269. Mark Manson: On Killing Your Dream, "The Subtle Art," Anxiety & Depression

The quickest way to kill a dream is to achieve it. That's how Mark Manson opened our conversation, and it hit me harder than I expected. We get into altitude sickness, the arrival fallacy, and why the one variable that predicts how long you live is the one I almost never hear talked about in the wellness world. CLICK HERE TO BECOME GARY’S VIP!: ⁠https://bit.ly/4ai0Xwg⁠ Get all Mark Manson’s books here: ⁠https://bit.ly/42sbr9q⁠ Listen to Mark Manson on all your favorite platforms! YouTube: ⁠https://bit.ly/4dBTDin⁠ Spotify: ⁠https://bit.ly/4tuGdJN⁠ Apple Podcasts: ⁠https://bit.ly/3PxcJgs⁠ Connect with Mark Manson Website: ⁠https://bit.ly/48ThxTZ⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://bit.ly/4dBTDin⁠ Instagram: ⁠https://bit.ly/4dkm5UK⁠ Facebook: ⁠https://bit.ly/4eFY8to⁠ TikTok: ⁠https://bit.ly/4ttiE46⁠ X: ⁠https://bit.ly/4dkmmHg⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://bit.ly/48TdZkw⁠ Thank you to our partners A-GAME: “ULTIMATE15” FOR 15% OFF: ⁠http://bit.ly/4kek1ij⁠ AION: “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: ⁠https://bit.ly/4h6KHAD⁠ AIRES: "ULTIMATE20 " FOR 20% OFF: ⁠https://bit.ly/4a3Duze⁠ BAJA GOLD: "ULTIMATE10" FOR 10% OFF: ⁠https://bit.ly/3WSBqUa⁠ BODYHEALTH: “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: ⁠http://bit.ly/4e5IjsV⁠ COLD LIFE: THE ULTIMATE HUMAN PLUNGE: ⁠https://bit.ly/4eULUKp⁠ CYMBIOTIKA: "ULTIMATE10" FOR 10% OFF: ⁠https://bit.ly/4tjyluP⁠ GENETIC METHYLATION TEST (UK ONLY): ⁠https://bit.ly/48QJJrk⁠ GENETIC TEST (USA ONLY): ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/3Yg1Uk9⁠ GOPUFF: GET YOUR FAVORITE SNACK!: ⁠https://bit.ly/4obIFDC⁠ H2TAB: “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: ⁠https://bit.ly/4hMNdgg⁠ HEALF: 10% OFF YOUR ORDER: ⁠https://bit.ly/41HJg6S⁠ PEPTUAL: “TUH10” FOR 10% OFF: ⁠https://bit.ly/4mKxgcn⁠ SNOOZE: LET’S GET TO SLEEP!: ⁠https://bit.ly/4pt1T6V⁠ WHOOP: JOIN & GET 1 FREE MONTH!: ⁠https://bit.ly/3VQ0nzW⁠ Watch the “Ultimate Human Podcast” every Tuesday & Thursday at 9AM EST: YouTube: ⁠https://bit.ly/3RPQYX8⁠ Podcasts: ⁠https://bit.ly/3RQftU0⁠ Connect with Gary Brecka Instagram: ⁠https://bit.ly/3RPpnFs⁠ TikTok: ⁠https://bit.ly/4coJ8fo⁠ X: ⁠https://bit.ly/3Opc8tf⁠ Facebook: ⁠https://bit.ly/464VA1H⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://bit.ly/4hH7Ri2⁠ Website: ⁠https://bit.ly/4eLDbdU⁠ Merch: ⁠https://bit.ly/4aBpOM1⁠ Newsletter: ⁠https://bit.ly/47ejrws⁠ Ask Gary: ⁠https://bit.ly/3PEAJuG⁠ Timestamps 00:00 - Introduction 01:03 - Mark Manson on the show 02:25 - Outsider years and meeting his wife in Sao Paulo 04:35 - The arrival fallacy and altitude sickness 07:40 - Why nobody wants to hear a successful person complain 09:38 - Gary's bankruptcy, divorce, and the day he took radical responsibility 13:18 - Fault versus responsibility (the part most people get wrong) 15:41 - Cymbiotika NAD ad read 16:45 - Tony Robbins, the five-second pause, and self-awareness 18:40 - What ego actually is (Freud's framework) 21:53 - Accurate ego versus delusional ego 22:33 - Marriage, ecosystems, and signing up for everything 24:25 - How to start the journey of introspection 26:51 - Try on beliefs like jeans 29:01 - The dad-bod study and the 80/90% gender split 31:20 - Why people refuse to accept other perspectives 34:05 - Harvard longevity, blue zones, and the relationship variable 38:31 - Why biohackers skip the relationship hack 39:52 - Relationship quality as a set of teachable skills 47:50 - Anxiety as a crisis of hope 54:16 - Cold Life filtered showerhead ad read 55:01 - Young entrepreneurs and the belief problem 58:39 - Why Gary built the Ultimate Human platform with no expectations 01:01:37 - Caregiver syndrome and autoimmune disease in women 01:07:18 - Finding versus cultivating purpose 01:14:18 - The genetic baseline of happiness 01:19:02 - John Gottman on recurring fights and what every happy couple has 01:21:53 - Where to find Mark 01:22:20 - What does it mean to you to be an Ultimate Human? Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not provide medical advice. It is not intended for diagnosing or treating any health condition. Always consult a licensed healthcare professional before making health or wellness decisions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The quickest way to kill a dream is to achieve it. People who achieve a big dream, the problem is, is they wake up the next day and they don't know what to hope for anymore. And so anxiety sets in, depression sets in.

• 0:09Gary Brecka?

  You've called anxiety a crisis of hope. It must be something endemic in society that's causing people to feel anxiety.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  We've become a society of people that they don't really know what to hope for. I think so much of it is just rooted in an inability to investigate the reality of what our assumptions are.

• 0:27Gary Brecka?

  Us setting the wrong expectation and being let down because we framed an unexpected outcome. And when it doesn't happen, we're let down.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  To really be psychologically well adjusted and stable, you need something in your life that you wake up and you're like, I'm excited for that.

• 0:43Gary Brecka?

  What are the exercises that help you honestly look at yourself?

• 0:47Speaker 00

  What it took me a little while to realize is that.

• 1:03Gary Brecka?

  We spend a lot of time on this show talking about longevity, biohacking, performance, and how to optimize the human body. But there's another side to human performance that people don't talk about enough. Your mindset, your meaning, your relationships, and the internal patterns that quietly determine the quality of your life. Today, I'm joined by Mark Manson, bestselling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F. And this conversation goes deep into burnout after success, the arrival fallacy, radical responsibility, ego, anxiety, and why the pursuit of a better life often starts with brutal honesty. If you want to understand what really drives fulfillment, not just achievement, this is the one episode you're going to want to watch all the way through to the end. Mark, welcome to the show.

• 1:47Gary Brecka?

  Hey, guys. Welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecka, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And today's guest is kind of one of those in-between guests. I'm actually really excited to run this podcast. He just met my parents and some of my staff outside, and we started a mini podcast in the kitchen before we got in here. But my wife is an enormous consumer of his content. My team has read all of his books. I think you're going to find today's podcast so insightful, so helpful. Welcome to the podcast, Mark Manson.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

• 2:25Gary Brecka?

  I'm pumped that you're here. You know, there's a. Kind of an interesting theme that runs through a lot of my podcast guests, and I don't think that you're very different. I find that the most impactful people, like the people that are really moving the needle, that are the most passionate, the most driven and making the greatest impact, have solved some kind of problem in their life. And, you know, when I was looking back over your life and your history and some of your content, you know, you didn't have a particularly easy time when you were younger.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 3:01Gary Brecka?

  And I don't want to mischaracterize it, but you almost felt like an outsider in your teens. And you had a lot of what I would call typical traumatic events that so many people watching this podcast have grown up with, you know, divorced parents, didn't really feel you fit in in school, moved around a lot, financial struggles. And then sort of just went on your own personal journey of becoming this global nomad for a while, which I found really fascinating, which is how you met your wife, right? I mean, had you not done that, which is, it's always like so fascinating because, you know, here was this just global nomadism going on where you're trying to figure out life

• 3:45Gary Brecka?

  and you meet your wife, you know, just randomly. What was it, nightclub in Prague, I think?

• 3:51Speaker 00

  Sao Paulo, Brazil.

• 3:52Gary Brecka?

  Sao Paulo, Brazil, yeah. At first she rejected him, but he reeled her back in. But what's even more fascinating to me is after you wrote New York Times bestselling book, which is right here on the table, and sold more than 20 million copies, had achieved a level of socioeconomic success, probably also personal success, you kind of arrived. That's when you hit the burnout phase.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:21Gary Brecka?

  And I believe that this happens to more of us than will actually admit that. And I wondered if you just unpacked that for my audience.

• 4:32Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  It's a great place to start because it's, I think it's something that surprises people. And like you said, it doesn't get talked about a whole lot. And I think some of it too is that people don't like hearing it, right? Because I think people who are on the ascent, who are climbing their personal mountain or chasing their goals and dreams, they don't like hearing that reaching the top might actually be problematic in certain ways. So to kind of-

• 5:03Gary Brecka?

  Call it the arrival fallacy sometimes, right?

