Mark Manson: AI is a Better Writer Than You But Here’s What it Can’t Replace

I honestly think AI self-help is going to eat most of humans' self-help, and I just think it's going to do it better and more affordably than most coaches and seminars and therapists ever will. I started to notice that a lot of friends in my personal life were going to ChatGPT for life advice, and tens of millions of people were doing this because ultimately everything that exists in the mental health space, it's all just language.

Everything we're doing to improve ourselves is dealing with our thoughts and feelings and experiences through language, and that is what LLMs are geniuses at. I feel like there is a countdown on nonfiction. Nonfiction book sales are down like 20% or 30% over the last couple of years.

Interestingly, the publishing industry claims it's podcasts, which I think is cope. It is obviously AI, but I also think this is a very good thing because this is going to force a lot of nonfiction authors to get creative in terms of how they teach and explain concepts.

One day AI will write as good as me, if not better, but it is finding that unique blend of traits and experiences that make me me. That's what I can own and hold on to. I have been thinking a lot about what still makes a book valuable, and there's probably a few elements that go into it.

I think one is that you need to.

Mark, welcome to NEW ECONOMIES. I'm such a massive fan of all of your work, all of your videos, all of your books. I'm just a massive fan, so thank you so much for joining us today.

Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

It feels like we are at this incredible inflection point, and for the audience who don't know who Mark is, well, you have definitely heard of some of his books, probably the most famous, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, which is now 10 years old, and just to shine a bit of light on the success, not just a couple million copies which got sold, 20 million copies now, I think it is.

Yeah.

And 56 languages, I think it's been turned into.

Yeah, I mean, at this point, I think it's 70 plus. It's made it into every crack and crevice of the planet, which is wild.

It's insane. You know, when creators start thinking about writing a book, I don't think they ever think about selling a couple million copies, let alone 20, 25 million copies,right? Take us back to 2016 when you were thinking about this whole concept of the Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.

What did that actually mean, and why did you decide to write about it?

I started blogging in 2008, and I kind of went through multiple iterations of a blogging business, and around 2013 or so, I kind of stumbled into I jokingly call it self-help for people who hate self-help, but it was kind of this gritty, raw, very honest, blunt type of life advice.

And at the time, you know, the self-help world, it was all touchy-feely, very woo woo, you know, it's like, you're amazing, the universe is going to give you a Ferrari, like you deserve it. I was, I think, kind of the first guy who showed up and was like, this is all bullshit, life is really hard, and by the way, it's not really going to get easier, even if you do make a bunch of money or do become a big successful person, like it's still going to be hard.

And that just resonated so much with people that I started going viral quite a bit on social media back in those days. And it's interesting because I think back then it was very much the whole not give a fuck thing, you know, the intention was that it was just kind of a Trojan horse to get people to think about what they care about, to get them to think a little bit more about their values and what they're choosing to make important in their lives.

And looking back, I think everybody, myself included, really underestimated the market signal of social media at the time. These days it's pretty standard that publishers will look for an author that has like a social media following or has like a big viral hit.

Back at that time, it was relatively new and unheard of. There were a number of publisher meetings that I went into, and they kind of just looked at me and they're like, really, Facebook? Like, this is your thing?

And it, but I just think it, what actually happened in reality was that that was a market signal that was incredibly strong, much, much stronger than I think any of us realized. And the success of the book, which was largely based on a lot of those articles that went viral during that period, is a testament to that.

So in many ways, I feel like it kind of, there was a little bit of a first mover advantage in kind of catching that wave likeright as it was first starting.

How long did it take you to write the book?

About two years. I've now written four books, and that seems to be pretty typical, like 18 to 24 months.

I remember when this book published, as I was 16, 17 at the time, it was a year after I left school. I remember like back in the UK when I was living there, everybody was talking about this, and it kind of felt like maybe in the first one or two years, it was really having that kind of like moment.

When was that kind of inflection point? It was just, you just knew this thing was going super viral.

It's funny because books, like 90% plus of book sales happen from word of mouth recommendations and like gifting. So it's interesting because the virality of a book as a piece of media, it happens on a very slow timescale.

So the book came out September 2016. It debuted on the New York Times bestseller list, which was like all I had ever hoped for it, and then immediately fell off. And I was like, cool, that works. Let me go back to writing blog articles.

