Solved, Answers: Finding Purpose, Failing Better, and the AI Future

This one’s different. In this special year-end episode, I answer your questions—from the deep stuff about purpose and motivation, to the uncomfortable realities of change, burnout, failure, and dealing with unsupportive family. I also share the behind-the-scenes chaos of building SOLVED this year, what I learned about making massive, meaningful content, and what’s coming in 2026 (spoiler: boundaries, ego, and maybe some live shows). This is part personal, part philosophical, and part therapy session disguised as a podcast. If you’ve been wondering what’s next—or why you feel stuck—this one’s for you. See you in 2026. CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:13 Recap of 2025 00:03:42 What if I don't have a single purpose? 00:06:07 Why don't I feel a strong need for purpose? 00:08:32 How do I find purpose when doing things I don't find important? 00:12:34 I'm having issues on getting motivated on one thing 00:19:35 What if my family doesn't support my purpose? 00:23:15 I'm struggling with the idea that purpose must be bigger than yourself 00:26:04 How Mark got Purpose AI to work 00:32:55 Questions from YouTube 00:33:13 How do you change yourself? 00:36:43 Finding meaning after AI takeover 00:44:01 What would a Models rewrite look like today? 00:48:19 Mark's first heartbreak 00:54:31 What would Mark put on Voyager 1? 00:57:35 Self-doubt on something you make 01:02:12 Mark's next book? 01:03:38 Tours around the world 01:05:55 Goals for 2026 01:08:14 Podcast changes for 2026 ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: https://go.markmanson.net/cdi1xzha ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at https://go.markmanson.net/217i5ys5 FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/markmanson⁠ Solved IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/markmanson⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mark Manson?

  What's up everybody, Mark Manson here for a very, very special end of year episode of Solved, the most thorough and over-researched podcast on the planet. Now, this is the last episode of Solved this year. It's a very special episode. It's gonna get a little bit personal. We're gonna go deeper on some common topics that have been coming up quite a bit, and I'm gonna share a lot of the future plans for the podcast coming up in 2026. But I do wanna put it on your radar that the next Solved episode is going to come out on January 1st. So it's gonna be new year, new you, new Solved episode. Definitely don't wanna miss that, so be sure to check that out. But for this episode, I wanna do something a little bit different than what we usually do.

• 0:43Mark Manson?

  As most of you know, Solved episodes, we dive super-deep, we get way into the weeds, we over-research everything, and then we end up delivering a like four-to-five-hour mega-episode on a single topic. Today, I would like to A, go a little bit more bite-sized, and then B, jump around a little bit more, just to kinda cover everything that's happened in this past year, also connect a little bit more one-on-one with you guys, and then also just keep you updated on what's going on. So, very quickly, a 2025 recap. This podcast is only seven months old, which is kinda crazy to think about. We had over 13 million downloads across platforms, which is insane. Not bad for a podcast with only eight episodes.

• 1:28Mark Manson?

  We peaked at number eight in the world in September with our Shame episode, and we have charted in 13 different countries worldwide. We were also the most listened-to show for 136,000 people on Spotify, which is just absolutely mind-boggling. So, first of all, a huge thank you to all of you who tune in, all of you who stick around, all of you who listen to Drew and I ramble on and on about obscure 13th-century philosophers and the pros and cons of behavioral empirical research in the 1950s. Who would've thought that many of you actually give a shit? So, thank you. Now, for this episode, I sourced- A bunch of questions from you guys from the audience.

• 2:13Mark Manson?

  And we're going to take this in two parts. So the first part of the episode. I sourced questions specifically about purpose. From our most recent mega episode, we on December 1st, we released an episode that was almost five hours long about life purpose. How to find your purpose, what that, what the hell that even means. And as people have been working through all that content, obviously, we hear from a lot of you. We hear a lot of follow up questions. A lot of people have personal situations that they're confused about. So I'm going to go through a bunch of those. These were sourced from community members. So thank you to all the community members who submitted a question. And then in the back half of the episode, I'm just going to get into some more general questions about the show.

• 2:56Mark Manson?

  About me, my career, the things I have planned in 2026. And these were sourced from the YouTube audience. And then finally, at the end of this episode. I'll spend probably five or 10 minutes just walking you through what we have coming up next year. We have a lot of big plans. We have a lot of new stuff coming down the pike. And I couldn't be more excited about it. So I think 2025 was an incredible year, but honestly. We're just getting started. So. Pretty, pretty fucking exciting if you ask me. So with that, let's jump into the questions. So like I mentioned, this first batch of questions mostly revolves around things. Purpose, meaning, values, people who are struggling to just feel a greater sense of purpose in their day to day life.

• 3:41Mark Manson?

  So to kick us off, the first question comes from a person who says. I'm a person with many different interests and passions. How do I choose just one purpose? They say that they worked seven years in education or are very passionate about educational reform. They are a professional magician. That's pretty cool. They absolutely love dancing bachata. They love gaming. They speak four languages and they even created an app to help them practice their languages. They conclude by saying, "How do I know which is my real purpose?" This is perfect because this is one of the things that we address in the Purpose episode. There is not a single purpose for you out there. You can have many, many purposes. It's not like a spouse, you don't pick one and then just hope you stick with them for the rest of your life.

• 4:26Mark Manson?

  Your purpose, like many things, it evolves, it changes, and you can source it from many different places. I actually think it's more useful to think of purpose like a stock portfolio. You divide your interests across multiple stocks and periodically you need to do a little bit of rebalancing. You know, every couple of years you have to look at your portfolio and say, "Well, okay, maybe I'm going to sell this stock and go buy this stock over here." The same is true with purpose. Ideally, you are drawing inspiration and meaning from multiple places in your life. Periodically, one of those areas that you draw meaning from is going to fail you or be hindered in some way, and you're going to have to rebalance. You're going to have to kind of renegotiate where you spend your time and attention and react accordingly.

• 5:11Mark Manson?

  The stock analogy also works really well because, well, you can over-diversify, right? So if you spread your money out across hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of investments, you're going to get a lot of stability, but you're probably going to miss out on extra upside of any particular thing taking off. Whereas if you only invest yourself in a single thing, if you put all your money into a single stock, sure, you might buy the next Nvidia or whatever it is, but chances are you're making yourself very vulnerable to something happening in your life. So if you're getting all of your meaning and purpose from like just your career, well, suddenly AI comes and takes your job and you're completely fucked.

• 5:53Mark Manson?

  So I would say to this community member, it's actually great that you have five or six areas of your life that you're extremely passionate about and that you really enjoy and you find a sense of purpose. That's a good thing. There's no reason to change that. They're all your real purpose, in other words. Next question, "How is it that I don't feel the need to have a specific purpose? If I can look and find meaning and purpose in anything, then I feel connected to it." I like this question because it kind of raises the question of just... What is the validity of purpose as a concept in general? Right? Like ultimately, I think what people mean when they talk about purpose is that they

• 6:31Mark Manson?

  mean that there is some overarching mission or goal that is overriding all of their motivations. Like it is kind of like a defining principle behind the things that motivate them in life. But that framing or that conceptualization may not be useful for everybody. Like this is kind of the dirty secret about psychology is that you can't like open up a person's brain and find where the motivation is, or find where the purpose is, or even find where the happiness is. Like, these are very abstract concepts that we kind of made up and they're very arbitrary. But the reason that they stick is because that they're useful for a lot of people.

• 7:13Mark Manson?

  It's useful to sit and talk about what makes you happy versus what makes you unhappy. It's useful to talk about what your motivations are, what makes you feel more motivated in life. And so for a lot of people, it feels useful to talk about having a sense of purpose in their life. But that doesn't mean it's going to be useful for everybody and it doesn't mean that you necessarily feel like you have to go find a sense of purpose somewhere if you're perfectly happy and doing well without it. So that would be my first response. My second reaction to this question is that, and I think I said this on the on the purpose episode as well, really what a meaningful life is, is just a sense that you're using your time well.

• 7:54Mark Manson?

  And I think to help people use their time well, it's often worth thinking about what is your purpose, or what is the purpose of this stuff that you're spending your time on? But if you feel like you're using your time well without thinking about all that stuff, that's great. Don't think about all that stuff. I definitely think you're probably in the minority if you don't have to think about that stuff, but. If you don't, more power to you. Because ultimately, what matters is that your time feels meaningful to you. And if it feels meaningful to you, then it doesn't really matter what I say or what anybody else says. Keep doing you, brah. Next question. "We sometimes have seasons of life where we need to spend the majority

• 8:36Mark Manson?

  of our time on activities that feel not aligned with our purpose. What are some tips to reduce the spiraling feelings of existential dread during those times? Little hyperbolic, but you get my gist." Uh, I do get your gist. So yes, we all have to go through periods of our life or give a certain percentage of our time this stuff that just doesn't feel very important or valuable. But here's the interesting part, is that I think the fact that we spend time doing things that don't feel important or valuable or meaningful, it has more to do with a lack of imagination than it does those things actually not being important or valuable. Let me explain. So on the Purpose episode, we talked about this concept of means and ends, right?

