21 Harsh Truths About Why You’re Still Lost - Mark Manson

Mark Manson is a writer, entrepreneur, and a New York Times best-selling author. Mark is one of my favorite thinkers. His blog, books, and X account are packed with timeless lessons I come back to again and again. Today, we get to go through some of his best lessons on life, love, and everything that makes us human. Expect to learn why it's important to do hard things, why it’s important to live your happiest life, why choosing a partner is also choosing their average Tuesday, why learning is the smart man’s procrastination, why you need to stop caving to the needs of others, 10 years of therapy in 1 minute, questions to ask yourself before you die and much more… - Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get up to 20% off Timeline powered by Mitopure (now at a lower price) at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy App at https://rpstrength.com/modernwisdom - 0:00 Why We Should Be Comfortable With Uncertainty 7:59 Is Friction the Key to Growth? 20:55 The Truth Behind Choosing a Partner 30:14 Why Self-Optimisation Isn’t For Everyone 39:18 Life Doesn’t Hand Out Pity Passes 54:48 Choose Someone Who Chooses You 01:10:57 Is Learning Just a Form of Procrastination? 01:21:01 Should We Prioritise Starting a Family? 01:24:57 Why Neediness is Pushes People Away 01:32:53 Does Hate Make People Dig Their Heels in? 01:44:14 Why Everything Worth Having Requires Sacrifice 01:50:13 10 Years of Therapy Summarised into 1 Minute 02:10:42 How to Make Your Life Count 02:14:21 Stop Waiting For Permission 02:21:41 Find Out More About Mark - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  The most important skill in the 21st century is the ability to live happily with uncertainty.

• 0:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I mean, do you know what's going on?

• 0:12Chris Williamson?

  Almost never.

• 0:12Mark Manson?

  I mean, you, millions of people like tune in to listen to you to try to figure out what's going on. And you still don't know what's going on. So it's if, if you and I can't figure it out, like, I think we're all pretty.

• 0:24Mark Manson?

  It is interesting that like, as access to information scales, the certainty and the confidence around that information like dissipates. I feel like everybody is, feels less moored to reality than ever before, despite the fact that we have access to everything 24/7, which is like a very weird paradox. But I think it's, it's, there's a deep human instinct to seek out certainty, to find a certain set of beliefs and assumptions that you can kind of like, hang your hat on and build your life around. And I think it's becoming harder than it's ever been before. And I think as a result,

• 1:08Mark Manson?

  developing kind of the cognitive flexibility to live in ambiguity is probably more important than it's ever been.

• 1:17Chris Williamson?

  What happens if you can't deal with uncertainty?

• 1:22Mark Manson?

  Then you will over-index on one single belief, right? So you'll become radical about one idea. You'll, you'll basically put all of your kind of emotional wellbeing into a single concept or a single world worldview. And the danger of that is just that like any, every worldview is going to get blown up at a certain point. Like, nothing survives contact with reality. So when you are forced, you know, when, when that worldview gets contradicted, you're either going to suffer immensely or you're going to have to double down the delusion to maintain the certainty.

• 2:00Chris Williamson?

  Anxiety is all about uncertainty. It's about trying to compress uncertainty down. I don't know what's going to happen in future. If I can imagine all of the different ways that the future might unfold, especially the really bad ones, I'll be able to plan and war game. And that means that when it happens, I'll be ready. You know, there's a, it's a really strange comment on how humans' brains work, that we would rather imagine a catastrophe than deal with uncertainty.

• 2:31Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:32Chris Williamson?

  You think about, you think about it as thinking in superpositions. People would rather collapse the superposition down into something that maybe even breaks the laws of physics. Your dead grandma comes back from the grave to tell you off for this thing that you did. There's entire supernatural shit's going on. That's what you would rather have in your mind than I don't know what's gonna happen.

• 2:56Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:59Mark Manson?

  It's interesting to, like, what you described about anxiety, that kind of, that treadmill that you get on, right? Of like, trying to predict future outcomes. In the process of trying to predict those outcomes, trying to be, become certain about what's gonna happen, you actually just inadvertently build more surface area for more uncertainty. Because every, everything you try to project into the future, you just create more opportunities for that to be wrong.

• 3:25Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes.

• 3:27Mark Manson?

  So it's interesting, because I think, I think actually, like, the antidote to this, it's more of like an aperture issue, right? It's, I think, instead of trying to be certain about very specific, small, narrow things, it's better to try to zoom out till you find a place of confidence, right? So, like, just take like AI, for instance, right? Everybody's freaking out about it. Everybody's got, you know, some people think the world's gonna end. Some people think everybody's gonna lose their jobs. Some people think like China's gonna take over everything. I have no idea if any of those things are true. But like, if I zoom out broadly enough, and you just look at every major technological revolution throughout human history, there is disruption, there is some displacement, but like...

• 4:11Mark Manson?

  Society adapts and moves on. And so if I zoom out to that wide of an aperture, suddenly I feel some degree of certainty that we're going to be okay in the macro. But in the micro, right of like, are you and I going to have jobs in two years? Like I some less certainty about that.

• 4:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's a it's a kind of fragility to need a lot of certainty. Because what you're saying is, I can't deal with something that I can't anticipate. I don't have enough robustness in my system. If something happens that I haven't planned for, the only way that I can survive the future is if I've already prepared for it.

• 4:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 4:53Chris Williamson?

  And that's the opposite of robustness or, you know, the best anti fragility. Look at COVID. Now, COVID, everybody's lives during COVID basically forked into one of two directions. People either went way off the rails or people's lives got stupendously better.

• 5:11Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 5:11Chris Williamson?

  But that's it. It wasn't really anyone that was like, yeah, you know, COVID was okay. Yeah, it ticked over and stuff really didn't show, you know, my trajectory stayed the same. That that was like a lifestyle Rorschach test that everybody took. Everybody looked at it and some people went in one direction and some people went in the other. And a lot of it is, you just got dealt a fucking shitty hand, dude.

• 5:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 5:35Chris Williamson?

  You know, like that, that hospitality job that you were just about to take that was going to change your life. I'm really sorry that fucking that blew or that SaaS company that you were about to start. Like, yeah, I mean, you timed the shit out of the market. Well done for incorporating in 2019 and having everything ready to work from home remotely.

• 5:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, like, so one of my fans recently asked me a question about confidence and about like, people who seem self assured in kind of every situation. And it's interesting because I think, you know, when you hear a lot of confidence advice, you hear, you know, you need to fail at something a certain amount of times and you need to build evidence. Right. That you're capable of handling setbacks and obstacles and all these things.

• 6:22Mark Manson?

  And it's interesting because I think it kind of like confidence actually operates on two different dimensions. There's like state confidence and trade confidence, right? And so you can put yourself in situations where you feel some degree of certainty, like you, you've done a thousand podcasts, right? So it's like, if a fucking light blows up right here, like you're probably gonna figure it out and be fine. And you're not gonna worry about it. But there's, there is an interesting aspect of like, kind of a broader trait confidence of just living enough of your life in that uncertainty, being in enough situations where you felt out of control, but things turned out fine.

• 7:02Mark Manson?

  That I don't think you can plan or predict for. It's like almost by definition,

• 7:08Mark Manson?

  you have to live through things not going as planned to build that like deeper level trait level confidence.

• 7:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's the dark knight of the soul thing. The worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you. It's like difficulty exposure therapy. Oh, I've been here before and I didn't die. That means I can probably be there again. Things will go okay. But if you haven't been there before and it happens, if a pandemic comes along again, everybody apart from five year olds are prepared.

• 7:36Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 7:36Chris Williamson?

  Way more. Okay, I understand what's gonna happen here. Like I lock myself in the house. I'll probably invest in some companies that have these, you know, like distributed stock.

• 7:44Mark Manson?

  Buy Zoom stock.

• 7:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. Buy Zoom stock. You know that when, uh, when COVID happened, there was another company called Zoom, whose ticker is very close to the proper one. And their share price went up by like 400%. It's some Chinese company, like just by fortune of being called the same thing. All right, next one.

• 8:00Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 8:01Chris Williamson?

  Do hard shit, not because it's fun, but because the win actually means something. You bled for it. You broke for it. You earned it. Easy wins are forgettable. Hard ones change you. That's the point.

• 8:16Mark Manson?

  I've been thinking a lot about this concept recently of like how

• 8:21Mark Manson?

  there's an inverse relationship between convenience and significance. Like, I think

• 8:29Mark Manson?

  we tend to only appreciate things that require some degree of friction or sacrifice. And, I mean, look, there's, there's the classic reason to do hard things, which is kind of what we just, you know, it's like you build resilience and you, you know, you build up your endurance and self-belief and confidence and all these things. But I, I'm, I've been thinking a lot about this more from like kind of a existential meaning lens of that. When things are just handed to you, you take them for granted. It's human nature. And so if there are a lot of results in your life, if, if, if we are all kind of accumulating more and more results and outputs in our life that are kind of just handed to us by technology,

• 9:12Mark Manson?

  you know, fucking burrito taxis coming anytime we want, like it's, it's in, in one way, it's kind of robbing us for opportunities of significance. And I'm, I'm, maybe it's because I'm 40 now, but I'm like, I'm like starting, I'm starting to develop this like interest in, in intentionally introducing friction back into my life in certain ways. I actually had a conversation with my wife last night where like, she was telling me, she said that one of her, her childhood friends sent her some voice notes and it's like, she was going through all this shit, like her kid was having problems. Her business partner was like, you know, just completely checked out.

• 9:58Mark Manson?

  Huge fight with like her ex-husband, all this stuff. And my wife was like, "Do you want to talk?" And her friend was like, "I never even considered, like, I didn't want to bother you or, you know, you're busy or whatever." And then of course they got on the phone, they talked for like an hour and a half and it was like this great kind of reconnection in this moment. But my wife and I were talking last night, I felt like how just that reluctance to even like actually call somebody without permission, without like establishing, "Okay, I sent a text and then I asked if I can call."

• 10:34Mark Manson?

  It's we're also like hung up on it's an the phone is annoying. It's annoying like when the phone rings, it's annoying to like have to deal with calls. That we've like robbed ourselves of the friction that actually builds like the the connective tissue of our relationships, right? Cause you can't reproduce that intimacy through like voice notes or text messages or anything. So like, that's a very superficial example, but like we're surrounded by those superficial examples 24/7. Is this making any sense?

• 11:03Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. I didn't know where you were going at the start, but you really brought it back into land there. The the inconvenience of a friendship is exactly where it grows from.

• 11:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 11:13Chris Williamson?

  It's the definition of safety. The best definition of safety that's been formally given to me is we can go through something hard and come out the other side. Okay. The best definition of personal safety and sovereignty is I'm okay. No matter what happens, which is something similar. It's a relationship with yourself, a relationship with somebody else.

• 11:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 11:34Chris Williamson?

  But you have to. How do you know that you're safe if you haven't gone through something difficult with somebody? It's the same thing as Jordan Peterson's idea about you're not being noble if you're unable to be harmful. You're just being harmless.

• 11:50Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 11:50Chris Williamson?

  A rabbit doesn't choose, actually rabbits can be bastards, but a rabbit doesn't choose to be harmless. Right. It just doesn't have very many weapons.

• 11:58Mark Manson?

  Sure.

• 11:59Chris Williamson?

  But I did that line between significance and convenience, I think, is so fucking right. And I've been thinking about this a lot. I'm sure that you you write a lot of things, you need to produce stuff. Everybody in one way or another is probably using AI to assist them with their workflow. And what I've noticed is that there's certain things that it's robbed me of the enjoyment of in completion, even as it's made completing it easier and maybe better.

• 12:27Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 12:28Chris Williamson?

  And then you start to ask yourself a deep question, which is, what am I doing it for?

• 12:32Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 12:32Chris Williamson?

  Am I doing it for the outcome? Because I can speed run the outcome.

• 12:36Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 12:37Chris Williamson?

  Well, kind of, but also kind of not. What I'm doing is I'm doing this thing for the way that I feel when I have finished it. That's really what I'm doing it for. Cause let's say that you could create some prompt in ChatGPT. Thank you to our partner ChatGPT. And

• 13:01Chris Williamson?

  That would create videos on your channel. Let's say they're even derivative of your work. Then it's not using anybody else's work, but it was able to get a new channel of yours to a million subscribers in four weeks.

• 13:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 13:13Chris Williamson?

  And you just put it in and you're like, oh, amazing. It's my work, right? So it's still you, but the process of getting there wasn't that challenging.

• 13:23Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 13:24Chris Williamson?

  I don't think, I don't think that you would feel that satisfied. Think about how satisfied you were when your book actually gets completed by you by hand in the before times.

• 13:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah. And it's like, I struggle with this too, because I'm generally like a very technology, pro technology person who owns an AI company.

• 13:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 13:41Mark Manson?

  So it's, but I, I think of it like when you were talking, the, I, the thing that came to mind is it's kind of like playing a video game with cheat codes. Right? It's fun for a minute. You're like, oh, I'm like crushing everything. This is awesome. But then when you beat it, it's not satisfying. And it's almost like most of the technological innovation of, say, the last 20 years has just been adding little cheat codes to all these areas of our lives. And it has made everything more seamless, frictionless, convenient, faster, more efficient. But it's like robbing the satisfaction of like doing.

• 14:19Chris Williamson?

  Which is the reason that you do it. You do it for the emotional state of having done it.

• 14:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 14:24Chris Williamson?

  Now, hopefully, having done it well, hopefully, having done it in a way that makes other people's lives better and is popular, maybe gets you some money too. But all of those things only matter in as much as you can link your effort to that outcome.

• 14:37Mark Manson?

  Yes. And I think part of it too is, is that it's, it's causing us to mistake the convenience and efficiency for what, why we're doing it, right? I like, I think, for example, like, I think this dating is probably the most egregious example of this. Right? If you, if you look at just the state of the dating apps, they're completely optimized for convenience of introduction. And on the surface, if you're a single person, like that sounds like a great deal, but. In the, in the process of like mass matching people out of convenience, you are losing that friction and that, and that the struggle,

• 15:19Mark Manson?

  which is essentially the filtration system for who's actually going to be a good partner for you.

• 15:23Chris Williamson?

  Which also creates the significance in the connection too. And that, that's that bottom line. Easy wins are forgettable.

• 15:29Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 15:29Chris Williamson?

  And that's the thing. You look back on your life and you say, wow, I, I don't actually know how I got here. I mean, it's great. And I look at all of the things I have. Isn't that wonderful? I, I think about this, people that got, became millionaires, Decker, center millionaires through crypto. Yeah, how deranging must that be? Completely deranging. The same way as somebody who's poor, winning the lottery. In many ways, that could be one of the worst days of their life.

• 15:55Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 15:55Chris Williamson?

  When they look back, they go, wow, that was completely unmoored, untethered to my existing perspective of reality. I'm never going to have a day that's that good again. It's like, it's like having never done cocaine and then deciding one day to complete like a Charlie Sheen sized dose of it. You go, well, I, I'm not conditioned. I wasn't right. I didn't build up my tolerance for this and I don't have the story and the narrative. And that's what we live in. Humans live in these narratives.

• 16:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah. It's, there's also like, there's a skill aspect of this too, right? Like especially with around money and relationships. Like, I think part of the issue with the, the app driven dating culture is that there's a lot of just simple, basic dating skills that you build and optimize through, like actually speaking face to face with lots and lots of people, especially people who are not very interested in you. And.

• 16:54Chris Williamson?

  I imagine you have a lot of experience with that.

• 16:56Mark Manson?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:00Mark Manson?

  The, and the interesting thing, you know, there's this stat around lottery winners, where like the majority of them end up broke, lots of them end up depressed, a lot, number of them commit suicide. And I think a lot of it too, is, is that there's this, this, there's a skill set around money. Right? Which is like, okay, you have a lot of money. There's a lot of. Bad ways to manage that money. There are a lot of bad decisions. There's a lot of bad habits around money that you've like never developed because you never climbed the mountain steadily over a long period of time. You were just like airdropped to the peak. And so clearly you just fall off.

• 17:34Chris Williamson?

