When Will You Learn To Grow Up? - Mark Manson

Mark Manson 0:00 Even in the best of circumstances, it's confusing to be a 16-year-old, 18-year-old, 20-year-old guy. Everybody struggles with their sexuality, everybody struggles with relationships, everybody struggles to build an identity and develop self-esteem in that identity and to get along with others and know how they're gonna fit into the world. Most of the pickup advice prescribed, generally, it's going to help you feel more confident and help you get more sex, but it's not gonna help your relationships and it's not gonna make you happy.

Chris Williamson 0:28 You are now a movie star.

Mark Manson 0:31 Um, yeah, I guess, you know, if we wanna put the bar that low for movie stardom.

Chris Williamson 0:36 (laughs)

Mark Manson 0:36 Sure. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 0:38 Yes, yeah, it's been a, it's been an interesting couple of years. Um, we were talking before we got started about some of the perils of success,

Chris Williamson 0:45 uh, that kind of come along for the ride. What do you think most people don't understand about success?

Mark Manson 0:52 I think people don't realize the, the more success you achieve... And I, I think it actually has more to do with the velocity of success. Like, I've talked to a number of very, very successful people who became successful by just kind of compounding 3% to 5% per year over, like, 30 years, and they seem to all be pretty mentally well-adjusted. Um, those of us who go a little bit cray-cray, it's usually because th- we have, like, some sort of insane slope, um, where it's, like, a 500% or 1,000% increase, uh, within, like, a two to three-year period, and, um, and that, that seems to be what messes with your head. And, you know, one, one thing I, I've said and known for a long time is that identity lags reality by a year or two. Like, you often run into people who lose a bunch of weight, for instance, like, they lose a h- 100 pounds, um, they'll still... It, it'll take a couple years for them to realize that they're thin, and I think the same thing kinda happens with success. Like, if you blow up massively in a 6-month period or a 12-month period, you spend, like, the next two years kind of wondering what the hell happened and where you are and why do all these people wanna talk to you, and, "Holy shit, that's a lot of money. I think I'll say yes to it," and then you regret saying yes to it. And it, it's... There's just a lot of psychological fallout that I think happens when you have that sort of meteoric rise.

Chris Williamson 2:28 You are, uh, describing a situation that I know pretty well at the moment. It's this weird combination of imposter syndrome and excitement and, um, anticipation for the future, overwhelm in terms of opportunity, and, uh, yeah, there is no one that's going to give sympathy to, like, "Oh my god, your growth is too, too quick." Like-

Mark Manson 2:50 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 2:50 "... Let's, let's, let's all get around a campfire and make you feel better about yourself." That's not gonna happen. Uh, but it is a, uh, a concern, and we've heard for a long time about the dangers of ch- child actors, you know, the Macaulay Culkins of the world becoming too big too fast as a kid. But I think that there's a, uh, similar but even potentially more difficult challenge for adults to deal with because your identity has become locked. You thought you knew who you were-

Mark Manson 3:12 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 3:12 ... and then something comes along and actually rips you out of that. At least as a kid, you're pretty malleable and you won't be able to remember a time that life wasn't like you having a chef and security and a private jet and stuff like that. Whereas when it's changed, you're so de-anchored, l- like, unmoored from whatever it was before, I think that that presents a new set of challenges.

Mark Manson 3:34 Yeah, I, uh, well, I think it's weird too because a kid doesn't know b- Like, the kid doesn't want it or doesn't really know what they want. It just kinda happens to them. Um, I've actually found it... I, I'm not a fan of his music at all, but I've, I've s- found myself becoming very interested in Justin Bieber's career or, uh, his unwinding of his own career that I think, apparently, within the last five years or so, he has just canceled and undone tours and albums to the point where he's just not working anymore, and I think he just sold his entire music catalog for like $300 million or something. But it's interesting because it, to me, that kinda transmits this idea that, like, he wanted to be famous when he was, like, 13. He didn't really understand what that entailed. And now that he's an adult, he's like, "Wait, I need to be a normal human being and, like, get my head right and have normal experiences." Um, I think for people like us, it's, it's a slightly different experience because you got what you wanted, right? Like, the... You asked for this, so like-

Chris Williamson 4:41 What you thought you wanted perhaps, yeah.

Mark Manson 4:43 (laughs) Like, this is the thing you've been working for for, like, 10 years, and suddenly it's here, and it's a lot more stressful than you thought it would be. Um, it didn't solve a lot of the problems you thought it would solve. There is that imposter syndrome. Um, everything that you do or say seems to carry a lot more weight than it used to. Um, you have something to lose now, right? So you can't just, like, you know, shit something out and throw it on the internet and see what happens. Um, so yeah, it is, it is, uh... It's this weird thing where you're like, "I'm so grateful. This is the best thing that's ever happened to me, but I'm also so stressed out because, um, I didn't realize that it would carry this kinda mental weight with it."

Chris Williamson 5:32 Yeah, terrified and holding on for dear life, I think, um.

Mark Manson 5:35 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 5:35 I get this sense, man, it's, ahem... It's so strange. When the channel blows up and, uh, we have a particularly good period, and the way that YouTube works, good periods beget good periods, and then you'll have a little lull-

Mark Manson 5:47 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 5:47 ... and then you'll come back and it'll go absolutely bananas again. It's, uh, the number for me is around about 10 to 15 million plays a month. When we break that, there is just this ambient sense of anxiety that goes through me, and it's-

Mark Manson 5:59 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 5:59 ... just me going... I, I don't know whether it's correlation or causation, but there's something that makes me feel like...... there are a lot more eyeballs on me than I'm used to and as someone that's naturally quite introverted, that makes me feel a bit, like, "Oh, fuck." Like, this is good because it's reach but it's bad because w- who are all of these people? What if I say something that was dumb? More second guessing-

Mark Manson 6:22 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 6:22 ... more self-doubt. What do you think, um, you,

Chris Williamson 6:26 you mentioned that success doesn't fix the things that you thought it was going to fix. What have you found, for people that maybe are aspiring towards success or looking toward, uh, finding this inflection point of a growth curve or whatever it is, what are the things that you found are good to ground yourself in? Or where do you t- continue to take your sense of pride, integrity, personal self-worth-

Mark Manson 6:46 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 6:46 ... from, uh, that isn't the rapidly changing ascending numbers and, and revenue and stuff like that?

Mark Manson 6:54 Well, I, I think the most important thing, and at least the most important thing for me, is just been having a really solid group of people in your life. Um... And that's the other thing, that's one of the other things that changes with success. Sometimes people around you start behaving differently or treating you differently and, uh, both in a positive way and in a negative way, and that, that's super weird to, to deal with. But, you know, ideally you have a, a critical mass number of people in your life that don't give a shit, you know, how much money you make or how, how many people downloaded your last episode or whatever. Like, they just wanna hang out and drink a beer and watch football, um, like, like they always did. And I, I found that incredibly... Like, I found myself craving that actually. You know, I would go do a speaking tour, um, go hang out with Will Smith, meet a bunch of crazy celebrities that I always wanted to meet and then, you know, make a bunch of money, and I would come home and I'd be like, "God, I just wanna, like, see my old friends and talk about totally unimportant stuff and just goof around for, for a week." Like that, that seems very nourishing, uh, at, at those moments.

Chris Williamson 8:13 Yeah. I completely get that. I think, uh, it's very strange. It's a very, very strange world when you can achieve sort of status and renown in a very short period of time, and I think the interesting point around someone that's iterated 3% or 5% per year and has-

Mark Manson 8:26 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 8:27 ... had time to... Identity, lifestyle, friendship groups, everything has just changed at around about the pace that you can. You know, but if you got to 20% per year, perhaps you're actually starting to lag behind a little bit and that's a little bit too much. Um, one of the things that you also have with this is, um, high expectations. So someone may have very high, uh, demands of themselves, they want to perform very well, they want their work to have an impact, they do want to chase down this, but commensurate with that is this pain when you don't achieve what you intended. You know, if you want to hold yourself to a high standard, you immediately set an ideal and then begin to compare yourself against that ideal.

Mark Manson 9:09 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 9:09 And inevitably, for the most part, apart from the freak best-selling book or whatever it is that you do, you're always going to fall short. Have you considered how people could deal with having high expectations?

