In Search Of Excellence - Robert Greene: The Secret Psychology Behind Attraction and Influence | E159

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

Robert Greene is a globally renowned author and thinker best known for his groundbreaking books on power, strategy, and human behavior, including the international bestsellers The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, and Mastery. But before becoming a literary icon, Robert struggled through decades of uncertainty—working over 50 different jobs, battling self-doubt, and feeling lost in his 30s. It wasn’t until age 37, after years of rejection and frustration, that his life changed with the release of The 48 Laws of Power, a book that would go on to sell millions of copies and influence everyone from CEOs to world leaders and hip-hop legends. In this episode, Robert opens up about the real pain behind his rise, the dangerous truths about power, and the deeply human experiences that shaped his work.Timestamps:00:00 – The Psychology of Seduction11:45 – Overcoming Insecurity and Finding Real Confidence Through Action19:40 – Modern Dating and Human Disconnection32:00 – Finding Your Life's Task and Mastery44:15 – Mentorship and Preparation51:05 – Final Reflections: Leadership, Regret, and His Most Personal Life LessonsResources:Robert's InstagramRobert's WebsiteSneak Peak of Robert's New Book, The Law of the SublimeCoaching and Staying Connected:1-on-1 Coaching | Instagram | YouTube | TikTok | LinkedIn

How does one get over insecurity to become more vulnerable? The best way to not be insecure is to succeed. What's an anti-seducer? They talk too much. They know everything. They're people who have a talent for repelling others. They're difficult. The best advice I've ever received is,

do what you love and the money will come. Do what you love and the money will come. You're listening to part two of my incredible interview with Robert Green, a six time New York Times bestselling authors. Books include The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction and Mastery. Incredible interview. If you haven't yet listened to part one, be sure to check that one out first. Now without further ado, here's part two of my awesome interview with Robert. Your second book, The Art of Seduction, you're 42 years old, another massive hit. Why did you write a book about seduction and where did the idea come from?

Well, it came from several places. First of all, the laws of power, I have stories of seduction in there. Because the ideas I mentioned earlier, if you get people to like, to do what you want but they think it's for their interest, they want to do it, you seduce them and it's the highest form of power. There's no resentment at all. They actually enjoy doing what serves your interests, right? Because you've made it pleasurable. So seduction is a high, high form of power, okay?

It's not just sexual seduction. Seduction is social, it's political, it's marketing, it's psychology. So I want to write a book about the psychology of seduction. Focusing, yeah, there's a lot of stories in there about sexual seduction, but there's stories about political seductions, JFK and Malcolm X and there's social seductions and there's marketing and I've had stories about marketing. So what are the differences between those three types of seduction? Political, social and marketing.

There's nothing. They're all the same. It's the same thing. You're lowering people's resistance. People are naturally resistant to you. They don't wanna vote for you. Why am I gonna vote for John F. Kennedy? He's a Catholic, he's too young,

he's too liberal, he's from Massachusetts. Why am I gonna buy your product? It's new, I've never heard of it before, I don't know anybody else who's using it. People are resistant to you. Why am I ever gonna go out on a date with this guy? I don't know who the hell he is. You know, he could be a serial killer for all I know. People are naturally resistant to you. Seduction is a process of lowering those walls one by

one until they fall under your spell and they do what you want, right? It's the same process. That's what fascinated me in this was to get the common psychology involved. The other aspect was in my 20s, when I was younger and had all that hot blood in me, I was playing a lot of that game of seduction. It fascinated me on a personal level. You mentioned that hotel I worked in Paris. I was 22 years old, a receptionist. It was a hotel where all of the models stayed when they came to Paris. Yeah.

Fun. Right. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. Hi. Yeah. Yeah. I gotta stop you there. Hotel receptionists frowned on sleeping with guests of the hotel.

Was that like a thing? We're trying to get around that? And so how'd you do that? It's France. Different laws in France. So you can just say, I'm out, 10 o'clock, my shift is over, hey, I'm gonna go upstairs with one of the guests, no problem? If you're in France and you're not doing that,

something is wrong with you, right? That's how the French people look at it, okay? So, you know, it wasn't just the models that I was like after, but I met a man there who was a Brazilian man, who was very tall, very handsome. He was most unbelievable seducer I've ever seen in my entire life. He was so smooth, women were just melting in front of him

and I wanted to go, why? What is his secret? And I kind of followed him around and I sort of saw some of his secrets that ended up kind of inserting themselves into the art of seduction. So there was a personal interest and also I kind of love the literature of seduction, the great novels that have to do with seduction. So there were many angles that fascinated me in this subject. Explain the difference between a warm seducer and a cold seducer.

Well, you want to be a warm seducer. a cold seducer? Well, you want to be a warm seducer. The cold seducer typically, or it could be a woman, but often it would be the male who is just predatory and is just basically after sex, right? And so, you know, he is...well, it could be a woman who's just after money or back in the day when that was the case, it's not so much the case anymore, a courtesan who's basically just a gold digger. Of course, there still are gold diggers, I don't mean that. So there are men who are just after sex and they're pretty good at it, right? But there's no real emotion in it.

They don't feel...they feign interest in the woman and the moment they get her, they move on to the next one, right? But the hot seducer is what you want to be, is what I consider myself more like, which is you genuinely are excited by the person. You're not just faking it. You're not just faking that you're interested in it. And you're not just after sex.

You actually are interested in the person. You actually maybe want to fall in love with them, right? And because you have that genuine desire for them, it has a mimetic effect on the other person. They get kind of caught up in the infection of it. They get infected by your own emotion and they fall under your spell as well. So that's the difference between a cold and a hot seducer. You want to be more of the hot variety. What's an anti-seducer? I encounter them in life and they're difficult.

