A Bit of Optimism - Power with author Robert Greene

Episode Date: September 26, 2023

How do people become powerful? Can understanding power protect us from those who wield it too strongly?When Robert Greene first set out to write about power, he didn’t have much of it. He worked odd jobs and was largely at the mercy of other people’s power. Now, his book “The 48 Laws of Power” has given him the power he wrote about. He sat down with me to share what he’s learned on both sides of that spectrum.This… is a Bit of Optimism.For more on Robert and his work, check out:https://powerseductionandwar.com/ 

How much power do you have? And have you ever felt powerless? Well, that's what happened to Robert Greene. He felt completely powerless for so many years that he actually ended up writing about what it felt like to be subjected to the whims of others who were trying to exert their power over him. He wrote the 48 Laws of Power, which has become a standard for understanding power, both how to wield it and also how to guard against it. So we talked about power and seduction and mastery and even human stupidity. And I found the impact absolutely,

well, powerful. This is a bit of optimism. Robert, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. I've been really looking forward to meeting you. We've never met, but I know your work and I've been so excited to talk to you and to dig into some of your work. Thank you. Thank you very much. Your book, The 48 Laws of Power, it's been around a bunch of years and it's still, dare I say, a powerhouse of a book. Before we get into it, because I have so many questions, I just wanted to ask you about the background first. What is your story, how you got to the point that you wrote a book about power?

Well, it was 38 years of various things happening to me. But to summarize it, I came out of college with a degree in probably the most irrelevant subject imaginable, classics, ancient Greek and Latin, with all sorts of ideals, romantic ideals about life, about creating things. I wanted to be a writer. This is what the world should be like. And then bam, I'm hit by reality. People are political. They have egos. I'm in New York. I'm working in journalism. And I'm rather shocked by all the games people are playing and the weirdness going on. I thought working in journalism. And I'm rather shocked by all the games people are playing and the weirdness going on. I thought it should be just about results. I didn't like it. And I wasn't very good at it, at least at the time. So I left journalism. I wandered around Europe with a

backpack. I had 50 different jobs, which I won't go into. I was a tour guide in Dublin. I worked for a television network in London. I worked in a hotel in Paris. I was doing construction work in Greece. I taught English in Barcelona. Nothing came of it, really. Nothing that I could even show you as material for all of my dreaming. I come back to Los Angeles in the late 80s because my father is a mom from LA. I'm going to be a Hollywood screenwriter. I'm finally going to show the world what I'm good at. And Hollywood is the worst environment of all the ones I've ever been in. The politicking, the egos, the gameplay, the Machiavellian stuff.

It's on the supreme level. Precisely the stuff I don't like. I'm failing. I'm 38 years old to get up to the present time here. I'm not amounting anything. My parents are starting to get worried about their son. And I'm in Italy on yet another job where it's all about politicking and egos. I won't go into that. And there's a man there who's a book packager. We were in Venice, Italy, and he asked me one beautiful day as we're walking near the Piazza San Marco, do you have any ideas for a book packager. We were in Venice, Italy, and he asked me one beautiful day as we're walking

near the Piazza San Marco, do you have any ideas for a book? And it just sort of spewed out of me like vomit or something. This is all of my experiences. People pretend to be so liberal, so interested in culture, and so interested in creation, in creating things, so much in the First Amendment, all this other stuff, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But they really want power. They're obsessed with power. And nobody writes about this. All the self-help books in the world, you compile them from end to end, from one corner

of the globe to the other. That's not my reality. That's what the world I know. Power is this timeless thing. So we may not be wearing Renaissance dress. We may not be carrying a little knife in our side ready to stab someone. But we're operating under the same laws of power. He loved the idea.

And he said, I'll pay you to write half the book and we'll sell it. And the last thing I'll say is I was so desperate, even to maybe the point of suicidal at that point. This is my one chance out of the hell that I've been in, where I'm not able to get anything I want. So I gave that everything I had that book. I put all of my blood, all of my sweat, all of my bad experiences into that book. And the rest is history. In reading that book, it's very cynical. I don't think it is at all, but okay. Well, I mean, I appreciate that what you're doing is showing us how the world works.