• 5:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the best name I've heard for it, and you are correct that this is actually a prevalent thing, but very few people talk about it, but I'll get to that in a minute. The best name that I've heard from it, the best name that I've heard of it is, came from Quincy Jones. Will Smith relayed this to me, he said that Quincy Jones used to call it altitude sickness, where he said that people who climb too quickly, they get sick and they sabotage themselves to come down the mountain.

• 5:31Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. So to quickly kind of summarize what you were just describing, like, you know, I was kind of this vagabond nomad, happy-go-lucky guy, living in Argentina, living in Thailand, running a blog, not a whole lot of cares in the world, right? And with some dreams and aspirations of becoming a writer and kind of revolutionizing the personal development space and self-help space. And what happened when The Subtle or Not Giving a Fuck came out is that basically all of the dreams that I had had up until, say, age 30, came true within about a six month period of time.

• 6:13Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  And at first it was absolutely amazing, right? It's like, all right, let's crack the champagne open, let's take a trip, take the wife to Paris, like, let's really celebrate and enjoy this. But very quickly, I'd say within a month or two, a pretty deep depression started to set in. And what made it worse was that I wasn't expecting it. I was like, struggling to get out of bed every morning, and I'm sitting there, I'm telling myself, I'm like, this is the best thing that's ever happened to me.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  I'm killing it. I'm like, my book is everywhere. I'm getting invited to all these amazing places. Sixty countries. I mean, it's astounding the level of success. And, and yet I'm like, I'm feeling lost. And what it took me a little while to realize is that, you know, once you achieve, probably the quickest way to kill a dream is to achieve it. Cause once you've achieved it and you wake up the next day and you're still the smelly, insecure guy that you were the day before you achieved it, and you still have to take out the trash in the morning, and you still have a stupid argument with your wife about something, and you still are worried about, you know, what your friends think of you. You realize that, that, okay, this thing that I've been chasing

• 7:29Speaker 00

  for decades, it didn't actually change anything. It didn't fix anything. All of my problems are still the same. And that is, I think there's just this, this feeling of, of loss of like, I don't know what to do anymore. Like this is, I literally did the best thing I knew how to do in this world. Yeah. And it didn't fix my problems. And, and it's interesting because as time went on, you know, I think the worst part about the altitude sickness is that you don't really feel at liberty to tell people, right? So it's like, when you go see friends and family, everybody's like, oh my God, things are, this is amazing. If you had a big exit, you can't like bitch about it, you know? Exactly. And you just sell your company for? Nobody wants to hear it.

• 8:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, nobody wants to hear you cry about it. And, and it's so you feel like you kind of have to keep up appearances of like, oh yeah, this, it's amazing. Things are great. I'm so excited. And it's funny because I, you, you mentioned the exit. So I had a friend in New York who was a co-founder of a very large unicorn startup and had exited for nine figures and also had not been working, had been kind of lost for a year or two. And it's funny because I, a few months later, I, I ran into him and he was like, so how are you doing? And I said, oh, things are good, you know, things, you know, it's pretty crazy what's going on with the book and everything. And he's like,

• 8:53Speaker 00

  yeah, but how are you doing? And I'm like, well, you know, I'm like getting by and, and. And he just looked at me and he's like, it's rough, isn't it? I was like, you know, and he's like, dude, I exited two years ago. I still like, I don't know what to do when I get up in the morning.

• 9:11Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  You know, it's, um, I think when you realize when like, when your young money motivates everything,

• 9:21Speaker 00

  success motivates everything, status motivates everything. And then once you achieve those things, you, for the first time in your life, you have to ask yourself, what's worth pursuing simply for the sake of pursuing it? And, um, and that's actually a very hard question to answer.

• 9:38Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, you know, um, I, I had a tipping point in my life and I've never really thoroughly unpacked it and examined it, but, um, you know, for 20 years I was a mortality expert for, for a large life insurance companies. And we were, we were attempting to predict mortality to the month and it was some of the most accurate science in the world. And at that time, um, like most people, I was in the pursuit of happiness. But happiness was a destination that I was going to arrive at some point. And I was sort of willing to be miserable and tolerated because I had framed this sort of destination in my mind.

• 10:18Gary Brecka?

  But realizing after 10 years, I was no closer to achieving this level of, I guess, socioeconomic success or, you know, um, financial freedom. And it was all that I thought about and all that I obsessed about. And, and I wasn't present for a lot of that timeframe in my life. And a lot of things went really wrong. I had a divorce, I had a bankruptcy, I had several failed partnerships. I had several failed businesses and I always felt like the victim. I was like, man, I have a really shitty partner. Man, I just picked the wrong spouse. You know, we grew apart. I got really screwed in this deal. I can't believe that I hired

• 11:00Gary Brecka?

  that manager. It's a terrible manager. And I do remember the day where I was just sitting in silence and just kind of exhausted. And I realized that I was exactly where I was in my life because of the sum of all my own choices. And I had no self-help motivational guru helped me get there. This was just this sort of really internal realization. Started to tap back into my faith a little bit. And I just took radical responsibility for everything. And I was like, you know, I can see why divorce is my fault. I can actually see why I ended

• 11:40Gary Brecka?

  up in bankruptcy. I can see why that partnership went wrong because I acted like an asshole. And it was both a very difficult point in my life, but a very liberating time, too. And it was very shortly after that that I just quit that industry and started a functional wellness clinic without even being a doctor. And that was the first time I did something without even having a plan. Like, I didn't have any expectation for it. I didn't have this dream of success. And now that I look back, like, it's, you know, from the outside looking in, that's been the most successful that part of my life from then, at least socioeconomically and impact wise. And I haven't really unpacked like, what I did, or how

• 12:25Gary Brecka?

  I got to that point, or why it was so impactful to me. And, you know, a lot of what you talk about, I actually wrote one of these down, the muscle of radical self-honesty. And I wonder if you'd unpack that, too, because I think if people had a mechanism to

• 12:46Gary Brecka?

  Stand up and go through these kinds of realizations. I think instead of letting 10 or 20 years just kind of slip by.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 12:54Gary Brecka?

  And they could get a hold of it now and do something about it.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  I think it's what it sounds like happened in your case. And this happens to a lot of us is at a certain point, you look back on all of your failures and failed relationships and realize they only had one thing in common, right?

• 13:10Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, you.

• 13:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like you can't dance around. You can dance around that for a year, you know, maybe a few years.

• 13:19Gary Brecka?

  Feeling when you internalize it too.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  But once you get like 10, 20 years in, it's like, okay, I can't pretend this is not the common thread through all of these. It is funny, I think people, there's a natural reluctance to accept responsibility and ownership because I think people tend to confuse responsibility with blame, right? So it's, and a lot of this just, I think, comes with the way we're raised and maybe the legal system, but like the idea is that if I'm responsible for my failure, that means it's my fault. That means I'm a failure or I'm a loser in some way. There's like some moral judgment that should come down on me. But interestingly, like I think the faults and responsibility are actually two different things.

• 14:05Speaker 00

  And while they can sometimes happen together, they can actually happen independently as well. Like the example I use in my book is that, you know, if you wake up one morning and somebody has left a newborn infant on your doorstep, it's not your fault that that infant is there, but you are absolutely responsible now.

• 14:22Gary Brecka?

  Right, right, yeah.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  Like you have to take care of this situation.

• 14:27Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  Or like if, you know, if I walk across the street after this podcast and I get hit by a car, it's not my fault I got hit by a car. But it's my responsibility to recover and it's my responsibility to go to PT and get the appropriate surgeries and take care of my body and make sure I'm rested, you know? So it's, we have a tendency to assume that if it's not our fault and it's not our responsibility and oh, don't accept responsibility because then that's going to mean it's your fault. And then you're, that means there's something wrong with you. And.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  The liberation of responsibility actually comes from what you just described is the the recognition that you are making a choice in each and every moment of your life. Whether you realize it or not, like even not making a choice is a choice that you are making in every moment of your life. So it's every moment that arises, you have an opportunity to choose where your attention goes, how you react to a situation, how you're going to move forward, how you're going to see something, what the story that you're going to tell yourself is. And when you take ownership and responsibility in every moment, you are now allowing yourself to control those reactions and control those narratives that you create for yourself.

• 15:41Gary Brecka?

  If you know me, you know, I don't recommend anything I haven't personally tested. That's not a marketing line. That's just how I operate. I've been on the road my entire career, different time zones, brutal schedules, no margin for days off. And so I'm constantly testing what actually works in my own body. NAD was something I keep coming back to. It's the molecule your cells use to produce energy and repair, and it declines faster than most people realize. When I found symbiotica's liposomal NAD, the absorption technology is what got my attention. I tested it. I felt it. And it's been in my bag ever since. I'm always evolving what I put in my body, and this one has stayed on the list. I'm genuinely excited for you to experience it. This is the standard we hold every product to before it even reaches you. Now, let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast.

• 16:25Gary Brecka?

  Is that just about like drawing yourself to the present and just being more aware of like, how am I feeling, what's coming at me right now? Like Tony Robbins talks about shifting your state or taking a pause. Like he says, five seconds will change everything. You just pause five seconds before you react to the situation.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  I think a lot of it is that kind of self-awareness. Because I think a lot of so many people are, you know, you're in autopilot so much of your life. And so yeah, taking that pause, checking in with yourself, what am I feeling right now? What are my assumptions in this situation? It's, there's an immense amount of value in that. And then I think it's like anything, the more you practice doing that, the more automatic it becomes, the more you start to recognize in each and every moment of like, okay, well, I'm bringing some assumptions to this argument. Or, you know, or, oh, I have a tendency to be defensive in these sorts of situations. So maybe I should, you know, take a step back and consider if I'm doing that again.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  And honestly, like this is, so the interesting thing is like this kind of separation between, you know, event and reaction, this gap that opens up. Like this is what pretty much every personal growth or mental health intervention is designed to do, right? Whether it's therapy, right? Like a therapist is sitting you down, stopping you and saying, what were you feeling in that moment? Why did you respond that way? What was the assumption when you responded that way? Whether it's meditation, right? Focus on your internal feeling, focus on what emotions are arising, where did this come from? What's the thought that's arising? Where did that thought come from? Who's inventing that thought?

