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Speaker 3Never put trust in friends and learn how to use enemies. The best clue for picking out people who are liars and deceivers is to look at their past. If you act like you believe in yourself and you feel confident, other people will believe that in you.
Speaker 4My guest is Robert Green, the legendary author of the 48 Laws of Power. Today, you're going to get the playbook on how to see sabotage coming at you and the sabotage you're running on yourself. By the end of this episode, you'll be able to walk into any room and read every person in it.
Speaker 3The ability to have self-belief, but also to get outside, and realize that there are things in the world that maybe are going to stop you is very important. You think what other people accomplished is so great, but it's something you could have done as well. So if somebody says you can't write that book, I just like give them the finger and I just go ahead and write it.
Speaker 4Do you think knowledge can make people dangerous?
Speaker 3Well, um. You have
Speaker 4this line from your new book that I love. Humans are becoming domesticated like animals in some way. We live in enclosed spaces. We work jobs instead of hunting. Our skeletons became slighter and more delicate. Our physical strength diminished. Our faces grew smaller, as did the size of our brains.
Speaker 3Well, that process of what you just described occurred 10,000 years ago when we moved more or less from being hunter-gatherers, free-roaming, hunting for our game, and gathering food, to agriculture. That's when we became domesticated. And all those things started, the human brain has pretty much, and the size of our bodies have pretty much stayed the same. We're actually getting taller because we eat better and things like that. But when it comes to the human brain, it's not shrinking in size. I don't think that's happening, and there's no evidence for that. But things are deteriorating because, and I write about a lot of this in Mastery, we're losing touch with what makes us human, with what made us a very powerful creature. What developed our brains themselves, which was pressure. Right? So the pressure to survive in a very hostile, harsh environment prior to being in agriculture made us very creative, made us very inventive, forced us to learn how to hunt, hunt big game in groups, how to be social animals. It led to the invention of language. When you take away the pressure from the human being, all of those powers seem to dissipate, right? There's no reason to do anything anymore. And if, technology does everything for us, all the less reason to put any effort into anything. And it's effort that develops your brain that gives it its beautiful, rich landscape. Think of the brain as a landscape. That landscape can be like the Amazon jungle, just full of diversity and all these things growing inside, or it can be like a desert, right? You create the landscape of your brain. And if AI is giving you all the answers, if you're spending all of your time on social media and you're not thinking for yourself, that landscape gets very barren and it's very frightening to me.
Speaker 4Yeah, me too. I see it actually all the time in people who work in our companies because I have this unique lens of having a hundred employees, which is great some days and tough others.
Speaker 3A hundred employees, wow.
Speaker 4Well, it's, you know, compared to other people, not that many, but for me a lot. To me it's a lot.
Speaker 3I have one employee.
Speaker 4Yeah, sometimes it's, but you can see, you can almost see people coming to like this average, you know, in the way they write because, you know, you go to AI first and write a draft and then AI gives you the same draft that everybody has. And then you see it. Now I can see it in design because we have a tech product and now the tech design just looks like everybody else's tech design. It's kind of horrifying. I mean, what do you think is the, how do you push back in a world of people who are all moving towards being exactly the same?
Speaker 3Well, you know, it depends on you as an individual. Do you want to have power in life? Do you want to be successful? Do you want to stand out? Do you want to create something original and get the kind of attention that people who are truly original get? Not those who kind of are flash in the pants, know how to manipulate social media to get attention. Do you want to actually create something? Do you have that drive, that hunger inside of you? Well, if you do, then you have to learn how to use AI as just simply a little tool that occasionally you rely upon. Like I rely upon to answer some question I can't find anything else out about. Or are you going to be, is it going to own you? Is it going to be your, are you its puppet, you know? And so if you have that drive, that hunger to stand out, to be original, to be unique, to have your own voice in this world, then you've got to get off that crap. You've got to get, it's like being a junkie. You know, you have to go cold turkey. You have to get off of it. It's an addiction, right? So there's no answer. I can't force people to be like that. I can rant and I don't like preaching to people. You have to be, it has to be up to you. Do you want to make something of your life or do you just want to be lazy and kind of skim through things? And we're seeing, you know, I saw an article recently, I think it was in the New York Times, about AI in colleges, you know, and how professors are just like, more and more, they're just seeing nobody knows how to write anymore, right? That's very scary. And so you have to, you know, when you work out, you have, it's resistance that you're pushing against, like lifting weights or swimming when you're going against the water. And that's what makes you strong. Our culture is like a 300 pound weight. You have to resist it. And to the degree that you resist it, you will be strong mentally, right?
Speaker 4It's a good way to think about it because today, I think you do have to sort of fight back against the norm. I love this idea of pushing against the 300 pound weight. What else, what other through lines have you found through your work if somebody wants to become exceptional?
Speaker 3Well, when you were very, very young, you weren't like immersed in all of these, in the social world yet. You were this rambunctious child who was willful, who was impudent, who kind of knew his or her, what she or he liked or loved and what wanted to do. And maybe even the things they like to study, right? And then you get older and that voice gets drowned out by other people, right? So truly successful people still hold on to that childhood. They've grown up, they've obviously grown up, the child is still very powerful within them, that impudence. So if you want to be successful, you're going to have to go, all these people are going to try and standardize you, make you like everybody else. Oh, you should do this, you should do that. You're going to waste your time. I get this all the time. You could, Robert, do your own podcast. Robert, here's a television show. I want to write books. It's the only thing I'm good at, right? So you're going to get all these pressures. If you hear that voice, if you're still that child, I don't want to do that. And you still feel strong enough to say, get the hell out of my life, right? I know what I want. I can concentrate on that. I have focus. I have drive. I have ambition, right? And so it's this weird thing. So you look at people like in science, like an Albert Einstein or any creative endeavor. I don't know about politics, probably in business as well. Someone like Steve Jobs, you can see that child in them. You can still see that, like, I just want to do this one thing. Get away from me. You know, close my door. I don't want to listen to you, mom. Kind of energy. I think that's one thing I've really noticed before. And I wrote a lot about that in Mastery.
Speaker 4I was talking about this with my producer, 48 Laws of Power. Like, have you found that there's one law that is more powerful than any other?
Speaker 3Well, it's hard to say. I would pick out three laws. I would say, learn to keep people dependent on you. I think it's 13 or somewhere around there. And the gist of that law is you're replaceable. Right? You have a skill, but as you get older, younger people are rising up who can do the same thing. They're more or less, and they're less expensive, and they're younger, and they look better probably, and they've got all this youthful energy. You're going to be replaced. It's the most helpless position to be in. So if you're in a position in a career of any sort where you can't be replaced, where people are dependent on you and you are not dependent on them, you hold all the cards. You can't be replaced because you have a unique set of skills. Right? I would say that law is incredibly important. I'd say acting, interaction with boldness would be my second choice. So people are far too timid in this world. world, right? They're so worried about what everyone else is doing, what everyone else thinks of them. Did I say the right thing? Am I dressed the right way? And power is like this action that causes surprise in other people. Power is a lot about playing appearances. When you do something bold, it makes people's eyes go, wow, that's interesting. That person is interesting. Even if you're faking it, it gets that kind of attention and it creates this kind of momentum. Like, what is this person going to do next? I did a book with 50 Cent and that's a law that he uses to great effect in social media, but also in negotiating and in business. You just want to show boldness that you have a vision of some place you want to go to. You're willing to go there, damn the torpedoes. I'm getting to that point. And, you know, everyone gets out of your way because confidence has this kind of infecting power. The third one would be the last law about confidence. About assume formlessness. So it's like people look at the 48 laws of power and they go, hmm, I'll do this law, do that law. You know, when should I apply this law? And they're not thinking in the moment. And I'm trying to tell you in that law to just drop my whole book. Don't listen to anybody else, but be in the moment, be alive to what's happening. Each circumstance in your life is different, right? So if you're trapped in the past, and you're thinking, you know, this strategy worked a year ago. Robert Greene said it's good in this law. I'm going to just apply that. You're not paying attention to what's going on in the culture right now in the moment. Think of our culture as this stream. It's in continual motion, right? What was cool a month ago is no longer cool, right? You're not paying attention because you're living in the past. You're thinking about what worked before. Be fluid and formless, like water, and just flow with everything and be alive to what's new and different in the circumstances that you face.
