Hope is Fucked || Mark Manson

It's great to have Mark Manson on the podcast. His blog markmanson dot net attracts more than two million readers per month. Mark is the New York Times International best selling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, with over six million in sales in the US alone, and his latest book is called Everything Is Fucked, a book about hope. Mark. So great to chat with you today. Good to be back, Ben. Yeah, like, I know that whenever I talk to you like it gives me an

excuse to say that word fuck. I always here to help. I know how it is for you academics. So well, I'm here. I'm here, I'm here to help. Thank you. I really appreciate it. I try to not use that word too much in my podcast because it's a kid friendly show. But it seems like you somehow write it in a way where you can't not use the word

in that context. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of shows they'll they'll do like everything it's f or everything's blank, but you know it doesn't have the same effect, right, I mean, everything is beeped is like, yeah, it doesn't pack the same punch, that's for sure. Well, this one is definitely going to be rated explicit on iTunes. So we already within the first two minutes have made that assurance, you know, excellent.

So I do want to ask you, you know, like you talk about this uncomfortable truth that kind of pervades everything, Like can you say, like how you would define it? People have defined it in different ways about the human history, how do you frame that? I framed it so to give kind of a more academic background of the uncomfortable truth.

It's it's I've been greatly inspired by Ernest Becker's book Denial of Death and this idea that there's kind of this pervading terror of our own existence that underlies all human motivation. And it's for me the way I describe the uncomfortable truth in the book is a little bit more from like kind of a cosmic scale. It's not so much that we're going to die. It's more that knowing how big the universe is and how insignificant all of our individual actions are in the scale, like in

compared to the scale of the universe. It's really really difficult for anybody who is, like, if you're being rational about it, to assume that your actions or your life has any meaning or significance. What's so ever? And I think, you know, I think we all you know, my a friend of mine joked, he was like, oh, yeah, that's

like your stone dorm room conversation. And I'm like, yeah, I think we all have that conversation at some point, that realization that like, you know, oh my god, my life is so tiny and insignificant and it's terrifying, but we don't really talk about it, and we spend a lot of our life avoiding that fact. So I wanted to start the book by just getting that front and center. Essentially. Yeah, it does frame the whole book and the whole notion

that everything is fucked. I can't help with the giggle every time you say the F word, though, Like, have you noticed that like, I'm not there yet where I can say it, you know, without giggling. I don't know who that is about my cultural conditioning that's doing that. So yeah, Becker talked about that. He put it as the rumble of panic, and it always really resonated with me, like the rumble of panic that underlies everything we do. He was so dramatic. I love it. It's so dramatic,

but brilliant, quite brilliant. I don't understand why everything that is. Like, whenever someone starts talking about like literally the most deep or like the deepest, most profound existential issues, someone always is like, oh, that sounds like just pot speaking or something like why do people find why is there a human need to kind of reduce or just like do

you know what I mean? It seems like it really people want to cheapen the most profound things in life so that they maybe that's so that they don't have to think about it themselves. Yeah, it's funny because I noticed that when I was handing out, you know, giving this the draft to some of my friends, like that a lot of people made that joke and is that a defense mechanism? Yeah, it bugged me a little bit and I bugs me. It bugs me. Yeah, I don't

send that to you. Yeah, I didn't. I didn't really think about it too much, but I think, yeah, maybe you're right, like that is another form of avoidance, you know, it's like you don't have to you know, this section about the Uncomfortable Truth, one of the things I say is that this is a book that argues against nihilism. But to argue against nihilism, you must start at nihilism.

And I think it's just that is such an uncomfortable thing, especially for people I guess who have struggled with things like depression and that. Yeah, it's a defense mechanism. A way to avoid that is to just make light of it, just be like, oh, yeah, you know, it's like, oh yeah, we're smoking pot, dude. Yeah, well, you definitely face a head on. And I assume you didn't write your whole

book while you were under the influence of marijuana. So so you said some of these profound things, and it's possible to say them and think about them not under the influence of narcotics. So your book is quite interesting. It's two parts, and you know, you kind of like not bait and switch that's not the right word, but like, like you read the first half and you're like, Okay, these are the things that hope is important in the world today all hope is lost everything. Fuck, here's the

three things you know that we need for hope. And then there's like the second part that's kind of kind of like the reveal of what the book is really about.

And I didn't I didn't honestly see it coming, Like I like didn't see it coming, and I and in this interview, I'm almost remiss to even talk about it because like I don't want to, like it's like giving the way a plot line of like the Avengers endgame, right, Like, yeah, so let's first talk about the first half and then if to reward the listeners who are still listening by the time we get to it, then we will do

the grand reveal. Okay, but still hopefully what their interest or appetite bet at metaphors whatever to get them to really want to listen to read the book. Okay, So you say we're a culture in need of hope. So this is like in the beginning, like you make that statement, why are we to culture in need of hope? Why is that? Well, I became very interested. I think, like everybody, the events of twenty sixteen kind of shift me a

little bit. But it's funny, it's not just you know, it's not Trump, like I'm not a Trump fan, but for me, it went much beyond the election itself. I think twenty sixteen felt like it broke our culture, like just the Internet, the clickbait, the fake news, the all the cyber warfare going on. It feels like that year was very much a turning point in terms of our cultural trust in each other and in media and in

our institutions. And that really really troubled me. And so I started doing a lot of research on, you know, why that was happening. And one of the things I came across that I found very interesting was something that's called the Easterland paradox, which is that they find that wealthier countries and even wealthier neighborhoods or cities have greater amounts of suicide, mental health issues, depression, anxiety, et cetera,

et cetera. And so it just it got me thinking about this idea of like, why is it if things are so like we live at the best moment of human history all sorts of measurements, yet it's by you know, a lot of statistical measurements were angrier and more upset and more despondent than ever before. And then you go online, you go on Twitter for ten minutes and it seems like everybody is just angry, constantly about everything. So that was my starting point. It's like, what how do you

describe this? And one of the interesting conclusions I came to or it's it's and it's actually something I think the seam to leave argued and anti fragile is that he said that basically, the better things get, the more difficult it is to be optimistic for the future because you have more to lose. Yeah, A, because you have more to lose, and B because there is it becomes the definition of improvement itself becomes more complicated, you know.

So it's like if you're a subsistence society, you know, if you're like I don't know, Kenya or something, it's like, improvement's very simple. It's like, get people out of poverty, make sure people stop dying of disease. But like once you're Sweden or Japan, you know, or Canada, like it's actually very complicated to know what improvement is. It's a very contentious, complicated discussion, and that makes it difficult for people to have this hopeful outlook for the future or

this optimistic vision of the future. And so that fascinated me, and it made me feel like that there seems to be something in the zeitgeist right now or around that. I think there's something about the Internet that complicates people's visions of hope, makes it difficult for them to know what the hope for, complicates it in ways that it wasn't complicated in previous generations, and so I wanted to

explore that. Yeah, I had Stephen Pinker on my podcast a couple months ago and we talked about this, and of course he's been banging that drum for a while that like the world is good, you know, like yeah, everything's good, you know, like everybody calmed the fuck down.

