Welcome to Episode five of Season four of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. My name is Mikhaila Peterson. This was an episode that I was involved in and we spoke with Mark Manson. Mark Manson is the best selling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. And his more recent book, Everything is Fucked a Book About Hope, as well as a very popular blogger. His books have sold over a whopping 13 million copies worldwide. The video version of this podcast is available if you search Mark Manson, Jordan Peterson on YouTube, it's on my channel and clips are on dads.

This is a fun episode. We discussed how to properly set goals, the destabilizing effects of social media, the value of committed relationships and responsibility. Mark and Jordan compared experiences as authors that both fit into the self-help category and their search for meaning as men inside and outside of religion. This episode is brought to you by Lucy Nicotine Lucy. Nicotine makes gums and lozenges with four milligrams of nicotine in flavors like Wintergreen, Cinnamon and pomegranate. I've known as my friends using vapes and smoking more, especially given the stress of this year, particularly vapes.

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Mark Manson, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. How many books have you sold? Oh, I mean, if you add them all up, I think it's like 13 million, 14 million. OK, OK, so that's a lot that's a lot of books I wanted to get you on because you sold a lot of books and online they usually underestimate books sold. So I wanted to hear the real number and I read the book and.

I'm going to say a couple of things. One, I don't think it resonated with me like it did to 13 million people, and I knew that it sold a ton of books. So I figured I'm an outlier and I want to figure out why and kind of delve a little bit more into your ideas. But one of the things and I think it might be somewhere that you differ from my dad, but I also might be misinterpreting what you wrote.

I'd like some clarification, but you talk a lot about how people shouldn't necessarily shoot too high because you can end up chasing some dream. And you used the example of the man who left Metallica and formed Megadeath and felt like a failure. And most people would say he's not a failure because he formed Megadeath, but he got kicked out of Metallica. So the comparison was off. So from what I learned, growing up with my dad was kind of aim for the highest thing you can reasonably aim for and shoot for that.

And in my experience, that's been a that's been that's worked for me. So. Is that different from what you say in your book? Hopefully that was clear enough and not too jumbled.

Sure, sure. And then and I think there are a few questions there. We have to take them one at a time. But the goal question, it's I'm not critical of necessarily, say, the distance of the goals. I think there's a lot of there there can be many advantages to, say, shooting for the moon or whatnot.

Kind of the cautionary tale of Dave Mustaine and Megadeth is more of be careful the direction of your goals. You know, it's I think kind of what I'm critical of and both of my books is people just taking kind of the cultural definitions of success and doing good or whatever for whatever that is at face value and not really questioning. If I do achieve these things, will that actually solve my problems? Will that actually make me any happier or will it bring any more meaning to my life?

So the issue isn't so much. Don't take on ambitious goals. It's more of be very careful and skeptical of your goals because it's, you know, that that that intense dedication to a goal. It's a very powerful thing.

And so if you're pointed in the wrong direction, well, in this the

the man who founded Megadeath and who ended up unhappy because he wasn't as popular as Metallica, I mean, he got trapped in a very unlikely situation because he was staggeringly successful, but unfortunately compared himself to a group that was even more staggeringly successful, reminded me of someone I knew once who was upset about how much progress he had made by the time he was 40 compared to his roommate in college.

You know, and this person was a successful serial entrepreneur and and a mover and shaker in his own right, intellectually and practically. But his roommate was Elon Musk. And to some degree, you have to write that off as just bad luck. I think the founder of Megadeath broke a rule that I wrote about in 12 Rules for Life, which was compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to some to who someone else is today. And I wrote that rule partly as a consequence of realizing that you could end up in the situation of the Megadeath founder.

If you pick someone whose attributes are so stellar in relationship to your own that the probability that you'll make that bar is extraordinarily low, whereas you could improve over where you were yesterday. And that's actually. Useful, which is necessary, but also attainable.

Yeah, absolutely, and I and I just feel like a lot of people kind of default setting is to you know, in the book I talk about metrics, how we kind of invent metrics for ourself to define what success is going to be.

And I think for a lot of us, our default setting is to define our metric by whatever the people around us are doing or have recently done and. And so if you're not consciously questioning that, it can get you into trouble. Yeah, well, it's it's a double edged sword, though, too, because, of course, the person who doesn't compare what he or she is doing to what other people are doing also can take on the attributes of a psychopath.

You know, we can't help but judge our own actions and emotions and reactions against those reactions of the people around us because we have to get along with them. And so we take into account what our family thinks and what our community broader community thinks. And that can lead us astray at times. But it also frequently serves as a corrective and stops us from what, going down a bad path that's defined by our weakest personal point. So they often get a situation where a perfectly reasonable strategy that works in many situations can produce bad outcomes in certain situations. And maybe that's why you need a diversity of strategies.

Yeah, I know I found and a lot of the people I've talked to over the years and I'm curious if you found this to be true, that some people tend to be very good at. Using metrics based on themselves and they kind of ignore the world around them and they take on, as you mentioned, you know, maybe they're not a psychopath, but they kind of develop narcissistic qualities in terms of they just see everything in terms of their own desires and their own metrics.

And then there are other people who only see things in terms of the metrics of the people around them. They're very bad at developing metrics of success for themselves. And I mean, my take has always been that a healthy individual is able to to do and hold onto both simultaneously. And that's a struggle for most people. I think most people are coming from one of those two directions to get to that healthy place. Well, I don't know if you agree with that or.

Well, it is it is one of the constant. Battles that everybody undertakes in their life to get the balance between their own self-interest and the interests of others, correct. And it's easy to air on one side or the other, I think agreeable people, technically speaking. They're empathic and compassionate and polite, and when they make an error, their error is that they sacrifice themselves too much.

For other people's interests, now that has some real advantages, for example, when you're taking care of infants, at least to some degree, you can't wear yourself to a frazzle. But there is a certain amount of self sacrificial necessity involved in taking care of infants because they're always right and you have to respond to them in that manner. Doesn't work very well when you're dealing with adults and then people who are disagreeable will they tend to be more self serving and they can run into problems because they don't take other people into account enough.

But it's not easy. It's not easy to tell. When you're when you've got that balance right, because it also changes to some degree from situation to situation, and so your temperament can give you an approximation. But but that doesn't mean that it's going to be correct in every particular situation. You talked a bit about surrounding yourself with people and then like figuring out, I guess, your goals based on everyone around you. But something Mark talked about fairly extensively in his book was social media.

And so part of the problem with judging your behavior off of others nowadays is you can surround yourself with weird groups of people and there are like one hundred thousand of them that will agree with you.

Yeah, Mark, you talked about that a little bit more in Everything is Fucked, your book about hope, about the effect of social media and its destabilizing effect. I mean, I've seen that happen more and more over recent years.

Where. You know, we just as Michela pointed out, we just discussed the fact that you can use other people's opinions to help you defend yourself against your own foolish excesses. But now that can go astray very badly because you can go online. And no matter what conspiratorial or paranoid twist your thinking has happened to take, you can find a group of people, a large group of people who share your viewpoint and who provide all sorts of evidence that it's true.

And so I don't know of any hard data on this, but I've certainly seen a rise in conspiratorial and paranoid thinking among my family members and friends. And I think in the broader community as well over the last year, that means one of the mechanisms that serves as a corrective for us is has gone astray, at least in part because of this new technology. But was the moon landing really real, though? Well, that exactly.

I mean, I haven't seen hard data either, but I did see something that said that the flat earth society has grown by like one thousand two hundred percent over the last few years. To me, that's just kind of says everything. Right. Right.