Mark Manson 9:23 Well, I... You know, it's one of those things. I think there's a lot of situations where certain mentalities or mindsets that work when you're not successful at all can actually start working against you when you become very successful. So I think that mentality is a perfect example. You know, it's like when you've done nothing, I think it's probably very helpful to set high expectations for yourself just because it gets you working harder. It gets you expecting more of yourself. Um, I've found that, like, once you start to reach the peaks of a certain industry, maintaining those, those absurdly high expectations, it just kinda works against you. It just makes you f- Y- you know, it's like if I expected my, my next book to sell, I don't know, more copies than Harry Potter. Like, that, that, that's absurd. (laughs) That's, like, a completely absurd metric of success, uh, and I'm, and I'm, like, pretty much guaranteed to fail. So, um, I, I think it's just you have to... The goal posts have to move. And, and not only, like, do the goal posts have to move but, like, maybe you even have to find, like, a different field to set up your goal posts on than, than you used to, because it's... A lot of the same measurements, uh, that you use to get up the mountain no longer make sense once you're fairly high up on it.

Chris Williamson 10:48 Yeah. The tools that got you here won't get you there is something that I've thought about an awful lot, especially when it comes to, uh, obsessing over little things, um, not being prepared to delegate control to other people-

Mark Manson 11:03 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 11:03 ... not being able to relinquish any of the neuroses that you have around stuff. It's like if you want to do this, you're going to have to scale if you want to let go of this sort of thing. And, um, yeah, the, the strategies that get you from naught to 50 are not the ones that are going to get you from 90 to 95 or 95 to 96.

Mark Manson 11:20 Yup.

Chris Williamson 11:20 Yeah. You

Chris Williamson 11:21 say that the most important question to ask yourself in life is, what pain do you want in your life and what are you willing to struggle for? Why is that the right question to ask?

Mark Manson 11:33 Uh, I think it's the right question because anything worthwhile is gonna require some, some degree of pain and struggle, and, um... And so if you're, i- if you're oriented towards the pain and struggle, you're, you're probably gonna be more aligned with what you're capable of accomplishing rather than if you just orient towards the pleasures.I also just think it's a much more interesting question, right? Like, we all want the same stuff more or less. We all want to be liked and make money and be popular and be good at something. Um...... what, what I think differentiates us as individuals is, is what sacrifices we're willing to make and what challenges we actually enjoy. Um, I used to say, like, I, you know, I meet a lot of people who tell me they wanna w- It's probably like, I'm sure there's a million people who tell you now that, like, they wanna start a podcast. I- it's ever since my, my books blew up, it's like e- everybody I meet, it's like, "Oh, I, I wanna write a book. I've got this great idea." And then, of course, you ask them, "Have you started writing?" And they're like, "Oh, no, no, no. No, I, I need to, like, you know, think about it a little bit more." And it's, I think at the end of the day, most people just don't enjoy sitting by themself in a quiet room writing and rewriting and rewriting the same paragraph, like, eight times, and I do for some reason. Like, to me, that's a very enjoyable afternoon and that's probably why I'm a writer and most people are not.

Chris Williamson 13:07 So that is the pain that you want in your life, or at least it's the pain that you're willing to endure?

Mark Manson 13:13 Yeah, it's, or, you know, another way to frame it is kinda like, what, what is the pain that f- what is the pain that feels easy to you, but seemingly nobody else? Like it, it never... I remember when I first started blogging and I went to a couple, like the first couple, like, kind of blogging or internet business events I went to. People would come up to me and they'd be like, "Man, how do you, how do you write such long blog posts?" And I was like, "What are you talking about?" And they're like, "Yeah, I, I can't, I can't write, like, it's 500, 400, 500 words a day and, like, I, I'm tapped out." And meanwhile, I'm writing, like, 3,000, 4,000, 500, 5,000-word posts, um, every couple of days. And to me, it never even occurred to me that that was a lot. That was just kind of, like, what came out when I sat down to write. Um, so I think it's very useful to look for and discover the difficult things that, that come easily to you and, but don't come easily to most people, 'cause that's probably where your con- competitive advantage is, and that's probably where you're, you're most likely to succeed.

Chris Williamson 14:20 Yes. I think the reality of the lifestyle that you say that you want is gonna be very different from what you see in other people. So, I remember this example, I think James Clear uses it where he talks about what it's like to be a rockstar.

Mark Manson 14:32 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 14:32 So what it's like to be a rockstar from the outside is playing this show in front of all of these people and they're screaming your name and you're making money and you're with cool guy. But the reality is 15 years living in a van with four friends, sleeping in the van, with bloody fingers putting superglue on, with poor health, poor sleep habits, not knowing if you're going to make it, stressed, being dragged by A&R and agents and all sorts of stuff all over the place, learning about mixing and mastering and song playing and desperately trying to go back over chords again and again and again.

Mark Manson 15:05 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 15:05 That's, that's not what you see. Or the same thing for Conor McGregor, right? You know, although he is now on a downward trajectory. I think he's kind of like one of the most cringe people on the internet right now. But-

Mark Manson 15:14 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 15:14 ... when he was at the, at the peak of his, his coolness, what you saw was this, like, fucking god, this, like, savant artist manifest into physical form. What you didn't see was him living in the attic of his parents' house in Ireland somewhere, rolling the same combinations and the same sequences over and over and over again with no idea if it was gonna work out. That's what-

Mark Manson 15:38 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 15:38 ... the price that you need to be willing to pay.

Mark Manson 15:41 Yeah, it's like every goal is like an iceberg, right? Like, it's, there's this shiny, beautiful thing on the surface and then there's all this difficult hidden stuff underneath that, uh, is, is not apparent until you actually get into it.

Chris Williamson 15:56 How

Chris Williamson 15:57 come you got depressed after your first book?

Mark Manson 16:00 Um, I think it succeeded so insanely highly, um, that I honestly felt like, I was like, "There's n- Where do I go from here?" Like, there's not... Like, m- for so many years, my goals were oriented around become a published author, become a bestseller, um, you know, become known in, in my industry, like a leading voice in my industry. Like they... I spent probably half a decade with that as, like, my map, my mental map of what I was working towards. And, and then all those things are achieved in, I think, literally three to six months after the book came out. Um, and then, again, the velocity or the, the intensity of the success was so drastic that I, I honestly was just completely at a loss of what I should do next for about six months. And I think, um, you know, depression at its core is a sense of meaninglessness, a sense of, like, none of your actions matter. And so I, you know, because I was so oriented towards those goals and I achie- Like, not only did I achieve them, I obliterated them, it just felt like until I kind of found new goals or new challenges for myself or a new map for myself, um, it just felt like anything I worked on or did was pointless.

Chris Williamson 17:24 Gold medalist syndrome is kind of similar, and I think that-

Mark Manson 17:28 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 17:29 ... uh, Tom Brady's a really interesting example of this, you know, as one of the longest standing QBs of all time, seven championship rings or something.

Mark Manson 17:38 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 17:39 And like, Tom, you only have 10 fingers.

Mark Manson 17:42 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 17:42 Like, literally you, y- you know, if you, if you have a good couple of runs coming up and you manage to stick your longevity, you're gonna have more championship rings than you do fingers to put them on.

Mark Manson 17:51 It, it's... I think athletes are always a fascinating example of this. Um, something that's been your identity your entire life, you've been rewarded psychologically, socially, financially to such a massive extent, and then you're supposed to retire at, like, 36. (laughs) You know, and you have the rest of your life to do something else.

Chris Williamson 18:10 Good luck. Let go of that identity.

Mark Manson 18:13 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Have fun.

Chris Williamson 18:14 (laughs)

Mark Manson 18:14 Um, it's, it's ... I can't even imagine. Um, you know, the best description I heard of this was, uh ... Apparently, Quincy Jones used to call it altitude sickness, and he would see it in young music artists that he worked with, that they would ... If they became too successful too quickly, he said that it was like climbing a mountain without acclimating on the way up, and that they would basically develop alt- altitude sickness and then fall back down the mountain in order, in order to survive. Like, sabotage their s- their, their s- themselves to get back down.

Chris Williamson 18:49 Uh, they would sooner have familiar failure than unfamiliar success, in a way.

Mark Manson 18:56 Exactly. Exactly. 'Cause it's just, it's ... Again, coming back to, like, how identity lags reality, like it's, it's ... I think when that separation between how you see yourself and how the world sees you becomes too massive, um, it, it becomes untenable and you start ... You probably find ways to sabotage to, to bring, to bring that gap closer together.

Chris Williamson 19:18 Just reflecting on my experience here, breaking the fourth wall a little bit, um, I've certainly noticed within the last s- six to 18 months, but certainly the last six, um, the way that people treat me is different.

Mark Manson 19:31 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 19:32 Uh, people that I've never met before, people that I, that I, I roughly know or don't. And, um, yeah, the way that ... It, it's, it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to work out whether people have got my best interests at heart, whether they actually want to spend time with me because they're genuinely interested and they're a well-meaning person, or whether it's just because they want to be associated with someone they think is a rising stock.

