Podbit · On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Treat people the way you want to be treated. Simple, ancient, and apparently forgotten. Towns argues that somewhere along the way humans started adding stipulations to this basic law — and that removing them is all we really need.
Where this was said
At 1:07:20 · chapter starts 1:06:48
Shetty asks about Mac Miller — Towns's self-described all-time favorite artist and genuine friend. Towns recalls Mac showing him unreleased music and asking a deceptively simple question: everything sounds good loud, but how does it sound in silence? [1] — Karl-Anthony Towns "Mac Miller showed Towns unreleased music and asked: 'Everything sounds good loud, but when there's no noise, how does it sound?' Towns rein…" 1:03:40 Towns didn't process it as a life lesson in the moment, but sitting here now he interprets it as the defining question of character: are you the same generous, authentic person when no one is watching, nothing is being reported, and there is no upside to being good? The Final Five rapid-fire questions land a series of memorable answers: the best advice is 'live in the present because the future's not guaranteed'; the worst is 'you can't do this without me'; money doesn't bring happiness — people do; he thinks too much about what he can't control; and the one law everyone should follow is the golden rule. The episode closes with a Gatorade gift of guava lemonade — Towns's favorite flavor, introduced to him by Jada Pinkett Smith — and a mutual, heartfelt appreciation.
Towns used to believe money would solve problems and bring happiness. Then COVID took his mother and eight family members. All his wealth couldn't save a single one of them. The people were always the source of happiness — money was just how you brought them together.
Towns says he used to believe money would bring happiness, but losing his mother proved that wealth couldn't save the people who mattered most.
More freedom doesn't produce more happiness — it produces more anxiety. Kierkegaard identified this 180 years ago: the more options you have, the more you feel the 'dizziness of freedom,' a paralytic unease at having to choose any single one. The freest generation in history is, by his prediction, exactly the most anxious.
Every person lives in constant tension between infinite possible selves and the finite, limited self they actually are. Tipping too far toward infinite possibility produces a loss of identity; too much confinement in the finite produces stagnation. Kierkegaard argued that this tension is never solved — only managed.
Standing outside a cold pool imagining reasons not to jump is the exact experience of pre-commitment anxiety. Once you jump, the shock passes and you wonder why you ever hesitated. The same mechanism governs every significant commitment in life — the dread is always on the outside, the relief on the inside.
Traditional societies had rites of passage that closed off childhood and opened adulthood. Modern society kept the in-between liminal phase but eliminated the ritual that resolved it. The result is 'emerging adulthood' — a decade or more stuck in the transition — engineered by rising education requirements, women entering the workforce, and delayed marriage.
When Mark Manson proposed to his wife, software he didn't know was running — the low-level assessment of sexual market value and other options — suddenly shut down. Commitment doesn't take freedom away. It trades optionality (freedom to do many things) for focus (freedom from distraction). John Dewey called these positive and negative freedom, and the latter is more powerful.
Mark Manson spent years as a location-independent digital nomad — always a new country, a new woman, a new venture. Then the diminishing returns kicked in: countries started feeling the same, dates felt identical, businesses all frustrated him. The cure wasn't more novelty. It was narrowing: one place, one person, one career.
Every meaningful commitment has a dip — an initial peak of excitement, a brutal trough of difficulty, and a second higher peak for those who push through. Institutions once kept people in the dip long enough to reach the other side. With infinite optionality and no institutions, everyone bails at the bottom and restarts the cycle of shallow first peaks.
Stage one — the aesthetic — is the default: chasing sensation, novelty, and keeping every door open. Stage two — the ethical — is learning to choose with eyes wide open, accepting the trade-offs. Stage three — the religious — is when a commitment becomes so total that it no longer feels like a choice. It just feels like who you are.
The ethical stage is rational commitment — you can explain your choices. The religious stage is when your commitment exceeds rational justification. You can't explain why. It just feels like it chose you. Kierkegaard called this the 'virtue of the absurd' — and it's represented not just in faith but in the entrepreneurs, artists, and athletes who can't imagine doing anything else.
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