Ryan A. Bush: Insights on Self-Mastery, Psychology and Happiness - Virtuous Living!

FEEL FREE welcomes the insightful Ryan A. Bush, author and founder of Designing The Mind, creator of the Psychitecture platform mindform.io and upcoming author of Become Who You Are. 

Join us as Ryan unravels the complexities of maintaining a virtuous character amidst modern temptations and negative psychological structures and how skewed self-perceptions can impair our mental health.

We probe the notion that surface-level self-improvement lacks the fortitude of virtue-driven disciplines, and we marvel at the courage that lies at the heart of every search for meaningful bonds in community and our own work.

So join us, as we offer guidance, hope, and the wisdom found in Ryan A. Bush's "Become Who You Are," equipping you with the tools for resilience and the art of personal transformation.

Check the links below for Ryan's resources on self-mastery!

Designing The Mind website - https://designingthemind.org/
Ryan's Books - https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B08Q8P63CF
Mindform - https://mindform.io/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/designing_the_mind/
Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/@DesigningtheMind

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:06

Welcome back to another episode of Feel Free, the only podcast that'll tell you to chase your dreams and call you out and all your bullshit Myself included, extremely excited for this week's episode. We are joined by Mr Ryan A Bush, the author and founder of Designing the Mind, the upcoming author of Become who you Are and the creator of the world's first psychotexture platform, mindform. His ability to blend creativity with research, with introspective thinking, has been a huge hit in the self-development community, and on this week's episode we talk about our mutual love for philosophy and then get into some of the themes of his upcoming book, become who you Are, which you can pre-order on his website. I will be dropping links to all of his products and resources down below. So show the man some love and sit tight, because we're getting into the episode.

Speaker 1: 0:59

Yeah, eudimonia, eudimonia, did you want to go into that topic at all Because I, honestly, am not well versed in that.

Speaker 2: 1:07

Yeah, I'd love to. So you can think of Eudimonia. It's the term that the ancient Greeks used for sort of the ultimate happiness, the good life, and it means something a lot deeper than I think. What happiness means when we use it a lot, it's a momentary feeling of pleasure or joy. It was a very deep satisfaction with your life and yourself. And what's interesting is that all the ancient Greeks pretty much agree on this that Eudimonia is closely linked to virtue or something like virtue.

Speaker 2: 1:38

Right, Arete is the word they used, which has been translated a few different ways. One is excellence, and that can sometimes be more clear to people than virtue. It's not just this preachy morality thing. It's about striving for excellence and bringing out your own personal excellences. And they argued that it really doesn't matter what happens to you in your life. Right, Socrates was put sentenced to death, essentially, and he chose to stay and chose to be executed because he wanted to reach toward Eudimonia. He wanted a deeper kind of happiness that had to do with your character and your choices, and these thinkers often said no one can hurt you if they can't harm your character. So it doesn't matter what your circumstances are. You can achieve Eudimonia in a prison camp.

Speaker 1: 2:28

Yeah, I think one of your quotes was like nobody or their actions can take your virtue away from you, and I was like damn, that's so true, and I think we get caught up in our own heads a lot with these. I think you also mentioned these self-narratives, or negative self-narratives that are in our heads, and I think trying to dispel those is so key to reaching that state.

Speaker 2: 2:55

Yeah, yeah, I mean. Another thing on the ancient Greeks is that the Stoics really inspired the practice of cognitive behavioral therapy that we have today. They were really the originator of a lot of these ideas about how our thoughts and beliefs lead to our emotions and our moods, and so I think those self-narratives, they very often become distorted, especially in the modern world, and that requires a kind of restructuring process that you see in Stoicism, you see it in CBT if you seek out therapy. But other than those schools, most people aren't really exposed to these ideas and most people don't know how to go in and actually change their beliefs that are causing them to suffer and rework them, and so they're kind of just trapped in their own personal narratives and that can get ugly.

Speaker 1: 3:48

And for someone to write a book on this, you've obviously had to have dealt with things of this nature. So you're pulling a lot of inspiration from philosophy and psychology, and then your own ups and downs as well. So why are we struggling so much in this century with these behaviors and these habits and stuff?

Speaker 2: 4:12

Yeah, a lot of layers to that, and I will get into my own sort of personal challenges.

Speaker 2: 4:19

But just to address that last point, a big part of why people are struggling so much with these things is that our brains weren't really built for the world that we live in.

Speaker 2: 4:29

We were built to live in tribes of 150 people where things like social media and cocaine and all these other addictive things didn't exist, and they've sort of been designed to hijack our natural reward systems, and so it is very easy to get caught up in behaviors that you're not proud of, that don't serve your. You know talking about virtue and eudaimonia, and so I think it's not too surprising that we see things like depression on the rise. There are more temptations than ever pulling you away from what is ultimately a good life, and there's also more things distorting your views on yourself. Right, you know, if you're getting all your information about who you are and how you fit into your community from, you know, a social media app, how is that going to affect the signal your brains receiving? And so I think a big part of the answer is the world is just so different and getting more and more different from the one that our brains sort of evolved to exist in.