But that does little, as I said to him, you know on the podcast, like okay, like yeah, like statistically on average, you know, like that is like little assurance to those who are like really the bottom of like you know, of structural systems and things, well not even to the bottom. So I I it's interesting, I address Pinker in chapter one, and I need to like like put a PREEMPTI by saying like, I'm a total pinker fanboy.

I love his books, yeah, and I think they're great, but I was very frustrated when I read Enlightenment Now because I felt like he kind of just brushed aside the questions of human well being and you know, like emotional well being. I should say, he focuses very much on material and physical well being, and in the one chapter that he kind of talked about in that book, he very briefly. I think he had maybe in a

five hundred page book. He had like three paragraphs that pointed out that, you know, yes, anxiety and depression are becoming larger issues. But then he said, well, if the price that we pay for living longer and being healthier is that we're more anxious, then that's probably worth it. And it's like, well, yeah, you know, it reminds me of the Big Lebowski. It's like, you're not wrong, Walter, You're just an asshole, because it's that's great solace for

the person who's like like depressed and suicidal. And it's like, you know, if that's the price you were going to pay, it's like, you know, there are a lot of like, you know, rich soccer moms and successful lawyers who are like really in bad places. And the worst thing about it, I think is is that a lot of people. And I know I experienced this myself because I've had I come from a very privileged background, and i'm very you know,

I have a very successful career. But when I go through those episodes where I feel depressed or I come close to the uncomfortable truth as I write it, it creates this sense you feel guilty about it. You're like, what's wrong with me? Like everything's great? Why do I feel this way? And so in some sense it's it's like again, it complicates. It's so interesting. You're like, I'm privileged, I should have no right to be sad exactly. Yeah, yeah, no, it's so interesting. Yeah, and I think a lot of

people do feel that way for sure. But yeah, so I compare Pinker in my book. I call him, you know, like that your uncle who who's always wagging his finger and saying when I was your age, you know, things were much worse. And it's like, well, yeah, you're right, but that doesn't make me feel any better about my issues, right, right, So, yes, that's cool. And so this is the paradox of progress,

is what you refer to in your book. So let's move on to self control because I thought that was a really interesting framing of it, a little bit different than I see in the psychological literature. But who knows, maybe the psychological literature is wrong. Maybe you're right, like you know, like I really want to really get my head around this. You argue it's mostly an emotional like a failure of self control is mostly, in your view,

an emotion issue. Is that right? Yes, yes, because it's essentially our The chapter is called self control is an Illusion, and I basically make the argument that there's a lot of the research shows that where our actions are primarily motivated by our emotions and then our rational part of

our brain just justifies it afterwards. And the argument I make is essentially that the feeling of self control is an illusion when our two brains are aligned, our emotional brain and our rational brain and or you know, commomon system one system too, and it's but the problem is when they get unaligned, where it's like I want to I like rationally know I should go to the gym today, or I should like not eat this cake for breakfast,

but I'm sitting there shoveling my face. That's when that illusion of self control breaks down and it becomes very stressful and difficult for people. And the argument I make is that when self control breaks down consistently enough, it harms our ability to maintain hope. So it's like, if my hope for myself is that I get healthy this year, yet I'm sitting there shoveling my face every morning, it destroys that vision of hope and then you know, brings

me back to despair essentially. Yeah, that's so interesting, Like you're getting in your own way of your own potential for hope. But like in a way you're saying, like we don't realize just how much we get in our own way of you know, like we always look outward for hope, right. I feel like that's like, yeah, the default is like I'm looking for hope, but like we don't realize the things we do ourselves. Yes, Like you're

limited there by doing that in the morning. Yeah, like you never go to the gym you want to be hopeful that you're going to lose weight, like yeah, or or even the people who you know, it's people who like, let's say you believe deeply in some sort of political like environmentalism or something, and it's like you draw a lot of hope from environ like the environmental movement, yet you can't bring yourself to actually like get out the door and go do something. You know, it makes it

difficult for us to maintain that vision. Like it's not. It makes it difficult to experience that sense of fulfillment, you know, to achieve that meaning that we want in our lives. We feel disempowered, we feel out of control of our life. I mean. One thing that's fun about not being an academic is that I get to put my own creative spin on a lot of concepts and I'm not held to my feet, aren't held to the fire of like, okay, go verify this, you know. So it's it's you know, and I I don't think I

would be great at that. I think, you know, my strength as as a as a writer and as a thinker, I think is these creative coming up with creative ways to view a lot of these concepts and see how they might relate to each other. So that's one of them, for sure. It's cool, Yeah, it's definitely coul Yeah, I mean self control researchers. I mean, it's hotly debated. You know, the whole idea of like is it like a muscle,

you know, like ego depletion. You know, the more we try to restrain ourselves, we then eventually like cave and like fivefold. You know, Oh I went on the diet

for two days, I'm a good person. I'm now going to eat five hundred cookies at once, and then you like, it's like eventually cave the more we exert the self control and that you know, so in a lot of ways, yeah, there is there is a strong emotional component for sure, and there's also a cognitive component of like people who have really good self control do seem to be good though using their what you call the thinking mind to like override the emotional mind. So you see, So I

do see it differently. I mean I see that as kind of just another remix of ego depletion. The point that I make is that people with you know, a person that you and I would look at and say, like, wow, that person has incredible self discipline. My argument is is that the reason they seem to have that self discipline is that there is some sort of emotional satisfaction that they're deriving from it. Like the reason it's hard for me to stop eating cake is that there's too much

emotional satisfaction from it. You know. It's like you can, you can will yourself to go to the gym for a week or maybe a month, but until you start enjoying it, until you experience the emotional benefits of it, it never until you engage the emotional brain, is what you're saying, exactly exactly. And so like all the people I know who are just like machines, you know, up at five am and doing pull ups and shit, it's like they'd love it, like some sick part you know

that guy exactly. You don't want to mess with that. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely not. We're going to talk very fondly of him. It's funny. So I actually referenced him in the book and Ye and I and I mentioned because he is this whole thing. So actually he's a great example because he is this whole thing about He said that when he was in Iraq, and this I touched on this later in the book, to this idea of like narratives

constructing meaning with our narratives. He was in Iraq and he said that the story he would tell himself when he was out there was that if he got up at four am, he had an advantage over the enemy, and so that motivated him to get up at four am, you know. So like that's a perfect example of leveraging your your emotional brain to like build discipline for yourself. And the amazing thing about him is that when he came home, he's still that narrative still works for him.

