How to Find Your True Path in Life (ft. Robert Greene)

Robert Green in studio in the flesh you are actually one of our most requested guests that right yeah for the most requested dr. K the gaming psychologist don't even know who that is wow have you had him on i have not i've i've i've contacted his people but what's so amazing about dr. K well he's uh he's a psychiatrist who uh targets mental health for gamers that's a lot of your audience i guess oh yeah i guess so it's the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your holds mark manson so my first question for you is actually quite selfish as a younger author it i i find your career so fascinating because you have this long history of successful books but it really seems like there's this resurgence of interest especially in the 48 laws of power over the last few years it seems like gen z is discovering rubber green and you're getting this whole second wave of attention i'm curious what that experience has been like what that what your thoughts on that are and whether you feel like you have any control over that or if it just happened well i don't know it's probably a confluence of things who knows why things happen in this world it's complex and it's mysterious but i would say um social media has played a huge role in it because um back 10 years ago or so you know nobody really know who i was i had no Instagram i was a little bit on Facebook but i hadn't really gotten into social media at all i was very very scanned on on twitter and so i think a lot of it is about five years ago some some fans that you've got to get on social media and he took over and he he did it himself for me oh wow and we ended up having to fire him because he was kind of a control free but um a nice guy but he he just wanted to like kind of run my empire he would call my amp he would say your legacy i'm going to protect your legacy as if i'm dead or so i got rid of him anyway um suddenly you know it started growing i have this guy Stan Lee who's my assistant who puts clips and he's very good at choosing certain clips and so a lot of it is social media giving me a presence you know up until recently i could walk down the street nobody knew the hell who the hell i was yeah and suddenly people started recognizing me because of this it was just exploded yeah you know even in places like London or Paris it's like i got this international reach was incredible yeah and so i have to thank social media for that for paying my mortgage and all the other things like that but then why has it resonated now and i think um young people are dealing with a world that's so much more chaotic and confusing some of it has to do with the conditions of the world that we're living in which is which is as i said much more chaotic than it was maybe 10 15 years ago some of it has to do with the parenting issues how differently they have been raised and the culture that they're entering and so because of that's feeling kind of very lost and confused the 48 laws of power kind of gives you sort of a grounding and kind of the the dark harsh aspect of life because i i don't know i'm not gentsy so it's hard for me to generalize of course it's ridiculous to generalize but a lot of them feel maybe they've been a little bit sheltered from that kind of harsh aspect of life i know when i was 21 if i can remember back that far i entered the work world out of college and i i was a liberal arts major ancient Greek and Latin you can't get any more irrelevant subject than that my first job was at real job because i had many different my first real job was at Esquire magazine i was the lowest editor there an editorial assistant it was like my blood i couldn't believe power games that were going because nothing in college prepared you for that all the egos of the writers and the editors the celebrity the weirdness i once edited an article by john erving you know the writer yeah he turned in a travel article about Vienna because i was like the travel editor it was such a bad article it was like go to this cafe turn right and then go here and then turn left and go it was like that kind of writing i edited totally amid it like a narrative and i got essentially fired because of that or got demoted i had outshown the master law number one so it was as rude awakening into this is what the world is really like i had to school myself very quickly and then with my 50 different jobs i learned over time this is how the world is young people are going through that but times ten because the world is even more confusing they're not used to dealing with all of these egos to all the political games so i think i can't say for sure but i think these are some of the components that go into this revival of the book it's selling five times more than it ever did 20 years ago so it's insane yeah i feel like cynicism travels on the internet faster than it does in real life and i think as a generation that grew up on social media and grew up on the internet what i detect from jinse is just is kind of an embedded cynicism about the world and and like severa skepticism and and i i could see why a book about power appeals to that it's like okay well this book is going to just cut through the bullshit and actually tell me what's going on so i the appeal makes sense but i'm not i'm not a cynical person i know people think of the book as cynical but i don't really think of it as cynical yeah because cynical is is basically you know leaning into all the bad things in life etc and it's not very realistic because not all life is bad there are bad people out there i just think the book is realistic yeah for sure because i'm not a cynical person at heart you know i'm actually got unfortunately more of a romantic naive streak and i think it in some weird way that comes out in the book but yeah it's interesting you know you and i have met in person a few times now and i imagine the the image that people get from reading your books versus how they see me how how you actually are in person like i do you get people like assuming that you're like trying to pull puppet strings and manipulating them like on five minutes late for a meeting it's not because of the traffic it's because i'm playing some kind of weird game on them you know like it's all 27 or whatever yeah yeah um i know uh i've said i've told the story before but when i met 50 cent for the first time before we ever thought of writing a book together he was like he later told me he was kind of a little bit intimidated by this he he expected an older man he picked like Henry Kissinger to show up when we first met yeah and then he was kind of surprised maybe even a little bit disappointed that i wasn't like that of course i had the same impression about him i was expecting someone really kind of mean and intimidating and thuggish and he was the sweetest gentlest nicest person you could ever imagine yeah but yeah people expect this that everything i do is a power move it's but it's not true yeah do you just kind of see that as the cost of the success of the book you know because it's i get this with my fuckbooks like people make assumptions about me that i'm and then they meet me in person they're like oh you're not like that at all like the well you do you do give a fuck do you of course yeah of course okay no i'm scared um yeah but you're already me robber you're not okay exactly sorry sorry you can start being mean to me now i should show people you know there's a theatrical element to the social world which i embrace and i think it's