Speaker 1: 5:32

Yeah, and you know I could talk for days about the social media, the technology and stuff like that, and that's big, and you used a word called virtue domain. Now do these, this online community, this social media or the society we're living in now? That's not designed for us right now. Where do we find these virtue domains at? Where do we find these places where we can, you know, achieve our virtues or even find our virtues?

Speaker 2: 6:00

Yeah, that ties in pretty well, actually, with my challenges. So, you know, a few years ago I was working at a company where I decided to go part time and write my first book and you know, I was pretty much struggling to write this book a few days a week. It wasn't going as smoothly as I thought it would, getting my ideas on paper, as a lot of first time writers find. You know, I was at this job where I was kind of I'd kind of become relegated to doing these really tedious sort of engineering drawings instead of the creative work that I started doing when I joined the company and I really wasn't good at it and I had, you know, I had co-workers who were criticizing me and who had taken a dislike to me and I, you know, was struggling with that. And then there was also a global pandemic, which doesn't tend to help if you're going through an identity crisis.

Speaker 2: 6:58

So, I really was at a place where none of the main areas of my life or very few of them I did have a very, you know, happy relationship that I'm very thankful for, but pretty much everything else it was not serving to show me what I'm good at and to bring out my greatest strengths or virtues and, as a result, my view of myself, my self-esteem and my mood in turn was kind of going lower and lower during that period and it kind of hit a point that you would say is sort of mild to moderate depression for a while during that period. And I think this really is what caused a lot of these ideas I'd been studying for so long to click into place. This lived experience allowed me to piece together this theory about what actually causes our wellbeing, what causes depression, and you know how does self-esteem work, all these things. And so, talking about virtue domains, I think what's crucial is that you build sort of vessels in your life that allow you to exercise your greatest personal strengths, the actions that make you proud of who you are, that you admire and other people, and I think this can come through your work, it could come through your relationships, your hobbies, communities and yeah, I mean, I think even a social media network in theory could do it.

Speaker 2: 8:15

I built what you might call a social media network, but it's an online community called Mindform, where it actually has been designed for humans and not for advertisers, right? It actually is built to bring out the best in us and help us achieve self-mastery, and I think it does serve as a virtue domain for members. But ultimately, a lot of us don't have these core avenues in our lives. We have jobs that are monotonous and repetitive and don't allow us to be creative and be the person we want to be. We've got relationships, potentially, that don't bring out our greatest strengths and, particularly for people who aren't religious, we don't have a lot of really great communities that bring about a lot of social connection, and that's just. There's a lot of issues with the modern world that sort of cause people to get trapped in a place where they can't see what's great about them, and I've argued in this book that your brain is really trying to see what's great about you and it's regulating your mood according to what it sees.

Speaker 1: 9:18

Damn. Yeah, that last part, your brain, or I didn't even say yourself. You mentioned the ego a lot. I think your ego is trying to tell yourself that you have these things to be proud of, these virtues, as you're saying. Ok, this kind of segues a little bit, but the ego has been given a bad rep here in the western world and even the eastern world, you know, and those sects and stuff like that. I don't believe that you can totally get rid of the ego because, in a sense, if you can learn to live with it in a healthy manner, then you find things to be proud of. You know that give you this purpose and this meaning. And right at the start of your book you said something finding meaning in meaningful projects. And I was like damn, because you know, if you just go to work and come home and scroll your phone like where's the meaning in that? You're just paying bills to survive, right, and we don't have a lot of communities that are showing us how to be the best person we are, you know, and that's sad.

Speaker 2: 10:18

Yeah, I agree, I think you know, especially on the on the ego point, I would say, you know, the eastern world started it. A lot of these, a lot of these eastern philosophies have argued that you know that the ideal is to transcend ourselves, whereas the ancient Greeks said the idea, you know, the ideal is to build ourselves up, right, eudaimonia. It's pretty different as an ideal from enlightenment or self transcendence or ego death. But the West recently has really taken a liking to these eastern ideas and, and you know, now you find them in every self help book and every you know spiritual work, so that your ego is your enemy. It's a, it's this, you know, evil sort of mechanism in your brain and you have to get rid of it.

Speaker 2: 11:06

And I've sort of questioned well, you know, is anything lost if we destroy our egos, if we disable this mechanism that is presumably in our brains for a reason, at least an evolutionary reason, why are we trying to, you know, permanently disable it or escape it?

Speaker 2: 11:23

And you know, what I found is that really the ego does cause a lot of suffering, the you know what I've called the self appraisal system in our brains.

Speaker 2: 11:33

It does create a lot of negative thoughts and negative moods.