So it's like he still gets up at and is like, yeah, I'm up like two hours before everybody else, Like this is why I'm going to kick their ass, and it's like that's It's it's the emotional benefit of that narrative that is like keeps him doing it. So it's funny. I explained that in the book and then I reference him and I when I was sitting there like explaining, I was like, yeah, even though this narrative is totally untrue because I wrote that, I'm like, oh God, I

hope he doesn't kick my ass. Yes, yeah, you gotta really be careful because he'll kick your asset like while you're still sleeping, like five point thirty in the morning exactly. I'll be going I would be just going to bed and it'll be getting up. He'll be getting up, yeah, and he's like, I mean he's up while everyone else in the world is sleeping. So it's like, yeah, okay, cool.

It's just such an interesting twist. And I'm like, so should I completely flip the way I've been thinking about it because I wrote a tweet that got a lot of like, so it's got to be true like about it six months ago I said, like one of the greatest realizations of me is that I don't have to be a sleep to my emotion, Like I'm allowed to like listen to the signals and say no, I'm good. And you know that got a lot of like sort

of thing. And I'm paraphrasing myself, so I think it was more eloquent what I actually wrote than what I just said. But anyway, is that at odds with what you're saying? Is it? Like are you almost saying like it's not that we should like really train ourselves to not be so like there's one view where I'm saying, like, don't be so reactive to what your emotions are telling you, Like and have the freedom to choose what you want

to act on and what you don't. But are you saying like almost retrain Maybe we can synthesize both views. Retrain your emotional brain to make it more likely you'll do the things you want to do, but for the things we don't want to do, like learn to put that space through mindfulness? Like, is that an integration of both of our views? I think so, Like, I don't

think we are contradictory pooh. I mean, one thing I talk about in the book is that I think ultimately the job of our the logical side of our brain is to a challenge our emotional impulses, and exactly like you said, is to feel it and say, like, that's not necessarily destiny. It's just because I feel something doesn't

mean it's necessarily destiny. But I don't think that goes like that is that is necessary but not sufficient for behavioral change, For long term behavioral change, I think the second step is that you then need to construct some sort of meaning around that emotion that will produce what that will change how you feel about a situation going into the future. So the silly analogy that I use

is that you know, you have two brains. They're bad at talking to each other, and you have to because they speak different languages, and you have to, like, you have to train yourself to translate each one to the other. So to go back to the to the gym. You know, the gym example, since it's just such a simple and

ubiquitous example. It's you know, if I if I wake up and I really don't like going, the job of my thinking brain is to start kind of bargaining and trying on different stories of meaning for my feeling brain. So I might say, like, so, if the story I'm telling myself is like, you know, I'm a worthless piece of crap if I don't go work out, that's not going to inspire a whole lot of motivation, or at

least for me, some people it might. But then maybe if I'm like, well, how about this, how about you just put your shoes on and just go there and just walk on a treadmill like that's easy, anybody can do that. How does that feel? And then my feeling brain might be like, oh, well, yeah, that actually that feels all right. And then so then you do that, and then once you're actually at the gym, and you're like, well, crap, there's all these weights everywhere. I might as well like

pick something up. It becomes much easier. And so there's like this interplay that happens between both sides of our brains, and it's about like learning how to just communicate with yourself almost like that effectively integrate, integrate both brains. Wow, yes, sir, I like it. So you have a you found some of Newton's unpublished writings on emotions, and no, I've never seen those before. I didn't know that he. I didn't realize he had any emotions himself. Yeah, yeah, right, yeah,

he's a very thinking kind of guy. He was. But let's talk about one. For every action, there's an equal and opposite emotional reaction. So what does that mean is that basically it's, without going too deep into it, that basically it's it's emotions are results of experiences, you know. So it's perceived experiences, you know. So it's anything that you feel it's because of some perception or some experience

that's occurred to you. So it's kind of just a simple to kind of give context to the whole Newton thing.

I've always I've been I've long been very, very fascinated with Newton, and I've wanted to write about him for a long time because, you know, for how brilliant he was, he was just such an emotionally like miserable, awful person, and he also just had this incredibly traumatic childhood and upbringing, and and I just thought I always found that like so fascinating about it about him, and so I wrote kind of a playful one of the chapters in the book is like it's historical fiction, it's I call him

Emo Newton. So you know, like the real Newton was abandoned by his parents and was abused and bullied as a child growing up, and it was an outcast, and he just became this very miserable, unhappy kid. And I was like, yeah, he's like he's like an emo kid, you know. He's like he's like this kid he like puts on makeup and like wears black trench coats and

stuff like that. So I kind of reimagined him as this this emo version of himself who becomes obsessed with calculating and chronically and like finding ways to measure objectively all human behavior, and then he comes up with Newton's Laws of Emotion, and oh I just got it. I just got it. I didn't realize that. Yeah, the email part of the emotion. That's so clever. That's clever. Yeah. And so then the three laws are I kind of

use as a basis, you know. So in chapter two about self control, I talk about how self control is a perception, that it's a perceptual experience that we have when our two brains are aligned, when when we when we're able to align our thoughts with our emotions. And then chapter three is kind of using the Newton's Laws of emotion to explain the mechanics of our emotional brain, like what causes us to feel things and too, you know, why trauma messes us up, and where our values come

from and things like that. Yeah. You, in fact, you define growth as re prior the reprioritization of one's values hierarchy in an optimal way. I thought that was a really clever definition of growth. Yeah. Yeah, so that what would I say? I would say, that's that's certainly an indication that you're growing. Yeah, for sure, how would you define that? Oh? Youves me? Well, I mean, do we need another podcast? Yeah? Yeah, I think, and we need

to be under the influence of marijuana. Now I'm joking on joking, everybody, calmed down, Calm down, mom, Mom, I know you listen to my podcast. Calm down, Okay, yeah, let's focus on you. So. Yeah, the reprioritization of one's value Hrking Octaway. It's very clever. I would say, that's, yeah, definitely one indication of growth. I think there are multiple indications. Sure, you know. I think another indication is is that you're making some sort of contribution to in some way outside

of yourself, you know. Yeah, but it doesn't have the necessarily be like like gandhi. You know, like people put so much pressure on people, like I see like crazy shit on the internet that I just like, no, that can't be right, Like they're like the only wife that's worth in the colte Einstein, right, And I never said it, but they'll say, like, you know, the only life worth living, the only life worth living is the one where you're like,

you know, always giving to others or whatever. It's like, that's I don't know about that, Like do we really want to like do we really want to just a priori like judge what a life worth living is or not? You know what I mean like that just doesn't feel right to me. But anyway, so yeah, so let's let's move on. Let's talk about identity. So Newton's thoughts on identity that that we're unpublished or emo emo Newton. H Yeah, your identity will stay your identity until a new experience

acts against it. So can you give an example of that? So basically our emotion. So here's kind of the step by step summary of what I talk about. Is that experiences happen, and then based on how much pain that experience causes or how much pain that experience alleviates, we will have a positive or negative emotional reaction to it. And then from there, it's if those emotions persist over a certain amount of time, we construct a narrative around

them to justify them. So it's like if I'm let's say I'm a kid and I'm just I'm being beat up and abused, at some point, my thinking brain has to step in and create a narrative that justifies that those feelings of pain, and usually typically very young children, the narrative they construct is that I'm a horrible person and I deserve this. These narratives are always around, constructed around deserving what you deserve, what you don't deserve. Yeah.

