Welcome back to the show, everybody.
Mark Manson here, and this is the last podcast of the Subtle
Art of Not Giving a Fuck podcast.
Yes, the rumors are true. The hints have been true.
All of the little bread crumbs that I've been dropping over the
past few episodes are in fact true.
We are shutting down this podcast, but we're shutting it
down because we're going to launch something very new and
exciting in its place. And I just want to take a little
bit of time to explain both the reasoning why we're shutting
this down and then also what's coming next.
So bear with me for a little bit.
I'm going to take you behind the scenes kind of my personal
thinking or my personal experience with the podcast the
past year, what my reasoning has been and why we are making the
changes that we're going to make and also why I'm extremely
excited. And I think you guys are going
to be absolutely thrilled with what we produce instead of the
subtle are Not Giving a Fuck podcast.
So let's get right into it. The first thing I want to say is
that it feels kind of insane the shutdown something this
successful. I was actually looking at the
numbers in in preparation for for recording this.
So we had 75 episodes over 30 million downloads, over 700,000
followers across platforms. That technically puts us in the
top 0.01% of podcasts. Like the top 400 ish podcasts in
the world is a massively successful podcast by any
objective measurement. Which is still a little bit wild
for me to think about. And I also I I think it's worth
saying too that shutting this down is not a good business
decision, at least in the short term.
There were multiple 7 figure offers on the table from major
podcast networks. Major ad networks that we turned
down and a big reason for turning those down is going to
be clear in a little bit. But I just want to make it clear
that like this change is really not for the money.
It's not like we're not selling out in any way, shape or form.
In fact, it's from a business point of view.
I might, I might just be shooting myself in the foot
here, but I think it's going to be worth it.
I think I think everything that we're going to be producing and
putting out is, is absolutely going to be worth it.
And five years from now, I'm going to look back and be like,
this is one of the best decisions.
So when I look at why I wanted to end the show, there are two
primary reasons. And the first one is honestly
just purely selfish. And that is I wasn't really
having a ton of fun doing the show.
And maybe I was apparent to some of you, maybe it wasn't, but it
became impossible for me to ignore past a certain point.
I mean, initially, say the first six or eight months, like there
was kind of this honeymoon period, everything's new,
everything's exciting. But like, really, once the show
got going last summer, it was painfully aware to me that like,
this is just not really my thing.
And we tried to experiment with formats, you know, we tried to
introduce segments to the show. Drew and I tried to get a little
bit playful and creative with some of the topics that we'd
address. We start taking listener
questions a lot more. We tried to get a little bit
experimental with like guests that we would bring on.
But it just, it never sat right. The simple reason why is that
I've been in this industry for almost 20 years now and my
thing, probably the reason that most of you even give a shit
that I'm talking right now, is I try to be independent minded.
I try to say things that maybe need to be said and nobody else
is really saying I'm contrarian when maybe it's not so popular
to be contrarian. I call bullshit when I see it,
and in the classic podcast format of bringing on kind of
star intellectual guests and thought leaders, I felt
completely hamstrung to be able to do that it.
It is a format that is antithetical in almost every
shape and form to ultimately what I think I'm best at and
what I enjoy doing most in my line of work.
And that sucks. It really sucks to have a
notable guest come on the show and start saying something that
I actually kind of don't agree with.
Or I'm like familiar with the research they're talking about,
but I don't think the research is very good.
And I puts me in a really tough spot of like, OK, do I start
challenging this guest and potentially creating like a big
argument or a debate on the show, potentially alienating the
guests, fans of the guests, alienating the guests
themselves, making sure that they're never gonna come back to
the show. Do I put myself in a position
where I'm like suddenly, like I, I didn't prep for a debate
coming into this episode, but now like suddenly I'm having to
put my, myself in a headspace of, of being willing to argue
and debate a really smart person.
It was just not fun for me. It felt like a no win situation.
I can either start to fight and make everybody miserable, make
me miserable, make the guests miserable and make the fan of
fans of the guests miserable, or I can sit there and smile and
nod along and pretend like everything's hunky Dory and also
be miserable, right? And I, I experimented with both
directions and, and nothing ever felt right and, and, and nothing
ever felt right with the audience either.
And I should add to that, like the whole process of sourcing,
reaching out, booking guests after guests after guests, it's
kind of this, it's a very unpleasant treadmill.
First of all, everybody in this space is having the same guests
on over and over again. So you're fighting with other
podcasts to get the same people on.
