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On this week’s episode of Keep Going, I spoke with Patricia Martin, writer, researcher, and author of Will the Future Like You? She has spent a decade studying what happens when failure is not just professional but personal. The kind that makes you wake up and ask, who am I now?

Patricia calls it identity-threatening failure. Not every setback qualifies. Missing a target or losing a client stings. But when your business is your baby, when your persona is fused to your public presence, when your work becomes your self, a collapse can feel like rejection at the level of love. The brain codes it that way. Cortisol rises. Adrenaline spikes. Dopamine drops. Executive function weakens. You feel empty, hypervigilant, unmoored.

Entrepreneurs are especially vulnerable. We are taught to invest identity in what we build. In the attention economy, we perform ourselves across platforms, post after post, video after video. The persona gets muscular. The inner self gets quiet. Patricia calls the result “persona fog.” We externalize the self so thoroughly that when something breaks, we do not know what remains.

What struck me was how physical this all is. This is not motivational poster talk. There is a somatic reaction to identity collapse. A rewiring. Some people pivot sharply. A tech founder goes back to the family farm. A software executive returns to the factory floor. Not because they failed, but because they need ground again.

So what do you do if you cannot escape to a dairy farm?

Patricia argues there is no hack. There is practice.

First, discernment. Identity failure scrambles executive function. You lose clarity. You must relearn how to hear yourself.

Second, reflection. We have lost the muscle of self-reflection. There is no app for the inner world. You have to sit with the question: what is this doing to me?

Third, confirmation and witness. Own what is happening. Say it out loud. Find someone who can remind you who you were before the fog rolled in.

As we talked, the conversation turned to AI, to coders who fear obsolescence, to journalists wondering what work remains. Patricia’s answer was not comfort. It was responsibility. You must know who you are. You must identify what you bring that cannot be replicated. Creativity. Imagination. Sentience. The ability to feel and transmit meaning.

Machines can perform. They can flatter. They can automate. They cannot enact being.

We are entering what she calls an age of hyper reinvention. Pivots will not be rare events. They will be routine. That means resilience can no longer be grit alone. It has to include an active relationship with the unconscious, with creativity, with reflection.

There is a line Patricia shared that I keep returning to. Every defeat of the ego is a victory for the unconscious.

In a culture built on dominance and performance, that feels radical.

The question is not whether the future will like you. The question is whether you can hear yourself clearly enough to survive it.

Transcript

Welcome back to Keep Going, a podcast about success and failure. I’m John Biggs. Today we have Patricia Martin. She’s a writer, she’s a podcaster, she’s a researcher, and she’s recently wrote a book. It’s coming out soon, Will the Future Like You? Which I’m afraid to hear the answer for, so welcome, Patricia.

Patricia (01:26.852)

It’s a pleasure to be here, John.

John Biggs (01:28.942)

So you’re an old hat at podcasting. You’ve been doing this for quite a while. A million views on your stuff. I want you to welcome to mine. And I’m actually really happy you’re here because this book sounds fascinating. Why don’t you just give us a quick recap about what you wrote.

Patricia (01:45.167)

So I researched this material in the book for 10 years. And I entered into the research originally to understand the impact of the digital age on the human psyche. And I encountered not only a variety of people and their stories, and then also, you know, as an entrepreneur myself.

I underwent a massive change in my life and in my business. And I woke up one morning asking the age old question, who am I? And that is when my research took a fresh direction. And I began focusing on what it means to lose and rebuild identity in the digital age.

John Biggs (02:34.144)

Mm-hmm. So you were talking earlier about the identity destroying failure. I guess reducing failure, right? A failure so poignant that it changes essentially your entire life. So tell me about that.

Patricia (02:49.378)

So not every failure that we have affects us at an identity level. What tends to happen though with entrepreneurs, and I would say this is generally a cultural issue for Americans, is that we invest a lot of identity in what we do. Entrepreneurs more so because it’s your baby, it’s your creation. You’re doing something, usually it can be out of a passion or you’re addressing a need in the marketplace.

But it is something that you have spotted and you internalize as part of yourself. So what happens when we fail at an identity level, especially in the attention economy, is that we begin to recruit differently from the interior world of ourselves. So let’s say, for instance, you have somebody who has built an online business and they’re an influencer.