  Well, the stupid thing is, we don't know what technology we have now. That had it have not been there, we would have preferred our lives in the past. There was a, I think the typewriter came in partway through Nietzsche's life. And his writing changed.

• 17:52Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 17:52Chris Williamson?

  When he, the typewriter came along. Previously, he was writing by hand.

• 17:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 17:56Chris Williamson?

  Then after that, his sentences got shorter. His writing style changed. And I wonder how many people, when the typewriter came along, said, well, I mean, without the quill, it's going to change all of these things. Now, that's not to say that some technologies can't unlock creativity and unlock your access to difficulty. There's a, there's unnecessary challenge, but it certainly feels to me like if there's a bell curve of where the optimal point is or the area under the curve, we are way overshooting it now that a single prompt can basically spit out a passable piece of work. All that being said, I do think that the advent of AI opens up for everybody. AI basically regresses you back to the mean. But that's what it is. It's optimizing for the mean.

• 18:36Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 18:36Chris Williamson?

  So if you're worse than, if you're in the bottom 50% of anything, AI will make you better.

• 18:41Mark Manson?

  It's a great deal.

• 18:42Chris Williamson?

  If you're in the top 50% of anything, AI makes you worse. And if you're trying to do anything, you shouldn't be doing it if you're in the bottom 50%. So presumably, it's actually dragging you back.

• 18:53Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah. I think the tricky thing with all of this whole concept, all these technologies, is what happens is that it becomes incumbent upon us individually to go find the new difficulty.

• 19:08Chris Williamson?

  Choose hard.

• 19:09Mark Manson?

  Exactly, right? So it's like using AI, but also pushing yourself to still do something original or unique or have original ideas.

• 19:22Mark Manson?

  And it's. And the problem is, is just like, it's really against our, you know, our nature is to always choose the last, the path of least resistance. And so it's very hard to develop that muscle. And I think a lot of people just don't have that muscle.

• 19:37Chris Williamson?

  Choose hard, dude. All right, next one.

• 19:39Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 19:39Chris Williamson?

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• 20:24Chris Williamson?

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• 20:54Chris Williamson?

  At checkout. When you select a partner, whether you realize it or not, you're choosing a whole lifestyle and not just the person. You're choosing their sleep schedule, you're choosing their money habits, you're choosing their stress levels, their family drama, their levels of cleanliness, their work ethic, their coping mechanisms. All of these things will be a baseline of your daily life. If their normal is doom scrolling till 2 AM, avoiding all conflict, impulse spending and never exercising, guess what? You're signing up to live in that ecosystem. Love does not cancel out people's flaws. In fact, love just makes you tolerate them for longer. Most people obsess over, do we have romantic chemistry? And they completely skip, can I live with this person's version of a Tuesday for the next 10 years?

• 21:37Chris Williamson?

  The hard truth is, you don't fix somebody's lifestyle from the inside. You either accept the package as they are, or you walk.

• 21:44Mark Manson?

  Hmm. I've been having, I've been having this conversation with a lot of single friends recently of.

• 21:53Mark Manson?

  What I'm, what I am noticing is that people tend, seem to have kind of this laundry list of requirements. And as soon as they, and there's this, also this false perception of infinite options. And so as soon as the person that they're seeing, or that they're on a date with, like, fails one of the qualifications, they're like, oh, next, I'm gonna move on. And then, of course, they're, you know, 45 and still single and wondering why they never found anybody. And have you ever heard that story that I think, I think it was Warren Buffett, where he said that he was like, you know, you, you write out a list of 20 things that you want in your life, put them in order from the thing that's most important to least important,

• 22:38Mark Manson?

  and then cross out everything but the top three. I, I've essentially started giving that exercise to my single friends. Cause I'm like, you're not gonna find all of these. And, and it's, you've been brainwashed, you have this like false perception that there's a lot of these people out there that, that tick every single box, and there's not. And you're probably, even if there is, you're probably not gonna meet them. And, and if you do meet them, they're gonna have so many options that it's gonna be like very unlikely that you end up with them. So it's find your three non-negotiables and then negotiate on the rest. And that's like fucking sacrilege these days to tell people, cause they're like, I don't wanna settle.

• 23:18Chris Williamson?

  Sounds like settling.

• 23:19Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I don't wanna settle. It's like, dude, everybody settles on something.

• 23:22Chris Williamson?

  I mean, you're settling in that you can't fly at the moment.

• 23:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 23:26Chris Williamson?

  You know, you're settling in that you need to go to bed every night.

• 23:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I mean, dude, there's things, I've been with my wife for 14 years, there's things about her that still drive me fucking crazy. And, but I,

• 23:35Chris Williamson?

  She's like Latina, right?

• 23:37Mark Manson?

  Well, yeah.

• 23:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so that kind of comes, that's part of the cause.

• 23:40Mark Manson?

  It's, yes, it's par for every course, but it's the Latina, the Latina versions are just much more dramatic. Very loud, with lots of tears involved.

• 23:50Chris Williamson?

  Spicy, spicy version, it's the fuego version.

• 23:53Mark Manson?

  Exactly.

• 23:54Chris Williamson?

  It's fuego dating.

• 23:55Mark Manson?

  Exactly. But there's things about me that like she can't stand, but it's like you just accept at a certain point, you're like, okay, the good vastly outweighs the bad, and, and you go with it. And, and I think, I think the reason that posted so well is, you know, when you are meeting people, when you are dating people,

• 24:18Mark Manson?

  There's this whole iceberg under the water of traits and characteristics and personality and connections and relationships that you're not really aware of, that they're there, but that's actually going to be the majority of the relationship.

• 24:35Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 24:36Mark Manson?

  And really, most people are just going on vibes when they're dating somebody. And so I just think it's helpful to be explicitly conscious about it and understand, like, okay, if her mother's crazy and you want to marry her, you're going to have a crazy mother-in-law for 40 years.

• 24:56Chris Williamson?

  Lock in for some crazy.

• 24:57Mark Manson?

  Exactly. It's just put it on the plate because it's part of the course. You can't only, it's not a buffet. You don't just take the items you want. You've got to take, it's the whole prefix menu.

• 25:08Chris Williamson?

  You know what the original name for this podcast was going to be?

• 25:11Mark Manson?

  What's that?

• 25:12Chris Williamson?

  Crushing a Tuesday. The reason for that, glad that I didn't do it. Another one was mind and matter, and another one was brain and brawn. And they were horrible. Modern Wisdom was divine inspiration that came to me at three in the morning.

• 25:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah, much better.

• 25:27Chris Williamson?

  Thank you.

• 25:28Mark Manson?

  Crushing Tuesday is not bad.

• 25:29Chris Williamson?

  Crushing a Tuesday was taken from a Tim Ferriss podcast. And what he said was, most people try to optimize their lives around peak experiences, but your life is made up of average Tuesdays. And your goal should be to make your average Tuesday as enjoyable as possible. And that's what you're talking about here, that what people look at is the amazing sex or the fascinating conversation. They don't realize what is this person like normally? What is the middle of their bell curve of just how they operate? What do they do? With the most frequent interaction between them and reality, what do they do with their

• 26:12Chris Williamson?

  diet? That's pretty important. What do they do with their sleep pattern? That's pretty important. These are structural things. How do they deal with discomfort? How do they deal with things when they're hot? How do they deal when they're dysregulated? What's their family like? What are their timelines like? Are your timelines moving in the same direction? And that is, what's their relationship with money like? That is what you are signing up for. And that line, love does not cancel out people's flaws. In fact, it just makes you tolerate it for longer.

• 26:42Chris Williamson?

  Which is what's deranging to a lot of people that they get into a relationship with somebody who isn't right for them or isn't good for them. And the capacity of their love, the intensity of their love, just allows them to stay in something which isn't right for even longer.

• 26:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 26:58Chris Williamson?

  And I think that people often feel guilty about having optimized for romantic chemistry when what they should have been optimizing for is, is to say evening with this person enjoyable.

• 27:10Mark Manson?

  Right. And it's, it's easy to optimize for that romantic chemistry because that's what you're flooded with when you meet somebody you really like. So that's what you're going to be biased towards. And I should, I should add, so it's funny because I think I've posted a couple variations of this post over the years and every, every time there's always like a couple of angry people in the comments who are like, you, this is unrealistic. You shouldn't expect somebody to satisfy all of these things for you. And the point of this isn't that you have to go find somebody who has a mother that you like and who, who's like good with.

• 27:46Chris Williamson?

  The opposite of that.

• 27:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah, no, it's like, it's you have to find somebody that you're willing to tolerate all of those, all of those things, right? So it's, it's not, um, they're not trying to hit a, a ceiling like you're just trying to make, find somebody who's like, nothing falls below your floor. And it's also, I think a lot of it, there are a couple of other facets of this. I think one is understanding that what you, what, what are you particularly well equipped to handle? So for example, my wife's Brazilian. She has a lot of feelings.

• 28:19Mark Manson?

  And I'm just like very even keeled pretty much all the time. It, it really takes a lot for me to get worked up about anything. Like I'm, I'm the guy who doesn't give a fuck. So it actually works extremely well. Like I can handle a lot of emotions. It doesn't really freak me out. I don't like get sucked into drama easily.

• 28:40Mark Manson?

  So there's like a certain amount of self-knowledge of understanding this is the type of partner that I'm probably well suited for because my strength kind of resonates well with their weakness or vice versa. Whereas like my.

• 28:58Mark Manson?

  You know, I I have a very, very like strong need for intellectual stimulation. I get bored extremely easily. And back when I was single, like I I dated a lot of really cool girls, but who just like weren't super smart or curious and I I was bored within minutes and some of them were smoking hot, some of them were awesome in bed. And I I I remember sitting there being like, I can't believe I'm gonna break up with this girl. Like, she's, what am I doing? But I was bored.

• 29:25Chris Williamson?

  Got nothing to talk to you about.

• 29:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I was bored out of my mind.

• 29:27Chris Williamson?

  Your first date with your now wife was you met in a nightclub and within thirty minutes, we're talking about Russian literature?

• 29:35Mark Manson?

  Uh, Russian grammar.

• 29:36Chris Williamson?

  Russian grammar, that's it.

• 29:38Mark Manson?

  Yes, yes.

• 29:39Chris Williamson?

  I told you about this last time, that uh, my best piece of advice for sort of the intellectual bros or the intellectually inclined bros when they're single is to speedrun sending weird psychology articles to the girls that you're talking to and to just see who comes back. It's like an intellectual shit test.

• 29:56Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 29:56Chris Williamson?

  And you're not looking for the smart ones, you're looking for the ones that engage.

• 29:59Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 29:59Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's cool. Never, never heard of that before. Like, let's talk about that the next time we get on the phone or next time we go for dinner.

• 30:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 30:04Chris Williamson?

  Even if they don't know anything about it, like, that's not what it's about. Okay, can I, is this person interested? Are they gonna engage with me? So, yeah, I think uh,

• 30:14Chris Williamson?

  it's funny, Rory Sutherland's got this idea, he says, you should have an air fryer girlfriend, not a Fiat five hundred girlfriend. And what he means by that is you want to find somebody who only you can see the value in, in a way that other people can't. And who have disadvantages that only you can tolerate in a way that other people can't. So if you have an air fryer, for instance, it's gonna stank up the kitchen. If you're sensitive to smells, it's gonna be a bad thing to have in your house, or else you're gonna have to put it out on the balcony or in the garage or something like that. And that's a bit of a nightmare to you. Not that bothered about smells, you can have your entire life's calories go through one machine.

• 30:56Chris Williamson?

  He uses the example that um, he doesn't mind noise when he goes to sleep. He's a fan of trains and he likes beer. So he lived in a house that was next to a pub with a garden that backs onto a railway line because he quite likes the trains, they're actually actively sort of enjoyable for him to see going by. He doesn't mind that much about the noise from them or from the beer garden and he's made good friends with the landlord of the pub and it means that he can order a beer by leaning over his fence.

• 31:25Mark Manson?

  And asking for it.

• 31:26Chris Williamson?

  And he can sort of enjoy the atmosphere of the pub from the comfort of his own home. What he's done is he's been able to get a house. I think it's his cottage that's somewhere in the British countryside. He's been able to get that at a price that most other people would still think was too much, despite the fact that it's discounted. Because there are certain inconveniences and challenges that he is particularly well-equipped to put up with, that other people would struggle with.

• 31:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 31:54Chris Williamson?

  And the same thing is true when it comes to choosing a partner.

• 31:56Mark Manson?

  Can we dig into this a little bit? Because I feel like-

• 31:59Chris Williamson?

  Air fryer girlfriend?

• 32:00Mark Manson?

  Well, I'll let you know how that goes over with my wife. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go home after this.

• 32:05Chris Williamson?

  Darling, darling, I-

• 32:06Mark Manson?

  You're my air fryer.

• 32:07Chris Williamson?

  You're my air fryer wife.

• 32:09Mark Manson?

  I can cook everything in you.

• 32:12Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's, I mean, she is Brazilian, so they're highly fertile.

• 32:15Mark Manson?

  Yes. But it's, and especially like you, you come more from this optimization world than I do. But the person, like, the personalization of optimization. Like, this is the thing that always bugged me about a lot of the optimization content out there, because it's, everybody's so different in terms of what they want and who they are and like what they're predisposed to. And I think the same way like some people are more predisposed to certain athletic activities or certain physical activities than others, we're all predisposed to like certain psychological environments and certain types of relationships than other people.

• 32:57Mark Manson?

  And, and, and I just, it drives me crazy that there's like no accounting for that often. Like, there's no discussion of how it's, yeah, living next to a train track where you can order a beer over fences. Like, that might actually be optimal for one person's life, whereas you would never see that, like- Broadcasts on, you know, health and fitness.

• 33:20Chris Williamson?

  This is the optimal wave that you should get your house. Look at all of the advantages. Well, we know that those advantages are so niche that it only addresses a very small cohort of people.

• 33:30Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 33:31Chris Williamson?

  But the assumption here is all optimization advice is optimizing for.

• 33:36Mark Manson?

  For the general.

• 33:36Chris Williamson?

  Exactly.

• 33:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 33:37Chris Williamson?

  You know, that study about they tried to engineer fighter pilot seats inside of US fighter jets, a new US fighter jet. They took all of the fighter pilots and averaged their body dimensions so that they could design the seat that was the average of them all. And it fitted zero pilots. There's no such thing as average.

• 33:57Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 33:57Chris Williamson?

  There is no such thing. The average person literally doesn't exist. They're an aggregate of everything. But I mean, let's say, for instance, that you had a distribution of people on a graph that looked like a pair of boobs.

• 34:07Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 34:07Chris Williamson?

  Right. So you have sort of two there.

• 34:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 34:09Chris Williamson?

  Where's the average? It's actually at a point where maybe nobody is.

• 34:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 34:13Chris Williamson?

  You know?

• 34:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 34:14Chris Williamson?

  This is the problem with doing it. And I understand that sweeping generalizations about advice is something that I've always steered away from when I can.

• 34:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 34:23Chris Williamson?

  And it's been massively to the detriment of my credibility.

• 34:28Chris Williamson?

  I've done other things that are massively to the detriment of my credibility as well. But um, one of the reasons is people love certainty. They love absolutes, they love certainty. And this goes back to the fact that uncertainty is very difficult to deal with. If I listen to someone who says, well, we know, we know that this is the case. We know what Israel is doing. We know how much protein you should have per day. We know what the best sleep formula is. You go, well, fucking hell, like, I don't need to worry anymore. All the chaos of the world, all of the different directions that things could have gone in. I don't need to, I don't need to wrangle with that.

• 35:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 35:05Chris Williamson?

  And it's way less sexy to say, well, it's directionally correct that.

• 35:11Chris Williamson?

  It seems to be the case that in most circumstances, I would estimate that it is good to, it's way less sexy, but it's much more accurate for people. If you're the sort of person, and this is why for the whole podcast, and I see this all the time, when people get pissy about some piece of advice that's been put forward, especially when it's been caveated, well, the outlier, actually, I think you're fine. It's like, hey dude, if this is not for you, that's fine, but your ability to discern doesn't mean, what you should say is, that's not for me, huh? I wonder if it is for anybody else? Can you imagine if that piece of advice is for somebody else? And if so, then like, shut the fuck up.

