This is your moment. You ready? [Music] I love doing tours like this because it's a chance to actually meet fans face to face. Matson, hear their stories and just remember why I do this. The talk is about the trade-offs we make in life. It gets a little philosophical, but there's a lot of fun stories and jokes and, you know, typical Mark Manson [ __ ] So, it's a good time. What's up, Melbourne? How are you? It's so good to be back here. It's been about 5 years since I've been here. I traveled over 7,000 miles to come desecrate this fine establishment with Fbombs. So, thank you for joining me in this festive occasion. So today I'm going to be sharing with you seven harsh truths to help you unfuck your life. Now you might be asking why harsh truths, Mark? Why do the truths always have to be so harsh? Why can't they they be flowery pillowy truths? A truth like a a daisy sprouting on a spring morning? Well, my answer to that is the famous quote from David Foster Wallace, which he said, "The truth will set you free, but only after it's had its way with you." Which, when I think about that, I see this. So, for the next 45 minutes or so, I'm going to have my way with you, Melbourne. Bend over and get ready. So, tonight we're going to be talking about a lot of things. We're going to be talking about uh the one mental mistake. I don't even know if it's a mistake. It might be like a mental flaw that I think leads to probably 99% of our bad decisions in life. Uh it's it's something that we're all susceptible to and I don't think it's particularly obvious. We're going to talk about why we blame others for our [ __ ] and uh hopefully how we can try to stop. We're gonna talk about an unexpected definition of evil, which is uh quite appropriate. Today, we're going to talk about why, easy, easy. Not that kind of talk. Uh we're going to talk about why World War II survivors make the best psychologists. And we're going to talk about the importance of living an unbalanced life. So, you guys ready for this? Awesome. Let's get into it. So, truth number one, everything in life is a trade-off. Now, this is one of those things that when you first hear it, you're like, "Well, yeah." So, and it's true. A lot of trade-offs in life are very obvious and mundane. You know, you go to a very overpriced coffee shop in Melbourne and you pay your $10 and they give you your coffee. And that's like a very clear, obvious trade-off. You're giving $10, they give you coffee, you move on with your life. But then there's like very abstract, intangible kind of long-term trade-offs, the sort of trade-offs that we make uh when we're making major life decisions, when we're choosing goals and dreams, when we're defining our identities. And these abstract, intangible, long-term trade-offs, uh we tend to [ __ ] them up. and our minds don't seem naturally well equipped to handle them. And that's a problem because it's these long-term abstract trade-offs that are the most important things that we do in our lives. They're the most important decisions that we ever make. So tonight, I want to talk about those trade-offs, how we can identify the ways that we [ __ ] them up, and also how we can hopefully be a little bit better at them. So I put together a nice hypothetical scenario here. Uh let's say you are deeply unsatisfied with your relationship with your marriage and you uh you decide to alope to the beach with Rocco the coconut vendor. Now obviously this is a major life decision and uh clearly there are trade-offs. So let's go through some of them. The benefits of Rocco the coconut vendor. You get to live out your romantic fantasy. All those romance novels that you've read, it's finally coming true. You're in this exotic location. It's so beautiful. He treats you like a king or queen. What could be better? You get to live the beach life. I mean, it's sunny every day. Life is easy. There's breeze. What could be better? And you get free coconuts. a lifetime supply. Rocco is very good at his job. Now, let's talk about the drawbacks. Poverty. I don't recommend poverty in case you were considering it. Uh, your kids hate you and never want to speak to you again. And of course, the beach is full of mosquitoes. Now, how many people actually know someone who's like blown up their life dramatically in this way? Does anybody Yeah. Yeah. Like 10 of you, maybe? I've known a few. And I can like I can kind of sympathize where people like this come from because we tend to make our worst choices when we overvalue short-term emotions and when we undervalue long-term commitments. And if you're a person who say is been unsatisfied in a marriage for a very very long time, those emotional needs go unmet for many many years. they start building up. It's kind of like a a pressure system that's about to explode and you finally reach a point where it actually feels rational to completely blow up your life and all of your commitments and go live on the beach with a AI generated Rocco. So, I kind of understand it. But we're here to figure out how to be better about this. How to not fall into that trap. How to not make those mistakes. Now, I come to you tonight. It is not a coincidence that I'm here tonight because I myself chose to make a trade-off for two reasons. Little did I know that Australians give way more [ __ ] about my [ __ ] election than any of my friends and family do back home. I went on ABC radio this morning and all they did was [ __ ] ask me about the election. I'm like, really, guys? Like, why do you think I'm here? Truth number two, our mind's natural tendency is to deny that any trade-off exists. This is where we start running into trouble. And there's a real psychological reason that this happens, and we're going to dig into that. But it's important to I think it's important to understand that we we all experience this to a certain degree or another. None of us are immune to this trait in life. And I'll let you in on a little bit of a secret, which is this is basically why I have a career. Like my books, everything I post, I write about, it's kind of just revealing to people the trade-offs that they've been in denial about. I'll give you an example. So like this post, the person you marry is the person you fight with. The house you buy is the house you repair. The dream job you take is the job you stress over. Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice. Whatever makes us feel good will inevitably make us feel bad. Well, no [ __ ] Sherlock. There are trade-offs. But we forget these things. When we get excited about the marriage, we don't think about the fights that we're going to have. When we dream about a house, we don't think about all the repairs and [ __ ] that we're going to have to deal with. When we uh start pursuing our perfect career, uh we don't think about all the office politics and and and whatever hazards come along with it, right? So, it's I see self-help very much as it's almost like hygiene. It's like mental hygiene. It's not that you're learning. It's not the learning of anything that is supremely valuable. It's the reminder of the [ __ ] that you kind of already knew but you're in denial about that you push below the surface. Now, why do we do this? Well, the truth is is we're primates. And you know, earlier I was talking about how there are some very obvious tangible trade-offs. And the thing about obvious tangible trade-offs is they're very measurable. They're quantifiable. You can put them in a spreadsheet and you can sit there and you'd be like, "Hm, that coffee really worth [ __ ] $180 or whatever the [ __ ] it is. I don't know. Let me Yeah, maybe not. And then you can make a decision. But when you're thinking about running off to the beach with Rocco, there's no spreadsheet for that. There's no like easy costbenefit analysis. And in fact, because it is such a personal valuesdriven, emotional driven decision, it becomes very emotionally overwhelming. And when we get emotionally overwhelmed, that's when we fall back into our primate brain. We fall into the animalistic side of ourselves. And the anim animalistic side of ourselves does not do a good job of weighing pros and cons, positives and negatives at the same time. The anim animalistic side of ourselves is like I either want to feel good or I want to feel bad. There's no in between here. Freud had a great term for this. He called it um cognitive dissonance. And he noted that when people have contradictory feelings about something, they experience a lot of stress and anxiety and they look for the the easiest way to alleviate that to escape it. And usually they escape it by, you know, doing some [ __ ] or coming up with unrealistic perceptions of the world. And this is where we get black and white thinking. Black and white thinking in in many ways is just simply the inability to hold cost and benefit in our minds at the same time. We see things as either all benefit or all costs. And in both cases, we're being inaccurate in terms of our perception of reality. We're not seeing what's actually in front of us. And this causes a ton of problems. I mean, it's it's not only does it get us into awful life decisions, uh, but it it it can make us an [ __ ] It can drive wedges between groups of people. It can prevent you from learning things, from experiencing new ideas, new places, new perspectives. And the worst thing, and this is the thing that, you know, I I I tend to worry about these days, is that fighting black and white thinking, it requires a certain amount of cognitive load. like it's to to override the animal brain with our more rational human brain. That takes a lot of effort and energy. It takes time. You have to like sit and focus and really think through what you're perceiving and and and what feels real and true to you. And the more distracted you are, the more you're bombarded by information and news stories and social media and all the stuff that's going on with all your friends all the time, the less cognitive horsepower you'll have to fight against the black and white thinking. And I think we obviously see the repercussions of that across society. Black and white thinking is it's ultimately it's a distorted version of the world and it drives poor decision-m. It's the root of prejudice and bigotry. It starts wars and keeps them perpetuated unnecessarily for many generations and it makes stupid people famous and it makes Tik Tok profitable. But wait, there's more. It gets better or worse. Truth number three, we blame others for the costs and we take credit for the benefits. So when we're in this distorted view of reality of something is