kind of fun and interesting and it's part of the 48 laws of power so when you enter the world you're not yourself um i think it's something a mistake people make they have no distance between their inner self and their public self so they enter the work world and people are different and weird and stuff and they take it personally and i try and strike people it's not personal it's a game people are wearing masks it's like something from the 18th century people are in costumes and they're in theater and they're performing people are constantly performing well i'm performing as well and so if people have this image of me is this dark sinister figure sometimes you know i don't mind i might lean into it a little bit i might give that out that impression because i kind of enjoy that i kind of enjoy playing that role sort of thing yeah you know i don't have a problem with it yeah but it's not really who i am right right um tell me about in in your book mastery you talk about finding your life task and from what i know about you and from the bits and pieces i've read about you and talk to you you seem to know pretty early on that you wanted to be an author you seem kind of just built and to be a writer like what was your process of searching and discovering and finding what you consider your life you know i my story was was fairly clear i mean like you there's it goes up and down it's not it's never like a straight path of course but um when i was very young i loved writing i wrote i i believe i wrote something like a novel when i was about nine years old oh wow And it was about our early, early human first entering the scene, you know, walking in the savannahs of Africa, I'm nine years old, and it's told from the point of view of a vulture who's watching them. No, I'm sure it's terrible. But for a nine-year-old, that's impressive. That's very impressive. I was really obsessed with vultures and I did a little sculptures of vultures. So you kind of see the dark side already there when I'm nine years old. And so, you know, I love words, just the sound of words, the sensuality of words, the weirdness of, you know, I just, I never took language at its face, but I thought there's something strange that we speak in words that we have these symbols that we take for granted that talks so smoothly, but they're not. They're weird that these little squiggles that mean something that have a sound attached to them. So child, this is really strange. I was obsessed with words I played with words. I still do that to this day. I love like pal and drums and word games and such. So words obsessed me and obviously I wanted to be a writer. I thought when I was 18 in my drug days that I would be a wild novelist, you know, that was my real dream. I still am kind of a failed novelist, so to speak. And so I tried, as I've told people before, I tried many different types of writing. I tried journalism. I hated it. I failed at it. It wasn't good fit. I tried writing novels or bumming my around Europe with a backpack. I failed at that. I came back to L.A. tried to be a screenwriter. I failed at that. These weren't fits for me because I have a weird mind and I'm also a control freak and I didn't have any kind of control in Hollywood. And so, you know, I lucked into the 48 laws of power by meeting this man in Italy. We were there to start a new media school for Beneton, some weird project like that. It was kind of a meaningless venture. It really was about being in Italy and having good pasta and espresso and wine. It wasn't about getting anything down if you know the Italians. This is the land of Machiavelli. And so, he at Yost and I, the man who did that, we kind of bonded over it. One day I'm in Venice. Italy was near Venice and we were walking. He said to have any ideas for a book. And the 48 laws of power just was like almost like we have vomited out of me. I kind of improvised the gist of it. Actually, I told him a story, the story that opens the book. I said, this is how I'd illustrated. He said, that's fantastic. I'll pay you to live while you write the book because I was very poor. And so, I kind of found my way in this kind of circuitous way manner to what I was really meant to do. But the lesson I think for people because I get so many emails, people telling me, I don't know what my life's task is. I can't figure out what my purpose is. Can you help me? Can you help me? And there are signs. I believe everybody has signs. And these signs come out. A lot of them are negative signs, which you're not paying attention to. Things that you hate. Things that frustrate you. So, you're in music. It isn't quite working. You feel a little bit uncomfortable. It's not a fit. Yeah. So, you make the wise decision that it's not for you to get out. Other people, they maybe feel at frustration, but they don't go there. They go, oh, I've already trained as a musician. I got to stick with it. They go. And then they then they burn out at 30 years old. And it does, it's not working for them. They go, what's my life's purpose? I have no idea. You've got to listen to the signs. Sometimes the signs are physical, but literally in your body, you literally feel frustrated. You literally feel like you're swimming against the tide. It's not working for you. You get up in the morning. You're not interested in this. So, the negative is very important, but also there's the positive. So, for me, the negative was, I hate, I actually hate office politics, which is very ironic for me, you know, who wrote that. I couldn't, I can't stand working for other people. And so, I have to work for myself. I have to be an entrepreneur. I have to write books. I have to have control. But then there are the positive signs. There's the signs of things that you love that you're passionate about. They generally show up when you're very six, seven, eight years old. And so, I tell people, you've got to go through that process. You have to reconnect with the child inside of you. Because children or dreamers, every child thinks, I'm going to be president. I'm going to write a great novel. I'm going to do this out of the other. And then those dreams slowly get squeezed out of them. But you have to return back to that. You have to have a little bit of that expense of quality, a little bit of imagination, even a little bit of naivete, and go back to who you were, and go back to the things that excite you in a way that you can't even explain. You know, the negative feedback thing, one thing I notice in a lot of people, you know, there's this narrative around grit, persistence, hustle culture, right? Like what I notice with a lot of people is when they start running into that resistance and it doesn't feel right, it feels painful. The first thing they tell themselves is like, oh, well, I just need to toughen the fuck up and keep going because this is this is what, you know, all my heroes did is they just kept fighting through it. And it's I think it's such a it's so much more nuance than that of like understanding when to push through and when to let go. Well, the the subtle art should be actually the title of your next book because it is subtle, it is nuance. Life is not so obvious. So sometimes grit and persistence is the right way. Yeah. So for me, writing, I failed at all these different aspects. I didn't give up. I didn't say, all right, my parents wanted me to go to law school, wanted me to settle down, wanted me to take these awful television jobs that I had. You know, and I can I've had the worst television job you can imagine. I