Is the Self-help Industry a Scam? Insider Author Exposes the Truth | Mark Manson

I believe very, very strongly in debullshitizing the self-help industry. What's up, everybody? Mark Manson here. We still don't really know what works. We have not found anything to help people feel better about their lives.

Do you have a primary growth channel?

For whatever reason, my content, my brand, it just seems to be YouTube. YouTube is the most important platform. I put everything on hold. I had a number of contracts.

Fuck it all.

Yes, not doing it. I'm going to go do this YouTube thing.

Who do you think is crushing it at YouTube right now?

He's a great example. In a lot of ways, he kind of feels like the new GaryVee, and he just fucking grinds. A huge part of a content business is you just gotta fucking grind.

Your ambition in your 20s versus your 30s, how has that changed?

When I was doing all the shit in my 30s, I burnt myself out. I really sat down last year and asked myself, what's the legacy I'm gonna build? You don't start a business because like, oh, I'm gonna be happy with this business when I'm 60. No, you just fucking wake up every day and just keep building. It's an inevitability that we are always going to experience problems in life. I think a lot of what is considered self-improvement is learning how to direct yourself away from the problems you don't want and towards the problems you do want.

So, Mark, what do you think has made the self-help industry yucky? Is it like low-quality content and then like super high prices and just leaves everyone with a bad taste? Like, what is it?

So everything in self-help is very abstract, right? If I promise to make you happier, like, how do you measure that? There's not really any objective way to measure it. So it lends itself to very creative marketers because you can basically make any promise whatsoever.

Yeah.

And it's not really refutable, you know? So it tends to attract very aggressive marketing on the one side. And then on the other side, The customer base is particularly vulnerable, right? Like, what's the first thing you learn when you learn to copywrite? It's find the pain point. Like, find their insecurity and then just fucking needle at it.

And then hit the objections and they're like, yeah, yeah.

Just like mercilessly. It's like, oh, you're insecure about your body? Oh, let me tell you how ugly you are for like 4 paragraphs. And with self-help, you are dealing with a particularly vulnerable audience with like very deep insecurities and, a lot of people were at a very low point in their life. So you have this combination of like super aggressive marketers who are probably overpromising because it's more profitable, and then a very vulnerable customer base that you don't wanna fuck with their expectations too much because you might really like harm somebody, right?

Mm-hmm.

And I think the combination of those 2 things has just given it a slimy reputation. and left a very bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. Yeah, I do think it's getting better, but it still has a long way to go.

How big is your YouTube right now? Like, more so, how many views are you getting per month? And then subscribers, less of a big deal.

Yeah, so it's about 1 million subscribers. And then I think we're doing between 2.5 and 3 million views each month.

The first thing that we talked about was we had this mandate, the 3 of us, we're at this conference, right? We're at the All-In Summit. Yeah. on this Ferris wheel and I think maybe on this Ferris wheel or maybe we're walking or something, you were just saying, hey, YouTube is the biggest thing, the biggest opportunity probably in the next decade, which is why you're all in on it. So let's start with that first.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah. In my opinion, if you are in a creative field or in a content business, YouTube is the most important platform today, bar none. Like, no question in my mind personally. I think there's a lot of reasons for it. First of all, just best algorithm overall, best discovery. The format is such, you know, like TikTok has a great algorithm, but the format of the videos on TikTok, it's so short and punchy and it's impersonal that it's much harder to build a strong brand that people identify with.

You don't remember the people you watch on TikTok.

Exactly. You can spend 30 minutes on TikTok and not remember a single thing you just saw. Whereas on YouTube, like, There's something about the long-form video. It's higher resolution, it's higher, you know, it's larger. It builds that personal connection much more strongly. It's also like way better monetized. The CPMs on YouTube are significantly better than any other platform. And Google's just better at figuring out which ads to put where. It's also still growing. It's the fastest growing platform. Not only is it the fastest growing just on the internet, but it's fastest growing on televisions. If you look at like survey data of pretty much anybody under 25, like 99% of 'em are on YouTube, 70% on Netflix, and then like maybe 50% watch TV.

Is that your behavior? So when I eat lunch sometimes, I'm just watching stuff on YouTube. Like, is that what you do?

Totally.

Yeah.

And that was actually what kind of tripped me off on it is I noticed maybe 2, 3 years ago, I was like, wow, I kind of just spend all my free time on YouTube. And like, I don't even open Netflix unless I already know what I'm gonna watch.

watch. Yeah.

You know, and that got me kind of curious. I mean, it was a combination of that. And then there was another thing, which was in 2020 during the pandemic, my team and I, we decided to just kind of repurpose some old content in video form. It was just kind of like a little side project to do, 'cause that's, we were just doing a lot of that at the time. Didn't think anything of it and put it on YouTube. And not only like did YouTube just blow up so much faster than any other platform, but It was the only platform that we repurposed content on, and it was actually bringing in new people who had never heard of me before. And that had not happened in like 5 years. And I was like, holy shit, like this algorithm's still finding new people out there that have been, you know? So like, that's pretty insanely powerful.

You're basically making a new show right now. Mm-hmm.

I kind of looked into this maybe a year and a half ago, and I came to the conclusion, I'm like, okay, YouTube's the new TV. From 2018 through 2022, I spent a large part of that 4 years doing a feature documentary, doing a number of TV deals, and also following Will Smith around the world and watching all the movies and TV shit that he did. So I was very enmeshed in kind of traditional media/Hollywood for those 3 or 4 years. And I was, Not impressed. Like, I came away from it, it felt very much like a stodgy, old, bloated industry that spends way too much money and is losing relevance and can't really figure out—

Slow, outdated.

And is kind of up its own ass with importance. So it doesn't understand why it's losing relevance. And it was funny because I'm friends with a few people in that world, a few producers in Hollywood, Every single one I sat down with and talked to and was like, you know, I'm thinking about going all in on YouTube. Every single one said, great idea.

And these are like A-list celebs?

Not A-list. No, no, no.

These are producers. Okay, producers.

These are the suits.

Got it.

Every single one I talked to was like, that's a really good idea. Like, that's a smart move.

Well, the producers call the shots anyway. Yeah, yeah.

They're writing the checks. So that adds a little bit more context. So that, you know, coming into, I started doing a bunch of research and I came to this conclusion like, okay, YouTube, if my assumption is YouTube's the next TV, and where that means at this stage of the game, we're still very, very early in it in this market's development. So we're in the land grab phase, right? So it's like, man, whoever can scale up the fastest and the strongest is just gonna win.

Yeah.

It's just gonna have this massive advantage over the next 10, 20 years. And so that's when I kind of put everything on hold. I had a number of contracts, book contracts, TV contracts, and I was just like—

Fuck it all.

Yeah, I'm like, not doing it. And gonna go do this YouTube thing. And the fact that, this is the other thing too, is the fact that everybody thought I was crazy, like, reaffirmed that this was a good idea. I'm like, okay, good. Because if—

They all said it's good, it's like, uh-huh.

Yeah, exactly. It's too late. If everybody thinks it's a good idea, you're too late. But if everybody thinks you're fucking nuts, then it's like, okay, you might be on to something.

Awesome.

So yeah, the assumption is, You know, we're in a land grab phase. So looking at the terrain of YouTube right now, there's a ton of talent. Most of it tends to be very young. And so it tends to be— this was the other— so this is the other thing that, like, tripped me off, like, massive opportunity. The talent on YouTube tends to be extremely young and professionally inexperienced.

Mm.

So they're not good managers. They don't understand finance. They don't know how to manage money. They still don't have a super strong conception of like brand. I mean, some of 'em naturally do, but, you know, most of 'em are just kind of stumbled onto a thing that worked and they just keep doing it. So it's, I'm like, okay, this is great. I have a huge competitive advantage, right? And I looked at it, I'm like, okay, if a bunch of people, if this space is gonna grow massively and it's gonna get way more competitive, Like, how can I stay ahead of the curve or how can I do something that nobody else in my industry is doing? So everybody in my industry, which is kind of personal development, life advice, they do the classic thing. They sit behind a desk and they're like, here are 3 reasons that you're not getting all the work done you wish you were getting, you know, whatever. And then it's like, it's a 9-minute video and it's like, reason number 1. And then, you know, whatever.

Direct to camera.

Yeah, exactly. And I'm like, okay, And I had been doing a lot of that, and it had been fairly successful. I was like, okay, this is gonna die in like 2 years.

But it sucks the soul out of you when you're doing that. At least it does for me. It just doesn't resonate with me.

No, it's not that much fun to make. And then I've also noticed that I don't enjoy watching it anymore either. But my issue with it primarily are like, if I'm putting my strategic hat on, is that it's too easily replicable, right? So it's like any dude with a successful business or an interesting career can sit down behind a desk, write up like 3 reasons why you're not more productive, and do the exact same video you just did, right? So I'm like, okay, if we're looking 2 years ahead, this whole format's gonna be super saturated. So what can I do First of all, to elevate this type of life advice, make it more interesting, more enjoyable to watch. Second of all, do something that's like, has a moat. It's like super hard to copy and replicate.

A content moat.

Yes. And the conclusion I came to is ironic 'cause it kind of comes full circle back to the beginning of my career, which is do in-person coaching, but record it and then scale that content. So early in my career, Like some of the first money I ever made in my career was in-person coaching. But like a lot of people who coach, I stopped doing it 'cause it's fucking really hard to scale. Like you just can only take so many clients and it gets exhausting and you can only raise your prices so much. And so I, you know, after 4 or 5 years I stopped doing it.

What were you charging at your peak?

I used to charge by the session, like, 'cause I would go out with guys.

Yeah.

I think it was like, $2,500 a weekend or something like that. So it was like, it was like a Saturday and a Sunday.

Okay, got it. 2 days. Okay.

Yeah. So it'd be like maybe I guess it'd be like 10 hours, it's $250 an hour or something like that.

Okay.

And yeah, I think phone consultations was around the same. It was like $200, $300 an hour or something like that.

Okay.