Mark Manson 19:56 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 19:57 And, um, that's, that's like a genuine, uh, uh, something that I palpably noticed. And I think that you're probably right. The, um, analogy across to the person that loses a lot of weight, of it being around about maybe one to two years that your identity lags behind doesn't seem that wrong. Um ...

Mark Manson 20:13 Yeah. It, it's ... So the trust thing is super interesting. That is something that I have experienced as well. I'm much slower to trust people than I used to be, and, and it's exactly for the reason you said. Um, I've also noticed that I've developed a pretty strong ... I call it, like, a fan radar. So there's a lot of people who, like, are big fans, but they don't ... Obviously they don't wanna, like, fanboy. They, they kinda wanna, like, come in un- under the radar and, like, be friendly first and get to know me and then, um, you know, be all casual about it. And I've noticed that I, I've kinda ... I can be talking to somebody for, like, 10 seconds and I'm like, "Oh, this is a fan. I can tell this is a fan." And sure enough, like two hours later, they're like, "By the way, can you sign a book for me?" (laughs)

Chris Williamson 20:54 (laughs)

Mark Manson 20:55 Uh ... I'll also say that, that, uh, you know, my wife has got a very good bullshit detector, and she's been huge for me the last five or six years, um, just beca- just as an outside observer. Because, you know, when you're, when you're in an interaction with somebody, you know, you like somebody, they seem cool, you're in- you're having a good time, it's, it's very easy to miss things or miss details or miss red flags. And, um, you know, having somebody like that who's close to me, who ... That I, that I trust very deeply, you know, kinda pull me aside and be like, "Hey, I'm not sure about that guy. Like-"

Chris Williamson 21:37 Mm.

Mark Manson 21:37 "... I think he wants, he wants something." Um-

Chris Williamson 21:40 Yeah. I mean, this isn't to say that ... I, I, I ... Some of my favorite connections that I've made over the last few years have been through the show, through people that listen, because it becomes a, a gravity distortion well that attracts in other people that are interested in the things you're interested in, which is great.

Mark Manson 21:53 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 21:54 The concern is people that maybe don't have your best interests at heart. And, um, I haven't had my fingers burned by that, like, super badly or whatever yet, but it is the sort of thing that I do get quite conscious about.

Chris Williamson 22:06 Speaking of keeping yourself on the straight and narrow, you recently quit drinking alcohol recently.

Mark Manson 22:11 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 22:12 Right?

Mark Manson 22:12 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 22:12 Welcome to the club. Welcome to the club, my friend.

Mark Manson 22:14 Thanks, man. I actually ... I saw your video ... I don't remember if it was right before I quit or right after.

Chris Williamson 22:22 Ah.

Mark Manson 22:22 But it was ... You know, there was ... It was one of those things where there was a series of events over about two or three weeks, um ... I saw your video, I saw the ... Huberman put out his podcast about alcohol, which was very eyebrow-raising. Um, had a couple conversations with friends who had quit alcohol recently, and, and then I had a personal event, which, um ... Like, I've, I, I've been ... I was a heavy drinker pretty much my entire adult life, and-

Chris Williamson 22:50 What does that ... What does heavy drinker look like?

Mark Manson 22:53 Uh, I mean, I was a party hound, right? So I ... Any time I went out ... You know, when I was younger, any bar, club, or party I went to, I drank a lot. As I got older, that kinda turned more into restaurants, fine dining, um, trips, vacations. It, it was just ... Alcohol, for me, always ... If you took something fun, alcohol made it more fun. And if you took something boring, it made it less boring, so ... (laughs) I, I, I pretty much always found some sort of justification to, like, "You know what'd be great right now? A drink." Um, (laughs) so ... But it, it, it ... I think for me, it hit ... And I, I'm a very functional drunk, um, so I ... It never ... You know, I know some people have i- it causes a lot of problems in their personal or professional lives. Um, for me, it, it was always ... It never interfered massively. Where it actually started to interfere for me was in physical health, uh ... I started gaining a ton of weight, um ... I went to a doctor, got blood work done. The doctor was like, "Shit, this is the blood work of a ... (laughs) This is the blood work of a man, like, 30 years older than you." (laughs) "Uh, you might wanna, like, take a look at your habits." Um-... so all that was kind of going on in the background. I, I started losing weight, cleaning up my diet. That also meant drinking less. And then, uh, at around this time, I, you know, some friends of mine were kind of experimenting with qui- quitting drinking. Uh, I had hired a health coach who was kind of encouraging me to maybe give it up, stop for three, three months or six months. And then I, I remember I went to an event, and it was an event I signed up for and paid for, and I ended up hanging out at the bar. The first night, I ended up hanging out at the bar with a ha- a few guys that I had met, and just got absolutely plastered, like (laughs) just fucking shitfaced. And I was so drunk, I couldn't, I couldn't get up and go to the event the next day. And I remember just laying in, in bed in the hotel room being like, "This is the dumbest fucking thing." Like, "I paid thousands of dollars (laughs) to be here and I feel so awful, I can't even, I can't even be here," right? Um, so it, it was kind of in the air, you know, it was percolating and, um... So I gave, I gave it up end of July last year. Initially, I was gonna do three months. The three months was so amazing that I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna go to the end of the year." Went to the end of the year, drank at New Year's just to see what it felt like. Um, overrated. And so my, my goal for '23 is to actually go, do, do all of 2023 without a drink.

Chris Williamson 25:56 Let's fucking go.

Mark Manson 25:57 That's-

Chris Williamson 25:57 Dude, that's so good.

Mark Manson 25:58 Yeah. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 25:59 It's the exact experience that I had as well. So throughout most of my 20s, running nightclubs, a thousand events, stood in the front door, big party boy, similar to yourself, and then I realized, "This isn't really serving me." Again, was propelled by a very bad hangover one day and thought, "Right, that, I, I mean, just this, the memory of this hangover will get me through the first month."

Mark Manson 26:21 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 26:21 And then I only have another five to do after that. Committed to six. Went back to drinking, didn't really like it all that much, wasn't very enamored with it. Found that the progress I made when I was sober was more addicting than the enjoyment of the party when I went back to drinking.

Mark Manson 26:36 Absolutely.

Chris Williamson 26:37 Came back onto drinking, did another six months, then thought, "Right, well, I, it, I must have done my sobriety stint now. I must have got it all out of my system." Went back to drinking for, like, a month and a half, and this is once every two weeks, this isn't me drinking consistently, and thought, "This sucks." And then did a thousand days, and that was what I did the, the video about. But yeah, it is such a game changer for a vestigial party boy to go through, because you just open up all of this consistency, time, money, calories to spend on things-

Mark Manson 27:11 Yup.

Chris Williamson 27:11 ... that you genuinely care about, energy. Everything that you care to care about in your life gets better when you go sober. And this is from two people who had their drinking, like, relatively under control, right?

Mark Manson 27:21 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 27:22 Alcohol's the only drug where if you don't do it, people assume you have a problem. And the problem that both of us had was lifestyle or productivity/health-based, but it wasn't dependency-based. So it's the easiest of the letting goes, you know, compared with almost everybody else that attempts to go sober. And if they can do it, we definitely can do it.

Mark Manson 27:42 Yeah, for sure. And it, it... I vastly underestimated the effects it would have on my energy, my focus, my motivation. Uh, one of the things that st- stood out to me that Huberman said in his, his episode is he said that if you've been a heavy drinker, and I think researchers define heavy drinker as, I think it's 15 drinks a week? Um...

Chris Williamson 28:06 Which for some people is one night out.

Mark Manson 28:08 Yeah, right? (laughs) I'm like, uh, yeah, that's, that's, that's an average, that was an average week in my 20s. Uh, he said at least 15 drinks, you know, if you've been a heavy drinker for, uh, multiple years, he said that it can take 6 to 12 months for the al- for your system to actually entirely reset, for your brain to go back to the way it was, your internal organs to go back to the way they were. And I was like, "Goddamn, I've been doing this basically since I was, like, 18," right? Like, so half my life, almost two decades. And, um, yeah, i- it's incredible. It, it's incredible. It was, I'd say within a few weeks, waking up with more energy, sleeping like a baby. Um, you know, and one of the things, you know, I cut back quite a bit before I quit completely. I'd say I cut back to drinking maybe two, three times a month. And when I drank, it was, like, just two or three glasses of wine. And it's funny, like, uh, something... I feel like something you notice when you cut back that you don't notice when you keep drinking heavily, like when you drink heavily, you just expect to feel like shit. So when you feel like shit, you're like, "Oh, yeah, well, of course, I drank, I drank a lot." But when you drink very moderately, it actually showed me how much it affects you. Like, I would go out and have two glasses of wine with dinner, and not only would I feel maybe 20% worse the next day, I would feel 10% worse the day after that. And that was shocking to me. I was like, "Whoa, this is actually... It's not about hangovers. It's about just general lack of energy and motivation on a day-to-day basis, and it lasts for multiple days." So yeah, it, it's been an eye-opener. I think it's underrated. I'm also... I feel like it's becoming a thing. Um, I'm, I've been really shocked and surprised how many friends of mine who, without talking, like, people that I haven't seen in six months, I hang out with them, and they're like, "Oh, I quit drinking, by the way." And I'm like, "What? Me too. Holy shit." Like, that has ha- that's probably happened three or four times just in the last year, uh, completely spontaneously. So I feel like it's something that...... is, is becoming almost trendy, um, among, I guess, people who care about productivity and accomplishing things.