Speaker 2: 11:36

But it's doing that because it's it's trying to find good things about us, things to like and be proud of and to show off to our social tribes and friends and potential mates and all these things. And so, yes, it's responsible for the suffering and the self critical monologue, but it's also responsible for the pride and the admiration we feel for ourselves. It's responsible for the good moods, along with the bad. And so my stance is that we should, you know, have a healthy respect for our egos. We should be trying to design better egos that are better capable of seeing our strengths and acknowledging them, but we should also be trying to sort of prove ourselves to our own egos. We should be going out every day and trying to give ourselves reason to be proud of us, and that'll result in the ego producing positive thoughts and healthy moods and happy you know lives essentially, and that's easier said than done, but I do provide a number of sort of steps and exercises in the book for actually going about that project.

Speaker 1: 12:40

Yeah, absolutely. Another thing that you had mentioned was embracing the ego, or having the ego embrace your virtues. So I mean, we've talked a little bit about virtue, but for the people who are listening, what do you define virtue? As it's a good question.

Speaker 2: 12:58

It certainly includes the things that we think of as virtue. You know the moral things like honesty, but I think it includes everything from compassion to courage to creativity, anything that we look at another person and we say, wow, I really admire that about them, that's a good trait that they have, right, this is really what a virtue is, and I think it's important, too, that we observe other cultures to make sure it's not just something that our culture sort of tends to admire. You know like there are plenty of skills like stock trading that our culture sort of values, but that an indigenous tribe wouldn't care about but there are also virtues that you know you could go to any culture in the world and they would admire it. Courage is admired in every culture, and so these are what we really need to be paying attention to, because it means there's something very deeply ingrained about these traits in our brains. And so you know, martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson came out with a list of 24 virtues that they observe in every culture, and I think, you know, creating a finite list is always going to simplify things like this, but it's a great starting point to just look at this list and say these are the things that humans universally value, and so chances are I value them and I should learn to embody them as much as I can.

Speaker 2: 14:17

I also think it's important to study your own greatest virtues and identify what those are. You know Martin Seligman same, you know, pioneer of psychology, of positive psychology. He created a test that you can take, called the signature strengths test. That'll basically give you a starting point and tell you these are your top five virtues and you can sort of home in on those and say how can I amplify these, how can I bring these out more in my life? That's really going to be the key question when it comes to improving your life and your happiness in the next stage of your life.

Speaker 1: 14:54

Yeah, and I think, yeah, that's crazy because a lot of people get lost when they try and like better themselves. You know, they think I'm just going to like die it and go to the gym and my life's going to get better, and then people end up like losing steam. They're like, well, I'm not passionate about trying to heal myself, you know. Well, it's like you haven't found your virtues, you haven't found a reason to want to get better. Yet you know you can fill your time with a lot of really good habits and activities, but you got to have a reason for doing it, you know.

Speaker 2: 15:24

I agree.

Speaker 2: 15:24

If you are, you know, motivated to say, go to the gym and exercise because you want to get a six pack for the summer, you know that motivation is going to really have some ups and downs and it's probably not going to be sustainable.

Speaker 2: 15:39

But if you want to do it, because you want to exercise your virtue of discipline on a regular basis and you want to make this a part of your lifestyle and not just use it to achieve some external results, it's going to be a lot more powerful and sustainable and it's also going to do what what I would say is more valuable, which is to actually show your brain look, I have discipline, I have this positive trait that we admire in others and hence I admire myself, and that's that's. That's really. The core question is how can I earn my own admiration more? That's, I think, what should be underlying our desire to exercise and to write books and to, you know, create music. It's all, ultimately, about exercising our own strengths, and I think that's why that's the biggest reason why I go on podcasts and maybe why you host them. It's because I have strengths that I can bring out and I can do it through this avenue.

Speaker 1: 16:37

Essentially, and it's enjoyable to. You know, finding something that's difficult to do because it's, you know, if everything was always easy. I find that we get very bored with life, you know, so we need to have those difficult things to do. And, specifically, one story that stood out in the book was you had been homeschooled and then you decided that you wanted to go to real school, which was a shock. And then you also join the football team, right, and you play for four years. Yeah, that is, I'll be honest. I played two years of football. I played in sixth grade and I played freshman year and I was just getting knocked around, man, I'm like, yeah, I belong in golf I'll be honest.

Speaker 2: 17:19

Oh, you and me both, I was getting knocked around too. I just didn't, for some reason, stop getting knocked around. But no, I think it served its purpose for me, which was not to become a starter on the team and be the all star, but to get out of my comfort zone. Because, yeah, I didn't have the social skills that I knew I should at that point in my life and I felt like I was afraid of the world. I was afraid to talk to people, afraid to be seen, and so I kind of asked myself at one point and I don't know how I knew to ask myself this as a 12 or 13 year old, but you know, what could I do to get as far out of my comfort zone as possible? What would be the just the craziest thing for me to do?

Speaker 2: 18:02

And for a little 100 pound kid who probably belongs on the chess team, joined the football team, was it? And it ended up doing, yeah, exactly that. It did get me out of my comfort zone. It allowed me to connect and build camaraderie with a lot of people that I'm still friends with today, and it also gave me this kind of reference experience where I can pretty much remember what it was like on game night of a football game. Anytime I'm doing something that I might be nervous about. If I'm going on a podcast, I can be like, well, at least it's not game night. So, yeah, it's really valuable and I talk about this a lot in my anxiety program the anxiety algorithm, how really going toward the thing that scares you is exactly what you need to do if you want to get rid of that fear that's holding you back.