So, so yeah, it's— I gave that up because it was impossible to scale. But then I kind of came to this realization. I'm like, you know, if you, if you make the coaching sessions super interesting, visually interesting, fun, dynamic, and then you film it, that's actually a very profitable way to scale it. And it's also, it utilizes skills and experience that most people don't have, which is like, I can fly into a random city, meet a dude with social anxiety, work with him for 2 days, and then like get him to do a bunch of things he didn't think he could do.

Mm.

Like, I'm very confident I can do that. So if I can just catch that on tape and make a video out of it, then like, that's pretty special.

Yeah. And your success rate, I think last time we talked about it was like 75, 80% so far?

Right now I'm 6 for 6. I actually just got back from Vegas.

Better than therapy.

Yes, so far, so far. I do have an unfair advantage in that we're vetting applications.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So like, and I kind of, at this point, I kind of know how to find people who are coachable. Like, that's a huge part of it is like finding people who are like gonna be receptive. But like, I just got back from, we just shot a video in Vegas last weekend. 2 women who were afraid to drive. And I'm talking like, you put 'em in a quiet neighborhood at 20 miles an hour and they're like white-knuckling, you know, the steering wheel. We got 'em into a NASCAR car on a racetrack. We got 'em into Lamborghinis on the Strip. And then at the end of the video, I told 'em, I said, you know, I didn't buy you guys a return ticket. You have to drive home. You have to drive back to LA from Vegas. And they did it. So it's like, we got it all on camera, you know, we've— it's a fucking mountain of footage.

Yeah.

But yeah, it's— right now I'm like batting 100. I'm sure I won't forever, but so, like, so far so good.

What's— the series is live right now on YouTube?

So we've posted the first 2 videos. We've got 3 more in the can. So this kind of gets into a whole— this could lead us into another topic, which is just the figuring out the actual production process. Like, I'm new at this stuff. And I've hired a team that's very talented, but I'm just realizing, like, there's just all these bottlenecks that I've had trouble predicting and coming up. So, like, we actually have way more footage than we were able to post at the moment, just 'cause, like, I just need to keep hiring people and putting 'em in the right spot and figuring out all of our processes and stuff. So this year has been, like, very, we're still on that learning curve, right? Like, we still don't have, like, the processes.

It's not like a MrBeast video where it's 15 minutes, but, like, he's clearly gone around the world.

Yeah, and he's got a team of, of 100 people and 7 editors and they've got everything like ironed out and everybody knows exactly what they're doing. Like, we're still in that process of building the team, training everybody up, getting everybody on the same page in terms of like, what should this content look like? And like, that's actually been the biggest challenge. It's funny 'cause the videos themselves have gone better than I expected. And then the team building side of it and the production side of it has been much harder than I expected. Yeah.

Well, one thing I want to tug on real quick is there's 2 things. One thing that I've— the fact that I've been talking about this on a lot of live podcasts just reinforces, I think, the fact that if you want to win at content today, you have to first define what is in your content box and what you're actually good at.

Yeah.

And then the second piece is what you brought up, which is the content moat, right?

Yeah.

So you combine the both, you'll actually have something unique and not just a me-too thing, which you've seen a lot of channels over the last couple of years. They just copy whatever someone else is doing right behind.

Totally.

And they win. By the way, for you to get to the million subs, like, were you compounding that over the years or did you hit your email? Like, what happened there to get it to the million?

It's actually, so I'd say the first 300K, 400K was pretty much just picking up followers from other platforms. Like, just sending out a couple emails, promoting videos on Twitter or whatever. Like, we got to, I think, 400K, like, super easy without even really posting anything that was that good. And then from there, I'd say, you know, there have been a handful of like viral videos that, that popped off and did super well. They probably brought in another like $400K. And then probably the last $200K is just existing for a long time. Yeah, you know, it's just kind of like organic discovery that happens.

Do you have like a primary growth channel? So like, is it your email list or like, are you big on Instagram? Like, what is it, do you think, that led to the— like, or is it a combination of all the social channels?

It's mostly YouTube at this— I mean, this is another reason why I'm pivoting so hard into it, is because, you know, so I started out as a blogger, primarily.

Mmhmm.

And that was great up until probably the late 2010s. And that started— that dried up. That has been drying up very slowly. It's been a very long attrition process. But it was pretty clear, you know, probably back in 2020, that it's like, OK, SEO's never gonna be the way it was before. People don't click off, they don't click on links. None of the platforms promote links anymore, right? So it's like you're never going to get that organic website traffic. The organic website traffic's probably just going to go down forever.

Yep.

And then 10 years it'll be gone. So accepted that. So in 2020, I started going really hard in the other social platforms. So Instagram, Twitter, Facebook to a lesser extent, LinkedIn. And we got some, Twitter and Instagram, we got some pretty decent traction on, but it just, it always feels like you're climbing up a hill.

Mmhmm.

Like, it almost feels like the algorithm's working against you. Like, on the Facebook platforms, they're absolutely working against you 'cause they want you to pay for reach. And then Twitter, I don't know, there's just some kinda weird mismatch between my brand and the audience that it just feels, uh, it feels like I'm just walking into a huge headwind. And so YouTube was the first thing that it just felt like there was a massive tailwind at my back. Like, it's just new people started showing up for the first time in like 3 or 4 years. Some of that is unique to me. I know there are some people who have been growing on Twitter a lot. I know there's some people who've grown on Instagram a lot. But for whatever reason, my content, my brand, it just seems to be YouTube.

Who do you think's crushing it at YouTube right now? We kinda talked about this.

Mm. I mean, the people I'm most impressed— I mean, obviously there's MrBeast, but, like, the people I'm most impressed with, there's kind of like a younger cohort that's coming up behind MrBeast that are, like, doing a bunch of interesting things. There's a guy named Arak. who's super smart. There's a guy named Ryan Tran, really unique. Um, the penny dude? Yeah, like very, very clever. Like does a lot with very little, like super lean team, low production value, and like fucking 5, 10 million views per video. What Hormozi's done this year has been really impressive. Like Hormozi's a great example of like, if you're somebody who has the business chops in another industry, and you come in and you make some very smart strategic hires, like you hire some, like he hired some really smart people from the content industry, like he found some of the best players, and you find them and then you strategize well and then you execute well over a long period of time. By long, I mean a year, but in content world, a year is not long at all. Yeah, you can crush it. You can go from 0 to 1 million in a year.

He's interesting to me because there's a period of time, maybe in the last 2 years, when I saw his channel rising quickly, this is when I had more subs I was like, oh man. But he's like, he overtook me in like a month, right? It's not like I have a lot of subs, but, um, he was public. He was just really consistent. And I think the way he talks is like, it just makes you feel smarter listening to it. And then he was consistent for a year. And then that's when he hired Caleb from Team GaryVee. And then the team came together and boom, it's like 14 to 20 people now or whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, so it's interesting too that he took GaryVee's guy because in a lot of ways he kind of feels like the new GaryVee to me. Like, he reminds me a lot of GaryVee when Gary started. Like, Gary's kind of— I don't wanna rip on Gary 'cause I like Gary a lot, but—

I get it.

Gary's content has kind of become like a parody of itself. You know, he's kind of just been recycling the same 10 talking points for 10 years. But I remember when Gary blew up in like 2011, it was just this breath of fresh air. It was like, oh my God, this guy's like so real and he's so legit and he like actually fucking has a, like he's actually built a business before. He's not just like, it's not a pyramid scheme, you know? And Hormozi reminds me a lot of that. Like he's an excellent communicator. He's a very distinct personality, which always plays well on social. And And he just fucking grinds, which in this day and age, a huge part of a content business is you just got to fucking grind.

Dude, so this is what I wanted to bring up. So before you came in, I was looking at this guy. I think he still has to be in his mid-20s or so, or early 20s. But this guy, Nate O'Brien, I believe. So he's got like 1.3 million subs on YouTube. And I saw him tweet this out. He's like, as of today, so today I am done with YouTube.

Yeah.

And then I look at the comments and people are like, why? Why are you done with YouTube? It's like, whoa, are you going to go on TikTok next? He's like, no, I'm sick of the grind. And like, you know, I'm just done with it, right? And then I remember having a conversation, I think last year with Jake Paul, right? So I think he had like 19, 20 million subs or whatever. And his whole thing is like, I'm never going to beat MrBeast and he's just better at the game. And like, I'm just going to focus on something else. And it's interesting because I'm, I'm like, I believe YouTube's number one. You believe YouTube's number one. So it's like it kind of ebbs and flows, right?

Sure.

What's your take on that?

You know, the burnout question, again, I think this kind of comes back to YouTube's a pretty young space. And so, you know, a lot of these guys are 22, 23 years old. They've been going balls to the wall for 5 years, and they're hitting their first bout of burnout. I mean, like, how old are you?

37.

Okay, I'm 39.

Yeah.

How many times have you been burnt out in your career?

More than I can count.

Yeah, like, it happens all the fucking time.

Yeah.

But it's like when you're young, it's kind of like your first breakup.

Yes. It hurts.

The first one, you're like, what's wrong with me? I'm never going to be okay. And then, and then you get over it. And the next time it happens, you're like, oh, it's this again, you know? So like, I think burnout's a pretty normal part of most careers and especially any entrepreneur. Like you talk to any startup founder, any tech person, like burnout's a very normal thing.

Plus there's variables too, because they probably didn't have teams earlier, whereas like, okay, we're shelling out more money for our teams, right? And taking some of the pain off so it doesn't hurt as much.

For sure.

Yeah.

And like a breakup, you learn, as you get older, you learn, you get better at dealing with it, right? So it's like now today, if I start to feel burnt out, I notice it much sooner than I used to. And I know like, take a vacation, take some time off, like back off a little bit, you know? Like it's not the end of the world. If you go away for a month, your audience isn't gonna disappear. Like there's kind of this irrational insecurity that a lot of people in this space have. So I sympathize with it, but I also kind of look at it and I'm like, yeah, it's just kind of a lack of experience. I also think burnout in the content space, it's very, like, obviously we all care about numbers. We all like hitting big numbers. It feels good. It's fun. It's like a video game, right?

Mm-hmm.