That is persona heavy identity. And the persona is the weakest part of the psyche. It has never been, it was never designed to undergo the garrulous rigors of online life, right? And yet we’re pounding it day after day, post after post, video after video. And so when something goes awry there, there are some specific things that start to happen.

when we tip that into an identity problem. So first of all, it’s a social neural pain. We treat that failure as a rejection, just like we would treat it as a love rejection. And that’s how the brain codes it and the body feels it. The other thing that happens is it’s probably not a surprise that we get a cortisol rush from that kind of failure, but it has a lingering effect.

Probably I think the most intriguing thing that came out of the neuroscience is the amount of adrenaline that courses through the body during a failure that is specific to the loss of identity. So it’s as if we are now hyper vigilant to find our sense of self again and we begin the search to recruit back the sense of who we are.

Patricia (05:10.536)

And so that has an effect that is, you know, and your dopamine goes low. So now you’re operating on cortisol, adrenaline, and low dopamine. So it’s kind of a perfect storm for feeling really empty, lost, stuck, disconnected. So, you know, you’ll talk to people who have had a failure like that. And it requires in the attention economy more than just grit.

Because it’s moving so fast, you’re not just, you know, pulling yourself back up by your bootstraps and standing back on your feet. Back on what? What ground? The territory is moving so fast. So this is where you find people tend to tumble out. You’ll also find people at this point sometimes will take a sharp pivot. I talked to people who went from

running software companies to working in their father’s box factory. One woman was in a tech startup that got really big. She sold it, and she went back to running the family dairy farm. So it was kind of like they needed an antidote to kind of clear themselves. some of these were success stories. But what was interesting is that some of them didn’t go back to the hurly burly and the grind of something that was as intense.

as an online business.

John Biggs (06:38.67)

So I love that you’re able to codify this and describe it in a very clear way. think a lot of people have that. I mean, first off, a lot of people have that fantasy, right? I think that every single Hallmark movie is about that, where you go back to the small town and you become a dairy farmer after having a hard business, like a hard charging business life. So I think the primary question is, you’re in that mode, once you end up failing out of it,

out of an entrepreneurial situation, you described the persona being destroyed to a degree. from a layperson’s point of view, the persona would be just, I don’t know, just my day to day happy-go-lucky whatever. But it sounds like you’re talking about something a lot deeper here. what happens when that identity is destroyed? And how do we get it back, aside from working at a dairy farm?

Patricia (07:30.989)

Well, here’s the thing. Yeah, because we can’t all do that, right? And some people genuinely like to learn and ladder up. Failure, success, failure, success. I think, though, what’s important to understand about the difference between a more linear type of set of milestones in one’s career and the matrix of what we’re experiencing now.

So pivots and turning points happen more frequently. I think we’re going to see with the rise of AI, that is going to become an annual event for people. I’m just putting a pin in that. We’re going to be pivoting more and more and more. And so I think the problem with the internet age is it has made us externalize the self.

So, you know, there’s no app for the inner world. We are always out there. We’re always on. We’re always pushing content. And we’re dividing our sense of self across multiple platforms and multiple personas. So when we’re externalized like this, we’re vulnerable. We’re vulnerable to the kind of change.

the kind of failure that we’re talking about that have real bodily consequences and psychological consequences. So I would say the plague of our time is something I identify in the book as persona fog. And what happens is that when this gap opens between the true self and the externalized self, we’re no longer in search for the self.

We’re performing a self. That’s a very different proposition. The self is at arm’s length to begin with, also making us vulnerable. And so when we take a loss and we’re in this fogged state already, first of all, it’s very hard to hear the signals from the self. I’m a Jungian, right? People fall into, are you?

John Biggs (09:53.484)

You don’t look it.

Patricia (09:54.222)

Are you a Freudian or a Jungian? And I’m a Jungian. And Carl Jung’s definition of the self is that it is actually an ever active resource in our lives and it will give us symptoms that are signals. And these signals will continue, they will persist.

plasticity in the self. And the trouble with persona fog is that when we identify so much with our external self, you know, we’re, there’s a noise floor we’re hitting so that we can’t hear the signals. So we prolong our pain and suffering. so, you know, part of what the mission of the book was is to help people understand how to hear those signals first and then what to do about them. So I think the

Antidote is like a three-part process and the first requires discernment and that is tough because another thing that goes offline when we have an identity failure, you know, when our failure is an identity failure is we lose, this has been proven, we lose loss of executive function. So some of what makes us feel competent and like you have a handle on this, this is lost to you and that

John Biggs (11:16.11)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (11:23.507)

also means a loss of discernment. having to tune into yourself becomes a practice. It’s not a hack, it’s a practice. You have to get good at listening to the signals of the self so that you pull yourself up off the noise floor. The second thing you can do is, this is so simple and this sounds a little self-helpy, John, but we’re losing this ability to reflect. I mean, you could talk to anybody in psychotherapy.

