Failure, Solved

0:00 You know, Drew, usually we do some sort of cold open to these episodes, but I failed to think of one. We're getting kind of a trend. These like little medical open. Yeah. So we had, when you failed already, I'm just before we've even started, I'm just trying to be clever. We can't commit to a studio space.

0:19 We had commitment last week or last month. Fortunately, we're lucky that we have such a great show. Well, if you remember all the bad luck we had during that show. Yeah, that's true. Good luck too. I guess some good luck. The change episode, God. Did you change? Well, that's- I have not changed. Well- I'm definitely the same.

0:37 I mean, we can get into that, but yeah. For another podcast. I'm a little bit afraid of this one then. If it says I'm failure, we're talking about failure today. Yes. Okay. What's going to happen? I'm pretty sure whatever happens, it's not going to be my fault and I'm going to learn nothing from it. You better listen to this episode then.

0:57 That's okay. Should I? You probably should. You probably should. That's actually what most people do is they learn nothing. That's right. Let's learn something. Okay. Yeah. Let's try to learn something. Without further ado, I'm going to read this intro that you put together and hope it doesn't fail spectacularly.

1:18 You know the quotes. You could recite them in your sleep. Edison and his 10,000 light bulbs. Michael Jordan cut from his high school team. Fail forward. Fail fast. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. You've probably reposted one of these at some point on your Instagram. That's a little too close to home, Drew.

1:38 You may even have one on a coffee mug. That I don't have. You tell your friends that failure is your best teacher. You tell your kids that mistakes are how we learn. You believe it. You would swear on it. So here's the question. The last time you actually failed, really failed at something, take a moment, think about it, something that you cared about, you failed in front of people whose opinion mattered to you, what did you actually do in that situation?

2:06 If you're being honest, because if you are being honest, you probably didn't immediately extract the lesson. You didn't find the silver lining. You probably minimized it in the retelling. You built a version of the story for yourself where the market shifted or the timing was off or the other person screwed up and dropped the ball.

2:25 You probably went a little quiet in the group chat. You checked days later whether anyone was still thinking about it, and somewhere, without ever really realizing it or announcing it to yourself, you made the next bet a little bit smaller as a result. You resized your ambitions so that that particular flavor of pain would never find you again.

2:47 And at some point, at some ungodly hour of the night, you probably replayed it. The failure, I mean, not the lesson. On a loop, your body reacting like something was actually wrong. Obsessing over an email, a failed pitch, a faulty launch, a sentence you said three years ago that nobody else remembers.

3:06 That gap between everything you believe about failure and everything you actually do when it shows up, that's not hypocrisy. It's not weakness. It's not an error. It is actually just a very human mechanism. And nobody has actually honestly explained it to you. Because here's the spicy take that Drew and I have learned from researching this episode.

3:30 The entire modern conversation around failure is cope. The old culture that shames failure, well, it was always lying to you. It doesn't really matter that much. But the new culture that worships failure, it's running the exact same lie in reverse. And for once, we don't have to argue about this philosophically.

3:50 We can just check. Because, as always, the Solve podcast brings the receipts. Because over the last two decades, that failure worship went fully mainstream. The conferences, the mantras, the keynotes, the measured share of people who are too afraid to fail to even try something rose by almost 50%. Perfectionism, tracked across three decades and the exact countries preaching embracing failure the loudest, hit the highest levels ever recorded.

4:19 And in the lab, researchers can now watch in real time the human mind refusing to learn from its own mistakes. The single most repeated piece of advice in self-help, grow from your failures, turns out to be incredibly difficult for us to do. So today we're going to break down all of the reasons why we both worship and shame our failures, both in ourselves and in other people.

4:42 We're gonna talk about how to actually learn from our failures and it's, It's really not as simple as you think. And along the way, we're also going to tell you a story about a conference founded to celebrate failure that... spoiler alert, ended up failing. We're going to talk about the two psychologists who drafted the most important theory of loss from a Jeep in an active war zone, while their own country's inability to admit failure got thousands of people killed around them.

5:08 We're going to talk about the evolutionary reason a rejected email can produce the same physiological response as a threat to your life. We'll discuss a monk so tormented by his failures that he confessed them for six hours a day until his confessors had to start avoiding him. And whose eventual breakdown accidentally split Western civilization in two.

5:30 We'll discuss one of the greatest athletes who ever lived, who stood at the very top of his sport and secretly hated it. and spoke the truest sentence ever uttered about failure, and his escape is actually how this episode ends and is completely mind-blowing. We'll discuss why the best golfers on earth have a deeply ingrained bias that costs them serious money, and why even when explained to them, they cannot stop it.

5:53 We'll talk about the difference between quitting and failing and the five-question test that tells you whether you're quitting wisely or just fucking scared. We'll talk about why what doesn't kill you makes you stronger is true only the way a barbell makes you stronger, which is to say, it doesn't. Something else does.

6:11 We're going to talk about all of this and much, much more. Because in this episode, we are going to argue that every piece of advice you've ever received about failure has been aimed at the wrong target. Avoiding it, bouncing back from it, even embracing it, all of it assumes that failure is an event outside of yourself, out there in the world.

6:29 But it isn't. What we're going to discover is that it is a byproduct of your own arbitrary standards and values. The truth is, you will never avoid failure. you're only going to choose how you define it. And it turns out that there are better and worse ways to define it. And this episode is ultimately about that learning to choose.

6:49 My name is Mark Manson. I'm the three-time number one New York Times bestselling author. And this is Drew Burney, my co-host, producer, lead researcher, and the man who ran a pre-mortem failure analysis on this very podcast episode and concluded that I was its top risk. And this is Solved, the most comprehensive podcast in the world where every episode we aim to solve one major life problem so you never have to deal with it again.

7:14 That was a good one. That was a good one. You did not fail that. But before we jump into it, be sure to rate, review, or subscribe to the show. It is the best thing you can do to support us. We put a lot of work into these episodes, if you haven't noticed. So please show your support for the show without further ado.

7:39 Our story starts in October of 2009 in San Francisco. There are about 400 entrepreneurs, software engineers, and investors attend a new conference that's built around one purpose, failure. Talking about failure, embracing failure, trying to make failure a little bit more acceptable in the mainstream.

7:59 The conference was called FailCon. Now, the founder, Cass Phillips, she had spent years in Silicon Valley surrounded by startups that frequently failed. Yet every conference and event that she went to, everything was about hockey stick graphs and how everybody was succeeding and how everybody was getting rich and how everybody was going to be super successful.

8:18 And she just recognized that that wasn't the actual experience of most startups. entrepreneurs. So at FailCon, everything was built around celebrating failures. At the beginning of the event, she would always ask the audience, how many people here have failed at some sort of business venture? And pretty much everybody's hand would go up.

8:36 And then all of the speakers, their keynotes had to be about their failures and what they learned from their failures. And the conference was a huge hit. They did versions in like Tokyo and Dubai and London and all over the place. They had sessions on all sorts of topics from really practical kind of nuts and bolts startup scaling advice to philosophical discussions of like what is suffering and what is despair.

9:00 And basically... FailCon kind of had a moment. You know, it got a lot of press, got a lot of attention. It was kind of a big thing in the early 2010s. But then in 2014, Phillips decided to shut it down. And the party line was that Phillips believed that she had achieved her goal, which was that she had made failure acceptable in the mainstream.

9:20 But I don't really buy that, and I don't think anybody else really bought that either. Personally, I think FailCon probably failed for a simple reason, which is it's actually the same reason a lot of conferences fail, which is that it was specifically targeted towards people who don't have money. Like if you think about like a conference for people who have failing startups or have a recently failed startup, what do all those people have in common?

9:46 They are probably broke or in debt. Yeah. And it's hard to build a thriving conference business on attendees that are broke or in debt. But there was actually a deeper structural problem with FailCon and the philosophy behind it. And I think this is the same structural problem. behind every inspirational story that we all hear about how somebody failed, you know, Michael Jordan failed so many times, or Steve Jobs failed so many times.

10:12 And that is the issue of survivorship bias. So survivorship bias, it's a concept that originated with bombers in World War II. So the military, the U.S. military noticed that all of the bombers would come back with bullet holes in the same areas of the plane. And so they did the obvious thing that you would do if you didn't think about it very much, which is that they sourced more armor to reinforce the parts of the planes that they were in the same area.

10:37 that had been hit with all the bullet holes. But surprisingly, this didn't prevent more bombers from being shot down. In fact, they saw no statistical increase in the amount of bombers that survived. So after a couple years of this happening, it was an analyst in the Air Force by the name of Abraham Wald that realized that people had it completely backwards.

10:57 The airplanes that were coming back with bullet holes all in the same spots, you know, around the wings and the tail fin... Those were actually the places you didn't want to reinforce because those were the spots that the airplanes could survive being shot. Instead, what he pointed out is you wanted to reinforce all of the spots on the planes that didn't have bullet holes because the planes that got shot in those spots were the ones that didn't come back.

11:21 This flaw in reasoning, this faulty assumption that we all kind of have around this, it is something that we do all the time. Survivorship bias, it infiltrates all sorts of things, especially in our industry. We look at a story like Steve Jobs and all the inspiration around all the times he failed or like Michael Jordan, how he got cut from his high school team, but those aren't really failures.

11:44 I mean, there are literally millions of people who got cut from their high school basketball team and none of them became Michael Jordan, right? So that is actually not something that is worth learning from. Yet it's a huge part of his story, and it's a huge part of explaining why he is who he is. You see this happen with productivity a lot in our space, right?

12:06 You've got some guy who's, I don't know, he writes like five books a year and has started six companies, and I don't know, he like wakes up at five and... eats an upside down waffle or something. And so everybody goes out and starts eating upside down waffles and thinks that that's going to make them as successful as this like random dude on YouTube.

12:26 And the truth is, is that the defining variables of success are often hidden from us. They're not apparent. And the things that are apparent are actually quite common. We're just not aware of the thousands of other people that share that trait, but don't share the same success. Yeah. So it's really just like a big humble brag for a lot of these people, right?

12:47 They're trying to pass these things off as failure, but really it's just part of their whole success story, which makes it still just another survivorship biased story of some kind, right? But we end up kind of fetishizing people. those failures that are just the bolt holes in the wings that on the planes that came back.

13:03 Right. Right. And this is kind of where failure porn came out of. And this actually came from a guy, Jeff Lewis, who himself was a founder of this company called Founders Fund. But he wrote this post in 2014, same year that FailCon failed. He wrote this in the Washington Post and he coined the term failure porn.

13:21 And he's got this great quote in it. It says, it's failure as fast fashion peddled by wildly successful people packaged for mass consumption. That's no more reflective of real failure than commercially produced pornography is of real sex. Very vivid, vivid example there, right? He has his own little kind of failure porn story around this too with his company.

13:42 He was like $45,000 in credit card debt. He was going to pitch some people on his fund one day and didn't have like the 20 bucks to take a cab across town. So he had to walk on an empty stomach for 45 minutes. And it was like, he calls one of his coworkers and was like, I'm such a failure. This isn't going to work.

14:00 And he got this pep talk from his coworker and everything went and did this pitch and they got funding and then turned it around and it was a multimillion dollar company. And, you know, that's a failure porn story. That's not, he's like the real failure would have been me just giving up there. This is just a low point in the story.

14:14 It wasn't an actual failure. Yeah. And he said the problem with this is that we trivialize failure when we do this. Real failure. This article, I should go read it. It's actually full of these great little lines in it. It says, just as excessive consumption of pornography desensitizes a person to the joys of real sex...

14:32 Excessive consumption of failure porn desensitizes a person to the horrors of real failure. So again, it's these survivorship bias stories. Yeah. Take away from the actual failures, the actual harm that's actually done by real failure. Well, it's funny because just in you recounting his story, I think you...

14:54 You described exactly what's wrong with all of these stories, which is when you said it, you said he was broken and on his last legs and then he managed to get funding with his last pitch meeting or whatever and then went on to become successful. It's that went on to become successful. Yes. That's where actually all of the meat and valuable information is, but it's not nearly as exciting or interesting as the failure porn.

15:20 So the failure porn is what gets shared. And. it's funny too i was thinking like when we were prepping for this this episode i was thinking about the fail con thing I was thinking it would probably get really old fast. If you are a struggling startup founder working 60, 70 hour weeks, barely scraping by and year after year you get up and you hear these like the guy who started PayPal or the guy who started, you know, whatever, get up and tell you these, all these situations that they, they were in at one point at a certain point, it'd be like, okay, I get it.

15:52 Like they struggled. Yeah. what did you do that worked? Right? Like, yeah, yeah. Like, I don't- It's not a complicated message. Yeah, yeah. I don't care what didn't work. Tell me what worked, right? Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. A quick pause. We'll be right back after this. This episode is sponsored by 80,000 Hours.

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18:54 That's livemomentus.com, promo code SOLVED for up to 35% off. code solved. All right, we're back. Where were we? We've romanticized failure over the last 20, 30 years to the point where it's like, it almost doesn't mean anything. Why do you think that is though? Like, why do you think we romanticize?

19:13 I think there's kind of a, um, a little bit of a self-attribution bias going on. So like your failures, you want to, um, kind of externalize them. Right. And you want to internalize your successes. And I think part of it is, is like, Oh no, look at me. I went through all of this. I failed all this. And I still came out the other side and look how Look how strong I am.

19:31 Strong I am. Successful. Look how gritty I am. Look how, you know, I think there is kind of like a, it's a humble brag. We've talked on previous episodes. Yeah. How we, we tend to, our memories tend to package things in ways that like exalt ourselves a little bit. You don't want to attribute it to luck either.

19:47 Remember the luck episode? Like, like you saying, oh, I got lucky in this. That doesn't feel good. When it's like, actually, yeah, a lot of other people did the exact same things as you and you came out on top. Maybe you just got lucky. Like instead you say, no, no, no, I went through, look at all the hardship I went through.