Chris Williamson 30:35 So one of the interesting things, it, it would make a good bit of sense for someone that's in their 30s like me and you, perhaps, to dial this back, especially if you're not going out and trying to pull every night and going to clubs and stuff, right?

Mark Manson 30:46 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 30:47 What is maybe even more interesting is the trends that I'm seeing amongst younger people, people who would have taken their sense of self-worth from their degeneracy like me and you might have done.

Mark Manson 30:59 Yep.

Chris Williamson 31:00 And even those people, even the Gen Z'ers, are also seeing going out and getting absolutely lathered as not exactly a high status, um, pursuit.

Mark Manson 31:15 Yeah, it... It's funny, I've seen this a few times on social media over the last few years, but I, I always find it amusing. It's... Inevitably, it's somebody posts a chart and it's like alcohol consumption, uh, sexual activity, maybe illicit drugs thrown in, and it's a chart of, like, generations, like how, how much each generation had done it-

Chris Williamson 31:37 Yeah.

Mark Manson 31:37 ... by age 18, and it's, it's a consistent trend downwards.

Chris Williamson 31:42 Yep.

Mark Manson 31:42 Um, and Gen Z does it the least of all. They do sex, drugs and, and alcohol less than any other generation before. And the people who post this chart, they, like, complain about the kids. They're like, "Wow, kids are so boring these days. They're just, like, on their phone all the time. They should get out and have some real fun." I'm like-

Chris Williamson 32:00 Why aren't they having some heroin-

Mark Manson 32:01 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 32:01 ... and unprotected sex? Come on now, kids.

Mark Manson 32:03 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 32:03 Where are you?

Mark Manson 32:04 I'm, like... I'm like, "Wait a second. When the hell did this turn into a criticism?" Like, when I was growing up it was, it was, you know... Everything was like, "Don't drink, don't do drugs, don't have sex," and that's all we wanted to do. It- It's, um... It's really funny how it's, like, somehow flipped almost.

Chris Williamson 32:21 Yeah, I mean, the, the behavior that me and my housemates considered high status 15 years ago when I was at uni would have been how drunk you got the night before, whether you woke up in a bush, if somebody got an injury. I actually did my master's dissertation on this. It was the effectiveness of anti-alcohol advertising on students at Newcastle University.

Mark Manson 32:40 Mm.

Chris Williamson 32:40 And what I discovered was that a lot of students saw these painful experiences as badges of honor. They were almost like a rite of passage that everybody went through. You know, if we were-

Mark Manson 32:51 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 32:52 ... 21-year-old Mark and 21-year-old Chris ringing each other and say, "Man, how was last night?" And you go, "Dude, it was amazing. John lost an eye." And you're like-

Mark Manson 32:58 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 32:59 ... "What?" (laughs) Like, that would be, that would be-

Mark Manson 33:01 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 33:02 ... an unironic way that we-

Mark Manson 33:04 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 33:04 ... would go about talking

Chris Williamson 33:05 about stuff. And yet, um, Hamza, who is a young guy, 24, 25, I think, British kid living out in Dubai now, YouTuber, his whole thing is do hard things especially when you don't feel like it, big in the no-fap community. He's got this underground fight club thing where he gets young boys to box each other, and this is the new sort of hustle culture. It's the counterculture away from cheap dopamine and, uh, sort of ease degenerate behavior. Uh, so yeah, like, the cool culture is always the counterculture to whatever is the main culture. And for a long time, degeneracy was so mainstream that now it's come the other side. I don't even know if a film like The Hangover would resonate with young people anymore, if you were to release-

Mark Manson 33:50 Good point.

Chris Williamson 33:50 ... a movie like that.

Mark Manson 33:51 That's a good point. Yeah, it, it's something that I've been fascinated with recently, especially because I'm, I'm doing a lot more on YouTube now, and obviously everybody on YouTube is young as fuck. So it's, I'm, like, watching a bunch of 24-year-olds, feeling like an old man. And it's so fascinating to me because yeah, it's what was cool... My entire young life what was cool was destructive. It was how fucked up can you get? What crazy thing can you do? What rule can you break and get away with it? Um, whereas it's... High status behavior today, at least among a certain amount of the younger generation, it does seem to be very productive. Like, it's very... Uh, you know, it's like study hacks and, um, sleep habits and, you know, going to the gym and no fap and all these things, like digital detoxes. It, it's... It gives me hope. It's funny, I, I found myself, I was at a... I was at, like a, uh, speaking at an event, and I was at, like, a dinner with a bunch of the VIPs or whatever, and we were going around... I... You know that Peter Thiel question is like, "What do you believe is true that most people don't?"

Chris Williamson 35:00 Yes.

Mark Manson 35:00 Um, it w- ... We went around the ta- ... We were, like, going around the table and everybody was giving their answer to that, and the answer I gave is I said, "Not only are the kids okay, but they are so much more impressive than you and I or anybody was at their age." Um, and no- for some reason nobody sees this. People just see TikTok and they're like, "Oh, the kids are fucked." Um, you know, they see the crazy woke stuff going on on campuses and they're like, "Oh, these kids, they're brainwashed." And I don't know, like, I play a lot of video games. I spend a lot of time... You know, I, I post a lot on YouTube. I have a lot of young fans. Um, I spend a lot of time engaging with Gen Z and I'm consistently very, very impressed by them.

Chris Williamson 35:45 Do you think that that could be selecting for the cohort of Gen Z that consume content like yours, that they will be-

Mark Manson 35:52 I-

Chris Williamson 35:52 ... the ones that will have an idea about how to restrict their use of TikTok and what they consume online and stuff like that?

Mark Manson 35:59 I think so, I think in the case of, like, my fans. But, um... I don't know, even, even when I, when I get on and, and play games, play video games with a bunch of random kids, like, this... I, I hear the stuff they talk about or, like, go on message boards and stuff, go on Reddit, um-

Chris Williamson 36:16 They're not calling you racial epitaphs, are they? They're not... Not-

Mark Manson 36:20 Mm, or at least (laughs) -

Chris Williamson 36:21 (laughs)

Mark Manson 36:21 Or at least way less often than they did when I was-

Chris Williamson 36:24 (laughs)

Mark Manson 36:24 (laughs) When I was in high school. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 36:27 Yeah.

Mark Manson 36:27 Or, or actually, like... So, you know, I got kinda sucked back into online gaming a few years ago and-

Chris Williamson 36:33 What are you playing?

Mark Manson 36:35 ... a, a... Well, years ago, I played a bunch of Overwatch and it... I loved it. It, it was... Especially 'cause it was kind of a throwback to my era. I played a lot of Quake and Unreal when I was growing up, and so Overwatch was kind of right at, right at my alley. So I played a lot with, um, bunch of young people and it was f-... Two things really blew me away. One was, um, first of all, how many women there were playing, like openly too. Like when I... Back when I played video games in the '90s, it was like if there was a girl, she didn't want anybody to know that she was a girl. Like she's-

Chris Williamson 37:05 Using the voice modulator to try and (laughs) from speaking-

Mark Manson 37:07 Yeah, yeah.

Chris Williamson 37:07 ... on the other side of a pillow, yeah.

Mark Manson 37:09 Or, or just didn't, you know... No, there was no mic, she used a boy's name, you know, stuff like that. So there are a lot of, there were a lot of women playing. And, and the other thing that impressed me too was just, yeah, obviously, yo- young people are immature, they're dumb, but... And they say and do stupid things, embarrassing things, but I was impressed with the amount of kind of self-regulation. So, you know, inevitably, there would be some jackass who would come in and say a bunch of racial epithets and then everybody else would just immediately mute that guy, and it was like problem solved, no big argument, no like-

Chris Williamson 37:46 Yeah.

Mark Manson 37:46 ... big drama, no talking shit.

