Episode 183 – Oliver Burkeman – Happiness for people who can’t stand positive thinking

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What's up, guys? Xavier Katana here with our latest episode with Mr. Oliver Berkman.

His book is called The Antidote, Happiness for Those Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking.

Yeah, this is much different than our usual. I really just had this desire to cover the other

side of the coin with this one. In this episode, we dig into the self-help culture. We explore some

of the guru worship that happens within that industry. We also dove into some of the absurdly

hilarious things people do on social media. So I think you guys will find this episode hugely

comical. It was massively cathartic for me to do. I feel like our world has become so

technologically driven that we've lost touch of some of the things that connect us as real

human beings. Oliver has a tremendous amount of experience interviewing some very, very big names

such as Jerry Seinfeld and 50 Cent, among others. Please pick up a copy of his book,

The Antidote. You can find us on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, all at TheHumanXP. We survive on your

support. So if you value what we're doing here, get to TheHumanXP.com slash donate,

buy us a cup of coffee or dinner for all the work that we pour into this show. So much respect to

anyone who does that for us. As usual, and without much further ado, this is Mr. Oliver Berkman,

The Antidote. Thank you guys so much for listening.

The human experience is unlocking the keys to happiness. My name is Xavier Katana. My guest

today is Mr. Oliver Berkman. His book is called The Antidote, Happiness for People Who Can't

Stand Positive Thinking. Oliver, my good sir, welcome to HXP. Thank you very much for the

find your book title hilarious in the best way possible. Are you just the most cynical person

on the planet to write this book? Or what happened here?

I hope not. I mean, I guess that's for others to judge. But I'm coming at this from the perspective

that there's kind of something very, very wrong with the culture of positive thinking, the idea

that you can sort of just forcibly think your way to happiness and success

and that setting ambitious goals and relentlessly driving after them

is always the right way forward, etc.

But I'm also rejecting something that I associate much more with my native Britain,

which is a kind of resignation that says, you know, you can't have those things.

There's no route to happiness, no route to success.

I want to say that it's a different one

and that if you're the kind of person who's prone to a certain amount of pessimism or, let's say, skepticism rather than cynicism,

that might actually be really useful and great.

And you don't need to transform yourself into a person who is grinning in a slightly scary manic fashion all day long.

But it's not cynicism.

I mean, I think I've tried in a lot of the writing I've done on this psychology and things like that in general to steer that course,

You know, to be totally open about mocking all the stuff that I think is useless, but not to pretend that there isn't some really great value there as well.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I was so excited just to get into your book that I skipped over.

This is your second book that you've written.

Yeah. The first is a collection of columns. So that was kind of easy to write because I'd already written them.

You work for The Guardian. You write for The Guardian on a regular basis.

That's right. I have a weekly column on these related areas, you know, psychology, productivity, science of happiness, this kind of thing.

I have this right. Just looking at my notes, you did your master's in social and political sciences over at Cambridge.

That's right. Yes.

So, OK, so getting back to the book, I mean, just establishing your credentials there.

I understand the need for a book like this.

I mean, I understand that the current trend in our society culture is moving towards this sort of be happy all the time.

Happiness is this sort of goal.

Mindfulness, there's just this whole, it's almost trendy.

You know, even for myself, there's a lot of, I guess I can be immensely cynical at times.

So in the book, you talk about just trying too hard to be happy.

I mean, what does that mean?

Well, I guess it's useful to give a sort of a working definition of positive thinking here, maybe.

Because, you know, on the one hand, not every single happiness guru gets condemned by me as a positive thinker.

On the other hand, a lot of people who think that they would never fall for the pseudoscience or whatever,

they may also, as I was, I think, be guilty of a certain kind of positive thinking.

What I mean is not optimism.

I don't mean there's something wrong if you get out of bed in the morning feeling great.

That's wonderful. Keep doing it.

But this idea that we can successfully just use our conscious will to control our emotions, our thoughts, and outcomes in the external world, that you can sort of, in a very simple way, achieve dominance and mastery over your human psychology and get rid of all the stuff that you don't want and just create all the outcomes that you do want.

And what I try to do at the beginning of the book, I do spend some time just like mocking terrible positive thinking.

I confess it.

But I then try to be more constructive in the rest of the book and explore this idea that I call the negative path to happiness,

which is a whole family of different approaches, including some stuff from Buddhism and meditation, including Stoicism, which is all very popular these days.

Again, that was that was the next thing that I was going to get into.