Speaker 4You have another law that I love and aspire to, although I'm not quite very good at it, which is law four, always say less than necessary.
Speaker 3Well, it's a podcaster that wouldn't be very good.
Speaker 4I'm a professional yapper in many ways. But we do have sort of 13 mission statements at my company, and one of them is less words, more meaning. And I do feel like 50 Cent is actually incredibly good at this. He is, especially in interviews, does not speak very many words, but seems to have a high signal to noise. I guess I'm curious. I've never thought to ask you, did you learn anything about power from 50 Cent?
Speaker 3Well, first of all, I can't take credit for much, but I really do think he got that from the 48 Laws of Power. Yes, I learned many things from him. When we would be talking and I'd be interviewing him, he'd go, Robert, you're nodding your head too much. And I'd go, what do you mean 50? He goes, you nod your head too much, and that means, you know, I think it kind of looks a little bit weak, you know? And so maybe just be a little more still. And that's a more, and I go, well, okay, that's good. Thank you, 50. I like criticism like that. Always stuck with me. So I still nod my head probably too much, but I think about it at least. He also had a confidence and a fearlessness that I didn't really have. I didn't really have I always thought of myself as being slightly fearless. But around him, I could realize that I'm not. I'm full of fears and anxieties. And his kind of, he doesn't have those things. I think a lot of it came from his near-death experience, right? So after you're shot like nine times and you nearly died, certain things don't matter to you anymore. And it gave him that kind of edge. So he always told me, in negotiations, this is something I believe before I met him, but I think even more so now, when you're in a negotiation of any kind, he's in a lot of them, your ability to walk away gives you all of the power, right? And if you're in a meeting and there's negotiation going on, and you're just thinking, I don't need to be here. I could walk away. Even though they're offering me good money, I want more. I don't care. This isn't good enough. Just thinking that, is going to change the dynamic he believed. You know, I watched him in meetings and he would hardly ever say anything. And all the other people who had made them talk a lot because, well, 50 is not talking, we better fill in the space. But it gave him so much power because all these other people were saying stupid things. They were committing themselves to certain numbers. He just sat there like a king. And then it just drew attention to him and drew power. So I learned a
Speaker 4lot from him. to the tune where I get to call it chains instead of two chains. So that seems like an upgrade. But it's interesting how you talk about 50, because he had this same presence. I sometimes, if I like somebody, I want them to like me. So I'll be more engaging or, you know, I don't want to say performative, but maybe. He was none of that. He almost, it was a blank canvas. There was really nothing I was engaging with at first, which was really quite hard and off-putting. But as the interview progressed, obviously, he started to relax a little bit. But I realized how powerful that was, because he wasn't trying to entertain me at all. For a normal person, are there body language? Are there communication signals that you've learned that are a signal of, I actually am more powerful?
Speaker 3In the laws of human nature, I go through that in a chapter on nonverbal communication. And invented this, there's people who study that for a lot, for a living, and they've kind of come up with what are the cues that indicate power. But the most important thing in this game, let's call it a game, is to be self-aware, to realize that your nonverbal communication is something that's signaling things to other people, that you can be a little more conscious of it. Because if it's unconscious, it's, you have no control. Like he was saying, you're nodding too much. I wasn't aware of that, because you don't think about these things. So you want to be able to observe yourself and notice these things. And yes, body language-wise, a powerful person is able to look at everybody in the office, in the room. So people who are weak, who are afraid, who are timid, their eyes are down, they don't want to look around because they're a little bit afraid. A powerful person has completely no control over their body language. And so, control of the surroundings, of the whole area. They're able to look at everybody in the eye. They have a kind of a stillness. So actors who act in theater on the stage have known this for a long time, that the stiller you are on the stage, the more attention you command. If you're nervous and you're moving around, your hands are gesticulating, people are a little bit irritated and they're going to look elsewhere. But if you're on that stage and you're still and you're quiet, the attention comes in. It comes to you. It's a very powerful thing. You know, very powerful. You know, a lot of these things you can control. Your voice is hard to control. But a kind of a weak, high-pitched voice, this is for a man, I'm afraid, because a little bit different for women in all of these things. Because in the world of nonverbal communication, women are at a disadvantage because people judge a lot of these things that might seem powerful in a man. They'll seem as kind of bitchy in a woman. Or ugly or hard. So I'm afraid I'd have to rewrite a lot of this for women. People have written about the whole nonverbal world for a woman who's in a powerful position. But being aware of your voice and the fact that you pause a lot, you're hemming and hawing, you go, uh, uh, uh, you know. So if you know what you want to say and you're not like improvising in the moment and you have a goal in there, you can control your voice. You can control your voice. And the tenor of what you're saying a lot better than if you're just in the moment just spouting nonsense. There are other things. There's how your posture and whether you've, so a weak person is kind of closed and timid. And they have this thing, I forget what the word is, but they're always touching their hair, their face and their body. Signs of incredible nervousness. A powerful person that can have their legs, well, for a man, could have their legs a little more out like this. They can be in this kind of position. They're not, they're open. They're not like that, right? This is a position of very royal, you know, very kingly. Like those would be some of them.
Speaker 4Yeah. Is there any correlation between those same behaviors? And can you tell somebody who's going to manipulate you or lie to you more because they have those same behaviors?
Speaker 3It would be difficult just based on those, on those cues to tell whether someone is deceiving you or not. chapter, I do talk about things that kind of reveal somebody might be trying to deceive you. But to be honest, because I've written a lot about deception, as you know, the best clue for picking out people who are liars and deceivers is to look at their past. People have a history, right? You've caught them before saying a lie, or they have a record, you know, in previous jobs or on social media and such. Exaggerating, lying, seeing their past and seeing their patterns of behavior is a lot better cue. But one thing that indicates somebody is lying is the forcefulness of their argument. The more forceful they are and insecure and trying to assert themselves about something that they believe, the more that they're trying to cover up something. So I often say when people seem hyper-aggressive about trying to sell you something, about trying to convince you about an idea, they are probably lying or they're covering up something. So that would be one cue.
Speaker 4That's really good. Yeah, I had a funny situation happen lately to me where I had a colleague, a friend for many, many years, probably 10 years. And we weren't super close, but close enough. We had done a few things together. And anyway, this individual, Dave came at me and said, Hey, I think you copied some of my work.
Speaker 3It's a man or a woman?
Speaker 4Man. Okay. What was interesting is my first reaction was, fuck, you know, do I have some sort of unconscious bias? Because if you've been around somebody for a long time, I don't know, I could have done that. So I go and look at the thing that he's talking about. I'm like, what are we talking about here? And thankfully with AI, you can also run it a bunch of places and see like, is anything in here something that could be from somewhere else? Uh-huh. So I go and run it and I find other stuff. Like, oh, actually this was influenced by a 1964 marketing, you know, term, the XYZ. And this has actually been done by a friend of mine, Marcus Limonis, but a different way, right? Oh, that's interesting. And lo and behold, what I found in like pursuing this little thing we were going back and forth on is he had a history. There were like 22 instances of imitation, duplication. And I thought, huh. Maybe this is like a thing of human nature where it's not just past history what people have done, but often this projection. Like if I've done it to somebody, then I always am going to assume you have. So I was curious your thoughts. Like, is that also, what is happening in the human's mind when they push on another person something that they've done themselves? And does this fall within the laws?
Speaker 3Something I've been thinking about and might write about is the, need for us to deceive ourselves, self-deception, right? So you don't want to believe that you are somebody who's evil or bad or rotten, or that you have a pattern of projecting or getting other, you know, accusing other people of things. So you're, you know, if I back up a little bit with this particular gentleman, if I call him that, I imagine at the root of it is probably some envy.