Chris Williamson 37:49 It's interesting. I tell you what I've become more and more obsessed by recently is availability bias on stuff that you've learned to do with contentious topics. So this weekend, one of my good friends, a guy called Gwindon Bogle who's been on the show three times, he's on again next week, he just released an absolute monster of an article about TikTok, put it out in his Substack and I managed to get it in front of Rogan, and then Rogan tweeted it out, which means that it reached like three million people. So his-

Mark Manson 38:17 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 38:17 ... Substack just went berserk. And this thing is a fucking masterpiece. It... I'll send it to you once we're done. Everyone that's watching now will have already seen the video that I put up with Zach where we talk about it and we go through it. Um, but my most recent... Because that's the most recent thing I read and it was so compelling, I'm currently in this state of, "Right, okay, how do we protect? We need some sort of guidelines. Maybe we should do the same thing that the CCP has done and only restrict access for 45 minutes a day. You can't open it between 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM." I, uh, so tha- that's my, my current leaning, and yet I can't deny people that are Gen Z and watch your content or my content or guys like Hamza who not only speak to those kids but comes from that world and is just-

Mark Manson 39:00 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 39:00 ... completely flying, one and a half million subs on Twitter, really, really well-regarded, super well-rounded guy. Um, yeah, I don't know. I wonder whether there's going to be... uh, whether the Matthew principle is gonna come back in here and you're gonna have the haves and the have-nots. The people who do have the ability to deploy some self-control are going to benefit so much more than the people who can't, because the people that can't are going to be hijacked ever more limbically by these new technologies, by the For You algorithm, and stuff like that.

Mark Manson 39:30 Yeah, I, I think... I mean, look, every generation has its super talented people who are very well-adjusted and figure things out very quickly, and every generation has its people who lag behind, its antisocial people, people who, you know, get distracted or whatever. I'm, I'm, I'm always skeptical, you know, i- it... Social media is such an easy scapegoat for a lot of just general cultural issues, and I'm, I'm always... My default position is to be very skeptical of those things. Um, you know, when I was growing up, I used to come home from school and watch TV for six hours straight, and that was what I did from like age seven till probably 10 or 11. TV and video games, like non-stop from the, the moment I got home from school until I went to bed. I don't see how that's that much different than TikTok, um, in, just in terms of constant stimulation and distraction and, you know, getting your, your, your entire sense of culture from like a very s- tiny sliver of human experience. I think these are things that just... They're just kids. Kids, kids are very distractable. Kids are very easily seduced by crazy ideas and charismatic people, and then kids generally grow out of those crazy ideas. And, you know, nine times out of 10 they grow out of those crazy ideas and charismatic people. Uh, and, and so I, I just try to remember that and hold some patience. Um, I personally think... and I've been banging this drum for about a year now and nobody listens to me, nobody cares, but I, I, (laughs) I personally think TikTok is vastly ove-... TikTok might be the most overrated thing in our culture right now, both in terms of its dangers and in terms of i- it, you know, it's taking over Silicon Valley or whatever. The, the qu- the thing is, is TikTok kind of puts up... It's like TikTok puts some garbage time minutes, you know? To use a sports analogy, TikTok is like that basketball player who can score 60 points a game but never wins. Um, it's... The videos are super short, there's a lot of bot activity, there's a lot of kind of compulsive scrollers, so you get these very inflated numbers on the platform. And coming from a place like YouTube or Facebook where content is longer form, requires more time, energy, you see a TikTok video with like 800 million views and you're just like, "That's fucking insane. Oh my god, everybody must be watching this." But they're not. It's... What, what that is, out of those 800 million views, it's 600 million people spent two to three seconds and then immediately forgot about it. Like when I use TikTok, I'm usually either...... taking a shit or, like, waiting in line somewhere. You know, there's like a, I've gotta wait five minutes for a bus to come and I have nothing else to do in those five minutes, so I just get on TikTok. And I, I'll watch 10, 10 videos and I will for- as soon as I close the app, I have forgotten nine of those 10 videos. I don't remember who made them, I don't remember what they did or what they said. I may have chuckled once or twice. It, they're just in-

Chris Williamson 43:06 I'm not s- so one of the things that Gwinda brings up in that article is digital dementia, which is-

Mark Manson 43:11 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 43:12 ... uh, a, a term that, uh, actually refers to this loss of gray matter in the brain and it appears to be facilitated by very passive, short, iterative platforms like TikTok. And the precise reason that you can't remember the stuff that you went through... If you were to ask me what the last four videos were that I watched on YouTube, I probably could tell you.

Mark Manson 43:31 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 43:31 I think I watched a, a SunnyV video about Joe Rogan's biggest arguments that he's done on his podcast. I watched something from MoistCr1TiKaL between him and Ludwig about building a new esports team. Something else and something else. Um, at least when you spend sufficient time and attention with a particular topic, it does force you to do a little bit of recall. Uh, so-

Mark Manson 43:51 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 43:52 ... although it may be good in that the impact that it has on you isn't so great, you, you can't be ideologically pushed, uh, you can be sort of psychologically degraded through this particular... Anyway, I'm gonna send you it and I'm, I'm gonna be interested to-

Mark Manson 44:05 Sure, sure.

Chris Williamson 44:06 ... to, to know what you think.

Mark Manson 44:06 So, so, so that, that may be true. That may be true. I'm not, I'm not... and, and it's, that may turn out to be true, um, but just to wrap up my argument really quick. Like, I, it's empty calories, you know? Psychological side effects aside, it's empty calories. It's, advertisers are discovering this for, it's like you can't get people to leave. Like, nobody buys anything there, nobody clicks off of it. Um, it's the views that are not, they're worth a thousandth of what a view on Twitter or YouTube is worth. Um, creators like us are discovering that views there are not worth anything. So I, I just think, you know, we should chill a little bit, wait a little while. And what you're saying about the digital dementia, it's like, okay, if somebody, if a- if their only media consumption in their life is TikTok for, like, 12 hours a day, okay, yeah, that's probably concerning. There's probably negative side effects to that. But if you're, like, watching TikTok for an hour or two a day, you're watching YouTube for an hour, you're watching a movie a, a few times a week, you're listening to podcasts, like, I, you're probably... It, it's fine. The

Mark Manson 45:15 world's not ending.

Chris Williamson 45:16 You have, you have a media engine around you, and I've mentioned to you offline that I'm really impressed with the way that you have this sort of cascade of single pieces of content repurposed across lots of platforms. For the people out there that are maybe trying to do the same thing, what is the current prioritization list or the hierarchy of Mark Manson capturing of audience members?

Mark Manson 45:42 Well, I, I, I'm in a, I'm in a unique position because I have built up... I have, like, 200 to 300 long form articles over the last 12 years that I've built a library out of, you know? So that's probably two to three books worth of written content on my website, and generally what we do is... And then I have a weekly newsletter that is kind of new content. But generally what we do is we just find ways to repurpose that old content for whatever platform we are posting on, you know? So Instagram, that might be a little, uh, frame slideshow of, you know, a three or four frame idea. Twitter might be a little tweet or a quote, um, and in YouTube it's usually some video format of one of the ideas from the website. So a lot of, most of the work I've been doing online in terms of just audience generation and engagement has just been repur- taking that, like, massive library that I'd spent 10 years building and then just repurposing it, testing new ideas, testing new versions of old ideas, uh, in, in a bunch of different places and kind of seeing what sticks and what doesn't stick.

Chris Williamson 46:55 What's your priority at the moment? Is it grow email list? Is it grow YouTube? Is it accumulate Instagram? What is it?

Mark Manson 47:02 Uh, pri- top priority right now is video. So I'm actually, I just hired the first few people on a video production team. Um, 2023 is basically completely blocked off in my mind as, like, going all in on video content. It's, that's primarily be, uh, there's two reasons for that. One is I think the, the only two mediums and formats right now that aren't super saturated, uh, for scaling is podcasts and video, and I think even podcasts might have peaked right now, but there's probably still... I mean, y- y- you're showing there's still pockets and people can still climb through, um, but I mean, in terms of, like, written cont- like, blogs are dead, uh, it's, if you're trying to, like, build an audience on Facebook or Instagram, like, your reach is garbage. Um, it's just very-

Chris Williamson 47:53 Substack seems to be doing okay. Some people seem to be growing okay-sized Substacks.