• 9:21Mark Manson?

  So for example, me going down to the DMV to renew my driver's license does not feel very meaningful. It feels like a complete and utter waste of my time. And I could sit there and just feel dread of, oh my God, I'm wasting so much time at the fucking DMV. Or I could think about, what is this a means towards, right? Okay, I need to renew my driver's license so I'm able to drive and get around more often. All right, why do I need to drive and get around more often? Well, it's important for my work. Uh, it's important to see friends and family. Uh, you know, maybe, maybe a parent is sick and I need to drive quite a bit to go see them. Great, now being able to drive and move around frequently is now a means to that end, which feels very meaningful and full of purpose.

• 10:06Mark Manson?

  So. If you can kind of sit and do a thought exercise of like, what is this a means towards? It can imbue whatever you're going through with a greater sense of purpose. I'm not saying it's gonna make you love it, and I'm not saying it's like suddenly gonna solve all of your problems overnight, but it should make the struggle a little bit more manageable. You know, Cal Newport wrote a book called So Good They Can't Ignore You, and absolutely, it's actually my favorite book that he's written. And in it, he has a whole, a big chunk of that book is him arguing against the whole follow your passion advice. And one of the reasons he gave is he said that you can actually theoretically find passion

• 10:50Mark Manson?

  or meaning in pretty much anything you do. And he used the example of a secretary at the university that he works at. He said the secretary had been there for like 30 or 40 years. She's basically a paper pusher and a phone answerer. Like, she's at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of like authority and responsibility. But he said that when he went around his department and kind of interviewed everybody about their vocation and how meaningful it felt and how important it felt to them, she was the one who said that she felt incredible amount of meaning in her job. And he asked her why, and she said, "Oh, if I'm not here, nothing else works." So sure, she's not a professor, or a mathematician, or a programmer, but if she's not there, then the department probably doesn't function correctly.

• 11:33Mark Manson?

  She's not an administrator, she's not in the dean's office, she doesn't work for the admissions board, but if she's not there, they're not able to do their jobs well, or as efficiently as they're able to. And so she actually ended up finding a ton of meaning and purpose in just the fact that she removes friction from other people who do very meaningful things, right? The things that she does, which seem very drab and meaningless, are actually a means to a very meaningful end. So if you can draw those links or chains of meaning in your mind, you can draw upon that sense of purpose, even though it's pretty far removed from you. I think you can do this across time as well. Like, you can go through periods of your life where you're saving money, working a job you hate.

• 12:17Mark Manson?

  But you're really what you're doing is you're working towards financial security. And that financial security is going to give you and your family a much better life five or 10 years from now. And so if you can just focus on what is that future that you're enabling through your current actions, you can find a lot of meaning and purpose in that as well. Next question. Hey Mark, so I might be stuck in an existential vacuum. I've had issues with finding purpose for years. I think my biggest issue is that my motivation to stick to anything I find meaningful quickly vanishes. I jump from one thing to another. I do things that make me feel a spark of joy and enjoyment. And soon after, I feel like I'm just a drifter going through the motions. I'm wondering if this is really it and never lasts. Am I approaching this in the wrong way?

• 13:00Mark Manson?

  Uh, yes, you are. So the short answer, I would say is that you are mistaking excitement and passion for purpose. And those are two completely different things. So the first thing I would ask you is I would say, what feels like it's still worth doing even when you don't enjoy it? Think about that. A lot. And then get back to me. Or don't. Just go do the thing. You don't have to get back to me. It's fine. All right. So in business, there's a concept called the Valley of Despair. And I want to, I'm going to try to draw this for you guys. This is a solved first. Mark's beautiful, beautiful drawing skills. All right. So if you imagine you've got kind of a chart.

• 13:44Mark Manson?

  And this is.

• 13:47Mark Manson?

  We'll call this like love and enjoyment on the, on the Y axis. And then on the X axis is just time, how much time you spend doing it. So generally the curve, what you see when people pursue something, when they try to get good at something or try to accomplish something, is that there's a huge spike of excitement early on. This is the optimism phase. And then what starts to happen is they start to realize, oh shit, this is hard. There's actually a lot of details and complications and nuances that I was not aware of. And so I need to actually learn and get good at a bunch of this stuff. And so the enjoyment starts to go down.

• 14:29Mark Manson?

  So in the beginning is called the uninformed optimism phase. This is the phase where you're like, let's start a podcast, guys. This is gonna be awesome. Meanwhile, you have no fucking clue what you're doing. You have no idea how much work goes into it. You have no idea how hard it is, how long it takes, how to get listeners. And so, once you start to realize that you don't know all those things, you start to become informed, the pessimism sets in. This is when it's like, oh, man, this is so tough. This is so unfair. And most people jump ship in the pessimism phase. But if you can hang in there, you kind of ride through the valley of despair.

• 15:12Mark Manson?

  This is called the valley of despair, where you're like, what am I doing? I've spent so much time on this. This is so hard. I don't know what I'm doing. It's not going anywhere. It's not going to work. But if you stick it out, you come up, you start coming up on the other side. Because you develop the skill sets you need. You start learning where all the traps and pitfalls are. You start figuring out what you're actually good at, what you're not good at. And this is called the informed optimism phase. And you start working up the informed optimism phase. And then eventually, you get to the mountaintop, which is the achievement. Typically, when you see this chart, that's where it ends. If I was making this chart, I would, there would be a cliff on the other side of achievement

• 15:56Mark Manson?

  called existential crisis. But that's another podcast we'll talk about. But the point here is, is that like, anything you start pursuing, there's gonna be that honeymoon phase. There's gonna be that initial excitement, that initial optimism. Because the world's your oyster. You're like, I'm up for it. I'm ready for it. You've got all that emotion behind it. And so, the investment, the time, the energy, the money, like, none of it feels real. It's all abstract and theoretical. And you're like, fuck it, I'm gonna put my 10,000 hours in. But then, once you're actually a few hundred hours into that 10,000 hours, the reality sets in. The honeymoon phase wears off. The novelty wears off. All the emotion wears off.

• 16:41Mark Manson?

  And you just realize it's hard work. And you gotta get better at stuff. You're bad at a lot of things. You have to learn a lot of things. And that's when you go through the valley of despair. And what you find is that, generally speaking, people who don't stick through valleys of despair, they kind of end up on this treadmill that it sounds like you're on, which is, you're always chasing after the new shiny thing. But you're not really investing or developing any real skills or knowledge base in any one thing. And unfortunately, like, that's where the real long-term joy of something comes, is when you've really given yourself to it and developed an expertise and a knowledge base and a history

• 17:22Mark Manson?

  with it, that you actually, not only do you become very good at it, but you have a very, you have a good relationship to it, you have a realistic understanding of it, how hard it is, how much it takes from you, and, you know, what it's gonna require from you in the future. So, if you are somebody who is consistently falling off in the valley of despair, I think there's four different reasons you might be falling off. The first is, you just don't have the pain tolerance, right? You haven't done enough hard things in your life, and so, as soon as you hit another hard thing, you're just like, "Oh, no, fuck this, I'm out, where's the bar?" The second reason is that, when you start facing those challenges, you kinda secretly

• 18:07Mark Manson?

  believe you're not gonna be able to handle those challenges. You don't trust yourself to figure it out and to learn as you go. The third reason you might be jumping ship is that you just aren't learning, right? Like, you start hitting all those speed bumps and obstacles, and instead of adapting to them, or trying to learn from them, or develop skills around them, you just keep doing the same thing, over and over, expecting a different result. And then the fourth reason you might be jumping ship is, probably the most common one, is that you don't actually like it. And, that's okay too, by the way. Like, the reason the valley of despair exists is to weed out all the people who don't actually like the thing.

• 18:50Mark Manson?

  Like, there've been tons of things in my life, that I thought I loved, or I thought I was going to love, and then I hit that valley of despair, and I'm like, "Oh, this fucking sucks, get me out of here." And that's why, that's why, like, so much of my work is about finding the struggle you enjoy, because that's actually when you find out what your relationship with any particular pursuit, or skill, or activity is. Is, how do you feel about it when it's hard? Like, how do you feel about it when it feels like you're banging your head against the wall? Because, if you still like it in that moment, then you've found the right thing. But if you don't like anything in the valley of despair...