• 18:11Speaker 00

  All of these are just techniques, journaling is another one, right? Like going back through your day and kind of like thinking about why did I make this decision? Or what was I feeling at this moment? These are all ways of just kind of creating that that five second gap that you just talked about, right? So the next time something happens, you're not just instantly reacting, you're actually able to stop, focus, kind of assess the situation and, you know, bring a little bit of wisdom to it.

• 18:41Gary Brecka?

  Is that the ego that is taking over? Because, you know, we talk about how the ego is so, can be so damaging.

• 18:48Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:49Gary Brecka?

  Right? And we can actually just steal years from your life, you know, insulating itself, protecting itself, not wanting bright light to be shown on it.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:59Gary Brecka?

  And, and I think a lot of people don't recognize how, how powerful that is in a negative sense.

• 19:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's, so ego's a funny thing because it's, the way it's used in popular terms, I think is, it's often a misnomer.

• 19:15Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  Right? So everybody's like, oh, that guy's got such a big ego, like.

• 19:19Gary Brecka?

  Like Donald Trump has a big ego. He's like, we dropped the most beautiful bomb. No one could drop a bomb as beautiful as I am. I'm the only person in the world. There's definitely an ego there.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  There's definitely a lot of ego there. The funny thing about the ego, though, so like if you actually go back to Freud and like, look at what his framework is.

• 19:37Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  Basically, what Freud said is he's like, there's two conflicting, there's kind of an inherent tension in all of us, right? So there's our animalistic impulses and urges and desires. It's just these like very, these subconscious wants.

• 19:54Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  And then there's social expectations, rules, norms, culture, judgments from other people. And those two things are often in conflict. And so the original theory was that the ego arises as a way to negotiate between those two sides. Right? So it's like, I, I have a desire to, I don't know, like,

• 20:19Speaker 00

  like go, go eat an entire birthday cake by myself. But like, I'm gonna feel sick and I'm gonna miss this podcast and I'm gonna like, I'm not gonna be present for the work I need to do tomorrow and, and it's gonna be like a whole mess. And so you develop kind of these, these narratives and beliefs about yourself of like, okay, I'm not the type of person who does that. So like when you tell yourself like, I'm not the type of person who just eats half a cake. Cause I feel like it. That's ego, right? That's self-definition. That is deciding who you are and building an identity for yourself. Where ego goes wrong is where, is when ego starts to become inaccurate,

• 21:03Speaker 00

  like an inaccurate reflection of reality. So generally what we refer to as people with a big ego is people who have beliefs or have, self-identify in a way that is just completely false or wrong. Right? So it's like if I, if I was a huge asshole to your whole team and then I came on this podcast and told you I was the nicest person in the world.

• 21:26Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Speaker 00

  That's somebody we would call someone with ego, a big ego, right? So the misnomer here isn't that you should get rid of your ego. It's that you need to have an accurate ego. You have to have a clear, your ego should actually reflect your real behaviors, your real thoughts, your real feelings. Because if you delude yourself and convince yourself of a bunch of stuff that's not true, not only are you going to make yourself suffer, but you're going to make other people suffer.

• 21:53Gary Brecka?

  And so how does, how do people just draw awareness to that? I find like a lot of your content so refreshing, like, you know, 10 years of therapy in 10 minutes and, you know, I've, I've, I've, and I've, and I've watched that several times because it, it made me realize partially why I'm so happy in my current relationship and why we had become different people in my previous relationship. And a lot of it was so poignant and so, so refreshing. Part of what you talked about was how when you're in a relationship, especially a marriage, you're not just signing up for that person and your interaction between yourselves.

• 22:36Gary Brecka?

  You're signing up for everything, their entire ecosystem, right? Their, the time they go to bed, their, their, their, their sleep patterns, you know, their-

• 22:46Speaker 00

  Their family.

• 22:46Gary Brecka?

  Their family.

• 22:47Speaker 00

  Their childhood baggage, like it, it all comes with their financial beliefs, their religious beliefs, like it all, it's all a package.

• 22:55Gary Brecka?

  And you don't, you don't run into those things until, I mean, you can be 10 years deep and start and still be. I, I will say I'm, I am the most deeply content that I've ever been in my adult lifetime. Amazing spouse, Sage, I'm like obsessed with her. I watch her sleep, I love her so much. I mean, I love this woman and, and we spend probably 50 or 60% of our time just laughing at each other.

• 23:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:23Gary Brecka?

  Who, you know, we, we really get each other's. You know, sense of humor and, and I, I was an only child, so I didn't have spouses growing up. So I, I tend to act like a brother to my wife and like tease her like a sister, just to push her buttons, see how far I can take things. But she, she knows that about me. It's, it's just a great, you know, dynamic. But, you know, back to the ego and these, these realizations. So how does somebody wants to go on this journey of introspection? How, how do they start? Like, because like you, I'm, I'm not a fan of just all of these, this self-help motivational guidance that seems to be endless. And, you know, it has to, you have to have it

• 24:08Gary Brecka?

  with you your entire lifetime. Yeah. You know, I, I love philosophically how you approach, like you can fix something and then you don't need me anymore. Right. I don't need to be your therapist for 20 years. Yep. What I need to do is come in and fix this problem and, and sort of off you go. By the way, before I answer that, I want to, I want to say, I'm happy you're bringing this up. And, and I'm happy, I'm happy I'm here in general, just because

• 24:34Speaker 00

  I'm happy you're here too. And so is Malia is the happiest that you're here right now.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  Cause, cause we were talking in your kitchen. I, I, and we could get into my health journey at some point, if you want, cause it's, I'm a, I'm a latecomer to, to this whole train that, that you've been driving. And, and it's, as someone who's, who's been consuming a lot of content in, in your industry, a lot of your content and a lot of other people, I get frustrated at how much relationships aren't talked about because it's as someone who has gone deep on the, on the psychological side, like the number one outcome driver in terms of wellbeing, both psychological and physical is the quality of relationships. There's so much research around, you know, chronic stress, anxiety, depression.

• 25:23Speaker 00

  I think it's people who are depressed are twice as likely to have heart disease. There's research showing that people in happy marriages, actually their wounds heal faster. So like, there's just all of this amazing research around social quality, relationship quality. And I feel like it doesn't get talked about.

• 25:42Gary Brecka?

  You know, and I think the reason for that is like, we're biohackers.

• 25:46Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 25:47Gary Brecka?

  And we don't know how to biohack.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  How do you measure that?

• 25:50Gary Brecka?

  And what I will tell you without naming any names.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:53Gary Brecka?

  Some of the people I hold in the highest regard, I mean, some of the most intellectually dominant figures in this industry that are mentors of mine, I've read multiple books of theirs, have the worst relationships.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:08Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. And have had multiple failed relationships. And I would love to unpack that.

• 26:15Speaker 00

  To me, yeah, I mean, as a fan and a consumer, that feels like the elephant in the room to me. When I, when I like watch podcasts and read, read these books and things like that. But yeah, so I'm back to your question, I'm glad, I'm glad we're getting into this. You know, the first step, we already talked about kind of developing that awareness, right? So it's like, okay, what, what's the story I'm telling myself here? What, how am I defining myself? You know, I, I think I'm a nice guy. What if I'm not a nice guy? What if, what if I, what if I'm, what if I'm actually more impulsive than I, I think I am? I think the core practice here is to look at your beliefs about the world in general, but primarily about yourself.

• 26:59Speaker 00

  What are the things that you assume to be true about yourself? And what if they were wrong? What if, and, and I think of it, I always tell people, I'm like, try on beliefs like, like you try on a pair of jeans, you know? It's like, see if it fits. See if it feels comfortable. See what it, how you look in the mirror when you, when you try it on. You know, so it's like, try on that idea. What, what if you aren't a nice guy? And you've just been telling yourself, right? Sit with that for 10 minutes and, and like actually go through your life and, and ask yourself, what, what would that mean? What, how would that explain my relationships differently? How would that explain how I approach people differently? And what you might find is like, Oh, that fits better than what I had before.

• 27:43Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  You know, and it's that becomes kind of that moment of realization. And so I kind of coming back to the self honesty piece. I think so much of the the stress and anxiety in our lives is purely driven from an inaccurate view of ourselves and an inaccurate view of the world. We've adopted beliefs. We we think the world should be a somewhat. We think the world should be a certain way. We think we are a certain way. And these things aren't true. And so we spend so much of our time and energy and effort trying to square the circle, so to speak, right? Like tying our brain in knots, rationalizing, you know?

• 28:26Speaker 00

  Oh, well, my my business partner, you know, he was just really selfish and like, I should have hired a better manager, right?

• 28:31Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. I did that for years.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  Right. It's like, no, there was actually, there was a personal failure going on. There was a there was a blind spot in yourself that you weren't seeing. And so I I think so much of this stuff, you know, there's all this talk about the mental health crisis and the anxiety crisis and all the kids are freaking out and all this stuff. And it's I think so much of it is just rooted in an inability to kind of investigate the reality of what our assumptions are.