Speaker 1: 18:51

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's honestly the virtue you probably got. Going to school with the football was probably courage, you know, the courage to step out of your comfort zone like that. That's huge.

Speaker 2: 19:02

I think I gained several virtues through the experience, but definitely courage.

Speaker 1: 19:07

Yeah, that is, that is for sure. I played a lot of sports in high school. I played baseball, basketball, basketball and golf. So that sense of community, that camaraderie, you really can't replicate it. And it's so sad to see us, or millennials and people who are older, like we, leave high school and college and then we don't have this sense of community. And the sense of community comes up a few times in your book when you're talking about depression and the virtue domains and stuff and we need. You've created a community online with the mind form thing, which is, which is awesome. I'm actually heading to a narcotics anonymous meeting tonight because I'm looking for a different type of community as well, other than the people I play basketball with. So stepping out of that comfort zone. It gets a little more difficult as we get older, don't you think?

Speaker 2: 19:59

Oh, yeah, absolutely. As far as the community goes, it is really difficult. One thing that you brought up I've got this online community, but I actually have ambitions of turning it into a real in person community. I want to build mind form centers around the world so, just like you have a gym membership or a health club membership, you can have a mental health club or mental training center membership and a place where you go and build community and work on yourself and your mind and improve your emotions and habits and values. So this is maybe a little bit longer term vision, but absolutely something I plan on doing and scaling mind form to kind of a bigger level. And then, what did you bring up after the community part? What was the end of that question? No, it's okay, that's all right.

Speaker 1: 20:58

Well, like the depression thing is bent on the rise and you would think, with the rise in technology and social media and it's like I can talk to my family members who are thousands of miles away you would think, with this ability to integrate on a digital scale like this, that people would be more connected. Right? But why we feel so disconnected and I think that was huge during the pandemic too because we were locked down too. We have the ability to call and talk to people and stuff, but we still feel like hold up, you know.

Speaker 1: 21:32

Yeah, no, I was going to say it's tough, because I try and watch my screen time too, and I've talked about the dangers of social media on my podcast as well, but there needs to be a better way at like being able to regulate that and even teach us how to use it properly.

Speaker 2: 21:47

You know, yeah Well you know these tools really haven't been designed, you know, to be healthy. It's like you can do your best to teach people how to think critically and how to, like you know, respond to these things in an emotionally mature way, but the engineers at Metta are going to keep trying to design the app to get you to do all the wrong things, because that makes more money, and so it's a general systemic issue that the further we go down, you know, this road with the incentives that we have, the more the world is going to be designed to extract value from humans instead of bring value to humans, and so that's a challenge. But I definitely think striving for our own self-mastery right, educating ourselves on how to do these things, is certainly better than nothing, and so we do have to sort of fight back in that way. As far as depression goes, you know being on the rise and kind of what to do about it, I think there are really two general possibilities for someone who is, you know, experiencing depression. One is that your brain isn't getting the signal of your personal virtues because you aren't sending them, or in other words, you're not taking the behaviors that give you reason to be proud of yourself, and this is really common in people who are depressed. They get trapped in this vicious cycle where you know you're not taking actions, you're sort of you've adopted this lifestyle of idleness and social media and streaming video games, whatever, and, as a result, you don't have reason to believe positive things about yourself, which makes you feel bad, which makes you not want to do anything, and so on and so on. And so the way to get out of this trap, if you're in it, is to create an activity schedule essentially, where you gradually and I mean baby steps get yourself out of this by saying okay, every day I'm at least going to tidy up my room and go for a walk, and then, once you've got that down, you say I'm going to read a book and call a friend, and then, as you slowly add these things, you pull yourself out of this sort of trap that is so characteristic of depression.

Speaker 2: 24:10

On the other hand, the second possibility is that you are living a good life that should be giving you reason to be proud of yourself, but for some reason or another, you can't see it, and so your beliefs are distorted, you have a warped worldview, and this can happen for a lot of reasons your upbringing trauma, whatever. But in this case it may not be that you need to create an activity schedule. You may need to go through what's called cognitive restructuring in CBT to actually work through those beliefs and correct those distortions. Yeah it's.

Speaker 2: 24:48

We have a lot of these common distortions, like black and white thinking, for example, assuming well, if I'm not a genius, I must be an idiot. Right, it was the only options. And and we get trapped in that thinking and we really hold on to those beliefs for years sometimes. And so learning how to log your thoughts and go in and actually reframe and question and challenge your beliefs is really critical To you know. Getting out of a depressed sort of space and a negative view of yourself and really using these tools in combination is one of the most powerful ways to sort of get out of this trap.