That that's a really good example. If you were flat Earth or 50 years ago, you know, all your friends and family would kind of laugh at you and tell you you're ridiculous and you'd move on with your life. But now, you know, there's all sorts of communities and groups and YouTube channels that you can hop onto. And they they'll sit there and tell you that you're right with it.

Mrs. Krabappel on The Simpsons, who told Relf that the children were right to laugh at him.

Yes. Yeah.

Well, I mean, one of the things I argued for in my new book, which is called Beyond Order, is that we frequently outsource the problem of sanity, you know, for the psychoanalysts, for example, and for most clinical psychological thinkers, sanity was a characteristic of the integrity of your own psychological structures or maybe even the health of you as an organism. But I think that that's I think that that misses an important source of sanity. And that is that.

If you behave reasonably well, so if you're reasonably well socialized and you can hold your tongue and not be too annoying to others and maybe occasionally helpful, then you'll be surrounded by other people and they will hint to you continually when you're going off on a inappropriate tangent. You know, everyone knows people who can't take a social hint. When I've taught seminars, for example, at the university, be 20 kids, 20 students in the seminar, and there's almost invariably one of them who is completely opaque to social cues and who will.

Kill the conversation stone dead within seconds of entering it, because they don't know how to play the game properly and they're.

They're not functioning well, not so much, because their internal psychic structure isn't doesn't have the appropriate integrity, but because they can't avail themselves of social cues, they're not acceptable to others. And and so they can't they can't benefit from the collective intelligence of the group, which is generally but not always telling you how to be sane. Now, it doesn't always work because sometimes the group goes insane. And then the same person as the person. Yeah, everybody.

And well, you saw that. You see that very often. You saw that in Nazi Germany, for example. And you see that in these conspiratorial groups that are popping up everywhere as well now. So you. A lot of. This intellectual endeavor that you've been engaged in over the course of these last two books. Was reminiscent to me of. What I was involved in when I was, I think, probably almost exactly your age. Maybe we started about the same age, but used your investigating, as far as I can tell, the relationship between value structures and emotion, that seems to be your fundamental concern.

Is that reasonable? And you made the conclusion that. Yeah, I'd say that's accurate, that your values determine your emotional state. Generally speaking, yeah, and then the question arises, what constitutes a valid value and you investigate that even more thoroughly in your second book, relying on philosophers, for example, like Nietzsche and and can't. And so the question of what constitutes an acceptable value structure is incredibly deep question, and maybe part of the reason that your books have been successful is because so many people are asking that question now.

What I think so. Sorry, I'm I'm I'm anticipating your question, which I assume is why, why? Why is that? Well, what's it done for you?

This investigation. Well, it's. That's that's an interesting question, because it's I've always seen my work and my background is just is blogging. I'm not I don't have an academic background in this stuff like you do. But I started blogging in 2008 and it initially I kind of used it as my own vehicle for personal development growth. Developing emotional intelligence, managing relationships, all these things, and so kind of the way my career career has been spooled is.

Whatever issue I'm kind of struggling with at that period of my life, I investigated and then I write about it as and the writing is kind of my own personal form of digestion, I suppose. And there's I just kind of have this faith that if I'm going through it, then there must be a lot of other people going through it as well.

I actually think that's the answer to why your book was so successful, is that it is the case that there's a large population of people who are who have the same questions that you do and and are stumped in the same way that you are or were and that you're leading them through a process of investigation and thought at exactly the level that there's this idea from developmental psychology that a man named Vygotsky originated called the Zone of Proximal Development. And adults speak to infants and toddlers with implicit knowledge of the zone of proximal development.

And what they do is speak at a level that's slightly more advanced than the infant or toddler can understand. And that leaves them so they can mostly understand the adult speech, but not quite. And that leads them further, right? They can understand, but they're also forced to develop further understanding. And I've noticed when I was teaching that it was often the case that when I was trying to figure out something out, that was the best time to teach it rather than after I had figured it out, because then I would have forgot what the problem was and also what I didn't know.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense to me, I think part of it is this is kind of the hypothesis I lay out in the book and it's something I still believe, but I think. When you when you live in a society where information is no longer scarce, where there is essentially more stuff for you to consume and understand and learn about than is humanly possible, the most obvious question becomes what is worth pursuing? What is worth learning about?

What is worth trusting and believing it? I think if you look at previous generations, you know, information was scarce, opportunities were more scarce. And so people had kind of from an early point in their life, a more clear path of what they should be following. And what they should be learning about and I think today. Starting with millennials and even more so GenZE, it's you know, we've grown up with this overabundance of information and an opportunity of paths, life paths to choose for ourselves.

And so it kind of on paper, that sounds like a great thing and it is a great thing and a lot of ways. But it also kind of invites these existential questions of what is worth pursuing. And I just found that myself and a lot of my peers and and friends kind of went into what most people would call a midlife crisis in our 20s and. And for me, writing subtle art was kind of writing my way out of that was, as you said, investigating these value structures, going back to the philosophers and trying to understand, you know, what their ideas around these things were and.

And it's for me to kind of. You asked me your original question was, what did it do for me? For me, it gave me a sense of. Since that, I understood. Where I was, I guess I guess it helped me create like a map of how to navigate my life and and so it was with subtle art. It was kind of I wanted to provide the right questions for a lay person, you know, somebody who's not going to go near, somebody who's not going to study existentialism to ask the right questions, that will kind of help them do the same thing in a more basic way.

How do you you talk about the average person in your book, what to you, what does the average person look like? Are you are you the average person? I don't think so, no. OK, I agree. You know, I think the average person is. Does not have the time or the interest for a lot of these questions, yet they still struggle with them. OK, I think, you know, I think the average person has a generic middle class job, maybe partially college educated, but not always.

And feel these things, they feel kind of the the social fabric. Unwinding underneath them, they see things on social media and on the news that is confusing and upsetting, but they don't have the time, they haven't had the time to investigate these things further. And so those are kind of one way I think of you started this off asking me, you know, you said you didn't identify with my work as much as 13 million other people.

I mean, one way I think about it is I'm asking many similar questions or bringing up a lot of similar points to your dad. But I think I'm translating it down further. It's more. It's more organized and packaged for for mass consumption, if that makes sense.

Yeah, that was a solid answer, actually, that that was good. OK, and then one, this is just a simple question. Well, maybe what what do you mean? Like, what are you supposed to give a fuck about according to you, is it different for each person or are there rules people can kind of follow to figure it out? I intentionally don't answer that question because I I don't feel it's right for me to impose my values on any of my readers.

I do simply at times in the book, I offer kind of what I have discovered. Is better or worse to give a fuck about for myself, and I do provide I'm going to harass you about that in a minute or two.

So I thought I'd walk that so you can prepare for the water. No problem.

I do layout, I think, some principles that I generally, I think find to be useful, you know, so so generally it's more it's more useful to focus on kind of what I for the most sophisticated terms, but internal values versus external about, you know, so focused on things that occur inside of you.

Focus on your own integrity, focus on your own honesty. These are things that you experience internally versus say, you know, things that you experience externally, external markers of validation.

What would that be like? Fame. Is that an example of money?

Yeah, money, social media, followers, things like that. Having a nice car. You know, there's nothing wrong with those. But it it's kind of it's similar to the the discussion we were having earlier. Like, it's we all like money. We all like having nice things. But there needs to be you can't only value those things. Like you have to have a balance of kind of more internally driven things that you care about. So I do think that you impose your values on your readers and but I actually think, well, OK, I'm going to make two observations.