• 29:01Gary Brecka?

  I I find that very refreshing. In fact, I've heard you talk about an experiment where this guy had before and after pictures and he got in really, really, really good shape.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 29:14Gary Brecka?

  And they showed these before and after images to a large audience of men and women. And the men all picked the, you know, image of the guy when he was jacked, not when he had the dad bod.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:28Gary Brecka?

  And and then the vast majority of the women picked the image of the guy when he still had the dad bod. And and the way that you explained and rationalized, it just made so much sense because you were like, you know, they looked at this figure and said, he doesn't actually look like he'd be that much fun.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:45Gary Brecka?

  He's probably gonna leave the party at nine o'clock. He's probably getting up at six in the morning to work out.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  He's not gonna eat anything.

• 29:50Gary Brecka?

  He's not gonna, he's not gonna have birthday cake at my niece's birthday party.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:54Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I don't know if I want to sign up for that level of like, discipline. The other dude looks like he'd be a fricking joy to hang out with.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  A blast, yeah.

• 30:02Gary Brecka?

  And I'm gonna spend time with him. And I I thought that reframing was was really interesting.

• 30:08Gary Brecka?

  And I think it shocked me a little bit because I mean intuitively, I probably would have gravitated through the same thing.

• 30:15Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 30:16Gary Brecka?

  It's not to say that not taking care of yourselves is a good idea.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  But it's funny, it's, yeah, so it was a post, it was, and I actually, it was funny because I think it was a coach who posted a before and after picture of a client. And he like made a kind of a joke of like, look out ladies, you know, this guy's coming or whatever. And then a bunch of women replied saying, I prefer in the before.

• 30:40Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 30:41Speaker 00

  And then a bunch of guys replied to that saying, you're lying, that's impossible.

• 30:44Gary Brecka?

  Exactly.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  So then they ran the poll and it turned out, yeah, like 80, 90% of the women prefer the dad bod and 80, 90% of the men prefer the like the chiseled jack guy. And it's just, it's interesting because I think it's reflective of like how people come to the same experience with a completely different lens, right? As, you know, the women were coming to it of like, who's, who's, how am I going to feel around this person? Whereas the men were coming to it as like, how reliable and disciplined is this person? Right? And it's, the men admire the reliability, the discipline, the ability to achieve an extremely difficult goal.

• 31:19Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 31:20Speaker 00

  Whereas the women are like, but yeah, am I gonna, am I gonna feel bad around him? Is he gonna be fun? Is he gonna like pay attention and, you know, be present if I'm, want to do something with him, you know? And it's, it's, again, it's just that it's an example, and of course, you know, both sides seem completely incapable of like accepting that there was another perspective out there. But it's, it's another case of, you know, just reevaluating our own assumptions about things and, and being flexible with them, you know? Like it's understanding that, I think that that's another piece about the ego thing, that it's, it's not just that your ego needs to kind of reflect reality, you need to have a flexible ego.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  You need to be able, you need to be willing to change your mind on things. And, and I think it's, so much of our stress is originates in that rigidity of, no, it has to be this way.

• 32:17Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 32:18Speaker 00

  That guy is a six pack, he has to be attractive.

• 32:20Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  Because I want a six pack.

• 32:22Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 32:23Speaker 00

  It's like, well.

• 32:25Speaker 00

  Maybe those things aren't true and maybe you don't need a six pack.

• 32:28Gary Brecka?

  Right. Hey guys, let me tell you about one of my favorite new hydration drinks. Now, this is for distance athletes, HIIT's cardio exercisers, people that sweat a lot or exercise intensely. And A Game is a hydration drink. It has eight essential vitamins, it has all of the electrolytes, the entire suite of B vitamins. Before you freak out and read that it has 21 grams of sugar, which it does, the sugar is coming from natural cane sugar and honey. My preferred mechanisms for getting glucose into the blood during intense exercise. It also has natural flavors, but these natural flavors don't come from bacterial fermentation. They actually come from real citrus fruits and the color is from vegetable juice, not artificial dyes. So, next time you're looking for a great hydration drink and you're exercising intensely, A Game is your choice.

• 33:12Gary Brecka?

  Now, let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I want to get back into the relationship thing, but you know, there's, when you talk about the, you know, research on longevity cardiovascular disease, first of all, I completely agree with you. If you look at big meta-analyses and blue zone data, real longevity data,

• 33:33Gary Brecka?

  there is a common thread that is a non-negotiable in all of these blue zones and the big meta-analyses. And that is this sense of community and connection. And, but I don't think we really define that. Yeah. Right? And, you know, one of the longest running studies ever done in longevity, Harvard Longevity Study, it said the number one predictor of lifespan was the quality of your relationships. Yeah.

• 34:07Gary Brecka?

  And yet, you're right, we don't spend a lot of time talking about it. And I think a lot of it is because, and this is a question for you,

• 34:14Gary Brecka?

  we don't really know how to define connection. Yeah. Like, what is it really, what does it really mean? Like, you know, I wake up every morning and I go to my son's house and there's like a group of guys that, you know, we work out, we go through this intense workout together and...

• 34:31Gary Brecka?

  And it's my favorite part of the day.

• 34:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:33Gary Brecka?

  And it's, and it kinda sucks during the workout, but.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:36Gary Brecka?

  I do feel that sense of community and connection, but maybe you could unpack that for us.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  I, I do think this is at the heart.

• 34:43Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  Of the issue. There's a thing in psychology called the legibility bias, which is that we tend to focus on things that are easily measurable and counted. And we tend to focus less on things that are kind of intangible and like difficult to define.

• 35:03Gary Brecka?

  Legibility bias, I gotta.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  And so it's, so it kinda makes sense, right? Like if you, let's say you're really getting into longevity and health and you really want to start optimizing things in your life. Well, there's this whole nebulous area of relationships and community and feeling socially connected. And it's like, well, what does that mean?

• 35:22Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 35:23Speaker 00

  Or I can test 500 milligrams of magnesium versus 300 and see how I feel.

• 35:28Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I can look at these 58 biomarkers and I can try to move them.

• 35:32Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 35:32Gary Brecka?

  Which is kind of the world I live in, right?

• 35:34Speaker 00

  Right, right. And there's tons of value in that and it's, but, and it's part of the value is that you, you get that measurement, right?

• 35:40Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 35:40Speaker 00

  So you can see, you can experiment, you can get the outcome, you can start optimizing and you know, all this stuff. On the relationship and the social connection side, it's, it's much more difficult because ultimately it's subjective, right? Like maybe you feel completely connected and loved with, you know, six people really close to you. Maybe I don't feel connected and loved unless I have 10 people close to me or whatever. You know, some people like to have a few really strong relationships. Some people want to have many, many, many social connections and want to be able to see a lot of people at different times. So everybody's a little bit different.

• 36:21Speaker 00

  A lot of it has to do also with your relationship with yourself. So what you see consistently is that people who.

• 36:30Speaker 00

  Feel a lot of shame, negativity towards themselves, low self-esteem. They have trouble feeling safe and secure in a social relationship or a romantic relationship. And so even though they might have a marriage and kids and tons of friends around them, they still feel alone. So it is, it's, it is difficult to measure. It's difficult to track. I mean, you can't, you can put numbers on it like the Harvard study did. You can, but it's short of just kind of, you know, tracking things like mood, life satisfaction, psychological wellbeing, you know, emotional volatility. These are all self-report metrics, right?

• 37:13Speaker 00

  And so you're literally just either going to people and asking them from a scale from one to 10, how loved and accepted do you feel this week?

• 37:21Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, that's, and most people have never, you know, even considered that.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. And it's, and you can do this with yourself as well. You know, there are a lot of mood tracking apps and things and you can, you can actually start identifying like a lot of interesting variables if you track your mood over a long period of time. But yeah, it's, I think this is why it gets overlooked

• 37:43Speaker 00

  in, in the longevity and health conversation quite a bit, just because it's like, how do you measure it?

• 37:48Gary Brecka?

  How do you measure it? And like, what are the, what are the ways to hack it?

• 37:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, right.

• 37:53Gary Brecka?

  Right? I mean, we have, we have ways to hack detoxification, fat loss, muscle building. You know, we got peptides for this and peptides for that. And, and you know, the vast majority of these things work. But hacking our relationships. And when I see my peers that are, you know, in, in struggling with very difficult relationships,

• 38:15Gary Brecka?

  because it's the one area where we haven't really developed, you know, good hacks. Like, you know, everybody in our industry is waking up in the morning, getting sunlight in their eyes. Right? The data's in on that. And so every one of us would be easy to put a hit on because within 30 minutes of waking, we're all outside.

• 38:31Speaker 00

  And meanwhile, they don't talk to their wife until 12:00 PM.

• 38:34Gary Brecka?

  Exactly. And, and, and that's why I'm so, I was so excited to have you on today because I find what you talk about so refreshing. I feel like I accidentally figured it out with my current spouse. Uh, hey, you know, because I'm, I'm, I'm in the place where I think people would would love to be with their relationships. But if you're not there, how do you go about doing it?

• 39:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:02Gary Brecka?

  What are the hacks? I mean, or what are the, what, what, what are the exercises that you go through very specifically? Like, you know, should I sit down with my spouse and say, hey, what are your non-negotiables? And here's my non-negotiables. I mean, should we open that conversation? Like, and so did deepen the relationships that we have. Um, because I don't think connection comes from the time you spend around people. I think it comes from the time that you are actually connected.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:29Gary Brecka?