Speaker 4Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3Okay. Okay. So envy is an extremely common emotion. It's, you're, you're encountering it every day of your life, but you're not aware of it because it's very secret. Nobody wants to talk about it. It's like this insidious gas that is just everywhere, but it's invisible because the human mind operates by comparing ourselves to other people. We're constantly comparing. Is she making more money than me? Is he better liked than me? Do I look as good as that person? You're, your mind is always doing that because we're social animals. So this particular person, for some reason, is feeling envy, but because you don't want to admit that to yourself. Do you think that was going on? Yeah. Okay. So perhaps you're doing better in your career now than, than he is. And for a man, that's a hard thing to swallow sometimes, right? Yeah. So you don't want to admit that you feel envy. So you project onto the other people that they're the ones doing something wrong. They're the ones doing something wrong. They're the ones doing something evil, right? That way you can justify it because you don't want to go through life thinking, God, I'm so, I'm so much worse than that other person. They're so much better than I am. I really wish I had their, we don't want to admit that it's too painful. Instead, we make them the evil one. They're doing these things that are wrong. And that's why I feel this way. That's why I'm angry. And that's why I'm going to accuse Cody of stealing these things from me when actually at the root of it is that he's, he's envious of you. And that might be, if I could analyze it, because I'm afraid this is my life study, is that this guy has a pattern of envy. Yeah. That he's an insecure man. He's always been envying other people. And because of that, he's accusing them of stealing from him or copying him. So it's actually the reverse of what's going on, what he won't admit to himself.
Speaker 4So interesting. Well, it's a really good point because it goes back to your point on, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. And you're really, you're not looking for cues. You're looking for, if someone's going to deceive me, it's likely because they've done it before to themselves and others, maybe.
Speaker 3Well, I, you know, one of my basic laws is people never do anything once. Right. They've done it once. They're going to do it again. Right. If they've lied to you once, they're going to lie to you again. If they were late for this meeting and they said, oh, I'm sorry, it was the traffic. They'll be late again, you know?
Speaker 4So, yeah. Why is it that we do not believe somebody the first time that they show us who they are? You know, the person lies to you before, they've cheated before, they've done whatever before. And it seems like we should realize that's likely a reason they're going to do it again. But we ignore that for some reason, at our peril, I guess.
Speaker 3Well, a lot of it, I'm afraid, is a function of just simply being distracted and self-absorbed and not paying attention. Right. So, and that's. That's a problem that's getting worse and worse and worse. So, if you were in the moment and you were paying attention, I often get this from women who talk to me in relation to the art of seduction. You know, Robert, when I first met that guy, I just felt he was a bit of a creep. But then I forgot about it and I started dating him. And then all hell broke loose and I'm miserable and he abused me, blah, blah, blah. So, these women, in their first instinct, they got that feeling, that creepy feeling that something is wrong with the person. Where do you get that from? You get that from their body language. You get something you can verbalize exactly, but you can sense that something is wrong with the person, right? In so many ways. And I often say, like, if you look at narcissists talking about body language, there's a kind of deadness in the eyes. Yeah. So, the eyes. The eyes are very revelatory. The eyes reveal that you're engaged. There's a depth to the eyes. When we're looking at someone we're interested, it's almost like there's something going on deeper inside and we're engaging with you. But when we're a narcissist, when we're so self-absorbed, our eyes are turned inward and there's a deadness there. So, when you first meet someone, there are cues as to what's wrong with them or what's good about them, right? Yeah. You can control everything about what you say. But you can't control these body language things, a lot of it. And so, these women would pick up these signals, but then they would forget them. And why do they forget them? Well, they get distracted. He starts talking and he says very sweet things. You know, he love bombs them. He gives them all this attention, which is always a bad sign. When somebody love bombs, he gives you all that attention. It's too. They're in too much of a hurry because they're covering up something. They lose connection to what they're. Intuition, which was the accurate one. And they're paying attention to all his sweet, loving words and to the flowers he buys and to the money, the things he buys for them. So, you're not paying attention. You're not trusting your intuition. You're not letting your gut tell you something about somebody. You're not observing people. And I read a lot about history. And I read like a lot of novels from the 19th century. One of my favorite writers is Jane Austen. And I had the sense that in the past, people were so much more observant, right? I read story after story of, I sense that this man was a charlatan because they were so social. And all they had in life, they didn't have the internet or television or radio or anything, was being around people and they were paying attention. We don't pay attention, right? So, if you're always on your screen, if you're always interacting, with the virtual world, you're going to lose that gut, that intuitive feel for what people are really up to. It's a muscle that you have to develop and it's a social muscle.
Speaker 4I've never thought about it that way. I met Tony Robbins. I got to interview him. And I've become friendly with him. But what I thought was interesting about him is how attentive he was.
Speaker 3How about those hands?
Speaker 4The whole thing. I told him. I was nervous to meet you. I wasn't nervous to meet you. meet tony but when i met tony i thought whoa this is a lot the energy he's an intense human but what i was really impressed by is he was locked in the entire time yeah yeah and i could imagine if i was trying to project that i was somebody else or get he would pick up on in two seconds and sort of wave me off and and tell me to knock that off but not only you can do that if you've had those pattern recognition a thousand times plus you're really present well you know
Speaker 3who's really good at picking up liars and cheaters and deceivers and people who were faking it who children really yes children could pick out a con artist a liar really quickly because they're not they're not yet lost in all those distractions and they're paying more attention when you're a child and i know this from my own child in particular your life depends on observing people is this person going to hurt me are they going to be nice to me so you're supremely acute and aware and observant and the point of that is and and i and i've noticed it a lot in children right they they see something wrong about you something good about you they can they've got an intense radar for that the point of that is you had that once as a child as well and you've lost it yeah right
Speaker 4and the only way you get it back is being more present with humans and trying to pick this up but that's also how you talk about i think that's why these books are so powerful because it is a game it's a little bit like game theory and you can get better at games by the more you practice them and when you even know the rules which is maybe why one thing i thought of with you is everybody loves to talk about how your book the original you know 48 laws of power got banned in prisons and people said it was dangerous you know and what it makes me think instead is that maybe information can make you dangerous to some people and so i was curious your thought on that like do you think knowledge can make
Speaker 3people dangerous oh i think the opposite um so just to go back a little bit uh you said a game well one thing about a game is there's a little bit of element of play involved and you know it's a game so you don't have to take everything so personally because it's a game right if you're losing at monopoly with a friend you're not thinking god i'm a loser something's wrong with me it's just a game we're having fun i want you to have a little bit of lightness with this the 48 laws of power not take it so damn seriously but the other thing is the evil the manipulative and there are evil people i do believe that the evil manipulative people who are abusers who want to hurt you they don't need the 48 laws of power yeah i mean to be honest with you some of them have read it and probably some have acted on it in ways that i would be very ashamed of and if there are people out there who've had that i apologize to them but my my my gut is that most of the people who read the 48 laws of power are in a position of not so much power they feel kind of helpless why else would they read the book right you know the sharks out there 40 laws of power i already know that shit i don't need to read robert green's stupid book right i'm like that in business i you know i could write it for robert i could teach him a few things but most of the people out there and i know because i interact with them every day right people come up to me on the street or they email me right they're everyday people who have suffered immensely from the power games that other people have played on them and i'm arming them with the knowledge the information of what's going on now it's couched in this kind of slightly evil tone i i understand that and it could be misunderstood because i'm saying get other people to do the work but always take the credit which is a pretty nasty law right but the point of the law at least to me is people are going to be doing that to you so be aware of this so the laws operate in that kind of unconscious way of oh i don't want to do that but wait they've been doing this to me and it makes you aware of things i think that's more of what's happening than arming so when i was writing the book i had this idea that the game of power traditionally was for elites yeah uh in our culture white men right who dominated the scene they knew these things they talked about it in their clubs they understood this because it was a very limited exclusive game i don't want to sound grandiose but i had the idea that i wanted to reveal all of this to everyone so that it was no longer this secret little novel that people had and when rappers first started communicating with me and i'm talking about 50 and god i can never remember his name it'll come to me the first guy that that he friend of 50s i don't know why i can never remember his name it'll come to me later this is knowledge that you know i need because i'm nobody was more exploited in than black musicians throughout history right totally right they they did all the work they composed all this music they were making incredible art and culture and they were making hardly enough money people were stealing from them and nobody taught them anything else and so 50 said you know the the 48 laws really helped open his eyes to the how the music business actually operates and so i think and i obviously i have my biases that it's more for the defenseless people who who are actually the victims of power games than for the sharks i also
