Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Robert Greene - Optimizing Your Reality - [Invest Like the Best, EP.379]

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

My guest today is Robert Greene, author of many books but perhaps most famous for his books "48 Laws of Power" and "Mastery." He has spent his life studying why people behave like they do and why some go on to build great things. I love his idea of finding your life's purpose, which we explore in detail. Please enjoy my conversation with Robert Greene. Listen to Founders Podcast For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Tegus, where we're changing the game in investment research. Step away from outdated, inefficient methods and into the future with our platform, proudly hosting over 100,000 transcripts – with over 25,000 transcripts added just this year alone. Our platform grows eight times faster and adds twice as much monthly content as our competitors, putting us at the forefront of the industry. Plus, with 75% of private market transcripts available exclusively on Tegus, we offer insights you simply can't find elsewhere. See the difference a vast, quality-driven transcript library makes. Unlock your free trial at tegus.com/patrick. ----- Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.  Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com). Show Notes: (00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like the Best (00:03:17) First Question - Exploring Reality and Human Behavior (00:07:41) The Concept of Masks and Social Roles (00:10:47) The Sublime and Social Conventions (00:13:48) Writing 'The 48 Laws of Power' (00:16:38) Defining and Understanding Power (00:18:01) Historical Figures and Adaptation (00:23:59) Modern Applications of Power Laws (00:31:57) The Boldness of Deception (00:32:54) Exploring Good and Evil (00:35:56) The Art of Seduction and AI (00:38:31) Defining Mastery (00:42:44) Discovering Your Life's Task (00:51:53) The Power of Observation (00:59:56) The Kindest Thing Anyone Has Ever Done for Robert

Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts, and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes, and other resources to keep learning at join colossus.com. Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of positive sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of positive sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc. My guest today is Robert Green, author of many books, but perhaps most famous for his books the 48 laws of power and mastery. He has spent his life studying while.

why people behave like they do and why some build great things. I love his idea of finding your life's purpose, which we explore in detail. Please enjoy my conversation with Robert Green. So, Robert, in preparation for our conversation today, I went back and reviewed all your books and the notes I had made in them over the many years and was trying to identify a common question that might have been behind all of them. And the only thing I could come up with was something about man and his dominion over his surroundings and his influence over his surroundings, both the earth and other people and other

species. And I'm curious what your thought on this question is, is there a common thread that you've been pulling? I think so. I would call it the common thread is reality. So I think most of us are divorced from reality. We live in a social realm and we wear masks and we pretend to be something that we're not. We're constantly performing to others and playing games. And my books are trying to take a look a little bit behind that mask as far as possible and see what's really going on in the human psyche in our souls and decipher that. So even mastery, which is the least Machiavellian of my books, if you will, I'm looking at the brain and trying to get behind what creates excellence in the world and even the social aspect of that, as opposed to the superficial

ideas and the belief in you're just born a certain way, you're just talented, or you can hack your way to being a genius, which is just bullshit. So I'm trying to get at the reality as opposed to the received ideas that are so prevalent in our culture. And if you had to rewind your own personal history to the very first seed of that interest in reality, the raw curiosity, is there some point that that brings you back to? Yeah, my parents and childhood is. The problem for most of us is we forget our childhood.

We forget what we felt and what we saw when we were children. But I think a lot of it and I'm very aware of it. So children have the sense that their parents are odd. They're like strangers, that they're actors, that they're performing. And I remember when I was very young, four or five years old. I'm an older guy, so I hate to say it. I'm going back to the 1960s. But my parents had these parties, the drinking and the smoking and their friends.

The adults are so weird. What are they doing? It was because children, we like to play. We played games. We pretended to be certain things. But we knew we were pretending. We knew we were putting on masks playing rules, but they didn't seem to be doing that. They seemed to take it seriously.

And I remember being very struck by the weirdness of my parents' social life and how it seemed faked to me. And I think that was the seeds for a lot of things that flowed out of it. I could go into other things. My obsession with games, I've always been deeply, deeply obsessed with games and the world that you create inside of a game. But I'd say that's the main seed that you're wanting me to uncover. What is it about games that obsesses you?

draws you in? Well, when I was a boy, I was left alone a lot, so I invented my own games. A lot of them were sports games or war games, because those are my two boyhood passions, I hate to say. So what I loved was using my imagination to create a world. It was my world. I dominated it. I was like a god inside of this world. And when you play a game, you enter a new realm. It has its own rules. It could be poker, it could be chess, it could be backgammon, you're entering a world with its own rules, and everything inside of that world is like a bubble, and you enter it, and it takes you over. So when I entered the work world as a young man, 21 years old, I'd see my first real serious job was maybe when I was 22, because I had many jobs before then. I thought of it as a game.

I thought people were playing this weird game of power game, where the rules aren't written down, They don't come with instructions. They don't tell you how to roll the dice or what cards mean or anything. It's all in the head. It's all psychological. But people are playing a game and they're making moves. So the idea is some people want to say, oh, I'm not playing a game. I'm not like that.

I'm not interested in power. I'm not ambitious. My mind was, that's a move in the game. That's a move of the pawn in this particular position. You're playing a game. You're just pretending that you're being something that you're not. So the idea that everything social has rules. If not, we couldn't live, we couldn't govern ourselves, we couldn't control ourselves. And to be aware of those rules and to see them in operation and the

psychology behind it has always fascinated me. You've mentioned the phrase masks a few times. I love that roomy quote, take off your mask because your face is glorious. I love that quote. And I would love to hear you riff on masks, where they come from, why we wear them, just picturing the cocktail party from your parents. You can just see the absurd. of some of it, but we all do it all the time. What is the source of masks in your opinion? Well, it's very interesting you ask that because it happens to be the chapter I'm writing in my book right now. I'm writing a chapter on what it was called the daemon in ancient philosophy, which is Socrates had a daemon that lived inside of him that told him what he wanted to do.