won't even say that. They want me to settle down, you know, I had to have the persistence to go, no, I'm going to do is I'm going to stick with it. I have faith in myself, even though I got very depressed, but also sometimes persistence can be exactly the wrong thing. Right. And the key is, the key to everything in life is knowing what you really truly love, what you were meant to do, why you were born, why you're a different individual. You know, I know it sounds like a cliche, but everybody, your DNA is unique. There's never going to be another Mark Manson, the way your brain is wired, the way your parents raised you, your early experiences, you are unique. And so that is where your power lies. And connecting to that is is is the source of everything in this world. So if you connect to it, if you know who you are, you know what you love, you know what you were meant to do. And it's not a cliche, it's actually very real. Then that persistence will become an actual positive thing in your life, because you'll know I can't keep kicking against a wall here. It's not what I was meant to do. I got to get out. Yeah. You know, so I was 25, 26 years old. I was in New York working in journalism. I had a meeting with an editor after I wrote an article. And I didn't know what the meeting was for. And he was kind of an alcoholic. He was like on his second or third martini at lunch. And he was basically said, Robert, you're not a good writer. You're not going to make it in this world. You need to go to business school. You're not disciplined. You're all over the place. You don't understand your audience, right? And so I could have like said, fuck you, I could have like stayed in journalism. I'd probably be dead by now. I'd probably be an alcoholic, because it wasn't right. But I listened to it and I go, you know, there's something true there. It isn't right. It isn't a good fit. I'm hitting against a wall. I got to get out and I got to try something else. But if you don't know who you are, if you don't know what marked you as a weird person when you were a child, then you're lost in life. You have no radar. One thing that I tell people all the time is I ask them, what's the form of pain that you enjoy that most people can't tolerate, right? Like it's, and you don't mean like in a kinky way. No, not in a kinky way. No, not in a way. We don't judge here. It's a hard podcast. But, um, keep it a PG-13, Robert. I'm sorry. What is the the challenge or struggle that that you kind of relish? Like you kind of, you know, like I know for me, and I imagine it's similar for you. Like when I'm in the hole with a book, when I'm like just deep, deep, deep in a mess of a draft, and I'm like agonizing through it, I'm laying awake at night. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about right now. You know what I'm talking about? There's still kind of a sick part of me that like likes it. Yeah. Like there's something thrilling about it. Yeah. And I think most people, they can't stomach it. Whereas like in music school, I remember the moment I decided to drop out of music school. I remember I was practicing four to six hours a day on what it should play a guitar. So I was practicing four to six hours a day on top of all my classes. And I remember I went into one of my private tutors and tried to play a song for him and he just looked at me and he's like, you know what your problem is? You don't practice enough. And like that was the moment I was like, I'm done. I like, I can't. And it was the practice painful, but not in a good way. Correct. It was, it was drudgery. Yeah. And to me, that was a very profound lesson, you know, because I'm. I loved performing and I loved getting attention because I could play some song or some solo, but I didn't like practicing. And musicianship is actually practicing. - All practicing. - It's the 99% practice, 1% performance, right? So it was a very painful lesson of like, you think you like this, but you don't actually like it. - Wow, that's very interesting, yeah. - Well, you know, when you love something, when you have that connection that I'm talking about, then the practice, you enjoy it, you enjoy learning, because you enjoy the process of getting better, and you can feel your brain kind of tingling and things are happening inside. And I tell people, if you have found the right path, if you are like an artist or creative, and you feel frustrated and you feel blocked, that's a good thing, right? That little bit of pain, a little bit of frustration, it's often a signal that you're actually on the verge of turning into the right direction. You know, it's a signal that things aren't quite working out and you're listening to it. But if you get anxious and you don't listen to the frustration and you can't be creative, you can't go into it. But you'll learn at a much higher rate and you'll enjoy, because anything, as I said in mastery, everything involves a degree of pain, a degree of practice, a degree of drudgery. There's nothing that's gonna come easy in life. So anything is skill that you're gonna learn, it's gonna involve that. And if you're not connected to it in a deep way, like you weren't with music, you're never gonna get, you're never gonna learn fast enough, you know, and you're just gonna dry up, you're gonna burn out too early, so. - Yeah. - What about Robert? What about reconnecting with that life task and going back and finding that? Because I think you talk about a lot of the negative signs. - Yeah. - I think people can get stuck. Everything's just a negative sign, they're like, and they completely forget. Mark, you said that you got disconnected from that. At one point, and you kind of, by chance, stumbled back into it. Robert, it sounds like you kind of always knew you wanted to be a writer of some kind. I feel there are a lot of people who just, they feel like, they don't even know what that is to begin with. So can you talk a little bit more about like, uncovering that connection to your life task? - Well, it's a good, you know, to childhood or whatever. - It is a good question because a lot of people, they only know the negative, they only know. And then you kind of beat up on yourself and then you start doubting yourself and you think, well, maybe there's nothing that I'm really good at. Maybe I just need to go make a lot of money, which I'm not against making money. I'm not telling people to say, oh, I meant to be a poet, which can't make a living off of. You have to be able to put food on the table if you're supporting a family, et cetera. So being able to make a living is important, right? But you don't have to compromise completely in that. So fighting that positive element. Well, the first thing you have to do is it's a process and people are so impatient, they are so unused till being to introspecting. And being able to introspect is a very, very powerful tool. And what that means is you have to be able to examine yourself. And in our culture, we're so out or directed, we're so directed towards what other people are doing to the social world that the idea of who am I? What I like as a child, what do I really love? Is alien to people? I can't understand it because I'm a very introspective person. But a lot of people have a hard time with that concept. And I encounter that when I try and counsel them. So I tell people, you have to be patient. It's not gonna come in the light and a flash of, wow, I was meant to be a sculptor here where I go, okay? So you've got to be patient, you've got to take a book and you