And what happened was, I think it was maybe a month or two later, it started to kind of slowly climb. And I think by the end of that year, I started getting emails from my publisher and my agent saying like, hey, your book is like top 10 on Audible.

It's top 10 in Australia. It's on the bestseller list in the UK. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. That's cool. I guess people are recommending it. And that trajectory just continued for

pretty much nonstop. I would say the book sales climbed week over week for like two years straight. And it was pretty much number one everywhere, almost all of 2017, all of 2018. I think 2017, I think it was, I want to say it was the second bestselling book on Amazon, all of Amazon, for that entire year.

And then it kind of just like, I mean, again, the timescale is so slow in the book world that like years are going by and it's number one everywhere. And the whole time I'm sitting there, I'm like, well, this can't last.

Like this is definitely going to end sometime soon. And then it just went on for months and months and months and months. And I was like, allright, I guess, you know, it's funny because as an author, at a certain point, you're just like, okay, I sometimes joke, I'm like, I'll take credit for the first million copies.

Everything else, like I don't, I have no clue what happens and how that happens. Like it just, because it just feels complete, I'm not, you're not promoting it anymore, you're not talking about it anymore, you're not posting about it anymore, and it just keeps going and going and going.

It's insane. And it's still a thing. People still talk about the book 10 years on. Like I live here now in Thailand, and a bunch of my Thai friends even have the book in their houses.

Yeah, yeah, it's, I couldn't tell you how many places, like random places I've run into it. I've had like, I've had people send it to me. So like political prisoners in Syria have had it. I heard that it was, there was a Sudanese refugee camp that it was getting passed around.

The story, like Vladimir Putin named it by name in the Duma in one of his speeches. It boggles the mind. Like at some point, you're just like, okay, this is clearly not real life.

It's insane. It's insane. You know, we're now in this incredible apocalypse, are we? We're just in this incredible moment in time where it's so easy to become a creator, but it's also so hard to become a creator at the same time.

And I kind of feel like when you have a moment like a book just going super viral, and it still is to some degree today, you probably have to think about quite early, what does this actually mean from a business standpoint,right?

When it was starting to go a bit viral in the first one or two years, did you then start thinking about, oh, maybe there's like a book tour here, maybe like there's a second version? Like how do we actually create a business out of this?

Because creators should be thinking like founders as well as creators,right?

Yeah, it's a good question because I think in many ways what I did back then is not what I would do today. So back then, it's important to contextualize this as well. Like back then, creators, like it wasn't really a career.

Like nobody, it wasn't really, nobody was really making a living, a stable living. It was always a means to some other end,right? So everybody who was blogging, the goal was to either get some sort of book deal or get a column in a newspaper or a magazine or something.

If you were on YouTube, the hope was that like you'd get picked up for cast in a TV show or, you know, maybe get a screenplay made. For the whole 2010s, I would say, really what a creator was, was somebody who was just publishing online in hopes that it would get them through a gatekeeper into traditional media and get them a traditional media career.

And a lot of people did that. And that was very much what I did. So after the book took off, I did do a number of book tours. I signed a big multi-book deal with my publisher. I did a big special audiobook deal with Audible, so I created an Audible original with them.

I created a movie, came out on Netflix. Like it was all the things, all the things that you hope, you know, when you're sitting in your mom's basement blogging when you're 25, it's all the things you like dream and hope will happen.

It's funny though, because today, I think if this happened to me today, I would not do most of those deals. I would spend most of my time cultivating and leveraging and expanding the online audience, because these days, that is actually where most of the value is, and that's actually the long-term asset.

So for example, like somebody in my space, Mel Robbins was really smart about this. So she was kind of, she has a book called Let Them Theory. Every three or four years, there's a self-help book that just goes crazy and sells a bajillion copies.

And so after me, it was James Clear with Atomic Habits, and then Mel Robbins is kind of the most recent one. And it's interesting because what Mel did is kind of what I would say is kind of the 2020s version, which is the book blew up, and she very intentionally leveraged it into live events, podcasts, like really building out the online audience and the online brand and everything.

These days, I honestly, I see a book as just a different platform. The same way Substack and YouTube are different platforms, I see a book as just another platform to like publish content, build audience, monetize, and then obviously kind of feed back into other platforms.