Mark Manson 47:57 Substack could be good. Um, I think it's, it's very niche dependent. Um, so it's, if you are, especially i- if it's politics related, that seem, like... If you're an interesting voice in some political topic, you're probably always gonna find a way to break through. But for me, I'm in an industry where anxiety today is exactly the same as a- anxiety was 10 years ago. There's nothing new to say about it. Uh, so it's, it, it gets very crowded, or like, and, and once you've kind of, like, stuck your flag in, it's gonna be there for a long time, um, you know? And I think I've done that with a few topics, James Clear's done that with a few topics, Ryan Holiday's done that with a few topics, and it's just...... it's just gonna be very hard to, like, change that real estate, um, in terms of, of ideas and everything. So I'm, um, I'm, I'm excited and bullish on video content. I think there's... It's still underdeveloped as a, as a medium online. I still think the audience is m- massive and it's continuing to grow. And it's, and it skews young, so it's a lot of people. You know, if you're, if you're a 35-year-old or a 45-year-old and you've been online for a long time, you've probably heard the, all the shit that I have to say or James Clear has to say, you've probably heard like 20 times by now. But if you're 25 and you're on YouTube and TikTok, you probably haven't. And, um, so for me, that's kind of where the, the, the green pastures are.

Chris Williamson 49:31 What are your thoughts on the modern era of men's advice? Because this is the industry that originally, originally, originally you were kind of born out of this not quite pickup art history, maybe started there, then holistically moved into a more balanced version of that, uh, and yet there is always more opportunities for men's advice to come around. So how do you see this new world of it?

Mark Manson 49:55 Um... You know, I see it as cyclical. I think every generation... I mean, self-help in general is cyclical. Like these i- none of these ideas are new. It's just each generation kind of needs to discover them in their own format and their own language. And I think the same is true with, with a lot of men's advice. I think, you know, our generation, it was the pickup thing. Uh, the generation before that in the '90s, it was men's groups and sweat lodges and Iron John and things like that. Um... This generation (laughs) , let's say, when it was Jordan Peterson was, was kind of like the focal point, I was a little bit optimistic. I thought... I do think he's an improvement on a lot of men's, you know, advice geared towards men. Uh, when Andrew Tate showed up, I, that quickly turned to pessimism. (laughs) Um, so I, I don't know. I feel like there's a void right now. I think there, there, there's a void for, like, a really healthy voice directed towards young men of how to be, how to manage yourself, how to develop yourself. Somebody needs to step into that void.

Chris Williamson 51:15 What are the memes that you keep seeing coming back around? Are there any trends that you see that, from when you first started out, you're starting to see resurface now?

Mark Manson 51:28 Um... I will say that the, i- it is surprised and impressed me how, like, the staying power of the NoFap thing. I remember when that started, I think, around like 2010, 2011. I remember I experimented with it a little bit and people, like, a bunch of people ju- jumped on that, that train. And I don't know, I, I guess I assumed that there wasn't a whole lot there, but it's, it's been impressive how mu- how it stuck around. It's interesting, I feel like this generation of men's advice, it's more about a- abstention. I mean, this kind of comes back to an earlier point about destruction versus productivity. I- i- you know, men's advice in our generation, you know, when I was 20 years old, it was all about here's how to make all the money and here's how to fuck all the girls and here's how to go, go to all the parties. And th- this generation, it seems a little bit more like you should just, you know, stop jerking off, stop distracting yourself, stop eating garbage, um, stop wasting your time, stop dealing with people who don't respect you. And that, it, that seems to occupy a lot more re- I mean, there still is the make a bunch of money and fuck a bunch of girls, like, like, we're human, there's always gonna be that, but-

Chris Williamson 52:50 That's the physics of the system, yeah.

Mark Manson 52:53 Yeah. And it seems like there's more real estate given to the abstention side of things, which is, which is very interesting.

Chris Williamson 52:59 Is there anything... I, I, I found it very interesting to look at the trajectory of the pickup/dating coaches from 10 to 20 years ago. So I spent Thanksgiving with David DeAngelo in his new form.

Mark Manson 53:14 Oh, wow.

Chris Williamson 53:14 Uh, Neil Strauss, yourself, Tucker Max, are all people who came out of a more use 'em and lose 'em degeneracy party boy style pickup world, right? Uh, Jeffrey Miller-

Mark Manson 53:29 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 53:29 ... even to, to a lesser extent, the evolutionary psychologist, you know. And yet, I mean, you look at particularly David, Neil, and Tucker as guys that went from being absolute degenerates to now, especially Neil, almost like this sort of awakened, born again, sort of aligned kind of guy. David was showing off his daughter to me at Thanksgiving and he's just this sort of really holistic, like, open-hearted guy. Tucker Max, you know, whatever it was, five years of daily psychotherapy then into MDMA psychotherapy, now he's living on a ranch with four kids and 50 sheep and whatever else it is that he does.

Mark Manson 54:09 (laughs) .

Chris Williamson 54:09 Like, it... W- w- what's going on here? What's happening with this trajectory of, of men that go from what appears to be, from the outside, one extreme to another?

Mark Manson 54:18 Well, I think some people just have extreme personalities no matter what their value system is. And, you know, I, I think William J- William James had, had an old quote where he said, like, "The only, the only cure for addiction is religion." And that's not to say that these guys have, like, literally adopted relig- I mean, I think in some... I think Tucker's become quite religious. I'm not sure though. Um, but yeah, i- it's...I think a lot of us from that industry exhibited a lot of compulsive behavior around parties, women, sex, alcohol. And generally speaking, it seems that, that compulsive personalities don't ever stop being compulsive, they just change the focus of their compulsivity. So it's, in a way, it's not that surprising. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 55:11 That, it is interesting though. I mean, I see, uh, a bunch of guys who don't have theory of mind to be able to project themselves forward into what that person in the future would be like.

Mark Manson 55:24 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 55:24 And, you know, if, if 15 years ago, either of us had been, tried to be convinced by the older version of us that actually, you know, when you grow up, maybe these aren't the things that you're going to take your greatest sense of self-worth from, we would've just said, "Fuck off, pussy." Like, that's not ...

Mark Manson 55:40 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 55:40 I wa- I wasn't there to, to listen to it. And I do, I am in part concerned that outlier guys who have very black and white sort of mono-thinking strategies when it comes to this, who can't perceive a world in which anybody that chooses to get into a monogamous relationship isn't just settling-

Mark Manson 55:59 Hmm.

Chris Williamson 55:59 ... a- are, um, because of the, like, alluring seductiveness of someone that has very, very clear parameters around, "This is the way that relationships work. This is the way that men work, and this is the way that women work. And that's just the way it is, and there is no room and no caveats and no nothing else," they are outliers. And the problem that you have is, if that cascades down, you have a bunch of men who perhaps don't have that same mentality naturally or that same predisposition then trying to retrofit their lifestyle to somebody else's preferences because they happen to be-

Mark Manson 56:32 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 56:32 ... a thought leader within the dating space. Do you know what I mean?

Mark Manson 56:35 Yeah. Yeah, it's, I mean, look, it's these spaces, when you're young, it's confusing, like trying to figure out, especially in this day and age, right? Like, trying to figure out your sexuality to begin with is confusing, trying to figure out dating, your dating life, what you like in a partner, um, how to actually get somebody attracted to you. Th- these are all very confusing and stressful things when you're young. And, and it's, in a lot of cases, th- the culture has fed you a bunch of stories and narratives that are pretty obviously not always true.

Chris Williamson 57:19 Mm-hmm.

Mark Manson 57:19 And so there's kind of this void for some, some other narrative or story to step in. And, you know, for us, it was, uh, kind of the pickup artist narrative, and I think for a lot of, a lot of these, th- young guys today, it's, it can be somebody like Andrew Tate. So, like, I empathize, like, where, like, that situation and what draws young men to a lot of these explanations and stories. I think what inevitably happens, and I think this happened, this happened in our industry, like, my industry back, uh, 15 years ago and I imagine it's gonna happen again, is that you, you take these kind of countercultural narratives, you know, "This is the way men, men are," "This is the way women are," "This is how you have to act towards them," "This is what gets you laid," uh, and you go, you go try that out. And generally, more often than not, that doesn't work either, or maybe it works a little bit in this one area, but it doesn't work in the others. And I think, generally, kind of the, the, what most of the pickup advice prescribes, and I think what a lot of what Tate prescribes, it, it's generally, it's going to help you feel more confident and help you get more sex, but it's not gonna help your relationships and it's not gonna make you happy. And so I think a lot of guys have to experience that kind of shallow success, like, "Oh, shit, I do have more friends and I am going to more parties and I did get laid a few times, but I, I'm not happy. I don't have a girlfriend. I, I've, like, alienated some people. I haven't made any new friends. This isn't really, like, this, this isn't really working for me." And then they kind of start looking deeper, um, at their own emotional issues and what is right for them. Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 59:08 And I think most of them at that point kind of move on into, into healthier subjects. There's a quote from Naval Ravikant where he says, "It is far easier to achieve your material desires than it is to renounce them." And what he means by that-

Mark Manson 59:20 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 59:20 ... is that, you know, driving a beat-up Honda Accord is way simpler if your last car was a Ferrari because you've closed the loop, right? The Zeigarnic effect-

Mark Manson 59:28 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 59:28 ... is a hell of a drug. And if you can tick that box and go, "Oh, I know what it's like to fuck a Colombian chick," like, I go-

Mark Manson 59:34 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 59:34 ... "Fantastic, I now don't need to worry. My Colombian box has been filled," or her Colombian box has been filled, perhaps.

