The Joe Rogan Experience - #464 - Robert Greene, Aubrey Marcus

Episode Date: March 4, 2014

http://powerseductionandwar.com/joe Robert Greene is an American author and speaker known for his books on strategy, power and seduction. He has written five international bestsellers: The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law and Mastery. Aubrey Marcus is writer, entrepreneur, and adventurer. Some of his writings and experiences can be found on his website, WarriorPoet.us, as well as links to his latest venture, Onnit Labs.

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! First of all, Robert Green, thank you very much for doing the podcast, I really appreciate it. It's a pleasure to meet you, pleasure to have you in here. I've heard many, many, many fantastic things about you, but this guy over here raves, rants and raves. And I know you were recently on the Warrior Poet Project podcast, which is his podcast. And he couldn't say enough good things.

So I had to have you in here, man. Thank you. I have to learn some stuff. I have to figure out what you've accumulated for all your years of research and writing books. And your books all seem to be about getting your shit together, about producing results. Uh-huh. Yeah. Starting with The 48 Laws of Power, I basically decided to enter the self-help genre with a lot of trepidation because I think it's full of a lot of bullshit.

Wait a minute. Hold on. What are you saying? I'm saying that it's filled with a lot of triacly stuff that's going to make you feel good about yourself. It's going to boost your ego a bit but doesn't get anything. There's nothing real behind it. Right. There's some things about life that are harsh.

There are people out there that are dirty and mean that you need to know about. There's all sorts of things that aren't being discussed in these books. And I know, for instance, when I started out like in Hollywood, I used to work in Hollywood, I was like really shocked by all of the kind of power maneuvers and the kind of passive-aggressive games that were going on. What did you do in Hollywood? I wasn't horribly successful.

I was a writer. I was assistant to a producer, assistant to a director, a researcher, a story developer. I basically did everything. But you were connected to the machine. You were in there. Very much so. You got to see the gears spin.

Very much so. And nobody writes about what really goes on in the world. I got so sick of it. I see, you know, all sorts of weird games being played. One director, this one producer who wanted to direct his first film. And basically, it would look bad if he was the director of something that he had sort of put together. It just wouldn't look good politically. So what he did is he hired somebody he knew would do a terrible job, a director, a first-time director. He knew the guy would fail, and then

he could go in and rescue him and become the director on the project. But in the meantime, totally destroying this other person's reputation. On and on. I could list 100 other sort of games like that. That's a quite clever move. All sorts of things right out of The Art of War. That's just so I can jump in here and give a bit of my story. I found that book, Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power, before I had met you. And I was in kind of a dark time in my own work climate. And I started reading it and I started realizing all of the things that were happening. Like, oh, shit, that's what's going on.

That's why this bad shit is happening. That's why I'm being thwarted in this goal that I have. Because you go in with these good-natured intentions thinking, I'm just going to do my best. I'm going to wear my heart on my sleeve and it's all going to work out. Bullshit. It doesn't work out.

It can. It can. You've got to get lucky and get in touch with the right people. Or be in the right situation. But a lot of times, if you're in a kind of politically charged situation or a situation with a lot of ego, his book was like this wake-up call of just sheer, unabated truth about what the fuck is going on. It's not so that I could do it myself, but at least so I could protect myself and see it and identify it. So this move that this producer did, did that surprise you at all? Were you like, oh, you motherfucker. Completely, because he never told me, obviously.

He wasn't going to confide that this was going on. That's my interpretation later on. So you're sure that that's what happened? Oh, completely, 100%. And I've seen him do other things, so I saw... What's his name? What's his fucking name? I can't do that. You shouldn't. He's no longer among us, so I don't want to... Oh, he's dead? Yeah. Fucker.

You got off light, pal. And he wasn't a totally awful person. You know, he had a good side to him. That business is ripe with that stuff. But what really annoyed the hell out of me about the Hollywood business is that people

would pretend to be so liberal and wonderful and good. I love your project. You're wonderful. You're great. But at the same time, they were so fucking

power hungry. Yeah. And nobody really talks about the power hungry side and about what people are really up to. I worked with a guy on my very first sitcom.

It was the first time I ever did any acting at all. Oh, I didn't know about this. I was young. I was like 20-something, 25, I guess, or 26. And I was on this show on Fox called Hardball. And there was a guy that was on the show that would insult people right before it was their time to perform.

Like, you would say something about, what are you, fucking Gane and Wayne here? Like, something? What's going on with the gut? And the guy would be like, what? And then you'd see the guy perform with this, like, shit. He would fuck with you. That's pretty good.

Like, I've seen, it was really interesting to watch. It was bizarre. But it wasn't pretty good. It was really shitty of him. You know, he did it to me once and I went what? what the fuck did you say? and then I cornered him and I said dude don't insult me

because you're an ugly fuck do you understand how ugly you are? we could just start talking about what's wrong with you and the guy would go come on we gotta film the scene and I go no this guy's a dick this guy likes to talk shit to people and everybody was like what is he doing? he's calling out the thing that this guy's a dick this guy likes to talk shit to people right before they and everybody was like what is he doing he's calling out the thing that you know this guy's doing like you're not supposed to do that but

he would feel like really subtle about it you know he'd be like who picked out that shirt like like weird shit to girls too man it wasn't just two guys but this was his thing he would be like really catty he was always reading like Entertainment Weekly he was always reading what I would call the devil's rag like the Hollywood Reporter, all that shit. He would read those things, and you could see the little fucking power wheels spinning in his devious mind.

Luckily, he's dropped off the face of the planet, fortunately. So you could read some of Robert Greene's books, like Strategies of War, maybe, and probably find some tactic in there that this guy was applying in order to weaken his people to gain power. Probably, right? I mean, does anything come to mind, Robert?

Oh, several come to mind. Mostly passive aggression. Creatively, though, that stuff is very ineffective. Because I firmly, absolutely, wholeheartedly believe that if you put your effort into diminishing others creatively, it diminishes your own creative ability. I really do believe that. I also believe that performance-wise, if you try to diminish someone's performance, like as an actor,

this is one of the reasons why this guy sucked. He was so transparent. Like, he's just a shitty person. You know? The guy that he did... The guy he called fat, too, wanted to kill him. I had to talk the guy out of killing him. Like, he wanted...

This is a big fucking guy. Like, you know, you shouldn't call him fat, even if he is fat. Like, he was doing it to fuck with the guy right before his scene because he wanted to shine. He wanted to be the guy in the scene that was, like, really on top of the ball. Yeah, so the key thing is to know these strategies so you can do what he puts in there. It's called the reversal.

You know, like how to be aware of it and then reverse it. Well, the main thing is to never get emotional in these situations. If you're in control of yourself and you can do like Joe did, you can sort of see the game behind the game, then you're in the position to do something that's strategic like he did to play the same game back. It's mostly like a warrior. I call it kind of a warrior pose where if you're calm and centered and you're aware and in the moment of what the other person is doing, then you've got strategic options to play the game back. But if you get emotional, you get angry, you get intimidated, then forget about it.

Yeah, I would probably today respond very differently, but when I was in my early 20s, it was scorched earth. It was every time. I was going to DEFCON 9 every time. I'm like, let's see who can hold our breath the longest. I'll drag you in a pool. That was going to DEF CON 9 every time. I'm like, let's see who can hold our breath the longest. I'll drag them in a pool. That was always my strategy. I just, because I was always nice to people, but as soon as people weren't nice to me,

I just said a very... That's a good way to be. Very bad way of handling it. But that thing that people do seems to be, not just calculated, but it seems to be something that's been going on since the beginning of time. As soon as people invented language and they invented the ability to deceive.

You're touching upon the subject of my next book. That's why I'm smiling. What is that? It's tentatively called The Laws of Human Nature. that somewhere around 10,000 years ago, maybe 6,000, our nature was set because we started living in groups that were larger than 10, 20, 30, the size of a tribe. And once you put 100 people together, all sorts of political games start happening. And things like envy and passive aggression and basic irrational responses, they already occurred in the time of the Bible.

And so there are these laws of human nature that are so deeply ingrained in us. They're ingrained just like a chimpanzee will react a certain way under certain circumstances. And I'm going to show you where these laws come from, why people are envious, why people are insecure, why somebody who has a certain exterior, a face that they present to the world, why it's generally hiding the opposite, on and on and on. So you can

understand where people's behavior comes from and not be surprised by it anymore. So what you present is steps to recognize cunts. Yeah, but you know what? There's a little bit of cunt in everyone, in all of us, including myself. All of us, though? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And those who deny it, and hopefully you're not one of them. Deny.

Are actually crypto cunts. A new word has been formed. I'm so excited. Crypto cunts, that's the greatest word. That's a great band name, by the way. You can use it. Crypto cunts. Yeah, if I was. That's a great band name, by the way. You can use it. CryptoCunts. Yeah, if I was going to start a band, it might be the CryptoCunts.

Okay. And get arrested just so they'd have to talk about it on CNN like they did Pussy Riot. Yeah. That was my favorite thing about- Free CryptoCunts. Yeah, that's my favorite thing about Pussy Riot. The name is just great. Them talking about it on CNN.

What a name. I know. Pussy Riot. The members of Pussy Riot. I was like, stop. This can't be real. This is a beautiful time I know. Pussy Riot. The members of Pussy Riot. I was like, stop. This can't be real. This is a beautiful time. A beautiful time in history.

Those girls are fucking badass, man. Not just badass for their ability to come up with an awesome name, but they get arrested. They spend fucking how many months in Siberia? That's true. They get out and start protesting at the Olympics. Get horse whipped. Those chicks are fucking gangster. They're so gangster.

I love Pussy Riot. I'm a huge fan. Even if if their music sucks and i don't even know if it does it probably does though live performance on jre pussy riot make it happen so the crypto cunt um so that's just my next book everyone but does everyone have cunt in them because they're reacting to other cunts? Or do you think that everyone has like a selfish aspect to them that's undeniable? I mean, what is it about people that you think everyone has a little bit of cunt in them? Is it reactionary or is it actionary? It's both. It's both. I suppose there might have been one saintly figure in our history who doesn't have any of this, maybe a Jesus or somebody. But pretty much the underlying philosophy of all my books, particularly the 48 Laws of Power, is that human beings have a primal need for power.

And we've used that word power in the wrong way. When we think of power, we think of white men up in the White House controlling the world. I try and bring power down to an everyday level and say, the feeling that you have no control over your life, over your destiny, over the people around you, your children, your wife, is the most miserable feeling that any human can have, that you have no power over them, no ability to influence them. And so from the age of one, two years old, we have had this feeling of insecurity, of weakness,

and we want to have control and power over the people around us, the events that go on in life. And that is the source for a lot of our manipulative behavior. Some people are overtly manipulative and very dangerous that way, but all of us, all of us engage at some point or another in something that teeters on manipulation. And my books are about let's just be honest about who we are instead of trying to imagine that we were somehow descended from angels instead of primates. No, we're descended from chimpanzees. If you study chimpanzees, they're pretty Machiavellian creatures.