So if you were to publish a book today, and it's six months in, it's going super viral again, it's having its moment, what would that look like? How would you package that into a product and then into, you know, I guess a business?

What I would probably do is I would probably create some sort of serial format of content around the book. I would promote the hell out of it. And then I would probably create some sort of back-end course, seminar, live event, and I would own it, I would organize it.

Because like when I did my book tours, they went to, you know, kind of your classic like live event companies that organized everything. And as the speaker, you kind of get paid nothing. So I would organize kind of my own high-end, high-ticket promotion or product, and then I would run ads based on the book.

So I would run ads, and the ads would feature the book, and then the ads would push people to the product line or the live event that I'm trying to sell. And these days, if you had a book at the level of success of Subtle Art, creating some sort of ecosystem like that online would be worth many millions of dollars in revenue.

And as the creator, I would keep probably 80, 90% of that. Whereas when you run things through a movie studio or like a live events, like something like Live Nation or whatever, Ticketmaster, like as the creator, you're keeping like 10 to 20%.

There's this new type of entertainment going wildfire online, AI micro-dramas. Have you seen them?

I've heard of these. I've not watched any, but I've heard of them.

I think it's a pretty interesting concept. So it's this new form of entertainment where essentially it's two to four minutes, snackable types of entertainment, all generated by AI. But the storytelling of some of these AI micro-dramas is incredible.

For example, a friend of mine just did an AI micro-drama recently about Dario, the founder of Anthropic, who falls in love with a girl from China. It ends up being a true story. This thing has had like five or ten million views in the first few days.

And I kind of feel if you have a fan base of someone like yourself or there's a book going super viral, you can probably create really cool different types of entertainment formats. Maybe it's AI micro-dramas, maybe it's something new which comes out.

That could be a pretty interesting new concept, which I don't think many authors have done yet.

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, this kind of gets into AI content in general, which I have mixed feelings about. My thesisright now is I do think AI content is going to proliferate and there's going to be tons and tons of it.

I also think a large percentage of it is just going to be slop. But I feel like at least what I'm banking on is that there's always like, there's always going to be demand for authenticity and trust. And I kind of foresee the just media in general kind of bifurcating.

And there's just going to be, there's going to be AI content and then there's going to be human content. And people are going to want both and they're going to want to, they're going to want it both for different reasons.

And I think some stuff, AI content will do a better job of servicing what people want. I think maybe just pure entertainment or pure education, they'll be more interested in AI content. Whereas I think with like human-led content, they're going to want that kind of parasocial relationship.

They're going to want that feeling of like community and inclusion and like they're part of something bigger than themselves. But I think it's going to look very different. I think the human content is going to actually be very

kind of messy and gritty and sometimes awkward and weird. Whereas the AI content, I think, will very much kind of cater and like narrow in on kind of the platonic ideal of like what makes somebody laugh or what makes somebody cry.

There's this whole term new media now,right? Which is essentially like the creator economy. And I've been speaking to a few creators like this recently. And my personal assumption is the human-led content, people, you know, hopefully people like us, where all of our content is human-created, is that going to go down the route of timeless type of content or gated content where you have to pay some form of subscription to get access to it?

And then the typical AI-generated content, which is so easy to make, you don't know if it's accurate or not, that's just going to live on all of these platforms. Do you have a take there? Is that potentially where we're going to, you know, potentially where we're going to go?

AI content will be kind of infinitely scalable,right? So it makes sense that that will be platform-based and probably dynamically served to people. I don't know if the human content will be gated. I think it kind of depends. It'll probably partially depend on niche and it'll probably depend on like, because like what the monetization backend is.

As a human creator, and I imagine you kind of feel the same way, it's like, I would love to make everything for free. Like making everything for free just makes everybody's lives easier. The problem is, how do you pay the bills?

So, and I think in some kind of verticals and some niches, people will have backends that allow them to kind of just post and proliferate content for free. Whereas like other niches, they'll probably need to gate it. But I just think a lot of it's going to be much more focused around community, I think.

It's, because that's the thing that's irreplicable by AI. Like a funny joke, good information, interesting historical story, like all that shit, it's going to come from AI at some point. So like the things that can never come from AI is that feeling of like, we're in this together, we share a worldview, we're part of something bigger than ourselves, we're doing something that matters.