• 19:33Mark Manson?

  Then yeah, you're probably just not trying hard enough. Next question. So there were multiple questions about what do you do when you have a strong sense of purpose, but the people in your life, particularly your family, don't support you? Nothing feels worse than this. There were, I think, three or four people who submitted questions in this area. It is a very common problem, a very consistent problem. I don't think there's an easy way to handle this. Let me just state upfront, I don't think there's any pain-free way of dealing with this. I think anything you do here, it's gonna suck in some shape or form. If you try to cater to your family's interests and desires, then you're gonna be sacrificing a lot of your own, and that's gonna suck.

• 20:18Mark Manson?

  Whereas if you stick to your own values and interests, it's gonna put a lot of stress and strain in your relationships with the people that you care about deeply, and that obviously sucks. There are two pieces of advice, though, that I will say. If you are somebody who is going through this or trying to manage this, the first one is, you need to find somebody who supports you. Somebody who is either on the same path as you, or gets the path that you're on, and is encouraging, supportive, and gets it. Even if you're, like, forget your family not approving of it, like, nobody accomplishes anything great alone, anyway. So, that's just kind of like a general piece of advice. You know, you

• 21:01Mark Manson?

  always wanna find people who support your sense of purpose, or the thing that is really important to you, in general. But I think if you're a person who is not feeling supported by your family and your loved ones, it's like 10 times more important to, like, go find those people. The second thing is, is that you should stand your ground with the family, but also don't expect them to change. And I think this is where I see a lot of people kinda mess this up. You know, it's like, let's say your family's super traditional, and they're like, "You're gonna be a doctor or a lawyer," or "I'm never gonna love you again." And you're like, "I wanna be an artiste. I wanna go be a mime in Paris," or whatever it is. And, obviously, mom and dad hate that, but fuck mom and dad. You're gonna go do

• 21:45Mark Manson?

  your mime thing, and, you know, pretend to be in a box in front of the Louvre. I don't know where this is going. The worst thing you can do is go back to mom and dad and say, "Either you respect my mimeage..."

• 22:00Mark Manson?

  Or I'm never talking to you again because what you're doing is you're doing the exact reverse of what they're doing. You're doing the same thing back to them. It's like the Uno reverse card. They're being disapproving of you and threatening the relationship over some silly conditional thing and you're just turning it around and threatening the same relationship over the same conditional thing. So there's like a very difficult sweet spot here, which is like, I respect your opinion, mom and dad, but I'm gonna do my own thing. And I would love for you to respect it and support it, but it's okay if you don't. And that's very hard to do. It requires you being a much bigger person. It also requires setting

• 22:43Mark Manson?

  boundaries and expectations. You know, maybe it's like when you go home for the holidays, you don't bring up your mime career at the dinner table. And maybe it's when your mom starts telling you that you should have been a lawyer, you just change the conversation or change the topic and refuse to engage with it. It is hard. It's not an easy thing, but I do think it's necessary. I think it's kind of the only healthy way to navigate a situation like this. Coincidentally, January 1, Boundary Solved is coming out. So that should help quite a bit. Next question. I struggle with the idea that your purpose should be bigger than yourself. What does that mean exactly? It means that you are not the only reason you're doing a thing. Because if you are

• 23:28Mark Manson?

  the only reason that you're doing a thing, it's going to eventually feel silly and superfluous. It's gonna have no staying power. And it's also gonna make you kind of a self-absorbed twat around everybody else. Because here's the thing, the part of you that wants something that like, that finds something important for your sake, it is largely ego-driven. That doesn't mean it's bad necessarily. Coincidentally, episode on January 15, it's gonna be about the ego. It's not bad necessarily to be ego-driven, but if the only motivation you have in your life is an ego motivation...

• 24:07Mark Manson?

  It is going to have all these negative side effects. It's not long-term sustainable. It's not mentally healthy over the long run and it's bad for relationships. And ultimately, relationships are where we derive most of our meaning and significance over the long run. So that's not to say that you shouldn't focus on yourself. It's just to say that like, in the long run, if you only focus on yourself, it's just, it's a, it's a very inefficient way of living a meaningful life or like a mentally balanced and healthy life. Now, there are some caveats to this, and I talk about this about halfway through the Purpose episode. I talk about the four stages of life. So I think the two kind of caveats here are, A, if you're particularly young, I do think

• 24:50Mark Manson?

  it's actually very important at a certain stage of your life to be incredibly self-focused. You need to figure out who you are, what you like, what you care about, and you need to be able to block out some of the external influences to like really make those estimations and decisions. I also think it's really important if you're particularly hurt or going through a very difficult time. It's the, the classic like, put your oxygen mask on first before trying to put the oxygen mask on somebody else. Like, you can't really give yourself to a cause or a person or a group or something outside of yourself unless you feel good about yourself already. So if you're not in a place where you feel really good about your life and who you are

• 25:35Mark Manson?

  and what you want to be, it makes sense you're going to be more focused on that initially. But ultimately, the idea here is to build a self, an identity that you are so proud of, that you feel so good about, that you feel compelled to go share yourself with the world, to give part of yourself away. It comes back to the Picasso quote that I talk about in the episode, which is, "The meaning of life is to find your gift, and the purpose of life is to give it away." I believe that very deeply. Next question. How did you train your AI app? Did you make it read all of your books? Or did you just feed it a bunch of Aristotle?

• 26:15Mark Manson?

  Funny thing. So obviously, the AI app that's being mentioned here is Purpose. I just launched it a couple of weeks ago. Go to purpose.app/bonus. There's a bunch of promotional offers and shit available there for listeners. You've probably already heard me drone on about it. So when Raj and I started the company, I had all these ideas of what I wanted to train the AI on, how I wanted to fine tune the model, all sorts of different frameworks and psych research. Like, I started making a really big spreadsheet of like, all of the stuff that I thought was critical and very core to like, what the AI needed to know and understand. And then it was funny, because I was like, well, let me, let me go ahead and test some of, some

• 26:58Mark Manson?

  of the main AIs out there and just see what's already in their training data. It's all already in there. It's all, it's, it's all in there. Like, literally, the entire field of psychology is in there. Every framework, every study, all the research, everything. It's all fucking in there. My books are also in there. How do I know? Because OpenAI and Anthropic are sending me checks because of class action lawsuits. So it's all in there, everybody. Like, the AIs, they have already vacuumed up pretty much all of human knowledge at this point. The issue with AI is not the knowledge. Knowledge is not the bottleneck. The issue with AI is how it's using

• 27:43Mark Manson?

  the knowledge. Like, the problem with ChatGPT is not that it doesn't know what therapy is, or what a good therapist is, or what a good psychological framework is. The problem is, is that ChatGPT is not optimized to help you go through a really difficult life problem. It's optimized for engagement. It's optimized to make you feel good. It's optimized to give you like, really basic, surface-level answers extremely quickly and easily. So that's what the actual problem is. So that, like, very early on, our whole approach to the product...

• 28:20Mark Manson?

  veered and took a very strong left turn, pretty much from the get go. And the challenge became, it's not about what knowledge do you give it? It's about how do you craft and hone and point that knowledge in the right direction based on each individual user? And the way we did that, we did that in a few ways. So one of it, one way is just crafting really good system prompts, right? Like giving extremely good instructions, both in terms of how to approach the user, how to approach their problems, what sort of style and tone and personality and approach you should use in different contexts. Having great, great prompts is probably the first and I would argue the most important component of it.

• 29:05Mark Manson?

  Just the system prompts and purpose alone, I spent probably two to three months working on. And I would consider the intensity at which I worked on those prompts like comparable to working on a book. Some of that is understanding what each model is good at and bad at. So this was the other interesting thing is that as I went and started testing all of the major AI models, I found that they're all really good at something and really bad at others. For example, ChatGPT is really great at generating action items or actionable first steps. Like ChatGPT, it just seems very, very much optimized to like giving you a, hey, here are five things you can do in the next week.

• 29:49Mark Manson?

  And that's great, like there are a lot of problems that need that, right? Like there are a lot of things that I could go to an AI and ask. And what I'm really looking for is like, hey, give me five things I can do in the next week. There's also a lot of problems that you don't want that as an answer, right? So already you, you find like, you start to see where some of the use cases for ChatGPT are versus maybe another model. Another example, in my opinion, Claude is the most philosophical and the deepest, the most insightful AI on the market. So clearly if a user's coming and they have like a Deep, profound existential question that they're trying to work through in their lives. Claude is probably going to be the best at handling that.