So I'm just in this idea of the doubleness of our nature that we have two selves. And the mask is our social self. So the word personality comes from the word persona, which is Latin meaning of mask, of playing a role. So when you're born, a child, a moment of your birth, just a piece of nature. You don't have a personality. There is no mask there. You're just a crying, euling, little pink thing, screaming, wanting food, wanting your mother's breast, etc. There's no personality there. You're just a big piece, a splinter of nature. So when you're a baby, you have what I would call an essence, something that's truly you and who you are. And then as you enter the social realm. You start distancing, you start losing a sense of that essential part of you.

You're educated. So you learn all the ideas that come from other people. You start imitating other people. You start being told, this is what's good, this is what's bad. So the bad things that are inside of all of us, you're ashamed of and you want to hide from people. You don't want to stick out, you don't want to seem weird or unusual. So slowly all of these pressures create a mask that you're wearing, you're performing. People expect you to be something. You have to live up to that. If you don't live up to that, they start to wonder about you. So who you are is shaped and formed by all of these social pressures to the point as you get older in particular because when you're younger, that mask is a little bit more fluid. It's a little more flexible. It's a little softer,

if you know, the clay hasn't hardened yet because you're a teenager. You're playing around with different roles that you want to perform socially. And in your 20s, you might do that a little bit. to get older, that mask hardens and stiffens. You see sometimes in people in their 50s, they wear a permanent frown. They've been frowning for so long. There's just, the mask has become their face. Some people have that fake smile, frozen in place. So the mask is something that we all have. You can't go out into the world and just be yourself. It wouldn't work. And it would cause a lot of problems. But the problem for us humans is that we're not aware of this. We're not aware that we're actually always playing a role, that we've lost sense of what's beneath the mask, what's behind

the mask. So that was the thing about the parents that struck me. They're playing a game. They're drinking these drinks. They're telling these jokes. They're pretending to be loose or whatever it was back then. But they're not aware that they're playing roles. And that's what struck me. And that's always struck me. I want to be aware of who I am and when I'm out in the social realm and I am performing. I know right now you're thinking a lot, reading a lot and writing a lot about the experience of the sublime. Do masks necessarily impede us or get in the way of experiencing the sublime in your research so far? Yes, very much so. So the sublime is something that lies beyond our normal day-to-day experience. I like to create a metaphor of a circle. So to be a

human being, instead have certain rules and conventions. I talked about games, but even any kind of social behavior requires certain guidelines and rules that you do not violate or bad things will happen. their unwritten rules. And that circle governs not only just what you do, but how you think. You're not supposed to really even have thoughts that go outside of this circle. It's culturally bound, standards that people have. At the same time that there's this circle, we humans by our nature, are attracted by exactly what's prohibited from us, exactly what lies beyond the conventions. And everything beyond those conventions is the sublime. So the social realm is the realm of what I call in many ways, the anti-sublime, although there can be aspects of social life that can be sublime,

such as group experiences, going to a rock concert and taking LSD, and wow, man, there's some ancient roots to group experiences and ecstatic moments, burning man or whatever might be, your cup of tea. So I don't say everything social is anti-sumpline. But I mean being inside that circle, being always social, being always concerned with how people see you. And your mind starts to shrink small and small and small and small. So that's all you can think about. And with social media, the word social, it's gotten even worse so that you can't even imagine

what lies outside of that realm that you enter when you look at your phone. So to be able to get out of all of the social pressures and to realize that you're a part of nature, there's something actually very deep and weird about being human, about being conscious itself. But everything that you don't think about, in order to be able to think about these things,

You have to turn off your phone. You have to maybe be alone or just with a friend out in nature or looking up the sky. You have to get out of the social realm. So the idea of there's something underneath the mass is what I'm writing right now about. And it is sublime. And it's moments almost kind of wordless. The sublime traditionally is something that makes it hard to express it in words because it goes beyond those limits that we're talking about. And a lot of those limits are linguistic. So we have words that describe. things, but they're conventions, their symbols, and not the reality. So sublime experiences go beyond the symbols and the conventions. It touches a core and you go, whoa, there's something outside of it. It makes your skin crawl. It makes your heartbeat faster, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So all of this requires that you're aware that you're wearing a mask and to be interested in something that lies behind it and to go kind of deeper into who you are and what it means to be alive. I love your framing earlier about the throughline being just curious about reality, how things actually are. And it's very interesting that very famous book you wrote, an early one was on power.

And then this notion of having to feel the thing you're writing about. So take me back to that. What did it feel like to inhabit the world of power? Well, it's very exciting because you have to think I was 36, 37 years old when I got the chance to write it. And I had no success up until then, no power in my life. I had many different jobs. Nothing was really working at. I had been working in Hollywood, which to me is the pithole.

I did not like it. I did not fit into it. There's all these power games. People were so smart. I'm talking about masks. That was just one world. That was one mask ball that you entered, period, costumes, and all that kind of stuff. So I was miserable in Hollywood.

And here I get a chance to write about power, something that obsesses me because I read a lot of history. And as I said, I'm looking behind the masks. And people are pretending to be so liberal, to be so saint-like, to be so virtuous. And yet they were, in Hollywood, many of them were A-holes. They were raging A-holes. They weren't nearly as saintly as they wanted people to believe. So here, I got the chance to write a book about that, to write a book about all the crap that people don't want to confront.

It's almost like bathroom stuff, power. I don't want to think about that. I want to think about these things that I have manipulations, that I do, the games that I play. It's a taboo. All those self-help books out there, the millions of them, they're so gentle and they're so sweet and they're so uplifting. But to me, that wasn't reality. I had so many bad bosses in all of my different jobs.

So many people who were so manipulative, sometimes even damn right, downright psychotic, that nobody's writing about this. They're writing all about as if we're just these cooperative, wonderful creatures. This is out of to manage, et cetera, et cetera. It just seemed like just a massive bullshit to me. So here I'm given a chance to write about the reality that I knew. And in the acknowledgments of the 48 loss of power, I thanked all of those people who had played games on me, who manipulated me, who told me I was never going to make it, et cetera, et cetera.

And I thanked them for providing all of the material for this book. I didn't name names. So entering that game, that board game, because it was like a board game, chess game, was very exciting for me. And I was much younger then. At the time, it wasn't really young, but I was much younger than I am now. And I had a lot of energy, and I just wanted to have a lot of fun with it.

