's wrong for a man, 53% of men say it's wrong FOR a woman, 56% of women say it's wrong for a woman. So, I mean, women are more sort of enforcing and judgmental on this generally. Might not be that surprising, but I don't know what that says. Spicy romantic relationships matter more to men than to women. So this is from Steve Stewart Williams, who's got a new book out. He's coming on the show very soon. Romantic relationships matter more to men than to women. Stereotypes say it's women who care more. But this time, the stereotypes are wrong. A new paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences assessed that very question. And researchers found that, among other things, men strive harder to establish romantic relationships. They fall in love faster, they benefit more from relationships, depend more on their relationships for social support, are less likely to initiate breakups, suffer more in the wake of a breakup, and take longer to get over their exes. So I wonder how much of this is wrapped up in the fact that men don't have social support structures outside of their relationship in the same way that women do. Typically, women have a broader and tighter support structure of friends. And a lot of the time when men get married, they get rid of their social support system and just sort of adopt the wife's support system. Her friends and the husbands of her friends become his friends, and then if they get divorced, those friends go with her, not with him. So not only does he lose a wife, he also loses his social support network because he let his atrophy. This is kind of typical. But they fall in love faster, strive harder to establish romantic relationships, benefit more from relationships. I think all of this is, like, pretty normal. If you were to look ancestrally, why not? Like, women have got more choices, so men need to work harder to do it. Women are always going to be able to get a replacement, and men are going to struggle more. So. So they're gonna take longer to get over. They're gonna be more worried. They suffer more in the wake of breakups. They're less likely to initiate breakups because the chance of them finding somebody else. They depend more on their relationship for social support. All of these things make complete sense, especially when you look at it ancestrally. But anything that denies male privilege is usually treated as kind of abhorrent or blasphemous. And I just think it's. It's cool to highlight some of the ways that maybe things aren't super rosy for guys or maybe. Maybe some stereotypes are turned sort of back to front, Just not calling women bad or men weak or men more moral or anything like that. It's fucking interesting. All right. Married men and women disagree on how much sex to have. Women typically believe their marriages have about the right frequency of sexual, Whereas men wished for twice as much sex as they were having. This suggests many couples adjust their sexual frequency to the lower rate that the wife desires. Right. Women typically believe their marriages have about the right frequency of sex. Men wished for twice as much more. That means that there is a disparity in what people want versus what they're getting for each partner. But look at which partner it defaulted to. Defaulted to the woman, not to the man. Now, that's not a bad thing, right? You might say it's much better to have to, like, run the speed of the race at that of the slowest person as opposed to, like, dragging them along. Like, there's definitely a difference between someone who doesn't get to have sex that they want and someone that has to have sex that they don't want, obviously. But it is interesting that there has to be a negotiation that goes on here, and men are sacrificing, on average, 50% of the amount of sex that they want, and it's sitting at around about the right amount that women do want. It would be interesting to see how many of these women would want even less sex, but aren't prepared to say it because they know that their partner wants more. That would be really interesting to work out. Also would be interesting to work out if women want more sex. But they're just scared of telling researchers what they truly believe. Maybe because they think that there's more judgment around women being actually open or something like that. But more spice before we continue, Most people in their 30s are still training hard. Their protein is dialed in. They sleep better than they did in their 20s. Discipline is not the issue, but recovery feels somewhat different. Strength gains take a little longer. The margin for error starts to shrink. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of timeline. You see, mitochondria are the energy producers inside of your muscle cells. As they weaken with age, your ability to generate power and recover effectively changes. Even if your habits stay Strong Mitopure from Timeline contains the only clinically validated form of urethralin A used in human trials. It promotes mitophagy, which is your body's natural process for clearing out damaged mitochondria and renewing healthy ones. In studies, this supported mitochondrial function and muscle strength in older adults. It's not about pushing harder, it's about actually supporting the cellular machinery underneath your training. If you care about staying Strong into your 30s, 40s and 50s and beyond, this is foundational. Best of all, There is a 30 day money back guarantee plus free shipping in the US and they ship internationally. And right now you can get up to 20% off by going to the link in the description below or heading to timeline.commodernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's timeline.commodernwisdom and Modern Wisdom. A checkout and a final one here, which is actually nothing to do with sex differences, but far fewer people are made for polyamory than think that they are. Polyamory is hilarious because the community is basically 5% genuinely ascended, emotionally hyper intelligent communication masters who've got nervous systems like a fucking glass Lake and 95% insatiable hungry ghosts who have convinced themselves that they're the former. And this is from Cuck Fuchsias that me and George fucking love on Substack. He's so funny, even just the name is brilliant. Polyamory. 