20:00 Look at all this shit that I waited through. I actually went and researched how many other microprocessor companies there were at the same time as Apple. And there were like dozens, dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens. And it was really interesting. They all failed and they all had like... similar stories and story arcs and made similar decisions.

20:19 And the human mind thinks in terms of narratives. When you are constructing a narrative, you always need to have some sort of obstacle or setback. Yeah. The three acts of story arc. Yeah. It's just the way our brains work. I think it is very natural that we look at a highly complex long-term project or path and we just simplify it into...

20:41 Yeah, I was down on my luck. All these things went wrong, but I fought through it. I learned, I survived, and now I'm successful, right? Like, that's just kind of, I think, our default narrative that we like to package around things. And also, like, narratives make things feel meaningful. Like, if I was really honest about my success and, like, the amount of luck and circumstance that was involved in it...

21:02 It would feel less meaningful to me. And I do think that we are biased towards generating something that feels very meaningful and purposeful in our lives. Yeah. There's not a lot of lesson to be taken from luck, right? No. There's something we're just lucky. So we'd rather have a narrative that's a little bit cleaner and has some sort of struggle in it that we could identify with.

21:20 Are you susceptible to failure porn? Oh, man. And that whole Michael Jordan story, man, especially when I was a kid, that was like, oh yeah, he's got all that grit and he won't give up, never give up. And he's just got to fight through all the failures and getting cut from the team, all of that. Oh, dude, I bought into that big time.

21:37 In the 2010s, you really did see this too. You really did out there. It was like, no, no, no, it was like fail fast. What was the Facebook move fast and break things? Move fast and break things. That whole thing. Everybody got caught up in that. Yeah. How'd that turn out? Yeah, right? Right? It's very seductive.

21:53 It's very seductive. Yeah, yeah. Everybody, especially Americans, we love an underdog too, right? So somebody who's down on their luck and down and out, no, they came back from it. That's a great arc. So I get asked all the time, would I change anything about subtle art? And generally my answer is no, but it's funny that this episode, it made me kind of think back to that chapter.

22:15 I'm like, oof. Yeah, it was a little simplistic. The depth that we're going to go into in this episode is much more thorough than what's written there. I mean, I do think the general lesson is in that you do have to make mistakes. Like everybody makes mistakes, everybody fails, and that's the fuel for learning and growth.

22:35 I do think that is true, but I also think that that is... bit of a simplistic way to look at it. There's a lot more going on under the hood than just simply like, oh, I tried a thing and it didn't work. What can I learn from it? That's our surface level experience, but there's some deeper questions in terms of like, how are you defining success and failure?

22:55 Who are you choosing to be in that pursuit? Are you defining failures in ways that you are actually going to be comfortable with? Like that's actually way more interesting. And that's some of the stuff that we're going to get into here. What we're calling kind of the old way of looking at failure too, though, which was more just like, oh, you're a failure.

23:12 Like people saying I'm a failure or taking it so personally or over identifying with it. Obviously, that's not good. We wanted to get away from that. What we're saying is maybe we overshot a little bit too far the other way. Yeah, yeah. Do we want to call this like a Hegelian synthesis, right? So aren't you excited for that?

23:32 Do we want to call it that? Of course we do. Of course we do. This is solved. Okay. Where we over philosophize everything. Yeah. So I know what a Hegelian synthesis is, but why don't you go ahead and explain to everybody else what that means? Okay. George Friedrich Hegel, the German philosopher, the idealist philosopher from the 19th century, he said a lot of things.

23:50 But one of the things that stuck, interestingly, he didn't actually write it, but people later attributed it to him. So they call it a Hegelian synthesis, which is that basically thought and information progresses in a pretty standard pattern, which is that you have a thesis of how the world works or something that's true.

24:06 You have an antithesis, which is the contradiction or an alternative hypothesis. of those two viewpoints. It's not that one of those two things is right. It's usually some synthesis of the two points of view that wins out and becomes the next thesis and develops its own antithesis. That was like the progression of history and knowledge in his view.

24:31 The Hegelian dialectic of failure would be that the old school version of failure was that it was this horrible, shameful thing and that you should hide your failures from people and you should avoid trying anything that you're going to potentially fail. That's kind of like our default approach towards failure.

24:49 The antithesis of that is that failure should be celebrated, that it should be encouraged, that we should support people in their failures, which – Sounds nice if you've got a startup and are trying to like find investors, but I don't know, like go talk to a meth head or like somebody in an abusive relationship.

25:09 That's not a message you want to be generalizing out to the broader populace. So you could say that this podcast, we are attempting a synthesis of the two views, a more holistic view of failure. And how to approach it in your own life and how to benefit from it. The important thing here, the reason why we're kind of shitting on this positive view of failure is that the data is in and it doesn't really help.

25:39 Mm-hmm. We've taken the last few decades to figure that out too, right? There is this kind of weird paradox where if you go and you talk to people, they'll tell you, just like in the business world, let's say, it's easier than ever to start a business. Right. And yet people are more afraid to start a business than ever.

25:56 This is right after all of these, this 20 years of failure worship has come out of the culture. Right. And yet people are still more risk averse than ever. Still more risk averse than ever. Like just some stats, like basically one in two Americans say they would fear starting a business because of the fear of failure, because it might fail.

26:15 Half of all people. Around the world, too, they've done these surveys every year, and the share of people agreeing that starting a business is easy, that climbed to almost 60%. And yet, again, almost one in two people all around the world say they're afraid of failing in one of these ventures, even though it's easier than ever.

26:34 So the message didn't stick basically, right? You could actually argue that things got even worse. We didn't get more comfortable with failure, right? We probably got less than what actually happened here, right? What was actually going on? One of the big things that I found anyway, through all this is that perfectionism actually seems to be becoming more and more of a problem.

26:55 If people were actually taking this to heart, if they were taking this advice, this failure worship to heart, what you would probably see is actually less perfectionism out there. We see the exact opposite of that in all these different studies. Now, before I jump into that, though, real quick, there's two different kinds of perfectionism that researchers kind of brought to broad buckets that they can sort it into.

27:14 Right. One is what they call perfectionistic strivings. OK, this is when you hold high standards and you you are aiming for success. This is basically fine. Uh, as long as you don't like take it too far, you're really just like, I have high standards and I want to, I want to hit those, but you don't take it too personally when you don't hit them.

27:31 Okay. Contrast that with perfectionistic concerns, which is the more kind of toxic form of perfectionism that people can have, which is basically you're holding yourself to a very high standard. And if you don't hit that, there's something very wrong with you or the world or whatever. Right. That is actually associated with more like mental health problems, even to depression, anxiety, less wellbeing that you have with that.

27:55 Okay. What they found is if you kind of control for those concerns, if you, if you, if you can parse all of that out, if you just have this like striving perfectionism where you're like, I want things to be better and I'm going to aim for them and it's okay if I don't hit them, but I'm going to continue to aim for them and strive for them.

28:11 That seems to be okay. That seems to be fine. It's when we get into that more toxic form of perfectionism that. that the wheels start to fall off a little bit, okay? When we actually look at the numbers too, over the last 20 to 30 years, across all the countries that celebrate failure the most, mostly the Anglosphere, right?

28:27 United States, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, those places, we all celebrate failure a whole bunch. Perfectionism has actually risen and the toxic kinds of perfectionism have risen the most even too. They've done some studies from the late 2010s up to today And they see that this trend is just accelerating.

28:44 It's not getting any better. They basically concluded that, and this is a quote, young people perceive that others are more demanding of them, they are more demanding of others, and more demanding of themselves. Like, people are holding us to higher standards, we're holding ourselves to higher standards, and we're holding other people to higher standards all at the same time.

29:00 Like, all of that is going up when... really probably none of that is actually true. Okay. And yet that's against the backdrop of, hey, it's okay to fail. Go out there and fail. Nobody cares. Give it your best shot. Give it your best shot and it's going to be okay. And yet we have this rise in perfectionism and rise of these ungodly standards that we put on ourselves during that.

29:20 So what's going on here? I hate to be that guy. Yeah. But I think it's the phones. You think it's the phones? I think it's the phones. You think it's the phones? The trend started before the phones. I think it accelerated with the phones. It could be the internet. I mean, the difference between, say, our adolescence and kids today, you know, when we were growing up, if you asked a girl out and she shot you down, nobody remembered, nobody saw it.

29:44 I remember. I remember. I remember. Nobody else remember. Oh, okay, right, right. Nobody else saw it. You know, if you made a huge mistake in front of the class or you did something really embarrassing or you got kicked out of school or whatever, now everything is documented. There are consequences to every failure that exists today in a way that didn't exist before.

30:05 I actually think that there's some usefulness of forgetting. I was reading about Walt Disney recently, and it was super fascinating in that he came from a family of failed entrepreneurs. And he himself was a failed entrepreneur. Today we know as Disney was like his, I think his third or fourth business that he started.

30:25 And his father started a bunch of businesses that failed, and his uncle started a bunch of businesses that failed. And it was funny because what happened back in those days is you would start a business, it would fail, you'd go into a bunch of debt, and you'd just pack your shit up and go to the next town because nobody in the next town knew that you failed, right?

30:42 And so you could start over, you could get new investments or get a new loan and start a new business. And so the Disneys would kind of like bounce from town to town around the Midwest, trying all these different ventures, watching them fail spectacularly, and then like... just kind of moving on and not having it...

31:01 track with them. Whereas today, if something like calamitous happens at one of your jobs, it's going to be online forever, right? There's going to be a record of it potentially forever. People are always going to have access either to your old workplace or your old boss or your old LinkedIn profile or something you wrote like 14 years ago.

31:20 It's like comedians getting canceled for tweets that they wrote in 2008. Yeah. You know, like it, there's just, there's a record today that follows you that didn't exist in previous generations, even if people are more accepting of failure in the moment, which I agree with you, I don't think they are these days, even if they were, the fact that that moment is now going to follow you for decades across your life means that you have to weight it so much higher than you would have otherwise.

31:51 Yeah. I mean, I guess I do remember, you know, when social media started to be a thing and we had to be warned like, Hey, watch what you put online. Now think of, I mean, that's like, now you just don't even do it because you can't even help if it gets online or not. Yeah. I mean, I remember, so to your point about it being maybe before the phones, I remember when I was single in my twenties and it started to become a thing about like Googling the people you were going on dates with, because you would, sometimes you would find like some pretty crazy shit.

32:18 I just imagine that that's like 10 X'd. These two researchers, Kieran and Hill, they give some other reasons as well. Well, like one of them being just kind of the structural competition, especially like in capitalist societies, like competition in the markets got so crazy. And that just kind of bled into all the other areas of life.

32:35 Getting into a good idea. good university or something like that, that all of a sudden became super, super important. And like doing your, your application by committee, you know, and having your whole family or getting tutors or that really took off in the last, you know, 20 to 30 years as well. Like the competition, intense competition.

32:52 around those sorts of things happened at the same time too they're talking about the collectivist institutions that we used to have where some of that would get diffused right some of that kind of tension of your failures or whatever and your church or your whatever communities you were in church temples whatever you were going to those are not you know it's it's much more individualistic like hyper individualism has contributed to a very competitive right life not just marketplace And people are by and large lonelier, so they have less of a support system, right?

33:21 So they have fewer friends or family members close to them that they can rely upon if they do screw up or if something does go wrong. It's interesting because what we're talking about, it is not about people's philosophical acceptance of failure. It is more about the stakes that are involved, right? Like when you remove social and emotional safety nets, when you make everything more competitive and...

33:45 And when you add a historical record that follows you for pretty much your entire life and you can't get rid of it, what that does is it just puts so much more importance on each action and behavior that in a way that did not exist certainly 30 years ago, but definitely not like 100 years ago. One other thing they bring up too is like anxious and controlling parenting.

34:06 There's some debate around this. Their studies have been questioned a little bit, but you do see it on at least an individual level. Like kids who do come from households where the parents are very controlling and, you know, expect a lot. They have very high rates of this toxic perfectionism as well.

34:21 Whether that's pervasive across the culture or not, I'm not sure. But that can definitely, if you're one of those people, that can definitely have a big, big impact as well. Shout out to all of our Asian listeners right now. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So perfectionism is rising. We see that. It is really worse amongst young people too.

34:39 This is where we have the most data too. We don't have as much data for older people, but it is worse amongst young people. Half of all teenagers all around the world, they fear judgment for failing in some way. They report that they say when they're failing, they worry about what others might think of them, which, you know, okay, that's teenagers.

34:56 I get that. But. But the risk of the stats of risk aversion are so high right now. They're so high. They're accelerating. Like I was saying, right? Kids are not asking each other out. They're not taking risks. They're not going out. They're not having sex. They're not even learning to drive at the same rates that they used to.

35:09 So it's, yeah, there's a lot of risk aversion going on. One really interesting thing we found though too, and a lot of people think that, well, I'm just not as good as these people. And so of course I'm afraid of failure or whatever. An interesting thing we found was actually that the fear of failure is oftentimes the worst amongst the highest achievers.

35:27 So people out there who are actually already doing the straight A students, you know, the ones that are doing all the clubs, the ones that are out there achieving, looking like they're, you know, having a great time. They're actually the ones who are the most afraid of failure, which is... Fascinating.

35:42 I feel like so many people use fear of failure as an excuse for not doing the thing, whereas it's like, OK, the people who are actually out there doing the thing and they're doing it well. are more afraid than you are. Right. And we're going to find out why that is here in a little bit too. What would you say is your relationship with failure?