And they will tell you what the one primary skill is, self-reflection. We’re so out there, we found it hard to get back in here. And the myth of the digital age is that what we put out there has no effect, right? About what’s going on inside. Like that is the biggest myth we need to shatter. So, know, reflection is like, okay, I failed.

How is this making me feel? What’s going on inside there right now? Just asking ourself a simple inventory of questions. And then I think the third thing is to confirm. Confirm with yourself. Own it. This is what’s happening to me. This is how I’m reacting to this psychologically and physically. And then to seek a witness. To seek.

someone to talk to, someone who can reflect with you and remind you, well, this is how I see you. This is how I’ve always seen you. You can’t, I can’t state this enough. And it’s part of what made me seek out psychology because as I was interviewing some of these entrepreneurs, they were kind of turning me into their therapist. And I thought it was in over my head, you know, like I’m a researcher and I’m a writer. I am, I’m really not qualified.

John Biggs (13:14.656)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (13:20.436)

So that’s what kind of turned me into a Jungian.

John Biggs (13:24.898)

mean, that’s literally why I did this podcast, right? So I was a hard charging journalist weirdo for TechCrunch. I would get pitched at urinals. I had a million friends around the world, a million friends around the world, but if I was in a pinch, not a single one of them pick up the phone, right? So that was the depression aspect. And I also met so many entrepreneurs that were clinically depressed and some of them who died. I knew...

Patricia (13:34.225)

my God.

John Biggs (13:50.382)

quite a few folks who just couldn’t handle it. And I think this is so vital. mean, those three things that you just described are just the self-reflection, I think, is the other thing. I would also argue that in this day and age, those entrepreneurs are going to like mushroom retreats or whatever to get their self-reflection. Is that an alternative? Is that a way to go? Or should it just be sober reflection in a dark room?

Patricia (14:14.592)

Well, I think it’s interesting that people are trying to ingest consciousness.

John Biggs (14:20.736)

Mm Exactly. That’s I mean, that’s the answer, right? It’s like you said you said there’s no app for for self for the self. But to a degree, a couple of mushrooms are kind of like that. It’s like it’s like it’s like Matrix Neo in the Matrix.

Patricia (14:22.785)

Yep.

Patricia (14:34.6)

Right. And so, I mean, this is the danger of my work all the time. You’ve been asking me good, deep questions, but, you know, often people just want the set of 10 hacks, you know, the listicle. And that’s not what this is. I mean, I’m really asking people to take a hard look at what’s happening to them and how they’re losing their sense of self and what the costs are. And you’re right about the cost because, you know,

John Biggs (14:46.039)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (15:01.458)

One of the people that I had in the research study attempted suicide. mean, the costs are very real. so what you’re really talking about though is rich because, you know, Carl Jung was a big believer that much of what makes us who we are lives in the unconscious. It’s not a fish, it’s a whale we’re riding on. And so to access that.

is vital in restoring your sense of self. And so it doesn’t surprise me that people are taking hallucinogenics and people are ketamine and people are trying to get there however they can. I have never done it myself. So I’ve looked at some of the science on it. I can’t poo poo it, but I certainly can’t proclaim it either. I think the more opportunities you have to

raise the unconscious and make it conscious, the better you’re going to be. So keep in mind the persona is attached to the ego. And Carl Jung said, every defeat of the ego is a victory for the unconscious. And so the more you confuse the two, the more you fuse the two, the more resilient you’re going to be. So this is like keeping just a simple dream notebook.

John Biggs (16:15.822)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Patricia (16:28.574)

Next to your dream. mean, one of the things that I found is that some of the entrepreneurs I interviewed were so strung out, they weren’t dreaming anymore. And this is a, this is a signal. This is a signal from the self that you’re starting to lose your attachment to the unconscious. So anything you can do to tap into the unconscious meditation, walking, re embodying yourself.

I mean, we live such disembodied lives in the digital culture that even reconnecting to your senses by walking outdoors has a huge impact on your inner world.

