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

The quickest way to kill a dream is to achieve it. People who achieve a big dream, the problem is, is they wake up the next day and they don't know what to hope for anymore and so anxiety sets in, depression sets in. You've called anxiety a crisis of hope. It must be something endemic in society that's causing people to feel anxiety. We've become a society of people that don't really know what to hope for. I think so much of it is just rooted in an inability to investigate the reality of what our assumptions are. Us setting the wrong expectation and being let down because we framed an unexpected outcome and when it doesn't happen or let down. To really be psychologically well adjusted and stable, you need something in your life that you wake up and you're like, "I'm excited for that." What are the exercises that help you honestly look at yourself? What it took me a little while to realize is that, um. Ultimate humans. We spend a lot of time on this show talking about longevity, biohacking, performance, and how to optimize the human body, but there's another side to human performance that people don't talk about enough. Your mindset, your meaning, your relationships, and the internal patterns that quietly determine the quality of your life. Today I'm joined by Mark Manson, best-selling author of the subtle art of not giving a F. And this conversation goes deep into burnout after success, the arrival fallacy, radical responsibility, ego, anxiety, and why the pursuit of a better life often starts with brutal honesty. If you want to understand what really drives fulfillment, not just achievement, this is the one episode you're going to want to watch all the way through to the end. Mark, welcome to the show. Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, Human Biologist, Gary Brecker, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And today's guest is kind of one of those in-between guests. I'm actually really excited to run this podcast. He just met my parents and some of my staff outside, and we started a mini podcast in the kitchen before we got in here. But my wife is an enormous consumer of his content. My team has read all of his books. I think you're going to find today's podcast so insightful, so helpful. Welcome to the podcast, Mark Manson. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. I'm pumped that you're here. There's kind of an interesting theme that runs through a lot of my podcast casts, and I don't think you're very different. I find that the most impactful people, the people that are really moving the needle, that are the most passionate, the most driven, and making the greatest impact, have solved some kind of problem in their life. And when I was looking back over your life, in your history, and some of your content, you didn't have a particularly easy time when you were younger. And I don't want to mischaracterize it, but you almost felt like an outsider in your teens. And you had a lot of what I would call typical traumatic events that so many people watching this podcast have grown up with divorced parents who didn't really feel you fit in in school, moved around a lot, financial struggles. And then sort of just one on your own personal journey of becoming this global nomad for a while, which I found really fascinating, which is how you met your wife, right? I mean, had you not done that? Which is, it's always like so fascinating because here is this just global nomadism going on while you're trying to figure out life and you meet your wife, right? Just randomly, and it was a nightclub in Prague, I think. And so Paul O'Bruzile. So Paul O'Bruzile, yeah. And first you rejected him, but he reeled her back in. But what's even more fascinating to me is after you wrote New York Times bestselling book, which right here on the table, and sold more than 20 million copies, had achieved a level of socioeconomic success, probably also personal success, you kind of arrived. That's when you hit the burnout phase. And I believe that this happens to more of us than will actually admit that. And I'm wondering if you just unpacked that for my audience. Sure. Yeah. It's a great place to start because it's, I think it's something that surprises people and like you said, it doesn't get talked about a whole lot. And I think some of it too is that people don't like hearing it, right? Because I think people who are on the ascent, who are climbing their personal mountain, or chasing their goals and dreams, they don't like hearing that reaching the top might actually be problematic in certain ways. So to kind of call it the arrival fallacy sometimes, right? Yeah. So the best name I've heard for it, and you are correct. This is actually a prevalent thing, but very few people talk about it about. I'll get to that in a minute. The best name that I've heard from it, the best name that I've heard of it, is it came from Quincy Jones. Will Smith relayed this to me so that Quincy Jones used to call it altitude sickness. Where he said that people who climb too quickly, they get sick and they sabotage themselves to come down the mountain. Wow. Yeah. So to quickly kind of summarize what you were just describing, like, you know, I was kind of this vagabond nomad happy go lucky guy, living in Argentina, living in Thailand, running a blog, not a whole lot of cares in the world, right? And with some dreams and aspirations of becoming a writer and kind of revolutionizing the personal development space and self-help space. And what happened when the subtle or not giving a fuck came out is that basically all of the dreams that I had had up into, say age 30 came true within about a six month period of time. Wow. And at first, it was absolutely amazing, right? It's like, all right, let's crack the champagne open. Let's take a trip, take the wife to Paris. Let's really celebrate and enjoy this. But very quickly, I'd say within a month or two, a pretty deep depression started the set in. And what made it worse was that I wasn't expecting it. I was like struggling to get out of bed every morning. And I'm sitting there, I'm telling myself, I'm like, this is the best thing that's ever happened to me. I'm killing it. I'm like, my book is everywhere. I'm getting invited to all these amazing places. Six countries. I mean, it's astounding the level of success. And yet I'm like, I'm feeling lost. And what it took me a little while to realize is that, you know, once you achieve, probably the quickest way to kill a dream is to achieve it. Because once you've achieved it and you wake up the next day and you're still the smelly, insecure guy that you were the day before you achieved it, and you still have to take out the trash in the morning and you still have a stupid argument with your wife about something and you still are worried about, you know, what your friends think of you. You realize that, okay, this thing that I've been chasing for decades, it didn't actually change anything. It didn't fix anything. All of my problems are still the same. And that is, I think there's just this feeling of loss of like, I don't know what to do anymore. Like this is, I literally did the best thing I knew how to do in this world. And it didn't fix my problems. And it's interesting because as time went on, you know, I think the worst part about the altitude sickness is that you don't really feel at liberty to tell people, right? So it's like when you go see friends and family, everybody's like, oh my God, things are, this is easy. Yeah, it's easy. You had a big exit. You can't like bitch about it. Exactly. And you just saw your company for a long time. Nobody wants to hear it. Yeah, nobody wants to hear you. Nobody wants to hear you. You try about it. And so you feel like you kind of have to keep up appearances of like, oh yeah, this, it's amazing. Things are great. You did. And it's funny because you mentioned the exit. So I had a friend in New York who was a co-founder of a very large unicorn startup and had exited for nine figures and also had not been working, had been kind of lost for a year or two. And it's funny because I, a few months later, I ran into him and he was like, so how are you doing? And I said, oh, things are good. You know, things, you know, it's pretty cool. It's pretty crazy what's going on with the book and everything. And he's like, yeah, but how are you doing? And I'm like, well, you know, I'm like getting by and, and, and he just looked at me and he's like, it's rough, isn't it? And I was like, you know, and he's like, dude, I exited two years ago. I still like, I don't know what to do when I get up in the morning. Wow. You know, it's, I think when you realize when like, when you're young, money motivates everything. Success motivates everything, status motivates everything. And then once you achieve those things, you, for the first time in your life, you have to ask yourself what's worth pursuing simply for the sake of pursuing it. And, and that's actually a very hard question to answer. Yeah, you know, I had a tipping point in my life and I'm never really thoroughly unpacked and examined it, but, you know, for 20 years, I was a mortality expert for, for a large life in terms of companies. And we were attempting to predict mortality to the month and it was some of the most accurate science