Modern Wisdom - #383 - Robert Greene - 12 Laws Of Power & Human Nature

Episode Date: October 11, 2021

Robert Greene is an author and historian. Many people want and need power in life, but almost none of us admit it. Robert's new book compiles 366 of his best lessons on power, seduction, human nature and mastery, and today we get to go through my favourites. Expect to learn how remaining absent can increase respect, why you should suffer fools gladly, why focussing on actions not words is the best way to judge someone's character, how to avoid losing your sanity in a group and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy The Daily Laws - https://amzn.to/3iH7A1D Follow Robert on Twitter - https://twitter.com/robertgreene  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/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://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Robert Green. He's an author and a historian. Many people want and need power in life, but almost none of us admit it. Robert's new book compiles 366 of his best lessons on power, seduction, human nature and mastery. And today, we get to go through my favourites. Expect to learn how remaining absent can increase respect, why you should suffer fools gladly, why focusing on actions not words is the best way to judge someone's character, how to avoid losing your sanity in a group, and much more. It's been three years, nearly three years since Robert was last on the show, which is mental to think that.

But today's episode, I really, really enjoy it. These ones where I get to take a big body of work and then just chop them up into little lessons like the harsh psychology truths episode with Adam Lane Smith, or there's another one with Gwinderbogel coming up this Saturday on mental models that you need in life. I find it, it keeps everything really fast paced and it means that we're constantly changing and switching and it keeps us accountable and then it still gives us time for tons of lessons and examples that Robert gives from history and from politics and stuff. It's really, really interesting. I know that you're going to love this one. In other very exciting news, I I finally got the modern wisdom community sorted and ready to launch.

Tons of you have been asking for it somewhere where we can go and discuss episodes and I can do live streams and you can connect with me and give me ideas and everything. And we're going to do it on locals. I'd had Patreon, I launched Patreon about a year ago, but I didn't, I just felt a bit icky about it. I don't really know what it was. And I think it's because I didn't feel like I was adding a ton of value,

and it wasn't actually providing what I wanted, which was for people who listened to the show, and think about these sort of topics and have interests that align with mine and everyone else's, it didn't help them create a community, it didn't bind them together, and locals is perfect for that. It's like a private social media feed where all of us will be in one huge community. It means that not only am I posting stuff on that feed, but you can post things as well. You can connect with other people that listen to this show. We can have threads about different episodes, and you can give me ideas for upcoming guests and questions.

I can do live streams. You can connect with me directly, and all sorts. Like that sounds absolutely sick to me, and it's going to launch one week today, so it will be Monday the 18th of October. That will be live. Membership will be open. You can actually join for free, and then you can upgrade to be able to support the show, and also comment and post your own stuff as well. So yeah, I'll be telling you a lot more about that over the next week. But now it's time for the wise and wonderful Robert Green, pocket in the show.

Thanks for having me Chris, my pleasure. Is it true that you've had more than 80 jobs in your life? Well my girlfriend and I once counted and we got into the 60s, right? And then it kind of became a blur. And sometimes I would recall, I think I had this job in college. And so we just kind of estimated upward. But I can at least count 60 in the 60s of actual jobs. And there probably is more. Pretty wide-ranging. Doesn't say great things about me. I was very restless as a young man. Couldn't quite find my way.

I hated working for other people more or less. That was sort of the gist of it. And I now I've kind of found the perfect life because I don't have a boss above me. You were, was it 36 when you got the book offer for 48 laws? Well, I was 36 when I pitched it to the man who packaged it yo stuff for them We sold it like a year and a half later. So it's probably 37 somewhere around there. Yeah, it's inspiring for people that are Thinking I should have my shit together by the time that I'm 30 and still

Together, but you know, yeah, it, it is inspiring, you know, because the lesson that I could tell people is that I never gave up, even in the worst moments where I was very depressed, and really kind of doubting myself, there was a little voice inside of me that kept me pushing, going forward, knowing that I really was, I did have some kind of talent as a writer. I'm not good at anything else in life, but I had some kind of talent as a writer and that it was worth, you know, keeping myself, keeping a spark of hope of the light and never giving up. So that was kind of my lesson.

What's so interesting about power in the modern era? Well, the interesting thing is that people are so damn hypocritical. So it's, I mean, this was at the case 25 years ago when I wrote the book, but nobody wants to admit that they're interested in power. They like to package it in all these different forms. I just want to change the world. I just want to make a great movie. I just want to write a great book.

Yeah, those, those are motivations for sure, and there's always a part of it. But come on, admit that you love the sensation of power. You love the fact that you have a degree of control over your own life, that you can more or less influence the people around you, that you don't feel helpless. But nobody wants to admit it, but everybody is after some form of power.

So that's kind of the modern dynamic. Things have gotten much more competitive than they were 30, 40 years ago, but nobody wants to admit that they have a competitive ambitious nature. What's the difference or how do you differentiate between power and status? I'm not quite sure how you mean that. Can you elaborate? Well, people, you mean your

status in life? Yeah, yeah, status just generally as a tool that permits you access. Well, you can have the status or status. That's how you pronounce it. Well, you can have the status or status. That's how you pronounce it. In life, you can have a position of power, but you yourself are not very powerful. So power is an inner quality. Power is a sense of control over your emotions, a sense of being able to see into the future

and kind of devise plans for getting what you want being strategic in life. It's kind of thinking ahead, it's a certain form of rationality. We find plenty of people in positions of power and believe me, I've worked for them. I was on the board of directors of American Apparel and the CEO was a very charismatic man, but he was all over the place. He had no control over himself.

That is not power. So you can have status without power. You can have power without status, but eventually you will get the kind of position that you want in life. If you have this degree of self-awareness and self-control, at least I believe. Talking about the new book, which is Daily Laws, Talking about the new book, which is Daily Laws, is there a romantic arc, a sort of a sense of coming full circle with Ryan releasing the Daily Stoic a few years ago, and him being one of your apprentices not so long ago, and now you creating a book with that sort of model assisted by him in the future. Is that quite nice to think of it like that?

Yes it is. What it means is my former apprentice has now outshown me. He's now like more powerful and famous and successful than I am. And now I'm following in his footsteps. But I'm fine with that because youth rules the world, I'm happy at some point to leave the stage. He's an extremely smart, very brilliant guy. And to feel that I am kind of imitating him is fine with me. I'm very happy with it, because I love Ryan. I think it's quite charming. It's quite a nice way to do it.