The first is that I think that apologizing for that is the most predictable thing that a millennial could possibly do, because I think your generation and perhaps even more the generation younger than you, what they've been taught above all else is that the cardinal more moral sin is to judge be judgmental, right. To be discriminating. But that's absolutely foolish and you actually make a case for that because you say that one of the most important things that you can do and by you, you mean you, but you also mean other people is to say no, and that as soon as you value one thing, which you need to do and hopefully the proper thing, you're saying no to a very large number of other things.

And so this is why the the the stance of of of of the idea that you can raise being nonjudgmental to the level of a higher moral virtue is definitely wrong.

If your claim is correct that your emotional state depends on your value structure and it's more important than anything else to get your value structure straight. And if you have a value structure, you have to say yes to some things and know to others. Then you immediately admit that there's a value hierarchy and there's some things at the top and some things at the bottom. And I think one of the real strengths of your book is that you at least begin to do that.

And and and I think you do it explicitly. So you say quite straightforwardly that there are five things that you've discovered that are of general utility that you found of general utility. And you don't say that you're certain that you're 100 percent right about those five things, but you certainly make the claim that the reader should take them seriously and that they've been useful to you. And that was taking responsibility. And you do a very careful job of distinguishing that from accepting universal fault, which is a good, good piece of intellectual exercise because it's necessary to take responsibility and to discriminate that from assuming universal fault.

You can get cancer and it's not necessarily your fault. In fact, it probably isn't. But you still have to take responsibility for it or or or or suffer the consequences. You talk about the necessity to accept and cultivate, the ability to tolerate, to accept uncertainty and to cultivate the ability to tolerate it. You talk about learning to appreciate failure. You talk about rejection, we already mentioned that and the ability to say no and the necessity of saying no and perhaps the unapologetic necessity of saying no.

And you also you make that concrete in some sense because you talk about, for example, that you learned as you transition from your 20s to your 30s that. Saying no to an entire smorgasbord, let's say, of sexual possibilities. Was worthwhile because you found something deeper in the commitment to a single person. And that's a form of sacrifice. You talk about sacrifice in your second book and you made a sacrifice and sacrifices are actually worthwhile. And then you talk about contemplation of your own mortality as a way of discriminating, doing what's important and what isn't.

And so and then in your second book, you talk about both Nicha and can't in some detail. And both of them were striving for for the apprehension of something approximating a universal morality. And so I can see that. And you also mentioned Ernest Becker. You know, and and, you know, better believe, right, you got me. What do you say to that? You got it.

But you totally know you are right. It's funny because. So now now I'm kind of doing like a. A check of my because you are right, you are correct, I think. And it's and I gave you I'm going to admit here, I gave you guys the stock answer, you know, so that's a dangerous thing to do.

I don't know, especially with you guys. But, you know, I've been asked a million times, too, like, oh, so what should we give a fuck about? And my my defacto answer has always been like, well, it's not my place to tell people exactly what they're going to do. Bullshit.

That's definitely true.

That's exactly what you're trying to do now. Well, 13 million people are listening.

I think the reason you get away with it is because you're trying to do it for yourself, too. You're not preaching and you're kind of inferring.

Right. You say this is what worked for me, but it could work for you, right?

Yeah. And let me well, let me present some context to this, which I think can can be helpful. You know, my my background is straight up the self-help world. And generally in the self-help world, values are just shoved down your throat. You know, you're supposed to want. Then the fancy car, you're supposed to want the perfect marriage, you're supposed to want to be happy and live happily ever after. You know, it's like these are the things that are taken for granted at page one.

And so, you know, when I wrote Subtle Art, I went through pains to kind of be contrarian a lot of ways to what a typical self-help book is. And so one of those ways was I don't want to explicitly ram values down people's throats, but I agree with you that the overarching project of the book is, yes, I am I am imposing. Even if I don't come out and say it like this is what you should give a fuck about.

It's. The way I've constructed the book, and particularly the second book, the book, the second book is much more striving for.

Striving for some sort of solid structure. That's this book, by the way. Yeah, so everybody knows what, you hooked yourself into this project as soon as you made that initial discovery, like you made it quite a profound discovery, in my estimation, which was that values regulate emotion. So then then as soon as you make that discovery, you're stuck with a question which is, OK, then what are the appropriate values that make me happy?

Well, I know or even well, if it's not happy, it's some other metric, you know, because you can also question whether or not happy is the right I long term value, like happiness as I know you.

You're like it's not about being happy, but will beat the hell out of being miserable if happiness comes along, you should be bloody happy that it's like lit on on your stem for while. Yeah.

Yeah. But it's. Yeah. And then as soon as you get into that question it's turtles all the way down like it's that's that, that takes you into, you know, kind of staring into the void so to speak, which you talk about in your work. Quite a bit of you know how there's. You have to you have to take on the responsibility to create something that's meaningful in your life. Yes.

Or to discover it. That's one of the weaknesses of nature, I think. I mean, I'm a great admirer of nature. And he I've never read anyone who could think with as much glittering brilliance as nature. And he's very dangerous to read because he's so unbelievably intelligent. He'll take everything, you know, apart sometimes with a sentence. He said once he was bragging in a sort of self-deprecating manner in some sense. I mean, he never sold any books.

And so he was sort of bragging to himself, I suppose he said, I can say in a sentence what it takes other people an entire book to say what they can't say in an entire book. And that's ad that actually happens to be true. You could, in fact, do that, and he believed that we could create our own values, but that's wrong. We can't create our own values. We can discover them and we can create them.

But you know, and you know this in your book as well, it comes out again implicitly. You wouldn't be able to violate your conscience if you could create your own values. Violate your conscience? Yeah, because your conscience, you'll lower this a little, you'll do you'll do something that your conscience objects to. OK, OK. And if you were fully capable of creating your own values, your conscience would never object. You would just go along with what you proposed, like if we were the sorts of creatures that could do that.

But what we find very rapidly is we try very hard to impose our own values and then we then it fails. We're not satisfied by what we're pursuing or we become extremely guilty or become ashamed or we're hurt or we hurt other people.

And sometimes sometimes that doesn't mean we're wrong, but most often it does. And so this this and you your your search for bedrock, I think is. And perhaps the fact that you never do come to any final conclusion is definitely, at least in my opinion, so maybe not definitely, but in my opinion. A large part of the reason why your books are attractive to millennials, you know, you talk about the consumer literature that shows that people who have an infinite variety of choices are less happy than people who only have one or two.

And you mentioned at the beginning of this discussion that the millennial generation that you're a part of suffered in some sense because they weren't deprived enough and had too many choices. The advantage to being deprived is that it's obvious what to do if you're starving, then you eat. There's no question, but if you have enough to eat and you have enough shelter and you have enough information, maybe not as much as you could have, but enough, it starts to become difficult to decide what to do.

And then you have another problem, which is that you can't decide what to do. And and then you have to start to investigate value, and that seems to me, even from your autobiographical comments, seem to be what happened with you and obviously so many other people.

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that plays into kind of what we were talking about, the. Kind of the radical subcultures that exist and percolate online. I feel like a lot of people are going through these existential malaise and they're they're searching and so they're just scrolling through social media and they find something that piques their interest, seems counterintuitive or exciting, and suddenly they're kind of whisked down this rabbit hole without much awareness of what's happening.

One of the reasons that I'm a rather staunch admirer of traditional Christianity, say in its Catholic form, let's say, which is the most traditional form, arguably, is that I think that Catholicism is is seen as people can get. Like your areas of Catholicism that were a little out there. There still are I mean, the doctrine is very difficult to understand the idea, the virgin birth, for example, and all of the strange irrationality that goes along with a religious belief.