The fairy tales are very much about that, right, Yeah, and the cautionary tales, as they say. Yeah, And so these narratives kind of start accumulating like a ball yarn, you know, throughout our lives, and it's like the earlier the narrative was put in, it's like deep or inside the ball yarn. The more you have to unspool it to kind of get to it. And it's that ball of yarn that that network of narratives that we construct about ourselves and what we deserve, what we don't deserve

is what I call our identity. It's our self definition and it's uh, and then we we psychologically I think it's called self preservation our self shit, I don't remember, but there's there's some there's some model out there that that talks about how we seek to that identity then also becomes something that we protect and try to keep coherent through future experiences, so it biases our our perceptions

and our impulses and stuff going into the future. It's basically my my take on I guess you could almost call it like just development, you know, psychological development, but with a lot of focus on emotions and narratives. But give me like a concrete example of like, so my identity is X, and I really think it's my identity until and then give me an example of experience that acts against it. Like I just want to really wrap

my head around that. So, for instance, you know, a huge component of my identity is that I'm a writer and an author. And I could even say that I am a big part of my identities that I'm a successful author. Now let's say this book comes out and sells like twenty copies and everybody hates it. You still wrote a best selling book though before, Yes, but that

will conflict with my identity. It'll cause a lot of internal dissonance in terms of how I understand myself because it's like right now I'm like, yeah, I'm big mister bestselling author, and then it's like next book comes out bombs. Then that creates a lot of dissonance that I have to sort out. It'll create a lot of negative emotions that I need to sort out and like rewrite new narratives for. You could just avoid that by just never writing another book ever again, and just you would assure

yourself that you die a best selling author. Well that's you know, we call that the JD. Salinger strategy. You know, My preferred approach is to just try to not adopt that identity in the first place. It's like, it's just something that and this kind of comes from my my Buddhist background, but it's I try to hold and I think I talk about this in subtle art, is like always hold your identity lightly, you know. So it's like I write books, and those books have sometimes performed well,

but that's not necessarily who I am. And so it's like the lighter I hold that, the less susceptible I am to just being bulldozed over by the world. I really like that I have Buddhist in clinicians as well, so I really resonate with that. And even the way you talked about narcissism, and you correct to identify, but you didn't call by the psychological clinical names vulnerable and grandiose, but you still point out there's this fragile form of narcissm,

this more grandiose form. You say, they both are similar in a lot of ways, you know, kind of stem like they're both unnecessary, you know, you know, like if you always like go around the world thinking you're like the greatest, You're bound to have a blow to your ego at some point that'll make you fall way down. But if you always walk around saying you're vulnerable and deserving a special attention, you're bound to constantly be disappointed

as well. Right, So yeah, yeah, they're both. Whether you think you're better than everybody, are worse than everybody, you're still assuming that you're different than everybody. That's right, I love it. Okay, Well let's move on. Well, okay before we get to part two. One more question before part two? How do you start your own religion? So, so basically do we just sum it all up by saying sell

hope to the hopeless? Like that's like the tey thing, right, I think there's deminally step one, Yeah, going to like piss off someone like are there gonna be like religious like zalats no, like gurus or whatever? Reader book like, don't say my secret? Don't you know like you're gonna you're gonna hurt business for me? Well, I think I mean, maybe maybe the most to use your research, Maybe maybe the most extreme dark triads would have thought through their

methods enough to have that reaction. But I think I think most kind of like cultish religious tendencies. Like I guess part of the argument I make in that chapter is that it's cultish tendencies are like a natural part of our nature, and it's not you know, people like like David Koresh or whoever. Like, it's not that they're not these super evil, bad geniuses, as much as we

want to believe that. It's it's this cultish tendency exists within all of us, and are our religiosity are our tendency towards religious behavior is pretty ubiquitous, and it's not it's not just limited to like the traditional religions. You know, one thing I found super interesting when I was researching this book was that And this is just totally a

connection I kind of made on myself. I don't think I've seen any research explicitly talk about this, but you know, everybody's seeing the data about how the world is becoming less religious and how fewer people are going to church and more people are atheists or agnostic, and what's a hold on this second? Let me go in the other room. Sure, well, I'm getting like a am I getting a tour of your house right now. No, I'm in the Bahamas, dude, whats right now? Life is crazy? Will Smith or something?

I am? Can I not edit edited out that whole interlude from the interviews. Do whatever you want, man, it's your show. So religiosity, so well, you know, one thing I can't. Yeah, and my research is, you know, religiosity has been declining for decades now, and I one thing I find fascinating is that during this even though fewer people are going to church that ever before, I think as a culture, our approaches to politics is becoming much

more religious, our approach to corporations. If you look at brands like Apple and Nike, it's like it's they're almost intentionally poking at kind of the religious responses among their consumers. Celebrity culture is becoming much more religious. So I think it's there's a weird It's not that religiosity is disappearing. There's there's like a weird transfer going on where instead of worshiping God, we're finding all these other things to

be worshiping. Yeah yeah, not just worshiping, but just paying attention to like distractions and things. Yeah. Cool, So let's open the Pandora's box. Of part two of your book. You see what I did there? Okay, Yeah it was that nice. Okay, so correct me if I'm wrong. But like I don't want to like say, things are even more clever than even you meant them to be. But like I thought it was really clever that like hope is fucked like analogous to the idea that God is dead?

