Episode 217: Mark Manson - How to Stop Giving a F*ck

Hi guys, it's Tony Robbins.

You're listening to Habits and Hustle, crush it.

Today on the podcast, we have Mark Manson.

He is a three-time New York Times best-selling author.

His most well-known book is The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, which probably has been the highest-selling book in its decade, almost selling 20 million copies.

He also runs one of the largest personal growth websites in the world, More than 15 million yearly readers and a half a million subscribers, making him one of the largest and most successful independent publishers in the world.

This was such an amazing podcast episode, you guys.

It was, first of all, I just really, really like Mark.

He's super real, very down to earth.

We covered so much stuff on this podcast.

Universal made a movie out of the book, Settle Art of Not Giving a Fuck with him.

He just, he's just crushing it.

He also, by the way, for those who don't know, he wrote Will Smith's autobiography called Will.

I mean, this guy is, he's everywhere.

He is incredible.

I really can't wait to share this episode with you.

And please, for those who, I always forget to mention it, if you guys can remember to leave me a review, let me know how you're enjoying the podcast, what you thought of this episode, both on Apple, Spotify, wherever you're listening to this.

It really, really helps a lot.

So thanks and enjoy.

Poor guy, this is like you've been here for like hours, and we haven't even

started yet.

Oh, God.

Just don't tell me this is like a three-hour podcast.

I promise it's not going to be three hours.

I promise you.

I mean, it might be two.

No, I'm joking.

I'm joking.

I am very, this is going to be, this is exciting for me.

I just did a little Instagram story on this because we have Mark Manson on the podcast today.

And for those of you living under a rock, he wrote the book,

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, and

many other books.

And that book, I think I said this in my story, is probably one of the top or has been touted as one of the top books of the decade.

Sold 20 million copies plus.

How many has it sold so far?

Well, if you add all my books together, that's where the 20 million copies.

Oh, I thought it was that one alone, 20.

So subtle art, I think, is 15 or 16.

Oh, just 15 or 16.

Just 16.

Oh, that's nothing.

It's like, oh, my God, you're such a loser, Mark.

It's so much less impressive.

Oh, my God, really.

It's just 16 million copies of one book.

And then your follow-up book, we're saying, this is what I was like, oh, I want to have this on the podcast.

Even though it was like a smash hit as well, you're saying, how many did that one sell?

So it's coming up on a million worldwide.

And it's, which is funny because

by any, I mean, 99.99% of books don't sell a million copies.

Yeah, right.

And my insurance hell is not.

That's for sure.

But it's funny because it's following up subtle art,

you know,

our perception of what success is is very relative and it's very influenced by like the recent past and recent experience.

And so coming after subtle art, it was very, very hard for that to not feel like.

a letdown.

Right.

Like a failure of some kind.

Yeah.

But yet, like, even though you know psychologically, intellectually, that it was still an enormous hit.

Yeah.

It's, it's,

you, there are many moments of having these silly arguments with myself in my head where it's like you know my my primal instincts are like oh you're such a loser this is this is such a this is bombing and

then my like higher-minded more intellectual part of my brain is like no

like you have to keep perspective it's hard though it's very perspective it's very hard like do people even recognize do they even connect the dots like do they know that you're the guy that wrote that book like when you go out in public and do they come up to you do people know who you are at this point?

Back then, or

I joke that being author famous is the best form of famous

because

everybody loves your work, but nobody knows what you look like.

And so I do get recognized occasionally, but it's just sporadic enough that it's still very enjoyable.

So I'd say like once a month, I'll get recognized on the street.

Really?

Yeah.

And it's like a nice ego boost.

Like it's like, oh, sweet.

Exactly.

But it's not like ruining your life.

No, it's, it's not a, you know, know, if it was every day, it would probably get tiresome, but

it's, it's just seldom enough that when it happens, I'm like super grateful and feel really good about it.

What's interesting is like, okay, so I read that book forever ago, like I told you.

I feel like everybody on the planet that I know have, has actually read that book,

and, or at least in their audiobooks, you know, and I find it's still so super relevant today, even more so today.

But I was going to say, what's interesting is that like, it has this, like, it's like the anti-self-help book, but yet it's self-help and it's very psychic, like you're, you're very, you're not a psychologist, but you play one in the book, I guess, right?

Like

I get mistaken for one often.

Often, right?

Because it's very, there's a lot of stuff in there that's very much, it has like that psychological element to it, right?

Or like human nature element.

So we just go back to like the origin of like your beginning.

Like you, I mean, I know you're from Texas, but how you even got to be be that person to even write that book because like i said like what who are you who are you mark

well i i think um

i have

one thing that's very inherent to my personality is i'm a little bit of a chronic contrarian um i was very rebellious growing up um

and i've just always kind of naturally looked for the problems or flaws in things.

And I think when I was younger, that caused me to be a very negative person and cynical person and i but i think as i grew older i was able to kind of harness that in a more productive way and so i think

i think what makes subtle art and just my work in general so appealing is that it doesn't there's a certain amount of i think emotional pressure that comes with positivity like

Like life is just really fucking hard and I can curse, right?

Well, yeah, I mean, the name of your book in itself is I curse, right?

So Just checking.

I've been doing a lot of like TV and radio.

100%.

Well, it's glad that you asked, though, because I just noticed that in like Apple, they put like an E next in my podcast for explicit.

I didn't even know that was even there.

So apparently it happens all the time.

You're explicit.

Apparently, yeah.

But yeah, I think,

you know, there's a certain kind of emotional weight or pressure that comes from

the expectation of positivity all the time because life's really hard and things suck and things are complicated and

I've just found a lot of relief and the acceptance of that and kind of learning to to channel that and work with it rather than fight against it and so

from the beginning that was always kind of the goal of my work

I think I grew up in

during a period of the self-help industry or personal development industry that I classify as delusionally positive, like kind of like a delusional level of positive thinking, stuff like this.

Isn't that still like happening now?

It still exists, but it was it that was like the primary message of the industry, you know, when I was a teenager in my 20s and buying books and consuming a lot of this stuff.

You know, The Secret was the biggest book in the world.

Yeah.

Oh, right.

Which is literally

believe something that is true that is actually not and you know, delude yourself into believing it will come true.

But no, but what I think that, first of all, that's still like right now, a huge trend is manifestation.

Um, looking into, and you talk about this in your book, even back then, people like giving themselves positive affirmations, even if they don't believe it to be true, say it over and over and over again.

I feel like everything in life gets recycled again.

Like, it was a trend back then, and it's now, I think, hitting a stride again.

Yeah, it's it's interesting.

Um, we don't need to go too far down this rabbit hole if you don't want to, but self-help is very

cyclical.

So you see the same ideas pop up generationally.

You do?

Generationally.

Yeah.

So if you think about like the classics of the self-help space,

think and grow rich, power of positive thinking, I'm okay, you're okay.

Power of now, is that considered?

Sure.

Power of now,

Tony Robbins stuff in the 80s.

They all have very similar messages.

They're just kind of packaged differently.

And, you know, here in 2023, we look at all those books and we just see them all as classic books.

But those books all came out 20 to 30 years apart.

So Think and Grow Rich came out in the middle of the Great Depression.

Power of Positive Thinking came out height of the Cold War.

Tony Robbins stuff came out.

height of the Reagan 80s.

Yeah.

You know, The Secret, Power of Now, Manifestation, all that kind of cosmic woo-woo stuff came out, you know, in the mid-2000s, uh, when like Eastern spirituality was kind of making this big comeback in, in Western culture.

So, uh, I didn't realize how many years apart that's so interesting.

Okay, sorry, go on.

Yeah, and you can take this all the way back to the 1800s.

Um,

so I

really studied, this actually ties in kind of orthogonally into the success of subtle art.

Like I really studied the industry before I wrote my book.

And I,

if you actually pull up my book proposal for subtle art, I point this out in the book proposal.

And I said, there's, so,

and I argued that, you know, in the next 10 years, there's going to be a classic self-help book for millennial, the millennial generation.

It hasn't been written yet.

And so, my goal is to write that for the millennial generation.

And then I kind of went through a section where I identified like

these are the

hallmarks of what millennials experience.

They tend to be more cynical.

They tend to be more honest and upfront about their emotions.

They tend to,

they've lived through the first major decline.

And,

you know, they're the first generation to be worse off than their parents were at the same age.

So there's a certain degree of like

pessimism, but realism about problems in life and realizing that you don't get to control everything and that you have to accept something.

So

that informed a lot of the

kind of early packaging or marketing of the book in my mind.

So interesting.

Like by that point, I had been blogging a lot of these ideas and hashing them out and testing them, you know, on social media and with my blog audience.

So I kind of knew which ideas were resonating really well.

But in terms of like packaging everything together and really

creating like a

message that was going to stick around for decades.

Like that was

something that only came together when I started thinking about the book.

So when did you already had a very successful blog, right?

So how did the book even come to be?

So you, because before that, you like you were in the pickup, you were like a pickup artist, weren't you?

Yeah, back.

Explain, talk about that.

I want to hear about the evolution of you, right?

Sure.

So

I too was an awkward and emotionally stunted

adolescent male.

You too?

Oh, wow.

Believe it or not.

So the game, the Neil Strauss book, the game came out, I think I was 19 or 20.

Okay.

And I had just gotten my heart broken by my first girlfriend.

So I was like the perfect audio, you know, perfect level of maturity, perfect level of like heartbreak and anger, perfect level of like total confusion towards women

when that came out.

And so I got,

I dabbled in that subculture quite a bit and I had a bunch of my friends were into it and you know, we'd go out and try the lines in a bar or whatever.

And it was,

yeah,

it wasn't that successful.

But it was interesting because that subculture,

you know, really what the pickup artist thing was, is it was

like a masculine excuse to actually work on yourself.

If you got past like the cheesy pickup lines and like the top hats and weird stuff that they did, you would actually find like very deep and interesting conversations on a lot of those message boards about trauma, childhood, broken families, childhood experiences.

beliefs like shame around sex, around intimacy.

Really?

Yeah.

And so for a lot of guys, including including myself, like this was the first time that we had ever

been exposed to a lot of these conversations, especially with other men.

You know, like maybe you would talk about this with like a really, really close female friend.

But not with like two guys talking.

Yeah, you never get a, you would never see a group of guys sit in a room together and talk about their childhood traumas together.

And this

happened in that community.

And so I think there's a really, there's kind of like a non-obvious positive element of that subculture that was

people who didn't really spend a lot of time with it didn't see.

It's funny, too, because most of the friends that I had from that, that period

really went on to become amazing dudes.

Really?

Like, what are they doing now, those guys?

Super successful in a bunch of different fields and great relationships, marriages, kids.

Like, it's

most, most of the guys left that scene after a year or two.

Like they came for a reason, like either they're heartbroken or they're confused or they need to build social skills.

But then as soon as I got it, they left.

You know, it was really only kind of a toxic minority that got stuck in this like weird festering misogyny brewed over a period of time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I visited that.

that subculture, spent some time in it, dabbled in it.

Meanwhile, I started creating like blogs and e-commerce websites.

You know, I read Tim Ferriss's four-hour work week.

I wanted to do the whole like, you know, work at home in your underwear, make money while you sleep.

You know, the dream.

Living the dream.

Yes, exactly.

So I was creating a lot of websites and stuff like that on the side.

And

one of the things that guys in the pickup artist industry or subculture would do is that they created blogs and they would kind of share stories of like, hey, here's the date I went on last weekend.

She never called me back.

Like, can you guys take a look at it and like tell me,

you know, what went wrong.

You're right, right, right.

And so there was a lot of that going on.

So I, I also started a blog,

like a dating blog on the side.

What was it called?

Oh, it was just my like pseudonym.

Oh, okay.

Which was, which was, it was entropy,

which is really, which was actually my gamer name in high school.

Does it just show how deep the nerdiness goes?

Oh, my god, that's I love this.

This is so great.

But that's why you're so likable, though, right?

Like you're like I said before we even started, you're like so different than I would have expected you to be just from the book vibe, you know?

I thought you were like a Tucker Max, I told you, right?

Yeah, I think people expect me to be super abrasive and snarky, but I don't know.

And arrogant.

And you're so the opposite.

Yeah, I don't know.

Maybe I've mellowed as I've gotten older.

I don't know.

I don't know.

You seem like, I don't know.

I don't think, I think that it's who you really are.

Yeah, really.

It feels like it anyway.

So I started writing about my dating life.