• 30:33Mark Manson?

  And you definitely don't want ChatGPT giving them five action items to go figure out their fucking existential crisis. So a big part of it was just understanding what model is good at what? And then like also figuring out how to make them play well together. And then finally, the the third aspect of this, and this was less me and more some of the people on my team, on the engineering team, was getting the different AI models to kind of have checks and balances against each other. Right? So we have like the main AI that talks to you, but we also have an evaluative AI that checks the first AI's work and offers it feedback based on what it's saying.

• 31:13Mark Manson?

  And then we also have another system that generates the memories and summaries from the conversations that then feeds back into the primary AI as well. So all all three of those are really different AI architectures. They're different system prompts. They perform different things, but they have to work together well. So that is a brief overview of kind of the architecture of purpose. But I will say like I had so much fun working on that. I'm not a huge fan of software in general. Software is like fucking hard. I like media a lot better. Media is like when if you mess up in media, it's like so easy to go back and edit it or change it. Software, if there's a bug or if there's like even a typo in software,

• 31:58Mark Manson?

  it might be two weeks to get that fixed. It's absolutely agonizing. But I really, really enjoyed working on the AI aspect of the product. It is endlessly fascinating. It really is like designing an AI is about language. And I've spent my entire career working on language. So. Strangely, even though I don't know how to code, I don't have any software engineering experience, I did feel incredibly qualified to work on that aspect of the software product. So that was fun. Once again, if you want to check out Purpose, we have a seven-day free trial. We are offering a free 15-day course in the Solve community on Purpose

• 32:40Mark Manson?

  that's available, I think, till December 18th. And we're also doing a live webinar on the 29th to kick off the new year. So all of those things are available. If you go to purpose.app/bonus or purpose.app/solved, either of those will get you there. Now, let's get into some more general questions from the broader audience. These were sourced from YouTube, and they are not limited to Purpose or values or kind of the main topics of the month. We're going to jump around a little bit, and then we're going to finish up kind of talking about next year's plans and where the podcast is going. So the first question is, "How do you change yourself when you don't really want to? How do you stop accepting a horribly miserable life?"

• 33:24Mark Manson?

  That is pretty, pretty rough. I'm going to pull up Purpose here and see what it says. It says, "That's a gut punch of a question. And honestly, the person asking it already knows something most people don't. They can see their misery clearly enough to name it. That's not nothing. Here's what I tell them. You don't have to want to change. You just have to want to stop hurting more than you want to stay comfortable in your familiar hell. Most people think motivation comes first, then action, but it's backwards. Action creates the momentum. Momentum creates hope. Hope creates more action. You start with one tiny thing that moves you towards aliveness instead of away from it, not because you feel like it, but because staying stuck is slowly killing something inside of you.

• 34:09Mark Manson?

  The trick is finding that one thing that feels less terrible than doing nothing. Maybe it's walking outside for five minutes. Maybe it's saying no to one thing that drains you. Maybe it's admitting the one person that you're drowning. But here's what really matters. Stop waiting for permission to want something better. Stop telling yourself that you're spoiled for not accepting misery as your permanent address. Your dissatisfaction is not a character flaw. It's your soul refusing to die." What would you add to that, Mark? Because I'm guessing this question hit close to home for a reason. It's always trying to bring it back to me.

• 34:42Mark Manson?

  What would I say? I mean, I think that's actually really good advice. That feels like it's actually straight out of my work. The thing that I noticed with this is that often people who feel stuck in their misery, it's often because the misery is very subtly serving something. And I often ask people in this situation what they think that something is. Like, what is feeling stuck in the same place protecting you from? And in my experience, it's protecting most people in this situation. It's protecting them from some sort of fear. A fear of vulnerability, a fear of taking a chance,

• 35:23Mark Manson?

  a fear of not living up to something that they wish for themselves. You know, it's the classic, like, they'd rather not try at all than try something and fail. And when you run that script enough times, you can kind of just embed yourself into this this life that you have no agency, or you feel that you have no agency and feel completely at a loss of how to get out of it. I think the answer is like that that balance has to shift. Like, the continuing to accept the current circumstances needs to start feeling worse than taking those risks to improve things. One way is to make those risks as tiny and small and manageable as possible,

• 36:07Mark Manson?

  as Purpose said. Another way is to just let the status quo get so bad that anything feels better by comparison. And that's, you know, when you when you look at the addiction literature or Alcoholics Anonymous, that's generally what they call rock bottom. They often say, like, if you're not willing to change yet, it's because you haven't hit bottom. I think both of those things are essentially saying the same thing, just from different ends. On one side, it's like you need to decrease the sense of risk until it feels more desirable than the current misery. The other, on the other side, it's like maybe the misery has to get worse before things can get better. Next question. A lot of people in the AI field, including Elon,

• 36:50Mark Manson?

  are predicting that we'll no longer have to work in the next 10 to 15 years. What will we do then? How are we going to derive meaning then? Please pick this with lots of exclamation marks.

• 37:03Mark Manson?

  This is a very hot topic at the moment. I am skeptical of the mass job displacement for a couple of reasons. The first one is just that there have been so many times in human history where people have predicted mass job displacement due to technology, and it has not happened a single fucking time. So I think by default, we should assume that it's not going to happen this time. Like, this is a pretty regular occurrence. Every time there's a new mass technological breakthrough, there's this fear of mass job displacement that comes with it. I think our default stance should be, why is this time different? But the second reason I'm a little bit more skeptical, I think, than most, is that as somebody who's just spent the last year building an AI product, it

• 37:48Mark Manson?

  has lowered my estimation of what AI can do. I actually think humans are very, very necessary, even in AI workflows. To be more explicit about that, I would say that we're probably pretty close to AI being able to do most tasks at the level of like, better than 90 to 95% of humans. And that sounds like a lot, but the thing is, is I think most of the economic value in the world is generated by people who are able to do things better than 99.9% of humans. So like, if you think about what is the thing you make most of your money doing, you're probably better than 99% of people at it. And AI is better than 95% of people at it. And it just, it turns out that that, that extra 4% is

• 38:33Mark Manson?

  a lot, and people are willing to pay a lot for it. I've definitely observed that that is, it's true with writing, it's true with, you know, a lot of, a lot of automations and stuff that we've tried to introduce into the business, like, they just kind of don't work, just because it's like, everything the AI does, it's, it's, it's kind of like a really smart college student or an intern. Like, to get the AI to a place where it's excellent, you have to spend so much time optimizing it, and like, crafting it, and honing it, and prompting it a million times, that you're probably not actually saving time. So, I'm a little bit skeptical. I do think, I mean, don't get me wrong, I do

• 39:16Mark Manson?

  think AI is going to be incredibly disruptive. I just think, I think it's going to happen on a much slower time scale than people expect, and I think it's, it's not going to... Replace all the jobs. That said, I do think you can kind of look at the oncoming disruption and make some make some logical predictions in terms of like, what is going to go up in value and what's going to go down in value? For example, I think anything that is in-person, community-driven, or relationship-driven, is going to go up in a lot of value. Right? So, anything that is real-world, face-to-face, human-to-human, people are going to start being willing to pay more for that, just because it's going to be scarcer, and there's

• 40:00Mark Manson?

  going to be a premium attached to it. I think anything that is like artisanal, or human craftsmanship, I think it's going to go, the value of it's going to go up as well. Like, one of the analogies, you know, there's a popular analogy when this topic comes up, where people talk about chess, right? So it's like AI, computers started beating the world champions of chess like 30 years ago, almost 30 years ago. Currently, the best AIs at chess are orders of magnitude better than the best humans, yet nobody watches the computer tournaments. Everybody watches the human tournaments. In fact, human chess is more popular than it's ever been at the moment. So, I think at the end of the day, it's like, people care about things because there's

• 40:44Mark Manson?

  another human at the end of it. I think the same is going to be true with art. I think the same is going to be true with entertainment. I think the same is going to be true with a lot of stuff that robotics does. Like, for example, you can go buy a really nice piece of furniture that looks like it's handcrafted, like, it's probably actually even better quality than something that's like, handcrafted by some artisan in Italy or something, and it was just churned out of a factory, but people are still paying 10 times more for the handcrafted thing from Italy. Why? Because it was handcrafted by a dude in Italy. That's what they're actually paying for. That's where most of the perceived value is. So, anyway, that's all to say that I think a lot of this, like, AI is going to replace

• 41:29Mark Manson?

  everything, nobody's going to have anything to do, like, I think it's a little blown out of proportion. The other thing I will say that's really interesting, so there's a great podcast by a guy named Dwarash Patel, and it's all about AI stuff. And he just did kind of a roundup this year. And he made a really interesting distinction. So in the AI space, there's kind of two schools of thought. There's the, I guess you could call them the accelerationists, like the people who think that the timeline for AI development and takeover is exponentially expanding and that we're like two years away from AGI replacing all of us. And then there's kind

• 42:12Mark Manson?

  of the more skeptical timeline, which is like, yeah, this is probably going to play out over multiple decades. The actual displacement and integration into society is going to be messy and sloppy at first and a lot of tech people are probably overestimating the impact it's going to have. The thing that Dwarsh Kesh mentioned that was super fascinating is he said that from a technical perspective, from like purely, if you're looking at like the measurement of compute and inference and the amount of energy that's being used and the amount of GPUs and TPUs that are being used and the amount of processing power that is actually happening from the AIs, it is matching up to the accelerationist timeline.