Like all that, all that kind of stuff, I feel like is, it's almost going to be just these like kind of mini movements that people are constructing and building.

I agree. And you know, all of this is still pretty new. AI is only four years old, give or take. And if you see just how quickly things have progressed in the last four years, it's terrifying, but it's also super exciting.

How are you as a creator using AI today? Do you actually like it? What's your take there?

It's love-hate.

We're the same. Some things you love and some things you just hate, you know?

It's funny because like these days I'm like, I can't imagine living without Claude Code, but then I noticed that I spend about a quarter of my time yelling at Claude, being like, you're so stupid. What made you think that this is what I wanted?

Exactly. Exactly the same.

Yeah, like how did you mess up something so obvious?

So I use, I'm very AI forward, very bullish on AI. We use it quite a bit in my business. I mean, it's very, I think the term that I've heard people use around this is that AI is very spiky.

Like it is excellent at some things and terrible at others. And a lot of it is just learning and kind of understanding what in your industry AI is excellent at and what it's terrible at. So obviously we use it a ton for research these days.

Like let me put it this way, a couple of years ago, I had a research team of four people full-time. Now we are two people and we are producing better research and more content. We're fact-checking more stuff. Basically, those two people are more efficient and effective in getting more done than the four people were a couple of years ago.

I think it's good for ideation, brainstorming. I actually find a lot of use for it as a, I guess you, I wouldn't call it an advisor or like a business coach, but like I built a project with kind of all the financials and information and data and stuff about my business, my org chart, all my employees, everything.

And it is a fantastic kind of mentor slash business coach. Like if I have an idea for a new product or a new book or a brand pivot or something like, I have great conversations with it. And then, yeah, obviously like little, there's little efficiencies here and there, you know, design tweaks, web design, building web pages is like so much cheaper and faster than it used to be.

So yeah, there's a ton of stuff.

That's pretty cool. We're pretty similar. If we're publishing a new piece of content, we would ask Claude, Gemini, OpenAI, read this podcast or read this newsletter edition like out of 10. And if each of them are saying like 9, 8.5, hopefully you think it's a pretty good episode.

And we tell it about like the taste, the type of format, like we are the Prada equivalent of like, you know, new media. And that's a pretty good like sparring partner. Because as we know,right, creating and being a creator and founder is pretty lonely.

And we need a sparring partner to bounce ideas off. And how do we make new revenue streams, new types of people we could hire? We built a tool recently where the agent will look at, if we have a guest coming on, it will look at all the other episodes the guest has been on recently, different podcast shows.

And they will pinpoint, these are the topics that this guest hasn't spoken about before, where it could be an interesting conversation. That's quite a cool thing for a creator. And this thing took us like two, three hours to build and I'm not even a coder.

Yeah, we've built a lot of internal tools. It's great for analytics and like spotting trends and stuff like, hey, here are your eight top performing episodes and this is what they all had in common. So yeah, I mean, it's, and it's obviously, it's getting better every few months.

So it's, I'm very bullish on it. There are some creators that

are not. And funny enough, I've had conversations with my agent where it's like the publishing, not only is the publishing industry, kind of traditional media, so prints, books, you know, newspaper, magazines, not only are they anti-AI, but they're actually, a lot of those companies, the employees are not allowed to use AI at all.

Like, so you can't even open ChatGPT and be like, tell me, you know, tell me who the Prime Minister of Spain is. Like it's, that's not allowed. It's like blocked on their networks. And I was having this conversation with her like a month ago.

And I just looked at her and I was like, they're so cooked. They're so fucked.

Do

you think, do you think they do it because they're scared of the implications and what's actually going to come? They're just too afraid to admit it?

I think, I think it's a couple of things. I think one is just legal liability,right? So let's say you're an agent at CAA and you use Claude to like help you negotiate a contract and Claude messes up. And that's, that's like a $200 million contract with a celebrity,right?

Like it just opens you up to all this legal liability that is really problematic. So I kind of understand that side of it, but what's interesting is, is you're not allowed to use it for anything. Like it's, it's like blocked on their PCs.