They're people who have a talent for repelling others, right? Okay, so they talk too much. They know everything, okay, right? A lot of women have this experience, the man will get it, they're explainers. They know everything and they just talk about themselves and they know, answer to everything. Very anti-seductive because it shows

that you're only interested in yourself, right? People who preach and moralize is very anti-seductive. A seducer wants to be open, wants to be non-judgmental, wants to be tolerant of the other person. That shows that you're kind of secure, you're not insecure. You can reduce all of the anti-seductive traits to great deals of insecurity that come out, right? You're always, you're on a date and you're always thinking about yourself. Am I saying the right thing? Does she or he like me?

How are they viewing me? As opposed to being interested in them and their world, what are they thinking of? What are their likes and preferences? Not about you, it's about them. That's what makes seduction successful and very therapeutic as well. So anti-seducers are too self-involved, they're too worried about themselves,

they talk too much, they're vulgar, they moralize, they preach, I could go on and on. You've talked about seduction as also a matter of vulnerability. I think vulnerability is one of the most underrepresented qualities of being a leader. How do people become more vulnerable and peel away all that exterior armor so they have better relationships?

Well, you have to let go. That's part of the process. You have to be willing to accept pain and being hurt and being rejected. So the word vulnerable comes from the Latin vulnus, which means wound, a wound. So to be vulnerable is to be open to being wounded, right? And a lot of people, particularly in the world today, they're definitely afraid of any kind of wound, of any kind of hurt. So they protect themselves.

If I don't go out in the world, if I don't date people, if I protect myself, then I'm never going to feel hurt. I'm never going to feel rejected. And you want the opposite thing. To be rejected is okay. It's a good thing in life. It teaches you something. It teaches you about your limits. It teaches you about what maybe you did wrong.

It also gives you a little bit of a thicker skin. You can endure it. I tell people if you've been rejected, if you've been hurt, on to the next person. Just go on. Find somebody else. Don't internalize it. So feeling vulnerable is letting go of your ego, letting go of that tightness, letting go of that ability to protect yourself at all costs from any kind of hurt. You want to fail in life, you want adversity. Failing in life is the best education that can ever happen to you, right? And failing in life is a deep wound, but it teaches you very valuable lessons. So if you go through life where I don't want to ever have to feel hurt, I don't ever want to feel criticized or to fail, you're never going to learn, you're never going to succeed,

you're never going to be powerful. One of the reasons why we're not vulnerable at times is because we're very insecure. We're insecure about the way we look, we dress, we feel our relationships, our personality, anything in our sphere of life. At some point in life, we all are. So how does one get over insecurity to become more vulnerable? Because insecurity is a bad thing or is it a good thing?

Well, it's neither good nor bad, it just is. I mean, the best way to not be insecure is to succeed, is to have to do something to accomplish something that gives you a degree of real confidence. Because there's fake confidence, there are people who think that they're wonderful but they're not really wonderful and that's masking a lot of insecurity and we can kind of read that off them. But if you actually achieve something, if you actually reach a goal, you set yourself a goal, I'm gonna start a business when I'm 25, you start that business and it fails, okay, but I had the

cojones to start that business in the first place. I can feel pretty good about that, right? That gives you confidence. But if you never try it, if you never try to start that business, you may feel protected, but you're insecure and that insecurity will haunt you the rest of your life, right? So the best way to not feel secure is to accomplish something, is to get off your butt and do something to act in this world, to try and achieve a goal. And if you do, then you'll feel less insecure. You'll have something to rest upon. You'll have laurels to rest upon.

You'll have a sense of, damn it, in a world where people talk and talk and talk and pretend to be something, I actually tried. I didn't talk. I did it. Well, that will help you overcome some of your insecurities. I think one of the plays, and this is an unusual thing to say, but I think this is very true for so many people. People are afraid to tell their partners, even their wives, some of their

sexual fantasies. So it could be mirror on the ceiling, could be swings. Wow, I didn't know we were going this way. Could be all different things. Yeah. Right? But people are afraid to express their sexual desires, even the people they love the most, because they're insecure of how people are going to perceive them.

Yeah. How should they get over that? Whoa. Did you talk about the swing? Hey, I really want a pole coming down next to the bed. Well, no. I think you have to be kind of subtle about it, right? I don't think it's just come out of nowhere.

But there has to be already a base of comfort between you, the two of you, where they're not going to be judgmental where they're not gonna be judgmental, they're not gonna, you know, the worst thing is you're gonna say, yeah, you know, sometimes I like to be, to be dressed up as an infant and be spanked. And that comes out of nowhere, God, I didn't even know who this person was, get the hell out of my life, right?

Yeah. So there has to be a little- Thinking's a big thing apparently. What? They may have paddles, they got outfits, they got whips. Who the fuck wants to get whips? I remember once I was on a movie set, the first film I was on,

and we're shooting in somebody's house, they're not living there, and they had the doors that were not supposed to open, and of course we go and we open the closet door, and they had like, you know, adult infant outfits with all the paraphernalia within, to open and of course we go and we open the closet door and they had like, you know, adult infant outfits with all the paraphernalia with it. We were like, oh my God, you know, it was pretty shocking.

Anyway, so it is out there. But you know, if you reveal something like that, the other person is going to go, God, I didn't know Randall at all. I didn't know he had these kind of tastes. Get me out of here. I'm getting a divorce, right? So it's got to be a level of trust already established between you two.

And the context has to be kind of not so heavy, like, you know, it has to be kind of fun and playful. And maybe you introduce it subtly in the context of, you know, you're actually doing something quote unquote intimate, I'm getting a little embarrassed here, you're doing something kind of intimate and you introduce a little element of this. So it's not like a total shock.

I'm just saying you have to be subtle about these things and you have to kind of prepare them so it doesn't seem like, hey, I don't know who this person is who I've been involved with for 20 years. When I got divorced, I was single for seven and a half years. I go to line, I had three guys who I was friends with and they were all 60 plus older in age.

