SOLVED with Mark Manson - The Biggest Self-Help Scam in History, Solved

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

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? Vote for Solved for Best Indie Podcast in the 2026 Webby Awards: https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2026/podcasts/features/best-indie-podcast For practical, science-based advice each week that might change your life, sign up for my newsletter here: http://bit.ly/3JRg3NX Written & Directed by Mark Manson Edited by Michelle Hsieh Director of Photography Jess Choi Thumbnail by Jonathan Sippel Follow Mark Mark’s IG: https://www.instagram.com/markmanson Solved IG: https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/ Twitter: https://x.com/markmanson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Plan started just $12 a month. Learn more at tellus.com slash online security. No one can prevent all cybercrime or identity theft. Conditions apply. It's 1908. A scrappy, ambitious journalist named Napoleon sits down across from Andrew Carnegie in his 64-room Manhattan mansion.

Hill is a no-name, born dirt poor in a one-room cabin in rural Virginia. Carnegie is the richest man in the world, a titan of industry. He came from nothing, made his fortune in steel, crushed his competitors, and built the backbone of American industry.

And now, at 72, he's giving it all away, libraries, universities, foundations, he's looking to leave a legacy. Carnegie had a proposition for Napoleon. Interview 500 of the most successful men in America and distill their secrets into a philosophy anyone can follow. No salary, no advance, just introductions to the most powerful people in the world and a chance to unlock the formula of wealth itself. The only condition, Napoleon had to share it with the world.

Napoleon accepted. The project would take him 20 years. years. He would interview Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, Woodrow Wilson, John D. Rockefeller. He would study their habits, their mindsets, their failures for decades, and then codify everything he learned into a single book. But there was another man. It's also 1908. This man's name was Oliver, and he is fleeing on foot through the woods of Alabama from police with warrants out for his arrest. Oliver has defrauded lumber suppliers, of tens of thousands of dollars, buying product on credit and selling it for cash at prices

so low that it raised suspicions from authorities across three states. His wife has just filed for divorce, accusing him of domestic violence, spending all of their money on prostitutes, and choking their daughter until she turned blue. Oliver is broke. He's desperate. And for the third time in his life, he's about to change his name, move to another state, and start over as if nothing happened. Now, these two men, these two stories, happened in the same year.

These two men, one, an intrepid journalist seeking the secrets of success, the other, a con man seemingly always on the run, appeared to be the complete opposite. Yet, they are somehow inextricably linked. History is often ironic, and in this case, its irony is also its lesson. Can you guess the connection? Oliver and Napoleon were the same person. The first story is what Napoleon Hill claimed he was doing in 1908. the second is what he was actually doing.

And this book, sharing the secrets of wealth, well, chances are you've heard of it, if not read it. Think and Grow Rich is one of the best-selling books of all time. It's been credited by Tony Robbins, Oprah Winfrey, Damon John, Larry Ellison, Steve Harvey, and hundreds of others as a book that changed their lives. What's more, Think and Grow Rich launched the modern self-help industry. The secret, manifestation culture, vision boards, affirmations, visualizations, all of it was started by a man who made up nearly everything. Yet, people fucking love it.

Even today, it sells like crazy. So the question is, why? Is the advice actually good? Does that even matter? In this video, we're going to explore how a serial con man wrote one of the most influential books of the last hundred years. We'll get into Napoleon Hill's colorful history, the fraud, the abuse, even a religious cult. We'll take a hard look at the ideas in the actual book,

figure out what is good and what's just bullshit. And finally, I want to discuss why this book's influence and importance actually kind of makes sense. This is the Napoleon Hill story, as told by the Napoleon Hill Foundation. In 1908, a young journalist named Napoleon Hill was assigned to interview Andrew Carnegie. We already know that. Hill had grown up poor. He was genuinely poor.

Appalachian poor. One room cabin in the mountains poor. He'd started writing for local newspapers at 13 to help support his family. But by his mid-20s, supposedly, he'd claw his way to a position where he was interviewing the wealthiest man who had ever lived. Carnegie was so impressed, the story goes, that he made Napoleon Hill an offer. Spend the next 20 years interviewing the most successful people in America, figure out what they all have in common, and then publish your findings. When Think and Grow Rich was finally published in 1937, it became an instant phenomenon. It sold out its first print run in weeks, then the second, then it just kept going.

