- I'm really excited for
today's episode, Drew. I think this is gonna be a ton of fun. As you know, we get hundreds, thousands of questions, millions of questions all the time from readers and listeners asking, what do you think about X? What do you think about morning routines? What do you think about saunas? What do you think about meditation, affirmation, manifestation? Enter whatever you want under X. And so we're gonna play a game today, overrated, underrated. And we're gonna go through things that you see influencers,
and authors, and scientists, always recommending the people to be happier or more productive. I'm gonna give my opinion on whether it's overrated or underrated. And I've got some really
cool printouts here. So we've got the Nicholas Cage underrated 'cause, I mean, what is Nicholas Cage if he's not underrated? If you don't believe
Nick Cage is underrated, go watch "Leaving Las Vegas." We've got the Will Ferrell overrated. And he's very upset in this picture. And then finally, we've got the, it depends. (Drew laughs) This is gonna be a fun one. Hopefully, I don't upset
too many snowflakes in the audience when I shit all over their favorite personal development, habit, or practice. - A hundred percent chance
that's gonna happen. - Do you have your
biohazard suit on, Drew? Are you ready for this? The pure toxicity is about to begin. - [Announcer] The podcast
that's saving the world one fewer fuck at a time. It's "The Subtle Art of
Not Giving a F*ck" Podcast with your host Mark Manson. - Oh, I'm ready for it. I don't know. We'll see how this goes. But yeah, I got a stack of cards here. They're random. I don't know. I don't
know what the order is. We're just gonna machine
gun right through them. - Okay. - Are you ready? - Let's do it. - Goals. - Hmm. Overrated. That's not gonna surprise you. We have a very popular article on the website called
"Goals are Overrated." That's not to say that
they're not valuable. Goals are definitely valuable. But I think people mistake what the value of the goal is. The value of the goal is
that it gets you motivated to go do something, and it gets you pointed
in a particular direction. The goal itself isn't what's valuable. If I decide I wanna lose 20
pounds this year or whatever, the 20 pounds doesn't really matter. What matters is, am I exercising? Am I eating better? Am I drinking water? Am I taking care of myself? And if I lose 16 pounds instead of 20, that's still great. Or let's say I lose 10 and then I realize, like, well
20 is probably unrealistic. It turns out actually I
need to add muscle mass. So I'm gonna up my gym workouts, and I'm gonna drop that goal, and I'm gonna set a new goal now that I have new information based on pursuing the first goal. I think people get too
attached to the goal. They're like, "Well, I can't quit now 'cause I got halfway there." It's like, no, you can
quit anytime you want. You quit. The second the goal stops
being the optimal thing for you to do, that's when you quit and you set a new goal. So I actually think you
shouldn't be achieving all of your goals. You should be quitting
a significant percentage of your goals, but you should also be
setting a good amount of goals regularly, completely understanding that at least half of
them you're not gonna hit or nor should you hit. - Yeah, I think you said
it best with Derek Sivers. You said your goals should serve you not the other way around. That kind of just sums
up what you just said and that, for me, I was like, yes. That's what we all need
to think about when we sat and worked towards goals, is let them serve you. - And this is why I didn't run
the marathon on my birthday. I instead ate a marathon of tacos and no regrets. - You gotta do a follow-up
episode on that, Mark. I'm interested to hear more about that and your decision around that. - We'll get to that. We'll do the six-month goal episode. - Okay, here's a good one, self-care. - Okay. It depends. Philosophically, I think the concept of self-care is good. You need to carve out space in your life to take care of yourself. You need to know how to set boundaries and give yourself a break. That is very, very true. What bugs me is what passes for self-care is usually
just self-indulgence. It's like spa weekends every other month, or spending your savings on
a three-month trip to Europe 'cause it' #SelfCare. It just the way it gets portrayed online, it really does not look good. It looks like really
narcissistic self-indulgence. So the concept is good. There are important lessons around it. But the way it's practiced
and promoted online, it just makes me wanna puke sometimes. - The one I saw recently was bed rotting. Have you seen that one? - No. What is that? - I guess you just stay in bed all day and you order Uber Eats, like the worst food imaginable, and just sit in your bed and pick out. And that's a form of self-care.
- How is that self-care? Like there's nothing caring about that. I mean, at least the massage
is arguably good for you. Don't even get me started on this. I went on "The Drew Barrymore Show." They did an episode on self-care. I went on and my whole thing was like, "This is all bullshit. Real self-care is paying
your credit card bills. Real self-care is waking up on time. Real self-care is going to the gym when you don't want to go." Self-care is doing things for yourself that are good for yourself. That is what self-care is. And most things that are good for yourself are not necessarily pleasant. It's not enjoyment. It's not indulgence. It's not eating pizza
at a four-star resort. It's like taking care of yourself. And I think what people don't
realize is that the burnout that they feel like they need
to escape to self-care for, that burnout wouldn't exist
if they just took care of themselves a little bit each day. - Yeah, definitely. So one thing around exercise that I've found is I treat it more is like that's my self-care, and sometimes I don't wanna do it. - A hundred percent. - But I see it-
- A hundred percent. - Like this is self-care. I know it's gonna make me feel better and make me happier in the long run, even if I don't wanna do it right now. - A message that needs to get shared more is
self-discipline is self-love. The way you love yourself is
almost parenting yourself. It's like forcing
yourself to do the things that you don't feel like doing, but are good for you, that are in your best interest, that are gonna set you
up for long-term success. That is the way you love
yourself is by being disciplined, is by doing the things that you don't necessarily
feel like doing. Laying in bed, eating pizza all day, that is not self-love. That is self-indulgence. That is being a child. Sorry, not sorry.
