Modern Wisdom - #078 - Robert Greene - The Laws Of Human Nature

Episode Date: June 6, 2019

Robert Greene is a New York Times best selling author. You can be a genius in your field and know all the things you need to know, but if you're bad with people you will totally neutralise your brilliance and can face many difficulties and pains in life... Today we're talking about Robert's new book The Laws Of Human Nature, as we delve deep into understanding people’s drives and motivations, even when they are unconscious of them themselves. Robert names this most recent publication "the culmination of the last 20 years of his work" - so get ready for some fantastic insights. Extra Stuff: The Laws Of Human Nature - https://amzn.to/2KtfADb Follow Robert on Twitter - https://twitter.com/robertgreene Check out Robert's Website - http://powerseductionandwar.com/ Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello podcast people, I hope you are strapped in and ready for today's episode because it is an absolute belter. My guest today is none other than New York Times bestselling author and all-round fascinating person Robert Green. Feel incredibly fortunate to have Robert on the podcast discussing his new book. Many of you may know Robert from the 48 laws of power, but his most recent publication, which is the laws of human nature, he says is the culmination of everything he's learned over the last 20 years. So I guess you could take that as an indication that it's a good idea to listen to what he's got to say today. I wanted to give a special thank you to Abbey Carver, who is the fan of the show and also mutual

friend of mine and Roberts. And she's the reason I've managed to get Robert on. I can't thank her enough for sorting this out. I feel very fortunate to get to sit down with him today. If you too have a New York Times bestselling author just sitting in your phone book waiting to come on a podcast with me, then please feel free to link us up. But in all seriousness I am always on the lookout for new guests and interesting people pop up in the unlikliest of circumstances. So if you do have a suggestion for someone that you'd love to hear me sit down with then find them over at Chris Willek's on all social media as per usual. But for now, please welcome Robert Green. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I am joined by Robert Green. I'm sure he needs no introduction,

but Robert, thank you very much for coming on. I can't wait to sit down and talk with you today. My pleasure, Chris, thanks for inviting me. So I have a very lovely story to tell you actually about one of the guys behind the Modern Wisdom Project, Gakal Jordan, who said that your book, 48 Laws of Power, was the sole reason that he studied history at university.

Apparently, somehow Tesco, big supermarket in the UK, randomly had it on a shelf. He picked it up at the age of 13, and that was the reason he studied history at the age of 18. Congratulations. I think, thank you. I've heard such stories before, but that's always nice to hear, thanks. Yeah, it must feel, it must feel very, I guess, scary to think when you reflect on stuff like that and realize the sort of impact that you work as on people.

Well, if I can get people to read, I, you know, what more can I ask? You know, my view of history is that it's not something that should be thought of as boring as something that's just buried in the past and has no relevance to today. I want to make history come to life. So when you're reading about Julius Caesar, you can feel what he felt like when he was on the battlefield when he decided to cross the Rupa Khan and you know, Pompeii.

So I try to make history come to life and if readers feel that way, they feel inspired to study, God that's the greatest compliment I can receive. Well I think you've definitely been paid that by Jordan. So 48 laws of power, I'm a massive fan of what we're talking about the laws of human nature today, which is your new book as a October last year. That's correct. Fantastic. So the first question I wanted to ask was how does this book relate to your past work, 48 laws of power, art, seduction, etc, etc. Well, I kind of see it as the culmination, sort of the

the distillation of all that I've learned over, excuse me, over 20 years of writing books and doing a lot of consulting work and just sort of observing people. And I wrote a book prior to this called Mastery and I had a chapter in Mastery about social intelligence and the idea is that you could be absolutely brilliant in your field. You could know all the technical things you need to know. But if you're really bad with people, you'll completely neutralize all of your brilliance. You can even be a genius.

And if you don't know how to work with people, if you irritate and alienate them, then you're going to have a life of misery and pain. And I wrote that chapter. This is one element of becoming a master in your field, is being able to work with people. And readers really responded to that. And they said, Robert, I really like that chapter, but I need more. You can be more.

I felt like, you know, this is an area where people really need help. You know, I needed help when I was just starting out in the work world and this kind of, this kind of knowledge. You know, we live in a world where people are increasingly self-absorbed. They're just lost in their smartphones, whatever. They're not paying attention to people. They're not interacting as much as we used to interact with people. And so we're losing some basic social skills,

the ability to judge people and see their character, and not just simply be taken in by their appearances. So I felt this was a culmination of all I've studied and learned over 20 some years. And I'm also trying to meet a really deep need that people have right now in the world today. I couldn't agree more. I recently interviewed Robin Hansen, author of Elephant in the Brain, and secret motives in the way that people behave was, it is a way to

expedite your movement through the world and avoid pitfalls, I suppose, with other people, isn't it? So I wanted to ask something you've already basically answered, which is why is understanding drives and motivations important for normal people. Like you'd think maybe it's the sort of thing an evolutionary biologist might be interested in, but how does that relate to the normal lay person? Well, if you want, for instance, take a common scenario in life, you either with your children or your boss or your spouse to have some sort of irritating behavior, it gets on your nerves and you wanna change them,

you wanna somehow find a way to change them. It's a very common scenario. Well, the normal thing that most humans do in that situation is to kind of preach, to tell them, look, this is what you're doing. It's irritating me. You've got to change. Or else there's going to be consequences.