So what I've done is I've stolen a bunch of my favorite laws from the book. So anyone that's familiar with the Daily Stoic, your new one, the daily laws is one page a day and you can go through each day new laws and an insight and sometimes stories from history or quotes or whatever. And I've gone through when I've taken some of my favorites and we're going to go through them and we'll see how many we get through today. Okay, very good. All right, I'm ready. First one, win through your actions, and the law is demonstrate, do not explicate. I think there's a story about Secrester for Ren in here.

Yeah, I mean, basically, we tend to talk too much. We're very verbal, chatty creatures, particularly in the world today. And it's not a very powerful way to be. If you're in a position where you have to explain yourself, explain why you did something, explain why your work is better, explain why your idea is better. You're already in a weak position, right? Because people don't really trust words anymore, right? Because everybody talks where it's inundated with advertisements, with people who can bullshit it, with can bullshit us with all kinds of words about how great they are.

It is the era of con men and con women. And so, the fact that you can actually demonstrate your idea through an action by making people feel that your idea is superior, by making them feel that you are actually a person of power, that they can make them feel that what you did was the right thing to do and was justified. Is much more powerful and effective than blabbing a lot of words, right? And, you know, I give in the 48 laws of power in that chapter, I give you dozens of strategies for how you can make that put that to life, but that's that's the general gist of it. And it's kind of stories are pretty much perfect example of that, right? Yeah, he had these columns in a church

and this critic, this other guy who thought he was a great architect and Christopher Rums, the greatest architect at this time, said, you know, I don't think there are enough columns here to support the roof. It's going to fall down. And Christopher Rums goes, what an idiot, you know, I mean, obviously I know what I'm doing. But instead of arguing with him, what he did was, he put in an extra column, just like the guy said, but he left a little space of like six inches at the top. So it actually

wasn't supporting the roof. So the guy got the feeling that he won the argument, but in fact, Christopher rented one for the feeling that he won the argument, but in fact Christopher at Renhead won for the action because you never did Really with the guy proposed for him to do. There's a subreddit called our slash malicious Compliance are you familiar with this? No, it's phenomenal. It is absolutely outstanding So it's just people that have been asked to do certain things and they follow them to the absolute letter of what's been. It's completely not what the person asked for, but it's malicious compliance. If you're one of my best reads, if you're ever bored and

you need to go down a rabbit hole and read it, I highly highly recommend that. There's a great novel written on that very subject by Mila Kunderer called the joke in which people in like a some kind of prison camp were asked to do these different tasks and they did them exactly to the letter, but it's a hilarious novel doing exactly what you're talking about. So I will check out the subreddit. Malicious compliance is good. Right next one, next one.

Money and success, daily law, concentrate on maintaining a high sense of purpose and the success will flow to you naturally. Yeah, well, a lot of people get caught up in sort of immediate emotional things, like, am I getting enough attention on on Instagram? How many followers do I have? Am I making them as much money as other people? And if you get caught up in your 20s like that,

you're gonna fall, that you're gonna end up in a dead end in life. Because really what brings success, ultimate success in life, is kind of realizing something from deep within. You have a purpose, you understand that there's something that you were born to do, something that connects you to your childhood, your deepest inclinations, right?

And so in your 20s, you're not in a hurry to make money or increase your Instagram followers to a certain number. You're in a position where you're going to learn as many skills as possible. You're going to follow that purpose, which for me was learning how to write and trying journalism and trying Hollywood, et cetera. And you're going to take your time and you're going to be calm,

but intense about that. And then eventually success will come. And when it comes, it's like you're able to then go to the next step, because you know, it's the purpose that guides you, not the money and not the fame. So like, after I finished the 48 laws, the power, you know, I could have gotten all drunk with a success and I could have, could have like just kind of created the 48 laws of power, part two, etc. But instead I realized, you know, my purpose is to continually branch off into other directions, to try new things. It's not the money that interests me.

I don't mind the money, don't get me wrong. I love the fact that I'm able to make a good living. But what really drives me is actually fulfilling this deep need within me to express what I believe is what I call my life's task. You talk about hyper intention and that sometimes holding on to things too tightly can actually cause us to be less effective at it, you say, hyperintention cause hyperanxiousness. I think that's something I've been considering a lot recently, especially after a little last year, where everyone's been locked up, ruminating, more neurotic, fewer experiences, less adventures, less opportunity to get outside of our heads. I think that's certainly something a lot of people will have been seeing. Yeah, definitely. I mean, we all have that feeling like you're trying so hard to get something

and the effort is actually kind of messing you up, right? It's kind of getting in your way. Like in a seduction setting, if you're so nervous and you just really, really want to please that woman that you want us to do, and that's all your energy is going into, you're going to give off vibrations that are going to be kind of off putting your trying too hard. Your intention is too obvious. But if you kind of let go, it's a more process of letting go inside of yourself and not in realizing that by letting go,

oftentimes when I'm blocked in my writing, I'm trying too hard. If I take a step back and I relax and I listen to some great music or watch some football and television, suddenly the idea comes to me because I'd let go of that inner tenseness that kind of envelops you. It's difficult, though, right? Because if this is a life's calling, if you've done the explore period during your 20s and you're getting towards finding what you think is your true life's calling, you take it seriously finding what you think is your true life's

calling. You take it seriously and you can quite easily kid yourself into believing that the consequences and the repercussions of your performance can be very grave. This is super important and you start to grip more and more tightly to what it is that you're doing. It makes you tense and your performance suffers. Yeah, I mean definitely, but you have to learn certain strategies of letting go and it only comes through experience. You know, I know, for instance, when I was writing my war book maybe 14 years ago, I bought a pool table and I thought shooting pool will be a great way of relaxing myself, right? And I'll be able to learn some strategy and I'll become a hustler maybe in the end. And so I played every day and I got better and better and better. And then when somebody would show up to play against me suddenly, I was just terrible.

I completely melted in, you know, under the pressure, shocks that I can normally make. I was bungling left, right, and center. And it was because I was taking it way too seriously. I was too invested in winning and then when I learned to kind of let go and relax and kind of enjoy the game and not show off, I was actually performing better. I wasn't performing brilliantly. Don't get me wrong. I'm not at the hustler level, but I was actually performing better. So you learn through experience, you learn through writing seven books, through trying to hustle your way on a pool table and things don't work out, that you have to take a step back sometimes and let go. It's not easy, but you learn this

through experience. Next one, cultivate negative capability. And the law is, develop the habit of suspending the need to judge everything that crosses your path. Consider and even momentarily entertain viewpoints opposite to your own, seeing how they feel. Do anything to break up your normal train of thinking and your sense that you already know the truth? Yeah, well, whenever you are facing like a project or something that you're creating or building, there's a level of anxiety involved, like you're not quite sure of what you need to do and you're anxious for getting the right results, etc. And this kind of tightens you up from within.