- Yeah, for sure. For real. Oh, good one. Romance. - Romance. That's easy. Overrated. So much relationship advice, particularly women's
relationship advice revolves around maximizing romance
or optimizing for romance. Romance, don't get me wrong, it's nice and especially in like a
long-term committed relationship, once you've been together
for seven or eight years. It's nice to be able to turn on the romance every now and then. Go on like a nice little getaway, get the honeymoon suite
in Vegas for a weekend. But overall, I think romance
derails more relationships than it rails, no pun intended. (both laughing) - Oh, that's a good one. - I think a lot of people have a tendency to mistake romance for love itself. They mistake romance for
things like respect or trust. They mistake romance for a healthy, thriving relationship when actually some of the things that maximize romance are
completely unhealthy and toxic. You can have a very dramatic and toxic relationship that
has a lot of romance in it because you're writing the
emotional ups and downs. So romance for me is an easy overrated. There's an article on the website called
"Love is Not Enough." I advise everybody who may be triggered by this answer to go check those out. - What do you think about like
certain situations, though? Like maybe romance needs
to be injected back into some areas. I don't know. Especially with the
whole online dating thing and the apps and everything. It's like you meet somebody up for a drink or coffee or whatever and that's it. It's like, go to a fancy dinner, get dressed up, go for it. - Yeah. I mean, look, there
should be some romance. It's just that romance is the supplement. It's not the main thing. Especially in the first year, there should be a lot of romance. There should be like a
lot of juices flowing, no pun intended. I've been with my wife for 12 years. Romance is definitely a
practice that you have to... I mean, we've reached a
stage in our relationship where it's like we kind
of have to plan romance otherwise it doesn't happen organically past a certain point. And it's nice to plan it. I think it's important. It's nice to have those moments, but again, it's the icing on the cake. It's the cherry on the cupcake. It's not the cake itself. - Yeah, we do a lot of
stupid things for romance. We sacrifice a lot of ourselves. We sacrifice some of our
values just for romance. I would agree with this one. - Totally. There's actually an old article on the website called
"Romance is like Alcohol." The whole piece is basically
just a bunch of sentences that if you replace the
word romance with alcohol, it still makes sense. Basically, all of your
worst decisions were made while on romance. (Mark laughs) - Well, it's, you quit alcohol and it sounds like you've
quit romance too, Mark. - No, no, no, no. I'm an old romantic, Drew. How did you not know that? (Drew laughs) Sparkling water, the cold moonlight. Nothing gets better. - Sparkling water. - Okay. I was gonna say sparkling wine, but I don't drink anymore. So next one. - Next one, okay. Oh, friendship. - Oh, underrated, underrated. This is another easy one. We actually just did an
entire podcast on friendship, particularly adult friendship. And I think we ended
that podcast discussing actually just this thing
that we just talked about, how people tend to overestimate
their romantic relationships and underestimate their friendships. I think just the most stark example of this is that if you
look at mental health data and happiness data of
people who are single, they're generally happy
and healthy as a cohort. If you look at people who
don't have any friends, they're horribly unhealthy as a cohort. In fact, there's a statistic
that gets passed around a lot that says that social
isolation is just as adverse for your health as smoking
15 cigarettes a day, which is shocking. You wouldn't assume that that being alone and not seeing people is as bad for you as smoking almost a pack a day, but statistically, it is. - Yeah. I think you can also feel very alone in a romantic relationship
when it gets sour. I think it's hard to feel alone even halfway decent friends around you. - True. I mean, it's almost like the definition of friendship is not
feeling alone with somebody. - [Drew] Ah, yeah, yeah. - Quote that shit. Put that shit on Instagram. Let's go. - That's what we're going for. We're going for quotable shit today here. Share, like let's go. - Yeah, we're going
for Instagram virality. That's what we're optimizing
on today's podcast. This episode is sponsored
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a two week free trial, but as one of my podcast listeners, you get a whole month for free. So go to listening.com/idgaf or use the checkout code idgaf. - All right, next one. Therapy. - Ooh, the mother of all interventions. This one depends. In aggregate over a large population, it has one of the highest hit
rates for the most people, but it doesn't work for everybody. And even the people it works for, it doesn't work forever. But what's difficult about
therapy is that so much of it really seems to depend
on the quality of the therapist and your personal relationship
with the therapist. One of the most maddening
things about therapy is that there are dozens
and dozens of modalities and philosophies around therapy. And if you look around enough, you'll hear all sorts of
arguments of why CBT's the best. or DBT, or psychodynamic,
or psychoanalysis. Really, when you look at
the data behind everything, none of that shit matters. What it really comes down to is, is the therapist good and empathetic? Do they listen well? Do they respond well? Do they ask pointed and useful questions in a nonjudgmental way? Do they not insert their own values and beliefs aggressively? Are there incentives straight? I didn't dig into this research, but I saw somebody post
recently on a substack. They said that in a meta-analysis, they found that the best
therapists are produced 10 times the outcomes of the average therapist. So the very best