• 42:57Mark Manson?

  But if you look at the cultural impact that it's having, it's lined up with the skeptics' timeline. That basically the AIs are improving exponentially, but the impact that they're having is plateauing. And that seems intuitively extremely true. Even though each AI model is technically significantly better than the previous, the leap feels smaller and as a result, kind of the cultural impact feels smaller as well. Ultimately, I think this is, it's going to be kind of a situation like the internet. You know, when I was a kid in the 90s, everybody thought the internet was going to replace everything. It didn't.

• 43:40Mark Manson?

  It was a big bubble. And what happened is that slowly over the next 30 years, the internet replaced everything. So it wouldn't surprise me if we're kind of going through the same thing, that it's like. There's gonna be a big bubble and then in like 2030, everybody's gonna be like, wow, we were stupid and crazy for thinking this AI thing was gonna take over the world. And then by 2050, AI will have taken over the world. If you were going to rewrite models today in a culture of Me Too and heightened tension between men and women, what would you change, if anything? This is a great question, and this is something I think about periodically.

• 44:18Mark Manson?

  So the first thing I'll say is, when the Me Too stuff started, when was that, 2017, 2018? I definitely got nervous. I remember I actually went back to models and I read it again because I hadn't read it in a number of years. And I was like, let me make sure that there's not anything in here that is just like horribly insensitive or is gonna fucking get me canceled. And I remember going back through it and being pleasantly surprised at how well it held up, how respectful it was. There were a couple of spots that like, the language was a little crude or, you know, it was, the tone was a little bit boys locker room style.

• 45:02Mark Manson?

  And I actually remember making a couple like small tweaks of like phrasings and changing a couple of words here and there. But I remember being like very satisfied and, again, pleasantly surprised at how well it held up. I also think the fact that the subtitle is "Attract Women Through Honesty" like definitely put me on the right side of history in terms of just like, the target was not on my back like it was like a lot of people in this industry. So I feel good about that. The tensions between men and women, that is very much a recent thing, like a post-pandemic thing. I would say I'm very hesitant to write or say too much about that just because it's unclear to me, well, for a couple of reasons.

• 45:44Mark Manson?

  One is, I don't think it's necessarily that much worse than when I wrote models. I think it's just the nature of that tension is different. And then the other thing is... I'm not convinced that this is like a permanent, long-term thing. Like, this might just be kind of a moment, a cultural moment thing that we're going through. Like, we might look back at this and it may feel like it's a 2020s thing, kind of the same way we look back at Me Too and think of it as like a late 2010s thing. The one thing that I think about frequently that I'm like, Models is missing, and if I could go back and write a new chapter for it, I definitely would, is apps and online dating.

• 46:25Mark Manson?

  When I wrote Models, I think online dating was like a small percentage of how people met their partners or went on dates. Today, it is the majority of how people meet their partners and go on dates. And there is a shockingly small amount in the book written about online dating or app dating. I mean, Tinder hadn't even been invented when the book came out, so there's nothing on there about apps. And it's just, to me, it's like so clear that the apps in particular have kind of fucked up the dating market and really made things worse for both men and women. So, yeah, gun to my head, if I had to revise the book today,

• 47:10Mark Manson?

  I think the only major change that would happen is I would write at least a section, maybe an entire chapter, about apps and dating. The thing that never gets asked, at least by men, but I also think about quite frequently, is writing a version of Models for women. And this, I never saw coming, but what happened is that Models became so successful and so popular and like shared via word of mouth so much, that women started reading it. And for 10 years now, I've gotten many emails from women saying, "I'm not a man, but I read Models and it's better than any woman's dating advice I've ever read.

• 47:54Mark Manson?

  Can you write a version for women?" In a perfect world where Mark has infinite time and is not like overcommitting himself to 18 different projects, I would sit down and write a woman's version of Models, but unfortunately, like, the opportunity cost is just very, very high at this point. So... Unfortunately, I don't know if that's ever gonna happen, but that's also something I think about quite a bit. Next question. How did you handle your first heartbreak and how to move on completely? Well, uh, these are two very different questions because I handled my first heartbreak fucking terribly. And it took me like five years to move on.

• 48:38Mark Manson?

  So I would say, don't do what I did. There is pretty solid advice, inconsistent advice on how to move on. But let's go through both because I'm pretty sure I did the opposite of everything I should have done. The first thing I will say is that if your ex still triggers you emotionally, either positively or negatively, you really need to cut contact. The biggest, like the most rookie mistake I see people make is that they try to be friends with their ex that they're not over. And it, you're like, you are literally, like, you're walking into a room full of gas tanks with a lit match, like, and then wondering why shit's blowing up in your face.

• 49:21Mark Manson?

  If you cannot be around your ex or talk to them without being emotionally triggered, again, either positively or negatively, then you should cut contact because nothing good is gonna happen from it. Wait, it's like, I, I get the question frequently from people. They're like, how do I know when, when I can be friends with my ex? I'm like, you can be friends with your, with your ex when you no longer wanna be friends with your ex. That's how you know. Number two is you need to focus on yourself. Earlier I was talking about like when it makes sense to focus on yourself and to find purpose and meaning in yourself. This is one of those times. If you've come out of a really big relationship or a bad breakup, you need time to rediscover who you are.

• 50:03Mark Manson?

  Like, part of the process of being with a person for a long time and, and being very intimate with them and in love with them and sharing a life with them is that they become part of your identity. And your identity like literally shapes and morphs itself around them to a certain extent. That's inevitable. It's like, a certain, a certain amount of that is normal and healthy. And when you break up, those aspects of yourself that used to be occupied by them, now there's a void there. And you don't know who you are anymore. You don't know what you like anymore. You don't know what you dislike. And, and people who come out, especially if you, if you were with somebody for a long time.

• 50:42Mark Manson?

  People will often come out of those long, long relationships and like they literally don't know what they like. They're like, "I don't know what I want to do. It's Friday night. I don't even know what's appealing." So you need to spend time to figure that out because if you just jump into the next relationship, you're just gonna fill that void with the next person and chances are whatever fucked up the first relationship is not gonna get fixed in the second one. So take some time, really dedicate it to yourself, invest in hobbies, friendships, reach out to some old friends. Maybe if you lost touch with some friends because your ex like fucking hated them, this is the time to reach out and be like, "Hey, I stopped dating my psycho ex. Let's hang out." This

• 51:25Mark Manson?

  is a great time to focus on career, to learn a new skill, basically anything that's gonna build up your self-esteem a little bit. Because that's the other thing is like when you come out of a relationship, you do a number to your self-esteem. So anything that's gonna like make you feel better about yourself, it's a good thing to do. So you asked me how I got over my first heartbreak. Like I said, I didn't really. I didn't get over her. I kept getting back in touch with her. I kept trying to get back together with her. I was often extremely angry at her. Instead of investing in myself, I spent more time drinking and partying and losing myself. And I didn't really invest heavily enough

• 52:10Mark Manson?

  in my own growth and things that would make me feel better about myself. Where things started to change, and this is actually a good tip, I remember at a certain point, because I kept getting back with her and then it would fall apart again, then I'd get angry again. And like, it was just this, it was a whole fucking mess. I remember at a certain point where it was pretty clear things were over, but I was like very pissed. And I remember, I took that anger and I was like, I was like, "You know what?" My goal is to improve myself so much that I'm gonna make this the worst decision she ever made. And for like, a year, that was my fuel. I started, that was when I started going to the gym for the first time.

• 52:52Mark Manson?