• 35:53Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 35:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. This piece of content that isn't for you found you, or this piece of advice that isn't for you found you, your first port of call should be, wow, I wonder if that actually exists for anybody? Fuck, I actually can imagine somebody that it would be good for that's in my life, or, huh, how varied are we as humans? That that's the case, isn't that interesting?

• 36:12Mark Manson?

  The flip side of that, there's a flip side version of that, that I see a lot, that I, that actually concerns me even more, which is that people will hear a piece of, a general piece of advice, they will try it on themselves, it won't work. And instead of coming to the conclusion of like, oh, there's just something different about me and I need to adjust accordingly, they assume that there's something wrong.

• 36:36Chris Williamson?

  And the advice?

• 36:37Mark Manson?

  No, with them.

• 36:38Chris Williamson?

  Oh, okay.

• 36:39Mark Manson?

  They're like, the advice is the gold standard, right? Cause it came from, you know, Mr. Guru or Mr. Super PhD and, but it's not working for them, so therefore they must be doing something wrong. They must be, something's wrong with them. And so they need to like, go find an even more detailed protocol and implement it even more strictly. And you see them kind of get into this like OCD spiral.

• 37:03Chris Williamson?

  Over optimization spirals.

• 37:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:07Chris Williamson?

  The pain of trying to be perfect will kill you more quickly than your imperfections will.

• 37:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah. The one thing that I remind my listeners on my show of all the time is that like the best, most credible piece of advice in psychology, like if you look at all the literature in terms of every intervention imaginable, every intervention imaginable, and like what its hit rate is, it's like maybe 50%. You know, like the very best forms of therapy with a really good therapist, it's like maybe cracks over 50%. So it's none of this stuff is going to work for everybody all the time. And in fact, you should expect that roughly half of it is not going to work for you.

• 37:49Chris Williamson?

  At best.

• 37:49Mark Manson?

  At best. And so it is, it is your responsibility to try everything, track what, what's working, what's not, be honest with yourself about what's working, what's not, and then like move forward accordingly.

• 38:02Chris Williamson?

  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 erythylin A used in human trials. It promotes mitophagy, which is your body's natural process for clearing out damaged mitochondria and renewing healthy ones.

• 38:43Chris Williamson?

  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.com/modernd wisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's timeline.com/modernd wisdom. And MODERNWISDOM at checkout. Nobody owes you patience just because you've had a rough upbringing or a hard day. Life doesn't hand out pity passes. Use your pain as fuel, not a crutch.

• 39:27Chris Williamson?

  You don't build psychological resilience by feeling good all the time. You build psychological resilience by getting better at feeling bad.

• 39:36Mark Manson?

  That is definitely, uh, that was definitely posted in 2025 or 2026. Cause that was, that was, that's the sort of thing that you could not post between like 2016 and 2022. It would have gotten me cancelled. All sorts of proclamations about white male privilege or whatnot.

• 40:00Mark Manson?

  I mean, it's, it's.

• 40:06Mark Manson?

  It's difficult because there are genuine victims in the world. And there are people who have genuinely suffered lots of shit that is not fair and not their fault. And those people deserve sympathy.

• 40:27Mark Manson?

  But they don't deserve, they don't necessarily deserve anything more than that. And.

• 40:35Mark Manson?

  I think we're kind of coming out of this period, but we went through a very intense period where there was a lot of entitlement associated with. Like I, I think in one of my books, I called it the victimhood Olympics. Right. It's like, and, and you see this now with like a lot of like super lefty groups, you know, it's, it's like, well, I am a abused indigenous person of color who grew up with. Three legs and, and then it's like, the next person is like, well, as a person who grew up with. One leg and is a abused, transsexual indigenous person, like my voice actually carries more weight than yours.

• 41:11Chris Williamson?

  And I've got gluten intolerance.

• 41:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it's like, at a certain point, it's like. Who fucking care, like, what are you gonna do?

• 41:18Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 41:18Mark Manson?

  Right. Like what? It, it, you can't, uh, you can't like just sit around measuring your pain every day as if it's like, uh, you know, it, it earns you merit badges.

• 41:31Chris Williamson?

  I've had to pull this up. This is one of the best takes. So Alex Homos, you got in trouble for saying this. The same thing, that nobody owes you patience just because you've had a rough day or a hard upbringing.

• 41:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 41:42Chris Williamson?

  And he wrote a response, this is fucking money by him. If you had disadvantages, I agree with you. You are right. It's harder to be successful if X happened to you. Replace X with gender, race, birth deformity, different language, different country, abuse, et cetera. The main point of the longer conversation is that despite the disadvantage, you only have one choice. What are you gonna do about it? Number one, take action anyway and become proof to other people like you, your people, also born into this abused tragedy, that you too can overcome it and they can as well. Number two, blame and complain. And to be clear, do whatever you want.

• 42:25Chris Williamson?

  I support your choice, but only one of those decisions will make you better. And I wish I could say this without getting attacked, but you know who wins by you not being successful? Whoever and whatever you blame. Fuck that and fuck them. You can lead a rebellion of one and blame the one thing you can control, which is you. In your mind, redefine the word blame as give power to. And when you do that, there's only one person you're gonna wanna give more power to, and that's you. For everyone who had shitty circumstances, I'm on your side, your long-term side, the side that wants you to win. So do it anyway, with all the disadvantages, and still tell them to shove it and win. I wanna be clear again.

• 43:10Chris Williamson?

  If you had tough shit happen to you, it sucks and that's not your fault. But now what? Where do we go?

• 43:15Mark Manson?

  Isn't it, isn't it crazy how many caveats and like, you know?

• 43:20Chris Williamson?

  Throat clearing land acknowledgements?

• 43:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:23Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I got in, I, I can, I continue, I continue to fucking get in trouble by saying things that to some people doesn't land right and to other people becomes a mantra that they live by. And yeah, the, the, I understand because

• 43:40Chris Williamson?

  creating any goal to aim for and degree of obligation can make people who feel like that's out of reach for a reason that isn't their fault, feel like they are being made to pay twice for something that hurt them. And that fucking blows. But it also makes communication really clunky and I hate it. Like it's so, yeah, over and over. And it, it's such a, a shallow form of empathy as well. To, to assume that the only way that you can be caring is if you think about the middle 90% minus the two fives on the end

• 44:22Chris Williamson?

  that are obviously unrealistic for you to have thought about, that you have to include all of these people as opposed to, hey, I'm speaking to a very specific cohort of people now.

• 44:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I would argue the empathy is actually completely disingenuous because it's, right, like if I'm empathizing with somebody strictly because of their, the color of their skin and their gender or their sexual orientation, like that's exactly what they don't want to be empathized for.

• 44:51Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 44:51Mark Manson?

  So it's, it's, it's backfiring, like the whole strategy is backfiring in the first place.

• 44:58Chris Williamson?

  We were talking before I did my show in Australia and to the people who came to the Sydney show, you will remember that James came out swinging when he did his warm up set before me and he made a comment partway through which was, I hate to say it, but I'm racist and I'm racist against a very unique group of people and it's Italians. He says, I know that I'm racist against Italians because I love the food, but I still don't like the people. And there was a lady, a lady partway through the show who piped up and said that I was made to basically do the apology for James. She piped up and said, I really think that you need to be more careful about, you know, some of the sort of judgments that are

• 45:40Chris Williamson?

  being made in the show. I'd, I'd make a joke and James had made a joke and she's like, you know, this is sort of, can make people uncomfortable and it's exclusionary and all the rest of it. And it was one of those moments where I'm like, fuck, there's like 2,499 other people in here looking at me to see if I can handle this situation. And I realized that true equality is when you have to put up with the same level of shit that everybody else does.

• 46:04Mark Manson?

  Mm hmm.

• 46:05Chris Williamson?

  If you want to be properly, properly included, the most inclusive society, it's to not be treated with kid gloves.

• 46:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 46:14Chris Williamson?

  If you told me that somebody was treating me differently because they thought that I couldn't handle it or something, that is a kind of bigotry and patronizing cotton wool gentleness that would make me feel so fucking icky. Be like, oh my God, you are not my friend. You are not my friend. Yet, does that mean that you push the person who's only just started training at the same level that you push the person that's a professional athlete? Obviously not. But when it comes to including people in discourse, I think that, yeah, true equality is when you put up with the same level of shit that everybody else does.

• 46:51Mark Manson?

  Mm hmm.

• 46:53Mark Manson?

  That's funny in Australia, man. I I'm just remembering, I did a show a couple of years ago in Brisbane. And I had this bit in the show, I was talking about Freud. You know, do they do this in your shows out there? So Australia has this thing where they have like the sign language person on stage.

• 47:11Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 47:12Mark Manson?

  Signing for everything.

• 47:12Chris Williamson?

  Did they have one for you?

• 47:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 47:14Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 47:14Mark Manson?

  Like all of my.

• 47:15Chris Williamson?

  Do you have many deaf fans in Australia, Brisbane?

• 47:18Mark Manson?

  I don't know. I never hear from.

• 47:25Chris Williamson?

  Fuck me.

• 47:26Mark Manson?

  You walked right in. Yeah. So every show, yeah, I had a, there was a guy on stage on the corner of the stage, like doing all the signs or everything.

• 47:34Chris Williamson?

  Cool.

• 47:34Mark Manson?

  So I implemented a segment of the show when I had a whole section about Freud and some of Freud's like wackier theories. And I had a segment where I talked about how Freud had an obsession with dicks, moms, moms with dicks, fucking moms with dicks. And I just like went on and on and then like I would like make the person sign everything.

• 47:55Chris Williamson?

  Unbelievable. What does Freud's obsession with fucking moms with dicks in sign language look like?

• 48:01Mark Manson?

  I don't know, but it was, it was just so funny to like, watch the signer just get so uncomfortable.

• 48:07Chris Williamson?

  Wonderful.

• 48:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it was a great crowd moment, but there was one, there was one time in Brisbane where in the Q and A afterward, a woman got up and basically started chastising me for transphobia and lecturing me about how I had like a moral responsibility and.

• 48:24Chris Williamson?

  It's because of the moms with dicks thing?

• 48:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 48:26Chris Williamson?

  Okay, right.

• 48:27Mark Manson?

  Because I have a platform and all this stuff and

• 48:31Mark Manson?

  and it was interesting because the crowd just instantly started booing her and but it was funny because like I, I

• 48:40Mark Manson?

  I tried to use it as kind of a teaching moment and I said something very similar to you, which is like, look, if you, you, it's not equality if we can't laugh about it. Right? Like if, if, as long as something is so like, can't even be spoken of because it is, needs to be, it's so fragile and it needs to be protected to like such an extreme extent.

• 49:05Mark Manson?

  Like that's, that's not a quality, that's actually kind of the opposite of equality in a lot of ways.

• 49:12Mark Manson?

  I don't know if I convinced anybody of anything, but it was it was a fun moment.

• 49:16Chris Williamson?

  But certainly the deaf people got convinced.

• 49:19Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 49:20Chris Williamson?

  Jimmy Carr's got a line where he says, telling me that there is a problem too serious to joke about is like saying there's a disease too bad to create medicine for.

• 49:31Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 49:32Chris Williamson?

  You go like, this is the salve that helps people to see this problem with less seriousness. It's not being callous, it's not being flippant with it, but it's helping them. If anybody has ever had a problem that's felt really important to them, have they wanted to take it more seriously? Or would they like to be able to find a way to actually inject some? Yeah, like that is, isn't that like, isn't that funny?

• 49:56Mark Manson?

  Humor, it's therapeutic. It's funny, actually, that Jimmy Carr quote, it reminds me, so my grandmother, she died of a brain tumor when I was probably fourteen, fifteen. And it was it was one of these like awful cancers, like she died very slowly.

• 50:12Chris Williamson?

  Rapid on, oh.

• 50:13Mark Manson?

  Slow. Slow, yeah, over the course of like, you know, probably eight or twelve months, and we just watched her deteriorate like week after week after week. And it was awful, like we we would spend every weekend with her and we'd go see her. And my grandmother had a great sense of humor, and so she started cracking jokes about, she like named her tumor and she was like cracking jokes about her tumor all the time. And when it got really bad, like it it started to get awkward, you know? So she's like, she can't walk anymore, she's like, she's having memory problems, but she's still cracking jokes about the fucking tumor.

• 50:50Mark Manson?

  And then at a certain point, like, my aunt got really upset and she was like, you know, she was like, Maureen, like, you can't joke about this, like, this is, this is really, like, it's upsetting. And I remember my grandmother said, she was like, there's nothing so serious in this life that you can't laugh about it. And and she was like, it's my tumor, I'm gonna, I'm gonna.

• 51:11Chris Williamson?

  I'm gonna laugh if I want.

• 51:12Mark Manson?

  She's like, I'll make any joke I want about it. But that always stuck with me, and it's something that like I believe very deeply as well.

• 51:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's a strange one that that there's a recent bit of research in the New Statesman that just came out about the attitudes of young women specifically in Britain. And white women are significantly more likely than women of color to say that the country's racist.

• 51:35Mark Manson?

  So like, how, how?

• 51:39Chris Williamson?

  Because, because there is this-

• 51:41Mark Manson?

  I know how, but it's just like, how did we get here?

• 51:43Chris Williamson?

  I know. It goes back to, it goes back to the desire to be seen as empathetic.

• 51:48Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 51:48Chris Williamson?

  If you can show yourself as some kind of savior, some sort of white knight that's going to steam in. But again, in that is so much, it's such a patronizing perspective to say, oh, you poor, you poor people of color, you poor deaf people, you're not able to, you're so unresilient that you can't deal with this yourself. Allow me, allow me to come in and tell these people exactly what you want. Hang on a second. Notice that the person that piped up about the joke James made about Italians wasn't Italian.

• 52:23Mark Manson?

  Of course, of course she wasn't. I mean, I don't know, Chris. I think you're kind of minimizing the epidemic of transphobic deaf people in Australia. It is-

• 52:33Chris Williamson?

  With a good intolerance.

• 52:34Mark Manson?

  It is a real problem and you're not taking it seriously.

• 52:38Chris Williamson?

  I'm not, I'm not helping, I'm not helping.

• 52:39Mark Manson?

  Check your privilege.

• 52:40Chris Williamson?

  That is true. That is true. I am, I am British, which I do think means that I've kind of got, how do you say? I've got ancestral empire privilege, but modern day embarrassment disadvantage, you know? I've just, if you had invested in the UK, if the UK was a stock, it was like fucking Herbalife or something. This thing's just absolutely nosedived.

• 53:05Mark Manson?

  You, you had to have seen that recent survey where they surveyed British people of economically, what if the UK was a state in the US?

• 53:14Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 53:14Mark Manson?

  Where they would be and the, the Brits said they'd be like number six or number seven. And it's like, actually it's 51st.

• 53:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 53:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Although, well, like fifth in America in, or like number one in America in heart health, number one in America in obesity, number one in America in all of the health stats.

• 53:33Mark Manson?

  That's a low bar.

• 53:34Chris Williamson?

  That's true. Like across all of America, there's not even, there's not even one state, you know? It's like those-

• 53:39Mark Manson?

  When it comes to health, like, yeah, we're, we're completely fucked over here.

• 53:44Chris Williamson?

  All right, next one. 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. No sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients, just the stuff that your body actually needs to function. This plays a critical role in reducing your muscle cramps and your fatigue. It optimizes your brain health, it regulates your appetite, and it helps curb cravings. I keep talking about it because I genuinely feel the difference when I use it versus when I don't. And best of all, there's a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration. So if you're on the fence, you can buy it and try it for as long as you like.

• 54:29Chris Williamson?

  And if you don't like it for any reason, they just give you your money back. You don't even need to return the box, that's how confident they are that you'll love it. And they offer free shipping in the US. Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. If you have to explain to somebody why you deserve respect, then you're already in the wrong relationship, full stop. People don't realise that you shouldn't have to ask someone to prioritise you. You shouldn't have to beg them to be proud of you. If their efforts have to be requested, then it's not really effort. It's like compliance, and compliance fades the second you stop asking.

• 55:12Chris Williamson?