5% like guys on the right with the Jedi master hood up and 95% spiritually bypassed bead wearing fedora hat shawl Burning man like hungry ghosts. And I think in my experience this is really true. And the problem is that the people who are in the 95% who can't get it right and aren't built for it and just keep on trying more and more and more until in the hopes that that's going to fix the problem have mistaken themselves for the former and used the success of the people who've got the amazing nervous systems and can handle it as the justification for why they keep going. But they are not the same Shock Horror all right, the Internet is awash with videos about how to find your true self. But what do we mean when we talk about our true self? I think we live with a quiet superstition that beneath the noise of our habits and our mistakes and contradictions lies a truer version of ourselves to self that's fundamentally good. An alcoholic who gets sober is becoming who he really is. But a sober man who starts drinking again has Lost his way. In Scrooge, Dickens didn't just write about a man who swapped stinginess for generosity. He wrote about a man who discovered his real nature. When Richard Nixon fell in disgrace, people said that power had corrupted his real self. But when Nelson Mandela forgave his captors, the world said his true self had been revealed. Or in real life, patients that have got dementia or lose their memory but retain their kindness are often seen by loved ones as still the same person, while those same people who grow cruel are perceived as having lost their essence. Even when fiction tries to make villains irredeemable, audiences resist. Darth Vader is terrifying until he saves his son and proves that there was goodness there. Deep down, we are reluctant to accept that anyone, even fucking Satan in Paradise Lost is rotten all the way through. And our language betrays the bias. Goodness is authenticity, while badness is a mask. And psychologists have tested this belief and the results are so consistent. People overwhelmingly identify morally positive changes as revealing someone's true self, but dismissed negative changes as surface corruption. I started thinking about this when I saw this unreal study about a man called Mark. So a study about a man called Mark. Mark's life was presented in two versions, right? In one, he was a devout Christian who believed homosexuality was wrong but admitted he was attracted to men. In the other, he was a liberal who believed homosexuality was perfectly acceptable but confessed to secretly feeling repulsed by same sex couples. In both cases, Marcus split right belief pulled him one way while a feeling pulled him the other. The question to participants was which side represented his true self. Liberals almost always said the attraction to men revealed who Mark really was. While his disgust at homosexuality was right wing programming. Conservatives almost always said that his conviction against homosexuality revealed who he really was and his public support was woke peer pressure. Basically, each group looked at the same man and saw their own values reflected back at them. It wasn't that people consistently treated beliefs as more authentic or feelings as less genuine. Instead, they treated whichever side lined up with their own moral compass as the real side. And this has some fascinating implications because it suggests that authenticity isn't something we find inside others. Instead, it's something that we project onto them. What counted as Mark's essence wasn't hiding in him at all. It existed in the values of the people that were judging him. And these fights are never just about evidence. They're about who gets to define authenticity. Interestingly, the whole exercise only works when someone is conflicted. If Mark only had one belief or one feeling, no one would have hesitated to declare oh that's who he is. Conflict is the playground where we get to impose our judgments about which side counts as the real self. There are consequences to always seeing ourselves and the others that we favor as moral too. Right? It cushions us from despair because failures can be brushed aside as not really me, which makes bouncing back after mistakes easier. But it also blinds us to our own cruelty because harmful actions get rationalized as accidents or errors or aberrations. It creates an asymmetry where we forgive ourselves quickly while judging others more harshly. It skews our sense of authenticity because we treat virtuous impulses as real and darker ones as intrusions, which can make us dangerously naive about people who are not conflicted at all, but those for whom malice isn't a mask, but it's a pattern. And it fuels this sort of lifelong quest to uncover the good self. As though the work of living is not making choices, but excavating our own purity. And to add even more complexity to it. Notice how unevenly this belief gets applied. If goodness is the truth and