That's where we come from. Let's be honest about the human being instead of trying to pretend that we're all born like Gandhi. Well, the chimpanzee has one thing that we don't, and that's language. Or we have one thing that they don't, rather, which is language. And language is where things get weird because you get deception. Yes. And you also get strategy. Yes.

You know, where chimps have some strategy, like you ever seen the videos where they chase monkeys, where they corner them on the sides and then other chimps rush them towards them and they climb up and they eat them? It's pretty radical stuff. Yeah. And until the 1990s,

people didn't even know that chimps ate monkeys. You know, they thought, these beautiful berry-eating friends, they eat bananas like Curious George. Nope, not really. They fucking rip monkeys apart and eat them alive. And they engage in warfare. Yes, they do.

They engage in warfare against other chimps. They engage in it in a very strategic sense. They have lines where they're not allowed to cross. And when they do cross, they take action. This is actually an interesting topic because if you read Chris Ryan, he proposes a theory that this behavior that they've observed, the chimp warring, was created by the artificial production of this food box in the chimp's habitat when they were observing them.

They would have food around that they were giving the chimps. No, but... Right? So this is pretty well done. They didn't see any of that prior to the food box when they would just go out in the wild. No, no, no, no, no. I don't know who Chris Ryan is, but I think that's very wrong. Jane Goodall observed this in the wild. Jane Goodall observed this, but to keep the chimps around, she had a box of food. So this is a fact, right? And after that, it created this zero-sum game where the chimps were competing for a limited resource of food, which actually goes to

the argument that when you create a civilization and it's not just tribal and it becomes a zero-sum game, that's when the war and the strategy gets to a peak because you're creating a zero-sum game. There's a limited amount of resource, a limited amount of crop, or in the case of the chimpanzees, a limited amount of food that was coming out of this box. So only a certain number of the chimps would get the food. So kind of interesting. I just thought I'd bring that up. And when Dr. Ryan's on here, you can certainly bring that up. He'll be on next week.

He'll be on the 11th. What was your issue with what he said? Well, it's always a zero-sum game. Why isn't it a zero-sum game in nature? There's always limited food supply. Right, but there's more resource you can go to. You're not competing for one specific section. You can go to more

acres, more hectares of land and find the grubs or the fruits or whatever of that area rather than competing over one to find. I don't want to argue with somebody I haven't read so maybe he has a very valid point and I haven't read it so it's not fair for me to... It doesn't affect your theory that once you're in civilization,

these games begin and the tighter the resources in that civilization, i.e. bigger cities, and the more closely people are working together, the more fever pitch these games develop. Well, I don't want to get on a tangent here, but there's a writer, a scientist named E.O. Wilson, a biologist, and he's pretty much demonstrated that our earliest human ancestors, going back to Australopithecines, were engaging in forms of warfare. So he wants to sort of debunk the notion of the happy, peaceful savage that goes back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, etc., that we do have very violent roots. And so maybe chimpanzees, it becomes zero-sum if there's overpopulation and they're fighting over smaller territories, which we humans were doing as we became more populous.

So he was trying to debunk the notion that it's only at the advent of agriculture where we started living in settlements and became civilized, that warfare began. And he shows very clearly that the beginnings of warfare go back hundreds of thousands of years. Well, it seems unavoidable. It seems like all animals who compete for breeding rights, who compete for food, they engage in some form of combat. I mean, deers regularly kill each other. Yes. You know, that happens with elk.

It happens with sables. Sables with those crazy big horns that they have, they fucking spear each other and they kill each other. I had Louis Thoreau on the podcast yesterday and one of his documentaries, he had this African hunting camp

where there's sort of these canned hunts where they have these high fence operations and they breed all these animals. And they have these sables and they're fucking murdering each other. They just run into each other and gouge each other when the females are in heat. What are sables? It's one of those crazy fucking deer things. You pull up a picture of a sable, Jamie.

It's one of those African deer-like creatures with big crazy horns. They have these fucking murder weapons is what they have built in their face. You know? I mean, that's really what they have. But the point being is that, yeah, there they are. Those guys murder each other. Looks like an oryx. Similar.

Yeah. There's a lot of those different types of antlered, horned animals, that they clash heads. I mean, that's what they do. They go to war with each other. It seems to be a part, I mean, it's also a part of genetic selection. It seems to be unavoidable.

And I've always felt that when we look at the time frame between now and 6,000, 10,000 years, whatever it was, when we started having these civilizations, we're in a very small window between then and now. And such radical change has taken place between then and now. But yet genetically, not much. A few variations have been observed between us and people that lived thousands of years ago, but, God, not that much when it comes to need, when it comes to sexual desire,

when it comes to greed, when it comes to all the motivating factors and all the reward systems that are in place. Yeah. And the other thing being that we don't have release anymore. The physical release that a human being is essentially hard wired. Every chimp, they're swinging from branches and they're working out all day. I mean, they're

constantly getting this release of energy. And they're also getting a release of some of their aggressive energy as well, which we don't seem to have a lot of. Exactly what I'm talking about. I think people are essentially leaky batteries of aggressive energy. I mean, when someone's in their car and they start fucking freaking out because you got

in front of them and fucking honking their horn, that's a leaky battery of aggressive energy. The other day, this mild-mannered woman in her 40s or 50s cut me off and she just turned around and gave... I've never seen a woman show that kind of absolute chimp-like, aggressive, burying

my teeth at me in a car. It was shocking. You haven't been to the post office very often. Stamps.com. Yeah, it's a weird thing. And it's also, the car is a very unique environment in that because of the fact that you don't, even though you see people, you don't feel them.

You're not in front of them. Like, I'm looking at you right now, and if I said something that hurt your feelings, it would bother me. But if I didn't know you and you were in a car, I'm like, fuck you, dude. Fuck you. Fuck you. Honk, honk.

Fuck you. People do that all the time. I've seen people cut in front of each other and race down the street and get in front of each other and just madness that you wouldn't see in a line. You wouldn't see if you were waiting in line to go to a movie. It's very rare. But you see it there because all the social cues are missing,

all the human interaction is missing. It's like there's this wall and this filter up. Same thing on the internet. Yes, more so on the internet because you don't even see the person. They're hiding behind DickFuck69 69 is their name you know whatever it is they're not real and so they can reach out to robert green and go your fucking books are for faggots you know they just post youtube comments and go fucking crazy on your blog like people like a friend of mine writes a blog and someone's like why don't you have comments in your blogs

like what do you read comments do? Do you read comments on blogs? Why would you want anybody to write where you're writing? If you had a painting, would you allow people to paint underneath your painting what they think about your painting? It would be a lot of dicks pointing to your painting and piles of shit with flies. That's what they would draw. Not all people, but enough people to where it's a problem because they haven't earned the ability to communicate with you like that. You choose who you communicate with in real life for the most part,

especially who you surround yourself with on a regular basis. But online, you choose nothing. It's the beautiful thing about being online is that everyone gets to say something, and it's the horrible thing about being online is that everyone gets to say something and it's the horrible thing about being online is that everyone gets to say something and do so anonymously yep which is another part of what's weird about our progression from this ancient society where you know we hunted and gathered to eventually agriculture and then civilization in quotes to where we find ourselves today so your books essentially and this new book especially,

is sort of recognizing these traits so that you can move away from them? Well, you're talking about my new book that hasn't been written yet? Yeah. The point of the book is that this is human nature, and it's an animal nature. And to be truly human, we have to overcome these traits in us, to be truly rational, reasonable, empathetic creatures. We have to overcome these various aspects of our own nature, which are embedded in each one of us biologically, genetically,

such as our propensity to feel envy. The propensity to feel envy is basically at its root the fact that we humans are constantly comparing ourselves to other people. Look at your own life in a day-to-day basis and be honest with yourself and try and calculate how many times during a day you're actually comparing yourself to another person. He's got more money. She's prettier. He's, you know, got a better job. That's so completely human for various reasons, which I'll explain in the book. To reach a higher nature, which is the goal of my book, you have to be aware that that's happening in you, and you have to find a way to disengage yourself from that need to constantly compare

yourself to others, to find your own value, your own self-worth from within. These are all kind of cliches, but I'm going to show you in a very real fashion how you can overcome them once you're aware that they're inside of you. But the book is not written yet. It's a beautiful point, though. That's the beautiful point of being aware of them instead of denying them, instead of getting all foo-foo, chimes, and Indian chants. Thank you. Being aware of them. Yes.

So when you started reading all of these self-help books and started recognizing that there was all this horse shit going on, was your immediate reaction to try to write something that you thought was more realistic and beneficial, or did you just, how did you, how did you deal with it? Well, there's a lot of anger. I have, you know, I have less now that I'm older, but I had a lot of anger back then because it really pissed me off that no one was talking about it. People were pretending that this was the world we lived in. There'd be books in the business section about management, how to manage people, which is a very primal topic of discussion. You have a group of people and you're a leader. How do you manage all of these insecure egos who are thinking of

themselves? And these books were essentially dishonest. They weren't confronting the fact that when you put 10 people together, those people generally have their own agendas. They're thinking first and primarily of themselves and their future and their careers and what they can get for themselves. And if you start from a basic false premise, you're not going to get anywhere. So I was dealing with, I wanted to cut my sword through all of this thick bullshit and say, this is what really happens in business, in the music industry, in Hollywood, among lawyers, in politics. And if some of it was a little brutal, maybe I gave myself a little bit of literary license to exaggerate ever so slightly.

But for instance, I have a chapter in there about how to create a cult. And it's obviously ironic. I'm not telling you you need to go out there and create a cult. What I'm saying is we humans are very gullible and we're very easy to mislead and we're very easy, we want to believe in something, we want to believe in a cause. This is, these are the strategies that people have used in history to create a cult-like following and I'm going to sort of reveal that to you. These are things that just aren't in self-help books, at least in 1998 when the book came out.

So when you're writing about creating a cult, what are your strategies? How do you go about doing that? Well, you're trying to wrap yourself up in this sort of mystical veil. The chapter originally... I already fucked that part up. You probably haven't, because you have a cult-like

following, and therefore... Isn't cult-like different, though? From what? Cult-like is different than cult. Because there's no organization whatsoever. I'm not trying to get anything out of anybody. I'm trying to tell them what to do. It's different. I'm not trying

to benefit from it. Well, you'd want to have as many followers as possible. Shouldn't have as many as possible. Quality over quantity is very important in the cult business. I don't know you well enough. And I'm sure you're right, though. I keep hearing you saying cunt and cult. Oh, cult. We're done with cunt.

