How to Make Friends as an Adult, Solved

SOLVED with Mark Manson

Mark Manson

Education, Self-improvement

4.9 • 4.1K Ratings

🗓️ 1 November 2025

⏱️ 279 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Friendship is the most important thing nobody talks about. From ancient philosophy to game theory, we break down why friendship isn’t just some social nicety—it’s a biological survival strategy. Plus: the modern forces slowly strangling our ability to connect, and exactly what to do about it. You’ll walk away with a clearer sense of what real friendship looks like, how to build it, and how to stop shooting yourself in the foot every time you try. We also put together a free companion guide for this episode with all the takeaways, references, and tools to help you get your sh*t together once and for all. Download it here: https://solvedpodcast.com/friendship Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: ⁠⁠https://markmanson.net/breakthrough⁠⁠ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get 7 days free at ⁠⁠⁠purpose.app/solved⁠ Chapters: 00:04:44 CHAPTER 1: Reframing Resilience — Definitions & Misconceptions 00:23:50 CHAPTER 2: Developmental and Biological Foundations of Resilience 00:38:54 CHAPTER 3: Biological & Physiological Foundations 01:17:17 CHAPTER 4: Psychological, Philosophical & Evidence-Based Frameworks 02:27:00 CHAPTER 5: Sociocultural & Community Dimensions 02:57:28 CHAPTER 6: The 80/20 of Becoming More Resilient 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

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back, everybody to the Solve podcast, the most over-researched and under-rehearsed podcast on the internet.
0:06.7	I'm number one New York Times best-selling author Mark Manson, and this is my co-host, lead researcher, long-time acquaintance.
0:15.0	Drew Bertie.
0:16.3	And we are here to be your friends for the next few hours. You see what I did there, Drew? I do see what you did there. All right. Am I clever? Was that a good intro? Was I clever enough on that intro? I think we hooked them in. Okay. Yeah. Are you hooked yet, audience? Do you need two friends for the next five hours? Well, we've got the podcast for you.
0:39.7	In all seriousness, Drew, I'm actually very excited for this episode for two reasons.
0:43.9	One reason is I think friendship is probably the most important topic that is talked about least.
0:51.1	A hundred percent.
0:51.8	I agree with that.
0:52.4	Like if there was a- Absolutely.
0:53.7	If there was like a ratio of Like if there was a- Absolutely.
0:55.0	If there was like a ratio of importance to discussion, I think friendship would be maybe the
1:01.1	highest in this entire field.
1:02.1	Romantic relationships get all the air time.
1:04.0	Yeah.
1:05.0	And yeah.
1:06.0	Physical health, mental health, happiness, like everything really, like your social life drives so much of all these things.
1:13.2	We're going to be talking about it.
1:15.1	And it's on top of that, it's a huge problem these days.
1:18.2	There's some scary stats that I know we're going to talk about later, but just a few, like,
1:22.6	just the wet the beak of the listener.
1:25.0	The number of people without a close friend is quadrupled in the last
1:28.2	30 years. The amount of time the average person spends alone has grown by 25% and the amount of
	...

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