But my fear is that people will take it as a manual. Okay, look, there are 48 laws, right? 48, that's the number, okay? I could count maybe four, maybe five overtly manipulative laws in there. There are 44, 45 others that are not manipulative at all. Plan all the way to the end. Create compelling spectacles. Despise the free lunch, which is about being generous. In victory, know when to stop. Don't go too far. Work on the hearts and minds of other people. Be the perfect courtier. Don't isolate yourself in a fortress. Demonstrate your

ideas. Don't argue. There's nothing evil. There's nothing manipulative about that. But people pick out the chapters that are the most egregious. That's manipulation in my mind. Now, yes, I don't deny that there are some dark ideas in there. I'm not trying to sugarcoat it. But I make it clear, if you read carefully the preface and the way I write it, that there are two ways to look at it. So law number seven, get others to do the work, but always take the credit. That, I agree, is a nasty law. I don't deny it. But I explain very clearly in the course of that law that you look at it from the reverse side, that while you're happily working on your screenplay or on your startup, there are vultures

circling around you right at that moment who are ready to pounce and steal your idea and take it from you and take credit for it. Be aware. Even on those manipulative laws that people think is so evil, there's a flip side to them. They're opening your eyes to the dark side of power. Because I came from the book from the side of the innocent. I never had power. So I'm writing it from that point of view. Because that happened to me. People took my ideas in Hollywood. They stole them. They put their name on it. Are you grateful for those first 38 years? Do you have a different point of view? Are you grateful for those first 38 years? Do you have a different point of view?

Because your life did profoundly change. I mean, you describe it that you felt like a failure prior. But do you look back and say, I wouldn't be where I am today if it weren't for that? Do you have a different view of those first 38 years and all those crazy jobs? Yeah, that's a great question. And it's true, I do. I'm a firm believer in something that I've written about. I like to practice what I preach, which is amor fati, which is love of fate. I don't have any regrets.

People ask me, Robert, if you could go back to when you were 25, would you have told yourself to do anything differently? And my answer sincerely is no. Everything was for a purpose. So although I was a failure, I never gave up. I kept trying. I kept writing. I tried journalism. I didn't do well at it. I tried writing novels. I didn't do well at it. I tried writing screenplays. Didn't do well at it. I kept trying and trying and trying. And I had all of these experiences with bosses and power. And it all went into the soup that became

the 48 Laws of Power. If the same man came to me when I was 25 to write the book, I wouldn't have been able to. So everything had a purpose behind it. I tell people, you can look at your life in the same way. I mean, maybe it doesn't come out as fortunate as it did for me. But even your bad jobs, and even in the pain that you've suffered in your life, and even the setbacks, they've made you who you are. You've learned from them. They can help you grow if you look at them in the correct light. I love this idea of love of fate.

I find that beautiful and romantic. What I also appreciate is I am still an idealist in my writing. I try to write the ideal version of how we could work. And I really do appreciate that you're not for or against any of these things. This is just sort of your experience of the world, how the world seems to operate. Like you said, we don't wear Renaissance clothes anymore and carry stilettos on our sides. But rather, this is the good, bad, and the ugly of the world we live in. You can use these if you want to be that kind of person, or you can be guarded against these things from those kinds of people. And I really do appreciate that it's kind of like an instruction manual for sort of life, if anything.

In my experience as someone who is naive and is at heart an idealistic person, at heart a romantic person, I am afraid to say, I suffered from that. It created a lot of pain for me, a lot of emotional drama that I don't really need in life. And it is my experience, and I could be wrong, is that people like artists, etc., people who are very sensitive, and I have a sensitive nature, they enter the world like I do, full of ideals, and they come butt up against the realities in the art world, the film world, whatever, and they're not ready for it. And I'm on their side. I don't want you to lose your ideals, your romanticism. I want you to just be aware that this is the games that are happening in the world. And if you're aware of them,