either all cost or all benefit, the way we escape cognitive dissonance, the way we relieve the tension of our cognitive dissonance is that we just outsource the cost to somebody else. We're like, "Well, it's not my fault uh that I I blew up my life to go live on a beach with Rocco." You know, I think it's my piece of [ __ ] husband's fault or my piece of [ __ ] wife's fault. You know, I never really like my kids anyway. There might be something to that, but I think in psychology this is known as the actor observer bias. The actor observer bias basically finds that when I run a red light, it's because I'm in a hurry and I have a really important meeting to go to. And when you run a red light, you are an irresponsible psychopathic piece of [ __ ] and you should be put in jail and never let out. The comedian George Carlin had a great quip about this. He said, "You ever noticed that everyone driving slower than you is an idiot and everyone driving faster is a maniac? It's this amazing effect that like somehow you are always the one driving the perfect speed. It's incredible. You're so talented. How did you do that? Now, this this relief of cognitive dissonance, this leads into one of the main themes of subtle art, which is entitlement. Because to perpetuate the belief that other people are responsible for your problems and you're responsible for your benefits, you have to start believing that you are somehow uniquely privileged or deserving or you're somehow uniquely victimized by the world. It's essentially believing that you deserve to receive benefits in life without giving up any costs. Entitlement is the natural consequence of denying that we have trade-offs and it necessitates black and white thinking because it forces you to delude yourself about reality. And I think this is kind of a place where we've gotten where it feels like there's more entitlement going on every year across society. It seems like we're being exposed to it more and more. I think there's a couple arguments. You know, there's some research, uh, some data sets that are showing that, uh, narcissistic traits have been rising over the past few decades. There might be something to that. There might not. You could also make the argument that we're simply exposed to narcissistic [ __ ] more often. There's probably something to that as well. Uh but I think a really important point is that entitlement is not learned. Entitlement is unlearned. Entitlement is our default state as animals. It is the monkey side of our brain and it is something that we have to be trained out of. I mean anybody here who has been around little kids knows that they are really [ __ ] entitled. Like no kid is like, "Hey, dad, I want ice cream, but uh I'm considering the long-term consequences of my decision, and I was wondering if maybe we could compromise on, you know, no kid says that. Every kid is like, I want ice cream now." And if you don't give it to him, like, I hate you. Sound familiar? Entitlement has to be trained out of us. And I think if it is becoming more prevalent across society, I do think that some of that onus falls on the leaders of society because ultimately the role whether it's parents or teachers or leaders, community leaders, politicians, the their role is to train people out of entitlement to civilize them, help them think long term, help them consider trade-offs, help them consider their fellow man. And so if we are losing that capacity as a society, uh then some of that must fall to us. Now, Big Daddy Wall said another great quote. He said, "Evil people never believe that they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil." I think this is kind of the endstate of an entitlement mindset because once you have truly come to believe that every pain in your life is the responsibility of someone else. Uh it is it's only logical that you start seeing everyone else as an enemy. And I think I guess as you go through the world and you're exposed to certain people and ideas, at least for me, this is the best litmus test I have found for detecting if there's character there. And you can invert this as well. You could say good people rarely believe that they're good people, but rather they see good in everyone else. And so I think that's something for us to aspire towards. Now, I have a really important question for you guys. As you know, I'm American, which kind of means I like represent the world and freedom and God. So, on behalf of the world, explain yourself. What the [ __ ] is this? How How could you let this You guys are so mildmannered. How could you let this happen? I don't have a point for this slide. I just I just wanted to ask you that. Truth number four, the enemy of growth is not stagnation but delusion. I think we tend to assume that if we want to grow and get better that we need to find some sort of new perspective, new information, new like life-changing habit or hack or whatever. And the longer I do this, the more I just kind of come to the conclusion that personal growth is just a long struggle against our own [ __ ] I don't know who made that. It's not a question of learning more information that's going to set you free free. It's learning the false beliefs, the false patterns, and just understanding the things that don't work for you. Because if you think about