Mark Manson - When Quitting Is the Smartest Business Move

25:45So I had another article called Happiness is Overrated. I had another article called You're Wrong About Everything or like Don't Trust Yourself. You know, and it's just like these articles kept hitting. They kept striking a nerve. And so that's when I started putting together a book around them. But it was hard. It took a long time. I'd say it took about a year to kind of see what the connective tissue was between all of them. And then it became clear that it was kind of the values thing. And then I was like, well, nobody's going to buy a book about values. So why don't we just tell them not to give a fuck and see what happens?

26:18Yeah, what about the title? because I mean, the bold orange and the title, I truly do believe is just the same thing with the titles of all your blog posts. Very, very contrarian. How'd you come up with the title? It's funny. The title was a bit of an accident. So I worked on that book for a year and a half. I was actually almost finished with it. And I had a Google Doc with a bunch of article ideas. And on that Google Doc of article ideas, I had a title idea called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. And that title was actually based off of a heavy metal song that I really liked, which was called The Subtle Art of Murder and Persuasion.

26:59Yeah, super dark. And that title had been sitting on that dock for like a year. And I loved the title. I thought it was so strong, but I was like, whatever I write for it, it also needs to be very strong. It needs to be very bold. And I just didn't really know what to write for it. And so then there was one day I was in a really shit mood and I needed to write an article for the blog. And so I looked at that title and I was like, you know what? I'm going to write the best advice that I can possibly give, but I'm going to write it in the most offensive way I can possibly imagine. And I'm going to, it's going to have so much profanity.

27:39It's going to have like lewd jokes. It's going to be super confrontational, really controversial. And I'm going to put them both. Like, I just want to create cognitive dissonance in the reader of like, wow, this is such good advice, but God, this guy is an asshole. And I wanted them to like not know what to do with it. And so I wrote that article up. And once I wrote it, I was like, this might be a little bit too much. I don't, I don't know if I could actually. Was Tucker Max out at this point? Had he already come out? Yeah, he was. He was the first guy that really did this crazy. Super lewd. Yeah, very crude, lots of profanity.

28:16So I remember like looking at it and I was like, okay, this might actually be like a bridge too far. And then I showed it to my research assistant at the time who coincidentally is Drew, my podcast co-host today. And Drew read it and he instantly messaged me and he was like, you can fire me, but I'm posting this. He was like, this article needs to be in the world. And I was like, okay, go for it. It ended up becoming the most viral article I ever did. I think it had, in the first week, it had 6 million page views. It had like over a million shares on Facebook, which was the big platform at the time.

28:52And so when that came out and just took off like wildfire, my agent called me. And like I said, so the book was like 80 % done. And my agent called me and she was like, I don't care what you have to do, but you need to call the book, The Subtle Art, Not Giving a Fuck. and you need to make this chapter one. And I was like, oh, okay. I want to dive more into just the book process. I'm very, very curious. So I guess beginning to end, how long did it take to actually write that book? That one, about two years. I'd say generally a book for me is 18 to 24 months. What is the biggest kind of misconception about people like when you're writing a book?

29:31What's the big things that they need to know? Most of writing a book is revision. The actual writing process itself, as in like taking a blank page and filling it with words, is a small fraction. It's maybe 25 % of it, 30 % of it, of the entire process. It's also the least fun part. It is absolutely arduous, agonizing. The first draft is where you're crippled with self-doubt, where everything comes out worse than it was in your head, where you're like, you know, you're six chapters in and you're looking at it and you're like, is this even a book? Like, does this even make sense? It's awful. The first draft is absolutely awful.

30:14Hemingway famously said that the first draft of everything is shit. He was 100 % correct. But once you have whatever that is on the paper, on the page, whatever you puke out onto that draft, the real work kicks in, which is honing it, polishing it, refining it, moving things around. Okay, maybe if you make chapter six, chapter two, things flow a lot better. Okay, if you cut this part out of chapter three and maybe expand chapter four, this makes a lot more sense. The back half of the book is going to feel a lot stronger. You start finding those things. And then of course, once you have everything kind of locked in order and you know which ideas are going to make it, which ones aren't.

30:58Then you spend like another three to six months editing, polishing, revising, fact checking, doing more research. Then it goes to a publisher and then they do their edits and revisions and copy edits. You know, then you go through the, all, all the, the cover process and the promotion process. And so it is the vast majority of that two years is spent not actually writing anything. For someone that wants to write a book on the front end to get it from beginning to publishing, it's the writer with the ideas, it's the research assistant, and then the editor? Those are the three? I mean, the only one that's absolutely mandatory, obviously, is the writer.

31:43If you want to publish with a publisher, then yes, you will work with an editor. And I personally think the vast majority of authors should have an editor. It's a very solitary creative process. So authors have a tendency to be a little bit arrogant and up our own asses with self-importance. So a lot of authors, they don't like the feedback editors give them. They don't like what the publisher suggests. They feel like their ideas are so precious and so beautiful and so perfect that nobody else understands. My experience is that authors who feel that way tend to write shitty books. The best books tend to come from authors who really trust their editors, have a very good editor, listen to suggestions from their agent, from their publisher, integrate certain insights from different people, and really try to collaborate as much as possible.

32:34But yeah, if you're doing nonfiction, that core team probably is the team. I would add an agent in there as well. If you do want to pursue traditional publishing, you need to have an agent. Can you have a bad product, but with good promotion and distribution still win? Yeah, for sure. I mean, the secret, right?

32:53Very, very true. We'll dive deeper into it, but I just want to know now, like on the book side, like how much money do you make like off a book? What is it? What does the actual economics look like with the book? It's funny because it's, it's not great unless you sell a ton of them. It depends on territory, depends on format, right? So everything, hardcover, softcover, audio book, ebook, the author's royalty is going to be different on all of those. And then even - We're talking dollars, we're talking cents. What does it look like? Ballpark. So the most is hardcover, right? So if like a hardcover of subtle art, I'll probably make three to$4.

33:32An ebook, I'll make like a - Guys, you could do the math on that. That's nice. Well, not all. So let me finish here. Ebook, I make maybe a buck 50. Audiobook, maybe a buck 50. But then you get in the foreign territories, right? So my book was a massive bestseller in Russia, for instance. and it's, I think the amount I make per copy in Russia is like maybe 40 cents, 40, 50 cents per copy. There's some territories like you literally make 10 cents per copy. So it just really depends on the market and the format. But I would say if you average everything out, you know, I probably net somewhere, buck 50 to$2 per copy sold.

34:11So yeah, it's a really nice chunk of change. but also I'm at like the extreme high, like long, far right of the distribution. Most authors actually don't make most of their income from books. It's funny in the nonfiction world, like people call books the world's best business card because the book doesn't actually make you a ton of money, but it gets you into conferences, events, conventions. It gets you corporate gigs. You get consulting. You can start a coaching business off the back of it. And that's where you actually make all the money. Top of the funnel marketing for sure. And these are set up as licensing deals, right?

34:45You get a upfront payment and it's a draw against royalty. Yeah. So it's unlike music where... You have to recoup. There's no recoup. Yeah. Unlike music where the record label actually owns the rights, authors retain their rights. So it's a much better business deal for authors, say, over musicians. And from a term perspective, how does that go for them having production and distribution rights? If you do a deal and they give you a million dollars as a draw against X, can they sell your book forever? Is there a term? The generally like large domestic deals will be indefinite. Generally, foreign rights deals are on like term basis.

35:22So like a five-year basis or a three-year basis or a 10-year basis. And is it the domestic partner that gives you that one check? They own the rights and then what are they doing? They're probably dealing with distributors in other countries. Thus, the royalty is lower. Is that probably why? No, it has to do with the local market. So for instance, I probably make almost as much, if not as much in the UK and Canada as I do in the United States per book sold. The difference is that in a place like, say, India, the average book is sold for like$3. So my 20 % on that$3 is$0.60. So it's not as exciting.

36:01Yeah, it's the local publisher. So you can do worldwide rights deals with like a large, like a HarperCollins or a Penguin or something. Those are rare. Like generally you have to be a really big author to get a worldwide deal. And sometimes you don't even want one because you'd rather go shop it individually, territory by territory. But what tends to happen if you're an American author, you get the domestic deal first and then the rest of the world looks at that domestic deal that you got in the US and then bases their offers on that. Because they basically assume that like, okay, the big American publishers have the best market data and the best sense of like how well this book's going to do and how valuable it is.

36:44So we'll wait for them to get a US deal. And if the US deal is good, then we'll all make our offer. So if you're an aspiring author, it's actually really, really important to get as big of a deal as possible. This is actually a conversation I have with a lot of like creators who want to have books because a lot of creators are like, well, I want royalties. I don't want an advance. I want to take a small advance but have like a higher percentage. And there are some smaller publishers that will do deals like that. But in general, if you do have an international audience, it's a really bad idea because what, you know, the publishers in the UK or in Japan or Taiwan or whatever, they're looking to see how big your advance was in the US because that essentially establishes your market value to the publishing industry.

37:29And so if you get like a massive half a million dollar advance, the publishers around the world are going to take notice and they're like, okay, we need to translate this book and put it in our market too. Whereas if you get a tiny, I don't know, like a 20K advance, but like a higher royalty, the international publishing industry is probably not going to take notice. But you do recommend someone that it's not going to be their main revenue driver to probably write a book as top of the funnel marketing. Do you recommend that to people? Absolutely. What I tell people is just be realistic about what the book is going to serve for you.

38:04There's something about books that people get very romantic about. And I find, it's funny because one of the things I never realized until I became a published author is just everybody wants to write a book. I remember getting my hair cut once and the hairdresser started telling me she wanted to write a book. And I was like, you too? Everybody wants to write a damn book. but what I run into is just that people, they're not realistic about what the book's gonna do for them. So like for instance, I have friends who are successful entrepreneurs, you know, maybe they're a consultant, maybe they're like in e-commerce or something and their ideas are like, I'm gonna write this book and it's gonna be amazing, it's gonna be this huge bestseller because my ideas are so brilliant and I look at them and I'm like, okay, like if we're being realistic, that's probably not gonna happen.

38:50First of all, almost no business book ever becomes a bestseller Everything is so niche and specific to each industry and each target market. But if you write a really good book, say, on the arbitrage and e-commerce markets, that can be a great book and only 1 ,000 people can buy it. But those 1 ,000 people will probably work for companies that will pay you tens of thousands of dollars to come consult for them. And so that book that only sold a thousand copies can turn into a million dollar a year consulting business if you play your cards right. Depth versus breadth. And yeah, I definitely do think it just, you position yourself in the market as an authority.

39:33Like if you've just said you've written a book, like so many people that have it like in their Instagram bio, immediately you're like, hey, somewhat legit. Yeah, it's a credibility marker because like people understand that you basically like sat in the suck for two years thinking about this topic. So, and probably researched until your eyeballs bled. So, you know, you probably know what you're talking about. Where do you think the future of the book industry is going? It's really interesting because up until a couple years ago, the book industry seemed to be really the only creative industry that was immune to the internet that actually, actually benefited from the internet.