You know, once you... What was your term again? Crypto cunt. Yeah, you fucking knocked it out of the park with that. Basically, if somebody is using numbers – now, I know I have the 48 laws of power, so I couldn't be guilty of it. 33 strategies of war. 50th law. They're probably starting to create a cult because that goes back hundreds and thousands of years. Not hundreds of thousands.

Right. Hundreds and thousands. Thank you. Yes. Giving a sort of mystical edge to what you're doing. You're trying to make people think that you're creating a religion without a religion. And I show you the steps that people go through, five steps in order. And you can pretty much, if you see those steps happening, you know that this person is creating a cult-like following. And one of the steps towards near the end is creating an us versus them dynamic. It's us 1,000 followers against the whole world that doesn't believe in our theory of how aliens landed on the planet and started the human race.

So whenever they're creating this false dichotomy of us versus the nonbelievers, then you know that you're on your way to a cult. Yeah, that cult of thinking is very common, isn't it? Yes. The us versus them is really, that's the big one. That is the big one. And that goes back, I'm going to say in my new book, which hasn't been written yet, that that goes back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors where we're separating ourselves very violently from us, from them.

That tribe over there, they're evil. They don't believe in the same gods that we believe in. They don't practice the same rituals. We have to go kill them. It's a very primal human thing. Yeah. People have this really seems inescapable need to be a part of a group. Yes.

Whether it's a group of Mac users or, you know, whether it's whatever the fuck it is. I like Fords. I like Chevy. You know, people get, they get really crazy about that. And it's a very weird aspect of human nature. Yes. Like people want you to be on the same cell phone provider as them. Like, what are you doing with T-Mobile, man?

Come on over to AT&T. Well, the companies have used some of those strategies. They've created this us versus them mentality to help make people feel like that. All of these advertising practices that you see, generally you can find a lot of their roots in, you know, some of these larger scale strategies. Like look at this map versus this map, creating this antagonism that actually probably helps both sides. And they're all just shaking hands like that plane ride where the Republicans and Democrats were playing Yahtzee with each other and having a big laugh. I remember the Think Different ads. Do you remember the Think Different ads for apple where they use

all these dead people it was like does that guy even know he's in an ad he's dead this is weird you know think different with the apple logo and that and everybody wanted to think different very effective ad very effective but almost you know kind of deceptively so yeah in some weird sort of a way you know well you're just it's fucking computer man yeah what you have is a computer like it's not thinking for you that's doesn't you could write the most racist horrible shit on a mac and it doesn't stop you you could you could totally plot your agenda against whatever and they fill in the blank anti-homosexual anti-woman anti-whatever you could just write the worst shit ever on a Mac.

It doesn't discriminate. It doesn't have any effect on how you think. It's such a dumb ad. Think different. Think different how? I'm sitting in front of this thing going, I'm not thinking any different. I think it's also grammatically incorrect. It is, differently, yes.

You're right. Yeah, it's fucking dead wrong, but yet effective. The need to be a part of a group, it's one of the things that people definitely play against. Well, we're complete social animals. That's the source. If you think about the human being, go back a million years ago, we were incredibly one of the weakest animals on the planet. We were just barely learning how to stand up on our two legs. We were slow, couldn't run very fast, didn't have teeth to kill another animal with, no poison, no claws.

We were one of the weakest animals in Africa. And yet look at us now. It was from becoming the preeminent social animal. We learn how to work in groups, to hunt in groups, to cooperate. Out of that came language eventually. So you can't divorce our extreme social nature from who we are. And because of that, we have a tremendous propensity to conform, to want to think like other people. I don't know if you're familiar with the Milgram experiments about authority and obedience. It was in the 60s, a Yale professor had people come in for an experiment where they were made to give electric shocks to other people if they didn't answer the question correctly.

They weren't really giving a shock. It was all a plant, but he was trying to see how they would respond to authority. And the most mild mannered housewife would be giving those shocks to people when they got the wrong answer. And he was showing how inbred, how we are all wired to obey authority. So these are things embedded deeply in us as a social animal for a good thing, our ability to cooperate, but also it's a very dark and negative side,

which is our ability to engage in groupthink and our mindless obedience to authority. Is that where that's coming from, when the mild-mannered housewives are hitting that button and shocking people? Is that where that's coming from when someone, the mild-mannered housewives are hitting that button and shocking people? Is that where it's coming from or is it they finally have some power over something? I feel like there's a lot of people out there that

feel incredibly powerless and frustrated and they feel like they have this backlog. They have a leaky battery for that. They want to have some fucking power over people. And when you finally do, like, what was the Stanford prison experience? Yeah, that's the same. Was it the same thing?

No, there were two professors who were friends, and they kind of did. Oh, both shitheads. Yeah. Pointing out how to make people evil. The Stanford prison experiments, I mean, they cut them off after, or they cut the experiment short because people were being so evil. They had fake prison guards and fake prisoners. I personally experienced that on a personal level when I was a security guard. I worked as a security guard at Great Woods, which is a concert center for the performing arts in Massachusetts. It's in Manfield, I

think. Manfield, Mass, I think it is. It's this outdoor venue, and there was a lot of crazy shit going on. They had all these nutty concerts there, and all these fights would break out. And it became us versus them. Us as a security guard versus them. And I saw some really mild-mannered people do some mean shit to the people that were guests there. Very interesting. I saw a guy that would never hurt anybody, punch somebody in the stomach,

because the guy, I forget what the guy did, but I remember watching him hit this guy going, wow, this is crazy. And it was because of that. It was because he was wearing a security jacket. He was security. The guy was a drunk asshole. But where he would normally,

if he ran into this guy in the street, would never hit him. But because he was in this position of power, in quotes, he hit this guy. I mean, I don't know if the guy pushed someone or something, but it was avoidable. He didn't have to hit him. And I remember that mentality being very clear, the us versus them mentality. The key to avoiding these dark characteristics is you have to be honest, number one, which I think he's very good at doing, but then also understand and identify them. Not, you know, be able to look and say, this is why this is happening.

We have this us versus them dynamic. It's creating this thing. And unless you can identify it and become aware of it, you're pretty much powerless to break it. pretty much powerless to break it. So the knowledge that these books give, give you, at least in my opinion of one of the reasons I loved them so much, they give you the power back by saying, you're not just a leaf at the mercy of the wind of these forces of human nature and the forces of other people wielding these power games and the forces of seduction by these people you're desperately trying to date and how they've got you all wound up inside, you're no longer powerless because you can see, aha, this is what's happening.

And you can take some of that back and then chart your course with your own intent, with your own morality, how you want to do it. Yeah, that's fair. Thank you, Aubrey. That was very well put. But I have a book. I should have you just do all the answer all the questions. I did a book.

I think he's busy. I don't know what's going on uh i did a book he's busy i i did a book uh with 50 cent uh the rapper called the 50th law and basically what i did in that book was i wanted to figure out what made 50 so interesting so powerful and after hanging out with him i decided that the guy was fearless he had a just incredible fearless quality and philosophy of life. So the book that we wrote together was sort of a meditation on fearlessness. And the whole point of the book was being fearless isn't a question of just going out there and saying, fuck you, I don't care what anybody does.

I'm going to, you know, push you around and I'm not afraid. That's not fearlessness. Fearlessness is first coming to terms with the fact I'm not afraid. That's not fearlessness. Fearlessness is first coming to terms with the fact that you are afraid. You are afraid of death. You are afraid of other people getting one up on you. You are afraid of being alone. You are afraid of people thinking that you're different. Okay, look at it in yourself. Be aware that that's existing, that it's happening in your body before it even hits your mind. Now that you're aware of it, now you can start conquering your fears. So we say it in that book, for instance, Napoleon Bonaparte or General Patton, two men

who were incredibly brave, who would be on the front line of battle, take bullets flying past them. These were men who were very afraid in the beginning when they first went into battle and were quite ashamed of the fear that they saw in themselves. And they became aware of it, and then slowly they overcame it by exposing themselves to the very thing that they were afraid of. So that's sort of the paradigm you're talking about. Becoming aware of the process of these sort of qualities we don't want in ourselves, seeing how they operate inside of you, instead of saying, oh, it's always the other person. It's

not me. I'm not afraid. I don't have these problems. No, you do have them. Let's confront it and let's show you how you can rationally and in an intellectual and mindful way overcome them. Yeah, because there truly is no managing of anything that you're denying. If you're denying that it exists, you cannot manage it. Well, that was well put, too. You guys are much more eloquent than I am. Well, we take a lot of mushrooms, Robert Green. That helps us confront these interferes.

Have you ever taken mushrooms, Robert? Yes, a big deep breath. Of course he has. But I took a lot of peyote. That was my drug of choice. Just as good. Yeah, there you go. Just as good. Talk about a way to show you the fears that you didn't realize you have and help you confront them. These things, they're really a great mirror to reflect upon yourself. Oh, hallucinogenics? Yeah, hallucinogenics. I mean, I think that's one of the great values that it brings is, you know, you don't know exactly what your deepest fear is until you do ayahuasca.

And then it's like, oh, yeah, that's it. The thing that you've been showing me for the last three hours. I guess I'm most afraid of that. Well, the thing with peyote is you never knew what was going to happen. You never knew what one trip was never the same as another. So you always had like trepidation, like, whoa, this could be really ugly. I don't know what's going to happen. And you had to deal with it and confront it.

How did you do it? Did you do it in a traditional Native American setting? No, no. I was in Berkeley going to college. We would take the buttons and you'd take off all the little white stringy poisonous bits and then you cut it up and you either put it in a shake or in a peanut butter sandwich and then you go

find a nice safe place. The traditional peanut butter sandwich. Yeah, exactly. The Cherokee people. They would eat it. They taste horrible. It's not just the taste, it's the consistency. And unless you're a Native American, it's hard to stomach it. You're just going to vomit it straight up.

And you don't want to vomit it because then you're not going to get the trip. So you've got to trick your body into digesting it. And so you have to put it in a smoothie. If you vomit it, it doesn't work? No, you're vomiting out immediately all of the stuff you just digested. It's interesting because it works with ayahuasca. Well, if you vomit based on the taste, it hasn't had a time to assimilate. Oh, I see.