therapists are responsible for like 90% of the results, and the worst therapists
actually make people worse on average. There is a small minority of people who get worse in therapy, but A, it never gets talked
about or acknowledged because I think it's just
therapy is under-attended in society, and so people don't want to talk about how it doesn't work all the time, or it can actually make
things worse occasionally. But two, I think the complicated thing with therapy is that when
it makes things worse, you aren't aware it's making you worse. It's unclear that you're getting worse. In fact, in a lot of cases, you feel like you're getting better, but you're actually getting worse. So therapy is a complicated one. I think it's really, really important. I get people in my personal life come to me all the time saying, "I'm looking to get therapy. What advice do you have?" The advice I always give them is this, completely disregard the
background, credentials, and school of thought. Just fuck it. Think really hard about what
type of therapist is going, think about the problems
that you're facing, and then think about the type of therapist that you think will understand
what you're going through. And you'll actually see this, like there are therapists that... There's LGBTQ therapists who
specialize in LGBTQ people. There are couples therapists, therapists that specialize
in relationship problems. There are therapists who
particularly specialize in anxiety problems. So look more towards like the
subject matter that they tend to specialize in, but also just look at
who they are as a person. Like if you are 22-year-old guy with a lot of sexual insecurities, I don't know, maybe think about finding a
male therapist who can relate to your sexual insecurities or go the other way and find like a 70-year-old woman who has no idea what your
sexual insecurities are like and are is going to give you a
completely objective opinion. So just think hard about that. And then the second thing
I tell people is I say, don't just jump in with the
first therapist you talk to. Like most therapists will give you a free or discounted consultation, like a first session. Try out two or three or four and see how you vibe with them, see if you feel like you're
being heard, and understood, and that empathized with, and that you're not just signing up for the first person who comes along. I think that's very important. - They have a whole bunch
of therapist friends and they will back this up. They're like, "It's all about fit." They don't want to take on people who don't fit well either. That's a big thing too. They're not just in it for the money. I know a lot of people
think that's what it is, but they don't want
anybody who's a bad fit. They don't wanna want
anybody they can't help. They're not hurting for work either. So it's one of those things. - I think the other thing
too is that people need to... Again, about setting expectations. You'll get as much out of
therapy as you put into it. - That was the other thing I
was gonna say. Yeah, for sure. - These people are not superhuman. They can't just magically mind read and pull insights out of your brain. You have to go in there
willing to dig deep and share and think hard about your life, think about uncomfortable things, ask questions about yourself. And ideally, carry those
questions into your life. I remember my therapist, we would have like a
very deep conversation and he would ask me a
lot of difficult things that confused me on the spot. But then over the course of the week, I would continue to think about them, and I would slowly develop insights over a number of days. And then I'd come back
into the next session and I'd be like, "So I really
thought about that question and I had a few ideas." And then we would pick up from there. And so it's like the work
continues outside of the office and then you bring it back with you. And the best therapist will
tell you when you're done. That's the last thing is the
best therapist will be like, "It seems like you don't
have whole lot to talk about. Maybe we just end this now." - One too, the one I really like, she told me, she's like, "Look, we don't have to resolve
every little thing here." And I was like, "Fuck yes, thank you." - That's true too. - Like, "Yeah, Thank you for saying that." She's like, "You realize that, right?" I'm like, "Yes, okay." Oh, purpose, I believe like finding
purpose in your life. - Hmm. Depends. I think it depends. 10 years ago, I would've said underrated. I think today, it depends. You should have some sense
of purpose in your life, but not everything in your life is gonna feel
purposeful all the time. You're still gonna have
to do a lot of shit that feels unimportant and it's not fun to do. And I think at some point in the last 5 or 10 years, that got lost a little bit. I wrote an article, I
think, back in 2015, 2016 called "Screw Finding Your Passion," which is basically this
argument that you don't have to love every minute of your job or every minute of everything you do. And in fact, trying to optimize that is probably actually
making yourself miserable. There's a lot of bullshit in life. There's a lot of bureaucratic
nonsense, headaches. You gotta do the dishes, and take out the trash, and file your taxes. We all have to do this shit, and it's not going to feel purposeful or meaningful most of
the time and that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. So I would say it depends. I would say if you are underweighted in purpose in your life, if you feel you have no
purpose in your life, then it's crucially important. But if you do feel like you have a sense of purpose in your life, but you're trying to make
everything seem meaningful and purposeful, then you're probably overdoing it. - Yeah, I think when
you're overdoing it too, you tend to... Like, if everything
revolves around your purpose and everything in your
life is going towards that, you miss out on a lot of just
simple pleasures in life, or not even pleasures. - Yes.