And so I think it kind of goes along with, there's just a very strong kind of anti-tech bias that's emerged in old media. They think it hallucinates a lot more than it does. And it's like, most people in those industries tend to be very politically left-leaning.

And so they've heard all the talking points around, you know, environmental issues and all that sort of stuff. There's been a huge copyright issue with the AI companies. So I think that also kind of just makes them antagonistic towards it.

So it's just become this like bubble of people who are not supposed to use it and they think that's a good thing.

It's insane. I think they're cooked, as you say. I mean, I was thinking earlier, you know, if I wasn't to use any of these AI models for a week, just to go back to like old times, I kind of forgot what those times were about.

Yeah, I just think about how much more efficient me and my team are than we were a year ago,right? Like we're probably able to accomplish

25, 30% more with the same amount of time than we were a year ago. And so if that's like 30% of a year, that's like four months of work,right? Like that's just out the window if you're not using it.

And then if your competitors are using it, you know, so it just, it starts to compound. And I think about that a lot. That's why I try to stay very much kind of on the, towards the front of the curve on all this stuff, because I'm like, even if I adopt one of these things three months before my competitors do, that can compound into a very significant advantage.

Yeah, pretty massively. There is this other side to old media,right? Especially authors, publishing books, magazines I think are kind of forgotten anyway, but books, I think hopefully they're always going to be around,right? How do you think about writing new books if you are going forward?

Especially because so much has changed, really just in the last 12 months.

I say this as somebody who is probably going to write another book in the next couple of years. I feel like there is a countdown on nonfiction in general. And I really started to notice this just in my own life, you know, a year or two ago.

I noticed what would have, so I used to read a ton of nonfiction books. And slowly that started to come down the amount that I was reading. And I found myself gravitating more and more towards fiction. And what I realized is that a lot of nonfiction books, I would start reading them, I would get a chapter or two in.

I would, you know, most, as you probably know, most nonfiction books, half of it probably doesn't need to be there. You know, you spend half the time just being like, okay, get to the point.

Exactly.

And so I'll get two, three chapters in, and then next thing I know, I'm like opening ChatGPT on my phone and I'm asking ChatGPT about the thing I'm reading in the chapter. And then ChatGPT kind of comes back with a bunch of interesting information.

And then I ask a follow-up question. And next thing I know, I'm talking to ChatGPT for 45 minutes and I've completely forgotten about the book that I was reading. This started happening so many times that I realized I'm like, ooh, this is a bad sign.

This is a really bad sign, especially as a nonfiction author,right? Like, so I have been thinking a lot about what still makes a book valuable. And you've seen this, it's interesting. So nonfiction book sales are down quite a bit.

And then particularly in how-to and advice, like so everything from cookbooks to fitness books to, you know, how to start a business, like all these things, like those books, I think sales are down like 20 or 30% over the last couple of years.

To me, it's just clearly AI. Interestingly, the publishing industry claims its podcasts, what you and I are doingright now, which I think is cope. It is obviously AI. So I do want to write another book, but I'm really approaching it this time of asking myself like, okay, what does an AI-proof nonfiction book look like?

And how can I write one?

What does a non-AI nonfiction book look like? That's a bit of a tongue twister.

Yeah, say that five times fast. I think this is still a work in progress on my end, but I think there's probably a few elements that go into it. I think one is that you need to actually have novel concepts that, like you're not just reporting on other people's research or stories of what other people have done.

You actually have to come up with some sort of novel framework or packaging that's never existed before and is compelling enough that people are actually like, okay, I want to hear what this guy has to say. I also think it is going to force nonfiction authors.

And I think this is a very good thing because I think nonfiction books have become incredibly formulaic,right? It's like every chapter is, you start with a story, that story leads into the idea, you give some examples, you go back to the story, you put a bow on it, move on to the next chapter,right?

And it's just like, it's so repetitive. I think this is going to force a lot of nonfiction authors to like get creative in terms of how they teach and explain concepts, which I'm actually very excited about because I think that's an area that I can excel in that most nonfiction authors cannot.

And then I think there's also something about, it's interesting, you know, my business, we publish content on a lot of different topics. So we publish content around productivity advice and relationship advice and confidence and philosophy and all sorts of different things.