They were all very wealthy. And it was so depressing to talk to them because what they told me, and they were all divorced too, and they said, yeah, I mean, you lose sexual desire for your partner at some age in life and it doesn't really matter as much, so you're just gonna have to accept that going forward. And I know a lot of friends, I'm sure you do too, who barely have sex with their husbands or their wives.

I have a friend I've known for a long time. She hasn't had sex with her husband in 15 years. I guess she's still in the relationship. You talk a lot about companionship and compatibility. What's your advice to those people on how to reignite that spark and get back into it and just want to get in there again? Well, you know, everybody's different. I don't, if it's something that you're missing that's painful for you, then I understand. But, you know, you have to, it has to be a mutual thing. It can't just come from one side.

So relationships, you know, people don't understand that it's this continual back and forth. There's an energy that happens between you two. And sometimes the current is cut off on one side, but it's generally both people are kind of responsible for it. So it can't be just you bulldozing the other person saying come on let's go have sex now kind of thing you know or judging them or doing that. You have to kind of you know go at it subtly. You have to kind of get them as interested as you are in it. It has to be a mutual

back-and-forth thing and not something where you're just foisting it on them. Because that's the whole thing about when we're talking about seduction is when it only comes from one side, when it's only like, god damn it, I've got to have sex with this woman, right? And you're manipulating her. It lacks that juice, it lacks that energy that happens with like an electrical current that goes back and forth. So in your scenario, you want to have that current opening up between the two of you, however

you do that. You don't want to be like imposing on the other person and make it seem like you're judging them kind of thing. Does that make sense? Yeah. Can you fix something if you're not attracted to somebody physically and still have a great relationship with a spouse or a significant other? Yes, of course you can. I mean, you know, you have a deep affection, you have a love, just like you have a love for your children, and that's not crossing a boundary. You know, there are all forms of love, and they don't have

to involve sex at all. You know, we have to widen our interpretations of things. If you're with somebody for a very long time, you have incredible memories. You have things that you've shared together. You have all that kind of years of affection. Yeah, you've had your disagreements, but you've seen a lot. You've grown together. You've experienced the world together. I think it's a great thing to go through that and it doesn't have to be, you know, when you're in your 20s and you have that kind of intense physical relationship, they tend to burn out pretty quickly, right?

And so you're going to mellow out as you get older anyway and it's okay. It's okay because it can be kind of more of a deeper bond in some ways. And yes, you still have sex and still intimate and you're still physical. But it's not the same thing. Why does everything have to be the same? You're not young anymore. You're not in your 20s. Just get over it.

So you're accepting the fact that people have less sex and they should have less sex when they're 40, 50, 60 years old? I'm saying it's... If that... It's nothing wrong with that is what I'm saying. If you think there's something wrong with that that's fine I'm not judging you. I'm not a judgmental person it's okay but it's also okay to feel like things are mellowing. I'm older. I don't have the desire that I used to have. I'm not freaking out about it. I'm not freaking out about it. I'm not going out and getting massive injections of testosterone to change that.

I'm not swallowing Viagra every few hours. It's okay. That was going to be my next question. It's okay. That's what happens. Look, I'm in my 60s. I had a stroke, right? Your body doesn't change.

Your mind changes, and your body changes. You get older, and you have to kind of accept things. It's painful, but you have to accept some of this. Dating today is way different than when we were growing up. I mean, it's just- Well, I'm a lot older than you. It's just different. I'm 56, so you've got, I think-

10 years on you. 10 years, I mean, not that much. My dating life when I was younger was similar to yours. There were no online apps. I mean, you can go on these bars. And by the way, I had to pound down a few brewskies to even have the courage to go talk to somebody. Today, you can go on an app. There's apps. I know. There's swiping. There's fucking apps where you just, you're on, you know, on an app, there's apps, there's swiping, there's

fucking apps where you just, you're on, you know, you put in your menu and you're there and it's just one and done. What is your advice in this kind of world where social media makes it so easy to hook up with something on dating? Well, I know I'm going to sound like your grandfather to those people out there, but what the hell, I probably am the age of your grandfather. You know, you're doing yourself a disservice if you're doing that. And it's not just because I'm this old guy who never had to deal with that. It's because I've been studying human nature and people for many many years. I'm not good at a lot of things. I can't

shoot a basketball like I used to. I'm not good at a lot of things but I understand people very well. In human nature I wrote a very thick book on that. And your ability to understand people not virtually but in the flesh, eye contact, being able to be in front of them, to talk to them, not virtually, but in the flesh, eye contact, being able to be in front of them, to talk to them, not through a screen, but actually there, to actually have to be funny, to actually have to communicate, to actually have to say something interesting, to actually have to express interest in their world. You need to be in front of them.

You need to be there and see them. And in doing that, you run the risk of doing the wrong thing because on that computer, on your phone, you can kind of make yourself seem like, you know, the hottest thing on the planet. You can create a whole fantasy that's not real. But when you're there together, everything's real and you're going to say something stupid or you're going to not look so great or your hair's gonna be all messed up, whatever. It's okay.

You've gotta learn human skills. You've gotta go out there and you have to deal with people because if you don't, it will ripple outside of your dating world into your work world, into your social world. You won't know how to deal with colleagues. You won't know how to say something. You won't know how to be charming to people, right? You'll be all shy and nervous while swiping, swiping, swiping. It doesn't take anything. But to go to a bar or to come up to a stranger and try to talk to them and try and get them interested, man, that takes guts. And you're being timid. You're being

weak. You're being a coward. Put yourself out in the world, face rejection, and try and develop some real people skills. Because social skills are a muscle. And if you don't ever exercise that muscle, you're just going to be really flabby and you'll never get anywhere. You want to exercise that muscle through real experiences, not through virtual experiences. You wrote a book called Mastery when you're 53 years old. You know more about me than I know about myself. That's pretty great, okay. Why did you write the book?