I mean, are you do you consider yourself a Stoic or do you practice that or?

these approaches they're all very different but what unites them all is this idea that we could

usefully learn to get more friendly towards and tolerant of the negative emotions in us you know

the thinking in us that is is not always exactly as we'd want it the idea that if you you know

meet with opposition to your goals and end up in a different place than you'd planned that might

not be a bad thing so just this general attitude that says let's just be more open to everything

rises instead of this actually really stressful and not very happy way of being which is constantly

trying to eliminate the negative it's a very exhausting way to feel that you have to keep

replenishing your reserves of relentless good cheer and much more i think open and actually

practical for for getting things done to have a more resilient capacious attitude so stoicism i

mean i i don't think i can claim to call myself a stoic all the way through because there is a lot

philosophy that I don't practice that I some bits that I kind of disagree with but the bit

that I took from it that was so powerful and really sums up I guess some of what I'm trying

to say is this idea of negative visualization or the premeditation of evils to give it its cool

title which is this idea that a lot of the time instead of trying to persuade yourself that

everything's just going to go fantastically or persuade other people you know um there's real

merit in uh in soberly thinking through actually how badly things could go what the worst case

scenario could be in any given circumstance and and really going forward into the risky future

absolutely open to the idea that it might all go disastrously wrong but with a real sense of

actually, you know, the ground floor to that, how far things really could go wrong. Because what you

find, obviously, in almost all cases, is that this, we sort of go through life panicking and fearing

things that have an almost zero, and in some cases, zero chance of actually happening.

Right, okay. So, I mean, I think the few fascinating things that I find about, you know,

what you're doing in this book and your, and your work is that, you know, you're looking at,

you, you spend a lot of time looking at the science of, of quote happiness, and you're

looking at the psychology of it and, and productivity. And, but also you, you spend

some time to kind of question, uh, the, the tenants of, of the people in the self-help industry.

and kind of the way that people tend to worship these people that are in that industry.

Yeah, sure.

And I think it divides into two.

There are kind of charlatans.

There are people who I want to criticize fairly openly and say that on some level,

I'm not accusing them of criminal offenses, but on some level it is a con.

of strange built-in dynamic to a lot of self-help such that if it really did

its job, they would put themselves out of business.

Exactly.

Which is – that's actually true of quite a few different industries. But the special thing about self-help then is that when it doesn't work, especially with positive thinking, the ideology tells you that you're not thinking positively enough.

Your problem is you're not doing it enough. So you go back and get more replenishment from the same people, the same seminars, the same books.

parallel I make somewhere is, you know, if you bought a TV from a specific manufacturer and it

broke and you did it again and it broke again, like you'd stop buying TVs from that manufacturer.

Whereas there's a tendency within the way, the logic of positive thinking to keep of going back

to the same methods and the same gurus convinced that it's you and that if you can only think a

bit more positively, you know, all this, this promise will be, will be granted to you. And

And then I think there's a lot more in the world of positive thinking and a bit more broadly positive psychology that is not dishonest or ill-meant.

It's just that it doesn't allow enough of the side of the coin, the emotional coin that is negativity and feeling sad and feeling inadequate and feeling insecure.

And actually, you know, learning to get friendly with those feelings is a kind of a superpower, I think.

Definitely.

relate to this a lot. And I, and I kind of want to, I want to bounce back to, you know, your,

the way that you view these people that, and, and, you know, you, you called it a con and it is,

you know, I, I agree with you. I, it is, there is a sense of if they were doing their jobs,

if they were actually coming through, you, you would no longer need them. Right. Yeah. I mean,

so you nailed it by saying that, and I need you to dig deeper into this. I mean, why this

Why, as human beings, why do we feel like we need to give our power, surrender our power into a person who may or may not be able to hand us something that we can't kind of garner ourselves?

It's a really good way of putting it. I think that we all of us, to some degree, feel inadequate or not up to the task, or we secretly think we're the only person who's winging it.

And we don't realize that, as I often try to say in my writing, you know, that basically everybody is winging it all the time.

And in that situation, you can go in one of several different ways.

And one of those ways is to sort of, yeah, as you say, hand over all your power to someone who seems very persuasively to not have any of those issues so that you, you know, so that you don't need to feel those negative feelings anymore.

And it's, you know, not to exaggerate, but it's a minor version of why people join certain kinds of cult and certain kinds of terrifyingly extreme political organization.

It's like it makes things simple and somebody else is taking responsibility for everything you do.

And that is one way of dealing with emotions that you don't want to confront.