  So really, it's just a performance. They're just doing it to placate you and keep you satisfied and stop you from complaining. The right person will treat you well because that's who they are. They just fundamentally care about you regardless of how other things are going. Not because you gave them a checklist or a deadline, but because you are just somebody that they value. So, if you feel like you have to train someone to just be a decent partner for you, they've already kind of told you everything you need to know. You probably just don't want to hear it.

• 55:46Mark Manson?

  I'm gonna amend that. Cause that that works great. You know, that's, I, that's probably one of my reels on Instagram or something. Um, but I'm gonna amend that. I'm gonna say that that is true in the macro, not necessarily true in the micro. Like, let me, let me explain this. So if somebody is egregiously disrespectful consistently, like you are constantly fighting for them to even acknowledge you, pay attention to you, care about you, like do anything. That in and of itself is, is unfixable to a certain degree because like if there are

• 56:26Mark Manson?

  certain just base layer requirements for a healthy relationship. That the fact you have to request them means that it's, they are non transactional by nature. So as soon as you request them, it becomes a transaction. And so you, you kind of invalidate whatever is given. So if it is, if it is on a severity of scale that like, there's just nothing present at all, the amendment, the nuance that I will add to that is that there are often cases within a relationship that is already well established on trust, where somebody is

• 57:06Mark Manson?

  just kind of dropping the ball and, uh, and is not showing up in the way that even they would intend to show up. Not acknowledging certain things. Maybe he has a blind spot around something. Maybe he's going through something, right? You know, uh, has some difficulties going on in their lives. So it's one of those cases where it's like, it's, I think it is margin, like on the margins, it is not only normal, but it's healthy to ask, like, say, like, hey, I'm kind of feeling unacknowledged or unappreciated in our relationship right now. Like, can you, can we work on this? Can you help me out here? It'd be nice if

• 57:49Mark Manson?

  you did this or did that, or, you know, showed up to my birthday party or whatever. Um, but if it is on such a macro scale that like you are asking for it to exist in the first place, then it's, there's nothing there. Um, and I think.

• 58:05Mark Manson?

  I think the reason this resonated, I think the reason this resonated so much is because there are so many people out there who are, they confuse that, that macro problem with the micro problem.

• 58:18Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 58:19Mark Manson?

  Right? So they're, they're in a relationship with somebody who's like, gives zero shits, is not showing up for anything, is not acknowledging anything. And in their head, it's actually just a marginal issue of like, hey, it'd be nice if you like, answered my phone sometimes, you know, like, um, so anyway, that's, that's some nuance to apply to that.

• 58:41Chris Williamson?

  There's a difference between telling somebody that they should think of you and explaining what your love language is.

• 58:48Mark Manson?

  Exactly.

• 58:49Chris Williamson?

  All right. Like, there's a difference between asking somebody to show up and explaining how you would like them to show up.

• 58:56Mark Manson?

  Correct.

• 58:57Chris Williamson?

  This person is applying effort, they're being thoughtful, they're considering me. They're just maybe doing it in a, a different sort of a way than would maybe be optimal.

• 59:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 59:08Chris Williamson?

  Versus this person just isn't considering me, or the imbalance of consideration is so great. And also, you said, when there's been an established level of trust, right? That you kind of know what this relationship has in store typically.

• 59:22Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 59:24Chris Williamson?

  What if it's never shown up? What if this has never actually been there? And the only reason it is there is if you kind of constantly, you're constantly refueling this gas tank with requests and beratement and compulsion. I'm gonna keep dragging you to do this thing, to think about me, to reply in a timely manner. I'm gonna keep on reminding you that this is something that's important, full stop. And after a while, if you've done it a lot, either in the macro, or to be honest, enough micros makes a macro in any case, you just have to admit to yourself, you go,

• 1:00:02Chris Williamson?

  This is just incompatibility. Like if you have to make so many bids and this person after a while is just gonna feel like, well, who are you in a relationship with? Because I'm showing up as me. You have to assume that people for the most part are showing up as themselves. And the goal should be to find somebody that you need to instruct and train as little as possible.

• 1:00:24Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:00:25Chris Williamson?

  Because some people have a big tank of growth. Some people have a small tank of growth. But regardless of how big or small the tank is, if you start really close to the destination, you don't need to drive as far. And then let's say that someone's able to grow a lot, then you can both grow together and become better than you ever were before.

• 1:00:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:41Chris Williamson?

  But if almost all of your time, you, you want to go to bed at two in the morning because you love going out partying and your missus wants to go to bed at nine P M. Because she likes an early night. In order for that relationship to work, both people are going to have to compromise on the thing that they want. Now, maybe that would expose you to some really important routines that might make your health better. And maybe that would expose her to some really exciting nights that she wouldn't have had otherwise, and it'll be really enjoyable. But also, maybe you might be better off with someone that you can party with until two in the morning and not have to compromise. And she'd be better off with someone that wants to watch Peaky Blinders at eight P M. And then fall asleep. And that is kind of what you're looking for overall.

• 1:01:21Chris Williamson?

  How is this kind of compatibility and are our incompatibilities complementary as opposed to competitive friction inducing?

• 1:01:32Mark Manson?

  I think there's a component of intention here as well, where there, there is, there's a compatibility dimension to it, right? Where it's like, you're just two completely different people and you're not well suited for each other.

• 1:01:47Mark Manson?

  And then there's, I, I, and I think really what that post was like, I think what it was kind of poking at is that sometimes you just have a partner who like is not prioritizing the relationship. And, and so if you go to them and you're like, hey, I need to be acknowledged. I need to feel special. I need like, it'd be nice if you cared more.

• 1:02:07Mark Manson?

  The issue isn't that they're not returning your calls, that they're not, you know, showing up for your after work thing or whatever. The issue is that they don't care. It's not a priority for them.

• 1:02:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:19Mark Manson?

  And, and you can't change somebody's priorities.

• 1:02:24Mark Manson?

  I would say too, there's like, it's, there's a certain amount of like, but if there is, if there is kind of a bedrock of trust, if there is kind of an overall compatibility, there is still this like maintenance process that happens over the years.

• 1:02:41Mark Manson?

  Like a simple example from my life, I'm, I'm like a hopeless workaholic and I go through these cycles where boom and bust. Yes, I kind of get like ramped up and my wife is super patient and supportive.

• 1:02:57Mark Manson?

  But I'd say every three or four years, like we hit a breaking point where she's like, all right, dude, you've got to take a Sunday off or like, we have to go on a vacation.

• 1:03:07Chris Williamson?

  I want to hang out with you.

• 1:03:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah, exactly. She's like, I feel ignored. I feel like I never see you anymore. I feel like you're working all the time. You're always tired. You come home, you don't want to talk because you've been shooting all day, like all this stuff. And, um, and she's a hundred percent right. And so I'm like, oh yeah, I should like back off because I'm like, but it's, she's also not just doing it for herself. She's doing it because it's like, it's for my sake as well.

• 1:03:31Chris Williamson?

  She's like an external conscience. She's augmenting your life as opposed to working against it.

• 1:03:36Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:03:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I mean, that's such a good point that if you're not being prioritized, Stan Atkin's got this wonderful audio book. And he refuses to come on the podcast. She's very sad to me, but um, he's got, still got the best relationship book that I've ever consumed and it's only available on audio. Uh, and it's called Your Brain on Love. Stan Atkin, fucking brilliant. In it, he says, all a relationship is, is a set of agreements. Typically a set of agreements about how you'll behave. Says the first agreement that every relationship needs to have is the relationship comes first.

• 1:04:09Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:10Chris Williamson?

  Before everything else. And I think if you are in a relationship, especially after a while, where that agreement is met by one party, but not by the other. You just need to accept that this is going to be a high friction environment, specifically for the person who is more invested, but also for the one who isn't. Because they're going to feel like they're being pressured and pulled along. And if you want to be in a relationship with somebody who prioritizes you at the same level that you prioritize that, like, leave that person to go and be with someone for whom the relationship is their fourth priority.

• 1:04:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Chris Williamson?

  And they may be happy, or they may end up realizing that, oh, fuck, I actually wanted to be in a relationship with someone. The reason that this relationship was so good for me is that I felt prioritized. And now that I no longer am, because I wasn't doing it reciprocally, that fucking sucks. But, yeah, if you're not being thought of. And here's the other thing, like, some people aren't choosing to not do that. Some people simply don't have the time. And their lifestyle and their current setup is not accommodating of the level of attention that you need. You go, also, fine, just because they're not choosing to do it of a variety of other options, because they're currently in med school and this is just all they've got to do.

• 1:05:30Chris Williamson?

  Or they're training for this big thing and they can't spare any time because their ultra marathon's coming up and they need to make this happen because it's real important to them. That's also a choice. That's also a choice by them.

• 1:05:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:41Chris Williamson?

  And you can go and choose someone who chooses you as opposed to choose someone who's choosing something else.

• 1:05:46Mark Manson?

  I would, I would add emotional capacity to that.

• 1:05:50Mark Manson?

  And I think, so, The Agreement thing is great. I have not read that book. I should read that book.

• 1:05:54Chris Williamson?

  Fucking money. Just keep, hold on that.

• 1:05:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:57Chris Williamson?

  The reason it's so good, and I wonder whether more people are going to do this. He's obviously a super wizard expert of his area of expertise. I don't think that he wrote it. I think that he just had bullet points and he reads it like a lecture.

• 1:06:11Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:12Chris Williamson?

  And he, he speaks like this.

• 1:06:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:16Chris Williamson?

  One of the things that we need to realize when we're talking about, it's so listenable. And what it's made me realize is listening to most audiobooks that are scripted.

• 1:06:28Chris Williamson?

  Performances of what was meant to be written and meant to be read in written form are actually to be horribly unlistenable.

• 1:06:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:37Chris Williamson?

  Compared with someone who is allowing themselves to just play with the language a little more. And what I would wonder is when people do audiobooks moving forward, I don't know how many authors already do this. I'm sure some do. But what if you allowed yourself to add a sentence in here or there?

• 1:06:56Chris Williamson?

  Authors seem to be almost prisoners of their own work.

• 1:06:59Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:59Chris Williamson?

  When presenting it in a medium that that wasn't meant for, you go, hey, maybe add some stuff in.

• 1:07:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:06Chris Williamson?

  You'd allow yourself to have a pause. Is the goal to represent the book in its most sterile form? It's the the exact presentation of this thing. Because pretty soon, some company, ChatGPT or whatever, will open AI will just allow you to record five minutes of you speaking and then pitch perfect.

• 1:07:27Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:28Chris Williamson?

  Get you to say the book. So what's the reason for it?

• 1:07:31Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:07:31Chris Williamson?

  Hopefully it's so that you can add some emotion, you can ham it up, right? Dramaturgically, you can add a little bit in. So I wonder whether, I know that I would appreciate that as a listener of audiobooks, I would appreciate it if authors, hey, you get an extra half paragraph here. That's just me this day. You know, I really thought this is an important idea.

• 1:07:51Mark Manson?

  Maybe your audiobook. Uh. Break ground.

• 1:07:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's true. I mean, I'm going to be out of a job in a variety of different places, even in jobs that I haven't yet started by AI currently.

• 1:08:02Mark Manson?

  I want to come back to the agreement thing because this actually ties into the the friction and the sacrifice thing as well. It's like that agreement, because I think one thing I've seen a lot is that people think they have a partner who is in on that agreement, but it's actually not. And it's, it can actually be difficult to accurately detect if you are being prioritized or not. And I would say the the way to accurately perceive whether you're being prioritized or whether you're actually prioritizing the person is.

• 1:08:37Mark Manson?

  How much, how much is each person in the relationship putting the other person first when they have nothing to gain from it?

• 1:08:43Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:44Mark Manson?

  I think where people get mixed up a lot is they have somebody who's really into them, who's like love bombing them, giving them tons of attention and affection, is like excited all the time to see them.

• 1:08:56Mark Manson?

  But they're also getting something out of the situation. And so they falsely perceive it to be like, oh, they're in on this agreement with me. And then a couple of years go by, conditions on the ground change, and suddenly that person is withdrawing.

• 1:09:08Chris Williamson?

  Also, how are they behaving when they're busy? Right, maybe that person was just on a off period.

• 1:09:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:14Chris Williamson?

  From work.

• 1:09:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:15Chris Williamson?

  They had a little bit of downtime and they're showing you attention in a way that, or maybe they were going through a hard time and they needed you, they needed that. Or maybe you were particularly available.

• 1:09:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:28Chris Williamson?

  At that moment and it was easy. But when it gets hard, that person's unable to show up in the same way because it was easy in the beginning.

• 1:09:36Mark Manson?

  Which is why the friction is the filtration.

• 1:09:39Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:09:39Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:09:40Chris Williamson?

  Send them weird psychology articles.

• 1:09:42Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:09:42Chris Williamson?

  Telling you, send them weird psychology articles.

• 1:09:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. In other news, I've been in the gym for nearly two decades now, and it wasn't until the past few years that I had the best training run of my entire life. And a huge part of that was the RP Strength app. Actual scientists built this thing around one obsession, having a science-backed path to maximizing muscle gain. It tells you how many sets, how many reps, the amount of weight that you need to use. So all you have to do is show up and do the thing. It adjusts automatically every week based on how you're actually progressing. And there are over 45 pre-made training programs and more than 250 technique videos built in. So you're not just lifting, you're lifting optimally to get the most out of your workouts. A lot of the time I have less than an hour to be in the gym. And what I love about the RP app is that it takes that into account and adjusts my workout on the fly.

• 1:10:31Chris Williamson?

  So I know that I'm going to maximize how much time I've got available. For me, following a proper evidence-based plan has made a huge difference. And if you're serious about training and the gains that you want to make, I'm pretty sure that it'll do the same for you. Right now, you can follow the exact same training plan that I use and get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to r p strength.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's r p strength.com slash modern wisdom, a modern wisdom, a checkout. Beware. Learning more is a smart person's favorite form of procrastination.

• 1:11:07Mark Manson?

  Guilty. So fucking guilty.

• 1:11:12Mark Manson?

  I, I, I think, I think this is, you know, learning is safe to a smart person. It's something they know they're good at. It's something, it feels like progress.

• 1:11:25Mark Manson?

  And it's relatively easy to convince yourself that it is going to help you do the thing when it finally comes time to do the thing.

• 1:11:36Mark Manson?

  But you and I know that's like not always, it's often not the case. And, and there is such a thing as

• 1:11:43Mark Manson?

  cramming too much information into your brain because then you start, you know, creating obsession, perfectionism.

• 1:11:52Mark Manson?

  You actually generate anxiety where there, where there was less before.

• 1:11:57Mark Manson?

  So yeah, I, I mean, the, the learning as procrastination that, I mean, that's just, that's like fucking bread and butter for this industry. It's, it's, everybody struggles with that. Like, you know, we, we all like to think, well, let me, you know, let me just buy a couple more books on this and then, then I'll start. Then I'll figure it out. Then I'll know what to do. And it's, the truth is, is you need both simultaneously. You need to learn, but you need to practice. You need to do things.

• 1:12:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I think about this with

• 1:12:28Chris Williamson?

  people who constantly go back to couples counseling.

• 1:12:32Chris Williamson?

  You know, if your relationship is held together on a bi-weekly co-journaling session to work through the difficulties of the last three days and regular therapy and CBT, you know,

• 1:12:49Chris Williamson?

  after a while, like this is just you putting off the fact that this thing isn't working. And the same thing goes for learning more is a smart person's favorite form of procrastination. If. If you keep on learning, you never actually have to engage with the fact that this thing might be too difficult for you to achieve, that you might not be good enough, or that you could be good enough, but it's going to take an awful lot of work. You're insulating yourself, right? You're inoculating yourself from the pain of potentially failing publicly by postponing your stepping onto the stadium floor privately.

• 1:13:21Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 1:13:21Chris Williamson?

  I don't need to do it. And I guess.

• 1:13:25Mark Manson?

  Well, you bring up an interesting thing with the marriage counseling, because I would say in the, in the, the personal development world, the self-help world, you could easily replace learning with insight. Insight, gaining more insight is, can also be a smart person's way of procrastinating. And you see this a lot of people who sign up for a million seminars and they need.