And then when you do get them on, they kind of just say the
same thing they said on the on the other podcast that they went
on. And if you try to get them off
the thing that they said on the other podcast that they went on,
then, you know, they don't really want to talk about some
other thing that you you want to talk about.
And it it like, I understand that like really good podcasters
are that like, that's the skill set that they're experts at,
like getting a new guest and getting them to open up in a new
way and talk about something that they've never talked about
or like researching really intensely and finding that
subject matter that like they've never really been super public
about. I just found that like, I don't
really care to get good at that. That's not my thing.
And I don't think it's the thing that I am best at.
I don't think it's the thing I'm particularly talented at.
It's definitely not the thing I enjoy and I don't think it's the
thing that you guys are here for.
So what the fuck am I doing trying to do that?
Like trying to like get these super spicy breaking guest
interviews going so that the the whole guest thing was just kind
of it's a little bit of a non starter for me.
And don't get me wrong, like some of the guests who came on
the show I had a fucking blast with and had great conversations
with. But you know, there are a lot of
guests that came on that I was just kind of like going through
the motions. And it's one of those situations
where I have to take my own advice.
And you know, I'm constantly telling my audience that the
more you care about something, the better you'll be at it and
the more impactful it will be to other people.
And here I am just going through the motions, working on
something that I don't deeply care about, I don't think I'm
super great AT. And not only am I paying the
price, but you guys are paying the price as well.
So starting a few months ago, it became abundantly clear that
some sort of pivot needed to be made.
And Drew and I started talking very seriously about what if we
just reboot the whole show entirely and start from first
principles. Before I get into that though, I
do I want to go on a little bit of a rant here because having
been in the the self help personal development podcast
world now for a couple years, I'm like a little alarmed by
what kind of flies in the space. Not to say that like, you know,
the the shows are bad or the advice that's being given is
bad. It's just I don't think the
incentives are very healthy at the moment.
So in the the creator influencer world, there's a concept that
that's relatively well known in my industry known as audience
capture. And chances are you guys have
seen this among people that you followed over the years.
Like often somebody will build an audience among a certain
demographic or a certain group of people who have like some
crazy belief, right? And the creator or the podcaster
or the YouTube, like they realize that if they, if they
just keep hitting that crazy topic over and over again, 10s
of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people keep showing
up in force and engaging with them over and over again.
And So what you see is that the influencer actually starts to
take on those crazy beliefs and that personality of this like
segment of their audience that they've suddenly captured.
And so it's like, it's almost like being brainwashed by your
audience, like you're rewarded for feeding into their kind of
crazy beliefs or narratives. And so the the podcaster or the
YouTube kind of convinces themselves that they believe
those things so that they don't feel any cognitive dissonance
when they when they keep putting out the content that that
audience wants. And audience capture is a very
real thing. I've seen it happen in my
industry many, many times. It's something I'm very careful
about and aware of with myself that I, I like really try to
check myself and make sure I'm, it's not happening to me.
But I think there's something specific to the podcasting world
that is similar to audience capture, but it's a little bit
different. And I would call that guest
capture, which is you end up with these incentives like, OK,
fuck it. I'll just, I'll use a real
person as an example because I, there's no way in fucking hell
I, I would ever have this person on the show.
Take Joe Dispenza for example, right?
Joe Dispenza, he's like kind of the new big self help guru.
He's doing these massive seminars and like arenas and
stuff. And when you look at his
content, it's really, it's kind of just the secret 2 point O
like it's, you know, meditate, breath work, manifestation,
believe in yourself. You can be and do anything it
it's a bunch of bullshit like we've been here before, right?
But if you have them on your show, it's like a guaranteed 4
to 5 million person audience. Like his audience is massive and
it is absolutely rabid. They they consume every single
thing he touches. And so I've quietly watched as
multiple people in my space continually bring them on, hit
on their shows and let him spout his quantum fury bullshit over
and over again. And I, I'm not like singling out
Joe Dispenza's like, he's not uniquely bad in any way.
He's just an example, right, 'cause it's like I understand
what those podcasters are going through.
Like, I know for a fact that some of those podcasters don't
believe any of the stuff that he says, but they still bring him
on the show and they placate him and they humor him and they let
him like go on his spiel about manifesting in quantum spirits
and whatever. And then they let the, the, you
know, the 4 million views or the 5 million downloads come in and
then they, you know, they move on to the next guest.
And to me, that just feels like a certain level of, of
prostituting oneself. And it's like, I find it very
distasteful. But I understand the impulse to
do that. Like as a podcaster myself, I
want to bring on guests that are going to bring in massive
audiences. And so to bring on somebody with
a huge audience, I want to at least placate or go along with
whatever they say and act as though I agree with it or at
least don't disagree with it because then that will convert
their audience into my audience. I felt myself being pulled in
this direction while having notable people on the show.
