David McElroy

If I tell you a secret, will you keep it just between the two of us?

OK. Here it comes. My new podcast isn’t very good yet. If you’ve already heard some of the episodes, you might be relieved to hear me say that. You might be thinking, “Well, duh. Everybody else knows this, but I’m surprised you admit it.”

I’m not just being self-denigrating when I say this. I mean it with all sincerity. But there’s something I have to add — which I think is the more important part of the story.

Roughly 98 percent of the podcasts out there — out of about 750,000 active podcasts right now — are dreadfully bad. And when I admit that my podcast isn’t very good, I’m saying that with the knowledge that my “not very good” podcast might already be in the top 25 percent in terms of quality — only because most podcasts are so incredibly awful.

This leaves me baffled at what most people are producing — and it also leaves me encouraged about my future prospects. Let me tell you what prompts this thought.

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I have horribly mixed feelings about Valentine’s Day. I grew up being told that it’s a very artificial holiday made up by companies that want to sell you something. That still makes sense to my head, but my heart strongly identifies with the things we associate with the day.

In a lot of ways, that head vs. heart struggle perfectly captures all of my lifelong struggles with loving and being loved.

Preview of new week’s show: It was about 16 years ago when I got an unexpected first-hand lesson in how motivation really works. I had wanted to make a film for something like 20 years, but I kept finding every excuse in the book not to overcome my fears. And then I met a woman who was impressed that I was going to make a film. I wanted her to love me — and I was shooting my film less than 90 days later.

Next week, we’re going to talk about how love can motivate us to do things we didn’t know we could do.

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Your culture is slowly going insane — and you are under increasing pressure to conform to the insanity.

Living a life which seems to be sane and emotionally healthy by my standards is slowly becoming “radical” by this culture’s standards. To step back from the conformity and collectivism increasingly demanded by culture is now considered weird and radical.

This makes it far more difficult to find friends, allies and even a life partner, because most people unconsciously want to conform to the norms of their culture, even if they fear there’s something dysfunctional going on.

For the most part, normal people don’t even notice that the culture is sick. It‘s perfectly natural for human beings to go along with crowds in unthinking ways. We are trained from an early age to fit in with other people — to earn their approval and to do the things we believe will make them love us.

But what if you’re one of those rare people who see the growing sickness? What if you wake up from the mindless conformity that has been programmed into you? How can you live an emotionally healthy and sane life in a world where almost everyone seems to be bumper to bumper on the highway to self-destruction?

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