And what does mastery actually mean? I wrote the book because I was a little bit worried. People were taking the 48 laws of power as all that matters in life. If I'm good, if I have the people skills, if I can be like a con artist, if I can kind of bluff my way through life, that's power. There's something missing from that scenario and that something is you actually have to be good at what you do. You can't bluff your way through life, right? You could be the CEO of a company, you can master all the

48 laws of power, but if you're incompetent, if you don't know, if you don't have the necessary skills to see it through, then it's all going to blow up in your face. So mastery is an extremely important component in the game of power, in your success and your feeling of fulfillment in life. And basically what mastery is, is essentially using the human brain, this immense organ, this gift that you have been given, the most powerful instrument that we know in the universe, the billions of neurons that are there, the connections, it's immensely powerful.

Mastery is using that brain that you were gifted with to the maximum effect that it has to reach a level of not just creativity but to have an intuitive feel for exactly what's going to come next. So if you're a soccer player, you know exactly like Pele did or Messi exactly where the players are going to be, you can anticipate them with a great pass or like a great basketball player. You're a chess master. The chessboard is in your head. You have seen 15 moves in advances, whereas the other person's only seen a couple of moves

in advance. You're a piano, you're a pianist, and the piano is so deeply inside of you that you don't have to even look at your fingers. Just flows out of you. That is mastery. It's an intuitive feel for the instrument that you are using. And to tell you the truth, it is the most joyous experience a human being can have, you know?

Maybe even more joyous than the sex we were talking about but I'm not gonna go that far. Randy Love who is a porn star and she's kind of an icon in the industry. I think she hit it right. I think she said sex is the most pleasurable activity in the world. And if you, you know, we haven't taken any scientific polls but I think a hit it right. I think she said sex is the most pleasurable activity in the world. We haven't taken any scientific polls, but I think a lot of people would say that. But mastery beats sex. I think it does because, you know, sex is like... I'm not...you know, don't get me wrong here.

But, you know, sex is like a continual hunger. You never really feel satisfied. You want more and more and more of it And then there are moments of pain You know and you feel like afterwards like sometimes I know as a man sometimes you feel kind of almost sad or depressed afterwards Mastery is like this high that just continues on and on and on you don't have to think anymore all these great ideas come To you now granted on and on and on. You don't have to think anymore. All these great ideas come to you. Now granted, this is something that not many people experience because they talk about 10,000 hours,

this is 20,000 hours, this is 25,000 hours of work and it's very high level, but it's like a continual mental orgasm because things just come to you. The greatest ideas, you know, you see perfectly exactly what has to come next. It's a wonderful feeling. You study some of the most iconic figures in history, Darwin, Einstein, Henry Ford.

Da Vinci. So how does a guy like Freddie Roach, who was a boxing coach, Manny Pacquiao and some other people, who retired at age 26 and who bit a guy's eye out in the ring make that list? Well, Freddie is a great guy and he's probably the most successful boxing coach. He also does mixed martial arts as well in history. His record speaks for itself.

But what interested me in the story of Freddie Roach was, and I met him and I got to know him very well, is he was not a great boxer. He was not a master boxer. He was a journeyman, right? You know, he took a lot of punches. His record was good but wasn't great. He was not bad, but he was maybe a mediocre boxer.

And his career is over at an early age. He took too many punches. I don't know exactly how old, early 30s. And as a lot of people in that situation, like you mentioned, Olympic athletes, he was very depressed. And he's wandering around Las Vegas trying to make a living. He's doing telemarketing, you know, and he's like reaching the bottom there, you know, he's, I don't know if he's suicidal, but he's close to it.

And then he wanders into a gym and he starts sort of seeing some boxers training there and he starts helping one of them. And I mentioned that moment where Yost Elfer said, Robert, do you have any ideas for a book? And suddenly, whoa, yeah. Helping this person, suddenly he had that light bulb go off in his head going, this is what I was meant to do. I'm not a very good boxer but I am a great teacher.

I know boxing. I know the strategy. It's all in my head. I couldn't perform the right thing but I know about it in my head. And he was able to translate that skill. So I love that story for the ability, the lesson that it has, that you might be that lawyer who's 29 years old, who's like Freddie Roach, who's boxed out, who's taking concussions, who's taking too many punches to the head, and you can segue into something else and become a master.

As long as you understand that Freddie didn't go saying, I'm going to become a politician. I'm going to become a writer. I'm going to come a rock. No, he's going to take his boxing skills and become a great teacher. And over the course of 10, 15, 20 years of teaching, he knew every little aspect of that, of what we call the beautiful sport, the strategy of boxing. He had it in his head.

He wasn't the man punching, but he was the man telegraph, telling people how to punch. I think it's an amazing story, an amazing lesson. One of the phases of mastery is apprenticeship. You just talked about 10,000 hours, but you said it's 20,000 hours. I think when people hear that number, Robert, they say, holy shit, there's no way I can do that to master something. That's a lot of hours. You know, when I was pulling nails out of those boards on the island of Crete to get my pay my way off the island and I was pretty miserable, if I ever looked at the 500 boards that I had to pull out the nails,

I would have killed myself. I just did each board at a time, each rusty nail, and took them out one board at a time. You don't sit there and go, wow, I've got 20, I've got 19,800 hours ahead of me. You just do what you have to do. So here's the beauty of it, Randall. If you're starting out, you're 21 years

old and your apprenticeship starts, which is usually about 7 to 10 years long, whatever field you're in, and you have chosen something that you want, that interests you, that excites you, in some way it doesn't have to be exactly what you're going to end up doing, but it excites you. Those hours just float by. Yes know, yes, it's painful. Yes, you have to learn things. You have to practice. You have to take your punches. You have to take some pain.