And what happens with most people is, before you start, this really has to do with your creative process, which is extremely important no matter what line of work you're in. So when you start your project or a problem that you're solving, you're generally only thinking of two or three possibilities. Let's say A, B or C, and A will be something that you've done a million times before so you're naturally going to be thinking of doing it that. And B might be something that you heard somebody else do or whatever and maybe you'll try that out and see some kind of odd thing that you probably will never try anyway.

Anyway, and so you're going to follow these paths, right? Because you already assume what you think is the answer before you've started. And negative capability is to start with a different mindset is to let go of that certainty is to allow yourself to have something to have some mystery to let you to tell yourself I don't know the answer. I don't know exactly what the right path is to follow. In fact, a bit flimless by it. So instead of trying A, B or C, maybe I should also think of D and and E, and F. Maybe I should look into what other people have done. Maybe I should look into what my enemy, the person I hate the most, has done in this situation. Maybe I should entertain ideas that I normally would never entertain.

And so the ability to keep a sense of openness while also feeling a little bit anxious about the answer is the essence of negative capability. So you're not in a rush to get an answer. You're let your open to all kinds of different possibilities. Mr. Mousart and backstory with that as well that Mousart didn't really tend to absorb in many other artists but with back for some reason he did and that actually added a big flavor to the way that he played. Well, you know, particularly as you get older and you've had some success, you think that you know the right way or you know the right way to write a book or or do a great podcast or whatever. And so you get kind of closed to other possibilities, right? So in the case of Mozart, he was like that, but then he was like

looking at the scores of the great composer Bach who had kind of fallen out of fashion by that time, and he was going, my God, there are actually things in here that are far superior to anything I've ever composed. He's on another level than I am, and so he was able to drop his ego a very important part of negative capability and say, this is actually a superior form of music, which was counterpoint. He said, I'm going to actually try and incorporate Bach into my music. I'm not going to imitate him. I'm going to incorporate his ideas and it led to a whole new level of creativity in his career and music that survived the centuries.

So the ability also to drop your ego and admit that other people might have a better guitar. It's so good. It's interesting that people can be so nimble like that. Think about the startups at the moment. Why you've got companies that have less than 50 employees making, and they're in the FTSE 500 or FTSE 100. Why? It's because they're able to adapt very, very quickly. They don't have these huge, disacconnities of scale. They're not these big fat leviathons that people need to drag lumbering along with them.

They're able to move with the market and they don't have these cultural challenges where the guardrails are brought in. And then they get bought out by Google or Microsoft or Amazon. And then they ruin it. And ruin it. Which is the sad fate of our world right now. But I completely agree with you on that. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. Next one. Remake yourself into a character of power. And the law is remake yourself into a character of power working on yourself like clay should be one of your greatest and most pleasurable life tasks. It makes you, in essence, an artist, an artist creating yourself. And there's a story I can't pronounce this name. A raw du pin du du vent, the novelist that did Indiana. George Saund. Yes. Well, it's basically where creatures were animals that judge people by appearances. And we don't like to admit that, but we pick up vibes from people's appearance, their

face, their body language, their presence, and we kind of judge them based on that. And once we've judged people, that's kind of who they are in our mind. And if you let people continually kind of pin you down, this is who you are, this is who you are, Chris, this is your type, et cetera. It kind of limits your freedom because their opinion of you will actually constrain what you can do, right? Your reputation kind of precedes you. And so you want to turn this around and think of your image as something that you get to play with, as something that you get to create, it's like your greatest work of art.

You want to take control of the process of how people can judge you, right? Which is, you think it's a little bit different, you should watch, just be who I am. But you're never exactly being who you are. You're always in some ways crafting your words and your persona and how you present yourself depending on the people you're dealing with. And I'm simply telling you here to take greater control over that, to make it more conscious, to think of yourself as a kind of actor in this world, right? And you're acting is you're not just doing anything, you're just being yourself, but you're learning to play a role and you're learning to sometimes change your image, right? And some of the most powerful people in this world, you know, like a David Bowie, for instance,

or a Pablo Picasso, they were constantly changing their image every five or six years. It didn't make them seem crazy, it made them seem incredibly powerful. We wanted to see what is the next incarnation of David Bowie? Who's he going to be now in the 80s, etc? It's very powerful, right? And in the case of Georges Sond, she was a woman at a time where women novelists were not very successful. And she decided that she was going to create this image of a woman at a time where women novelists were not very successful and she decided that she was going to create this image of a woman who dressed like a man who almost had the appearance and spirit of a man and she took a man's name, George, and that became her image.

And it was incredibly successful, incredibly powerful. It added to her aura as a successful novelist. So that's sort of the essence. Are you familiar with the Theranos story and Elizabeth Holmes? Yes I am. Very similar with her, right? In what way? She decided that she was going to try and take on masculine characteristic. She purposefully made her voice lower. I mean, she was a complete charlatan and is going to jail for a very

long time. She wanted to be, she wanted to be Steve Jobs, et cetera. Yeah. I mean, of course, you can, if you have nothing to back it up, if it's only image, if it's only, you know, playing a role, that's not going to get you very far. There has to be some substance behind it, you know, a David Bowie or George Sant. He's a very talented people who were great artists, right? So it's not that you're just a con artist. So you know, you can take that too far. But you know, if only she had Elizabeth Holmes

had had a like a really brilliant idea that would have had actually foundation, all of those black turtleneck sweaters and that kind of Steve Jobs, he and appearance in her in her pot, whatever in her, you know, in the shows that she gave to deliver her product would have been that much more effective. So it could have been the right answer to here if she had had something to back it up. It's the same as Fire Festival. If that had actually worked, everyone surrounding it would have been hailed as marketing geniuses and the same with Elizabeth Holmes. The one in the Caribbean, which festivals are? Yeah, Fire Festival. I think it was...

