Seven minutes of chitchat and one real question into an interview, Mel Robbins begins to cry. Her eyes brim with tears behind her signature glasses; her confident voice gets squeaky. Here’s the question: how would you describe what you do? Not exactly a hardball, especially for Robbins, who has an everything-must-go approach to self-disclosure. This is a woman who on her wildly popular podcast described the appearance of her aging breasts as “dirty gym socks,” and has also given listeners a letter-and-verse account of her urinary incontinence. A job description should be a light lift.
Then again, Robbins, 56, has had so many incarnations, perhaps it’s complicated to sum up for a stranger who she now is. She has been a public defender, a life coach, a syndicated talk-radio host, a CNN legal analyst, an entrepreneur, a motivational speaker, a self-help author, a daytime talk-show host, and now a luminary of the podcast world and mini media tycoon. She has also, famously, been $800,000 in debt. Her high moments have been giddying and her lows desperate.
Robbins’ style, trained as she is for radio, where silence is referred to as “dead air,” is to keep talking until she figures out what she wants to say. She tries to describe what she does in several different ways. “I think a lot about the magic of taking a walk with a friend,” she says, as she chokes up. “When you take a walk with a friend, you feel better.” Switching to business terms, she explains how she’s trying to transform that friend-feeling into content: “I’ve built a production and media company that focuses on the human experience.” As she regains her composure, she adds, “I am on a mission to find as many stories and pieces of science and research and tools that a person can use to make their life a little better.”
Finally, she jumps ahead to the question that lies underneath the question, the one that eventually all motivational gurus (a term she hates) such as Robbins face. “The hardest thing about what I do is that oftentimes the advice and the tools sound dumb or repetitive,” she says. And there it is, the real truth of Mel Robbins, disclosed by herself. She is the queen of stupendously obvious advice, the psychological equivalent of a doctor who suggests you try breathing in and out. But—and here’s the amazingly simple hack that you won’t believe really works!— people listen to her and attempt to do what she suggests. “I spend a lot of time thinking about how I make this information that you’re going to care about, information that you’re going to connect to, and information that you’re going to trust enough to try,” she says.
Her best-selling book, The 5-Second Rule, is about motivating yourself to do something by counting backward from 5 and then doing it, much as one might encourage a reluctant child. Her second best-selling book, The High 5 Habit, coaches people to look at themselves in the mirror in the morning, think about what they have to do that day, and then literally high-five their reflection. It has more than 6,000 five-star reviews on Amazon, many of them calling it transformative. And in December she will release a new book, The Let Them Theory. The premise of this one—already hovering at the top of Amazon’s bestsellers list–is, pretty much, that people will be happier if they quit trying to control other people.
If you’re thinking these insights seem like thin gruel on which to nourish a media company, Robbins in some ways agrees with you. She’s fully aware how basic they seem. What Robbins sells, however, is not just advice. She’s offering her listeners a reason to believe in themselves. On Oct. 23, SiriusXM announced it had reupped her contract in a three-year deal in which she will not only continue to produce The Mel Robbins Podcast, but also launch a second show in early 2025. “Every single player was in the mix for the next ad-sales deal,” Robbins says, “and we were told by three different groups that based on the numbers, this is the single fastest-growing podcast they’ve seen.”
Since the first podcast was launched a mere two years ago, more than 187 million episodes have been downloaded and it has spread to 98 countries. People have spent 22 million hours watching it on YouTube, where she has 3 million subscribers. She has 6.5 million followers on Instagram, 2 million on TikTok, 2.5 million on Facebook, and six audiobooks that have hit No. 1 on Audible. At the end of 2023, her podcast was named the fifth most followed on Apple’s charts, prompting the Kelce brothers (whose podcast was third) to give her a shout-out.
Robbins has become the voice in people’s heads—often literally, since many listen on earbuds—encouraging them to keep going, insisting that they can do it, and shouting down the murmurs of self-doubt. In every podcast she says the same thing: “In case anyone hasn’t told you today, I love you,” a line that’s so corny it could be distilled into ethanol. And yet because it comes from her, people drink it up like syrup.
The morning TIME visits her book-lined Boston studio, Robbins, wearing a cool but relatable ensemble of black shirt, jeans, and Air Jordans, is interviewing Dr. Aditi Nerurkar, an author and physician at Harvard Medical School who specializes in stress. Nerurkar is talking about the difference between hedonic happiness and eudaimonic happiness. She’s expounding on “horizonlessness” where young people can’t get their bearings. Robbins repeats what Nerurkar says, synthesizing it and trying to find a practical application, all while blowing sunshine the doctor’s way. She’s interviewer, translator, therapist, and cheerleader.