you don't have to play them. In fact, maybe it's better you don't. But you can protect yourself with a little bit of knowledge and not have to go through all the pain that a lot of people who are naive go through. Are you less idealistic now? I'm still the person that I was. I'm still the eight-year-old boy that I was at heart. You know, I'm in my 60s now. I don't mean to dwell on this. I've said it enough in other interviews. I nearly died five years ago. I had a stroke. I came this close to dying. So my vision of life is changed, and I'm extremely grateful to look out my window and see

the world as it is. I mean, because you also wrote about mastery, which is much more idealistic, purpose-based, passion, love. It's such a joy to meet you, to understand. And this is why maybe I'm being cynical by calling the book cynical. But the first book is like, here's the ugly truth of reality. And then you get to the point of writing about something that's not, I mean, it is idealistic and it is romantic and beautiful. My work is all semi-autobiographical. I can tell you what the struggles I was going through in my life, at each point, one of those works was produced. And each work that I was producing was a reflection of the struggles I was going through at the time. And each one of them moved

me to the next thing. Start With Why, which is my first book, was born out of... Great book, by the way. I've read it. Thank you very much. And just like your first book, people ask me, how long did it take you to write that book? And my answer is every day of my life up until that day. How old were you? I wrote Start With Why when I was... Oh, I have to do math now. 34, 35. And what it was for me was like you, which is reflecting the shit that you had gone through, that you actually had a point of view having waded through so much of that muck. For me, it was loss of passion where I was living what others would consider superficially a good

life. I owned my own business. I was living the American dream. I had great clients. We did good work for them. And yet I didn't want to wake up and go to work anymore. And I was very embarrassed by that because, oh, poor you, you know? And so I kept those dark feelings to myself. And for anybody who's ever gone through dark feelings, if you keep them to yourself, they feed off of themselves and it gets worse. What brought me out of that darkness was the discovery that I knew what I did and I knew how I did it, but I didn't know why. And I became obsessed with understanding my why, because I realized that was the source of love and passion for my work, not the actual work itself, but it was the underlying inspiration that I wanted to do the work in the first place that had nothing to

do with whatever the job was. It worked for me. It worked for my friends when I shared it with them. My friends invited me to share it with their friends. And like you, I had the opportunity to meet a publisher and spewed the ideas and they simply went, all right, I'll publish that. And you wouldn't have been able to write it like 10 years before, would you? No, impossible because I had to have gone through what I went through and I had to get to the pits of darkness. And then, you know, each book progressed, like new challenges showed up in my life. And if I found solutions, and I haven't found solutions to all my challenges, but the ones that seem to have worked and worked for my friends and that others found valuable, I ended up writing about. And so I'm curious, because you've written a bunch of books, how you get from

almost a warning to how the world works to where you are now, you know, which is much lighter, I would argue, in how you're dealing with the world around you. Well, I mean, to go chronologically, I wrote The Art of Seduction After Power. And The Art of Seduction is similar to power. You might say it's very realistic, but it's actually about creating pleasure in this world, which is what seduction is about. So I was investigating that, and that was kind of a fun book to write. And then after that, I had intended to write a book about the history of human stupidity, which is something that's very dear to my heart. And believe me, there's so much material, you know, it could be a million pages.

But the publisher thought that was too dark, too negative, you know, okay. So I segued into a book about strategy, which was sort of a look at warfare and strategy, which is something I'm interested in very deeply. And then because of my previous books, I became very popular in the hip hop world. And I met 50 Cent who wanted to meet me. He's kind of like, you would think the polar opposite of me, me, a middle class Jewish boy from Los Angeles. He from Southside, Queens, dealing crack cocaine at the age of nine. And yet we had a really great rapport. We got along really well. Our minds operated similarly, we had a really great rapport. We got along really well. Our minds operated similarly,

which I thought is a remarkable phenomenon in America that you can be so different, but on another level, you connect. And I'm fascinated by that occurrence. So we decided to write a book together, which is a meditation on being fearless in life. And I now arrive at the point of mastery to kind of my long-winded answer to your question. And I've been growing a little bit concerned of the success of the 48 Laws of Power and some young people thinking that just playing games and just being aware of the Machiavellian side was enough to be successful in life. You know, a lot of people in tech were like that, etc. And no, my experience in dealing with at this point, now I'm like a working with CEOs in business, working with rappers, working with athletes.