I think basically everything that goes wrong in life is because we're thinking and feeling things that we don't want to acknowledge that we're thinking and feeling.

And if you can just gently, to a certain degree, learn to acknowledge them instead, I think you become, you're just twice as powerful and in a much better situation.

So I do think that, I mean, I went to one of these particularly ridiculous motivational seminars where one of the people, this is not something I mentioned so much in the book, this particular speaker, because I was focusing on others.

You know, there's somebody there who goes around these things selling software that enables you to completely beat the stock market, to get all these advantages that apparently top secret, you know, the star investors have.

And that will enable you to get these kind of like insane returns automatically from his software that costs several thousand dollars to subscribe to.

this is an old point many people have made it but like he would not be there selling it for two or

three thousand dollars if it did what it said you know if he could if he could sit back and become a

multi uh millionaire uh using that method he would not feel the need to be on the road uh 300 days a

year trying to sell software to other people precisely yeah you're ringing there's so many

bells that are ringing for me right now just through all this because when i look at the the

there is a sense of it's very amorphous, you know, it's very transitory and it's very just far away.

And then when you grasp it, when you start to grasp it, just as you said, you need to, you continually have to go back for more.

You know, whether it's like a Facebook feed that the person runs and, oh, okay, well, you know, I just read this amazing article.

it you apply it for a couple days and then you you have to go back and read another article or

whatever it may be right and i mean it just it's such an interesting phenomenon that was it was

just snake oil you know you were just called a snake oil salesman yeah i'm gonna say i think

there's really important little distinction that's worth making as well though which is that you know

to some extent all of us who are in the writing and speaking and podcasting business like we'd

like people to keep coming back for our stuff. That's just the way of the world.

I think there is also something very specific about kind of mood boosting, right? There's this

idea of getting motivated is a kind of really complicated and thorny one when you get into it

because we tend to think that if we want to achieve amazing things, what we really need to do is kind

of psych ourselves up and get motivated and really then just like, you know, go out and kick ass.

always try to argue and I say at one point in the book I think you know if you want to do something

risky scary amazing then like that's a challenge because you need to take the actions associated

with it but if you tell yourself you've got to feel like doing it first that's actually you know

that's not helping that's adding a new uh hurdle because we most of us have the ability to control

our physical movements we can sit down open the laptop start typing email the person whatever it

may be. But the desire to make yourself feel like everything's fantastic is actually much harder

because our brains and our emotional lives are such complicated things. And so for me, both in

the message in the book, but also something that helped me write the book and has helped me a lot

ever since is just this insight that, you know, you don't need to feel like doing something in

order to do it. You can be okay with your grumpy, grouchy inner dialogue and the fact that you don't

want to be doing something and you don't need to try and squelch that and go to war with it

you can just feel it and by the way at the same time take some actions that that move you towards

your your objectives so in a way i think you can see the whole motivational culture as this thing

like yeah it's this kind of quest for a short-lived little shot in the arm and yeah a couple of days

later you need another one maybe just don't get hooked to that at all and let the the motivated

feeling and the unmotivated feeling come and go like the weather and and meanwhile take some

action i mean it's easier said than done but i think it's much more effective than uh than the

alternative i have this sort of philosophy i guess and and it what i call it is the message versus the

messenger theory so the way that i look at it is let's let's just steve jobs he his message was

profound to change the world. But as him as a messenger, I mean, I didn't know the guy,

but the stories about him and surrounding him is that he was kind of a dick. And what I've noticed

is that there are people who like to talk a lot and they like to really hear themselves speak.

and when they're giving these speeches, it's very adrenaline-fueled.

It's almost like a church gathering where they're doing these special spells,

except it's a motivational course, and it pumps you up and it gets you driven,

and all these neurochemicals are firing off in your brain, but eventually it just fades.

Getting back into your book here, you talk about insecurity being this sort of power source.

Insecurity can be a way to look at things differently.

Let's get into that.

Yeah, sure.

I mean, I was really inspired and affected in my life by reading a very thin book by Alan Watts,

the great 60s, 70s sort of counterculture philosopher guy called The Wisdom of Insecurity.

in which he, it's very sort of abstract and philosophical, but really packs a punch.

And it's this basic idea that we all feel totally insecure these days.

It's kind of a joke because he's writing in 1951, but it totally applies today even more so.

On every level, people feel economically insecure, the world feels sort of geopolitically insecure, the climate.