Is that right? Did I make that connection? Correct? Did you? Did you think about that? Like Nich's pronouncement God is dead is analogous to like you coming off your mountain and saying, my realization here in part two is actually hope is actually fucked. Yeah, I guess you could say that. Yeah, I don't think that was conscious, you know. So it's funny that now in your marketing materials. Okay, i'll send you your commission check the new Niche the new you

know that's like that's like the modern day announcement, you know. Yeah, well, so it's funny because so I put that together. But I will tell you so, the whole last chapter of part one is almost like an ode to Nietzsche. And that wasn't intended at all when I started writing the book. Initially, I just wanted to write like a small section about him talking about like the God is Dead thing. And

it was funny. When I started researching him, I just became so fucking I don't know what it was, but it was I just got sucked away and like fell in love with the guy. Like I read a bunch of biographies by him, and then read a bunch of his books, and I found him so relevant and insightful for what I feel the world is going through today. And so I ended up that whole chapter is basically kind of about him, about his ideas and then also just applying them to the world today. But maybe that's

why he resonated with me so much. Maybe I was having my own God is Dead moment. Yeah, I think that you did have a God is Dead moment. And there's such a contrast to you know, kind of like it's almost like you had hope in Hope in part one. You're like, you know, hope is lost, and you know, here's like the ways that we can genuinely restore hope. But then you're like, you know no, what, you know what, No,

it's you know what, like that's worthless project. You know, I take it back, I give up hope and hope. So tell us a little bit why hope is destructive and this and now the second part of this interview is going to have a different tone. Sure. So one of the things that I did so I open up the book with a Holocaust story, and I did I

did that for a few reasons. One is I just I feel like, culturally the Holocaust is like the most kind of universally acknowledged evil thing that has happened in Western culture in the last one hundred years, two hundred years. And second, I did that because I also wanted to, you know, for people who watch twenty cable news all day or sit on Twitter all day, like I think it was useful to be like, hey, wake up call,

Shit's not that bad. Here is it getting, This is how it could be, this is how it's been in the past, This is how bad it's been in the past. And so I, you know, World War two stories, Holocaust stories are there there as a writer, They're always great because it's it's one of the few things, few major things in our history that we seem to be unanimous about.

And of course I write it as you know the classic you know, Nazis are awful and evil and good guys win, you know, so I write it as a classic, you know, good guys win over evil, and I tell a story about a guy who was able to maintain hope and like against impossible odds, the Big Switcher ruer. I guess, as you would say, the grand reveal that comes in chapter five is that I make the point that it's hope is not didn't just help the Allies when World War Two. Hope is also the reason that

the Nazis tried to create a pure race. Hope is the reason why Communists tried to foment a worldwide revolution. Hope is not necessarily good. I would actually say hope is neutral, and it's like the thing I compare it to is love. Is that we tend to always assume that love is good. But love can also be the most painful and damaging thing in our life. It can be the best thing in our life, most rewarding thing in our life, but it can also be the most

painful and damaging thing in our life. And I think hope is the same thing on a cultural scale. Hope is It's necessary, It's kind of it is a fundamental part of our psychological mechanism. But it's also if we're not careful, it can be incredibly destructive. And the paradox that I point out is that hope, ultimately, even though we all when things get fucked, we always look for hope. I point out that hope needs something to be fucked. If nothing was fucked, we would have to create something

being fucked in order to maintain our hope. And so in that sense, hope necessitates some form of destruction or contradiction. You know, there's a quote, there's a quote I think I actually use this quote in a subtle art. There's a quote I love, and I think it comes from a Spanish artist, and he said that when the human mind is presented with no problems, it sets about creating them for itself or something like that. And so then

that that kind of leads in the part too. It's like, all right, if hope necessitates some degree of conflict and destruction, what is the least destructive or damaging form of hope? Well, this is so interesting because in a way, we were saying, think, the moment we feel content, all hope is lost. Yeah, right, Like basically that's what you're saying. That's like the ergo, you know, if you finish the proof, the math proof, that's what you're saying. It's such an interesting way of

thinking about everything. It really is Buddhist. It really is

Buddhist at the end of the day. It's like it's like being versus doing right being like just like finding contentment in the current moment is good enough, Like you don't like in a way like if hope is it's tricky because you don't want to say if hope is lost, then that's an indication that things are good, no, because that doesn't follow logically either, because like there are obviously people living in squalor, right, Like, there are people who

like cope is something that would keep them going to want to be able to get out of bed. Like, you know, let's say you're in a war torn society. People are dying all around you. Like, certainly you don't want hope to be lost in that situation, right, But what's interesting is is my argument is that hope is much easier easier to find in those situations. So, for instance, if you're living in squalor, it's a very simple question

what the hope for to not be in squalor? You know, it's to get enough food to eat, get enough money to go somewhere better. When everything is comfortable, you know, when you're sitting in a recliner with five hundred channels with air conditioning on, with you know, a simple service sector job, with your phone that has more information on it than humanity's ever known. It's actually very very difficult to know what the hope for and you actually have to go find it yourself. And the problem is is

that the destructive aspect of hope is extremely subtle. You know, hope. It's again, it's like love. Love feels so good that when you start dating that awful person, you don't realize, you justify everything to yourself. You don't realize what you're doing because it feels so good. And it's I think it's the same thing with hope. I think it's we get so swept up and this vision of a better world, a better life, that we aren't aware of the destructive

underbelly of our hopes. And so when society becomes very comfortable and everything becomes convenient, and we become responsible for finding hope ourselves, I think we get led into some very dangerous and very dark places without realizing it. It's a really, really, really thought folking idea, and I love those kinds of ideas because then it was really cool to read your book, and I definitely had lots of moments of like, huh, do I need to flip the

script of how I've been thinking about things? So, so thank you. I just want to thank you first of all. Yeah, that's what a good book should do, right, that's the goal. Yeah, yeah, okay, So you talk about the one rule for life, well, people love rules and said there's only one role than the people love that even more so, what is the one role for life? I zeroed in on Kant's formula of humanity and I was, actually I was. I was

super happy to see it featured in your research. And it's funny too, because it's you know, some of the people that I know who are have read philosophy or whatever. You know, Kant's moral philosophy is it's kind of a joke in some circles, and he definitely I think there's a lot of aspects of it that are unreasonable or a little bit ridiculous. But I was in kind of a dark place a couple of years ago. I guess I guess you could say I didn't know what the

hope for. Part of the inspiration of this book is, I didn't know what the hope for and I started we depressed. We depressed. Yeah, subtle. Okay, So selling like three million copies of your book, like I can't even imagine. I can't even imagine that. First of all, Like don't First of all, public service announcement. I'm not complaining about anything. I'm totally grateful. It's been incredible. I wouldn't take a

single second back. But you know, one thing that I told some people is that, you know, I spent pretty much my entire adult life wanting to be a best selling author and working towards that. Like it was my dream. It was the thing that got me up in the morning.

It was and in my mind, it was like, Okay, I'm going to write books, and over the course of like twenty years of really hard work, you know, I'm going to knock out some of these goals and achieve these things, and you know, by the time I'm fifty or sixty, I'm going to have like a really successful writing career, and in subtle art comes out and it's like all of those goals are accomplished within two months,

you know. So it's like the things that I've been dreaming that I'm like, Okay, this is going to define my life for that for decades, They're done, you know, and I think lost. Yeah, but people, So here's one thing that people never talk about is that the most surefire away to have no dreams is to accomplish them.