My idea of what really attains success is actually through your work, through externalizing your interior emotions, which if they just stay inside of you will eat you alive and ruin you. To take all of that and to externalize it into something. I don't care if it's a business. I don't care if it's making a great family. I don't care if it's carpentry or sending a person to the moon. It's all the same thing. It's inside of you and you're putting in your work and getting to the point where you're so good at it, where you've mastered it, is to me the quintessential human quality. It's what our brains are there for. Our brains are there for mastering our environment and creating something. It's a book for young

people, honestly. It's a book for people in their 20s. I want you to get excited about learning, about mastering something. And the first chapter, which connects very much to your book, is about discovering your life's task, the purpose behind why you were born in this world, which is the seed for anything else that will come out of whatever you can do in life. How do you define your life's purpose? Well, it's not like something you can put in a sentence. It's not like a verbal formula. It's a feeling. It's an emotion. It's something that you know deep inside of you, right?

And so I knew from very early on that I was somebody obsessed with words and languages, almost to a point of almost mental illness. I was so liking chopping words up into little phonemes, et cetera, et cetera, playing word games, et cetera. So I don't know where that comes from. I couldn't explain it, but I knew that I had to do something with words, right? But what is it that I'm supposed to do with words? And as I explained in my trajectory, I couldn't figure it out. It was like a riddle. And I tried journalism, I tried novels, I tried screenwriting. Finally, I hit upon this one thing. So my life's purpose was to take all of my experiences and help people with them. I genuinely want to help people with their suffering and their pain and the problems of life.

And if I have anything I'm good at, I can't dunk a basketball. I can't play soccer. I can't play music. It's figuring these things out and writing about them in a way that can help people. That's my very convoluted way of saying that was my life's purpose. Well, I think helping people deal with their pain is pretty succinct. Can you share with me a specific story from your career that you absolutely loved being a part of? It doesn't matter if it was a commercial success or not, but something that if everything in your life went this way,

and I'm talking go way back, you can go back to the beginning. It doesn't have to be since 48 Laws of Power. Something specifically you've been a part of or done that you absolutely loved. And if everything in your life was like this one thing, you'd be the happiest person alive. Since I'm somebody so involved in making things and creating things, I'd have to go back to to before the 48 laws of power, back to 1994, 1995. And we had a little theater troupe, my wife and I, and she put on musicals that I acted in. And then I wrote a series of plays, four plays that we then put on together at a couple of theaters. And I acted in and she directed.

And that was me. That was so exciting. That was so much fun because I was creating a world. And I've kind of transferred that to my books in a way. What do you think it is about that experience of performing in those plays with your wife that you look back with such funness? Well, I have a strong satirical streak, and I'm very much into humor and comedy because all these plays were essentially comedies. I was really pointedly making fun of the world and the people I knew. You know, the books are doing that, but in a kind of indirect way. And here I was like punching people in the face with a lot of the stupidity of the world. I don't mean to be, I know I sound so negative, I'm sorry, but maybe that's just who I am.

I have to face up to it. Can you tell me an early specific happy childhood memory? Not like something like we went to my grandparents every weekend, something I can relive with you. There's an early specific happy childhood memory. play all of these games that we invented. And I look back on that with such fondness. We created a ghost town in an empty lot where we built our own tree house and created all these scary things. And then we would invite people to come there without telling them what it was. And we would scare the pants out of them and kind of record their reactions. We're very, very creative. If I were to make you relive it, I would put you on in the kind of the Los Angeles summer with the sun beating down, it's all hot,

and the sky is clear. And just the intensity of the sunshine and the kind of madness that was in your head from all of that, and the Hollywood aspect of the world around you. What I find so curious is that the way you describe that street and your friends inventing and playing games is much the same language that you use to describe the plays.