And we don't realize when we're in that situation and we talk like that, even if we're being polite, that we're making people defensive, we're actually making the situation worse, we're making it harder to get them to change, because people don't like being told what to do, they don't like being told that they have to, they're forced to do something to change themselves. And so, when you're in that kind of scenario, you know, you have to understand something basic about human nature, you have to understand that people have an opinion of themselves. They like to think of themselves as basically good and decent, as basically autonomous

that they are in control of their own lives and their destiny, and that they're basically intelligent. It could be, in some, if it's your teenage son, it could be, he thinks he's intelligent with video games. It doesn't matter. People think they're intelligent. And so you're pushing against that by telling people what to do. You're making them feel that they have no control, that they're not autonomous, that they have to be forced

into changing their behavior. You tell them they're not very smart, you're making them feel that they're not a good person. And so all you're doing is making the situation worse because you don't understand a very basic principle of human nature that instead of pushing against what people think about themselves, instead you have to validate what they think about themselves.

You have to make them feel comfortable about who they are. You have to feed their idea that they are good and autonomous and intelligent. And once you validate and recognize the other human being you're dealing with as a human being, as an individual, then suddenly they're open to suggestion. They're open to change. But because you've worked with

some basic human psychology on and on and on. So constantly in life we're dealing with, hitting against walls with people, we're frustrated, we're disappointed, we can't get them to change their behavior, we don't know why they're acting this particular way. You know, I have a chapter on envy and I discuss how dangerous envy is in the world today and how it's like a, it's like a secret gas. Nobody admits that they're envious until you suddenly attack by an envious person and you find, you know, something awful is happening to you. Nobody comes with a side saying, I feel envy, I'm a type of reason.

Right? So you have to understand where envy comes from. Why it's a very basic human emotion? Why you feel envy as well and I feel envy? And why some people are toxic in this direction. I could go on and on in all of the different chapters, but your ignorance of human nature, of what motivates human behavior, of why we are simply, many of us are

prisoners of things that are wired into our brain from millions of years ago, is absolutely essential to navigating these very complicated social worlds that we inhabit. I couldn't agree more. I think that especially the modern workplace where it's serendipitous, open office plans and multiple emails, multiple meetings, it becomes a petri dish for these sort of interactions, doesn't it? Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. So I wanted to talk about narcissism. It was an interesting chapter that you touched on. I wanted to ask about whether it's a negative emotion. I think when most people hear the word narcissism, they think immediately negative emotion. No, I don't think anything is negative actually in a human realm.

I'm trying to make you realize that this is part of who we are, this is part of human nature, it's not good or bad, it's simply the qualities that we have. And when we look at something like narcissism or envy or aggression, it's partially part of human nature to say that it's not me, I'm not narcissists, I'm not aggressive, I don't feel envy, it's always him or her or other people. And I wanted to put a whole mirror to your face and say, look, you are also a narcissist. It is human nature that we become self-absorbed at a very early age. It's very essential for a child who feels very vulnerable in an adult world to develop a degree of self-love so that they're in situations where you're not getting

an upattention from your parents, not getting an upattention from your teacher or your classmates, you can withdraw into yourself and feel that you're actually good. You can withdraw into your own imagination and sense that you are worthy of a love and attention. It's a very healthy process to develop a degree in self-love. And what happens is, so I believe everybody has not been narcissistic to some extent. And what you see in the world is there are people in early childhood who never develop

that kind of self-love that anchor inside of themselves. They can't get a feeling of being a good person, of being a validated from within. It has to come from outside. So they spend their whole lives trying to get attention from other people. And that's what a deep narcissist is. You know, you know, a classic example is President of the United States never feels satisfied from within from the attention that he's getting. So he constantly has to act out and get other people to validate who he is. So deep narcissists are incredibly insecure. And the only way they can get over that feeling is to get attention is to be extremely dramatic.

The problem that happens is a lot of times people like that are very brilliant, they're very charismatic. They learn as children to be very dramatic and have a flair and get a lot of attention that way. And it's when you get into a relationship with them, either it's an intimate partner or they become your boss or they're your calling. It's only after months and months that you realize this person doesn't care about me at all. They only see me as an object that they can use to sort of feed their narcissism. So I want you to recognize that there's a spectrum that at a certain point, like let's say with zero to 100 and at

the halfway point 50 is where most of us are, we have a degree of self-absorption. And when we feel comfortable about ourselves and we're not insecure, we rise slowly above that level and we get up to 75 or 80. And as we get higher and we feel comfortable, we can get outside of ourselves and pay attention to other people and transform that sub-love that we have at narcissism into actual empathy. But if we fall below that 50% mark, we get lower and lower and lower. And we've all been through moments like that, moments of depression, etc. We become more and more self-absorbed, becomes very hard to get outside of ourselves and get into the skin of other

people. And that's what happens to deep narcissists. They can never rise above and get outside of themselves. And they're actually quite miserable. So I want to take away the judgment that narcissism is necessarily a bad thing. I call it healthy narcissism. So there are two forms of taking that sort of self-love that we have, and turning it into something healthy. It's getting outside of ourselves, either into other people, putting our attention into other people, and caring about them, and getting inside their world, or into our work, and pouring all of our energy into our work.

So you'll notice a lot of great artists, even scientists, etc., can actually be very narcissistic, but they pour a lot of their energy into their work and they're able to kind of transmute or transform that ugly energy into something positive. So there's nothing wrong with being a narcissist. We all have that degree of self-love. It's whether we've become so self-absorbed that we can't get out of our own little prison. I totally agree. I'm sure that a lot of the listeners will be able to think of people in their lives who are constantly searching for attention who can't find that sense of self-worth from within themselves.

Is there any strategies that you can recommend for someone who is around another person who is like that, potentially the first lady of the United States. Well, it's very difficult. I mean, really often the best strategy of all is to learn about how to recognize a deep narcissist because as I said before, they don't go around the sign saying, I'm a deep narcissist, watch out. They can be very charming and charismatic. And so you want to look for signs early on that they're not really paying attention to you.