Oh Fire Festival, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Pablo Picasso, Pablo Escobar, you've got Picasso. Imagine if it was on Pablo Picasso's Old Island. Pablo Escobar's Old Island and blah, blah, blah. And the only difference with both Elizabeth Holmes and Fire Festival, the only thing they got wrong was not having a product that backed it up. Everything else was perfect. And people, even if they'd had the minimum viable,

they scraped that festival buy and people had got and they'd farted out a half competent music event. Or with Elizabeth Holmes, if it had done 50% or 70% of what it was supposed to they would be hailed as the second coming Right look at the gap they found in the market because we applaud success so much We're so happy to put it on a pedestal because this person's got the new idea And there be young girls going to school and mothers would be dressing them in black turtlenecks because you want to be just like Elizabeth Holmes You know like it doesn't change the fact that she, the way that those marketing strategies have

been deployed and the fundamentally predatory nature of the people that were deploying them hasn't changed, all that's changed is the fact that they had something finally to back it up. I think there's something really worrying to do with that. This sort of cult of personality that we have at the moment in the 21st century. Yeah, it can be very dangerous. As I said, when I wrote the 48 Loves of Power, people kind of scratch their heads and they say,

why do you have so many stories about con artists? Well, I say we're living in the era of con artists and that's going to be our future, where people are kind of trying to fake their way to some kind of power Con artist isn't necessarily doing an actual con game on you like the traditional con game and getting your money They're trying to make you think that they're more competent than they are that they're more powerful than they are Politicians are are largely con artists these days, you know, so yeah, that's I sort of see that as kind of the future of power in some ways. Next one. Next one.

Next one. Next one. Do not be the court cynic. The law is, the ability to express wonder and amazement and seem like you mean it is a rare and dying talent, but one's still greatly valued. Yeah, well, you know, a lot of people in the work world think that they can just kind of be whoever they are. And if they have a kind of sarcastic, sardonic humor, but that's, you know, that's just natural. And people are going to love that kind of thing. And, you know, we're filled, we're surrounded by people who are generally, the world has become increasingly more cynical.

We're people doubt everything, and everything is a conspiracy theory, and everything everybody has a ulterior motive, etc. And sort of that kind of dropped that, and to actually feel the opposite, to feel that people might be sincere in what they're doing, that they might have a good reason for believing what they are, to being open to their spirit instead of being closed and cynical and skeptical about things, to having a sense, kind of a child-like aura in which you're excited by the world and you're in awe of things and you think that people have interesting ideas and you're going to try and get inside their ideas is an incredibly seductive tactic. It's incredibly powerful because it's so rare in this world where everybody thinks they have the right answer and everybody else is so stupid. So dropping the kind of cynicism and kind of

Opening yourself up to the spirit of other people is exactly what you need in the kind of modern core worlds that we live in. Superbly disarming. Yes. Yes. Very. Well, do you have Chris? Oh, thank you.

Yeah, I, um, when I'm on the internet, the number of times that you watch people have a discussion and they're fighting backwards and forwards and entrenching themselves in their position, and if someone does come in and say, wow, that's really interesting. Can you link me to something about this so that I can learn more? The entire argument gets muted. There, done. Yeah. What is it?

It's a show of faith. It's them saying, I am here in good faith. I am here because I genuinely want to understand your point of view. Everyone is convinced of their own points of view. Like it's not that they have your information and are choosing to disregard it so that they can hold. No, they have their own point of view. You have yours. If you want to understand the world from their perspective, you just need to, if you had their stuff, you would believe it as well. Minus some biases and life experiences. But yeah, it's super disarming and you're right. I think making that balancing act between how would you say avoiding cynicism and remaining sufficiently aloof

and not psychophantic, that's a delicate balance to play. Yes, you have to have a slight level of detachment where you kind of analyze the situation and determine that maybe their idea is a little bit bogus, but at least you're going to make the ever going to take that step forward to try and understand them in some way. A lot of people mistake cynicism for intelligence, for intellectual capacity. If I disbelieve everything that must be a sign that I'm so brilliant because I'm ahead of the curve I can think of exactly what's wrong in your idea. But that's not the case at all. The greatest

scientist in this world and I interviewed one of them from my book Mastery, Ramashandran, via Thramashandran, said, so many scientists begin now with that kind of skeptical attitude. And he wants to have the opposite attitude that he had when he was a child, that he's in wonder of all the things going on in this world. And he doesn't know the answers, and that's precisely what we'll need to some great discoveries. So cynicism is not intelligence. In fact, I think it's kind of a closed mind.

Just because you have an Etudeaux opinion doesn't mean that you're smart. Right. Right, next one. Judge them on their behavior, not on their words. What you want is a picture of a person's character over time, restrained from the natural tendency to judge right away and let the passage of time

reveal more and more about who people are. This is something I see play out pretty much every single year that I exist on this planet. Well, I do a lot of consulting work with people in various lines of work in sports, in politics, entertainment, et cetera. And the number one problem that people have is they've hired someone, a business partner, a manager, an employee to help them, and it ends up they're a disaster. They're like trying to get the company away from them. They're just so incompetent.

I had no idea. Tell me, Robert, how can I get out of this? I'm going to tell you how to get out of it. First, I'm going to teach you the number one thing is never hire these fuck-ups in the first place. And the reason you're hiring them is because you're judging them on their appearance, on their dazzling resume, on their charming smile, on the cool clothes that they're wearing. And they kind of charm you and they kind of con you with their appearance. And that's sort of the animal part of our nature where we're kind of dazzled by how things look.

You need to look below the surface. Character is something that's etched so deeply in people that almost cannot control it. It's what creates patterns of behavior in their life. That is who they are. Some people have a good character and some people have a very bad character and instead of good or bad I like to say strong or weak Strong character that people who can take criticism, right? That's the number one thing you want in somebody that you're hiring or working with or even an intimate partner

You want to be able to criticize them on some level in a constructive way. If they can't take any criticism, it shows a weakness in character, and you're never going to be able to work with them on any level. You also want strong character people who can handle stress. So many times these people hired someone who seems so great, and then the shit hit the fan and they kind of withered and turned to use whiny little five-year-old, right? Well, stress reveals who people are

and I instruct people, you can't put people in stressful situations right now, but in the interview process, you can make them sweat a little bit, you can make them a little bit nervous, you can put them in a little bit of stress to see how they react and I show you what is the proper reaction and what isn't in those kinds of situations. You want people who can work as a team who are not so ego-driven and everything is about

them who can kind of subsume their ego and work with others. These are signs of a strong character, the opposite is weak character. Stop looking at the resume, at the smile, at the pretty close, at the charming words, and get under that surface and look at their character, because that is really what is going to determine how well you can work with them. And choosing people of bad characters is going to make your life hell. Believe me, I've been dealing with this for 25 years and my consulting. I have a lot of stories about that so

Very important. I was talking to a Navy seal and he brought up a really nice dichotomy around how people hire and fire so that people hire based on skills So they look at someone's resume and they have this particular qualification and this was their last job and so on and so forth But they fire people based on their attributes. So it's not the fact that they weren't able to do the job. He uses as a Navy SEAL example, he said, look Chris, if you said to me, I want to be able to hit a target at 25 yards with a handgun. He's like, give me a couple of weeks.