But the problem is, is that. We we need something structured and irrational to protect us from even less structured and more irrational beliefs. That's my sense of it. We can't live in a fully rational world because we're not smart enough. We need something to fill in the gaps and.

The advantage of a codified religion is at least that there's a unifying force behind it, and what you get now is this fragmentation and search for. Replacement for religious values, and there's not much difference. Well, conspiratorial theory will offer exactly that, but none of the true benefits of a religious system, one that's evolved over time and that. That has a deep that has a deep basis. Well, Mark, did you argue that some of the values you kind of inferred could potentially replace that?

The religious values, you mean, or. But one of the concerns I raised and everything is fact is that is what Jordan just said, which is, I think, people. In lieu of religion, they were they are taking worldly values, things like politics, cultural issues, social group identities and. Behaving religiously around them, adopting kind of religious belief systems around them, and that's extremely concerning to me. I mean, you don't have to read far back in history to see how that ends up that.

Take an organized religion, this is something that Carl Jung really recognized and he was an astute critic of, of Nietzsche and also an admirer of nature, is that we do have a profound religious impulse and.

Not that I'm not saying that that's good or that it's bad. I'm saying that something has to be done with it. And the advantage to a genuine religion is that. It's very, very complicated, while the alternatives don't seem great. Yes, yes, they do it and it's got its been back tested for 2000 years. Well, and there's something at the core of it.

There's an ideal like in Christianity, there's the the idea of the ideal human being. That's Christ who's who whose mode of being offers redemption in a miserable time though.

Well, people do have a miserable time, you know, and that's one of the things that makes it powerful to the happiness thing. Back to the happiness.

So there's a striving there to to to to specify what that ideal constitutes. This is something that Ernest Becker got wrong to as far as I'm concerned. So Becker believed that our attempts to weave together a heroic narrative were motivated by our denial of death. And that's true. But it's not true enough because what Becker didn't understand or didn't didn't realize and I like the denial of death. I thought it was a great book, was that a lot of our heroic projects actually stave off death as well.

So they may have the symbolic value of providing us with symbolic immortality, but they have the practical value of us not dying. And so if you adopt a mode of life that is practical, it gives you a sense of meaning. But that's not because that's somehow papering over your fear of death. It's because it actually provides you with a meaningful way of being in a world that's rife with uncertainty and mortality. You can't write that all off is psychological.

And that comes through in your book. The fact that you know that like one thing I'm really curious about this commitment issue that you raise, because it seemed to me and I might be wrong, but tell me if I'm. Barking up the wrong tree. It seemed to me that it was quite a revelation to you that being in a committed, monogamous relationship would bring you as much satisfaction and happiness as it did compared to a more libertine lifestyle. So is that a reasonable observation?

Oh, yeah. OK, huge epiphany. OK, so so two questions. The first is what did you discover that you didn't know? You know what, what is it that being in a committed relationship did for you that you didn't realize it might do beforehand? But there's there's a there are two sides of that, there's kind of. The alleviation of the negative and the positive side of it, so I think, you know, back before I had that experience, my kind of irrational gut reaction to intimacy in general was I'm going to be trapped.

This person is going to expect too much of me. I'm going to disappoint them. I'm going to hurt them. I'm going to hurt myself. It's better if we just kind of go our separate ways.

It is better if you keep it shallow. Exactly. It's safer. So I think the first epiphany was that that. That's not necessarily true. You're not necessarily going to. You know, the world's not going to end if you have a fight and you're not going to ruin each other's lives and you're not going to be trapped all the time. There's there's a there's a different kind of leads into the positive side of the epiphany, which is that there's a different kind of freedom in commitment, which is the freedom to.

Like one way I described it in an article many years ago was that it felt like it felt like like if my brain was a computer, it felt like I had a program running in the background in this program, in the background was constantly. Thinking and worrying about which women were single, which ones were interested in me. Which ones were attracted to me. Which ones I was attracted to. And it was kind of just eating up a lot of ram and my brain.

And as soon as I hit that point, it was actually almost instantaneous when I proposed to my wife. It's like that program just shut down and suddenly my computer, like my brain had like 30 percent more energy, the focus on other things. And and I really the feeling was of liberation. It was like, wow, I never like this is solved. I never have to think about this stuff ever again. I never have to worry about it.

That's the problem with too easy divorce route. You know, one of the advantages to being married is precisely what you just described is that it solves a set of problems so that you don't have to consider them anymore. But if divorce looms as a too easy exit, then every time you have a fight, you can think, well, I can just dissolve this relationship. And although. From some perspectives, you could say that that increases your freedom from another perspective, you say, well, no, it doesn't.

It just reintroduces you to the whole bloody set of problems that the marriage was designed to solve. And it is very perverse in some sense, although this is part of the meaning of sacrifices, that you can give up a whole set of options and focus on something narrowly and what the consequence of that is. This whole new world opened up for you that you didn't know were there. You don't lose any freedom at all. In fact, you tend to gain it.

So, OK, so commitment and now you emphasize commitment in your book in more than just the marital domain. But more implicitly, I would say, because your your insistence that people develop the ability to say no and that that's necessary, which is your defense for discrimination, by the way, that also that implies a broadening of the appreciation for commitment is you have to commit to. Some set of values or or you, well, you're swamped by chaos is essentially the the situation.

Yes. Yeah, so that epiphany of kind of commitment and the romantic space or the intimate relationships face, I quickly saw that you can apply that in other areas of life. You know, it's a deep commitment to say a career path is liberating in a lot of ways because it removes distractions and extraneous options and things that may, you know, waste your energy. And so I argue towards the end of everything as fuck that that there's. That, I think, are the kind of growth, especially here in the US, we have this worship of freedom for its own sake, and I think the definition of freedom in the US often gets very warped of just having lots of stuff or being able to do lots of stuff.

And and it's. What I discovered is that kind of the traditional ideas of freedom and liberty and. Things like that from the Enlightenment was much more of this, like virtuous, you know, having a freedom to decide who you are, having a freedom, you know, discipline was seen as a form of freedom.

That's the freedom to choose your own shackles. Yeah, yeah, and you talked about that with choosing what, man, I'm not going to say this properly, but setting a goal and deciding how much pain you can tolerate to accomplish that goal and being OK with it, because you said, you know, people want want to be a CEO and they don't want to work 80 hour weeks. Yeah, they don't understand.

I don't know I don't know what that had to do with what you were just saying. And I know it's it's totally a part of that. And in fact, I think this is kind of I think the one reframe, if you were to take one kind of reframe from my work that I think is resonated the most. It's I've taken kind of that classic. Motivational speaker question of like, what do you want in life to want the corner office?

Do you want to have a boat? Do you want to have 10 kids in an amazing garage, whatever you want, and twisting that over and saying, OK, what are the problems you want in your life? Because there's there's no there's no escaping problems like a struggle. And it's easy to want the benefits of something without wanting the cost. And so you need to ask yourself what what are the costs that I'm OK with, because that's actually a much better indication of a, what you're going to be successful at.

And B, what actually makes you different from other people? What actually distinguishes you as a person and kind of conform your identity?

You do a bit of investigation into the sacrificial motif in your second book. I believe it's mostly in the context of false religions, but you make a case. It's just something I'd like to point out, because it's part of where it seems to me that your thinking is going. Is that the case you're making is that you can tell what you want by observing what you're willing to sacrifice for it. Yes, and sacrifice, modern people have a very.