have to make a journal. If that, you know, I think it works for a lot of people. And you have to start going through this process. And you know, I tell people, look for the signs of things that excite you in a way that you can't even really control. Because we live in a culture that is so damn rational. Everything is an algorithm. Everything is generated by data. But this is a feel, this is not data, this is a feel, this is an intuition. This is something that excites you in an intuitive way. And there's no algorithm in the world that I could invent or any genius could invent to help you find that. It's a feel, it's subtle, it's inside of you. But if you can't go inside of yourself, if you're so, not into looking into who you are, all the advice in the world will be useless. And I tell people that I can't help you unless you're willing to go through that process. And some of that examining is tough. Some of it is, yeah, I had a rough childhood. Yeah, I had these fantasies, but they weren't necessarily positive. You're going to come and pause negative things, you know? And I had a lot of negative things in my childhood too. So you have to be willing to go through that digging. You're like an archaeologist with your own past. You're digging in there, looking for the signs. And they're there. When you were five years old, four years old, you were naturally excited by certain things. The other thing I tell people is, we've got to get away from this idea of intelligence as just being intellectual. There's a book I recommend to a lot of people I've probably over-recommended it by Howard Gardner, called the five frames of intelligence. I'm probably always misquoting, but it's something like that. You'll find it. And he's basically a neuroscientist. He's a scientist of some sort. And so there are five forms of intelligence. There's kind of a mathematical intelligence. Do with patterns often related to music. There's a social intelligence that has to do with dealing with people. There is kinetic intelligence, which is moving the body, right? Sports or dance or whatever. There's word intelligence. There's that kind. There's another one I can't remember what it is, imagery or something like that. Every brain has that natural inclination towards one of these intelligences, right? And you have that as well. I compare it to like a grain that's inside of you and that you have to move with that grain. You have to find it. And it's one of these forms of intelligence. You have it. Yes, you can have two. But if you have two or three starts, I don't know. You're going to get a little bit lost. You're a polymath and that maybe you're a genius or maybe you're just confused. But you've got to find that one thing, right? And if it's sports, if it's dance, that's intelligence. Kobe Bryant, my idol, because I love basketball. He is intelligent as he's a Michelangelo on the basketball court, you know? It's intelligence. Parents like to say, well, no, you've got to go to law school. You've got to be this, you've got to be an academic at Poblaba. No, it's whatever is that grain of your brain that is natural. You've got to find that. And so don't think in terms of, I want to be this specific job or whatever, think in terms of what is that natural form that my brain is veers towards. And now if you know that somebody who has a mathematical abstract mechanical like brain, all right, let's go into that. Let's go deeper now. Let's find if you're an engineer or if you're a musician or, okay, well, but you've got to go back and you've got to dig. I could go on for hours about some of the process that I go through people. That should give you an idea of some of the positive things that you can do. Yeah, but it is a process. That's what I like about it. It's not the lightning bolt. Like you said, it's not. No, and they're also never completely hints. It's not like, no, for sure. You don't just like find the thing and you're like, cool. I'm set. And there's every five, 10 years, something happens in your life or you evolve or you change a little bit or definitely your preferences change, you know, so it's it is it's a perpetual thing for sure. You know, some people like they get tired of the thing they've been doing for 10, 15, 20 years. And then they go try something different. And I often counsel. You don't want to go like, you know, you're a writer and now, oh, no, I'm going to be like a, I don't know, choose something totally irrelevant from that, whatever that. A programmer or something. Yeah. Okay. That's not you should, you should go off in a different direction within writing or something. Right. And so you get bored and the boredom either means I've got to change my job or means I have to change something within my job. And I prefer this something within my job. So I'll high personally deal with it is every book that I write is on a completely different subject. I never repeat the same book twice. I'm onto something that is not the book I'm writing now. People are going to be shocked because it's completely different from anything we've written. So I don't get bored. I'm constantly challenging myself. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. We will be right back. So Robert, we do a segment that drew and I love called brilliant or bullshit, which is we take recent scientific research, surveys, new theories, things that have kind of become popular or become talked about. And we discuss whether we think it's brilliant or whether it's bullshit. So we want to, we want to include you on this round. We want to hear your opinion. Okay. We have something selected. Yes. For this brilliant or bullshit, Robert, we're talking about Peter Pan syndrome. Now, there's a lot of talk about how men are checking out. They're not getting jobs, not getting educated, committing to long-term relationships. City of home, playing video games, playing video games, vaping, watching porn. Yeah. There's a female version of it too called the syndrome or else. syndrome, but it's the Peter Pan syndrome is really the, in the zeitgeist more and more. And actually, there are some recent studies that are trying to quantify this and label it a, I wouldn't say, diagnosable syndrome, but they do call it a syndrome and they suggest there before it. What I would like to ask you, first of all, do you think calling it a syndrome is brilliant or bullshit? I think I know what you would think about that, but what do you think the main drivers really are? Is there a problem of prolonged adolescence, or the drivers of that prolonged adolescence? Should we be, um, therapists, so much too? Well, you know, um, syndrome, yeah, that's a bit, a bullshit, it's a bit like, people like to talk about things these days because everybody's an individual, everybody has their own child or their own background, their own reasons for wanting to stay in adolescence. And there are plenty of people in my generation, particularly in my generation who got stuck in adolescence and are still stuck there. So it's not necessarily endemic just to Gen Z. It's a phenomenon that has existed. I'm not saying forever, it's certainly not, but since the reign of popular culture probably since the 1950s, the Peter Pan phenomenon has become more and more pronounced. And what was the second part of the question, um, what do you think is driving it? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, as I said, everybody's going to be different. I know that's not a good answer for you, but I think a lot of it is, it's a very strange time to be a male, to be a boy, to be a man, it's very confusing time. And so I think that's a lot of the source of it because when I was growing up, I'm sounding like I'm a hundred years old when I was 30, I hated hearing that stupid accent expression. When I walked 12 miles to school in the snow, um, anyway, uh, you know, there was, there was this being a male, it was obviously positive because it was a very male oriented culture. But you know, it was, there was no sense of confusion about it, really, although some people were confused. Um, and there's nothing wrong with that. But you know, there were icons in sports, in, in movies, you know, the kind of the rugged masculine hero. But in all aspects of life, you know, I remember as a kid, I was, I'm so old that as a three-year-old I can remember John F. Kennedy on the television, you know, that, that got, that I was fascinated by him. I thought this was, it was a man who was very commanding, he was a president, but there was also a weird kind of softness to him, like a strange poetic side to it, a drumeon. There were these icons, and so you didn't feel, you wanted to grow out of adolescence, you wanted to become a man, you wanted to enter the world and be and kind of follow in the footsteps of some of these people that you admired. But now it's like being a man, being a male, being a masculine is almost ugly, it's dirty. It's almost like something you have to wipe off your skin. Oh, you know, toxic masculinity. But, you know, there's something you have to say about testosterone, it can turn ugly, but it drives you, it makes you do things, it's got a positive element, it gives you ambition, it makes you go out and do things. Twelve thousand years ago, it made you go hunt mastodons and kill them with your, with your other members, right? This should be positive things about being a man. And so then, I don't want to stay in adolescence, I want to, I don't want to stay in this little cocoon with my mommy and my daddy and my home playing games. I want to go out in the world, I want to conquer, I want to have ambition. I think the root of the problem is that there's no kind of positive masculinity out there. And so it doesn't give people an incentive to get out of that little kind of adolescent cocoon. Right. I agree 100%. It's funny. We were joking around about Dr. K at the beginning of the show, but I think one of the reasons why he's become so popular is there's this whole demographic of young men who were kind of checked out and they're playing video games all day. And he's one of the only popular mental health voices that's speaking directly to them. Saying, Hey, you're playing too many video games. Let's talk about it. How can, like, how can we get you back out in the world? I definitely see, you know, a big portion of my audience is younger men. I definitely have noticed this over recent years and I'm becoming a little alarmed by it. I agree that there's, there's a lack of clear role models. There's a lack of, there's, there's not a roadmap, right? Like it's not obvious to a 17 year old male, who to be, who they want to grow into, right? And that's, that's difficult and confusing. And then I think the ease of checking out today is exactly is so much, I mean, I struggle I mean, I'll download a game on my phone and I'll be lost for two hours, right? Like, yeah, it's, it's tough, man, so it's like, and I've got a fully developed prefrontal cortex. Like, imagine an 18 year old, like he's fucked, so it's, I really, really sympathize with a lot of the young guys today and it's, I definitely see it as a problem. It does seem to be a growing problem. The syndrome thing makes me uncomfortable and I'm curious what your thoughts are on, on, on kind of this. There seems to be a little bit of a recent tendency to like medicalize everything, yeah. And, especially things that were just kind of, not normal behavior, but not necessarily abnormal behavior, say 20 or 30 years ago, either. Like what? Like a Peter Pan syndrome. Like, like, when I was, I remember when I was in college, we used, me and my friends, we used to go out with this guy who was around, he was a divorce guy around 50, a ton of fun, awesome dude. And we used to go out in the parties and clubs with him and, and we used to joke, like, oh, yeah, it's Peter Pan over there, you know, like, but he was, you know, he was in this phase of his life. He had just gotten out of a marriage and, you know, he was, well, you can be a functional Peter Pan. Totally. There are a lot of, there are a lot of people out there who are, you know? People like Bill Clinton was a functional Peter Pan. Yeah. I see of them all the time. It's the boomer generation. I'm a little bit younger than that. Yeah. It's full of very functional Peter Pan's, I'm a functional Peter Pan. Very true. It's very true. I'm not accused of the same as well. Yeah. So, I mean, well, this is exactly my point, right, is that, that, until I guess a few years ago, this was just kind of like something that you would casually talk about in conversation or like, oh, yeah, he's a bit of a Peter Pan, you know, he still goes out the clubs in his 50. But now there's, yeah, there's researchers. But now there's a syndrome. It's from social, making recommendations to therapists. Are they actually like, medicating people for this? No. No, not that I know of yet, the paper that kind of operationalized this as an actual psychological phenomenon, you know, it's in 2021. And they don't give any recommendations for like, medications or anything like that. But they do say therapists who are seeing this all around the world should be aware of it. Uh-huh. To me, that just, I'm not sure about that. Yeah. I mean, we can't send all of our kids to therapists, you know, and, um, also, you know, it's like there's too much talking going on in this culture and not enough acting. I fucking love that. I just want to like take that clip. That's the episode. That's the episode. There's too much talking. I know where you're going, but it's so true. It's sorry. No, no, no, but sometimes you just got to get off your ass and you got to do things in this world. And that's the best therapy in the world, you know? So I make the analogy in my book and in some of my talks that I see how the power and the life out there in our work world as a game. It is a power game. And I frame it that way. You're maneuvering. You're constantly maneuvering. It's this fluid game that you're playing where the parameters nobody really sets. The rules are that aren't very clear cut, but there are certain laws, laws of power that you can operate to get ahead. It's the most amazing game you can ever play and you should enjoy and you should have fun. Well, you know, let's start talking about things like that that like life is a game. Get out there and be active. You know, when it comes to dating, stop all this bullshit with your phone, go out to bars, go to supermarkets, pick up, learn how to pick up on women, learn how to get over your fears and actually interact with them. So start acting and stop talking and stop over analyzing things, but actually act in the world. That's to me. The greatest therapy in the world. I as someone who for better or worse kind of operates within the self-help industry, this is my personal pet peeve. It's the thing that drives me insane is there's seems to be, there's so much emphasis put on awareness. Like, let's be aware of our problems. Let's be aware of our emotional issues. Let's be aware of our mental health problem, you know, and it's