- Just like, I don't know, I'll find myself in standing
in line being super bored and then just be like, "Oh
my God, it's like I'm alive." Just something like that.
And there's no purpose to it. There's no deeper meaning
that has to be there. - It's almost like the
inane things are actually in a way more profound for that reason. I might be a little bit
sensitive to this as well because this is one of
my gripes about LA is that you'll go to a dinner
here on the west side and you'll be having a perfectly fine, normal conversation with a group of people and then somebody will
interrupt everything and they're like, "Let's go around and state our intentions for the evening. Let's all say something that
we're grateful for this week. And I'm like, "Can we just eat food and fucking talk like normal people? Does everything have to be
optimized all the time?" - You're gonna piss off
the Californians again. - I did not get canceled for that episode, so I'm gonna keep working on it. - Okay, okay. We'll get you there. We'll get you there. - We'll get there. - One of these is gonna happen. Ooh, maybe this one will. Maybe this one. Dancing/music. - Underrated. - Okay. All right. - I'm biased on this one. So really interesting
meta-analysis came out like a month ago, and I posted about it on social media, I don't think we've talked about it. The meta-analysis looked at
physical activity as it relates to depression and mental wellbeing. And what it found was that
over a large population, over a long period of time, simple physical activity
is just as effective as pharmaceutical intervention. Now, that's not to say that
it's just as good for everybody as a pharmaceutical intervention, but it's fascinating
that such a simple, free, available 24/7 intervention
as something as simple as walking around the block
can have as much of an impact as like pharmaceutical that
we've spent tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars on. But what was interesting
about that meta-analysis is that it broke it down
by physical activity. And you know what was
at the top of that list? Fucking dancing which is
kind of not surprising. It's impossible to dance and be unhappy and I don't know why that is completely, but I've never seen an
unhappy person dance. I mean, I haven't seen you dance, Drew. - I was just gonna say
you should see me dance. I'm usually crying by the end of it. (Mark laughs) - I hate this. (both laughing) Seriously, if you imagine
somebody who's like dancing and like really into dancing, it is impossible to not elevate
your mood while dancing. So I think that's really interesting. And I also think a lot of under-discussed data around music and the positive mental and emotional benefits that music brings. It helps a lot of people with focus. It helps a lot of people with happiness. It helps a lot of people
with ADHD symptoms. Music really enriches
people's life quite a bit. I mean, it's one of those
things like people kind of know intuitively, but like you'll see a YouTube video or a book like drawn on for 20 pages about the importance of gratitude and writing in your journal, which we'll get to those in a minute. Nobody's like just put
on a really good song and go outside and dance in your backyard. That's probably gonna
accomplish something. It sounds silly and stupid. - It sounds a little new agey, Mark. I don't know. - It's the California in me. It's happening - Now, I did recently see
there's been some pushback against that study. People have have kind of
taken it to task a little bit, and I think some of the results
might have been overblown. I don't know. I haven't
dug into it very much so I won't get too far into it. but a psych study overblown. - No. - Getting up and moving and
dancing is not gonna hurt. I will tell you that right now. Like, obviously, I'm just not sure if it's as impactful as they said it was, but we will see. - It probably is not, but it's free and easy and you can do it anytime. - I still think it's underrated. Yes, yeah. - Yeah. This podcast is powered by One Skin because, let's be honest, aging sneaks up on you. And if you want to age like a
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the checkout code idgaf. - All right, politics. - Ooh. Overrated. I completely match the
expression on his face as soon as this topic comes up. We're like, what, 20
episodes into this show? Something like that. I think one of the most poignant things that was said on this show was
when we had David Brooks on when he said that our culture
is in a crisis of connection and a large percentage
of people have tried to fill that void with
politics and it's not working. I think the thing that is
damaging about politics is that it creates unrealistic expectations of what should be the case in the world and what could be the case in the world. I used to be very much
wrapped up in politics when I was younger. And I think as I've gotten older, I've backed off quite
a bit for two reasons. One is just I'm old enough to see how wrong everybody is
about everything constantly. I'm old enough to like reserve judgment and be like like,
"Maybe, let's wait a year before we decide who's on
the right side of this issue and who's on the wrong side." But also, I think I've
just intuitively understood like how big and messy society
is in human systems are and how imperfect they're