I can teach you to do it. That'll be fine. That's a skill. What I can't teach you is how to take criticism or how to be, uh, how to have humor or how to have empathy or how to be a team player, how to be resilient, I have grit or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you hire people based on the skills, then realize that they might have the skills that you require, but their attributes and their personality and their character are completely sideways because during any 90-minute interview, you can't see, you can't stress test the character. So yeah, I would be, I think that's a really good way to try and make

someone sweat purposefully to create some discomfort. Well, so when you do that, when you do that, you want to see whether they can say something like, you know, actually Chris, I don't know the answer to that. That's a good question. Let me think about it. Or know the idiot, the bad wheat character responses, you know, to get all defensive and say, well, you know, blah, blah, blah, blame other people or say, you know, trying to justify why your idea is the best. You're already revealing that kind of underlying inability to take some kind of criticism. So yeah. Those people that struggle to sit with that discomfort,

even if it's just in an interview and do get defensive and do start to bluster, it's, you know, that's the pebble at the top of an avalanche, I think, and something worse is going to happen down the road. Yeah, I mean, so don't, don't look at the resume so much. Don't look at whether they went to some great business school, try and see patterns in their past. Look at that resume for certain patterns, right? So if they were continually being fired every couple of years from some job and they say, oh, I had this boss was terrible, et cetera.

No, look at maybe that there's a pattern that's kind of recurring in their life and it's going to recur with you in the next next time it goes around. So, be focused not on the skills and the glittering resume, but what I'm people are trying to disguise because if people have weaknesses in their character, they're doing everything they can to disguise it from you. Unconsciously, they're doing that in the interview in the initial process, right? And then months later, it'll leak out, right? So you want to be detective and you want to get under that facade.

Use absence to increase respect. The more you are seen and heard from, the more common you appear. If you are already established in a group, temporarily withdraw from it, that temporarily withdrawing from it will make you more talked about even more admired. You must learn when to leave, create value through scarcity. And as this Napoleon quote where he says, if I am often seen at the theatre, people will cease to notice me. Right. I mean, it's very counterintuitive to our social media age, where we think the only way to gain power is to be immediately present continually every single day on Instagram or whatever it is with the new TikTok video. Never letting one hour go by where people aren't clicking on you, right?

So it's kind of a hyper, you know, a mood that we're all caught up in. It's very infecting. And it's not based on real psychology. So if you're so much in people's face, if you're continually there, they're naturally going to grow tired of you. They're naturally going to think that you're kind of weak, that you're trying too hard for attention. They may not say it, but they feel it a slight level of contempt

from within, right? And so, if you disappear for a day or several days or a week, people are going to start thinking about you, and they're going to wondering, well, maybe I didn't really know Chris. Maybe he's a little more mysterious and dimensional than I thought of. Maybe there's something going on, maybe he's disappeared for this reason or that, and as they think about you and as they may be fantasized about what's going on in your mind, it's kind of creates a sort of seductive process where your spirit is entering their head.

As opposed to them being so filled with you that they want to vomit and get rid of you, you're creating an appetite where they want to like now know more. It's an incredibly powerful dynamic. And so in a dating situation, it's extremely obvious. That's the most obvious of all. So if you're continually bombarding people with texts, love bombing them, I love you, I need to see you bubble, bubble, blah. People might initially think that's kind of cool. You know, I don't get enough of that. But after a couple of days, it starts to get a little bit tiring and you begin to wonder about the other person. Maybe they're desperate. Maybe it has nothing to do about me.

Maybe they're just desperate, right? And so, you know, but if they've created this pattern where they're texting you, and then suddenly they don't for a day or two, you're like, wow, maybe I've done something wrong. Maybe they don't like me as much as they like me before, and now you make them one try harder to please you. So learning how to absent yourself in this social media age is extremely important, and it's not easy. I know where you're trying to always post something on Instagram. It's not just absence. It's just creating a sense of mystery. So people have the sense that they don't thoroughly know you so that they can disdain you, right? You want to keep them on their toes and occasionally do something unpredictable that will surprise

them. That's sort of the art here. There's two things that I really like about this. The first is the pattern interrupt that you have that makes people realize, oh, hang on, there's something different to what I'd expected here. And the next one is the scarcity creating demand that you use the example of the tulips, that bubble market.

And that demand was simply created through scarcity. And think about anyone that you kind of admire, some of them may be omnipresent, but the ones that are omnipresent have to be so talented and so likable that they're constantly delivering you something that's very, very nice. And even they will be pattern interrupting by supplying you with something that's slightly different. It's always worded a little bit more and they're always sort of forward thinking and creative. But the people that are aloof, they're the ones that have this sort of mystique and they're kind of like mysterious and attractive and you don't really know what's going on with them.

Right, right, very much so. I mean, we lived through that with Donald Trump here in the United States, where he was so much in your face that it was just like you, you know, you couldn't avoid it, even if you didn't want to think about him, you were thinking about him night and day. And initially it was powerful in a perverted sense. He captured so much of our attention, but eventually so many people got tired of it, even his own supporters got tired of the daily tweet, et cetera, and it really turned against him. Because he didn't know, I didn't know how to do your

pad interruption, that's what you call it. He didn't know how to surprise or do something different because it was his character that made him always do the same thing. And he didn't never, ever knew how to absent himself. So these are powerful lessons and there are people like an Elon Musk who doesn't really absente himself very much, but he is kind of keeping us on the toes. We never quite know what he's up to next. You know, he can do that pattern

and direction that you're talking about. Appeared to be an object of desire. Build a reputation that precedes you. If many have succumbed to your charms, there must be a reason. Yeah, I mean, I give people a very banal example. You're looking for a restaurant, you're with your friend, your girlfriend, your girlfriend, and you pass by a restaurant. It looks kind of nice, but there's only one couple sitting at a table in a rather vast room when you go Hmm, even though you don't admit it. You can now unless let's try to look at somewhere else And you pass by this restaurant. It's packed with people that are all laughing and drinking you go. Yeah, let's go in there There must be a reason right?