Mark Manson 59:41 Yeah, there you go. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 59:41 And the thing with, the, the reason that I'm like ... First off, me and Tate have known each other for, like, maybe four or five years now, I think. We've been talking for a, for, for an all right while. The reason that I think he has been able to fit in so effectively into the modern discourse around men's advice is that there is no alternative.

Mark Manson 1:00:03 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:00:03 There is a huge, huge void. And for all that, uh, Peterson is someone that I consider a, a fucking unbelievably valuable and important influence in my life, and also someone that I hold as a friend, he has abandoned those talking points recently.

Mark Manson 1:00:19 Yep.

Chris Williamson 1:00:19 I, I haven't heard him create any new stuff. The last time I heard him talk about this in all of last year, he did Lex's show and he did mine, and those were the only two times that I really got anything about the sort of existential philosophy, depth of suffering in life type thing. Very much now, he's concerned about, uh, broad scale social problems, environmental change, culture, overreach in academia, blah, blah, blah. They very well may be more valuable things in his eyes for him to spend his time on, but for young guys, the- there is a void, and wherever there is a void-

Mark Manson 1:00:51 Yep.

Chris Williamson 1:00:51 ... someone will get sucked in. And for every single person from the left that has an issue with Andrew Tate being the new role model for guys in 2023-... please show me your alternative. Like if you-

Mark Manson 1:01:06 Yeah. I-

Chris Williamson 1:01:06 ... do not speak to men, they will find someone that speaks to them, and right now you have a very well-spoken, regardless of what you think of him, his ability to speak is fucking 10 out of 10, 170 IQ-

Mark Manson 1:01:20 Yup.

Chris Williamson 1:01:20 ... verbal agility. Uh, d- how could he have never, how could he have not been successful in this world?

Mark Manson 1:01:27 Yeah. And, and this is the, this is the thing, you know, 'cause we had a lot of, I mean, I'll, I'll just call it kind of toxic male advice back in the pickup days. But the thing is, is the guys who were giving it were like weird dweeby guys with like feather boas and top hats. Um, the thing about Tate is he... if you're a 16-year-old kid, you look at a video of him and he just looks fucking cool. Like, you're like, "Dude, that's a cool fucking guy." He drives a Lambo. He's got a bunch of money. He's banging girls. He's a kickboxer. Like, I, so I get the appeal. I just, you know, and I've been saying the same thing. A lot of people have been... I've been doing a lot of traditional media for the, for the, for the film, and a lot of them have been asking me about Tate because of my background, and I keep saying exactly what you're saying, is I say, "Look, it is... even in the best of circumstances, it's confusing to be a 16-year-old, 18-year-old, 20-year-old guy." Like it's, everybody struggles with their sexuality. Everybody struggles with relationships. Everybody struggles to build an identity and develop self-esteem in that identity and to get along with others and know how they're gonna fit into the world and know how they're gonna find a relationship. I- i- it's a very difficult thing for, for everybody, including young men. And I said that the correct question isn't like, why is Andrew Tate saying such awful things? The question is, is like, why are so many young men listening to him? It... what is appealing about him? What is drawing all these young men towards him? And why i- isn't there, as you said, a better alternative? Um, I do think too, I mean, i- it's, it has to be said, like I, I just think it's intellectually dishonest to not say, even if you believe a lot, a lot of the social changes that have happened over the last five or 10 years are good, uh, you know, things like Me Too and some of the woke movement, you have to admit that that adds confusion to young men. Like if, if you're a 18-year-old guy and you grew up watching Me Too happen and all the stuff that your dad told you to do five years ago is now deemed offensive, uh, that's confusing as shit. Like, how do you sort that out in your young head, you know, without, (laughs) without, you know... and especially with all the, the consequences and cancel culture and stuff that's going on. So I, I just think, um... again, I, I hope for a, a healthier, more integrated men's voice to, to start appealing to these young guys. And I do think somebody will eventually come along. Um, but it's, it's, it's definitely a, a massive gap in the social fabric at the moment.

Chris Williamson 1:04:13 Well, let me give you this with regards to how Me Too could have hurt and confused young girls' approaches as well. So for almost all of recent history when it came to dating advice for women, which they do-

Mark Manson 1:04:25 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:04:25 ... actually have, apparently there is an industry of that, um-

Mark Manson 1:04:28 Yeah, a very large one. (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:04:30 Yeah. Significantly larger than it is for men. Um, why men love bitches, treat him like you don't like him, all of this advice-

Mark Manson 1:04:37 Yep.

Chris Williamson 1:04:37 ... told women that the way to get a guy to be interested in you was actually to pull away. But then in a post-Me Too world, guys who see a girl that plays hard to get thinks, "Oh fuck, I do not want to get canceled. I'd better avoid this situation at all costs." And yet, girls, I don't think, have updated their operating procedure in order to account for this new hypersensitivity that guys have around anything short of a "fuck yes" being an "absolutely not, get away from me or you're gonna f- end up on the front page of a newspaper."

Mark Manson 1:05:10 Yeah. And it, it's... I think this is why, not to toot my own horn, but you know, for people who don't know, I, I made my name in the pickup industry by promoting a philosophy of just blunt and radical honesty in dating situations, and I think that's more important than ever. Like, i- you just express how you're feeling, express your desires, but express it in a way that's respectful of the other person and be... always be willing to hear no and accept no. Um, I just think at the f- at, at the fundamental core of all dating romantic relationships, you have to have that clear line of communication from the get-go. And I think given all of the cultural confusion and mixed messages around this stuff, um, it's probably more important than ever.

Chris Williamson 1:06:02 What do you think most people misunderstand about how relationships work?

Mark Manson 1:06:07 I think they, they think it's a game. They, they... they conceptualize it in ways that ultimately boil down to a power struggle. So this could be anything from, you know, "Oh, wait a day to text her back so she, you know, she doesn't think you like her too much," to, uh, pulling up old arguments. You know, like let's say my wife and I get in a fight and then I'm starting to lose that fight and so I pull up something that she did six months ago to like score a point. I wrote an article about this, uh, i- it was called like ti- ten or Six Toxic Habits... Ticks, uh, ah-

Chris Williamson 1:06:45 (laughs)

Mark Manson 1:06:45 I can't talk, man. Uh, Six Toxic Relationship Habits That Most People Think Are H- Are Normal, and one of them I called it the relationship scoreboard. Basically people who keep score, track responses, track time, um, you know, people who get upset of like, "Well, I called you twice and you never called me back." Like it- it's... if you're counting shit like that, like you're already losing just from the fact that you're counting.

Chris Williamson 1:07:11 Some people's nature is that though, right? Some people will struggle due to feelings of insufficiency, anxious attachment, just general concern about their partner. They'll think, "Oh, well, how many times should I call them back? Maybe if I do message them too quickly then they're not going to like me." What do you say to that person?

Mark Manson 1:07:30 It's hard because I think to communicate honestly, you have to sort through your owns and insecurities. And this is ultimately what... You know, I wrote a book, uh, it's called Models: Attract Women Through Honesty. And, and the... ultimately, the core of the book is that honesty always wins, but to actually be able to live that, you have to sort through your own shit. And, and often that process of sorting through your own shit, it results in short term failures, you know. Uh, so it's... To that anxious per- person with anxious attachment, um, you ultimately want them to communicate how they're feeling in a, in a very unconditional way, but the first few times that they do that, they're gonna come on way too strong and it's gonna create... it's probably gonna scare people away or it's gonna cause them to not be attracted to them anymore. Uh, but I think you have to kind of go through that experience to understand where the line is of, of like, okay, where does honest communication end and then my insecurities begin, um, to, to kind of get a sense of like how to healthily communicate in the future.

Chris Williamson 1:08:43 Yeah, I think a lot of insecurity in people around their own self-worth then gets borne out when a relationship happens. Because for the most part, all of your foibles and concerns and everything else, you can hide them away, brush them under the rug. You know, you have that thought pattern every single day and you do some Buddhism mindfulness exercise thing where you sort of let go and allow and it just fucks off. And you go, "I'll deal with that mañana, mañana, mañana." And then before you know it-

Mark Manson 1:09:09 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:09:09 ... it's five or 10 years later. But there are so few places to hide when you start spending time with somebody else and you get that compulsion of companionate or passionate attachment to someone and you go, "Okay, all of that stuff that was under the rug has now congealed into a dust monster and it is just running ravage around in my mind," and you can no longer hide it. And this is why I like your insight around doing the self-work before you-

Mark Manson 1:09:36 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:09:36 ... then even expect to have a particularly healthy relationship. And it's also presumably why people see the same problems in all of their relationships. You are the common denominator between all of your different relationships. And if every single partner that you get with is just way too distant or way too needy or way too overbearing or way too whatever, it's like they have nothing in common with each other except-

Mark Manson 1:09:59 Except for you.