gonna be no matter what. And so if you kind of
naively bang your head against the wall, expecting this one solution's
gonna solve everything, you're just setting yourself
up for disappointment. A, because that solution's
probably never gonna pass into law and B, even if it does, it's not gonna work so you're gonna be incredibly
disappointed at that too. I think politics, it's become almost kind of a drug, it's become like reality
TV for the masses. And I don't think that's a
healthy way to govern a society. I don't think it's a healthy
way for people to find purpose and meaning in their lives, to bring back the purpose piece. I think you need to find
something more localized and something more in your control to feel meaning and purpose. And I think people just need to revise their expectations drastically, both in terms of what is possible and also what is plausible. That's like take any issue. I'm not gonna pick a single one. Any issue. You can name any issue across the board and it is so much more complicated and nuanced than 99% of the
discourse you see about it. And it just feels like people don't want to dig into that nuance. They just want to get angry and yell at each other. Again, to bring it back
to like psych data, mental health, wellbeing, the data around news consumption
is absolutely horrifying. I mean, if you want to depress
yourself as soon as possible, maybe the most effective way is to like start a drug
habit and watch news 24/7. Those are probably the
two most effective ways to ruin your life and ruin your happiness. One thing that I started
doing during the pandemic, which in hindsight is like one of the best decisions I ever made, I stopped watching news and instead I replaced that
information consumption with history. So instead of like watching and reading news every day about what the new thing
was happening in Europe or the UK or whatever, I went and bought books about previous pandemics and plagues. I went and bought books about previous constitutional
crises in the United States. I went and bought books about
the cholera plague in 1793 and what George Washington
did to handle it, and why nobody believed him and nobody wanted to stay home either. And you start to realize
that none of these problems that we have in society are new or particularly novel or unique, and none of them cause the
end of the world to happen. So take a chill pill. - Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, most people, if they know any history at all, it's all from like World War II forward and that's it, right? That's all they know.
- It's that at this point. - Moving along. Journaling. - I'm gonna do depends, but I'm gonna do it 'cause I think it's
probably properly rated. I think people value
journaling quite a bit and I think it is genuinely helpful. There are a lot of interventions or practices that have
very real downsides. There's like potential
for abuse or misuse. I think journaling is probably
one of the safest things that you can do that is probably gonna be
net positive 99% of the time. It's not always gonna be super useful. There have definitely
been times in my life that I've journaled and I'm
like, "I don't really feel like I'm getting a whole lot out of it," but there are other times in
my life that I've journaled that I'm like, "God, this is so helpful." Just like getting your
thoughts on the paper, getting clarity around the stuff that you're thinking and feeling, being able to go back and look at stuff that you wrote like four or five years ago, seeing the stuff you were
concerned about at the time, seeing how far you've come. I think it's all really, really useful. So thumbs up on journaling. And I think I would
say it's properly rated because people understand
the benefits of it, but you don't see this
hype in like hysteria around journaling that you
do around some other things that I'm sure we're gonna get to. - Yeah. For one, I think it's harder so people don't hype it up. It's like, oh psychedelics, all you gotta do is take a drug and you're gonna be all
of a sudden changed, but you're not. Is there a certain kind
of journaling, though, that you think is more useful than others? - That's a great question. So I have seen there are a lot of journals on the market that, for lack of a better term, they just seem a little
bit self-indulgent to me. When we were putting together
The Subtle Art Journal, I bought maybe 10 or 20
journals on the market and kind of looked through them. And I was a little bit
appalled by how many of them, particularly the ones marketed
the women, I have to say, how many of them were like, what are your three favorite foods? What is your favorite vacation? Who's your best friend? It's like it's stuff you
ask like a 6-year-old. And I think the best journals are the ones that force you to ask
difficult questions of yourself and confront uncomfortable
situations in your life. So I would simply look
at journals that do that, that probe more into your feelings, that ask questions like, what is something that you
are unsure of at the moment and why do you think you're unsure of it? Or what is some something
you have said recently that you kind of regret? Is there something you can do about that? Like stuff that's a
little bit more personal and emotional and serious and not just like write
down 10 awesome things about yourself today. - Right. - You know?