But if the only thing you're concerned about is the numbers, you're gonna get burnt out way faster. Like, you need to find, there needs to be something beyond simply hitting 1 million subs or 10 million subs or having 100K on your newsletter? Like, for me, it's just I believe very, very strongly in like debullshitizing the self-help industry.

I like that. Debullshitizing.

Like, I have a very, I mean, I have this cheesy page on my Notion for people when I hire them. I make 'em look at it when I hire them and I'm like, look, like, It's at the end of the day, we are like, if you can take a poorly framed piece of advice, like something super cheesy, you know, like The Secret or something, and you can distill that in something that is way more practical and helpful and usable and reach millions of people with that, like you just made the world more efficient. You made the world a better place, right? So it's like, Nothing in my industry, in the self-help industry, is new. Like, it's all been around for 2,000 years. It was all invented by the fucking Greeks and the Buddhists.

Yeah.

So what we're doing is we're repackaging and we're compressing. We're taking like a very difficult ephemeral concept and then like finding a couple sentences to make it concrete and impactful and immediate, and then putting it on Twitter or putting it in a video. that impact has real effects on people. And so, and there are good ways and bad ways to do that. And I think in the self-help industry, historically, people have done it in a lot of bad ways 'cause it's more profitable. And so I think I'm very passionate about the idea that like with the internet, with the content business online, you can be rewarded proportionally by doing it in a good way.

Right.

And I think Hormozi's a great example of that. A lot of my generation of creators is like James Clear, Ryan Holiday, myself. Like, I think we're all kind of, Tim Ferriss, like we're all kind of proof that that works now. So I'm very passionate about that idea. I'm also very passionate that this advice or this information should be as widely disseminated as possible. Like, it should be freely available to everybody on Earth.

Yeah.

Because it's important and everybody needs to, at least have a basic understanding of it. So that's what gets me up in the morning. And if I'm like tired at 4 p.m., the thing that gets me through the next 2 hours is like, oh, I'm almost to a million subs. Like, you know, like that's the cherry on top.

Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Well, I think your point is super important about just giving everything away for free because so Tim Ferriss, Ryan Holiday, you— I mean, even if you look at Hormozi, his launch, when he did his book launch recently, he just gave away like 10 courses away for free. And he made it seem like he was going to sell you something. He did the Russell Brunson stack. He's like, well, this is worth $10,000. It's worth $20,000. But I'm going to sell it for— and everyone's getting pissed right in chat. He's like, it's going to be $0, everyone. And then but like also at the same time, that is the most selfish thing to do because you build so much goodwill and you know it's going to come back to you tenfold.

The brilliance of Hormozi, and I think this is also what's so exciting about the creator space right now, is that he realizes that the people on that webinar, like, that's not actually his customer. It's, you know, this is, his whole content business is basically just one massive lead magnet for acquisition.com.

Yeah.

Like, he has something on the backend that is so potentially lucrative that, like, he can easily give up a million-dollar launch or a $10 million launch or whatever. Like, it's no sweat off his back. And I think you're starting to see that, you know, you mentioned the Paul brothers, um, MrBeast with Feastables. Like, we're just now discovering that that brand relationship between a creator and their audience is so fucking massively powerful for non-content businesses. And so I imagine that we're probably gonna end up at a point where where, yeah, it's just a massive amount of free value is given upfront. And then there's like associated businesses on the back end, you know, like, oh, by the way, buy my chocolate bar next time you're at the grocery store or, you know, drink Prime next time you're thirsty.

Right.

And that's actually where all the money's made.

There's an argument that in the next 10, 20 years or so, you're only going to have like the top-tier creators and then you're going to have this long tail, right? So it's like you mentioned the Maybe you agree with this because you just said the keyword land grab, right?

Yeah.

And when I think about land grab, typically I'm thinking about early-stage social apps, like, yeah, you got to take as much attention as possible. But land grab also typically means that you're willing to burn a lot of money to get there. So how are you thinking about this?

I'm thinking I'm burning a lot of money to get there. It's so funny, man. Like, I talked to— I'll talk to like some entrepreneur friends about like all the— they'll be like, how's the YouTube thing going? You know, I'll like be like, oh, doing this and doing that and the other thing. And every once in a while they'll be like, oh, so Are you making money? Yeah, are you making any money? I'm like, no, dude, I'm fucking, I'm like setting briefcases of money on fire left and right. It's the first time in my career I've done this. But to your point about the long tail versus like the handful of winners, the reality is that if you look at every creative industry, whether it's music, film, stage performers, like whatever, art, painting, You know, it's, you always end up with winners take most. Like, it's extremely, I forget what the word is for it. There's like a name for markets like this. But it's, yeah, you end up, there's the top 50 musicians on Spotify make like 80% of the revenue. I don't see why the creator space would be different. I do imagine that there will be a very long tail of like middle-class creators, especially like super niche creators.

Mm-hmm.

people who are, it's like lawn care for elderly people. You know, it's like, okay, yeah, that's probably like an $80K a year business or something. But yeah, you're probably gonna end up with maybe 1,000 mega creators. I'm not super high conviction in this, but I do think there's a real possibility that like the next, the 21st century major media companies are essentially born out of creator brands, right?

Yeah.

It's like, it's not, It's not that hard to imagine how MrBeast could become the next Disney in like 30 years.

Right.

Right? And if you look back at the history of the TV and film industry, all of the major TV and film studios were started within the same 15-year period, roughly 20 years after the technology was created. So it like, it takes a decade or two for everybody to kind of figure out how to make something. And then once people figure out how to make it, you get this, like, the rich get richer effect. And pretty soon you're like, you know, 2 decades after that, you've consolidated down to like, you know, 10 major studios that are making 90% of the content.

It's always like that. You know, you talked about this on a pod about how your level of fame right now is like, it's a good level because like, you know, every now and then you'll get noticed. Like, oh my God, great book, right? Yeah. But I think what you're swinging for here might be that top 1,000 fame level, if I'm not mistaken.

It's funny, my wife and I had a conversation about this. I am at the perfect level of fame. Like, I get recognized just enough that it's an ego boost.

Yeah, like a nice dopamine hit.

Yeah, like, you know, it's like makes my afternoon. Good job, Mark. Like, fucking crushing it. And it doesn't interfere with my day-to-day life. Like, I don't ever dread going to Whole Foods or whatever, 'cause, like, oh, God, people are gonna wanna talk to me, get a picture, whatever. Um, that said, like, you know, if that happens, I feel like I can manage it. One of the things I learned following Will Smith around for 2 years was that fame just becomes another system that needs to be managed, right? Like, his exposure to the public is something that is carefully managed. And the people on his team have protocols and processes. You know, it's like if he gets approached at the airport by a fan, everybody on his team knows exactly, like Will knows how he needs to respond. His managers know how they need to respond. His security know how they need to respond. So it's something that you, can structure another system around. Obviously, it limits your life in a lot of ways. Um, you know, it's not like Will can, like, go buy a turkey at Whole Foods. Uh, but it... it's... it does become manageable, and you can kinda reach a happy medium with it. I actually think, like, the bigger cost of fame is just more probably in friendships and personal relationships. Like, I think it's probably... I imagine it becomes much more difficult to make them and keep them. Anyway, that's just like a long-winded way of saying, like, you know, if that level of fame happens, whatever.

Yeah.

I'll deal with it. Yeah, it's just, I'm like so passionate about the opportunity that exists right now. And I've like really just built my career on trying to disrupt my industry and push it to a new level, new territory. And I, and I just feel like this is the moment to do it. So, you know, this was, this was at the All-In Summit.

I don't think you were, you were here for the last day, so maybe this was the last day. But I think something was said about how capital is easy to come by and you can basically, you know, almost like in a sense you can buy investment, but what you can't buy is real attention. And that's what you're going for, right? It's not like you're necessarily trying to— I don't think the angle is maybe you didn't even know what you'd be selling or pushing down the road, right?

Yeah.

It's more so, hey, let's get the attention first.

And it turns out that that's actually way more valuable, right? Like if you've got the attention, there's, there's always going to be monetization opportunities in this in 2023 and onward. Like if you have the audience, money will show up one way or another. Like you've got more than enough options. Whereas if you kind of like, I think the previous, the old mindset persisted up until recently, which was like, well, you've got to figure out how are you going to monetize, monetize off the back of this? What's your funnel gonna look like? You know, all this stuff. I think people are figuring out that that isn't as important as they thought. I also just think, and it's funny 'cause we were talking about Gary Vee a few minutes ago, this is one of those things that Gary Vee was saying like 10 years ago and it sounded kind of crazy. And then, and now it's like true. Like it actually, it took a long time. Like it's one of those things that he was like, oh yeah, in like 3 years it's gonna be like this. And obviously it wasn't like that, but—

Yeah.

Now we're 12 years ahead and it's like, oh shit, no, wait.

His whole thing about needing to create content and build a brand?

Yeah, that brand and authenticity is gonna be the most scarce asset. And that if you can build a relationship with your audience, you can take that anywhere and just, that will be the ultimate currency and everything else will flow out of it. And I remember him saying that in 2012 and I was like, dude, what the fuck are you talking about? I'm writing so many blog articles that I'm broke. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? And I think we are arriving at that point where he, he's correct.

Well, that's what the model is, right? I think it's you build the attention and then you can figure out the monetization engine. I think too, most of the time people are like, let's figure out the monetization engine first because people are greedy and they want their nut. But the longer you can defer, the better. First world problems.

I saw an interesting presentation at VidCon this year. So it was interesting, actually. He was— I forget which VC fund, but he was like a VC investor in the creator space. for many years. And then he actually left the VC world and is now basically running all MrBeast's business operations. He gave a presentation that was super interesting, and he was kind of talking about like why he made that jump. He said that back in the late 2010s up through like even 2020, 2021, he said there were a lot of, like all the investment in the creator space was going towards the services and software platforms that creators would operate on, right? So it's like the t-shirt platform or the newsletter software or whatever. You know, everybody was like, okay, what are creators gonna need? We'll invest in that platform and then we'll like capture a piece of, you know, the millions of creators who like sign up for this thing.

Most of them got torched.