You have to, people have to criticize you. But in general, you're having a great time. You're learning. You're young. You look good. You have energy. People like you. You know, when you're in your 20s, life is beautiful.

I don't care, you know, how depressed, how poor you are. You're 20 and you have all this energy. It should be wonderful. So you're not sitting there thinking about each hour. You're enjoying it. So if you're Kobe Bryant, God rest him, if you're 20 years old and you're just starting in the NBA, you're not thinking of all the jump shot,

the next 10,000 jump shots you have to take. You're in the moment. You're getting better each day. You're progressing, you're competing. You're getting better and you're enjoying it. You love it because he had a great love of basketball. So you don't sit there and count the hours. You'd kill yourself if you did.

You're in the moment. But if you don't find the career that was meant for you, if you have a bad match, if you were meant to be a basketball player and you're a lawyer, that's a terrible metaphor but it's something like that, you're going to be miserable. You're going to be counting those hours. You're going to be going, damn it, I have to do law for eight more years and I have to put 10,000 hours, I'm never going to make it. You're going to tune out, you're going to be a failure. You're going to start taking drugs or something.

I hope you're enjoying this video so far. But before we jump back in, I want to know if you've ever thought about what you need to do to reach a nice level of success in your life. Over the last 25 years, I've been an advisor to more than 50 companies. I've invested nearly a hundred including Google lift and Seagate and I also co-founded a company that today is worth more than 15 billion dollars. I've been incredibly blessed in my journey and at this stage in my life I want to give back. I want to share the lessons I've learned so you can reach incredible success way faster than I did. In my own journey I've learned that having the right mentor is a massive advantage to achieving our goals. I'm hugely passionate about mentoring others and I'm

looking for a few hungry entrepreneurs who are excited to take action on their journey to incredible future success. So that's you, I've got an opportunity. In the description of this video there's a link where you can apply to work with me. All you need to do is answer a few simple questions and if you're a good fit my team will reach out so we can build a game plan together. All right now let's get back to the video. You said everyone in life has a purpose, life's purpose, a unique purpose. Is that really true? You talk about life's task.

There's so many people I know who are lost and they don't have a purpose. So for those people, how do they find it? Well, it's the million dollar question. If I could summarize that in two minutes, I'd be a billionaire. So it takes a little longer. But the gist of it is, I'll put it this way. When you were born, you have a DNA, a combination

of genetic factors that have never existed in the history of the universe and will never exist in the future. The number of permutations of combinations in that code are just mathematically impossible to calculate. So you are a unique individual at birth, right? Your brain is wired in a very particular way. Your parents are also wired in their own particular weird way. They're going to be raising you in their own unique, weird,

unique style of raising and parenting. And then your early years and your encounters are going to be unlike anybody else. But you are a unique individual. You're like a flower that has never existed before, right? There is something about you that will never be replicated in the history of the universe. That uniqueness points to something that is your life's task. What your brain is, how you're wired differently, what that sensitivity is in you, is an indication of what you were meant to do. And if you look at anybody who succeeds in this world,

anybody who's powerful, anybody that you admire, you can say one thing, they're one of a kind, they're unique, right? I'm not a great admirer of Elon Musk, particularly nowadays, but he's very successful, there's nobody else like him. There was nobody else like Steve Jobs, there's nobody else like him. There was nobody else like Steve Jobs. There's nobody else like 50 Cent. 50 came from the worst part of America, South Side Queens.

All the cards stacked against him. And all the friends that he knew are either dead or in prison. Yet he succeeded. He's unique. He's one of a kind because he understood what made him different. Understanding what makes you different is your life's task. If you understand it, if you cultivate that seed and make something unique, you will have found your life's task.

When we're younger, our brains function differently. We're more emotionally engaged in things that we're interested in. It gets harder and harder when you're 25, 35, or 45. So can you learn as effectively to master something as you get older? You haven't found life's purpose at 45 or 55. Can you still do it? Look, my advice to people is don't get into that situation. Avoid it at all costs. Yeah, but there's a lot of people listening to this where 30 mid-career professionals... 30 is very possible. 45? You're pushing it. Okay. I'm sorry to say, I

don't want to be giving false hope. I mean there are examples of people who at that age have figured, have taken their career and what they've learned because really what it's about is... So for instance, in Mastery I talk about the story of Paul Graham, the man who founded Y Combinator, the most successful tech startup school that ever existed for entrepreneurs, right? He sold it, and Sam Altman became the owner of it. We all know what's happened to Sam Altman, somebody I met when I was interviewing Paul Graham. Anyway, Paul Graham started out studying computer coding

and AI even back in the late 70s. He was a hacker his whole life as a kid and he studied programming in college and he got a PhD in it and he burned out and he wasn't interested in it anymore. He got sick of it and he was interested in art and design and he went to Italy and he studied painting in Italy. And then he comes back to New York and he's painting in his loft in Soho or wherever,

not making any money. And he hears an ad on the radio for Netscape and how the future and the internet will be selling things on the internet, which nobody had ever heard of. So the light bulb goes in his head, goes, I can take my coding skills, my programming, and I can take my skills in art and design and I can combine them to design a very aesthetically pleasing and very grabbing and very effective internet shop which he ended up selling to Yahoo, the first internet shop ever created, made his first fortune and then the rest is history. The lesson I'm trying to tell you here is he reached this point in his early 30s. He took his skills that he had loved

and he put them together in a unique way and he developed something monstrously successful. Even if you're in your mid-50s, you've probably had several different careers, several different things. If you can loosen yourself up and not be so rigid in your thinking, you could probably take the different skills you've acquired and combine them in something unique. If you're open and creative, the problem is when you're young, you're open and creative and willing to do things, you're flexible, you're open and creative and willing to do things. You're flexible, you know, you have an open spirit.