• 1:13:47Chris Williamson?

  What I was thinking about.

• 1:13:48Mark Manson?

  They need three.

• 1:13:48Chris Williamson?

  You can do the Hoffman process and IFS and.

• 1:13:50Mark Manson?

  Three coaches and I'm gonna go do this like meditation retreat and ayahuasca and like, you know, over and over and over again. And it's, at a certain point, you need to digest all of the insight that you've gained. And the only way you digest is by like, living and doing other things. I'm curious, like, where, where have you procrastinated by learning more? Cause I mean, clearly you like learning.

• 1:14:16Chris Williamson?

  Where have I procrastinated by learning more?

• 1:14:19Chris Williamson?

  Well, before I started the show, just one example. I knew I wanted to do a podcast at the start of, the middle of 2017, but it took me until the February of 2018 to launch, because I was working on what's the perfect name gonna be? That took like two months to come up with.

• 1:14:38Mark Manson?

  Crushing Tuesday.

• 1:14:38Chris Williamson?

  Crushing, Crushing Tuesday. It was Brains and Brawn, actually.

• 1:14:44Chris Williamson?

  That was a huge part of it. Then the artwork needed to be perfect. Then I needed to listen to Tim Ferriss's How to Start a Podcast podcast and game my way to the top of the Apple charts, which actually worked. So thanks, Tim. And then, you know, what's the, I'm gonna start the channel, the YouTube's gonna launch at the exact same time as the Apple podcast.

• 1:15:04Chris Williamson?

  And in some ways. I actually think that feels very justified, given that that would turn into a project that was a thousand one hundred episodes. And, you know, the URL that I registered at the very beginning of that is the same one that we use now. All of those things are locked in, so it's just as well that I got it right. But also, you need to be able to pick your battles because you can't spend six months or many years doing that. So that's one part of it. Certainly when I was at university, I did four years of my bachelor's, which included a placement year, and then I did a masters. Already, while I was thinking about doing the masters at the end of my bachelor's, I

• 1:15:48Chris Williamson?

  couldn't remember half of my bachelor's. I couldn't remember the stuff I was learning as I was learning it, and I just assumed that the next thing, because I'm like, I don't really know what to do, and I'm like, more business. My choice of degree, that's a perfect one, my choice of degree. Like, really interested in psychology, really interested in philosophy, but what? I mean, I get a job as a psychologist or philosopher. That, obviously, those degrees are useless. I can't imagine how, what is the most applicable degree to making money? Well, business, because business makes money. So if I do business, that means that I'll understand what I'm doing. Dude, so one of the biggest, one of the biggest regrets of my early life is doing something that I thought would be transactionally useful, instead of just doing something that I was

• 1:16:33Chris Williamson?

  interested in. Because the thing that I was interested, it just took me a decade and a half to, I guess, like, six years from leaving uni or 12 years from starting it, to make my own amateur version of that by speaking to the world experts on whatever subject I wanted, most of which are about fucking psychology and philosophy. So I'm like, you know, had I have gone into an degree, modern wisdom wouldn't have existed, but I wouldn't have had to wait 12 years to get started, you know? I don't know.

• 1:16:59Mark Manson?

  Yeah. What about you? What, what, what stands out for you? Uh, health was the big one for me. I, dude, I read every, I was, I was the fat guy who, who could tell you everything about like metabolic dysfunction, insulin resistance. Oh, you're an expert. Yeah. Yeah, I'd. You did. You used to be fat. I was. Which, uh, looking at you now as a fucking slim trim 40 year old. Yeah. Believe. Um, yeah, I mean, I mean, I mean, I'm in the best health of my life, um, which is crazy because I spent years. I mean, I read all the blogs. I understood all the different workout protocols. I did a bunch of different workout protocols. I didn't stick to any of them. Hadn't stopped drinking. No. Oh, dude.

• 1:17:43Mark Manson?

  Didn't change a fucking thing. I was pizza every day. You know, whiskey every night, uh, going to bed at three in the morning, waking up at 11, uh, and reading books about, you know, health, you know, yeah, yeah. This, this is specific type of, uh, you know, calorie is gonna cause inflammation and fuck up your gains, you know, as if any of it, any of it mattered.

• 1:18:11Mark Manson?

  And yeah, eventually it just took, I, I just had to hire a coach and he, he was like, dude, just go to the gym. And I, I, I was that obnoxious client who, um, would try to kind of debate him. I'd be like, well, you know, I, I heard that like this rep scheme wasn't as effective as like, and he'd just look at me and just be like, dude, just go to the gym. Like, why are we? Fat as fuck. Yeah. Why are we talking about? Why are we talking about this? Like just go to. Brazilian girlfriend can outlift you. You're, you're hungover. You, you ever, you've been, you ate a pizza last night. Like just go to the gym. You're a mess. You're a mess. And I think this sort of.

• 1:18:49Chris Williamson?

  The over-optimization thing I think is really falling away. Like, if I was to, me and my friends play a game of bear or bull pretty frequently, which, which is just anything, pick anything, a trend in the world, an individual, a type of fashion, a product, whatever you want, country, a culture, what do you abolish on and what do you perish on? What would you invest in and what would you, what would you bet against? And I think that over-optimization, I'm heavily, heavily against at the moment. I think people are drowning in information, they're drowning in advice, and what they want is a degree of simplicity. Mm-hmm. And more than anything, they want connection. This is the thing, I'm talking about the relationship stuff, I kind of tracked my

• 1:19:33Chris Williamson?

  journey of learning about relationships, and it broke down into a few different epochs. So I guess I became interested in what was happening with mating and dating. You see these stats around sexlessness and stuff like that, and you think, oh, wow, that's interesting, I should do some research and look at Pew. You start to look at the Institute for Family Studies and you go, oh, my gosh, isn't this strange? And then you go, well, I wonder what's going on. So you start to learn evolutionary psychology. You think, okay, well, I'm going to learn about the physics of the system, the principles that are maybe guiding some of these decisions. And, but that's still not enough, right? And then you combine them, and that's where you get to something akin to Red Pill or a more sanitized version of Red Pill, right?

• 1:20:14Chris Williamson?

  Or, you know, feminism tries to do the same thing, and I'm going to look at mismatch, and I'm going to work out why the current situation and ancestral programming, how they're coming together, right? What, what that's causing. But that's still not actually what a relationship is. Right. A relationship is your nervous system interacting with someone else's. Yes. Like, relating has nothing to do with any of these. It is, this is, it's totally the midwitt meme of like, the idiots, like, just go talk to girls, and like, the Jedi is like, just go talk to girls. Exactly, exactly. She makes me feel good, bro.

• 1:20:48Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:48Chris Williamson?

  She makes me feel good, bro.

• 1:20:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:50Chris Williamson?

  I must ensure that my mate value is matched with hers with an optimal fertility window so that we can ensure that our children, like, no, no, like, eat protein, lift weights, eat protein, lift weights.

• 1:20:59Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:00Chris Williamson?

  My intra-window, workout window must be predigested and ensure that the, like, no, no, no, no.

• 1:21:05Mark Manson?

  Can I put you on the spot?

• 1:21:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:07Mark Manson?

  So I think it was maybe two years ago, maybe a year, no, maybe two years. There was a point, like, a couple of years ago, I saw you and you said that you, or maybe it was one of your Q and As, you said that you were going to make, um, finding a wife, starting a family, like, a big priority.

• 1:21:25Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:21:26Mark Manson?

  Do you think you're doing this with that, like, finding more insight? Or do you feel like you're making headway?

• 1:21:35Chris Williamson?

  Uh, trying my best. One of the challenges there is that you can't do it solo, right? You can put all of the time in that you want, but inherently what you have to do is have another person to dance with.

• 1:21:46Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 1:21:46Chris Williamson?

  So, uh, certainly to a degree, I think, I wanted to bring this up about a talking point that both you and Scott Galloway push, and I think that it's done in real good faith.

• 1:22:00Mark Manson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:22:01Chris Williamson?

  But speaking as somebody that is the child of that, the progeny of that philosophy, uh, I think contributes to it. And this is, the single most important decision that you make in your life will be the person that you choose to spend it with.

• 1:22:16Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:22:17Chris Williamson?

  And this may be an important piece of advice for many people, maybe even most people, who don't think about that, who fall backward into a relationship with someone they met when they were 24.

• 1:22:27Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:22:27Chris Williamson?

  And then before they know it, they're kind of living together, but they didn't really choose it, and they've kind of got a dog, and then, I guess we're engaged, and fuck, we've got a kid. Do I like this person? Like, are we, are we actually good for each other? And they were too unintentional about it.

• 1:22:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:41Chris Williamson?

  But on the flip side, especially as people are dating older and older now, that advice, I think, can create an awful lot of anxiety and... It's meant to say, treat this decision with appropriate care because it's very influential.

• 1:22:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:57Chris Williamson?

  But I do think that, and I've said this too, right? Cause I believe it.

• 1:23:00Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:23:01Chris Williamson?

  But that when that rubber meets the road, like functionally, what that ends up being is, well, I mean, I really should spend an awful lot more time scrutinizing this person. Which is the opposite of the other one. You just, what's a good Tuesday look like?

• 1:23:15Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:23:15Chris Williamson?

  Marrying those two, and that's certainly been a challenge. There is a curse of knowledge when it comes to.

• 1:23:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:20Chris Williamson?

  Dating. And yeah, I've definitely decided to jump in at the deep end with that.

• 1:23:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I could see that. It's interesting because I think it's, it's one of those things. It's one of those talking points. The importance of like choosing your partner.

• 1:23:34Mark Manson?

  It's.

• 1:23:37Mark Manson?

  I think it is objectively true in a vacuum. I don't know how helpful it is when you're sitting across from somebody, right? Like. Because ultimately the majority of whoever you do end up marrying, the majority of that marriage is not going to be found. It's going to be built.

• 1:23:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:55Mark Manson?

  Over the course of the relationship. And so it's, it's almost like. It's almost like, and this is gonna sound really trite, but it's almost like finding a business partner. Like you, it's not, you're not looking for somebody who's had, who has it figured out or has you figured out. It's almost just like. This is somebody I can work with. Like.

• 1:24:12Chris Williamson?

  Can you build with this person?

• 1:24:13Mark Manson?

  I can build something with this person.

• 1:24:15Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:24:15Mark Manson?

  We, we get along well. We fight well, which is equally as important.

• 1:24:23Mark Manson?

  They're high integrity, good character. We have some things in common.

• 1:24:28Mark Manson?

  Awesome.

• 1:24:29Chris Williamson?

  Challenges make us stronger, not weaker.

• 1:24:30Mark Manson?

  Let's see how far we can go. And, and at a certain point, you just, you just opt in, right? It's like the.

• 1:24:37Chris Williamson?

  Let's incorporate this business.

• 1:24:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah. And it's, it's a one-way door and it's the fact that it is a one-way door is what keeps you guys, keeps both people. Fully invested.

• 1:24:47Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:24:47Mark Manson?

  To keep working on it.

• 1:24:48Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh. Which is why situationships are so damaging.

• 1:24:51Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:24:51Chris Williamson?

  To people, because it's a halfway door.

• 1:24:53Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:24:53Chris Williamson?

  And typically, a situationship is a one-way door for one party. And a revolving door for the other party.

• 1:25:00Mark Manson?

  Yes, pretty much. Yeah.

• 1:25:02Chris Williamson?

  All right. Neediness occurs when you place a higher priority on what others think of you than what you think of yourself. Anytime you alter your words or behavior to fit someone else's needs rather than your own, that's needy. Anytime you lie about your interests, hobbies, or background, that's needy. Anytime you pursue a goal to impress others rather than fulfill yourself, that's needy. Whereas most people focus on what behavior is attractive or unattractive. What determines neediness, and therefore attractiveness, is the why behind your behavior. You can say the coolest thing or do what everyone else does, but if you do it for the wrong reason, you will come off as needy and desperate and turn people off.

• 1:25:41Mark Manson?

  Pulling out the classics.

• 1:25:42Chris Williamson?

  That's an old one, dude.

• 1:25:43Mark Manson?

  The old hits. That's from Models.

• 1:25:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:46Mark Manson?

  She's gonna be fifteen years old this year.

• 1:25:48Chris Williamson?

  Unreal. Everyone needs to go and read it, dude. Anyone that needs a new book, go and read an old book. And then that is now an old book.

• 1:25:54Mark Manson?

  It is.

• 1:25:54Chris Williamson?

  So that and Mate by Jeffrey Miller and Tucker Maxx are the two-car garage of dating books for men.

• 1:26:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:01Chris Williamson?

  That's it. And it's still relevant now. It's mad that like, hey, a T-shirt that fits and jeans that don't have stains on them is still probably revolutionary advice for a lot of guys. But yeah, it's fucking, it's money.

• 1:26:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:16Chris Williamson?

  But the whole thesis of that book, for the people that haven't read it.

• 1:26:18Mark Manson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:26:19Chris Williamson?

  Neediness is unattractive.

• 1:26:20Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:26:20Chris Williamson?

  Basically. You could summarize the whole book for men as in dating, neediness is unattractive.

• 1:26:26Mark Manson?

  It, it, it's really funny because, uh, so for people listening who don't know, like I started my career as a dating coach and from like two thousand eight to like two thousand thirteen, Models came out in two thousand eleven, but I was meeting dozens and dozens of guys in person. I was taking them out to bars and clubs and helping them meet girls online and, you know, giving them advice on, on dates, on relationships, everything. And it was so funny because at the time, it was like the whole men's dating advice space, it was super fragmented. There was almost like different classes you had to take at a college, right? There was like texting game and, and then there was like the first date that you had to master. And then there was the opener that you had to like figure out and.

• 1:27:11Mark Manson?

  I I just, I kind of wanted a unified theory of men's attractiveness. Cause I, what I noticed is that guys who were supremely attractive in one moment and one, like in one phase of the early relationship just seemed to not really have any problems in any other part. It's not, it's not like there were any men who were like amazing at meeting a girl in a bar. And then went on a date and just embarrassed themselves. Like it just didn't really happen. It was, you kind of either had.

• 1:27:43Chris Williamson?

  Winners and losers.

• 1:27:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah, you either had the skills or you didn't. And there was nothing special about like a text message or, uh, you know, a, a, a second date that like you couldn't figure out if you, if you had the fundamentals in place. So I was like, kind of searching for this, this unified theory of, of like men's attractiveness. And what I noticed, what I noticed about all of the men that I knew who were incredibly successful with women, regardless of their circumstances in life, you know, how old they were, their appearance, money, background, anything was they just had this, they prioritized their perception of themselves over the perception of the girls.

• 1:28:27Mark Manson?

  Like all the guys who were, who were terrible with women and who struggled with women. And even some of the ones who could kind of perform like a dancing monkey and like maybe get a little, like a hookup here and there. But they would lose the girl inevitably within a few days.

• 1:28:43Mark Manson?

  I noticed that everything that motivated what they said, what they did, how they dressed, how they presented themselves. It was, what is she gonna like? And what does she want to hear? And, um, and so it, it, it kind of, it, it became this, what I realized around that time is that ultimately, and I think this is true for women as well, but I think it's more true of men, that your attractiveness is really dictated by your comfort with yourself and how deeply you have explored your own life, your own identity and your willingness to share that with the world. And

• 1:29:25Mark Manson?

  The result neediness was kind of that glue that held everything together. Or the concept of non-neediness, right? It's like, don't do things for other people's approval. Don't, don't change your lifestyle for other people's approval. Don't work out for other people's approval. Don't say some bullshit line in a bar for other people's approval. Like, it's just, it's all the same thing. And it's all just being needy for validation and approval.

• 1:29:51Mark Manson?

  And it's, I guess, I'm fortunate. It's just a very timeless concept.

• 1:29:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's as true today as it was then.

• 1:29:59Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and it probably always will be because it's, I think it's, if I was to describe my career in like a simple phrase, it would be taking very abstract, intangible concepts and like, concretizing them in a single phrase or a single term in a way that like, an average person on the street can understand and use them. Like, that's entire, like, that's essentially my entire job. And like, why I'm here and why I've done anything. And I think, I think the non-neediness was like, my first real success at that.