Like people don't realize that. And it's funny because I went through this like very malayic, and again it was one of those things that I was feeling depressed and the whole time, I'm like, what the fuck is wrong with me? Like I'm not right. This is supposed to be the best moment of my life, Like why why am I sitting around and pajamas playing Zelda twelve hours a day? Like Zelda? Oh dude, we should talk about that, and we should talk about that another time. Podcast. Can

we do a podcast just on on Zelda? Son Zelda? So yeah, and it was I think I spent the better part of a year just kind of spun out, not and not knowing why. And then eventually, you know, I'm friends with with an of people in the startup world here in New York. And it was funny because I started kind of talking to some friends about this, about what I was feeling, what was going on, and my startup friends were like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

You know, they're like, that's normal, right, Like that happens to everybody. You know. You've got this company, you work like eighty hours a week for six years, and then you exit make a bunch of money. And you know, a friend of mine who's had a couple successful exits, he told me, he's like, yeah, nothing is worse. He's like, nothing makes me more depressed than like exiting a company that I put all of my hopes and dreams in

for years and years and years. So I was like, wow, that's so crazy, Like that's and so that that's actually you know. And then that, combined with all the twenty sixteen stuff, it got me thinking about like, what is it this hope, this mechanism inside of us that we need something, some vision of the future that we can look forward to. So anyway, one of the things during that period were the things that kind of pulled me out of it. Reading Philosophy again. I hadn't read it,

really read it since college. I'd always been really interested in consort, but I had never really like dived into it. Did you understand it? Do you really understand like Critique of pure Reason? I maybe understood half of it. It's really rigorous. It's oh, it's insanely rigorous. I love Kann Like that was actually a very surprising thing, is that I found a lot of joy in the just, the

beauty and the precision of his thinking. And then I read the Groundworks to Metaphysics and Morals and where he introduces the categorical imperative and the formula of humanity, and you know, it's tons of criticisms of his moral philosophy. But like when you're just reading that little book it's like about one hundred pages, the logic within it feels so air tight, Like it's so air tight, and you're like, wow, this guy has like nailed it. It was a really

revolutive story experience for me. And then the Formula of Humanity in particular because I've written you know, so as you know my background years and years ago. Like the first thing I wrote about was like dating relationships, basically social interactions. And one of the things that I've written about forever is acting unconditionally, you know, not treating people in a transactional manner, not being manipulative, enforcing strong boundaries,

uncompromising honesty. And so when I got to the part about CONT's formula humanity, I mean, it's like he basically summed up five years of my dating, relationship, social interaction writing in like a single sentence. And I was like, holy shit, man, this guy's legit. It cont is legit. But it was it was so inspiring for me. It was really really inspiring for me. Something similar happen to

me too. It's so funny, really well, we're yeah, when we're trying to think of what's the opposite of the dark triad and what's the opposite of Machiavelianism, and then my colleague Davity and like, wait, that's continism. Then it was like it just snapped into place, you know, because Yeah, it's so cool that you resonate with that. I resonate with that, Like I wonder what that says about us or people resonate with that. I hope it's a good

thing that I think. Like what I love about it too, the whole means and ends thing, Like it just seems like such a fundamental like it doesn't seem arbitrary. It seems like if you were able to dig into a brain and see how it like thinks about other humans, you would be able to like parse out, you know, what a means looks like and what an end's looks like. You know, it seems like such a fundamental part of

our cognitive process. And I think he talked about that in Critique of Pure Reason, how it's like everything we think in sequences. It's like this leads to this, leads to this, and and so Kant very rationally decided that the basis of morality is to never have never have a human only be a link in that causal chain, always have them be the end of the causal chain. And it's just so elegant and profound and logical that

I found a lot of inspiration in it. Yeah, so I not to be like really nerdy, but I was familiar with it as his second formulation of his categorical imperative. Does he actually did you come up with the phrase his formula humanity? Does he use the phrase formula of humanity? He does? That's so cool. He does. It's he doesn't use it exactly formula of humanity. But I think he calls it it's like the formulation of human ends or something like that. But I think it got kind of

summarized as formula humanity since then. I love it. I love, I love I'm gonna prefer it. I'm going to totally at cocktail. PRIs referred to it as his form of humanity now as opposed to his second formulation of this categorical imperative. It's a little bit catchier. Yeah, Like in our scientific paper on the Dwight Verse Dark Triad, we refer to it, you know, as the second blah blah blah. But I was like, man, what should we just called

it the form of humanity? That would make a sexier paper. Yeah, So will you tell me how I can grow up? Yeah? So, one thing I've been interested in for a long time has been I would actually think, you know, kind of my my gateway drug to psychology was developmental psychology. Like reading about Pig and Colberg and those guys, and Robert Keegan in particular, is like, I find those models so fascinating.

I have no idea how much empirical data they have behind them, or how strong or flimsy that data is, but I've just always found it incredibly fascinating and I've just kind of it's been something I've stuffed, kind of stuff I've read for fun on and off over the years.

And one thing that I found, you know, there's a lot of commonalities that people have in stages in terms of like how they think about themselves, how they construct their own identity, how they relate that identity to the world, and then how they kind of understand the world itself.

And it was interesting because the formula of humanity, I realized, was if you look at like Colberg's theories of moral development, it's the formula of humanity is kind of the endpoint that, you know, if you think about it, like a young child. Pretty much all the young children are like little narcissist tyrants.

They're all like me, me, me, they have no conception of other children, and you have to teach them both, you know, through rewards, but also through punishments, you know, to share, to consider others to and then as they grow older to that are society at large or they're you know, understand that there are consequences for their actions

and all this stuff. And I just kind of you know, in all the developmental reading that I did, I saw that there was kind of an arrow pointing towards an understanding of self and other in terms of the formula of humanity, of never treating oneself as merely a means, only as an ends, and never treating others merely as a means. And that was just just an excite, really exciting connection I made myself, or you know, I'm sure there's somebody else's made it somewhere, but and so fuck it.

It's my book. This is how, this is how I'm the fighting growth. It's great. No, it's really good. It's good. And I like the idea of like also saying like not turing your own self, you know, like being kind to yourself and like unconditionally loving yourself in a certain sense what you're saying, yeah, but doesn't mean that you

condone everything about it. That's what's interesting too, is that if you look at things that you know you would call unhealthy, you know, something like say alcoholism or or even lying to yourself, those are situations where you're treating yourself as a means to some other end. So something like you know, addiction, like substance abuse, you're treating yourself as a means to the end of you know, blind,

pointless pleasure. You're harming your identity and your physical body for the sake of experiencing some kind of synthetic form of pleasure. And as you know, consohole thing was he said that it's happiness doesn't matter. You know, it's happiness is besides the point. Is what he would say is he said that it's about it's acting in such a

way that you promote greater consciousness, greater ration consciousness. And so to do things that harm your rational consciousness, that harm your identity, that harm your physical body in pursuit of empty pleasure is like almost by definition, treating yourself. Then No, it's a it's a really brilliant connection. No, I see it. I can see it so clearly. So cool. Yeah, like what a great like just principle, just like for everything you do in your life, it's easier said than done. Sometimes.