in the world. And at that time, like most people, I was in the pursuit of happiness. But happiness was a destination that I was going to arrive at some point. And I was sort of willing to be miserable and tolerated because I had framed this sort of destination in my mind. But realizing after 10 years, I was no closer to achieving this level of, I guess, socio-economic success or financial freedom. And it was all that I thought about and all that I obsessed about. And I wasn't present for a lot of that time frame in my life. And a lot of things went really wrong. I had a divorce, I had a bankruptcy, I had several failed partnerships, I had several failed businesses. And I always felt like the victim was like, man, I have really shitty partner. And I just picked the wrong spouse. And we grew apart. I got really screwed in this deal. I can't believe that I hired that manager as a terrible manager. And I do remember the day where I was just sitting in silence and just kind of exhausted. And I realized that I was exactly where I was in my life because of the sum of all my own choices. And I had no self-help motivational guru helped me get there. This was just this sort of really internal realization. Started to tap back into my faith a little bit. And I just took radical responsibility for everything. And I was like, you know, I can see why the divorce is my fault. I can actually see why I ended up in bankruptcy. I can see why that partnership went wrong because I act like an asshole. It was both a very difficult point in my life, but a very liberating time too. And it was very shortly after that that I just quit that industry and started a functional wellness clinic without even being a doctor. And that was the first time I did something without even having a plan. Like I didn't have any expectation for it. I didn't have this dream of success. And now that I look back, like it's, you know, from the outside looking in, that's been the most successful that part of my life from then, at least socioeconomically and impact-wise. And I haven't really unpacked like what I did or how I got to that point or why it was so impactful to me. And you know, a lot of what you talk about, I actually wrote one of these down, the muscle of radical self honesty. And I wonder if you don't impact that too, you know, because I think if people had a mechanism to stand up and go through these kinds of realizations, I think instead of letting 10 or 20 years just kind of slip by. Right. And they could get a hold of it now and do something about it. I think it's what it sounds like happened in your case. And this happens to a lot of us. It's a certain point. You look back on all of your failures and failed relationships and realize they only had one thing in common, right? Yeah, yeah. You, correct. Yeah. It's like you can't dance around. You can dance around that for a year or a minute. It's a shitty feeling when you internalize it, too. But once you get like 10, 20 years in, it's like, okay, I can't pretend this is not the common thread through all of these. It is funny. I think people, there's a natural reluctance to accept responsibility and ownership because I think people tend to confuse responsibility with blame, right? So it's, and a lot of this just I think comes with the way we're raised and maybe the legal system, but like the idea is that if I'm responsible for my failure, that means it's my fault. That means I'm a failure or I'm a loser in some way. There's like some moral judgment that should come down on me. But interestingly, I think the fault and responsibility are actually two different things. And while they can sometimes happen together, they can actually happen independently as well. Like the example I use in my book is that, you know, if you wake up one morning and somebody is left a newborn infant on your doorstep, it's not your fault that that infant is there, but you are absolutely responsible now. Right. Right. Yeah. You have to take care of this situation. Yeah. Or like if, you know, if I walk across the street after this podcast and I get hit by a car, it's not my fault I got hit by a car. But it's my responsibility to recover. And it's my responsibility to go to PT and get the appropriate surgeries and take care of my body and make sure I'm rested. You know, so it's, we have a tendency to assume that if it's not our fault, then it's not our responsibility. And, oh, don't accept responsibility because then that's going to mean it's your fault. And then you're, that means there's something wrong with you. And the liberation of responsibility actually comes from what you just described is the recognition that you are making a choice in each and every moment of your life. Whether you realize it or not. Like, even not making a choice is a choice that you are making in every moment of your life. So it's, every moment that arises, you have an opportunity to choose where your attention goes, how you react to a situation, how you're going to move forward, how you're going to see something, what the story that you're going to tell yourself is. And when you take ownership and responsibility in every moment, you are now allowing yourself to control those reactions and control those narratives that you create for yourself. If you know me, you know I don't recommend anything I haven't personally tested. That's not a marketing line. That's just how I operate. I've been on the road my entire career, different time zones, brutal schedules, no margin for days off. And so I'm constantly testing what actually works in my own body. NED was something I keep coming back to. It's the molecule your cells use to produce energy and repair. And it declines faster than most people realize. When I found symbiotic as liposomal NED, the absorption technology is what got my attention. I tested it. I felt it and it's been in my bag ever since. I'm always evolving what I put in my body and this one has stayed on the list. I'm genuinely excited for you to experience it. This is the standard we hold every product to before it even reaches you. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. Is that just about like drawing yourself to the present and just being more aware of like how am I feeling? What's coming at me right now? Like Tony Robbins talks about shifting your state or taking a pause. Yeah. Like he says five seconds will change everything. He just paused five seconds before you react it. Yeah. I think a lot of it is that kind of self-awareness because I think a lot of so many people are you know you're an autopilot. Yeah. So much of your life. And so yeah, taking that pause, checking in with yourself. What am I feeling right now? What are my assumptions in this situation? It's there's an immense amount of value in that. And then I think it's like anything, the more you practice doing that, the more autumn that automatic it becomes. The more you start to recognize in each and every moment, I'm like, okay, I'm bringing some assumptions to this argument. Or, you know, or oh, I have a tendency to be defensive in these sorts of situations. So maybe I should, you know, take a step back and consider if I'm doing that again. And honestly, like this is, so the interesting thing is like this kind of separation between you know, events and reaction, this gap that opens up, like this is what pretty much every personal growth or mental health intervention is designed to do, right? Whether it's therapy, right? Like a therapist is sitting you down, stopping you and saying, what were you feeling in that moment? Why did you respond that way? What was the assumption when you responded that way? Whether it's meditation, right? Focus on your internal feeling. Focus on what emotions are arising? Where did this come from? What's the thought that's arising? Where did that thought come from? Who's inventing that thought? All of these are just techniques journaling as another one, right? Like going back through your day and kind of like thinking about why did I make this decision? Or what was I feeling at this moment? These are all ways of just kind of creating that five second gap that you just talked about, right? So the next time something happens, you're not just instantly reacting, you're actually able to stop, focus, kind of assess the situation and bring a little bit of wisdom to it. Is that the ego that is taking over? Because we talk about how the ego is so, can be so damaging, right? And we can actually just steal years from your life, insulating itself, protecting itself, not wanting bright light to be shown on it. And I think a lot of people don't recognize how powerful that is in a negative sense. Yeah. So, ego is a funny thing because it's the way it's used in popular terms, I think it's often a misnomer, right? So everybody's like, "Oh, that guy's got such a big ego." Like Donald Trump has a big ego. Yeah, actually. We dropped the most beautiful bomb. No one could drop a bomb as beautiful as I am from the only person in the world. It's definitely an ego there. Let's go to the ego there. The funny thing about the ego though, so if you actually go back to Freud and look at what his framework is, basically what Freud said is, there's kind of an inherent tension in all of us, right? So there's our animalistic impulses and urges and desires. It's just these subconscious