35:57 Because I know you've struggled with perfectionism quite a bit throughout your life. Yeah. I wanted to come in here and say, well, you know, like I don't, the failures I do have, I don't see them as failures. But then I think about the perfection. I have some talks of perfectionism. What it ends up doing is it makes you not take a lot of the risks that you would have want to take or just like, I don't know, go and find it out.

36:20 Like I look, I don't know, I look at some of the stuff you do and you're just like, we're going to try this. And it's, that's didn't work. Let's just keep moving. You know, I don't think you're anyone to dwell on that. And I, I dwell on stuff, man. I dwell on stuff for sure. It does cost me a lot in terms of, yeah, in terms of the outcomes that I've, I've seen, I just haven't taken some of the bigger swings that I probably would have because of that.

36:44 Do you think some of that is that you grew up with higher stakes. Cause like, I know like my wife grew up pretty poor and like, ah, the margin for error when she was young was just very slim. So, so she's developed, I think she has kind of evolved into a person that is just very wary of, of risking failure.

37:02 Yeah. And I think if, if you do come from a back kind of background and the way you got out of it was by through performance, um, that puts a lot of weight on performance then, right? Like I got out of that through school and the activities that I was involved in that contributed to my education and all of that.

37:19 And so you learn that, oh, in order to not, have to go back into that world or not be in a more precarious state, you have to perform. There's something you have to do or be or whatever it is. And that, yeah, I bet a lot of people can identify with that. I'm a weirdo. I'm definitely, I think I'm somebody that- Are in a lot of ways, Mark.

37:41 You really are. I think this is one area where I'm not relatable. I think I'm really good with this just because, I mean, I'm not, I don't give a fuck, right? Like I just, I genuinely don't. Like it really, I mean, you've seen this for years. It really doesn't bother me. Like launching something that fails or putting something out there that bombs or, you know, saying something that gets me a thousand angry email.

38:05 Like I'm just kind of. water off my back. And it's interesting because when I was younger, I spent a lot of time kind of thinking about where that comes from. And I've got all sorts of narratives and explanations. Growing up in kind of a weird environment that I always felt like a black sheep where I grew up.

38:24 My dad's a lot more kind of rigid and perfectionist than I am. But my grandfather, I mean, you talk about not giving a fuck. Like, he started seven companies. He became a millionaire three times, went bankrupt three times. And according to my dad, he said, if you saw him, you would never know which end of the pendulum he was on.

38:45 Like, you could never tell. It didn't bother him. He didn't care. And I've felt that way, too. Like, I've lost a lot of money on some stupid decisions. And it actually freaked me out how much it didn't bother me. Is there any area of your life where you identify a failure that either you did or didn't learn from or like, is there any particular area?

39:07 I've thought about this in terms of regrets. So like, I generally don't regret many things. And, and what I, the thing I would point to the things that like, I do feel say dwell on, or I feel like some degree of shame or guilt. It's when I've, I feel like I've failed people. Yeah. Yeah. So if it's just me and if it's like just my money or my stuff, I really don't seem to care.

39:34 Like I'm good. You know, I could sleep on this concrete floor tomorrow. Like it's fine. If I feel like I failed somebody I really care about, like that eats at me for a long time. We're going to get into some of that then. Uh-oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh-oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh-oh. Am I getting on the sofa this episode?

39:49 No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Ugh. I mean, yes, but- We'll get into why that might be, I think. Yeah. This hints at where we're going with this episode and that I don't actually see most of my failures as failures. The crux of what we're going to get into is that failure is actually more of a definitional problem than it is an actual problem.

40:14 Like the fact that you are failing at things in your life is not really the problem. The real problem, if there is one, is how you've chosen to define failure for yourself and how you've chosen to measure yourself. And that's actually where we're going to end up going with this, starting with the next chapter.

40:32 But to understand that and really have an appreciation for it We do need to get into some of the evolutionary mechanisms behind our sense of failure, the feelings and emotions that come along with it, the social repercussions that are associated with it, and why something like an embarrassing email or getting shot down by somebody you have a crush on.

40:57 Feels like fucking death in the moment. Like, just makes you want to crawl in a hole and never come out again. Like, why does that happen? Why does it hurt so much? Why does failure hurt so bad? Why is it so hard sometimes? And the important thing is that the answer, it's not just your childhood. It's not a mindset.

41:17 It's not... It's not about learning, you know, finding the silver lining and things like, sure, all of those things matter at the margins, but really we're going to go way back and we're going to go back 2 million years and, and look at some of the biological machinery that's going on behind the scenes and, and try to get a deeper understanding of why all these things happen.

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43:17 That's right. You get a free trial if you go to shopify.com slash solved. That's shopify.com slash solved. This episode is brought to you by AG1. We like to picture failure as one dramatic moment, the big blowup that detonates in your face. But usually it's the 20th morning in a row that you meant to get your act together, but didn't.

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44:32 For a limited time, visit solved.deals.ag1 and get a free immune support bundle, including omega-3 fish oil and vitamin D3K2 with your first subscription of AG1, NextGen, or AG1 Pro. That's solved.deals.ag1. So the modern research on why failure and loss hurt so much begins in 1969 in Israel. It's Hebrew University.

45:04 Daniel Kahneman is a new professor, and he invites Amos Tversky to give a guest lecture to his professor. psychology students. And at the time, Tversky is a bit of a celebrity academic in Israel. He's considered a genius. He was a very famous paratrooper in one of the recent wars. He's generally beloved by everybody.

45:26 And he gets up in front of Kahneman's class, and he starts lecturing about how people's guesses are actually often statistically accurate. That if you ask somebody to estimate a large number across the population, that people people's intuitions are surprisingly good at this. Now, Kahneman is watching him lecture about this, and he is thinking to himself, this is total bullshit.

45:49 Because Kahneman was also a veteran, but he had worked in the psychological unit. So he had watched as IDF analysts had made confident predictions, created statistical models, come up with all sorts of plans, and been horribly wrong about every single one of them. He had actually seen the opposite, that people's intuitions were...

46:09 absolutely terrible at predicting the future. So he politely lets Tversky finish his lecture and all the students leave and he walks up to him afterwards and in classic Israeli fashion, he's like, I think you're wrong. This is a bunch of bullshit. And the two begin arguing about it. And as they're arguing, finally, they just kind of look at each other and agree.

46:31 They're like, well, then let's study it and figure this out. So they plan to do some experiments together and thus begin probably the most fruitful research partnership ever. in the history of the psychological field. They would go on to publish dozens and dozens of studies. They would revolutionize not just the field of psychology, but also behavioral economics.

46:54 They would win a Nobel Prize. Their influence in how we understand human thinking and human decision-making really can't be overstated. Now, their method was really interesting, which is that they would kind of just sit around together, And they would spitball hypothetical situations to each other, like little thought experiments.

47:15 And the reason they did this was to test each other's intuition. So they would ask each other things like, let's say 600 people have a terminal illness, and you have enough money to finance one of two medical programs. The first medical program is guaranteed to save 200 of the 600 people, but you're going to lose 400 of them.

47:33 But the second medical program, you have a one third chance of saving all 600, but a two thirds chance of all 600 dying. Which one would you choose? I would probably go with the guaranteed 200. Yeah. Yeah. I probably would too. It just instinctively feels better for some reason. Right. And they notice this pretty much universally.

47:55 Like almost everybody picks the first medical program, even though mathematically they have the exact same risk profile. Okay. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. feel pretty strongly about the first program. So they had another little fun thought experiment where they would present students with a situation where you could flip a coin, and if it came up heads, you would make $1,000, but if it came up tails, you would lose $1,000.

48:25 Sure enough, Pretty much all the students turn this down. But what was really interesting is they changed the offer. So you flip a coin. If it lands heads, you get $1,050. If it's tails, you only lose $1,000, right? So the expected value is actually positive. If you had infinite money, you should flip that coin as many times as you possibly can.

48:48 Every time, yeah. Interestingly, pretty much all the students still turned down the opportunity to flip the coin. So time after time after time, they started to notice a pattern, which was that people tend to weigh losing something more than they value gaining something. They even did another little thought experiment with this is that they took one group of people and they put a coffee mug in front of them.

49:11 They said, how much would you pay for this coffee mug on average? And let's say that people said five bucks. Then they would take another group of people and they would give them the coffee mug and say, how much would you sell this for? And people wanted to sell it for more than they were willing to buy it for.

49:26 Right. They valued losing the thing more than they valued money. gaining it in the first place and this was really driven home for them because in 1973 israel was invaded by all of its arab neighbors uh and they were called into active duty in what today is known as the yom kippur war and what was interesting is that both of them as they were riding off to the front when they started looking at all of the intelligence failures and the military failures that happened leading up to that war, they kept seeing the same pattern.

49:58 Intelligence agencies that didn't want to risk losing too much, so they papered over evidence of an impending invasion with different narratives or different stories. People who looked away from potential catastrophe because the loss of being wrong about it would have been so catastrophic for their career or, you know, for whatever, their platoon or their agency or whatever.

50:25 Now, this phenomenon eventually would become known as loss aversion. And Kahneman and Tversky's big contribution was that they found pretty consistently that the ratio of how people weighted loss versus gain of the same thing was, was roughly two to one, that people generally experience the loss of something as twice as bad as the benefit of gaining the same thing.

50:47 And if anybody who's been competitive in sports or tried to win at anything, like everybody knows that the pain of losing is significantly more severe than the joy of winning. And it lasts much longer. Now, they eventually kind of bundled up a lot of their experiments, and they broadly called it prospect theory.

51:08 And they would go on to win a Nobel Prize for it in 2002. Unfortunately, Tversky did not survive that long. But Kahneman has always insisted that the work was theirs together and has always given him credit for all of the work that they've done together. But it raises a really interesting question, which is that if loss aversion is very much just baked into our psychology, it seems to be hardwired in all of us.

51:35 Why is it there? What are the circumstances in which we evolved that loss aversion would make sense in nature? It's kind of cruel, right? Right. And as we're going to find out that you can't train yourself out of it, you can't convince yourself. Like being aware of this does not change. Mm-hmm. the fact that it exists inside of your brain.

51:52 It's pretty much a fundamental aspect of how we perceive risk and loss in our lives. So then the question is why? Why, Drew Bernhe? Just tell me why. It's very cruel, like I said, right? It seems like a very cruel thing of the universe, I guess, to deliver us this like... Pain hurts so much more than gaining something.

52:11 You know, something good is not as equal as something that is equally bad. Like we're just, we experience pain so much more vividly and acutely than we do of gaining something, right? Why is that? If we look at, if we kind of step back a little bit. There's this really interesting study done on capuchin monkeys.

52:28 Okay. You know, those capuchins are like the little, you think of the like little grinder, you know, like those little monkeys. You with the little symbols? Yeah, with the little symbols. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like this. Right. Yeah. They're cute little monkeys, but they're smart too. Okay. But we diverged from them about like 40 million years ago.

52:42 We're like a common ancestor. We haven't. have one of those for a very, very long time. But you can train them to operate in somewhat of an economy, right? This one researcher, Keith Channey's from Yale back in the 2000s, he trained these capuchins to basically trade aluminum coins that he made for apples and fruits like that, right?

53:03 Yeah. And they figured it out pretty quick. They showed them that there was market fluctuations. Like some days apples would cost this much or this much, and the capuchins would participate in this economy. So they were smart enough to even do that. What they found out too is they kind of set up this experiment where you could test loss aversion.

53:22 So they had one of the experimenters go, and they would offer them one apple. Every now and then they would give them two apples for the same coin, for the same aluminum coin. And monkeys figured this out. Okay, fine. So you got another researcher that would come in and would show them, present them two apples, but would sometimes take one apple away.

53:40 But on average, they were always getting the same number, like 1.4 apples or something like that on average, right? For every time that they would give them one of these coins. Even those monkeys, though, at that point, they preferred the first person. Who would guarantee them one and sometimes give them an extra one.

53:56 Yeah. They didn't like the one who would give them two and then sometimes take one away. Right. So even in that context, like this monkey that we haven't shared an ancestor with for 40 million years has loss aversion. They would rather take that sure gain rather than have something that would be taken away from them.

54:14 Yeah. Okay. It is about 71% of the trades, about 70% of the trades shook out like that. And they've actually shown this in other primate species too. One's even closer to this too. So chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, they all show this, what they call endowment effect, which is basically what you're talking about.

54:32 It is when you have something, you would prefer to hang onto it rather than trade it for something else. Even if that other thing might be a little bit more valuable, you're going to take the sure bet more likely because you don't want to, experience that loss. Yeah. Okay. So it seems to be very, very ancient hardware that we have like in the mammalian brain.

54:51 And in fact, it is what the neuroscientific studies that they've done on this have found very ancient parts of our brain that are involved with this very deep mammalian structures. It kind of splits in these like two systems. You have a system that evaluates subjective value of whatever it is in the environment that you're hanging on to.

55:12 And then the systems associated with like negative emotions and both of these fire up whenever we're experiencing a loss like this. And so it's, and then it's very ancient, these very ancient brain systems that are in like all mammals. So it seems to be very, very hardwired into us. Now, the question you asked was why?

55:30 Why would it be that way? And if you think about it from an evolutionary standpoint, most of our history as a species has kind of, we've been living on the edge of survival, right? We're on the margin of survival. On that margin, if you get a windfall of some resource, food or whatever it is, that's kind of nice.

55:50 It's gonna get you through another month or two, maybe at the most. If you lose something in that same environment, though, you could be dead next week. There's an asymmetry going on there. Right. You lose something, you're dead. If you gain something, eh. You live a little longer. You live a little bit longer.

56:04 Yeah. So there's an asymmetry there where the loss is much more significant in terms of your survival than a gain would be in that situation. Kahneman and Tversky figured out is that that's about a two to one ratio. Yeah. And so that's why you would have this bias towards wanting to hang on to things and not lose them.