people treat that as an end of it in itself. Like, well, the fact that we're sitting around talking about our trauma and our baggage, you know, we're doing the work. They even call it that, doing the work. And I'm with you. I'm like, okay, that's great. We can talk until we're blue in the face, but until you actually go and behave differently, until your behavior has shifted in some tangible way. What is it? What is it man? What are we doing? Well, I don't know if I can remember it exactly right because it's about a chapter. I was writing just a few months ago and I've already forgotten it. But there was a psychologist professor at UCLA named Schwartz. I forget his first name. His study was OCD, right? And this is back in the 80s when people were first calling it a syndrome. And so much of the therapy was a talking therapy, right? And giving them these certain ideas about let's talk about, let's figure it out. He came up with these action strategies. He literally had you go out and do things that were your biggest fear because OCD is all about fear, right? So if you're afraid of germs, go out and rub your hand some dirt or whatever. He had them do this over time. He took brain scans and their brains were literally changing. The brain was rewiring itself through these action strategies. So when you take action, your brain strategies. It adapts. That's how the human brain is. But if you're always internal, if you're just talking about things, none of that stuff is going on because it's not how our brains are wired. Yeah. And I feel like the danger in it is that it can, like let's say you and I have a very profound conversation. It gives you the illusion that something has changed. Yeah. Even though we're still sitting on the same damn couch doing the exact same thing we were doing 30 minutes ago, right? And so I see that all the time that so much of this industry is just built around giving people the sensation of having a change happen without any necessary behavior shifting. I'm going through something similar to you, like questioning and wondering about the self-help thing and whether I'm just part of that problem as well, whether I'm just a bunch of words. But I think that at least I know that my approach is to give people maps on how to act. Yeah. And I'm very much against over analyzing and talking things to death. Yeah. And it's talking is necessary, but not sufficient. No, definitely not. Yeah. For sure. Great. All right. We saw Peter Pan syndrome. We'll be right back. And we're back. All right. We've got we've got questions for Robert. We do what we do. We have some some listener questions. This one actually came in from Spotify and Mark and I recently did an episode on behavioral change. And there was this big study where some psychologists came up with all these interventions to get people to go to the gym more. And it turns out they were terrible at it. Uh, who was terrible at it? The psychologists were terrible at coming up with these interventions that would work. And we got a question in response to this that I think was a really good one for you, Robert. It comes from Ian, who says as bad as modern psychology is at helping people, is our current best bet given that it's at least based on science? Or is this the wrong approach given that science doesn't tell us what's right and wrong? And we should instead turn to things like timeless philosophy. Basically, the question is is like, what's the value of science and behavioral interventions, specifically in our lives? You mentioned a little bit already that you were skeptical of, we don't need all this data to make a decision or we need we need some sort of guidance from above to help us make these decisions. What's your, what's your take on this? Well, I mean, is it related to like something like going to the gym or exercising or what is it relation to? That was what the question was, but I think the larger question is how much should we lean on science or, you know, the behavioral science academia in general, I think for improving our lives? Well, I'm old school. You know, I'm an old guy. Let's let's let's not, you know, call spade a spade here. And I think it's bullshit. I mean, look, what happens with big data and with algorithms and we've seen it with Facebook early on is you think that you're accumulating big data about how people actually are, but what you're actually doing is you're changing who people are. You're changing their behavior because now you're feeding them the very algorithms that you think that they are that involve their behavior. And then you're turning them into lemmings, everyone, a herd, everyone's now going to be responding the same way, but you're an individual. It all starts with who you are as a as a as a human being as an individual born into your body with your parents with your background with your genetics. Okay, big data doesn't have anything to do with it. It doesn't know what that is. AI can't possibly see into that. So I'm more of the timeless wisdom type person, but I really think you have to know who you are in a gut way. You know, we're talking about awareness and talking and talking has has has its value as we were saying as we were talking, but there's also this very important gut element of knowing what, you know, what makes you different, what motivates you, what what you were meant to accomplish, what you hate, what you love. And if you're constantly looking for science and big data and algorithms to solve all your problems, well, they are not because you're running away from the only source of your of your salvation, which is you as an individual. I'm going to sound like a nutty preacher. We do not have enough individuals in this world. We do not have enough weirdos. We do not have enough people who are happy to be unique and different. And no amount of AI, in fact, all of that stuff is turning you into just a glob, a big social glob on social media where everybody is the same. Everybody is told to respond like little mice to this algorithm to this algorithm. And that we're turning into something that's not human. Yeah. So I'll shut up, but that's sort of my answer. We'll take we'll take your soapbox away now. No, I sympathize with this a lot. It's interesting early in my career. My career kind of began around the confluence of positive psychology. There was this whole movement in the 2000s of positive psychology where a lot of psychologists felt like they were able to quantify happiness and deduce exactly which practices led you to be happier and feel more fulfilled in your life. And, you know, I was young. I was naive. I bought fully into it hookline and sinker. I wrote tons of articles around positive psychology research and everything. And it's been interesting because over the past 10 years or so, something like 80% of those studies don't replicate. Like they don't like their insufficient sample sizes. They can't be reproduced in other studies. And so it we're kind of back to square one of like, oh, actually, we don't know what makes us happy. And we don't know how much willpower we have. And we don't know how much motivation is external versus internal. And like it's given me a much deeper and more profound appreciation for the timeless things. Yeah. You know, the simple principles, whether it's the Stoics or the Buddhist or the Christians, like if it's been around for 2000 years, there's probably something to it. And so we should maybe put a little bit more. Well, I mean, if you think about, I tell people this all the time, if you think