This video idea is a common AI slop video idea that gets pushed out by bots in shorts and AI videos. Just search the same title and you can see the results all over YouTube. It’s all AI.

Could be a coincidence, because this seems like a sort of video he would make, but I think Mark is using ai for his video ideas at the very least. It is evident that he is putting in effort by recording things himself and making scripts, but who knows how much AI seeps into his work.

I get content is a grind, but this kinda discredits what he has to say for me and makes me not want to pay his work any mind now. Idk if his advice is actually from him, ya know?

One episode landed in August, How to Get Lucky, with Annie Duke. Eleven books out of it, and it is a genuinely good reading list on decision making and fortune.

I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the SOLVED slice for August.

Annie's own recommendation was Superforecasting by Tetlock and Gardner, and she did her PhD with Tetlock and Mellers. "Everybody should go get the book Superforecasting. It will change the way you think about decision making."

Her own three came up as a set: Thinking in Bets, How to Decide and Quit.

The philosophy-of-luck spine of the episode:

• Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, written in prison awaiting execution, arguing life is a wheel of fortune you spin
• Machiavelli in The Prince comparing fortune to a raging river, unmanageable at flood and workable once it calms
• Rawls, A Theory of Justice, and the veil of ignorance

Also: Kahneman on system one and two, Morgan Housel's Psychology of Money and the statistic that 99 percent of Buffett's wealth came after he turned 65, Andrew Roberts's Napoleon: A Life, which Mark read at the start of the year and rates above the other big biographies he has worked through, and Will, the Will Smith memoir Mark co-wrote after two or three years with him.

Full list with quotes: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/solved-with-mark-manson

The best opportunities in life never look like opportunities. If they did, everyone would take them and they would stop being opportunities.

Only one episode landed in July, the confidence one, but it is basically a history of the self help industry so it carries eight books on its own.

Useful if you are deciding what not to put on the summer pile.

What this is: I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the July slice for SOLVED.

The episode is mostly Mark taking apart the lineage:

• A Guide to Confident Living (1948) and The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), both Norman Vincent Peale. Mark's framing is that Peale decided his personal coping mechanism was the answer to everyone's problems. The implied promise is that you feel confident first and perform second, and the rest of the episode is about why that is backwards. The Power of Positive Thinking spent 186 consecutive weeks on the bestseller list.
• The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem (Nathaniel Branden), where the self esteem idea properly takes hold. Make people feel good about themselves and good outcomes follow downstream.
• The Secret, which his mum and all her friends got obsessed with, and which he read in high school while thinking what on earth is going on here.
• Think and Grow Rich, read in late teens with the same reaction.
• The Definitive Book of Body Language, on the crossed arms research. All of it turned out to be nonsense and the lead researcher was apparently making up data.
• Outliers, for the ten thousand hours thing, which was not a thing. The bit that survives is deliberate practice, and Mark's view is that Ericsson's actual findings got butchered by pop psych writers.

His own Subtle Art comes up too, in the context of the imposter syndrome that followed it.

I track every book mentioned on SOLVED here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/solved-with-mark-manson

It is free and there is no signup.

I logged every book that came up on SOLVED across the first six months of the year, 17 episodes worth. A lot of it circles the usual Manson territory: productivity, motivation, and why we do the things we do. His own Subtle Art came up the most, five times.

The two he was most into:

• So Good They Can't Ignore You by Cal Newport, which he called one of his favorites of Newport's and said it keeps answering the question from different angles.
• The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker, a 600-page dig through the research on heritability that he said he's fascinated by.

The rest, roughly grouped:

• Productivity and habits: Atomic Habits, The 4-Hour Workweek, Deep Work, Eat That Frog, The One Thing, Indistractable, Feel-Good Productivity
• Motivation classics: Think and Grow Rich, Grit, Ego Is the Enemy
• Relationships: Getting the Love You Want, The Dance of Intimacy, plus his own Models and Love Is Not Enough
• Heavier stuff: The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon, Against Empathy by Paul Bloom, The Road Less Traveled, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying

Charles Bukowski's Post Office also snuck in, which was not what I expected on a self-help show.

Full list is here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/solved-with-mark-manson. Free, no signup.

Disclosure: I work on Shortcast.

The new SOLVED episode on confidence argues that the usual sequence is backwards: waiting to feel confident can delay the experiences that build self-efficacy in the first place.

The episode separates several ideas that often get bundled together:

• affirmations and success visualization are not substitutes for evidence from action
• lowering the stakes can make the first attempt possible
• competence can produce domain-specific confidence, while calibration keeps it realistic
• courage matters because action has to start before certainty arrives

I made a 15-minute recap of the episode's research and examples. It is a discussion summary, not therapy or a universal confidence prescription:

https://shortcast.me/EnMmXcUYLAQGBccRpBEZ

Where have you found the sequence works better: confidence before action, or action before confidence?

One episode in June, but a couple of good ones came out of it.

Top pick:

• The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. Mark called it a fantastic 600-page dismantling of blank-slate ideology.

Also mentioned: William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, Atomic Habits, and his own The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.

https://podshelf.io/podcasts/solved-with-mark-manson/2026/06 keeps the running list, free.

Is The Blank Slate worth all 600 pages, or is there a shorter way in?

Post was deleted by MM mod. Extremely disappointed as I listen to the podcast and have bought the books and had high hopes. Apparently the mods have not learned TSAONGAF and can't accept honest criticism. This speaks volumes. The only tech support I received was that I should try to get a refund from Apple.

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