Speaker 1: 25:26

Yeah, and that the, the funk is dangerous, as I call it. When you're in that type of pit, I Can't say I don't see the world a little black and white, unfortunately. I'm zero to a hundred person. I'm, you know. I go to narcotics anonymous. I'm four and a half years sober from drugs and alcohol, and that's awesome, thank you. And To say that I've always been zero to a hundred is, you know, that's that's just the way I've been. But because I couldn't see the Beauty and myself for those eight long years of using, I just kept digging a deeper and deeper pit. And then I Like how you mentioned, you know, the baby steps with the activity schedule, because Realistically that's kind of how I got off of everything I was addicted to alcohol, cocaine, weed, ecstasy and a bunch of stuff, and I'm like, all right, I got to get rid of this one first and then introduce a healthier habit, you know, because when you try and do it all at once, you just get over.

Speaker 1: 26:22

Yeah, and you fail, and you get discouraged, you know, and Sometimes you don't really see the results like instantly. We have this delayed gratification over here in in 2024, you know, and people want everything fixed right now. But that's, that's not how it works. Yeah, wish you could, like I tell people now. I'm like listen, you spent years screwing your life up. You're not gonna fix it in in a day or a week or a month. You know, you're gonna live the best life you can live. You got to put in some time, you know.

Speaker 2: 26:54

Yeah, it really is the, the baby steps in every area.

Speaker 2: 26:57

I talk about it, too, with Anxiety.

Speaker 2: 27:00

For example, you know, people will try to face their fears all at once, or what's called flooding.

Speaker 2: 27:06

And if you go from from zero to ten in terms of, you know, taking on the scariest things that you can, you're very likely gonna freak yourself out. You're gonna, you know, escape the situation and you're gonna teach your brain that this is actually dangerous and you're gonna, you know, reinforce the fear. So you're more scared than ever. And that's why you have to have the patience to say, okay, I'm gonna take my fear to a level three, then I'm gonna face it, I'm gonna sit there, I'm not going to run, I'm just going to wait until my anxiety lowers, and then tomorrow I'll take it to a four, and and so on. And I think that's Critical with addiction and that kind of thing too, you cannot try to do everything cold turkey, because you will, you will learn the wrong things and your brain will walk away from it with some very distorted beliefs, right and yeah, you try and apply that later on in life too, and you know the zero to a hundred lifestyle it's.

Speaker 1: 28:04

You know it's not sustainable, it's dangerous to the human. You know, the only time I ever look at it as something that you can throttle is like with creativity, or like the will to write or the will to dance or be creative.

Speaker 1: 28:16

It's like you don't necessarily want to throttle, that you want to express yourself because you know that's, that's what living is. If you're a creative person, but you know, don't don't stop eating or don't stop sleeping because of it. You know, like I think people forget that we're still human. We try and compare ourselves to computers all the time right, and then we start to embody the smartphones that we're holding.

Speaker 2: 28:40

That's a good point, I certainly do. I I've talked about how, like one of the roles that my partner plays in my life, she will snap me out of my, you know, computer obsession like State where I just, you know, forget about eating and sleeping and forget to just be like goofy and be a person and, yeah, she's great about just pulling pranks or whatever is needed to. You know, remind me that I'm a human and I have human needs basically. But absolutely we do get sort of trained into this like Obsessive state where we, we turn into computers and I think that's probably not too healthy.

Speaker 1: 29:21

No, and I you know I don't talk like much about you know politics and other stuff like that, but you know the whole grind culture here in America it's just it's, it's not good. You know this whole got a grind, got a hustle, get aside hustle, keep making money, climb, climb, climb. You know you're just gonna get burnt out. You know that's not what life is. No.

Speaker 2: 29:45

I agree. I mean it's funny how you even see this showing up in the Philosophical spaces that you and I are interested in. I've been Seeing all this. I call it mixed stoicism, but like I saw a Thumbnail the other day that was like Stoicism how to tell if a woman is secretly trying to seduce you or something and there's like how to use Stoicism to get rich and get jacked and it's like, well, this is really not what this is about. It's. It's actually like the opposite of that. You know, these philosophies are there to help you not Feel the nagging need to get more and to you know, work harder to earn this External outcome, because really it's not about the external outcomes and you're not gonna be happy even when you get those and You're gonna go your whole life forgetting to actually be happy and make the changes to your mind that will allow you to achieve that piece.

Speaker 1: 30:42

Yeah, and, like you said, meta's designing stuff to Take the veil, extract the value out of everything you know and insert money in its place. So that's, that's tough. I did want to say one thing that I laughed when I was listening to the book is because you had mentioned you're like, well, it's a global pandemic. Surely I can play Animal Crossing all day and I'm like, then we talk about like this idleness and it's like you know, I play a lot, you know I play a lot of video games, watch a lot of anime and stuff. It gets to a point where it's, yeah, it's de-habilitating, you know, because you get, it's not the best virtues to have, right.