wants. And then there's social expectations, rules, norms, cultures. judgements from other people. And those two things are often in conflict. And so the original theory was that the ego arises as a way to negotiate between those two sides. So it's like, I have a desire to, I don't know, like go eat an entire birthday cake by myself. But like, I'm going to feel sick and I'm going to miss this podcast and I'm going to like, I'm not going to be present for the work I need to do tomorrow. And it's going to be like a whole mess. And so you develop kind of these, these narratives and beliefs about yourself of like, okay, I'm not the type of person who does that. So like, when you tell yourself, like, I'm not the type of person who just eats half a cake because I feel like it, that's ego, right? That's self definition. That is deciding who you are and building an identity for yourself. Where ego goes wrong is where is when ego starts to become an inaccurate, like an inaccurate reflection of reality. So generally, what we refer to as people with a big ego is people who have beliefs or have self-identify in a way that is just completely false or wrong, right? So it's like, if I, if I was a huge asshole to your whole team and then I came on this podcast and told you I was the nicest person in the world, yeah, that's somebody we would call someone with ego, a big ego, right? So the the misnomer here isn't that you should get rid of your ego. It's that you need to have an accurate ego. You have to have a clear your ego should actually reflect your real behaviors, your real thoughts, your real feelings because if you delude yourself and convince yourself of a bunch of stuff that's not true, not only are you going to make yourself suffer, but you're going to make other people suffer. And so how does how do people just draw awareness to that? I find like a lot of your content so refreshing, like, you know, 10 years of therapy in 10 minutes and you know, I've and I've watched that several times because it it made me realize, partially why I'm so happy in my current relationship and why we had become different people in my previous relationship. And a lot of it was so poignant and so so refreshing part of what you talked about was how when you're in a relationship, especially marriage, you're not just signing up for that person and your interaction between yourselves, you're signing up for everything. They're entire ecosystem. Right there. The time they go to bed, they're sleep patterns, you know, their family, their childhood baggage. Like it all comes with their financial beliefs, their religious beliefs, like it's all a package. And you don't run into those things until I mean, you can do 10 years deep and start and still be. I will say I am the most deeply content that I've ever been in my adult lifetime. I'm an amazing spouse, sage. I'm like obsessed with her. I watch her sleep a lot so much. I mean, I love this woman. And we spend probably 50 or 60% of our time just laughing at each other. You know, we we really get each others, you know, since a humor and I was an only child so I didn't have spouses growing up. So I tend to act like a brother to my wife and like tease her like a sister just to push her buttons, see how far I can take things. But she knows that about me. It's just a great, you know, dynamic. But you know, back to the ego in these, these realizations. So how does somebody want to go on this journey of introspection? How do they start? Like, because like you, I'm not a fan of just all of these, this self-help motivational guidance that seems to be endless and you know, it has to, you have to have it with you your entire lifetime. Yeah. You know, I love the philosophical how you approach like you can fix something and then you don't need me anymore. Right. I don't need to be your therapist for 20 years. Yeah. When I need to do is come in and fix this problem and, and sort of off you go. By the way, before I answer that, I want to say I'm happy you're bringing this up. And I'm happy. I'm happy I'm here in general just because I'm happy you're here too. So is Malia is the happiest day you're here right now. Because because we were talking in your kitchen. I have, I, and we could get into my health journey at some point if you want because it's, I'm a, I'm a late-comer to, to this whole train that that you've been driving and, and it's as someone who's, who's been consuming a lot of content in your industry, a lot of your content, and a lot of other people, I get frustrated at how much relationships aren't talked about, because it's as someone who has gone deep on the, on the psychological side, like the number one outcome driver in terms of well-being, both psychological and physical is the quality of relationships. There's so much research around, you know, chronic stress, anxiety, depression. I think it's people who are depressed or are, or, twice as likely, that have heart disease. There's research showing that people in happy marriages actually, their wounds heal faster. So like there's just all of this amazing research around social quality, relationship quality, and I feel like it doesn't get talked about. You know, and I think the reason for that is like, we, we're biohackers. Yep. And we, we don't know how to biohack that. You measure that. And what I will tell you without naming any names. Yeah. Some of the people I hold in the highest regard, I mean, some of the most intellectually dominant figures in this industry that are mentors of mine. I've read multiple books of theirs. Have the worst relationships. Yeah. Yeah. And have had multiple failed relationships. And I would love to unpack that. To me, yeah. I mean, as a, as a fan and a consumer, that feels like the elephant in the room. Yeah. When I, when I like watch podcasts and read these books and things like that. But yeah, so I'm back to your question. I'm glad I'm glad we're getting into this. You know, the the first step we already talked about kind of developing that awareness, right? So it's like, okay, what's the story I'm telling myself here? How am I defining myself? You know, I, I think I'm a nice guy. What if I'm not a nice guy? What if, what if I, what if I'm, what if I'm actually more impulsive than I, I think I am? I think the core practice here is to look at your beliefs about the world in general. But primarily about yourself. What are the things that you assume to be true about yourself? And what if they were wrong? What if, and I think of it, I always tell people I'm like, try on beliefs like, like you try on a pair of jeans. You know, it's like, see if it fits. See if it feels comfortable. See what it, how you look in the mirror when you, when you try it on. You know, so it's like try on that idea. What, what if you aren't a nice guy and you've just been telling yourself, right? Just sit with that for 10 minutes and, and like, actually go through your life and ask yourself, what, what would that mean? How would that explain my relationships differently? How would that explain how I approach people differently? And what you might find is like, oh, that fits better than what I had before. Wow. You know, and it's that, that becomes kind of that moment of realization. And so I kind of coming back to the self-honesty piece. I think so much of the stress and anxiety in our lives is purely driven from an inaccurate view of ourselves and an inaccurate view of the world. We've adopted beliefs. We, we think the world should be a somewhat, we think the world should be a certain way. We think we are a certain way. And these things aren't true. And so we spend so much of our time and energy and effort trying to square the circle. So it is big, right? Like tying our brain and knots, rationalizing, you know, oh, well, my, my business partner, you know, he was just really selfish and like, I should have hired a better manager. Right? Yeah. It's like, I did that for years. Right. It's like, no, there was actually, there was a personal failure going on. There was a, there was a blind spot in yourself that you weren't seeing. And so I, I, I think so much of this stuff, you know, there's all this talk about the mental health crisis and the anxiety crisis and all the kids are freaking out and all this stuff. And it's, I think so much of it is just rooted in an inability to kind of investigate the reality of what our assumptions are. I find that very refreshing. In fact, I've heard you talk about, um, an experiment where this guy had before and after pictures and he got really, really, really good shape. Yes. And they showed these before and after images to a large audience of men and women. And the men all picked the, you know, image of the guy when he was jacked, not when he had the dad bod. Yeah. And, and then the vast majority of the women picked the image of the guy when he still had the dad bod. And, and the way that you explained and rationalized, it just made so much sense because you were like, you know, they looked at this figure and said, he doesn't actually look like he did that much fun. Yeah. He's probably going to leave the party at nine o'clock. Um, he's probably getting up to six in the morning. That can't be anything. He's not going to have birthday cake at my needs. His birthday party. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if I want to sign up for that level of like discipline. The other dude looks like he'd be a frickin' And Joy to hang out with. And I'm going to spend time with them. And I thought that reframing was really interesting. And I think it shocked me a little bit because I mean intuitively I probably would have gravitated through the same thing. Totally. It's not to say that not taking care of yourself. Yeah, good idea. But it's funny. Yeah. So it was opposed. It was, and actually it was funny because I think it was a coach who posted up before an after picture of a client. And he made a joke of like, look out ladies, this guy's coming or whatever. And then a bunch of women replied saying, I prefer him in the before. Yeah. And then a bunch of guys replied to that saying, you're lying. That's impossible. Exactly. So then they ran the poll and it turned out, yeah, like 80, 90% of the women prefer the dad bought and 80, 90% of the men prefer the chisel jack guy. And it's interesting because I think it's reflective of how people come to the same experience with completely different lens. The women were coming to it of like, how am I going to feel around this person? Where is the men were coming to it as like, how reliable and disciplined is this person? And it's the men admire the reliability, the discipline, the ability to achieve an extremely difficult goal. Yeah. They're like, yeah, am I going to feel bad around him? Is he going to be fun? Is he going to like pay attention and be present if I want to do something with him? And it's, again, it's just that it's an example. And of course, both sides seem completely incapable of like accepting that there was another perspective out there. But it's another case of just reevaluating our own assumptions about things and being flexible with them. Like it's understanding that I think that's another piece about the ego thing that it's not just that your ego needs to kind of reflect reality. You need to have a flexible ego. You need to be able to, you need to be willing to change your mind on things. And I think it's so much of our stress is, originates in that rigidity of, no, it has to be this way. That guy is a six pack. He has to be attractive because I want a six pack. Yeah. It's like, well, maybe those things, maybe those things aren't true and maybe you don't need a six pack. Right. Hey guys, let me tell you about one of my favorite new hydration drinks. Now this is for distance athletes, hits cardio, exercises, people that sweat a lot or exercise intensely. And A game is a hydration drink. It has eight essential vitamins. It has all of the electrolytes, the entire suite of B vitamins. Before you freak out and read that has 21 grams of sugar, which it does, the sugar is coming from natural cane sugar and honey. My preferred mechanisms for getting glucose into the blood during intense exercise. It also has natural flavors, but these natural flavors don't come from bacterial fermentation. They actually come from real citrus fruits and the color is from vegetable juice, not artificial dies. Next time you're looking for a great hydration drink and you're exercising intensely, A game is your choice. I want to get back into the relationship thing, but when you talk about the research on longevity cardiovascular disease, first of all, I completely agree with you. If you look at big meta analyses and blue zone data, real longevity data, there is a common thread that is non-negotiable in all of these blue zones and the big meta analyses. And that is this sense of community and connection. But I don't think we really define that. Right. And one of the longest running studies ever done in longevity, the Harvard longevity study, said the number one predictor of life span was the quality of your relationships. And yet you're right, we don't spend a lot of time talking about it. And I think a lot of it is because, and this is a question for you, we don't really know how to define connection. Yeah. Like what does it really mean? Like, you know, I wake up every morning and I go to my son's house and there's like a group of guys that, you know, we work out. We go through this intense workout together. And it's my favorite part of the day. And it kind of sucks during the workout. But I do feel that sense of community and connection. But maybe you could unpack that for us. I do think this is at the heart of the issue. There's a thing in psychology called the legibility bias, which is that we tend to focus on things that are easily measurable and counted. And we tend to focus less on things that are kind of intangible and like difficult to define. Legibility bias. I got to. And so it's, so it kind of makes sense, right? Like if you, let's say you're really getting into longevity and health and you really want to start optimizing things in your life, well, there's this whole nebulous area of relationships in community and feeling socially connected. And it's like, well, what does that mean? Yeah. Or I can test 500 milligrams of magnesium versus 300 and see how I feel. Yeah, you know, you get these 58 biomarkers and I can try to move them. Exactly. It's kind of the world I live in. Right. Right. But yeah. And there's tons of value in that. And it's, but, and it's part of the value is that you, you get that measurement, right? Yeah. So you can see, you can experiment. You can get the outcome. You can start optimizing and, you know, all this stuff. On the relationship and the social connection side, it's, it's much more difficult because ultimately it's subjective, subjective, right? Like, maybe you feel completely connected and loved with, you know, six people really close to you. Maybe I don't feel connected and loved unless I have 10 people close to me or whatever. You know, some people like to have a few really strong relationships. Some people want to have many, many, many social connections and want to be able to see a lot of people at different times. So everybody's a little bit different. A lot of it has to do also with your relationship with yourself. So what you see consistently is that people who, if feel a lot of shame, negativity towards themselves, low self-esteem, they have trouble feeling safe and secure. Kind of social relationship or romantic relationship. And so even though they might have a marriage and kids and tons of friends around them, they still feel alone. So it is, it is difficult to measure. It's difficult to track. I mean, you can't, you can put numbers on it like the Harvard study did. You can, but it's short of just kind of, you know, tracking things like mood, life satisfaction, psychological well-being, you know, emotional volatility. These are all self-report metrics. And so you're literally just either going to people and asking them from one to 10, how loved and accepted do you feel this way? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And most people have never even considered that. Yeah. And it's, and you can do this with yourself as well. You know, there are a lot of mood tracking apps and things. And you can actually start identifying like a lot of interesting variables if you track your mood over a long period of time. But yeah, it's, I think this is why it gets overlooked in the longevity and health conversation quite a bit just because it's like, how do you measure it? How do you measure it? And like, what are the ways to hack it? Yeah, right. I mean, we have ways to hack detoxification, fat loss, muscle building. You know, we got peptides for this and peptides for that. And, you know, the vast majority of these things work. But hacking our relationships. And when I see my peers that are, you know, in struggling with very difficult relationships, because it's the one area where we haven't really developed, you know, good hacks. Like, you know, everybody in our industry is waking up in the morning and getting sunlight in their eyes, right? Yeah, the data's in on that. And so every one of us would be easy to put a hit on because within 30 minutes waking we're all outtime. And meanwhile, they don't talk to their wife until 12 p.m. Exactly. And that's why I'm so excited to have you on today because I find what you talk about so refreshing. I feel like I accidentally figured it out with my current spouse. Yeah. And, you know, because I'm in the place where I think people would love to be with their relationships. But if you're not there, how do you go about doing it? What are the hacks? I mean, what are the exercises that you go through very specifically? Like, you know, should I sit down with my spouse and say, what are your non-negotiables? And he's my non-negotiables. I mean, should we open that conversation? Like, so to deepen the relationships that we have, because I don't think connection comes from the time you spend around people. I think it comes from the time that you are actually connected with them. It's quality. You know, there are a lot of houses full of husbands and wives and kids that don't really know each other. Right? They coexist. Right. It's more of like a cohabitating place or the other's just a dependency. But I don't know if they're really, you know, they've really woven that fabric. Yeah. I think it's the way I would characterize it is that it's primarily a skills issue. I think it's useful. to see relationship quality as the output of developing certain skills. So we've