40:13So if you go back to the 2000s, when the Kindle came out, everybody thought ebooks and self-publishing were just going to. destroy the market kind of the same way that like streaming destroyed music and, and TV and film. But interestingly, that didn't happen. Like the, the publishers maintain control. It turns out that people really love physical books. Well, I've never Kindle or ebook. Never. I have really hard copies. I've never even touched one before. It's funny. Cause I, I remember going ebook like 15 years ago and then yeah, after a year or two, I was like, I miss physical books. I absolutely prefer physical books.

40:49And it turns out that most people do. So it's the publishers, nothing really changed. And in fact, now that e-books and audio books just became another method of distribution, so actually the entire publishing industry gained and grew from that. So the 2010s were a little bit of a golden age for books, which was very unexpected. Nobody really anticipated that happening. The thing that is actually the threat now is AI. And the reason is because, and I'm already feeling this myself, AI, I think, is the first thing that's ever come along that has made a book feel inefficient. If you grab your typical nonfiction book on, say, some topic that you want to learn about, so much of that nonfiction book is filler.

41:37It's random stories, it's anecdotes, it's some study you don't really care about. And if you're like me, most of the nonfiction books I read, I'll kind of skip through a section or two or maybe pass a chapter that I don't really care about just to try to focus on the thing that I want to understand. And with AI now, you can just basically just skip straight to all the information that you want. If you want to know all the research in a certain area, then you can just go ask ChatGPT. And in fact, what I've found too is that I'll start a nonfiction book. I'll get two chapters in. I already know what you're going to say.

42:15I'll get really annoyed at how long. It's just not very well written. The author's very long-winded, taking a long time to get to the point. And I'll just flip to the back of the book, to the references, and I'll just go to ChatGPT and I'll be like, tell me about these studies. Okay, what's the conclusion here? Summarize this for me. And in 10 minutes, I feel like I've probably gained 90 % of the information that's in the book. So how does the book win then now? I don't know. I think it will probably, there's some genres that are probably safe. For instance, like memoir or biography, I think are probably safe.

42:54I think a lot of fiction is probably safe. Although I think there will be some like very interesting kind of choose your own adventure, AI driven fiction, which will be really, really exciting. But I think that'll be kind of like a new medium. Nonfiction is, let's put it this way. as a nonfiction author, I don't really anticipate writing books 10 years from now. This man's being vulnerable right now. Basically just saying his whole entire career is fucked. I didn't say that. I did say that. But I... I think right now, like, you have to... I mean, there's updates that came out today with Nano Banana.

43:32It's absolutely crazy. You need to... If you have a lead, you're in a good spot. If you don't, or a little bit, you need to push your lead from a brand and story perspective because I completely agree. Like on a nonfiction perspective, like the information is one thing, but unless you have some sort of like nuanced, interesting story in conjunction with the information. Yeah. That's what I want. I want like the case studies to show me how to implement it. Absolutely. And I think there's going to be a lot of cool stuff that happens. Like I don't think books are going to go away, but I could see them kind of becoming like vinyl records, right?

44:04It would be like a very, like a collector's item or something that you really only buy, you pay a premium for it. And it's really because you just love the author or you really love that book in particular. This episode is sponsored by Poppy AI, a visual AI workspace that almost acts as a whiteboard where you can ingest in YouTube videos, podcasts, episodes, voice notes, PDFs. You ask it a question and then it gives you answers based on everything that you added. It's made for visual thinkers and for anybody that's sick and tired of bouncing back and forth from a bunch of different tabs. It really just helps you organize your ideas and thoughts and research.

44:40For podcast prep, I load in a bunch of past episodes, some ideas for interview questions, past links, and then Poppy comes back and helps me kind of shape questions that actually sound like my true voice. You can choose from a bunch of different models, ChatGBT, Claude, a bunch others. It's all actually baked into the workspace. I actually genuinely enjoy using the product. I've met the founders before. They're super, super sharp, and they're very, very deep in the product. They're actually former content creators, so they really, really get how and why someone would use this product. Go to getpoppy.ai slash openresidency.

45:14Use the code OR for$25 off. If you're a creator at any level, this will change your workflow. For anybody that writes a book, that has wrote multiple books, as you have, you have to be highly productive. You have to have great habits. What's like your philosophy on habits? I'm laughing because I don't know if I have great habits. Dude, I don't have great habits. Well, if you knew how I wrote my books, I think I've gotten, I've gotten much better habits the last few years. For me, the 80, 20 of productivity is just showing up. Showing up was without distraction. Like that's the 80, 20. I like all these hacks and like Pomodoro and all this shit.

45:54Like it's just, you're not Pomodoro guy. No. Like you do just get in the chair, Put your phone in the other room. Like that's the 80-20. If you can do that, you're going to be fine. With books in particular, what I do is I just set blocks. I like schedule blocks on my calendar. So let's say it's like 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. I'm working on a book. My rule is that I have to sit down. I have to open the book up on my computer. And I don't have to write. but I can't do anything else. I just have to be there in the chair, staring at the screen. I can't be on social media. I can't be on the phone. I can't be talking to a friend.

46:38I can't be taking a call or whatever. And what I find is that like my brain will kick and scream and find all these excuses not to do it. But then it's like once I'm in the chair for 10 or 15 minutes, that boredom kicks in. And then suddenly writing the book feels more interesting than just sitting there quietly, not doing anything. And so you almost like torture yourself. into doing it. The other thing that's huge for authors is co-writing. Almost every author I know co-writes to some degree. So like find somebody else who's like working on a book or an article. I had a friend when I was working on my second book, I had a friend who was working on his PhD dissertation.

47:16And he and I, we used to, we lived in New York. And so we would, we would basically just like rent a house outside the city for like three or four days. And then And he and I would just go out to that house and just write like 12 hours a day in a room together. And it was awesome. It was great. So the secret is just focus. Focus, block all the apps, sit at the chair. Yeah. It's all about that. Yeah. And I don't even know if it's funny because there was one time I remember a friend asked me, I was like deep, deep in a writing session and I came out to like, you know, take a break or something. And my friend asked me, he was like, how's it going?

47:54And I was like, oh, it's actually going really well today. and he said, are you feeling inspired? And I was like, no, it's just not distracted. And then he kind of looked at me and he's like, yeah, I don't know if there's a difference. And I was like, yeah, there's not. That's actually a really, really good take. Yeah. What about this law of avoidance that you talk about? So the Manson's law of avoidance, which I cheekily named after myself, but to this day, I don't think I've ever found anybody who else is, I've yet to find an academic who's explicitly stated it the way I stated it. so I'm going to continue to take credit for it.

48:27Manson's law of avoidance is that you will instinctively avoid anything that could potentially threaten your current identity, both positive or negative. So people often have the experience, obviously everybody's had the experience of being anxious or nervous around something that could threaten our identity, that could make us feel worse about ourselves. But what's interesting is that I think most people have also had the experience of avoiding or being anxious around something that could threaten our identity positively, right? That could show us that we're actually much more capable than we thought, that we could be much more successful than we thought, that we're much more intelligent or admirable or lovable than we think we are.

49:07And so we avoid those things too, right? So it's like the people who don't believe that they deserve love will unconsciously avoid people willing to show them love. People who don't believe that they are smart enough or good enough to achieve success will find ways to avoid the opportunities that could give them success. So yeah, we, we, we avoid things that force us to change how we perceive ourselves, both good and bad. And it's, I think just being aware of that, of like why we do it can be very helpful. I mean, that just sounds like self-destruction. Is that, is that what I'm self-sabotage?

49:42You know, the fear of success is, it's really interesting because I think we've all experienced it to some degree, but you're not supposed to be afraid of it, right? You're supposed to want it. And then secondly, there's a certain responsibility that comes with success that I think people don't think about until they're confronted with it, right? Like if you are a hotshot at work, people are going to rely on you that much more and they're going to become dependent on you and you're going to be responsible for a lot of other people's well-being and performance. And that's absolutely fucking terrifying.

50:20So a lot of people, when they're on the precipice of achieving that thing that they want, for the first time they get sight of like, oh my God, there's going to be all of these things riding on my shoulders if I do this. They freak out and they go back to, they self-sabotage. They go back to whatever simple unsatisfied existence they had before. What recommendation do you give to someone to like give themselves permission to do that? What should they be doing? I think you have to want the responsibility. You have to want, this comes back to the pain, right? Like you have to want the pain. If you want to be a leader, you need to want the responsibility of owning the success or failure of the group.

51:02If you want your creative work to become popular and people to love it, then you have to want the criticism that's inevitably going to come with it. The scrutiny, the hate, the comments section, essentially. Like you can't want the benefit without the cost. And so it's, again, but it comes back to a lot of people don't even consider the cost until they're like right in front of the benefit. It's like right there. And they've worked so long to get here and they're like, oh shit, I'm gonna have to give something up for this. I wasn't expecting this. And they freak out. I want to rewind 10, 15 years to that moment.

51:38You launched your book as commercial success right away. Were you ready to confront that moment? you became famous very, very fast. Yeah. It's, being a famous author, it's very weird because in many ways, like your book is the celebrity and you're not. And, because like if you think about it, for instance, right? Like if you're, say you're an actor and you get your big break in a huge blockbuster movie, you probably go out the day after that movie premieres and people start recognizing you. People start taking pictures of you and following you. If you're a musician whose album takes off and becomes super famous, suddenly like 10 ,000 people are showing up to your shows and they're singing your song back to you, right?

52:25So it's like this very tangible, visible thing. When you sell a million books, you wake up in the same bed, you eat lunch at the same cafe, you hang out with the same friend. Like literally nothing else changes. Sounds like the best type of famous. In many ways it is. Like it's just, it's a fame that's like a number on an email. And you're like, wow, that's a really big number. Cool. And like the high, like the closest you ever get to it is you're walking through the airport and you like glance at the airport bookstore and it's like number one and it's your book. And you're like, oh, sweet. That's pretty cool.

52:59You know, but that's it. So it's, it is the best way to become famous because you don't get overwhelmed and drowned and all of this attention and publicity and pressure all at once. Forget about the attention. Let's talk about the money. Because I'm not going to say you won the lotto or sold a company. But it seems as though there was a pretty big liquidity event for you pretty fast. How'd you handle that? Not well. It is very similar to somebody having a big exit. My blog was doing pretty well before the book came out. I think 2014, 2015, I made like probably like low six figures. But then the book hits.

53:43And within six months, like seven figure royalty checks are showing up every few months. And at first it like, it doesn't really sink in. Because again, it's just a number, right? Like you see this number in your bank account, just like 10x in a single day. And you're like, okay, that's sick. You know, and like, I remember I took my wife on like a trip to France and we like flew business class and stayed in this like really luxury hotel. And that was kind of our big celebratory moment. But then even then you're like, okay, I'm still the same guy. My life's the same. it takes a while for like the reality of your financial situation to start to catch up with you and it becomes very disorienting because you start to realize you're like oh i can literally buy anything i want anything i ever wanted i can just like go get it and that's not actually a great place to be like guardrails are good for us and in our case like we we went and bought a condo that in hindsight, like we had no business buying.