I researched every period in history about power, every culture, men and women, every possible paradigm, every arena of action. And honestly, it was a lot of fun, and I've never written a book so fast. So I can't even imagine what it was like by then. I was almost like I was possessed in writing it. But I was totally immersed in that world of power when I wrote it. Can power be simply defined? Well, no, it can't be simply defined because it's a relational thing. It's a social game. Yes, there's power in nature. We can use all different forms of the word power, but I was talking

about the social aspect of power. And people are weird and the rules are slippery and elusive. And we don't know exactly how the psychology works. Things like always say less than necessary law number four. In my view, people who talk less. appear powerful. So power is a game of appearances. It's a social game, but that's not the only thing. So the essence of power is having a degree of control over the events and circumstances in your life. And I emphasize degree because life is full of randomness, it's full of things we can never, ever begin to control. Some people, their control element could be one or two percent. A person of power might reach six percent because they can control themselves and the ability to control yourself to make,

manage your appearances to shut up when you need to shut up, to know that it's dangerous to work with friends sometimes, to know these things and control yourself is power. So the element of having a greater margin of control over events, not full control, not even half control, but a little greater margin is to me how I would define power. But as I said, it's a very elusive concept. Do you have a favorite current or historical exemplar of a person with great social power, if you think in totality across all the 48 laws? Well, the icon in many ways was a man named Talleyrand in the 48 laws of power. He was a very Machiavelli figure.

And so the spirit of Machiavelli was very much behind the 48 laws of power because Machiavelli was the patron saint, You Love Schopenhauer. Machiavelli serves the same role in the Schopenhauer philosophy as Machiavelli. Machiavelli does to power. But Machiavelli himself was an extremely powerful person. He was just a mid-level diplomat. But Talirond was amazing. Machiavelli talked about Chisari Borgia as being an exemplar, but Borgia was bloody and evil. Tali Rahn certainly had a dark side to him. But what was so interesting about Tali Rang was he came from the aristocracy, very ancient old family. And then the French Revolution erupts, where most people are being guillotine, had any association

with the aristocracy. He manages to adapt to that and to become a revolutionary and to be involved in the revolution. And then as Napoleon rises to power, he becomes Napoleon's secondhand. And he knows every trick in the book, every one of those 48 laws of power, about how to manipulate Napoleon.

Because often, it's not the great powerful leader who's in control. It's the man or woman behind the throne. And Tali Rahm was the man behind the throne. And I had many examples of the book. We've always played to Napoleon. his huge ego and manipulated him in many ways. And then they reached a point where he realized Napoleon's going downhill.

He's going to lose it all shortly after he crowned himself, emperor. He goes, I got a plan for the next future. Napoleon's out. The king comes back in a restoration. And lo and behold, Talleyron is now a royalist. He just kept reinventing himself. And you can think this is weird and maybe even ugly. But if you're talking about somebody who knows the 48 laws of power,

Tali-Ran was the grand chess master of it all. I can save a few others, but he stands out in my mind. It sounds a little bit Kissinger-esque as someone that recently passed that seemed to always be in a position of power regardless of who was in power. Yes, but Kissinger was a republic and he was conservative. Imagine if Kissinger had gone from Kennedy being a diplomat with Kennedy and then transforms to Nixon and then goes to Rick. Talley-Rong surpasses that, this swings that he was able to adapt to.

So Machiavelli had this idea that a person of power was. What happens often, and I've noticed this in my business connections and my consulting work, this is a Machiavelli notion. People rise to the top because of a certain quality that they have. Aggression, supreme confidence, a real good sense of money and practical, technical issues, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There's a single quality that makes them stand up. They rise to the top, but then things change, times change. And what brought them to the top was often fitting into the spirit of the times, the zeitist, but as times change.

And as now they're on a new level, they can't adapt. And they fall down and they're crushed because they can't adapt. They only knew one thing. And so the great person, Tamaki Belli was the one who could adapt, who could change with the circumstances. To him, that was the ultimate figure of power. And to me, that's what Taliban represents. What was the method of recreation?

One of the laws, if I remember it correctly, is just recreate yourself. That's one of the laws of power. What did people that did that well share in common through time? because things change faster than ever now. So the value of adaptation is probably at an all-time high and rising. What was the common strategy or method of those who could recreate themselves effectively like Talleyrand? Well, it's being aware of what we were talking about earlier, that you're a performer,

that you're an actor on a stage. So for many, many centuries, every culture tends to have a metaphor that's like it's guiding metaphor. Today, everything's about computers and algorithms, et cetera. But for many, many centuries, it was the theater. All the world is a stage and we are players, the Shakespeare stuff. But it was a cultural metaphor that has deep roots. So the idea that I am an actor, that I'm playing a role, okay,

but sometimes actors get typecast, and this is who they are. You're a gunslinger, you're a courtesan, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And actors don't like that they want to be able to play many different roles. Well, it's the same thing in life. We get typecast as a certain thing. I'm a writer of self-help books. You're a podcaster of such and such. And this is how people see you.

Aware of that and aware of the dangers of other people pigeonholing you and labeling you a certain way means, all right, I want to play with that mask. I want to play with that performance. I want to become someone else. A great figure, one of the great people I use in the book for that is Julius Caesar, who had an immense obsession with the theater, the Latin theater at the time. And he always saw himself as a performer. He was always careful how his hair was combed and what color robes he wore, et cetera. he performed in front of his troops, and he managed to recreate himself from a soldier and a warrior to an emperor and then to Cleopatra's lover, etc. And I talk about George Sand and how women

tended to be labeled a certain way, and she was able to play with that and almost assume a man's costume in a man's role. So it's aware that you're performing, but that gives you the power to change the roles that you're playing. And, you know, in modern times, someone like Madonna would exemplify that. I remember growing up, Bob Dylan was like that because he had a style early on. He was a folk singer. Then all of a sudden he becomes a rock singer playing heavy rock music. Then he becomes a country Western person. He never allowed himself. And Bob Dylan, by the way, was somebody who read the 48 laws of power and it's very interested. And I happen to know that. He was constantly recreating himself. Beyonce coming out with a Western album.