And back then, I had a pretty raucous, I mean, I partied a lot.

I was drinking a lot.

I was going out a lot.

And I was starting to have success in the dating world.

I was seeing a lot of girls and hooking up a bunch.

And so I was writing about it.

And I kind of developed this little cult following.

in Boston.

But wait, did you have success around it because you were kind of like learning from the pickup

artist world, like how to kind of navigate?

Because a lot of the stuff, as you know, it's like human psychology, right?

Like people, it doesn't matter how attractive you are, how talented you are.

It's about how you, that's how, it's how you kind of carry yourself, right?

And you learned body language.

And honestly, I think a lot of

what made the pickup artist stuff quote unquote work was like the placebo effect, which was like, these pickup lines don't actually work.

They're actually very cheesy and stupid.

It's just they give you a false level of confidence to convince you to actually walk across the room and talk to that attractive woman who you were scared to death to attract to before or talk to before.

And it ended up going really well, but it would have gone well anyways, even if you didn't have the line.

You just needed the line to like give you that

focus

to go do it.

So I think

the bravado or whatever to I think in a lot of cases, I think a large percentage of the quote-unquote success that guys experienced in that industry was really just that.

And I kind of figured that out pretty quickly.

Like the lines never sat well with me.

I was like, you know, I'm actually like pretty fun and funny just being myself.

So

if I can just get my foot in the door, like find a way to like open up a conversation, I think I'm okay from there.

But again, I think a lot of the most valuable stuff from that community was, was, was, again, some of the deeper, less obvious stuff, like helping guys become more aware of their emotions, helping them become more aware of their insecurities, understanding things like body language, social etiquette, basic social skills, you know, how to be polite, how to be funny,

how to be respectful.

How to socialize, basically.

Yeah.

And it's, I think what also gets missed too is that, you know, a lot of the, I mean, there was a lot of disrespectful behavior and courage towards women

by some companies and some coaches in that industry, but

a lot of it was just,

I mean, a lot of it, there was a lot of just false bravado.

It wasn't even necessarily about the women per se.

It was, it was kind of just dumb locker room advice of like, oh, bro, you got to,

you're the fucking man.

You got to let people know you're the fucking man.

And it's like, whether it was a woman in front of you or another guy, like it didn't matter.

It was a lot of these guys were just kind of like puffing out their chests and stuff.

So

it was a real crash course in just social dynamics, social skills,

romantic dynamics.

And

while there was a lot of cringy things that went on and

definitely there were certain sectors of the industry that were misogynistic and not healthy.

I do think it was net positive for most of the guys involved.

So anyway, I kind of developed this little following around my blog of guys in Boston

and started to kind of be known as a party hound and a player, I guess.

And then the weird thing that started happening is guys started asking me, asking to like go out with me, you know, like go to a bar with me

to like see

like how hey, like, I just want to see like how you talk to these girls in person or whatever.

And I was like, all right.

And then it started happening enough that I was like, and I was completely broke at the time.

So I was like, well, how about this?

If you give me like 200 bucks, you can come spend this, hang out with me for a Saturday night.

And to my shock, like,

you know, a dozen guys signed up.

And I was like, oh, shit.

All right.

How about 500 bucks?

You know, like, let's see, let's see how far this can go.

So I did, you know, and then once it, once I realized, I'm like, oh, crap, I'm a coach.

Like, I need to like teach these guys things, you know, that started precipitating the

research and the investigation into like, okay, like, you know,

what is actually effective here?

What do different people need?

And it was, I did that for about two years.

And I, I ended up, I managed to kind of grow that audience nationally.

I did it all around the country.

I did it in Europe.

Were you still taking guys to bars?

Or, yeah, like all across the country?

Yeah.

How much were you charging at the end?

At the end, I think it got up to like

$1,200 or $1,500 a day or something like that.

For some guy to come watch you do this at the bar.

Well, it actually, I mean, what I

what you quickly learn is that it's, you know, for me to walk up to a woman in a bar and chat with her and like get her phone number or something

it's cool like for the guy watching it's cool for about three minutes yeah yeah but then they don't actually learn anything

it's kind of like

you know so

um so it quickly turned into like okay

why don't you go talk to that woman at the bar and make a fool out of yourself and then we'll see like what what actually you know what are you doing wrong here like

and

it's funny because i nine i'd say 90 of the time it was guys either just had

poor social skills like they really just needed somebody to stand there and be like

you know don't stand that close to somebody you're invading their personal space or like don't slouch you know look people in the eye when you talk to them um

like basic stuff like that that most of our parents teach us, but you know, a lot of these guys grew up without their parents around or without like a role model.

So

it's weird.

It's almost like you're being paid to like parent somebody.

I mean,

there were clients where I'm like, did you take a shower today?

No.

Okay.

First rule, you do not leave the house without taking a shower.

You know,

like it's, it's on that level.

And I think, again,

the whole industry kind of gets misconstrued as this like evil conniving, like, you know,

mad, super genius nerds in their evil lair, like conspiring how to trick millions of women into bed.

And it's like, no, these are guys who like didn't learn basic hygiene, didn't learn basic social skills, often suffer from extreme social anxiety.

A lot of them are on the spectrum.

A lot of them grew up in extremely, I had a lot of clients that

either grew up in incredibly religious households where like they literally were not allowed to date period right

or they grew up in extremely high pressure households you know where it's like you have to go to med school you have to become a doctor right you know or we're going to disown you and you know next thing you know they're 28 they're a doctor and they've never been on a date in their life and they have no idea how to start all their friends are getting married and so

it's, you know, 90% of the time, you're really just helping kind of underdeveloped men,

like socially underdeveloped men,

you know, develop the social skills and the basic romantic skills that most of us learn in high school and college.

Right.

So did you just like take a like a boatload of people at once to the bar or did you like teach them a class?

Like were you how many were you taking at a time?

So early on, I would, I would

take, I think, up to five.

and then,

and yeah, and we would do like classroom during the day and then go out at night.

As time went on, I started to realize that,

you know, it went from five max to three max to two.

And I think by the end, it was, I would only do two at the most because it's just, you, you need to.

You need personal attention.

Like, it's so much of it is.

Personal attention.

Yes, exactly.

It's like what these guys are lacking is personal attention.

Like nobody has spent enough time with them to tell them like, hey, dude, like, you know, it's, you've got this weird tick when you talk to people and it kind of creeps, creeps them out.

You should stop doing that.

Like it's, right.

You, you need the, you need enough FaceTime to be able to tell them that.

Totally.

And yeah, after about a year, I got rid of the classroom stuff too, because it was mostly stuff like you can just read it in a book or, you know.

But a lot of these things, but you know this, like a lot of this stuff, common sense sometimes isn't so common.

Like, people can find a lot of information on this, on like life coaching on Google or on YouTube, but they're still paying a million, like thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars for masterminds and for some guru to tell them what to do.

Yeah, it, it's, it's a weird aspect about this industry in that it almost

so.

This is the weird thing, too, is like, it's like the more money they pay

the more

i guess accountable they feel for like oh i better get get value out of this so the more they listen and the more they care and the more they try um i noticed that was another great lesson interesting lesson uh from my time in that industry is that like often raising prices

made people try harder and care more.

Didn't always, but sometimes it did.

But then there are other times too, where

you know, it's people would

be in the market for a coach and they'd be like, well, this person charges $1,000 a weekend and this person charges $2,000 a weekend.

Well, clearly, the $2,000 person is better.

Right.

Perception of value.

Yeah.

Right.

Is that because if you charge more, it must be better.

Yeah.

And obviously, that's not always true.

So,

you know, eventually

I wanted to get out of that industry for a few reasons.

One was that it felt very...

I became convinced that any like really,

anything more than a superficial change isn't really possible in a weekend.

Like you can teach some basic social skills.

You can help somebody get over an anxiety a little bit.

You can build a little bit of confidence.

But most of the quote-unquote breakthroughs that happen in like a like an intensive, you know, say 12-hour coaching period, they don't stick.

And because it's really what you're dealing with, you're not dealing with like, you know,

oh, this guy in the bar is afraid to go talk to, you know, pretty Sally or whatever.

Like it, what you're dealing with is

years of bowling,

you know,

years of social anxiety,

ostracization.

Not saying that right.

Ostracization.

Yes.

Ostracization.

It's hard work to say, actually.

You know, lack of socialization.

You know, you can't.

It's embedded deep into your DNA.

You can't just check it.

But what do you think about how the Tony Robbins seminars or all these seminars where people go away to do their date with destiny or they go do whatever they're doing for four or five days and they're so motivated?

Yeah.

I'm curious what the percentage of people who actually stick to that.

Because most of the time it's the same, it's repeat customers going back all the time, right?

Which I have a big problem with that.

I know.

That's why I want to, you're a perfect person.

Like, can I tell you something?

That's why I loved reading your book.

Like everything you were saying, I like, it resonated because you were speaking like truth.

Yep.

It's, I have such an ambivalent, like, love-hate relationship with Tony because

I think a lot of the information he gives is very good.

Like a lot of the advice is very good.

Yeah, I agree.

I agree.

What I hate is the business model and the implementation.

So I think one thing

he does,

and he does it extremely well, is,

and

I learned this when I was coaching too, is that if you can, we used to call it state pumping.

So if you could elevate a person's emotional state and make them emotional,

you create the perception of permanent change, even though nothing is permanently changed.

The only thing that's changed is the emotion.

So one way to do this, and it's actually ironic because Tony does the exact same thing.

So one of the ways we used to do this, you know, let's say I take three guys out to a club and we're there to like learn how to pick up girls or whatever.

Well, obviously there's a lot of expectation.

There's a lot of anxiety.

So what's the first thing you do?

Well, you go to the dance floor and you get everybody dancing like an absolute maniac.

That was always the first thing I would do.

And if things were going really well, then I'd then I'd get them to do like silly things.

I'm like, you know, we're like sitting there dancing on the dance floor like idiots.

And I'd be like, let's do 10 push-ups in the middle of the dance floor.

And they're like, that's crazy, you know?

And so next thing you know, we're doing push-ups in the middle of the dance floor.

And

it just seems completely wacky and out of place.

But there's actually a really important utility of that.

One is you get over

that first embarrassment out of the way.

So it's, it's one, you know, once you've been embarrassed once, you realize, oh, nothing bad happened.

I'll do it again.

Right.

The fear factor is kind of eliminated a little bit.

Exactly.

But then the other thing, too, is it just like in a very physiological way,

you have

have amplified or

elevated the person's emotional state.

And so they're way more excited, they're way more energetic, they're way more motivated.

And so suddenly that

difficult thing of talking to an attractive stranger doesn't feel so difficult anymore.

In fact, it sounds a little bit fun.

And that's great.

for that night.

The problem is, is, you know, the next weekend when they wake up and they're still their nervous self and they go into that club and they're like, oh man, well, maybe I should try to dance on the dance floor by myself, but that's weird.

And, you know, they're right back to square one.

Like it's, it's the real change only occurs over a very long timeline of

kind of re rewiring neural circuits, reforming social habits, emotional habits,

altering people's expectations, altering people's identities, like their perceptions of themselves.

You can't do that in a weekend.

So I think what Tony does really, really well, and it's ironic because Tony uses the dance thing.

Like if you ever go to a Tony Robbins seminar.

Have you been to one before?

I have not, but I have a bunch of friends who have gone and I've watched a number of his videos.

He has people, he's blaring music and having people dance constantly.

And

a lot of that is to elevate people's emotional state.

I think his argument would be that when people's emotional state is elevated, it makes them more open to feedback and

lessons, which is true.

But it also gives this false sense of change.

It gives us false sense of progress.

And so I think,

and I hope this is unintentional, but what I think happens with the seminar model like that, and it's not just Tony, you know, you could say this about Landmark.

You could say this about a dozen other companies.

Yeah, I know.

You know, we're just using him as an example.

I mean, that's the most prominent one.

Right.

And we all know who he is, right?

Of course.

Yeah.

You know, somebody, you take somebody, they're very depressed, they're very anxious, they're very insecure.

They feel a certain level of hopelessness.

They go to this seminar.

They spend a ton of money, go to the seminar.

For a brief three-day window, they feel good.

They feel a little bit of hope.

They feel like, oh my God, I changed.

And they leave the seminar feeling great.

And hopefully a little bit sticks.

And I'm sure some stuff sticks.

You know, you nailed it, though.

It's that hope.

Yeah.

Because people need hope to kind of move on and carry on, right?

Yes.

That's the first part of that.

Yes.

Hope for the future and hope for themselves.

That it's like, oh, I have now seen that I'm actually capable of being this different person.

So I think that is very valuable.

But then the problem is, is that, you know, habits take time.

Identity change takes time.

And it's only four days have gone by.

So pretty soon you're back to the same old you and you start feeling hopeless again, feeling a little bit depressed.

And then I think things can go one of two ways, which is one is, well, shit, I need to go back to do another Tony Robbins seminar.

You become addicted to the self-help seminars.

Yep.

And I've seen this with people I know.

They have that, they're just

drain their savings.

Yeah.

It's sick.

They're going over and over and over and over again.

They're giving him thousands and thousands of dollars.

You know, it's,

but their life isn't really changing.

Yeah.

You know, but they get addicted to that high for like a few days.

Yes.

And that, that's the really gross side of it.

And

I don't think that happens to a majority of customers, but I imagine that is the majority of their revenue is repeat customers.

100.

It's definitely repeat customers.

Yeah.

The other, so you know, you get those people, they go one of two ways, either like, I need to go back.

The other direction is

it actually makes them feel more hopeless.

And this is something that doesn't get talked about a lot.

Right.

Talk about it.

Yeah, but it's, it's, if you actually look, so there's, there's actually been a lot of psychological research on self-help material and self-help seminars, and it's super interesting.

They find that overall, it is beneficial.

It's like, it's net positive.

It's not as net positive as therapy,

but it's

good.

It's better than nothing.

It's kind of like a therapy light, I guess.

Okay.

But what's interesting is that there is a significant minority of people are actually worse off afterwards.

So they feel worse about themselves.

They feel more depressed.

They feel more anxious.

By the way, this is true about therapy as well, but it's...

Why is that?

What's the reason behind it?

I think, well, I think in the case of self-help, self-help it's you know

you're depressed you're anxious you feel hopeless you go to the seminar you feel great you come back you feel depressed anxious hopeless and you realize you're like

it's not i there's nothing i can do it's not me like i'm i'm broken and i either right and i need somebody else to fix me but i can't i don't have the money i don't have the resources i like

i can't be going to a seminar every weekend for the rest of my life like or what happens i would think.

Sorry, I was going to interject that I would imagine, I haven't been, but like you go and you get all these people like-minded, like you, all together in this community, like, rah, rah, everything's going to be great.

And then you go back to your real life and you're like, oh shit, this is real life, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, it could be.

It's

one thing I know, and again, this goes back to my coaching days.

It's,

you know, people who come into this industry, they tend to be in a vulnerable position.

Like they don't feel very good about themselves.

They don't feel very good emotionally.

A lot of times they're very unhealthy.

And they have a propensity to blame themselves.

And

so if you as a coach or therapist or a guru, seminar leader, whatever, if you give them bad advice and it doesn't work,

most of these clients don't blame you.

They blame themselves.

They're like, oh, well, you know,

Mark knows what he's doing.

You know, it didn't work for me.

So I guess there's something wrong with me.

Or like Tony knows what he's doing.

He's helped, I mean, he's like millions of people.

Yeah, he's advised presidents or whatever.

It's like, so if his advice doesn't work for me, it must be me.

And that's dangerous.

Like, that's a really dangerous.

And again, this is why the personal attention aspect is so important.

Like, the reason.

therapy is so efficacious is because the therapist is in the room there when that thought is happening to catch it and be like, Don't go there.

That's right.

That's not true.

You know, therapists can be wrong just as often as anybody else.

One-on-one, you're saying exactly.

But if you're in a self-help seminar with 5,000 people in the room and you start having that thought, you're like, wow, look at all these people.

Like, it's working for them, but it's not working for me.

What's wrong with me?

Well, it's like Tony's not going to come off the stage and be like, hold on.

Don't hold that thought.

Exactly.

Everybody, timeout.

Exactly.

Because he always does pick that one person.

Maybe it could be you.

But that's with social media, I find too, right?

Like, it's this whole idea that you looking at everybody else.

It's like you're comparing yourself, which is a whole bad, slippery slope

at all, right?

Yeah.

Because you always think, what's wrong with me?

Why am I not living that life?

Why am I not happy?

Why am I blah, blah, blah?

You know?

And that's something you put, you did this in the book even before social media was so rampant as it is now, I feel.

But sorry, I didn't mean we were like, I was like, we're going off on, because you're saying that from the whole pickup world, how did you then, so you were kind of doing all this research on, on these like sick, like cycles of books for self-help.

And then what happened?

Oh, well, that came later.

So, right, right, right, right, so, right.

So the pickup.

So the transition from pickup to kind of social media.

Yeah, so now you're deciding you don't want to do the pickup stuff anymore.

Yeah.

How did you kind of exit that?

Yeah.

So I decided to exit for a couple of reasons.

One was because of everything we just talked about.

Like I became very skeptical of how much, how helpful you can really be on such a short time span.

I also just left because I'm like, you know, by then, I think I was 27, 28.

And I was like, shit, I don't want to be like, I don't want to be like the creepy 40-year-old hanging out in bars, like

talking to college girls.

So I was like, I need to find, I need to find a way to turn this into a real career.

You know, this is, I can't do this anymore.

What did your parents think, by the way, of you being that person?

Because you came from a pretty affluent family, right?

Yeah, you know, dad and stepmom were pretty horrified.

Mom was a little more open-minded and trusting.

She didn't get it, but she was like,

you know, he's going to figure it out.

You're smart.

You'll figure it out.

Yeah.

You know, dad and stepmom were pretty horrified, really.

Like, you know, it was a lot.

There were a lot of awkward Thanksgivings of like, when are you going to get a real job?

Right.

What did your dad do for a living?

What was his?

My dad owns a small plastic manufacturing company.

Yeah.

And your mom?

My mom was in the travel industry for a long time.

Okay, just curious.

Okay, continue.

So I was kind of looking at the situation.

By this point, the blog had grown quite a bit.

And you've always been a good writer, right?

Like

that's always been like one of your

really strong.

Okay.

Yeah.

So it, and I also enjoyed it a lot.

I actually enjoyed the writing.

I, you know, it took a couple of years, but I started to realize I actually enjoy the writing a lot more than the coaching.

Okay.

So I was like, you know, maybe, maybe I can find a way to make the writing side of this work.

And so I started developing the blog, building the audience there.

And then I self-published a book,

which was called Models Attract Women Through Honesty.

And it was basically,

at the time, I kind of thought of it as like my mic drop of

like leaving that industry because by that point, there was a lot of toxicity going on.

It's funny because a lot of that is kind of resurfaced with like the Andrew Tate stuff the last year or two, but a lot of that like, you know, alpha male, don't be a beta, like, you know, put her in her place type shit.

Yeah, you know, and you're right, there's always cyclical, though, like you said.

When did you put that book out?

Like, so that came out in 2011.

11.

Okay.

So, 12 years ago.

Yeah.

And it's, yeah, it's, if you think about it, because it's my generation, we went through the pickup stuff to kind of,

you know, our generation of men needed that to kind of grow up.

And I think Gen Z now is hitting that age.

Yeah.

Um,

where they're looking for that.

So,

um,

so yeah, I wrote that book and it was basically like

it's, I want to write a book that is

how to be more attractive, how, how to have better relationships, but from like a very emotionally healthy standpoint as a man, you know, but also acknowledging, you know, kind of the

social pressures or expectations of like the man is always supposed to initiate, you know, the man is expected to take the social risk, the man's supposed to be willing to be embarrassed, um, to be rejected,

but write it from a healthy point of view, like instead of like,

you know, this like

macho

shitty thing.

So

that was that.

And it's funny because that book came out and it was crickets.

Like

at first, none of the guys wanted to hear it.

You know, they were, I got, I got trashed on forums.

I got called like a beta bitch and like really all this stuff.

Yeah.

i was like all right guys good luck yeah

good luck yeah

that's so funny yeah enjoy uh you know enjoy circle jerking in your mom's basement um i love this

hilarious so good um so

that the book did eventually kind of through word of mouth you know that that industry kind of cleaned up its own act over time over time and and that and i i actually became very happy and proud of of how

well that book ended up doing.

It took a few years, but it ended up,

I mean, at one point on the

pickup artist subreddit, it was, there was like the pinned post at the top was like,

don't ask any questions till you read Mark Manson's book.

And it, it kind of became like the the first

any guy who came into those communities are like, you need to read models before you talk to anybody or ask any questions, like read, read, read, really.

Yeah, it was like my book and maybe one or two others that they're like, read these books and then

wow.

Okay.

So I became very proud of that.

So it was actually, it worked out really well.

But at the time, you know, at the time when I left, I was like, oh, God.

I can imagine.

So my thinking at the time was like.

What I also discovered from the coaching was like, there's no such, like, all these guys would come to me.

They're like, you know, I go on all these dates and girls never call me back.

Like, I don't know what's wrong.

And

early on, I'm like, oh, well, you just didn't try the right text message, you know?

I love it.

Like, you got to tease her more.

What would be the text message that you would tell people to do?

Oh, my God.

I don't even remember.

If someone doesn't, you do so remember.

I really don't.

So if someone doesn't text you back, what do you say?

You just, you move on with your life.

That's what you say now, right?

But back then.

I don't know.

There would probably be.

Would it be something funny?

Would you say like

stupid self-deprecating?

What would it be?

Send a meme or, you know, a joke or I don't know.

Yeah, it was probably something dumb like that.

It's like, okay, you get her to laugh.

Then you follow up with a question.

So you know exactly what you would say.

That's probably, that's probably what the advice would have been.

Okay.

So get her to laugh and then follow up with a question.

Okay.

Good.

I'm going to take a note here.

You know, it's like once she responds, you know,

she's hooked.

Although today it's probably weird with like the red, the thing, messages being marked red.

Oh, yeah.

See, this is why it's hard for me to talk about this stuff because I

was in this industry pre-tender.

I was in this industry between, like, pre-WhatsApp and like.

But it still works.

It's still the same.

Like, I think that the principles will not be.

Yeah, the principles will not protect.

But this is why, like, the tactical questions, I'm like, I don't know, dude.

Like, yeah, but you know what?

I think I would imagine, I mean, not to give you another, like you could have a whole new career, but you could, like, I think this is helpful for women who are single, right?

Because, like, you're like,

you are like that quintessential guy, you know, you know?

So, like, can't you give advice to women on the same thing?

So, this actually ties in to kind of where my career went next.

So,

my

what I realized after a couple of years working with guys guys is like, okay, your problem isn't that you don't know what to text girls.

The problem is, is that

you're super needy and it's just really repellent.

That's exactly right.

Like you can give them some like bullet points on what

so it's it's uh

like no tactic here is gonna save you from yourself.

Like you really need to look within yourself and figure out like, why are you so needy?

Why are you constantly craving validation or approval?

So I started started writing about, and what I realized is that that's pretty much every guy who ever came to this stuff.

Like the problem is not that you don't know what to text or don't know what, you know, how to respond or whatever.

It's there's some emotional issue going on.

So I started writing about those emotional issues.

And it was

And initially it was geared towards men, but something really interesting happened, which is I started to develop a

sizable female audience.

I would think so.

Yeah.

And it was crazy because I was specifically writing for men.

You know, it was like, this is why she never calls you back.

And then it would get into like how needy dudes behave and how to stop being a needy dude.

And then women started emailing me like, oh my God, I sent this to my brother.

Like, this is the best thing I've totally.

This is, you know, and do you remember the movie, the movie He's Not That Into You?

Yeah.

Was that like around the same time when women started to really kind of look at you as that too?

I think that was a little bit before.

Oh, was it?

I don't remember.

But it was, it was interesting because I was completely oblivious to the women's dating advice market.

Right.

Like I had no,

had paid no attention.

And I started getting a lot of emails from women.

They said, you know, I know you write for men, but this is

better than anything I've read that's written for women.

Like, have you written anything for women?

And eventually I got enough of those emails that I was kind of like, huh?

Yeah, maybe I should just write for everybody.

You know, I started looking at a lot of my articles.

Because

doesn't it apply to votes?

It does.

It does.

The only thing that changes is,

well, I mean, the only things that are different,

sex gets a little bit different because obviously men and women are different that way.

Yes.

Have different

parts.

Different parts.

But then the social expectations, like the cultural expectations are different as well.

So it's like men are expected to initiate, but then women, and this is the thing that guys never understood is that, you know, they're like, oh, women have it so easy.

Like they just like stand around and look cute and all the guys talk to them.

And I'm, and like, you know,

if you actually think about it, it's actually not that easy because anywhere you go in public, guys just like start randomly coming up to you and talking to you.

Like that's really intimidating.

And how do you, if you're not interested, how do you tell them you're not interested without them getting pissed off and taking it personally?

You know, if guys being super creepy and following you, like, how do you deal with that?

And so there's, there's a,

you know, and women, on the other hand, see guys and they're like, like, wow, guys don't have to deal with creepy people following them and intimidating them.

And they don't get bothered when they're in a coffee shop or in a bookstore, you know?

Like, right.

And they're like, wow, guys have it so easy.

And they, there, so there was a lot of interesting

disconnects on kind of the social expectation side of things.

But I also think with women, though, like, how many times have you hear, like, oh, he's not calling me back?

Or what am I doing?

Like, why doesn't he like me?

Or why this girl?

You know what I mean?

Like, it's to the core of what you were doing with those guys.

It's the same shit.

It's the same shit.

It's the same shit.

You're too needy.

Like, exactly.

You don't know who you are.

The artists all are about giving a fuck.

Your social skills suck.

Like, be a little indifferent.

Like, don't care so much.

Like, don't want me to have a life.

you know, all these things.

And it is similar to that most of the female dating advice is very tactical, you know, so it's like, oh, like, don't call him back for three days.

That used to be a thing.

Yeah, I remember that.

You know, it was like, don't call him back for three days, which is fucking stupid.

Like, if you like a guy, just call him back.

It's, it's, if you get, one of the things that I started preaching at a certain point.

was like, if you get your emotions straight, everything else takes care of itself.

Right.

You don't have to to worry about anything else because you're not worried about rejection.

You're not worried about getting your feelings hurt.

You're not worried about, you know, not being liked enough or whatever.

Like, so it's, it's get right with yourself, get your own life in order, figure out who you are, what you love, what you care about, who you want to meet, learn how to express that effectively.

Um, and then be confident when like, be okay with hearing no for an answer.

And then you're set.

Like, that's, it'll take care of itself after that, right?

Right, right.

Or you would hope, but yeah, yes, yeah, eventually it will.

So then you started getting women as clients or women as an audience, yeah, readers.

And so from there, I kind of

rebranded my website and changed everything and just became Mark Manson and started writing for everybody.

And that was

2013, early 2013.

And

as soon as I did that, the

audience exploded.

Like it was,

you know, with the combination with all the women coming in.

And then at the same time,

you know, social media was really,

I mean, social media had been around for a while, but that was the first time ever that things kind of like went viral on social media.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What year?

Okay, so the book came out what year?

The settlement.

So it was 2016.

2016.

Okay.

So yeah, so you're yeah this was 2012 2013.

did you did you have like a big email list and a big audience before you even wrote the book yes like how big was that audience yeah so we

let's see uh

from 2012 i think in 2012 it was like around i want to say like

100 000 people a month okay um and then by

2015 it was i think it it peaked in 2015 at 2 million a month.

2 million.

Wow.

So it 20x'd in two years.

That's amazing.

And it was, you know, it was one of those kind of perfect storms.

I think a lot of things went right.

One was

opening up my material to both genders.

Like that was really crucial and important.

I think

being

I think I recognized the viral potential of social media before most people.

You know, it took a few years.

Back then, it was like writers at the New York Times or the Atlantic, like, they didn't know what SEO was.

They didn't know.

Right.

They didn't really, they didn't have a so, like, they maybe just hired a social media manager.

They would just kind of just post the article and forget about it on Facebook.

Right.

Meanwhile, what I realized is that if you write a really good title, and create a really good thumbnail image,

Like, people start sharing your stuff.

So, you knew that already.

I figured that out.

I kind of figured it out on accident.

But thumbnail's more visual, like video.

You weren't doing video back then.

Well, it was, I'm not using the right word.

But, like, when you post an article on Facebook, it like pulls an image from the article.

Oh, you mean like an image?

So, I used to spend a lot of time thinking about like, okay, what image do I want to be pulled for this?

What title?

What description?

because I realized there was, so I basically just realized virality, I think, a year or two before most, right?

Which is super important.

So, you were ahead of the curve, like you knew what.

So, when you got the book deal, um, and all that other stuff, did you, did it, what did it kind of have that tipping point?

Because you, right away, your entire audience that you already had embedded in bought the book right away, and then the algorithm started to make it go viral.

Yeah, it, um,

you know, the book, I got my book deal in that period, Right.

One of the smart things my agent did is she started looking.

Molly.

Yeah.

So Molly, shout out to Molly.

The fact I know her name is kind of

she started looking on Facebook for

authors.

Yeah.

Oh, really?

Did she find, so she came after you, Molly?

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A number of agents did.

Yeah.

Like, I think kind of word got out that this was happening, that, you know, People were building these massive audiences.

Who else am I?

like when you were doing this back then?

James Clear.

James Clear, right?

So was he the only one?

Like, who else is your, not competition.

There were a bunch.

So Tim Urban, Wait But Why started.

So James, James started his blog, I think, 2011 or 2012.

Okay, same time frame.

Yep.

Tim Urban, I think, started 2013.

Who's Tim Urban?

Wait, but why.com.

You know, like the stick figures.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

That's his name.

Tim Urban.

Okay.

I didn't know that.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

Sorry, Tim Urban.

There are a few others.

I'm probably blanking on a few.

I think Gretchen Rubin started her blog around the same time.

So, yeah, there's like a whole kind of like

click of us that came up.

But Gretchen Rubin's book, what was it called?

Happiness Project.

Happiness Project.

Didn't yours kind of surpass that one by a landslide?

Yeah, but I think she built her initial audience

around the same time.

Yeah.

So people were all circling circling you to sign you for a book.

Why did you go with Molly?

So Molly,

I love telling this story.

Molly is a very aggressive New Yorker.

And

it's really interesting.

Like, so I took a lot of calls with agents.

So to give a little bit of context, at the time,

This was probably 2014, 2013, 2014.

So at this point, I had been five years.

I had like scrapped and clawed my way.

I was like living, you know, when I started, I was living on friends' couches.

I moved back in with my mom for a while.

Like, it was hard days early on.

Really?

Because you came from a rich family, though, too, right?

But they didn't support you, basically.

No, no, no.

Okay.

No.

And I only know that because I heard you say that before on other people's podcasts.

Yeah.

Or in an interview.

No, I never asked for money.

And dad wouldn't have given it any.

He would be like, won't you go get a job?

And I'll be a pickup artist.

Yeah.

And then we'll talk.

So there was actually a very, there was like a lot of, I also felt like a very large amount of pride of like, I want to do this myself.

Yeah.

So, you know, I, I went back, lived with mom for a few months.

Ex-girlfriend of mine was supported me for a little while.

Like it, it, it was month to month for a few years when I started out.

And then

after five or six years of clawing and scraping and grinding,

you know, I get to 2013, 2014 and it's I've built this huge audience.

I'm finally making decent money.

How are you making the money now?

Was it just from advertisers on your blog?

Yeah, mostly like affiliate stuff.

But I had some, I had like e-books.

So I had the self-published book.

I had

a couple online courses that I was selling through my website.

Courses on what?

Just basic, you know, relationship skills.

Got it.

Okay.

Conversation skills.

You know, all the shit.

The shit I used to coach, basically.

Yeah, exactly.

So

I had a very strong sense of self-sufficiency of

like, I got here on my own.

I had to build everything myself.

I,

you know, I'm making money myself through my own website.

So there was a little bit of like skepticism at, at,

I guess, conventional media.

So when agents came and started knocking, I was like, well,

and by then I had been working on subtle art for maybe six or eight months.

I knew I was going to do a book.

So when all the agents came knocking, you know, my attitude was like, okay, yeah, I could do a book with a publisher, but

if you do it with a publisher, you only get 20%.

Your royalty is 15 to 20%.

And in a lot of cases, as you know, the publisher does not do what they say that they're gonna do for you

you know i had heard i had heard some horror stories

uh

and by that point i had already self-published a book and that book was my i'm getting between 70 and 80 royalties on that self-published book and that and that book is doing really well it's selling a couple thousand copies a week um or not a week a month um so i'm making like a really nice yeah six-figure income off of that so i'm like well

you know why

why give up that extra royalty?

Like, I've got this huge audience.

I've got an email list.

Totally.

Why didn't you self-publish that book?

So

none of the agents could answer this question.

And it was, it was funny, too, because a lot of, I mean, I talked to a lot of really nice, nice agents and

had good conversations with them.

But it was funny because they were, everyone, all of them that I talked to,

they were really trying to be my friend.

Like they were trying to be like really cool.

Yeah.

Like, what are your favorite books, man?

Oh, I love that one.

you know like we'd have these like really chill 45 minute conversations about whatever and uh and then i got on the phone with molly and she just like

very abrasively

starts like bombarding me with all these questions about my audience and my my monetization and my revenue and what do i want and um

you know and then she starts saying like well if we pitch it to this publisher you're you know they're probably going to expect this.

And if we pitch it to this publisher, and blah, blah, and I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, who says I'm going to publish it with a real publisher?

And she was like, what do you mean?

And I was like, well, I've got this audience.

I could self-publish it if I want.

And

she was like, you mean you don't know if you want to publish a book?

And I was like, no, I'm still like, I'm actually curious.

Like, why do you think I should do it?

And she was like, I don't know, but like, stop wasting my time.

And she basically kind of hung up on me.

And I was like, wow.

All right.

She's a prickly one.

You know?

But then I started thinking about it.

And I was like, you know, what is an agent?

And essentially an agent is like the bad cop to your good cop.

You know, because it's like you want to be chummy with your publisher and your editor and have fun conversations and talk about your favorite books.

But it's like, if you're negotiating a contract and that contract's worth a lot of money, and you don't want to get fucked over, you need an agent who's going to come in and start being like, you're fucking us over.

You're not going to do this.

You know, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You know, I'm like, okay, yeah, I want her on my team.

Molly got the job.

Yeah, I'm like, I want Molly to be my bad cop.

That's great.

And she's, you know, and that's actually one thing I learned from my dad.

My dad, my dad taught me this great lesson.

So my.

As I mentioned, my dad has a small manufacturing business in Austin.

And I used to work summers there.

And

it's not glamorous.

So you're, you're basically in this giant warehouse shop making plastic in the Texas summer heat

and getting paid not well.

But, you know, it's one of those formative experiences when you're 18 that kind of sticks with you.

But the cool thing about those experiences was that I would be on the shop floor all day, you know.

producing the plastic, hanging out with all these like blue collar, redneck Texas dudes,

learning kind of like how a industrial company actually functions and then I go have lunch with the president and

it was funny because so like the main supervisor of the shop floor was this guy named Ed

and everybody hated Ed hated him like

everybody was always telling they're like don't talk to Ed he's gonna ruin your day he's gonna fuck you over he's gonna do this he's gonna do that and uh after I'd been there this is like my first summer there and I remember after after I'd been there for a few weeks, I've just heard all these horrible stories about Ed.

So I went to lunch with my dad and I was like, hey, dad, I got to tell you something.

I don't know if I should tell you this.

He's like, what's that?

I'm like,

man, everybody hates Ed.

Ed is the worst.

And my dad just starts laughing.

And he's like, really?

What have you heard about him?

And I started telling him some of the stories that I heard.

And he's like, all right.

He's like, let me tell you another story about Ed.

He said, when I hired Ed,

our quality control went up 40%,

productive output went up 20%.

You know, he starts listing all these stats of just like Ed, just like complete game changer, made everything more efficient.

And he was like, he's like, what do you think about that story?

I'm like, well, yeah, but like, and he's like, look, Ed's an asshole, but

sometimes it's good to work with assholes.

And I remember like that lesson stuck with me a lot.

Like, there's a, I even wrote,

I even wrote an article.

I'm trying to remember what it was called.

It was called like why it's important to be an asshole or something like that.

And it was all about that.

It was all about how like there are moments in your professional life where it's, I called it the asshole switch.

Like it's important to be able to like turn on an asshole switch.

Yeah.

And be like, okay, this is going to be unpleasant for everybody.

But we're all good.

We're all going to be better off for it.

Right.

We're going to have a very unpleasant interaction.

I'm going to call you out on some bullshit we're gonna argue about it

but it's gonna make things get done and it's gonna get done better because of it and i think it's as a individual it's important to like be able to learn how to recognize those moments and flip that switch but i also think in teams it's probably optimal to have an asshole on the team sometimes it's true actually right yeah like not everyone has to be your best friend yeah you know and like you learn that like with the agent situation right but you could i think because that ed situation was so prevalent in your life that's probably why you gravitated to molly i you know and i i look like one of my biggest values in life is honesty and trust and the the great thing about molly is i always know she's being honest.

Yeah.

And it's funny because I know where you stand.

Always.

And it's funny because I'm

these days I'm friends with a bunch of other authors who are really successful.

And

some of them have relationships with their, like their agents basically just kiss their ass all the time, tell them what they want to hear.

And it's, I know I can pick up the phone and

call Molly and ask her a question and I'm going to get an honest answer.

And it's like, it might not be what I want to hear.

And that's actually really,

especially and okay.

Okay, kids, here's a lesson for you.

The higher you get up the success mountain, the harder it is to find people who are going to to be honest with you.

Totally.

And you, and like, you see that now.

I was going to say, like, you've seen that probably as you got more and more successful.

Yeah.

And seen it in others.

And other people around you, because as you get more successful, your probably professional circle is getting more.

And you see that everyone just surrounds themselves with yes men.

Yeah.

And it's, and it's, I don't even think it's conscious.

Like it's just,

it's human.

We like being told things that we want to hear.

And so we become biased towards the people who will say the things we want to hear, and we'll keep them around a little bit more.

And

so true.

How do you keep that level of

down-to-earthness as that?

Like, it sounds to me, is it because not, you could be, you can use yourself as an example, but like it is really hard, right?

Because as you get more successful, as all this stuff is happening, it's human nature that you gravitate to people who like make you feel nice and sweet and say nice things to you because like you just, it just what happens in human nature naturally.

Yeah.

How do you keep yourself like

on the ground and down to earth?

I think it's a combination of two things, or there's two things that I do that I think is very helpful.

One is just having very solid relationships with friends and family.

It's,

you know, it's important to have people in your life that knew you before, totally, you know, you were whatever, um,

who still see you that way, um, right, who don't think of you as a big deal, yeah, right.

Like, it's funny, I brought, I brought my mom once to one of my events, and

you know, afterward, I like, we were hanging out backstage afterwards, and I was like, so what'd you think?

Like, how was it?

And she just, she was like, don't take this the wrong way, but it was really fucking weird.

But that's good, It's good.

Yeah, it's totally good.

It's amazing.

Did you know your wife before you became, oh, you did?

Okay, that's good to know.

Which is also very helpful.

So what year did you meet your wife?

I met her 2012.

So what's interesting to me also, because I see this myself, once people hit a peak, like a success peak, they get rid of those people, right?

And they marry someone else who's like, they like marry up or not like what I would think is a term, right?

But what they see and perceive as like a status symbol for themselves yeah you know what I mean which is so gross it is well it's interesting because

so this is one of the things that I talk about in in my dating book is that

it's it's toxic to see most people most people who have poor relationships, it's because they see relationships as status games.

Or it's because they don't feel like they're something.

It's more because themselves.

They're usually so insecure.

they feel in inadequate themselves and so they as a result they see relationships in terms of like i don't know yeah status scoring points on a scoreboard and they're like oh well she looks like this and has this background so that makes her more you know, a better catch than this other person, you know, and it's a hundred percent.

And I see it, that happens almost always, by the way.

Not it's not the exception at all.

Yeah.

And I mean, it's, I think it's because usually that person, person, and if you get to know that person, you can see they have deep-seated insecurities.

And that's why they're doing that.

Right.

Yeah.

It's,

I always try to be aware with myself is that, you know,

it's more likely than not that this is going to go away at some point.

You know, maybe it takes five years.

Maybe it takes 25 years.

But at some point, I'm just going to be a random dude.

But you're never going to be a random dude.

And I'll tell you why, because you already had the success behind you to say you had this big biggest you had this book you had this movie that was made on your life and your book like even if you don't have the you know the i guess the very

the success that it's at that level at that moment you still are successful because you had it already yeah yeah that makes sense sure but it's

that's why you're a bad example let me keep telling myself that okay okay okay go ahead

go ahead that's very important for you asked how i keep myself grounded okay good go ahead But I do think it is important to keep that awareness that this, it could go like.

Because I'm sure with girls, you meet girls all the time.

Yeah, it's...

But you're not as in forefront.

I know you're not

in the front as much as you would be.

But the movie.

Well, yeah.

I mean.

We'll see.

We'll see.

But it's...

It's...

I try to keep that awareness in mind that this is likely temporary.

And I'm sure we're going to talk about Will Smith at some point, but Will.

I was going to go right into it.

Okay, so Will, Will's grandmother has a fantastic line in the book.

Let me just say something because I don't know if people know, but Mark

wrote Will's huge biography, autobiography called Will.

I don't think most people, I don't think, does everyone know that?

I don't think it's like common knowledge that it was you who wrote that with him.

Yeah, I mean, it's if you open the title page, my name is

in a much smaller font.

For people who read the book, he's not exactly a beloved person these days, right?

No, no, it's complicated with him.

But you said his grandmother would say.

So when he first went on his first tour, so a lot of people don't know he was a hip-hop star in the 80s before he was an actor.

Doesn't everybody know that?

Not our age, I think so, but

Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

Yeah, but it's, yeah, a lot of kids don't know that.

I've been surprised how many people are like, wait, he was a hip-hop star?

like yeah oh okay won the first hip-hop grammy ever really yeah fun fun fact fun fact okay so anyway when he went on his first tour ever as he was getting on the tour bus his grandmother told him she said

be nice to everybody you meet on the way up because you might have to meet them again on your way back down that is a great line

i like that that's a really i'm gonna tell i love that line yeah there's a lot of wisdom in that that is there's a lot of wisdom in that What I was going to say, just to finish what I was going to say earlier, is that like you may not have relevance in that particular moment later on in life.

It was the relevance, but you'll always have had the success.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Relevance and success are different in the moment, in that moment in time.

Yeah, I think what I mean is,

you know, the ego gratifying stuff, you know, being recognized or, you know,

getting offered contracts to do movies or TV shows or whatever.

Like that, that will probably go away eventually one day.

But you're still young.

I mean, you have

your whole life.

Like you're going to have like a huge more hits.

Like things keep on like elevating for you.

So, okay, so this kind of brings a full circle.

Like, I

feel like it's very important

for my own sanity, but also my own creativity to constantly be aware that this is very temporary, that this is probably not, because I think it's by

that constant awareness of knowing that this could be temporary and this might not last, it,

I don't know, it brings me like some degree of peace.

Like I feel like if

I went, if I proceeded in my career with this expectation of like, no, this has to last or I have to become even more famous now, like it would put so much pressure and

expectation on myself.

Totally.

That I'd make myself miserable.

Whereas if I'm like, okay, you know,

you happen to hop on the this roller coaster here.

You stumbled upon it.

Like, enjoy it,

see where it goes, enjoy the highs, enjoy the lows, whatever.

But it's not going to last, right?

So, um, I'll keep on saying that with you then, just to make you feel better.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Just see if you can do that.

Delusional negativity.

But listen, it works for you, right?

Because it keeps you honest.

And I think that you have more peace because of it.

Absolutely.

Like, that to me is what I noticed just from like the essence of you versus, you know, a lot of people I meet who are very famous and they have like, they, they got that, the, the, the, the partner that's way more elevated and famous and beautiful.

And they're doing, it's constantly like it's searching for more and more and more.

And they're so empty and lonely and sad inside.

Yeah.

You know, it's really sad.

And like you see, I see it all, especially living in LA.

It's like all you see here.

You you see it quite a bit here and it's like uncomfortable and i have to say like

being a tourist in the film industry

it was it was a little bit shocking and off-putting yeah the way i got treated in the film industry versus how i get treated in like my other professional relationships really the amount of

ass kissing

like

almost

like the anxiety that happens when you walk when being the talent walks into the room,

it actually reached a point it got awkward at a certain point.

Like when we were making the film, you know, I'd be like,

you know, we'd have like a little bit of food backstage or like offset or whatever.

And I'd be like, wow, the sandwich is really good today, you know, and it's like

we'd shoot another scene and then I come back 20 minutes later and it's like another tray of sandwiches is there.

I'm like, I didn't need that.

It was so crazy.

But, you know, there's some PA who's like, oh my God, Mark said he he likes the sandwiches.

Got to go get more sandwiches, you know, and, and it's, it, it actually, I'm really glad that the,

the shooting only lasted about 10 days because, uh, I, I started getting uncomfortable.

Like it, it, I became almost hyper aware of the things I was saying or doing around other people because I knew

they were putting so much weight on my words and actions that like if I

made a joke that came out the wrong way or made a comment, you know, a snide comment about something that isn't really a big deal to me, but I'm just kind of making a comment.

Like, I don't know, it was just like everything was being blown out of proportion.

Totally.

And I, I, it made me think, I'm like, God, like, I don't even know how, like, if you're like Tom Cruise or somebody like that.

I was just going to say, how the fuck do you live?

How do you live?

That's why, like, I was going to say, like, how do you live when you're actually like a real A?

Like, I'm going to ask you about Will in a second.

Yeah.

Because it's so awkward and off-putting.

Like, when I first moved here, I was an assistant at a place called ThreeArts.

It's like a management company because I was like really super young.

And at the time, I'm sure you remember, those jobs still is super coveted, like these assistant jobs for these like top agents and like managers and bullshit like that.

And I literally lasted seven days.

I could not do the job because of the bullshit that was around.

I could not stand it.

Everyone's kissing each other's ass.

I couldn't like the kind of messages that we were getting from the agents of how to like deal with the clients.

yeah like doing this like we would have these people i'm not going to mention her name she'd call and she'd be like um can you order flowers i i have to do this thing and i would be like and i'm can't i'm canadian and i just moved from canada at the time i'm like well why are you calling me to order the flowers like you could have just called the florist like i couldn't i didn't understand the kind of like nonsense that really goes on yeah and i saw it and like and in six days i was like oh my god this is such bullshit how to live in that world is so awful yeah it's like not, it's not for, it's not for, for me.

But anyway, okay, I just wanted to kind of like just put my little two cents in because I, and I've been around a lot of these people, and it's uncomfortable for me to even watch how people deal with them.

Yes.

And like how they have to, like, no wonder they're all, so many of these people are anxious and nervous and like hyper aware and like, because they have, like, everyone's staring at you 24 hours a day.

Yep.

It's crazy.

So, so the to bring it it to Will.

How did you even get to the place where it was like, hey, Will Smith wants to write a book?

Like, how did that even happen?

Well, it's interesting.

So I think

to kind of answer our own question here,

what I learned, what I noticed rather about Will and the people around him

after

spending a couple years around everybody,

there's like layers to an onion, you know?

So

if you're a random person person off the street or somebody that he's meeting just very casually in a professional situation, you know, a PA on set or

an assistant in a meeting or something like that, there's a certain kind of,

you get like celebrity version of Will, right?

So he's going to be very friendly and charming, but it's going to be very impersonal.

You know, it's an interaction that he has a thousand times a day.

Anytime he goes out in public, people recognize him, scream, you know, they're fans, whatever.

That's kind of the outer layer.

If you get to a place where it's like, okay, you're a person that he's going to see and work with repeatedly,

um,

there's a little bit more comfort there and a little bit more authenticity.

Like, he, he will, he'll open up a little bit.

But it, it was funny.

I actually, you know, working on the book with him,

I honestly feel like it took

maybe three or four months before

I even started getting the like actual real material.

Um,

and I, I, at the time I found it kind of frustrating, and I thought it was him, you know, I'm like, wow, I, it's kind of hard to get him off autopilot.

He's done so many interviews throughout his career.

Um, but then I realized, I was like, you know, it's,

I think it's more that I, in hindsight, I think it's, I had to kind of earn my way in.

You know, it's like I had, I had to stick around for three or four months and show that I was trustworthy, that I wasn't going to, you know, that I was reliable, that I got along with his team, that, you know, his family members liked me

before he'd kind of go to that next level.

What is the next level?

The next level is, is, I think, probably the first level that it's actually him.

Yeah,

that you're interacting with him.

Which is what, though, because I don't believe that he's like that affable, hey, look at me.

Like, we've saw that already would happen.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, a lot of times when people have that, like.

He's a complex individual, like anybody.

Um,

you know, for me, it

took,

yeah, I'd say

maybe the fifth or sixth trip I did with him.

First of all, it took, I think, probably four, four trips for me to just end up in a room with him one-on-one for more than 10 minutes.

You know, like there are always people around.

Who's around?

Like, who are the people?

Personal assistants, managers, family members.

He's always like that dude works

so hard.

Like his schedule is so packed with so many like,

you know,

even if he's doing a movie on off days, he's doing some sort of ad thing for something in Japan.

He's got a meeting for a charity.

He's meeting kids at a local university for some charity that

he's doing a thing for.

Like there's always something, always.

There's meetings is it stat like give me a day in the life of what happened

it's hard to pick like well i i think it's hard to

it's hard to give like a typical day i'd say that there's two different ones you know if he's on if he's making a movie it's very different than when he's not when he's making a movie it's the movie's the full focus and the rest of us are just trying to fit ourselves into like he's got two hours off here.

He's got an hour here.

But it's those situations are hard.

It actually got to the point, you know, by the second year I worked with him, I kind of told his manager, like the manager who was of the book project, I told her, I was like, look, like

if he's on set, it's not even worth me coming because

he's, even if I do get FaceTime with him, he's so distracted.

And like, we're not getting high quality time.

We're getting interrupted constantly that it's really not worth me being here.

So yeah, when he's doing a film, it's like, it's full-on, 12-hour days, 14-hour days, super intense meetings all the time.

When he's not doing a film,

it's a lot more free-flowing.

It's more fun.

Like, he's got a

pretty, not going to surprise you, he's got a pretty awesome life,

really?

You know, so,

you know, there'll be,

he'll be hanging out at home for a few days, and then he, he'll have, there'll be some event in like France that he's MCing or appearing at.

So he'll fly to France, and then he'll spend a week there.

He'll do,

you know, maybe a couple events there and

maybe bring one of his kids out and hang out on a yacht for a couple of days.

And then he'll go to Miami for a week.

And

it's all very like kind of seat of your pants.

Fluid, yeah, it seems fluid.

Like this, yeah, it's very fluid.

There's always something going on.

Everywhere he goes, there's somebody who wants something.

So, um, and where did you fit in?

Like, how did you have to like have a, how do you have a life if you have to work around his life?

Great question.

Um,

you know, it worked well because I'm very uh, I like chaos a little bit.

You know, I'm not super structured in my life.

Um,

uh, you're malleable.

I'm very malleable.

I'm not, I'm not huge on routines.

Um, so

it's like habits and hustle is not really your thing

i mean the hustle for sure habits i'm working on yeah you got the first part of it yeah yeah uh

so it you know it they it's funny because a couple people on this team told me really early on they're like if this is going to work you need to be flexible um because it's yeah there's crazy stuff schedules get interrupted i mean there were times like i got flown i would get flown out there was one time i got flown to atlanta and uh i basically just sat in a hotel for three days.

And they were like, Yeah, he doesn't have time.

And then, you know, got sent back to New York.

So it's what do you do?

Do you have to sit there and wait for him?

Or can you go and work out?

Can you go for lunch?

Can you go for whatever?

Yeah, I mean, it's but if they call you, you got to come right back.

Yeah, it's you're kind of on call basically.

Um, and look, it's not the worst thing in the world.

Like, they put me up in the St.

Regis and I'm like ordering room service.

Right, right, right.

You're not at the double tree, you know, exactly.

Exactly.

I'm being taken care of.

And at that point,

I was working on my other books.

So I was actually perfectly happy to sit in a hotel room and write for 10 hours a day with no other obligations.

So, you know, it's just, I had to learn how to be very flexible.

The biggest thing for me was to learn how to not take things personally because especially being around such a prominent person

early on.

So this is a funny story.

So the first time I wrote anything for him,

which

anybody who's a writer or an author has published anything, like you know the insecurity that comes with writing something.

So he and I had had, I think, a few meetings and there was one story that he and I both really liked.

And

I decided, I was like, I'm just going to write up this story, like two or three pages, and I'm going to try to write it sounding like him.

It was kind of my first shot at sounding like Will.

and uh so i wrote this up and flew out to meet him he was shooting uh shooting a movie it was

uh in columbia actually you just flew to columbia yeah okay cartagena yeah yeah okay

so go meet him on set i'm like hey uh you know so i wrote this thing at this point it's still early in the process so i don't realize how insane his schedule is and how unavailable both physically and mentally he is when he's on set at a film.

So I'm like super excited.

I'm like, hey man, I wrote this thing.

I want you to check it out.

And he's like, yeah,

yeah,

you know, leave it, leave it, leave it here in the hotel room.

I'll, I'll check it out, you know, next time I get a break.

And I'm like, okay, cool.

And like, leave it, leave it on the desk in the room.

And he goes back to film set and I like go to lunch or whatever.

And, and it's, I think shooting is going to break at like 2 p.m.

So that's when he's going to read it.

And so I'm like, looking at my watch.

I'm like super nervous.

Like, oh God, I hope he likes it.

I'd shown it to his manager his manager loved it she was like it's great don't worry he's gonna love it like okay cool so two o'clock comes around he goes back to his hotel room like all right you know waiting any minute I'm like literally just sitting in the lobby like all right any minute now I'm gonna like get called up there we're gonna start talking about it 230 comes

three o'clock comes

By this point, I'm like freaking out.

I'm like, oh my God.

You know, it doesn't take an hour to read three pages.

Like,

there's a problem here.

He's not happy.

I'm going to get fired.

Like, this is shit's going to hit the fan.

You know, I'm like pacing in circles.

I'm like, oh, God.

Like,

well, it was fun while it lasted.

All this stuff.

You know,

3.30, still nothing from him.

Finally, it's like four o'clock.

He comes out of his room, goes back to set.

And

then his manager comes out.

And I'm like, what happened?

like she's like what do you mean what happened i'm like well i left the the pages for will like it's like i don't know i didn't hear from him like what what yeah did something go wrong and she's like she's like started laughing she's like no he took a nap like

he didn't read anything

out i'm freaking out the whole afternoon i told her i was like i've been walking i've been pacing in the lobby for two hours because i'm thinking that he's like reading and she just started laughing and she's like he was up till 5 a.m.

shooting last night like he hasn't slept she's like it's not you and I'm like oh okay okay exactly that is really funny

when he first read your stuff when it did he like it though was yeah it went great it went great

yeah yeah honestly like our his and I working relationship was fantastic

when you saw him how often did you see him like was it yeah the problem was getting FaceTime that was honestly the biggest challenge of that entire project.

Like, he and I, we got along really well personally.

We meshed really well professionally.

I think our skills complemented each other really well.

Like, it's the,

I'm very good at, like, theme and structure and outlines and understanding, like, okay, this chat, this idea should come after this idea.

Whereas I really struggled to sound like him on the page.

Whereas he was great.

Like you could, I could go to him and I'd be like, hey,

write that story you told me yesterday.

Like, can you write like a one pager in your own words?

And he could write it and it would be great.

Like, it would be fantastic.

And I could literally just copy and paste that into what I was working on.

Really?

Yeah.

So what we ended up with was I, you know, we did the outline together.

And then I did the first draft.

And then he went through and kind of revised his own

stories and that's it.

His own style and language onto it and added little details and things like that.

So he like embellished it.

You know, kind of the way I thought about it, it's like, if we're building a house, it's like I laid the foundation and built the framing and then he went through and like painted it and decorated it.

Right.

Put like, yeah, exactly.

Put his touches on it.

Yeah.

But did you, like, how often, like, how many times did you actually see?

And were you seeing it for big chunks of time?

Was it like five hours?

Because you did, you you need to get the stories out of them you need to get like the the nuances it took a while to kind of so early on it was they would just kind of fly me out to tag along with him randomly yeah and that was useful for maybe like

two trips you know but one this is two years you said of your life doing this right yeah well i worked with him on and off so we started in 2018 and the book came out end of 21 so it was it was three it was a three-year project um

yeah that first year it was a lot of just kind of tag along which i think there was some utility in that just because it's such a foreign world i used to call it willy world because it's like you're in in an alternate reality when you're around somebody that famous like the security

like the they come in and out of hotels in ways that you didn't know you could like give me an ex how um

So I didn't realize this, but pretty much every five-star hotel, every high-end restaurant,

every airport, major major airport.

There are secret entrances.

Yeah, the back doors and stuff like that, right?

You know, so it's we would,

you know, he came to New York once for an event and we left the event through some back door, you know, tinted windows.

SUV picks us up in an alley.

drives us to a restaurant, lets us out in an alley.

They open the back door.

We walk through the kitchen.

And then there's a secret dining room that, and this is a restaurant that I had been to multiple times, and I had no idea there was a secret dining room.

There's a secret dining room.

There's secrets, so like high-end restaurants will have secret dining rooms for celebrities,

politicians, heads of state, things like that.

They go through the kitchen, yeah.

We see that in the movies all the time.

So that's real.

Yeah, it is real.

And then at the hotels, are they going through the back entrance?

Like, people see you in the lobby, don't they, walking through?

So what they would do is they'd bring him in through the service entrance.

Like, so the same place that they like deliver the laundry, like that's where celebrities go in.

So you go in through the service elevator, they take you up to whatever your floor is, and then they've already got security on that floor to escort you to the room.

So yeah, it's crazy.

It's crazy.

Like your whole life is different.

Whole life.

Whole life is like that.

It's strange.

It's also really exciting and fun.

Like, I was going to say, like, I kind of missed it a little bit.

Did you like it?

Yeah, like, I, I loved

being attached to it.

Like, I love that it wasn't my life.

Right, but you could be like the, like the outside kind of perched in for a few days, yeah.

Like, that's why I called it Willy World.

I was like, I used to tell, you know, when they would call,

I used to tell my

wife, I'd say, uh, you know, I'm gonna go visit Willy World for, you know, I'll be gone for a week, probably, maybe longer.

And is he nice to like how many, how he's great?

He is nice.

Did you see any like

anger?

Like, obviously, he's got like some deep anger issues, right?

You didn't see any of that?

Uh,

No, I mean, so it's interesting.

His

Achilles heel is, and we talk about this in the book.

His Achilles heel is the women in his life.

He feels very,

he feels an irrational level of

protection towards Jada, towards Willow, and towards his mom.

And it actually comes from his mom.

So

his father was a very violent alcoholic, um, used to beat the shit out of his mom all the time.

And Will was the oldest child, and so Will felt like it was his responsibility to intervene or help or do something to stop it, and he never could.

Um, I remember him talking to Oprah about that, actually.

Yeah, and it, it, it's really, uh,

it's interesting because it's that came up

That story actually came up pretty early in our interviews.

And

it was funny because as soon as it came up, I was like, wow,

that's like a defining component of your personality.

Like that should, we should open the book with that.

And he was like, really?

He was like, and you did, didn't you?

Yeah, yeah, we did.

He was like, wow, it's like a really dark thing though.

And I was like, yeah, but that is like the whole arc of who your development over your whole life has been that.

It's like you are the scared nine-year-old boy

failing to protect his mother.

Um,

and like all of the struggles you've gone through throughout your life are just you playing that out, that conflict over and over again.

And

so, yeah, it's funny.

Like, if there's one thing that could set him off, it would be

attacking one of the women in his life.

Like, it's a very irrational trauma.

He didn't get attacked.

I mean, Chris Rock hardly attacked her by saying something about the bald head or something about Propecia.

I don't know.

Whatever.

But

did he seem like a good dad?

Was he nice with his kids?

Was he nice?

Did you see?

Did you spend time with her too?

Yeah, I spent time with everybody.

Were they all traveling with him or do they all travel?

They come in and out.

So

he's on the road all the time.

And so,

you know,

Willow or Trey would travel with him for a week or two.

Jado would come out for a week, you know, and then he'd go home for a few weeks or a month.

Like, they're all very,

you know, and they all have their own careers too.

So everybody's pretty transient.

Yeah.

They're all a little bit like nomadic, but they

convene in a lot of places together.

So I

like.

You never saw him lose his temper or anything like that.

No, but see, it's one of those things that

he probably should lose his temper more often because if he did then this wouldn't happen exactly yeah you know he's he's one of those people it's it's like he it's like chronic nice person syndrome like because he is is he nice to people he's unbelievably nice he's unbelievably nice and it's it's funny like when i was so

when you hang around somebody that famous you you spend a lot of time waiting and idling cars and hotel lobbies and

and the only the only people around around you are the security guys and um

and so I got to know a lot of his security guys yeah and uh and it's it's a fascinating industry because all those guys

you know they've all worked for other celebrities they've all worked for like heads of state and things like that so

and they don't share stories but like you know that they've seen some shit and

I remember I remember I was talking to like one of the security guys and he

he had actually been head of security for madonna for like 20 years and i was like dude you must have seen some shit and he was like you can't even imagine he was like if you ever he was like i can't talk about it but man

if you ever wanted to write a book about some stuff he's like i've got some stories but uh right right for sure but uh he asked me i remember he asked me he said uh he's like have you done a lot of celebrity books i said no actually this is the first one he's like you've never never worked with a celebrity before i was like no Will's the first one.

And he looked at me and he said, You got the best one.

Really?

He is, this is why.

So I came out and like after the whole slap thing, a lot of my readers got kind of upset and got angry emails of like, you know,

I thought you said he was a good guy and I can't trust you anymore because how could you work with someone?

And it's like, yeah, whatever.

Go fuck yourself.

Yeah.

So I wrote a piece.

And one of the things I said is I was like, look, like, we all do stupid things and

make mistakes.

But like,

you know, the level, his level of like genuine kindness and generosity.

First of all, it's really remarkable.

And he does it even when nobody's looking.

Like it's...

That's what I was trying to ask you.

Even when nobody's there.

When nobody, like, there are things that nobody knows about that he's done that are absolutely incredible.

Like, it's honestly, it was very inspiring for me.

Really?

Personally.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He, he, it's, he made me want to be a better professional.

Really?

Yeah.

Like I, I, the things I learned from him, you know, the book is primarily about his personal life, but I, I told him at one point, I was like, I was like, dude, these last two years have been like a masterclass on like how to

how to be a professional in an entertainment industry.

Like it's, he's,

he's great.

That's amazing.

I mean, also based on like what happened, have you spoken to him since that whole thing?

A little bit.

A little bit.

Do you guys text each other, call each other?

He's so busy.

I mean, yeah, you'd text.

You're never going to get him on the phone.

Yeah, we texted a little bit after it.

You know, we went back and forth a few times and had some conversations.

You know, I was very vocally supportive of him.

And I think,

I mean, I don't know.

I wasn't keeping up with it, but I, maybe I was like one of the only ones.

So he reached out and thanked me and we talked about it.

Oh, we did, yeah,

isn't it funny?

It's so life is so relative, right?

Like, you are with him, like, the people don't know who you are because he's so big, right?

But, like, you and yourself is very much like in your world, you're a celebrity, right?

You go to his world, they're like, Who are you?

Like, what books have you written for?

Like, they don't even know about what you've done, you know what I mean?

Yeah, isn't that funny how like life works like that?

Yeah, yeah, it's

yeah, yeah, it's it's strange, it's really strange, and it,

I think it was

weird to, you know, I grew up watching him.

So that's right.

That's what I'm saying.

Like he's like an icon for people like us, right?

Like for us, I mean, I remember like he like epitomized, like he was a star, like from like the hip-hop days to like Muhammad Ali.

Like he's, there's no one really bigger than him, really, in that world.

Yeah, I mean, there's a few

few people on the same level.

Yeah, that's what I mean, but no one.

Yeah, I don't think you get more famous than him.

Do Do you think his career now is ruined, though, because of what happened?

I don't think it's ruined.

So I think the interesting thing about,

so I think people are going to say it was ruined, but I don't think the slap ruined it.

There's kind of an unspoken truth out here in Hollywood.

Maybe people here in LA are more aware of it.

Maybe not.

But,

you know, the film industry, star power has been in decline for well over a decade at this point.

Because of social media, probably.

Social media, people are, you know, it used to be when we were young,

you'd go see the new Will Smith movie, you'd go see the new Tom Cruise movie, you'd go see the new Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

It didn't really matter what the movie was, it was like, oh, it's Arnold Schwarzenegger.

So, of course, I'm going to go see it.

That's changed.

That doesn't exist anymore.

Now people go see franchises.

They go see the new Marvel movie or the new Star Wars movie.

That's exactly it.

There's no mystery.

There's no level of mystery in people's lives anymore.

Yeah.

And that's why.

And there's no,

you know, the celebrity themselves is not the focal point.

That's not what people get attached to.

So I think there's already been a pretty steady decline of star power for a long time.

And Will and his people have been very aware of that.

And actually, Will was kind of one of the last holdouts.

He was like one of the last celebrities that could still get a good turnout to movie theaters.

So I think it's.

That's true, actually.

Now that you think about it, I think about it.

Even The Rock, who always had like a big movie,

the last movie bombed, I heard.

Yeah, it's which is not very rare.

Well, and what I've heard, too, is that post-pandemic, it's like,

you know, that whole industry is

in complete chaos.

Like, nobody knows what works anymore.

You know, I think.

the new top gun movie is is the outlier.

That is the only outlier.

Yeah.

But everything else is just kind of like, everything's falling flat.

Nobody knows what works.

So I think,

you know, I think in terms of being an A-list Hollywood celebrity,

that decline is probably going to continue, but, and it'll probably be blamed on the slap post hoc, but I don't think that's what caused it.

I think it's just times are changing.

Yeah, I mean, I guess that's true.

It's just

he will work again, though.

I'm sure.

Of course, he'll do movies.

He'll do other stuff and people will like it and life will go on are you gonna do any more celebrity books like that though what have you been asked to do any more has that book because that book sold exceptionally well right yeah it did really well

up until the slap I was gonna say up until the slap I was gonna say I'm sorry Mark because you get paid based on the royalty I got paid so I'm sure

my check got written regardless so I'm not did you get an upfront check didn't you get royalties also

yeah you get I got a advanced piece of the advanced Oh, you're good, yeah, yeah.

And honestly,

for him, that

you know, book money for him is he's not doing it for the money, chum chick.

Come on, I mean, give me a break.

That guy needs money like I need a hole in him, you know what I mean?

Like, give me a break, but it is funny and kind of sad to see like the chart of book sales.

Yeah, you can go on book scan and see the chart, and it's like you know, that last week in March, it just

falls off a cliff.

Um, oh, God, I think it was probably, I think it was,

it sold a million pretty fast in like a month or two.

I think it was, it's pretty close to 2 million probably.

Wow.

Worldwide, which is still amazing.

It's like your second book.

Yeah.

You still, you still basically, though, like catapulted him by like 15 million, though.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, and it's, it, I think, I think had the slap not happened, it probably would have been significantly higher.

See, personally, I would have wanted, I would want to read the book more to know like what is in inside of him.

I'm so surprised.

That is the irony

is that if people, and I wrote this in the piece that I put out, is I was like, you know, if you people actually read the book,

this would not surprise you.

Like he had a long history in his teens and 20s of sucker punching.

Of violence, sucker punching people.

Like he used to just walk up to people and punch them out of the blue.

that he people he had problems with.

And you wrote that in the book.

There's a whole chapter about it.

And he had to learn why, you know,

this is the thing at the end of the day, right?

It's like, I think we got spoiled.

The guy,

he was such,

it was like such a perfect product of great PR for so many decades.

So true.

That we took him for granted.

We started to think that that's actually who he is.

Like we forgot.

That's so true.

He's a dude from West Philly who got in trouble for fighting.

Like,

that's not fiction.

100%.

But that is who he is.

But his image, his image is a fresh print, no matter what happens, you know, like that is how people want to.

Because

facts are not reality, right?

I mean, sorry, facts are not your beliefs, right?

So it's like what we want to believe to be true, no matter what the facts are.

Yeah.

Are you going to do it?

So have you, so have you been asked?

Yeah, I've been asked by a few other people.

You know, it's not something I'm like look actively looking for.

I'm open to it.

I think it would have to, again, it have to be like a very, very prominent person.

Like who?

Who would be your ideal person to write a book for?

Oh, I would write the shit out of Tom Brady's book.

Oh, that would be a great one.

I would love that.

Yeah, I'm a big, big Tom Brady fan.

Yeah, it'd have to be somebody like that.

It'd have to be somebody that I really personally respect and admire.

And then they'd also,

you know, one of my, when I first met with Will, one of the first things I told him is I said, like, look, you know, for me to be on board.

By the way, I'm going to clip that for Tom Brady too.

And I know them, so I'm going to send that to him.

Are they talking to you already?

No.

No.

No, but if you can hook that up, I would.

Maybe I'm going to.

That would be a great one.

Brady is, I think it's, you know,

well, anyway, that's what I'm saying.

No, no, no.

Tell me.

Tell me.

Tell him.

I'm curious.

So the thing about Brady, I think, would be incredible to kind of investigate because everybody knows he's competitive and he's like works really hard.

And, like, so this is the thing.

This is what I told Will when I first met with him: I said, the thing I'm asking myself, because obviously, you know, you're talented, you're famous, you're charismatic, whatever, you're smart,

you have to be all those things.

What I'm looking for is like, what is the thing that you can say that nobody else can say, or 99.99% of people can't say?

Like, what's the, what is the absolutely unique thing?

And for me, with Will, it was he actually has this unbelievable

capability of for resilience, for

overcoming incredible amounts of hardship, pushing himself through unbelievable amounts of struggle and pain and training and discipline.

Like his

pain tolerance is the highest I've ever seen in an individual.

And that goes all the way back to his childhood, you know, dealing with the family, the home that he came out of.

Like the rest of us would not come out of that home

as functional as he is.

So, you know, for me, that was when I found when I we tripped upon that with him, I was like, that's that's got to be the cent, the central thesis of the book.

That's why it's called Will.

It's because it's not just his name, it's like Will.

It's his

undying will to

overcome everything.

Um,

oh, I didn't even know that.

That's great.

Yeah, So it's, um,

I think with Tom, the, the, the thing that's remarkable about Tom is that everybody who's ever played with him says he's the best teammate they ever had.

And I think there's such an opportunity to investigate like, what, why is that?

What does that look like?

You know, like it's because there have been a lot of huge stars in sports who have been total assholes, who have had drama and beefs with people

who have had left teammates and coaches with bad tastes in their mouth.

Look at Michael Jordan, right?

The best in the world of the

undeniably the best.

Undeniably also undeniably an asshole.

And

so what I find really remarkable about Brady is that all of his teammates just have these like gushing,

you know, when they, when they're asked about him, they just gush about him.

That's an interesting one.

Yeah.

So yeah, it'd have to be somebody like that level.

And they'd have to be doing it for the right reasons.

You know, it's, it's, I, I, I'm not interested in

a PR campaign or whatever.

It's like they need to be bought into it, like really care about it for the right reasons.

Yeah.

Okay.

So what else are you working?

By the way, we start off.

You're like, this is not going to be a three-hour podcast, is it?

I'm like, no, don't be ridiculous.

No, just two and a half.

Two and a half.

Two hours and and 45 minutes okay i'm sorry

what are you working on now that we that people can besides of course you have your movie that is amazing that you got a movie deal i mean nobody ever gets a movie deal yeah the fact that you have a movie deal and they're making a movie the movie's out um congratulations thank you uh what else are you working on so i'm actually um

this is so la but uh oh i'm uh you're opening up an era one no i'm just joking

Make it a yoga studio.

Exactly.

You're going to become a life coach

and then teach yoga at night.

Ayahuasca yoga on the beach.

That's what we're doing.

Exactly.

I forgot about that.

Ayahuasca yoga.

That's a great, that's a great hybrid, actually.

That's my calling.

I love it.

That's hilarious.

Okay.

Besides that, I'm actually hiring

in the process of hiring a video production team.

So

I've been asking myself a lot, like

what, you know, coming back to personal development.

Right.

Let's get back to that.

It's at a certain point as a writer, it's hard to keep writing about these topics without repeating yourself.

It's impossible.

Yeah, it's like.

Human anxiety doesn't change.

Relationship problems don't change.

100% true.

The same thing, the same advice that worked 10 years ago works today it's going to work 10 years from now so just packaging it exactly yeah

so

I uh and I think traditionally what happens to

self-help authors in my position is that you kind of just end up rewriting the same book for like 30 years yeah and cashing checks

just calling it something else yeah and I I really don't want to do that.