54:46It's not that we couldn't afford it. It was just stupid. Like we didn't understand what we were signing up for. Once again, we looked at the benefit. We're like, oh, this big, beautiful condo in the middle of New York City. We didn't think about the sacrifice and the cost. We didn't think about like the taxes, the monthlies, the insurance, furnishing it, dealing with the board, dealing with the building, getting all the approvals for all the stuff. Like we'd never shopped anywhere other than like West Elm before. And suddenly we're trying to furnish this big, beautiful, luxurious condo in downtown Manhattan.

55:18And basically we got our lunch eaten. We were so clueless and dumb. We didn't know what we didn't know. And what I've learned now, I guess being wealthy for 10 years. There's a certain skill set of like having a lot of money that nobody talks about nobody tells you. It's certain markets. There's like certain temptations that you have to know how to resist. There's certain markets that behave very differently at the very high end. What do you mean by markets? So you always assume that the more you pay, the better the product you get. That's true like up to a certain threshold. And then there's like past that threshold, in many cases, it stops being true.

56:06You're actually paying for something completely different. The simplest example I can give is furniture, right? So, you know, if you go from, say, making 50K a year to 100K a year, you're probably going from like Ikea to like a nice furniture, so like an RH or something, which is great. It's enough, actually. It's actually... Yeah, I know where you're going with this. Stay there. Everybody listening, stay there. Stay at RH. But when you go from, say, 100K to a million or 5 million or 10 million, And all these new worlds open up to you that you didn't even know existed, right? So there's like this fine Italian handmade thing in Bologna, Italy that they can ship to you in three months.

56:51And like, I don't know, this like 80-year-old Italian guy carved it himself with a toothpick and it's a one of a kind and all this shit. And not knowing anything about anything, you're like, oh my God, that's amazing. Cool. I'll buy one. And it shows up and it's actually like, it falls apart. It's not the specifications you asked for. It doesn't fit the room or match anything. And you can't send it back. You can't change it. It's like an art piece. So like, they're offended at the fact that you even ask. And I'm like, I just want a fucking couch. Why is everybody wasting all my time? Meanwhile, you've paid like 10x for a worse result.

57:29So there's just all sorts of situations that pop up like that. There's also a lot of kind of, I would call it like predatory markets, right? So when you make a bunch of money, you'll start getting a lot of phone calls from banks and money managers, wealth advisors, fund managers. And every single one of them has a once in a lifetime opportunity that they want to tell you about. And they're all scams. Every single one is a fucking scam. If you actually sit down and open a spreadsheet and do all the math, it's a fucking scam. Whether it's life insurance, a hedge fund, like all of it. They are either overtly or very subtly skimming off the top.

58:10And if you run the numbers out 10, 20 years, you're giving up like millions of dollars to this guy to basically just click a button. Put on the S &P. Yeah, and put your money in an index fund. So there's stuff like that that happens as well. So you become very distrustful of a lot of people. For the people out there that have econ businesses, I'd say the number is probably about 5 million. Once you start doing 5 million and somehow the outside world knows it, these money managers come in. They're predatory. And they have boxes for the Lakers, the Clippers, the Chargers. And they're just trying to get you in early.

58:41And they all come at you. It's absolutely crazy. It's crazy in LA. It is. I'll take the Lakers tickets though. Yeah. I'll take the Lakers tickets. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy too. Yeah. The networking and stuff that they do. The stuff they invite you to. Like you end up in a room with like all these like crazy, you're like, how am I meeting this person? You know, and it's all a racket. It's all a total racket. It's funny because when I was living in New York, all these like fund managers and hedge fund guys and stuff would keep inviting me out. And it was like every other one was a former NFL player.

59:14Like all of them. They were all like, it was like a former quarterback, former linebacker for the Chargers, former defensive end for the Minnesota Vikings, like guy I watched growing up as a kid. That's how they get you, man. Well, that's the thing. I'm like, wow, how are all these NFL guys so good at finance? And then eventually I figured it out. I'm like, oh no, they don't know a fucking thing about finance. They're just in the room because the guys with money are guys like me who grew up watching football and are excited that so-and-so is here talking to me about protecting my legacy and all this shit.

59:46This is why Chauncey Billups is at the poker game. So they can get everybody to come to the poker game. A hundred percent, dude. It is the same analogy. A hundred percent. I did not know that you were married when you came into millions. Where would Mark Manson be today when those millions of dollars came in, if he was a single man?

1:00:05The hard hitting questions. Oh man. I don't, I don't even want to know. It would, it would have gotten degenerate. I know that. I know that. It's. We're going to go into part two of this conversation. It's about, it's about to get very, very juicy. Yeah. I feel the same way, man. I had, a bit of success. But when I found my wife, it was like an inflection point where she has grounded me in a huge way. Yes. Me too. Yeah. Let's talk about your relationship. Love versus romance, love versus compatibility. How do you kind of look at that? I personally think romance is overrated. Not to say that it's not good.

1:00:45Romance is great, but I think it tends to be very overrated early in a relationship and underrated late in a relationship. The reason is because romance, by definition, it skews and distorts how you see reality. Like when they actually do brain scans of people who are like madly in love with somebody that they just met and they find that what's going on in their brain is the exact same chemical reactions as cocaine. Like it is that level of addictiveness, excitement, stimulation. Lust. Happening. it's beyond lust it's like infatuation you know it's like you know that like first few months with somebody that you're crazy about and you're just like obsessed with them and you're thinking about them all the time and again don't get me wrong it's a great experience a lot of fun feels really good the problem is when you overly rely on romance and not on other things like am I compatible with this person do we share values and interests do we respect each other are they trustworthy people will often overlook these fundamental things in a relationship just because there's this intense romantic love that they've gotten swept away in.

1:01:59It's like, oh, we're in love. Love conquers all. We're going to figure it out because we love each other so much. But the truth is, is that if you don't have good communication, if you don't trust each other, and if you don't have shared interests and values, you're actually not really building a relationship on any sort of foundation. I see so much on Twitter, people talking about, you know, there's all these kind of graphs saying that people aren't getting married till they're older. I think, I mean, I could speak for myself. I didn't really start maturing till I was like mid thirties, quite frankly.

1:02:30I think too many guys go in actually too early and they actually don't know who they are and all in on the romance and not being like pragmatic in nature and asking the right questions. I feel like that is actually an epidemic. And I think people, males, I'm not talking about females, males should actually wait till they're mature and they're thinking with their head more. I don't disagree. The counter argument to that is that they should mature faster. It just doesn't happen, man. I think both can be true at the same time. But no, look, I'm in the same boat. I didn't know my head from my ass until I was 30.

1:03:09Forget about maturity. I'm talking about even knowing yourself. Right. Knowing what you want, knowing what's good for you, what's bad for you. I do feel like you need to go through a couple bad relationships to understand what you do wrong, what bad things are you attracted to that maybe you should watch out for. I agree with you. Those are important experiences. What are those red flags? I have a lot too. Let's hear what you got to say. For me personally or just in general? Both. Okay. I'm a stimulation junkie. So I tend to, when I was younger, I tended to fall for the party girls, the fun girls, the girls who were up for anything and everything and would go all night.

1:03:56And it was a lot of fun, but I was not the most functional. You asked me about good habits earlier. I was definitely not the most functional person in the world. And I did not have great lifestyle habits. And a lot of the women I dated were also not the most functional people in the world and did not have the best lifestyle or habits. And so what ended up happening is that we would just kind of enable each other. We would enable like the worst tendencies in each other. And you would get like a pretty vicious cycle sometimes. I think that's another interesting point to make around this is that people often assume that love and romance, it has to be exciting.

1:04:35It doesn't have to be exciting. Actually, like romance can be a very calm and boring experience. Like you can feel an intense amount of intimacy and romance, just like sitting on a couch with your partner, reading a book at the same time. I think enabling your significant other to become the best version of themselves in any and all aspects of life, like that is the key KPI for me. Like for me, when I met my wife since then, all of the key KPIs that I look at, physical, mental, health, my bank account, everything, intelligence, clarity in life is all up and to the right. I just don't understand why people don't see that.

1:05:15I think that's the most important thing. Is there anything more important? Literally, is there anything more important? Does this person make me a better person and me being a better person will make our relationship and our family's life better? It's really that simple. That's the formula I look at. I agree with you. And my wife has had the same effect on me. Like I'm definitely a person who needs, you said earlier that your wife grounds you. Like I'm very similar. Like my wife, I need guardrails put around me because I'll just like go off. As do I. I will go off in any and every direction if I don't have limits set.

1:05:48And she's really good at setting compassionate limits. I mean, just her existence puts limits on me. Like just the institution of marriage itself, I think makes me a better person. And I think most men don't see that. They only see what they give up. They only see the financial downside. They don't see that those limitations can actually make them a better, more functional person. I completely agree, man. I've been married for two weeks and me just understanding and knowing I'm having like certain little trigger moments where it's like, oh, I'm married. And it just gives me more purpose and guardrails just knowing that in general.

1:06:25Yeah. It's so crazy that just, yeah, I don't see how people don't see that. Yeah. I can sympathize. It's funny because I never, for many years, I thought I would never get married. I never thought marriage was that important. For many years, I just kind of assumed like, yeah, I'll get married if I want to have kids with somebody one day, just to like kind of formalize the whole thing. Even when I proposed to my wife, a lot of it was just because I knew it was very important to her. And I really wanted to be with her and stay with her and keep her happy. The power, the emotional and psychological power of marriage really blindsided me.

1:07:04I did not expect it to have such a profound effect on myself because there is something extremely, extremely powerful about getting up in front of every single person in your life, every single person who's ever cared about you, who's ever loved you, who's ever given a shit about you, and then publicly declaring that you are committed for life to this other person, like that, there's a reason this institution has been around for like 5 ,000 years. It's just such a powerful declaration and it reoriented, for me it reoriented kind of how I prioritize my life, how I, my identity in general, like how I see myself as an individual.

1:07:48Like I'm on a team now. Nothing that happens in my professional life nothing that happens with my hobbies or interests, nothing that happens with my finances changes that. Like we're a team and we deal with everything together. And it's, there's just like an incredibly profound comfort that you can find in that and a peace that you can find in it. And also finding something in your life that becomes more important than yourself, than your stupid impulses. You have kids? I do not. You don't have kids. You said something interesting there. I'm curious to get your opinion from a priority perspective, what for you is the number one priority?

1:08:25Is it you or her? You because you'll enable her better or is it her? How do you look at that? I look at it as like kind of a pyramid. You can't have a healthy and happy relationship unless you are healthy and happy with yourself. And I don't think you can be a healthy and happy parent unless you have a healthy and happy relationship, right? So it starts with your relationship with yourself. That enables a good relationship with your partner. And then a good relationship with your partner allows you to be good parents and role models. Forget the Manson avoidance. I like the Manson pyramid. That's nice.