No matter the level you choose, we spend a lot of our lives feeling insecure.

he makes the argument that a big part of the cause of that, and maybe the whole cause of it,

ironically, is our attempts to feel secure, and that it's only by constantly struggling for this

feeling of safety that we sort of expose ourselves to this constant awareness of how we're not

completely safe. There's a quote that goes around on the internet, attributed, I think,

to Helen Keller about how security is mainly an illusion. You know, if

And to say that building these walls to try to feel safe inside is A, not very successful usually, and B, just creates a greater sense of being exposed to the slings and arrows of the world.

I don't mean you shouldn't have an emergency fund of savings. You should take precautions, sure. But this idea in life that feeling safe is what you're shooting for.

leads a lot of people astray and actually leads them to feel more and more unsafe because

same dynamic as with other aspects of sort of positivity or whatever is you're

you're constantly made aware of all the ways in which you're still not yet

completely completely safe if that makes sense so that's why I think sort of

learning to embrace insecurity a bit is is is so powerful because you're going to feel it

anyway and you might as well not feel it in the really extreme way that comes from

spending your life trying to feel safe does that make any sense yeah no of course yeah it it does

really to me it does and i really honestly don't know how my listeners are going to react to this

conversation but i was i was speaking to a friend of mine last night and i mentioned that that you

were going to be on the show and they just they just they were crying laughing just because

you know, they, I, I can be extremely cynical at times, even though, you know, I'm doing this show

that is meant to really help people. And we, we explore the depths of being human, which is why

another, another reason I just wanted to look at the other side of the coin. For me, it just,

it comes down to really exploring all angles. Why not, why not bring you on the show and kind of

deconstruct in a way where, you know, you're not, you're not selling some seminar that you're not

offering some coaching course that, you know, that you're going to be running soon?

Yeah, no, yes, I, I got to get on that. I think that, you know, it's, it's, it's two different

things again, right? It's the, it's, I keep saying that, but you know, it's like, it's,

there are people you should ignore because it's pseudoscience and it doesn't work. But then

there's also a kind of just like a, a widened lens, you know, it's not a, it's, it's not that

everything you previously thought was completely wrong. It's that there's this other side

to the yin and yang. And in fact, by the end of writing this book, I started off

talking about happiness, and the subtitle has the word happiness in it. By the end,

I began to wonder, and I write about this, whether it really makes any sense to think about happiness

as the goal that we're aiming for here,

as opposed to meaning and meaningfulness.

And I think that when you reframe it as meaningfulness,

you can begin to see that this is a meaningful life

is surely one that has the highs and the lows,

that is sort of present for the whole crazy catastrophe

of being a human life on the planet,

sort of careful and closed thing where like I'm gonna get it exactly right and

I'm gonna be a success every step of the way it's like no it's messy and it's so

much better for being messy there's a there's a self-help writer Susan Jeffers

she died a couple of years ago who wrote the book called feel the fear and do it

anyway which sounds a bit like the kind of title I might make jokes about but

a good piece of wisdom, I think, feel the fear and do it anyway, rather than eliminate your fear,

kill your fear and be fearless. And she wrote another book about uncertainty. And she made

this point in it that, you know, if somebody could hand you a list of everything that was

going to happen to you in the rest of your life from tomorrow to the end of your life,

like you, you, most people, I think when they really thought about it, wouldn't want to receive

that list. And the real kicker is you wouldn't even want to receive it if every single item on

because the moment you knew for certain what was going to be happening every day of your life

to the end of your life it will be a little bit like you know death basically it will be like

your life was over the juice was gone and so I feel like being really open to what might happen

and to the fact that that's going to be a roller coaster and that there's going to be like real

lows as well as real highs it just feels much more much more like a life on your deathbed you

with real sort of pride and joy?

I mean, I think essentially we're all just at the base of everything.

We are all just human beings.

And we're going to have bad days.

We're going to feel like crap.

You know, it's going to be hard.

And not everything is going to be rosy, peachy, and beautiful.

And, you know, I do meditate.

I practice meditation.

I meditate every day.

help sometimes, but, you know, I, I tend to cycle through, you know, varying emotional states and

at least I'm aware of them. You know, I'm aware of, I'm, I'm aware that I, I get super depressed

occasionally and I'm aware of my highs and my lows, you know, and I'm not, and I'm not,

and I'm not trying to fight either of them. I, I'm okay with them. And it just feels like,

you know the the culture that we've we are seeing grow more and more kind of trendy and popular is

do yoga meditate have mindfulness attend my seminar and i will show you how to take control

of your life you will have control of your life again right and i think that you know yeah and i

think that control thing i mean this is a lesson i've had to learn and i'm still learning in life

if I don't want to pretend I'm some perfect paragon.