  Started getting into shape. I started like, really trying harder applying myself. I was in university at the time. I started applying myself in school a lot more. I started building out my social life. I got really into meditation and Buddhism. And was like, really investing in myself, because I'm like, I'm gonna fucking make her regret this. The good news is, I think I succeeded. The other good news is, I don't fucking care anymore. So, that's how you know you've gotten over your ex, when you're like, oh, it's, this is such a waste of energy. Next question. How do I stop watching porn? Well, my friend, imagine you have a 10-year-old boy who can't stop jacking off.

• 53:34Mark Manson?

  And is on his phone, looking at porn, all the time. What would you do? You're the parent, you're responsible, you have access to his phone, you have access to everything. What would you do? You'd probably download some safeguard apps, you'd probably password protect a bunch of websites. You'd probably install some filters. You would probably make him check in with you periodically. Or revoke phone privileges periodically. What would you do? You had a 10-year-old kid. Figure that out, write it down, and then do that for yourself. It's that simple. We've all got that little 10-year-old kid inside of us, who makes horrible decisions.

• 54:16Mark Manson?

  And sometimes, we need to treat it for what it is. Why do we drive on parkways, but park on driveways?

• 54:28Mark Manson?

  I'm gonna lose sleep over that, tonight. I can tell. Coming with the hard questions, the YouTube audience. Oh, I love this question. What would you put on the Voyager 1 golden discs if they launched today? Thank you for asking this, whoever in the YouTube audience asked this. Okay, little background, the Voyager 1. So, back in the 70s, Carl Sagan and a bunch of scientists had this great idea of like, We're gonna send a probe into deep space. They were gonna send this probe called Voyager 1 all the way through the solar system. I believe it was the first probe that was gonna intensely photograph the outer planets in the solar system. But the nature of it was like, there was just no way for it to come back. So it was just gonna fly out of the solar system and fly into the infinite void of

• 55:12Mark Manson?

  the universe forever and ever. So they had this great idea. They're like, "We should put stuff on it. We should introduce ourselves." And so that's what they did. They put these golden discs on Voyager 1, and they have all of the basic information of the human race. So they have like 50 examples of tree species, and they have photos of all the most famous cities in the world, and they have like Bach and Beethoven and Chuck Berry and all this music that we listen to, and a bunch of pop culture references from the 1970s, which I find fucking hilarious. Because that thing is gonna take thousands of years to be found, and I just love the recency bias that must exist for a bunch of scientists to be like, "Hmm, what are

• 55:55Mark Manson?

  the most important things in human culture, ever? Oh, it's the things I listen to on my drive home from work." Fucking idiots. Anyway. I wouldn't send Voyager 1. That's my answer to this. I think it was incredibly naive. Let me explain why. See, there's a game theory aspect of this. Think about any alien civilization that has the technology to decipher the information on Voyager 1 and understand where it came from and make contact with us. That civilization is gonna be so advanced that they probably don't need Voyager 1 to tell them where we are. So, immediately out of the gate, this thing is pointless.

• 56:37Mark Manson?

  Second of all, let's imagine that that alien super-civilization was not aware of us, for some reason, but when this archaic fucking junker of a probe strolls into their solar system, they suddenly realize, "Oh my god, these people have no idea what they're doing." And, "We don't know that the aliens are nice. I mean, have you read The Dark Forest? Come on." They might come for... There could be super predators in our galaxy, and we just have no idea. The third reason is simply that... So basically, we're in a game theory situation of like, there's zero upside, and there's only downside.

• 57:20Mark Manson?

  And it's just seems very silly and self-serving. So I would not send a probe. I would not send a probe. Nobody cares. The aliens don't care. They don't care about Chuck Berry, dude. They don't care about the Bee Gees. Like, come on.

• 57:36Mark Manson?

  Really? Next question. When you're creating something new, how do you handle the moments when it feels not good enough?

• 57:48Mark Manson?

  I'm sorry I'm laughing so much. I'll explain in a second. How do you push past the doubt? Okay, remember in the first Avengers movie? Where it seems like the Incredible Hulk, Bruce Banner, has like somehow learned how to manage his anger? And Iron Man keeps asking him, he's like, "How did you learn? How did you do it? How'd you figure it out?" And like Bruce Banner like keeps like putting off the question. He's like, "Ah, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it." And then finally, at the end of the movie, Bruce Banner's like, "Hey, Tony, you know how I learned how to manage my anger? It's because I'm always angry." I'm Bruce Banner, and this is the question. How do I deal with moments when I feel like something I made is not good enough? Everything I make is not good enough. I always feel...

• 58:34Mark Manson?

  In this moment, I'm sitting in the studio and like half the things going through my head is how shitty this fucking studio is.

• 58:43Mark Manson?

  Do you have any idea? Like, if I sat down and wrote down everything that I think I could improve in my content, in my writing, I would just be writing that list for the rest of my life. That's it. There's nothing else to do. Like, it is absolutely endless. So this fear in the first place is just, it's silly and ridiculous. It never goes away. It doesn't matter how much you put out there, how much you make.

• 59:13Mark Manson?

  Nothing is ever good enough, at least for me it's not. And anecdotally, from like the authors and creators that I I meet and hang out with, that's pretty standard. I I've never met an author who's like, nailed it. Yeah, that book, fucking perfect. No, no, every author I meet is like, oh, my God, it's still awful, but my my publishing deadline is coming, so I guess I'll just ship it. That is how everything goes. That's how every movie goes, it's how every TV show goes, it's how every album goes. It's how everything goes. So, Rude Awakening, that is the process. You don't, this feeling that you have, this feeling that you're like upset about or or is holding you back, it is never going to go away.

• 59:57Mark Manson?

  You simply learn how to ship and publish despite it. I personally think that this fear, and this, again, this comes from my personal experience, this fear of like, everything not being good enough and not being ready to put out, I I think it's a lot like the fear of public speaking. Because like, when you're afraid of public speaking, you're, the the thoughts that are running through your head is just about like, how everybody's gonna laugh at you, and how embarrassing it's gonna be, and how you're gonna make a fool of yourself, and people are gonna judge you, and they're gonna hate the things that you say, when the reality is, is nobody fucking cares. Nobody's paying attention, nobody's listening, nobody cares. And the same is true with your work.

• 1:00:40Mark Manson?

  Like, if you can actually make something that people care about, you've already won, to a great extent. It is so hard to get people to care or even notice something. So like, the fact that you're you're worried about what they're gonna think when they like, analyze your thing, they're not, dude, they're not. I have to say, like, our team at this point, I I don't, I haven't actually sat down and counted, I would guess that we have published over a thousand pieces of content this year. If I had to guess, that roughly works out to three pieces of content a day. I think we've easily cleared that. If you look at my entire career, it's probably at least 10,000 pieces of content.

• 1:01:24Mark Manson?

  I can tell you the downside of posting something bad is almost zero. Like, the worst thing that happens, if you post something that's not very good, nobody sees it. And the people who see it, like, just scroll away and they forget about it three seconds later. There is so little downside to posting a bad thing. Yet, the upside of posting something great is absolutely massive. It can literally change your life. So, until you start posting, you don't know what the bad things are and what the great things are. Like, out of those thousand things we've posted this year, I would say maybe 10 to 15 of them were really, really good. Like, in my opinion, like, they were very good pieces of content.

• 1:02:08Mark Manson?

  I would say that I am satisfied with something I make a couple times a year. It's a hard life. Next question, very appropriate for this. Are you writing another book? I am not writing another book. I have not written a book, I have not written a book since Will Smith's book came out in 2021. A lot of that was by design. I needed time off. And then, for the last couple of years, I've been, like, very focused on the online content, YouTube channel, the podcast. I also just didn't miss writing books. So, you know, my agreement with myself was that I wasn't gonna write a book again until I really wanted to. I am excited to report that as of three, four months ago,

• 1:02:53Mark Manson?

  I'm starting to get excited to write a book again. Some of that is that I'm starting to have ideas for books again. Some of it is that there's a lot of ideas that we've been posting content about that, like, I feel like I could go way deeper or do something very cool with, but just haven't had the chance to. So, all that is to say, there is some excitement coming back into my life for books. I know there's a massive demand and excitement for another book in the audience. My current plan is to start writing whatever the next book is next year. No other plans other than that, no other timeline other than that. Just, current intention is to sit down and start tinkering with ideas, playing with outlines, seeing what sort of stuff comes out in 2026.

• 1:03:38Mark Manson?