Yeah. And it's like they got absolutely taken behind the woodshed. And he was saying the reason for that, he said the lesson that they had to learn the hard way was that actually 90, This comes back to the power law. It's a market of power, like it's a power law market. So coming back to the point about power laws, he said what it turned out was that 1% of the creators were actually deriving 90% of the revenue. And it actually wasn't very profitable to own the support platforms and systems and stuff that creators use because most creators don't make any money. There's like a couple thousand that make all the money.

Yeah.

So you're saying what VCs are figuring out now is like, just screw the platforms, go straight to creator, right? Go invest directly in Logan Paul or MrBeast or Jake Paul or whoever. And that comes back to the Gary Vee thing of like, if you build the audience, like, the money's gonna show up on your doorstep.

Right. 100%. Let me ask you this. I'm sure you've gotten this asked 1,000 times, but On the Will Smith piece, how did that book deal happen?

They reached out to me. He had wanted to write a book for a while, and he had met and talked to a few different authors. And for him, it was— it's funny because, you know, it was probably that year, it was probably like one of the top 3 or 4 book contracts that were signed in the entire industry. And, you know, for him, it's like a passion project. Like, it's like a rounding error on his tax return. Yeah, he had wanted to do it for a few years and he had kind of met with some authors on and off. And they contacted me, I think late 2018. And then I finally got to meet him early 2019 and basically just flew me out to a movie he was shooting. We just hung out for like 4 or 5 days and got to know each other, had a good chemistry. He and I have very complementary skill sets and personalities. Like he is very, He's very good at like micro stories. So like if you tell him like, hey, tell us about the time you auditioned for Fresh Prince, he'll tell like the most amazing, fun, charismatic story. But if you tell him like, hey, talk about that transition in your life between hip-hop career and TV, he like doesn't really know where to start. And so, and I kind of come from the other side. Like I'm very, I think very structurally, I think very organizationally, you know, like, what are the themes? How do you organize a person's life? What are the themes? And like, I'm never gonna sound like him. Like, even if I tried to write the way he talks, like, I probably wouldn't be able to. So we just found it complemented really well. Like, he just kind of, he needed somebody to like structure everything for him and kind of give him the canvas to like paint by numbers.

Mm-hmm.

And that's that's what comes really naturally to me. So I spent a few days with him and then I pitched him on an outline. You know, like the— I think the last night I was out there, he was like, he was like, so what do you know? What do you think? Like, if we did a book, what would it be?

Yeah.

And I told him, I was like, I was like, give me one night and I'll show you something tomorrow. And he was like, okay. And so then the next— stayed up till like 2 a.m., like typing something up. Showed up at breakfast the next morning with my laptop and just kind of showed him an outline, just like boom, boom, boom. Here's how we organize it. Here are the beats. Here are the main themes. Here's the title.

Yeah, we had a, we had a book club. It was hosted by the founder of Morning Brew, Alex. And the first book that we picked was the Will Smith book.

Oh, cool.

And then, yeah, that was, that was actually the first book of yours that I read.

Oh yeah?

Not The Subtle Art. Yeah.

That's cool. Yeah. The other thing he wanted too is that he really wanted it to be— he wanted there to be takeaways. Like, he wanted people to be able to read it and, like, take lessons from it. But he's never been in this world. So, like, he, he kind of, like, didn't know exactly, like, where those lessons should be or how it should be written or whatever.

Yeah.

So I helped out a lot with that side of it as well.

Well, I got to ask you, the reason I even talk about the book in the first place is because I've done a book. I don't think I ever plan on doing another book. Why is it worth it to do the book? Because doing the book is such a pain in the ass.

The counterargument would be everything's kind of a pain in the ass, but—

True.

A lot of it depends on—

But this is a really big pain in the ass.

Yeah, books, dude. Books are, they're massive. Like, the amount of time and energy that goes into them. The beauty of a book, if it hits a certain threshold and hits like a certain longevity, a book can last longer than you, right? Like, and I don't know if there are many mediums that that's true. Like this podcast episode, it probably won't be listened to 10 years from now. Vast majority of YouTube videos are not watched 10 years later. But there are so many books that are read 10 years later, 20 years later, 100 years later. Like there's some sort of longevity.

There's a Lindy effect to it.

There's absolutely a Lindy effect. Like there's some sort of like longevity to just to the format that's very valuable if you can kind get above that threshold of quality that like this is gonna be read for a long time. That said, getting there is extremely hard. Again, it's a power law thing, right?

Yeah.

It's like everything, the stat is, I think the average book, it's really funny actually. So the average book I think sells like 140 copies and the average author buys 40 copies of their own book or something. Like it's like, It's really hilarious. Most publishing profit comes from like maybe 10 or 12 books each year.

How's your marketing team? How's the content team right now structured? And how much, roughly, how much do you think you're spending a month on this?

The content team right now is, I'm trying to separate video from everything else. So everything else, honestly, I could probably run everything that's not YouTube or video production related or podcast related, which we're gonna launch next month. If you remove all that stuff, I could probably run everything else with 2 people. And I did run a team. It was just a team of 3 people for many, many years, pretty much up until I decided to like start distributing on all the social platforms. So just newsletter, blog, and social media, like non-video social media, I could do with 2 people. So a 3-man team. As soon as you add podcasts, that probably gets to 4 people. And then once you add video, like really high-quality video, now you're talking probably another 4 or 5 people just for the video side. So right now we're at 8 and I'm scrambling to hire more people. So we'll probably end up at 10 to 12.

Got it. So similar to Hormozi and Cody, I have to assume you're spending anywhere from like $80,000 to like $150,000 a month. Something like that. I'll just throw a range out there.

On people?

People plus content in general.

Are we counting hosting and shit like that, or no?

No.

OK.

Um...

Should we? I mean, well, that's the funny thing, is like... these days, a fucking newsletter platform is expensive as fuck.

What do you host it on?

ConvertKit.

Oh, OK.

But it's like... I mean, if you've got a list of like a million people...

They'll get you.

Yeah, dude, that's tens of thousands of dollars, Yeah. So yeah, I mean, it's that— that's expensive though. My hosting bill is super expensive these days. I would say if you add everything together, all the video production, video team, I don't think we're over $100K. I'd say I would ballpark it probably $75-ish, probably between $60K and $80K, somewhere in there.

Yeah. And I keep asking this question just so people understand that, hey, to build this content team, it's not free. It's like, oh, well, I don't spend on paid ads. Okay, you're still spending on your content team. Oh, for sure.

It adds up.

So what do you think your monthly reach is right now with all the channels combined?

I'm like tempted to grab my phone and start looking at my analytics for each platform, 'cause I haven't thought about it. It's definitely, you know—

Over 20 million?

Maybe 20.

That's solid.

I don't know. Like, I think if you add my following across all platforms, it's close to 4.

Yeah. I'm just looking at impressions.

Yeah.

I think it's probably 15, 20.

Probably.

We'll see later. Yeah, but like, and the reason I asked is because I think when you become like a top 1,000 guy and we do this interview in 10 years or whatever, it's going to be like hundreds plus.

For sure.

So that's the difference. How many books have you sold so far? 20 million on Subtle Art. And how about the Will Smith book?

20 million is total.

Total. Okay.

Subtle Art's probably, probably like 16, 15, 16, something like that.

Yeah. Got it. That's a lot. Yeah. So how many edits did you go through? How many drafts did you go through on Subtle Art?

Like, fucking dude, that's how I'll answer this.

Because by the way, just to preface for everyone, typically you might do 6 or 7. That's like the average, but they're not trying to write average books. So yeah.

Honestly, I couldn't even tell you. I wrote a whole version of that book that was just bad, like straight up bad. I think I showed it to my wife and maybe 1 or 2 friends.

Was your wife like, This sucks.

In so many words. I mean, she was very kind about it, but, you know, she's like, I'm not sure if this chapter is it, honey. But like, no, it's just, it was bad. It wasn't there. Like, the ideas were there, but it was just executed very poorly. I'd say maybe half of the content in that first round survived in the second one. And then with the second one, the second round is actually what ended up becoming Subtle Art. You know, I myself, I probably did 3 or 4 rounds. I did probably a couple rounds with my wife and friends. Then it went to my editor. My editor and I did 2 or 3 rounds, and then it went to a copy editor. It did 1 round with the copy editor. So yeah, if you add it up, it's at least 10 revisions.

And I want to illustrate to The version I did just to show like what crap looks like versus like amazing. When I talk about drafts, it's like, oh, I'm still editing on— like, I'm not— I'm trying my best not to delete because, you know, what did I say? I forgot what it was. But for you, you're actually tearing up half of it and then maybe the next draft, maybe you're tearing up another half of it.

Yeah, the first draft of Subtle Art was like, I think, 110,000 words. Which is roughly, I think, like 440 pages. The second version was about 70,000 words. So immediately cut about 30% from version 1 to version 2. And then I think the version I turned in to my editor was maybe 60,000. And then the version that got published was like 52,000.

And the reason I'm even talking about this right now is I just want people to understand it takes a lot more work to do New York Times quality. Oh, for sure. Yeah.

And not only that, but like a lot of that content in that book had been market tested on my blog and market tested on Facebook, you know? So it was like for every idea that made it into the book, there was probably 1 or 2 ideas that were tried on the website that nobody liked or nobody shared. And I was like, okay, well, let's skip that one, you know?

Can we— okay, can we go back to the blog for a second? Because I'm an SEO dude, right? So yeah. Back in the day, I mean, like you were— it sounds because self-help is very— there's the TAM is everybody, right? So how were you? Were you just growing? You're just writing and then it just started to compound on its own. I'm assuming you're not doing any link building or anything. It's just, you know, good-ass content.

Any, any like kind of more formal SEO attempts that we made over the years of like link building or whatever didn't really pan out. I had a lot of just natural virality. Like, I had a very— I had a period like 2012 to like 2016, I had a bunch of articles go super viral. So I like my backlink profile is pretty damn robust naturally.

Well, but is it because you're pushing on Facebook and Twitter and just started going viral and everyone just started linking to it? Is that okay?