it, if you knew exactly what was worth doing, motivation wouldn't be an issue. If you knew exactly what was going to have the most impact in your life, if you had the correct information about it, then finding purpose wouldn't be an issue. If you knew, if you had an accurate view of yourself and the world and the people around you, you'd probably stop [ __ ] up most of your relationships. I think ultimately a lot of personal development is just developing an understanding for yourself and having a clear honest vision of the world. So how do we do that? Well, if there's one piece of practical advice or a takeaway from this talk that I'd like you to take, it's this. Don't set out to make changes. Make experiments. It's typical in in my industry, you know, that you're supposed to, you know, here's the model or framework and it's going to change your life and now you're going to go be a new person. And I think that that model of like a clear before and after moment in your life is not only unrealistic. It usually doesn't happen that way, but it's also I I think it it puts unhelpful pressure and expectation on you. when you read a book or uh take a course and you have this expectation of like, okay, now I'm supposed to be different, it can be very counterproductive because then you you feel like a a dumbass if you're not or if you like try to do the thing and you mess up a few times or you're not really liking it or you feel worse, you feel like something's wrong with you. But when you approach things like an experiment, you basically approach things in terms of gathering information. Because the truth is is that the only personal development advice that works is personal. It's different for everybody in this room. And so nobody can tell you what's right for you or what's going to work for you except for yourself. And so therefore, your project is to try things, set parameters and boundaries of like, okay, I'm going to give up alcohol for 30 days and I'm going to see how it affects my life with no expectation of like, I'm going to be a new person now. It's like, let's just see what happens. Because when you that seeing what happens, that's when the costs and the benefits are actually revealed to you. and you discover that all of the benefits you thought you were getting from drinking alcohol weren't really that big of benefits and all the costs that you thought were there from giving up uh well yeah actually there were pretty big costs and it's going to be different for everybody right you know give up social media for a week uh you know stop talking to that friend who treats you like [ __ ] like just see what happens and these experiments they can take place they can be behavioral changes they can be uh difficult conversations with people in your life. They can be any number of things, but I think when they're framed as an experiment to discover information about you and yourself and the world around you, uh it removes all of the shame and pressure and judgment. Truth number five, all trade-offs cause pain. Bad trade-offs cause suffering. There's a great story about uh or an allegory that was supposedly taught by the Buddha that I I really love and I find very inspiring. The Buddha said that there are that getting hurt is like getting struck by two different arrows. The first arrow is the actual arrow piercing your skin. There's the physical pain, the sensation. And the first arrow, it can be excruciating, but it's always temporary. It always goes away. It eventually heals. The second arrow is the meaning that we put around the first arrow. It's the why was I the one who got shot by the arrow? Why didn't Jim get shot by the air? Jim's an [ __ ] He should have gotten shot by the arrow. It's all the excuses or the the demands like, "Well, I got shot by, so people need to be nice to me now because I got shot by the Why aren't people nice to me? Maybe maybe I deserve to get shot by the arrow." It's like that [ __ ] mental game that we start playing with ourselves, that endless narration that goes on around the pain. And the problem with the second arrow is that those stories and that narration, it doesn't go away easily. It can last and persist well into the future. In fact, in many cases, we forget that it's a story. We forget that we invented a narration around our pain. And because we forget that it's just a story, it sticks us sticks with us forever. This is why I guess kind of like the central takeaway of subtle art of like using instead of thinking about what benefits you want in life, thinking about what costs or as I put it in the book, what pain you want to sustain. This is the closest thing I have found to like a mindset hack because it's essentially asking yourself what what is the first arrow that I actually kind of enjoy. Like we're all secretly a little bit masochistic. You know, we like the harsh truth. Like [ __ ] hit me daddy. Or maybe that's just me. I don't know. Uh but like we all have something in our lives that that some pain, some struggle that secretly kind of enliven us. It it it makes us feel alive. It's like we enjoy the challenge and we enjoy the process of overcoming. And if we use that as the starting place, we become immune to the second arrow. And if we use that as a starting place, then we're always aware of the costs