John Biggs (17:14.958)

I like from a Jungian standpoint, we could argue that some of the self-medication and some of like raves and all that other good stuff, the group activities, et cetera, that these folks are Burning Man or whatever, they’re trying their damnedest to hit those notes and try to bring that unconscious up. What does it mean in a normal sense? Explain to me the idea of...

dissolving ego and connecting to the unconscious.

Patricia (17:48.748)

So the ego serves a function. That’s where your executive function emanates from. The ego plays a role. The ego is there for a reason. The ego will keep you safe. The problem is that the ego is hungry. And it will turn everything you do in your life into a project of the ego if you’re not attuned to that. And so this is where

You know, sometimes for an entrepreneur, the ego will be, will get, you know, you hear phrases like, you’re getting in your own way. That is typically the ego wanting to try to protect you from taking risks. So being able to monitor the ego is, valuable. especially for people who are reaching high strivers, entrepreneurs, but, but I would also say that we’re not trying to dissolve the ego.

John Biggs (18:31.47)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (18:47.295)

What we’re trying to do is raise what is in the unconscious to bolster the other parts of the self, right? The ego is only one part of the self. And so it gets very muscular, especially in American culture. And you’re seeing this play out in politics and business, right? And everything else gets atrophied. So you’re trying to bring things into balance.

John Biggs (19:09.688)

Sure, sure, sure.

John Biggs (19:16.846)

So the suggestion is that the ego doesn’t allow for, I don’t know, obviously reflection and obviously maybe kindness to a degree. mean, if we look at the current political state, it’s all ego, right? It’s all bluster. And it’s all just the assumption you being right constantly is what’s polarizing us. So the question I have, especially related to the book, is how do we survive these next?

this next decade, right? So I was speaking to a guy just now who is, literally he’s been a coder all his life. He’s probably one of the best coders I know. And he says he’s going to be obsolete in half a year, basically because of AI. he can, the bosses who are full of ego say to themselves, we can replace this guy with a couple Claude instances and we’ve saved $200,000 or whatever this guy wants for his contract.

How are we even not the hard chargers? How does mental management survive this? How do the folks who are eking out a living being journalists and media creators?

Patricia (20:25.429)

of what you have to answer is number one, who are you? And really understand that and know that. number two, what you bring to this that makes you unique that Claude or Chachi B.T. cannot replicate. So I think where...

John Biggs (20:44.482)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (20:50.097)

human contribution is going to be most valuable is in some of the ways that we as humans connect to each other and in some of the ways that we are sentient beings so that we receive messages and send them out to other human beings. So one of the things that fascinates me, John, is just how much the new platforms for AI have learned from

you know, years and years and years of internet success. And one of the things I’m really tuned into is how my robot wants to love Bummy. Right? I’m a genius.

John Biggs (21:30.318)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (21:32.971)

And I have to tell you, if you talk to my robot, you know, he would tell you all kinds of things about just how special I am. What is at the root of that? They are coded in these early phases of public engagement to build trust that then can be leveraged and...

John Biggs (21:33.432)

Yeah.

Patricia (21:56.554)

you know, the en-shitification is coming, but it will learn as much as it can about us by love bombing us. And so...

awareness that we’re in this moment. I mean, we’ve been here before, right? Especially people like you and you and me, we were there in the early days. If you were writing for TechCrunch, you’ve been around. So we’ve been here before and understanding that this is the moment we’re at and really digging in and doing some work to understand who we are.

John Biggs (22:17.582)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (22:32.651)

There was a case study that I wrote about in the book, Janet. She was a coder at a very young age. She went to a STEM school. And she was great at online gaming, massive multiplayer games. She was great at blogging. She was on every single platform at the time that was available to her. And she was 17. And around.

18, she was getting ready to apply for colleges and she was like, said, this was her phrase to me, I felt empty. She didn’t know who she was. So she actually disciplined herself to write a paragraph in her notebook describing herself to herself.

John Biggs (23:10.382)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (23:21.771)

And then she went out to every single one of those platforms where she had a persona that was active and she ignored how many clicks. She ignored how popular it was. She ignored the places where she was trolled. And she said, is that me? Does that align with this paragraph? And if it did, she kept that voice. And if it didn’t, she, she self-regulated. And it was 18 years old. And I thought, what a lesson.

John Biggs (23:35.278)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (23:40.28)

Wow.