Speaker 4think when we all have this bias where we think other people think like we do and i fall into this all the time oh i would like this so they would like this or i think like this so they must think like this and so it's like this blinder that sort of gets removed and you get to see oh okay it doesn't mean that they're bad or evil people always but somebody may be doing this to you because we're incredible self-deceivers we don't want to hate ourselves we don't want to think like we're bad people we don't want to think like we're evil we're the bad guy and we're probably all the bad guy and the good guy in some way shape or form to oversimplify and so then when you can see oh other people are doing this you at least know what the counter move is right and you know it's fascinating i was reading a statistic the other day that 90 percent of small business owners in the u.s will get sued 90 that if you're in business for more than 10 years you'll get sued on average seven times wow and so if you think about that i remember the first time it happened to me i was really blindsided and my attorney uh set a line because i was like we should explain all the things and everything we did and all the stuff we have and this is crazy and he was like you need to slow down uh because i am getting the signal from the other person by how aggressive this is and how much much posturing that thou doth protest too much they don't actually have anything and so you're coming out trying to be full disclosure what you're doing is giving them all the ammunition and i would have he fights for a living he understands power loss i don't fight for a living i had no idea yeah yeah and so once you understand some of these laws and the same thing with seduction you know i never really thought about that what so maybe i'm curious like what rule in any of your books whether it's seduction or laws or etc do people come up to you the most often and say oh wow thank god i you taught me this because i had no idea
Speaker 3oddly enough one of the most common ones particularly with people in business is law number two never put too much trust in friends and learn how to use enemies and what i mean by that is so many people in business in positions of power tend to hire a friend tend to hire somebody that they know that they feel that there's trust there somebody they went to school with you know well that's going to be the best partner for me right we had a friendship we go back 20 years together you know we've done this and that and the other our wives are friends blah blah husbands it's the worst thing you can possibly do i could write a hundred books of detailing the anecdotes of all the disaster that accrues from that kind of thinking because when you work with a friend there's all these emotions involved right so you hire your friend and the friend is secretly going well he or she just hired me because i'm a friend they're not really they're not conscious of this but the unconscious they're thinking you know they didn't really hire me because i deserve it so there's always a little bit of insecurity going on and then the slightest thing that you do that seems a little bit unfriendly because in business you need to ask people to do things a little bit of resentment is there and it slowly slowly slowly kind of poisons them inside it'll take months or years and then it's like oh my god i'm not going to do this again i'm not going to do this again years and they're not even aware of the poison it's inside of them envy shame insecurity and then it'll burst out and they'll rebel and they'll do something nasty they'll steal your company from you they'll steal your husband or wife they'll sabotage you they'll steal money where did that come from they were my friend i've had that scenario you came up many many many times and i served on the board of directors of a publicly traded company i saw that firsthand because this was american apparel the ceo dove charney he had lots of issues, but he was constantly hiring people that he knew that he was friendly with and they were just disasters. And he also hired people that he could bully because he was also insecure. So the lesson is that from there is don't hire friends. Don't hire people you can bully. Hire people who are efficient, who get the job done. They may not be someone you want to go have a drink with afterwards, but they're good at their job. That's much more important than hiring a friend.
Speaker 2Learn more at schwab.com. It's really good.
Speaker 4There was actually, I should find it by the time we're done with this. I might give this to you, Colton, for you to help me find it. But there was a tweet I saw that reminded me of this about how none of the scars that I've been given were ever from someone outside my circle, that it was always from the inside that they gave it to me. And I thought that was so true. And you've, ah, you know who it was? It's from, it's the Joker from Batman said, you said, not a single scar on my heart came from my enemies. They all came from people I thought
Speaker 3loved me. Is this from the movie, The Joker or from this?
Speaker 4Okay. Yeah. And it kind of hits hard because when you hear it, it's true. It kind of goes back to our original point, which is, you know, so many of the things you write, it punches you a bit because you go, it's so true. And yet I didn't see it or it's so true. And I knew it. And then I forgot it. And I did it again. And that one is, is quite hard. anything really surprised you about human nature after all these years like does anything scare you about human nature surprise you
Speaker 3thrill you scares me the hell out of me because the idea about human nature is written in that book the laws of human nature is that our brains were developed 30 000 years ago in a particular environment right and you think 30 000 years That's a lot of time. But actually, in this course of evolution, it's an incredibly, incredibly small slice of time. And so what I mean by that is our brains are cognitively very developed, but emotionally, we are still that animal from 30,000, 10,000 years ago. We have not grown up emotionally. And so you look at the world today and you see all the reactiveness, all the anger, all the partisanship, all the hatred, and you go, God, we're like six-year-olds. We're like six-year-olds with these immensely powerful tools in our hand, like a six-year-old that you're giving a machine gun, an Uzi to. What are you going to expect from that? You're going to expect a lot of mayhem. And that's who we are. And so it's very frightening. It's very frightening to me. I can't remember what your original question was.
Speaker 4No, that was it. It was what scares you about human nature.
Speaker 3It's not surprising. I mean, I must admit, I have a slightly negative bias towards human nature. It's just who I am. I've always been a little bit that bent. And there are people who are the opposite, like Daniel. What's his name? Daniel. God, I'm having such a problem today.
Speaker 4It's okay. I'm pregnant, so I forget everything right now. You can blame my pregnancy. Steven Pinker. Oh, sure.
Speaker 3Very optimistic about we live in, you know, things are so much better now. There's so much less violence, so much less war, so much less crime. Oh, really? Well, you wrote that 12 years ago. Look at the world now. Maybe you want to rewrite that book. You know, I mean, there are things, statistics that show things have gotten a little bit better. But overall, you know, one of the things in the book that is one of the scariest things about human nature is our short-sightedness. And that's a chapter in the book about how we are kind of incapable of thinking consequentially about our actions, about what's going to happen a year from now. We're just caught up in the immediacy. So we were talking about picking up people's cues, women and intuitiveness. We're locked in the moment. We can't get outside of the appearances. And so, you know, we're facing things like global warming. I'm sure we're going to face things like global warming. I'm sorry. I believe in it. I don't think it's a myth, you know. And it's going to destroy our planet. We're in the process of destroying our planet. But we can't think about it in those terms, right? Because all we can think about is our immediate needs, what's most important in the present. That's going to doom us if we're not careful. There's a lot that's going to doom us. It could be AI. I don't know. But you're talking to someone who's born a little bit on the negative spectrum when it comes to
Speaker 4human nature. But I think there's a lot of use for that. Because, you know, I think optimists make a lot of money, but pessimists are usually smart. And so I think, you know, in business, you have to be irrationally optimistic to win, usually.
Speaker 3Sure. There's great value in that.
Speaker 4Uh-huh. But I think often, if you were at all thoughtful on the real likelihood percentage, you know, data set, you would think differently. And so I think it's useful having both.
Speaker 3It is useful having both. I don't mean to emphasize, of course, thinking, acting with boldness and feeling confident about yourself and having a project that excites you. Yes, of course, it's extremely important. But I consult with a lot of people in business, and I try and tell them there is some kind of disaster possibly looming in the next year or two in your business, and you're not seeing it. Yeah. And there are little signs. A little drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. And that drip, drip, drip is creating a tiny little puddle that you're not even aware of. Okay, what are they? And we go through a process, and we try. And maybe there's nothing. But thinking that way is very, very powerful. Because our brains are not trained to think like that. Our brains are not trained to think of what could be happening that's invisible right now, because we can only see what's visible. And there are signs that are so subtle, you can't even pick them up. But you could. And then you would avoid these terrible things that will probably happen in a year or two to your business.
Speaker 4So actually, that's an interesting question. What do you think about positive affirmations and manifestation, as opposed to maybe critical thinking and worst-case scenario analysis?