But, like, I am not at all sure that control and dominance is a helpful way of thinking at all.

I'm increasingly drawn to things like the, you know, Joseph Campbell, the great scholar of mythology,

who said that, I'll gobble the quote, but it's something like, you know,

You have to put aside or let go of the life you had planned in order to live the life that is waiting for you.

There's something about control that keeps us very small.

Because obviously, if you're going to plan and control and execute a perfect life from where you're standing now, that is limited to your perspective now.

You can't know what the possibilities are beyond your current perspective.

And that sort of idea of getting out of your own way, or as someone else I know puts it, you know, think of yourself as the super in an apartment building, not the owner of the apartment building.

Like, think of yourself as the person whose job it is to, like, keep the thing running and be open and let things happen and then just, like, see where it goes and be able to respond in the best ways to where it goes.

I think there's an awful lot in that.

Something else that springs to mind, tell me if I'm going on too much.

No, no, please, go on.

There's a psychoanalyst, a Jungian psychoanalyst in the tradition of Carl Jung called James Hollis, who I've really since writing the book that I've discovered his stuff.

So he's not in there.

But he says somewhere that the question we should be asking about life choices, choices in, you know, work, romance, whatever, is not, is this choice going to make me happier or less happy?

Because that is a very tricky thing for all the reasons we've been discussing.

You know, we don't even know.

But instead, to ask the question, will this choice, this path in life make me larger or smaller?

Will it enlarge me or diminish me?

I find this incredibly powerful because if you say to yourself, okay, I'm going to go for growth, I'm going to go for enlargement, and I'm going to go for getting bigger rather than getting smaller, there are all sorts of choices that might just be really scary.

They might not sound like they're going to make you happier necessarily, but they are going to be sort of like stepping into life in a way that is much more, you know, I don't know, just feels like more like worth doing than than this very sort of careful pinched path of like, I'm going to try really hard always to be feeling happy.

so yeah i mean there was a there was an article that you wrote called facebook and twitter the

art of unfriending or unfollowing people oh yeah and you kind of break it's just such an outstanding

article you kind of break down how unfriending someone on facebook is like a sort of snub

and do you even give a sort of example can you explain this to us because i i am going to butcher

Well, I mean, I think the main point I was trying to get at there is, and this was one that I think Ambrose Bierce had made like centuries ago, was that we don't have an acceptable social mechanism in society for being deintroduced from people.

And he was suggesting, you know, hundreds of years ago or hundreds of years ago

that there should be a way of formally deciding no longer to be an acquaintance with someone.

Because otherwise you just collect an infinite number of people.

And they might not all be right for you.

And obviously that's a thousand times more of an issue in the world of social media.

Because we can sort of develop these thousands of supposed friends.

And just generally, actually, in the world, not even just friendship, we're kind of bad at endings. We're bad at saying, actually, it's right for this thing to come to an end now. And that could be anything from the big stuff, like a relationship.

and now I read

according to the newspapers that

write about millennials

I'm no longer one, I can't count

ever to have been one myself but

just vanishing from

relationships is apparently

more and more

ghosting, yeah right, we don't have

good rituals for

ending things, could be as big as a relationship

could be as small as just like

when is it okay to stop reading a book

that you started reading and you decided actually

And I think defriending gets in there somewhere.

But, you know, it's difficult stuff.

I'm aware that there are some people on Twitter who have some system set up, some app or something,

so that they are told when people unfollow them.

And I'm just like, why would you love to do that?

It's like a daily reminder.

I mean, I'm aware, keeping half an eye on my follower count, that, you know, it climbs on average,

but it definitely climbs and falls.

deciding they're sick of me on a regular basis.

I find this absolutely hilarious, man.

I just, it seems like an exchange, like a currency.

So even recently, I started to do this experiment where, you know, on my Facebook account, I

just stopped liking other people's stuff.

And not that I didn't like it or that I did, I just didn't care enough to click like anymore.

And so I just, I simply wanted to measure what the effect would be on my, my friend count and also whether people liked what I posted or not.

And it was, it was, I mean, it was completely unsurprising.

It was the suddenly I'm losing friends and no one is liking any of my posts.

So it's almost like, it's almost like this, it's a currency.