Yeah, primarily. You know, my big competitive advantage early on, you know, because I tried SEO stuff and I was just bad at it. My big competitive advantage early on that I attribute a lot of my success to is I think I just figured out before most people, you know, Facebook rolled out their newsfeed in 2011. And I think I figured out before most people that you, the same way you optimize a thumbnail and a title on YouTube, like you can optimize a title and a cover photo on Facebook to get a lot of shares and clicks. And so I started writing my articles very specifically to optimize Facebook virality. and just took advantage of it.

It's like BuzzFeed back in the day.

It's exactly what BuzzFeed did. Upworthy was another one back then. Upworthy was actually the one.

Upworthy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I remember seeing them pop up in so many spots and I was like, it was clear they were doing it on purpose and like kind of manufacturing it. And I was like, huh, I wonder, like, if I did that for my blog, like, what would that look like?

How much traffic were you getting to the blog each month?

At its peak, I think it peaked in like 2014 or 2015. At its peak, it was like 2, 2.5 million uniques each month. And I think probably 6 or 8 million page views.

It's a lot. And the reason I even ask right now is just because you started with that and you focused on that before deciding to move into another area.

Yeah, I actually think it took me longer to move into other areas because I was so like, because the blog had been so successful, like I was very hesitant to move away from it. Like, I actually kind of like was fighting against the tide, trying to like keep it going instead of building a podcast or a YouTube channel or something.

Going back to personal growth, I think you, you had a statement about how your ambition in your 20s versus your 30s, how has that changed?

Well, and I'm about to hit 40, so that's part of it too. 20s, my ambition was literally just make enough money to live wherever I want and party as much as I want. Like, that was pretty much it. And I successfully did that. I think I didn't hit a 6-figure income until I think it was like 29. Up until that point, it was just lifestyle business, taking as many coaching clients as I needed to, like, run off to Thailand or Argentina.

With the babes.

Yeah. Like, get laid a few times, fly home. You know, like, that was pretty much it. Yeah.

Yeah.

It wasn't— it's funny 'cause as I approached 30, I kind of had this mini midlife crisis of like, oh shit, I need to have a career. I can't just do this forever, right? Like, I don't wanna be 40 and still like flying to Argentina to like hook up with girls at 4:00 AM. So that was when I actually really sat down and I started thinking about building a brand and taking it more seriously, systematizing stuff, hiring people. And that was, yeah, that was around 28, 29. My 30s, it was all about, so this is really interesting because in the early 2010s, creator businesses were still, they were still kind of seen as like not real businesses. Like, okay, that's cool. You've got millions of readers on a blog and like you're popular on Facebook, but like you don't really have a job, do you? You know, I used to get kind of these looks and questions from family members at like Christmas and stuff. They're like, but like, what do you actually do?

Yeah.

Like, they didn't understand, even though I was making 6 figures and had like a small team and was doing all this stuff.

Same trend as the YouTube trend right now.

Yeah, 100%. You don't really make money. Yeah, it's not really a job, is it? So there was kind of this chip on my shoulder in my 30s, I think, of like proving I'm legit, you know, get the book deal, become a bestseller, you know, get to the top of the New York Times list. to prove I'm legit. They're like, this is a real career. I'm actually an expert. I actually know what I'm talking about. And then when the book took off, it just opened up all these other opportunities to do more books, to do the Will Smith thing, to do the movie. I did like a big exclusive podcast with Audible. You know, it's like all this stuff like, oh man, like real companies are giving me real money to make a real thing. And that was exciting for a while, but then I kind of realized after a few years, which is what I said earlier, which is like, it's a little bit of like emperor has got no clothes going on. You know, like it's traditional media is shrinking drastically. Nobody's making money and nobody knows why. And so coming back to the creator space, I realized like everything's like really like, this feels like the moment, like the bottom of the S-curve. So coming into my 40s, there's like a very real, and then on top of that, when I was doing all the shit in my 30s, I burnt myself out, kind of like lost the fun, you know? I don't know, some TV studio's like, oh, here's a bunch of money to, like, consult on this script or whatever. And I'm like, yes.

Yeah.

'Cause I'm just saying yes to everything. And really, like, I don't wanna do any of it. Coming into my 40s, I really sat down last year and asked myself, like, what are, like, the 1 or 2 things I actually give a fuck about that I wanna do for the rest of my life? What's the legacy I'm gonna build? What's, like, the business I wanna have? Stop doing shit that's not fun. Stop doing shit that's, like, not sustainable. Morgan Housel has this great thing that he says, like, if it's not sustainable, I don't do it. which I think is very, very wise. Like, if you can't see yourself doing it 5 years, 10 years from now, then like, why start?

What are those 2 things?

The creator business, you know, like going all in on creator economy, video content, and honestly just like writing in general. Like, I just, I'm so, what I've discovered is I'm so much happier when I'm in control, when I have creative control, I'm making branding decisions, business decisions. It's so much more satisfying and invigorating for me than dealing with a big publisher or studio or something who's got like, wants me to get on another Zoom call with 9 people and I don't know what any of them do. And they've like, anyway.

Yeah.

It's, this is just so much more fun. And so for me, my 40s is very much like, okay, this is the moment to like, you know, leave your dent in the universe, as Steve Jobs would say. Take it seriously. You're a grownup now. You know how to manage, you've got money, like fucking use it. Because, you know, up until now, I don't think I either had the maturity or the experience to like really take advantage of it.

And plus you also said there's different seasons of like, you might say in this moment, yes, I'm an author, but that might change, right? So can you elaborate on that one a little more? I think that's a helpful framing.

Yeah, so that was actually strangely huge for me was I became most well-known for being an author. I still am most well-known for being an author. Most people know me as an author. And without even realizing it, I just kind of adopted that as like, oh, I guess I'm an author, you know? And coming back to the creator world and doing content, like rebooting my content business, it showed me, it's like, dude, you were successful before you were an author. Like, you don't, you're not necessarily just an author. Like, you can be whatever the fuck you wanna be. You don't have to ever write a book again if you don't want to. And it's, It's so simple, but that thought—

It's freeing.

Like, it's so liberating. Absolutely liberating. And so like, that has been a big shift in my thinking about myself.

I think that's a pretty big unlock. Like, I'm more trying to think about or figure out what your frameworks too are to get to these philosophical unlocks again.

Well, in my experience, it's just been like, run yourself into the ground and then like, Like, when you literally can't do anything else, like stop and think about like why you did that.

Got it, so burnout.

Yeah, exactly. Got it. Exactly. Will's book came out November '21, and then my movie came out. I took 6 months off right when I moved to LA. And I originally intended to take like 1 or 2 months off 'cause of the burnout. But I was like so run into the ground that it turned into 6. And it just turned into this, part of it too was like I had hit that, I guess, financial escape velocity of like, I literally never have to work again if I don't want to. The combination of those 2 things of like, okay, all the stuff I did the last 5 years clearly just ran me ragged. And looking ahead, like, I literally never have to do anything I don't wanna do ever again if I don't want to, right? So there's a huge amount of liberation in that. And so there was just like this very honest, slow conversation with myself over the course of months of like, what do you want to do? What do you want to do? Like over and over and over again.

By the way, you said this too. You said that you can stop the power struggle at any time.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so I think this applies here, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's— we sign up for status games, I think, without realizing we signed up for them. And this kind of ties into like chasing numbers. Like the chasing numbers is the status game in the content business. And And it's very easy to get sucked into that and lose track of that there are other things that matter. And I think that chip on my shoulder that I mentioned earlier of proving I'm legit, proving this is a real business, proving being able to go home to Christmas and be like, yeah, I actually do have a job.

Yeah.

I think I didn't realize that that put me— I signed up for a status game and I wasn't aware I was signing up for it. And status games as a rule burn you out because you can't win them and it's never enough. So at some point, the only way to win The only way to win them is to stop playing.

That's a perfect segue. So how can people stop caring about what people think about them? Because I don't think you— I think you're always gonna care what people think, right? But it's like, what can you do to mitigate it?

We will always care what people think about us. Like, it's just a fundamental part of our wiring. The question is, what metric are you using to judge how people care? Like, I had a tweet a long time ago, and it said that you'll never stop seeking validation from others So seek validation from better people and for better reasons. So like, you can sign up for a stupid status game, like who has the coolest car, right? Like, I think we all kind of know that like, that's a dumb status game, especially if you don't have any money. But plenty of people sign up for it, right? So like, that's an example of choosing to seek validation from like a bad source and for bad reasons. So find better reasons. And I signed up for status games, which probably at the time helped me. You know, it was like, become a bestselling author, do a bunch of traditional media, you know? And it's like, that was helpful for a short period of time, but it ended up getting me in trouble. So—

How did it get you in trouble?

It put me in a position that like, I felt like I couldn't say no to opportunity. That world, like the Hollywood and publishing and everything, like you're only as good as your last deal. And so it always felt like, okay, if I don't take this book deal, they'll never talk to me again. Or if I don't agree to help with this script, they'll never talk to me again.

So I keep thinking about, does this guy want to talk about the movie at all?

Yeah, yeah.

What is the movie at a high level? And it doesn't seem like you really enjoy that experience, but you can tell me.

Well, to be honest, I enjoyed the production process. I really— so the production company, which was a Kiwi company, called GFC, shout out to them. Really nice people, really liked them. The shooting of the movie itself was very enjoyable. The director was a really nice guy. Like, no complaints. Where things got really dissatisfying was when it came to the studio and the business side, right? Like, how are they gonna roll out the movie? What's my involvement with it? What are the— what's the promotional obligations? And that's where our incentives diverged, because I've got this huge audience online. Obviously, it's in my interest, like, just put it on Netflix or Hulu, and then I'll just promote the shit out of Netflix or Hulu. Like, just like, everybody go to Netflix, watch my thing. But that's not where the studio makes the most money. The way the studio makes the most money is if I send all my audience to a bunch of tiny shitty theaters or some pay-to-download platform that nobody's heard of.

Hmm.

They wanted me to do that. And I was like, no, absolutely not. Like, there's no way I'm gonna do that. And so it just, there was just this really—

Tug-of-war?

Yeah, and it was just like a very, it was very clear after a while that like, they exist in a different world than I do. And we clearly don't see each other's perspective at all. And they weren't very transparent about things. Like, they would kind of try to bullshit me 'Cause that's the other thing about if you're the talent, like nobody ever is, everybody just kisses your ass. Like they just tell you how smart you are and how excited they are to work with you, even if you're a total dick.

Yeah.

So I was like, this is stupid. Like this makes no sense for my audience. I would try to explain step by step, like here's my online business, here are my incentives, here's what's best for my audience, here's why I'm not gonna do that. And they're like, ah, you know, it's so great working with you. We're so excited. You know, why don't you, we're gonna come back tomorrow with a new PowerPoint and we're gonna get this figured out. And then they show up the next day and the PowerPoint's exactly the fucking same.

Same shit.

And I'm just like, okay, yeah, this is not, this doesn't make sense. So that part sucked. But it was very, very illuminating for me because it gave me a glimpse into that industry, how it operates and how dysfunctional it is at the moment. Like how nothing makes sense. Like they have no idea how to make money off, like unless you're Marvel, like they have no idea how to make money off you. Nothing's making money. So I can kind of sympathize with like where they're coming from. They probably thought like, oh, this guy's got 4 million followers, let's give him a movie. I bet he'll promote it and we'll make a bunch of money. Well, it's like, no, I'm not gonna do that. So it's— I sympathize with where they're coming from, but it also made me realize like, you know, the budget for the movie was probably around a million bucks. First of all, First of all, $1 million can buy you a lot of really good YouTube videos. Second of all, if they just gave me the rights and I sold it myself through my website or whatever, like, I'd probably make a huge profit and crush. So like, what am I doing? Like, why am I even signing these deals or doing these projects?

This kind of goes back to focusing on, A, what you're good at and what you actually enjoy doing. And I think most people don't learn that until maybe some— I think most people don't even— they never learn this.

Sometimes you have to learn the hard way, right? Like getting tempted into a thing, a bunch of things, a bunch of like kind of prestigious or sexy things that you don't actually like, but you kind of talk yourself into liking it because it's, it's going to scratch some itch your ego's got.

So you have a quote here. Learning more is a smart person's favorite way to procrastinate. It kind of sounds like mental masturbation. Like, is that what it is?

For sure. Sure. This is something I actually learned very early on when I was coaching, 'cause I would, every once in a while, I'd have a client who was like off the charts intelligent, like just massive big brain. And they were often the hardest people to coach because anything you told 'em that they didn't wanna do, they would come up with the best, most convincing reasons not to do it. And then I would spend the entire coaching session like arguing with them. And where is it like if I— I don't wanna call anybody stupid, but like if I coached like a guy who was, you know, just kind of your average dude, not super smart, I'd be like, hey, go do that.

Oh yeah.

Say this. And they'd be like, okay. And then they'd go fucking do it and it'd work. And it's like, wow, this is so much easier. So one of the things that, you know, I've like long been aware of is that when it comes to emotional issues, intelligence can actually work against you. Because when you're smart, you're better at rationalizing and you're better at excuse making and you're better at learning. So like intellectualizing. And those are all forms of emotional avoidance. And so if you're super smart and you have an emotional problem, you're going to be much better at finding ways to not deal with it than somebody who's not smart.

Similar to this, so the average email that you get, Is, how do I stop feeling bad? And what's your typical response to that?

My most typical response to readers when they send in their life problems is, is to simply let them know that they're normal, that it's— this is normal. It's okay. I think one thing that happens a lot is that when we deal with something very painful in our lives, first of all, we feel alone. And so it's very easy to convince ourselves that nobody understands what we're going through. And I have a very interesting and privileged position in that I am exposed to thousands and thousands of people's life issues throughout the year. And I see people from all over the world, every country, every gender, every background. You start to notice that it's just the same half a dozen things that just pop up in different forms in different cultures. And so, you know, if somebody sends me an email I don't know them. I don't know their life, their values, their history, their relationships. So like, I can't, it's very hard for me to like say anything that's like super tangible and useful. But what I can do pretty reliably is be like, oh, it's another one of these emails. Like, gotten 900 of these this month. There's nothing weird about you. These situations hurt. It's fine to let it hurt. I hope it gets better, whatever.

You talked about how happiness comes from solving problems. Can you elaborate on that? Because everyone just wants to be happier, so I figured you might have this mastered already.

Sure. Yeah, I'm always happy, always, like 24/7. No, I think I like to frame happiness as the process of moving from one problem to a slightly better problem, or from moving from problems you don't want to have to problems you Right. Because it's an inevitability that we're always gonna experience problems in life. We don't have full control over the world. We don't always get what we want. Life is finite. We all age and die. Problems happen. So the question is, are you currently confronting and dealing with the problems that you wanna be confronting and dealing with? Confronting and dealing with problems that are kind of just thrust upon you. And I think a lot of what is considered self-improvement is learning how to direct yourself away from the problems you don't want and towards the problems you do want.

I think that's what Tony Robbins said. It was— maybe it was Tony Robbins or maybe he quoted somebody else, but success is waking up and being able to work on whatever it is that you want to work on.

Yeah.

And then this excerpt I pulled from your book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. So trying to avoid rejection is a Sense of entitlement.

Yeah, because it's, if you try to organize the world in such a way that you never feel rejection or failure, the assumption there is that you are above feeling disappointment, right? Like that your feeling of contentment or satisfaction is more important than whatever is happening in the world around you, or is more important than what the person you're interacting with wants for themselves, right? So I think there's a very strong correlation between a sense of entitlement and just an inability to deal with reality. And the more we're able to deal with reality, the more we're able to destroy that sense of entitlement within ourselves.

My friend was dating this Russian woman, and she's being— he said she was being really difficult. And he said, why are you being so difficult? And he said, She said, there's no strength without resistance. As you're saying that, it reminded me of that. So, yeah.

It's funny because within the context of relationships, I mean, this is the thing, right? Is like, I think some people kind of naively believe that the perfect relationship, there's no fighting, there's no disagreement. You're always on the same page all the time. And I actually think that would be a boring relationship with zero intimacy. I think part of what creates the sense of intimacy and closeness and trust is the fact that you have different values and you clash about those values, but you still respect each other and choose to be with each other despite those differences in values. Like, that's what makes it meaningful.

I think you were saying on a podcast that therapy has the biggest hit rate. It's not like going to any conference. It's not reading a book or anything like that when it comes to not just personal growth, but happiness in general. Can you elaborate on that? Can you maybe give some examples of how you've done this?

Sure. So I, you know, this investigation maybe started with my own insecurity. When I started to blow up in my career and people started to take what I said seriously, I didn't have like a, I wouldn't call it a crisis, but I take very seriously kind of the ethical, the ethics of the situation that I'm in, right? Like if millions of people read my material, then if I give bad advice, that has real effects on my audience and on the world. So I became deeply interested maybe 7, 8 years ago of like, okay, what actually works, right? Like, what modalities and therapies have they studied and what are the results? Like, what's the hit rate? Which form of therapy is the most effective? Are weekend interventions effective? Are books effective? Like, they've actually done empirical research on self-help seminars, on self-help books.

Yeah.

And it's actually super interesting. So therapy is the most effective intervention. It's the classic for a reason, right? But what's fascinating is that even therapy, well, first of all, 2 things are really interesting about it. The first one is there are dozens and dozens of different modalities of therapy. Like there's like an alphabet soup, you know, it's like CBT, DBT, REBT, like I could list a dozen of 'em. Every single one they measure, and they measure outcomes of patients, they all top out around 40%. Like, all these different schools of thought, all these different academics and brilliant minds like Freud and Adler and all these people have, like, come up with all these different modalities of intervening in people's lives.

What does that mean, by the way, when you say 40%?

40% report feeling better.

Got it.

A year or two later.

Got it.

report no difference. That's just across the board. Every, like, so like when people come to me and they're like, what type of therapist should I get? I'm like, it doesn't matter. Just find somebody you like. You know, find, like, the most important thing is just that you go and talk. Like, that seems to be the common denominator. So therapy kind of tops out around 40%, which by the way is pretty shitty. Like, that's like anything, a 40% win rate.

And that's the best.

That's as good as it gets, right? Self-help content is generally, it's a weaker effect. It's around the same. It's like 30 to 40% report feeling better, but it's a weaker effect rate. So it's like if therapy takes you from, let's say from a scale from 1 to 10, your happiness is a 5, therapy might take you, like a successful therapy intervention might take you from 5 to 7 or 5 to 8. Self-help will take you like 5 to 6. So it does something. It's a little something and it doesn't always work, but it's like, it's something, right? There are 2 reasons I find this significant. One is, is that basically even the top experts in the field of psychology who have spent their entire lives studying this and practicing it in a clinical setting still are not very successful at it. Like, we still don't really know what works. We have not found anything that is a consistently highly efficacious intervention to help people feel better about their lives. That's the first thing that's super interesting. The second thing that's super interesting is that everything is kind of roughly the same. So what seems to work seems to have nothing to do with the actual theory itself. You know, like I could come up with all these cool little models and I mean, and this is, you see this in the self-help world a lot, right? Like you go to a Tony Robbins seminar and he's got all these models and he's got like charts graphs and he's like, well, you know, we start here and then we go here. And it turns out like none of that shit matters. Probably what matters is the fact that you're sitting in a seminar room surrounded by a bunch of people who are in similar life situations as you, you're interacting regularly with them, and your feelings and intentions are being validated by somebody you respect. That seems to be like the common thread through all of this. And to me that was very relieving because as just just quote unquote a random dude on the internet. I think I had like a lot of imposter syndrome around like, who am I to be giving advice? Like, why should anybody take me seriously? And when I dove really deep into it, I realized like, oh, well, nobody really knows what they're doing. So, you know, like, and actually what I'm doing, which I guess this kind of ties into marketing, which is reaching a very broad set of people and exposing them to to ask these questions of themselves, like fundamentally, that is the value.

Do you think therapy and coaching can go hand in hand sometimes? Because sometimes the way I look at my, my coach is he's got range, right? He's been a VC, he's been a coach before, and he's also a good father too. Right. And so it's like, I feel like good therapy just comes from good asking good questions. Like, what's your take on that?