that we're incurring. We know what we're getting into before we do it. Like, writing a book is [ __ ] hard. It's grueling. It's isolating. It's full of self-doubt. And, you know, sometimes you just want to crawl under your desk and start crying. But there's a part of me that like [ __ ] likes that. It's like, I don't know. It enliven me. And that's probably why I'm an author. It's funny because before I even thought about writing anything, um I went to music school. I initially aspired to be a musician. And I remember uh I was really having a hard time with it. I was like really really frustrated. I remember I went to I was practicing probably four to six hours a day and I went to one of my guitar lessons and I remember the teacher just looked at me. He was like, "Stop playing. You don't practice enough." And I was like, "What the [ __ ] What is wrong with me?" And I remember there was one kid in my class. His name was Chris McQueen. He was like, he was the one guy in the music program that everybody was like, "Okay, that guy's going to make it. We're all just like trying to get by." And I cornered him in the cafeteria one day and I was like, "Okay, he's got to know something. He's got to have like a secret or a hack or a method or something, right? And I corner him in the cafeteria. I start talking to him. I'm like, "What's your practice routine?" Right? How do you warm up in the morning? Like, "How do you approach a song? Like, what's your process?" You know? And he just kept like looking at me and like shrugging. He's like, "I don't know. I just, you know, I just play for a while." And I'm like, "Great. [ __ ] you. All right." And it took me a long time. By the way, I dropped out. Chris McQueen has two Grammys. But it took me a long time to figure out that ultimately he didn't have to think hard about practicing because he just liked practicing. And I had to think hard about practicing because I [ __ ] hated practicing. And ultimately, the real cost of being a musician was practicing. Because if you're a professional musician, the vast majority of your time is spent practicing and you don't think about that when you're watching like a [ __ ] Taylor Swift concert or whatever. You're just like, "Oh my god, it would be so cool to be on stage." But the reality is you're spending most of your life practicing. And so I think ultimately it's about finding that secret struggle that only you seem to be able to bear because aside from being kind of the hack to, you know, delusion and black and white thinking and uh making you immune to the second arrow, the thing that you enjoy struggling with is going to be your competitive advantage in whatever you pursue in the world. that the [ __ ] that you like to eat that nobody else will touch. Yeah, they'll pay you for that. That's my money advice. Truth number six, the more downside you can stomach, the more upside you will enjoy. This is kind of logical. I mean, this isn't like I've got two points to make around this. One is going to be kind of obvious and then the other one I think is very unobvious. So, I could have used a lot of examples for this. I chose Arie because look at those biceps. Schwarzenegger was an interesting guy. Um, back in the 70s when he was doing the bodybuilding thing and he won Mr. Olympia seven times. Uh, if you ever go read his biography, it's just like it's it's pretty astounding the stuff that he put himself through. He used to his daily routine at the time was he would wake up at around 6:00 a.m. He'd go to the gym. He'd work out for two hours, then he'd go work a full shift as a construction worker, go home, take a nap, go back to the gym, do another hour and a half in the gym, go home, eat, go to sleep, wake up at 6:00 a.m. the next day. He did that for like six or seven years straight. Now, here's the obvious takeaway, and this is probably the takeaway that like is in everybody's head right now. It's like, god damn, that's why he looks like that. He can suffer a lot and there's some truth to that, right? There's like some crazy story like Bill Gates apparently didn't take a vacation or weekend for 20 years. Okay, that's a lot of suffering. Clearly, that paid off for him. That's the obvious takeaway. No pain, no gain, whatever. Here's the unobvious takeaway. During this period when our friend Arie here was doing this, he had a failing marriage. He basically had no friends. He barely spoke English. He had zero hobbies. He was broke. He had no life. There are an infinite number of possible identities and trajectories that he could have been on that he wasn't because he was on this one very intense semi- insane trajectory. And I think that's what that's what we don't consider like the no pain no gain is like the first arrow takeaway. It's like oh if I can take more arrows I'll get more benefit. Great. What we don't think about is that there's an identity, a self-defin that has to go as well. When you choose a new career, you are choosing to give up another part of your life. You're giving up old co-workers. You're giving up old skills, old habits. You're giving up old routines. uh when you choose to move to a new city, you're giving up certain relationships, you're giving up certain lifestyles. There's like a void that happens anytime you change yourself. And this gets missed