Shallow notion of what sacrifice constitutes sacrifice is, in fact, how you please the gods and our people acted that out because they were struggling to bring to consciousness the knowledge that it was necessary to give up something that you valued in the present to gain something that you valued even more in the future. And maybe they acted that out by. Offering up a choice cut of meat to God, and that seems pretty barbaric and archaic to us, but but that was the birth of a tremendous idea.

And the tremendous idea was the observation that if you gave up something you valued, you could bargain with the future and that that's like the most amazing discovery that human beings ever made. It's like the discovery of the utility of work. A little pain now will pay off in the future, it's equivalent to the discovery of the future, it's no trivial thing. So then the question becomes, what what is it worth, what what is it that's worth sacrificing for?

And you found in your own life that commitment was one of those things. Absolutely, absolutely. I've become a an ardent. Zealot for marriage, you know, it's funny because my career actually started in men's dating advice and I still get emails all the time from young people who. You know, they say, what's the point of marriage? What's the point of settling down? What's the point of being with one person? And I, I feel like I've become a very unlikely.

Just preacher for. For the benefits of commitment, the more people that you take to bed, the more you're with one person and that person is yourself. Because all those relationships are exactly the same. The fact that they happen to be different bodies is trivial compared to the depth of realization that you obtain by getting to know one person really well. There's no comparison and. It's very sad in some sense that young people. Have have have a question such as what's the value of marriage that should be if if our education system, if our socialisation systems were operating properly, that would be self-evident.

It's part of what makes your life worthwhile to to go all in on something. One of the things I wanted to ask you on a more personal level in you and I are similar in that we've both written books about value and and they're both, I suppose, in the self-help genre with some detours into philosophy and psychology. I found this very difficult. The consequences of this very difficult in some sense saddened me terribly because. So many people have. Talk to me about.

Mixed up their lives were. And how the words of encouragement that I've offered have helped them put their lives together, and that's a very positive thing. And on the one hand, because. I can be pleased. That my work has been helpful, but it's also very painful, on the other hand, to get a real glimpse into how much of a longing there is out there for guidance of any sort and how much how much of a lack there is of that.

And that's been very hard on me to see that over and over and over and over. And I don't know if you've experienced anything like that delving into the same realm. Yeah, it's it can be heartbreaking at times I. I I very consciously kind of manage my exposure to it. How do you do that? Schedule reader email, essentially. And I it's. I have an assistant who kind of screens everything, gets rid of the trolls and the hate mail and the spam and stuff like that, so I have a folder that it's pretty.

That that she moves certain emails into and it's when I open that folder, I know that I'm going to get pretty personal and heavy stuff. It's not all negative. Sometimes it's great life changing stuff. And so there's like a there's a mix there.

Yeah, well, it's generally positive the stories that. Yes. Most often stopped on the street. And so that's a it's not as easy as an encounter to control. And I mean, I'm not complaining about it because people who stopped me on the street are almost invariably polite beyond belief. And I've had very, very few negative interactions. But that doesn't mean it isn't heartbreaking because people reveal the cataclysmic conditions of their life very rapidly in a very intimate way and.

You need a burka, but solve that problem real fast. Can you imagine the headlines Jordan Peterson wears a burqa?

Yeah, well, I'm trying to hat and sunglasses from time to time, but the solution. No, it's it's it can be heartbreaking and it's.

Well, you know, sometimes I. I, I, I don't know what to say sometimes, and a lot of times I simply respond with. You know, I I'm listening. I don't know what to do in this situation, you know, and my audiences, because, you know, by so much of my body to do. It is, it is, but it's my audience is very international, and so I'll get emails from like. A girl in rural India who says, my parents are making me marry a 50 year old man who I've never met before, I don't know what to do, should I run away?

And I'm like. You know, but and it's I struggle with that, like, how do you even respond to that? And so there's a lot and I mean, it can go to pretty dark places, and so, yeah, I just kind of I set out set aside a certain time of my week. I'm I'm definitely not as recognizable as you. I don't get stopped on the street. I don't do many live events, so I don't get it as much in person.

But in terms of like the emails and stuff, I've just kind of learned to kind of. All right, Sunday afternoon is. For these few hours, like that's where I'm going to. Dive into this emotional space. Yeah, that's intense, you do get approached quite a bit. OK, so your second book. Changing the topic, something a little bit later, trying to keep it light. It's hard to keep things light with you around again, subjective like, oh my God, the atmosphere is getting have been around me 100 percent of the time.

You're your second book about hope, which is something people are seriously having a problem with this year.

Like everybody is so depressed. You do you have suggestions or I guess maybe suggestions for what not to do and might be might be easier for people than what to do?

Yeah, well, it's funny because that book is a bit of a Trojan horse. I think it lures people in with the promise of hope. But what it actually gives people is. A long lesson of be careful what to hope for. You know, it's. Kind of the main point of that book is when you're desperate for hope, the more desperate you are for something to hope for. I think the more liable you are to. Just grasp at anything that comes that comes around and just dive in headfirst, and I think that can get people into trouble.

And so it's it's very much a book of.

Trying to provide context for people to be more aware of. What visions of hope they're buying into, what belief systems they're buying into, what information they're spending their time on and trying to focus more locally focused more on themselves and the people in their immediate vicinity, you know, get off news. Get off social media. Don't don't buy into the latest outrage that's being spread everywhere and essentially just focus on the things that you can actually have immediate impact on.

When I when I did the speaking events for that book, one of the big arguments I made is I think there's a real argument to say that we are we have become too globally minded. The fact that we're so aware of what's happening in India and Australia and Japan and Russia and all these places like it makes us feel helpless in a lot of ways. I think there's a lot to be said of of returning a majority of our attention, share to the things immediately around us, to our family, our community, the local school, the kids down the street, things like that.

Those are the things that we have actual immediate impact on and. Those they're not sexy or glamorous and they don't travel well online, but those are the sorts of hopes that you can actually see come to fruition.

Well, you you also outlined something very practical as far as I'm concerned with regards to hope. It's like imagine that you're talking to someone who's hopeless but who isn't. Suffering from a fatal, painful disease, let's say, so their hopelessness is more a matter of disorientation than. A condition brought about by chronic pain or or something like that, we'll leave that aside. The first thing that that might be offered to someone like that is to say that if you don't know what to do, you should try doing what other people have always done.

And so what that might that mean, it might mean, well, you have a job, and if the answer is no. You might be encouraged to take small steps towards getting a job now you you concentrate on doing. All right, you said when you're in doubt, do something, even a small thing. OK, so you could say, well, look, you're not going to. You're not going to generate yourself a functioning value hierarchy that's optimally tuned.

To your personality in the next week, it's going to be a lifelong endeavor of approximation and you're going to get a lot of it wrong. And you talked about tolerance for error in your first book, so you're going to get a lot of it wrong, but you've got to start somewhere. So let's start with what people have agreed upon universally. And this is simple. It's like. You should probably get up in the morning. He should probably go to bed at night.

You probably have some friends, you probably have a family, probably have a job, wouldn't hurt to pursue some education and you know, you can raise objections to any of those. And you might say that that doesn't stop me from feeling hopeless. But the right answer to that would be, well, take some steps and take some steps in at least one of those directions. Small steps, daily steps and don't. Don't upgrade yourself for the mundaneness of your efforts, you just said, you know, you might want to turn your attention more to the local and there's nothing heroic about that.