1:09:04I mean, you basically answered it both ways. That makes a lot of sense, man. Because for me, yeah, for right now, I don't have kids. So it's just, it's all about, I need to work on me. I'm the priority because then I know I'm just going to show up as my best self. Yeah. And you see this a lot. I mean, not to get too much into parenting, but you see this a lot. People will have a very unhealthy, unhappy marriage, but they'll stay together for the kids. They're like, we're just going to tolerate each other for the kids, even though they don't respect each other, even though they don't trust each other, even though they don't share any interests or values together, even though they don't communicate well.

1:09:39And I think what people don't realize is that kids don't learn from what you tell them. They learn from what you do. They watch you. And if you are clearly unhappy around the other parent all the time and you are clearly censoring yourself and you are clearly resentful and harboring all these emotions of guilt and shame and anger and embarrassment, they're going to pick up on that. And that's going to become their kind of default definition of what an intimate relationship looks like. I think what you just said right there is the biggest problem on the single before getting married side, which is people are like, like for me, when I was 25 to 28, I was dating a girl for three years, almost got married.

1:10:18And I was going through my head. I'm like, oh my God, I've been with her for almost three years. I've invested so much into this. Like I got to do it, right? All my other friends were getting married and people don't realize like the power of you're allowed to change your mind. You're allowed to pivot. If you want to live a fucking miserable existence. You keep going with that. People won't just cut their losses. It's the same thing we talked about earlier. They won't cut their losses. Yeah. Some cost fallacy, right? Yeah. It's like, I've been with this person for this long. I don't want to start over.

1:10:47So might as well try to make it work. Yeah. And for me on the other side, it's when I got married, I made a commitment that now, if that happens on the other side, then that's on me. And I just fucked up and I'm the worst human. If I can't make it work on this side, because I was methodical beforehand. I was very patient and I think I picked the right one. I know I picked the right one. So on the other side, if I fuck it up, then it's on me. I also think it's okay to doubt and be unsure. I think it's actually very natural and healthy. It's funny. So I really agonized on whether to propose to my wife or not.

1:11:22I was very anxious about it. And I mean, I had a long history of commitment phobia and avoidance and stuff. But every time she had been dropping hints and my family had been dropping hints, like it was, it was that time we were in our early thirties. We'd been, we'd been together for like four years. It's time. If you're going to do this, it should be soon. And I remember going back and forth on it. And I just like, I couldn't, I was like looking for that feeling of certainty. Like is, how do I know she's the one? How do I know this is right? And I remember I went to dinner with my dad and my stepmom one night.

1:12:02And my stepmom is a very blunt woman. She does not hold anything back. And they love my wife. They loved her. They were really, really on board, wanted me to marry her. And so I went to dinner with them and they just casually asked her, like, so when are you going to put a ring on it? Anytime soon? Any rings? Any marriage happening? And I was like, ah, I don't know. And my stepmom looked at me and she's like, damn it, Mark, what's the holdup? And I just looked at her. I was like, how am I supposed to know if I want to be with this person for the rest of my life? You said that? Yeah, I said that.

1:12:36I was like, how do I know if this is the right move? Like, I don't want to commit to something that I'm like not sure that I can fulfill the commitment. And my stepmom looked at me like it was the biggest fucking idiot she'd ever met in her life. And she was like, Mark Manson, I've been with your father for 32 years. I still don't know if I want to be with him for the rest of my life. You just do it. I hear about this on the kid's side. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You're never ready. You're never ready. It's a choice. And what she said is she was like, she's like, you don't know. It's a decision. You like choose every day to renew that commitment.

1:13:16To like show up every day to make it work, right? To keep going. And that made a lot of sense to me. And I was like, oh, okay. So it's like an active thing. It's not this passive like, okay, now I'm married, everything's decided. It's like, no, it's like an active thing. Like a marriage is a thing that you build and nurture and work on for the rest of your life. Every single day. I'm learning that now. What's your thesis on conditional versus unconditional love? Conditional is when people try to barter for affection or validation from somebody that they care about, right? So it's when I will love you if you do the thing I want you to do.

1:13:55or I will show you affection if you let me buy the thing I want to buy. And conditional love is extremely toxic. It's manipulative by definition. And it perpetuates itself, right? Because what ends up happening is it creates a power struggle within the relationship, right? So it's like if if I'm always trying to do something to get my wife to do something for me in return, then she's going to feel like she's giving up too much. So then she's going to try to like manipulate me to get what she wants out of me. And you get this like vicious cycle that starts happening. The fucked up thing about conditional love is that it actually usually starts in the family.

1:14:39It usually starts because you grew up in a family that was very conditional with their love and affection. And so you never learned what unconditional love and affection felt like or looked like. And so you look for partners that treat you the same way. Basically keeping a scoreboard. Is that kind of what you're saying? If you're keeping a scoreboard in a relationship, you're both losing. What's your thoughts on the fact that I run my relationship like a business, like an operating system? We do monthly meetings and quarterly offsets. What's your thoughts on that? I want to know. It's kind of like a scoreboard a little bit.

1:15:10I love it. I'm deeply amused. Well, it depends. What are your KPIs for each other? So we do monthly meetings and we just go over, you know, are we happy? We go over sex. We go over money, trust, communications. Are you happy the person you're becoming? Kind of go over all those things. And we kind of all of these different prompts. And then we create action steps. And then I have to, it's like, we had the action steps for this month. And then the next month we go over it. Did we get better? So it's just like a running kind of, let's just call it 30 question test to just make sure from an awareness perspective, nothing just gets too far off the tracks.

1:15:49Yeah. Is the disposition that you two are a unit trying to accomplish these KPIs together? 100%. Okay. Because that's the difference. That's the difference. Is you're either on the same side facing the world together. Exactly. I mean, that's what we are. Or you're facing each other and it's a zero-sum game. You're trying to win from the other person. And that's when it turns toxic. So if you're on a team facing the world, that's healthy. If you're each on your own team trying to get what you want out of each other, like that's when it turns toxic. Make me feel better about myself. What about like healthy compromises versus like this self-sacrifice?

1:16:29Like how and when do you know when to give to your partner versus like they're just getting everything that they want? Yeah. I think it's being strategic. It's knowing, first of all, I think both people have to speak up about the things that are important to them. And if there's something that's important to my wife and it's not very important to me, then I should compromise on it. If there's something that's important to me and not very important to her, then she should come. I say should, like it's not like she's obligated to, but ideally it just makes sense, right? You want to make each other happy.

1:17:05And if there's something that like is very small and simple for you to give up and it increases her happiness dramatically, then like give it up. You know, where you run into, where it starts to get complicated is when you run into something that's important to both of you and it's diametrically opposed. Like then it becomes very complicated and very difficult. And, and that's when you, the discussion of sacrifice can be very painful. I'll give you two examples from my own life. one is something important to her that doesn't really matter to me. I think like a lot of marriages, my wife is the clean one and the organized one.

1:17:41And I'm a fucking barbarian. And I'm with you, bro. And she has tamed me quite a bit over the years. But she genuinely like a clean house just makes her very happy. And she also has extremely high standards for cleanliness. Like I would call them absurdly high. I mean, you're Brazilian. So you actually understand. Bro, I'm actually messing. You know what's so funny is I have six things on my whiteboard from the monthly meeting to like keep top of the mind awareness. Yeah. And one of them, clean the place, clean the car. Yeah. I see viciousness when it's not clean, bro. And she's judging my bathroom.

1:18:19There's a reason why I have my own bathroom. Why am I getting evaluated on my bathroom? The door's closed. Oh my God. It's crazy. I've been there. So what I realized, two things had to happen. There were like two realizations that had to happen on this front. One was she had to realize that even if I cleaned everything, I am never going to have the same standards as her and I am never going to clean things as well as she cleans them or she wants them clean. So like she just needs to accept that, that even like me giving 100 % is going to end up in her being like 80 % satisfied. But the thing I had to accept is that for me to take her from 0 % to 80 % satisfied was not a lot of work, right?

1:19:05It's like some very basic shit, like take out the trash every morning, do the dishes after dinner, you know, stop throwing my shit on the floor in the bedroom. You know, it's like very basic stuff gave her 80 % of the happiness. And so I looked at that and I was like, okay, those things are pretty simple. I'm happy to do that. And sure enough, it's great. It's like 10 minutes of my time each day She is drastically happier. We argue and bicker over dumb stuff like 90 % less. So it's great. It's a huge win. Totally worth the sacrifice. An example that becomes very difficult and complicated is when we moved to Los Angeles, I really loved it here.

1:19:47I still love it here. She did not. She really missed New York. And there was like a year or two there where she was trying and she really was like looking for her people and looking for her scene and everything and like could not find it and was just intensely sad and really missed our old lifestyle in New York. And I'm sitting here, I'm like, I'm thriving. Like my life's awesome here and much better than it ever was in New York. And so that was extremely difficult to navigate because now you're looking at like, one or both of us is gonna have to make a very significant sacrifice or just like sit in the suck for a long time.

1:20:29And this is like the core KPI, happiness. Yeah. Yeah. What happened? So it was a mixture of things. One was we agreed to spend more time in New York and Sao Paulo, which is where she's from. So she spent more time in those two places, which helped quite a bit. And then there was like a lot of adjustment here in LA in terms of like lifestyle and people we hung out with, things that we would do here. I would say that that has gotten solved somewhat, not completely. But that's the thing is like when you're in these long-term relationships, like there have been periods, we've been together for 14 years.

1:21:08And I think we've both had periods where there was something in our lifestyle that one of us was really not happy about. But it did not make sense to change it drastically. Like it would just uproot too many things and destabilize too many things. And so you kind of end up in this situation where like, all right, I'm just going to have to eat shit for a couple of years here and like, until we figure this out. So she's been the next one up in that position here. And it sucks, but that's the other thing about the power of the commitment. You know, like if we weren't married, it becomes that much easier to just cut loose and be like, well, fuck this.

1:21:48I'm going back to New York. Again, I think the constraints are, they're a benefit. They're not, they make us better people, right? It's so funny you say that because after we got married, we were like joking in the car and we're not allowed to say the D word, divorce. Yeah. And she's like, oh, like if we get an argument now, we have to like go do paperwork. That's what she said to me in the car. I was like, that's so true. That's like, this is actually really, really serious now, huh? It is. It's very serious. It is. Would you say respect or communication? What do you think is more important? Respect.

1:22:20because communication you can fix if it breaks down. Respect, it's very, very hard to fix if it breaks down. Makes sense. What are those questions? You know, I have my monthly meeting, the quarterly offside. What are those questions that you think you should be asking your partner often to kind of keep things on track? I think some of the ones you mentioned are actually really good ones. I don't think you don't necessarily have to do a monthly KPI report, but it is really good to touch base around things like that. So there's this thing in coaching called the Wheel of Life and it's basically eight categories.

1:22:55There's like eight categories of life and you give yourself a score in each of them. I think those categories are often very useful just to kind of evaluate yourself. So one is health and fitness. One is hobbies and interests. One's social life. One is career. One is... Probably financial. Finances. You know, so there's... I'm not going to remember all of them but like there's some pretty clearly defined ones. And I think it, I will often just kind of like run through those categories and just give myself a little score. And I think any of those are, like it's good to check in on all of those things.