Yeah. You know, that you're inventing with your wife and creating and playing. And there's a magical idealism. And you use the word bubble, I think, in both cases where you created a bubble. And the way you describe the way you play as a child, you talked about creating a bubble and the absolute utopia that exists within this bubble with you and your friends. It's very not lonely, by the way. And what I find so curious is you light up as you talk about these bubbles and these co-creations and these spaces where you're with these other people.

You said it yourself, which is where you're your true self. You're fully realized, you're fully authentic. Yet then your own experience seems to fly in the face of that. Reality burst that bubble. And the opportunities to create these safe, closed spaces kept being thwarted by selfishness or arrogance or hubris, whatever other people's motivations were, kept bursting the bubble because the magic of the bubble was that you were co-creating with people that weren't operating in this selfish Machiavellian way. I think you are an idealist

and that you crave those magical, beautiful, safe spaces with your friends to create and be yourself. And it sounds like you want that for other people too. That's the idealism. It's not selfish. You genuinely, genuinely want other people to have that. Your work makes so much sense to me now, now that I've heard these stories.

Because the 48 Laws of Power, going through through the other books when you get up to mastery and then you're talking about the sublime seem very different, but now I understand them. It's about forming and protecting the bubble. It's about forming and protecting that safe space where you can be fully realized as yourself and with your friends. And you gave it to your friends as much as they gave it to you. You speak in these beautiful terms about co-creation with your wife and co-creation with your friends, and nobody was the boss. Hearing you talk about these things, the way I understand your life's purpose is to help people to create those magical bubbles and not only learn how to build them and sit in them because they are so

beautiful and share them with your friends in the world, but also to learn how to protect them from other people bursting them because they're fragile and they're special and they're worth protecting. Yes, I think that's very eloquently put and you kind of saw things maybe I wouldn't have been able to see exactly into myself. So thank you for that. I mean, the through line is that the books that I create are these kind of self-contained little worlds, these little bubbles that I bring you into. Like you wanted to write about the history of human stupidity. And just as you say that there's two sides to how you want to interpret each of those laws, which is you can use them as a manual to be an asshole, or you can use them to guard against

the assholes. On both sides of the coin, there's an element of, and we can use a kinder word than stupidity, which is naivete. There's a naivete to wanting to be the dictator because love is more difficult to find and true loyalty and trust is more difficult to harness. And living a life of joy is going to be a struggle if you choose that path. If you choose the path to obsess and use your work as a manual, it comes at a cost. And that cost is steep. steep. But at the same side, there's a naivete on the other side, which is to live a life thinking,

you know, to be Pollyanna-ish and like the world is beautiful and people tend to err on the side of good and don't worry, the universe will protect you, is also equally naive. You're going to get stabbed in the back and someone's going to steal your idea and claim it as their own. And so this history of human stupidity is really about being aware of our own naivete on both sides of that coin. It's a healthy lesson, which is be idealistic, but don't be stupid. Be ambitious, but don't be backstabby. I guess what all of it is trying to do is asking people to walk on the tightrope that we call life. And by the way, that's a really difficult road to travel. that we call life. And by the way, that's a really difficult road to travel. There's a blindness in naivete on both sides of the coin.

But it's not an impossible path to travel. Not impossible at all. We're so black and white in our thinking, we either think you either have to be idealistic or you have to be Machiavellian. You can combine the two with a kind of a playful touch and be aware and still keep your romantic ideals together, but not be so naive. It's like a dance, you know? In the spirit of mastery, I don't think you can challenge or reinvent something until you've mastered the old way. I mean, just to pick up on your allusion to dance, George Balanchine is credited with creating what is now known as American ballet, even though he was Russian. But he had to master Russian ballet first before he could throw out all the rules.