Speaker 2: 31:29

Sure, I mean, you know there's nothing problematic about playing an occasional video game, but you know they're also designed to be addictive and they can take over your life and ultimately what you're doing is, you know, spending your time building up the wrong character. Video games are essentially like what real life is, in that you are leveling up a character in this game, and if you were doing the same thing to your own real life character, you would actually be getting the deeper benefits, but instead, when you turn off that game, you don't feel any better and you actually feel worse because you've neglected yourself. Yeah, I mean, ultimately, the problem with that period is I kind of let myself be lazy for a little while. I gave myself permission not to do all the things I've been doing for years the exercise, you know, the music, the all the things that sort of build me up as a person and I learned what I had always suspected, which is that that's really not good for your mental health. Like you always have to keep pushing, you don't ever get to stop. In that sense, you don't have to push in the hustle culture. You know productivity and profit sense, but you need to always be striving to be a better person, and some of that can be creative and professional and some of it is interpersonal and has to do with you know your relationships and how you treat them. But I think you always need to have goals and ambitions. You always need to have things that you're doing to grow and strive for more.

Speaker 2: 33:00

And the minute you let yourself be lazy, your brain notices. It starts saying, oh, I'm not seeing evidence of those strengths that I always thought I had, and then before long you've forgotten that you even have them. You forgot that you're a creative person because you haven't shown yourself in six months. And so you know I even worry, like people see retirement as this golden you know in state, and then once they actually ride off into the sunset, they're like now what Now? I, you know, my whole self esteem was coming from my job, and now I don't have my job anymore. What am I good at? I don't even remember. So it's really important to think about how we sort of demonstrate what we're good at to our own brains and build our own self esteem.

Speaker 1: 33:47

Yeah, I think with the video game thing, or even the community aspect of like the online community is, we can be something that we're not out here in reality, right, and the things that we don't like about ourselves we don't have to take into the online world with us, you know. So, yeah, and then when we turn that game off, like you said, we come back and we're like I don't feel fulfilled at all. Now, I got to deal with this heaping pile of human that I just don't know what to do with, you know.

Speaker 2: 34:17

Yeah, and, and you know there is something extremely important to be learned from video games. There's a book called reality is broken that talks about all the ways that video game designers have learned how to create this kind of ideal world, ideal system that makes you actually want to do it. And we haven't designed our real world in the same way. It doesn't tap, all the same, you know neurons. It doesn't make us want to go out and do these things, and so we kind of sometimes have to do a dopamine detox and step away from these things to learn to appreciate how rewarding it is to have real life relationships and do real life creative work and all these other things.

Speaker 2: 35:02

And so, you know, I think learning from video games and how we structure the world can be really valuable. I mean, if people can get so addicted to World of Warcraft where you know you basically, I mean some of these are sort of simulating real life. You have this character, you put in a lot of hard work and time and you build up these points and kind of level up. You know how can we make real life and real character building just as addictive as that? Essentially, I think for some of us it is, but it's an acquired taste for sure.

Speaker 1: 35:39

I think it's an acquired taste, but also like a muscle you got to work. You know, because, like you know, right when you start, I actually got a buddy. He's, he just hit his 12 month sobriety mark from alcohol and heroin and he comes into town a couple of months ago and I was I wasn't doing so hot because my cat died right, and you know I'm still sober, thankful for that, obviously always grateful and he comes in with like man, such a fire for like wellness and like improving his life, and I'm like looking at him and I'm like, damn, that's awesome. You know, because once you start that six month period of not being creative, not doing good things, and you get used to putting yourself down, and then just like one instance of somebody doing it, and you see it and you're like, oh shit, like life can totally be like that, right, I just don't know how to go about it. And that's where most people struggle with, honestly, you know. Yeah, well, I think.

Speaker 2: 36:38

I think that you know you bring up a really good point, which is kind of like role models and the importance of having people you admire that show you these things.

Speaker 2: 36:48

One of the things I talk about in the book is how important it is to build a list of the people you admire most. You know these can be like people in your life, historical figures, fictional characters even but essentially like creating this list and then going through it and writing down specifically what you admire about these people, each person, what are the traits they have that you really like, what are these specific types of actions they take that you wish you could be more like, and that that is a pretty good blueprint for who you need to become next, and you can break it down into individual habits that will allow you to be more like these people. But essentially, your own impulses of admiration tell you everything you need to know about where to go. This is your built-in compass, essentially, and paying more attention to that and learning who you admire and what you admire about them basically tells you where your next step needs to be.

Speaker 1: 37:50

Yeah, and having, I think having role models is so important. I mean everybody here in America or in the world. You know, with the rise of Hollywood and movies and media and stuff, we have all of these fictional characters that we look up to, right, but we don't know how to go about embodying those virtues right, because it requires a lot of hard work. I think at the start of your book you said you have to go through suffering in order to accomplish things of that nature. You know something along that. But if you're not like suffering and struggling to be better, like if we were all just like, you know, marvel, superhero, physical Specimen, demigods who are all insanely smart and stuff, like we're just peak everything, it's like and Everything was peak everything, and people call that heaven and it's like, well, it's kind of boring, everything's done right, mm-hmm, but right now we we're not grateful for the fact that we do get to grind and train ourselves and heal, you know.