Speaker 3Well, I think there's value for both. I mean, if you're totally critical, you'll never get anything done. Damn it. If I start that business, all these terrible things are going to happen. Robert Greene told me, I'll never even start the business. So to start something, you have to have a little bit of blind optimism, and just go ahead and do it. So the affirmation thing, I have a chapter in Power called, Act Like a King to Be Treated Like One. And it's kind of a sort of a manifestation type thing. Yeah. Without the other is a recipe for disaster. So always being critical, you'll never get anything done in life. Always being the optimist, whatever the word is, is also a recipe for disaster. Because you're not going to have that critical thinking that's essential. You're not going to see bad things when they happen, even when they're right in your face, because you're so rosy-hued and you're so certain of yourself, right? So the ability to have self-belief, but also to get outside of yourself and realize that there are things in the world that maybe are going to stop you, that they're malevolent forces, is very important.
Speaker 4Yeah. I actually think that the over-optimism is really problematic, because I think you see it a lot of time. I live in Austin, I told you this. And there's a lot of crystal-loving, sage-carrying people there. And okay, I like a crystal. I like a sage. Fine. But I think when the trouble comes knocking in the dead of the night, and the big scary thing looms, you have to be able to have sort of the anti-manifestation of like, if everything crumbles, if this person does lie, cheat, and steal from me, when this tragedy befalls me or my business or whatever, what will I do then? And if you can think about it that way, to your point on the water dripping on rock, then when it happens. You're not so concerned about it. And so I think a lot of times people get this visualization wrong. They think that Michael Jordan always visualized hitting a three-point shot every time. No, he visualized the bad, too.
Speaker 3Don't they? What this reminds me of is a story I have in, I think it's Mastery, no, in the War Book, of Alfred Hitchcock, the great film director. If you've ever been in film, and I used to work in film, and my wife works in film, she's a director, it's like a war scene. It is really scary, because there's a lot of. There's a lot of money involved. You've got all the actors' egos. The director has his ego. People are fighting. There's a lot of yelling going on. Alfred Hitchcock would sit in the director's chair, and he'd be falling asleep. He was so bored. And people nicknamed him the Buddha. What gave him his calmness? He had prepared every single detail. He had foreseen every problem that could come up. The actress would not like this particular costume because she doesn't look good in green. I thought of that beforehand. And so I've created a costume I'm sure she's going to like. So that won't happen. On and on and on down the line. Every single element of the production he had thought of. If this goes wrong, what am I going to do, right? And he had every detail planned so that he said he shot the film in the camera. He didn't really even need an editor. He shot everything he wanted right there, right? And he didn't leave anything to chance. When you're like that, you can be completely calm because you've foreseen everything. You don't have to worry about it because you know the things that could go bad. And you've foreseen it and you've dealt with it already. And that kind of thinking. It actually makes you calmer and makes you a better leader. It doesn't make you all scared and negative. It makes you know that I've foreseen every possible thing that could go wrong. I don't need to panic. I don't need to change course or listen to all these other people telling me what to do because I've already thought about it and I know exactly what to do. That was what made Abraham Lincoln such a great leader as well.
Speaker 4You've written about Abraham Lincoln a few times. What stands out for you from him? Is there a story you'd like to tell? There's a very similar thing.
Speaker 3So he knew in the Civil War that all these terrible things were going to go wrong. And that in the beginning, the North, because it was very divided within itself, was going to not work out very well. And he had generals that he hated and weren't fighting enough for him. They would never do exact fight as hard as he wanted them to fight. He had a vision. The vision was we're going to win this war, but we're not going to destroy and decimate the South. Because in the end, there has to be a reconciliation. And in the end, we have to be one nation. So we have to win this war in a way that leaves them space for peace afterwards that will really last, right? So he had a vision of how the war would go, of how he would free the slaves. He thought it all in advance. And if you don't, if you follow the Civil War, things were going terribly for a while, right? The North lost battle after battle, it looked really bad. And people were. There's no way Lincoln's ever going to get re-elected. People turned against him, all these voices saying, "You need to change your strategies." He didn't listen to them. He compared it to a ship that he was navigating in a direction, and he wasn't going to change course, because he knew how to get to that port. And that's what made him a great leader, and it's made him calm, because he didn't listen to all the naysayers and all the people who were, you know, picking at him. If he lived in the area of social media, I don't think he would have survived, right? But he had the power of not listening to people and staying true to his vision. And his vision was very true and very real and very correct.
Speaker 4What do you think are the best ways to combat all the noise in social media when you're struggling, when you're going through it, when everybody seems like they're against you? What do you say to yourself in those moments?
Speaker 3Well, first of all, you have to know yourself. You have to know your own voice. You have to feel comfortable with yourself so you're not susceptible to listening to all the people. But I talk a little bit about this in my new book, and I've talked about it in "Human Nature," is you have a soul. Now, I know that that's not a word that we like to think about right now, and it might even be on the level of your crystals and your manifestation, but I believe very much that we have a soul. And the soul is our character, what makes us unique, who we are at our core. And that is the actual original Greek concept. It's the concept of the soul, right? And so when you're true to yourself, when you're true to who you are and what you believe in and your vision, not to say you don't listen to other people because you need advice from time to time, but when you know who you are, you know what makes you an individual, what makes you unique, what your source of power is, you don't have to listen to people. You feel strong and you feel like, "I have something to protect, which is who I am." And by listening to people, you feel strong and you feel like, "I have something to protect, which is who I am." And by listening to other people and by being constantly buffeted by the winds of social media, you're going to lose your soul. And when you lose your soul, you've lost everything. You just become one with the crowd. And I'm sorry, that's the saddest thing that could ever happen to you, right? Because you have something precious, which is your voice, what makes you unique, your vision, what makes you different from other people. That is your source of power. That is your soul. And to lose that. If you feel like that, if you understand that concept, it's not just an intellectual concept because I've always believed in all of my books, and particularly in the last one I just finished, we're emotional creatures, we're emotional animals, right? We're not just these heads with a brain. Emotions dominate us. And the feeling of a soul is an emotional thing. It's like who I am. It's like what makes me me. And I don't want to lose that. And I get people, and I get tempted, who say, "Robert, here's a great project for you. You should be doing this." I told you in the beginning, I don't know, before we were rolling, that everyone wants me to chop my content up into 30-second sound bites. And I'm tempted, yeah, okay, I've got to appeal. I can't be such a stick in the mud, I can't be such a dinosaur. Young people like these things. But the other part is, that's not who I am. I'm not a 30-second guy. You hear me. I'm very long-winded. I talk, and I talk, and I talk, because I have to develop my ideas. If I start doing these little 30-second sound bites with all flashy graphics, et cetera, it's not me, and I don't feel comfortable. I would lose my soul. And I want to be comfortable with myself. I want to feel like I am me. And so, I don't know if I'm answering your original question. I've gone off here on the. I think you did.
Speaker 4Okay. Thank you. No. It's very interesting, because I always go back to the Oracle of Delphi, "Know thyself," right? And it's one of the quotes that I think about often, because any advice that you get in life, well, it can't be very useful if you don't know what you want, or if you don't know who you are, or you don't know what you're skilled at. And so, I always kind of chuckle when even I give advice, or if I took Elon Musk's advice, who's very, very wealthy. Most wealthy. You know? Man in the world. Or Jeff Bezos. Take your pick. I'm neither of them. So, I probably could not apply that playbook well, you know? And so, I think this idea of spending time to know oneself is so important and underrepresented. And maybe this kind of goes a good way into this next question I was curious about, your new book, talking about sublime. You have multiple types of sublime, true sublime, false sublime, anti-sublime. And I was curious. What is false sublime, maybe in America right now? And what do you think some of the most dangerous false sublimes are that we tell ourselves? Well, to understand the false sublime, you have to understand a little bit about the true sublime. So, the true sublime is going back to deep in our history. We are this creature that became aware of our mortality, of our death. Now, other animals, we have to be aware of our mortality.