And when you're older, you think you know everything and you're so rigid, you're so on a one track. So that's the problem that you face. How much of our mastery is determined by our passion and just how far can passion take us to be successful? I don't like the word passion because it sounds like a perfume ad or something. It's not, I don't like that word passion because it sounds like a perfume ad or something. It's not, I don't like that word. I like the word desire. Okay? So, because passion is like something kind of uncontrolled.

It's too strong. You want to have the desire for something. So when I first, when I was in college, I studied French for two, three years because I love foreign languages. And then I went to Paris where I worked in a hotel. And damn it, I couldn't speak three words. I couldn't order breakfast. I couldn't tell, you know, what I wanted a room for this kind of thing.

I couldn't do anything. I hadn't learned a thing. And then when I was at the hotel, I think before I was at the hotel, I met this French girl that I was really excited about. I wanted to seduce her, right? She was fantastic. In two months, I learned more French than three years of college because I wanted to. I had the desire. So if you desire something, you learn at a faster rate because you're motivated, your mind is open. When you don't want to learn something, you're 26 and you have to study algebra, you're never going to learn because you don't want to. You're tuning it out, you're not focused.

But if you're focused on something and you desire it, your mind just is absorbing it at a much faster rate. So desire is the key to learning in anything. I do a lot of coaching. I do coaching with interns and I have a professional coaching business now where I'm coaching people who want to grow their businesses, be a better professional. One of the things that people are motivated most about in their jobs is money. And money ranks usually at the top of the list when you ask people what they're most interested in. You said in your book that people should take half salary to learn more, but at some point

in people's lives, that's not practical. So at what point do you say we should do it? At what point do you say it's not practical, we shouldn't do it? Well, look at it this way. One of the richest men in the world at his death was Steve Jobs. I know there were other people wealthier, but he was worth several billion. And if he were still alive, he'd be worth incredible amount of money. He was never interested in money.

It never crossed his mind. It was never something that motivated him. What motivated me, if you read the biography by Walter Isaac Singel, you'll understand this. What motivated him was creating the perfect design. He was a perfectionist. He was obsessed with creating the perfect design. And because he created the perfect design, he became fabulously wealthy. If money is your primary interest, you're not going to be creating something unique and different. You're going to be following what other people are doing.

The path to money is what that person did. I'm just going to imitate them because business is full of imitators. Believe me, I know. I served on the board of directors for a publicly traded company. Business people are very frightened. They're always following what the other guy or other woman did, right? Okay? That's what's going to happen if money is your motivation. You're not going to stick your neck out there and start a business that's a risk, that could lose a lot of money, but could be fabulously successful if it takes

off. The other thing is, if you a small company that's small, that's just starting out but is paying you a pittance 20, 30 thousand a year or whatever that would be, you're going to be learning so much because you can be hands-on. You're going to have responsibility whereas if you take that six figure figure at Golden Sacks, you're not going to be learning anything because you're surrounded by all these other whippersnappers from Yale who are just as motivated as you are and you're all sitting around, you're not hands on, you don't have any responsibility. So if you're young, be willing to be poor, be willing to be hungry. You can eat ramen and things like that.

I know I lived on that for several years. You can't when you're thirties and forties, you get, it's depressing, but you can eat, you can live more cheaply and you're gonna learn and you're gonna be excited and you're gonna take risks. If money's your only value, you're never gonna take risks and risks is where the money, true money really lies. When I was an intern in Washington,

I worked at the National Crime Prevention Council in Watergate, Safeway. Man, you've had a lot of different, you've had more jobs than me. Well, this is an internship. I have had a lot of jobs. We would buy a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese for 99 cents.

We got four meals out of that bad boy. It was great. You know, really makes you stronger. One of the things, and it's you pointing to, I've had a lot of jobs. A lot of people I know have had lots of jobs. You were at this job for seven years, and then you said, oh my God, I just wasted all that time.

It's not what I wanna do. Now I wanna go into something else. Not true? What do you mean, not true? Is it, you said that nothing's a waste of time. Your career will follow you and you never know what you learn, how valuable it is in your future. It's all in your head, it's all in who you are.

So I've given advice to people who were depressed. They had like the equivalent of a fast food job, flipping burgers, it wasn't exactly that, but something like that. And they were really depressed. And I said, look, look at your job differently, okay? First of all, you're learning what you hate. You don't wanna be doing this forever.

So there's a motivating factor, okay? So you're learning that every day on the job. You're telling yourself, I've got to improve myself. The second thing is, you're dealing with people all of the time. People you don't necessarily like, customers, etc. You're learning about human nature. You're learning about people.

Everything is a learning experience. Even the worst thing going on, the horrible smells, the food frying, etc. You're learning, you're learning, you're learning, if that's your mindset, right? So then when it comes time to move on to something else, you have feel like you've wasted your time. That's what I talk about alive time and dead time. Dead time is just, oh, I can't wait for these three hours to pass. I just got to get there. Or I'm going to, you know, I'm learning in these three hours. I'm learning what's going on. I'm learning about observing, observing myself, I'm observing people, I'm learning in these three hours. I'm learning what's going on. I'm learning about observing. I'm observing myself.

I'm observing people. I'm observing the craft, the trade that I'm doing, et cetera. That's not dead time. That's a lifetime. You're learning, okay? So that's the attitude that you want to apply to any circumstance in life. And so I would tell people stuck in these horrible jobs,

I would say, look, you've got a – this was one case I'm thinking of in particular. You're 27. You've got a wife. You've got two kids and they're depending on you for support. You've got a crap job. You can't quit because you need to support them. But if you keep going on, you're going to kill yourself.

You're so unhappy. Here's what you do. All right? You get online. There's something that excites you that interests you. First of all, we discussed what maybe could be a career that interested him. Get online and start researching it a little bit, researching the schools, the night classes you can take, the great thing about the internet is you can learn skills online. There's all kind of online courses.