What's some of those signs? Well, you'll notice that when you talk about yourself, they seem to be listening, but they're not really listening. Their eyes are kind of dead. They don't really engage with you. They're not really interested in your ideas and who you are. They give it kind of a service impression that they are.

But it's, so sometimes with a deep narcissist, you'll notice on their facial expressions that they'll be smiling a lot as they listen to you and nodding their head, but there's a dentists in their eyes. They're not really engaged with you. They're not really, on the eyes reveal a lot about how deeply people are looking at you and interested and engaged.

And there's a kind of sheen there they're not paying it really attention to you. They're not interested in your ideas. Look at their past and their broken record of how many people live alienated and how they can't stay very long in a relationship. See the patterns of that. But most of all, notice that people who are extra dramatic, who even seem charismatic, they tend to be narcissists learn how to charm you to get the attention that they need. It's called the narcissistic fee, they need to be fed all the time. And so they're always searching for that attention.

So be able to look at people like that from a distance. If you know someone who's extremely dramatic like that and you find it interesting, perhaps your intention should go off and think maybe all of that drama and all of that excitement that they generate is just to get attention. It is nothing to do with you. So, I sort of look for the signs beforehand. So, the best strategy is to not get involved. The best strategy is to avoid them all costs. It is. Most of us have degrees of narcissism and we should be empathetic to that and you can draw people out by getting them involved in a relationship or getting them interested

in your life. Or if you have a child that you suspect might have that tendency, getting them to become extremely excited by some field, some works, some objects, something they can study to get outside of their self-absorption. But with someone who's an adult who has these tendencies, you're not really ever going to change them. So the best strategy is either to not avoid a relationship or to somehow manage it so that they're not kind of destroying your life.

One of the points that you touched on there, which I found very useful and very interesting was curiosity and what someone else is saying as being a useful strategy for for bonding and for making people feel like the conversations going in the right direction listeners may remember a recent conversation I had with David Perel where he spoke about most conversations being two intersecting monologues, almost like a game of tennis, and as a solution to not coming across as two self-insorbed, genuine curiosity, like actually caring about what the other person is saying and genuinely wanting to know what they think about things appears to be a really good, rough

you and antidote to that. Yeah, very much so. I mean, it's kind of a cliche to say that people don't listen well and you just need to become a better listener. And I don't think that's going to really change people's behavior. The problem of why you're not really listening to other people in a conversation while that kind of tennis game of monologues, two monologues going on is because you're not really listening to other people in a conversation while that kind of tennis game of monologues Two monologues going on is because you're not really that interested in what the other person has to say

You find your own problems your own life your own interests More fascinating than what they have to say you're worried about you know You're what you're gonna do tomorrow whether this woman is interested in you or not. You're absorbing your own anxieties and problems and what people are talking about aren't as interesting to you. So the only solution is to somehow get yourself to a place and realize that the people you deal with are actually very interesting. They're fascinating. You want to understand that they're weirder than you imagine. People are weird. They have strange dreams just like you have strange dreams, right? We watch movies because we're fascinated by the characters.

And we want to get inside what's motivating that evil person in that movie? Why is that person a killer murderer, et cetera, who wanna get inside their worlds were fascinated by characters in a movie? Well, the people you're dealing with on a day-to-day basis are like characters in a movie. They have debts that you can't even be gone to see or suspect. They have fantasies, they have a dark side,

they have a shadow side that they're trying to hide. So if you approach life like it's theater, like it's just all like a movie and that people are interesting and you want to figure out who they are, it suddenly changes the game so that when you're sitting down tomorrow now with that friend who you've had endless boring conversations with nobody ever listening to them. If suddenly you stop that and you actually stop your interior monologue and you pay attention and you looked at their body language and you looked at the way their eyes shift is they're talking about something or how their eyes light up when a certain subject is touched. If you suddenly stop and really pay attention,

you're going to learn things and it's going to be fascinating, and you're going to be able to apply that knowledge in many, many ways. But none of this, all of my talk, all of my books, all the books ever written, won't matter at all if you don't find people inherently interesting. Yeah, I think there's some people in your life that you have to put up with the conversations with, like you're not going to stop speaking to grandma, like when she wants to come around, but there's a there's an upper bound on on how far you can take that, but yeah, definitely, especially my experience having done this podcast and, you know, recording two, three hours of deep conversations every week for a year. I've certainly noticed in myself that that instantiation of genuinely being

interested in a normal guest is now bleeding into my discourse day-to-day with other people. And that's making my conversations with other people so much more interesting than they ever were before. But I've not become any more interesting. Well, maybe a tiny bit. But obviously, after speaking to you, Robert, I'll be an awful much more interesting than they ever were before. But I've not become any more interesting, well maybe a tiny bit, but obviously after speaking to you Robert I'll be an awful lot more interesting, but yeah, I'm not that much more interesting, but I'm more interesting what they have to say, which elicits a better response from them, which raises the level of the conversation up. But yeah, I totally agree. I wanted to move on to some of my favorite stories from the book, and I wanted to ask why Bill Clinton was a successful politician and how this relates

to wearing masks. That's strange because I took that a story you were referring to, the Ireland story. The one where he was talking about why, how Bill was able to curate himself and his accent towards different audiences. Okay.