Or great modern dancers have to, you know, even though the modern dances is the rejection of ballet and the formality of ballet, great modern dancers are masters of ballet before they reject it. You have to be an expert for that which you have contempt. You have to know it really well before you can break it. The best generals are experts in their enemies, not just in their own tactics and strategies, in their enemies' tactics and strategies. It's not black and white. It is a walkable path, but it does require effort and work and attention and idealism and caution simultaneously, to your point. I appreciate how much you are attempting to uncover the complexity of life. negative capability. He wanted to figure out what is the source of true creativity, and he ended up calling it negative capability. And he said, look at Shakespeare, whom we revere as perhaps the greatest writer who ever lived. His characters are so human. They're both evil

and they're good. Nobody is purely good and nobody is purely evil. They are human. That's what makes us all human. None of us are saints. And yes, there are some truly, truly evil people, but even they, I mean, I might have to exempt one or two in history, I'm sorry. But even the most Machiavellian figures, at heart, they're very insecure people who have probably a broken idealism inside themselves. Something happened that twisted them around. Even Joseph Stalin had that. He was like a poet when he was a young man, et cetera. So nobody is like that.

And it's like that is human stupidity right now to paint this polarizing world because life is very fluid. It's very complex. Things are continually changing, continually shifting. It's a complete flux, and our brains freeze them into these little snapshots into good, bad, moral, evil, etc. And it's not lifelike, and it is stupidity. It's what leads to stupid ideas in politics, it's what leads to bad films, it's what leads

to bad startups, it's what leads to people films, in what leads to bad startups, in what leads to people doing things without thinking of the consequences. Now that you have the power that you have, I really hope you write the history of human stupidity. As I said, it'll be like a million pages long. I've been collecting anecdotes from- Volume one. Volume one. Start with volume one. And I'll die and then I'll have mapped out the other ten volumes.

You know, the only reason I want to read it is because it's not really an indictment of others. It's really, like so much of your work, a reflection. Just even as we're talking it, I'm thinking about the times I'm naive to the point of being stupid. The times I've been taken advantage of. The times no good deed goes unpunished. I myself have had to grapple with, should I be a little more Machiavellian? Should I be a little more? And I don't want to, but at the same time, I have suffered in various ways because of my idealism. And I have to make a decision each time, which person do I want to be? Do I want to be the idealist who

is occasionally taken advantage of? Or do I want to be that Machiavellian character who maybe never gets taken advantage of, but I never get to enjoy the light that I enjoy as an idealist. And each time I come to the crossroads and each time I choose the same path, which is I'm going to continue to be the stupid idealist. I think there's stupidity by choice, and then there's stupidity by reflex. That's interesting. I never thought of that, but yeah. I mean, the source of human stupidity, if I could say that, is certainty, is believing that I know the truth, that I have the answers. And that is the source of the greatest tragedies, the worst wars that have been ever fought,

the most fragile political institutions that have been created. People, generally men, who think, I have the answer, I have the perfect utopia, I'm going to create this perfect communist state, I'm going to create the cultural revolution. The certainty in the soul that I know the answers is actually flipped around complete unadulterated human stupidity. And the ancient Greeks, whom I'm sort of seeped in because that was my education, had this idea that more bad things are

occasioned in this planet, not by evil people, but by stupid, incompetent people who don't know how to steer a ship, who don't know how to build things properly, who don't understand the mechanics of the situation, etc. And to me, if you're going to say the opposite of stupidity is intelligence, oh, duh, all right, well, what is intelligence? Intelligence is to be able to look at yourself and go, I don't have the answers.

I don't know what is right. This thing that I'm creating, it might actually have the opposite effect. This wonderful piece of technology that's going to save humanity. Maybe it's going to damn humanity. Maybe it's going to curse humanity. Think it over again. Reflect. Go back.

Start over. Think about the consequences. That is intelligence, right? As opposed to, I have all the answers. The writer Colin Wilson called it the right man. Man who thinks everything about him is right. He's so certain about it. And they're the ones that create the most damage on this planet. That wonderful inverse proportion that goes between the inverse relationship. I love it. The more certain you are is directly equivalent to how stupid you are. And the more you embrace uncertainty, the more intelligent you become.

It's like Oppenheimer, this great physicist, became intelligent only after he realized what he had built. Yeah. Intelligence is not an intellectual faculty. It's a combination of intellect and emotional. It's an emotional intelligence as well. So when you're faced with a problem, you generally have anxiety. That's the human state. I don't know what's going on here. I've got to figure out a solution to it. And then you grab onto something right away to kind of solve your anxiety. But it's not thought through.