about 2000, if you only go back 200 years ago, I like to go back to the world of the writer Jane Austen and like the 1810s. You have no internet. You have no television. You have no radio. You have no, your only form of entertainment is people. So you're constantly interacting with people day in and day out. That's your only salvation. It's the only thing you have to distract you from the misery of your life, right? So people become these incredible observers, right? And they write about it. I'm not saying everybody, but the great philosophers, the thinkers, the writers, the novelists, they're so keyed into people and who they are that they see things that we're no longer capable of seeing because we're so this oriented, right? We're not human. As I said, we're not so human anymore. So that's why someone like Plato or Socrates could have this timeless wisdom because they're wandering around with in their sandals and togas, just constantly interacting with other people, thinking about issues that we don't think about anymore because we take everything for granted. We've lost our sense of wonder. So yeah, I'm, look, I studied classics, Greek and ancient Greek and Latin. That's my world. I find when I read something from that time, I feel like I'm traveling to another planet. I'm so amazed. I'm so astounded by what they're insights, what they're saying, what they're talking about humans, about our senses, about what it just means to be alive. So God, I'm losing track of what our question is. Science versus philosophy, science versus wisdom, data versus wisdom. It sounds like we're all team wisdom. Yeah, but going back to what you said about, we need more individuals. I think I found this in myself when I was, I studied psychology, I studied, I was in academia, I feel a little out too. And so I got very much, I was like, yes, everything should be data driven. And for the longest time, you know, for instance, Mark mentioned well power, how much well power do we have? Well, we thought this was this little finite resource that we had to like parcel out and distribute throughout our lives in strategic ways. Well, it turns out, if you believe that you don't have a lot of willpower, you probably don't. I see this over and over and over again. I'm going down the laundry list of things that I believe for so long on you know, extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. That could be complete bullshit too. I'm externally motivated by a lot of of things. Is that such a bad thing? No, it's not. It reminds me. There's so much like recursive stuff in psychology. It reminds me of, uh, there's a great one-liner from the comedian, Emo Phillips, where he said, uh, he said, uh, I used to think the brain was the most amazing thing in the universe that I, then I remember who was telling me that. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, but I mean, a hundred years ago, there was this, or more than 100 users, many William James psychologists. Yeah. Big fans. He wrote things about willpower that blow all of this bullshit in our culture now out of the water. He nailed it perfectly. If you want to understand will and the power that you have through your willpower, go read William James and throw all those studies out. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that. You're here. What else do we got? Yes, we do have some more questions. So these came in. Uh, we asked, asked people to ask you questions. Yeah. Um, one of them will kind of give out a true self one. What is your recommended process to get back to one's true self after getting lost, exhausted and cynical and mid life? Forty laws came out when you were like 38 or nine, right? You were 39. Yeah. So you were older. We have a lot of people like I'm 35. My life is over. What do I do? I felt that way pretty much to when I was 35. Well, um, you know, as I said, everyone's different. And I don't know where this person comes from. But hopefully in that period up until your age 35, you have done something with your life. You have learned some skills. You have followed some kind of career path. It just wasn't the right one. Okay. But you can't just junk all of that and suddenly start over. You have to build from what you already have. Right? It's kind of an organic process. You can't just suddenly start with from a blank slate and say, I'm going to go completely redraw the course of my life. You're setting yourself up for a mystery because it's not how world works. You have a brain. It has developed certain things. It has functioned in a certain way and it has accumulated some level of skill. So where can we apply that skill that fits you better? So when you're 22, 23 that process that you went, we went through earlier on. It fits more. But now you're 35, you're 36. It's a different process. And if you're 50, it's even more different process. If you're 70, I don't think there is any process anymore. But I try to see in the seeds of who you are, the 35 year old, where it went wrong. And so I like to go back to people and sort of go back where they felt like they made a wrong turn. And often where they made a wrong turn was they decided on a career either because it was money and they needed the money or because people told them that this is what they should go into, right? Like your parents. A lot of people who end up becoming lawyers, I don't mean to pick on lawyers because we need lawyers obviously. But they go into law school for that purpose to make money. And then they kind of burn out because law, certain kinds of laws are just so repetitive. And there's no, and after you turn 35, it's trapped in this thing. It's so bored. So turned out. So we've got to go back and figure out where you made your wrong turn. And often it's because you listen to someone else or you grab for money. All right. So you grab for money because you're anxious. You feel like you don't know if you're going to make it in this world. You need that. You need to eat and you're worried about your future and your career. Okay. So if you're 35 and you made a wrong turn and you still have that anxiety about making money, we have to prescribe something that fits you. I don't like telling people to do things that are going to ruin their make them miserable that can potentially really screw up their future. I'm very sensitive to that. So if money is very important to you, we have to take that path that you're on. We have to deviate it a little bit in a slightly different direction. And I talk to people about that and we go back into their childhood. We go back into things that indicate more of where they would like to be. And even if you're like flipping burgers at in and out, there's going to be some other path slightly different from that that will still be better than where you are right now. Okay. So if the money thing isn't so important, if you're not so anxious, then we have a little bit more latitude to explore and go into something that deviation has to be like this. It can be more like that, but it can't be like this. Okay. So everything depends on who you are, your psychology. And your level of anxiety plays a very important role in this because making these changes can be very frightening. I once had some guy who was in his mid 20s, who was basically trapped at a terrible job, kind of like a fast food type job. And I was very sensitive. He had a fan. He had a wife and some kids. And I said, all right, we figured out what he really wanted, what he was really excited about, which was great. Because otherwise you never