And honestly, it hasn't really led up since. Nearly 100 years later, it still often lands on bestseller lists. Estimates put total sales at over 100 million copies sold worldwide, making it one of the best-selling books in human history. Now, the book's influence is really hard to overstate. It spawned an entire industry and worldview. The idea that your thoughts create your reality. That desire combined with faith leads to manifestation. That there's a secret to wealth that successful people know and unsuccessful people.

don't, that if you can hold an image in your mind with enough intensity and belief, you will eventually make it real. All of that started here. He'll claim that he was an advisor to two presidents, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. He took credit for one of the most famous phrases in American history. That the only thing we have to fear is... It's a hell of a story. The poor kid from Appalachia who met the richest man in the world, spent 20 years learning from Titans and then distilled their wisdom into a book that would change the lives of tens of millions of people. But there's just one problem.

None of it is true. David Nassau is Andrew Carnegie's definitive biographer. He spent years with Carnegie's personal archives, his letters, his diaries, his appointment books, his correspondence. Carnegie was a meticulous man. He documented everything throughout his life. If he'd met a young journalist and commissioned a 20-year research project, they're definitely would have been a record of it. Yet, Nassau found nothing. Not a single mention of Napoleon Hill

in any of Carnegie's papers. Now, conveniently, Napoleon Hill didn't start claiming that Carnegie meeting happened until after Carnegie died in 1919. There are no photos of Hill with Carnegie or evidence that he met anyone else he claimed to have interviewed for that matter. That that's because Napoleon Hill was a serial con man. And unlike the story from the book, we have plenty of records to prove it. Throughout the 1910s and 20s, Hill would start schools where he charged people large amounts of money to teach them, well, how to start schools that charge people large amounts of money. Sound familiar. Eventually, this escalated to outright fraud. The state of Illinois tried to prosecute him for securities violations, and he even went as far as to create a charity where people

could mail him money to help educate prisoners before they got out of jail. Where did that money go? Let's just say that Napoleon was a Thinking and Growing Rich Throughout all of this, Hill cycled through five marriages and abandoned multiple families. His wives couldn't stand him and his kids basically never saw him.

Oh, and then there's a religious cult. What? See, in the late 30s, right around the time Think and Grow Rich was published, Hill became deeply involved in the royal fraternity of master metaphysicians. This was a group that used Think and Grow Rich as a, some kind of

Holy Scripture. They believed that thoughts were literally reshaping reality. Hill became the godfather to Baby Gene, a child of the cult that they claimed was going to be raised to be immortal through the power of positive thinking. Yes, immortal. The idea was that if they could shield Baby Gene from any negative thoughts or influences throughout her life, that she would never die. Fun fact, Baby Gene would one day grow up to start a YouTube channel and today is more popularly known as Brian Johnson. But anyway, the cult leader James Schaefer, was eventually convicted of fraud in 1942 for a magazine scheme. He took the fall yet in all official statements.

He blamed Napoleon Hill for the entire thing. So here's the question that's been nagging at me. How did a man running from creditors, abandoning families, getting arrested for fraud, write a book that genuinely seems to have helped millions of people? I mean, did it actually help them? Or did they just believe that it did? Or is there a difference? So we should probably take a minute and actually talk about what is in the book.

So the book lays out 13 principles for success. These are the quote-unquote steps to getting rich. Some of them are dumb. Some of them are kind of weird. And some of them are actually great advice. So let's start with the good stuff. Goal setting. Hill's first principle in his framework is desire.

But not a vague desire. It's a specific written-down deadline-attached desire. tells you to decide exactly how much money you want, determine what you're willing to give in exchange for it, set a date, create a plan, write it all down, and then read it aloud twice a day. This sort of thing sounds kind of obvious to us in the 21st century, but in 1930, it was not. This was cutting-edge stuff. It wasn't until the 1990s when Edwin Locke and Gary Latham did their breakthrough research on goal setting, and today, goal-setting is one of the most validated frameworks in all of organizational psychology. Meta analyses show that specific change

challenging goals improved performance by at least 16%. And a study by the psychology professor Gail Matthews found that people who write down their goals and share weekly progress will achieve their goals almost twice as often. Hill also has an entire chapter dedicated to persistence, to not giving up. He argues that most people fail because they quit too early, often just before they would have actually succeeded. As you probably know, there's plenty of research today that backs this up. Angela Duckworth's research on grit, which has become one of the most influential psychological frameworks in the 21st century essentially validates this, showing that sustained effort over time