56:24 Right. The problem comes in is that we're using this ancient evolutionary hardware on modern problems that don't have those same types of consequences. Right. Right. So, like, if you're going to lose 50 bucks or something like that, that's going to be the, like... emotionally the same as gaining $100, the valence there is completely skewed, when that doesn't really have a whole lot of bearing on your life now.

56:46 Or like you're looking at your quarterly reports at your job or something like that, and if you see the loss on there, you're registering a loss in your brain using that ancient hardware and that ancient software going on, and it's registering as, oh, this is a threat to my survival, when it's really not.

57:03 So that's the theory, the evolutionary mismatch theory anyway, is that we're applying these in all these wrong ways. I think it's exacerbated by the fact that you could probably answer to that in modern life. the gain of something is worth more than the loss of the thing, right? Like if you just think about money, right?

57:21 Like the more money you make, the easier it is to make more. Yeah. That's pretty well established. Like financial wealth compounds in all sorts of different ways. Whereas like losing money, I mean, sure, you can go broke, but like you can't really, I mean, you can go into debt, you can declare bankruptcy and kind of start over.

57:39 I would argue that the asymmetry today is actually the other way. I feel like, probably people who are very intelligent risk takers, financial risk takers, whether it's traders, finance people, entrepreneurs, even executives at large corporations, they probably have gotten good at fighting against their loss aversion, leaning against it, not listening to it.

58:08 Yeah, it's easy to do this in terms of business and stuff like that. We also do it in a lot of other areas of our life, though, too, right? A breakup hurts a lot more than getting into a new relationship feels good, right? I think that's a big one. I think there's a lot of people who are like, oh, I took this for granted, and then I lost it, and then all of a sudden you feel all this weight coming down on it.

58:28 That's loss aversion. You took the relationship for granted or something like that, and then... Once it's gone, then it hurts so much. That's loss aversion. That also is loss aversion. Or losing a job too. Just like you're saying, that's probably a good thing in this. You'll find a better job or there's more jobs out there, right?

58:45 Yeah, but it still feels worse. It stings more than it is any gain. And anybody will tell you this. Anybody who's acquired any sort of success will tell you this, that the losses hurt more than the gains. The gains are never as good as you think they're going to be. That's baked in. That's hardwired in.

58:58 And we can't get around it. I think probably the most interesting example of loss aversion that I found was there was a really interesting study done in 2011 on golfers. Great title of a paper. It's called, Is Tiger Woods Loss Averse? And basically it's these two guys, Pope and Schweitzer. They, they analyze two and a half million putts on the PGA tour, over 400 different pros, 239 tournaments.

59:23 It's actually a really interesting way that they set up the study. So, For people who don't play a lot of golf, there are things called birdies, which is kind of the equivalent of gaining a point. And then there are things called par, which is not losing a point. You stay at the same number. So you could view putting for a birdie as putting to gain a point.

59:45 And you could view putting for par as... putting to not lose a point. Not lose, okay, all right. So what these researchers did is that they took the exact same golf courses, they took putts of the exact same distance, same exact location, but different players in different circumstances, either birdie putts or par putts, And they analyzed all millions and millions of putts.

1:00:07 They analyzed the distance, location, direction, everything, apples to apples. And they found a significant difference in terms of the accuracy of birdie putts versus par putts. So birdie putts, they go in 83.5% of the time. Par putts go in 88% of the time. Which is crazy. Yeah. Like there shouldn't be any difference.

1:00:26 Right. Right? So you're saying, hold on. So you're saying like, let's say it's a birdie putt at 10 feet. Yes. And it's a par putt at 10 feet. In the same direction. Same direction, same spot, same everything. Yes. They're more likely to make the par putt than the birdie putt. Correct. Okay. Okay. Okay.

1:00:39 And the argument, the conclusion is that players are paying a lot more attention. They're much more focused. They take more time. They're much more diligent. They're much more careful with their swing. They're afraid to lose a stroke. They're afraid to lose. Okay. So they put more effort into the par putts than they do the birdie putts.

1:00:58 Interesting. And then that shows up in the result. Okay. So they're loss averse in that situation. They are loss averse. Okay. So what's interesting is that the loss aversion, it mellowed as the tournament went on. So like golf tournaments, they go on for four days usually. And the further you get into the tournament, you're no longer really playing against the course, which is what you do on day one.

1:01:21 You're playing against the other golfers. By day four, you know how many strokes behind you are the person in front of you, how many strokes ahead you are of the person behind you. And so what you see is the loss aversion stops showing up with birdie and par putts, and it starts showing up with their placement on the scoreboard.

1:01:38 Interesting. So the standard changes, the relevant metric changes, and their behavior changes because of that. Yes. And this is a nice little metaphor of... how we're gonna approach failure throughout this episode. Loss aversion never changes. What you are loss averse to changes based on your definition of failure.

1:01:57 So when the definition of failure is bogeying on a hole of golf, you experience loss aversion there. But when that definition of loss changes to falling behind the guy ranked behind you, then that becomes what you become loss averse to. Oh, interesting. Okay. That's fascinating. Okay. Okay. So that's, that's all well and good.

1:02:19 We don't want to fall behind the leaderboard in golf. We want the best treats that we can trade for all of that. Like, why does it hurt so bad when there really isn't anything being lost or like there's no physical damage, like physical pain makes sense, right? Yeah. And like damage. And like a golf game, right?

1:02:37 Like you lose a golf game, nobody died. Right. Like nobody's going to die, but like people get really upset. Right. Why? Yeah. Why do they do that, right? There's something inside of you that is treating that as some kind of injury of some sort, obviously. But what is that? Like- what is being injured throughout all of this, right?

1:02:55 Well, it turns out there was this researcher in the 90s, Mark Leary. He came up with this idea of what he calls the sociometer, right? And it's really what it is, is it's tracking your status within a social group. So, you know, in our evolutionary past, we grew up in these small groups and letting someone down, failing something, that actually, that had real stakes to it, right?

1:03:16 And so you would lose status. in that situation if you were to fail other people, especially in that situation. And losing status meant you could be left alone, which meant you could die, right? There was like real stakes involved with this. So it's not this like cold calculation that we're doing either.

1:03:34 It's, It's got to hurt. Yeah. It has to hurt for you to be motivated to not want to fail and not want to let other people down like this. Yeah. Again, this is what he called the sociometer. It comes back to the fact that like pain at the end of the day is an evolutionary tool. It's a nudge towards behavior that's going to help you survive and replicate or at least helped us survive and replicate for hundreds of thousands of years.

1:03:56 And so in this case, it's like, okay, even if it is an arbitrary game, even if it is just something. as simple as like who can carry the biggest rock or whatever in their caveman days stuff like that mattered because it indicated who was the most reliable who was going to help the tribe the most who could save your life when you needed it uh who could hunt the biggest game when it came down to it and then status began began to become attached to that and so we have this like internal measurement gage inside of our head at all time trying to gauge how much status do we have with the group And it happens like almost automatically too.

1:04:33 Even if you don't know the people around you, if there's any sense of there's a status thing going on, you latch onto that and you try to figure out exactly where you're sitting within that. which is really interesting set of studies that was done by Leary and others, too. That was they brought people into the lab and they had strangers were assigned to these meaningless groups.

1:04:54 There wasn't really any meaning to them, but they were told that they would either be included or excluded by the group. OK, just people would be like people are either going to accept you or deny you based on just some arbitrary criteria, whatever it was. Even that the people who you never met. Okay.

1:05:09 These are strangers. People had never met before. You'd never meet again. Tasks that you were doing within this group that didn't matter if you were excluded or included, like had a had an effect on how you felt about yourself in that situation. Yeah, that's how ingrained it is. And you could tell your status from that.

1:05:26 If you told them, if you told the people that this was just random, like your status is just decided randomly, it didn't matter. But if you said there's other people judging you based on this, people you didn't know, again, would never interact with again, doing tasks you never, that don't mean anything.

1:05:40 That's how innate it is. It's so funny. So have you ever, have you ever like volunteered for a psych study? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I used to do it in college a lot. Yeah. And I would do anything for 10 bucks back then. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And I remember I used to go in and it was always really funny because, yeah, they just put you in a room of strangers.

1:05:57 You have no idea what you're there for. You have no idea what you're going to do. Like, they come in and they ask you to do, like, some very random thing. And I'm just thinking back and imagining, like, walking into that room with, like, five or ten other people. And then having the researcher just look at me and be like, who here wants Mark to stay?

1:06:14 And, like, nobody raises their hand. I would be so fucking pissed. I would be like, fuck all you people. Fuck you. Who do you think you are? Right? And it could be who cares what the reason is for it, right? Like, it's just imagining that happening is enough to, like... Yeah, I can imagine the emotion that would come up.

1:06:34 Importantly, in these studies too, what they found is that it's really the exclusion. It's this loss aversion going on again, okay? Because when the same was true when you were included in the group, they found the people who were, yeah, oh yeah, you were accepted into the group and you're good. They felt fine.

1:06:51 They're like, okay, fine, whatever. It's when you're excluded that the pain really came in, that that was measurable and they got a measurable response from that, that people would just felt worse about themselves. That sociometer really took a hit only during the exclusions. It's a threat detection system.

1:07:05 It's not a bonus reward system or anything like that. You don't get to feel good because you get included. You only feel bad because you're excluded. It's loss aversion is what it is. But it's at the social level. Losing social status is really the measure that hurts the most. You know what this reminds me of?

1:07:22 You didn't go out to many nightclubs, did you? I was not a clubber. Good for you. Yeah. Good for you. The biggest waste of fucking time and money. Yeah. Ever. I went to way too many clubs. And a lot of nightclubs, especially in big cities like New York and London, they have a setup where it's like you have the VIP section, right, where you have to pay a ridiculous amount of money to basically sit at a table behind a velvet rope where it's just as loud and shitty as the people on the other side.

1:07:50 An arbitrary standard, yeah. It's completely arbitrary. And it was funny because I remember when I was young and broke and I used to go out to clubs all the time, You know, I would sit there. I'd be like one of the cattle herd, like crammed into the middle of the bar, waiting 20 minutes to get a drink.

1:08:05 And I would look over at the VIP area, and they all have their own waitresses, and the waitresses are super hot, and there's champagne bottles and sparklers and everything. I'd be like, man, it must be so cool to be in there. It'd be so much nicer, so much easier. You could talk to people. You can meet a bunch of girls.

1:08:22 And I used to think that for years in my early 20s. And then I remember once I got a little bit older and I got some money, I went out to a couple clubs, and I bought VIP tables for me and my friends. Yeah. I just remember sitting there and being like, this is so dumb. This is so fucking stupid. Exactly.

1:08:38 I just wasted so much money for nothing. Exactly. Nothing. Yeah. So getting included had almost zero benefit. Zero benefit. Yeah. Zero benefit. Being excluded hurt like hell. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly the sociometer's mechanism there. Yeah. And again, it just comes back to that whole loss aversion thing, like losing status with our evolutionarily ancient brains that we have.

1:09:00 That signaled literal death at one point in our evolutionary past, right? Yeah. It's just being kind of hijacked now in a lot of these situations. That's a perfect example of when it's being hijacked in a way that's screwing you over, basically. And there's a lot of places that... we'll mess with you you know different status games and um you know airlines do this right with their statuses and points and you know do you get the premium economy seat or did you get a free upgrade to like the you know special extra legroom seat you know and it's and people love it it really taps into something extremely primal in us yeah yeah it does even if it's super arbitrary like you're saying yeah So, yeah, there's another thing, too, like you've kind of been hinting at.

1:09:42 You can't really talk yourself out of this. Yeah. You can't reason your way out. Even if you know about it, it really doesn't change a whole lot. One of these studies that they did as well was they had participants. They would speak into a microphone and just talk about themselves. And then they received feedback from a quote-unquote stranger.

1:10:00 It was just the researchers, basically, that either accepted or rejected their stories. Like, this was a good story. This wasn't a bad story that you just told about yourself, right? Yeah. The rejected participants, they would dismiss these impressions. Whatever. These people, I don't care about these people.

1:10:15 It doesn't matter. Somebody I don't know. But when they measure their sociometer status kind of thing. How they felt about themselves. How they felt about themselves later, it actually still went down no matter what. Wow. Even if you had that self-talk, like we always say, oh, just screw them. They don't know what they're talking about.

1:10:30 It's like the comment section. Yeah, the comment section. Dude. It digs at you, doesn't it? It still digs at you. I mean, it's what... It's so funny because it's like, I know it doesn't matter, but it's like, it's still, it still just sucks. Yeah. Yeah. And you were like good feedback. You're like, oh, that's, that was nice.

1:10:46 Yeah, exactly. Like there'll be hundreds and hundreds of comments. But you'll hang on to that one. Right. And then one person like makes fun of my hair or my shoes or something. And I'm like, oh, fuck you. Joey Baloney, 648. Right. Yeah. What do you know? Yeah. People that you don't know will never interact with again.

1:11:01 Yeah. And arbitrary standards. Yeah. Yep. Fucking mammalian brain. Can't get away from it. Yeah. No. Well, exactly. You know, when somebody rejects us for something completely arbitrary, right? Like, and we're not actually losing it. You know, it's like we lose a golf game or we lose... you know, Joe Blow next to us that can carry a bigger rock or, you know, run faster than us.

1:11:23 Like, why do we feel so bad? Like, what is actually being harmed? It was funny because when you said that, the first thing that came to my mind was the ego. And it's interesting because if you actually go back to... Freud's theory. You know, we've done a whole episode on, on the ego unsolved. People can, can go back and listen to it.

1:11:42 The TLDR is that Freud's original theory about the ego has just been completely butchered over the years. And, and people have a very, almost like a cartoonish understanding of what, what the ego is. And, the purpose it serves us psychologically. The real understanding of the ego, Freud's actual explanation of what the ego is, ties in perfectly with the sociometer theory, right?