But that's actually not true in most situations. That's where the heroism lies. It's unheralded, but that's still the adventure of your life. It's and it's the personal adventure of your life, and so that's where hope can be found, you know, can you make your relationships a little bit better? Can you make your career a little bit? And maybe that you have a revelation at some time and you decide that. Standard career isn't for you that happened to you, you took an entrepreneurial route, and that's fine, but what you did was replace the traditional route, which would be to obtain something approximating a nine to five job with an entrepreneurial activity.

You didn't just say throw up your hands and say, well, the whole idea of being actively engaged with the world is so questionable that I'll just cease to do it. So I would say for people, they should adopt a conventional worldview and work towards optimizing their functioning along those conventional dimensions, and then if they discover that they have a really good reason to deviate. Then they have the right to deviate, and I think you you you push it that in the first book, when you offer the advice to people that it's OK for them to embrace their averageness, it sort of addresses the issue that you had brought up.

You may discover that you are exceptional along some dimension and you can pursue that, but. Averageness beats the hell out of nihilism. Absolutely. I know you had Matthew McConaughey on a few weeks ago, and one of the things one of the things that he said in his book that I really liked was he said said that you've got to follow the rules before you can break the rules. And and I think he even even spoke a bit politically. You've got to be conservative before you can be liberal.

You got to follow the rules before you can break the rules.

And I think that's called growing up. You're right, discipline of discipline first and then exceptional, yeah, I one thing I found over the years just talking to a lot of people is that and I think this comes back to the emotional aspect is that people who are suffering because they're suffering kind of pervades all of their life experience. They they develop this irrational notion that the solution must be. A massive, huge life altering event like they have to change everything from A to Z in one go, and the opposite is usually the case, like it's it's often the difference between somebody being depressed and somebody not is is something as simple as getting a job or making a new friend or moving out of your parents basement like it's it's actually very basic things that have compounding effects.

You want to try those to begin with before you switch to a more radical solution. You want to come back to your. I guess it comes back to your you know, put your own house in order before you try to change the world.

Yes. And you want to rely on incremental solutions before you switch to revolutionary ones.

It's harder, though. I mean, part of the reason people don't do that is because it's a lot easier. It's a lot easier saying, well, I'm against climate change than not arguing with your husband or trying to sort out the resentment between yourself and somebody else. That's way Harden's way easier to focus on something that's far away and out there.

Well, you also get a sort of perverse.

Boost in relationship to your own self perceived. Ethical stature, you know, if if you're concerned about climate change, then you're someone taking on a global problem. If you're trying to figure out how not to argue with your husband about who's going to cook dinner, it's so mundane that it's almost that. It's almost laughable. Right. But but the difference between the first situation and the second situation is the second situation is real and real advances can be made there, whereas the first situation just makes you feel virtuous.

You're someone suffering for a noble cause, but the suffering isn't going to produce any benefit to anyone to put your house in order before you can accomplish those kind of things, make sure you're not harboring resentment for, I don't know, your significant other before you try and solve some global problem. In your view? Well, the thing is one of the the dangers of tackling a global problem when your house isn't in order is that you don't know what your solution is motivated by.

It'd be by avoiding the problem, right? It could be motivated by all sorts of things that you haven't dealt with yet. So, I mean, there's reasons that utopian political schemes go wrong. And those reasons often have to do with the unexamined, unconscious motivations of the people who are pushing the ideologies. OK, Mark, this is this is something this is something that we kind of touched on earlier, and you were saying you had your mind changed about commitment.

And I think you and I had similar thoughts because I was I kind of had the same perspective. It was like. I kind of had the same perspective anyway, one of the things I have a kid, she's three and a half. And I've I've seen a lot of people my age who are I don't want kids. And part of the reason is. Because there's a sacrifice associated with it and it's actually quite a large sacrifice, like even just being pregnant is hard the whole time.

And then while some people have it easier, but it's hard, and then the first year you're kind of glued to a baby, especially both parents, but especially if you're a mom. And so there's a lot of sacrifice. And my argument's been, yeah, but then you end up with a kid. Why?

It's a lot of work, but then there's another human there, like that's pretty that's pretty crazy. So it's a good payoff. Yeah. It's like a crazy real principle.

It's the best relationship you'll ever have. It's certainly the one that you have. You have more opportunity with that relationship for it to be deep and meaningful than any other relationship you'll ever embark on. You can force them to do chores.

They could enjoy the sort of fruit and amusement. You can teach them things that aren't true. And then when they make a mistake.

Yeah. What are what are your thoughts? What are your thoughts on kids? Well, I agree.

And it's funny because I was one of those people, you know, back in my libertine life, you know, I was one of those people who's like, I don't think I ever want kids. A lot of work and effort in right around kind of just all of these epiphanies, this whole period of my life where I came to a lot of these conclusions or discovered a lot of these ideas. It was funny. As soon as I kind of.

Cross that hurdle with my wife, the kid thing suddenly opened up, it was like within weeks of. Proposing to her, I'm like, wow, I think I want to be a dad. I just felt it like very instinctually and my gut and. One of the things, you know, you said people complain about the sacrifice and how much work it is and how hard it is and how much you have to give up.

And to me, it's like that's the point, that's for sure. Man, you have no idea how fortunate you are if you have a meaningful burden that you can lift. It's so I've been very ill in the last year and I haven't been able to undertake my normal ventures. And I miss it so much. I'm I'm I'm so grateful now when I can engage in something difficult that I have the privilege of being able to engage in something difficult and.

You want to thank your lucky stars that that's sitting there for you. It's so backwards to say, well, I don't want a kid because of the commitment and work. It's like no, man, the commitment and work. That's where you're going to find the meaning and then you get a kid to.

This is a deal about your unfortunate person in that situation. But but I look back. So when I look back at, say, like twenty five year old Mark and back when I had that mentality about kids, about marriage, you know, I think part of the problem was I had never actually experienced that meaningful depth enough in my own life like it to me. It's I didn't know that that existed, that that was possible. As soon as I realized it was possible and it existed.

Hellyeah like, sign me up for as much as I can handle. I think I mean, I grew up in a dysfunctional family and looking back, my relationship with my parents was quite dysfunctional. And it's it my relationship with my parents and my family in general, I don't think became started to become somewhat healthy until. My late 20s, early 30s. And part of that just comes back to, you know, it's not they weren't. You know, they they weren't in a healthy place either, like they grew up in dysfunctional family systems and situations, and so they were they were giving it their all and doing the best of what they knew.

But it wasn't. It wasn't like an emotionally healthy environment. You know, I have a colleague who studies maternal behavior in rats and one of the findings in her field, I can't remember if this is her finding or not, was that if you take rat pups away from their mother. And and provide them with the necessities of life, but deprive them of that maternal relationship, you can see disturbed maternal behavior in their children and their children's children three, three generations later, and that's with rats.

And I mean, rats are complicated. And if you don't think so, you should try to build one. And they're pretty good. They're pretty good models of people when you compare them to your model of a person. You know, when people deride animal research because rats aren't humans, but they share a lot of similarities, but we're way more dependent on our maternal and paternal relationships than even something as complicated as a rat. And it is a real loss, a real catastrophe.

That's why it's so painful to me to see that our society doesn't understand that marriage isn't for the people who are married. It's for children. You know, it's not about, you know, once you have a child in a marriage, it's about it's about child and that's actually a good thing, too, because then for the first bloody time in your life, someone who isn't you is more important than you are. And that's such a relief. It's so appropriate.

It's such a relief for that to happen. I just want more the inheritance. Well, there's going to be Julianne, it's like I have five. So I think look, let me ask let me toss out another possibility here.