do figure that out. And I said, don't quit your job. But I want you to start studying this new field on the internet, absorbing it at night in the one or two hours that you have free. And then I want you to go to night school and spend maybe work four days a week and spend some time there. You still can pay your bills and go to night school. He said just the thought of doing that made him feel a thousand times better that there was some kind of hope that there was a path. Yeah. Right. So it got to be, I've got to work with the individual and what where they are, you know, and and and deal with the anxiety about making a living. Yeah. Totally. I one thing for sure is I think people definitely underestimate how much a small shift. I think it's when they feel emotionally overwhelmed because the emotion is so all-encompassing, they assume that they just have to throw everything out and start over from scratch. Whereas it's like if you just shift the couple things in the right direction, it's like dominoes. It knocks, it has like a reverberating effect across your life. It was really interesting though. We ran a survey maybe three or four months ago on our audience. And one of the questions we asked purely out of curiosity was just what are you struggling with right now? Like what is your the biggest struggle in your life? And it was very interesting among the middle-aged cohort, say people in their 40s and 50s. One of the most common responses was people saying I have a great career. I've got a great family, great spouse. Is this it? I kind of want to just disappear and go to Tahiti and start over. Like they kind of had a little bit of this midlife, this can't be it, right? Like there has to be more. And almost like a little bit of a panic that went on. And I'm curious what your thoughts with somebody like that would be. Well, my thought is, for those of you out there who are in your 20s, do not get to that point dammit. Never let that happen to you because it will happen to you and it's terrible. Yeah, it's tragic. Yeah. Right. So don't let that happen. Yeah. Figure it out before then. But some of it is like unrealistic. Yeah. I mean, if you're in your mid 40s and you've got all these things that you said, maybe you have to find, maybe you have to kind of accept it and find some beauty in it. Now, this will sound completely irrelevant and off track here. But six years ago, I suffered a stroke, right? And prior to that stroke, I was somebody that swam every third day, rode a mountain bike up into the hills and hiked. And other things, I was just very active because it was my main main way of just stressing overnight. All of that is taken away from me, right? I can't walk, I can't hike, I can't swim. I can't take even a simple walk. I'm not trying to get pity, but I'm saying, you know, I had to go through, I had to adapt. Yeah. And what I had to do is I meditate every day. And I had to go through this process and I'm writing a book right now. And I had to find what is beautiful without being cliched or polyannish about it. What is beautiful about my life as it is? These are my circumstances. This is, you know, if I was punished or whatever happened, it happened. It's just who I am now. I am this person who can't walk. That's who I am. But I'm still able to think, I'm still able to write books. I'm still able to find beauty in my limited world. Yes, I wish I was an athlete. Yes, I wish I could do the things I did before. That doesn't help me at all. So my advice to someone, maybe in that air, is become a little more zen and find a little bit more of the beauty in your life as it is. And don't be thinking that there's some golden ring out there that at 45, 48, some hot model that you can run off to with Tahiti and start over and, you know, I'm new to, you know, also the Peter Pan syndrome. There's definitely, there's a connection there, for sure. You can almost say, like, to a certain degree, maturity is the acceptance of your own limitedness. I think. Yeah. You know, I mean, you can get too accepting. Yeah, that's true. You know, you get complacent, which is different. Yeah. Yeah. No, we've talked about a lot about that though. I think there's a gratitude piece in that where acknowledging just your existence is a miracle, first of all. Yeah. And I've leaned to the older I get the more just the simple things around me, are very much like this is amazing. There's literally that's going to sound like I'm gloting, but there are literally days where I'm like, I'm one of the luckiest people on the planet. If you are, you are. Yeah. So it's a subject of my new book, it by the way. Oh, it is. Okay. Oh, we outed you. Okay. Yeah. Good luck or gratitude. No, neither. It's about true Bernie. Exactly. The biography, the unauthorized biography of true Bernie. Everybody would be shocked by that. No, it's it's a book about the sublime. Yeah. That's it. That's the word I want. Nice. Yeah. So, you know, I've tried to say I have a chapter called awakened to the strangeness of being alive. And so like being alive is a very strange thing. That's so weird. You know, it's so weird to think that in this vast universe, there's life here on this one tiny little tiny little thing in this vast ocean of darkness. And we're here. And do you know the chances of your parents ever coming together and reproducing it through? You can never calculate it's impossible because, you know, your parents met on some quirk of fate, right? And they may have never met. Multiply that by 70, 80,000, all the generations that went prior to them meeting. Yes, maybe the title is part of you might have been born. If that had gone off, 70,000 years ago differently, but it wouldn't be you at all, who you are, is the strangest thing you could possibly think of. So it's a book about triggering those kinds of thoughts and people, but everything around them. Because for me, writing that book is like liverdive, I don't start thinking like that. I'm just going to get so goddamn depressed. I'll kill myself. I have to think about these things, you know? Well, there were there were several questions people asking when is the next book coming out so when is that book coming out every author's favorite question? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. There are 12 chapters. I'm on chapter 10. Okay. Okay. And I was hoping you'd be out next year, but I won't, I'm not getting my acting other. So 2026. Okay. I'm going to be out in two years. Okay. If I don't die before then, what if I die, they'll still be able to get the book out because I have enough of it out finished. So we'll look forward to it. We'll have to have you back. We'll sit and bask in the miracle of life together. Yeah, it's a weird book. It's like, my wife says it's kind of like taking drugs without drugs. Yes, it's funny because when we were sitting here talking about how weird life was, I was like, man, we sound like a bunch of stone kids. Of course, yeah. It's so weird. We're alive. It's the kind of thing that you, yeah, I know I remember seeing that thing. Totally smoking some pot. Yeah, we did not drop any acid for this episode. Yeah, there was, this was a sober episode. Yeah, maybe we should, maybe we'll next time. That's the next one. All right. Thank you so much, Robert. Thank you, Mark. It was a pleasure. It was a great time. The subtle art of not giving a podcast is produced by Drew Burning. It's edited by Andrew Nishimura. Jessica Choi is our videographer and sound engineer. Thank you for listening and we will see you next week.