- Yeah. That's probably not helping a whole lot. - I heard a musician one time talk about how he would journal and he's been journaling
since he was a teenager, and he would go back. He's in his thirties, I think, now. He's like, "If I want to write a song that's about being a
pissed off 21-year-old or something like that, I go back to those journals and I see what that pissed
off 21-year-old was thinking." I was like, "Oh, that's good. That's a good sales pitch for journaling." - I will say the older I get, the more I wish I had
journaled when I was younger because I've journaled
in sporadic periods. So there were a couple
years when I was a teenager, there were a couple years
when I was in my twenties, and I've done it on and
off throughout my thirties. Every time I go back and look at stuff that I
wrote, 10, 20 years ago, I'm like, "Fuck, I could
just read this all day. It's so fascinating." - No, it's great. It's great when you come across
something too that you wrote and you're like, "God, that was good. That was actually good." A lot of it is shit. - That was pretty smart. Yeah, yeah. (both laughing) And
then you turn the page, you're like, "Oh my God, cringe." - Yeah. But the cringe is good too. we discussed that before. Cringe is good too. - Cringe is underrated. - Cold plunges and saunas. - Ooh. Okay, I'm excited about this one. I'm gonna go both, underrated on saunas, overrated on cold plunges. These two get combined a lot because people like to do them together. Give you an idea of how funny LA is and why it's so easy to be healthy in LA. So in New York, people's idea of like hanging out is going and drinking somewhere. And in LA, people's idea of hanging
out is doing saunas and cold plunges together. So I can't tell you how many
times I've texted somebody and be like, "You wanna hang out?" And they're like, "Yeah, you
want to do sauna, cold plunge?" I'm like, "Yeah, sure." So both of these kind of became popular around the same time a few years ago with Huberman and Rhonda
Patrick and a few other people. What's interesting is, like, I think as more data has come in, the data on saunas and
heat exposure is very good and continues to be very, very good. It's great for longevity. It's great for heart health. It's great for immune response. It's great for all of these things. The data on cold plunges is not great. The studies that I've seen at least, the sample size is very small and it's very homogenous. It tends to be like 13 athletes
did cold plunges for a week and this is what happened. The data around cold plunges
is a little bit more suspect. But part of my rating on these too is because I own both of these. I have a sauna. I have a cold plunge. The sauna is amazing. You turn it on, you can turn it on from your phone. I can be like sitting here in the studio and turn it on now and go hop in the sauna after the show and it's like get a great sweat in. I can be in there. I can get some email done, listen to a podcast, do whatever. It's very relaxing. It's a really nice. It's a good way to decompress. You can do a little meditation in there. Big ups on the sauna. The cold plunge is such a pain in the ass. You don't think about this, but you're dealing with water, water that sits in the same spot for days and days and days. So you have to constantly clean it, or you have to leave it running like 24/7. Refrigerator on it is loud as fuck. So you've either got
this loud motor running in your backyard 24/7. I can honestly say I've
spent more time cleaning my cold plunge than I've spent in it 'cause you get in for
like two to three minutes and then you're done. But then every week, you have to spend like 30 minutes fucking
cleaning the thing, replacing the water, adding like alkali, balancing the pH. It is such a pain in the ass. It's not fun to do. You feel great after you've done it. But honestly, if I could go back, I wouldn't buy one. So overrated on the cold plunge. - I feel horrible for you, Mark. That sounds awful. Your life is- - I know, man. Come at me, Huberman bros. I'm waiting for the
Huberman bros to come in and be like, "You just not doing it right. You don't understand. The way you gotta do it is blah." - Well, you're right, you do feel amazing after one of those. It feels great. If that's
what you're going for, go for it. Yeah.
- You do. I think a lot of that is
that it releases a lot of adrenaline and adrenaline fucking hypes
you up like a motherfucker. Releases endorphins too
which makes you feel good. But there's a lot of things
that release endorphins that aren't necessarily good for you. And so it's I'm skeptical. There's not really a whole lot
of good long-term data on it. And like I said, a lot of the studies that people reference are
like not great studies. With the heat exposure stuff, Scandinavian has been doing it for like a hundred years. So you can actually go look and see, like, this guy
does a sauna every day, and this guy does a sauna once a week, and this guy never does a sauna. And you just see how when they die and what they die of. - Yeah, right, right. Now, I'm a big proponent
of the heat exposure stuff because I've been doing hot
yoga for a few months now and my God. - Nice. - Yeah, it's awesome. And
it's one of those things too, I really look forward to it, so it's super sustainable for me anyway. So on my off days, when I'm not working out, I'll go do hot yoga and I'm just like, yes. I don't know. There's a lot of the
claims around that too. It's like you sweat out toxins and stuff. I'm like, "I don't know about that." - Yeah, toxins. - It feels great. I mean, activating your
sweat glands too, I think, is just a good thing. - It's good to get your heart rate up. That's really what most
of this boils down to, is it's good to get your heart rate up and create a stress response, like a modest stress response
in the body periodically. It's just good for you. So anyway. - Similar theme here. Psychedelics - Depends, which I think a lot of people are gonna interpret
this as me being a hater, but it's not at all. As someone who's done
a lot of psychedelics when he was much younger, had a whale of good time. I can't hate on psychedelics. I think they're awesome. I think they should be legal. And I do think the research around the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics is