• 1:30:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Essentializing, distilling things down. Someone once, the two best descriptions I've ever heard of modern wisdom. One was, uh,

• 1:30:43Mark Manson?

  Brains and Bron?

• 1:30:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it was crushing a Tuesday, actually. Dispelling comforting myths was one. And another one was, uh, it feels like spirulina, spirulina for my soul in an environment filled with fast food for my amygdala. And I was like, that's, that's, that's lovely.

• 1:31:01Mark Manson?

  Very poetic.

• 1:31:01Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, like, look, essentializing something, there's this big fluffy concept. Like, what were we saying? Over-optimization, too much information, I'm feeling all da, da, da, da. Like, I don't think that you're going to get, even with where L L Ms are at the moment, I don't think you're going to be able to get the unwieldy world of human attraction distilled down to.

• 1:31:22Chris Williamson?

  Prioritize your approval of yourself over other people's approval of you. Don't be needy, right? That just, that is a distillation that kind of requires a human in the loop.

• 1:31:33Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:34Chris Williamson?

  Because it's about language. It's about, okay, what does this mean? Not what is it? If you synthesize it, right? It's not a synthetic idea. It's still quite an organic one. But yeah, when I think about the, the problem with the neediness thing, it also explains why so many guys felt like, I mean, the red pill movement was born out of PUA hate.

• 1:31:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:54Chris Williamson?

  Do you remember that?

• 1:31:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, because that was your era, the PUA hate thing. So these are guys who had.

• 1:31:59Mark Manson?

  I remember that forum.

• 1:31:59Chris Williamson?

  Found success or found failure with pick up artistry.

• 1:32:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:04Chris Williamson?

  And I think that both of them were quite deranged. The guys that had found failure with pick up artistry saw themselves as so broken that even the most evidence-based system to ensure that they could get laid couldn't help them. And I mean, that's pretty disparaging. But then the guys who did find success with it also felt like they were disparaged because they said, God, look at how much I have to contort myself.

• 1:32:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:25Chris Williamson?

  In order to be remotely attractive to a woman.

• 1:32:28Mark Manson?

  And this is an example of none of them stopped to consider that it's just maybe the system is wrong. Like the model is incorrect. And so they just assumed, no, women are incorrect. Right? It's like, it's, the problem isn't, uh, uh, that like every woman on the planet is broken. It's, the problem is, is that your model of dating and human relationships is broken. And, but you're not willing to toss that out because you're so psychologically dependent on it.

• 1:32:57Mark Manson?

  I, fun thing, so I name checked you.

• 1:33:01Mark Manson?

  I did, you know Jubilee's Surrounded?

• 1:33:03Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:33:03Mark Manson?

  So I just shot an episode with them.

• 1:33:06Chris Williamson?

  What for? What was the thing?

• 1:33:08Mark Manson?

  One man versus the manosphere.

• 1:33:10Chris Williamson?

  No fucking way. You went up against the manosphere?

• 1:33:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:14Chris Williamson?

  Who was in the room? Anyone that I'd know?

• 1:33:15Mark Manson?

  Um, I don't think so.

• 1:33:17Chris Williamson?

  No big names, no huge names?

• 1:33:18Mark Manson?

  No.

• 1:33:19Chris Williamson?

  There's been a couple of that just did, I'm fucking fascinated by this.

• 1:33:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:22Chris Williamson?

  A couple of them had, uh, people who were sort of moderately well-known.

• 1:33:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:28Chris Williamson?

  Going in, but maybe you're not deep in the manosphere enough to know who was that.

• 1:33:31Mark Manson?

  Yeah, maybe, who knows? Maybe there was a guy there that.

• 1:33:34Chris Williamson?

  Fascinating that they chose you, especially somebody who came out of that world. That's a unique choice. That's cool.

• 1:33:39Mark Manson?

  It, it's interesting because I, I told the producers, I was like, in the pre-production.

• 1:33:43Chris Williamson?

  I'm proto manosphere.

• 1:33:45Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah. I told them, I was, well, first of all, they were concerned. They're like, are you ready for, I'm like, dude. The first five years of my career, I spent arguing with these fucking guys. So like, yes, I'm more than prepared. I know all the evolutionary psych and all their like silly theories. But it was interesting because I told them, I was like, you realize that like half these guys are probably going to be fans of mine. And they're gonna have read my book and they were actually all for it. So they were like, no, no, no, this is like, we kind of want this dynamic. So it was really interesting. It actually went really well. They were like way more respectful than I expected. And some of them were super smart, which I've been around enough of those guys to know that like a lot of them are super well read.

• 1:34:29Mark Manson?

  But it was funny because afterwards, a few of them were like, they said, they're like, I can't believe we debated you. I thought I was gonna be debating like some women's studies professor, you know, from UCSF or something.

• 1:34:43Mark Manson?

  But I name checked you because like one of the things that one of my talking points was like, I said, it's,

• 1:34:52Mark Manson?

  the manosphere is the incorrect solution to the correct problem. The correct problem is young men are struggling. There's a real crisis going on and it's not talked about enough. And you and I both know that. But this is not what's gonna work. Like this is, this is not helping. And so the issue isn't, and then of course, a lot of the guys came with like, well, there's this great advice. And like Andrew Tate got me to like get my life together. I'm like, that's great. But the problem isn't the advice, you know, the seed of advice embedded within the manosphere content. It's the problem is the packaging. Like you can go find that advice anywhere and it's great that that particular packaging reached you in that moment. But you need to be able to let it go.

• 1:35:36Mark Manson?

  And so a couple of the guys, they're like, oh, well, what should we listen to instead? Anyway, I threw your name into it.

• 1:35:43Chris Williamson?

  Fucking go, dude. I'm sufficiently sanitized. I've got the seal of approval. I appreciate that. Hey, man, I fucking, I think this is, I've said this to Mick. I know Jordan's in a bad way at the moment, but the timing of Jordan Peterson to get ill and also aggressively do the God pivot was

• 1:36:04Chris Williamson?

  Highly fucking inconvenient for where the culture was moving. Because I think that a lot of what you're seeing with the more cantankerous sides of the manosphere would not have had the oxygen and the fuel to be able to get big had you have still had Jordan floating around.

• 1:36:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it's almost like he was too early.

• 1:36:28Chris Williamson?

  He did. He timed the market. He was right, but early and then created the gap and then stopped supplying the demand. He created the demand and then stopped servicing the market.

• 1:36:38Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and I have to give him credit too, because I mean, I I've always appreciated his work. But I remember I remember back when he first kind of got big and he was kind of going on about a lot of this stuff. I was I was like, really? Like, is this really such a like, do we really need to be talking about? I thought we solved this, right? But it's been it's been pretty eye opening how, just in terms of of like correctly identifying a a cultural catastrophe years before it.

• 1:37:10Chris Williamson?

  Precious, yeah, prescient as fuck, like so prescient. And I go back and listen to, you know, golden era JBP of which, you know, I've got many episodes with him. And I look forward to him coming back with a fully functioning brain.

• 1:37:27Chris Williamson?

  It gets more true. It is big one of if you want a real adventure in life, tell the truth. Like, fuck me, like, every single time that I think about there's a problem in my life, it's because I'm not telling the truth. Every single time, like, Jesus Christ. It is, it was really, really good. And he got embroiled in things and became, in many ways, like, he got deranged by the level of aggression that he was being attacked by. This wonderful article from Ethan Strauss on Substack that people should go and read. It's called, um, criticism capture is more deranging than audience capture. He basically says that it's the criticisms, not the compliments that sway the way that we move. Yeah. And in my experience and watching a lot of people on the internet, that becomes so true.

• 1:38:12Chris Williamson?

  Look at anybody who is really, really.

• 1:38:17Chris Williamson?

  Militant and and

• 1:38:21Chris Williamson?

  gregarious with the way that they sort of communicate about stuff. You're like, wow, like, that's a that's a firework of a of a world that's going on there. They're very unforgiving, uncompromising in the way that they talk about things. Almost always people who have been very heavily attacked.

• 1:38:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:38Chris Williamson?

  Rightly or wrongly, you know, Trump became more Trump because of how much people were pushing back against him. Tate became more Tate because of how much people were pushing back against him. Hassan Piker became more Hassan Piker because of how many people were pushing back against him. This happens to everybody. I don't see the same thing being true for people that are just regularly complimented and don't get haters. So I do think that it it causes people to react in a way where they dig their heels in and they become more spiky about their beliefs.

• 1:39:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I could see that. I also, I it, one of the things that I've grown to appreciate over the years is that, and and I really, I really learned this being around Will Smith when I was working on his book and kind of in his orbit, some of the other, like, very famous people in his orbit. Like, there's a certain amount of skill or personality that is well suited for fame. And and I think it's some people's, some people just naturally respond very poorly to a lot of attention and a lot of fame. And some people naturally respond very well and they function very well with it. And

• 1:39:53Mark Manson?

  and it just, and this is not a knock on him. He just, from, I I don't know him very well. I've only met him a couple of times, but like, just as an outside observer, he just strikes me as somebody who like, it it was not, it did not do him any favors. And and it was, it was so much and it was so like intense and it was so critical that it's a

• 1:40:17Mark Manson?

  I sympathize a lot for what he probably went through.

• 1:40:20Chris Williamson?

  I think about people who have the skill to become famous, but not the disposition to deal with the fame.

• 1:40:27Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:40:28Chris Williamson?

  Lewis Capaldi is a phenomenal example of this. So writes his first album, billions of streams, global tour, needs to write a second one, gets put under so much pressure that he gives himself a Tourette's style tic where his anxiety has pushed his body beyond a limit that he was able to cope with. Then he steps out on stage at the O2 or and Glastonbury, I think, and is under so much internal pressure that he can't get the words out. And he can't sing and, and then goes away, completely goes away. And then comes back, maybe a year or two years later, main stage of Glastonbury again, and plays a new song, which is all about his desire.

• 1:41:11Chris Williamson?

  He says, uh, uh, I swear to God, I'll survive, even if it kills me this time. And just like looking healthy, super regulated. But there is a world of people who are good enough to achieve fame, but just straight up, don't have the disposition to be able to cope with it. And that's a ruthless position to be in because the thing that you want is in your hands.

• 1:41:35Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:41:36Chris Williamson?

  And kind of through no choice of your own, there's another thing, almost everybody wants to be successful, but doesn't have the talent.

• 1:41:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:45Chris Williamson?

  And there are a very small bucket of people that get to become successful. And of them, there's a proportion who can become successful, but for some reason, just self-destruct.

• 1:41:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:55Chris Williamson?

  Detonate this thing that they've worked their entire lives to try and get. And that's like, no one's going to give them sympathy, velvet fucking prison champagne problem, but it's a unique kind of pain to get to the top of the mountain and find that you threw yourself off.

• 1:42:08Mark Manson?

  Well, in that, that, that throwing off, like, I mean, it can be catastrophic. I mean, if you look at what he's gone through the last few years, or if you just classic celebrity stories, right? You know, Kurt Cobain or Amy Winehouse or like, who did he?

• 1:42:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:23Mark Manson?

  Got you. Yes, yes, that is one way to self-destruct.

• 1:42:29Mark Manson?

  But it's, you know, you can see it play out in a lot of different ways. The other thing that like I really grew to appreciate being around Will is like there, there's a system, a systemization of fame. Like you, him and his team had like, they had guardrails built around him. They had, uh, you know, they had systems of like, here's how you deal with unruly fans in a way that like doesn't upset anybody. Here's how you like guarantee his privacy in certain places without like disturbing his weekend. You know, here's how you make sure he gets enough time to like rehearse and, you know, learn his scripts. Like they, they had, they had protocols for all of this stuff that it was literally just protocols to maintain his ability to function.

• 1:43:13Chris Williamson?

  There's a middle area of fame. I, I haven't been exposed to, I've only ever been exposed to one or two people that have got that. Becoming friends with someone right now who basically lives with a team of SAS guys 24 hours a day to keep him on the straight and narrow so that he can continue to produce the things that he needs to produce. But it's a very small number of people that have that. And a very large number of people that would really benefit from that, that I know of, who are in sort of the middling level of fame.

• 1:43:41Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:43:42Chris Williamson?

  Where it can disrupt your life and get in the way of your relationships and hurt you and stuff. But no one's handed them the pamphlet or the playbook to be able to deal with it.

• 1:43:51Mark Manson?

  And dude, it's introducing friction back into, back into your life, right? Because that's what happens when you achieve this insane level of success and fame is like, it removes all the barriers and guardrails. Now you have all the money to do whatever you want. You have all the people who are going to say yes to whatever you want. And so the only way to like, stay functional is to like intentionally reintroduce.

• 1:44:14Chris Williamson?

  Limitations.

• 1:44:15Mark Manson?

  Those limitations, the, the friction.

• 1:44:17Chris Williamson?

  Sexy.

• 1:44:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, this is similar to one of yours. You only envy the lives of people whose sacrifices you can't see.

• 1:44:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah. Um.

• 1:44:34Mark Manson?

  I mean, it's easy, it's easy to just want the benefits of something like it's, it's so, it's the default, right? Like it's almost childish to just want the benefits of something. It's a very naive way of seeing the world and

• 1:44:51Mark Manson?

  I think

• 1:44:54Mark Manson?

  it's not only is it important to want the costs of something, check and make sure you want the costs of something before you actually start pursuing it. But again, it comes back to like, that's the part that makes it meaningful. Right? If you just got the benefits of things, you would never appreciate those things. It's the fact that you like struggled and sacrificed and crawled through shit.

• 1:45:23Chris Williamson?

  Isn't that a wonderful duality? You only envy the lives of people whose sacrifices you can't see. So if you could see the cost that somebody had to pay in order to get to where they are, you probably wouldn't want the life. But if you were able to get to the place that they got to without the sacrifices.

• 1:45:41Mark Manson?

  You wouldn't appreciate it.

• 1:45:43Chris Williamson?

  Bingo.

• 1:45:44Mark Manson?

  It's the, it's the Elon quote you mentioned earlier, right? It's like, you don't want, you wouldn't like to be me.

• 1:45:50Chris Williamson?

  My mind's a storm. People think they want to be me. They don't want to be me. Yeah, there's a line from James Clear that plays off this, which this is one of the best things that I read over the last few years. 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. Fucking money. It's such money because how many people want something? But

• 1:46:22Chris Williamson?

  George Mack's got this idea, the, the difference between Call of Duty and war. He says, a lot of the time, people think that they would love to play Call of Duty all the time, but that's not what war is. War is the smell of burnt gunpowder and your friend getting his leg blown off.

• 1:46:34Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:46:35Chris Williamson?

  And you want to become a musician. You want to become a world famous guitarist. You're okay. Well, what does that look like? You're gonna have to learn to play guitar for a decade to know one. And then if and when you start a band. You're gonna be playing also to no one with no promise of whether or not this is going to work?

• 1:46:52Mark Manson?

  Let me cut you off there, because that was my life.

• 1:46:54Chris Williamson?

  I remember.

• 1:46:55Mark Manson?

  So no, the rea- that's it.

• 1:46:58Chris Williamson?

  As an unfamously unsuccessful musician.

• 1:47:00Mark Manson?

  Yes, as a failed musician, let me tell you that, that what you just described is, that's still like the most fun 5% of it. Like, the 95% of it is you're sitting in a room by yourself practicing.

• 1:47:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:11Mark Manson?

  And there's no applause, there's nobody watching, there's nobody.

• 1:47:15Chris Williamson?

  It's frustrating and difficult.

• 1:47:17Mark Manson?

  You're playing the same song literally hundreds of times. And it's, the, the thing in music that they, they always say is, is that you're not practicing until you get it right, you're practicing until it's impossible to get wrong. So it is, you know, if it takes 100 repetitions to get it right, you need to get to 1,000 to never get it wrong. And it is so monotonous and tedious and just like absolutely soul destroying unless, unless you love it, unless you just genuinely can't imagine living without it.

• 1:47:51Mark Manson?

  So, yeah.

• 1:47:52Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's the, your line about, um, what sort of pain do you want in your life?

• 1:47:57Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:47:58Chris Williamson?