  With them.

• 39:29Speaker 00

  It's quality.

• 39:30Gary Brecka?

  You know, there, there are a lot of houses, houses full of husbands and wives and kids that don't really know each other.

• 39:37Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 39:38Gary Brecka?

  Right? Um, they coexist.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  Right.

• 39:40Gary Brecka?

  It's more of like a cohabit, cohabitating place where the others, there's a dependency. Um, but I don't know that they're really, you know, they've really woven that fabric.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. I, I think it's, the way I would characterize it is that it's, it's primarily a skills issue. I, I think it's useful to, to see relationship quality as the output of developing certain skills. So we've already talked about self-awareness, being, being able to kind of question yourself, humble yourself, look at blind spots. You know, I would, I would describe that as one fundamental skill of relationship quality, mental health. I would say another one is quality of communication, which is what you're getting at. And it's funny because it's, it's, it's, it's super cliche, right? It's like, oh, married couples, they've got to communicate, you know?

• 40:33Speaker 00

  And it's, again, it's not, it's not just about sharing information. It's about. It's about intent and empathizing with the other person. It's understanding their values. It's understanding, you know, not just what happened at work today, but how do they feel about what happened at work today? How does that relate to, you know, the thing that they, maybe they've been insecure about the past couple of years, checking in with them about it, having that slightly uncomfortable conversation of, of, you know, oh, wow, it's, it's, that sucks that your boss said that to you. Like, how does that feel given that you're unsure in this new, in this new role or whatever? You know, so it's like seeing the conversation underneath the conversation,

• 41:16Speaker 00

  empathizing with the emotion, addressing it directly, and then, and then being comfortable, you know, kind of playing in that more vulnerable space. That's absolutely another skill. Ironically, I would say the responsibility piece comes back into play here because what you see in a lot of unhealthy relationships, I would actually characterize quote unquote, a toxic relationship as two people who chronically don't take responsibility for themselves and/or try to take responsibility for the other person. So it's, we come full circle a little bit here and that.

• 41:51Gary Brecka?

  Try to fix them.

• 41:52Speaker 00

  Exactly. When you see a dysfunctional couple, almost all, in every single case, at least one of the person is trying to take ownership and responsibility for the other person's feelings and actions. They're saying, oh, no, no, no, let me tell you how to do, fix this in your life. Oh, no, you're angry, let me, it's your, it's your fault that I'm angry. You shouldn't have said that, right? It's like, these things are all, uh, it's a relinquishing of responsibility over my own actions and emotions and understanding that my wife's actions and emotions are her responsibility. And so we can come together and communicate with them, right? It's like, I can come to my wife and say, hey, when you said that, like, I got pretty upset. Let's talk about, you know, why that happened.

• 42:36Speaker 00

  You know, I appreciate if you didn't do that again. Versus like.

• 42:39Gary Brecka?

  Appreciate if you didn't do that again.

• 42:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, versus like, you made me angry, you're such a bitch, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? It's like, what's subcommunicated in that latter accusation is that it, my anger, or my anger is your responsibility. So don't do that again.

• 42:55Gary Brecka?

  Wow. And, and how much of this is us? Setting the wrong expectation and being let down because we framed an unexpected outcome. And when it doesn't happen, we're let down, you know, because, um, you know, in, in the infrequent times where, you know, Sage and I have disagreement, it's usually because, um, at least from my perspective that I've, I've set an expectation for how she should behave.

• 43:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:28Gary Brecka?

  That is not anywhere in line. It's, there's no basis for me to do that.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:34Gary Brecka?

  Like, um, like we have, you know, I have, uh, invited a bunch of guests over to the house that I didn't tell her we're coming and they're there.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:43Gary Brecka?

  And she's in her pajamas, working on the computer and I expect her to get dressed and come out and be happy and be engaging and come out and meet these people. And she's like, no, I'm actually doing work in here. I didn't know they were coming over. You didn't tell me. And then I'm upset with her, you know?

• 43:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:58Gary Brecka?

  And then when I reframe it, I'm like, you know what? I don't know why I set that expectation on her.

• 44:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:03Gary Brecka?

  I'd be actually pretty upset if she set that expectation on me.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:06Gary Brecka?

  Um, you know, at least give me the courtesy if you're to, you know, if you, if you want me to be socially engaging with a bunch of new strangers, at least give me a heads up that they're, that they're coming to just spring it on me.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  It's the classic relationship scenario. I, I, I often call that the, the mind reading scenario, you know? It's like, we're like, my wife will get mad at me for not doing something. And I'm like, I didn't know you wanted me to do that. Like I can't read your mind. And then, you know, she's like, it should be obvious. And I'm like, well, it's not, you know, that, that happens quite a bit, right? So communicating expectations, checking in on things. Um, the other thing that happens a lot in, in relationships, especially early on, is that people have the different definition for things, right? So very simple and common example, my wife and I, we have a very different definition of what a clean kitchen looks like.

• 45:01Gary Brecka?

  Oh dude, you're hitting all the high points. So does my wife.

• 45:05Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 45:05Gary Brecka?

  I'm like, if there are no tennis shoes on the counter.

• 45:08Speaker 00

  We're doing well.

• 45:09Gary Brecka?

  We're doing pretty good.

• 45:10Speaker 00

  We're doing pretty good. You know, we have, we have different definition of, you know, what quality time looks like. We have a different definition of what a fight looks like. You know, so it's, people come from different families. They come from different cultures. They come from different backgrounds. They have different personalities. And so you have different definitions of all these things. And it's, and what's funny is that I think a lot of couples early on, they get into, they get into trouble because they try to change their partner's definition. They're like, no, no, no, this is what clean is, or this is what, uh, this is what quality time is, right? Instead of just understanding each other's definition. Like, my definition of a clean kitchen has not really changed. And I've been with my wife for 14 years.

• 45:52Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 45:53Speaker 00

  But I, I sure as hell know what her definition of a clean kitchen is.

• 45:58Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  And so when she's coming home from a trip, I'm like, we gotta get it.

• 46:02Gary Brecka?

  We're gonna meet her definition.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  We gotta get it Fernanda clean, not Mark clean.

• 46:06Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. I love that. You know, um, and I think, you know, be, this, this expectation leads to a lot of apprehension. You know, you, you've called anxiety a crisis of hope.

• 46:19Gary Brecka?

  You know, I, I sat with that definition for a little while because, um, it makes a lot of sense.

• 46:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:27Gary Brecka?

  To me that, you know, um, hope is your at least belief that something's going to turn out, you know, a certain way. Um, and when it doesn't, or that you hope certain person isn't at a dinner party when you arrive, or you hope that you get to have them earlier. You hope that the food is good at a restaurant. And, and again, I wonder if you would like, give us some context around that too, because, um, when I do stage talks and podcasts and lectures and, and, and I'll just generally ask the audience, you know, how many of you? Suffer from anxiety. And 70% of the audience will raise their hand.

• 47:10Gary Brecka?

  Like, wow, there can't be a condition, you know, a pathology that exists at that scale.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:18Gary Brecka?

  Right? So it must be something endemic in society that's causing people to feel.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:24Gary Brecka?

  Anxiety and.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I have a pet theory around this, which is ties into that hope thing. So anxiety, it's, I think it's the only emotion that's very future focused. You know, so fear is, there's a lion in front of me. It might kill me. It's present, you know, it's like this thing is happening now.

• 47:47Gary Brecka?

  Standing on the edge of a 30th floor balcony and I'm afraid heights. I mean, that's.

• 47:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. Whereas anxiety is a fear of what might happen in the future. It's like, okay, well, if I walk through the savanna, I might come across a lion. What am I going to do if that happens? So it's like, it's kind of this mental preparation for the future worst case scenario that starts happening. And I think there are a couple of things that have kind of scrambled our brains around this. One is that we are so overexposed to all of the possible problems in the world that could happen in the next week, year, five years. We are constant, you go online for two seconds, you're getting hit with messages of like, you know, World War III is going to start. There's going to be another pandemic.

• 48:34Speaker 00

  There's going to be, you know, global warming. Like, there's just all of these narratives that are constantly taking place, that things are getting awful, things are going to, you know, the world's going to end and all this stuff. And so that's, that's one piece of it. But I think the subtler piece of it, which is the crisis of hope piece, is that to. Really be psychologically well adjusted and happy and stable. We, humans need something to look forward to. Like you need something in your life that you wake up and you're like, I'm excited for that.

• 49:05Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  I'm like, I can't wait for that to happen, or I can't wait to pursue that. And, and this is, I think this comes back to where we started, you know, with, after subtle art, like, people who, the altitude sickness piece, like people who achieve a big dream, the problem is, is they wake up the next day and they don't know what to hope for. Like, well, I just did all the good things I could have imagined, so like, I don't know what to hope for anymore. And so anxiety sets in, depression sets in. I think we live in a world where we're so over aware of all of the problems of everything. Like, there's just anything, name anything interesting or exciting, or, you know,

• 49:48Speaker 00

  whether it's a, a job, or a relationship, or moving to a certain place, or a political movement, or whatever. Like, we are so, everything is criticized so often. And we, and we see the downside of everything so clearly, that I think it's, we've, we've become a society of people that like, don't really know what to hope for. Like, I don't know what's good anymore. I don't know what a better life even looks like, much less how to get there, right? So it's, I, I ultimately see it as, there's kind of a lack of clarity of like, what matters? And what is, what is good and what's worth pursuing?