People who are powerful recognize the dangers of being pigeonholed. And they learn or on to switch it up and surprise their audiences. There are two laws of power that fascinate me as a pair. You mentioned one of them already, which is always say less than necessary. The other one is court attention at all costs. So maybe draw the helpful contrast between these two interesting ideas. Well, one of the limitations about people's thinking, which can sometimes drive me crazy, they say, well, Robert, you're contradicting yourself all over the place.

You're saying court attention at all costs, but then you say, think as you like, but behave like, others, and then you say, you know, da-da-da-da-da. Well, I tell people in the law 48 of some formlessness, that you have to be fluid. Circumstances are never the same. There's no formula for success in life. So if you're a low-level employee at a company, always say less than necessary. It might get you in a lot of trouble because you have to talk. But if you're powerful, if you rise to the top, talking a lot reveals weakness, reveals insecurity. We all know people who can't shut up, and they try and cover it up with a lot of bluster, but we realize that there's something insecure going on,

because in the process of doing that, they're saying inevitably something stupid, but they have no self-control. So saying less than necessary is a signal that I have reached a position, and I have control, I can control my tongue, I can control what I say, which is not an easy thing to do as a human being, but it signals power, very much so. Court attention at all cost is more depending on where you are in life,

but particularly in our media era, it's extremely relevant for no matter where you are. And the icon for that was P.T. Barn, the grapes first in history, did court attention at all cost, although there's somebody in our world right now who's even better at that, and I won't even mention names, but you know who I'm talking about. But P.T. Barn was the 19th century master of him, and his idea was that no attention is bad attention. It's like oxygen. People pay attention to me, and I'm getting that oxygen. To be ignored is the worst thing. So he would deliberately do things that would upset people because he knew that would bring in attention.

One of his tricks that I loved is he had a museum in New York with all of his oddities, all those weird misshap and fetuses and things. It's like a museum of oddities that people loved. And sometimes people on the streets wouldn't come into his museum. It had it irritated him. So what he did is he hired the worst band of musicians he could find. And he had them sit on the balcony and perform horrible music that, I don't know, maybe in front on the street. The music was so bad, so irritating that people had to rush into his museum

to escape it. But he knew doing things that were ridiculous, people would talk about him and being talked about his power. So sometimes being talked about is not what you want in life. And you want to hide and you need to retreat a little bit and have laws about that. But the game today on social media with followers and attracting followers and being a quote unquote influencer, is all about courting attention. And it noticed, to me, when I look on social, when I look on Instagram or whatever, I think people, they're like clowns.

They're like going a little further than people used to go to get attention. Sometimes it seems a little bit ridiculous. I watch, I'm not going to name names certain people, and the way they shout, the way they have to say absurd, ridiculous, extreme things to get attention. They might as well be wearing a red rubber nose as far as I'm concerned.

They look like clowns to me. But that's the game. on social media core attention at all costs. It depends on the period you live in and the world that you actually are performing. So what do you think are the laws of power that have trended up and or down the most since you wrote the book, given the conditions of the modern world, given the social media and the connectedness and all the stuff we're all familiar with? Are there certain aspects of the laws that you think have become more relevant than when you wrote them and or less? I don't know about that. There's always an aspect of each law.

that's relevant. So crush your enemy totally. I love that one. People like to point out it's the most evil law of all. Yeah. And maybe in our hyper-correct world, you don't want to do that. But I didn't write it about individual behavior. I wrote it about business. And if you look at a company like Google or Microsoft or Facebook, crush your enemy totally. I'm sorry, but that's their philosophy. That's how they operate. The second any kind of competition pops up, their game is to buy it out. But crush it or put it out of existence. They cannot endure any competition. The monopolistic dynamic in business across even tech and other businesses is all about crushing your enemy totally. So it's very much relevant. Play a perfect courtier. Maybe that seems like a false thing and people nowadays

want to seem so genuine and real. But my thing is being genuine and rule is playing a role. It's a certain mask that you're wearing. You want people to take you as genuine and real. And in the social realm, nothing is genuine and nothing is where you're always performing. So trying to make people out as if you're not accord to you, just being yourself is a way of performing. I recently heard a story from a prominent tech entrepreneur who made the mistake of not crushing their enemy totally and gave the story in response to the question, what's the biggest mistake you've ever made? And the mistake was not crushing the enemy totally. So it's very true. And when you heard the story, it wasn't malice or mean. It was just business strength.

and its basic form. I wrote the book really before social media even existed. Internet was in its nascent phase. But to me, it demonstrates. So I take a law like, never isolate yourself. Fortresses are dangerous. I forget the exact word of July 18. And the idea was it's a military term that a fortress is the worst place to retreat to

because the enemy knows exactly where you are. You have no room to maneuver. They can lay siege to it and you go starve to death and diseases will happen. It looks great. It looks like you can protect yourself, but it's the worst place to be in. The idea was it's a social game. Being isolated is the most dangerous thing that can happen to. You have to circulate. You have to understand what's going on on the streets everywhere. That's a timeless law that goes back. I have a story from ancient China that demonstrates the dangers of this. And yet here we live. I wrote that came out in 1998. Here we are where that law is more relevant now than it's ever been.

because social media and the modern world doesn't alter human nature. It emphasizes it. It brings it out even more, things like envy and narcissism and all that stuff. Can you give your favorite examples of entering action with boldness or creating compelling spectacles? Those seem like extremely applicable modern laws. And I'm curious, what examples stand out to you through history of those two, or one of them? Well, I wrote that book thinking of con artists.