Find something like that, okay? We discussed it, he found it, and then I said, all right, an hour every night after you come home, you're gonna devote to following these courses online, okay? In six months, you're gonna take classes at a real school. Just telling him that, just coming up with that plan flipped a switch in his brain, and he wasn't unhappy anymore.

He was feeling good, he was feeling hopeful. He had a plan and that's what it takes him like. You just have to have some hope and a plan. One of the things I think that's important to our growth and our success is finding great mentors in life. We're here today because you're mentoring Max Schleermerhorn, who's an incredible guy, he's sitting right over there right now. How important is mentorship in all of our success and how does someone have Robert Green become their mentor? Well, first of all, Max is more successful than I am so I should be mentoring under him. Max is a fucking stud. Yeah, yeah, you know, when it comes to money, he's certainly making

more money than I ever did so So I should be studying under Max. But anyway... By the way, for those people who don't know Max, he's 20 years old. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. How do you think that makes me feel? Right? I didn't make any money until I was 37, 38.

Anyway, mentorship is very important because it can accelerate the learning process. So if you sit there and go, God, 10,000 hours, seven years, how depressing. But if you have a good mentor who can steer you in the right direction, that knows the mistakes you're going to make, that knows don't go this path, follow this path, don't do this, do that instead, you're going to save time. You're not going to make the save time. You're not going to make the same mistakes, you're not going to slog your way through the battlefield. You'll have more energy and more direction. It can save you time. It's also like the equivalent

of a second parent because you don't get to choose your parents. Sometimes that's okay, sometimes it's not. And the second parent is somebody you get to choose. And you choose them not because they're highly successful, not because they look good or they've got charisma. You choose them because you want to follow their path. There's somebody you admire. Your spirits align. And it's a really enriching human experience. We were talking earlier about dating and how inhuman it can be.

Well, mentoring is a very human one-on-one experience where you're interacting with someone who knows a lot more than you. It's very exciting and it's very direct and it's very immediate and it can save you a lot of time and energy. It's a very enriching experience that not many people really get to have in life. And I'm telling you, in the book Mastery, I explained the kind of mentors, mentees, mentors, I'm sorry, that you should choose because you need to choose wisely. But as for me, probably besides Max, well, I can't take credit for Max's success because

that's pretty much on his own. But I was the mentor to Ryan Holiday, who we all know is a highly successful bestselling author. Huge. Yeah, he's written more books than I have and he's like half my age. And he was my mentee and it was great because he was so smart and it was a lot of fun for me because I spent so much of my time alone in my office thinking. I don't have as

much human interaction as I like and here was somebody that I could bounce ideas off of and he was he was really smart and it worked and it was very satisfying for me to take Ryan and instruct him. I cannot take credit for his success, don't get me wrong, but I helped him figure out how to write. I gave him the scheme, the bare bones of how to write a book and how to write a bestselling book. I showed him the way, the path.

I gave him my system of taking notes. I showed him how to research. And he took it to another level. But it's immensely satisfying. I don't have any children, you know, for good or for bad. I consider my children my seven books, right? But having Ryan, he's almost like a son to me. He's almost like the kid I never had.

So it's a very satisfying feeling for me. One of the things that's contributed to my success is something I call extreme preparation. I'm writing a book by the same title. It's something I coach and teach. How important is out preparing everybody else? When someone's spending 10 hours for something, you're spending reading 200 books preparing for your next book been your success.

Preparation is extremely important. It's one of the most important laws in the 48 laws plan all the way to the end. And, you know, people don't understand planning and preparation. They think of it as kind of drudgery, something that's kind of painful. But actually preparation and planning can be a hell of a lot of fun if you look at it the right way. All of your creative energy goes into those years of preparing. You're foreseeing the consequences of your action.

What could go wrong? What if this happens? Well, I'm going to go in this direction or that direction. It gives you freedom. It's a very liberating sentiment. I talk in my war book, I talk about the great film director, Alfred Hitchcock. If you've ever been on a film set like I have, it's utter chaos. Everybody yelling and screaming.

There's so many millions of dollars at stake. Actors have their ego. The producers have their ego. It's hell, right? It's literally hell, okay? Alfred Hitchcock would be on the set and he'd be falling asleep. He'd be snoozing.

You could understand what the hell's going on here. He's not even directing. They nicknamed him Buddha because he was just like calm, almost to the extent of snoring on set. The reason he was, he was just like calm almost to the extent of snoring on set. The reason he was he was so prepared. He had figured everything out in advance to the details of the costumes that the women would wear, the colors that they would be, the way he would edit it, exactly the lighting that he wanted, how they would deliver their lines. He worked on the script in advance so it would be the kind of script that he wanted. Everything was prepared in advance so he could be calm.

Being prepared allows you that kind of calmness because you've foreseen all of the possible things that can go wrong. And when they do go wrong, you have an answer. You don't panic. You don't go make some stupid decision that's going to make everything worse. You thought in advance. You don't have the perfect answer but you have a good enough answer and things go back on the tracks and everything is sort of smooth. Preparation gives you that feeling of calmness and confidence.

The more you prepare, the calmer you will be and the more confident you will be heading into any kind of situation. So you know, life is like a battlefield. It's chaotic, it's messy, there's smoke everywhere, there's soldiers dying. And when you look at the level there, everything seems confusing. But if you climb up 100 feet and you're on the side of a mountain, you look down, things kind of make sense. You can see patterns.

If you climb to the top of the mountain, you see everything clearly. You understand exactly where people are, where the battles, how it's going to progress. Climbing up that mountain and seeing further into the future and being better prepared is being like a god. You understand the situation in kind of a god-like way. Preparation is extremely important and I use it in great detail for my work. We're at the end of our show and I always conclude the end of my show with a game called fill in the blank to excellence. Are you ready to play? Not really. I'm not good at these kind of things.