It doesn't, doesn't matter what the content of what you're posting is.

it's just simply oh okay you know this person liked my thing so i'm gonna go out of my way

and make sure that i you know i pay them back in this electronic you know way and just and make

sure that i like their stuff as well yeah i think likes are a really fascinating phenomenon right

because you know firstly there's this whole problem of how do you show support to somebody

who's saying something sad or negative like you don't want to like a post where somebody tells

you that they lost a loved one because it's like not a good thing but um but you might want to sort

of show support and there's this constant debate is facebook going to introduce ways of uh ways of

doing this so that first of all creates a kind of positivity bias in what people post i think

um and then secondly yeah it's just sort of transactional uh and then facebook's algorithm

responds in really weird ways so like if a friend of mine has a baby and posts the pictures on

facebook of course i'm going to like those photos because i want to say you know i'm really pleased

I'm thinking of you and that's all great but then Facebook then decides that all

I want to see in my Facebook feed is pictures of people's babies which might

not have been the case so you know there's it's a it's obviously it's a

metric that's being used for commercial purposes and in that sense I mean I'm

not anti social media at all pretty much addicted to Twitter but but it but there

is a sort of an erosion of the meaning of of you know friendship I think added

this phenomenon of how Facebook feeds are like the highlight reels of people's lives. So if you

judge yourself subconsciously by them, you'll end up concluding that your life is much more,

is much worse because everyone you follow seems to only be, you know, announcing new jobs,

great vacations, getting engaged. And, and you don't, they don't post about the days,

They're just feeling kind of blah.

So there's lots of strange phenomena emotionally that go on with social media.

There's a form of kind of humble bragging.

You know, it's like, oh, I just bought this brand new Maserati.

I paid $200,000 for it.

And you're just, you're disgusted.

You're nauseated.

You know, you don't even make six figures a year.

And this person is posting, you know, pictures of their Maserati.

And it does affect, you know, it does, being on social media,

kind of just your psychology. I mean, if you're, and, and how can you not compare yourself to

another person's life? How can you not compare? Just it's, it's human nature to just automatically

do that. You know, I find it amusing. And I think it was Terrence McKenna who just said that,

that you should be an anthropologist of your own culture, you know, and just that you can learn so

much by doing that. And, and I find our culture truly, truly fascinating. And there's, there's a

called the museum of failure and um it just it you know the sub subheading is just the case for

embracing your errors how would we go about just embracing failing well big question i mean the the

fun part of doing that chapter was that i got to go to this place in uh in michigan which is a

a giant it's a commercial operation it's a storehouse of like failed consumer products

so that product designers can go and research things they're planning

and see how it compares to other products that didn't make it.

So there's like tens and tens of thousands of just like ridiculous things,

like microwavable pre-scrambled eggs in a tube that you're supposed to take

so you can eat them in the car on the way to work.

And there's like all these kind of, there was a brand of cola called Breakfast Cola

that was specifically designed to try to get you to drink it for breakfast, all this kind of stuff.

You mean like failed inventions?

Failed consumer products, so supermarket products.

Failed products that you would have seen on the shelves at the supermarket,

but then they were withdrawn after a few weeks or months because nobody was buying them.

And the fascinating thing about this place is that it didn't start as a collection of failures.

It just started as a research library of like they went out and bought every new thing that came to the supermarket.

And it's just a fact that because the vast majority of products that are brought to launch in that space fail, it's just the law of how it works, that naturally over time this place would become a collection of failed products.

And what that sort of shows you is that failure is kind of the default mode.

You know, I believe it's certainly true that, like, most restaurants fail.

And you can even, if you want to get grand and existential about it, you could see, like, evolution as a process of progressive failure.

Because, you know, the vast majority, something like 99% of all species that have ever existed are extinct now.

Like, that's how it works.

We wouldn't be here if that mechanism didn't kick in.

So it's kind of a little bit insane when you think about that to try to avoid failure at all costs

because there is clearly something very closely connected between failure and progress.

And it's pretty simple, I think.

If you've got the courage to try stuff knowing that it might go wrong, then you try bold stuff.

I think there's a very close connection that you see in all this, right, between failure and progress, that you are only going to make grand successes by being exposed to the risk of fairly serious failure.

Otherwise, the alternative is this very safe, very cautious middle ground where you don't risk too much, don't lose too much, don't achieve too much.

So, you know, I think this is an idea that's got a lot of followers now.