Chris Williamson 1:10:00 ... you. You're the only thing that they have in common.

Mark Manson 1:10:03 (laughs) Yeah, and, and again, this is why honest communication and disclosure is so important. You know, I get, I get a lot of questions from guys who say stuff like that. They're like, "Well, I, I, I tend to be very anxious and clingy and I struggle with that." Like, "What should I do?" And I'm like, "Well, when you start dating somebody, just calmly let them know, like, 'Hey, I have a tendency to be a little clingy. If it ever starts to put you off, just let me know and I'll back off.'" You know, like ask your partner to help you regulate your own boundaries, understand where the line is, um, so that you can adjust your behavior accordingly. Like not only is that the most effective thing to do, but it re- you, now you don't have to spend weeks and weeks or months and months, like, hiding this horrible thing inside yourself that you think is gonna get you rejected by somebody.

Chris Williamson 1:10:56 There's something called the Michelangelo Effect, which I learned about a little while ago, which is over time in a relationship, each partner begins to look more and more like the other partner's idealized version of them. And the reason it's Michelangelo is that from a rough-hewn block of marble, over time, it gets chipped away to look like the vision that the artist had. And that's the best way that you could have a relationship, right? That you are going to help me become not only more of me, but I am going to be more of the type of person that you would like. And hopefully your desire for the type of partner will make me even better than I could have been on my own. But again, that is all mediated by being able to tell the truth, by not coming ac- across as being too needy.

Mark Manson 1:11:37 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:11:37 And you had a, a tweet last year that I loved that said, uh, "Nobody remembers your mistakes as much as you do."

Mark Manson 1:11:44 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:11:44 And I think that that level of self-, um, concern, uh, and self-doubt is because of that, right? That you have this front row seat to every mistake that you make as you fall flat on your face over and over again. And even the person that's the closest to you probably can't even remember the thing that you did yesterday that you felt like was this huge, embarrassing episode.

Mark Manson 1:12:07 Yeah, it's because everybody else is too busy worried about their mistakes (laughs) that they think everybody is paying attention to.

Mark Manson 1:12:15 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:12:16 What about, um, as, as a guy who is now 38. You're now 38?

Mark Manson 1:12:20 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:12:20 38.

Mark Manson 1:12:21 Yep.

Chris Williamson 1:12:21 What do men have to focus on at 38 that they didn't have to focus on at 28?

Mark Manson 1:12:28 That's a great question. Uh, for me, the most obvious, I mean, and this is... a lot of this is personal, but I think physical health is the biggest one. Um, Tim Ferriss actually said it perfectly with, when I talked to him, he said that it's... As you age, the amount of focus and attention you have to give your physical health does not increase linearly with your age. It increases exponentially. And I've definitely found that to be true. It, it is shocking and upsetting how many habits I had in my 20s that I thought were okay, (laughs) you know, by 35 are actually causing significant problems in my life. Um, so I, you know, I think health is the biggest one by far. I do think, um...You know, the nice thing that happens when you age is you've had enough experiences and enough time has passed. Like, I think a lot of kind of the dumb stuff that we do when we're young is simply the fact that we... not enough time has passed for us to realize how much our values change o- over the course of our lives. And so when you're young, if something feels important, you, you kind of just naively assume it's gonna be important forever. And once you get to your, your 30s and probably more so in your 40s, you've lived enough to see that, like, oh yeah, that thing that seemed really important 12 years ago, I realized didn't matter six years ago. And there's like a fluidity that comes in and out with your prioritizations and, um, you know, friendships that you thought were the most important friendships in your life, they come and go, and you realize that life goes on and it's okay and you meet new people. Um, so it's, it's almost like this, this kind of like existential fluidity that starts to happen with the things in your life. I guess that's called wisdom or it's another name for wisdom. But, um, it's... I think it's underrated. Like, I really appreciate that about aging. And again, it's something nobody really tells you is gonna happen.

Chris Williamson 1:14:40 Yes, perspective.

Mark Manson 1:14:42 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:14:42 The ability to have that perspective. I... Dude, I remember even now I, I find it the same. I just presume the thing that I'm obsessed by now will be the thing that I'm obsessed by for the rest of time.

Mark Manson 1:14:53 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:14:53 And, you know, even when I started this show, which was five years ago, I was s- so deep into the productivity space. That was my thing. I, I thought that would just-

Mark Manson 1:15:01 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:15:01 ... do endless numbers of episodes about the Pomodoro Technique or procrastination or-

Mark Manson 1:15:06 (laughs)

Chris Williamson 1:15:06 ... mono-thinking or mono-tasking or whatever. And then after a little while you realize, okay, like, maybe the friendships I had are going to drop away. And, you know, I know that you moved to... was it Bra- Brazil or somewhere, you just kind of dropped everything and went? I think when you make decisions like that, which I did last year to go from the UK to Austin, it... That's a nice sort of landmark flag in the ground, a very formative experience that reminds you, well, maybe things aren't always going to be the way that they were.

Mark Manson 1:15:37 Mm-hmm.

Chris Williamson 1:15:37 And maybe I'm not always going to be obsessed, and maybe my friends aren't always going to be there. And also, as you grow older, people are gonna start passing, you know.

Mark Manson 1:15:44 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:15:44 Situations are going to change. Um, I realized this only the other day, that I think it'll be episode 600 or something of this show, pretty soon there's gonna be people that I had a conversation with for an hour that I really, really enjoyed, and they're not gonna be here anymore. Like, I'm, I'm-

Mark Manson 1:16:00 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:16:00 ... I'm gonna have, I don't know, an ever-increasing number of posts that I'm gonna have to write or mornings that I'm gonna have to deal with where I wake up and go, "Holy fuck, that guy or girl that I really loved spending an afternoon with is gone." So yeah.

Mark Manson 1:16:19 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:16:19 All, all of this as you grow older does remind you, um, stuff doesn't last forever, including your obsessions and including-

Mark Manson 1:16:27 Yeah.

Chris Williamson 1:16:27 ... your thought pro- thought processes.

Mark Manson 1:16:30 E- It's interesting. Related to that, I have found I... how much more aware I am of the time I have left. Again, I think when you're... when you're 20 something, you have your whole life ahead of you, it seems like forever. And, you know, coming up on 40, I've now experienced how quickly 10 years goes by (laughs) and, and how many things you wanted to do in those 10 years you never, never got around to doing-

Chris Williamson 1:17:00 Yeah.

Mark Manson 1:17:00 ... or tried to do and, and weren't able to do. Um, and so it's again, back to the perspective thing. Um, it's really given me appreciation for like, okay, you've probably got 25 to 35 years left of a career, and that's not... that does not feel like that much time anymore. And so you have to be very, very conscious of like how you're investing each year, how you're spending each month, um, a- and, and kind of bringing this full circle back to the, the, the perils of too much success too soon. Um, that's been helping me a lot to say no to things, is, is remembering like, "Look, man, like it, it's... you've got... you've got 20, 25 peak years left. Like, don't waste them. You're, you're almost halfway through your professional life, so make the last half count. Um, don't make the same mistakes you made coming up the first half." So that, that's kind of been where my mentality's been at.

Chris Williamson 1:18:02 What can people expect from you next?

Mark Manson 1:18:05 Uh, so there will be a lot of video content coming primarily on YouTube over the next year. Um, I'm hoping to... I've actually got a video going up this weekend where I make, I guess, a, a, a bold intention, which is to reinvent the self-help space on YouTube. Um, I've got some ideas for new formats and involving the audience, uh, in real life situations. So I'm very excited about that. I think it's, it's an opportunity to do something very new and, and big and, uh, and bold. So that's getting, that's getting me very excited.

Chris Williamson 1:18:44 Unreal.

Chris Williamson 1:18:45 Where can people go to check out everything else that you do?

Mark Manson 1:18:48 Uh, markmanson.net is the website. I've got the Breakthrough Newsletter there. I'm on every social platform for better or worse. Um, but yeah, the new... the new stuff will be primarily on YouTube, so check it out.

Chris Williamson 1:19:01 All right, Mark. Thank you. I appreciate you, dude.

Mark Manson 1:19:03 Thanks, man. It's a pleasure.

Chris Williamson 1:19:05 What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace.