SOLVED with Mark Manson
New episodes every month. Life advice that doesn’t suck by a 3x #1 NYT bestselling author. I’ve spent two decades calling out everything wrong with the self-help world: the bad science, the guru nonsense, and the advice that preys on people's insecurities. This podcast is my no-BS, research-backed answer to all of it.
Episodes
June 3, 2026 • 306 mins
If you've ever tried to change something about yourself, failed, tried again, and concluded you must just be broken, here's some good news: you're probably not broken. You've just been aiming at the wrong target for years. Who you are is actually a layered system. There's your personality, the deep set points you were largely born with. There's the layer of adaptations you've built on top of that, the beliefs, identities, and emoti...
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Mark as Played
May 20, 2026 • 111 mins
Why do smart, emotionally aware people stay in relationships that are clearly destroying them? Drew and I dug into the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard marriage, to walk through the seven psychological mechanisms that quietly lock people inside bad relationships and make leaving feel impossible.
If you have ever watched someone you love stay in a relationship that is destroying them, or if you have been that person yourself, this episo...
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Mark as Played
May 6, 2026 • 138 mins
Here's the uncomfortable truth about anxiety: most of what people reach for to fix it was chosen because it feels easy, not because it works. The supplement that went viral on TikTok, the CBD gummy, the glass of wine after a hard week... they range from doing nothing to actively making things worse.
We ranked 17 of the most popular anti-anxiety interventions from the absolute worst to the number one most effective, according to th...
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April 29, 2026 • 71 mins
It's been one year of SOLVED. 20 episodes, 20 million downloads, 3 million YouTube subscribers, and a truly unreasonable number of poop jokes. To celebrate, I sat down with over 200 of your questions and picked the ones that hit the hardest.
We get into why most people fail at quitting addictions (hint: the problem isn't the feelings, it's that you never planned for them). I explain why, if you have ADHD and can't stop procrastina...
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April 15, 2026 • 129 mins
Nearly 60% of American workers are checked out at their jobs. Meanwhile, every graduation speech in history tells you to follow your passion and you'll never work a day in your life. So which is it?
In this episode, Drew and I debate both sides. I argue for passion. He argues for practicality. And what we discover along the way is that the whole question is kind of a false dichotomy. We get into the psychology of harmonious vs. ob...
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April 8, 2026 • 32 mins
So here's the thing about happiness: the harder you chase it, the faster it runs. That's not some bumper sticker wisdom. It's basically the core finding of decades of research.
In this highlight, Drew and I get into the stuff from our original happiness episode that I think people need to hear the most. We talk about Schopenhauer's idea that happiness is less like finding a treasure and more like removing a rock from your shoe. We...
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April 1, 2026 • 130 mins
We pulled over 2,600 studies and ranked 19 of the most common self-improvement techniques across three dimensions: research quality, consistency of results, and actual effect size. Then we sorted them into four tiers: legitimately works, works sometimes, probably not helping, and straight up bullshit. Microdosing landed in the bullshit tier. Crystal healing outperformed several "serious" techniques. And the number one most effectiv...
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Mark as Played
March 25, 2026 • 27 mins
This book has sold over a hundred million copies, billionaires swear by it. But what if it's a lie? Does the effectiveness of the book change if we find out that the author is a huge scammer and quite possibly made up the whole story that spearheaded the book?
CHAPTERS
(00:00) Introduction
(02:35) The Book That Launched Self-Help
(03:35) The Con: Who Hill Really Was
(07:17) What's Actually in the Book
(14:12) The Placebo Eff...
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Mark as Played
March 18, 2026 • 88 mins
Meditation has been sold to us as a magic pill for so long that the backlash is almost as overblown as the hype. I spent years deep in Buddhist practice, went on retreats, meditated daily — and then slowly discovered that half the gurus evangelizing it were alcoholics, abusers, or running Rolls-Royce-funded cults. Here's what the more careful research actually shows: there are three things meditation does reliably well, and t...
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Mark as Played
March 11, 2026 • 38 mins
If you’ve ever felt stuck, or like you’re doing all the right things but something still feels off, there’s a good chance it’s a values problem. Not a discipline problem, not a productivity problem. A values problem. Most people have never actually sat down and figured out what they care about. Not really anyway.
This clip is from our episode How to Find and Live By Your Values, which came out back in May 2...
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March 4, 2026 • 202 mins
Focus is one of those things everyone swears they need more of and almost no one is actually addressing correctly. In this episode, we dig into what the science actually says about attention spans (hint: your brain isn't broken, it's just overwhelmed), why the standard advice to "try harder" is probably making things worse, and what's really driving your inability to sit down and get things done. We get into the neuroscience of exp...
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Mark as Played
February 25, 2026 • 24 mins
A Hungarian doctor discovered that handwashing saves lives, and was destroyed for proving it. Michael Jordan’s competitiveness made him a legend, then turned him into a prisoner of his own intensity. My ADHD nearly derailed my life and later became the foundation of my career. This video explores an uncomfortable truth: the traits that make you exceptional are often the same ones that create your biggest problems. The real qu...
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Mark as Played
February 18, 2026 • 101 mins
We put love on trial — literally. Drew and I squared off in a full debate over whether romantic love is overrated. I made the case that love is basically your brain's con man, a neurochemical hijacking designed to make you delusional about deeply flawed people, and that the most intoxicating relationships are often the most toxic. Drew fought back with the evidence that love is the foundation of social infrastructure, physica...
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Mark as Played
February 11, 2026 • 45 mins
This is a segment from the full episode on procrastination.
Procrastination isn't a time management problem — it's an emotional regulation problem, and once you see that, everything changes. We break down how your brain uses avoidance as a mood-management strategy, why every philosopher from Plato to the Buddhists was partially right (but nobody had the full picture), and the specific internal and external levers you can pul...
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Mark as Played
February 4, 2026 • 277 mins
Most people aren’t bad at dating, they’re just trying to solve the wrong problem. We treat dating like a personality test (“Am I attractive enough? Confident enough?”) when it’s actually a multi-stage process, and each stage punishes completely different mistakes. That one misunderstanding explains why dating feels so confusing, why men and women keep blaming each other, why dating apps feel brutal, an...
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Mark as Played
January 15, 2026 • 159 mins
Most people think ego is either something you need to kill off entirely or inflate to take over the world. Both are wrong. In this episode, we dig deep into what ego actually is—how it evolved, why it matters, and how it secretly runs your life without you realizing it.
We hit Freud, Buddhism, David Hume, Jung’s shadow self, and even the Navy SEALs to unpack why your ego isn’t always the enemy—it’s mo...
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Mark as Played
January 1, 2026 • 252 mins
This is probably the most comprehensive, no-BS breakdown of boundaries you're going to find anywhere. We cover what boundaries actually are (spoiler: it’s not just telling people to f*ck off), why they matter more than you think, and how your entire life—your relationships, mental health, identity, even career—is quietly shaped by whether or not you have them.
By the end of this, you’ll know exactly how to ...
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Mark as Played
December 15, 2025 • 90 mins
This one’s different. In this special year-end episode, I answer your questions—from the deep stuff about purpose and motivation, to the uncomfortable realities of change, burnout, failure, and dealing with unsupportive family. I also share the behind-the-scenes chaos of building SOLVED this year, what I learned about making massive, meaningful content, and what’s coming in 2026 (spoiler: boundaries, ego, and mayb...
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Mark as Played
December 4, 2025 • 291 mins
This is the episode I’ve been waiting to make for a long time. Purpose has been at the core of everything I’ve written and done for over a decade—and in this episode, we go all the way down the rabbit hole. From Viktor Frankl surviving Auschwitz to the myth of “finding your one true purpose,” we break down what purpose really is, why you feel lost without it, and how you can build it into your life.
W...
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Mark as Played
November 15, 2025 • 129 mins
We all compare ourselves to other people—our friends, coworkers, strangers on the internet—and most of the time, it makes us feel like shit. But why do we keep doing it?
In this episode of Solved, we dig into the uncomfortable truth behind social comparison, how it quietly ruins our self-worth, and why most of what we envy in others is a projection of our own insecurity.
We also get into the brutal paradox of success...
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Mark as Played
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