I'm the only person saying, you know, it's good to embrace failure. But I think it's a really

powerful way to think it relates also to that stuff about fixed versus growth mindsets that

I'm sure you know about and have encountered. Yeah, to comment on, you know, what you just

said about failure. And I agree. I mean, I think some of my greatest ideas have have have have

have come through just massively failing. And the idea of just trying, as you said, just trying

something that is immensely large and then failing in a huge way. I think that, and we hear a lot

about the success stories of various companies and entrepreneurs. And I think there's a sort of

misperception about this sort of overnight success that, that, that is such a huge myth

that I think we need to focus on eliminating because, you know, there's the, the, the actual

curve is, you know, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail for, for at least a year and a half. And then,

you know, maybe you, you hit that success point. Right. Um, but I, I was going

happen. The universe will align, the stars will come together, and it will just appear in your

lap as if hard work is not part of this at all. And so I just want to hear your representation of

how you kind of viewed The Secret. Well, I mean, my main response is don't get me started.

um i that is uh the secret is a is a book that i have not uh held back from uh being being rude

about i i don't feel too bad about that because i think that the people involved with that now

have so much money that uh they can they can take a few uh they can afford it take a few knocks yeah

exactly but i mean yeah right you're completely right i it is constantly unclear in these um

discussions of what's called the law of attraction exactly what is being said if you're saying that

sitting and visualizing and envisaging success is a substitute for doing anything about it

then that seems to me just clearly obviously stupid and wrong and if people out there do it

and it works for them then i don't want to stop them but but i just that has no uh there's no

contact point in my understanding of the world for that. Sometimes what people will say is,

no, it's not that. It's about cultivating a certain mindset that will help motivate the

right kinds of actions. And in that case, I'm a little bit more open to that. I think that can

sometimes help. But the same goes for that as what I was saying about motivational,

the usual way we talk about motivation. I actually think that thinking that you've got

to divert an enormous amount of your energy to cultivating the right mindset and to feeling like

you're in a state of welcoming success and affluence and whatever it might be. This is a

huge distraction from action. And it means that on any day that you wake up and you're just not

feeling it, you're probably not going to take any action. Whereas if your attitude towards your

inner emotions is one more tolerant of the different weather patterns that come and go,

then you might well wake up one day not feeling it, which could be for any reason, right?

You know, slept badly or, you know, and still take action that day because you have not made the action dependent on the specific mindset.

And so I actually think it can really hold people back.

Finally, I don't know if you want to go into this, but there is a sort of really weird and quite unpleasant moral implication sometimes

kind of way of thinking, which is that, you know, if you are poor, that must be your fault. If you

have a terminal illness, that must be your fault. You know, you're responsible for your reality.

And it's always only your individual responsibility for anything that goes wrong. And I think that

that is a very unhealthy way to organize a society, you know, that we have no compassion

for people in those situations. We have no social structural ways of helping or a social safety net

to kind of, you know, I think that's a very sort of unhelpfully individualistic way of

thinking about human flourishing.

I mean, it's a billion dollar industry, you know, and these people that are, you know,

kind of selling us this idea that we can simply be rich, which they're actually becoming rich

by selling us this idea.

Right, exactly.

Or, I don't know, I really, I just, it's, it's, it's,

It's frustrating and I really just want to grab someone and just kind of say, no, it takes hard work and deliberate practice and science.

Yeah, right, right.

And also, it's also a question of looking at who's giving you advice, right?

Because I mean, I suppose what I do is in some sense give advice.

I've got to confess that.

But I hope that I've spent enough time talking to the people whose ideas I'm trying to communicate and studying the research that I'm trying to communicate.

Quite often you will read about self-help gurus, I don't need to name any names, whose life story goes like this.

They hit rock bottom very early in their lives.

They consider themselves to be terrible losers in their late teens or something like that.

or they struggle with alcohol or something like that,

which is no shame in facing up to things that go wrong in life like that at all.

But then they decide as an immediate response,

the way to deal with the situation they're in is to become a self-help guru

and start advising other people.

So I'm always on the lookout for, you know,

I want to read self-help books by 90-year-old guys rather than that

because I want to know that the advice that I'm hearing has been put to the practice,

that it's not actually just being used in the same way that the people around the secret

might be using the secret to make the money that they say you can get by following the secret.

So do that same kind of, pull that same kind of trick, if you see what I mean.

Yeah, yeah, I get it.