already talked about self-awareness, being able to kind of question yourself, humble yourself, look at blind spots. You know, I would describe that as one fundamental skill of relationship quality, mental health. I would say another one is quality of communication, which is what you're getting at. And it's funny because it's super cliché right, it's like, oh, Mary Couples, they've got to communicate, you know. And again, it's not just about sharing information, it's about intent and empathizing with the other person. It's understanding their values, it's understanding, you know, not just what happened at work today, but how do they feel about what happened at work today? How does that relate to, you know, the thing that they maybe they've been insecure about the past couple of years, checking in with them about it, having that slightly uncomfortable conversation of, you know, oh, wow, it's, that sucks that your boss said that to you. Like, how does that feel given that you're unsure in this new role or whatever? You know, so it's like seeing the conversation underneath the conversation, empathizing with the emotion, addressing it directly, and then being comfortable, you know, kind of playing in that more vulnerable space. That's absolutely another skill. Ironically, I would say the responsibility piece comes back into play here because what you see in a lot of unhealthy relationships, I would actually characterize, quote unquote, a toxic relationship, is two people who chronically don't take responsibility for themselves and or try to take responsibility for the other person. Hmm. So it's, we come full circle a little bit here and that, when you fix them, exactly. When you see a dysfunctional couple, almost all in every single case, at least one of the person is trying to take ownership and responsibility for the other person's feelings and actions. They're saying, oh, no, no, no, no, let me tell you how to do fixes in your life. Oh, no, you're angry. Let me, it's your fault that I'm angry. You shouldn't have said that, right? It's like these things are all, it's a relinquishing of responsibility over my own actions and emotions and understanding that my wife's actions and emotions are her responsibility. And so we can come together and communicate with them, right? It's like, I can come to my wife and say, hey, when you said that, like, I got pretty upset. Let's talk about, you know, why that happened. You know, I appreciate it. If you didn't do that again, versus like, I appreciate it if you didn't do that again. Yeah, versus like, you made me angry. You're such a bitch, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. What's sub-communicated in that latter accusation is that my anger is your responsibility. So don't do that again. Wow. And how much of this is us setting the wrong expectation and being let down because we framed an expected outcome and when it doesn't happen or let down? Because in the infrequent times where, you know, say, you know, I have disagreement, it's usually because, at least from my perspective, that I've set an expectation for how she should behave that is not anywhere in line. It's, there's no basis for me to do that. Yeah. Like, we have, you know, I have invited a bunch of guests over to the house that I didn't tell her we're coming and they're there. Yeah. And she's in her pajamas working on the computer. And I expect her to get dressed and come out and be happy and engaging and come out and meet these people. And she's like, no. If actually doing work in here, I didn't know they were coming over. You didn't tell me. And then I'm upset with her, you know. And then when I reframed them, like, you know what, I don't know why I set that expectation on her. Yeah. I'd be actually pretty upset if she said that expectation on me. Yeah. You know, at least give me the courtesy. If you're an, you know, if you want me to be socially engaging with a bunch of new strangers, please give me a heads up that they're, that they're coming to. Yeah. Just springing onto me. It's the classic relationships scenario. I often call that the mind reading scenario. Yeah. You know, it's like where, like, my wife will get mad at me for not doing something. And I'm like, I didn't know you wanted me to do that. You know, I can't read your mind. Yeah. And you know, she's like, it should be obvious. And I'm like, well, it's not. You know, that happens quite a bit, right? So communicating expectations, checking in on things. The other thing that happens a lot in relationships, especially early on is that people have the different definition for things, right? So very simple and common example. My wife and I, we have a very different definition of what a clean kitchen looks like. (laughing) Oh, dude, you're hitting all the high points. So does my wife. Yeah. I'm like, if there are no tennis shoes on the counter, we're doing pretty good. I asked if we're doing pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. You know, we have, we have different definition of, you know, what quality time looks like. We have a different definition of, what a fight looks like. You know, so people come from different families, they come from different cultures, they come from different background, they have different personalities. And so you have different definitions of all these things. And what's funny is that I think a lot of couples early on, they get into trouble because they try to change their partner's definition. They're like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this is what clean is or this is what, this is what quality time is, right? Instead of just understanding each other's definition. Like my definition of a clean kitchen is not really changed and been with my wife for 14 years. Yeah. But I sure as hell know what her definition of a clean kitchen is. (laughing) Yeah. And so when she's coming home from a trip, I'm like, we gotta get it. We're gonna meet her definition. We gotta get it for Nanda clean, not Mark Clean. Yeah. I love that. You know, and I think you know, this expectation leads to a lot of apprehension. Mm-hmm. You know, I sat with that definition for a little while because it makes a lot of sense to me that, you know, hope is your at least belief that something's gonna turn out, you know, a certain way. And when it doesn't or that you hope certain person isn't at a dinner party when you arrive or you hope that you get to handle more or you're, you hope that the food is good at a restaurant. And again, I wonder if you would like give us some context around that too because when I do stage talks and podcasts and lectures and I'll just generally ask the audience, you know, how many of you suffer from anxiety? And 70% of the audience will raise their hand. Like, wow, there can't be a condition, you know, a pathology that exists at that scale. Yeah, right? So it must be something endemic in society. There's causing people to feel. Yeah. Anxiety and. Yeah, so I have a pet theory around this, which is ties into that hope thing. So anxiety, it's, I think it's the only emotion that's very future focused. So fear is, there's a line in front of me, it might kill me, it's present, you know. It's like this thing is standing on the edge of a 30th floor balcony and I'm afraid to hide. So I mean, that's. Yeah. Whereas anxiety is a fear of what might happen in the future. It's like, okay, well, if I walk through this savanna, I might come across a line, what am I gonna do if that happens? So it's like, it's kind of this mental preparation for the future worst case scenario that starts happening. And I think there are a couple things that have kind of scrambled our brains around this. One is that we are so overexposed to all of the possible problems in the world that could happen in the next week, year, five years. We are constant. You go online for two seconds, you're getting hit with messages of like, you know, World War Three is gonna start, there's gonna be another pandemic, there's gonna be, you know, global warming, like there's just all of these narratives that are constantly taking place that things are getting awful, things are gonna, you know, the world's gonna end and all this stuff. And so that's one piece of it, but I think the subtler piece of it, which is the crisis of hope piece, is that to really be psychologically well-adjusted and happy and stable, humans need something to look forward to. Like you need something in your life that you wake up and you're like, I'm excited for that. Yeah. I'm like, I can't wait for that to happen or I can't wait to pursue that. And this is, I think this comes back to where we started, you know, with after Settle Art, like people who, the altitude sickness piece, like people who achieve a big dream, the problem is, is they wake up the next day and they don't know what the hope for. I'm like, well, I just did at all the good things I could have imagined, so like, I don't know what the hope for anymore, and so anxiety sets in, depression sets in. I think we live in a world where we're so over aware of all of the problems of everything. Like there's just anything, name anything interesting or exciting or, you know, whether it's a job or a relationship or moving to a certain place or a political movement or whatever, like we are so high, everything is criticized. - So often, and we see the downside of everything so clearly that I think it's, we've become a society of people that don't really know what to hope for. Like I don't know what's good anymore. I don't know what a better life even looks like, much less how to get there, right? So I ultimately see it as, there's kind of a lack of clarity of what matters and what is good and what's worth pursuing. And when you remove that from people's psyches, anxieties are setting in, right? 