• 50:32Speaker 00

  And when you remove that from people's psyches, anxiety starts setting in, right? Cause it's like, well, I, I can't think of anything good in the future, but I can think of a lot of bad things in the future, right? So it's, and then the brain, the brain's a predictive machine, so that's where it goes.

• 50:52Gary Brecka?

  And all it has to predict is what's happened in the past. I mean, it only has this experience, and then it just supplants that experience in, in, in the future. You know, you know, well, you know, my, my relationships never work out. You know, so I'd be shocked if this one did, you know? And I've even heard sports psychiatrists and sports psychologists talk about how they'll work with professional athletes and...

• 51:17Gary Brecka?

  A golfer will walk up to something they need to one putt and he'll just, he'll say out loud, probably gonna two putt this, you know. In some ways, allowing themselves to fail by, but meeting their expectation of failure, which in a weird way, makes them less anxious. Cause see, I told you I was gonna two putt it.

• 51:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:42Gary Brecka?

  And, and then when they fail, they've met the expectation of failure.

• 51:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. There's this classic saying in psychology, which is that people would rather be right than happy.

• 51:52Gary Brecka?

  That, yeah, that's exactly.

• 51:53Speaker 00

  And it's, that's a perfect example of that.

• 51:55Gary Brecka?

  So do you think that we frame things like that, as, either as a defense mechanism, or without even being aware that we're doing that? And therefore, we're sort of subtly setting ourselves up to achieve mediocrity, to strive for mediocrity and just stay in that comfortable soup of, you know, not taking too much risk.

• 52:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:18Gary Brecka?

  And staying, so our life is never great?

• 52:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:24Gary Brecka?

  It's just kinda, okay.

• 52:26Speaker 00

  It's, I, in a weird way, it is the comfortable.

• 52:32Gary Brecka?

  Like, what they say, the good is the enemy of great, kind of, or, you know, it's, it's, if it's good, I don't wanna do anything about it, you know?

• 52:41Speaker 00

  It's, yeah, there's a certain, it really, it's kinda sick, but like, there's a certain psychological safety in, in underperformance. It's, right, like, it's, to do something truly great, you have to invest a lot of energy, emotion, effort, strain, right? And you, you still might not succeed. So like, that's a lot to give up for an uncertain outcome. Whereas, if you kinda set the bar low, you know, like, well, I'm pretty sure I can hit that. And I don't have to invest as much. And yeah, it would be disappointing, but I'd rather be disappointed than give something my all and then come up short, right?

• 53:26Speaker 00

  So like, a lot of people unconsciously, they kind of make that negotiation in their head. And it's. And it's very, it's very tricky. I think we sabotage a lot in that way without even realizing it. It's crazy. If you look at, if you look at the research around goal achievement in psychology, the number one factor of whether somebody achieves a really difficult goal is something called self-efficacy, which is literally just the belief that you're capable of achieving the goal.

• 53:59Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  It's something like if you just honestly believe that you're capable of achieving something, it increases the chances that you achieve it by like 33% or something like that. It's,

• 54:09Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 54:10Speaker 00

  It's so stupidly simple, but it has just a massive outsized, outsized effect.

• 54:16Gary Brecka?

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• 55:01Gary Brecka?

  I meet and deal with a lot of young entrepreneurs and I love the entrepreneurial spirit. And you know, there's sort of careless over exuberation, right? Without any semblance of a plan or this is going to be a billion dollar company. I'm like, yeah, okay.

• 55:24Gary Brecka?

  Let's talk about how it gets to a hundred thousand.

• 55:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. Let's talk about your first sale.

• 55:27Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah, let's talk about the first sale. And, you know, and they're like, well, Coke or Pepsi or Monster Energy has done it. But, you know, and, and, and this tastes better, so it's going to be a billion dollars. I'm like, there's a lot of distance between cup and lip there. But by the same token, there, I feel like there's a lot of these young entrepreneurs that because everything is not mapped out and because everything is not perfect, they actually really don't believe much in their idea. You know, I, I went through this with, going through this with my, my, my daughter and

• 56:08Gary Brecka?

  she's, she's launching a chemical-free skincare line, which she's deeply passionate about. She's a nurse, had a background in, in health services administration, just always been healthy, always been very, very cautious about what she's put on her skin. And when she got her medical degree, she really started going down the rabbit hole of all these things that damage your skin, phthalates, parabens, polyfluoroalkyls. And she just went headfirst into starting the skincare line. It's been amazing to watch her, as a young entrepreneur, unpack this. But what I noticed that she does a lot of times is, you know, when I ask her if she'd shared this idea with some of the people that she holds in the highest regard in her

• 56:52Gary Brecka?

  life, she hasn't. Because she's afraid that the idea is not yet good enough. So I can see that her belief, and hopefully this podcast comes out after she launches this, sort of thrown Madison under the bus. But, but, but we talk about it a lot, but I, it's, you know, is her belief in it as strong as it needs to be for someone to like lead a brand and lead a, lead a, lead a company that you passionately, passionately want to start?

• 57:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, you, you almost have to become like an evangelist for something.

• 57:27Gary Brecka?

  Can I say, look, it can't be what you do, it's got to be who you are.

• 57:29Speaker 00

  Right. My favorite line around this was a long time ago, like 15 years ago, Elon Musk was giving a talk at a conference or something and somebody in the audience asked him, he said, they said, What words of encouragement would you give to struggling entrepreneurs? And Elon said, none, because if you need words of encouragement, you shouldn't be starting your business.

• 57:55Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 57:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. And it's

• 57:59Gary Brecka?

  That's really powerful.

• 58:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it's so true. It's, you need to believe in something so deeply, because it's, look, even if it is a great idea, and even if people are excited about it, the process of building a business of like, the amount of embarrassing launches and ad campaigns and, you know,

• 58:22Gary Brecka?

  Oh, talk about

• 58:22Speaker 00

  mistakes, you

• 58:23Gary Brecka?

  Failure, failure.

• 58:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, you fall on your face so many times and very publicly. And so, yeah, you need, the underlying belief in the business needs to be so strong that all of that feels worth it.

• 58:39Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, you know, when we started the Ultimate Human Platform, we started this media platform with the sole intention to give without the expectation of receipt. And, and the reason why I did that was because I wanted to remove all of those initial expectations that would create these, this systemic and repeated failures. Like, oh, we didn't get enough affiliate links, or we didn't, you know, put things behind a paywall, or grow the Instagram account as fast as we thought. I just took all that pressure off and said, we just need to create the most intentional, authentic information and give it for, for free. And if we've accomplished that, we've succeeded.

• 59:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:21Gary Brecka?

  So that's how I'll define the success of the business. And what it allowed us to do is like, put all of the effort into the message. And, you know, since then, we've monetized it for sure, but put all of the, the intention into the messaging and not into all of those things that create all of those landmines for, for failure.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:45Gary Brecka?

  And, and when we got to tens of millions and then hundreds of millions of views, and I saw the adoption rate and likes and shares and forwards and comments, I realized that we, we'd done it right.

• 59:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:58Gary Brecka?

  And I was trying to set up the media platform to not fail.

• 1:00:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03Gary Brecka?

  By removing a lot of those expectations. But, so for entrepreneurs,

• 1:00:10Gary Brecka?

  Because having a relationship with your business is like having a relationship with your spouse.

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:17Gary Brecka?

  And, and I think a lot of people need to prepare for that. You know, I started a company with my spouse when we were dating, then we got engaged and we got married. And if anybody tells you that you can start a company with your significant other and separate business from pleasure, that is the biggest lie probably ever told.

• 1:00:34Speaker 00

  Kudos to you. I'm, I'm sitting here in awe right now. I'm like, that's a lot of stress.

• 1:00:38Gary Brecka?

  Oh dude. And we had a mixed family, you know, I had three kids.

• 1:00:42Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:00:43Gary Brecka?

  Divorced. She had one young daughter divorced. We moved the families in together.

• 1:00:48Speaker 00

  Oh man.

• 1:00:49Gary Brecka?

  Then, you know, we started a business together. And initially it did not go very well.

• 1:00:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:57Gary Brecka?

  So we were making like, you know, 15 year married couple with the same family decisions, like three years into our relationship.

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:01:06Gary Brecka?

  And I've, my view on relationships is that the best relationships are the ones that have gone through everything that's meant to tear them apart.

• 1:01:15Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:01:16Gary Brecka?

  And somehow they haven't given up on each other.

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:18Gary Brecka?

  But that's my sort of rudimentary definition of a good relationship. Because I experienced that because, you know, when, when you go through all those things that are meant to tear you apart and you somehow figure it out. Then when some measure of success comes, it is such a panacea, you know, especially if you've achieved it together.

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:41Gary Brecka?

  But in any case, I, what are some things that young entrepreneurs and young folks in relationships, especially women, because, you know, I always quote the statistic that 82% of all autoimmune disease is found in females. Not because autoimmune disease is selective by sex, it's selective by weakness. And what a lot of the research intimates is that women have a tendency to put the needs of other people before the needs of themselves. They call caregiver syndrome.

• 1:02:15Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:02:16Gary Brecka?

  And by slowly but consistently putting themselves in the backseat, their spouse, their kids, their career, their girlfriends, their coworkers, what have you.

• 1:02:27Gary Brecka?

  They haven't taken any time for like that introspection, for self-care, for like, what actually makes me happy?

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:33Gary Brecka?

  Like, and they wake up one day, they don't like what they see in the mirror, and then they also feel terrible.

• 1:02:41Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:02:42Gary Brecka?