But if you vomit later in the trip based on it trying to clear your body, that's a different. It's already assimilated. Anyway. So do you feel like those peyote experiences help form your view of things? Very much so. Very much so. You know, it just made

you, it kind of connects you to reality, where there's things where you're just in a fog all the time because we're so conditioned to think in certain ways and to have something that draws you out of the same rut of thinking and confront you with

really the real world, this amazing world that's around you, has had a huge influence on my writing. And I know this next book hasn't been written, but I have another book after that that has not even begun to be even thought of as written. And that's going to bring together all of my experiences on that level, a book on what I call the sublime, which I've written about in the 50th Law and will write a whole book about at one point. So the 50th Law is the one that you wrote

with 50 Cent? Yes, sir. Now, what was the motivation behind that? Well, basically my early books, meaning the 48 Laws, Seduction and War to some extent, were very popular among hip-hop artists. Really? Yeah. Basically because, you know, the music industry, I described to you Hollywood, a war to some extent were very popular among hip-hop artists really yeah basically because you know the music industry i described you hollywood well hollywood is kind of like kindergarten compared to the music business they they are the real sharks are in the music business they are pretty nasty pretty machiavellian um and people like 50JZ and their managers in the late 90s, early 2000s, were coming to grasp with the fact that they wanted to control their own work, to have some power and some money and become entrepreneurs.

And dealing with these sharks in the music business was something that not even any kind of street life prepared them for. 50 would tell me he hustled on the streets dealing cracks, saw people being knived and killed and dealt with a lot of danger, and nothing prepared him for the sharky, horrific games that he saw in the music industry with Columbia and Interscope, etc. So they were reading my book to help them deal with this. These are not people who went to Harvard Business School. They didn't have a book out there to help them understand

how manipulative these people could be. And so they gravitated to the 48 Laws of Power. 50 was one of them. And he contacted me at some point, I think about 05, 06, wanted to meet me because he liked the book a lot and then we met and we had a really interesting synergy obviously we don't come from similar backgrounds, we don't look alike You're not from the street? I'm from a street but I'm not the street

Were you born in a field? Everybody's born from a street I come from a middle class Jewish background so I'm not quite the same as Southside Queens. But we had a really nice energy together. Like we think alike. Like I told you about that Hollywood director.

Most people in Hollywood were getting so angry with him and so angry about the games that they never took a step back to figure out, oh, this is the strategy that this guy applied. And 50 was the same way. He said, I took a step back and said, this is what the guy at Interscope is really doing. So we thought alike and we thought, let's bring two minds together that think alike, but from totally different backgrounds and see what happens. That's fascinating. The music business, for folks who don't know, has been, The music business, for folks who don't know, it's really a fascinating operation. And it's kind of been gutted because of the MP3 influx and Napster was the first blow.

And then from there, it's like really. Now it's kind of interesting because the performers actually make their money from performing more than anything else. It's very difficult to make the millions and millions of dollars that the Rolling Stones and what have you, all those bands in the past made from selling records. There's no really, that doesn't exist anymore in the same way. But Courtney Love wrote a piece about it. I'm sure she probably didn't really write it. They said it was ghostwritten.

I agree, it's pretty fucking smart. She's a smart woman. Yeah? Okay, I believe you. But I don'twritten. I agree. It's pretty fucking smart. She's a smart woman. Yeah? Okay, I believe you. But I don't know. Maybe not. Anyway, let's say she wrote it. Okay?

Let's say she wrote it. It's insane. If you've ever read it, that piece that she wrote on the music business and how it really works and how they extract everything from your profits, everything, promotion, expenses, all these different things. By the time the artist gets paid for the records, they have all this weird way of doing math where it shows no money. It shows no money's been made.

They use that for not just the music business, but Hollywood. Sure does. I have a friend who produced a television show. It's a very successful television show and it's not just can you stop doing that for a second the crunching thing sorry it's very distracting the um the television show is not just successful nationwide it's syndicated across the world and the company that made this show the production company is claiming that it doesn't turn a profit. I mean, I'm not talking about

one country. It's in 16 different countries, and there's like several versions of it with different hosts all throughout the world, and they're trying to tell him that it's not, and so he's suing them, and there's like this crazy fucking lawsuit right now. Lawsuits are just course for business. That doesn't even scare, it doesn't even make people bat

an eye in those industries. But it's weird. It's weird. Like, how is it not making a profit? Did you get paid? Did you get paid? Is that a profit? There's got to be a fucking profit here because there's all this money. A movie that can make $100 million can be said to have turned no profit. Yeah.

Wow. That's bizarre. And where's that money going to? But this fuckery, these shenanigans are sort of a lot of the stuff that you're talking about in 48 Laws. Yeah. Yeah, Courtney Love was a big reader of the 48 Laws of Power. She used it in one of her lawsuits against the music industry. She held up a copy of the book and said, this is what you guys are using against us.

Look at you, you bad motherfucker. You're helping out Courtney Love. Did you ever see that documentary that claims that she killed Kurt Cobain or had Kurt Cobain killed? No. One of the most fucking bizarre documentaries ever. Like someone fucking set out to prove that Courtney Love was responsible

for Kurt Cobain's death. I was like, oh, all right. Are you sure? Yeah. Because if you're not sure. Check your sources. Yeah, that's a pretty fucking crazy statement. Yeah.

You know? How can you just, you can just do that? You can just say that? Yeah. You know, nobody tried her for that. Like, can you sue someone who says that you're responsible for the suicide of your fucking husband? Awful.

Off track, obviously. Back to the book um so this this business this music business is just an example really of what happens when power structures are created when people who are in these power structures understand the game and then take these people that are just coming into it fresh and especially artistic types people who are creative people who are artistic types oftentimes not very good with money not not sound financial thinkers and just the opposite of these business sharks that are involved in Interscope or whatever the the you know whatever the label is well they've dedicated themselves to

the mastery of their craft and this whole craft, this business sharkiness is this other whole skillset that it's, you know, challenging to be able to master both, you know, so getting the cliff notes is awfully helpful to be able to sort that out because, you know, that is, to be as where they are at that point. And obviously he'll go into his book mastery, but that is a relentless pursuit of excellence in a well-defined niche that doesn't allow for a lot of time to explore these other things unless you're forming some bridge. If you were going to recommend your books to someone, what order would you recommend them in?

Well, it depends on what business you're in and what point you are in life. How about me? You? Yeah, what should I do? You? You who are already so successful? Well, probably mastery in some ways, because maybe it'll take you to the next level. But I don't know if you're dealing with a lot of political stuff.

If you are, then you're going to want 48 laws or maybe the strategies of war. It depends on who you are, what your weaknesses are, what your strengths are, where you are in life. If you're 22 years old and you're just graduating college and you're about to enter the real world, I'd say mastery for reasons that maybe hopefully we'll get into. But if you're 25 and you're now working at Goldman Sachs, God bless you if you are. God save you, I think. You're going to probably want the 48 Laws of Power because, man, that's a power-hungry, nasty, manipulative, Machiavellian environment if you're in the music industry as well. If you're someone who's very afraid,

you've got all sorts of great creative ideas, but you're never going to the next step and starting that great movie or project you have, maybe the 50th Law would be good for you so you can get over some of those fears that are holding you back. If you're some guy who just can't find a, you know, is really bad with women, Art of Seduction obviously would probably be your choice. It depends a little bit on who you are.

Now, you wrote The Art of Seduction to help people get laid. Is that the idea behind it? No, I didn't. No? I know it would sound great. I know I'd probably have 8 million people buying the book tomorrow, and now I'm only going to get like 15.

But the truth of the matter is, the art of seduction is about how to seduce people, how to get them to like you or love you. It's all about creating a spell. So if you want to just get laid, maybe Neil Strauss or the pickup artist, that's probably more your speed. They've got all sorts of gimmicks about how to sell a woman something in a bar and melt her resistance, et cetera.

I'm more about the long term, how you can take that woman, or it can be a woman seducing a man, obviously, and get and play a mind game on her. So in the course of three months, she doesn't want to just sleep with you. She wants to give you everything she has. So you're creating stalkers? Could be. And I have, and I'm ashamed of it. But more likely... I don't believe you at all. When you say I'm ashamed

of it, you're fucking proud of that shit. No, I don't like stalkers, because really the book is about casting a spell. Okay? Let's say this is the goal of seduction. When that woman leaves you after whatever night you had together, the date or whatever,

or just an encounter, she's going home and thinking about you. Okay, now you're starting to seduce her. It's a mind game. It's a mental thing. We humans, our sex drive and our mental process are really interconnected.

And I'm getting you to play on that. I'm getting you to play on psychology and melting other people's resistances, getting them to lower their guard because everybody's very got their guard up constantly, particularly in this modern world. Nobody is opening up to you or nobody wants to show vulnerability. You're just dealing with a million porcupines out there. Nobody wants to show vulnerability. You're just dealing with a million porcupines out there.

I'm showing you how to get those resistance levels down and give room to finagle your way into their head. And the converse, of course, too, which is a lot of people are getting these things played upon them constantly. And again, it goes back to the same thing. If you're not aware of the tactics that somebody's using, you're defenseless against them. You're just completely vulnerable and you'll get sucked into this lure, this spell that they're creating by this push-pull tactic that they're using, whatever strategy that they're using. And you'll just be helpless to it. And you see guys fall for these all the time. It's something that bums me and you out personally a lot when we see friends and people we love caught in this spell that someone's woven where they can't let go despite so many other things going bad in their life. They're just trapped in it. And reading

something like The Art of Seduction says, oh, she's using law number seven as her primary means and 13 and 17. And now I see you you now i got you bitch you know and it's like you can switch it back and say okay now what do i want do i want to keep you around do i want to or do i want to just release myself you know remove these hooks these invisible hooks that you've created and just be free to chart my own course well thank you i find that a lot of people enjoy the struggle of relationship struggle because it distracts them from their own life. It distracts them.

The drama. Yeah, distracts them from their shortcomings and achieving their goals. They put up obstacles almost on purpose. They create these interpersonal relationships that are going to ensure conflict so they don't have to deal with success, so they don't have to deal with success, so they don't have to deal with, they have like a built-in excuse for failure. Yep. That's very common.

Yep. Freud called that erfohlungst. Basically, that means fear of success, which is something I talk a lot about in my books. That's real, right? It sounds ridiculous. It sounds like an oxymoron, but it's real. Yeah. That's one of the main points in Mastery.

Mastery is basically a book that's trying to get away from all of the political stuff I've described in my previous books. And here I'm going to show you how we humans can attain excellence in this world, how we can be really, really the best at what we do, because I think that's the highest form of power we humans can reach. When we're so good at what we do, then all the political games in the world can't topple us from where we are. And what holds a lot of people back is that they're really self-sabotaging. They're finding all kinds of excuses why they can't go through this process. They believe in the myth that people are born talented or geniuses are simply born that way. Or that they didn't get to go to the right school.