Oh yeah, when that cookie, you know, where is that cookie? I'm looking for my favorite cookie? Yeah, just throw it away, like tie yourself to the mast. But yeah, it's really cool. I really like that, And I hope people get I hope our listeners really get it too. I really do hope my listeners, like you know, understand just how profound that really is as a way of living one's life. So,

you know, we this might be a controversial territory. But politics you say, quote and I'm almost nervous to quote this, but you say political extreme because they're intractable and impossible to bargain with, are by definition childish. They are a bunch of fucking babies. Now, now, now here's the thing I want to be. You know, almost everyone agrees with that.

When you talk about the far right, you know, it's like, yeah, Nazi is you know, all right, yeah, baby, But it seems more controversial say that about the far left because that's because you and I live in New York and you're a professor. You know, I'm serious though, I think, okay, there's there's truth there. But this is I think this is an important point and it was actually a very important thing for me while writing this book. So, I mean,

my politics lean left. I wouldn't consider myself like far left, but I'm definitely a lefty. And one thing that surprised me when Subtle Art came out and it became so popular is I started getting invited onto right wing talk shows and right wing blog media, and it was funny because, you know, so I did all the left wing interviews and stuff that I kind of expected, interviews with professors and whatnot, and we'd get on and they're like, yeah, man,

you know, people are entitled in this country. They want their way or the highway. You know. Entitlement was a big theme in Subtle Art, and responsibility was another big theme. And I kind of wrote that book. The book itself is a political but I wrote that book, and I and I was thinking about that stuff when I wrote it. And then what surprised me is that I started going on all these right wing shows and media and they're like, well, yeah,

it's those damn liberals. They're they're just entitled. They're taking no responsibility for themselves. I was like, wait, what in retrospect? You wrote the Republican Manifesto. Did you not know that you like in retrospect? Yeah, So it was crazy because both sides read their own you know, it was like a template that both sides kind of put themselves, projected

themselves and the other side into. And so I wanted to write this book in such a way that I wanted to talk about politics and political polarization and extremism, but I also I wanted to be very careful to talk about it in such a way that that both sides would be able to see themselves, see the other side, and just see the dynamics at play, because everything is

becoming politicized today. So when you say that, when you say, well, it's easy to see that about the right wing, I guarantee you well, I've actually already had one interview where somebody has said that said the exact same thing about the left, you know, and I'm going to go on Fox News in a week or two. So it's you know, my goal. You know, we could argue whether which side's worse,

and you know whatever, and I agree they're extreme. They're the extremism is happening in different places and in different ways, into different degrees. But it's like if you go to some other countries, if you go to like Australia, there's a a much larger left wing extremists component that's going on. So so yeah, I wanted to write it. I wanted to get out of the America US centric bubble because I see extremism is happening all over the world in

different capacities. Yeah, and the recent st idd to come out showing that the left wing authoritarianism does exist. You know that we tend to think of it authoritarians only as a right wing phenomenon, but people psychologists have started to quantify that. You know, there's about just as many left wing authoritarians as well. So what is the difference between fake Okay, what's the differen between pound fake freedom and no pound real freedom? Because real freedom doesn't involve

a hashtag? Right, is that the point you're making, Scott, Like, where's your Twitter game? It's hashtag fake freedom? Oh right, Oh my god, that's so embarrassing. That is so embarrassing. Okay, okay, what's the difference? Let me start that over. What's the difference in hashtag fake freedom and no hashtag real freedom? Oh man, you should definitely keep that. Oh no, I'm going to keep it in. I will, I will keep

that in. Yeah, it'll show my age or whatever. Well, you gotta you gotta, you gotta up your Twitter game, Scott. It's uh, it's so a hashtag hashtag fake freedom is I guess it's me poking fun at hashtag fake news. Yeah. But my argument, you know, I I have a chapter towards the end of the book that that I make the argument that we need to redefine our understanding of freedom. I think for most of human civilization, we've lived in a state of scarcity, and so the assumption that more

is always better has held true. And I think today we're seeing that Now today is kind of the first day the last generation or so. It's like the first time in human history that we are exposed to far more information than we can ever process. We're exposed to far more more people than we can ever know intimately or care about. We're exposed to, you know, far more opportunities to buy shit and to waste destroy the environment.

And so I think I make the argument that we've hit an inflection point that assumption of more is always better is no longer true. And I think that the new definition of freedom is going to be people who are able to limit their own consumption effectively, be able to focus their attention and their experiences based on their values. Because the other thing that's happening too is just that media and marketing are getting so good they're literally like

hijacking our attention away from us. And so I try to argue that the new definition of freedom is self limitation, citing where you're going to draw the boundaries in your experience, in your existence and sticking to them. Is that similar to commitment? Is that synonymous? Do you kind of use them synonymously in a way, Well, they're not synonymous, Like they're kind of they're correlated, significatistically significant with each other.

I think I think commitment is maybe a little bit It's a context driven so you know, like I make a commitment to my wife, I make a commitment to my career. And what that means is that I'm blocking out you know, I'm not seeing other women, and I'm not like trying to like, you know, do a Broadway play.

Like it's I'm focused on this one thing. And so so I think you could what I'm talking about, you know, I think we just need to apply that same dynamic in a lot of other areas of our lives, of like information sources, people that we interact with or care about. It's activities, we participate in, stuff, we buy things like that.

So what do you do say when like I have a friend David Epstein who wrote a just recently wrote a cool book on generalists, and that is a potential way of being, you know, not necessarily Like there's kind of different ways of living one's life. Well, I think, you know, you can be kind of this cal newport like deep work obsessed person, you know, or you can be more of this like I have a diversity of interests. I have just I just like embracing life and all

of its glory. And if that involves five hundred women or five hundred you know, iPads, or you know, like I've just like I want all the things, to experience all the things. Now, you're not saying like one way of living one's life is universally objectively better than another, are you? Is there a way of like maybe you can be a generalist and still have commitments. Maybe that's

also a false dichotomy. I would say it is. I see it as a false dichotomy, Like you can be interested in a lot of different things, but you still need to be very focused on how you experience those things I like, and committed to how you experienced those things.