So in my idea of social being a game and people playing where. wearing masks, deception enters into that because you're never letting people know exactly what's going on with you to seal your attention, et cetera, et cetera. And con artists are like magicians that. They're great. And their stories are so interesting, how they deceive people with the big cons, the large cons, always fascinated me. Because I see politicians as con artists. I see business people as con artists. But these are the real things. These are the pure masters of the art. So one of the great con artists, there were several in the book, but one of them is a man named Count V. Victor Lustig. And that is not at all his real name. Trust me. It was George Zimmerman, I don't know,

was Count Victor Lustig. And he went to Paris, and his con game was one of the most brilliant that ever was. He decided that he was going to sell the Eiffel Tower. And the Eiffel Tower was clearly not for sale. Who would ever sell? Who owned the Power? Who could sell it? He created this. You did all the paperwork with all of the seals of the government. And then he invited these industrialists room where he was going to offer them that they could give bids on purchasing the Eiffel Tower. I'm not totally correct you. There was a need for repairs of the Eiffel Tower at the time. So it was slightly believable. It was really ridiculous at heart. And these industrialists were going, okay, all right, and they put their bids in, and he collected the money, and then he

disappeared. We made a million dollars off the sale of the Eiffel Tower. Somebody finally won the bid, paid him, and then the count disappeared. Then he returned to Paris, and he did the same. con a second time. Now, if that isn't boldness, I don't know what is. And the idea is, if you're going to lie about something, a small lie, people can see through, because it doesn't seem, they can sense the distortion that's going on. But a big lie like that, someone who's so bold is to sell the Eiffel Tower, who would be crazy enough to make that a con game, who would be crazy enough to deceive on that level? So it has to be true. It has to be real. So being bolder with your Deceptions, which is often a game that, unfortunately, politicians play works better than being

meager with your lie and your deceptions. So those are the best example of entering action with boldness as far as spectacles in South Dakota. What did all of your investigation of power lead you to believe about good and evil, the concepts of good and evil versus reality? What do you think of those concepts and where do they belong in all this? Well, they definitely belong. I would never say that there's no such thing as ethics. I believe personally in treating people as well as I can, you won't find. I hope too many people out there who talk about Robert Green as being a mean bastard. Manipulent bastard. There might be, who knows? As far as I know. So personally, I like to not engage in a lot of those things. I'm revealing what other people do. But on the other hand,

it's something that I wrote about in my book on human nature. We all have a dark side. We all have a shadow. what Jung would call the shadow. And a lot of us, the game that we play is we try and repress it. We try not to show any of it in public. It can be our ugliest desires, our competitive instincts, our ambition, even our desires to hurt people, our ambivalence. People have this notion that when we feel an emotion, or it's even somebody we love, it's like this pure thing.

But emotions are never pure. We're always ambivalent. So even with our parents or our loved ones, we have little elements of hostility. We still have moments of that. So we have a dark side, and yet we don't want to omit it. So what annoys me are people trying to pretend that these saints, that they're these virtuous people, the dark side, people who pretend the most, the dark side leaks out and all kinds

of their behavior. So to me, to be a truly, quote unquote, ethical human being, if there is such a thing, is to recognize to be a self-aware that you're not as good as you think you are. You're not as virtuous. You're not as saintly, that you have a dark, maybe even an evil side to you. because that is human nature. That is how we're born. That is who we are. So I'm not going to wrestle with what exactly is good or what exactly is evil. But I do think true virtue, if you will, comes from awareness of your complete self, your good side and your dark side as well.

To take one of your ideas from earlier that the zeitgeist today is so much about algorithms. And obviously with artificial intelligence, which I'm super curious for your read on, just watching this get built and unfold up against all the research you've done. How you would program an algorithm to be seductive? Lots of talk now about the new open AI voice sounding like the movie her. If you were programming the voice to be as seductive as possible, maybe even to trick people into doing your bidding through artificial intelligence, how would you think about the variables in the seduction equation? Well, I mean, it's very interesting question, but it's also a bit of an oxymoron or a paradox because seduction depends on being a human being, depends on mirror

neurons, depends on picking up all the nonverbal cues in a human being. And there's no AI on the planet that will ever be able to do that. Maybe in 500 years if there's some insane breakthrough. So people are so bad at seduction or the people who are bad at seduction. They're not paying attention. They're not living with the human being, the flesh person in front of them. They've been in their phone so long, but they've lost the ability to interact and to look at another person and to pick up all of the cues that they're emitting. So I say seduction is a language, but it's not really a language with words, although it can be, but the words and seduction are actually very demonic, and I have a chapter on it. But mostly it's a language of gesture,

it's a language of scent, it's a language of the gifts that you give. It's the language of your behavior of how you show up, of how you dress, where you take people to. It has nothing to do with words. Do you say, I love you? Well, I say I love you can have its effect. The demonstrating that I love you is infinitely more powerful through gestures. So all of this nonverbal language that is involved in seduction is what people are not good at because they're so immersed in words. They're so immersed in the virtual aspect that they're not attuned with their bodies enough. Now, AI doesn't have a body. And you have to know. So the game in seduction is if you appear to be a seducer, you're going to turn people off because they can

see through it. That's what would happen with an AI generated seducing. It'd be so obvious. The game is to not appear that you're seducing. But you can't fake that. That's very hard to fake. So what you have to do is you also have to fall in love to a degree with the person you're seducing. You have to be vulnerable to them. Now can the computer be vulnerable? I don't think so. I don't even know if that can't even entertain that notion. But if there's a woman out there that I'm trying to seduce, and I am not under her spell. It's going to be obvious what I'm trying to do. So in Dangerous Liaison,

is probably the greatest novel about seduction. There's this, the Ficom Valmont, who's the great seducer in it. He wants to seduce the most prudish woman that he can find because it's the ultimate challenge to him. And everybody knows his reputation. Every woman in France knows how dastardly he is.

And the President de Tourville knows how dastardly he is. And his seduction attempts, he uses all the tricks. they're not working because she sees through and he's getting so fresh. Finally, he reaches a point where he finds himself actually falling in love with her because he's tried so hard. It's never happened to him before. He's never let his emotions run.

And the moment he falls in love with her, she starts falling for him. So the lesson I gleaned from that is you have to have some of the emotions that you're trying to inject in the other person and yourself as well. And people are not good at that. They're too in their heads. And seduction is a game where you're getting out. of your head into your body and playing this mating ritual that I don't think AI could ever achieve. I think that your very first law of power is to not outshine the master, which makes me think

of just mastery in general. And I'd love you to define mastery. You wrote a whole book about it. It's one of my favorite things you've written. I think you define it as finding your life's task. It's one of the steps. We talk a lot about life's work and what we do, which I think are very similar concepts. What is mastery to you? What is it and why is it worth pursuing? Well, I have six chapters that are like this steps upward to this ultimate state, which I call mastery. And the level before that is creativity. And creativity is gold. It's like the philosopher's stone. If you're a creative person, you'll be successful in whatever event you do because you'll always be coming up with new ideas, novel associations. But mastery is one step above that. And it's where you have this feel for your subject, for your field, for whatever it is.