1:12:04 Like, Freud's argument is that we have two primary... incentives in our lives. One is our instinctual urges and just base drives. And then one is the culture and social influence around us, right? We want to satisfy our urges and needs. But we also want people to approve of us, people to like us, to have social status, to fit in the cultural norms, social norms, to be seen, you know, to be respected and admired and all those things.

1:12:35 And the ego is the self-definition that balances those two things. The ego is it is the. The bundle of narratives we tell about ourselves that exist to help us both get our fundamental needs met and satisfy our urges, but also do it in a way that doesn't make everybody hate us, doesn't get us kicked out of the tribe.

1:12:57 Yeah, I had a psychology professor explain it really well one time, I think. So you have your urges and your base desires and everything like that, and you have society's expectations on top of you. And then the ego comes in and says, wait, I have a plan. I thought that was a really good way to say what the ego is.

1:13:14 I got it, guys. I got this. But what's interesting about the ego is that it is we... protect it as if it's part of ourselves right like and when the ego is threatened or attacked we feel the same physiological response that we do if our body is threatened or attacked and so when we talk about failure failure of social status failure of like losing the respect and admiration of others It very much is a threat to the ego, right?

1:13:41 Because it is a threat to our self-understanding of how we feel about ourselves and how we see ourselves. And sure enough, you see this in the research as well. Like people will experience the pain of failure, even when they're alone by themselves, even when nobody's around and nobody can see what happened or what they're doing, right?

1:14:00 Like we still, even if you're alone in your room, trying to do a thing that you think is important, when you fail at it, you're going to feel like a loser. Yeah. And the reason is, is because that sociometer, it doesn't turn off when you're by yourself. It still exists within you. And you are always using it to gauge what your relative social status is to other people.

1:14:22 And even when you are doing things by yourself, you are still measuring your ability to do those things against that sociometer of like the standard that you have set for yourself based on the people around you, based on society at large, based on whatever culture you exist within. Now there's a word here that we've been dancing around, and I've intentionally wanted to dance around it, and that is self-esteem.

1:14:46 Like another way to think about what this internal sociometer is, is self-esteem. I mean, one day we'll do an episode on self-esteem. Oh, we definitely should. And we will talk about all of the ways that it got butchered and mangled over the decades. But it is, I think most people conceptualize self-esteem as something that exists independently and internally on your own, right?

1:15:09 Like when people say, oh, you just need to have better self-esteem or like, oh, we just need to improve her self-esteem. It is often said in a way that if you just felt good by yourself on your own, then everything would be fine. But the truth is, is that self-esteem is intimately connected to how you're seen by others, right?

1:15:31 Because ultimately, the way you feel about yourself is a response to how you predict other people are going to feel about you based on what you can do. So we're tying together a whole bundle of psychological concepts here. But the point is, is that... Failure hurts regardless of whether you actually lost something or not, whether it's a tangible thing you lost or just some abstract arbitrary measurement that you failed to live up to.

1:16:00 It hurts whether you agree with the people judging you or not. It hurts whether you're even with other people or not. And it hurts whether it even makes sense or not. And like you said, the reason it hurts in all these circumstances is because it identified as a threat prevention system, as a way to protect yourself and to keep you in good graces with the people around you and to keep you competent and living up to expectations that other people set for you and that you've set for yourself.

1:16:31 We still haven't defined failure yet. And a lot of that is because it doesn't really matter. What the definition of failure is. If you lost something. Either tangible or abstract. It's going to feel bad. No matter what. You could be fucking Steve Jobs. And you wake up. It's going to feel shitty. Right?

1:16:49 Warren Buffett wakes up. Sees he lost a bunch of money. It's going to feel really shitty. And it's going to feel worse. than making that same amount of money. It doesn't matter who you are, what situation you're in, how smart you are, how many ways you rationalize the importance of the failure, how many lessons you gain from the failure.

1:17:06 It is going to suck always, all the time. It's just fascinating. I don't know. kind of sick yeah it's cruel yeah it's really cruel like our minds are just set up to be kind of cruel to ourselves and it we we create these egos right and these egos are what is reflecting back on us that we that hurts us too like it's the target of our pain but it's also our own creation and it is the whole purpose of the ego is to be hurt right right because by being hurt the ego is signaling to us that our livelihood is under threat, right?

1:17:42 So we construct our egos. We create all these narratives about who we are and what we can do and who's going to like us and who's not going to like us so that all those narratives can fail us and be threatened so that we can get really upset and anxious and freak out so that we behave in more adaptable ways that promote our survival.

1:18:02 And I guess there's one or two ways you could look at that. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here, but That could either be the best realization you have of this whole episode. Yes. Or the worst, right? Depending on how you look at that. Yes. You have to define yourself in some way or another, right?

1:18:17 We covered that in the ego episode. You have to... pick some self-definition and whatever self-definition you choose is going to be the definition that fails at some point. And it is that failure that is evolutionarily useful because as soon as it fails, that is what motivates you to change your behavior and act differently in the future, which is of course your way of learning, right?

1:18:40 So the learning is generally it's going to happen, you know, unless there are times where you can kind of live in denial. Sure, sure. You know, Freud had his defense mechanisms, which I think, in many ways prevented learning. I think they were defined in such a way that it was like, there were ways that people protected their ego in a way that prevented them from having to learn, right?

1:19:00 So it's like, you, you develop a strong sense of denial, or you project your own flaws onto other people as a way to protect your ego. And because you're protecting your ego, your ego never gets harmed. And because it never gets harmed, you never have to learn and grow This comes back to the fact that it's just like growth is fundamentally rooted in pain.

1:19:22 Failure is inevitable. No matter how you define your goals, your aims, your identity, you are choosing the future ways in which you are going to fail. And so the game is not necessarily learning from failure because as long as you're just honest about failure, that's going to happen anyway. The game is not avoiding failure because that's impossible.

1:19:43 The game is choosing the right goals and identity so that you have good failures. So that pain is worth it. Yeah. Okay. Right? So a very crude example, if I define myself as a family man, right? That is a self-definition that I'm going to fail at at some point. Yeah. And each time I fail at that, I'm probably going to...

1:20:09 become better in my relationships, become more loving, better with intimacy, better with communication, and become a better family man. If I define myself as a meth head, I'm setting myself up for a series of failures that are not going to help me very much. I'm being very inefficient in sourcing meth in downtown LA right now.

1:20:29 Whereas if you define yourself as a family man... That pain is very informative and will guide you along the way into becoming closer in line with your values or what you actually want to be. And something that's very chosen and intentional. Correct. Okay. Before we can even talk about growing from failure, which we will talk about that towards the end of the episode, we have to talk about...

1:20:51 What are we, how are we defining ourselves? Because the way we define ourselves defines what our failures are going to be. Right? Right. I'm not a golfer, so I don't give a shit if I miss a par putt. Tiger Woods probably gives a lot of shit if he misses a par putt, right? So for me, it's not a failure.

1:21:09 I don't care. Right. Tiger Woods, it's like, it probably feels life or death to him at certain points. Yeah. I brought this up several times in the change episode. I kept saying, you know, pain is a great teacher. And I think this is a little bit where rubber hits the road with it. Pay attention to what's causing you pain.

1:21:30 And if you like dig underneath of it, I think we're going to talk about this a lot going forward. But if you dig underneath of that, is that pain worth it? Is that pain really what, like the family man versus the meth head, right? Which one of those pains is a better pain to have? Yes. Like, I think that's what I was trying to get at.

1:21:43 What would you rather fail at? That's kind of what I was trying to get at in the change episode. Like pain is a great teacher. Like, listen to it. Don't, don't avoid it. Cause the chapter of my book is called failure is the way forward. And this is why that just feels very surface level, you know, at this point, because it's, yeah, it is the way forward, but it's, it's the way forward for what?

1:22:03 Right. Okay. Like if, if you are failing at something that is a waste of your time, it's probably good. You're failing. You probably don't want to move forward. And you see this a lot. Like we're going to talk about quitting later and what the difference is between quitting being a success and quitting something being a failure.

1:22:20 And I think a lot of it has to do with understanding, like, is something worth failing at? Is something worth failing? pursuing in the first place because if it's not worth pursuing in the first place then failure like failing at that thing is a good thing you should i should hope that i'm not very good at being a method okay I would hope so too.

1:22:42 Unfortunately, I'm prodigious at acquiring meth on the streets of LA. I just appear to be like Isaac Newton. And yet here you are. Yet here I am talking to you. What are some good ways that you define failure for yourself throughout your life? And what are some bad ways? Professionally speaking, I guess I haven't been fired from really any jobs that I think of, but I've definitely failed.

1:23:10 Not yet. Yeah. Right. We'll talk about that. But when I have like, I've gone into something and I didn't, it just didn't work or I quit. You know, I left grad school. Like I've talked about that plenty of times before. I never saw that as a failure. I did really see that as, Oh, uh, The pain I was experiencing during that was pain I really didn't want.

1:23:30 So I'm getting the hell out. Yeah. So I think that was a healthy way to see it. Every time that I have, though, like an unhealthy way to see it has always been it's someone else's standard or someone else's definition that I have not lived up to. And I probably felt that sting that we're talking about, the sociometer sting.

1:23:47 Yeah. And not really paid attention to why and just felt bad and just externalized all of it, thought that I was just a failure and... Like, how can I live up to this, that, the other thing? It was always some external standard usually that I was failing to live up to. I think that's a big difference for me anyway.

1:24:04 I don't know. I definitely relate to that. When I think about it, I think about my early dating and relationships. I was very superficial in that I viewed my success at dating really just in terms of how many... women I went out with and how many I hooked up with. And what eventually happened, and I wrote about this in my dating book many years ago, what eventually happened is I realized that I was putting so much time and effort into pursuing women that I didn't even actually enjoy being around.

1:24:34 It was because of what you're saying. It's like I had kind of downloaded this lame cultural script of what a successful dating life as a young man was. and I was trying to live up to that, regardless of how much I actually enjoyed the company of the women I was seeing. And as soon as I flipped the standard of success from, I guess, hooking up with lots of girls to like, being happy and enjoying the women I spend time with, it completely changed everything, right?

1:25:07 And then it changed the nature of the failure, right? So it was like, before, if I went on a date with a woman and she didn't call me back, that felt like a catastrophic evaluation of my worth as an individual. Whereas like when I shifted the metric to just like having a happy, good relationship with somebody and I went on a date with a woman and she didn't call me back, it was like, oh, well I guess we wouldn't have been happy together.

1:25:36 Good thing she didn't call me back, right? Like it's no longer a failure. Like texting her a million times and like manipulating her to go back out with me would have been the failure. Because it would have made us both miserable. Right. And some people would say, oh, you're diluting yourself and you're inflating your own ego or whatever.

1:25:53 And you're diluting yourself. Well, you're diluting yourself either way. Yes. Right. There's a delusion on either direction. On every vector. You may as well choose the one where it's telling you a better story and giving you a better outcome and is aligned with what you actually want. Not what other people are telling you and all of those arbitrary standards that you're putting on yourself.

1:26:13 You just make yourself miserable. Yeah. And it's, I think that the point that came up in the research too, is that you're going to feel bad when other people judge you, whether you agree with them or not, whether you even care about them or not, it's just going to feel bad no matter what. So you might as well pick the thing that's going to make you happy anyway.

1:26:31 Right? Like you're going to get criticized no matter what you do. So you might as well do what's best for you. Yeah. No, that's totally true. I guess I get that. Like, um... I don't know if I, I don't get a lot of overt signals, like from my family, you know, like I'm not, I'm not married. I'm in my forties.

1:26:46 I'm not married. I don't have kids and all that kind of stuff. And I come from a pretty traditional family. Newly single ladies. Well, talk about a failure. the world i don't know if we have time in this podcast another episode that's another episode i see that too because i will tell myself i'm like well i don't care what they think and it's like i actually do you do but when i sit down and think about it i'm like not but i'm still okay even though that that it kind of gets at me a little bit i'm like i'm still okay with like my choices and the way i've done this and Yeah.

1:27:19 It's funny because, yeah, things like that, they never stop getting to you. It's like the comments, right? I get asked all the time by younger influencers, creators. They're like, when do you stop caring about it? I'm like, you never stop. Yeah. You just get better at it. Yeah. It's like public speaking, right?

1:27:33 You never stop being nervous before you go speak in front of an audience. It doesn't bother you as much as time goes on. You get desensitized to it. Yeah. I think that's more of what happens. Yeah, I think that's where I'm at with it too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, believe it or not, we're going to go even deeper on this, which is way deeper than I think anybody asked for when they started this episode.

1:27:55 But this is why we're here. Let's get weird. We go way too deep and get weird. Yeah. So in the next chapter, what I'd like listeners to do is think about. One of the largest failures that they have experienced in the last few years. And take a moment and think about what are the assumptions or yardsticks that they are using to measure that failure?

1:28:20 Like what's the underlying assumption or value that defines that failure? In many cases, I think people... don't realize that they didn't actually accept the terms of their failure. Like they just kind of inherited it from the people around them. So that's the first thing I want them to do. But then I want them, as we go into the next chapter and we start talking a little bit more deeply about This identity stuff and how we're measuring ourselves and the ego and where all this stuff comes from in the first place.

1:28:58 And does any of it matter? I want them to keep that in mind as we work through it. So as you know, for many months, we've been joking about doing an episode on religion, religion solved. And surprisingly, a lot of people in the audience have encouraged us to do it. So this next chapter, it's going to be we're going to dip our toe in the water and we're not going to get religious, but we are going to use two of the world's most prominent religions as a way of of investigating how we define failure and how we define ourselves in the first place.