Well, he was, you know, Bill Clinton was kind of a master actor. And I have nothing against people being actors in life. In fact, I say it's essential. We are all actors. We're all performing. Some of us are say it's essential. We are all actors. We're all performing. Some of us are good actors and some of us are bad actors. But when you're interacting with your boss, you're not the same person as you are when you're interacting with your intimate partner, you change, you put on a different mask, you change your body language the way you talk. We do that with everybody that we deal with. And so people who are really

good at this game who get far who have high level of social skill know how to kind of blend into the audience to the people that they're dealing with. They can sometimes you know change their accent a little bit like he would do. If he wanted, if he was talking to a working class group, he would kind of emphasize his own working class southern roots. But if he was talking to a group of intellectuals, he would kind of soften his southern accent a bit. A lot of people find that false and manipulative. I don't. I think being able to adapt to the people that you're dealing

with is a high level of social skill because what it means is you're thinking about who that audience is, about who the people you're dealing with and you're trying to get into their spirit and you're not just simply looking at them as something from a distance like objects that you manipulate, you know, to win an election, You actually care about them and you're getting into their world and into their mindset. And so I want to take away the guilt that we humans have for who we really are. That's the main theme in all of my books. We're so God damn guilty about the desires that we want for power, for instance. That was the subject of the 48 laws of power. And we're so we feel so guilty about this desires that we want for power, for instance, that was the subject of the 48 laws about. And we're so, we feel so guilty about this idea that we might be manipulated,

that we might be actors as if we're being fake or inauthentic. It's just a lot of bullshit in my mind because we are all acting all the time. Look at yourself in your day to day interactions. You change your mask, you change your expression, your words, depending on who you're dealing with. You never tell people, damn it, you've put on 40 pounds, you're not listening. You say, no, you look great today. Wow, I loved your screenplay.

It was great, you don't tell them the truth. Just a minute, you do that and stop being this kind of fake saint that everybody's trying to pose like they are? So I applaud someone like a Bill Clinton who knows how to be a consummate actor and change according to who he's talking to. Why do you think we are so guilty about our natural human natures? Is that because we are only exposed to the highlight reel of other people. So the sort of the darker depths of them is never really shown with that same degree of fidelity that we get to see our own kind

of biases at work in our darker parts. Well, you know, a few years ago I was in Sydney, Australia and I went to the zoo there. And I was kind of transfixed by the chimpanzee compound that they have at the Sydney Zoo. It's amazing. It's this very open space where you can observe an entire community of about 30 chimpanzees. And which shocked me more than anything. I was sat there for two hours watching them because they were so human. It was just like looking at an office situation with the alpha male and all the others kind of.

But what was equally fascinating was all the young people who would stop by and they were very embarrassed by flicking the chimpanzees, they were giggling, they were made uncomfortable about it. And the point I'm making is I think we feel uncomfortable about our own animal nature, about our own primate roots, about the primitive part of ourselves. We want to think of ourselves. Angela Carter, the English writer, she said, we like to think that we're descended from angels instead of primates.

But we are descended from primates, and primates have tendencies that are embedded in us, our tendency to feel envy, our own aggressive impulses. These are things that come from millions of years of evolution, but we're uncomfortable with it. We want to think of ourselves as these sort of 21st century, incredibly sophisticated people, that we don't have these sort of dark animal-like impulses, but just spend a couple of weeks on social media on the internet. And you see that primary part of our nature is out there in full display, even though it's the most sophisticated tool of communication ever invented.

You will never see so many displays of envy as on social media. You know, envy was a terrible problem among hunter gatherer cultures hundreds of thousands of years ago. People would be murdered because you had a little group of 30 people, your clan, your tribe, and if some people felt envy that others had more food or more wealth or more goods, they would get very angry and they would murder someone for that. And so, because the human brain is always comparing ourselves to other people, our brains operate by comparing mechanisms, it's how we learn.

And we're also because we're social animals, we're also comparing ourselves to what other people have. So, hunter gatherer tribes, it was a terrible problem, and that's why they invented all kinds of rituals. So the moment you received a gift, you had to share it with everyone else or give it away. You never felt comfortable that you received more than other people had, because you knew that was dangerous. You had to give it away. But here we are, hundreds of thousands of years later, and NV is even worse than it was. Still suffering that artifact of a quarter of a million years ago.

Yes. So, we're no more sophisticated in so many ways than we were, but we don't like to confront that. I think a lot of people would do so well to read a tiny bit of evolutionary biology, a evolutionary psychology. There needs to be, I've been thinking about this for a while, there needs to be like a 10 page booklet cheat sheet with big pictures that's just like the absolute 80 to like the 99 to one of exactly what people need to know. And you're totally right. The more educated you become about these biases and why we feel the way we do. People accept sensations

like envy as this sort of emergent property that's just a law of the world, the same way that gravity is. Whereas it's not. It is this artifact of a time gone by where we needed it. And we don't know, but with somehow still it's mercy, I find it's so fascinating. So I've really enjoyed getting into learning about it recently. Yeah, I mean, another aspect that's similar to that is our answer, going to the evolutionary biology part is before the invention of language we as a social animal are survival dependent on our ability to communicate with a group.

And so we humans developed complex emotions, more emotions than other animals have that could be displayed on our face and in our body language that would communicate to people. So if we felt fear about a situation, we would have, you know, chimpanzees and other animals have the hair stand on the back of their neck. We had many more ways of signaling fear and this would communicate itself to the entire group and the whole group would feel that fear and they would know we better run away, you know, better get out of this situation. But other emotions like joy, etc. So the group, we were primed evolutionarily to feel the emotions

of the group, to be susceptible and vulnerable to what other people are feeling as a form of communication and survival. We'll fast forward to hundreds of thousands of years later and that kind of viral susceptibility that we have to the emotions and ideas of other people is in full display on social media and in our politics, etc. We're extremely susceptible to the moods and ideas and opinions of other people. We like to think, well, I'm left-wing, I have all of my ideas on my own. Nobody ever told me, but you'll notice if they explain their ideas, they're just exactly the same as thousands of other people. Why do they share all of the same ideas about the same subject as thousands of other

people is because they're conforming to the group, it's because you're susceptible to that pressure to feel like you're fitting into the group and you're very vulnerable to what other people are saying and doing. We're constantly imitating and we're constantly being influenced by people and not realizing it. So that's just another aspect of how something very ancient that served a purpose for our ancestors is now something that doesn't serve so well for us in the modern age. Yeah, I think people being very careful about the circles that they expose themselves to online is an incredibly useful tool.