will predict success much better than talent or IQ does. And then there's the mastermind. Hill says that you should surround yourself with a group of people who are smarter than you, more experienced than you, but aligned with your same goals. This mastermind group then becomes a kind of external brain trust. I completely forgot that he invented this. It's crazy because I am in a bunch of masterminds. They have been huge in my life. And modern research on Social networks confirms that who you spend time with dramatically affects your life outcomes. You're the average of the five people closest to you, right? It sounds like a motivational poster, but that actually came from empirical data and research.

Then there's specialized knowledge. Hill distinguishes between general knowledge, the kinds you get in school, and specialized knowledge that can actually be applied to make money. He argues that knowing how to find and used highly specialized knowledge gives you more leverage and helps you accumulate wealth. Now, in 2025, with Google and AI at everybody's fingertips, this seems almost prophetic. So this is all very solid practical advice that holds up almost 90 years later. But then things get weird.

Weird? How? See, Chapter 11 is a thing called the mystery of sex transmutation. I'm not making this up. Hill argues that sexual energy is the most powerful force in human nature, and that successful people learn to transmute it, to redirect it away from physical expression and towards creative and business pursuits. His evidence? Castrated bowls become docile as cows. Now, let's just say that Napoleon Hill's docile cow theory of motivation has not really held up to empirical scrutiny.

Hill goes on to claim that men hit their peak achievement between ages 40 and 60 because that's when they finally learn how to keep their dicks in their pants. I'm not making this up. He says that highly sex people are the most creative and successful, but only if they learn to harness that energy rather than waste it and then have to pay for her Uber home afterwards. To be clear, this is 19th century pseudo-Froidian nonsense with no scientific basis whatsoever. My guess is that people who read this book either skip the chapter entirely or just nod along awkwardly and pretend it never happened. Probably like Napoleon Hill's wives did with after sex with him. Chapter 13 claims that the brain is a broadcasting and receiving station for thought.

What the fuck does that mean? Hill argues that human brains communicate with each other through vibrations, man, transmitted through the ether, man, the same way radio waves travel through the air. Sound familiar? Chapter 14 introduces the sixth sense, a faculty in which infinite intelligence can communicate with you directly. Hill describes receiving flashes of inspiration and hunches and guidance from what he calls

his personal guardian angel. He claims that by mastering the other 12 principles in his framework, you can essentially tune your brain like a radio to receive messages from the universe or something. I don't know. It's not clear. He doesn't really explain what the hell the infinite intelligence is. He calls it a cosmic force that permeates every atom of matter. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that this infinite intelligence that Hill was tuning into that gave him his great ideas to scam thousands of people out of their charitable donations.

Maybe that didn't come from God. Just going to throw that out there. The book's brilliance seems to come from the fact that it makes the ordinary seem magical and the magical seem ordinary. And then sells it as forbidden knowledge coming from the richest men in the world. From a marketing perspective, this is absolutely fucking genius. Which brings us back to the central question. Millions of people love this book,

despite the fact that half of the advice is kind of obvious and common today, and the other half is weird mystical nonsense. So what do we make of this? Need a vehicle that isn't afraid to make a splash? That's the Volkswagen Touse. Capable and confident, the Volkswagen Touse is fit for everyday life. Nimble in traffic, agile and tight spots, and still spacious enough for weekend getaways.

while available 4-motion all-wheel drive gives confidence in rain and snow. The capable taos, you deserve more confidence. Visit vw.ca to learn more. S-UVW, German-engineered for all. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk.

Habaniero? More like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. Here's a story that I often think about. In 1957, a psychologist named Bruno Cloffer documented the case of a man he called Mr. Wright. Mr. Wright was dying of lymphoma. His tumors were the size of oranges. His doctors had exhausted every available treatment. Nothing had worked. But Mr. Wright had read about a new experimental drug called Kray-Biozin. He was convinced, absolutely convinced, that this drug was going to cure him. He begged his doctors to give it to him. They were skeptical, but this was a dying man, so what did he have to lose?