Speaker 3So the true sublime is going back to deep in our history. Now, other animals have an instinct for death, but they don't think about it, which makes them die with great ease. Have you ever had a pet? They don't die like a human dies. They just relax into it. It's the end. They're not crying. They're not suffering. They're not trying to escape. We know about death. We think about it, and it weighs on us and has a very powerful effect. And because of that, we are always in search of something that can transcend our mortality, which is what is the origin of all our spiritual impulses, our belief in God and our desire to be more than just this creature that lives for several decades and then disappears completely into the eternity of time. We want something more. It's a deep hunger. Every single human being has it okay and in the 21st century was we have it as much as people had it 20 000 years ago in the upper paleolithic okay so to get this to sublime you have to like open yourself up it takes a kind of openness to to experience and to being active you can't be passive you have to go out and you have to have sublime experiences you have to open yourself up to to your own mortality to the death that is stalking you right and to the absolute insanity the beauty the awesomeness of the world that we have all been born into okay it's not given to you you have to go out and appreciate you have to go make it happen all right so we live in a culture where people expect everything to be given to them right okay so i'm not going to go out and and and have these sublime experiences robert when i can get it from a video game when i can get it from online pornography when i can get addicted to this or that when i can go watch this movie with superheroes Thank you. And so the false sublime is kind of a hunger for something transcendent, but trying to get it on the cheap, right? Get it, you know, for a dime instead of for a thousand dollars, right? So I look at movies and advertisements on television, and it's like all these like superheroes and these people, these immense forces. Technology is almost a kind of false sublime because the powers that it has are immense, right? And I can get it in my phone. I can look up anything I want. I can see images of anything I desire, things that are very entertaining, very addicting, right? And it gives me a sense of something larger, but it's false because it doesn't come from within. It's not anything that's developed. It doesn't lead to any change inside of you. When you confront the sublime, you're never the same again. The great psychologist Abraham Maslow called it a peak experience. When you have a peak experience in life, it changes you. You may go back to who you were, and you may be neurotic again, but down the line, you're always in your mind thinking about it and wanting to return to it, right? And so it changes you. But these other things, these addictions, because we live in a culture of addiction, they don't change you in any way that's ever going to lead to anything lasting. That's what the false sublime is.
Speaker 4It's so true. I guess I think a lot of the new book kind of lends itself maybe to this idea that stress and pressure are actually good. And I'd be curious your take on that. Like, should you go out and try to apply pressure upon yourself as a human?
Speaker 3Well, one of the forms of the sublime, and this goes back to a concept in the 18th century when people were first writing about the sublime, is called the sublime of the sublime. And the sublime is called the dynamical sublime. And the dynamical sublime is the sense of, we're these weak little creatures that walk on two legs. We're very fragile, right? Emotionally, physically, we're very vulnerable. And as an individual, there's 8 billion people in the world. There's this immense universe, et cetera. I'm very small. I'm very insignificant, okay? Look at what we've accomplished. This little weak little creature that couldn't fend off a leopard if we tried, right? They're much more powerful than we are. They should be running the world, not us. But yet look at us, okay? And what made us supreme animal is our willpower, our determination. When those pressures came, when that resistance from the environment came, we didn't wilt and become all whiny and stuff. We figured out how to hunt, how to play a big game, how to work together as a team, how to go gather to be hunter-gatherers, et cetera, and carve out a very powerful niche in an incredibly tumultuous period in the Earth's history. We're talking about the Ice Age. Okay, that's who we are, right? And so the chapter is called Against the Immense and the Impossible, okay? So I tell the story in there of these these young men who crashed in the Andes in southern Argentina on the border with Chile. And it's a famous story, and they've been films made of it, very good films. It was one of the most horrifying survival stories you can ever read about. But it was a group effort that got them out, but there was this one man, Nando Parado, who was the main person that kind of helped them get out of this absolutely impossible situation. And what we can, what we were capable of is incredibly sublime when we're arrayed against these forces. He was having to climb a mountain 14,000 feet high without any equipment, without anything in this intensely, you know, high altitude situation, nothing on his feet, the cold weather, nothing that anybody would ever, ever attempt if they had to. But he had to survive because he was, he knew that his father was going to be devastated by the loss of his mother and daughter in the crash of this airplane that Nando and a few others survived. And if you read the story, it's like, what he did was absolutely impossible. And afterwards, when they, when they rescued him, nobody could believe that he and the others were able to do this. This is a power that we have, our willpower, our determination. And so, I want you to feel like there's something sublime in yourself. So normally the sublime is associated with the universe, with all the strange animals on our planet, with nature, with things like that. But you yourself are sublime when you tap into this willpower, this determination, this idea that I am equal to all the forces in the universe, right? And if you look at who we are, what science is accomplishing, as far as figuring out the Big Bang, as far as figuring out the origins of our universe, the most insane facts that they're able to uncover. To me, the collective work of scientists is utterly sublime and is part of this dynamical thing that I'm talking about. That human willpower, when you're pushing against all the pressures, when things seem impossible to you, and you're able to accomplish it, I don't want to toot my own horn, but let me do that for one minute, okay? Because I normally tend to be very negative about myself. But one thing was, after my stroke, I had decided I was going to write this book, okay? It's something that's been in my mind for many years, but now I had to write it, okay? But my brain had been damaged, right? My hand is like a claw. I can't type, right? And I can't go out and take a hike. I can't do anything. I'm just trapped in a chair, all right? This book was an insane amount of labor. I cannot tell you the amount of research that went into it, the degree of thinking. I never thought I was going to get to the end. It seemed impossible, right? I'm sorry, it did, because I had to hand write the entire book. I wrote a chapter on one notebook. I would edit it in the other notebook. I would take sticky pads and edit on this one. It probably added two years to the work of it. When I finished it, I felt like I had climbed that mountain.
Speaker 4And it's not a short book. I wrote down how many pages? 450 pages. I was going to say, I thought it was 500 pages, handwritten.
Speaker 3Yeah. So, I felt like I had done that. I mean, it's not the same as what this guy accomplished physically. But for me, I had to push against so many things that I wanted to give up. And I just didn't think I was going to make it. And when I made it, I was like, I'm still to this day, I almost want to cry. It was so, wow, you did it. And so, I personally, in writing the book, lived that sense of measuring myself against the impossible, because it really seemed like an impossible task. Because it was very ambitious. It was the story of everything I believe in, everything that means so much to me. And I wanted to create something lasting and large and big. But I had so many limitations that I had to work with and work through and past.
Speaker 4When you have moments like that, many moments like that for years, probably, when you're struggling, where you say something to yourself, do you have quotes you live by? For instance, one of mine that I always go back to when I'm struggling is this woman, Emma Bombeck, who writ large, I don't agree with a lot of things with her, but she has this one quote, which is, when I stand before God at the end of my days, I hope that I can say I'm wrung dry. I have not one drop left. I've used everything that you've given me. And I like that one because I want to try to live my life that way. I want to do all, I want to see like, what is this corpse? What's possible? Do you have quotes that ring in your head like that?
Speaker 3Okay, I love this Emerson quote, probably one of my favorites of all times. It's from self-reliance. In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts. They come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Okay. And then another quote that means is very important to me. It's a quote I use in mastery from Leonardo da Vinci. He said, So a life well spent brings happy death. Meaning that if you pursue your life's task and you've accomplished something, when you die, it's like dying after you've had a good day of working really hard. You just go into this blissful sleep.
Speaker 4You actually, although you say you don't like to talk in short video segments, you're quite prolific on TikTok. I was not expecting you to say TikTok. Are you dancing on TikTok and I'm not aware of it?
Speaker 3We do TikTok. I like that. I'm not, yeah.
Speaker 4That's probably not your favorite, most normative platform.
Speaker 3Oh, I have nothing against it.
Speaker 4I like that. But I like, I mean, you take a lot of these ideas. And I think what's interesting about the new book is that in many ways, the first book is about, you know, it's about some of the darker sides of life. And this book is more about some of the lighter sides in life. But when I come and, like, listen to some of your work, there's a video I saw the other day that I saved of yours. That was about, like, mastering the art of listening to someone deeply. Yeah. Which is actually a really beautiful thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And to your point, it is 28 seconds, Robert. So, actually, you killed it.
Speaker 3I've been schooled. Okay, you own me. I'm sorry. I'm wrong.
Speaker 4I got you. You did. But it's incredible, like, what happens when you do the difficult, when you listen deeply, when you do the thing that is not right. It's not normative in our society today. So, what would you, you know, somebody, obviously, if somebody wants to live a sublime life, if somebody wants to test the limits of their humanity, they should read your book. That would be a good place to start. And what else would you tell someone who wants to touch the depth of what they're capable of?