I think I went onto your Twitter earlier on. Am I right in saying that you follow 68 people on Twitter or a very low number of people? Yes. So I'm on 66, which is... I found it very interesting to see that you've done the same. And I'm going to presume that it is because your new feed is to be curated to only see things that you want to see. Yeah, but you can take that too far because you do want to expose yourself to what other people are saying and thinking. You do want to not just read the same blogs and the same podcasts that confirm what you

already believe. The echo chamber affects dangerous. Yeah, so sometimes it's good to expose yourself to what Trump supporters are saying on the internet. I find it fascinating and I don't demonize them because they are human beings. I do want to understand why they have fallen to the spell of this madman. So it's good to like not just consume the ideas that's important confirm what you already believe, but also you're right, you do have to regulate it as well

because those that anchor that you can feel when you read something so frustrating and irritating can ruin your whole day. It's so, it blows my mind. So the listeners at home will know mine and the team's personal feelings with regards to notifications on phones. But if you are listening to this,

perhaps for the first time because you've seen that we've got Robert on, I'm going to sing the song to you right now, which is please go onto your iPhone settings or Android or whatever you're using and just turn off the notifications on your social media, check them at your will, not at the will of the machine that's in your pocket because this sort of unscheduled dopamine release that we're at the mercy of throughout the day. I mean, it must, especially for you, Robert, as someone who's been understanding

human nature for such a long time, presumably before the advent of smartphone social media, and then seeing, I guess, all of these human characteristics that you've known for so long get amplified and then broadcast to the world. It must have been a very interesting, fascinating sort of experiment and also terrifying. I'm going to free you. If you read books by marketing people and the psychology of marketing, you'll understand how insidious that can be. These are people who study psychology more than anybody else,

who understand why the human brain works and how to pass information along without giving the appearance that you're giving people news, how to be so sneaky with how you can influence human behavior. And you better believe that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, has studied in depth all of these marketing tools and has applied them to a great degree on Facebook. So just the idea of that pinging noise, of creating a noise like for a child that kind of has that dopamine effect that you have on and on and on, they know completely all the viral effects that they

can create. The reason why the budge color is red, because red is a higher-lure color, right? Right, exactly. So we're all just being doops of a great marketing team of people who know how to feed upon the vulnerabilities in human nature. I read a book a while ago, a French book, I don't know how to translate the titles, has to do about a guide how to manipulate people is basically what it's called. It was written by two social scientists in France who revealed all of the tricks that

marketing people, all of the studies that they've used. You know, in universities around the world, psychology departments are doing studies about human behavior, where they actually do experiments with people. The number one audience for reading those studies are people in marketing. So they know, for instance, they knew about virtual signaling well before we ever heard about it.

They know that people like to share the fact that they're giving to causes. You look on Facebook and you see all that time for your birthday, I want to contribute $1,500 to the Save the Gorilla Fund or whatever. They know this is a supreme marketing skill that people want to signal to others. So it increases their look, how many people look at it,

how much traffic they have. So don't be naive about social media. These people are geniuses, evil geniuses. Listen, sir. Everybody that's listening, just unfollow everyone from Twitter, then go follow myself and Robert and then slowly begin to build it back up. Obviously, you need us too first. And once you've got us too, you can start to build it up from there. I don't know, just to book end that, I don't know if you're familiar with Tristan Harris from the Center for Humane Technology.

So he used to be a design ethicist at Google and has now, he is the equivalent of like an Edward Snowden for social media. And Tristan Harris, I'll send you what once we're done, and I'll link it in the show notes below to anyone who is interested. His podcast with Sam Harris, no relation, is mind blowing, unbelievable about the psychology

of persuasion and all of the different tactics that are being used. I think you're going to find it fascinating, Rob. Oh, that's great. Thank you very much. Really good. So I wanted to talk, moving on to things that are interesting. I wanted you to try and explain why mystery is seductive.

Why mystery is seductive? Mystery in another person. I thought, why doesn't it need to be explained? So obvious to me. Well, it was news to me when it happened. It's something that when it's explained to you, they say the best books are ones that tell you something you already know, right? It was something that implicitly I maybe knew, but explicitly I don't think I'd thought of before. Well, it's the whole reason why we're interested in stories in drama, in films, in theater, in plays, and anything having to do with fiction is

We don't know what's happening next. So there's an element of surprise. What is the writer having mind? What are we going to read about next that happens to this character? And so I related to when we're a child and we're being, and our father, for instance, picks us up and carries us and twirls us around. We don't know where he's taking us. He doesn't, we don't know where we're going to, where we're on a ride in an amusement park. The excitement is, whoa, what's going to happen next? So we're inherently reprimed for surprises.

We want surprise, we want drama, we want this feeling. It's a mixture of anxiety and pleasure. Like we're anxious, like, is the murderer right behind that door? Is he going to come in now and kill someone? Oh, he is. And so it's like pleasure that we anticipated it. And so we are the sense of mystery comes from, we don't know exactly what's going to happen. And so the opposite of mystery is complete familiarity, is benality.