I kind of put life problems, life issues in the 2 buckets. One bucket is people who are in a bad place and want to get to an okay place. You know, you're depressed and you want to not be depressed, or you're somebody in your life, you had a horrible breakup and you want to get over the breakup, right? I think therapy is probably better for that. The second bucket is you're okay, but you want to be great. And I think that's where coaching comes into play more. Therapists don't really, like, if you come into a therapist's office and you're like, everything's pretty good, like, I'm pretty happy.

Yeah.

But I wanna be fucking crushing it. Like, a therapist can be like, well—

So therapy's level 1.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like therapy is kind of like bandaging the wound.

Yeah.

Whereas like coaching's kind of like building the muscle.

Oh, interesting. Never thought of it that way. Clearly you've thought about this. Let me ask you, I mean, 'cause when I've listened to a handful of your podcasts, it seems like you've really thought through all the different frameworks.

I mean, I've been doing it 15 years. I mean, first of all, even before I did this professionally, this was— I was a self-help junkie. You know, I read all the books and watched a bunch of tapes and stuff. And then when I started doing it professionally, I took it very seriously, studied everything, researched everything, read a bunch of old philosophy and psychology. So yeah, it's— you accumulate, you know, each one of these things that I'm saying is probably 2 to 3 years for me to arrive at that conclusion. But it's just I've been doing it long enough now That I can kind of just spit these things out.

The last leg of this podcast will be on the relationships piece with dating and all that. But you did mention that you're bullish on communities long term. And I think that's super interesting because to me, like, let's say we're recording this in— it's a software company, right? Office. And I think if you want to retain your customers for longer, you need to build community because it's a retention mechanism. So how are you thinking about community and how are you building it?

I just feel like life is so atomized that in communities, it's a fundamental human need. Like, we all need to feel like we're part of some sort of group. So there's less supply each year and the demand is staying the same. So it just makes sense to me that it's gonna become more valuable and more important. I don't think anybody's necessarily solved it, really. A lot of companies and organizations have tried, but I just feel like it's something people are gonna want more of. In-person events, in-person interactions, even excuses to just like meetups, excuses to get together with like-minded people.

Well, I mean, we were talking about this before, like that you have been used to working remote forever, but now that you have the video team, the video squad that you're putting together, it's a game changer.

Oh, so much. Like working in person, Yeah. And so much. And it's funny too, because, so with written content, I don't think being in person really matters at all. You know, if I type up an article on a Google Doc, I can send it to you and get feedback and notes. Like, it's not really any more efficient for us to be in a room together. The nature of video, being in a room, watching the same thing at the exact same time, commenting on like, oh, notice like how the light here looks weird or whatever. Like, it is so much more efficient. It's 100 times more efficient and it's more fun. Like, it makes the process more fun. You don't have to like upload fucking gigabytes and deal with Frame and all this shit. You get to sit in a room and it like feels like play. So I'm like a recent convert to in-person working environments.

And you also said this, I mean, outside of the working environment, people are longing for community because one, and dating is getting harder, right? And people aren't getting married. A lot of people aren't having kids, right? So people, you mentioned this, people are going to play pickleball, right? So—

It could be anything. Like, and it's, you know, work's going remote, family formation is happening less often, people are becoming less religious. You know, those are the 3 most binding social commitments that pretty much all human civilization people had, right? It's like you went to work, saw the same people every day. You went to church, saw the same people every week. Went home, saw your family every day. So if we're losing all those things, like what do we replace it with? Because we do have to replace it with something. Like it's just, we're not built to be happy without some sort of consistent socializing with like-minded people.

Do you have any plans to build a community around— I don't know what you want to call them— the subtle arters or whatever?

I— my experience in trying to build communities has been pretty dismal. Um, I don't know if it's just like I'm not good at it or if I'm just not built for it, but I don't have any hard plans to do that myself. Like, I'm open to doing it at some point in my business, but it's definitely something I would hire somebody who's good at it.

And you're in a handful of entrepreneurial communities right now.

Yeah.

Frontier Club, whatever else.

Yeah.

Have those been helpful for you?

Oh, huge. And honestly, 80% of the value is just that sense of community. You probably feel the same way. Like, it's hard to— like, if you hang out with somebody who's from the corporate world, even if they're a really cool person, it's like—

No alignment.

Yeah, it's really hard to relate. Like, they don't understand your life. You don't really understand their life.

Yeah.

So just having a group of, of entrepreneurs who, like, get it, who deal with the same problems, who deal with the same stress. Yeah. For me, it's just, it's been a lifeline over the years.

Got it. Hey, here's another Twitter quote from you. The person you marry is the person you fight with. The house you buy is the house you repair. The dream job you take is the job you stress over. Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice. Whatever makes us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad. This was one of your top ones.

Yeah, that thing crushes. We repost that like every year.

And it just does better and better.

Every year it's like one of the best performing posts of the entire year. I think it's because there's just something very fundamentally true and important that we all need to be reminded of, which is like the way our brain works is that we tend to, When we dream about some sort of future or goal, we tend to only think about the positive aspects of it. You know, if you think about your dream house, you just think about how awesome it's gonna be to be in that house. You don't think about fucking toilet clogging or the repairs or the taxes or, you know, any of the—

Yeah.

Icky, annoying stuff that comes with homeownership. That's like a fundamental part of it.

And Same thing with getting a dog.

Totally. Same thing with a relationship. You know, it's— I married a fiery Brazilian 'cause I'm like, man, she's so passionate, she's so emotional. And then like, you know, when we have a fight, I'm like, goddamn, do you have to be so emotional? Trade-offs.

You know?

And I'm like, well, that's what I chose. Like, you know, so it's—

You choose your suffering.

Yeah, exactly. You choose your suffering. And I have a saying that I love, which is like the best thing about about a person or a thing is also usually the worst thing. And I think it's important to walk into things with that understanding that the uniqueness of a person or an experience that is attractive to you is also probably the same thing that's gonna cause problems. And so just be ready for those problems and make sure they're problems you like.

Yep. Okay. More here. So this comes from your book. So a healthy relationship is when 2 people solve their own problems. What do you mean by that?

So an unhealthy relationship is when people try to fix each other and they develop like a savior complex and it just doesn't work for a variety of reasons. And even though it sounds very unromantic, what a healthy relationship looks like is that 2 people work on themselves with the support and encouragement of the other. Right. Right? So it's like if I'm going through a hard time, it's not my wife's job to make me feel better. She should want to make me feel better. She should support me in trying to like figure out whatever I'm going through, offer advice, you know, be a shoulder to cry on, whatever.

Yeah.

But it's not her job to go fix whatever's wrong in my life. And as soon as she and I tacitly agree that it's her job to fix whatever's wrong in my life, it fucks everything up because now I'm, Giving up my autonomy and my responsibility for myself, which hurts my self-esteem. And she's now taking responsibility for something that she can't control, which is my happiness.

Which then creates an imbalance.

Yeah.

And then it creates resentment.

Totally.

And then it's a cycle.

Totally.

Yeah. This is a problem I've had. So you overcame, I think you were an attachment phobe before.

Yep.

And somehow you managed to justify marriage So tell us what happened there. I'd like to learn more.

There's a really great interview of Daniel Gilbert. So Daniel Gilbert is like one of the top happiness researchers from Harvard. He had been in a long-term relationship with a woman for like 10 years, never married her because he never saw a point. And he was doing an interview with a journalist, and Gilbert's research found that constraints actually promote happiness. Like, there's something about our psychology that if you limit the number of options, we just tend to naturally become very happy with whatever option is left to us. Explains a lot of things in life. And so the journalist replied, he said, oh, maybe that's why married people are on average happier, which is true. He said, because if you put constraints on them and limit them to one person, they actually become extremely happy with that one person. They aren't always second-guessing of like, oh, is this person Or is that— should I date them or whatever? And Gilbert said that he was like so profoundly impacted by that observation that he immediately went home and proposed to his girlfriend.

Man, why did she stick around for 10 years?

My answer to you though is my wife and I, we were together for like 4 years before we got married. And I spent pretty much the first 3 of those Kind of constantly being a commitment-phobe, constantly worrying, should I be with her? Should I go? Should we break up?

And what do you think caused that? Some childhood trauma? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Family dysfunction, all sorts of stuff. My previous relationships, I had been a piece of shit boyfriend. And so my goal with my wife was just like, okay, you don't have to be with her forever, but just don't be a piece of shit. Let's start with that goal. And And I was successfully not being a piece of shit with her.

Nice.

And things were going well. But I was still having all these thoughts of like, you know, maybe I should just dump her and like, you know, run off to wherever. And it just kept recurring. And so I like, it was driving me crazy and I made a deal with myself. I was like, okay, I kept, 'cause I would always come back to him like, am I happy with, yes, I'm happy. Am I happy with her? Yes. Do I see any reason why I might not be happy with her in the foreseeable future? No. So eventually, I went through that thought cycle a number of times and I made an agreement with myself, which is anytime I feel like going, ask myself these questions. And if the answers continue to be, I'm happy, I'm gonna be happy for the foreseeable future, and I can't see anything that's gonna change that, don't fucking leave.

Yeah.

Just suffer through it, deal with it. And sure enough, the more I dealt with it, the less it kind of popped up.

How long did it take? How long did you run that exercise for? Was that program running?

Years. It got more and more manageable as time went on. When it came time to propose, I was fucking terrified. Like, absolutely terrified. The thing that actually kind of— it was funny. The thing that pushed me over the edge, we kind of reached that point where it was like, we should get engaged if we're 'Cause we've been together for a long time. We're in our 30s. But I couldn't pull the trigger. And I had talked to a number of friends and family about it. And I remember I was like at dinner with my stepmom. My stepmom's like old school Texas conservative, no bullshit, like just lets you hear it, whatever she's thinking. And my stepmom was giving me shit about it. She was like, why haven't you proposed to her? She's so great. Like, you're never gonna do better than her. Like, what the fuck are you thinking? And I was just like, ah. I was like, ah, I don't know. And I told her the same thing I was telling everybody, which is like, how am I supposed to know if I'm gonna be with her forever? Like, how do I know if I'm gonna be happy with her forever? Like, there's no way to know that. And like, my stepmom just looked at me and she was like, you're a fucking idiot. And I was like, what? And she goes, I've been with your father for 30 fucking years and I still wake up and wonder if I'm gonna be, like, if I wanna be with him forever.