And you tell me what you think about this. Well, you know, I've been trying to figure out why. My book was popular, my lectures, and I think part of the reason for that is that I've made a very strong case for the association between responsibility and meaning. Starting from the proposition that you need meaning in your life, because life is hard, and so if it's meaningless, it's meaningless suffering and no one can tolerate that. So you need meaning.

You need sustaining meaning. And the place to find that is in the adoption of responsibility. And that makes a responsibility, a solution rather than a problem. And, you know, people might think of responsibility as the enemy of freedom, which we talked about already. But if responsibility is seen as the as the source of meaning and I really believe that that's not only true, but testable, then responsibility starts to become a good thing very rapidly. And that's actually why you should grow up.

It's because when you grow up and you adopt responsibility, your life is actually way better than it was before. So, yeah, you're you're and you talked about. Growing up and you said you need to get disciplined before you become free, that's a need and observation, by the way. That was something he stressed not only in individuals, but in cultures. So he believed, for example, that the attempt by Europe to explain everything under the rubric of a single monotheism was a disciplinary strategy that enabled the modern mind to emerge, is once you become disciplined enough to explain everything under one framework, you could start adopting other frameworks and do the same thing.

So it's brilliant, but it was Nicha, so it's not surprising your book looks to me like it's. Likely to be particularly useful for people who are making the decision about whether or not to grow up. I think so. What was the term you used earlier, proximal development? Yeah, I, I, I think it's. It's very much. Speaking to people who were on that kind of similar to how I was on that cusp in my 20s of like of like, OK, I'm achieving all of my worldly goals.

I'm doing all the things that I. Imagine myself doing it when I was young, I'm I'm doing well in the world, but why why does it all seem so pointless? Why does it all seem so fleeting and superficial? And so I was very. Hungry for these ideas and this investigation, and I think there are a lot of people who are on that cusp of between childhood and adulthood, of recognizing that this is the way I describe it and everything as fucked is this is transactional nature with the world of everything is about what can I get if I behave this way?

Will I get appreciation or validation? If I behave that way, will I get more money or more status? I think people eventually tire of that worldview or seen everything in those terms, and they feel like there must be something deeper, more profound or more important than that. And there is. But it requires these things that we're talking about commitment, sacrifice, radical responsibility. And it's very counterintuitive in that way, because in the transactional nature of you in the world, everything is about getting more, you know, like getting gaining that advantage and in business, gaining an advantage in your relationships, gaining more status and popularity, but to reach that kind of maturity and intimacy.

You have to be willing to give up, you have to be willing to sacrifice. You have to be willing to let go of a lot of things and. And I think that's that's. You know, when I just look, the more time I spend online and interacting with readers and especially talking to young people, it just it feels like that is the message that needs to be out there. And it's not out there enough. And I think I definitely have.

You know, you're preaching that message in a certain way and towards a certain demographic, and I think it kind of caught fire among some groups of people, I think I did a similar thing with a certain demographic. I think there's a lot of overlap. I mean, you know, what you're doing, like Europe is just out of curiosity or the main buyers of the book. Yeah, it's so it's about. Fifty five, forty five women, the men, fifty five women in the fifty five women, women in the self-help world is a lot of men self-help books.

It's like 80 percent, but it's a slight majority of women. It's generally it's primarily a millennial audience, although it does kind of drift up into Gen X and also down to GenZE. Fifty fifty. North America and International, a lot of people in India, a lot of people in Brazil, a lot of a lot of people in kind of the developing world that is coming into its own, you know.

So India, Russia, Brazil, how many languages has it been translated into? About 60. Yeah, so that's pretty much all the languages that there is a book market in. Yeah, yeah, it's. I just I think the last language I saw was Uzbek, so I don't think you can get more obscure than the Uzbek market. So now you're in trouble to be prepared for a lot of Uzbek or Uzbek hate mail. Hate mail.

Yeah, but yeah, you know, I think it's this is the message. I believe very passionately that this is that this is the message the world needs. And and when I look at your work, Jordan, I think that you are also speaking to I think part of why you took off so much was you were speaking to. Kind of an underserved demographic, I think it's one thing I've noticed in a lot of press and media that I've done and events I've done is that.

People are consistently shocked at how many young men show up and how enthusiastic they are, and it's and it's a shock. It's a shock of like, you know, wow, why are all these meatheads here, you know, I know that's so appalling. Do they read books? It makes me nauseated that attitude. And it is so contemptuous and so dismissive. It is, and it's I think it's such an important, you know, in terms of this sort of information, I think exposing young men to these questions about maturity, responsibility, emotional intelligence, commitment.

I think it's an underserved demographic. And I think it's it's a demographic that was incredibly hungry for this material. And nobody realized it until a couple of years ago. It seems to me that. Men have to adopt responsibility voluntarily in a way that isn't precisely true of women. And I think that's because responsibility is thrust upon women in a way that it's not thrust upon men, for example, once they hit sexual maturity, they have to contend with the probability of getting pregnant.

Now men have to contend with the probability of getting someone pregnant, but that's not something of the same magnitude. And then when a woman has a baby, the baby either makes her responsible or tortures her to death. And it's not like having a baby is. Isn't also responsibility for the father, but it's a much more escapable responsibility. And so what that means to me, and I've argued this for a long time, is that men have to be convinced.

And this is the role of culture. Men have to be convinced to grow up and take responsibility, and you can convince them by threatening them and by finger wagging at them and by punishing them if they fail to do so. And perhaps all of those things are necessary to some degree, but it's much more effective to convince them in the manner that you were convinced, which is to say, look, you don't understand the game you're playing, which is adolescent and immature, is not the best game in town.

And although you might be cynical about the hallmarks of traditional maturation, that's a big mistake because you're going to miss out on the adventure of your life if you stay that way for too long. And there's nothing it's very, very sad to see someone who's 40 and who is still adolescent. And people who are in that situation suffer like mad, they're usually desperate enough to be depressed and suicidal. It's no picnic. OK, so. Your book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, is an investigation into values which isn't nearly as good a title.

And that would be the way those two things are related is it didn't stop me if I'm wrong, OK, because I want to summarize what you've been doing and and and and and develop from there. What you're basically making the case that you have to get your values together and what that means from my perspective, is that you have to engage in the construction of a true value hierarchy. And not giving a fuck means that doesn't mean that you don't care about anything.

It means that there are some things you really care about and a lot of other things that you cease to care about because you have to because you wouldn't be able to concentrate on those other things if you didn't. So it's a matter of getting your priorities straight. Exactly, and then and all this and this is partly attested to by your concentration on Ernest Becker, so Becker concerns himself with the impact of our mortality on our consciousness and and its Becker's observation and many others, that the fact that we're limited in finite means that our life is composed in large part of suffering, anxiety, uncertainty, pain, shame, guilt.

And we're very sensitive to negative emotion. And we need something to offset that. So we need something of value to offset that. It's not optional. If you don't have that, you spiral downhill. So you can't you don't have the option of believing in nothing. Because then you get swamped by your pain. All right, then you investigate, you say, well, you need to put your value hierarchy together and you you outline for your readers, at least in part, how that might be done.

You say taking responsibility. OK, so there's some things that you should focus on and try to change. You can do that incrementally. So if you don't know where to start, you aim at something and you try to do something and maybe you're not very good at that to begin with. That's the acceptance of failure. And you probably won't be. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't start. It's self-correcting. So the fact that you're I have a chapter in my new book that concentrates on a union idea that the fuel is the precursor to the savior.