So if you're in a relationship with someone and you know everything about them, there's no surprises left. Everything has, you've seen everything that's going, you're ever going to see. It's always the same. Some people might say, well, that's a really good marriage. That makes for a very good relationship. Well, no, it's not because the human brain needs a sense of there's something I don't know about them. I have to discover something. It's what actually kills a lot of relationships that people become too familiar with each other. They stop seducing. There's nothing left to learn about someone. We want to feel like we can learn something that there are surprises, that there is mystery. And so I maintain that seduction or exciting people are persuading them is a game of absence

and presence. So if you're continually present, if you're so obvious, if you're always in people's face, you give them no room to use their imagination to think, oh, Robert might be this very exciting, mysterious person. You're so in their face, they have no room to imagine to just see who you are. If you step back and you're not there so often, if instead of being seen every day, you're seen every other day or every three days, you give space for the imagination to imagine. Maybe this person is actually quite interesting. So you feed other people's imagine.

You make them think about you when you're not there. And as they think about you, they start idealizing. They start imagining qualities that maybe aren't there. But if you're too absent, if you're there only once a week, for instance, that people might start forgetting about you. So you have to know how to play that game of back and forth absence and presence. We had a discussion on a relationships episode that we do, which is a series we have ongoing at the moment, which discussed the fine art of when it's right to text someone after

the first day and then how frequently to do it thereafter. And you are totally correct that there is this spectrum where there's a Goldilocks zone that appears somewhere in the middle. And for some people, they may be shifted right down to the bottom and for some, they may be right up to the top. There's a video from Alain DeBotten who runs the School of Life YouTube channel, unbelievable. Anyone who hasn't watched it already, I implore you to go and have a look because there are some wisdom drops of five minutes on there. However, he does a video which is why we dislike people who like us and he talks about how people that are very forthcoming. It feeds into our own self-worry and self-hatred and insecurity about the fact that, well, why are they liking me? Does something wrong with me? They shouldn't

like me, therefore there must be something wrong with them. So I'm going to know, and this isn't for me, and bizarrely, we chase after the person who doesn't give us any attention. It's so hilarious. Yeah, and that's often why narcissists can be very seductive and charismatic, because they're not that interested in you, and we want to be the one that makes us chase after them. We want to get them to be interested in us. We want to get their attention sometimes. We want to get them to be interested in us. We want to get their attention sometimes. So You know, that's very known phenomenon, but You know the idea that

The number one law of human nature of psychology that you must understand Particularly when it comes to persuasion and influence is that people want to have their will powers engaged. They want to feel like they are the ones who are active, that they are doing something. That's why in marketing and in advertisements, if you bombard people with information, they know it's an ad and they don't care and they don't listen, they tune it out. But if you create a viral effect where everyone is talking about this particular product, then you no longer feel that you're the dupe of an advertising. You feel like that you've come to it

through your own decision because other people have talked to you about it. And now you go out and buy it because you feel like it's you who's doing it, you're being active. So we like to feel that we are active. And what a person who's mysterious who has a step back is our imagination is active. We get to think about who they are. We get to imagine that there's somebody great. And you know, that element is extremely powerful

as opposed to being told who they are by constantly being in our face. That's a fantastic point. I suppose influencer marketing now with the advent of social media is increasingly trying to make more and more subtle these steps that we take to get us to this recommendation for a product. And yeah, I wonder where the future of that lies.

I wonder how much more subtle and subversive the tactics can get. We're just gonna riff on social media. Right, stop the podcast, we're just gonna complain about such an idiot for the rest of it. Well, I mean, subliminal advertising, which was the big subject back in the 60s

when people would put in one frame of a soft drink in a movie and see that people pass so quickly you couldn't realize it. And then everybody at the intermission would go buy a Coca-Cola. That guy joked about because nobody does that, and it's illegal, in fact, to do that in the United States. But subliminal advertising using subliminal effects is extremely powerful and it's at the level of what you do for an infant. So people know that certain sounds have a certain effect. Movies are now designed by sound designers who know how not to use music, but how to create

that continual drone that's going to have the precise effect of creating horror and anxiety or raising, they are masters at manipulating. You want a subliminal level. That's the future. That's the scary matrix future that we have. And hopefully we can control and not get into it. If you know so well how to affect people subliminally on that instant level of, oh, there's a mobile up here,

I want to touch and play with this pretty little things. That's how they operate. That's very powerful and very insidious. Yeah, it really is. One of the chapters that I really resonated with me, I'm working Club promo, so I run nightclubs. As a part of that, I'm exposed to a very high velocity wide range of personality types. And the toxic types of people that you identified, particularly the big talker and the drama magnet, as I'm sure you can imagine working in nightlife, they really, really resonated with me. I wondered if you might be able to just I should. Honestly, the observations of human behavior in nightclubs is I feel like I should be an

anthropologist, just sat on the front door, observing what happens and should be an anthropologist, just sat on the front door, observing what happens and... Big big work, I'm telling you. Well, maybe, maybe that might be the next step. But yes, I wanted to just ask yourself about what toxic types of people you have seen consistently in your life, the ones that swim in the academic circles, perhaps, or the ones

who you think are more common to yourself. I would be interested to find that out. Yeah, I notice a lot of academic people, intellectuals, they're very aggressive, but they put all of their aggression into argument, into certain style of arguing. Their master is putting you down. I get a lot of grief for writing the 48 laws of power, for being kind of manipulative, for writing a popular, best-selling book, and it's not really weighty enough for them. And so people who are

intellectuals have very subtle ways of putting you down, you know, of saying, wow Robert, I see that your book has sold very well amongst people on Wall Street, you know. So there's complimenting you that your book is selling well, but they're also dishing you for the fact that you're appealing to sharks out there. So the subtle put down the kind of disguises envy, I get a lot from people who are academic intellectual types. I do a lot of consulting work with people who are high level in business and I was on the board of directors of a publicly traded company. And when I talk about a narcissist, kind of a toxic deep narcissist, believe me, I know

what I'm talking about because I've dealt with them on a very person-to-person level. So this CEO that I was working with who was head of this company, I was on the Board of Directors, he was very charismatic, very dramatic, and I was seduced by him, I fell for him, I thought this guy is brilliant, he's a genius, and as only as evidence piled up as I tried to give him advice and I tried to tell him. The company is heading down work quickly. You need to do this, this, and this. And I realize he wouldn't listen to anything I said even though he hired me for my brilliant