'Cause it's like, well, I can't think of anything good in the future, but I can think of a lot of bad things in the future, right? - Yeah, a lot. - So it's in the brain, the brain's a predictive machine, so that's where it goes. - And all it has to predict is what's happened in the past. I mean, it only has this experience, and then it just supplants that experience in the future. Well, my relationships never work out. So I'm be shocked if this one did. And I've even heard sports psychiatrist and sports ecologist talk about how the work with professional athletes and a golf world will walk up to something they need to one put, and he'll just, he'll say, out loud, probably gonna to put this. - Yeah. - You know, in some ways, allowing themselves to fail by, but meeting their expectation of failure, which in a weird way makes them less anxious. 'Cause see, I told you I was gonna do it, put it. - Yeah. - And then when they fail, they've met the expectation of failure. - Yeah. - There's this classic saying in psychology, which is that people would rather be right than happy. - Yeah, that's exactly. And that's a perfect example of that. - So do you think that we frame things like that, as either as a defense mechanism or without even being aware that we're doing that? And therefore, we're sort of subtly setting ourselves up to achieve mediocrity, just strive for mediocrity and just stay in that comfortable soup of not taking too much risk and staying. So our life is never great. - Yeah. - It's just kinda, okay. It's in a weird way, it is the comfortable. - Like the easy way it is, the enemy of great, kind of, or, you know, it's, it's good. - I don't wanna do anything about it, you know. - Yeah, there's a certain, it really, it's kinda sick, but like there's a certain psychological safety in underperformance, right? Like it's to do something truly great. You have to invest a lot of energy, emotion, effort, strain, right? And you still might not succeed. So like that's a lot to give up for an uncertain outcome. Whereas if you kind of set the bar low, you know, like, well, I'm pretty sure I can hit that. And I don't have to invest as much. And yeah, it would be disappointing, but I'd rather be disappointed than give something my all and then come up short, right? So like a lot of people unconsciously, they kind of make that negotiation in their head. And it's, and it's very, it's very tricky. I think we sabotage a lot in that way without even realizing it. It's crazy if you look at, if you look at the research around goal achievement in psychology, the number one factor of whether somebody achieves a really difficult goal is something called self-efficacy, which is literally just the belief that you're capable of achieving the goal. Yeah, it's something like if you just honestly believe that you're capable of achieving something, it increases the chances that you achieve it by like 33% or something like that. It's, yeah, it's so stupidly simple, but it has just a massive outsize, outsize the fact. 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What about your first sale? Yeah, it's about the first sale. And they're like, "Well, Coke or Pepsi or Monster Energy has done it but it's going to be a billion dollars." And there's a lot of distance between cup and lip there. But by the same token, I feel like there's a lot of these young entrepreneurs that because everything is not mapped out and because everything is not perfect, they actually really don't believe much in their idea. I went through this with. I went through this with my daughter and she's launching a chemical freeze king careline which she's deeply passionate about. She's a nurse in background in health services administration, just always been healthy, always been very, very cautious about what she's put on her skin and when she got her medical degree, she really started going down the rabbit hole of all these things that damage her skin, filates, parabins, polyfluoroal alcozyn. She just went headfirst into starting this king careline. It's been amazing to watch her as a young entrepreneur unpack this. But what I notice that she does a lot of times is, you know, when I ask her, if she'd shared this idea with some of the people that she holds in the highest regard in her life, she hasn't. - Mm. - Because she's afraid that their idea is not yet good enough. So I can see that her belief, and hopefully this podcast comes out after she launches this (laughing) sort of thrown Madison under the bus. - But we talk about it a lot, but it's, you know, is her belief in it as strong as it needs to be for someone to like lead a brand and lead a company that you're passionately wanna start? - Yeah, you almost have to become like an evangelist for something. My family say, look, it can't be what you do, it's gotta be who you are. - Right. - My favorite line around this was the long time ago, like 15 years ago, Elon Musk was giving a talk at a conference or something, and somebody in the audience asked him, he said, they said, what words of encouragement would you give to struggling entrepreneurs? And Elon said, none, because if you need words of encouragement, you shouldn't be starting your business. - Wow. - Yeah. And it's, that's really powerful. - Yeah. - But it's so true. It's, you need to believe in something so deeply, because it's, look, even if it is a great idea, and even if people are excited about it, the process of building a business, of like the amount of embarrassing launches and bad campaigns and, you know, - Oh, talking about it. - Mistakes, you fail at failure. - Failure, failure, yes. - I mean, you fall on your face so many times, and very publicly. And so yeah, you need the underlying belief in the business needs to be so strong that all of that feels worth it. - Yeah. You know, when we started the ultimate human platform, we started this media platform with a sole intention to give without the expectation of receipt. And the reason why I did that was because I want to remove all of those initial expectations, that would create these systemic and repeated failures. Like, oh, we didn't get enough affiliate links, or we didn't put things behind a paywall, or grow the Instagram account as fast as we thought. Just took all that pressure off and said, we just need to create the most intentional, authentic information, and give it for free. And if we've accomplished that, we've succeeded. - Yeah. - So that's how I'll define the success of the business. And what it allowed us to do was like, put all of the effort into the message. And since then, we've monetized it for sure, but put all of the intention into the messaging and not into all of those things that create all of those landmines for failure. - Yeah. - And when we got to tens of millions and then hundreds of millions of views, and I saw the adoption rate, and I was like, cheers and forwards and comments, I realized that we'd done it right. And I was, trying to set up the media platform to not fail by removing a lot of those expectations. But so for entrepreneurs, because having a relationship with your business is like having a relationship with your spouse. - Yeah. - And I think a lot of people need to prepare for that. And I started a company with my spouse when we were dating, then we got engaged, then we got married. And if anybody tells you that you can start a company with your significant other and separate business for pleasure, that is the biggest life. - Probably ever told me. - I'm sitting here and all right now. I'm like, that's a lot of stress. - Oh, dude. - And we had a mixed family. I had three kids. - Wow. - Divorced. She had one young daughter divorced. We moved the families in together. - Oh, man. - Then we started a business together. And initially it did not go very well. So we were making like 15 year married couple with the same family decisions, like three years into our relationship. And my view on relationships is that the best relationships are the ones that have gone through everything that's meant to tear them apart. And somehow they haven't given up on each other. - Yeah. - But that's my sort of rudimentary definition of my relationship. (laughing) Because I experienced that because, you know, when you go through all those things that are meant to tear you apart and you somehow figure it out, then when some measure of success comes, it is such a panacea, especially if you've achieved it together. - Yeah. - But in any case, what are some things that young entrepreneurs and young folks in relationships, especially women? Because, you know, I always quote the statistic that 82% of all on immune disease is found in females. Not because autoimmune disease is selected by sex, it's selected by weakness. And what a lot of the research intimates is that women have a tendency to put the needs of other people before the needs of themselves. They call it