Or their parents were mean to them. Or yada, yada, yada. Or my girlfriend is, you know, whatever. As you said, they get involved in drama games that so fill up their mind they can't think of anything else. So I'm going to make you, in this book as well, aware of what's holding you back and these fears that you're using to sabotage yourself. That is one of the most frustrating things to me when I'm talking to someone and they

have these built-in excuses for why they can't do what they want to do. Like, give me some of these excuses that you hear. Well, I have a friend who wanted to be a comedian. He wound up not being a comedian. He doesn't have children. He doesn't have a wife, doesn't have a mortgage. So he's not, it's not like he has this job that he has these responsibilities to feed his family. So he's stuck in this job, but he was like, well, you know what, man? I missed the boat with comedy. If I had started in the 90s, everything would have been great. I go, what are you talking about? These people start right now.

There's open mics right now. Go to Tuesday night to the Laugh Factory. There's a fucking line around the block. They get there at 9 a.m. and they wait in line. You should do that, too, if you want to do comedy. Oh, man, I can't do that. I'm 30 years old. Do you think the fucking line gives a shit at how old you are, man?

The line has no idea about your age. The line is there. The microphone is on for an 80 year old man. If an 80 year old man talks in that microphone, it makes noise just like a baby. If a baby cries into that microphone, it also makes noise. Like, what are you talking about? Like he and I got into this crazy debate about it. He's like, look, man, it's easy for you to say you're already successful. I'm like, look, dude, it's not easy for me to say. It's hard for me to hear because you're fucking yourself. You want to be a comedian. And if you think you're funny, and by the way, you don't even really have to be funny. You just have to have the ability to figure out how to become funny. And that's self-analysis, objectivity, and work. That's what it is.

But you're already creating this insurmountable barrier. You didn't start in the 90s. What are you fucking talking about? In the book, Mastery, I interviewed nine modern masters to sort of embed them amongst all the ancient masters that I talk about. And one of the nine modern masters I interviewed is a woman named Temple Grandin. I don't know if you've heard of her. No. Temple Grandin is like a very famous animal behavior scientist. And she was born with autism. And at the age of two was basically going to be put in a mental institution for the rest of her life because she was severe autistic. She couldn't learn language.

She was just the kind of kid you see who's just banging their head against a wall. She was just the kind of kid you see who's just banging their head against a wall. She was severely autistic. And through a process I describe in the book, with her mother's help and a speech therapist, she slowly got to the age of four to be able to start speaking and going to schools. And I show the process that eventually led her to become a great scientist. Now, if somebody born with severe autism at the age of two is going to be institutionalized for their whole life, can become a master, then there's no fucking excuse for some 30-year-old who has nothing, no barriers like that at all to ever get to

that point. That's really the reason I put it in there. If somebody like that can overcome their limitations, then there's no more excuses allowed. Well, there is one excuse. He's a weak bitch well that's the excuse and my advice don't be a weak bitch it's so simple break it down to that yeah my other advice that i always give out is be the person that you pretend to be when you're trying to get laid well if you can just do that just be that guy what would that guy do be that guy and let it become you. That's something I never covered in The Art of Seduction. Damn.

Be the person. Be the hero in your own movie. That's the other thing I say to people when people feel like their life's... Pretend you're a fucking loser in a movie. You woke up today. The same scenarios you always see. Guy wakes up, makes a fucking blender full of pizza or whatever they do. Get their life together. Smoke a cigarette. Realize you're a you're the bills are piling up. The phone's ringing off the hook from bill collectors. What would the

hero in the movie do right now? Do that shit. And it works. It works with some people. Other people, they find excuses to not do it. I got that advice from a, from a family friend one time and I was And I was terrible at dating until I was about 22 or so, 21. I was awful. I was way too nice. I was so doting. And it wasn't even the real me.

I was just playing this over-nice person and people hated it. It was the most repulsive. Isn't that weird? They hate you being nice. Yeah, it was the most repulsive thing I could have done. Oh, that's so true.

And so he told me, he's like, just analyze your actions and what you're saying and ask, what would Bruce Willis do? Because at the time, it was that's who was like the big action hero or whatever. My advice. That helped change the game for me. Is stay nice, but be willing to walk away as soon as you expose that someone else is not nice back. Be nice always.

But then as soon as someone's not nice back, say, all right, good luck. Take it easy. Not need them at all. If you don't need them at all. The problem with nice people is they're needy motherfuckers. It's not just nice. The reason why they're being nice is they need you to like them. You can be really nice and not need people to like you. And if they don't like you, they don't want to be around you, you're fine with it. Then they freak out. They don't know how to handle that. They're like, shit, I missed the nice guy. He was nice and it slipped through my fingers. Personal sovereignty.

It's one of the most important things to have in this life. The ability to be yourself, to be by yourself. And why would other people like you if you don't even like yourself? You've got to do things in life that you would admire. You've got to be the kind of person that you would like. And if you're not, why would you expect anyone to like you? I have this argument with guys all the time where they talk about women and, you know, fucking girls want money.

They want this. They want that. You know, women always like, you know, I just, I'm not so good with women's. I always say this. Would you fuck you? Would you fuck you? Would you fuck you? I don't think I would. Who would want to?

I don't know. Come on. Nobody would say yes to that. How dare you? You know, it's not just physical. It's mental. It's the way you behave. Are you a kind person?

Are you fun to be around? There are people that are just genuinely great to be around. You know? They don't have to be good looking. You know? They don't have to be intelligent. They don't have to be good looking. They don't have to be intelligent. They don't have to be well read. They just have a quality. They have a quality.

And do you not have that quality? And if you don't have that quality, can you acquire it? Well, what I try to do in our seduction is, I'm saying people who read a book and try to seduce are usually the worst seducers or who've taken some advice because they're not in the moment and they seem like they're kind of being cold and calculating. And the trick to seduction is to appear or to be as natural as possible and to at least appear natural.

So everybody has a different style. Some people are funny and great to be around, but maybe you're just not born that way. Maybe you're just not witty. But you have other strengths. You have other qualities, something naturally seductive about you. That could be you're very social and you know you can think about what the other person wants. It could be I have one of the types in the book, maybe you do have coquettish qualities. What does that mean?

You can blow hot and cold. Coquettish. Ooh, new word. Coquette? Coquettish. Never heard anybody say that before. A sultry French coquette. Isn't that amazing?

You could live 46 years on this world. I've taught you several words today. You have. Thank you so much, crypto cunt. That's my favorite word ever, I think. You're free to use it. Everyone's using it now. It's the world.

What you're saying, it kind of reminds me of what you talk about. Finish, but go ahead. It's all right. No, go ahead. You can finish. It reminds me a little bit of what you're talking about in mastery, of going with your natural inclination that is going to be the best thing, like going with that vocation.

Whatever makes you that unique individual, it's almost the same in seduction as it is in mastery. Pursuing that channel, that venue of what is going to bring you out your highest qualities is going to lead to the greatest success, no matter what it is, seduction or mastery. Yeah, I'm trying to make the point in mastery that you're born with a key to success. Every single human being is born that way. This isn't some new age bullshit that I'm trying to peddle here. What that key is is the fact that there's something unique about you. Your DNA is unique. Your brain is

wired in a unique way. They've done these really interesting studies on newborns, infants one month to six months. And they've been able to show that at the extremely early age, infants are already distinguishing between things that they like and don't like on very particular levels, like foods and colors and sounds. So when you were really, really young, you had what Aubrey calls, and I call in the book, primal inclinations. There were things you were attracted to that are very, very unique and distinctive about you. It could be sports. It could be competing and winning. about you. It could be sports. It could be competing and winning. It could be working with people and social situations. It could be music, whatever it is. If you're able to stay true to that or rediscover it when you're older and mine what's unique about you and your tastes

and your way of thinking and your whole spirit, you are going to fucking succeed in this life. You're going to create a business. You're going to create a book. Some have a podcast that reflects your weirdness, your uniqueness, and people will come to you because it's true, it's authentic, and there's nothing else out there like it. How do you do that? How do you stay true to that? How do you figure out what your life's task is, as I call it? How do you keep connected to those primal inclinations?

That's what the book Mastery is about. But you first have to be at least aware of what the root of your possible success in life is. And I try to make the point that if you aren't pursuing something that's personally and emotionally connected to you, you're never going to actually succeed in life. If you go into law and you were meant to be a writer, you might be able to bullshit your way for 10 years or so and be a pretty good lawyer. But eventually, because it's not something you were meant to do, you're going to disconnect. You're not going to be into it. You're going to emotionally disengage. You're going to start drinking. Your hair is going to fall out. You're going to start seeing hookers

and getting on drugs. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You were good up until that point. I lost you. Well, because you're not pursuing what you were meant to pursue and your life's going to fall apart. You're not going to have a good time with hookers and drugs. Well, you can. I see. You're right. I probably lost you there. People are probably going, that's what I really want. Yeah, it sounds awesome. So wait a minute. The plan to mastery is you become a lawyer when you're really supposed to be a writer, then you get hookers and drugs.

Yes. I think hookers and drugs are fun. I'm confused. All right. No, no. I'm just playing. I fully see what you're doing. And I do think that that is a very important point, that people do sabotage when they're

unhappy. And I find a lot of people that tend to work jobs they find very unrewarding to be exceptionally materialistic. Because they're trying to reward themselves with these material items. And these material items become goals for plowing through another day doing this shitty job. It's a real dead end. That's like one of the worst traps that people fall into. Now, I have nothing against money. I like making money.

But the goal of your life when you're in your 20s, for instance, should be learning as much as possible, developing skills in different areas, and not worrying about how much money you're making. Giving yourself the freedom to make mistakes,

to explore, to have some adventures, to try things out that don't quite work for you. And then when you reach your 30s, you've got all these skills and experiences, and you're going to make that money eventually. But the path to mastery, you look at somebody like Steve Jobs, you can hate him or you can like him,

you can think he's great or not. But he ended up being one of the wealthiest men that ever existed on our planet. He never thought about money. He never cared about it. He lived in a house that was hardly decorated. He just, you know, it just was never on his hierarchy of values, to quote Maslow there. So if you're obsessed with money, you're actually going to find all sorts of problems in life. You're going to become hooked to that paycheck. Let's say you're 32 years old and suddenly you're downsized or you're fired from your job and you've been addicted to that $80,000 or $100,000 years that you've been getting.

Now you don't have the mental freedom to take a job for half that price where you can now maybe start learning some skills and moving on and really finding your way because you're addicted to all that luxury and to the things, into the ego that you have connected to that paycheck. So money is one of the worst traps and the reason people get into that trap generally

is because of their parents. Their parents tell them, Johnny, Susan, whatever your name is, you've got to make a living. You've got to go get a, whatever your name is, you've got to make a living. You've got to go get a job that's lucrative. You've got to become a doctor, a lawyer. You've got to go to Yale and get this degree and go into the business school, et cetera. And you're not listening to yourself. You're listening to other people and their values. You call that a counterforce in the book. It's things that work against you from finding what you call your vocation,

which is like, what is going to make you the most happy in doing and being? And when you're in your vocation versus just doing a work, when you're in your vocation, you're passionate about it. You love what you're doing. And so you're going to naturally be more inclined to be great at it because you're going to put way more energy, way more passion into it. I mean, think about the people who have achieved greatness in any different field, all the people we know. Even the bow hunter, he loves it. He loves what he's doing. Cameron Haynes.