So a lot of our human desires are based on what other people are desiring. They're very interesting intellectuals who have written about that. The mimetic, the imitating aspect of our desire. If other people think something is cool, there must be a reason for it. I must think maybe I should think that it's cool as well. So you want to continually create triangles of desire, where the product that you create, or the person that you are, is desired by so many other people that it creates a kind of a viral effect, and attention is brought to you. So I don't like to often admit

this, but I'll tell the story about how I seduced my current girlfriend. We've been with for a whole for a while. It was like my birthday. We had already had two dates. And I didn't think she was that intimate. It wasn't quite sure, you know, the level of interest in me. So, and this is before I wrote the art of seduction, I have to admit.

So I invited her to my birthday party, knowing full well that eight of these really beautiful women would be there who have it to be my friends at the time, right? They were going to be all around the table. And I knew that seeing that she would immediately assume that these women were kind of interested in me, that there must be something enticing about Robert to have attracted all of these beautiful women. It could have been totally fake.

They were just friends of mine, but it worked as a charm and she admits it to this day. So creating triangles and desires is extremely important. This book, even if it's a product that you created or in this adduction facet, you know, and I talked about in my last book about the French designer Coco Chanel, who is really brilliant at that. about the French designer Coco Chanel, who was really brilliant at that. Whenever she created some designs, some new kind of outfit or whatever, she made sure that women saw other women wearing her outfits everywhere.

She'd purposely hired models to do that, and they go, wow, other women are buying this. I have to be interested in it. So even in a marketing sense, you want to continually create these viral effects. Yeah, mimetic desires are hell of a drug. There was a, wasn't there something a marketing campaign that was done with cigarettes and women? Wasn't it seen unbecomingly for women to smoke for a while and then they got models and they paid models to walk down some street

in New York? Have I got this right? Yeah, this was Edward Bernier, I talked about that in the art of seduction. He was a cousin of Sigmund Freud. He was one of the most brilliant public relations people in history. And he created this like Liberty March. That was it. In which women walked down Fifth Avenue in mass, smoking cigarettes. And it wasn't now this kind of dirty little thing that that loose women did.

It was now a liberty, a liberty thing, a liberating thing. It's great for women here in the 1920s. It's a new era, but it's not just one woman in a dark corner. It was like hundreds of the march down the street all smoking. And it had it, it was immensely effective. It's one of the great advertising campaigns of the modern era. Then they call them, was it like freedom torches or something that even given the cute little name. I think so. I think you're right. Yeah. Yeah. A long time. I've done that story. I have no idea where I've pulled that story from.

I've totally brought science in. It's from my book. There we go. Right, next one. Next one. Time is all you have. Resist the urge to respond to trivial annoyances. Time lost can never be regained. Yeah, well, I talk about this. I don't know if it's the same law, but I talk about dead time versus lifetime. And what I mean by that is, you know, you have a lot of possessions in this world, you have your car, your house, you know, the money that you save, et cetera, et cetera,

all these things, even your loved ones can eventually be taken from you, and they will be taken from you at some point in life, because that's the nature of our transient existence. you at some point in life, because that's the nature of our transient existence. The one thing, the one thing that you own that can never ever be taken away from you, ever until you die is your time, right? So when you're born, you know, and the biblical chord is cut, you have so much time to live. It's your time. You possess it. It's your empire. It's your treasure within you, right? And it can be 60 years. It could be

20 years. Whatever it is, it's yours, right? And you can inadvertently give it away by wasting your time by getting involved in people's trivial fights by working for other people that you hate. They own your time, you have to show up every day, eight o'clock in your miserable. They own that thing that you, is your only real possession. So your goal in life is to realize that that is your treasure.

And it's something that you own, and you want to make it your own. You don't want to give it away inadvertently to other people. So let's say you're working at that shit job and you have that horrible boss and you're miserable, right? That time that you have there, those eight hours, is what I call dead time. It's like something that was originally kind of green, a sort of turning brown and withering and dying on the vine. It's dyed within you. It's totally brown, right? And you're miserable and you resentful and you go home

and you're bitter, etc. You can turn that around and make those eight hours a lifetime. You tell yourself, all right, this isn't my future. I'm not going to be flipping burgers at McDonald's forever. Okay, so maybe when I go home at night, I'm going to start studying something. I'm going to go to night school. I'm going to create a different plan for my life. All right, also the people in this restaurant, maybe there's some interesting psychology is going on, even with my co-workers. Maybe I can learn something about how to deal with people.

Maybe I can learn what my weaknesses are. Maybe I can develop some kind of empathy with it. Maybe I can see that there are things that I can learn even from the worst possible job. Suddenly that dead brown time starts turning green, green, a little sprout starts showing up on the tree limb, right? So that's how you create a live time by saying, it's mine. I'm going to create something worthwhile out of it. I'm not going to give it away to others. I'm not going to be sucked into their dramas and their games that they try and get me to play with.

This is my time. I'm going to own it. I spoke to a friend on the show and was sad about the fact that I used to have a very small minor existential crisis every time I went to the supermarket after work at three in the morning. So I was working in a nightclub and then finish up and then it would be three or three thirty a.m. and I'd realize I didn't have any food for tomorrow or there's no milk or whatever. And that go into the supermarket and it was just the perfect amalgamation of fatigue and hunger and what the fuck am I doing in a supermarket at 3.30 in the morning? And I just used to always feel a bit sort of

wistful or melancholy or whatever. And I said to him, he's like, do this the next time that you go in. When you go in, someone that's stacking the shelves or the person that you speak to at the counter, like just genuinely care for 30 seconds about how their day is going. Like invest yourself in them and say,

hey man, like, how are you doing tonight? Little bit late, isn't it? Like, is everything okay? And it made me realize, I was like, look, if you focus your energy outward, not inward, you are going to sort of free that and open it up a little bit. And it made a big difference.