  Every pursuit worth having comes with some degree of pain and struggle and sacrifice. So choose what flavour of shit sandwich you want to eat.

• 1:48:07Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:48:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a, it's funny on the,

• 1:48:15Chris Williamson?

  the idea of the, the really unsexy stuff that becomes sexy when reflected in the glory of you standing on stage.

• 1:48:22Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 1:48:22Chris Williamson?

  And doing something really cool. But if you don't want to do something, if you genuinely don't want to do something, it's almost impossible for you to get yourself to do it. And that's the, it doesn't make sense to continue wanting something if you're not willing to do what it takes to get it. Like, not even willing to do, like, wants to do, ideally. Because you can be willing to do something, but the amount of willpower that it's going to take in order to get you through that is fucking insurmountable. And also, it's going to detract away from all of the other things that you should do in your life. Now, it's unfortunate that some people never get an obsession that's worth anything. I was thinking about this a lot, that- I would call myself, you know, there's that term serial monogamist. I would call myself a serial obsessive.

• 1:49:04Chris Williamson?

  But around about every seven years or so, I get a new obsession. And it was cricket from the age of 10 until 18. Then it was club promo from 18 until 25, 26, 27. And then it was personal development until early 30s. And then it's been the podcast from then until now.

• 1:49:24Chris Williamson?

  And that's cool because all of those obsessions largely have not been that destructive and maybe have even been beneficial to me and the world.

• 1:49:33Mark Manson?

  Except for the cricket.

• 1:49:35Chris Williamson?

  I will stand my ground with that. You're a fucking Philistine. You're an uncultured American Philistine.

• 1:49:43Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:49:44Chris Williamson?

  And anything that is in America is derivative of something that happened in Britain.

• 1:49:48Mark Manson?

  It's more boring baseball and considering how boring baseball is.

• 1:49:52Chris Williamson?

  I disagree. I disagree. It's a sport that's only played when the weather's good.

• 1:49:56Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:49:57Chris Williamson?

  It lasts for five days and sometimes ends in a draw. It's almost.

• 1:50:00Mark Manson?

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:50:01Chris Williamson?

  It's almost mandatory to drink.

• 1:50:03Mark Manson?

  This sounds like a circle of hell.

• 1:50:04Chris Williamson?

  No, it's not. It's England.

• 1:50:07Mark Manson?

  Okay, which is a circle of hell.

• 1:50:09Chris Williamson?

  No, no, no, that's incorrect. That's incorrect.

• 1:50:12Mark Manson?

  I love it.

• 1:50:13Chris Williamson?

  It's highly, that's highly offensive.

• 1:50:14Mark Manson?

  I love England.

• 1:50:15Chris Williamson?

  And good, good, good, good. Here's 10 years of therapy summarized in one minute. Number one, no one is coming to save you. Being a functioning adult means realizing you are responsible for everything in your life, even if it wasn't your fault. Number two, strong boundaries make for good relationships. Weak boundaries make drama. Number three, many of your problems don't get fixed. You just learn how to live despite them. Number four, your mind lies to you all the time. It will tell you that the world is ending when it's not, that a mistake is fatal when it's not, that everyone is thinking about you and laughing about you when they're not. Learn how to tell your mind to shut the fuck up. Number five, stop trying to convince people to like you. The right people won't need to be convinced and everyone else is just going to get very annoyed.

• 1:51:00Chris Williamson?

  Number six, sometimes the best thing you can do is let a dream die. No one likes to hear that, but it's true. And number seven, only a few people in your life are going to matter in the long run. When you find them, treat them right, make time for them, keep them close and be grateful.

• 1:51:16Mark Manson?

  You know, sometimes when I, when I put together stuff like that, I, I'm.

• 1:51:23Mark Manson?

  Like hearing you read that back to me, like the, the thought that comes to mind is like, how is this not taught in schools? Like how, how are we just, how is this not just- Discover this at thirty-four. Right. Like, why, why do people have to listen to podcasts all day to like, hear some of this stuff? Um, I, it just seems so fundamental, you know, but it is interesting. One of the things, one of the things that my perspective has shifted, you know, I've been doing this for seventeen years. Too long. Yeah, a long, yeah, a long time. Um, and when I look at, at things that I've, I've either changed my mind about or changed my perspective on through, over the course of my career,

• 1:52:07Mark Manson?

  I think one of the big ones is that, you know, early in my career, I, I really thought it was all about just like ideas, information, knowledge, right? It's like finding, there's like a few pieces of key knowledge that if you can kind of figure it out, if you can dig through enough psych studies and find the application, like it's just going to be a key that unlocks all these areas of your life. And I think if you were a consumer of personal growth advice, like that, the experience you have often feels that way, but I don't think that's true. I think actually what is true is that there are just certain concepts, ideas, um, principles that are pretty obvious and we all kind of already

• 1:52:52Mark Manson?

  know them, but we, we lose, it's, it's extremely difficult to keep them in front of our face. Yep. Through day-to-day life. And so we need, we need rituals and reminders consistently. And I actually think that for most of human history, I think religion was that mechanism of those reminders to like, keep people like, hey, nobody's like, you're responsible for this. Hey, treat people well. That person matters, you know, like let go of the, the small stuff.

• 1:53:23Mark Manson?

  But I think in our modern, our modern world, you know, it's people, most people are losing that. And so you're, you're almost seeing this like reinvention of those rituals online through like what you and I do, through podcasts and Instagram and YouTube and all this stuff. And, and I do it as well, right? It's like, I've got my shows and, and I've got the channels I follow and the people I follow. And it's like, they, it's, it's not that any individual piece of information is like, changing my life, unlocking this whole area of my life. It's just like, oh yeah, it's a good reminder.

• 1:54:00Chris Williamson?

  That's so true. I think because the modern world is filled with novelty, anything that we've seen before, we don't usually want to hear again. We think, well, I already know that, even if you don't, even if there's 10 things that you basically just need to hear over and over again. What you need to do, I think, is play the game of novelty whilst just re-delivering the same core message. And that's going to be anti-memetic and wholly unimpressive to people. This is the fucking clean your room thing again. This is the tell the truth thing again. Oh, neediness, is it? And you go, okay, well, I can lie to you and create this sort of fugazi gaslight thing where I say, this new thing is the big unlock.

• 1:54:42Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:54:43Chris Williamson?

  Or I can just try to repackage stuff that is the existing concept. So it satisfies your desire for novelty and my own desire for novelty whilst reinforcing the principle that is most accurate. And that's really, I think, what a lot of the game is now. And we, we were talking before we got started. I think that very, very dense information, consumption and over-optimization is kind of dead in the water. And the alternative is reminding people stuff that they already know in a manner that just, you know how the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve works? It's spaced repetition. It's why I keep flashcards

• 1:55:25Chris Williamson?

  and stuff work like that. Basically, you need that, but with novelty added in so that people are just regularly reminded, oh, yeah, I, I just need to like, go for a walk and sleep more. Yeah. Oh, right. Yeah. I just, I.

• 1:55:42Chris Williamson?

  Probably need to say how I feel to my partner when something upsets me.

• 1:55:47Mark Manson?

  I I've started, one way I think about it sometimes is that a lot of this advice, it's almost like having a fire extinguisher in the room. You know, like it's, it's, you've probably had the experience where, you know, maybe you read something five years ago and you're like, yeah, it's obvious. I, I, I know that. And then something happens in your life, right? It's like you get dumped or like somebody dies or you move across the world and you're like, suddenly you're like, oh my God, I need this so bad right now.

• 1:56:17Chris Williamson?

  Well, one of the most embarrassing things is to realize that the problem you're facing was solved by something that you learned long ago.

• 1:56:23Mark Manson?

  Yes, but didn't appreciate.

• 1:56:24Chris Williamson?

  And yeah, and then, and then have to now go and relearn.

• 1:56:27Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:27Chris Williamson?

  You're like, fuck. Or that you're now facing a problem that you faced in the past and that you not only learned something, but a specific type of pain that both me and you do, you go, oh, I wrote about this. I fucking wrote this thing.

• 1:56:41Mark Manson?

  Dude, tell me about it. Fucking tell me about it.

• 1:56:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:45Mark Manson?

  So I, I had a, speaking of like, you know, ascending the mountain and struggling to deal with fame. You know, when my book took, took off, um, you know, I went into a real identity crisis. I think I've talked to you about this before on the show, but you know, I had that, that first year or two, when my book was number one everywhere, it was like just all these crazy things happening. I felt super disoriented and like very lost and kind of went through a little bit of a depression, became.

• 1:57:13Chris Williamson?

  I got everything I ever wanted and it made me depressed.

• 1:57:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah, pretty much. And like massive imposter syndrome for, for a period of time. And started, started saying yes to a bunch of things I didn't want to say yes to, right? And so then I ended up in this situation where I'm like, I feel trapped in my own career. I'm like obligated to do all these things for these people that I don't really want to be doing. I'm like stressed all the time. I'm anxious. My health's going to shit and, and it's.

• 1:57:39Chris Williamson?

  I'm fat.

• 1:57:40Mark Manson?

  And I'm fat on top of everything else.

• 1:57:45Mark Manson?

  Stat insult injury. Fucking fat. And, uh,

• 1:57:53Mark Manson?

  it's so funny because I, I remember, um, when I was doing my film, um,

• 1:58:00Mark Manson?

  You know, it was that we were doing a film on The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. And I hadn't really read the book since I wrote it. And so I went back, I'm like, well, I should probably read my book again. So I went back and I read, this is like 2018, 2019. I went back and it was like all the shit I'd just, I'd been spending the last two years dealing with. It was like in my own book and I'm like, I'm, I'm fucking all of this up. Like I'm saying yes to things I don't care about. I'm like overloading my life with all these distractions. I'm like not standing up for myself. I've like lost clarity on what I value, like just like chapter by chapter by chapter. I'm choosing the wrong struggles.

• 1:58:35Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:58:35Mark Manson?

  And I, I just, I, it was rough. It was really rough. I like, I had to really have like a, a heart to heart with myself of like, dude, whoa. Get it together, man.

• 1:58:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's like, it's like personal growth Groundhog Day.

• 1:58:53Chris Williamson?

  One thing that I think is, is kind of important. I, I understand how you can say, hey, look, there's a small bucket of principles, over optimization, thinking about your life too much, all of these things like they, you're majoring in the minors, et cetera, et cetera. That is true once you've been through it.

• 1:59:11Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:59:12Chris Williamson?

  It is not true before you've been through it.

• 1:59:15Chris Williamson?

  Breaking the rules of the game before you've learned how to play the game is not breaking the rules of the game and being an innovator or being some essentialized distiller of cool stuff. It's playing a different game. And this is why I highly recommend that people become totally obsessed with personal development and productivity and David Allen's Getting Things Done and James Clear's Atomic Habits and Morgan Housel's Psychology of Money and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck for like, probably between three and six years. And then once you've done that, you can sort of get your black belt, put it on and go. Okay.

• 1:59:53Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:53Chris Williamson?

  Ninety-five percent of that was packaging. Here are the bits that really matter. And I'm now going to spend the rest of time trying to just maintain that momentum and not overcomplicate stuff. And maybe once a year, there'll be a novel insight, which is genuinely principled and fundamental that I just didn't know yet. But you can't get to that level without having gone through the first bit. And maybe it's just the case that the world of, like, everybody went through the same, holy fuck, like, this is novel. But talking about, like, choosing your struggles appropriately, or even neediness and stuff like that,

• 2:00:34Chris Williamson?

  that was novel when it happened, but that area of cognitive real estate, that territory's now been, you know, when you play a, a, a video game and the map's all fogged out?

• 2:00:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:43Chris Williamson?

  And then after you've played it for a while, the areas get opened up. It's like, well, that area's opened up now. So assuming that you've gone through this process, previously, it was kind of like, um, humans were moving at the same level that technology developed.

• 2:00:57Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:58Chris Williamson?

  But if you start doing personal development now, there's so much technology that you can speedrun all the way up to the top. Whereas for us, it's like, wow, telling the truth is something, this is revolutionary. Not that I've just discovered it, but it's just been said.

• 2:01:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:11Chris Williamson?

  Right? This is, this is groundbreaking research. But because there's so much to go through, and maybe it's just the case that the era that we're in had a formative hockey curve, like J-shaped thing, where, wow, there's a fucking ton of insight that's repackaged ancient wisdom for a secular world that's distilled down into good language that's memorable. I should, I'm learning this as it goes, and a new book, and a new book, and a new book. And now we're at the stage where much of that territory that's important has been captured.

• 2:01:43Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:01:44Chris Williamson?

  And now, because everybody kind of started the race, whether you were like eighteen or twenty-eight or forty-eight, everybody started it kind of at the same time, and Peterson comes along, and you, and James, and da, da, da, da, da. And you go, oh, wow. Like, that's, that's now all been done. So everybody has a degree of personal development fatigue, but that's not true if you're starting your journey. If you're like, hey, I'm a, I'm a fat piece of shit.

• 2:02:07Mark Manson?

  Correct.

• 2:02:07Chris Williamson?

  And I'm twenty-five, and I've never done any of this. It's like, lock in for the next six years.

• 2:02:11Mark Manson?

  Yes, absolutely. And then, and then it is very much after that is, it is just about maintaining the practice.

• 2:02:17Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 2:02:19Mark Manson?

  It is interesting, like to nerd out a little bit on kind of the history of this because I do think this is interesting, right? It's, it is. We do live in a very unique moment in the fact that this information is so diffuse, universally available, completely free. Like it, when I was growing up, you had to go pay Tony Robbins $10,000 to hear any of this. Right? You had to go, you had to join a graduate program at Cornell and like study psychology for three years to hear any of this, right? So there was like massive gatekeepers. Not democratized. Not democratized at all, extremely like marketed extremely aggressively. And like very, very. Predatory in some circumstances.

• 2:03:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah, with another podcast for another day, but it, the internet is what opened up the opportunity for this kind of diffusion of all this information across the entire population. And I think when I look at kind of my generation, you know, me, James, Ryan, and a bunch of others, like really what we were doing is we were taking the stuff that used to only be available behind closed doors or in really exclusive seminars or, you know, deep in academic research, and then we were repackaging it for a wider internet audience. And I think through the 2010s, that was a pretty novel and important function that was being played and within society is.

• 2:03:49Mark Manson?

  But now we're at the point where like you can literally just get on Instagram and see 800 pieces of the same advice any day of the week that you want. And it's all free and it's all like widely available and it's all repeated to death. And so it does raise an interesting point of like, I do think that saturation of information for people. Yep. Is probably, like you said, it's, it's being sped run, speed run? Yes. Speed ran? Speed run. Um, speed ran at this point, you know, whereas like 15 years ago, you'd have to spend years and years like really digging deep into books and, and studies and research. Now you can probably get the gist of that within a year or two.

• 2:04:32Mark Manson?

  And so it really does make the implementation aspect of it, I think more important than ever before, but there's not.

• 2:04:43Mark Manson?

  That's not generalizable, right? You know, so like that's, that's where the rub is now. So I, in many ways, I feel it's like a very weird time.

• 2:04:51Chris Williamson?

  It is, it is. It's certainly a transition and it's this idea of something that's anti-mimetic. Not just something that isn't mimetic, not something that won't spread, but something that is actively pushed back against and not spread, or maybe even criticized to the point where it sort of shrinks. And unfortunately, telling people the new information isn't better necessarily. Or at least not at the speed that perhaps it used to be. The market slowed down. It might be a way to think about it. Doesn't sound very good because if you've got a problem, you want to believe that there's a solution. But if there's a solution that's already out there, the reason that you haven't fixed your problem is your fault.

• 2:05:32Chris Williamson?

  As opposed to, oh, this new thing that's novel, that's what we've got this massive recency bias around it. And um, yeah, it is, there's a, there's a definitely a transition period going on. And that's why I think your solved podcast series is fucking great. That's different because it is so in-depth, whether you want to learn about fear or relationships or whatever. It is so in-depth that that's not been done before. Some of the stuff that I've got coming up with different guests sat around a table is it's not been done before. Okay, that's unique and at least novel, genuinely novel and the insights that have come out of it, novel. But for the most part, if it's, and this is going to get worse.