They gave it to him. Three days after his first injection, Mr. Wright was walking around the hospital, joking with the nurses, his tumors had shrunk by half. Ten days later, he was discharged. The man who had been on his deathbed was essentially symptom-free. But then news reports came out, questioning Kray-Biozin's effectiveness. Studies were showing it wasn't working.

Mr. Wright read the reports and his tumors suddenly came back. Stories like this abound in medical literature. The placebo effect is absolutely a real thing and incredibly powerful. It produces measurable physiological changes. Harvard studies have shown that placebo's work even when patients know they're taking placebos. The ritual of treatment, taking the pill, seeing the doctor, believing you're doing something. it produces actual shifts in brain chemistry, endorphins, dopamine, reduced activity, and pain centers.

The belief that something would help them, help them. You see this often in the psychological research on motivation and resilience as well. People who believe that they are capable of achieving a task are measurably more likely to achieve that task. People who believe they are capable of dealing with setbacks and problems are measurably more likely to deal with that setback or problem. I've had a belief my whole life that I'm capable of accomplishing. anything I commit myself to and with my full effort. Not dabbling, not try half-heartedly, but truly fully commit with everything that I have. Is that objectively true? Probably not. There are almost certainly things that I couldn't achieve no matter how hard I tried. I'm probably

not going to play in the NBA and I'm probably not going to win a Nobel Prize in physics. There are limits. But does believing this make me more likely to take on difficult challenges to push through long, discouraging middle parts to any ambitious project to eventually succeed at things that I might have given up on otherwise? Apsa fucking looting. This belief might not be true in some objective, verifiable

sense, but it is very useful. It produces actions that increase my odds of success. And in a weird way, the belief makes itself more true by existing. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not because the universe magically responds to my thoughts, but because my thoughts change

my expectations and my expectations change my behavior, and my behavior changes my outcomes. So here's something that I do believe. A very large percentage of self-help advice is just that. Various methods of sneakily inducing placebo effects into people, giving them concepts and ideas that are just plausible enough to be true, but also not really disprovable. And this is the genius of think and grow rich.

It is replete with beliefs that, if adopted, will probably help you most of the time. And some of them, it turns out, are backed up by science. And some of them are just made up bullshit. But as long as you believe them and they're helping you, who cares? I mean, come on, guys. Do you really think there's anything measurable or verifiable about giving fewer fucks? No, there's not.

But the conceptual packaging in the language creates a belief that generates emotional impact and that emotional impact then shifts your behavior. Most of the criticism of the self-help industry is that it's pseudoscience, and that it's not true. To which I'd argue, Yeah, but that's not the point. It's not trying to be true. Don't take it from me. Don't even take it from a cynical con artist like Napoleon Hill. Take it from one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived. William James had a radical idea about truth. In the late 19th century, most philosophers in the Anglo world were obsessed with a school today known as analytical philosophy, which was basically the process of trying to scientifically deduce capital T true beliefs about reality only by using people. your logic. Now, James took the complete other route. He was skeptical that we could ever know truth entirely, and instead, he argued that we should focus on believing what results in the

best outcomes. Scientific theories, therefore, aren't true because they map perfectly to reality. They are true in that they are the most useful explanations and predictions that we have about reality. Psychological theories aren't necessarily true objectively. They simply explain our experiences in a way that is most helpful to us in understanding our own minds. Now, this school thought became known as pragmatism, and this probably won't surprise you. It really only took off in America, especially around the time of Napoleon Hill. Because these ideas expand much further than philosophy or science, they bleed into everyday life. My good friend, Derek Sivers, the author and entrepreneur, recently wrote a book about the importance of adopting beliefs that are what he calls,

useful, not true. His argument is that most things are hard to know for sure, so you might as well defer to believing whatever is most helpful for you and others. And that may make the scientists in the room bristle and shake their fists and demand that every capital T true thing be empirically verified. But Derek points out that we do this all the time. Art is useful, not true. Religion is useful, not true. Political beliefs and economic forecasts and the fact that a guy kicked the ball into a net more than another guy makes him a winner, these are all useful, not true beliefs.