Oliver, this conversation has flown by, man.

recovered and and it was just a just a fun conversation actually for me and it was very

cathartic because it was just in your work and i think it's it's good to examine your all angles

and kind of just step back from whatever you may be involved in and look at what you're doing and

that self-actualization that self-awareness i mean how can it how can that be you know a negative

negative thing. Right. And I'm totally agreeing with you. I think that, you know, there's no

shame in pointing out like, why am I interested in writing about topics like this? Why do you do

this podcast? Why do people listen to this podcast? Like people who are interested in this stuff,

they're not the people, and there's no shame in this at all. They're not the people who started

out thinking like, well, my life's completely fine. I've got no problems and I'll just keep

going along with no change. Those people never get interested in this kind of stuff. It comes

partly from negative emotions and pain and issues that you have, problems you want to surmount.

And it's totally fine to be a person who has problems as long as you sort of take a conscious

attitude towards them and try to be a decent and compassionate person towards other people's

problems. And this idea that is in parts of self-help culture that you just have to start

by pretending that everything's perfect.

Just, yeah, well, as you can tell,

it gets me exercised.

Through your professional career,

you've actually, you've met

a lot of different celebrities

from, you know, Al Gore to 50 Cent.

First of all, how did that go about?

I mean, how did you get to the point

where you're meeting these people?

And then, I mean, what did you gain from that?

Like, how did that affect you?

Well, I did that.

And to the extent that I still do it,

as an interviewer and a feature writer for The Guardian.

So, you know, often it'll be like we have an opportunity to interview this person

and some of the time it'll be me who's chosen to go do it

or someone will make a sort of vigorous campaign for it to be me

and to try to display my editor as I did with Bill Clinton, for example.

I was like, you know, I want that opportunity.

It's been great.

privileged thing. And, um, I think that one of the most interesting things that, that

one can do in those situations is to try, you know, to ask one question that these people

haven't heard a million times before. And when you do manage that, which is not all the time,

but you do get a sort of connection. And I think, you know, this sounds like a cliche,

but one of the things you realize is that people in those very high profile situations struggle

with a lot of the same things that all of us struggle with.

Some people, armchair psychologists, might say they struggle with them more,

and that's why they become celebrities,

because they have a craving for a sort of attention that the rest of us don't.

So they're not kind of paragons of perfection,

but that's kind of great to realize that

and to know that they are flawed

and struggle with the same kinds of challenges.

And occasionally I got genuinely good bits of productivity advice from them,

like Jerry Seinfeld, for example, who gave me this great idea of thinking about creative work

using the metaphor of athletics, that you're not an artist so much as you're an athlete.

This involves small amounts of progressive training on a daily basis,

his comedy still goes to stand-up clubs in New Jersey where he doesn't need to go at all for the

money or for the fame but just you know it's like going to the weights room or going to the treadmill

and that was very powerful but mainly it's just this idea like oh you know okay they kind of

celebrities they're just like us like it says in Us Weekly magazine. I mean and that you know and

And, you know, as the way you spoke about kind of Jerry Seinfeld,

you can really feel the difference of someone who is kind of bullshitting you.

And I mean, I think we've crossed the paradigm of, I feel like our bullshit detectors are just at maximum.

Like we're getting better at just knowing, or at least, I mean, maybe that's my perception.

It could be completely off base.

I mean, there may be some people who just have no idea.

But, you know, I would like to think that the paradigm is shifting and that when someone is bullshitting us sooner or later, we eventually figure that out.

We find that out.

You know, either their actions don't line up to, you know, their words or, you know, something is going on that reveals who they truly are.

In that same kind of regard, there are people who that, you know, we can take away from and that that do walk, talk and and kind of follow up with what they're saying and doing.

Yeah, absolutely. It's always the same thing. You know, be willing to call bullshit, but but also be open to the idea that that there's value there.

And the same applies, I think, to the world of self-help, right? I mean, don't fall for useless pseudoscientific rubbish. But on the other hand, and this has been, if anything, more of a challenge for me, like things like keeping a gratitude diary, which is kind of an embarrassing thing in the social circles I come from, to be like, oh, yeah, I keep a gratitude diary. It's like gratitude journal. But like, it works. It's worth doing. The science is there.

And so being willing to take that kind of advice, even when it feels kind of embarrassing, is just as important as being willing to call people out, I think.

Absolutely. Oliver, I really enjoyed this conversation, man. Where can people find your work? Is it just OliverBerkman.com?

that is my website

you can put my name into the search box

at theguardian.com

for a lot of stuff I've done there

and I'm Oliver Berkman on Twitter

and the book as you said is The Antidote

awesome

guys you have been listening to The Human Experience

my name is Xavier Katana

the book is called

The Antidote by Oliver Berkman

go pick up a copy

it's a fascinating read

we are going to get out of here

so much for tuning in and listening.