It's been very interesting seeing what topics are kind of hot or getting hotter in the age of AI and which ones are not. And I think the two areas that I see that are getting super hot are dating relationships, which makes sense because it's like that's one thing that you probably don't trust ChatGPT to give you good advice about.

Definitely not.

And you definitely want another human telling you, you know, what you should be doing. And then the other one is that I've noticed is business and making money. And I think that is for the same reason, which is that am I going to listen to ChatGPT who's going to give me the same advice that it gives everybody else, a hundred million other people?

Or am I going to listen to somebody like an Alex Hormozi who has like built multiple multi-million dollar companies? Obviously, I'm going to go listen to him,right? So it's looking for verticals that are very dependent on trust and credibility and then just, and kind of owning those.

You know, it feels like we're in this moment where these AI models are becoming so good. And I think especially for young people who are leaving school today, thinking about should they follow their passion or should they actually be a bit more, you know, cynical and think about actually how do they make money,right?

And you made a really good explanation on one of your videos where as the line, as the AI models become better and the line keeps going up, there are like a 1% dot on the line, which AI just cannot do.

And you need to figure out what is that 0.1%, 1% thing on that line that nobody else can do. Do you think we're kind of at that moment now? And if so, what is that 1% thing you're really good at that AI is just not going to replace?

Yeah, I think, so in that video I talked about how as AI improves, we're all going to have to find the thing that we're in the 99.9th percentile. And I think for most people, that's actually going to mean getting very specific and niching down.

You're probably not going to be better at AI at like one big thing, but if you combine like three or four things and they overlap, that's something that you can, it's like finding all the edge cases that you can master.

Like that's where all the value is going to be. For me, honestly, it's a good question.

I do think my moat, I do have a lot of what I just described, you know, in terms of just lived experience credibility, especially around business, relationships, entrepreneurship. So I think that's a moat that protects me a little bit.

And then I do think having, coming kind of back to the community thing, having like a strong brand, a strong relationship with my audience, like kind of a parasocial relationship, if you want to call it that, that can't be replaced as well.

I am under no illusions that I do think one day AI will write as good as me, if not better. I think it will come up with as good of ideas as I do, if not better. But it is finding kind of that unique blend of traits and experiences that make me me.

That's what I can own and hold onto.

And there's the taste element as well, I feel. I feel if creators really focus on taste and again, have amazing relationship with their fans and community, AI definitely can't replace that. That's going to probably what keeps creators relevant and it's probably going to keep the thing that actually makes them survive.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck then, so it's 10 years old. The initial concept, do you think it's actually changed much in the last 10 years? Because I feel the f*cks which we did give a f*ck about 10 years ago is very different to today.

What's your take here?

You know, sometimes I think

it's one of those cases, you run into this a lot in my industry where it's like advice that's really great in one context becomes terrible in another context. And at the time, the world was a little bit less crazy and it was more, you know, social media was just really starting to take off and people weren't as

polarized or antagonistic towards each other. There weren't all these kind of extremist views floating around the mainstream. And so I think at the time, most people were mostly just kind of overwhelmed and confused. And so I think that the message of, hey, just find a few things, the few things that matter and really invest in them and really give a f*ck about them.

I think by and large, that was great advice at the time. I still think it's great advice for probably a large percentage of people. But what's interesting is that if you look at a lot of, I guess what I would call the craziness of the current era, a lot of it actually comes from the fact that people have chosen only a handful of things to give all their f*cks about.

And people have become, I think, over-invested in certain ideas or identities or tribes. And that's actually kind of the root of a lot of our problems. So I don't think that necessarily negates the advice. It just means that it's not as universal as maybe it felt at the time and that maybe there's some hidden costs or side effects that weren't totally apparent when I wrote the book.

It's been pretty interesting just speaking to some of my friends. I'm 28 now. I was 17, 18 when the book came out. And you know, back then you were like, I want to buy a house like before I'm like 25.

I want a really nice car. You want a nice wash. I want to have a really nice family. Now it's like the complete opposite. Like my age generation, so 28-year-olds, we don't really care about owning a house anymore.

That's like not on our like f*ck list. We just want to, you know, have an amazing career, have an amazing family. Relationships is obviously a big thing. Wellness and self-care, I think, is a big thing to focus on for my kind of generation.