You don't have to think ideas come to you. You've internalized the whole world that you're doing. So you're thinking faster. You're on another level. And I give examples of people who play the piano, who've been practicing for so long that they don't have to think anymore and they're interacting with the keyboard. They become the keyboard.

So it's almost, I say it's mixing the rational with the intuitive. It's mixing the outside with the inside. You're a master at chess. That chess board lives inside of you. It's outside and it's inside of you. You're a great soccer player like Pele or Neymar or whoever. The field is out there, but it's inside your head. You've internalized it. So I call this inside out phenomenon where the external world is now living inside of you. And when you reach that level,

it's almost woo-woo. It's hard to even verbalize, but I tried in that chapter to explain it, that you don't have to think anymore. Things come to you. And it's most exciting sensation that you can have. So I wanted to give people the idea that this is a power. We're so interested in superpowers in Marvel comics, in things that don't include. exist at all, but pure fantasy. But the human brain has a superpower. This is it. It's an incredible instrument that we all have. And I wanted to interest people in attaining that level because they don't think about it. They think of hacking their way to something, to just finding tricks, how to fake being good at something or whatever. It's all just a game or whatever. But no, the brain has these

insane powers. If you follow the process that I lay out, you will reach them. It was a seduction. The book is a seduction. I want to seduce, particularly young people, because that was my audience for that. I want to seduce that 18 to 20 year old to think, this is something I want. Our whole world is based on immediate gratification. But delaying gratification and trying to reach something greater is a feeling of fulfillment and it's the best feeling you can have. And I wanted readers to think on that level. This is a value that I could maybe attain because I tried to debunk the notion of genius. I have people in there who reached mastery, who had the worst childhoods, came from the poorest backgrounds, and reached that level. I have a woman who was autistic at birth, a non-functional autistic child

who reached mastery, wanted to entice the reader to think of this as a value in our culture, that, hey, I want this. And then from there, I tried to lay out how you can get there. But the whole book is a form of seduction. Do you think that this term used your life's task, the thing, it sounds very predestiny or something that each person is wired with something that they're there to do. How predestined do you think that thing is for each person? And how do you encourage people to start searching for it? So if they're 18 or 20 and listening, how would you even know where to begin to look to figure out what your task might be? Well, the way I try and look in the way I explained it in mastery is your DNA, your genetic component.

I'm not a biologist, so I'm just doing my amateur way of describing it, is unique. The code that is you has not existed since all life forms, as far as we know in the cosmos, and will never be repeated again in the future. You are one of a kind. That code is in you. It's one of a kind. And you can think of that as happening for a reason. You know, in nature, there are mutations. And mutations drive a lot of the force of evolution. A mutated gene suddenly turns into a new species and turn into the human being. Our brain is a mutation. if you want to think about it that way. So you're being different from everybody else.

You're having a unique code. It's a form of your mutation. It exists for a purpose. You are one of a kind. You have to recognize that. Even in your most depressed feelings, in your most suicidal moments, you have to tell yourself,

I am one of a kind. There's never been anybody like that. And on top of that, your parents are one of a kind. Your earliest years of formation, there's nothing else like that. Your formative years are a unique experience. all that goes up to create an individual.

Okay? So connecting to what makes you different from everybody else is your life's task. And if you look at people who are successful and are powerful in business and arts and sports, wherever, they are one of a kind. They're not imitations. You can't say for better or for worse that we know of another Elon Musk. There's nobody else out there. It's so weird and strange.

And you can say that about other people. and artists as well, particularly in music or whatever, they're strange, they're not afraid to be different. That is your power. They have understood that they're unique. They recognized it when they were very young, usually when they were six or seven years old, often sometimes in their adolescents, and they mind that difference and they made it into something very powerful. So you have that, you outside in the world have that power, you have that life's task, which is to realize your uniqueness, which is your source of it. power. The problem is, as we were talking about earlier, so the social intervenes, and you start

hearing from your parents. This is who you are, little Patrick. This is who you need to become a doctor or a lawyer, because that'll make you a lot of money, blah, blah, blah. You don't want to become a podcast. You don't want to be doing that. This is where you need to be teachers are starting to tell that. Your friends and your peers are starting to tell about it. And as that happens, you lose contact with what is you, what is uniquely you, your life's task. So you come to the age of 18 or whenever, you have no idea. And that is a very, very sad thing, because it's a known thing that adolescence is the most critical moment

in some ways in your life. It's what's going to form you in some way. And when you're an adolescent, you finally awaken to how you're different from your parents and you want to be different from your parents. You don't want to be like them. Some people, it's different, but most people's like, damn, I don't want to be like my parents. I want to be myself.

I want something different. And that makes you explore and it makes you figure out something that's you and you rebel and you dress in a funny way. You dye your hair. You put nose rings, tattoos, whatever it is, superficial stuff. But you're struggling to be different. And to lose that and to just submerge yourself, what other people want and desire is very, very, very sad. So the reason why it's so important in that 18 to 22 year vein is you're about

to enter the work world, and you're about to make choices and decisions that are critical for your happiness and your success. And you have to have a sense of what makes you different from other people. It's a process. And people have lost sense of that word process. They want things needing that's just like they can get on the phone. So I have no hack to finding your last purpose. I can't give you a pill. It'll make you aware of it. It's a process. It will take writing in a journal. It will take introspection. It may mean talking to people, et cetera. And I have a I've talked to people through that process, but it means looking back at your childhood, looking about what you hate and what you love.

I always knew I wanted to be a writer, but I couldn't figure out what to write. But when I was 23, 24, going through the work where I started off in journalism, I realized I hate working for other people. I can't stand the politicking, the bullshit, the games that are being played. I don't like working for other people. It's not my nature. So that's a very important realization. So it's not always what you love.