Yeah.

She's like, you never stop wondering that. You just choose to be with them. And I was like, oh.

It's a choice.

It's a fucking choice, yeah. I was like—

At the end of the day, it sounds like a lot of self-control.

Self-control is harder for different people with different things, right? Like, for some people, not eating takes a lot of self-control. For some people, not drinking alcohol takes a lot of self-control. For some people, staying in relationships takes a lot of self-control. And I I think at the end of the day, you can always kind of train yourself to do it. And again, this kind of comes back to like the choosing your problems, right? Like that shift, the thing that my stepmom said that shifted was like, oh yeah, like you dumbass, you don't know what's gonna make you happy 30 years from now. It's like if you put it in the context of a business, you don't start a business because like, oh, I'm gonna be happy with this business when I'm 60. No, you just fucking wake up every day and just keep building.

Go for it.

Yeah. And then if someday you wake up and the business is bankrupt or you fucking hate it and you're miserable, you quit and leave. And it's the same thing with marriage.

You take the leap because there's a chance that will create a ton of happiness, this journey, right?

You're investing in something that's going to compound value over time. And that's the thing. So that's the other— so that's the thing that's kind of kept happy. And actually these days I'm like, dude, marriage is— I'm like a huge proponent of marriage these days. And the big reason is because there was that very— there was that very subtle hidden form of value that was compounding that I was never aware of, right? Like when you're only with a bunch of different girlfriends or partners for like a short period of time, you never have enough time to see it compound. It's kind of like trading too much and you end up losing a bunch of money.

Yeah.

Whereas if you just fucking buy a really good ETF, Yep. And sit on it for 10 years, you wake up one day and you're like, goddamn, this is like twice as good as it was 10 years ago.

Yep.

I'm twice as happy with this person as I was, and I didn't do anything.

Yep.

Like, I'm just here.

Do you know, here's some context. I was giving my mom some shit a couple weeks ago, but I told her to buy Nvidia stock when I was like 9 years old because I used to play a lot of games, right? That's so funny. So 10 grand would have became $6.3 million by now. Oh my God. So that is the power of compounding, everyone. So look, I got a couple more lines for you.

Also the power of taking stock tips from a 9-year-old.

Yeah, dude, everything I told her to buy worked out. She just held on to it. Never a loser. So, okay, modern-day dating advice. So people are talking about hypergamy. It's adversarial. You know, women deserve less. It's about dating Eastern European women, right? So, so what is your take on this? Because there's, you know, you got the Tates out there, you got the red pill community and all that. And I usually watching it for entertainment because, you know, sometimes they invite people, they fight each other and all that. So, so So what's your take on all this? Because, look, you are like the top 0.1% of this because you spent your 10,000— not 10,000 hours, 10,000 days plus on this.

Sure. Okay, first of all, the hypergamy thing is fucking dumb. All right? Like, people are attracted— people, not women— people are attracted to status. It's just that status markers tend to be different in males and females, right? Like, getting mad at women for being hypergamous Like getting mad at men for being attracted to, you know, big boobs and skinny waists. Like, it's dumb. Stop fighting nature.

Well, let me share a story with you real quick. So, so, so on the Eastern European one, my buddy, my buddy's friend, he was like, you know, he got— he's like, I'm tired of dating American women. They're so entitled. I need an Eastern European woman. So he signs up for this language app. And so this Russian girl starts teaching him. He starts teaching English. They end up meeting and they end up getting married. Anyway, sorry.

Okay, so I have a bunch of thoughts around this. Like, it's one of those things where it's not that they're wrong. It's like The Big Lebowski. It's like, you're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole. Like, it's not necessarily wrong. It's just I think they're taking the wrong conclusions away from it. Okay, first of all, let's take Western culture, right? Like, Western culture has complicated dating for a lot of reasons. One of the reasons is that women tend to be attracted to men who are more professionally successful than them. Statistically, right now, if you're under the age of 40 or 35-ish, anybody, like the average, under the age of 35, the average woman is more successful than the average man. More women are graduating college, more women are getting entry-level jobs, women are moving up through the workforce quicker. There's obviously nuances and caveats and stuff, but if you're a 25-year-old or whatever, then yeah, the average woman you meet is statistically going to be slightly more successful than you, and then that puts you at a disadvantage. And so you end up with this situation where it's like all the women want to date up professionally. There's only a few men at the top. And whenever you put men in a situation where they have a lot of options, they never settle or commit.

Mm-hmm.

And so you have this classic situation that's been written about many, many times of women are in this conundrum of, do you date the rich playboy or do you marry the garbage man? There doesn't seem to be an in-between. And so that creates a lot of frustration for women. And there's probably a lot of commentary and discussion that can happen around second-order consequences of feminism and and equality in the workplace and all that stuff.

Whole nother podcast.

Yeah, whole nother podcast. I think it's, and I think anybody who tries to just, as a blanket statement, say it's good or bad is stupid. Like, it's way too complicated and intricate and there's way too much stuff going on. You know, like, yeah, there's all—

It's like politics.

Yeah, and there's just a lot of, like, life is not simple, right? Like, you can have a very good thing in society and culture, which is women's empowerment, and you can have negative externalities and negative side effects of that, which, guess what? There are some negative externalities. So like, that doesn't make it bad. Doesn't mean we should go back to 1950. It just means like life's fucking complicated.

There's always trade-offs.

Always trade-offs. So that is a thing. And I get it. Like, if you're a guy who's like not in that top 10% or whatever, and you're not really getting a pick of the litter, And you're dealing with a lot of women who feel like they should be doing better than you, then yeah, it's frustrating and it sucks. The geo arbitrage of dating. What happens is these guys, they go to let's say they go to Eastern Europe. They meet a girl there. She's super hot, super sweet, falls in love with them. They get married, whatever. What all these guys have deluded themselves into thinking, they they've taken that experience and put it into made it fit their like narrative that like you know feminism. Is evil, Western culture is evil. They're like, oh, Eastern Europeans, they get it. They're traditional. The women are feminine, all this stuff. Look how happy we are. I've lived in these countries. I lived in South America. I've lived in Eastern Europe. I've dated women in both places. That's not why they're with you. They're with you because all the Russian men are fucking broke and treat them like shit. And so when you show up and you actually like listen to them and ask them for their opinion on something.

Provide for them, all the things.

Don't come home wasted and beat the shit out of them. They're like, wow, this is the best guy I've ever met. And, you know, whatever his shortcomings, I'm gonna deal with it 'cause holy shit, I'm never gonna do better. So that's what they don't see on the other side of that. And instead they only see their own narratives about Western culture. So yes, there is an arbitrage opportunity there. Like, there are a lot of very educated Eastern European women who are super smart, super sweet, very sexy. Same thing in South America. And if you are a just normal dude, an American, yeah, you can fucking find a 10 and do really well with them in some of these countries. But like, don't kid yourself. It's not because like, oh, these women And just, it's the same entitlement that these guys are upset about in the American women, right? It's like they go to Russia and they're like, oh, finally these women see how amazing I am. They appreciate like my—

It's across the board.

My masculine enlightenment. It's like, no, dude. It's like you're just, you're not a fucking drunk piece of shit like most of the guys she meets.

Yeah.

You know? So like, don't pretend like you're not, like you're something special. Just, it's an arbitrage opportunity. And sure, take advantage of it. I married a Brazilian. Like, my wife's fucking amazing. Like, I'm not gonna like pretend. I mean, I don't— it's hard to say if I met her in the US, like what it would be like. But as somebody who lived in South America, like, yeah, the quality of women you meet is fucking through the roof.

Men compulsively date not for the women, but for the approval of other men. Yes.

Dude, you dug deep to find that one. Um, I used to say this, so when I was part of that, the, the pickup artist industry, I used to say this and people would get really upset. But I— it's just, to me, it was plainly true that the men— and I noticed this, and I noticed it in myself as well— if you actually really cared about feminine validation, you would just find a really nice Nice girlfriend and stick with her because the best way to consistently get feminine validation is to have a really healthy long-term relationship with a woman. If you're a dude who's like spending an inordinate amount of time, money, and energy going to fucking clubs, it is such an inefficient use of time and energy to get like a scrap of approval from a girl that you're probably never gonna see again and don't give a shit So why are you doing that? Why are you putting in all this effort and energy? Well, it's because you got your boys next to you who are doing the same thing, and it's a fucking video game.

Yep.

And you want to see who's getting the high score this weekend.

And everyone's comparing.

Absolutely, dude. Absolutely. I went— it's funny, I went home. I went home and visited a couple, like, old friends I grew up with. And one of them, he, he, like, got divorced a couple of years ago, so he's single again. And I went home and was hanging out with him. And what was the first thing he did? Fucking pulled out his phone. He's like, dude, check out the chick I'm banging. Like, that's—

This happens across the board, full stop. I had a friend sold his company, 9-figure exit. He's divorced now. Every time I see him, the Instagram comes out. It's like 9 different girls. Yeah.

So like, again, it's like the Eastern Europe thing. There's nothing wrong with it. Like, it's cool. Like, it's fun. Don't get me wrong. Like, it's fun to like hang out with your buddies and like be like, oh dude, this chick was so hot. But like, don't fucking kid yourself what you're doing. Like, it's not about the women. It's about the dudes. Like, you're there. And this is the same thing with all the Tate shit. Like, all those guys, like, dude, you don't care about fucking Western culture. You're there because you got pushed into too many lockers and like watching this dude and hanging out with your buddies who watch this dude. Dude, makes you feel like more of a man.

That's it.

Just be honest about it.

Yeah, I love it. Well, Mark, this has been great. What is the best place for people to find you online?

I don't know, man. Fucking Google me.

Or YouTube you. YouTube me.

Yeah, there you go. YouTube me.

All right, appreciate it, man.

Thanks, dude.