48 laws of power advice. So a lot of people, like Elon Musk, have this kind of quality where know, a lot of people, you know, like Elon Musk have this kind of quality where they attract a lot of followers and they seem so exciting and interesting, but they're actually disguising a lot of deep-rooted emotional problems. And the person in the laws of human nature that really resonates with me on that level is the story of Howard Hughes, whom you didn't read that part. I must have missed that, but please tell us. Well, Howard Hughes, as you know, was the great, they did the film with Adam. He's the great

aviator who started an amazing, very important airline company, manufacturing airplanes, Hughes Aircraft. And he had this reputation for being this incredible maverick, for being someone who would fly a plane and risk death and do also some crazy things. And so he got this reputation and people thought, this is like an American icon, we've been arrayed in. And he started this business, this airline company. And if you add up the number of failures that he had in business, he has to be probably the worst businessman that ever lived. He lost more money than anybody that I can think of in history

through various ventures. On and on and on, he's the army commissioned him to build this new airplane. He can't do it, he can't bring it to pass. He creates one of them, the largest plane ever invented. If you saw the movie, you saw it, but it can't fly anywhere, it can't do anything. It was only one of them that was never used. He had other commissions like that. He was an incredible failure. But time and again, people funded him and supported him because they fell for this belief in the myth about how great he was. And a lot of what happens to people is, I I talked in the book about grandiosity. When you have success like he had or you get attention like that, you think that you're

a god, you think that you're infallible, no matter what you create or produce, is going to be absolutely perfect. And so you kind of believe in your own myth. That's a very big sort of toxic type that I've met in my consulting work with people in business. They've had some success and I think that nothing they can do is wrong so they don't listen to anybody and I feel like they can control everything, kind of micromanager type of profile. That's one toxic type. I could go on and on. I'm sure that you could.

I did want to ask a question actually that Sam Harris asked Daniel Kahneman when they did a podcast recently and he said, how much of your writing is advice for yourself versus for others? And does the understanding of these laws help your behavior? When Sam asked Dan Kanman this, he said he's no better at avoiding his own biases, just more cognizant when it happens and more regretful after the fact. And I found it so hilarious. Well that's true. I mean I can see that but I am a little more hopeful than maybe Dan Cannonman is. I think that if you recognize your own biases,

it gives you a degree of control over them. So I say that we humans aren't rational, that we're basically driven by our emotions, which is something that he talks a lot about. They call it the effect of heuristic. When people buy economic behavior, it's not driven by rationality, it's driven more by emotions. And so, I have these biases obviously as well. So when I'm running the book on human nature, I have a bias, which is I have a negative bias. I tend to view people from it through a negative lens. I don't think we're so great as we think we are. I think we're more violent and aggressive than

we want to admit. So it's a bias in mind, and the tendency is to go read books that confirm that bias. And so I've deliberately made a point of being aware of that. And so the percentage of books that I read probably were weighted for sure on the negative side. I can't help it. 60, 70% weren't on the negative side, but I overcame my bias to some degree in order to include books by like Stephen Pinker, whom I hate, like and stand as books. But I them, sort of force myself like our better angels, you know, and enlighten them in now, whatever. I read his books, you know, he's a very important thinker. He's brilliant, he's, you know, Harvard and all that.

Just to balance out my own biases, but, you know, it's a margin there. You're never, he, as Dan Connond saying, you can never really completely overcome those biases that you have because they're built into you. It's, but if you can recognize them, change you can open your mind a little bit of some information that won't necessarily confirm what you are already looking for. So my books have helped me in that sense of, when I wrote the book, I sort of had to come to certain

realizations. Number one, I had to realize, I'm not as great a person as I thought I was. I'm actually more of a narcissist than I imagined. I'm actually running that chapter on aggression was a real eye opening because I go, well, Robert, you are actually a very aggressive person. You manage to disguise it. People think you're so nice and polite, but you're actually deep down very aggressive. And it was kind of

painful for me, but coming to terms with these sort of qualities that I have have made me sort of more aware of how I'm operating in the social realm so that I can control it better. So I disagree a little bit with him. It has given me not complete control, but more self-awareness. I think finding out things about yourself through learning concepts and these sort of biases is one of the most rewarding things that I've done through my sort of self-directed learning reading books, reading books like yours and Danny Kahneman's and

Robin Hansen's and it's like discovering a treasure that's sort of inside of you and has always been there and sometimes they're terrifying and sometimes they're embarrassing or things that you don't like but they're never not fascinating. We touched on Alain DeBotten from the School of Life earlier on. He has a video that the listeners will be familiar with, which I love, which is called Why We Are Fated To Be Lonely. And he talks about how people whose views are more alarming, country, or subtle to society at large are by their very nature, likely to be out on the tails of the normal distribution, of normal, whatever normal is.