And what that means is that if you're not willing to bumble around and make mistakes, you can never improve. You absolutely you talked about the ability to discriminate, that's part of determining what's important and what isn't and then the necessity of commitment. Arguing the same thing, essentially, and then the apprehension of death. And I suppose that's partly because. To really test your value hierarch, you have to see if it. Still retains its function, even when you consider the finitude of your existence.

And a lot of values do not. Yeah, they a lot of things. Yeah, well, you know, it isn't just death that does that. I mean, one of the things there are worse things than death. And and if you're fortunate, you have values that will see you through that. I mean, I've been hurt enough in the last year or so that. That there were worse things than death. I've been fortunate in that some of the things I valued have kept me afloat.

And all of those were oriented, they were all derived from responsibility, responsibility to my family and responsibility to other people. That never ceased being important, even under the direst of circumstances. So I think that you and I, not only you and I, obviously, but we've been walking down the same road in some way. Being fortunate enough to engage in a conversation about what's fundamentally important and that it's reasonable. To propose that some of the reason for our mutual success is that we did realize that some things are important.

But you're not a sap and a sucker to make the supposition that there are things worth committing to. And value is real. Yeah, there's a there's a great essay by David Foster Wallace is one of my favorite. Authors and he had a great essay called Pluribus, which is kind of a play on The Pluribus Unum. And in it he talks, it's actually an essay about like literary critique. But he actually makes a lot of very pertinent observations about.

North American culture, Western culture in general since, say, the 1960s. And he kind of walks through how I started in the 60s and 70s, irony kind of took hold of pop culture. This idea of like being a rebel, being cool, being contrarian like these were all things that. Probably because they gained attention in the various mediums, they came to dominate pop culture and within a generation by his generation, he was Genex, they kind of came to define the cultural values to a certain extent of being ironic, being sarcastic, being too cool for school.

And the essay actually ends in a very sad place where he he talks about this was written in nineteen ninety two. He talks about, you know, if we keep going down this path of. Essentially exalting. Ideas and narratives that terror. The cultural structures down that basically say, like, you know, that kind of set things on fire and then laugh about it and say like, oh, look how cool I am. And as long as we perpetuate these narratives that actually.

Taking responsibility for something or genuinely or authentically valuing something, publicly saying this is important to me, you know, as long as we see that as something cheesy and worth the writing. He said he's like, this is going to take us to a very, very dark place and. And I actually reread that essay recently, but it's something I've just been I've been thinking about. Nonstop for the last six months. And it's it's very similar to what you were saying, that it's.

This authentically choosing something to make important in your life and standing by that and. And making sacrifices for it's not going to win you any cool points, like it's not going to. It's not going to. It's not going to get shared on social media all the time, it's it's you know, it's well, it's funny because it might yeah, looks like it's fairly popular. It did for you. Did did I know I know what you mean.

I mean, that's not the story, you know, but I had to couch mine in in snide and snarky humor. You know, it's and I'm not I'm not lamenting that I enjoy my work, obviously, but, like, it's. You know, one of the reasons I write the way, one of the reasons it is called the Sarda not giving a fuck and not called the importance of choosing your values or something similar like that is because I found just from years writing online is that you have to you have to package these ideas, or at least I do.

This is what I found that worked, is I had to package these ideas and a lot of kind of ridiculous snarky jokes to get people to. To consume them, you know, the sugar that makes the medicine go down essentially for people. And that's interesting because it wasn't clear to me when I read the book like that.

No, that's yeah, that's kind of the problem I had with it, because it doesn't like the ideas appealed to me. But that style didn't just to me to be like, blunt about it. But I mean, you've sold 13 million books, so it appeals to people.

Well, which is it's clearly not like it's not a book that's doing harm. It is. No, no.

And it's not the ideas. It was just like I was like, does he need to say fuck all the time? But I'm just like, I'm just old now.

Well, it just you know, it's interesting that one.

Now, Nietzsche said great men are seldom credited with their stupidities. And what he meant by that was you don't know how much bad has to be packaged along with something good in order for the good to be able to exist. And that's not a justification for what's bad, but it is an entreaty not to jump to conclusions too quickly. And Mikaela's observation that. You know, she she reacted in a particular way to the style of the book, but then had to contend with the fact that it's been unbelievably widely read.

Well, and I agreed with, like I read it and was like, yeah, I agree with you. There are a lot of points in here that I agree with. It was just a really I just couldn't exactly figure out what you were doing with the way you were writing was like, why? It's like they're it's funny, too. And I know that you have you have a bit of a background in comedy, but part of what I was thinking throughout reading it was why is it real this way, maybe effective?

Maybe there is a zone of proximal development issue as well. But this market is is millennial. Right. But what but what what Mark said, I believe, is that, you know, maybe what you did with your style was give people permission to. To think about the deeper issues that you were raising by adopting an ironic tone, he made it cool, right? You made it cool, snuck it in a bunch of cool stuff, right? Yeah, right.

It has a cool title like it.

The book is cool on the outside, too. So that was that was obviously a brilliant idea. It worked. Yeah, I mean, it's for what it's worth, Macala, I mean, a lot of people have the same criticism. They say the same thing that they're like, I love the ideas, but to really have to be like such a sarcastic asshole all the time, you know, and it's I mean, on the one on the one hand, it's like, OK, this is this is just how I like to.

This is the sort of stuff that I find funny, so I enjoy putting it in. But on the other hand, it's what apparently is actually very too.

They do.

But it was it was actually very interesting because my book came out about two years before your students, and it was very interesting watching your book take off so much because it is so serious and like very straight to the point. Like, there's no there's absolutely no ambiguity of what you're getting at in any of your chapters. And, you know, they're part of me. Read that, and it's like. And I was like, wow, like, how does he how does he do this?

You know, it's like I've never found a way to not kind of couch it in that language and have people take me seriously. It might just be my style of communicating.

Well, it's a hard question because, you know, one of the one one I realized something a long time ago when I was teaching in Boston. I was teaching a very, very serious course. The subject material was brutal, it was, of course, that focused a lot on atrocity, and it was based on my first book, Maps of Meaning, and I had this voice in the back of my head constantly that said, you know, if you had really mastered this material, you could teach it with a light touch.

You could inject some humor. And I know that I'm at my best when I have a sense of humor about what I'm talking about, no matter how serious what I'm talking about is. And, you know. You did manage to maintain a sense of humor while discussing topics that are very serious and it might be reasonable to debate about whether the humor goes too far or whether it's sufficiently sophisticated or I think that's irrelevant in some sense because the success of the book speaks for the utility of the approach.

Also, who cares if one person is, like you said, thank you much. Yes.

Well, I think it's useful to consider your reaction in light of the fact that it also sold 13 million copies.

But it is interesting that that you have some conscious sense that by playing. But maybe it's also to some degree that you showed that you were able to play the ironic game. You know, sometimes people who are serious. Are serious because they can't be funny, they can't joke, they can't be one of the crowd, they can't be one of the guys, and so they make the claim that their seriousness should trump that, but it doesn't. But by adopting that tone that you adopted, you did say, well, look, I can play the ironic game.

I found something better. And maybe that's part of what makes the book convincing. Yeah, because there are a lot of other books with fucking the title now, I can tell you that a lot. Congratulations. You've contributed one more generously of North American culture. You're welcome, Soci.

Thank you so much for coming on, that was really fun. That was a very, very enjoyable podcast. Where can people go to find you? Mark Manson, dot net, I've got hundreds of free articles and then obviously the books are in every bookstore, so just keep an eye out, but that's pretty much it.

Wow. Thank you very much for coming on. That was fun. Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure. Yeah, it was really good to meet you. You too.