a lot. Again, like change and growth is usually marketed as like this kind of euphoric, oh my god, I'm a new person. When the reality is is that there's a component of grief to it because you are losing your former self. And the way the same way you grieve a lost friend or a lost family member, you grieve that former self. Even if your current self is better than that former self, there's a certain loss to it. And so I think that that kind of existential identity based loss of self- definitionf is what [ __ ] people up. I'll give you an example from my own life. I've spent most of the last five years trying to like actually be healthy. And like most people I sucked at it. you know, I'd lose, I don't know, six or eight kilos, plateau, gain it all back, get frustrated, lose it again, you know, like did the [ __ ] yo-yo thing that we all do. And initially, my approach was very much the first arrow approach. It was like, I just need to get to the gym more. I just need to like [ __ ] eat less cheesecake, you know? Just suffer a bit more, Mark. You can make it. And that approach, that attitude is always unsustainable. Eventually, what I figured out after two to three years of trying and failing is that you have to take the second arrow approach. That this isn't just about short-term suffering or sacrifice. This is about identity. I had to start looking really hard at my lifestyle choices. I realized that alcohol and food was a huge part of my social relationships, that food was a huge part of how I medicated my anxiety, that alcohol was kind of how I dealt with my family. It's okay. My mom won't hear this. And so until I started addressing that, nothing actually changed. Like I actually had to lose friendships to lose weight. That sounds [ __ ] crazy, but it's true because I I had to drink less and then I when I drank less I realized that some of my friends I had nothing in common with other than we just like to get shitfaced together. And like that's just that was part of my life. And so again, it's the self-defin. It's the willingness to let go of a past self and to grieve that past self. Another way of thinking about this is that I think we gain more. We improve by not gaining more but simply focusing on less, narrowing our identity. Truth number seven, there's no such thing as a balanced life because you're naturally going to love certain costs and sacrifices more than others. And because you enjoy them more than others, when you start investing yourself into them, that's where you're going to get the most returns in terms of like happiness, meaning, purpose, good relationships. And so, it makes sense to actually specialize your life. This conventional wisdom of like, oh, you need to be balanced and you need to like have lots of hobbies and friends and do lots of things and go home early. Like I think that's kind of [ __ ] stupid, especially in this day and age because look, we're exposed today. We are unique in human history and that we're exposed by exponentially more cool things that we would like to do than we will ever have the opportunity to do. And so the challenge for us psychologically is developing the ability to turn down and let go the things that don't make sense to us. Like you can't excel in your career and be a great parent and learn French on weekends and go to every new restaurant opening and have a vibrant social life and win in pickle ball every week and read two books every day and visit your parents more often and post on social media. Like you can't do it. You got to pick one or two things to go all in on and that's what's going to get you further. And sometimes people hear this and they're like, "Well, that's [ __ ] Mark. I don't think I should have to make all these trade-offs. I think I should be able to have everything I want and be happy all the time." To which I say, "Refusing to accept trade-offs is a terrible [ __ ] trade-off. Trade-offs are like Michael Myers cannot escape. Every time you think you've defeated them, they come back even harder. I want to wrap this up by talking about some of my heroes and and honestly some of the great thinkers who uh you know inspired a lot of these ideas. It was funny while I was putting this talk together, I had the realization that most of my deepest held philosophical beliefs or beliefs around, you know, human nature, psychology were all originated with World War II survivors. So, you probably recognize probably at least one of these guys. We'll start with Freud. Most people know Freud for, you know, Freud's funny. He had like an early period and a late period. And in my personal opinion, Freud's early period [ __ ] sucked. It's mostly it's it's like kind of what he's known for. Like everything you've heard about Freud that involves dicks. Comes from his early, you know? It's like you you're a dick, you want a dick, your mom wants a dick, your mom's dick. It's all early Freud. Your mom's dick. She's good. She's really good. That is professionalism. [Applause] What was I talking about? Oh, yeah. your mom's dick. Um, so Freud's early period, you know, all the old psychoanalysis stuff. He got a little weird. He got a little bit out there. But interesting thing happened. So when the Nazis took over Austria, he barely escaped Vienna. Freud was a a Jew if you weren't aware. He