And it just, it made me feel very gross and it felt it, it
went against everything that I think I stand for in this, in
this industry and in this market.
And I don't, I don't want to get sucked down that.
And so the first thing I will say about the new show that
we're going to launch is that there will be no guests on it.
That doesn't mean that we're not going to talk to experts.
We're actually going to talk to a lot of experts, but we're
going to talk to them behind the scenes.
We're going to talk to experts who don't have audiences.
We're going to talk to academics.
We're going to talk to doctors. We're going to talk to pH DS and
we're not going to bring them on the show because I don't want
that to be a compromising incentive of the show.
I want to be able to present people's ideas and perspectives
and be able to criticize them openly and show the pros and
cons of certain viewpoints and not feel socially pressured or
audience pressured into going along with certain things that
maybe I don't believe in or or that frankly, the research
doesn't back up. OK, second gripe.
And again, this is something that I think is a wider problem
in the personal development podcast space, but I've also
experienced it on our show as well, is that you can have one
guest on one week and they they'll tell you XYZ and then
you have another guest on two weeks later and they say the
exact opposite of XYZ. And again, I feel put in a bind
whenever that happens, I struggle.
Like how should I contextualize this?
Well, shit like is this guy lying or was the guy two weeks
ago lying? Like should I, should I bring
this up? Should I argue with him about
it? I, I think it's, it's beautiful
to have podcasts with a wide variety of perspectives and
views, but I do think there needs to be some cohesion or
clarity around like, you know, what's a, what's legitimate and
what's not. Like certain viewpoints have
more evidence behind them than others.
But when you present everything as just another guest saying
another thing like that gets lost in the mix.
And again, I, I think the context is so important and the
context is not being featured. It's, it's like being left
behind the scenes. So when Drew and I sat down and
we were like, really just what do we want to build from first
principles? And not only what do we want to
build, but also like, what do we feel like this space needs?
What is it lacking? What is the show that needs to
exist but nobody's making at the moment?
And the conclusion that we came to is that this space needs a
very serious deep dive into individual topics.
And when I say serious deep dive, I mean like extremely
thorough vetting multiple perspectives, vetting research
from multiple places, walking through the history and context
and and train of thought that, you know, occurred from one
generation to the next of of thinkers and researchers.
Like really giving a fully fleshed out view of a single
subject instead of just, you know, bringing on, you know, Joe
Blow academic or, you know, Jane Smith influencer and and asking
them the same questions. So we really want to do like a
full, thorough, comprehensive guide to a single subject matter
and just simply include all of the varying perspectives of
experts within that single episode.
And so that's what we're going to do it.
They're going to be longer episodes and they're going to be
posted less frequently. And the idea is that every time
you listen to an episode, whatever the topic is, whether
it's procrastination or managing your emotions or discovering
your values. The idea Drew and I's North
Star, as we're putting this together with our team, is that
this should be the last podcast episode that you ever have to
listen to on this subject. That if you get through this
episode of this podcast on this subject, every other podcast
that comes up on that subject is going to feel repetitive and
like a waste of time because you you've already done it.
You've already been through the entire mix.
You've gotten all the information, you have all the
takeaways and you know exactly how to implement it into your
life. That is our goal and that
promise of being the last podcast you ever need.
We're keeping that promise with ourselves.
Our goal with every episode that we make is that we can never
come back to this topic or at least until there's like some
new breakthrough discovery or or research.
We are never coming back to this topic.
This needs to be completely soup the nuts A-Z cover every single
base. So like let's get it right.
The other thing about this show is that it's going to be ad
free. This is another incentive issue
I think in this space is that is somebody who is, is doling out
life advice. There's a lot of incentives that
come from sponsorships and a lot of companies who want to push
certain products or relationships.
And I mean, some of them I feel confident with.
I mean, a lot of the sponsors on this show or products that I've
used or I actively do use, but there's a lot of situations
where a company shows up with a lot of money and they want you
to say and do some things. And again, I don't, I just don't
want to deal with that. On top of that, every single
episode is going to come with a full PDF summary and guide.
It's going to have all of the sources, citations and notes.
It's going to be a full summary of the episode.
It's going to include everything that Drew and I talk about.
It's going to have all of the book recommendations and the
experts that we talked to. Some of these PDFs we're, we're
working on the third episode now.
Some of these PDFs are like pushing 8090 pages.