1:23:28You don't necessarily have to do it like in a regimented basis, but you should be talking about them with each other pretty frequently of, you know, how are you feeling about the financial situation? Do you feel like you're getting out of the house enough? Do you feel like you're working too much? How, you know, how are you liking your new friends? How are things with your family? Like it just, these should be bread and butter conversations between partners. It actually shocks me how many couples don't talk about these things. Insane, bro. Yeah. People just go so long without even addressing this.

1:24:02Years. That is for me, with our relationship, we've promised each other that that is the one meeting monthly that we must not miss. Yeah. Because it's impossible to go off track because if there's any issues anywhere, it's top of mind. Yeah. And then eventually you're going to figure it out. It's not sexy but it's probably incredibly effective. But this is the funny thing is like the effective relationship stuff is not sexy. It's not exciting. It's dull as fuck. Guys, put that reoccurring monthly calendar invite to you and your girl. Just quick. You could do the A questions. You could do my 30 questions if you want.

1:24:36You should sell your notion, your relationship notion template. Bro, we may or may not productize it. You think I'm kidding, dog. You'd make a killing, I'm sure. Bro, do you know what's so crazy? There's actually a lot of demand for it. I don't want to get too deep into it. I want to do this last section. Wouldn't be a surprise. And then we're going to get into business because I want to go deep into that. I will talk a little bit about dating before we go into business just because obviously we just went deep into relationships. How do you know if you think you're actually ready for a relationship versus just being 33-year-old Mark who was just lonely?

1:25:08Just a lonely man. How do you know if you're ready? Again, I'm going to come back to it's wanting the struggle and the sacrifice. Like, again, it's easy to want a hot girlfriend who's going to be fun and hang out with you and take care of you and do all these nice things. But do you also want the unsexy stuff? Do you want a companion? Do you want somebody to just kind of be there with you when things are difficult? Somebody to talk to through various issues? Like it's more like what the reality of a relationship is that it's much more about companionship than it is about hot sex or parties or, you know, a beach vacation.

1:25:51And you spend the vast majority of your time being each other's companion. So I think you need to want that and look for that. Do you think it has to be deep internal work and you have to be ready or you can meet someone and then they can help you grow into the person you need to be? What's your thoughts on that? I think you have to be willing to work on yourself. I do think the right partner can kind of pull it out of you a little bit, but you have to be willing to work on it. Makes sense. What do you think is the most common way people like sabotage their dating lives without like even realizing it?

1:26:27The most common way I see these days is just people have unrealistic standards. And I think this part of this too is, it's encouraged by the dating apps. Like there seems to be this endless supply of people that you could date. So everything, you kind of have this checklist in your head of all the things that you want in a partner. And by default, you're not satisfied until they're all checked off, which is unreasonable because nobody's going to check off all the things you want. Does not exist. Doesn't exist. One of the things that I've had a number of friends who have been chronically single, even though they want relationships for many years.

1:27:04And every single time I sit down with them and actually start talking through things with them, this is what I run into is that they just kind of have this like this fantasy version of a woman in their head that doesn't exist, a unicorn that has like the exact trait for every single aspect of her personality and body and family and everything. And so what I always tell them to do, a simple exercise, is I say, okay, write down everything you want in a partner. Okay, step two, order it from most important to least important. Okay, step three, cross off everything except for the top three things.

1:27:44Just look for those top three things. right so for sounds pragmatic it is but it's also like if you find the three most important things you need in a partner it it's much easier to overlook priority number 11 and priority number eight if you've got number one two and three fulfilled but what ends up happening is that a lot of people will when they don't do that exercise they'll start getting upset because priority number 11 is not satisfied. Yeah. I mean, I think like big key immovable objects, like stuff like value, stuff like, do you want kids? How many kids? If she wants five and you want one, there's an actual issue there.

1:28:23And like my buddy who's dating someone, it's pretty serious. You know, she ate really shitty foods and he's really healthy. And by month six, she's eating really healthy foods. Yeah. So a lot of stuff that can change over time. Stuff can change. This is the other thing too, is like, look at the priorities and ask, ask yourself which ones are superficial, which ones are going to last, which ones are not, right? So like my top priority, I remember doing this when I was single and my top priority by far, which it's funny because it surprised me in my 20s because I was an idiot, it was intellectual curiosity.

1:28:56Like I learned pretty early in my 20s that it didn't matter how beautiful she was, how sweet she was, how fun she was. If she wasn't intellectually curious, I couldn't really be with her for more than like a month. I just lost interest. And that actually surprised me. And I remember in my mid-20s, like prioritizing intellectual curiosity over a lot of other things. And I immediately started meeting women I liked a lot more and was much happier with. I'm with you on that one. That's probably top for me. Dating those dumb hot girls, it just doesn't do it, bro. Oh my God, bro. They just sit and say nothing.

1:29:33I remember those days. Boring. Those were sad, sad days. You remember those days over there? Those were sad, sad days. I'm glad I turned the corner. What about playing hard to get? Because I remember, you know, back in the day, that was the thing. Now with like so many options out there, like, do you even think that's a thing anymore? Because people would just leave. Yeah, I just don't. Just don't play. Like, you could have just stopped at play and I'd be like, yeah, no. I'm the honesty guy. I spent the first four years of my career as a dating coach, and my entire brand was attract with honesty.

1:30:09So I'm a bit of a radical in terms of honesty, especially when it comes around dating and relationships. As a former dating coach, outside of that, what would you say is the best dating advice you'd have for someone? The best, I would say the only real dating advice is self-improvement. let's get into the fun stuff. Let's get into some business here. When we spoke on Zoom, you said you poured all your book money back into building a team and systems. All of your book money into building a team and systems. Why? The last five years, yeah. He's like, no, guys, not that irresponsible. Some money he has on the side.

1:30:46That was a little drastic what I said. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I definitely kept a nest egg for myself. But I've been spending all this time writing books with celebrities and dealing with movie studios and dealing with a lot of traditional publishing gigs and traveling all over the world to fulfill different obligations and commitments. And I was like, man, I kind of miss just being a scrappy dude on the internet. And then I also realized I'm in a very special and unique position in that I have built this massive online audience. I have all this credibility. I've been around for a long time. This is not my first rodeo.

1:31:20I've been doing content for almost 15 years. Like I have a huge competitive advantage here in that I could build, I could essentially build a media company and or what would become a media company. But to do that, I need to, there are a few things I need to do first. One is I need to start doing video and I need to figure out how to do video and do it well. Second is I need to do a podcast. Third is I need to start building the teams and systems to do all these things well and understand them on a deep level and be able to scale them efficiently. And so that's what I started doing. In 2023, I launched my YouTube channel.

1:32:00End of that year, I launched my podcast, started building out the team. And yeah, these days, it's funny. Like we are, I joke, like we are like a creator media business. And I joke that instead of outside funding, our VC is called the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. And it's just like all the book money just gets funneled into building out this company. How big is the team? Who's on the team? So the team is now 22 people with some contractors. So there's the YouTube team, the podcast team, social team, email and product team, and then a couple operational people. So do the operational people sit at the top of the pyramid and they're making sure the operating rhythm and all of those channels are going?

1:32:43Yeah, the operations people are kind of in charge of video production and making sure. So there's like the product team is in charge of backend monetization. the content team is in charge of front end content creative essentially and then the operation team is in charge of okay let's get all this shot and made basically let's go through each let's dive into each youtube it's so funny when we were talking like you either know youtube you either like know like title thumbnail and what goes on and outliers or you don't and same as me i geek out about it i love this shit and you love it too so tell me more about the team i feel like you're probably too involved on that team.

1:33:22As am I. I'm deep in the weeds on that shit, bro. I'm deep. We were doing title and thumbnail. I was getting a haircut last night, baby. I love that. That's awesome. Tell me about the YouTube team. I love YouTube. I wish it was more profitable because then I could justify spending more time on it. We're just getting a little baby. The AdSense check, it's like Monopoly money. I just like that. That's just like little stuff that comes in. Dude, good video content is not cheap. I mean, you know this. It's not cheap and it's not easy. and especially if you're doing like IRL stuff, like vlogging and travel shoots and documentary type stuff, it's a lot of fucking work and you need a bunch of people to do it.

1:34:02But the YouTube algorithm, in my opinion, the YouTube algorithm is the single best discovery algorithm on the internet. Like if you want to be discovered and build an audience, YouTube is the best place to put content. and the audience there is also the highest quality, in my opinion, out of all the social platforms. What about the team? Who's the team that drives that YouTube? Is there a strategist? Is there a graphic designer? Is there a researcher? What does that look like? Yeah, so we've got strategist, thumbnail designer, producer, and then we have a number of video editors. But the video editors work on...

1:34:38Across everything? Multiple things. I think we have one dedicated YouTube editor and then a couple editors that like flex in and out depending on what we need. So it's a team of like four or five people. I basically, my goal with YouTube is to like run it at cost because of that discovery mechanism. So it's like, I don't mind, as long as I'm not losing my shirt on it, I don't mind not making a ton of money on it because it does, we just see the most growth there. That's your book. That's your new age book. It's the top of the funnel for you. Break even there, it brings everything in elsewhere.

1:35:09Exactly, exactly. Exactly. From there is podcast. So podcasting for the space that I'm in, you know, education, personal growth, podcasts are everything. It's like the primary form of media that is driving the industry at the moment. And that's the Solved podcast, the newer one. Yep. Yep. So we do, yeah, we do a deep dive podcast called Solved on a single topic. we will go four or five hours on like procrastination and it is all of the science all of the history psychology of procrastination all of the different techniques tactics advice that's out there what works what doesn't why it works how it works and then finally like how to implement all this stuff into your life so it's every month each episode is almost like a it's almost like a mini course that we just put in the world for free, that drives most of our monetization and backend monetization.

1:36:09Podcasts are the best business model in the creator space. Tell me more about that. It's just the monetization. So YouTube costs a lot, takes a long time. Monetization is not great. Podcasts, production is relatively low lift, right? I mean, you book - It's the same setup we've been doing. You booked this space, you got the same equipment, the same cameras, you got the same guys setting up the cameras. 36 minutes today? 36? 36 minutes today. There you go. That's nice. Right? So this whole thing, I imagine, probably ran you a grand, two grand most. Yeah. Right? And you get a massive episode that people tune in, they stay listening to it.

1:36:52So the ad revenue is better, the conversion rates are better, people are more engaged, they become better fans, they come back more often. And so it's just like, it is podcasts in my opinion are like the king of monetization in the creator space at the moment. It's why everybody is starting a podcast because it just monetizes so much better and easier than other formats and mediums. So yeah, Solved is kind of like the flagship content of the brand at the moment. The thing what's good too about the podcast here, just to interrupt you, is that video podcast lives on audio and video. Your quote unquote YouTube strategy is, I call it talking head content.

1:37:31Yeah. Like that only lives there and then obviously short form, but you don't get that audio either. So you get that extra rip when you do a podcast. That's what I like about it. Yeah, it's great. So podcast team is, I think five people, six people. So we have my co-host and producer, Drew, who's kind of like creative director. We have a growth strategist. And then our research team is three people full-time. We do a lot of research. So we have four. Drew also jumps in on a lot of the research as well. So we have four people researching for the episodes because there's just like so much fucking content.