Here we go. Well, we got some great questions for you. The biggest lesson I've learned in my life is... Don't learn lessons, just be open to the moment. No circumstance is the same and you have to kind of see what's going on in the present and don't be trapped in the past. So if I learned a lesson when I was 21, it will not be relevant to when I'm in my 60s. My number one professional goal is? To write a couple more books that maybe go off in different directions. I've always been somebody who was kind of a failed novelist. I'd like to write some fiction. That would be my

professional goal to have like three or four more books in me before I die and they're kind of get out some of my weirdness that I have in my head. My number one personal goal is? To live as long as my mother and to be healthy. The one thing everybody should say to themselves when they wake up in the morning is? To live as long as my mother and to be healthy. The one thing everybody should say to themselves when they wake up in the morning is? It's insane to be alive. It's like the strangest experience anyone could ever have imagined. To be in the year 2025 and to know who we were 50, 60,000 years ago, to know the history of the planet and the cosmos.

To be alive and the chances of you not being alive and being who you are are so incredible you should wake up and just say, man, this is awesome. This is unbelievable. It's like being on a drug. My biggest regret is... My motto in life is, as they say in French, moi je ne regrette rien. I don't regret anything. Because everything had a purpose to it. Amor fati is my motto.

My biggest fear is? Writing a book that nobody likes. The craziest thing that's happened in my career is? Writing a book with 50 cent and spending six months with him and going and having this weirdest experiences I've ever had. The funniest thing that's happened in my career is... I don't know if it's the funniest, but for so long, I was just this writer of books, nobody knew what I look like or anything. And now all of a sudden, people are coming up to me on

the street, which I've never had before. And you know, my wife is with me and like, it's really weird and it's kind of makes me laugh and it makes me feel really good. But it's happening more and more when it's all because of social media. The best advice I've ever received is... Do what you love and the money will come. The worst advice I've ever received is... Become a lawyer or a Dr. Robert. If you could pick one trait that contributed to someone's success, it would be...

Being able to take criticism. The most important quality of a leader is... Continuing to learn and not think like they have all the answers. The one quality that's going to make you a horrific leader is... The opposite, thinking you know everything. Ten years from now I'm going to be... Alive. The most important thing I'm going to be... Alive. The most important thing that's contributed to my success is...

I think it's not being afraid to be weird and unique and different. The biggest problem in the United States today is... Too many fearful people. Not enough people willing to take chances and risks. The biggest problem in the world today is... Well, unfortunately I would say it's global warming and climate change.

The biggest problem with young professionals today is... They're too much of in a hurry to make money. The one thing I've dreamt about doing for a long time, but haven't is... My body is the way it is, but I was a long distance swimmer and I wanted to like do this incredible long distance swimming in the ocean.

Never be able to do it. If I could go back and give my 21-year-old self one piece of advice, it would be... You're doing fine. Don't worry. Everything will work out in the end. Don't listen to my advice. Just do what you're doing. If you could meet one person in the world who is alive today, it would be... Bob Dylan. If you could have dinner with any person in the world other than Bob Dylan who would it be? Maybe Shohei Otani, somebody like that. My guess is you could probably have

dinner with them. Probably have the right people and I'm sure there's a lot of fans who work for the Dodgers. Oh god I'm'm a huge Dodger fan anyway, so yeah. If you were President Trump today, the next thing you would do is... Resign. Sorry, I'm letting out my true colors, but that's what I would say. If you were on your deathbed and you had 30 seconds before you passed away and had to tell your girlfriend Anna of 29 years one piece of advice before you died, what would that be?

Enjoy the rest of your life, marry someone else, remember me but you know, don't get stuck in the past. The one question you wish I had asked you but didn't is? You didn't ask me about the book that I'm writing. Tell us about the book that you're writing. I'm writing a book on the sublime. It's a little bit inspired by my near-death experience six years ago when I had my stroke, but it was a book that I've been planning to write since probably the year 2005. And essentially, my idea is that there's a realm of experience out there that we don't

get to have because we're afraid and because we live in these kind of limited circles of conventions and rules and what other people are doing. And outside that circle are experiences that are new, that are unpredictable, that are exciting, that reveal to you that life is this incredibly strange and bizarre journey, but you're too enmeshed in your phone and your small worlds, whereas there's something cosmic out there.

I'm trying to open your eyes to the strangeness of being alive, to the one, to the insanity of living on this planet Earth in this infinite cosmos of what it means to have a brain, to share the planet with these strange animals that we share it with, you know, on and on and on. And so I'm trying to mine this feeling I've had, because it's not an intellectual book, it's a feeling sensation about how there are things that you can't put into words that are so powerful.

And they're the best experiences that you can have in life. That's sort of what the book is. It's a departure for me and a lot of people are going to scratch their heads and go, is this the guy who wrote the 48 Laws of Power? What happened to him? Is there a publication date? Next year, fall of next year. My last question is,

are there any questions that you want to ask me? How do you think this interview went? I loved it, I absolutely loved it. Your answers are insightful, educational, motivational, and inspirational, and that is the goal of my show.

Did I keep them short enough? We had a, you know, we had a lot we had a lot to cover and I know we're here for some period of time, but this one of the best interviews I think I've ever done and you're one of the most fascinating talented people I've ever interviewed. I wasn't fishing for that. Yeah Yeah, but I'm giving it to you anyway. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Well, thanks Randall. That was really exciting I really appreciate you being here. Shout out to Max again for- Yeah, thank you, Max. Setting this up. Grateful, great guy, great future ahead of him.

Thank you. I look forward to getting to know you better and seeing you again. Yeah, I do too. I just, we're practically neighbors. We're neighbors. Or at least my mother is. Pleasure to meet you.

Pleasure to meet you too, man.