Like it, that doesn't feel,

it feels, yeah, it's just not exciting.

i'd rather like retire and go do something else

um you have such ethics though it's pretty amazing actually so i i've been asking myself the the one thing that can change is the format of the advice um and some formats are more useful than others so you know some people the same way like some people learn you know visually better than reading or you know better through audio or whatever some people learn better through doing with coaching versus talking talking

I've been thinking about like what what sort of formats are possible

with video and I've been really I've actually been really inspired with this this like younger generation of youtubers and some of the

some of the creativity that's coming out with them

like mr beast and stuff have you seen his stuff yeah like mr beast

air act there's a guy named ryan trahan that does some really cool stuff oh

it's a lot of like kind of man on the street challenges things like that.

It's really, it's really remarkable.

And I feel like there's a really great pivot from that.

Because I love the content they're doing, but they're primarily like, you know, 24-year-old dudes who

not to sound like an old person, but haven't really lived life.

Exactly.

Well, this is what's right.

Exactly.

How old is Mr.

Beast?

Like 23.

Yeah, 24.

He's really young.

So it's, it's, their content's extremely entertaining and it's, and it's really inventive.

But there's,

as, as a 30-something-year-old watching it,

like, I crave this depth that's not there.

You know, like, Mr.

Beast did this video of a guy.

I think he spent like 100 days in a house, like in a house.

He couldn't leave the house for 100 days or something like that.

And

this guy was socially deprived.

like he had nobody to talk to he had wow like he had nothing to do for months um and if he i think if he succeeded he got like half a million dollars or something so it's gonna it's gonna put his kids through college it's all these other things yeah you know it's gonna have this incredible knock-on effect for his family can he watch tv i don't remember like the exact rules just but the guy suffered like it was clear like yeah socially yeah isolation because like mr beast would go like 15 20 days between checking in on him and you know every time he came the guy would be like oh my god oh my god so good you're here ah so glad to be talking to somebody.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You might Google that afterwards.

It's really fascinating from a psychological perspective.

But

I felt like it was such a missed opportunity because, you know, Mr.

Beast would kind of just come check in and be like, oh, okay, that's weird.

And then like leave.

You know, he wouldn't, he like didn't investigate.

Right.

Like, what is, what's the mental process that's going on here?

What is the emotional process?

Like, what are the emotional struggles?

How are you feeling?

It's been 20 days since you had a conversation.

Like,

how has that affected you?

Like, why don't we sit down and talk for like an hour and see?

You know, obviously, we'll that's a great idea.

So

I love this idea of kind of using this

YouTube-y challenge format, but using it

like more instead of like giving away more money or doing like blowing up crazier stuff,

going deep with it, right?

Like, yeah.

And

like, for instance, I think back to bring it full circle to the coaching, you know, it's like take people with social anxiety, and there's all sorts of ways you can kind of coach them through social anxiety.

You can take them out to a mall, have them try to get them to talk to strangers, things like that.

But what if you tell them, like, hey, I'll give you a thousand bucks for every stranger you talk to?

And then you kind of like film them going through that process, dealing with the rationalizations, the defense mechanisms, the insecurities,

and kind of like chronicle that process because it's, it's

what we don't like to admit is that

incentive is probably the biggest lever for behavior change.

You know, like, and also money incentive, by the way.

Yeah.

And it's been proven by them that money is the biggest level.

Like, if you want to change a habit, put money on the line.

And so I look at Mr.

Beast, I'm like, well, he's putting a shitload of money on the line.

And there's,

and it's super entertaining but it's like what if you put that money on the line on on like

something a little bit more productive yeah or like developmentally interesting right like like do a video of like

like one of the videos i want to do is find like a local gym around here and

maybe take a group of like 10 people and be like all right if you show up at this gym at 5 a.m

every day for like the next two months and do a full workout and don't miss a single day.

Like, I'll give you $10,000.

Yeah.

You know,

and then see the motivation, see them like, you know, because eventually there'll be that initial excitement, but a weekend, the motivation starts waning, the excuses start popping up, see who drops out, see why they drop out, interview them afterwards.

That's a great idea.

You know, there's just so much to learn and glean

from that.

You have not have, so you haven't done it yet?

Not one video?

No, I'm currently,

so i've hired a few people and i'll probably hire a few more so we're gonna probably start production next month so who do you need to hire not to sound like you know who but

who do you need

you know what i'm talking it's an inside joke um so who do you need to hire to make this a reality for you um

me and mark go way back on this stage you can tell lots of inside jokes here yeah

the whole three hours yeah four hours um this is not going to be three hours

the so this kind of reminds me by the way of the mr beast like stuck in the

stuck in the house for a hundred days

you're stuck in this house for yeah there's there's a prize after this right oh

sorry

there's a circle that's progressively getting smaller um

oh my god i'm sorry i don't need to laugh i'm being giddy already from all the hours okay go ahead so

cool you have oh the team yeah

so this is part of the exciting thing for me like this is all new right did you think of this yourself was this your idea just okay yeah i just i i became a fan of a lot of these these youtube guys and i love what they're doing you know over like the last year you know i really love what they're doing but then at the same time as

And I think a lot of it's age, but I think a lot of it too is the background I come from, the kind of the psychology and personal development.

I'm just like, God, there's so much opportunity here.

Yeah.

So much opportunity.

Like, Ryan Traehan did it, did a whole video series of him.

He started with a penny on Venice Beach and he got all the way to the East Coast.

He like traded it for things.

So he traded for a pen, then he took the pen, traded for a bottle of water, sold the bottle of water for $2, took that $2, bought two bottles of water, sold those, like,

and managed to get himself stop it all the way to the East Coast.

It's like a 20-video series.

It's incredible.

It's like one of the best things I've watched in years.

And he got from like from California to New York.

No way.

Where?

Like, not like to New York or where did he go?

To Mr.

Beast.

Okay.

But

yeah, I think North Carolina.

On a penny.

On a penny.

Where did he sleep?

He bought a hammock.

On the way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, he had like a whole strategy.

He like managed to get a bike at some point, started doing DoorDash deliveries.

With the penny.

Started dog walking.

Yeah, he he like everything started from the penny and he like made it all the way there.

And it's, it's such a cool series, too, because

it's a real,

well, there's a few reasons.

One is, it's actually a very honest portrait of America.

Yeah.

So he goes from state to state and you really, and he interacts with dozens of strangers every single day.

And he's basically asking them for things, asking them for favors, asking them to buy something, asking them for support, help.

And you really just get this incredible sense of like, wow, 99% of people are really good.

Like they're just good people everywhere that you never hear about and you never see.

Right.

And so that in and of itself is really inspiring.

But then there's also this other element of,

you know, you.

You get to see it starts, it takes him a month and it starts wearing him down.

Like he gets visibly exhausted.

Yeah, for sure.

Starts losing motivation.

You know, at a certain point i think his dad flies out and spends a day with him because he's just like destroyed wow you know so it's it's it's a really cool journey that you get to go on with him um

and yeah this it's it's a new format that like

hasn't really existed before like you could never do that on television never never

um that's a great that's amazing it's incredible and it's it's you know there's a there's a group of guys out here in venice uh another huge YouTube channel called Yes Theory and it's funny because they I met them

They wanted to meet me

to they wanted like some advice they were they they got a book deal and they were in New York and they were like hey, can we like

get lunch and like ask you for book advice?

And I get dozens of emails like that all the time.

And I was like, all right, who are these guys?

And I click on their link to their YouTube channel and it's like six million subscribers.

And I start watching their videos and it's the most incredible thing like they have a video where they go door to door saying

uh

if you could travel to one place in the world where would you go and the person like says a place and they're like okay let's go

and then they find a person and they take the person to like africa and like they actually do it and that's the video like are you serious like in the moment or yes in the moment like they're just like answering the door and they what happens if that person has a job, a life?

Well, so most people turn it down because either they don't believe them or they're like, No, I've got so they do it until someone says, Okay, let's go, yeah, and then they film it.

Yeah, it's so cool, it's so cool, yeah, that's so cool.

You could imagine a

production studio's legal department,

I can't even imagine,

I can't even imagine

that's crazy, yeah, yeah, and it's the other reason I'm I'm really excited about this format.

You know, one, it's, it's,

it's, it's so new.

It's so young.

It's a new generation.

You know, we were talking earlier about the generational turnover.

You know, it reaches a new generation.

It's fresh.

It's fresh.

It's a new challenge for me personally.

And it's also just like I really,

and this is the last thing I'm supposed to say as somebody who just made a movie.

I've done a lot of projects in conventional media.

They've overall, I'm very grateful.

They've been great projects, but I've, as somebody who came from the internet, like blogging and

scrappy, like creating scrappy content, doing podcasts, I find it to be very old and stodgy.

And I don't,

you know, I think this is the future.

Yeah, it is the future.

And so I want to be a part of it.

And so that, that, that's super exciting to me.

It's like finding

finding my niche to fit into in that world.

That's incredible.

So, so who do you hire to help you?

Do you hire people, you know, like you hire people who are production people?

Do you hire people to find these people to storytell with you?

Like, who do you hire?

So, yeah, I've, I've, I've hired a producer and I've hired an editor

as kind of like the first two key hires.

And then I'll who else do you need?

I'll probably need videographers.

I might need

more production people, depending on how crazy the productions get.

Do you budget for this?

Yeah, roughly.

I have like a number that I'm willing to lose.

Okay, okay, that's good.

That's good.

That's good.

Can't you get someone to underwrite it, like a brand or a concept?

So I think the idea is to get a first handful of videos out, kind of proof of concept to ourselves first.

Like, okay, this is something that we can scale and

consistently make.

And then start going and looking at brands.

I mean, I already have a YouTube channel.

I get brand offers all the time.

Yeah.

But you get like, what, like 700,000 or something on there?

Yeah, like 650.

Yeah.

I did my research on you.

Yeah, there you go.

So it's, you know,

the monetization's there.

Like, I'm not.

I'm not worried.

Yeah, not worried.

Yeah, not like you need to worry about the money.

I'm not saying you did.

Obviously, you don't have to, but I'm just saying, like, that, you know, is is that just part of the plan?

Like, because it would cost, I mean, Brist Beast spends millions and millions of dollars.

Which I think, and he actually, it's funny because when I first discovered him and went and watched all of his videos, it was very interesting because it's like four years ago, he's giving people like $5,000.

And then a year later, he's giving people like.

$25,000.

And then a year later, he's giving people $100,000.

And anyway, it's worked its way up to.

It's like half a million.

Yeah, he's spending millions of dollars per video.

I heard all the money he makes, he puts right into the production.

That's why.

But I think there's a diminishing returns to that.

100%.

People,

they don't respond any better to 100K than 10K.

Yeah.

It's just a lot of money.

Exactly.

It's just a lot of money.

Exactly.

That is amazing.

So when is that launching, that whole project?

Later this year.

So we'll start initial shooting.

next month.

So we're talking, it's February.

Start shooting in March.

So probably start posting posting April or May.

Oh, wow.

Soon.

Hopefully.

Fingers crossed.

It's one of those like, you know, timelines that

it can move.

It can move.

What's the, there's a thing called Hofstadter's Law, which is every project takes twice as long as you expect it to, even when you account for Hofstadter's Law.

Even when you account for that.

That's a good one.

I like that.

And by the way, I know this has been forever.

I mean,

I feel, well, I don't feel terrible, but

I feel kind of guilty because I'm like, oh, it won't be this long.

But I really thoroughly enjoyed you being a guest on this podcast.

Thank you.

This has been great.

Thank you so much.

I mean, so people, if you have not read the book, of course, he's got a lot of books.

Just go check out Mark Manson.

Is that your dot com, right?

That's markmanson.net.

Dot net.

Yeah.

Oh.

I have the same

feelings.

Oh, my God.

Do you also have like a Hotmail account?

Or like,

or what are those

mark markmanson.com is owned by an old guy named Mark Manson and he won't give it to me there's he's never had a website there he's never he's he's owned it since 1999 he's never had a web page I've offered him a lot of money he won't take it I've offered him Mr.

Beast money and he won't take it are you serious I'm like literally waiting for this guy to die are you kidding me to get my dot com and he's doing nothing with it.

He's doing nothing with it.

Well, it obviously hasn't hurt your business at all being on a dotnet.

No, I mean, you are still the first Mark Manson that comes up when you Google you.

The SEO is there.

Yeah, yeah, it's working.

It's good.

It's working.

Wow.

Well, that's amazing.

Thank you so much for being on this.

I mean, thank you.

That's all I can say.

Go check him out.

He's amazing and he's even nicer in person.

And go check out his movie, Universal Studios.

And that's it.

Bye.

Habits and hustle.

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