really, really exciting. It's pretty, especially like the stuff
around PTSD is it's incredible. But what people don't understand is that these are controlled
clinical trials with patients who have deep seated mental health issues, very intransigent depression issues, very severe PTSD issues. What worries me is when I go
somewhere either here in LA or the Bay Area, New York, Austin, and people are just like
microdosing every other day to optimize their health. This comes back to, to my old, like there's bad to okay interventions and there's okay to great interventions. The okay to great is like the optimizers. Those are the cold plunge people. Those are the people who are
like, "I want the 1% edge so I can start my side hustle or make my business more profitable." That's a completely different category than the bad to okay intervention. But those two things get lumped
into the same categories. They all get lumped into mental health, personal development,
self-help, et cetera. So all of the research on the
incredible profound effects of psychedelics and the
effects that it can have on mental health, all of it is in the bad to okay category. All of it is with people
who are in a very dark and bad place and getting
them to a place that is okay. It's also done with trained
professionals, clinicians, people who have spent
their entire career working with this stuff. That's not to say that it's psychedelics can't help take you from okay to great. That is possible. The research around that is much spottier, it's much more inconsistent. There's much less of it being done. And the research around
stuff like microdosing, it's just like non-existent. It's basically a placebo. So I would say if you were
somebody who struggles with a very serious mental health issue, psychedelics are something
to be very curious and potentially excited about. If you are already a high
functioning individual who is simply looking for that next thing to give you a 1% edge and hope you fucking crush your
morning routine or whatever, I don't necessarily think it's appropriate to look in this area. Or if you do, just like understand that what you're doing is
like mostly just for fun, it's mostly a hobby. And if you get some profound insight or side benefits from it, great. Awesome. Like I said, I did a bunch of them. I had a couple of trips
that were very profound and meaningful for me, but I definitely don't
necessarily think it was like... It didn't like 180 my life
or anything like that. Last thing I was gonna say, and this is super
important for the depends, this never gets talked about. There is a small minority of people who have very, very
intense negative reactions to psychedelics, and it rarely gets discussed, it rarely gets talked about, but it happens and it exists. It tends to be people who are predisposed to a certain
category of mental illness, but it happens. And if you search online and you look for blogs and articles, you'll find people who did
a bunch of psychedelics and it completely up their life, and it took them years to recover, and some of them still haven't recovered. So I'm not saying that, I'm not trying to be like finger waggy and scare people away from it. It's just you can't just
talk about the positive part of an intervention without
talking about the negative. So there is a very
small minority of people who do have negative reactions to it. I think it's important to be aware those and understand the types of people that have those negative reactions and just be informed before
you run off the Burning Man and fucking, I don't know, do whatever they do with Burning Man. - No, for sure. I think too, one of the... You talk about the going from bad to okay, okay to great. I get a little concerned when I see some of the data coming out of these studies. The results are very similar to like the anti-depressants
and anti-anxiety medicines that came out in the eighties. We're seeing like 70, 80% success rate in those early trials. I think it was because they were using
these trials on people who were majorly depressed or had real serious problems, and these interventions helped them a lot. And then we started
prescribing these medicines to people who weren't quite as bad and so they're not quite as effective the. I see a similar parallel
to that right now. I don't know if there's anything to it, but it kind of concerns me a little bit that they're part of the hype around that is maybe getting
generalized a little too much. - This actually raises two
really good side points. One is selection bias, which is selection bias
happens when you experiment on a non-random group of people. So it's like right now, all the trials being done on
psychedelics are being done on people with very
intense mental illnesses, that those people are not representative of the general population. So we can't generalize the results to the general population. The second one, which is also doesn't get
talked about a whole lot, every psychiatric
medication or intervention that at least I think every
has lost efficacy over time. And I think some of that is
what you just described is that it starts with the worst cases and slowly moves to the milder cases and then at some point, just starts getting over prescribed and starts having no effect. But what's interesting is there also might be a little bit of a... There's this concept of
the expectation effect of like when something is
rare, and new, and special, people tend to have
higher expectations for it because it hasn't been tried before. And when something is very commonplace and has very mixed results
across a large population, people's expectations lower and your expectations when going into any psychological
intervention affect the results of that intervention because the human mind's
just crazy like that. So that's the other thing to keep in mind. - Good one, good one. - This episode is brought
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out with my business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial by going to shopify.com/idgaf. That means I don't give a fuck, shopify.com/idgaf. - Oh, Mark. - God. - God.