And also just going to see the world. It just feels like so much has changed in the last 10 years and who knows what the f*ck's going to happen in the next five or 10 years,right?

Yeah.

This is a good time to write the second version of the book, potentially.

Yeah, yeah. The AI-proof version.

Exactly. I think it's pretty exciting though. Is there anything that you personally don't give a f*ck about anymore, which has kind of changed in the last few years since this AI era?

I don't know if the AI era has specifically shifted my values or rearranged my values in any meaningful way. I think a lot of it's just getting older and more experienced and more mature. You know, I look back at, say, 10 years ago, six years ago, you know, obviously before the book, I was very, I gave a lot of f*ck about being successful.

You know, I really wanted to, I was very ambitious and I really wanted to build a great career. And I don't regret that or take that back. It's funny because I feel like once the book blew up, I kind of went through a phase of feeling like I needed to kind of prove myself or, you know, maybe a little bit of imposter syndrome of like kind of showing the world like, no, no, no, I deserve this.

I'm here. I'm a serious person. I look back at that now and I'm like, that's just insecurity. And

like all insecurities, it got me to say yes to things that I think today I probably would have said no to. I think today I'm in a very good spot in that like I'm very happy with what I'm focused on career-wise.

I'm just very happy in my personal life. My personal life feels very peaceful and probably the healthiest it's ever been. And so it's, even though the world seems to kind of be in chaos around me, things in my bubble are quite nice and I'm very pleased with them.

You've got this awesome new app called Purpose. Tell us about that.

So Purpose, I speaking of being bullish on AI, about two years ago, I started to notice that a lot of friends in my personal life were going to ChatGPT for life advice and kind of getting mixed results. Some of them were getting some good advice.

Some of them were, let's just say, not so good advice. But it kind of blew me away how many people were doing this and smart people, like really, like people who had gone to therapy and had like read all the books and done coaches and everything.

And so I got online and I started kind of researching this and discovered that quietly, tens of millions of people were doing this. And then when I went to ChatGPT and kind of started testing it to see how good it was, I personally found that it was not great.

Not that there's anything inherently wrong with ChatGPT. It's just, it's not what it's designed for. ChatGPT is very much designed to make your life easier and to make you feel good about using it, whatever you ask it. Whereas like a good coach or therapist challenges you and is willing to kind of call you out or force you to like think a little bit differently about your choices or actions.

So I started asking myself, I'm like, wow, like AI, if AI, if you trained an AI to actually be very good at this use case, I think it could potentially be incredible because ultimately everything that exists in the mental health space, from therapy to coaching to seminars to books to like sunsets on Instagram, it's all just language.

Like everything we're doing to improve ourselves is like ultimately just, it is dealing with our thoughts and feelings and experiences through language. And that is what LLMs are geniuses at. So I found my co-founder, his name's Raj. He's been building AI products for over 10 years.

And we founded Purpose at the beginning of 2025. We launched it in December 2025. And so we're about six or seven months in. And the business is doing really well. We're in the process of raising money this summer.

There's an incredible latent demand for this product and this use case. Andright now, people are not finding a good option anywhere else. And so it's like, we feel really, really good about both just the market we're in in general.

I think this market's going to, I honestly think AI self-help is going to eat most of human self-help. And I just think it's going to do it better and more affordably than most coaches and seminars and therapists ever will.

And I feel like we're the best at itright now and we're just getting better. So I'm very, very excited about the company and the product.

That's so cool. You know, you could take this in so many purposefully good directions. If this is for a consumer side, I imagine this is like a massive opportunity on the B2B side getting employees to obviously support all of their colleagues as now is probably the most important time to be doing something like this.

And then once you have the distribution, you can do tons of really cool different verticals. This is like just super cool and there are so many cool elements you could go down with it.

Yeah, I mean, the sky is kind of the limit. Like once you get the product working well, which we feel like we're there or pretty much there, you can scale it into pretty much anything. So it's very exciting.

I'm super excited for you guys. Well, super excited for the next book. Maybe it's coming out, you know, at some point in the next few months or few years. Can't wait to see what that's all about. We'll link Purpose down below.

And if anyone listening, go and follow Mark. Awesome video content, YouTube content, just an amazing person in general. So thank you so much for coming on the show. This was so much fun.

Thanks, man. I appreciate it.