It's also what you hate, but you don't want to do. Parents, why should you go to law school? You start your first year of law school. Oh, it doesn't interest me. You don't know. I think it's law school. It's going to be great. It can be perfect for you.

But you have to have awareness, but it's not something that suits you. It's not something that you love or like. So what repulses you is a sign. What attracts you is an even greater sign. Do you think that the best compass in this search is just energy? The things that give you energy and the things that drain energy, that's north and south, if you had to be reductionist about it. Is that the compass? That's a very interesting way of putting in it. I think there's some truth to that.

Our level of willpower, going back a little bit here to show up and how, but it's also William James, our willpower is actually more a definition of who we are than all his other qualities of shy, gregarious, et cetera, et cetera. Our energy levels find us in some way. So I describe it as a current in a river or a stream. And when you're in, engaged some activity that doesn't suit you like I was in Hollywood. You're swimming upstream or sideways and water's entering and you can't breathe and almost feel like you're going to drown. And because of that, you will become listless. You will become depressed. Your energy levels will dissipate because our minds are connected to our willpower. And when you're excited,

your energy levels rise. And then you're moving with that current. And you have to find that activity where you have that feeling of moving with that current. So for me, writing nonfiction books was moving with that current. And it felt right and it felt good. And it could be many other things as well. But your energy levels are tied to your love of something. There's the modern day philosopher that maybe he's not trying to be one, but he seems to be one, which is Jerry Seinfeld. And he's been talking a lot about the role, really mastery, I guess, is what he's talking about, that really all of us have one job, which is to get really good at something. And you have this idea of submitting to reality in the book, which I think is very much like submitting to the reality of your DNA and your circumstances

and your formative experiences. And then after that submission, I'm curious what comes next. What has defined Seinfeld, he's talked a lot about it, is just the insane work ethic, never missing a day of perfecting his craft, just going for it and trying to be as good as he possibly could be in everything else's bullshit as he would put it. I'm curious what percent of people you think ever do submit to reality and pursue their life's task. But let's say you do it. What do you do that? Well, you submit to it. That's about the apprenticeship phase and how do you become a good apprentice and your level of engagement, your level of love for it will depend how far you can go. So Seinfeld probably had an insane love for comedy, which is great. It is your life's

task. And we could go back to his childhood and find the roots of that. But to become really good at something to master it. It's going to require a lot of tedious work. It's going to require hours and hours of boring tasks that you have to learn that you have to repeat. For a comedian, it might be going through all of those small town comedy stores and taking it on the road and the humiliations and the rejections and all of that. But whatever it is, it's going to be painful. So if you don't love it, if you're not deeply engaged with it, you'll give up. Why keep going on? People are not laughing at my jokes. They're not showing up. I'm getting terrible. Why go on? But if you love it so much, you can't not go on, you're going to push past that, and you're going to learn, you're going to learn,

you're going to learn, you're going to learn, you're going to reach a very powerful moment in your life. So they have the 10,000 hour rule, which some people have thought is now debunked. I laugh at that. 10,000, I was just a number. So, yeah, it's probably inaccurate. It could be 8,000, it could be 12,000. But the idea that it's debunked, that the more hours you put in that you're not going to reach mastery is just ludicrous to me. But you put in so many hours that the 10,000 hours to show that your brain literally changes. You reaches a point where you don't have to think so much. So when you're a comedian, great comic routines come to you, you're standing in front of a live audience. You're not nervous anymore because you've gone through

it so many times. Somebody says something and you can just improvise it in the moment, somebody in the crowd, makes a joke you can improvise because you've been through it so many times, the repetitions take over. So you reach this incredible level where you are beyond the learning phase and you can go out there and become a journeyman or a master because you've had so many hours of repetitions. So you've learned the skills so well you've pushed past those obstacles that most people give up on. You ask me the percentage. Most people give up because they can't endure rejection. they can't endure failure. They can't endure that first, particularly nowadays.

I'm not criticizing young people, but young people have a harder time dealing with rejection and failure, probably because of all the horrible things they've had to go through in the past 20 years and all the stresses and pressures. But you have to be able to deal with rejection and failure and people criticizing you.

And if you do that, after those seven, eight years, something has changed in your brain. Now you can be creative with it. Now you can enter the world and be that journey, and a journey woman, and your mind has reached a new level. What other investigators of human nature through history have most drawn you? That's what you've done. You're investigating all aspects of human nature. Humans as a social animal. All your books are aspects of that nature and that reality. What other people that have gone on a similar path have impressed you the most

with the way that they frame their understanding of human nature? Well, I must say, one of the most brilliant people dissecting human nature and social codes was the writer Jane Austen. And a lot of the reason is, and a lot of 19th century novelists were some of the most brilliant people of dissecting human nature, a Dostoevsky, a Jane Austen, a George Eliot, a Flaubert, etc. Marcel Proust was one of the greatest ever, is because these worlds, as opposed to our modern world, people were incredibly social. So imagine, put yourself in shoes. You don't have the internet. You don't have television. You don't have film. You have theater and you have live musical performance, but they're very rare. If you were a monitor person,

God, you'd be bored stiff. I'm going to do. Yeah, you had books. That's true. The main form was socialized. You were continually socializing. You were playing cards. You were going to parties. You were dancing. You were listening to music. But you were never stuck in your home with your phone or whatever, you are out there socialized. People, people, people, people. And when you have a young woman who's very sensitive as women can be who are very empathetic to other people's energy, and they're socializing. Since the day they were a young girl, when they're in the 20s and 30s, they're going to have a grasp of human nature, of human psychology that's on another level because they've been practicing, they've been observing. So writers, I know this for myself, although I don't write fiction.

To be a writer, you have to be a master observer of people's character. And we've lost that. now, we're novelists now. They're not really so into the social, they're not understanding nearly as well as we did, because they're not doing it. So some of the people like Chekhov, Chekhov was absolutely brilliant and understanding human nature, mostly because this is the other quality in writers. They're non-judgmental. Not all writers are like that, but the best writers are depicting humans as they are, not as they wish them to be, Balzac, et cetera, et cetera. So you're non-judgmental, you're looking at people as they are. You're observing them intensely on and on for years and years and years.