1:38:07But what's really nice is that once we do the research for that episode, we have that research forever for any other content we ever want to do, right? So if we want to go create 20 Instagram reels on procrastination, we've got a 100-page document with like everything that we could potentially talk about for procrastination. So it's like, it just becomes a resource for every part of the business. You talk about that waterfall between the YouTube, the podcast, the newsletter, the shorts, like you do that deep research into procrastination. It starts with, you know, let's just call it your outline.

1:38:43It's printed out and then becomes video. And then what? You're just disseminating it on shorts and maybe using those ideas for other podcasts on YouTube. Yeah, you can cross pollinate in a bunch of different directions. So like we did a podcast episode on resilience back in September. and it was cool. I got really excited about a lot of the research that we were doing. I got really excited about it. And I was like, you know what would be fun is like signing up for an endurance race without training and then like testing this stuff and then filming it. And so that's what we did. We like, we did a YouTube video.

1:39:15I did a Tough Mudder endurance race. I talked through like what I was doing, how I was handling it. You know, we kind of went through, like there were five principles or mindsets that help you become more resilient. And as I was going through it, I was like, okay, like I'm going to try to like practice this mindset. And we like showed me doing it in the middle of the shit. It was awesome. It was a ton of fun. And that video did super well. It was like one of our top performing videos this year. So yeah, you get this awesome cross-pollination. And that was a video from the podcast that you then brought onto a YouTube video, isolated.

1:39:50Yeah, we took the podcast research and then used that to create the YouTube video. And then we pulled a couple shorts from that video as well. From someone that's gone from, let's just call it a one-man team to 20 plus, what has been that hire that's given you that asymmetrical fucking benefit where it's been like, oh my God, this is the best hire ever. Everything is easier, way more impact. Yeah. What's been the biggest change for you? Like for this industry, there's like two types of people that I think are more important than anybody else. The first one is just somebody with a lot of creative talent.

1:40:22That could be an editor, it could be a writer, It could be a producer, but it's just like somebody who has a really good creative taste, has a knack for something, can really like great work ethic, like will take feedback well and really improve and keep going and try again and try again. So it's really important to find those people. And I guess that's kind of obvious. But the second one and the more key one as you scale up is really just finding good leadership. And I think that's more personality based. Like you have to find somebody who can see the big picture, kind of understands how all the parts work together, how both the numbers of the company work, but also like the soft side of the company, the culture, the relationships within the company, and can think strategically about it.

1:41:11So I would just say like great leadership skills. Like a media business, a creator business, a media business, like it's not fucking rocket science. Like we're not, we're not curing cancer here. Like we're shooting YouTube videos. It's not that hard, but it's a lot of creative people, which as you know, creative people like tend to be a little loosey goosey sometimes. It's kind of like herding cats. You said it. And, and, and it's a creative industry. So things change quick. There are new trends. There's like algorithm changes. There's all sorts of different things happening all the time. So you just need people who are like, can think on their feet extremely well, synthesize a lot of information and then really like confidently lead people, take ownership of strategic direction, creative direction, and understand like why things are done the way they're done.

1:42:01Generally speaking, like the people that I tend to have trouble with in the business, they see like one sliver of the pie and they can't, it's like very hard to get them to see outside of that sliver of the pie. It's like, okay, yes, that is true on Instagram, 80 % of the time. But it doesn't make sense for us because we have this YouTube strategy and we're running this newsletter promotion and we're monetizing in this way. So no, we actually never want to do that on Instagram. And if like the person can't understand that, then it's, they've probably got a pretty low ceiling in this business. Who is that person for you?

1:42:37Is it like an acting CEO? Is it a project manager? Is it you? Who is that person that's making sure the vision is set and everything's kind of arriving on time? for me it's definitely like i need to set the vision especially because it is a personal brand and it's my face on everything so like i have to set the vision and i have to set expectations and then it's it from there it is really trying to clearly define you know what is our content strategy what's the brand strategy what's the monetization strategy and like communicate those things as clearly as possible like give the leadership on the team the blueprints for those things so that they can go implement them and act on them.

1:43:18I generally find like when things break down, it's usually because I'm not giving enough clarity on those things. Like this is why this content should be this way, or this is why we're branding this way and not that way. What about, um, you've changed from basically a writer to a business operator. There's a lot of creatives out there that are listening that want to get more into the business realm. What has been like the biggest hurdles and changes in your life and your identity? It's a good question. I think for me, the biggest thing was, I guess, learning how to manage. It's something I'm still learning.

1:43:54Just kind of like a lot of the blocking and tackling of just being a good boss and being a good manager. I think I'm good at the soft side of it. like I get along with everybody I have like a good relationship with everybody I think I need to be better about like thinking through repercussions of certain actions or certain directives having more clarity being more specific about expectations it's that's been the biggest challenge for me it's just like it's actually the nuts and bolts type stuff I feel like the hard complicated stuff brand strategy, marketing, hiring. Like, I feel like I'm pretty good at that.

1:44:36A lot of that is, a lot of that actually, my background in psychology, I think just feeds into that very naturally. So like, I didn't find much of a learning curve there. It's more the day-to-day, oh shit, I didn't update my notion board or oh shit, I didn't check these messages. Oh, I should have told this team this, I forgot. You know, that's the, when I screw up, it's usually stuff like that. A thousand plus nonfiction books, I'm sure that you're learning. a shit ton from those books too. Yeah. Just putting those into action. A couple more questions then I want to get into your startup. You have a paid subscription community.

1:45:10Very, very curious about that. Most of those fail. Why has it worked for you? I think it works for me because I think I've maintained a very good relationship with my fans, my audience over a long period of time. Like they trust me. It's crazy. A lot of people in that community, like they've been following me for 10 plus years, 12 plus years. It's great to like have a way to like reward those people with like a higher touch experience, be more interactive with them, spend more time with them. It is a hard business model. Like I don't think it's, I think 10 years ago, it was easier to make a good amount of money off of it.

1:45:44I think now it's people have higher expectations for what you're going to give them. So it does take a little bit more work and a little bit more of a team. Like we have a team of three people who run our community and it's, yeah, it's a lot. It's like people expect a lot. and so we have to deliver a lot. But it's great because it's just this, it's like this core group of people. It's steady revenue. They're really happy to be in it. We're happy to have them there. You can show them like content early, test ideas with them, have fun little meetups or seminars, webinars or whatnot with them. Like any kind of crazy idea that we have in the business, it's a resource for us because we're like, okay, let's try that.

1:46:25Let's try that with the community because if they don't love it, then like nobody else is going to love it. But if they really love it, then that's like a green flag to maybe roll it out to the wider audience. The true fans, thousand true fans, it's the ICP. Yeah. How long, you know, Jab Jab Left Hooked, Gary Vee, how long do you think you need to be building or how big do you think your audience needs to be before you go into that paid community? I think it's probably less size and it's more depth of connection, depth of relationship. It's probably more of a time thing. I think it works for, like I said, I think it works for us because these people have been following me for over a decade.

1:47:02It's rare that we get somebody who shows up in the community who just found out about me. It's probably a small minority of people. I think what people really want with community is to feel like they're being treated specially. That they're getting access to something nobody else is getting access to, or they're getting your attention in a way that you're not giving anywhere else. Yeah, I like the idea of early previews, use cases, and kind of feedback loop. Once you get into a lot of interaction with you personally, that becomes, it takes over your whole entire life. I've seen it take over people's lives in a bad way.

1:47:37Yeah. You've been doing this for over a decade. How have you not burned out as a creator? I have a couple times. One of the things I learned years ago is that it's very important to treat my own emotional system as another system of the business. there are certain opportunities that come up in the business to do things that I know are going to be extremely draining for me and that I'm not going to like doing and even if they might be extremely profitable I should probably turn them down because they're going to make me hate my work after six months and therefore it's not sustainable therefore it's actually not profitable because after making a profit for six months I'm just going to want to put my head in an oven and that's not good for anybody so I treat my own kind of emotional stability, my own excitement and passion for what we're doing as one of the top priorities to optimize for within the business.

1:48:30That is probably one of the most underrated pieces of advice you've given all day. I think especially, I mean, I'm in the same spot as you. Yeah. Is I'm driving the business and I'm also the quote unquote talent on camera. Like if my head is not in a good spot, I'm fucked here. Yes. The product will suffer. And if you're fucked, the team's fucked too. Everything is fucked. Everything's fucked. Everything is fucked if this sucks. If this conversation sucks, then I am fucked. Literally. Wow. All right. Might blackmail you here. Last question on the team side. What's the biggest kind of piece of advice you'd give for a creator that's building out a media team?

1:49:06I would really only hire people to do stuff that you either hate or you're not good at.

1:49:15It's what I see happen a lot, and I've made this mistake a couple times myself, is you feel like you're like, wow, I'm spending a lot of time doing this. Maybe I should hire somebody to do it. When it's actually the thing that you love most about the business, and it's actually your competitive advantage in the business. I've seen creators unintentionally hire themselves out of their own business. Like hire away the things that actually, that's the special thing that only they can do. So I would just be very careful of who you hire for and for what. Be very conscious of what makes your content special and unique and what is your specific talent or X factor that can't really be replicated and then protect that, build everything else around that.

1:49:59So in my case, it is writing. It's the thing I do better than anything else and the thing I do better than most people on the planet is write. We do have writers on the team. We have a lot of writers on the team. But ultimately, almost nothing goes out without me at least revising my voice onto it and clearing, making sure the outline is set, the ideas are set, that it is, these are like Mark Manson ideas and presented in a Mark Manson way. Putting that comedic filter over it to make sure it sounds like you. Yeah. And just the, it's really a tone and stylistic thing. and it's funny too because there are a couple people on the team especially people who've been with me for a long time that like they they can kind of mimic it like Drew for instance Drew's been with me for 12 years you know gun to my head if somebody had to write an article or a social media post that tricked everybody into thinking it was me I would pick Drew like he could probably swing it but it's hard it's hard for him like it's probably not natural for him but you can't count on that like at the end of the day that's like the secret sauce, you know?

1:51:09What's uniquely you? It's like Naval talks about it all the time is authenticity is undefeated. Yeah, double down on that. That is a great transition. You've spent, I don't know, 10, 15, 20 years writing and kind of crafting this language. Yeah. You have an AI startup. Yeah. Tell us about it. We've gotten here. After two hours, we've gotten here. That's quite a segue, but it's actually, it's a logical segue. Yes. because, so there were two things I realized about a year ago. First one was, I remember seeing an article that said that over 100 million people were using ChatGPT as a therapist. And I was like, whoa, okay, that's a massive, that's a lot.

1:51:49And so I went to ChatGPT and I started playing around with it and testing out different questions and asking for advice on things. And it was okay. It wasn't horrible, but it also wasn't great. ChatGPT, it tends to over-validate you. It tells you what you want to hear. It doesn't really challenge your assumptions or some of your beliefs, which honestly, anybody who's trying to grow and improve, you need to be challenged. You need to have your assumptions questioned. You need to have your beliefs holes poked in them. And ChatGPT clearly was not going to do that. So I became extremely interested in the potential for AI in the personal growth space.