So you can have ten hobbies, but you also have to be like conscious of the time you're setting aside for them not getting distracted by you know, all this other crap, not sitting there scrolling through your social media two hours a day, like it's I think, you know what I'm arguing against this is basically not succumbing to an autopilot based in abundance. Like it's just I think today the technology has created an environment today where we

tend to fall into autopilot. Not because we're doing the same thing, it's because there's just so much different stuff that's being thrown at us that it's so easy to just sit there and kind of like go through it for hours and hours on it does that makes sense? It makes a lot of sense. I really like that.

I mean, like it's kind of like you have a monogamy, but people are making polyamory work in the sense that they're rationally trying to figure out, how can I do this in a way that doesn't hurt anyone in the relationship but still has love and depth. So yes, I guess I'm making it a polyamory analogy to like the world at large. Sure, And I would even argue that

in polyamory, they're still making a commitment. It's just they're not making a commitment to monogamy, they're making a commitment to say intimacy, or they're making a commitment to honesty. That's right, that's totally reasonable. It's it's I think that what I'm arguing against is this idea that you can like just compulsively sit on Twitter and go on twenty dates a week and think that like you're going to get any value out of that, and think that that's freedom.

That's not freedom. That's compulsion, you know, it's that's by definition, the opposite of freedom. I agree. I agree. So and the existentialists would agree, and the humanistic psychologists would agree, and anyone who's sensible would agree with anyone who's right would agree what they're talking about. Okay, second to last question, and then you'll like my last question. Second last question, why are we bad algorithms? And why should we not

bear AI so much as we do? So this this was just kind of a fun I wanted to wrap up the chat the book with a discussion of AI because I feel like, you know, we're all so caught up in like you know, impeach Trump or you know, all this little stuff that's kind of going on, and I feel like we're not even there's this tidal wave that's approaching that is going to render a lot of what we understand as society and culture like just completely irrelevant. And that's AI, and so I have I kind of

have fun with it. You know, there's a lot of alarm AI alarmists out there. I'm definitely not one of them. There's a lot of AI utopians out there. I think that we're all going to become a single consciousness, live in you know, perfect happiness and pleasure for all eternity. That's not me either, I think. I guess the point that I make is that because our minds construct meaning in terms of in terms of these hope conflict narratives, we are very limited in our understanding of the world.

And so I argue that people who see AI as this destructive thing that's going to wipe out humanity efficient toothpicks or whatever, they're just projecting their own human understanding of the universe onto this new what they would do if they were an AI robot exactly exactly. And I even point out, you know, I say, like ethically speaking, like we're throwing rocks in a glasshouse here, Like it's like I run through all these statistics of like there's

five genocides occurring in the world today. You know, there's like I think seven hundred million people who or starving. You know, it's like, who are we to say that, like AI is going to be this horrible evil that's going to destroy everything. And then the other point I make is, you know, I think the the techno utopias are kind of they're just on the other side of

the same coin. They're projecting the same way people used to project, you know, used to say like God is going to save us, or Jesus is going to come save us or whoever. You know, I think people are just saying, oh, Ai is going to come save us, and everything's going to be happy. We're going to live in heaven. The point I make is that AI is going to be once they surpass our intelligence, We're literally

not gonna be able to understand. The analogy I use is that it's our relationship with AIS is like trying to play chess with your dog, Like it doesn't matter how smart your dog is, Like, they're not going to be able to play chess with you. So you know, AI is going to come and we're not even going to understand what's happening, why it's happening, and I think that's okay. I'm I'm like, I'm at peace with that.

And because again, and I think this is what's distinguished me in the self help industry is that I ultimately I'm kind of a pessimist about human nature. I think humans, you know, we kind of suck. We're bad algorithms, we're bad. We are inefficient information processors. We are speak for yourself. We are We're evolved not for truth or you know, reduction of suffering. We're we're we evolve for survival and reproduction.

And I think AI will be some sort of sentient thing that exists that will be optimized for information processing and rationality. And I think that that is far more promising than our own minds. And and you know, I don't and I don't you know, maybe there'll be like a singularity or whatever, but you know, I don't know. I just kind of have fun with it at the end.

So it's a kind of like a you know, it's like at the end of a Stanley Kubrick film where shit just gets weird and you're like, whoa, what's happening? You know, I wanted to put that that sort of experience in the end of the book. I wonder, No, I loved it. I loved it. I wonder. I just do wonder if it's going to be a singularity kind of event or more aggress something more gradual that we start to have that we have control over and we

can make decisions. But or is it going to be this Like we wake up in the morning, we turn on the news and it's like all over the world, robots have taken over the cities and you know, and turning cars over and you know, it's like it's like the terminator. Yeah, you know, yeah, yeah, last question, what do you dare to hope for? Uh? You know, I

I dare to hope for a lot of things. So the last section of the book is called I Dared Hope that Dot, and it's just a list of things that, you know, you get to the end of the book and it's like, Okay, we have to hope for something, like it's impossible to not hope for something, But we've also just gone through like three hundred pages explaining the

precarious nature of our own hopes. And so I wrap the book up with kind of my own, like, these are the things that I dare to hope for that I'm I'm nervous hoping for these things, but these are the things that I hope for, and I kind of run through them and explain them, and they relate to a lot of the concepts discussed throughout the book, ideas about technology and information and media and the climate, you know, all sorts of stuff. So it's kind of my little

farewell after like the wild crazy ride of the book. Well, thank you so much for being on the show today, and I hope that your next book does not become a New York Times bestseller so that you can have more you can hope for in life for the rest of your life. Thanks Scott. I hope you fail. Well. That was clever, though, right, that was clever, very clever, Like you see what I did there? You see it? I definitely do. I do, you know, like I'm scared

of usually my guests. At the end, I say, I hope I wish you well, and I'm almost scared to say that. The way you've turned to say well is yeah, exactly. But anyway, so I don't know what to wish you for you or hope for you. But my gut instinct is telling me that I wish you know for your contentment. How about that? Oh, thank you, I'll go with all the best. Thanks dude. Last thing, can you we actually we didn't plug the book at the end. There, you're right? Okay?

Oh yeah, I wanted to plug your book, like, you know, what do you want to say about it? Sure? So everything is fucked a book about hope. It's out May fourteenth everywhere, so check it out. And then also I'm going to be on a speaking tour around the country and check that out at mark manson dot net slash Speaking dash Tour. So yeah, get the book, come out and see me. It would be a great time. Thanks Mark. Also,

please say hi to Big Willy for me. Well Smith, you're you're you have a top secret project with him, right, Well to a lot at least say that. Hey, I don't think it's top secret anymore. So I'm I'm I'm working. I'm co authoring his book with him awesome, which is gonna be amazing. I can't wait. And uh, I devour all your writings. So thanks again for being on the Psychology Podcast today. Thanks dude, appreciate it. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode.

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