It is, to use the word again, stupid, right? So what an intelligent person does is it's not just intellect. It's not just algorithms. It's not just crunching data. It's an emotional quality that anxiety rises up again. And it goes, maybe I didn't do this right. Maybe my answer is wrong. I have to redo it. I have to rethink it. You let that anxiety come up and that's what makes you intelligent. If you just try to get rid of that itch or that anxiety by glomming onto the first idea that comes to you,

well, that is an intelligence in my book. And I would add one more factor to intelligence, which is the willingness to ask for help. Because I think when you don't know the answer and you're willing to embrace uncertainty, the strength to ask for help or perspective from others makes you a lot less stupid, because the group is much smarter than any individual always. I'm not sure I agree with that. I'd have to give that some thought. Sometimes the group can be very stupid. It's James Czerwicki's work, you know, The Wisdom of Crowds, which I found fascinating. I'll give you one silly example, but it's a good one. When people are asked to guess how many

jelly beans are in the jar, you know, they sometimes, you know, win the cash if you guess how many jelly beans. The average of all the guesses is almost always closer to the real answer than any individual guess. Yeah, but I don't know how that translates to real life situations. We're not dealing with jelly beans. We're dealing with things that are more complex, emotional, human. It's not numbers. So the translation for me would be at least, and I'm translating it to my own sort of personal and professional experiences, which is I have my point of view of how the world is operating, what someone else's motivations are, if I'm in a negotiation or if I'm struggling with a friend or whatever it is. I have a point of view and I have a narrative. Like most people, that narrative is usually I'm right, they're wrong. And good friends will give me many, many different perspectives of what is

actually playing out, what could be, not what is. And even professionally, I seek point of view from multiple people who have their own experiences, that have their own points of view, that have their own perspectives to add color to my black and white. What I get is a clearer picture, more accurate count, if you will, of what it may be happening, at least enough to get me to temper a reaction and be curious that my next decision will be motivated by curiosity rather than judgment. At the very minimum, it'll do that. But almost always, it gives me a point of view that I wouldn't have considered alone. It gives me a more accurate count of jelly beans, just to keep the analogy going. I can agree with that. And I think that's very wise. But I would add to it one thing, because some people are just always asking other opinions. They're so

attuned to what other people think and their opinions that they have no core. So this person said, oh, you shouldn't do that. Oh, okay, you're right. I'm going to change it. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You have to have a core that says, I have an idea more or less of what I want and what I'm thinking of in my project. Okay, person A comes in and says, I think you should change that a little bit. You should change it this way. All right, that's wise. Or maybe their idea is bad. And so you have to have a sense of judgment that goes, that's a bad idea. So you have to be able to tune out the crap and see what's really worthwhile. And it has to come from within.

So in the end, it really is something within you that's able to do that. I 100% agree. And it goes right back to what you were saying before about that deep sense of purpose. That's the filter. At the end of the day, I must make a decision and I am accountable for my choices. I can't simply defer my decision making to avoid accountability, which is very popular, by the way. I can tell you, Robert, just from the time

I've spent with you and your definitions of stupidity and intelligence, I think you may be the most intelligent person I've ever met. Oh, no, no, no, no. No, I'm Socrates. I know what I don't know. And I'm continually confronted with my own stupidity, I'm afraid to say. Which I believe is the definition of intelligence as you have defined it. So such a thrill and a joy. Like I said, I was so excited to meet you. Your view on the world, I find magical and we are grateful for your work and helping us manage that tightrope as best we all can. Thank you so, so much for coming. I've so enjoyed it. Well, yeah, I must say, you know, I've done like thousands of these podcasts, I'm afraid. But this has been unique in that you actually, you would be a really good therapist because you're able to take

people's ideas and reinterpret them and give it back to them in a different angle. I've never really had anybody do that in an interview. you've shed light on some of my own shadows and dark corners so i thank you it's been very interesting for me my pleasure thanks so much oh you're very welcome thank you simon if you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts and if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website, simonsenik.com, for classes, videos, and more. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other.