Speaker 2: 38:57

Yeah, yeah, I think we we don't tend to be grateful enough for our challenges and struggles, because they're what we usually look back on and say, wow, I'm so glad I went through that, that's what I'm most proud of, like I'm. You know, that's what turned me into who I am. I also think that you know it to, and to some extent we, we glorify suffering more than we should. I think it really depends on the circumstances. You know, some types of suffering are completely unnecessary and and you know it doesn't help us improve at all and we just put ourselves through these things Unnecessarily. And other types of suffering, I think, really do Cultivate greatness and and creativity and character and all these things.

Speaker 2: 39:40

I sort of use this dimensional model to get this across, where you've got an x-axis which represents pain and pleasure, a y-axis which represents loss and gain, and then a z-axis that you could think of as depth, you know, mountains and valleys, essentially which represents virtue, and so really it's the z-axis that matters. You want to build the most virtue that you can, but sometimes you'll have to go into, you know, you'll have to go towards suffering in order to climb up that mountain. Other times You'll have to go, you know towards towards pleasure to climb the mountain. So really keeping your eye on that core element of virtue and just using your circumstances and your suffering or your pleasure, really just using these as Instrumental steps toward that virtue, I think is the key.

Speaker 1: 40:29

Yeah, I mean the whole what doesn't kill you makes you stronger thing. I definitely rings true and you know, before Katy Perry started singing it, there was, you know, some, some German man in the mountains writing it. You know which is definitely one, definitely one of my favorite quotes by him too. Yeah, I think finding Finding those challenges and then not always heading towards suffering, but those uncomfortable moments you had talked about with like anxiety, it's like you want to actually go towards the things that make you uncomfortable. You want to have these ambitions. You want to heal yourself. You, deep down, we all want to be better people. I just think we we forget that because it's hard facing what, the things we were wrong about. You know that ain't easy shit.

Speaker 2: 41:14

Yeah, no, I think you're right, especially about Nietzsche. I mean he, he's certainly like the right person to take it from. He spent his whole life suffering, basically right. I mean, he was extremely sickly his whole life. He descended into madness later in life. He struggled with people and you know, rejection of throughout his life too.

Speaker 2: 41:36

And so if he's coming out of it and saying, you know, I think this is actually what makes us better people, you know we should listen. I think you know we can look at Victor Frankel too. He was in a concentration camp, and I'm certainly not advocating for concentration camps. But if you can come out of that kind of experience and say, yeah, it's really not having a comfortable, easy life that makes a life good. It's about virtue, it's about meaning, it's about character, it's about who you, who you're able to become, yeah, I think we should be listening to that a lot more. I think we're our brains are wired to pay a lot more attention to the flashy things that don't really deliver. I mean, drugs are a great example. They deliver the short-term high, but not the long-term deep satisfaction. So actually internalizing this sort of deeper, three-dimensional way of looking at our lives, instead of continually chasing the thing that we desire now but that we've learned time and time again, doesn't actually make us happy, I think.

Speaker 1: 42:40

I think it takes work to overcome our natural biases, but I do think it can be done, yeah, I think it can be done with the the right help and the right drive, obviously, and reading and listening to books, like Like yours, and listening to podcast. I have a lot of people who are getting really into podcast, like like Huberman lab and and modern wisdom and other podcasts like that which are, which are awesome and inspirational and stuff, and I believe we're at this, we're getting to this point in Humanity where we are going to heal. You know, before it was just about survival. Now we have survival down pat and now we're like, well, what do we do with all this free time?

Speaker 1: 43:19

now, right, I I think, we're gonna get to this really nice point where Everybody's able to like heal from whatever trauma or messed up stuff They've been through, you know, with the help of people like you and me. So that's always something to look forward to.

Speaker 2: 43:36

That's definitely an optimistic take. I can see it going that way and I can also see the systems in place and, and you know, advanced artificial intelligence Making things worse for everybody. I'm very much hopeful for the, for the better version of that, but I think we need to Some. Some things needed dramatically sort of turn around for that to happen.

Speaker 1: 43:57

Of course, yeah, but I mean, you wouldn't be doing what you're doing if you didn't have a little hope about it, right?

Speaker 2: 44:04

Sure, I mean I've, I've, at the very least, I've, impacted thousands of people at least, that's what I see in my inbox and my Amazon reviews but but, but we, you know, we need larger scale change and I, yeah, I do have a sort of glimmer of hope that I could, you know, keep developing my work and and be at the right place in the right time and have some ability to impact things on a more systemic level. So, absolutely, I'm, I'm, I do think there's, I think we got a shot here.

Speaker 1: 44:36

Honestly, it couldn't have said it better I yeah, yeah, that's uh. I yeah. It's just really nice being able to talk to people who also not only want to change their cells but also want to help change the world for the better. You know, cuz we have our faces in our phones, we go to our jobs and we come home and we look at more screens, you know, and we're not Seeing any evidence that there is any hope. You know, but talking to you right now, we're talking to other people in my life who are excited to hear about the podcast, or they're excited to hear about A new book or something like. There is that part of humanity that's still living there, even if you know these institutions are gonna pile Substances and products on top of us. Like, there, there is a glimmer of hope, you know, mm-hmm.