1:52:26Because if you actually look at what therapy is or what healing is, remember earlier when I was talking about pain and suffering and how like the difference is that suffering is that narrative written around the pain and it's the second arrow and what's interesting is that the pain from the first arrow will go away naturally but that second arrow once you've written that narrative it stays with you forever and so what healing really is is just undoing those narratives undoing the story or rewriting the story in a way that doesn't cause you to suffer unnecessarily anymore. Well, all that shit is just language.

1:53:02Like there's a reason that therapy is talking because there's language is like the programming language of our mind. And if you want to heal your mind, you have to find the right combination of language to access whatever pain or trauma you're trying to deal with, set the belief straight, reframe things in a way that's much more healthy. That's essentially what I've been doing my entire career. It's just finding ways to leverage language, package, wording, different ideas and concepts in ways that people are going to receive them in a way that becomes healing in their minds. And so I looked at the potential of AI and my background with language in this space, and I realized that there was just a massive opportunity here.

1:53:42Because the other issue with personal growth is that what works doesn't really scale and what scales doesn't really work. So what I mean by that is that if you look at all of the mental health interventions that a person could have, could be for depression, anxiety, OCD, whatever, all of the stuff with the highest hit rate, like the single thing with the highest hit rate is therapy for a long period of time with an excellent therapist. And even that, you're probably batting like 50 % success rate. If you look at like something that I do, which is write books or social media posts or like a self-help seminar or whatever, because it is specifically written to reach millions of people, you have to kind of water it down.

1:54:29You have to depersonalize it. You have to make it broad and abstract. And so it loses a lot of its effect. The reason therapy with a good therapist is so powerful is because that therapist has time to get to know you, to understand you, to see all the narratives that you've written and helpfully suggest other narratives that you could put in their place. The continuity. Yeah. but you can't scale that, right? There's just like, there's a worldwide lack of therapists right now. Like I think it's for every person who is in therapy, there's 40 people who want access to therapy and don't have it. So there's this massive disparity between supply and demand.

1:55:03So I was looking at this, I was looking at AI, I was like, I think there's a huge solution here. So I went, I found a co-founder, he's been building AI products for over 10 years. He's had successful exits. We went, we found an amazing AI engineering team and basically we founded a startup together. And I was in charge of product, training the LLM, like helping it understand like what questions it should be asking, helping it challenge people. And then him and the engineering team went out and built it. And so we've been working on this for the past year. It's been a fuck ton of work. A lot of work, but it's coming out December.

1:55:44It's available to everybody. It's called Purpose. It's free to try. and I'm super excited about it. And the input is the decades of work that you have. That's like the core input. So it understands your language and kind of how to answer questions. Yes. Yeah, it's everything that I understand about psychology, but it's funny, it's like, it's definitely my expertise in terms of like how to talk to people and how to question people, how to dig into problems. But it's really funny. So when we started working on the product, I had this idea, I started mapping out like, Like, okay, this is all the research that we need to train it on.

1:56:19And these are all the modalities that I wanted to think about. And then we started actually testing the LLMs. And it's like, it's all in there. Like, the AI is already, the entire field of psychology, it's already in the AIs. The problem is, is that they're not optimized to use it correctly. So then the problem just became, okay, now we just need to optimize it to use it correctly. And that's what we've tried to do. So it's your brand, your distribution, then optimized through your lens. Yeah. That's how you see it. Exactly. So if this helps people as effectively as your books, where are you going to be in five years with this?

1:56:51Well, this was one of my motivations, right? Because when I saw the potential for this, I realized, yeah, I'm probably going to be out of a job. I don't know if I'll actually be out of a job, but I do think that this will do the work of most therapy coaching, self-help books, seminars. A lot of it could be replaced by this. at some point. Maybe not today, but I do think if AI continues to improve the way it's improving, I think within five years, the majority of the personal growth market, self-help market, will be AI-driven. So I was like, well, if I'm going to get displaced by this thing eventually anyway, I might as well be part of that displacement and jump in early.

1:57:36that said i do think there will always be demand for like in-person face-to-face stuff i i think it's ultimately humans want human contact and there are a lot of personal issues that like demand human contact like you can't just solve it on your own intellectually so the way i see it is is the the direction of my business there's the ai business and then on my creator business the focus is going to become more on in-person events, live events, fan meetups, traveling like tours. It all feeds the flywheel. I think that the interesting analogy that you said there that makes the most amount of sense is the importance of continuity and success with people going and getting help.

1:58:21Because the reality is, I feel like someone goes to therapy once a week for an hour and if they can get 10, 20, 30, 50 hours behind them right away with what you're doing, it makes more sense. Well, and it's crazy too, because we started thinking about this really intensely. There's so much inefficiency that comes with therapy or counseling. First of all, the amount of time that you spend finding one is really intimidating. And then even once you've found one, you've got to get in the car, you've got to drive there, you've got to set an appointment, you've got to drive there, you've got to park, you've got to go in the waiting room, you get in.

1:58:53It takes 10 or 15 minutes to catch up. Maybe they forgot a couple things from your last session. Maybe that you need to go back and review like a story that you told them six months ago, it will take them, you know, five to 10 sessions to like really just even get an understanding of who you are and what you're going through. That right there is like two to three months of time. Whereas with AI and a properly designed app and like a really good onboarding system, you can get to that same place within 15, 20 minutes. Dude, it's so funny you say this because on the former, the beginning of what you said there, I can't even front.

1:59:31My assistant, I heard that like therapy is like good for anybody, whether you like quote unquote need it or not. She, you know, found me a bunch of different people. I looked, I spent time. I was like, oh, I like this, this and this. I had, you know, initial calls with a bunch and I went with one. Then I just was like, I didn't like the guy. I was like, fuck this guy. Yeah. And I've just never done it since. So I just wasted so much time like looking through and I'm like, yo, this is so much work right now. Yeah. It is absolutely incredible. And I, yeah, I do feel like if they're just running through sessions, it's going to take so long for them to understand and get me.

2:00:01To tie a bow on that though, what about like, you know, any type of accountability? How are they going to get to know you better? Any other features that you want to share with that people should know about? So the biggest thing about purpose is like, it's, it really, it is about this question of values, right? So it's the goal is to help people understand what matters to them and then live in alignment with what matters to them. So it's different. It's not really therapy in that respect. Like therapy is generally like you have some sort of emotional issue that you're trying to resolve or you're upset or anxious or depressed about something.

2:00:30we're more focused on people who feel out of alignment or just feel lost. They're like, I don't know what I'm doing. Nothing seems to matter. I'd like to care about, you know, I don't know what I should be caring about. The old, what do I give a fuck about thing? So the AI is very much optimized to glean your values and your personality within the first 15 minutes. Get a deep understanding of like what seems to matter to you and then ask you challenging questions about your own behavior and your own lifestyle. of like, okay, well, if that's true, like why are you spending so much time doing this when you say you care about that?

2:01:06What is motivating that? Have you ever considered that that might relate to this other thing that we talked about two weeks ago where you were out of alignment with your professional career? Oh, that's interesting. You'd seem to have that problem with multiple people in your life. Let's talk about that. It's the level of knowledge and recall that the AI has is like nearly flawless. And I just think it's so much more effective. And then yes, once you do find those things that you care about, like let's say you realize like, oh, I want to be way more intentional with my time at work, or I want to stop drinking for the next few months, or I want to spend more time with my kids, then the app will lay out like an accountability plan.

2:01:47Like, okay, here's an action plan. And then it'll ask you, would you like me to keep you accountable through like notifications, email check-ins, whatnot. So ultimately, this is just getting clarity and who you want to be, what you want to be, and then it's a guide to help you get there. I love that. So a back and forth plus the accountability. Love that. Guys, I'm going to put a link down below for this. Give it a try. Let's get into the last section. Quick strike. I'm going to fire off tons and tons of questions for you. I guess let's start with, you've traveled to over 50 countries worldwide.

2:02:19I want a detailed scouting report for all these different humans. Let's start with, for a single man, where does he go? Ooh. No one's getting in trouble here either. Don't worry about it, bro. It depends on so many things. Okay, so then give a couple. Depends what you're looking for. He's a single man, so I think we can insinuate what you want to insinuate there. And for this specific one, we don't need a, we don't need to follow up. Just tell me the places. Okay. And that's it. And I'm not chiming in. The best, okay, the best arbitrage opportunities for dating markets, in some order, it depends on your preference, but South America, Eastern Europe, and East Asia in some order.

2:02:58It depends on your… Dial in a country, bro. It depends on your preferences, dude. Dial in a country or a city in each. Okay. Well, I'm biased, but for Brazil, I'm going to say Sao Paulo. Just because amazing, the best nightlife and the women there tend to be like really smart, educated, doing cool things. They're also gorgeous. A lot of them are like well-traveled and stuff. So big fan of Sao Paulo. I think it's underrated. Most people go to Rio. Colombia is underrated for women. In Eastern Europe, like, honestly, you can't really go there anymore, but Russia was sick. Never gotten there. Oh, my God, dude.

2:03:33It's crazy. It's just, like, fashion models, like, falling on you everywhere you go. My girl's Polish and Ecuadorian. We're going to go to Poland. Ooh, nice. Yeah. Eastern Europe's great. And then Asia, obviously, you know, some guys are really into the Asian women, so. I think, I mean, pretty much anywhere. Yeah, I love Tokyo. It was great. What about for a trip with a significant other? That's a good one. It depends how adventurous or like chill you want to be. I mean, if you want like kind of like old school romance, I would say, you know, Paris and Rome are kind of the obvious ones. Like Spain is maybe under the radar a little bit.

2:04:13Portugal is definitely under the radar in terms of like beautiful old European romantic, like beautiful scenery, castles, all that sort of stuff. In terms of nature, the two best I've ever seen, New Zealand and Iceland. Both of those are just like, it's like a fucking postcard everywhere you look. If you're really into adventure, then I would say like African safari. Damn. What about for someone looking to learn more about themselves? Peace, quiet, a big turnaround place. Like for me, I went to Bali for a month, learned a lot about myself there. any places you would recommend? I would recommend India, but not for the reason most people suspect, not for the, uh, the, the Karmakola as, as they often call it over there.

2:04:56Sure. You can go do a meditation retreat or find a guru or an ashram or something. And that's, it's a cool experience, but India itself is so hectic, chaotic, beautiful, disgusting, incredible, horrifying. like it's just all of the human experiences and emotions condensed into a very intense two-week period, three-week period. And it really challenges you. It really, for me, India really forced me to challenge a lot of my preconceived notions of like what humanity was, what the world was. It's a pretty powerful place. You got everything. You've read over a thousand nonfiction books for people looking to improve themselves.