carrier for syndrome. - Yep. - And by slowly but consistently putting themselves in the backseat, there's spouse, their kids, their career, their girlfriends, their co-workers, what have you. They haven't taken any time for that introspection, for self-care, for what actually makes me happy. - Yeah. - And they wake up one day. They don't like what they see them here. And then they also feel terrible. Very often because that kind of stress weakens the immune system now they end up with Hashimoto's or some other kind of autoimmune disease. So what would you say to those women? And what would you say to young folks in a relationship who are starting a business, what are like the exercises that build the mental resiliency that help you create community and connection, that help you sort of honestly look at yourself, disease some of these blind spots, like you say, because if I was to give any advice, and I don't give any kind of relationship or by some success, but the exercise that I inadvertently went through in my 40s, if I had done that in my 20s, I can't imagine how much different my life would have been. - Right. I think the thing that comes to mind is just, and I ask, so as you can imagine, one of the most common questions I get from people is how do I stop giving a fuck? (laughing) How do I stop giving a fuck? Especially how do I stop giving a fuck what other people think? And I know that's a big one. This is much more prevalent in women than it is in men. And I think this is something that maybe has gotten missed or hasn't gotten broadcast. It's as women have ascended and achieved more educational and professional success. There's an aspect of it that I guess was never shared with them, which is that there's a piece of, kind of reaching those higher rungs is being willing to embarrass yourself, being willing to be hated, being willing to fall on your face in front of thousands of people and be judged by them and be criticized by them. And it's not, you know, it's historically all, the great men of history who achieved all these extremely, you know, the stratosphere of achievement. It was not pleasant getting there. - Right. - It was not a big thing. - Or they say nobody enjoys the climb. - Everybody enjoys the view, right? - It was not a picnic. And so I often hear from very talented, driven, ambitious women. And it's a very common question of like, how do I stop giving a fuck what other people think? And my, I always throw a question back at them, which is in this relates to your daughter. First of all, you're never gonna stop giving a fuck what other people think. You're a human. It's good that you give a fuck about what other people think otherwise you'd be a sociopath. - Yeah, so that's like, exactly. - It's, first of all, let's acknowledge that, yes, you should care what other people think. The question is, what do you care more than what other people think? And what I, what the question I throw back to them is I say, what are you willing to be, what do you believe in so strongly that you're willing to be disliked for it? - Wow. - Because if you can't answer that, then yes, your default is just going to be, make people like me. - Yeah. - Do whatever, do whatever is gonna get other people to like me. - Wow. - To really level up and just for entrepreneurs in general, it's like to get through that pain period, you have to be working on something that you believe in so strongly that it's like, yes, your family's gonna laugh at you. Your college friends are gonna stop returning your calls 'cause they're like, what is this guy doing? - Mm-hmm. - It's, Bukowski has this amazing sequence in one of his poems about this. He's like, you have to, you know, you'll be laughed at, you'll be derided, you'll be insulted, you'll be isolated. He said, isolation is the gift, isolation is, it's the opportunity for you to hone your craft. You know, and it's a package deal. And I think it's sitting with that question of like, what are you willing to be disliked for? What do you believe in so strongly that you're willing to embarrass yourself for it and feel like it's still worth it? It's not easy to find that thing, but I think when you do find that thing, that becomes kind of that North Star. It can be that thing that you do wake up and hope for every day, right? It alleviates the anxiety. It's, it gives you direction and it gives you something to keep climbing towards. - Yeah, you know, I, often when we talk about community and connection, people also talk about their purpose. And I get asked a lot on podcasts, even though I'm not a, profess to be any form of relationship expert by any stretch. How do I find my purpose? I mean, how do I define my purpose? You know, because it is so true that when you don't have that north star, it's very detrimental to your health. And, you know, we've now unpacked this in a way that we can link negative emotional states and elevated catacole amines to heightened cortisol from heightened cortisol to adrenal fatigue to impact on the immune system. So, so the bio hackers, we can we can draw this bio physiologically. We can give you all of the rationale behind the cellular biology of how stress makes you sick. Yeah. What we haven't figured out is how do we help people identify who they are? And how do they figure out what their passion is? Some people are blessed. They were really good at soccer. And they found that sport. They went to the Olympian level or they played professional sports. That was their calling and then they were able to manage their way out of becoming a professional athlete into it, you know, society and they did just fine. But for those people that are sitting around, they're an entrepreneur or maybe they're a 95 or the one thing they do know is that they're unhappy with their status quo. Right. The one thing they haven't been able to crystallize is, you know, that why am I here? And what is my purpose? Do you have any ways for people to frame that? Yeah. It's a difficult question and it's funny because I often I kind of hate how this question's often. And I don't want to make it so key to because I think people stumble upon it sometimes because it's the most painful thing in their life. Maybe they suffer from a drug or alcohol addiction. They fixed it. Now they're purpose is to help other people. First of all, yeah, I feel like purpose is similar to spouses, right? Some people meet their spouse when they're like 15 and they're just together for their entire life. It's rare, but it happens. And I think the same thing is true with purpose. There are some people that when they're 12 years old, they're like, I'm going to be a doctor and then they're a doctor for their life. and they love it. And it's like, good for you. You won't hate you. Yes, you little nerd. You know, you won the existential lottery. You're being your business will, okay. But most of us, most of us like finding our, our, you know, our lifelong partner, there is a very long process of trial and error and learning from the mistakes, learning from looking in the wrong places. So I, to begin with, I always like, I don't even like the verb find, you know, that's what everybody uses. Yeah. It's more like, it's more like, it's more like develop a purpose or cultivate a purpose in your life. It's, so what's interesting, when you look at the research around this, it's what, like, if you ask yourself, what is a sense of purpose? Like what gives your life a sense of meaning? It's interesting. It's kind of at the intersection of two things. So the first thing is what is unique about you? What it, what seems particularly unique or privileged or special about you or your situation or your context in life? And it, that could be anything from you of a extremely unique talent or skill that most other people don't have. It could be that you grew up, you had a very unique experience or came from a very unique background that most other people don't have. It could be that you have very unique relationships or connections in the world that most other people don't have. But it should be something that is very rare or unique that you have access to or that you inhabit. So that's piece number one. Piece number two is how do you make the world a better place? And then purpose is when you connect those two things. So you're taking the thing that is your gift that is special and unique to you. And then you are leveraging it in a way that makes the lives of other people better. When you combine those two things, that's when you start experiencing a sense of purpose. And those two things are hard because the first one is that a lot of people look at their lives and they're like, "Well, there's nothing special about me. I'm just a guy." Like I just hang out and play golf and whatever, watch the movie. It's, you really have to sometimes dig deep and really kind of explore your interests, explore your passions, your hobbies, your talents, and get a little bit of experience in the world to really start understanding like, "Okay, what do I have a knack for? What is kind of unique about me? What do I do a little bit differently than most people?" Like one question I often ask people to look at is like, what comes easily for you that seems very difficult for other people? 