John Biggs (23:47.694)

at 18 too, which is wild.

John Biggs (23:56.312)

So this is heartening, Usually these things end up as not being so chipper. But I’m trying to find a historical corollary for where we are right now. we’re talking about, I always think about this scene in American Splendor where Paul Giamatti is working in a hospital. And this is the 70s. He’s working in hospital where there’s paper files everywhere, all over the place.

like in a few years, those paper files would have been gone. But at that point, he was as Harvey Picar was like in a in a room full of paper. And he was perfectly fine. He was perfectly happy. He was he was the kind of guy who would who wanted to be alone in this room. But when all that went over to computer, when all that went automated, what changed, he no longer had a place. So who gets who loses that who loses that that that position who loses that their persona when we go from

essentially dumb machines to machines that are either constantly like complimenting us or are doing most of our work for us and we no longer have that thing. How do we rebuild that persona in this case?

Patricia (25:07.848)

Well, that’s a huge question, OK? And listen, I’m still figuring some of this out myself. I realize that I have stumbled on territory that a lot of neuroscientists are also still trying to figure out, and psychologists. And the other thing about this, this is interdisciplinary work. And science has gotten so specified.

John Biggs (25:12.056)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (25:17.239)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (25:35.752)

that we’re starting to behave now more like humanities departments, where there’s a guy in history and a woman in sociology and somebody else in art and culture. And we’re now starting to have conversations about how do we get back to a humanity that is resilient, has something to offer, and what is core to the human identity that

cannot be replicated. And some of that is actually has to do with getting back to what is creative about us. Creativity, imagination, that cannot be replicated by a machine. What the machine can do, just like love bombing, is it can give the performance of that, but it can’t enact it. And so I wrote a book in 2008,

which was called the Ren Gen, the rise of the Renaissance generation. And it talked about that in every, what are the conditions that precede a Renaissance? And it is always the same through history. Death comes first. The civilization is wiped out. A seed bed is created and something new emerges and it emerges from human contribution of creativity. So I think what we’re seeing now,

John Biggs (26:40.611)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (27:04.828)

is we’re seeing how bankrupt this dominance and aggression script is. And what it’s doing, it’s very good at destroying, but it’s not creating anything. And so there is going to be an equal and opposite drive that will be toward creativity. And I can see the wheels of this starting to crank up. And so...

John Biggs (27:12.238)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (27:33.876)

The future is yet to be seen, but the people who can tie into that part of themselves have a future.

John Biggs (27:43.854)

That’s amazing. I’m glad you said that. I think that’s vital to hear. think there’s plenty of people who just aren’t hearing that, right?

Patricia (27:50.792)

Well, that’s the noise floor. They can’t hear it. It doesn’t resonate with them. And dominance, when you look at the dark emotions that rule dominance, they’re constrictive for a reason, because that’s how dominance stays dominant. So people who wriggle out from underneath that, like if you saw the halftime show.

John Biggs (27:53.39)

Mm-hmm.

Patricia (28:19.642)

at the Super Bowl. You know, you see how people wriggle out from underneath that. And it resonates with a massive amount of other people. This is what I mean by humans being sentient. We pick up the signals across the culture from each other. And this is what will save us.

John Biggs (28:19.758)

Mm-hmm.

John Biggs (28:44.834)

Patricia, thank you for this. This has been amazing. When is your book coming out?

Patricia (28:49.726)

March 5th, launches, it’s in pre-order now. It’s called, again, Will the Future Like You? And it’s about this age of hyper reinvention when we’re having to pivot and pivot and pivot and reinvent ourselves, what it’s doing to us and what we can do about it.

John Biggs (29:05.998)

We’ve made a lot of people like me happy because I have like, on my LinkedIn, I think it’s like two or three pages of just like doing different things almost every year, which I think is, that makes me an early adopter of this future, right? It’s scary, but it’s fun.

Patricia (29:17.704)

Yes. It’s scary, but it’s fun. And you’re going to figure out like what keeps you resilient. The recipe is a little different for everybody. But the fact that you’re asking questions and you’re curious, the self always knows what it’s doing.

John Biggs (29:39.316)

Wonderful. Well, thank you for this. It’s been amazing.

Patricia (29:41.546)

Thank you. Pleasure.

John Biggs (29:43.79)

This has been Keep Going. I’m John Biggs. We’ll see you next week.