Toward the end of the interview, Robbins scribbles a note on a card and draws a box around it several times. She also, she tells me later, presses a tap pad under her desk that sends a message to the mixing desk that this is the key point of the interview. “My role, especially with the experts, is really translating, clarifying, distilling, making it entertaining, making somebody that is steeped in their research relatable and human, so that somebody listening to them doesn’t feel less than or dumb.”
Nerurkar is not just a guest; she’s a fan. “You have an uncanny gift for getting into the head of people,” she tells Robbins after the interview but before they emerge from the studio into a standing ovation from the staff. (Everyone gets that, even reporters.) “I’m sitting across from a hero.” Last time she was on Robbins’ show, her book sales blew up like a case of hives. “You are the ultimate hype woman,” she tells Robbins. Dr. Mary Claire Haver, whose specialty is menopause, had a similar experience. Her interview with Robbins, which is now the most popular episode the show has ever done, aired a few weeks before her first book came out. “It was like a juggernaut,” she says. “It was more powerful than anything I’ve ever done, as far as reach.” By release date, the book had presold 70,000 copies, much of which Haver attributes to Robbins.
Why does it make such a difference to people when Robbins gives the advice? Partly it’s her voice. She has a lively smoky tone, with a lot of empathy and a hint of mischief, like a scandalous but wise aunt. Partly it’s skills honed in years of radio, where you have to keep people from changing the dial as the ads approach by dangling treats that await. Partly it’s her infallible radar for zeroing in on the one nugget in a litany of nuanced observations made by scholarly guests.
A quick study, she can consume a large volume of research material and not only pull out the most compelling takeaway but buttress her advice with findings from the academic, often neuroscientific literature. The reason it works to count to 5 backward and then go, she proposes, is that it counteracts the natural hesitation the brain engages in before doing something new to make sure it’s safe. If you make a move right after the five-second window, you don’t have time to overthink and get anxious.
But mostly people listen to Robbins because she tells stories. One of her most popular podcasts, about how to find out what you want, is illustrative of her methods. She spends the first two-thirds of the show sharing tales of people who are unclear about what they want. She uses whatever material she has on hand, in this case her daughter Sawyer and sister-in-law Christine Harwig. Sawyer talks about moving to New York City; Harwig wishes she had a lake house. Then, after 29 minutes, including five promo spots, Robbins demonstrates the technique of uncovering what you actually want by asking why five times to really burrow into the kernel of the desire. Her daughter wants to fulfill a childhood dream. Her sister-in-law wants more time with her teenage sons. The method takes about three minutes to explain, but a full 45 to make compelling.
Being a content producer is a grind. Robbins throws up two podcasts a week, plus endless social media riffs. She knows how to do this from years of nattering on air and because she cooks all the parts of the chicken. A cat sleeping on her lap becomes a post about not letting other things perturb you. Falling asleep in workout clothes becomes a post about motivation. She uses the most popular of those as a guide to what might be a good podcast and she uses the most popular of those as a guide to what might be a good book. The idea for Let Them went from a moment where she was worrying about how disorganized her son was about prom to an Instagram post and podcast so popular, says Robbins, it inspired tattoos. “What was revelatory to me is that you can’t truly be in control of what you’re doing until you first stop living your life as if you can control what other people are doing,” she says. “When you say, let them, you detach from trying to control that person, and then you remind yourself, let me choose how I’m going to respond to this.”
She noticed echoes of the idea in Buddhism, stoicism, and the work of Dr. Robert Waldinger, the psychiatrist behind the Harvard Study of Adult Development. “It’s the single best thing I’ve ever done,” she says. “It’s got everything that I look for. It is personal. It is backed by just a tremendous amount of research in science. It is so simple, you can teach it to a fifth grader. And in a moment where you are overwhelmed by your emotions, you can remember it. And that’s key, because if you can’t remember what to do, you won’t use the advice.”
Robbin’s richest vein of raw material, however, is her own backstory. Born Melanie Lee Schneeberger to a mother who left college after getting pregnant her freshman year and a father who would go on to become an osteopathic doctor, Robbins grew up in Muskegon, Mich. She excelled at school, particularly at math, was accepted into Dartmouth, “and proceeded to have from college through law school [at Boston College] eight of the worst years of my life,” she says. “I had no idea that I had been struggling profoundly with dyslexia and ADHD.” She was only able to keep up with the workload, she says, because her anxiety disorder made her work so hard.
She was unaware of those conditions at the time; she just knew she was miserable, drinking too much, cheating on boyfriends, and doing too many all-nighters. The memory of it brings her to tears again. “I didn’t know,” she says, weeping. “I didn’t f-cking know. There are so many things that I did that I regret, because I just didn’t know, and I hurt myself.” Part of what drives Robbins, she says, is that other people might be like she was. “I feel like almost every human being has something like that that they just didn’t know.”