Speaker 3Well, you know, you're capable of more than you think, right? So, everyone's trying to tell you, oh, come on, man, you know, that's, you know, just relax. Don't worry about so much. But don't be. Don't be so ambitious. Just settle down. Just be, you know, just be mellow. I don't know. And you internalize all this stuff in our culture. And what I was trying to express earlier about the dynamical sublime is you're a human being like anybody else. And what somebody could accomplish, you can accomplish. One of my favorite quotes is from Ralph Waldo Emerson. It says, If you could read one essay in your life and never read anything else and never even read any of my books, I would say his essay on self-reliance. When I was 16, I read it and I memorized it. Now I can hardly remember the quotes from it that I'm trying to quote. It's kind of sad. But the quote was, when you read something great from Shakespeare, it comes back to you in all your alienated majesty. I'm butchering it again. The idea is you think what other people accomplished is so great, but it's something you could have done as well. And it's just we're all human. It's all part of us. It's all part of one great human consciousness. So you're capable of doing something great. You're capable of creating great artwork. You're capable of starting an amazing business, even at whatever age you're at. But it's the stories that you tell yourself, and it's the stories that other people have told you. And it's a sublime feeling to kind of go beyond your own limits, right? Because the book is based on the fact that we're all told that there are these limits to our life. These are thoughts we're all supposed to think. These are feelings we're all supposed to feel. This is what reality is. And to go beyond those limits is to touch upon the sublime. And one of those limits is what people tell you what you're capable of. You're capable of more. And when you do that, it's an immensely powerful feeling, right?
Speaker 4What do you do when someone tells you you can't do something or it's not possible for you?
Speaker 3Well, sometimes it's true. If they said, Robert, you're never going to be a shooting guard on the Los Angeles Lakers, yeah, you're right. It's true. I'm not going to worry. It's not going to bother me. I mean, I wanted to be a… I wanted to be a basketball player when I was a kid, but I've grown up and I know there are many things I can't do, right? I have limits and I'm aware of those limits, but I know of what I can do, right? And I'm very proud of that. So if somebody says, you can't write that book, I just like give them the finger and I just go ahead and write it. Now, one thing that happened was early on in my physical therapy, people said, Robert, you're never going to be able to walk again. You're going to be walking. Walking like this the rest of your life. To some degree, they were being realistic because I still have tremendous problems walking, but it made me so angry to hear that. And I had this feeling that I was going to go turn myself into Usain Bolt and I was going to run by their office at Kaiser Permanente and show them that I did the opposite of what they said. I haven't reached that point yet. I probably never will. But I don't like being told what I can't do when I know that I could possibly do it. But some things I can't possibly do.
Speaker 4Yeah. Well, I think it's almost like these days I think people want to keep you small for a myriad of reasons, sometimes because they love you, sometimes because they don't want you too far, sometimes because they're scared about what it might do to you if you fail, all the things. They want to be realistic. These all sound really reasonable. It doesn't mean they're necessarily bad people. And yet, you know, is it part of resilience? It's trying to do a thing and failing, but trying and trying again. Yeah, yeah. If we have to think about Sublime, what is the one takeaway you want someone to get today? If they aren't living the life they want, if they aren't applying pressure to themselves, what is the one thing you want to give them that you spent years crafting?
Speaker 3You know, I nearly died. I had a stroke that nearly killed me, okay? I came this close to dying. I'm this close to having such brain damage that I wouldn't want to live, okay? And when I woke up from that and I started being alive again, the world looked so strange and different and weird to me. Like, wow, this is this interesting world that we live in. I started paying attention just to the environment, even in city streets and even in like ugly weeds sprouting. this is a weird world. It struck me that something is strange about being alive. The things that you think are familiar suddenly didn't seem familiar to me because the shadow of death had come over me and it made life appear what it should be for everybody, which this is insane to be alive. It's the most intense experience. I mean, it's the only experience we have. But to actually be in the moment, to actually think about it, to actually be aware of what it means to be alive, to be aware of your heart beating, be aware of your physiology, you'll never think the same. I never thought the same after I had my stroke and after I came back to life. The world looks different. I want you to be aware that there's so much you take for granted and you shouldn't. And you should be incredibly grateful for this insanely marvelous, weird, magical world you've been born into, right? Everything is. Everything is like that. The sun is like the star in the sky that is exactly at the right distance so that we can have life here. If you read my book and read about evolution and about the origin of the universe, you realize that just the fact that you are alive now, who you are is almost mathematically impossible. The string of circumstances that had to happen for humans to evolve for us to be conscious. So my book, I want you to change how you look at the world from the roots down, from the ground up. Nothing will look the same, I'm hoping, once you read my book. And I've had some people who've read it early on who've had that kind of
Speaker 4experience. Well, it really helped me as all of your books have. I think the only one that I haven't finished fully is Seduction for some reason, but that might be- You don't need it.
Speaker 3You've got your husband.
Speaker 4I think that might be why.
Speaker 3I might not- It's a very good book for
Speaker 4marketing. I should really read it again. I think I read it back in the day and I probably need to read it again because marketing is hard. It's a seduction. Yeah, I did like there's a part seduction where you say, seducers are completely amoral. Moralists secretly envy them. And that seduction is deception that people want anyway.
Speaker 3You know, people think of seduction as kind of evil. All right. Now I use the word amoral, but I don't mean amoral as immoral. I mean, it's, you know, the famous expression, all's fair in love and war, right? Okay. So seduction is this realm where you're taken outside yourself. Because we're trapped in our bodies, we're trapped in our egos, we're trapped in our tiny little selves, our little world. And along comes this person, and they draw us out of that world. And they draw us into something else into their reality, into a world that's theatrical, it's a little bit heightened in which there's possibly love involved, there's possibly sex involved, there's drama, there's theater, and we all want to be taken outside of ourselves, right? When you were a child, one of the greatest pleasures you had was getting on the shoulders of your father and he would walk you all around and you never knew where you were going. You were laughing hysterically. Where is he taking you? The idea of somebody taking you to someplace you don't know is the art of seduction, right? We all want it. And the moralists who crow, oh God, it's so evil. I don't want it, are secretly dying to be seduced. There's the legend of the prudish woman who like, God, I don't want seduction. No way, man. That's not my world. Forget it. They're the most easily seduced by the rebel, by the rake, by the rock star, right? Because everybody secretly wants to be taken outside of themselves. And the more who those who are so closed say, no, I don't want anything of that, are actually trying to deceive themselves because they wanted all the more. And so there's a quote in there, I think it's Natalie Barney, that, when somebody resists seduction, that means you must seduce them even harder. Seduction requires even more seducing or something to that effect. I am butchering every quote today. I can't believe it.
Speaker 4It sounded great to me. I was getting seduced by the story. Okay, okay. Which actually is interesting because, and maybe I want to end somewhere on this, because it sums back to things that we've said a few different ways, but like, it seems like seduction, if it is just marketing, storytelling, listening, you know, presenting a different side, showing adventure, all the things you talk about with the different archetypes of the art of seduction. You also talk about, the art of seduction is about choosing the right person to seduce. Victim. Yeah, exactly. I use the word victim. And how do you choose who the easiest to seduce is or who has the weakest mind?
Speaker 3Choose the easiest person. You want to choose the hardest. Because that's where the fun is, is, right? So in the famous novel, Dangerous Liaisons, probably the greatest novel of seduction, which is told in letters, the seducer, Valmont, is one of the greatest seducers, I mean, it's fiction, you know, in this book, he's a master seducer. And he meets this woman who's a complete seducer. And he meets this woman Prude, the Presidente de Tourveille, who is so Christian, so pious, so religious. She sees Valmont, she knows that his reputation, she hates him, she won't have anything to do with him, even though there's, they're vacationing in the same like chateau, because they're, they have these common relative, she's trying to avoid him. And he goes, that is precisely who I must seduce. I've been seducing all these women, my life, and they're so easy, and I'm so bored. I'm going to take this woman, who's the most prudish of them all, whose reputation for piety is the most glorious, is his, her reputation is as sterling as mine is for being bad. I'm going to be the one to seduce her. And in the course of seducing him, which he does, it's in a marvelous story, he becomes seduced by her. He literally falls in love with her, as it happens. And he never wanted to do that, because a great seducer has to be in control of himself. Although I think that's a myth. Because once he starts falling in love with her, she now realizes that maybe he's weaker than he pretended to be. And she lets down her guard. And so this kind of back and forth dynamic occurs. But oftentimes, you got to choose someone that's that excites you in some elemental way, because it has to be fun. And it has to be you want the end result to be something very sad. And it has to be something that you want to be happy about. Satisfying. So it can't be just somebody you're not attracted to. But a great seducer loves the challenge, loves the hunt, to use a male metaphor to speak more of the male side of seduction.