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1:31:54 That's code SOLVED for up to 20% off home and sleepwear. And if you see a post-purchase survey, please be sure to mention that you heard about Cozy Earth right here. So we have now managed to get two hours into a podcast about failure without actually defining failure. And there is actually a very good reason for this, which is that failure is completely relative.

1:32:18 It's failure compared to what, right? What is the standard or expectation that you're setting that is defining your failure? So it is actually difficult to define failure without first... looking at the standards and expectations we set for ourselves. And it turns out that those standards and expectations are very deeply linked with how we see who we are.

1:32:42 And the best vehicle to explain this phenomenon and this experience that we all have, I actually think is... one of the most popular religions in the world, which is Buddhism. I'm going to tell briefly the story of the Buddha again. I'm going to tell it with a little bit of a twist in a way that I think will help us understand failure and loss on a deeper, more profound level.

1:33:06 So for people who don't know... The Buddha was born a prince to a very wealthy family. And the Buddha's father was apparently a very bold and ambitious man. And when his son was born, he decided that he wanted to create an environment that his son would never know lack. would never know pain, would never know loss, would never know failure.

1:33:28 And so he contrived everything in his son's environment to fulfill every wish, every desire. So supposedly, as the myth goes, as the Buddha grew up, he never wanted for anything. Anything he wanted at any time, it was immediately given to him. And he never had to deal with any problem. He never had to take responsibility for any struggle, any outcome.

1:33:51 Everything was just... easy peasy lemon breezy now interestingly this became very dissatisfying for him i think he probably intuited once he became an adult that this was kind of an empty life like it was just this hedonic treadmill of indulgences and and ever escalating novelty and at a certain point he decided that he wanted to actually experience the world And so late one night, he snuck out of the palace and he encounters four different people that all of them shock him.

1:34:20 So the first one is an aging and withered old man. He had never seen somebody old before, and this kind of freaked him out. The second thing he saw was a deeply sick person, someone riddled with disease and deeply suffering because of it. The third thing he saw was a corpse on the side of the road. He had never seen anybody who was dead before.

1:34:41 And then the last thing he saw was a wandering ascetic, which was at the time, it was a monk that gave away all possessions and just kind of wandered around, took a vow of poverty, I suppose. Now, all these things completely shocked him. Like he had never been exposed to anything like this in his life.

1:34:57 And it kind of gave him a wake up call. And he realized, you know what? I got to get out into the world. I need to learn and understand everything that's going on that I haven't been exposed to before. Yeah. So soon after, he planned to exit the palace for good. He had a wife and a child. He left them in the middle of the night without saying goodbye to them.

1:35:16 And he decided to wander the wilderness as an ascetic himself. He gave up all possessions. He took a vow of poverty. He supposedly lived on like a single peanut each day. He basically... intensely suffered intentionally for an extended period of time. Intentionally suffering isn't really satisfying either.

1:35:41 It's just kind of another form of indulgence, just, you know, with a different flavor, I suppose. And so eventually he came to the conclusion that like, this wasn't really leading anywhere either. And so that's when he went and sat underneath the Bodhi tree and he decided that he was not going to get up until he had a better idea.

1:35:58 And that's when he became enlightened. I find this story interesting because earlier we were talking about kind of the Hegelian dialectic, the thesis, the antithesis, the synthesis. I think we could look at the Buddhist story of kind of an example of that dialectic at work, right? So you have this prince who's born into a life of luxury.

1:36:17 He has zero problems, zero failures, right? That's kind of our natural instinct is to avoid any loss or failure. That is not satisfying because you don't grow. You don't have accountability for anything. You don't have any repercussions for anything. You never have to change. And that's not living. That's not a life.

1:36:35 Right. So he becomes dissatisfied with that. And then he goes to the other extreme, which is he seeks out failure. He seeks out pain. He seeks out loss. And he tries to indulge and optimize that. that suffering to achieve some degree of enlightenment or self-empowerment. And he realizes that too is a dead end.

1:36:55 That is just another form of self-indulgence, and it is also an unhealthy relationship with failure and loss. And so the synthesis that he arrives at, I guess you could say under the Bodhi tree, is that Everything is a sense of loss. Everything is an eventual failure. Because the moment you attach yourself to any thought, any desire, any identification, you are defining the terms of your future failure.

1:37:25 Because nothing lasts, and because nothing lasts, anything that you attach yourself to is destined to fail you at some point. From a Buddhist perspective, every time you say, I am, and then finish the sentence, you are committing a very subtle act of self-harm because you are setting the standards and expectations by which you're going to measure yourself.

1:37:45 And by definition, every measurement and standard you set for yourself is one day going to fail you. So as soon as you define yourself in any way, shape, or form, you are also defining the terms of your future failures. So in this sense, failure is not only inevitable, it is inevitable. fundamental part of our consciousness and the way we experience the world.

1:38:08 Now, the Buddhist response to this is that you just shouldn't define yourself at all, that you should let go of all attachments, all standards, all expectations. And this is a pretty radical idea. I mean, this ultimately is the realization that the Buddha came to sitting underneath the Bodhi tree and became the foundational premise of philosophy of Buddhism.

1:38:30 But I do think there is a lot of wisdom in that, of at least defining yourself extremely loosely and not being too invested or too attached to any single definition of self. Because the more invested you are in any definition of self, the more you bank your self-esteem or how you feel about yourself on any single narrow definition, the more vulnerable you're making yourself.

1:38:52 for when the eventual failures do occur i'm not really going to recommend that everybody goes full buddhist and just like sits in a corner and stares at a wall and tries to let go relinquish every single form of identification and attachment in their lives i don't think that's necessarily practical in 2026 But I do think it's an incredibly important principle to understand.

1:39:19 And I think as a mental exercise, it is useful for people to kind of explore this idea that a lot of their self-definition and a lot of the... Standards and expectations that they've invited into their lives are completely arbitrary, are completely self-defined, and don't necessarily need to exist. Like you can kind of just stop measuring yourself in certain ways, technically, whenever you want.

1:39:44 Right. Okay. So you're advocating for Buddhism light? Yes. It kind of sounds like a diet Buddhism. So this kind of leads to the four noble truths of Buddhism, right? Like the first noble truth being life is suffering or some sort of dissatisfaction that's just inherent in life. The second noble truth, I think, was that we create a lot of that suffering, though, too.

1:40:02 And this is kind of what you're getting at, is that these attachments that we have or these identities that we identify with or these things that we call ourselves, that creates some sort of inevitable future failure that you're talking about that will generate more suffering for us if we hold on to them so tightly.

1:40:20 So you're not advocating necessarily going and sitting under the Bodhi tree and reaching full enlightenment. Although if you can, great, right? But just being aware of that, being aware of those attachments and the failures they're setting you up for is something that can be useful for us because we can not attach to them so tightly if we're more aware of them.

1:40:41 Is that what you're saying? Whenever we pursue something or we're interested in something, I think we're psychologically predisposed to only see the upside of the success of that thing. while we tend to ignore the inevitable failure of that thing. The inherent inevitable failure. Okay, yeah. And what's funny too is like, I think it's really important for the listener to get this too.

1:41:01 Like this isn't just about trying to achieve something and failing. Like it's not like... like trying to lose some weight and not quite losing it. Like sometimes the failure is precipitated by succeeding at the thing, right? So like, let's say I want to become a parent and I want to, I want to parent a child.

1:41:19 Well, if I parent successfully, I'm going to raise a healthy independent adult who's no longer going to need me around anymore, which it means like being a successful parent means you no longer have to parent somebody. So, so even success can hold the seeds of failure. Correct. And you're just kind of screwed either way.

1:41:35 Correct. Yeah. Okay. And this is like, and I mean, this is what is so powerful about the first noble truth is like everything is impermanent. Every single thing. Nothing lasts. Everything goes away at some point and it goes away whether you succeed at it, it goes away whether you fail at it, it goes away no matter what.

1:41:53 So anything you attach yourself to, anything you define yourself by- you are tacitly signing up for the thing that is going to eventually disappoint you or the thing that you're eventually going to grieve. I mean, that sounds kind of dark and sad, but like it's inevitable, right? So it's not necessarily a sad thing.

1:42:14 So the question then becomes what is worth doing even though you know you will probably lose it one day, right? It is, I think for many people, it's like being a parent is worth it, even though they understand that one day they're not going to be a parent anymore. I think about this, you know, with marriage, right?

1:42:31 There is going to come a day where either my wife or I die before the other one, right? And it's still worth doing, though, even though you know that that is going to eventually happen. It becomes a very useful compass for people to think about what they invest themselves into, right? Because, you know, last chapter, we both gave some examples of like very superficial things that we pursued really just to kind of like win a little bit of status and approval from others and how empty that is.

1:42:58 I think this is kind of the rubric for how do you pursue something that is really worthwhile over the long run? You know, the third noble truth is that it is possible to escape suffering, right? Even if you lose something, even if you fail at it. And then the fourth noble truth is how you do that. The eightfold path, what they call this is how you live to in order to do that.

1:43:21 Again, what you're saying is you don't have to sit under the Bodhi tree. Yes. And become enlightened to do that. Is this what they mean by I'm kind of becoming an amateur Buddhist? Okay. I've been looking into it before this episode even started. Yeah. Is this what they mean by the middle way? I don't know if I completely understand the middle way in Buddhism.

1:43:37 Do you know about this at all? It's very similar. It's very Aristotelian. It's like any pursuit, you will kind of naturally be... There's a magnetic pull towards either extreme. There's always a tendency of you should try to go out and make all the money, or you should just never not care about money at all.

1:43:56 Where it's like, actually, the way of non-attachment is... understanding that money matters, but it's also not everything. Right. So there's always kind of this. Okay. The virtue is found in the balance. That's the Aristotelian view. But in the Buddhist view, it's the middle way, which is. Yes. How you become non-attached is seeing both of those simultaneously.

1:44:14 Yeah. And we talked about this a little bit in the values episode where it is. Yeah. Actually, a highly functional person, you have a almost like a balance of power of values within you. Like you have this tension between all the different things that you value in your life and you often have to make compromises between them.

1:44:33 Whereas like an unhealthy individual is when one value kind of takes over and becomes a tyrant and unlocks. Every other value or thing of importance has to be sacrificed to that single value. Like that's, that's where dysfunction comes from. That's where imbalance comes from. And, and Aristotle would say that would, that would mean living unvirtuously.

1:44:52 And then a Buddhist would say that you have become attached to, to something and, and. And that is the root of your suffering as a result. Right. Okay. There's kind of two other principles that I think are worth touching on that kind of flow out of this idea that failure is an inevitable side effect of just setting standards or expectations for yourself.

1:45:10 So the first one is that failure is relative and it's relational. There's never just failure in a vacuum. It's always failure compared to what? What is the expectation or standard that you have set? And then what is the gap between what happened and that outcome? I think everybody has had a series of these experiences throughout their lives where like something has happened to you and it initially felt like a failure because it didn't meet the expectation you had in that moment.

1:45:40 But then as you kind of processed it and thought about it, you suddenly realized like, wait, this is actually a really good thing. Oh, I'm actually glad this happened. This isn't a failure at all, right? Like we've all had that experience before. I think one of the most profound and world-changing versions of this was...

1:45:56 Alexander Fleming. So Fleming was a biologist and he was studying bacterial cultures and he went on vacation. He accidentally forgot to seal some of the bacteria that he was studying. And so I guess the Petri dishes became overgrown with mold while he was gone. So when he came back, the specimens that he was studying were ruined by a bunch of mold.

1:46:19 And so by the standard of a biologist studying bacteria, he had actually failed spectacularly. He had destroyed... dozens of samples by leaving them out and not protecting them appropriately. But what he noticed after he kind of cleaned everything up is he noticed that where the mold was, bacteria wouldn't grow in its place.

1:46:37 And this eventually led to the discovery of penicillin, which is... derived from a form of mold. And penicillin has arguably gone on and saved probably more lives than maybe almost anything. The first antibiotic, yeah. It's the first antibiotic. I mean, it's like saved hundreds of millions of lives, maybe even a billion lives, who knows?

1:46:55 And this was discovered as a failure. It was a form of failure. But if you move the goalposts, it's actually one of the greatest successes in human history. this sort of stuff happens everywhere. I mean, I see it like in our business, this industry, podcasting, online content, media, everything, it is changing so fast.

1:47:13 I mean, how many times do I change our business strategy? Yeah. By the end of the month, I'm not even sure what we're measuring anymore. Sometimes, yeah, because we have to. Yeah, sometimes I feel bad for the team. I feel like the team gets whiplash because it's like every other quarter. I'm like, OK, guys, we're changing everything.

1:47:30 We're going to look at something completely different now. But what happens so often is it's like you define standards and expectations for the quarter for the year. And then you get to June and you're like, oh, this actually isn't what we should be optimizing for anymore. Yeah. We need to change our definition of success, and that means we need to change our downstream strategy.

1:47:49 And you run into this in romantic relationships as well. I would say the majority of fights within a romantic relationship is the downstream result of either two people having different expectations about certain things or one person fighting. failing to shift their expectations about something based on new evidence or a new experience.

1:48:10 So failure is inevitable. Failure is relative and relational. And the last one is that failure is therefore arbitrary. It is a made-up concept. The idea that Alexander Fleming failed as a biologist is a completely made-up definition. The idea that a golfer failed because he missed a putt is completely made up.

1:48:30 Putting a ball in a hole 400 yards away, like this is a completely arbitrary construct that a bunch of people came together and just agreed was important. And it's not real. Back to the Buddhist view, it is illusory. Everything is illusory, right? It's like... this podcast success is illusory, right?

1:48:50 Whether we get a quarter of a million downloads or half a million downloads or a million downloads, whether that is success or failure, it's an arbitrary number that we make up. And we make it up so that we can either feel good or bad about it. what we did and what happened. At any moment, we can decide to measure success in a different way and then feel differently about ourselves.