  So. It is very likely happening. Next question. Have you thought about doing tours or speeches in other countries? Salutations from Croatia. I actually do do speeches in other countries and I have done some tours in other countries. I actually just toured Australia and New Zealand last year. And then this year I did a couple of events in the UK. That said, I don't do a ton of events and I don't do a ton of speaking. The reason is just I don't love it. But that said, I do think we're going to start doing more of it in 2026 and beyond. We haven't made any hard decisions yet, but there are a few things on the table and likely. One of them is doing live podcasts at a certain point.

• 1:04:22Mark Manson?

  Drew and I both have interest in doing that, even if it's here in LA. The tricky thing with that is that I don't think we could do one of the flagship episodes live unless we like broke it up over multiple nights just because of how long they are. So one of the things, and I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself, but one of the things is that we are going to start experimenting with slightly different formats for smaller episodes in 2026. This one is kind of the first one of those. Also next year, 10th anniversary of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. I've been talking to my publisher about doing some kind of special promotions for that. I think we're going to do a special 10th anniversary edition and I think there will likely be a handful of live events.

• 1:05:06Mark Manson?

  I doubt that there will be anything international for that, but never say never, could happen. I mean, the book was huge in a number of foreign countries, so it definitely could happen. So one of the questions that I've been asking myself is how is this industry going to change? How's the content industry going to change? How is the self-help industry going to change? And I really do think that AI is going to drive more demand for in-person, authentic, human. Content experiences. It is my intention to start doing more live in-person stuff. I just don't totally know what that looks like at the moment. That's something that I think we're probably gonna experiment with and figure out next year.

• 1:05:49Mark Manson?

  But I do feel pretty strongly that that's the direction we're gonna, we're gonna start going in. And I'm excited to kind of see what comes of that. Do you have a goal on YouTube for 2026? If yes, what is it? And can you walk with your hands? I cannot walk with my hands. I can do a handstand, though. I am proud to report. I can do, if I'm against the wall, I can do a handstand for a long time. If I'm not against the wall, I can do it for a few seconds. But more importantly, my YouTube goals for 2026. So the goal right now is I would like to kind of merge. We've got an amazing YouTube audience and we have an amazing podcast audience, but there's still a little bit of a division between the two.

• 1:06:31Mark Manson?

  So my goal in 2026 is to kind of blur the lines between those two audiences and also those two content formats. What do I mean by that? I think we have, we've got a great thing going on each side. So on the podcast side, we've got these large, deeply researched flagship episodes, which is great, and we've got a great audience for that. On YouTube, we do these weekly or sometimes bi-weekly, 15 to 30 minute videos of usually just me talking about a single topic. And, and people really love those too. So I feel like there's, there is a happy medium there that we can find. One thing that I'm noticing is that the educational YouTube space

• 1:07:15Mark Manson?

  is becoming a lot more conversational and podcast-like. It's like simpler production, more authentic, unscripted, kind of talking head style. Whereas podcasting is becoming more structured and format-driven. So.

• 1:07:34Mark Manson?

  Strangely, I think the two mediums are kind of converging, at least in the personal growth space. And I think what my ideal looks like is that we have, we still have the flagship podcast episode. We have two or three kind of smaller spinoff podcast episodes throughout the month. And then we have these, say, let's call them 20 to 40 minute monologues about very specific niche topics. And then we just post all of that everywhere. So whether you're on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube, you're getting, you're getting everything. And you can just decide what you want to watch or listen to, and

• 1:08:15Mark Manson?

  what you want to skip. So that's the goal. Next question. I actually liked it when you talked about different topics in your previous podcasts, because I heard a lot of interesting opinions from you. Can you make videos on different topics separately from your channel? This actually is exactly what I was just talking about. So Drew and I, like, we've been talking about this quite a bit the last few weeks. Like, we're very much in the same boat. We love the big episodes. We love the research. We love going deep. But it's just, it's a lot. It's a lot. So to give you guys a little bit of behind the scenes here, to produce one of, one of our big research episodes, we have a, we have a research team of four people full time. So you have four full time researchers. You have Drew, who's like managing

• 1:09:00Mark Manson?

  all the creative. We just hired a, a growth strategist and somebody to, to basically just manage the whole podcast. And then you have me on top of that, who's coming in and giving editorial guidance. I'm kind of, I'm, for the podcast, I'm more like an executive producer. I'm like, giving oversight, guidance, pointers, and, and making like, high level decisions. But, so like, just to get the fucking content, we have six people. And that doesn't count social media, marketing, promotion, monetization, like, there's, doesn't count the courses, doesn't count any of that stuff. So like,

• 1:09:42Mark Manson?

  It's turning into a pretty large scale production just to get that one flagship episode out each month and that episode is so massive and intense, it puts a lot of pressure on people. And so what's happened is that the whole team is just kind of on this like treadmill of intense pressure. And I think we're all feeling like a desire for to lighten up a little bit periodically, like have a week or have a or Drew and I can like shoot something, a 90 minute thing that's like a little bit lower stakes, a little bit simpler. And like I hinted at earlier, like this is, this is one reason

• 1:10:22Mark Manson?

  why we're doing this Q and A video. I think a Q and A video is a great way to like both supplement the, the main flagship podcast and do some more dynamic content, offer some varied opinions about different topics, tie together some threads that are maybe a little bit random, but it's stuff that you guys are thinking about or wondering about. I would love to do some sort of format like this every month or every couple of months on top of doing the normal podcast. And then on top of that, you know, we're talking about the, you know, the second podcast each month is kind of a smaller topic and it's a shorter episode, usually about two hours. And we're talking about maybe varying

• 1:11:04Mark Manson?

  that up a little bit as well. But all that is to say that like, we kind of stumbled into this just because Drew and I were really excited about the format and, and we felt very strongly that this is what should exist in this market. We didn't really think through the repercussions and consequences of that. It's one of those things where it's just like you, you like, you get on a train as it's moving and then you're like, oh shit, I didn't think about where we're going. We're kind of playing catch up mentally behind the scenes and trying to figure out like, okay, what's going to make this sustainable? Not just for us on the production side, but also for you guys as, as the audience. Because another thing that we're hearing a lot from people is they're like, I love

• 1:11:43Mark Manson?

  the show, but it's a little overwhelming. It's, it's a lot. Like it's very intense. I have to focus on it. It takes me a long time to get through an episode. So again, I, I feel like on the audience side as well, there's kind of this desire for like, you know, give me something light.

• 1:12:04Mark Manson?

  Once a month, that's like just easy and pleasant to get through. That just kind of like reinforces some of the things I learned and maybe have like a little bit of an expanded discussion on it. So that's kind of where our heads at at the moment. But please let me know what you guys think. Like, we're very, like, we're right in the middle of thinking deeply about some changes and pivots to the show early next year. So in January, the, we've already got the two episodes shot and they're almost finished being made. So on January 1st, we have Boundary Solved. January 15th, we're gonna have an episode about ego. Both of those episodes are bangers. I'm really, really excited about them.

• 1:12:46Mark Manson?

  I mean, boundaries, as you guys know, is huge. It's something I talk about all the time. I think, I think we did a really good job with it, being, just being extremely explicit in terms of like what they are, how to set them, how to enforce them, how to follow up on them. And then the ego episode is just fun. I actually, I'm seeing the second episodes each month as just an opportunity to kind of nerd out on these more niche topics that like probably don't merit an entire episode. So, you know, November, we did social comparison, which I think was really fun, and a lot of people related to that. I think the one we're doing in January is ego. I think it's another one that a lot of people are gonna relate to because ego's funny in that we all talk about it. We all talk like, oh, she has such

• 1:13:31Mark Manson?

  a big ego, or like, oh, that dude, like, he needs to like, his ego needs to chill out. But we don't think about what is an ego? What is a healthy ego? What's an unhealthy ego? What's a big ego? What's a small ego? Is it good to have a small ego? It's actually a very interesting topic and interesting thing to think about. So that one's fun, especially if you really like to nerd out on some of these psychological topics like, like Drew and I do. But then, once we get into February, we're gonna start experimenting with some more structured formats. So again,

• 1:14:04Mark Manson?