Yeah, that's very true. I agree with that 100%. Right, next one. The madness of groups never relinquish your ability to doubt, reflect and consider other options. Your rationality as an individual is your only protection against the madness that can overcome a group. Well, what often happens is if you're an individual and some and you're entertaining an idea, you might be a little bit skeptical and you might tell

yourself, maybe it's not the best idea, maybe after a couple hours you see from another angle and you go, and now, you know, maybe I shouldn't follow that path, I doesn't seem quite right, but in a group setting, the very opposite happens. When a group starts entertaining an idea, that ability to step back and detach and to analyze is suddenly goes out the window, right? Because other people are focusing on this idea and you get caught up in the group mentality and suddenly everybody is signing off on this idea and not reflecting on the possible negative consequences. So if you're an individual and you choose a particular path and it fails, you're going to pay terrible consequences.

The stakes are high. So naturally, you're going to think more deeply about the possibilities. But when you're in a group, and the boss is advocating some kind of ridiculous scheme that everyone's kind of buying off on, the back of your mind, you go, if this is wrong, if it fucks up, well, I'm not gonna blame because it's everybody else there.

So all these kind of group mentality start kicking in and it's kind of a madness. It's a kind of delusionary process. If you as an individual went through that delusionary process, you would be homeless. Your life would be a complete wreckage right now. But if every time you thought of some idea, you immediately convinced yourself it's brilliant, it has to work, and I'm not going to pay any consequences, you would probably be dead. But in a group setting, you can get away with that. Oh, yes, and how

many Hollywood meetings, when I worked in Hollywood before, that did I actually see with my own eyes, this very dynamic, where some really bad script was being entertained by some producer, but because the producer liked it, everyone was now like, felt the need to kind of say, yes, I think it's pretty good even though everybody knew it was a shit script, and suddenly this thing that you thought was the worst movie that ever was ever, this worst script that was ever written, is now being passed into production is it's going to happen. And nobody in that group meeting kind of raised their hands and said, you know, Mr. Producer, I think there's some things that really need to be changed. I think the

whole idea is actually pretty rotten. It's not going to work very well. If one person had done that, then maybe it's something to change. But the whole group signs off on it and there's really pathetic stupid movie actually gets made. Believe me, I saw that time, and again. So groups have a kind of madness, a kind of delusionary process, where the consequences of what could have go wrong are suddenly spread out about so many people.

And you get drawn in to the kind of group mentality where it's natural, you don't wanna be that one person saying, no, I don't think this might be so good because you're going to be me, be ostracized, people are going to wonder about you. So it creates this kind of insanity dynamic in a group and it's very dangerous. What's the solution then as an individual? How do you play that game? Well, as an individual, you have to have, well, first of all, the most important thing, this is what I do in my consulting, I'd say, it really starts from the boss, from the person who's like an

aspread the bad idea among the group, right? Did you have to realize that you don't want a bunch of yes, men and yes women around you? You want to create a dynamic in which people can raise their hand and say, this idea is shit, Mr. Boss, even though you might fire me. That's a sign that's a strong character that we're talking about. So it really starts at the top, where that person is able to create a group dynamic where some kind of air from the outside is led in, and people can actually express some of their

true opinion. And if you're caught in that kind of dynamic where it's the boss, it's like that. It's very dangerous and very delicate because your job might be on the line. So maybe you kind of sign off on the group dynamics so you're not fired so you still can have a paycheck and pay for your food and clothing, etc. But in your mind, you don't go, you don't seduce, but you create some distance when you go. I know this is a bad idea. I'm not going to get sucked into it. I'm not going to get personally involved in it.

And in any time in the process, if I can bring in a little word of criticism or a little breath of fresh air, I'm going to try and do it. I'm not going to emotionally invest myself in this group madness. Suffer fools gladly. Det detach yourself emotionally from fools, and while you're inwardly laughing at their foolishness indulge them in one of their more harmless ideas. This one I thought was quite interesting. Well it's one that I'm not so good at myself and I've worked at it over the years because I've hired people who are quite honestly very incompetent who end up, you know, I, I, I've violated my own law here about character

and I admitted and they're incompetent, they're lazy and they're foolish and manicets under my skin and what man I want to beat the shit out of it. Man it's hard for me to control my emotions. But I try, I try very hard. And part of the strategy that I talk about in suffer fools gladly is to take a step back and realize you are probably a fool yourself, right? You Chris Williamson have a foolish side to himself. You play the fool sometimes even though you don't want to play the fool. Me, Robert, you sometimes can be very foolish and very stupid, even though you wrote the 48 laws of power,

you often violate the 48 laws of power. There's a side of you that is quite foolish and quite emotional and quite reactive despite how great you think you are. And when you have that and you're dealing with someone that's getting into your skin who's got really bad ideas who doesn't working hard enough, although it's hard for me when people don't work hard enough, because I can excuse bad ideas and other things, but if you're not working hard enough, that's really hard for me.

But anyway. It fails very much within someone's control, right? Exactly. But beyond that, if it's people, they're just, like, not very bright, and they're kind of slightly incompetent, have a little bit of empathy. Maybe you don't want to work with them. Maybe you're trying to find a way not to be involved

in their life in a way that's going to have terrible consequences for you. But maybe have some empathy by focusing on the fact that you're not as great and smart and wise together as you think you are, that we all have a foolish side to ourselves. So that's how I've kind of been able to kind of overcome the fact that I don't suffer fool's glove. I think it stops us from feeling so caught up in the natural vicissitudes of other people trying to do

there. Just go about their days. There's all of those people that you hate follow online. The only reason that you follow them is because their life is a slow motion car crash. And we've all got those. It's this odd catharsis that we have by knowing that someone else's life is consistently shit. You think, yes, yes, mess up again, go on. And I don't know, I feel like if we were able to detach and kind of laugh more, because it's all well and good having it with that one or two people that you follow online,

but when it's someone that you're a little bit more invested in, that equanimity is completely out of the window. And you go, okay, let's try and take some of that mindfulness. Let's try and bring that over into someone else. One thing that I had in my mind, I want to read a story and I don't know if this is true about when you wrote the 48 laws of power, did you purposefully make it slightly less applied or applicable to people being able to deploy them because you had concerns over how much people were going to manipulate the laws in the real world.