1:49:11 And so this raises the question of like, if you are feeling like a failure in your life, if you are feeling like you are consistently failing to measure up to some standard or expectation, where did that standard or expectation come from? When did you adopt it? Like who says that you have to have it?

1:49:31 You don't. Right? Like I think we adopt so many of our standards without realizing that we adopted them. And then we have them for so long, we assume that they are capital T true. When really it's just another arbitrary narrative that we decided to identify with. Yeah. Yeah. You see this all the time, right?

1:49:52 Like people are, oh my God, I'm like 35 and I haven't bought a home yet. Or, and it was like, okay, what, what standard are you, you should have a home by 35 or whatever it is, you know? Are you measuring yourself by like the boomers who could just houses were practically handed out on a street corner?

1:50:07 Or are you measuring yourself by 21st century standards where there's not enough homes anywhere? Right. So it's like, what are you measuring by? It's just kind of like the water we swim in, though, a lot of times. Right. We're just like, this is what people do. And so we do it. Not realizing that just that's setting us up for a lot of that suffering and anguish that the Buddhists talk about.

1:50:24 Like you're attaching to something and you don't even know what you're attaching to. If you choose something and you fail by it, that's one thing. But when it's just kind of handed to you and you're just doing it blindly, that's kind of another level of suffering too, I think. I do want to note one thing though, because what we are talking about right now, I think is...

1:50:40 a very profound realization for people when they first have it, you know, whether it's when they go to therapy or, you know, when they meditate for the first time or whatever, like the first time you kind of realize this of like, oh my God, I bought into all these scripts without really realizing I bought into them and they are arbitrary and I don't have to accept them.

1:50:58 It is a very, very powerful personal experience that I think most people go through. There's a little bit of pushback I want to put out there, which is that once people realize this, there's a tendency to think, well, we can just define anything however we want, right? Like we can, don't tell me what tall means or what rich means or what poor means.

1:51:20 Like I can just decide what anything means myself and then you can't tell me whether I'm right or wrong. So while that is philosophically true, I think for a society to function well and a culture to be beneficial for the majority of people within it, people do have to come together and agree on some terms and definitions.

1:51:40 If everybody has a different definition of everything, then you can't coordinate. And if you can't coordinate, then you don't get the benefits of... being a social species, right? You don't get all the good things that come with being part of a larger social group. So again, from my amateurish Buddhist understanding, I think they address this as well.

1:52:01 They distinguish between the relative and the ultimate, I think is what they call it. They're just different names for it. But the relative is like the world that we have to navigate and live within and try to be in harmony with one another. And that's kind of what you're talking about. There's actually, hold on, you know, you can't just be making up all the rules all the time.

1:52:17 We all have to agree on a few things. That's what they call the relative relationship. kind of this human world that we have to interact with each other. Whereas the ultimate, like you're saying, the philosophical truth is actually, no, these are all arbitrary and made up. And there's a recognition of that.

1:52:30 I think, again, that kind of comes back to that middle way though, recognizing both. Again, this is my amateur Buddhist understanding. I think that's accurate. And I think a good example of this is imagine there's a golf tournament with a bunch of PGA pros and all the PGA pros come together and they're like, you know what, this whole golf thing, it's totally made up.

1:52:47 I'm going to change the definition of a birdie. I'm going to change the definition of a driver. I'm going to change the definition of a sand track. This isn't a par four, it's a par six. Yeah, it's like every individual golfer is like, well, you can't tell me what a birdie is. I have my own definition.

1:52:59 You can't invalidate my truth. It's like, okay, well, now the golf game means nothing. Right. You you completely you've like destroyed the entire activity because there is no definitional agreement across like what certain terms are. You don't want to be so attached that you forget that this is all just a bunch of made up stuff and you don't necessarily have to buy into everything.

1:53:20 But at the same time, you can't just tell the world to fuck off and imagine anything that's true for yourself. Anything you feel like is true for yourself is true. that's not really going to be helpful either. That's a form of attachment itself, right? It's attachment to yourself. Right. Attachment to your own definitions.

1:53:39 Yeah. To kind of wrap this all up, if I had to define what failure is, I would say really what we do is we define success as an arbitrary and temporary arrangement of certain standards and circumstances. And then failure is just the moment that reality fails to live up to that circumstantial arrangement.

1:54:01 And on a long enough timeline, the failure rate of everything is 100%. So there is no arrangement of circumstances that you or I could imagine that will... Always exist. Western psychology, too, has also kind of come to the same conclusion around this whole attaching to identity thing and all that. But when it comes to like well-being, for instance, Jennifer Crocker back in the 2000s, she came up with this idea of like self-worth and identity.

1:54:32 The moment that you decide your worth depends on any domain in your life. Again, it's kind of like that attachment. That is just setting you up for where the failure is going to be the most destructive in your life, right? So if you say my job is the thing that, you know, that defines myself worth the most or my relationship or whatever it is, you know, my whatever hobby you have or whatever.

1:54:53 talent or anything like that that's going to be kind of the ground zero for any sort of like damage or any sort of uh threat to that is going to hurt the most uh and the more you you you double down on one or you single out one area of your life or anything like that the more risk you're setting yourself up for you actually wrote an article about this a long time ago right that um diversify your identity diversify your identity right yeah right The identity side, too, there's other researchers who clear back in the 80s, like they were thinking about this, too.

1:55:23 Like if you define yourself through fewer and more concentrated roles, the blast zone for any of those when it does get inevitably does get blown up. These people, they suffer more from like anxiety, depression, all the well-being metrics you can think of basically. Yeah. concentrating your identity or your self-worth in any one of these areas is going to lead to catastrophe 100% of the time at some point.

1:55:48 There's a tendency to, for people to be like, we'll just succeed at it all the time then. Well, again, there's an inevitability of the impermanence of it at some point. These like fixed labels even too, maybe it's not a domain in your life, but it's just a trait that you have. Like I'm talented, I'm smart, I'm beautiful, whatever it is, right?

1:56:06 Any one of those is going to fail you at some point and attaching too hard to them The Western psychology bears this out, too. It took them a couple thousand years to catch up to the Buddhists, but they figured it out, too. So if we haven't lost all the people yet who got turned off by the religion, just know that there's actually some science behind it, too.

1:56:22 We still have a chance to lose them here. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. Yeah. Oh, for sure. Because we're not done with the religion yet. But yeah, but if you think about this, though, like you could even put all three of these together. Like think of somebody who is like nothing but their job title. Right.

1:56:35 And so they stick their self-worth on that domain, whatever they're in finance or they're in, you know, whatever. They identify with that so much, too. Like that's their identity. And they believe that their talent or their intelligence or whatever is what makes all of that possible for them. What happens when they get fired or there's a market crash?

1:56:52 You remember seeing this back in like 2008, right? The financial crash, like people committed suicide. Right. Every, yeah. Every massive market crash, there's a bunch of Wall Street guys that off themselves. Yeah. That's their sole identity. They based it on their intelligence that I'm a really smart person.

1:57:07 So I'm going to go into finance and I'm going to stake my whole identity. I'm a finance guy and I make a lot of money. That's who I am. That's an obvious example, but it happens all the time. Yeah, there was an interesting news story about a guy who killed himself in New York a number of years ago. And I remember reading about it.

1:57:24 And I think this is like, because everybody hears that there's always a bunch of Wall Street people that end up committing suicide after a financial crash. And I think that's what they don't realize is that people in finance, it's not just the money. In a lot of cases, it's their sense of competence.

1:57:40 It's their sense of self-worth. But... People don't understand that if you're a really successful guy in finance, you're not just investing your own money. You're not just investing your company's money. You're investing your family's money. You're investing your friend's money. You're investing your neighbor's money.

1:57:55 That literally is your identity. It is your identity. To all those people, those people, that's what they see me as. Right. And it's like if the market starts crashing, it's like the guy across the street's banging on your door being like... Did you get out in time? Did you get out of time? And if you lost everything right now, you have to go to all those people you love and care about in your life and tell them that you lost all of their savings.

1:58:14 Yeah. So for us to sit here and say, well, I would never do that. Well, we don't have your identity wrapped up like they did. Yeah. Okay. But have you ever done this? Have you ever sticked your identity on too much? I feel like you're, you kind of spread out quite a bit. Are there certain things? I don't know.

1:58:30 I don't think I'm very diversified. Oh, you don't? Okay. I don't. Okay. I don't. Yeah, I'm definitely more focused these days. I think when I was younger, maybe it was a little more diversified. But yeah, these days, dude, I'm becoming so boring and repetitive. I work. I hang out with the same five people.

1:58:48 hang out with my wife and I play some video games. Like that's kind of it. Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of, that's kind of all I've got. So if one of those legs got knocked out. Oh yeah. I mean, you would be devastated. You think? I know I haven't done anything and I don't think I will do anything that could potentially get me canceled, but like, Oh yeah.

1:59:06 You know, if, if I got canceled, if my career got massively jeopardized, yeah, it would be, it would be a deep, deep cut. Yeah. For sure. Like there's a lot of my identity. Yeah. I bet. Well, and there's a lot, a lot of people depend on you too. Yes. I can sympathize with that. I could definitely see that.

1:59:24 Yeah. I don't know. I feel like as I get older, I've, I've loosened a lot of those. I've talked about this before. Like I've always, I had that identity as like, oh, I wanted to be the smart guy. That was kind of like me getting out of certain situations. Like being smart is going to get me out of these situations and it'll get me things that I need.

1:59:37 And you know, satisfy some of those basic needs that I had. And that worked for a long time, but then I started to see it fail. And I think luckily I kind of like have slowly loosened my grip on that. It used to be like any slight to my intelligence. I took it very, very personally. Right. And that's another thing you'll see with somebody who over identifies with something is that they take it everything very personally around that domain.

1:59:58 I still have plenty of attachments. Sure. We're going to talk later about what are good things to identify with, like what are good failures to sign up for. And I think that's an example of a bad failure to sign up for because it is based on metrics outside of yourself, right? Like you're, you're, you're essentially basing your...

2:00:16 how you view yourself on the perceptions of others or the ability of others. It came into stark contrast too. Like when I go to grad school and everybody's smart around you, that doesn't mean anything anymore at that point. So you're like, well, I got to find something else, I guess. I had the same experience in music school.

2:00:33 Yeah. Oh, right. Yeah. It was my whole identity when I was a teenager. And then I went to music school and I was just... Yeah, everybody's talented. Everybody. And half the guys in my class were so much better than I was. And it just, man, it was a brutal hit to the ego. Like I said, I feel like I have fewer and fewer identities.

2:00:50 Maybe it's because I'm an amateur Buddhist too. There you go. You are getting pretty deep down the meditation rabbit hole. Oh man, we'll get into that. So if we haven't lost... everybody with the religious talk yet. There's still time, Drew. There's still time to fail in this chapter. I want to pivot to Christianity because I think there are some really interesting concepts in Christianity that...

2:01:15 I have a lot to say about failure and the management of failure and atoning for failures. As an atheist, I personally would characterize Christianity as a very efficient atonement technology or set of practices. The same way I think Buddhism is a set of practices to loosen the... the ties of identity and like loosen that identification with things.

2:01:39 I've come to appreciate Christianity as, as a set of practices to help one manage the inevitable fallout of our failures and, and disappointments. Okay. I'm interested to see where you go with this. So I actually want to start with the definition of sin. So, I mean, as we've talked on this podcast before, I grew up in the church.

2:01:59 I grew up going to church all the time. Yeah, same. Very, very familiar with the Bible. One of the concepts I always hated when I was younger was this concept of original sin, which is this idea in Christianity that... People are born sinful and you can only be redeemed by coming to Jesus and asking for forgiveness.

2:02:18 As a teenager, I thought this was the most fucked up thing that you could tell people. You're essentially telling people that there's something inherently wrong with them and there's nothing you can do to fix it other than pray to God and pray to Jesus. And yeah, I think on one level that is probably not the best message to be disseminating.

2:02:36 It is... Well, let's just say it's a little culty. But as I've gotten older and I've done a little bit of a deeper research into some of these things, and especially prepping for this episode, I came across some things that made me think about original sin in a little bit of a different way. So the first thing is that I think the popular contemporary idea of sin is that you did something wrong, that you are a bad person, right?

2:03:04 Like we think of sin, like if I say the word sin, What do you think of? I've like, you know, fornication and stealing something. Yeah. Yeah. They hit it like violence, hitting somebody. Murder. Like, yeah, all the horrible things that people do. Yeah. Like I almost equate it. It's like it's like crime essentially.

2:03:21 Right. Right. What's interesting is that sen, if you look at the origins of the word sen, it actually, it comes from an ancient Greek word that was used in archery. And the word sen was the word that described an arrow that missed the bullseye. So like the gap, I guess that gap in which you missed, that was the sen, right?

2:03:46 It didn't hit where you were aiming. Exactly. So it is... Interestingly, the origination of the word sin is much more attuned and aligned with the idea of failure or missing expectations of trying to live up to some sort of standard or outcome and just falling short. And so the idea of original sin, if you take all the things we just discussed about Buddhism, that no matter how you define yourself, you are also defining your future failures.

2:04:15 You're defining all of the standards and outcomes that you're going to fail to live up to. and how that's inevitable and unavoidable and there's nothing you can do about it because it is just an ingrained piece of your psychology, you could call that original sin, right? It's like we are all born with this sense of self that we can never fully live up to.

2:04:36 The only way to atone for that is through some radical form of self-forgiveness. That understanding... of Christianity, I was like, oh. It's a little more palatable. Tell me more. OK, OK. This is way more interesting. I think the backbone of Christian theology, there is a very manipulative culty way of looking at it, which is kind of what I described earlier.