  Some of the feedback that we've gotten from listeners is that, you know, these four or five hour episodes, they're great, but they're very uneven and like, people don't really know what's coming. Like it's, you might get an hour and a half in and you're like, okay, this is kinda interesting, but like, I don't know if I'm gonna really get much value out of the next section or three sections from now. Like it's just, it's hard for the listener to predict where it's going. And I do think some of that prediction is valuable. On the production side, it's also been a struggle for us because the research team goes and just like, research is hardcore for three, four weeks, comes back with a massive,

• 1:14:46Mark Manson?

  like 200 page document with all the most prevalent research and historical findings and whatnot. And then Drew and I need to like, make sense out of it. And there have been a lot of cases where it just feels very arbitrary. It's like, well, I guess we'll have a neuroscience section. And then we just kinda shrug and look at each other. And like, that's clearly not optimal. Like it'd be better, I think it would be good for Drew and I's mental health to have a little bit more structure and planning across the episodes. So, we're gonna try to introduce some more structure and make it more, make the listening experience more predictable for you

• 1:15:25Mark Manson?

  guys, so that you know what's coming, when. Also make the episodes more navigable to back up a little bit. So, Solve was actually inspired by two different podcasts. I think one, most people could guess, and the other one, most people probably wouldn't. So, the one I think most people would guess is Huberman, you know, just like, just this insane amount of depth on a single topic. I think the thing that Huberman does extremely well, and I didn't realize it at the time, is he makes his episodes extremely navigable. So, he like, is very explicit upfront of like, these are the, these are all the topics we're gonna talk about. And he doesn't talk about it in the abstract, which is what we do. He's like, very specific about it. Like, these are the, actually the questions that we're gonna answer in the episode. And it's a lot.

• 1:16:11Mark Manson?

  And then there's like, but then he's very good with timestamps. So, and I noticed this like, I couldn't tell you the last time I listened to a whole Huberman episode, front to back. Generally, if I listen to Huberman, it's like, I, I open up the description and I click through to like the five or six things that like, I'm really interested in. And I think it's, we just need to be realistic that that's like how a lot of people want to consume this type of information. So, that's one goal. The other comparison, the other podcasts that we're kind of inspired by is, is Acquired. And for those of you who don't know, Acquired also does like massive four to six hour episodes, but they do an entire history of a company. And I love them. I listen to them

• 1:16:53Mark Manson?

  all the time. What I didn't think about until recently is that because Acquired episodes are sequential, as a listener, you're always oriented towards where you are in the story. So like, let's say like, they did an episode on IKEA, how the founding of IKEA and how it grew through the decades. You know, you're, you're listening to the IKEA episode, you're three hours in, it's 1972, the CEO is like, got this big decision to make. They don't need to explicitly explain to you where you are or what's coming next. Like, because the podcast is based on a sequential story, you have an understanding of like, okay, after this, we're going to learn what happened in

• 1:17:36Mark Manson?

  the eighties and then the nineties, and then I'm probably going to hear about how they branched out internationally and like, all this stuff. It's implicit, just in the format of the show. Because our show is not narrative driven, we don't have that implicit context. So like, if we're two hours into an episode on friendship, and Drew and I just finished explaining, you know, the neurochemical reactions of having a strong social life versus, or like, the effects it has on memory, you guys have no sense of what's coming next. You have no idea if we're going to get into like, actual tips on how to remember your friends' birthdays, or if we're going to start talking about like chimpanzees and how they form tribes, like-

• 1:18:19Mark Manson?

  There's not, there's like no, it's just a black box at all times. And I think as a listener, that's, um, it's probably suboptimal. So it's a very long way of saying that we're going to try to introduce some structures, some predictability, make episodes much more navigable. That's going to start in February. And then I think in March, we're going to start, uh, doing more of these kind of spinoff episodes, again, potentially a monthly Q and A like this one. I love doing this for a few reasons. One is just that it's easy. Two is it's direct. Like we just go straight into the community and ask them like, hey, what are you struggling with? What's not making sense?

• 1:19:03Mark Manson?

  You've listened to the podcast, like what did we not explain well enough? What do you, what do you need? How are, how are you not applying this to your life? Or what are you confused about? And then I can just sit here and answer you. I also like it because it's lower, like it just feels more casual and like we don't have to like fucking break out a, a three ring binder full of notes to like get through a podcast. So let me know what you guys think about all that. That's what's coming down the pike. The other thing that's happening, so a little bit more of like kind of the business behind the scenes, there's two big changes coming. Um, I think one, you guys will be happy about, one, you will not. Tying into the aspect of feeling overwhelmed.

• 1:19:48Mark Manson?

  So when we launched solved, I did, I recorded an episode of the last podcast aptly titled the last podcast. And in that episode, it was a monologue and I was kind of explaining why we were shutting down the old podcast and why we were starting solved. And in that I talked about how like, there's just, there's so many conflicts of interest within the podcasting world. And especially in this space, I think there's, there's some moral hazard that comes along with that.

• 1:20:16Mark Manson?

  Our hope for solved was like, okay, we're essentially going to be delivering a fucking online course every single month on a topic. And people can either listen to it, or if they want to implement it into their lives, then they can sign up for the for the community and get the course version of it. And get community accountability and like do daily actions and check-ins and all this stuff. I think the what we underestimated was that overwhelm factor. Right? So a lot of people, most people listen to this podcast very gradually on their own time. And they often like, again, they'll get a weekend, they'll feel a little bit overwhelmed,

• 1:21:01Mark Manson?

  they'll need time to process, life gets busy, then they come back two weeks later. And so what we've just found is that like, it's a small number of people who like acutely feel an issue strong enough to take action that very day or that very month. So essentially, like it, we were hoping for more people to come into the community and start implementing this stuff into their lives. One thing that we're doing about that, one repercussion of that is that we are, starting in January, we're going to roll out kind of a simpler version of the community. There's basically going to be two tiers of community. The first version is going to be if you just want the course, like just give me the exercises,

• 1:21:43Mark Manson?

  just give me the day by day, like the 30 day thing, just give it to me and I'll go do it on my own when I have time. We've been getting a lot of requests for that, so we're going to roll that out in January. And that's going to be like a lower tier version of the community. The higher tier version with all the accountability pods and the live webinars and the check-ins and the like, all the daily exercise, like that's going to still exist as well. It's just that's not going to be the only thing that's offered. So there's going to be like a lower tier and like a simpler tier, which is kind of like a solve, do it yourself pace. And then there's going to be the higher tier, which is like the actual community accountability. So those are both going to be offered. But the other thing that we're going to do is, is we're going to reintroduce ads and

• 1:22:27Mark Manson?

  sponsors at a very measured, slow rate. And that's something that I didn't want to do. It's something I told you guys I wouldn't do, but. As I just described, like, it takes almost a dozen people just to make this show. And it's like, it takes a lot more work than I appreciated or suspected at the time. And I think the reality of this is that it's a media business. And, you know, as much as I'd love to just put this out and take a hit on my balance sheet, it doesn't make sense. So, we're gonna start rolling out. We have a few sponsors lined up.

• 1:23:10Mark Manson?

  We're gonna be much stricter about them. So, we're gonna be very, very selective with who sponsors each episode. And then the sponsors are only gonna be played for non-community members. So, if you join the community, whether it's the lower tier or the higher tier, you don't have to listen to any of the ads. But if you're not part of the community, then there will be some ads. There will be some sponsors. But they will be highly curated, and there will not be many of them. Because ads fucking suck, and I don't think anybody likes them. But they are a reality of having a creator business in this day and age. And especially if you wanna have a full research team, and producers, and multiple editors,

• 1:23:54Mark Manson?

  and everything else. So, I hope you guys understand. But that also enables us to do a lot more fun and cool stuff, including getting a better fucking studio, which is also gonna happen next year. So, production's gonna get better. We're gonna have more episodes, a more wider variety of content. The content's gonna be more structured. We're gonna have more solutions available to you guys in terms of, you know, whether it's like, just the PDF, the free PDF guide with the summaries and all the research, or it's the self-guided courses, or if you want the full community access. All those things are gonna be available. I'm super excited. Like, this show has been...

• 1:24:37Mark Manson?

  Probably like one of the best decisions I've made in the last five years. Like it was, it was a very difficult decision to decide to do this. More than a couple of people told me I was out of my fucking mind, but it, it has been great. Drew and I are having a blast. I love this podcast format so much more than the old one. I think you guys do too. So we're just trying to make it as good as it can possibly be. So that's it for now. I will see you guys in the new year. Once again, purpose.app/bonus. If you want to get that bonus bundle, it's available until 11:59 Eastern on December 18th. You get the, the Purpose Solved course and you get a free webinar with, when you sign up

• 1:25:22Mark Manson?

  for the seven day free trial and the annual subscription for Purpose. And as always, join the Solve community. Go to community.solvpodcast.com. People are working through the Purpose course as we speak. Very excited for all the stuff we have going on back there and it's only going to get better in the new year. So thank you guys for listening. I appreciate all of you. I will see you in 2026.