badness is a mask, then in theory we should treat all people's goodness as authentic and all people's badness as superficial. But that isn't what we do with our allies. We assume their virtues show who they really are, while their failures are only slips or distortions or masks. But with our opponents, we reverse it. Their good deeds are dismissed as fake or manipulative, while their mistakes and vices are taken as proof of their true character. This double standard shows that the rule isn't actually goodness is authenticity. The rule is the kind of goodness I value is authenticity. Our side's goodness is treated as essence, while the other side's goodness is treated as performance. And our side's failings are masks, but the other side's failings are revelations. Psychologically, this makes sense in small groups. Assuming hidden goodness on insiders helped to maintain our trust and our cohesion. And it assumed hidden badness in outsiders helped us define the boundary between us and them. But the cost is distortion. We give our friends a free pass while demonizing our rivals, blinded to their real virtues and our own side's flaws. What looks like a rule about human nature. Goodness is truth, and badness is a mask, actually turns out to be a rule about group loyalty. So here's a disconcerting idea. What if our true self doesn't exist at all? What if we are nothing but the bundle of drives and beliefs and feelings that show up in the moment? The addict is just as much himself when he drinks as when he doesn't. Scrooge was authentically Scrooge as a miser and as a benefactor. And we only anoint the generous version as authentic because it flatters our sense of what humans ought to be. And in this light, the true self isn't discovered. It's basically invented. The fiction makes forgiveness possible, but it also blinds us to cruelty and shortcomings. It allows us to keep loving people even at their worst, but it also tricks us into underestimating the malice. We say every tyrant or abuser has a hidden spark of goodness, even when sometimes there isn't one. You can see this bias everywhere. Addicts in recovery routinely say, that wasn't the real me about their lowest points. But no one ever says that sobriety is fake. Childhood stories teach us the frog is really a prince, the beast is really gentle. The happy ending is always framed as the revelation of what was hidden all along. Therapists describe patients getting back to themselves after depression, but it's almost unthinkable to frame it the other way, right? That the depressed version is the truest one. Even in daily life, when a friend lashes out in anger, we soothe ourselves by saying, that's not who she is. But when they show generosity, we never say, that's not them. I hope that that's not the truth, right? That there is no authentic real self. But my fear, my philosophical hypothesis that I want to be disproven is that there may be no real you at all. The true self isn't something to be discovered. Instead, it's something that we invent. It's a superstition that we cling onto because it makes forgiveness easier and love, sustainable love and cruelty bearable. And I started thinking about this when I went through some spicy stuff at the start of the year. And what I realized was, when you're getting criticism, you're being criticized from almost always one side for saying one thing that they don't agree with. And if they say, who are you to talk about this topic? The exact opposite opinion would occur if you were saying something different. So if someone says, who are you to comment about the environment? If they're an environmentalist and you are saying something which seems environmentally critical, but if you were saying something that was environmentally supportive in their direction, they would want you to say more. So it's not really. You're not allowed to speak about this. It's, I have a problem with the direction in which you're speaking. And because of that, I found the next closest association, like, who are you? American person to talk about the way that Britain is dealing with its immigration problem because you're saying something that disagrees with whatever that person's point of view is. But if you were saying something that agreed with them, they would want you to say it more. No one is saying your support is too much. Please stop doing it, because you're not supposed to be talking here. They will say your criticism is too much. You shouldn't be talking. You're not supposed to be here. It seems like an asymmetry. You know, Men shouldn't be talking about women's bodies. Well, if the men were in support of access to birth control When Roe vs Wade got repealed, I would imagine that lots of women who don't want men talking about women's bodies would have liked men to be talking about women's bodies. In fact, that's the only thing that you can get support with if you want to get 50% of the population to get on board with this thing that you think is really important. But if you only want to accept voices from the other side when they're in support of you, you can't expect them to show up if you criticize them when they don't agree. All right, that's it. 1100 episodes. Holy shit. Thank you all. I love you to bits. Thank you for supporting me. Thank you for supporting the show. I'm here in the new studio. This place rules. I've got so many big episodes coming up. Like, subscribe. It really does make a difference. Still now, 4.2 million subscribers later, it does make a difference. So wherever you are listening or watching, I appreciate you. I hope you have a wonderful day and I'll see you next time.