• 2:06:09Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:06:10Chris Williamson?

  With AI, it's going to get significantly worse.

• 2:06:12Mark Manson?

  So much worse.

• 2:06:13Chris Williamson?

  However, bad and repetitive and sloppy, you think that your least favorite optimization obsessed influencer of choice has been. Imagine that powered by fucking infinite robot army.

• 2:06:27Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:28Chris Williamson?

  That's coming.

• 2:06:29Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and not to mention a thousand copycats on TikTok and Instagram, right? So it's, it's just like anything that gets any traction is just going to be parroted thousands and thousands of times.

• 2:06:40Chris Williamson?

  Already derivative, but now it's derivative at scale powered by AI.

• 2:06:45Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:06:47Mark Manson?

  So I actually think we're gonna.

• 2:06:50Mark Manson?

  Re-enter, speaking of being bullish and bearish.

• 2:06:55Mark Manson?

  I actually think I'm bullish on authority and credibility over the next 10 years. I think there's going to be a mass return towards, because I just think there's going to be so much slop out there, and especially in this market. Like, there's just going to be so much crap being espoused by like, random stick figures and shit on YouTube, like, that people are going to lose patience very quickly, and they're going to crave, like, please just show me somebody who, like, actually knows what they're talking about, or has actually done something.

• 2:07:27Mark Manson?

  And so it's actually kind of ironic, because it's, I think, the great explosion and the dissemination of this information to people 10, 15 years ago, it was kind of the destruction of, like, credibility.

• 2:07:43Chris Williamson?

  Will be its downfall.

• 2:07:44Mark Manson?

  Right, credibility doesn't matter anymore, right? It's like, if you've got a good idea, you can just write a blog post and everybody can read it, you know, and like, that was great back then, but now it's been taken to such an extreme that there's going to be like, this incredible demand for authority and credibility.

• 2:07:57Chris Williamson?

  I think there's almost certainly going to be a pedestalization of legacy media, mainstream media. I think that if you get placed on 60 Minutes, or the new Dr. Phil, or whatever, whatever the next version of that is.

• 2:08:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:13Chris Williamson?

  Because anybody can do YouTube. What, what are you grinning about?

• 2:08:16Mark Manson?

  Dude, I got a crazy story for you. So, so yes, I agree, and like, this is already happening. So, so you mentioned it earlier, I started an AI company last year, it's an AI personal growth coach, it's called Purpose.

• 2:08:31Chris Williamson?

  Everybody go check it out, it's cool.

• 2:08:32Mark Manson?

  Check it out. So, when we launched in December, and we hired a PR agency to go get a bunch of publicity in like, conventional media, you know, put the logos on the website, all that shit. And dude, it was so funny. So, the publicists, they go, they get all these, like, you know, interviews with big newspaper, I'm not going to call, I'm not going to name check anybody.

• 2:08:56Mark Manson?

  Big newspapers, newspapers everybody would have, has heard of, TV stations, radio stations, like, all traditional stuff, very prestigious, you know, we're trying to get the logos.

• 2:09:08Mark Manson?

  So I go and I do these interviews with like, quote unquote, like prestigious journalists. And we talk about the app for like 10 minutes or whatever. And you can tell that like, they don't give two shits. Like, it's just, you know, they've got some generic article that they're doing about like AI products or whatever, and they're just gonna drop a quote from me in it and, and mention, mention the product. And so it very like, half-assed 10-minute conversation. And, and, and we wrap up very quickly, and I'm like, okay, well, this was very fast. And then the journalist would be like, well, wait, while I've got you here.

• 2:09:48Mark Manson?

  So I'm working on a book right now, and I was wondering if, um, if I could run some ideas by you. This happened three times, three times. That base, so basically what happened was the journalist, understanding their position, which is prestige media. This guy needs a logo for his website, you know, because it's

• 2:10:08Chris Williamson?

  I'm the logo.

• 2:10:09Mark Manson?

  Right, I'm the logo. I'm working on a book. This guy's a huge bestselling author.

• 2:10:14Chris Williamson?

  Prestige for expertise trade.

• 2:10:16Mark Manson?

  Let's barter.

• 2:10:18Chris Williamson?

  Motherfuckers, dude.

• 2:10:18Mark Manson?

  So most of those calls was me giving career advice. In exchange for a quote in their fucking newspaper.

• 2:10:28Chris Williamson?

  I would have just said, I would have just said to all of them, once they, once they've done it, it's like, I think your idea's shit. I'm sorry, I think, I think your idea sucks.

• 2:10:36Mark Manson?

  Nobody's gonna read this, give up.

• 2:10:37Chris Williamson?

  I highly, I highly recommend that you don't do it, and just leave them all dejected.

• 2:10:41Mark Manson?

  Oh, man, it was, it was crazy. It's, it's a weird world, man.

• 2:10:45Chris Williamson?

  Sorry to interrupt your scrolling, but this is a friendly reminder that your time on this earth is extremely limited, and everyone you love is going to die one day. So maybe you should put the fucking phone away and go and do something meaningful.

• 2:11:00Mark Manson?

  Dude, the death salience thing is just, it's, it's, it's magical, isn't it? Isn't like Memento Mori, like, it's just so magical. And especially like, I guess with like, you know, the doom scrolling kids these days, like it is,

• 2:11:19Mark Manson?

  it's such an important practice, I think, to just like, take that moment, not every day, but like periodically of like,

• 2:11:28Mark Manson?

  is this, if I were to die soon, is this what I would want to be doing? You know, if, when I'm 80, am I going to look back and be proud of what I'm doing?

• 2:11:40Mark Manson?

  And it's, that, that's one of those things, I'm glad how memetic that is.

• 2:11:44Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 2:11:44Mark Manson?

  It's, because I remember, I, I remember, so in subtle art, the last chapter is called, and then you die. And I remember my, my publisher was like, you know, this is kind of dark. Are you sure, you know, publisher thing.

• 2:11:58Chris Williamson?

  Supposed to finish it on an up note.

• 2:12:00Mark Manson?

  Yeah, exactly. You'd be all inspiring and everything.

• 2:12:05Mark Manson?

  But I felt really strongly about it because it's just like the, the kind of being confronted with death had been like so impactful in my life. And it was a big part of Stoic philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, a bunch of different philosophies.

• 2:12:20Mark Manson?

  That's one thing that I never expected to be memetic, but it is incredibly memetic. And it is, I'm like thrilled with how much traction that gets and, and that people do resonate with it and they do find value in it. And they do respond to it and engage in it.

• 2:12:36Mark Manson?

  So yeah, I just, I just think it's, it's a great practice. I'm glad that people stop scrolling and think about it.

• 2:12:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I, a few questions that I think are useful. What do you regret from the last year? What do you regret that you did too much of and not enough of? Typically, that's the same stuff that you did for the last decade, but you can't remember the last decade. So if you look at the last 12 months of your life, what did you do too much of and what did you do too little of? If you wanted to make 85 year old you as miserable as possible. When they look back in their life.

• 2:13:08Mark Manson?

  Oh, that would be easy.

• 2:13:09Chris Williamson?

  What would you, what would you do? What would you do more of? What would you do less of? You know, I mean, there's that famous five regrets of the dying, right? Wish I'd allowed myself to be happy. I wish I kept in touch with my friends more. I wish I hadn't worked so much. We are maybe just about to breach the first wave of people who are had a good chunk of their life spent on their smartphone and on devices who were about to die.

• 2:13:38Chris Williamson?

  It has to be number one.

• 2:13:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:39Chris Williamson?

  It has to be number one.

• 2:13:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:42Chris Williamson?

  There's no way that I wish I'd spent less time looking at a screen. Like it, it just has to jump to the top of the charts. As soon as that wave of people begin to die en masse. And it's still probably what like smartphone's been around 20, just under 20 years now. So he's 65, 70, like it's still not, it's still not quite there.

• 2:14:03Mark Manson?

  Couple more decades.

• 2:14:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. One, one more decade and that's going to start. But within two, it's just going to be fucking.

• 2:14:07Mark Manson?

  I don't know, man. I've seen some good memes.

• 2:14:09Chris Williamson?

  That's true.

• 2:14:10Mark Manson?

  Some really good memes.

• 2:14:11Chris Williamson?

  That is true, but you've never been the subject of them. That's why you have the, you have the optimal level of fame. You have the optimal level of fame, which is you can get a seat at a restaurant that's very busy. But for the most part, people aren't going to make a meme about you on the internet.

• 2:14:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:24Chris Williamson?

  I think that's the way you should go. All right, last one.

• 2:14:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:26Chris Williamson?

  At some point you realize that the permission you've been waiting for all along was your own.

• 2:14:31Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:35Mark Manson?

  I think so often

• 2:14:38Mark Manson?

  we seek advice when really all we want is somebody to just tell us it's okay. It's okay to want what we want. It's okay to stop doing something to change our minds.

• 2:14:51Mark Manson?

  To be wrong about something.

• 2:14:57Mark Manson?

  I don't, I don't get it's, it's interesting. You know, back in the day, I used to get a lot of emails, like fan emails and stuff. People asking for questions for advice. I still get some, but it is amazing how many emails, messages, questions I get that it, you could really just boil it down to.

• 2:15:17Mark Manson?

  This person feels bad about something and just wants to be told it's okay. To feel bad about it. And or this person wants to do something, but they're afraid and they just need somebody to say, no, no, you should do that. That's it. That's all I want. They don't need a fucking theory or a framework or, you know, a full like breakdown of their childhood trauma. They they just need somebody to say like, it's okay. You you should do that. It seems important to you.

• 2:15:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think the world is kind of split into two groups of people. People who don't know how to improve their lives and those who are too scared to start. And

• 2:15:57Chris Williamson?

  the first group doesn't care that they're going to do what they do. They're not going to overthink it. And then there's another group that's paralyzed by their capacity to think. Obviously, there's people that managed to overcome that. But almost anybody who is thoughtful and making shit happen in the world has had to overcome their thoughtfulness. Like their thoughtfulness is the fuel, but it's also the barrier to getting there. Because as we said right at the top, the degree of uncertainty that you have is paralyzing. It keeps you in place. So, yes, someone coming along and going, hey, man, like, it's okay to want that thing, or it's okay to not think that that thing's cool. You should try and do that thing.

• 2:16:40Chris Williamson?

  You just should and close the loop and that's fine. I describe myself as having a lifestyle wide praise kink.

• 2:16:53Chris Williamson?

  I respond well to encouragement. I respond really fucking well to encouragement. And this, again, there's two types of British people. There's British people who thrive on mutual piss taking. And there's British people that were meant to be American people. And I'm in the latter camp. You're a very enthusiastic country, right? You basically, you basically have permanent first line cocaine energy.

• 2:17:17Chris Williamson?

  That's what it is. That's it. I want to make enthusiasm great again and I want to re-export it back to the UK.

• 2:17:22Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:23Chris Williamson?

  Mega. And that, that, that was just something for me. That was a pathway for me. Hey, I'm happy to do the mutual piss-taking, sat around a table with my boys, but when it comes to really going for stuff, I much prefer to be around people that are like, yeah, you got this. Go and fucking crush it as opposed to gay. Like, the first one works for me. I've got tons of friends that are back home who, they don't care. It just doesn't factor. Piers Morgan had this conversation with Piers. He was like, I like the piss-taking. I'm like, Piers, that's because you've got a galactic ego and you need someone to keep your feet on the ground. That's fine. And that's good for you. Those of us that are a little bit more permanently unsure, for me, it's good. The encouragement thing's good. And that's very cringey in the UK.

• 2:18:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:04Chris Williamson?

  To export yourself to the US where that's kind of, that runs much more in the pioneer spirit. And I'm like, huh, it's okay for me to want that.

• 2:18:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:14Chris Williamson?

  It's okay for me to say that that's something that I like. It was okay for me when I was 27, 28, to go, I'm a club promoter who's going to stop drinking. Right? Like, that doesn't sound very revolutionary in the world of Athletic Brewing Co, N A beers, N A beer, you know, Heineken double zero bullshit. But.

• 2:18:36Mark Manson?

  I mean, in British culture.

• 2:18:37Chris Williamson?

  Culture. As a club promoter in 2016.

• 2:18:41Mark Manson?

  Sounds insane.

• 2:18:41Chris Williamson?

  That was, yeah, that was me inventing fire. And it, sometimes people can do stuff without anybody telling them that it's okay, but a lot of the time, that's what people are looking for. I'm worried about this thing happening and I'm scared. And someone will go, it's all right, man, you got this. Or maybe you don't, but you'll be all right anyway.

• 2:18:59Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:19:00Chris Williamson?

  I'm okay no matter what happens.

• 2:19:01Mark Manson?

  That too. I, I tend to notice this, I mean, it's, this is pretty proportional to age, right? Like, it's, young people, I feel like, need this reassurance all the time. I feel like as you get older, you just start realizing, you're like, nobody knows what the fuck they're doing.

• 2:19:16Chris Williamson?

  And no one was thinking about you anyway.

• 2:19:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah, nobody, yeah, exactly. Nobody's really gives a shit what you, what you decide.

• 2:19:23Mark Manson?

  It is, it is interesting. You know, the British culture thing, hearing you describe it, it, it, it just, it feel to me, as an American, it feels like the epitome of the, I'd rather be right than happy.

• 2:19:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:35Mark Manson?

  It's, um, or maybe it's like, I'd rather be snarky than happy. Like it's.

• 2:19:40Chris Williamson?

  Well, I'd, I'd rather be snarky than cringey and cringey as being enthusiastic.

• 2:19:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:44Chris Williamson?

  Because if you plant a flag in the ground and say, this is my position, you create a criteria for success, which also means you create a criteria for failure.

• 2:19:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:51Chris Williamson?

  And that means that if someone can snipe away at it, they can make you fail. But also that if you succeed, you leave them behind. So there's this wonderful difference between American people and British people. American people hope that you succeed in case you take them with you. And British people hope that you fail in case you leave them behind.

• 2:20:09Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 2:20:09Chris Williamson?

  And I wish it wasn't true. And it's not for everyone.

• 2:20:12Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:13Chris Williamson?

  But many of the people, like the, the UK had the second highest millionaire exits in 2024, behind China, but China's got like 13 times the population or something. It's insane how much bigger it is. So per capita, we lost the most millionaires by multiples. Why? It's not a very welcoming environment for people that want to do different things, that want to be innovative, that don't want to sort of follow that path. And it doesn't mean, matter about whether or not you want to be a fucking millionaire or not. But if you want to make a change to your lifestyle, or the way that you look, or the things that you think, or the culture that you're embedded in, or the way that you raise your kids, or whatever, it's just not that welcoming. And that's why we have the same number of universities in the top 10 globally, but American universities produce five times more entrepreneurs than

• 2:20:58Chris Williamson?

  British universities do. And remember that we have an international fucking cohort.

• 2:21:02Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:03Chris Williamson?

  So people come, get contorted by the culture and then leave with this veneer, this sort of varnish that's got on top of them.

• 2:21:13Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 2:21:14Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, it's a, it's an interesting one, dude. Look, I, I appreciate the fuck out of you. It's, it's fascinating to watch this, whatever we're in, some renaissance, I don't know whether it's a renaissance or a dark ages, um, that's, that's happening, but there's something, there's something sort of twisting and changing in this world. Personal growth, personal development. And I really fucking appreciate that you're there helping to steward it in whatever way you can.

• 2:21:40Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:40Chris Williamson?

  It's really cool.

• 2:21:41Mark Manson?

  Same, man.

• 2:21:42Chris Williamson?

  Thank you.

• 2:21:44Mark Manson?

  Cool. Thank you. What's where people go? Oh, uh, markmanson.net, solve podcast and purpose app free 7 day trial. Check it out. Mark Manson in your pocket, but without the touchy feely thing? Yeah. So it's, it's an AI that's, that's optimized to challenge you. So it's call, call you out on your bullshit, spot, blind spots, challenge your assumptions. Basically all the things like a good coach would do to help you grow instead of just, you know, kiss your ass, make you feel good. Unreal. Appreciate you, man. Until next time. Thanks.

• 2:22:18Speaker 02

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