Those, to me, are the master of players that understanding human nature. Of course, psychiatrists, psychologists who deal with patients day in and day out and individuals, they also like a young or a Freud or an Alfred Adler or a cohort. They can also reach that high level as well. Aramilton Erickson, one of my icons. What about Erickson? Why is he an icon for you? What did you learn from him?

So he's a standard who's been through all of my books. The reason I love Milton Erickson, he's supposedly the inspiration behind NLP, but that's a bit dubious, but really he's the founder of hypnotherapy. But Erickson, as I described in the loss of human nature, came down with polio at the age of 17 or so, and he was completely paralyzed, except for his eyeballs. So during the two years that he had to try and recover, he became a master observer of people's nonverbal communication because that's all he had. It's the only entertainment he couldn't read. He couldn't watch anything. He couldn't go outside. So his sisters mostly were coming in this room, entertaining. He observed every little aspect of their behavior. And he could decode it like he had

learned French. He spoke it fluently. And then he became a psychologist. And unlike the talking therapist, he wasn't interested in hearing about your childhood. He was interested in how you moves your body when you talked about your childhood, how your eyes reflect. He watched how people walked into the room. He watched how tight their body was. It was one woman sitting in his chair undergoing therapy. She was going on and on about her problems. And he goes, you know what? I know what your real problem is. She goes, what? He goes, you're having an affair? Wow, how did you know that? He goes, the way your body is the way you're in this locked position, I could just tell, the way you're crossing your feet. That's a power that he had uniquely, but it's a power that humans can

have when you understand non-verbal communication. He was also just a really great thinker about human behavior. And he was also one of those non-judgmental people. And he had amazing stories of how he cured people, not just talking, but through actions, et cetera. He had one person who was insane, who was in a mental institution. He had been a successful person, but he went crazy. And the only thing he could do was moving his hand back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and errant's solution, was to give him a piece of wood, some sandpaper, to go up and down and up and down and to sand it. And he got so entranced with the smell of wood and the motion. He decided to study carpentry and he became a carpenter and he got cured of his mental illness.

Now bastardizing the story, but that was his process of curing people. I'm fascinated by people like that. If you could take everything you've studied and learned and applied yourself and turn it into a challenge to be issued to people listening, how would you do that? What would you challenge people to do? I would challenge people to get outside of themselves and to be more observant. We're all too locked inside of our own worlds, inside of our own obsessions, our own problems, particularly it's a real problem now. It's been documented how levels of self-absorption are increasing. The best therapy of all is to get outside of your own brain and to get inside the world of other people and to observe them. It can be observing animals. It could be

observing protozoa. It could be observing plants. I don't care. Get outside of your world. yourself and get into the external world and immerse your spirit and your mind and your body and your brain into something else and to try and enter into it. I said before mastery is making the outside into the inside, I call it inside out. So you want to feel like, but first you have to get outside of your brain and into that world and other people and other animals. That to me is the best advice. It's what all my books are about is observing people, is not being self-absorbed to the point where you do talk more than necessary, where you do have these faults that I mentioned, that you are an anti-sidducer, that you're a bad strategist, that you are fearful because there's the 50-cent book,

that you think that mastery is only for certain people. It's just about getting outside of yourself and observing the world. What did you most learn from 50? Well, 50 is a great person. So the thing is, up to then, I've been three books, and they were all lots of research, and they were all dealing with dead people. So I was living in a room full of ghosts. and skeletons from books, the spirit of Napoleon, the spirit of Machiavelli, they're in my room. It's a little bit weird and depressing sometimes. So here I was in the presence of somebody, a real power figure, a Napoleon of hip-hop, as I called him. And I got outside of my book world and I could see somebody in action, somebody who really was a powerful figure in the world,

not like me writing about. He had overcome the worst circumstances, being shot nine times, nearly dying and he had turned himself into this powerful figure. So I never got to be around the polian bone apart, unfortunately, I wish I had. But I did get to be around 50 cents. I could soak up his energy, I could watch him in action. I could see how he operated. I could see his body language and how confident and how powerful he was with how he saw himself. So I determined that it was his fearlessness, that was the source of his power. So not many people who were dealing crack cocaine, age of nine in the streets of Southside Queens. rise to power. In fact, I think you find that group very, very, very small. How he did is an amazing

story. And it should be a positive example for us all. Speaking of recreating yourself, most hip-hop artists are one-hit wonders. He went well past that, but he branched out into business. He branched out into film. He was constantly recreating himself. So it was a great experience for me because I had been doing consulting, but it was just starting to actually observe a real-life person of power. It taught me a lot about charisma and confidence. I ask the same traditional closing question for everyone I speak with. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? I take you back to I'm 36 years old, somewhere around there. I can't remember exactly. And I was in Venice, Italy, and I've been working in Hollywood,

and I was very depressed, very depressed. I had this job in Italy that was seem to Italy how fantastic. And it is Italian. Italy is a wonderful country. The job was turning into yet another power game, another depressing environment. And there was a man there. His name is Yostov. It's a Dutchman, who was a packager of books, and we were both there to help try and launch the book for this new school that was being created in Italy. And it was a stupid, stupid job. We were both really couldn't believe how stupid it was. We were walking in Venice, Italy, and Yost asked me if I had any ideas of books. And I improvised what I turned into the 48 laws of power, even giving a suggestion of what it could be like. He was so excited that he said, you go and write a treatment,

and I will pay for you to live while you write the book. Now, mind you, it was in his self-interest because he thought the idea was good. But he had no idea. I could have been one of those people who talk a good topic, don't deliver. But he saw something in me, and he encouraged me, and he gave me a line out of the life that I was living in. And it was an act of kindness.

It was an element of, he had no idea that we would both be making all this money from the book and that it would be such a huge success. We had no idea at that moment. We were walking Italy, but he believed in me. He believed in my idea. He trusted me, and he turned my life around. So that was the kindest thing that anyone has ever done for me. Well, Robert, your canon of books is one of the most unique.

And if you like history, I think it's about the most chock-full of interesting episodes and history of any collection that I've encountered. I've really enjoyed talking you today. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Patrick. I really enjoyed. It was a lot of fun. If you enjoyed this episode, check out joincolossus.com.

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