'Cause that, and it doesn't even have to be professionally related. It could be something that's like, "I'm really great at meeting people at parties." And I'm always the one introducing my friends to people and I'm always connecting people. Like that can be your superpower. The second side is also difficult because this comes back to the hope thing of like, what is worth pursuing? What is, what makes the world a better place? What is, what's something worth hoping for? And that really comes down to understanding your values, understanding ultimately what you care about and what is particularly important to you. And so then you kind of get a marriage of those two things. But it takes time to find them. And just from what you've shared from your personal story, it sounds like you kind of went through a whole process. You did the nine to five thing and then kind of came into this industry later in life and then probably found emerging of your talents and skills with all of this science and all of these amazing information that you can share with people. And it's like, you didn't just wake up and do that. That sounds like it was a multi decade process that you had to-- who wants to work towards. So it's people often talk about purposes if it's something that you find under a rock. And it's like, oh, there's my purpose. I found it. I'm looking for it. I left it in the bathroom. Finally found it. But no, it's something that you cultivate over many, many years, both through that self exploration, but also understanding like, what do I value? What do I care about? How can I make the world a better place? You know, back to how you've framed this muscle of radical self honesty. Do you think that people that are generally happier, more satisfied, more content in their life, are there characteristics that they share? One of them-- I don't read a lot of business or self help motivational books, but I read Thinking Grow Rich. And I think the original version of that book was Pray and Grow Rich, but Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. And when I found a unique about that book, and I think it was written in the 1920s or 30s, was that he wasn't actually looking at the actions-- what did this person invest in to become rich? He looked at the characteristics of success-- Right. --the mindsets. The mindset, the like-minded people, quick to decision-making, not afraid to make a decision. And he wrote a book about these are the characteristics of successful people. And they were across different areas of success. And not all of it was socioeconomic. Some of it was religion, sports, entertainment, what would have you. And he identified those characteristics. Have you, on your journey, been able to sort of embody the characteristics of people that are really content and just truly happy? Like, lives that other people would want to emulate? Yeah. It's funny. It's funny because happiness, first of all, when you ask, what's the primary trait that drives happiness? The thing that no self-help book will tell you is that it's genetics. It's like 60% of baseline happiness is genetically driven. And personality driven. Wow. So think of it as like everybody kind of has a happiness center of gravity. So you can have peak experience. Let's say most people is around a seven from one to 10 scale. So let's say you're out of seven. And then it's like you have a great birthday party or a great vacation or whatever. So it goes to 10 for a few days. It's eventually going to come back and settle out of seven. Similarly, something bad happens in your life, maybe a friend passes away or a business goes under or something. It drops to a three or four. But then over the course of weeks and months, it comes back to a seven. So researchers call this baseline happiness. And what they find is that about two-thirds of your baseline happiness is just kind of genetically set. That doesn't mean that you can't manipulate it. There are things you can do to increase it. But it's funny because it's just-- That's wild. Some people are just more predisposed to be cheerier and in a better mood than others. I personally come from a school thought, I actually have a chapter in one of my books called, The Title Is Happiness is Overrated. [LAUGHTER] Because it won't give you a raw. Happiness is great. But it's ultimately-- I argue that you want to live a meaningful life. You want to have an impactful life. It's happiness is great, but it comes and goes. It's like any other emotion. It's you can feel happy today. But like tomorrow, you might feel like shit. And then the next day, something else happens. And it's just this roller coaster ride. But meaning and impact is permanent. Like that's what sticks around forever. But in terms of what can actually raise baseline happiness reliably, so there are a few mindsets and attitudes that can have an effect. The self-efficacy is one of them, which we talked about. Just the belief that generally I'm a capable person, I can do the things that I want to do. And also that belief that I can handle whatever setbacks or obstacles come my way. And then the other one we talked about, which is strong social connections. Again, the number one driving factor of happiness and happiness research is quality of relationships. And again, it's something-- it's not a say. It's like the relationship thing. I feel like in my industry is probably in your industry, it's like, oh, yeah, you should just eat less and exercise more. Right, right, right. But everybody knows and everybody's sick of hearing it. But it's also just that's the 80/20. Really? It's just deepening your relationship. Just have good relationship. Have good-- get out, meet people, have a few good friends. On the romantic relationship, it's interesting. So no romantic relationship is better than a bad romantic relationship. But a good romantic relationship is significantly better than no romantic relationship. No romantic relationship is better than a bad one. Yeah. Oh, meaning, OK. Yeah. It seems to me that it's getting worse and worse than being in a bad relationship. I would have to-- Exactly. Absolutely. Yeah, with that. And I think so many people get into relationships to fix somebody else. And I see it all the time with our friends, even with our families. Yeah. With calling out any of my family, but there are members of my family that have been married for very, very, very long. periods of time and the conversation is always centered around fixing the idea. But you eat this, you want to do like he hasn't eaten that for 40 years. He's not going to start today. You know, like that hanging your head against the wall. But then there also, you know, going on 60 years. So yeah, but they come from a generation of, you know, something was broke, you fixed it, you didn't throw it away. Right. Which is like my parents' generation there because they're coming up on 60 years. So there's something to that. Half a century. There's something to that. You can problem solve that's for sure. Because it's, and also a lot of problems, right? Relationship, well, a lot of fights are not significant. Like they're not so not significant. It's just you're just arguing about how to load the dish. Like who cares? You know, and you know, there's no reason to like start excavating all of this, you know, they're like deeper emotions. Like, oh, that's my childhood trauma. Because my mom never let me load the day. It's like, you can overdo this stuff. Yeah. To quite a degree. And I do think there's a lot of wisdom. And it's actually like, so John Gottman from the University of Washington is like the leading relationship researcher in the world. He says this. He says every happy couple has unresolved fights and recurring fights. He says completely normal. It's usually about stupid stuff. It doesn't matter. It's like, no, he watches too much football and weekends. And like, they've been fighting about it for 25 years. He said, it's completely normal. And he's like, it's only a problem if you let it be a problem. Yeah. So just maybe he just relax. Yeah. Yeah. Let it go. For my audience that would like to find out more about you, obviously we've got the book here. I'm going to link it into the show notes. Where can they find you? You can go to Mark Massen.net. I've got a free newsletter. I've also made an got a podcast called Solve, which is available everywhere. Yeah. I'm on every platform. I'm like you. I'm every. Okay. Okay. So they'll find you. Yeah. I'll link I'll link it in the show notes. So I wind down all of my podcasts by asking my guests the same question. Okay. And there's there's no right or wrong answer to this question. But what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? I'll give you a t-shirt if you get the right answer. Yeah. Oh man. The pressure is on. The pressure is on. I'm saying cotton. It's nice. I would say being the ultimate human is to live in alignment with your full potential, both physically, psychologically, and emotionally. Wow. Your full potential. I love it. Do you think most people reach their full potential? No. Yeah. Maybe they do. Yeah. That was powerful. Great answer. Yeah. You have the teacher. I'm not even throwing a trucker hat too. I'm feeling generous today. Hey guys, we're heading over into the VIP room. So there's VIPs waiting in there. They have a ton of questions. But thank you for coming on the ultimate human podcast. And until next time, that's just science.