And we lean on them all the time. This framework, judging beliefs by their usefulness rather than their correspondence, the some abstract reality, it offers a new way to think about Napoleon Hill and self-help in general. Judge ideas by the actions they inspire, not by the literal accuracy. If believing you can accomplish anything you commit to makes you more likely to succeed, then fuck it. You might as well believe it. The truth of the belief matters less than its utility. Or does it? Because there might be a line here that can be crossed. And if so, did Napoleon Hill cross it. Here's a belief that's useful but not true. Napoleon Hill wrote the book,

Think and Grow Rich. Funny story, Napoleon Hill attempted to write over a dozen books throughout the 1920s and early 30s. He sold some of them as mail-order courses, but they were long, rambling, indecipherable messes, and they all flopped. Then, in 1936, broke and couch-surfing, he met Rosa Lee Beeland at one of his seminars. He was so smitten with her that he proposed marriage, to her the next day. But Rosalie was smart, and she knew how to manage Napoleon. She also happened to be a great writer. Over the next year, she took hundreds of pages of his manuscripts and started refining

them. After months of curating and editing his work, the result was thinking grow rich. Once the book was finished, Rosa Lee refused to marry Napoleon unless he gave her the rights to the book. Like I said, she was smart. He obliged, as he was currently being sued by one of his ex-wives and one of his wife. wanted to prevent his ex from getting rights to any future book royalties. Three years later, Rosa Lee also divorced him.

She took the royalties with her. Hill's writing would go back to being a scrawled mess, and Rosalie would then publish her own book, aptly titled, How to Attract Men and Money. So here's something weird. As I researched this video, I came to the conclusion that it's actually quite appropriate that the godfather of modern self-help advice was a con artist and a huckster. That's because most self-help advice, when taken to its life,

extreme results in a special kind of narcissistic behavior, not unlike Napoleon Hills. Because useful not true is only useful when you have an accurate understanding of what is useful and what is not. Believing that the universe conspires to give you what you want when you work for it, it's probably useful and probably not true. But believing that you were personally asked by Andrew Carnegie to interview 500 of the richest people in the world, that you advised Woodrow Wilson on how to conduct the Treaty of Versailles after the end of World War I, that you wrote FDR's speeches for him, that's not useful. That's fucking bananas.

In fact, it's actually harmful, both for himself and for others. And I think the evidence of his behavior throughout his life really supports that. Napoleon Hill didn't just believe unprovable things about the power of thought. He implicated real people. He invented relationships with the dead. He stole credibility and at times a lot of money. And this matters because the book's entire authority, rests on the lie. Think and Grow Rich isn't pitched as Napoleon Hill's personal philosophy

based on his experiences. It's pitched as distilled wisdom from 500 of history's most successful men, delivered by Andrew Carnegie himself. Carnegie's name is invoked in the book constantly. The whole premise is that Hill is just a conduit for Andrew Carnegie's wisdom and the wisdom of other Titans. So if you remove the origin story, the book loses its weight. It becomes one guy's opinion about success, which might still be valuable, but it's a very, very different product. And this is where self-help gets ethically complicated. Where is that line of what's useful and not useful? Not even for yourself, but for the audience.

When does a lie help people and when does it hurt people? Lying about Andrew Carnegie didn't hurt Andrew Carnegie, but it helped millions of people. So you could say, who cares? That's all that matters. And you see this argument come up all the time in all sorts of places, art, film, music. I mean, does knowing Michael Jackson's personal life make Billy Jean a worse song? Does knowing Picasso's treatment of women make his paintings less of a masterpiece? Probably not.

But here's the difference. Michael Jackson's personal life doesn't affect whether Billy Jean has a good beat or not. The song exists independently of his biography. Picasso's cruelty doesn't change the brushstrokes on the canvas, But Napoleon Hill's fabrications are the fucking product. The book's authority comes from the lie. The creator and the credibility can't be separated because the claimed credibility is the entire basis

for the advice in the first place. So it's not separate art from the artist. It's the artist's fake credentials kind of are the art. So is it worth it? Is the benefit of the ideas, the usefulness, the help to millions and millions of people? Is it worth the harm of the fabrications? And the dishonesty?

Well, I guess that depends on what you choose to believe. Instacart knows that some people go bananas about getting the perfect, well, banana. Some want them green, some want them ripe, some want them ready right when they hit their doorstep. But with Instacart's preference picker, available at most retailers, you can choose to get your groceries just the way you like. That means perfectly ripe bananas, deli meat sliced just the way you want, and avocados that aren't still hard as a puck in the third period. So don't cross your fingers and hope for the best. Download the app and get groceries just how you like with Instacart.