  Very often, because that kind of stress weakens the immune system, now they end up with Hashimoto's or some other kind of autoimmune condition.

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:52Gary Brecka?

  So what would you say to those women? And what would you say to, you know, young, you know, young folks in a relationship or starting a business? What are like the exercises that build the mental resiliency, that help you create community and connection? That help you sort of honestly look at yourself to see some of these blind spots, like you say, because if I was to give any advice, and I don't give any kind of relationship or advice on success, but the exercise that I inadvertently went through in my 40s, if I had done that in my 20s, I can't imagine how much different,

• 1:03:33Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:03:34Gary Brecka?

  you know, my life would have been.

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  Right. I think the thing that comes to mind is just,

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  and I ask, so as you can imagine, one of the most common questions I get from people is, how do I stop giving a fuck? How do, how do I stop giving a fuck? Especially, how do I stop giving a fuck what other people think?

• 1:03:55Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:03:55Speaker 00

  And I noticed-

• 1:03:56Gary Brecka?

  That's a big one.

• 1:03:57Speaker 00

  This is much more prevalent in women than it is in men. And I think this is something that maybe has gotten missed or hasn't gotten broadcast, you know, it's, as women have ascended and achieved more educational and professional success, there's an aspect of it that I guess was never shared with them, which is that there's a piece of, you know, kind of reaching those higher rungs is being willing to embarrass yourself, being willing to be hated, being willing to fall on your face in front of thousands of people and be judged by them and be criticized by them. And it's not, you know, it's-

• 1:04:35Speaker 00

  Historically, all the great men of history who achieved all these extremely, you know, the stratosphere of achievement, it was not pleasant getting there.

• 1:04:44Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:04:45Speaker 00

  It was not a picnic.

• 1:04:46Gary Brecka?

  They say, nobody enjoys the climb, everybody enjoys the view.

• 1:04:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was not a picnic. And so I, I often hear from, from very talented, driven, ambitious women. And it's a very common question of like, how, how do I stop giving a fuck what other people think? And my, I always throw a question back at them, which is, and this relates to your daughter.

• 1:05:08Speaker 00

  First of all, you're never going to stop giving a fuck what other people think. You're a human. It's good that you give a fuck about what other people think, otherwise you'd be a sociopath.

• 1:05:16Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  So let's like.

• 1:05:17Gary Brecka?

  Exactly.

• 1:05:18Speaker 00

  Let's, it's good, first of all, let's acknowledge that, yes, you should care what other people think. The question is, what do you care more than what other people think? And what I, what the question I throw back to them is, I say, what are you willing to be, what do you believe in so strongly that you're willing to be disliked for it?

• 1:05:36Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  Because if you can't answer that, then yes, your default is just going to be, make people like me.

• 1:05:43Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  Do, do whatever. Do whatever is going to get, get other people to like me.

• 1:05:47Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:05:48Speaker 00

  And some like the, to really level up and, and just for entrepreneurs in general, right? It's like to get through that pain period, you, you have to be working on something that you believe in so strongly that it's like, yes, your family's going to laugh at you. Your college friends are going to stop returning your calls because they're like, what is this guy doing? It's Bukowski has this amazing sequence in one of his poems about this. You know, he, he's like, you, you have to, you know, you'll be laughed at, you'll be derided, you'll be insulted, you'll, you'll be isolated. He said, isolation is the gift.

• 1:06:32Speaker 00

  Isolation is, it's, it's, it's the opportunity for you to hone your craft. You know, and it's.

• 1:06:42Speaker 00

  It's a package deal. And I think it's sitting with that question of like, what are you willing to be disliked for? What do you believe in so strongly that you're willing to embarrass yourself for it? And feel like it's still worth it. It's not easy to find that thing, but I think when you do find that thing, that becomes kind of that north star. It can be that thing that you do wake up and hope for every day, right? It alleviates the anxiety. It gives you direction and it gives you something to keep climbing towards.

• 1:07:18Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. You know, often when we talk about community and connection, people also talk about their purpose. And I get asked a lot on podcasts, even though I'm not a profess to be any form of relationship expert by any stretch. How do I find my purpose? How do I define my purpose? Because it is so true that when you don't have that north star. It's very detrimental to your health. And, you know, we've now unpacked this in a way that we can link negative emotional states and elevated catecholamines to heightened cortisol, from heightened cortisol to adrenal

• 1:08:03Gary Brecka?

  fatigue, to impact on the immune system. So the biohackers, we can draw this biophysiological line. We can give you all of the rationale behind the cellular biology of how stress makes you sick. What we haven't figured out is how do we help people identify who they are? And how do they figure out what their passion is? Some people are blessed. They were really good at soccer, or they were, you know, a talented athlete, and they found that sport. They went to an Olympian level, or they played professional sports. That was their calling, and then they were able to, you know, manage their way out of,

• 1:08:45Gary Brecka?

  you know, becoming a professional athlete into a, you know, society, and they did just fine. But for those people that are sitting around.

• 1:08:56Gary Brecka?

  They're they're an entrepreneur or they're maybe they're a nine to fiver. The one thing they do know is that they're unhappy with their status quo.

• 1:09:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:09:05Gary Brecka?

  The one thing they haven't been able to crystallize is, you know, that why am I here? And what is my purpose? Do you have any ways for to help people frame that?

• 1:09:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's it's a difficult question and it's funny because I often I kind of hate how this question's often, you know.

• 1:09:25Gary Brecka?

  Even I don't want to make it so so, you know, key to because.

• 1:09:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:29Gary Brecka?

  You know, I think people stumble upon it sometimes because it's it's it's the most painful thing in their life.

• 1:09:34Speaker 00

  Maybe.

• 1:09:35Gary Brecka?

  Right. You know, they they they suffer from drug or alcohol addiction. They fixed it now they.

• 1:09:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:39Gary Brecka?

  Their purpose is to help other people.

• 1:09:41Speaker 00

  First of all, I yeah, I feel like purpose is it's similar. It's similar to spouses, right? Like some people meet their spouse when they're like 15 and they're they're just together for their entire life.

• 1:09:51Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:51Speaker 00

  It's rare, but it happens. And I think the same thing is true with purpose. Like, you know, there are some people that when they're 12 years old, they're like, I'm going to be a doctor. And then they're a doctor for their entire life and they love it. And it's like, good for you. You won.

• 1:10:04Gary Brecka?

  I hate you.

• 1:10:04Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:10:05Gary Brecka?

  Little nerd.

• 1:10:07Speaker 00

  You won the existential lottery.

• 1:10:09Gary Brecka?

  Your purpose is well, okay.

• 1:10:13Speaker 00

  But most of us, most of us like finding our our, you know, our lifelong partner. There is a very long process of trial and error and learning from the mistakes, learning from looking in the wrong places. So I to begin with, I always like, I don't even like the verb find, even though that's what everybody uses.

• 1:10:33Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:34Speaker 00

  It's more like it's more like it's more like develop a purpose or cultivate a purpose in your life. It's so what's interesting, when you look at the research around this, it's what like if you ask yourself, what is a sense of purpose? Like, what gives your life a sense of meaning? It's interesting. It's kind of at the intersection of two things. So the first thing is, what is unique about you? What seems particularly unique or privileged or special about you or your situation or your context in life? And that could be anything from you have an extremely unique talent or skill that most other people don't have. It could be that you grew up, you had a very unique experience

• 1:11:19Speaker 00

  or came from a very unique background that most other people don't have. It could be that you have very unique relationships or connections in the world that most other people don't have. But it should be something that is very rare or unique that you have access to or that you inhabit. So that's piece number one. Piece number two is, how do you make the world a better place? And then, purpose is when you connect those two things. So you're taking the thing that is your gift, that is special and unique to you, and then you are leveraging it in a way that makes the lives of other people better.

• 1:11:54Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:55Speaker 00

  When you combine those two things, that's when you start experiencing a sense of purpose.

• 1:12:01Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:12:01Speaker 00

  And those two things are hard because the first one is that a lot of people look at their lives and they're like, "Well, there's nothing special about me. I'm just a guy, right? Like, I just hang out and play golf and, you know, whatever, watch the movie." It's, you really have to sometimes dig deep and really kind of explore your interests, explore your passions, your hobbies, your talents, and get a little bit of experience in the world to like really start understanding like, "Okay, what do I have a knack for? What is kind of unique about me? What do I do a little bit differently than most people?" Like, one question I often ask people to look at is like, "What comes easily for you that seems very difficult for other people?" Because that, and it doesn't even have to be professionally related.

• 1:12:44Speaker 00

  It could be something that's like, "I'm really great at meeting people at parties," you know?

• 1:12:48Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:48Speaker 00

  "And I'm always the one introducing my friends to people, and I'm always connecting people." That can be your superpower. The second side is also difficult because this comes back to the hope thing of like, what is worth pursuing? What is, what, what makes the world a better place? What is, what's something worth hoping for? And that really comes down to understanding your values, understanding ultimately what you care about and what, what is particularly important to you. And so then you kind of get a marriage of those two things. But it takes, it takes time to find them. And just from what you've shared from your personal story, it sounds like you kind of went through a whole process. You, you know, you did the nine to five thing and then kind of came into this, this industry

• 1:13:32Speaker 00

  later in life and, and then probably found a merging of your talents and skills with, with all of this science and all, like all these, this amazing information that you can share with people. And it's like, you didn't just wake up and do that.

• 1:13:45Gary Brecka?

  No.

• 1:13:45Speaker 00

  Like, that sounds like it was a multi-decade process that you had to

• 1:13:50Gary Brecka?