Robbins was a public defender in New York City for a few years and represented a lot of people trying to make bail. “I saw how many people don’t have anybody showing up for them, and it left a huge mark on me,” she says. But she didn’t enjoy it, nor family law, and in 1999, after marrying and moving about an hour outside Boston, she started a business as a life coach.
Five years and two children later, her husband, Christopher Robbins, got laid off and decided to open his own business too, a pizza restaurant, which did well. He then opened another and another in quick succession, and there was a cash-flow squeeze, just as Robbins was having a third child and cutting back on her $250-an-hour life-coaching sessions. The couple took on a massive amount of debt. Robbins says she had a rehearsed routine for when her cards were declined at the grocery store. “I would cock my head a little to the left and go, ‘That’s funny, it just worked at the gas station. Hold on, I’m gonna go out to the car. Come on, kids.’ And I’d leave,” she says. But it got to her. “Never in a million years did I think at the age of 41 that I would be struggling with drinking, ready to kill my husband, just unable to get out of bed.”
Robbins, who often reminds listeners that “no one is coming to save you,” got a $25-an-hour gig as a local morning-radio talk-show host on weekends. “It was like a lifeline to talk to people that didn’t know the sh-tstorm that was going on in my life,” she says, and she was good at it. In 2012, five years after starting in radio, she got an official job at WBDO in Orlando. “I remember our very first meeting. It was one of those great meetings,” says Drew Anderssen, the show’s then producer. “Mel wanted to be a star, and she is a star. She had a way of making people feel really good.” When Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman in nearby Sanford, Fla., in 2012, Anderssen put her on the story and the case that followed. From there CNN hired her as an on-air legal analyst.
To pay the bills, she also developed a side career as a motivational speaker and author and got invited to speak at a TEDx event in San Francisco. At the end of her talk, “How to Stop Screwing Yourself Over,” she almost forgot to mention this little idea she had called the 5-Second Rule. She also gave out her personal email, which eventually she had to ask be edited out. The talk went viral, and she began to focus more on speaking and writing and less on TV. In 2017, she released The 5-Second Rule, which went on to become the best-selling self-published audiobook of all time.
While the past decade has been one of expanding successes, with an ever-growing footprint on social media, bigger paydays (a reported $100,000) for her corporate gigs, and two monster books, it’s been no cakewalk. Her eponymous daytime talk show, launched with some fanfare in 2019, was canceled after just one season. “It wasn’t good,” she says when asked why it was axed. But true to Robbins’ brand, the big public failure was a learning experience. “It taught me that I need to be in control of what I’m doing,” she says. “I am not a player in someone else’s game.”
Thus her podcast is produced by her own company, 143 Studios (named after the address of an apartment in Manhattan the couple lived in), and her new book, like her previous ones, is being released through a self-publishing platform. On the day TIME visits her office, each member of the largely female staff is wearing a magnetic name tag, including Harwig, who is the CFO and COO, and Sawyer, who works in marketing.
It’s safe to say the Robbinses are out of debt now. During the pandemic, the family bought and moved into her husband’s parents’ house on a hill in Vermont. Christopher runs a men’s retreat business, is a death doula, and is, by the looks of his Instagram, gloriously happy. Robbins wears a flashy diamond-encrusted ring, a present from her husband to mark 26 years of marriage. The last time she took Anderssen to lunch and talked about how much money she was making, he regretted suggesting the Magical Dining Month budget-price menu.
But her extremely fast rise in the podcast world has led to oversights. Recently Harwig discovered that Robbins was scammed out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in corporate speaking payments in an elaborate ruse that ensnared her speaking agent. (A business partner’s insurance covered it.) Robbins hadn’t noticed. “I’ve learned in running this business that I am fantastic at business development and fantastic as a creator,” she says. “I am horrendous at operations.”
Robbins believes her whole life has led her to this point. The financial difficulties, the ADHD, the public failures, the private struggles have all primed her to be a beacon pointing the way for people to improve their lives. Her studio location in Boston gives her access to a slate of world-class boffins who have done interesting research but lack the skill set to present it in a meaningful way. Her love of tech and data has helped her adapt to social media and discern what messages resonate with people. In a media race where relatability is more important than authority, her brand of empathetic imperfection is like rocket fuel. And in a world of parasocial relationships, the oversharer is queen.
Robbins cries one last time during our three-hour conversation, as she speaks of a visitor-center attendant in Iceland who recognized her voice when she asked for directions to the bathroom, burst into tears, and shared how her YouTube videos were a lifeline during a painful divorce. “Every time somebody stops me, it’s just a reminder of how that’s all you need, a little encouragement,” says Robbins, taking a moment to steady herself. “It’s really as simple as that.” There will always be people who say she just found a way to make money with extremely basic, even stupid, advice. Let them.