They are absolutely massive. I mean, honestly, it's crazy.
I, I, I honestly believe some of these episodes are more valuable
than entire books written on these subjects.
And we're just going to give it out for free.
It's just going to be available to all of you guys each month as
it comes out. So the new show, it's going to
be called solved because the idea is that if you listen to
the episode and you pay attention and you actually
fucking do the thing in the episode, you do the takeaways,
you implement it into your life. That area of your life should be
solved. It should no longer be an open
question. You should no longer feel a need
to go read another book or go hire another coach.
If there's one thing that I've learned over the past year with
a bunch of the live events that I've done, like meeting a lot of
you guys in person, doing a lot of speaking, it seems like the
number one issue everyone has at the moment is that there's
information overload, but there's no implementation.
There's no clear road map of like, OK, well, cool.
I just like listen this three hour conversation with this
doctor, but like, I don't know what to actually go do.
And so the goal of this new podcast is not only to give you
all the necessary information, but it's to give you also the
implementation along the way to make it clear of like, OK, these
are actually like just the four questions you should be focusing
on. And these are the three things
that you should do 1st. And if you do this, this and
this, then you're probably good. The soft podcast will be
launching on May 1st. If you're subscribed to this
podcast feed on Apple or Spotify or any other audio platform, you
will automatically be subscribe to the Solve feed.
We're just going to switch the Subtle Art feed over to Solve.
If you're subscribed on YouTube and watching this on YouTube, we
are going to move the Solve podcast back to the main Mark
Manson channel. So if you're not subscribed to
the Mark Manson channel, you should go there, get subscribed
because that's where the first Solved episode is going to be
dropped on May 1st. We're also getting away from
like, you know, every other Tuesday or.
Monday morning release schedules.
We're just dropping episodes on the 1st of every single month.
So the first episode will be May 1st, the second episode will be
June 1st, the third episode will be July 1st.
The idea is that these are long term slow burn commitments that
you guys make. You can work through an episode
at your leisure. The episodes are pretty long.
I'm going to warn you. Like we're looking 345 hours
long, but you can take your time with it.
You can listen to it slowly over multiple days or multiple weeks.
You can work your way through the PDF guide.
Everything is going to come with accompanying exercises and
implementations. So you can like really just let
it savor in your brain a little bit, just like let it baste like
a Turkey on Thanksgiving. And finally, I do have to say
like this, this experiment, this phase of my career, this
podcast, is it really, it's been wonderful.
It's something that, that I, I probably should have done like
five years ago. And, and honestly, if I did
start this podcast 5 or 6 years ago, maybe, maybe things would
be different. Maybe I would stick with this
format. Maybe we would be doing, maybe
we would be doing the same fucking guest treadmill that
everybody else is doing. I, I don't know.
All I know is that like this has been a really rewarding project
over the last year and a half. It's, it's built a, a, a
wonderful audience that that is so much more engaged than a lot
of other places that I post or a lot of other content that I put
online. It, it has introduced me to a
lot of amazing people. Like a lot of the guests that I
have had on are, are just like awesome people that I'm so
grateful that I am able to know and, and, and be in touch with.
So it has given me a lot and I am very thankful for it.
I just also think it's not the right thing for me.
I don't like this. It's not a right fit and not
only is it not a right fit for me, I don't think it's what you
guys want from me either. And so solved is my attempt to a
get right with what I want to make Like this is what I would
want to listen to in this market that nobody's making.
So fuck it, like let me go make it.
And I also think it's what you guys want to hear too.
I think it's what you guys are going to be more interested in.
You know, I, I don't think you guys need another like, you
know, fucking morning routine and to listen to the, the same
dude who's been on 18 other podcast to promote his book.
Like that's just, it's not interesting to me and I imagine
it's not interesting to a lot of you.
So thank you for understanding. Thank you for tuning in over the
last 18 months. It's it's been great.
And I seriously, I can't tell you how excited I am for this
next chapter. Make sure you're subscribed on
all the platforms. If you want to get an early peek
at some of the PDF content, make sure you're on my newsletter.
Go to markmanson.net/newsletter. We're going to be announcing and
pushing everything all over the place, so it's going to be very
exciting. And the first episode is going
to be on values, which I think is very appropriate considering
I'm the not give a fuck guy. So we'll see you there.
Drew and I will be waiting. And here's to a new chapter.
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck podcast is produced by Drew
Bernie. It's edited by Andrew Nishimura.
Jessica Choi is our videographer and sound engineer.
Thank you for listening and we will see you next week.