2:04:58 But I also think there is kind of a profound psychological way of looking at it as well, which is that we are all hampered with this kind of inherent sense of guilt and shame of the fact that we We'll never be able to fully live up to the standards we set for ourselves, that no matter what we pursue in our lives, it is going to slip through our fingers at some point, that the failure rate of everything is 100%.

2:05:25 It is always going to be difficult to deal with that and wrestle with that. Whether or not anything is our fault, we are always going to wrestle with certain feelings of guilt and shame around that. And what is the cleanser of guilt and shame? It is a radical form of compassion and forgiveness for ourselves.

2:05:44 If Buddhism nailed the psychological explanation of why we struggle so much with feelings of inadequacy and anxiety and failure and doubt and all these things, I think Christianity nailed the solution, right? Which is kind of this radical self-compassion or this radical self-forgiveness. What's also super interesting about Christianity is that it has this baked-in mechanism of confession.

2:06:10 Which I guess in some ways you could say it was like the predecessor of therapy, of talk therapy. Yeah. Yeah. Which I never really thought about before until we worked on this episode. I was like, huh. Interesting. We didn't just invent therapy out of nowhere. Like we've actually, the church has been doing this for like 2,000 years.

2:06:27 There's a funny story around confession, which is that Martin Luther, the... the guy who kicked off the Reformation, apparently he was such a neurotic mess. He was a monk in a monastery in Erfurt in the early 1500s when he was younger. And apparently he was such a neurotic, self-loathing mess that he would catalog and document all of his failings with such minute detail that his confessions would often last up to six months.

2:06:58 five, six, seven hours at a time. And it got to the point where like every thought that he had that was wrong, every like minute, tiny mistake that like eventually one of the confessors, one of the priests like pulled him aside and was like, look, man, you don't really have any problems. Like, he's like, I'm talking to people who like fucking killed somebody, like cheated on their wives.

2:07:22 You're coming in and telling me that you feel bad because like the rice was undercooked last night. You know, like it's, they had a little bit of a come to Jesus moment, no pun intended, of like, of like, dude, you don't really have any problems. You're kind of just making this shit up and you're abusing yourself.

2:07:40 I don't remember exactly what the confessor told him, but there is a great line in there about how forgiveness is not merely this external thing that happens to you. It is part of it is learning to develop a tolerance and an understanding of your own shortcomings. So if you think of confession in terms of being a technique or even a technology, right, for alleviating the guilt and shame of failure.

2:08:06 I think there's actually a really interesting kind of scientific explanation for this. And I'd put therapy in the same category, which if you go back to the sociometer theory that we talked about last chapter, right, that we are, there's like something innate within each of us that we are always subconsciously measuring ourselves as.

2:08:22 and how much value we have relative to the tribe. And that a lot of what we experience as our self-esteem is a reflection of that sociometer, right? If you fail at something and then you go talk to somebody else about it, one of two things is going to happen, and maybe both. First thing that's going to happen is if that person listens to you, empathizes with you, and accepts you despite your failure, then...

2:08:49 That probably repairs your sociometer. It reassures you of like, okay, I have not lost status with the tribe. I'm not a total loser. I'm not going to get kicked out tomorrow. Thank God. I'm okay. The second thing it can do is that it can alert you... to whether you had an unhealthy or an inaccurate expectation or outcome that you were working towards, right?

2:09:13 Because if you think about like part of the value of therapy or just talking to anybody is the empathy that you get, right? That there is a certain amount of healing in that. But another aspect of it is like beating yourself up over something and then you go talk to somebody and they're like, well...

2:09:29 Why are you beating yourself up over that? Like, why is that success to you? That doesn't make sense. My definition is completely different. Goes back to the definitions. Right. And then you hear their definition. You're like, oh, I was being crazy. This is like, that's completely off base. I should have seen it this way the entire time.

2:09:45 So I think the magic of what Freud called the talking cure, I think, is largely... It's a combination of both of those things. It is seeing that you are not going to be socially punished, that you're not being ostracized, and then also having the ability to recalibrate your expectations in such a way that the failure maybe doesn't look like such a failure anymore.

2:10:09 Again, if we haven't lost the people who are turned off by the religion, that bears out in the psychological research as well. And you're right. You've made the parallel with therapy. That's exactly what it does. And then it's not only that, but just disclosure in general. Any distressful event, maybe it's not a failure, just anything that's bothering you and getting it out there.

2:10:29 it seems to have some sort of beneficial effect all across the board. And it's not just catharsis. It's not just getting it off your chest, too. There is some form of processing, which is exactly what you're talking about. Like there has to you can't just vent to somebody like venting is fine. Sure. But there there has to be some sort of like processing that happens with it.

2:10:48 Penny Baker back in the 90s, he did all this research on this and did this whole meta analysis around it and kind of like basically the form of the confessional. where you have an audience and it's not, you're not just doing it to yourself. Journaling is good. Processing on your own is good, but actually putting it out there precisely because of what you're talking about.

2:11:06 Like that sociometer theory that we have. It's like we have to, in our minds, put ourselves back into the group and be okay and accept it in some way. When you think about this, a friend comes to you and they're like, oh man, I feel awful about this. Usually what you're like, you're like, dude, like, Take it easy on yourself.

2:11:22 And that has a lot of reparative effects that we've seen. There's also the cost of like not disclosing things too. If we keep all of that in, you end up doing it. That's where the rumination often comes in, right? That's where the open loops stay open and you can't quite close them. And so there's always that going on in the background of your mind.

2:11:42 There's a physical aspect to it too. Body keeps the score. Vessel van der Kolk, a lot of that is real. There's all sorts of effects of not disclosing versus disclosing. Again, though, it's not just the catharsis. There's got to be a processing element to it. From what I recall, a lot of Pinabaker's research on journaling in particular found that journaling was most beneficial when you specifically journaled about something that bothered you.

2:12:10 Like you couldn't just sit down and just dump all your thoughts and ideas. I mean, I'm sure there's some value in that, but like it was specifically when you journaled about some issue in your life that was really eating at you. That is when you saw the benefits of it. And it wasn't just the facts of what's eating you too, but the emotions and the integration between the facts and the emotions.

2:12:29 This is what happened. That's a very important part of it. This is how I felt about it. And then there were continued, if you did it over several sessions too, and the story developed over time and you were able to integrate it and tell a more coherent story over time about that, that helped a lot too.

2:12:42 You can do that a lot better with someone else. And I think that's why therapy works for some people, for a lot of people around something that you can, you can tell a coherent story about and eventually make sense of both the factual and the emotional side of it. So, yeah. In the case of confession and the church.

2:12:58 The power is that radical forgiveness, right? It's like you go sit with the priest or whatever. You tell the priest all the awful things that you've done. The priest consoles you, reassures you, and says, you're forgiven. God still loves you. Jesus loves you. Whatever, right? There's probably some sort of cleansing effect that comes with that.

2:13:19 It's closure to it, yeah. The other thing that I thought about while you were talking is when we hold things in, They seem to kind of drift and they drift into like irrational areas. And it's only by like saying it out loud. I mean, I, I, I'm sure you've had this experience a million times, right? Where it's like, you've thought, you've like thought something, you're really anxious about something.

2:13:43 And then you like, just go to say it out loud. And as soon as the words come out of your mouth, you're like, wow, I'm being ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like what's really interesting about that too, is that they, they do find that the, the listener in that situation, if they have two qualities, it tends to do the best as well.

2:14:01 One of them is compassion, which you've already said. The other one is being assertive though, too. So this, I have a, I have a friend in particular when I am thinking those kinds of like crazy thoughts or whatever, I'll call her up and she's like, she'll sit and listen. And then she'll immediately come back to me and be like, what are you like?

2:14:15 This is why this is crazy. So there's a compassionate, and this is the confessional is set up like this, like priests were there. They were trained to be like this, be compassionate, know that we're all sinners, quote unquote sinners. Right. But then also they have a code by which they live and they say, this is, this is how you should go about it.

2:14:31 So there's an assertiveness to it as well. So you're, you're absolutely right. Like, it's like, yeah, getting out loud, you might hear it yourself, but someone else could reflect back to you how crazy it is too, and be assertive enough where they can be like, look, I get where you're coming from, but at the same time too, you're being fucking stupid.

2:14:46 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like that's actually very, very valuable. So it's not, again, it's not just catharsis and getting it out there. Right. There's some sort of reflection and, and processing that has to happen around it. Yeah. I remember I met a woman years ago and I remember she came up to me after an event once, this was like a kind of a business event.

2:15:05 Yeah. And she told me that she really wanted to start a family, but she felt like she couldn't until she was professionally and financially secure. And she was just afraid that she was going to run out of time. And this, it was a conference with like a lot of successful people. So I was just, and I kind of looked at it.

2:15:20 I'm like, you're probably fine. Like in my head, I'm like, she's probably fine. So I was like, okay, when would you be financially and professionally successful enough to, to be able to comfortably have a child? Yeah. Where's your standard? Where's your definition here? And her definition was a million dollars a year.

2:15:34 Okay. Okay. She thought that was bare minimum. Okay. To like raise a kid. To raise a kid. Okay. And it's always tough because you like, you don't want to like laugh in people's faces. But you know, I remember I was like, okay, that's interesting. Why, why a million? And then she started going through all the reasons.

2:15:49 She was like, well, you know, either my husband and I would, we'd want to quit working. We'd want to have a nanny. We'd want to like go to a private school, like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, okay, everything you just described like that you're maybe at like 300k, maybe at most, like if you're in a, really expensive neighborhood.

2:16:05 Where's this other 700K coming from? Like, I actually tried to do the math with her and it just kept coming up so short. I told her, I was like, it's clear that this is, there's a lot of fear here and you are... overcompensating with an extremely large number in your head and you were defining success as this absurdly large number to compensate for that irrational fear that's going on.

2:16:28 I was like, where do you think that fear is coming from? And sure enough, it turned out she grew up very poor and was like, you know, father went broke when she was young and the family, you know, like lived in a car for a couple months and had... this like torrid story from her past. And I was like, got it.

2:16:45 Okay. That's so it's the extremity of the number is, is it's proportional to your internal emotions. It's not, it has nothing to do with the spreadsheet. I was like, first of all, that's completely understandable given where you come from, but you should listen to this spreadsheet. Yeah. That's an arbitrary standard she adopted without knowing it.

2:17:08 Yeah, that's crazy. And so yeah, reflecting it back to somebody and hopefully seeing it right in front of your face. It was funny too, because I remember asking her, I was like, how many people do you know who have had kids and don't make a million dollars a year? And she was like, oh, everybody. Yeah, 100%.

2:17:21 And I was like, how many of those kids are fine? And she was just kind of like, oh yeah, good point. Right. Yeah. But it's funny. I mean, your brain plays tricks with you, right? And it's coming back to that Buddhist point of the attachments, right? You know, it's like that attachment is probably deep seated in her from a very young age of like this intense anxiety around money and an overcompensation around money.

2:17:47 And it's probably been there for so long that she like forgets that it's there. She doesn't realize, you know, people don't really talk about money a whole lot. So like she doesn't have people to measure herself against, or maybe she only hangs around people who are super rich. And so her measurement of what's acceptable is like gotten completely out of whack and she doesn't realize it because she's not confessing.

2:18:09 you can get attached to independence. You can get attached to non-attachment even too, right? Yes. Like that's always one of my favorite ones that I point out in myself sometimes. And it goes kind of similar to that story. Like when I was growing up, I just realized so many different situations where it's like, oh, I'm on my own.

2:18:23 And so like independence became a value of mine or like a standard by which I measured a lot of my life. And then I see it start failing as I get older too. That's another one. Like with the being smart thing and the independence thing, then it starts failing you too at some point. when I was younger and I was really into Buddhism and meditation, I started to notice that.

2:18:41 So some of, some of the retreat centers and stuff that I used to go to, like the, the hardcore regulars, There was a little bit of a status game among them, right? You know, so you kind of hang out with these people after a retreat and, you know, they'd be like bragging about the month of silence that they did or how they were meditating three hours a day or whatever.

2:18:58 And, you know, it just kind of became another dick measuring contest to see who was going to get enlightened first. And I'm like, this is just the same thing. Like, this is another version of attachment. I just heard this. I think this is the term used for that. Zen stink. Isn't that what they call it?

2:19:13 Zen stink. I think it is where it's like, oh, look at how quickly I'm becoming enlightened or on the path to enlightenment or whatever it is. Yeah. They call it Zen stink. But it's a real problem. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. It's, I mean, and it goes back to like the sociometer follows you everywhere. It is human nature to, no matter what environment you put yourself in.

2:19:35 You will start measuring yourself against the people in your environment. Your brain is a big comparison machine. It is. Basically, it's what it is. Yeah. Yeah. No matter what it is. No matter what the comparison is. So at the end of the last chapter, I asked the listener to think about a major recent failure and kind of consider where they got the definition of that being a failure.

2:19:55 I think with this chapter... Really what to think is, first, where did that definition of failure come from? Did it come from themselves? Did it come from somebody outside of them? Were they aware that they were accepting that definition, that expectation? And then I think the second piece would be, what is their mechanism for finding atonement or finding compassion or forgiveness for that failure.

2:20:16 Who have they shared their feelings with? And if they have shared the failure with somebody, I'm curious if they ended up finding out that their expectation or their metric was maybe a little bit out of whack, a little bit irrational. But the point of all of this is that failure is inevitable. Failure is relative and relational.

2:20:37 And failure is arbitrary. It's self-defined. But it's also guaranteed. It's a structural, fundamental part of our psychological machinery. It is the inherent price that we pay for caring about anything, for pursuing anything, which I think makes us land with a much better question than we probably started this episode with, which is that it's not about how to fail less.