And he says, loneliness is a kind of tax that we have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind. I just wanted to get your thoughts on that brief little thought from Alain. I always wanted to ask you what your thoughts are on. People's uniqueness and their disability to be categorized into tropes or these archetypal roles, I guess even Jordan Peterson would say, about what your thoughts are on that and what their usefulness or their potential pitfalls are for people. Are you asking me whether I'm lowly or not? Not at all. Well, um, yeah, I mean, you know, there's a price that you pay for trying to be more of who

you are and being more of yourself and for not fitting into categories. But I don't know if I completely agree. It's hard for me to completely align that with my own experience. So I felt from very early on, I don't like talking about myself so much, but I'll just bring this up. I always thought that I was sort of strange, not like other people. And I imagine most of a lot of people have that feeling as well. But you know, so when it came to like making creating something or writing a book, which was my first book,

the 48 laws of power, I was able to sort of keep true to myself, to keep true to how my own strange way of thinking. And so I created a book that's not like anything you've ever seen before physically. It doesn't look like a normal book inside the way it's designed. It's all a reflection of my own strangeness of my own weirdness. That's precisely what made the book stand out and what's made it interesting. So stand out at what's made it interesting. So on the one hand, there is a little bit of loneliness in the sense that I don't fit into easy categories. Me speaking of myself, I'm not an academic.

I don't have a PhD, but I'm not purely a self-help of writer. I'm not a coach. I'm not a guru. I don't know what category do I fit in. And so, you know, people are a little bit, they don't know how to approach me, but I have to say that the attention I've gotten from sticking to being myself, from sticking to my own weirdness, to putting out ideas that are kind of strange to a lot of people and

not worrying about it, has been the source of a lot of social attention and social validation. I was actually a lot lonelier before I wrote these books. And before I had the acclaim, I couldn't connect to people. I felt like I had something strange to say, but no one would listen to me at all. So in some sense, I always preach people to people if you want to create something that's interesting and that lasts and that is meaningful. Kind of stage root of what makes you different

to what is that quality that Alan De Botan is saying is going to make you lonely. In some ways, it's sort of the source of your power. It's the way I think people are hungry in the world for something new, for some kind of new form of communication, from people who are coming from a different angle. And it's a source of power. And yet, it brings loneliness, but loneliness happens anyway.

It would have happened anyway. I've always had that degree of being alone and kind of what I actually like being alone and like being able to be away from the crowd or to have my distance in space. So that's just my slight little take on what you said. I totally get it. I think you have two choices when you're talking about how you view loneliness or how you view solitude, I suppose. And on one hand, like you say, you can have honesty or acceptability. And on the side of honesty, you have the virtue, you have creations of work like yours or for me at the moment, it's currently this podcast.

It's me talking and being unashamed about the things that I'm interested in, whether it does or does not fit the heritage or the mold that I'm supposed to have. Again, to give you a very brief background, I did some reality TV stuff. It would be the equivalent of the bachelor, I guess, in the US. And for that kind of archetypal role, that going and doing a podcast based in interviewing very successful and interesting authors and talking about the finer points of human nature probably doesn't really fit, but you're totally right.

You can have the choice of being lonely and truthful to yourself, or lonely and compromising yourself. You could be moving either way. Absolutely. Absolutely. That's a really lovely point. But one thing I say is, lonely, this is not a bad thing. I mean, you can get depressing, but it also gives you the space to kind of step away from the crowd and think for yourself and think about your own tastes and your own values and what you want to say in life. So a lot of times people have a hard time these days being alone. They always have to be surrounded by something that's, you know, attached to their phone

or whatever, but creating that space where you can reflect and have some distance from the world, I think, is very powerful and important. Absolutely. For anyone who is listening, there's a very interesting definition of solitude, which Carl Newport used from digital minimalism, and it's a different one to what most people will consider. A lot of people may think, well, I spend time on my own. I may be drive a lot or I work from home, as I do. I work from home. But Cal's definition of solitude, which he says is important for us to develop particular qualities of mind.

He defines it as time for your mind to be away from the input of other minds. And that's very different, solitude in that way is different to what most people would consider when the phone's still on, and emails still on, or they, you know, I think that that distinction and the time that you can spend alone

with your thoughts reflecting on the day or your bigger picture, I think is very important. I agree. I agree with that definition. Robert, I've absolutely loved today. I know that your book's taken a very long time to write, but I really hope that you're hazing the next one along because I want to sit down with you and talk again. Okay. We can always talk before the next book comes out because these books sometimes take several years.

So you just let me know. Fantastic. For the listeners at home, can you tell them where they can find you online and where they can look to find some more resources or some more info? Well, the main site is my old website, which is Power, seductionandwar.com. Those are the titles of my first three books, excuse me, Power, seduction, the word, and spelled out,

and war.com. And there you'll find links to the book. I did a book with 50 Cent, called the 50th Law, my book Mastery, and my new book, The Laws of Human Nature, and links to the Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and all the stuff that we were yelling about earlier. I'll have evil social media stuff that I was decrybed, but I still participated. We have to play the game.

That's a big deal, you're a great yeah. We have to play the game. Fine. No, yeah, I know we have to play the game. Absolutely. Robert, I really appreciate your time. I can't thank you enough for coming on in there. I'm afraid that I'm probably going to hassle you for that before the next book podcast invite that you've extended my way, and I'm sure that the listeners are going to want it as well. Yeah, I'd be happy to have very much enjoy it. Thank you so much.

You have great style, great podcasting style. Thank you. That's really, really kind to you. It's a shirk in the background. What's that? What's the shark in the background? Oh, yeah. Do you want to see him?

Wait there. It's sort of subliminal. I'm going to look at that guy. Is that a kind of a subliminal signal or something? I'm afraid. I'm afraid it's not a symbolic shark. It doesn't mean anything more than the fact that my black bedding without a fluffy animal on it looks a little bit kind of dull. So just decided to put a shark on it. Okay. All right. As for sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And on that we're gonna end Robert, thank you so much.

Thanks a lot Chris, my pleasure. you