Yeah, he's found success in doing it, but he found his vocation and he's just stuck with it. And so he's become a master. But if he was trying to do some legal job or some accounting job, he would suck at it probably. Well, he actually has a date job, which he fucking hates, and when he describes it, he talks about dying there. He feels like he's dying every day when he's at work.

Yeah, but you're absolutely right. Is there a benefit in experiencing that resistance early in life so that you steal your resolve against it. Which resistance? The resistance to do what you actually want to do. I mean, I feel like a big part of my motivation in life and the strength of my resistance to getting other people happy or to doing what other people wanted me to do was that I was pressured in a way that I didn't towards a direction that I didn't want to go in I was all this course yeah I mean one of the

things that like I would hear all the time when I was starting out in stand-up comedy is my mom telling me that I wasn't funny my mom was like why are you doing this you're not funny like this is not a smart and I would like bite down on my mouthpiece and fucking plow forward because of that because you know i didn't want i didn't want to hear that i didn't want to hear finish your college degree get a get a normal job stop being a dreamer i didn't want to hear that because i had heard it and it strengthened my resolve yeah very much so it's definitely a theme in the book i mean if your is too easy, if you just fall out of the womb and suddenly you know this is what you were meant to do and at 18 you're doing it, you're going to have other problems down the road. It's good to have resistance. It's good to have people fucking with you and saying you're not good at this, etc. in my path to writing the 48 Laws of Power, I kind of knew I wanted to be a writer, but I went into forms of writing that didn't suit me. I started off in journalism, did that for several

years and really kind of hated it. And at one point, an editor had lunch with me and he pointedly said, Robert, you're never going to be a good writer. You just don't have the chemistry for it. You're just all over the place. You're not disciplined. Maybe go to law school or something. And that got me out of journalism because it made me realize I really hate the assholes who work there who just got to stick up their butt and can't think about what real writing might be like. I got out of that and wandered around Europe and tried writing novels and all sorts of things that didn't work either. Then I tried Hollywood and I tried television. Through that process, I discovered what I loved. When it came

to the chance to do a book, I suddenly, the heavens blew open for me. Yeah, a book. I have total control over it. There are no assholes telling me, coming in like in Hollywood and changing everything that I write. There's no writing for an article for one week that disappears. I have a book. But it was only through this process of finding what I hated. So when people come and tell me, I don't know what my vocation is. I don't know what it is I should be doing. I often say, well, what is it that you hate?

What are those things in life that you don't like? What are those jobs that you've had that suck the life out of you? They're sort of indications of maybe something that you should like. You don't like working for large groups of people. You should be an entrepreneur. You should be working for yourself. You're shaking your head. You look very skeptical.

No, no, not at all. I'm agreeing with you wholeheartedly. The total opposite. I'm like, no, please go on. No, no, I'm just, I love it. Yeah, so you've got to have the resistance. And the worst thing that happens are people who get successful at 25 and then think that they've got the golden touch. And they don't realize that they don't have the golden touch, that maybe they were kind of lucky.

And then they keep thinking that they have to repeat the same thing that they did. Let's say they became a comic at the age of 25, became hugely successful, but they didn't have the resistance that you had. Now they start not listening to their audience or to other people or to their mother who says they're not really that funny. And they just think everything they do, everything they should, is just wonderful. By the way, that's very common very common very common that's a huge issue with comics yeah well huge issue with comics is that becomes successful then

they start to suck it's a real issue like with some of the greats I won't name names I think what happened to Woody Allen I mean he's older guy but you know I disagree with you there um because his movies his movies are fucking brilliant, man. Blue Jasmine was great. It was a great movie. Midnight in Paris was fucking fantastic. It was a really good movie.

I think he's just a crazy pervert. I think that's the problem. I think what we don't like to admit it, but what fuels Woody Allen is he likes getting his dick sucked. You know? He likes, he's a freak. You go back and, you ever seen Woody Allen's young stand-up? Oh, he was hilarious. He was really good. I thought he was much funnier back then than young stand up? Oh, he was hilarious. He was really good.

I thought he was much funnier back then than he is now. Oh, he certainly is. But he also wasn't exposed like he is now. He isn't hated and vilified like he is now. I mean, he became a pariah. I mean, he became like a real freak. Yeah. You know, we were talking before the podcast.

I was saying that the sound of clicking, I was putting something on Twitter, and I was like, I'm going to miss that if they ever get rid of that. The sound of clicking is so, I don't know, rewarding to me or something like that. Woody Allen does all of his typing, all of his scripts on an old typewriter. And the way he edits, he takes pieces of paper, and if he changes a scene, he'll print it on a piece of paper and then cut it and then staple it to the other thing or tape it to the other thing like he's like so old-school in his approach he uses the same typewriter that he's always used for everything yeah what's probably

because he's fucking terrified to go on the internet if he googles Woody Allen I mean is a i mean you know whoever you are jesus is a first word's gonna be cunt you know if jesus ever gets online and googles his name but for woody allen i mean the fucking hate and the vitriol that that guy must experience on a daily basis just looking people in the eyes at a restaurant must be like really pretty fucking intense yeah i think that phenomenon that you're talking about with comics it applies to pretty much everything athletes entrepreneurs because if you use this resistance of you're you know struggling trying to get to the top people

telling you you're not going to make you'll never be a champion you'll never you know start on the basketball team you'll never do this and then once you get there and once you achieve that that kind of opposing force that allows you to bring out the best can kind of go away. It's why it's hard for teams to repeat championships, you know, and things like that. It's an interesting phenomenon. It's almost like, you know, you need this kind of heat and resistance to create the greatest out of yourself. And when that goes, you have to look elsewhere and find it in other things. Yeah, you can't make steel without fire.

That's right. I have a story in the book of Freddie Roach. He was one of the modern masters that I interviewed. Oh, I love Freddie. Great guy. Freddie's an amazing guy. And the story of Freddie's really kind of a model for mastery in a way. And basically, I'll summarize it quickly. His father was a fighter, and he got all his boys into boxing at the age of four. They were already in a ring, boxing away at the age of four. And so from that age onward, Freddie was boxing on an amateur level. And at one point in high school, just like your mom, his mom said to him, Freddie, you're not really very good at boxing. Why are

you doing this? Your brother is so much better than you. That got him really pissed. So he went back into the gym and he started training twice as hard. And he suddenly got better than his brother. And not only he started getting really good, got on the Olympic team, became a professional, I think around the age of 18 or so. And he had a boxing career as a professional for about eight years. And he was good, but he wasn't great. He was kind of slow, and he started taking a lot of punches, and it had an effect on him. And finally, at the age of 26, people were saying, Freddie, you better retire. Something really bad's going to happen. And so he retires at the age of 26. And if you think about it, for 22 years, boxing was his whole life. It's all he ever did. And now it's finished.

It's over. His career is over. And it's just he's ready to go on a downward spiral to suicide or something bad. And he gets a job in Vegas as a telemarketer because he'd been living in Vegas and fighting. And he's drinking heavily in the daytime because his job's at night. And then he goes and does a telemarketer because he'd been living in Vegas and fighting. And he's drinking heavily in the daytime because his job's at night. And then he goes, does a telemarketer. He's on a fast track to suicide. And one day, he decides to go back to the gym where he used to train under his old trainer, Eddie Fudge. And he's just watching the fighters there like he used to be trained.

And he decides, hey, I'm going to maybe help this one guy out who's not getting any attention right now. And in that moment, he sort of realizes, wow, I like teaching. Like maybe this is what I was meant to be. And he starts coming back every single day. He's not getting paid. The trainer isn't hiring him. He comes on his own. And he starts helping out the fighters. And he slowly realizes that training is the ultimate't hiring him. He comes on his own, and he starts helping out the fighters.

And he slowly realizes that training is the ultimate job for him. He loves competition. He loves winning. But he doesn't have to take a punch as the trainer. He can in the training area with his large mitts, but no punches to the head. He can strategize. He can win. He can compete.

He can do all the mind games that he loves, and he can give these years of experience. The reason why I consider this a model is it took him a path where he sort of looked like he was going downhill, where there was nothing left for him to do, and suddenly just a chance encounter made him realize what his real task in life was. just a chance encounter made him realize what his real task in life was. And all that experience that he had now could be applied to becoming the greatest trainer, boxing trainer of our era and also a mixed martial arts trainer. And so people always say, well, you know, I can't make it. I don't know what my path is. I can't figure it out.

I'm too old, et cetera. It's not a't know what my path is. I can't figure it out. I'm too old, etc. It's not a question of what age you are. You can always take the experiences and mistakes that you've had in life. And if you still got some guts, and you're not a whiner, you can find a way to apply those skills in a new way that's going to be something that more engages you personally and emotionally. Because in fact, he really wasn't meant to be a boxer. His father had pushed him into it. What he was meant to be was a teacher because he's fucking brilliant at it. So that's sort of like the model of the path that is for you.

It's not all rosy. It's not all instantly finding the perfect job. It requires some pain, some defeat, some loss, some really tough moments, and then it's going to click together as long as you don't give up. Hear, hear. And it is important to experience the loss. It's very important to feel the lows.

If you don't feel the lows, you won't appreciate the highs. Right. People in this day and age, they want instant coffee. They want instant gratification. They want everything to come to them with very little work they want to win the lottery right you know and winning the lottery is probably the worst fucking thing that could ever happen to you as a human being i i think back i played the lottery once i won a free ticket i played it again i lost i'm done that was it i never played the lottery again i'm the same way but what if i fucking won man what if I won $100 million when I was 21?

I would be the biggest fucking loser of all time now. I probably would. The money would be gone. I'd be suicidal because I blew through $100 million. But it's what happens. There's a reason why so many lottery winners burn through that money. And it's because you don't know what it is. You didn't earn it.