2:05:40Why don't you give us three, four, five books and why? like bangers, like ones they need to read. The best book on happiness is, in my opinion, is called Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. He's a professor at Harvard, brilliant guy. The book is very relatable and funny, but it's also, like most of the research on happiness is very counterintuitive and unexpected. And I think he does the best job of kind of playing with that and relishing in it. Like most happiness books, they try to give you the tips. where like Professor Gilbert is kind of like honest of like, look, if you're looking for tips, you're probably just going to make yourself less happy.

2:06:20So let's talk about what's actually going on. I'm a huge fan. One of the most impactful books for me personally was a book by Ernest Becker called Denial of Death. Ernest Becker was an anthropology professor, but who was also very into Zen Buddhism. He was diagnosed with terminal cancer when he was, I think, in his early 30s. And on his deathbed, He was a bit of a zany academic, but then on his deathbed, he got like an intense clarity of focus. And he wrote this incredible book about how ultimately all of us are terrified of death. And so everything that we find meaningful, the reason it seems meaningful is because in some shape or form, we believe that it's going to live on in some way after we die.

2:07:02So whether it's our children or our life's work or some sort of activism or cause that we give ourselves to, the reason it infuses our life with a sense of purpose is because we are literally giving our time over to something that will outlast us. And it's both the most important thing that we can do, but it's also the root cause of wars and strife. He called them immortality projects, and he said that when two people's immortality projects contradict each other, they're willing to die for them. They're willing to kill each other for them. So it's a mind-blowing explanation of human psychology, human history.

2:07:40I'll throw another book in there. Steven Pinker wrote a book called The Blank Slate. There is a persistent, multiple-century-long bias towards the belief that people are born pure and innocent and they only get corrupted by society and external forces. Pinker, not only, it's like a 700-page book. but he goes through the exhaustive evidence showing that not only is this not true, that actually, ethically speaking, toddlers are fucking evil tyrants and that it's actually empathy has to be learned. It's the other way around, essentially, that humans are born intensely selfish and unempathetic, and that empathy and morality needs to be learned, not the other way around.

2:08:27And it's very mind-opening. It's crazy how much discourse still goes on in the world based on these assumptions that like, oh, you know, everything was great until I was corrupted as a child. And it's like, well, no, actually, you probably just didn't learn the things you needed to learn. So that's a great, that's a great book. Never heard of any of these books, so I love this. Oh, awesome. Yeah. Give us one you co-signed that's like very well known, besides yours. My opinion, the best self-help book ever written is called The Road Less Traveled. It was written by a pastor, actually, by the name of Scott Peck.

2:09:03You could kind of summarize the book with the quote, hard decisions, easy life, easy decisions, hard life. Or there's another saying which says that the road to heaven looks like hell and the road to hell looks like heaven. Basically, the whole book is just like life is full of very difficult decisions. And ultimately, like the quality of your life is dictated by how well you're able to approach and handle those decisions. Love that. What's Will Smith's superpower? Will Smith's superpower is, he is by far the most charismatic, emotionally attuned person I think I've ever met. He is the type of person who can walk into a room and intuitively feel exactly what needs to be said or heard to put everybody at ease around him.

2:09:59From what I've heard, it's similar to a skill of excellent politicians. You hear these stories about Bill Clinton or George W. Bush that they would walk into a room and they would just kind of work the room, so to speak. They're just this incredible charisma that they could meet any person and within seconds make that person feel like they're the only person in the world and that they've known them forever. Will has that. Whatever that is, Will has it. I think it's also why he's such a good actor or why he's been so successful at acting is that he has that ability to tune into his emotions in a way that most people don't.

2:10:36I think he's also a genius performer. And as I talk about, as we talk about in his book, that, that prodigious ability to perform was a survival mechanism from his childhood. Love that. You had a movie made about your book. What's the biggest thing that you learned in Hollywood? Don't work in Hollywood. I'm going to keep that one short and simple here, guys. Create your own media company. Control the distribution. Yeah. Fuck them. Let's just put it that way. External goals versus internal goals. Which one do most people get wrong and why? I think most people over-index on the external goals. They pay too much attention to the external metrics.

2:11:17I think it's useful to pay attention to the external metrics, but if you don't have a clear internal compass of why you're doing the thing you're doing or why you want to get better at the thing you're trying to get better at, then the external metrics will just lead you down the wrong path. Chasing external metrics without any strong internal purpose or reason is just, it's kind of like masturbation. Like you're just, you're racking up a high score for the sake of racking up a high score. It doesn't necessarily mean anything. So figure out what you want, who's the person you want to be, set a goal for yourself of, I want to be this type of person, I want to have this type of life.

2:11:50For these reasons, there are things that only you can, there are internal metrics that only you can judge and decide and then go find the external metrics that will like help you move towards that new identity. Love that. What's the most surprising thing you've learned about friendship that nobody talks about? The most surprising thing about friendship I've learned that I don't think anybody talks about is how much of it is just proximity. It's really funny. So we did a massive solved episode on friendship a few months ago. and I was really excited to do it, to dig into the research because like friendship, it's something I've been struggling with in middle age a little bit.

2:12:32I think a lot of people do and when you get into the research, it's actually painfully simple and I think people make it extremely complicated. People assume that their friends have to have all the same interests as them and want to do the same things as them and need to like travel with them and be excited about the same stuff that they're excited about and it turns out like almost none of that's true. most of friendship just boils down to the frequency of exposure and the proximity, the physical, like actual physical proximity you have to that person, right? So it's like, if we live a couple blocks away, we are far more likely to be friends, even if we have nothing in common than if you live in another city.

2:13:13And I just think we get that wrong. Like we don't think about our community spaces. We don't think about our neighbors. We don't think about finding something in common with the guy down the street. I think we've raised our bars so much for the people that we want to have relationships with that we've just kind of made it impossible to be satisfied with connecting with most people. I agree with you there. Last question before the final three is, what's the hardest part about podcasting that nobody talks about? The motorcycles, the helicopters, and the trains. Guys, we've done this whole entire thing with every single type of noise you can ever imagine.

2:13:51It's actually crazy. An amazing performance though. Anyone that did not have the experience that you had would have literally been shook. Well, honestly, I feel like, okay, so I feel like the universe prepared me for this moment because our studio, like I told you this before, like our studio, we have a fire station right next to us. We have a stoplight right in front of us. We get trucks and sirens going all day. So like when we shoot our podcast, we have to break for sound probably a couple times an hour. As he's massaging me right now, making me feel less bad. No, man. And I, dude, I like that.

2:14:20I was born for this. No, but really though, last question though, what is actually the hardest part about podcasting? I want to know personally, just I want to know what your thoughts are. Honestly, the hardest part about podcasting, I feel like it's just getting the word out about podcasts, your podcasts. Like there's no easy way to, you know, every other type of content on the internet, there's some sort of referral method. There's some sort of discovery algorithm. There's some sort of like systematized way to like grow the audience. podcast, it's kind of, you have to hope people stumble onto it or that people talk to each other about it.

2:14:54And I find that really difficult. If the question is like, what's the hardest part about like sitting, sitting in a chair you're sitting in? I found prepping for guests to be much more difficult than I expected. I agree with you. Yeah. I, I do research too much. Do you research too little? Do you like leave some questions unanswered? I never totally figured it out and I took the easy way out which is I made my producer be my co-host so that we can control everything we say and I don't have to rely on some dude flying into LA two hours before coming on a pot on my show and and saying a bunch of stuff that I didn't expect them to say that's the benefit that you get is everybody does tap out because they see that it's tough to not tap out I tapped out once this time I'm being way more intentional yeah on the burnout and for people out there that are doing a podcast too.

2:15:42Yeah, there's a balance of over preparation, a gazillion hours and 10 pages versus under preparation. Got to find that happy medium. It's tough. Favorite podcast and why? I'll probably say, I'll probably say acquired. Actually acquired was a huge inspiration for solved. Bro, I was going to say that before earlier. That's kind of what you're doing. Yeah. But you're going by topic as opposed to by company. Yep. That was, it was, it was the inspiration for our combination of acquired and Huberman were like the kind of the two inspirations because I looked at the personal growth market and I'm like, everybody's doing the exact same thing.

2:16:15Everybody's bringing on the same guests. They all say the same shit. They've got the same titles and thumbnails. I really asked myself, what can we do that's really different and differentiated and really needs to be in this space? And one of the problems I saw is that you'll listen to one of the big personal growth podcasts and they'll bring on three guests and all three of the guests will say three complete give completely different advice for the same issue and as a listener you're just like what the hell who am i supposed to listen to and of course the host doesn't contradict any of them or challenge any of them he just sits there and nods and agrees and i just think as a listener in this space it's like it's very frustrating like you don't know how seriously to take each each piece of advice so the goal was solved was like okay, let's do what the acquired does.

2:17:04Spend weeks and weeks and weeks researching a single topic. Try to make the definitive statement. And also like take all the contradictions that show up in the advice around each topic and try to make sense out of them. Try to explain like, okay, this is why some people tell you that you shouldn't try. And this is why other people tell you that you should try as hard as you can. And this is why both of those things make sense depending on the context. For people out there listening, acquired will go after big companies and they'll spend a month researching and do like five, six hour episodes on companies and businesses.

2:17:37NFL episode is a good episode as well. Entrepreneur or brand that you want to give flowers to and why? I'll give flowers to Tim Ferriss. It's funny. I feel like it's been interesting to be in this space long enough to see multiple generations of creators come through at this point. And it's been interesting to see like what what gets kind of adapted and stolen and also like what gets reinvented or changed completely. But I feel like a lot of what modern creators do, especially on the podcast side, like he really pioneered and created. I know even on the blogging side, he pioneered a lot of stuff.

2:18:17Oh yeah. And I guess I don't think, I don't think the younger generations, like these days, there's so many podcasts that are bigger than his. Like he, he, he had one of the biggest podcasts probably like 10 years ago at this point. But, you know, these days he's more of like a mid-sized podcast. But I think young creators don't realize like how much everything that they watch and listen to or read is like downstream of it has some of his DNA in it in some shape or form. I completely agree. I feel like four hour work week is like Bible for anybody that's like 33 to 50 that started a business. It was like the first one.

2:18:50Tools of Titans 2, that exact framework for that book has been repackaged a zillion different ways. Yeah. Amazing, man. I had an amazing time. Why don't you tell everybody where they can find you, where they can find Purpose? I'm going to put links below, but tell them verbally. Cool. So, Solve Podcast, it's on every platform that you listen to podcasts, including YouTube, Purpose. Go to Purpose.app, free seven-day trial. Check it out. The AI will blow your mind. And then I have a newsletter twice a week. You can go to markmanson.net slash newsletter and sign up there for free. That's where you can find out about all the cool stuff I do, all the offers, all the new stuff coming out.

2:19:22So, check it out. I want to give a special thanks to Lighthouse Campus. I'm a part of them. That's where I work out of often. I randomly ran into Mark. That's how we know each other. Thank you, Lighthouse. What's up, guys? If you guys got this far in the episode, I would assume that you enjoyed it. If you got any value, it would mean the world if you hit the subscribe button, give it a like, post a comment, tell a friend. We could keep going bigger, bigger guests, bigger locations, more value. See you in the next episode.