  It was.

• 1:13:50Speaker 00

  work towards. So it's, it's, people often talk about purpose as if it's something that you like find under a rock and, you know, it's like, oh, there's my purpose.

• 1:13:59Gary Brecka?

  I was looking for it. I left it in the bathroom.

• 1:14:02Speaker 00

  Finally found it. But no, it's, it's something that you, you, you cultivate over many, many years, both through that self-exploration, but also understanding like, what do I value? What do I care about? How can I make the world a better place?

• 1:14:19Gary Brecka?

  You know, back to how you frame this muscle of radical self-honesty. Do you think that people that are generally happier, more satisfied, more content in their life, have they, are there characteristics that they share? You know, like one, one of the, I don't read a lot of business or self-help motivational books, but I read Think and Grow Rich.

• 1:14:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:14:48Gary Brecka?

  And I think the original version of that book was Pray and Grow Rich, but, but, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. And, and when I found out, found unique about that book, and I think it was written in the like the 1920s.

• 1:15:00Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:15:00Gary Brecka?

  Or 30s.

• 1:15:01Speaker 00

  30s.

• 1:15:03Gary Brecka?

  Was that he wasn't actually looking at.

• 1:15:07Gary Brecka?

  The actions like what did this person invest in to become rich? He looked at the characteristics of success.

• 1:15:13Speaker 00

  Right, the mindsets.

• 1:15:15Gary Brecka?

  The mindset, the like minded people, quick to decision making, not afraid to make a decision. And he wrote a book about these are the characteristics of successful people. And they were across different areas of success. And not all of it was socioeconomic. Some of it was religion, sports, entertainment, what have you. And he identified those characteristics. Have you, on your journey, been able to sort of embody the characteristics of people that are really content and just truly happy? Like, lives that other people would want to emulate?

• 1:15:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's funny.

• 1:16:00Speaker 00

  It's funny because happiness, first of all, when you ask like, what's the primary trait that drives happiness? The thing that no self-help book will tell you is that it's genetics. It's like 60% of baseline happiness is genetically driven and personality driven.

• 1:16:18Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:16:18Speaker 00

  So, think of it as like, everybody kind of has a happiness center of gravity.

• 1:16:22Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:22Speaker 00

  So, you can have peak experience. Let's say, most people's is around a seven, from on a one to 10 scale.

• 1:16:29Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:29Speaker 00

  So, let's say you're at a seven and then it's like you have a great, you have a birthday party or a great vacation or whatever. So, it goes to 10 for a few days. It's eventually going to come back and settle at a seven. Similarly, like, something bad happens in your life. Maybe a friend passes away or a business goes under or something. It drops to a three or four, but then, over the course of weeks and months, it comes back to a seven. So, researchers call this baseline happiness. And what they find is that about 2/3 of your baseline happiness is just kind of genetically set.

• 1:17:03Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:17:04Speaker 00

  That doesn't mean that you can't manipulate it. There are things you can do to increase it, but it's funny because it's just...

• 1:17:13Gary Brecka?

  That's wild.

• 1:17:14Speaker 00

  Some people are just more predisposed to be cheerier and in a better mood than others. I personally come from a school of thought, like, I actually have a chapter in one of my books called, the title is Happiness is Overrated.

• 1:17:29Speaker 00

  Because it's, it's, don't get me wrong, happiness is great, but it's like, it's ultimately, I argue that it's, you want to live a meaningful life, you want to have an impactful life. It's, happiness is great, but it comes and goes. It's like any other emotion, it's, you can feel happy today, but like tomorrow, you might feel like shit. And then the next day, something else happens and it's, you know, it's, it's just this, it's this roller coaster ride. But meaning and impact is permanent, like that's what sticks around forever. Yeah. But in terms of like, what can actually raise baseline happiness reliably? There's, so there are a few mindsets and attitudes that can have an effect. Self-efficacy is one of them, which we talked about, you know, just a belief that generally I'm a capable person.

• 1:18:13Speaker 00

  I can do the things that I want to do. And also that a belief that I can handle whatever setbacks or obstacles come, come my way.

• 1:18:23Speaker 00

  And then the other one we talked about, which is, is strong social connections. It's again, it's like the number one, the number one driving factor of, of happiness in happiness research is quality of relationships.

• 1:18:36Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 1:18:36Speaker 00

  It's, and again, it's, it's something, it's, it's, it's not a say, it's, it's like, it's, the relationship thing, I feel like in my industry is probably like the, in your industry, it's like, oh yeah, you should just eat less and exercise more.

• 1:18:54Gary Brecka?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:18:55Speaker 00

  Everybody, everybody knows and like, everybody's sick of hearing it, but it's also just, that's, that's the 80 20, you know?

• 1:19:02Gary Brecka?

  Really?

• 1:19:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:03Gary Brecka?

  It's just deepening your-

• 1:19:05Speaker 00

  Just have a good relationship, have, you know, get out, meet people, have, have a few good friends.

• 1:19:13Speaker 00

  On, on the romantic relationship, it's interesting. So no romantic relationship is better than a bad romantic relationship. But a good romantic relationship is significantly better than no romantic relationship.

• 1:19:27Gary Brecka?

  No romantic relationship is better than a bad one?

• 1:19:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:30Gary Brecka?

  Oh, meaning, okay.

• 1:19:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:31Gary Brecka?

  So it's- Being single is way better than being in a bad relationship.

• 1:19:35Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:19:36Gary Brecka?

  I would have to-

• 1:19:36Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:19:37Gary Brecka?

  Absolutely agree with that.

• 1:19:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:19:39Gary Brecka?

  And I, and I think- So many people get into relationships to fix somebody else.

• 1:19:45Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:19:46Gary Brecka?

  And I see it all the time with our friends, even with our families.

• 1:19:49Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:19:51Gary Brecka?

  You know, with, with, without calling out any of my family, but there are members of my family that have been married for very, very, very long periods of time. And the conversation is always centered around.

• 1:20:04Speaker 00

  Fixing the other person.

• 1:20:04Gary Brecka?

  Why don't you eat this? Why did you? Like, he hasn't eaten that for 40 years.

• 1:20:10Speaker 00

  He's not gonna start today.

• 1:20:11Gary Brecka?

  He's not gonna start today. You know, like that hanging your head against the wall. But then they're also, you know, going on 60 years. So, but they come from a generation of, you know, if something was broke, you fixed it. You didn't throw it away.

• 1:20:25Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:20:26Gary Brecka?

  Which is like, you know, my parents' generation there, because they're coming up on 60 years.

• 1:20:30Speaker 00

  Wow. There's something to that.

• 1:20:32Gary Brecka?

  More than half a century.

• 1:20:34Speaker 00

  There's something to that.

• 1:20:35Gary Brecka?

  You can problem solve, that's for sure.

• 1:20:36Speaker 00

  Cause it's, it's, and, and also a lot of problems, right? Relationship, a lot of fights are not significant. Like, they're not.

• 1:20:47Gary Brecka?

  So not significant.

• 1:20:48Speaker 00

  It's just, you're, you're just arguing about how to load the dishwasher. Like, who cares? You know, and it's, you know, there's no reason to like, start excavating all of this, you know, like deeper emotions, like, oh, that's my childhood trauma because my mom never let me load the dishwasher. It's like, you can overdo this stuff.

• 1:21:06Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:07Speaker 00

  To quite a degree. And I do think there's a lot of wisdom.

• 1:21:12Speaker 00

  And it's actually like, so John Gottman from the University of Washington is like the leading relationship researcher in the world. He says this, he says, every happy couple has unresolved fights and recurring fights. He says, completely normal. It's usually about stupid stuff. It doesn't matter. It's like, oh, he watches too much football on weekends and like, they've been fighting about it for 25 years. You know, and it's just, and he said, it's completely normal. And he's like, it's only a problem if you let it be a problem.

• 1:21:41Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. So just, maybe just relax.

• 1:21:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:44Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, let it go. For my audience that would like to find out more about you, obviously we've got the book here. I'm going to link it into the show notes. Where can they find you?

• 1:21:54Speaker 00

  You can go to markmanson.net. I've got a free newsletter. I've also

• 1:21:59Gary Brecka?

  Amazing.

• 1:21:59Speaker 00

  Got a podcast called Solved, which is available everywhere. Yeah, I'm on every platform. I'm like you. I'm everywhere.

• 1:22:07Gary Brecka?

  So they'll find you.

• 1:22:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:08Gary Brecka?

  I'll link, I'll link it in the show notes. So I, I wind down all of my podcasts by asking my guests the same question. And there's, there's no right or wrong answer to this question. But what, what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

• 1:22:22Speaker 00

  I'll give you a T-shirt if you get it.

• 1:22:24Gary Brecka?

  If I get the right answer.

• 1:22:26Speaker 00

  Oh, man, the pressure is on. The pressure is on.

• 1:22:31Gary Brecka?

  Cotton fits night.

• 1:22:34Speaker 00

  I would say being the ultimate human is to live in alignment with your full potential, both physically, psychologically, and emotionally.

• 1:22:53Gary Brecka?

  Wow. Full potential. I love it. You think most people reach their full potential?

• 1:23:00Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:23:01Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, neither do I. Yep. That was powerful. Great answer. You got the T-shirt. You got a T-shirt. I'm not even throwing a trucker hat, too. I'm feeling generous today. Hey, guys, we're heading over into the VIP room. So there's VIPs waiting in there and they have a ton of questions. But thank you for coming on the Ultimate Human Podcast and until next time, that's just science.