It's not yours. It's crazy. What you've done is you've found a weakness in the system. You've exploited it because the system is designed to steal money from people and get those dummies to spend all this money on a fucking lottery ticket. It's legalized gambling, and the state profits from it not just once but twice because they don't just take the money, your tax dollars, the money after you've spent all your money on taxes and all that,

what you've got left over, then you buy a lottery ticket. Well, guess what? All that money goes into a pool. The government takes a piece of it always, and then when you get paid, they take half of that. They fuck you every way coming and going and you get all that money and you still blow it you still blow it You can't keep it almost. No one does you have a million other fucking parasites trying to steal it from you and Because they know you don't deserve it

It's it's a mad mad. The way you appreciate money, whether it's a dollar or a million dollars, is when you earn it. You work hard, you experience the loss, you go through the trials and tribulations, and then you get it. When I look back at my path, I'll just say real quick, when I look back at my path,

I got out of school and I didn't know what the hell I was going to do and already felt terrible. I had some idea that I was already going to be in my vocation doing something great by the time I finished college. Well, that didn't happen. I was successful in a variety of different things. I kept trying, but not really, nothing that I could really hang my hat on. So I was really anxious and antsy, and I kept trying things.

I started a marketing company. I sold fake vaginas. I worked for a pharmaceutical company. Wait, wait, wait. Fleshlight. Yeah, Fleshlight. Fleshlight, the largest fake marketing company. I sold fake vaginas. I worked for a pharmaceutical company. What? Fleshlight. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Fleshlight. Yeah, Fleshlight. The largest fake vagina company. This is a tangent.

We don't need to go down. Vaginas for what? For fucking. For fucking. Stick your penis in them and feel better than jerking off. And I was working with oil and gas companies. But every single thing, it was like the universe came and just bashed me on the head. Something didn't work out. I'd even get options in this company that was going to strike. They were fracking some gas or something like

that. I didn't really understand it at that point. But if that would have been successful and worked, I would have made a huge amount of money. And that would have deterred me from this path I am now, which now I truly feel I'm in my vocation. But if I look back, all of these things that I was fighting for, for success, if they would have come and they would have come lucratively, they might have deterred me from what my real vocation is. So all of these things, all these bashes on the head, like the universe taking a fucking hammer and saying, whack, not going to work, has kind of led me in this weird path to actually doing something that I truly now feel is my vocation. But those things are blessings, those failures. I think eventually you would have found your way because it's just who you are.

Maybe so. Like maybe it would have taken you. It's easy to say when someone's successful. I know. That's like the secret. I know, I know. My issue with the secret is they only talk to the ones who it worked.

Like I was hanging out at the comedy store once and my friend Kelly Kirsten very funny stand-up comic had a friend that came with her to the comedy show she seemed like a very nice person and She was talking about the secret and this is the first time I met her and she was going on about you know I'm gonna have this and I this and I'm going to have that. And because I discovered the secret. And, you know, that movie where it tells you to manifest your own destiny with your imagination. You can make things happen. She had decided that because she had this belief in this system, this secret thing, that she was going to somehow or another be super successful and find the man of her dreams and be rich beyond her wildest imagination.

Then I ran into her many years later. She came to another comedy show that I had at the UCB. And I remember she was very nice. So I was talking to her. I was like, hey, how you doing? I talked to her once, and I talked to her twice. This is the only two times I ever had interaction with this woman. She seemed very nice.

But I'm talking to her, and she's like, I don't know why it's not working. It's like, don't know why it's not working it's like i'm my relationships are terrible i can't cut myself off of these uh bad relationships my father is always wants money from me and he's always broke and he drinks and it's like she had she's like i thought that i was going to be able to you know create my own life and it's just not working and the secret when you watch those fucking shows it's only the people that succeeded they're like i drew a picture of the house that i wanted and 10 years later i'm living in that house i set a goal my goal was 10 million dollars i have 10 million

dollars the secret is real well there's a person out there that drew a picture of a fucking castle on the moon and they're still in pasadena they're a picture of a fucking castle on the moon, and they're still in Pasadena. They're like, where's my fucking castle on the moon? You ain't getting there, bitch. Okay? It's not that simple. And when you're dealing with a very biased profile, you're only talking to the people that are successful. coming up is this idea that if there's something that's easy, that someone's trying to peddle, it's a deception. It's a con game. We want to believe, we humans want to believe in something quick and easy and simple. And if we believe in something, that means it can't really be real. If

we believe it because of that. In other words, we want to believe that God will grace us if we perform certain rituals or that we can make a lot of money by just following the secret. The truth of the matter is that to get really successful, to make money that lasts, it takes hours. It takes 10,000 hours. It takes 20,000 hours. It takes a lot of work, tedious work, drudgery, boredom, moments of challenge, defeat. That's the reality. So anybody that's trying to tell you that that is not the case, that there are shortcuts, they're con artists. That's just pure and simple. They're con artists. And one thing I'm trying to show in mastery is that we humans are geared towards pleasure. We don't want to do things that are naturally painful.

We are immediately attracted to things that offer us some kind of pleasure or reward. And the problem is too many things nowadays offer pleasures that are immediate, instant rewards. You know, a movie or a video game or something like that, or a drug, where without much effort, we get a feeling of relaxation, pleasure. And what I'm trying to show in mastery is that there's a different kind of pleasure that you want to train your body towards aiming at. And that's a pleasure that comes from conquering yourself, from learning something deeply. You're taking up or you've been doing archery for some time. It's probably not too satisfying the first few days that you were doing it or first few weeks.

It was a challenge. There wasn't much creativity involved, etc. But if you keep doing this for five years, ten years, suddenly you reach a level of pleasure that no video game could ever, ever begin to supply you. And I want to reorient your whole value system towards this other kind of pleasure that comes from conquering yourself, getting discipline, getting skilled at something, becoming really good at it, and feeling incredible sense of fulfillment

as opposed to all those immediate rushes that our culture tries to peddle. That's such a huge point for satisfaction in life. I feel most relaxed after I've worked out really hard. And not just physically because I've blown off all this steam, but because I did it. You know, I'm a big fan of being uncomfortable. Yeah. I tell that to people and they go, what are you talking about?

Like, look, nobody likes sleeping in more than me. I mean, maybe you do, but I doubt it. I love it. I love sleeping in, but I don't do it. Okay? I get up. I get up when I have to get up, unless I can. You know, I did all my shit.

But my point is, when I have something that I have to do, when I do it, if I don't want to do it, it feels even better once I've done it. Yeah, really. And that's the fan of being uncomfortable. I like that feeling. I like that feeling because that feeling has shaped me. It's rewarded me. It's one of the reasons why I pursue so many things that I've never done before.

Why I got into archery. Why I'm enjoying it. Why I'm enjoying it because I fucking suck at it. I like sucking at something because you suck at it. Now, I don't suck at it as much as I did three months ago, whatever the hell it is, when I first bought a bow. I'm better at it now, for sure. I put pictures online of my patterns that I can hit.

The arrows in the bullseyes and shit. Because I want to reinforce that in my head to keep doing that. And also there's a discipline involved in something that's very difficult to do that requires all of your concentration that clears the mind. And I think that you can get that in gardening. You can get that in running up hills. Whatever it is, when you're running up hills, you're not thinking about too much other shit. When you're absolutely exhausted and your heart's pounding in your chest and you know you've got 300 yards to go and you don't think you can make it, there's a beauty in that.

Yeah, you're talking a lot about Zen philosophy almost too as well, as using some modality of movement, which is often it is, or anything, to find a sort of presence of mind, returning to that state of openness of consciousness. And archery is one of those main channels. Zen and the Art of Archery is a great book. I've read that. And, you know, you work for these moments, they call it Satori,

where it's these moments where you have this really mindless shot that you take in archery and everything is just completely in the moment. And I think the masters have found a way to duplicate that more, you know, more often, more, they have almost a formula that can allow them to get these moments where they're really in the zone, as you would call it. Or flow, they call it. Flow, yeah, get in these flow states, which is really, you know, harkening back to that old Zen philosophy of being of no mind. Well, that is the experience that best describes martial arts at its best as well when you're fighting when you're competing especially if there's anything on your mind anything else besides the the task

at hand besides dealing with the other skilled person you're you're going to be diminished you will be diminished your skills will be diminished your mind will be diminished it's one of the reasons why so many people talk trash they talk trash to fill your mind up with other tasks. They fill your mind up with insecurity and doubt or anger, which is just as bad. Fill your mind up with all those emotions. You might be able to win with anger if you're fighting a less than skilled opponent,

but if you fight a real master and you have anger, you're going to make mistakes. You're going to open yourself up. You're going to fight with that anger, and in fighting with that anger, you're going to expose yourself.. You're going to fight with that anger. And in fighting with that anger, you're going to expose yourself. You're not going to fight with perfect strategy. Unless you're Mike Tyson versus Michael Spinks, where Spinks is fucked no matter what he does. Tyson could come into that fight on cocaine, angry. Didn't matter. He's going to kill you

because he's just so much better. Unless that, but when you have two Mike Tysons, you know what you get? You get Mike Tyson versus Evander Holyfield. You get a guy who's fighting with purity and a guy who's going to beat your fucking ass. You're not going to take him out of there with one big rush in the first round. And, you know, you're going to wind up getting knocked the fuck out. And that's what happened to Tyson when he fought Holyfield. He fought a real master.

He fought a master when he wasn't a master anymore. Yeah, I didn't include him in mastery. I'm going to include him in my next book, but I was reading Phil Jackson's most recent book, and he's a Zen master himself. And he discovered in dealing with all these incredible egos on a team, as he did with the Bulls and later with the Lakers, that if he tried to get them all wired up before a game and emotional,

which is what a lot of coaches would do, yeah, we're going to rip the guts out of them, let's go just kill the Lakers, whatever, that they would play much worse. So his job was to imbibe in them incredible peacefulness and calmness, and they would meditate before a game, which no other coach ever did before. And he wanted them completely to be mindful in the game so that they could focus on the task and not use all that anger to push them.

And some players could use the anger a little bit, but most people, like Dennis Rodman, he would make them do all sorts of terrible mistakes. And look at the results. There's no coach who's had more championships or more success than someone like Phil Jackson. But the thing that I try and show in mastery, because I have a story of a great Zen master, a man named Hakuin, because I myself practice Zen meditation, have been for many years. This man, this was in 17th century, 18th century Japan.

This was in 17th century, 18th century Japan. He was reacting against all the Zen practices that were going on in Japan that were trying to promise you enlightenment through something very simple. All you had to do was sit in what's called Zazen, seated meditation, and enlightenment would come to you. And he said, this is such bullshit. I hate this. This isn't the way to mass to enlightenment. They've gotten away from the true essence of Zen. You have to have pain. You have to go through 10, 20, 30 years of torture,

doubt, misery, the Zen master hitting you over a head with that stupid stick every time he saw that you weren't concentrating, and then you would be enlightened. And so I'm trying to show you, even if it's enlightenment, which seems like the most un-material thing you could think of, requires the same process of going through a practice, of having pain, of having resistance, of having a teacher tell you that you're fucked up, you're wrong, hitting you on the head, on and on. And life is the greatest teacher of all. Life will hit you on the head. It sure will.