Speaker 2: 45:22

Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 45:24

I am a lot of questions.

Speaker 2: 45:29

Well, good, we got through it all. That's all. Yeah, is there?

Speaker 1: 45:31

anything. Is there anything else you wanted to talk about? I mean, I was actually gonna ask you a few personal questions like Favorite video games or books or TV shows, favorite food and stuff like that, you know.

Speaker 2: 45:44

Yeah, let's do it sure you got a favorite video game. Oh man, I'm a Nintendo guy to my core, so Me too, yeah.

Speaker 1: 45:53

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 45:57

Yeah, I had all the systems growing up. I Remember when I got my first Nintendo 64 and and those were good times. But uh, yeah, I mean smash bros has a special place in my heart. Zelda I did. I did have to get the newest Zelda and and spin a good 60, 70 hours playing, so, uh, that's a good one. I mean you can't beat that. But uh, yeah, yeah, that's. Uh, that's most of my favorite video game. I really like that. I think that's my favorite video game. I really like far cry as well and like some of those kind of open world like stealth type games.

Speaker 1: 46:34

I just got into open world games the last Three years. Actually, I didn't play them before. The first open world game I played was, uh, breath of the wild actually, and Wow okay, I was like damn, this is lit, you know. And then Then I get the witcher three which got ported to switch. So I'm a huge Nintendo guy. Um Uh, I actually refurbish old Gameboy sp's and Gameboys and stuff like that.

Speaker 1: 47:02

Um really, I just, like you know, have something to do with my hands. It's a little technical. My favorite game is probably fire emblem, though, so, um, I okay, I have not really gotten into fire emblem, that's interesting. I'm all turn based strategy, so that's um. You know the pokemon games had a little turn based in it, but fire emblems definitely up there for me.

Speaker 2: 47:23

Oh, I played a lot of a lot of the pokemon games growing up, so good.

Speaker 1: 47:29

Yeah, yeah, do you got any favorite books you're reading right now?

Speaker 2: 47:34

Oh well, favorite books. I've got Several hundred favorite that I'm reading right now. We're actually on mineform, we, we have a different book we read every month and we happen to be reading, uh, epic tituses and Kyredian, which is one of the original stoic works, and uh, it's just, uh, it's brilliant. Every time I read it it's probably the fourth or fifth time I've read it. And, uh, love that one, love you know Marcus Aurelius as well. The Tao to Ching is great. Um, you know I love Maslow as well. Um, but uh, yeah, I started reading, reading on the origins of political order recently, so I'm trying to branch into understanding more about how society works, beyond, you know, kind of the individual mind that I've mostly been studying for the last decade.

Speaker 1: 48:24

Yeah, it's tough to branch out into that. You know, even when I was taking political philosophy at college, I'm like man, this just ain't it. Chief, I'll tell you what.

Speaker 2: 48:33

But actually, while you brought this up so before we go.

Speaker 1: 48:38

I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the resources you have available to everybody out there. Now, you just said on Mindform you guys read a new book every month, is that right?

Speaker 2: 48:50

Yeah, there's a lot going on on Mindform right now. If you want to learn more, you can go to Mindformio, but you know, essentially it is an online community. It's got a number of like full length programs that I've created on anxiety and depression, and there's one on sleep and optimizing it, and then hundreds of my articles and those of members and, yeah, we do read a different book every month. We have live events on a weekly basis to connect and discuss these things and for a lot of people, this is, you know, some of the first people who really think like them that they've met in their lives.

Speaker 2: 49:28

I went most of my life not thinking anyone else was like obsessed with psychology and philosophy, and then I start this and I meet hundreds of them. So, yeah, mindform is really cool. And then, in general, if you go to designing the mindorg slash becoming you can put that in the show notes One you can preorder the new books that we've been talking about become who you are. But if you put in your email, I'll also send you a couple of free books digitally the psychotex toolkit and the book of self mastery, which is kind of a quote compilation that brings in ideas from all these philosophers and thinkers. So it's good stuff. You can get it all at that length.

Speaker 1: 50:08

Nice. Yeah, I was actually going to say I am going to be dropping links for all of this lovely stuff that Mr Ryan a bush has for all of you listeners out there Before we go. Is there anything you wanted to say to the listeners about becoming who you are? Maybe we're to start with that.

Speaker 2: 50:26

Yeah, let's see, we've covered understanding your own virtues and how to identify those. We've covered how to identify the people you admire most and sort of deriving your values from that behavioral activation restructuring. We've hit all the main points here, I think. Now you just need to read the full book and see how it all comes together.

Speaker 1: 50:50

Couldn't have said it better myself. Appreciate everybody coming out for another episode of feel free. Check the notes. I'll be dropping links for everything by this guy's book. Get on that stuff. We're all trying to be better and we're trying to heal and we're trying to become who we are. So y'all have a good rest of your night, stay up and feel free.