barely escaped Vienna. He didn't want to leave. His family and friends like literally physically made him leave like a couple days before the Nazis came in. and he escaped to London and he became intensely depressed. It was he lived the last five or 10 years of his life there and the work that came from that period was incredibly profound. He wrote a book called civilization and its discontents. And in that book, he talked about how people don't realize that we are mostly animal. That most of our psychology, our mind is anim animalistic. And it's only a very tenuous, rare, civilizing force that helps us defer gratification and weigh cost and benefits and care about our fellow man and think in more abstract principles. and that can be lost very very easily. He saw what was happening during World War II as what happens when short-term emotions take over. Now, the guy in the middle, it's Victor Frankle, who I'm sure most of you have heard about uh and read his book Man Search for Meaning. If you've not read it, it is I feel like an obligatory read for humanity. But he was a psychiatrist. Um he was sent to Ashwitz and he survived. and he wrote a memoir about it afterwards where he noted that the prisoners in Awitz who had found a reason to survive a a meaning or a purpose to the the grueling work and the violence within the camps were actually the ones who lived longer. He noted in the book that he could predict which prisoner was going to die next by the ones who lost hope. And finally, the man on the right, John Paul Sart. Most people don't know his story. Uh he was a playwright and novelist in the 30s in France. And he was drafted into the French army uh when the Nazis were invading. Um as you probably know, that didn't go very well. And so he ended up a prisoner of war for a number of years. and he was in a prisoner of war camp, not quite a concentration camp, but still not exactly a spa retreat. And he spent during that time he was in isolation for almost the entire period. And he journaled furiously. And he noticed something as he spent more time in the camp that there was a certain kind of almost relief that he started feeling at the fact that he didn't have to make choices for himself anymore. that even though he was imprisoned and his life was completely controlled by somebody else, there was a certain kind of relaxation that happened because he was no longer burdened by having to make significant decisions for himself all the time, day after day. And this freaked him out. And he eventually wrote those journal entries eventually became being and nothingness, which was the foundation of existentialist philosophy. And he has this great quote where he said that essentially people are afraid of their own freedom because it comes with the burden of responsibility. It comes with the burden of accepting the costs of your own choices. It comes with the burden of accepting that anything you pursue it means you are giving up an infinite number of alternative selves that you will never be. Last guy I want to talk about. It's Carl Young. It's nice little quote here. I'm not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become. Carl Young was uh different than these other guys. It's It's kind of funny actually. The Nazis really liked psychoanalysis, but the problem was that all the psychoanalysts were Jewish. So, they had to go find like, you know, a pureb blood German uh to do their psychoanalysis for them. And so they found Young. Young was not Jewish. And Young worked with them. He went to Berlin. He gave lectures. He was involved with some of the top level Nazi leadership during his career. He even met Hitler a handful of times. And he was roundly criticized for this his entire life. For the rest of his life, he was always people ripped into him for not taking a stand, you know, not saying no, not standing down, you know, speaking out, whatever. He was Swiss, so he could have if he wanted to. Well, something really interesting happened about 10 years ago. Alan Doss, who was the first CIA director and was the head of counter intelligence during World War II for the Allies. His memoir, he passed away and in his memoirs and diaries, he wrote that Carl Young was one of the most important spies for the US and UK. that he was delivering the medical records not only of the Nazi leadership to the Allies, but Hitler himself, and that he actually participated in a couple plots to get Hitler declared as insane to try to get rid of him. And the crazy thing is he never said anything. He never tried to defend himself. He never said, "Wait, wait, wait. I was a secret agent. No, I was doing all this stuff. He just let it go. And I find that so [ __ ] inspiring because the first three guys, they had everything taken away from them. And when you have everything taken away from you, it it opens up a space to really see kind of the bare reality of your mind and of human nature. And all three of those men discovered really incredible things about our nature. But Young didn't lose anything. Instead, he risked everything. He chose to potentially give up everything. And to me, that's what's so powerful about I'm not what happened to me. I'm what I choose to become. Thank you. Thank you, Melbourne. It's been a pleasure. [Music] [Applause] [Music] Go go go go go go.