Speaker 4Yeah. Although these days, all the tables are flipping.
Speaker 3They certainly are.
Speaker 4You know, I'm married, so I'm out of the game. But I hear of it all from my.
Speaker 3Okay. Well, you know, being married doesn't mean you stop seducing.
Speaker 4That's a good point. That's a very good point. You know? No, actually, that would be bad. My husband would not like me to stop.
Speaker 3Well, and you wouldn't want him to stop.
Speaker 4No, that's true. And like, what a. Yeah, that's very true. And I guess in anything, even the seduction of, we're trying to hire a new person that I really want on the team right now. And so the second I leave you, I have to go call her. And I was telling my husband, I was like, well, if she has doubts, that means we haven't sold her the dream well enough. We haven't explained to her how this ecosystem that we live in, would be even more powerful.
Speaker 3Why is she excited about the job?
Speaker 4I think she's excited, but she's very good. So as anybody who's very good, she should be careful about leaving something that's quite good to go to something that's newer. Okay. And so we have to seduce her to take more risk. Okay. Do you have any tips? How should I seduce her?
Speaker 3Well, it would depend on her history and where she is right now and what she's lacking. So one of the main tenants in the art of seduction is you can't seduce someone who's completely happy. Yeah, that's good. Right? They have no needs. They have no desires. They're just so happy with what they've got that you have no opening to start seducing them. So they have to have something that's missing, something that they're not getting at their current job. Yeah. I don't know what that is because I don't know the details
Speaker 4of it, but it could be- Not enough risk.
Speaker 3Oh, not enough risk?
Speaker 4Yeah. Like there's not enough upside. There's not enough adventure. There's not enough skin in the game.
Speaker 3Well, you're going to be- that's what you have to offer. Right there, you've just told me exactly where you need to apply it. You need to create a sense of this is going to be exciting, pleasurable, adventurous. There's going to be risk involved. You're going to be learning more. You're going to be going to a whole other level that you- maybe you're not making as much money. I don't know what that part is. But man, you're going to be- You're going to be learning so much more, and we're going to be having so much fun together. It's going to be- I don't know if she's in like a boring corporate job that's very secure and safe. Exactly. Yeah. And maybe, unfortunately, that might be part of what she likes. I don't know. Maybe part of the
Speaker 4resistance. Probably. I think change is usually hard for people. Do you ever do the anti-sell? Like you should not come here if? And does that play into the rules of seduction?
Speaker 3Would that be-
Speaker 4Like sometimes I might say like, you would never want to come work here if you don't want to chart your own path, and you don't want to build the businesses you want to, if you want to be sort of told what to do, and you want to fall within norms.
Speaker 3That's not a very seductive approach.
Speaker 4Oh, okay. Tell me a more- I love this. You're like my 50 Cent. Stop nodding, Cody. You're nodding way too much.
Speaker 3Well, emphasizing the negative, the words might be true, but the- The body language and what you're saying and how you're like communicating it and- Not good. You're not going to- This is- We don't want you, if you're going to be like this, is already like a scolding parent. Oh, good. And I wouldn't do that approach. I think it's- On the surface, it sounds reasonable, and I'm sure other people have applied it, but unconsciously to the other person you're signaling, this is a disagreeable woman I'm going to be working for. She's telling me already what I don't want. I'm not going to leave my comfortable job for this- Fuck, you're right. Woman who's going to be like breathing down my neck, telling me what I don't want, and you know, okay, that's all.
Speaker 4Good point. Yeah. Okay. So this goes back to the, Lord, we have to be more self-aware of how we're perceived by the other person across from us.
Speaker 3Yeah, yeah. I mean, in general, because everybody's different and she could be different, a more open, happy approach will have a- will draw them into your circle. I mean, I don't want you to give the impression that it's just going to be all fun and games. You want a serious worker there. She's going to work hard. But goddamn, the rewards. This is going to be an adventure. You're going to have so much fun. In the end, we're going to be building things together. You're going to be growing. You know, it's going to change you. It's going to change the course of your career. I don't know. I mean, that kind of more positive approach from the- From the man who always advocates the negative would be what I would go for.
Speaker 4The baby liked it, too. It was kicking. Oh, really? Oh, wow. We got some free business consulting from Robert Greene. And from the baby. And from the baby, backing it up. You said children know, you know. There was one other quote from the new book that I really loved, which was, you need to be brutal with your past so that the present and future can glisten with new sublime possibilities. That was my favorite quote. I was wondering if there was a favorite part of the book that you would want to share.
Speaker 3Well, there's a couple chapters. I happen to be an animal lover. Animals have always played a huge part in my life, from the dogs that I had when I was a boy to the cats I have now. I just have a connection to animals that I can't even explain. And I wrote a chapter about what they mean to us in our lives and how you said we're like this domesticated creature. and we're so attracted to things that are wild, To, you know, my cat is domesticated, but he is actually quite wild. And it takes us out of ourselves and it brings us into another consciousness, another way of relating to the world. Because believe it or not, Cody, we too are animals. We too have the same kinds of chemistry, the same hormones, the same sort of physiology that goes back millions and millions of years. So I love the chapter because I really wanted to get inside the mind, the consciousness of an animal that you can venture into. And the other chapter is one I write about history because obviously history is everything to me. I just love reading about other cultures, about the ancient world. I got particularly enamored with like ancient cultures in Mexico, like the Aztecs and the Mayans, because they're so different from our own. And I take you on a journey into the past. Where the past becomes alive, where it's no longer just history and facts and dead things. The dead come alive and living in history and seeing it come to life and seeing the past become the present is one of the most sublime experiences you can have. Because it connects you to who we are, to the human race as a whole, to our entire insane history. And so I want to take you back to ancient Greece, to ancient Babylonia. To Teotihuacan, the ancient capital of the Aztec Empire, and all these other places. So those are the two chapters that I love.
Speaker 4Is there a favorite story you have in the book?
Speaker 3Yeah, I have this one story that I think people are going to like about these people who were exploring caves in France. They're spelunkers, if you will. And there are all these incredible caves in the south of France. And they come upon by accident. This insanely magnificent cave with all these wall paintings from the upper Paleolithic period, 37,000 years ago. And the environment of the cave is completely pristine. They're the first people to see it in 37,000 years. It's a very famous cave. It's called Chauvet Cave. You can go look it up on the internet now. And if you look it up, you will be aghast at how beautiful the images are. The lions, the rhinoceros. The horses, the bears, everything. It's astounding. And they came upon this. And there are these handprints on the wall from the people. And they could feel the ghosts of these people still vibrating in this space. Even though they're not woo-woo type people. It was like this mystical experience of 37,000 years ago suddenly present. And I think that's one of my favorite stories in there.
Speaker 4It's beautiful. New book is out. Power, Seduction, and War.com is where you get it and pre-order it. I got an advanced copy. And so I know firsthand it's very worth reading. It's a beautiful book. I love how in this world it doesn't sound like anything else. All of your books are just so uniquely you. Well, Robert Green, thank you so much for being here today.
Speaker 3Thank you so much, Cody. I really appreciate the opportunity. I really enjoyed it.
Speaker 4Me too. Such a joy.
Speaker 1Thank you. I wrote a little song to remind you. Choice Hotels gets you more of the experiences you value. The Cambria Hotel's got it all. A rooftop bar, have a ball. Bring a date, your squad, or even your mom. Book direct at choicehotels.com.
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