- Just God. For the record, Mark came up with these. (Mark laughs) - I don't know what you're
talking about, Drew. I have no idea what we're doing. I will preface this by saying I am atheist and not religious. I'm gonna say underrated on God. And keep in mind that I'm saying this as a practice, or habit, or intervention for mental health or personal development purposes. When you look at religious populations or highly religious people, they tend to live longer, they tend to have better relationships, they tend to commit crimes, they tend to get divorced less often. And what's interesting too is I believe the more religious the group, the higher they index
on most of those things. That's absolutely fascinating. The rub here is to bring back
the selection bias, right? There's two ways to look at that. Either A, religion causes
people to become happier, have better relationships,
live longer, et cetera. The other way to look at
it is that people who tend to be very happy and have good relationships are very drawn to religious communities. That would be the selection bias argument, is that people who tend to be a little bit more disagreeable, skeptical are on average unhappier and don't live as long, and they also happen to not be attracted to religious communities. I don't think we can say
that religion causes people to be happier and healthier
and all those things, but there's certainly a lot
of evidence suggesting that. I also just think... And maybe this is some
of my bias as somebody who grew up in a religious community. As I've gotten older, I look back and I really admire the community aspect, especially in this day and age where it's so hard to build a sense of community in the world. I kind of look back at
the church community that I grew up in, and even though I fucking hated church and didn't believe any of it, I kind of envy what my parents had with their group of
friends at their church. It was a really cool thing to have those people
come together like that. So I think in the world today where, arguably, the biggest crisis of all is lack of community and connection among
people within society, it's hard for me to not say that religious communities
aren't underrated. - Dude, as a kid, did you ever do church camp, like a summer camp or anything? Those are the best. - Oh, yeah. - Those are a good time. - Yeah. When I was a teenager, I loved it when I was a teenager. - Yeah. - Jesus camp as a kid was not fun. (Drew laughs) - Yeah, no. When you got older, like you get to teenage, then you're doing cool activities. - And people are just nice. I don't know. This was the funny thing is like, as a rule, teenagers are just fucking mean people. And I was not a cool kid in high school, so a lot of my peers were mean to me. But then you go to Jesus camp and everybody's so nice, they're so fucking friendly and nice. There's not the cool kids and the jocks and the nerds like. Everybody's nice to each other. And so it's funny because even though, like I said, I was atheist, I didn't believe in any of it, even after I stopped going to church, I would still go go to those camps when I was in high school 'cause I'm like, "People are cool. They're really nice." (Mark laughs) I'm not gonna get judged for my hair or made fun of for my shirt. - Maybe get like water ski
too or something like that. I don't know. They would always have these like really not religious
anything related to. You know that? - Oh, yeah, dude. You play capture the flag. - Yeah, it's cool stuff like that. - Build like crazy go-karts and it's fun. It's just good, wholesome fun. - So you don't think
necessarily that maybe if the causal direction is
that people get into religion and then it makes them happier, is religion just the opium of the masses? Is it just a solve for
a lot of other problems? - I personally think, and I guess this is like
where I would differ from Sam Harris, is like I personally think that religious thinking is simply a part of the human condition and afflicts all of us
to a certain degree. Some of us fight very hard against it and develop a little bit
of a resistance to it. But religious thinking is an
inherent part of human nature. And basically, it either
gets applied to some sort of traditional religion, or it gets applied to
a government, politics, which I would argue is
worse than a religion, or it gets applied to
something super fucked up like a cult or some scammy business, multi-level marketing thing. - Oh, here's a give on gratitude. - I'm gonna go with it depends. Yeah. I personally think this is overrated. We've talked about this
on the show before. I think there's a lot
of things like gratitude that if you're the type
of person who tends to take everything for granted and just tends to be
kind of a selfish person, I think gratitude is a
really, really good exercise to kind of train your brain out of that. But if you're not, then I think it's kind of superfluous. I've tried gratitude journaling
and gratitude meditations and all this stuff. I definitely don't feel like
I get a whole lot out of it, but I can see why some people do. - Hmm. Just I've never been
able to connect with it. I've even tried like, okay, sit down, write your three things, really think about them, everything like that. And it just never seemed to generalize to any other part of my life very well. But I think part of that is 'cause I'm just a fairly
grateful person to begin with. Like I said earlier, if I'm standing in line somewhere, sometimes I'm just like,
"Oh wow, I'm alive. This is awesome, this is great. I'm experiencing a moment right now. This is amazing." I don't need to sit down and write the three things out and force myself to be grateful. So I think you're right. It depends on who you are. We got some flack for this one too before. So people were like, "This is bullshit My gratitude journal saves me and I'm like that." I'm sure it does. That's great. It's a tool. Use it. If it works, use it. - If there's a simple takeaway
from this entire episode, and this is true, by the way, the simple takeaway is that
nothing works for everybody and nothing that works for you
is gonna work all the time. Like, it's not a single intervention. You can dig up studies and
data on everything, everything. Nothing works all the time and the things that do
work don't work forever. So try things. When you find something that works, write it till it stops working and then try something else. That's the name of the
game with this stuff. There's no final answer. - That's it. - Cool. Well, this was fun. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed my Nick Cage and Will Ferrell. - Do you really like Nick Cage that much? - It's embarrassing. - You are really into Nick Cage. - Dude, "Raising Arizona"
and "Leaving Las Vegas" like "The Rock" in a "Con Air." He kind of started
getting a little bit goofy with the action movies, so he won an Oscar for
"leaving Las Vegas." It is incredible. It's an absolutely incredible movie, incredible performance. Nick Cage is a legit top actor. I think he just likes money, so he keeps doing stupid movie
movies for a lot of money. Shout out, Nick Cage, if you
ever want to come on the pod. (Drew laughs) Happy to have you. (Mark laughs) That's it, everybody. Be sure to leave a review, subscribe, follow the show. We will be back next week. Say goodbye, Drew. - Goodbye, Drew. - Till next time, everybody. Peace. (upbeat music)