Is there any truth to this? Well, I did want to kind of keep it open-ended, and the real point of the 48 laws of power was to open people's eyes who were a bit more like myself, who are a bit more naive and innocent, who enter the world with a bit of that foolish side that I mentioned, and that certainly was me when I was in my 20s, right? I suffered a lot, I violated these laws,

I was observing people of power. So when I wrote the book, it wasn't with the intention of helping assholes become even better assholes It was with the intention of protecting people like myself. I'm having to continually deal with assholes and not being so naive in my dealing with them and being aware of kind of the Games and manipulations that they play so I wrote the book from that kind of Shlimiel perspective if you will from that kind of shlameal perspective, if you will, from that outside of perspective.

And you know, at times I would catch myself kind of not doing that so much and then I would go return to that. And so I tried to build it into the way I wrote the book where when you read about, get others to do the work but always take the credit, which is what happened to me 90 times in Hollywood, I wrote it in such a way that you would feel like this what happened to me 90 times in Hollywood. I wrote it in a such a way that you would feel like this has happened to me. This is what other people are doing to me. I better be aware of it. So I was trying to get cues to the reader. This isn't necessarily what you want to do. It's what you want to be aware of, or create a cult like following, you know,

playing people's needs to believe to create a cult critical i'm not trying to literally tell you how to create a cult although i am actually in fact i'm saying we live in a world of cults now they're everywhere the political cults you don't call them cults but they are cults and this is a key to how you can decipher what is a cult and what is not a cult so i may have failed in some, but that was my lofty goal. All right, last one, accept your insignificance. The fact that you were aware of this insignificance and smallness is paradoxically what renders you powerful and significant. It is an understanding of reality that no other animal is capable of. Such awareness can begin to restore you to that sense of awe and connection that comes from a proper sense of scale. Well, this is a very powerful thing to me right now, because it's the book I'm currently writing and it's currently what I'm immersed in.

So it has great emotional resonance with me right now. And the idea is when you were a child and you were physically quite small, everything around you was larger, right? Your parents were larger, the house was larger, animals were large, rooms were vast, and because of that it created a certain mentality where you were kind of slightly frightened, but also in awe of things. You were aware that you were a small weak creature, and it made you curious. It made you, your way to kind of get a little bit of control was to understand through knowledge, to be curious, to read books, to be interested and one, and being kind of awe, continue awe of the world that's around you, right?

Because in truth, this world is insanely awesome. That's what I'm explaining in my new book. But how weird and perverted is it that as we get older, a kind of dynamic gets reversed, where everything that used to be so much larger now seems smaller. And it's as if like we're a gulliver, and now we've grown, and grown, and grown, and everybody else is now smaller around us, and we're these giants.

It's our ego, everything revolves around us, our desires, our beliefs, you know, which is so much superior to anything else, right? And so suddenly, the universe that is vast kind of starts shrinking down. Oh yeah, I know about the sun and the moon, the star that's all the science bullshit. I know I've heard about the big bang. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know about evolution. Yeah, yeah, okay. This is something to be excited about like when I was a child because I'm so much bigger now. I have understanding it's pure bullshit. You don't have any idea. You're not any bigger. The relationship between you and the cosmos is still you're insanely small. Do you know that the Big Bang occurred maybe 13 billion years ago? Can you try to compare your 70 years perhaps or 80 years of existence to 13 billion? Do you know how small that is? Do you know how small

is your little five foot six feet of space that you occupy compared to the vastness of the cosmos. You are incredibly small, and when you die within several decades, people will completely forgotten about you. They won't remember anything about Chris Williams and a Robert Green, right? So you're as small as you were in a child. All that's changed is you think that you're much larger

than you are. And so the process is to slowly shrink yourself back down to the reality and to look at the world and realize this world is actually as even more awesome than I realized as a child. You know, I did a lot of science for that particular chapter that I'm reading about. And to read about the big bang is one of the most earth-shattering experiences. This man who wrote a book called The First Three Minutes, a great physicist. I forget his name. He died recently.

He described the first three minutes of the universe as best he could. Now probably in a hundred years it will all be seen as nonsense. But the thought of what was actually going on from this tiny kernel, this thing that was our universe was so small it was nothing and then it kind of explodes and then it expands in the heat and the look and the feel of it and the power of it, it whoa, whoa, just to think about that was like put everything else in my life in perspective and to then kind of flow from that to the evolution of the cosmos. Or to think about, I'll leave you with one last thought here, Chris, is you know,

life on Earth sparked maybe two some billion years ago, whatever scientists decide upon. maybe two some billion years ago, whatever scientists decide upon. And then there were all of these like little bottlenecks in which the way life evolved as it is today might have happened very, very differently. Incredibly little chance encounters. The first chance encounter might have been the first spark of life and a little pool somewhere on the planet. But then there was this thing where multicellular organisms suddenly were created, right? And it's only happened once in the history of our cosmos because we know because there's only one line of DNA for all organisms on the planet. One organism, one piece of bacteria, ate another one and created the first complex multicellular

form of life. It only happened once, and it was like a freakish occurrence. If it had never happened, it would just be a planet full of bacteria. I could go on and on and on, the disappearance of the dinosaurs 60 million years ago, when a asteroid hit our planet and destroyed everything and killed off all the dinosaurs and that asteroid nearly missed our planet if it It missed it still be dinosaurs all around the world and we wouldn't be here and so you know And then you go through the 70,000 generations of people prior to you being born Think of how odd it was that your two parents met How unlikely it was well multiply that by 70,000 going back all the way to your first ancestors.

So you being alive, you being having two legs, two arms in a brain is so astronomically unlikely. So just think of that every day. Think of how small and think of how insane it is just to be alive. So that's sort of the point of returning to that initial smallness that I was talking about. Well, wait, finish. Robert Green, ladies and gentlemen, daily laws will be linked in the show notes below Why should people go if they want to keep up to date with the other things you're doing?

Hold on with me one second. Just bear with me because I Have a new website that I'm supposed to promote and I, and I, and I, and I bollocks it every single time and now I told this guy right now. I told this guy. I told this guy. I told this guy. I told this guy.

I told this guy. I told this guy. I told this guy. I told this guy. I told this guy. I told this guy. I told this guy. I told this guy. I told this guy. I told this guy. I told this guy. I told this guy. All right, I'm supposed to say my website is robbergreenofficial.com has links to all my books

and social media. And the inscriptions are all scripted and all of it. It's completely scripted. You nailed it. You nailed it. Look, I really, really think that you've done a great job with this. It's going to be an absolute smash. It's linked in the show now to below.

Everyone can go and get it there. Until next time, Robert, thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Chris. I'm really enjoying it. Pick it. you