If you don't have any teacher with an actual stick, you better believe that life itself will handle that. Can we finish with that? Yeah. No, I mean, what I try to say is I'm grounding you in what the human brain was evolved for. Because our brains weren't wired for iPods and iPhones and Twitter. for iPods and iPhones and Twitter. They were wired over hundreds of thousands of years of hunting, of dealing with extremely radical, dangerous situations in which at one moment, if we're not careful,

a leopard will come and eat us. And early humans were being eaten quite often by large cats. Very dangerous environment in which your awareness, your focus, your ability to understand your environment as if it were on your fingertips, to know every square foot of that very dangerous African savannah that you're on, that's what the brain was wired for. Focus, seeing something deeply, understanding your environment, not being distracted here and there and looking over there. That's not how the brain was evolved. So all of these disciplines from boxing to Zen enlightenment to archery to music to whatever, they're all connected with the same

brain process that we all have to go through in order to reach this point where we've mastered our environment, whatever that might be. Your work in meditation, what type of, you said Zen meditation, what type of Zen meditation do you practice? Well, I've done mostly what's called Renzai, there's Soto and Renzai. I used to go to a place where I was trained, and now I do it on my own. What's the difference between the two schools of thought? One of them is more a passive process where you're just sitting there trying to completely empty your mind. And that's sort of the easier, slightly easier path. And the concept is if you're able to reach a state where you're not thinking at all and you've emptied your mind, enlightenment will come to you.

The other school is more active. It's not just so passive. You just can't empty your mind. You have to do something else. And that something else is, I'm simplifying it, mind you, here. But that something else is more disciplined and going through learning these various koans. For instance, the most famous koan is, these are usually a series of questions,

the sound of one hand clapping, but the one that I've used for years is, the question is, does the dog have Buddha nature? And the answer from the Zen master is mu. Mu meaning no, but it means more than no. It means like nothing, just nothingness. And it's the most powerful Zen koan ever written. If you ever try and think about it deeply, you will reach enlightenment. The different school of thought is you meditate on that koan, almost like a mantra, and you try and figure it out until it opens up a gate in your head. That's a simplified version of the two different types.

So the idea being that this preposterous question becomes sort of a pattern that your thoughts go into and you become empty because this pattern becomes – you say it over and over and over and over again. You recite it. You think about it over and over again until you reach a state of mind. Until it becomes so absurd that the words fall off of you. Zen is trying to teach you something that's wordless. We're so trapped in language and words and thinking that it separates us from our natural state of original mind, of the non-thinking mind. I know that sounds a strange idea. So through words, you're going to realize the absurdity of words, that they're disconnecting you from reality.

And so at that point, you realize that mu means everything. There's absolutely nothing real in this universe that can be encompassed by a word. My talking about it here is absolutely, completely counterproductive and ridiculous because people are going to think, oh, I'll just repeat the word moo over and over again. No, it takes months of thinking very deeply about this.

It's trying to cut you off from that chatter in your head, from thinking constantly linguistically about, it's a total physical form of enlightenment, Zen. It's the most physical form of enlightenment you could reach. I keep getting reminded of that Bill Bradley story that you told, and kind of repeating the same thing. Bill Bradley was a terrible basketball player at the start. Big, gangly, slow.

Not terrible, but he wasn't good. But he had the most relentless pursuit of improvement of anybody that I've ever read. You can probably pick up the story, but just dribbling the ball constantly, eight hours, nine hours a day, again, over and over and over again. And that kind of repetition, it's all part of this same pattern of doing the same thing over and over again. Well, I'm glad you bring it up. It's a great story. It's kind of another like Freddie Roach type thing. He's a white guy who happens to be tall, but he loves basketball.

He's like nine years old. And I know this myself because I loved basketball when I was a kid. Just the sound of the ball swishing through the net. He just loved the sound of that, the feel of it. So he had this sort of visceral love of the game. But he stunk at it. He was tall, awkward, slow. There's no way he'd become good at it.

So he decided he was going to train himself from a very early age. And I call it, you know, they have a concept called deliberate practice, where you learn to practice what you're not good at. Because we often, if we're taking up archery or basketball, we find something that we're good at and we tend to just repeat that. And then our practice becomes very one-sided. Deliberate practices to practice on what you're not good at. I call it resistance practice. Actually practicing at what is painful and enjoying the pain. And that's Bill Bradley. He put these special glasses on his head that prevented him from looking down. So he would dribble on a court for 10 hours or, I don't know, 10 hours, 3 or 4 hours, and he couldn't look down at his feet, which trained him to dribble.

That's the worst thing you can have. If you're always looking down, you're not able to see what's going on on the court. So he did that. He went on a cruise with his parents across to England, and he wanted to build a practice there. He brought his basketball, and below deck there were these incredibly long alleys that would go from one end of the ship to the other that were very narrow. He would put on his special glasses, and he would dribble back and forth in this narrow area so that he could dribble with absolute, complete control. He devised all of

these other exercises where he could train himself to see almost behind himself, or at least way over to the side, on and on and on until he became so good that by the time he got into college at Princeton, and then later he played for the New York Knicks in the 70s with all the great championship teams, people would look at Bill Brown and they'd go, my God, this guy is a born, he was born with a basketball in his hand. He's naturally gifted. He is so graceful. He has eyes in the back of his head. He can make a pass to Walt Frazier without even looking. They didn't realize that he had gone through the most insanely rigorous, painful, deliberate form of practice ever invented by a single athlete at a very early age. And it made, you know, it made the game fun

for him. It was sure it was a lot of pain. But by the time he got good, and he was in high school, all the girls were admiring him. You know, he got invited to go to Princeton. I mean, it paid off and he got a huge level of pleasure and the game became incredibly fun. But it was all based on these insane moments and periods of pain that he put himself through. That's a beautiful story. I love that story. That's amazing. That's such a huge lesson for young people coming up to learn and hear, to instill that into your mind and to use that as a template. Yeah. Particularly nowadays when you're just so inundated with immediate pleasures and so many

young people are disconnected from what I call the pattern that our brains were built for. If you're going against that pattern and trying to get things quickly or immediately, you're just going to fail. You're just going to be a loser in life. There's no, you can't, you in your short life can't suddenly move against 2 million, 3 million years of evolution.

I'm sorry, it just can't be done. That's a beautiful statement, man. That's so, what you said is so important. And that story, the Bill Bradley story is such a powerful story because anyone can do that with whatever you're trying to do. Exactly. I mean, he just happened to be born tall. So if he hadn't ended up being six foot six or seven, he wouldn't have, but that's all he had. What about Muggsy Bogues? He was five foot six", who was a great basketball player? There's plenty of examples of people that they physically weren't built for.

Mike Tyson was one of the smallest heavyweight champions of that modern era. He was 5'10". He weighed 215 pounds in his prime. Go back to Primo Carnera, who was a heavyweight champion in the fucking 20s or 30s or whatever the hell it was. He was like 300 pounds.

Mike Tyson's, in my opinion, the greatest heavyweight of all time. And he wasn't that big. He wasn't a big guy, you know? And the cool part is that ultimately, you know, we've talked about it before, any master that you meet, they're generally a real true pleasure to be around.

You know, they've worked through all of those cunty, egoistic attitudes that they may carry along. And it's through this almost overcoming this physical resistance in the very art of the mastery that they're doing. It doesn't matter, ping pong, bow hunting, comedy, basketball, whatever it is, you reach a certain place by pushing through that pain and going through those hours and doing those things

that almost tempers your spirit as the main thing that's happening. And it just, the skill kind of comes along with it. Sometimes not. Even though you're focused on the skill. Sometimes not though, unfortunately. Sometimes focusing on that skill becomes to the detriment of all other aspects of your life. And there are people that achieve mastery in very specific things that are fucking total shitheads. Ty Cobb, great example, was a famous shithead. There's a lot of people. Mike Tyson in his prime went to jail

for rape. I don't think he did it. He says he didn't do it and he's really honest about pretty much everything else in his life. But the point being, he was a wild, crazy fuck and that was one of the reasons why he was being successful. There are very many examples of people

who become so selective in what they're trying to do and so obsessed and focused to the detriment of personal relationships, to the detriment of their own personality. I mean, Steve Jobs would definitely fall under that category. I agree. It doesn't have to be that way, though. It doesn't have to be that way. And then I always say, even with Ty Cobb or Steve Jobs, they were probably miserable to be around, but he had a pretty hugely satisfying life.

Maybe. I don't know, man. I don't know that guy. No, I don't know. I think it kind of goes to your- I'm going to use the bathroom real quick, please. Okay. It goes to kind of one of your final points, which is on that path to mastery, the final level is building bridges back to nature, back to different and making other connections. So if you stay too focused in that one thing and never look to build a bridge to anything else, you can probably result in some of these issues. Yeah. I mean, for those who don't know the book, essentially I've laid out kind of five or six steps towards this ultimate form of mastery.

It's like a path. And it involves first discovering who you are, what you were meant to do, then going through what I call an apprenticeship in which you develop all of the proper skills so that later in life you have like a real firm basis for becoming creative and part of that apprenticeship involves working with mentors and masters and it also involves learning how to work with other people and deal with their weirdness and their political games and then showing you then how you reach the creative level and then the mastery level and it it's a loose path. It's not like a straight line.

But I'm sort of showing you the various steps that get you there. And as Aubrey points out, particularly nowadays, it involves a kind of a well-roundedness. You're not just some you're not just some Asperger's guy in Silicon Valley who's great at logarithms and creating the ultimate Facebook or whatever. You also have to have social skills. And I have a whole chapter in mastery on social intelligence. You have to learn how to deal with people. You have to be socially fluid. You have to know how to be empathetic, how to

understand what other people's feelings are, how to handle the assholes that will inevitably cross your path. So some of the people that Joe's talking about who are a little bit one-sided, they've kind of bypassed some of these other things that I'm talking about because I'm trying to get you to that well-rounded form of mastery. Which is true mastery form of mastery. Which is true mastery. True mastery. Mastery over your whole life, not just a specific task. Very much so.

You were talking a lot about meditation. Have you ever spent any time in an isolation tank? I have. Do you do it on a regular basis? No. When I was living in New York years ago as a journalist, they asked me to write an article about isolation tanks. This was when they were just starting out, early 80s.

Oh, they were around before that. They were, but they became a recreational thing in the early 80s. Yeah, they were around as a CIA experiment. No, John Lilly, the guy who created it. But for the general public, it really became like a fad in the early 80s. So I was asked to cover it, and I got kind of hooked. And I did it for a while. I haven't done it since then, but it's a great experience.

I think that was because the movie Altered States. Yes. When did that movie come out? Because that was how I found out about it as well. Yes, I think. You're right, 81. No, 1980. 80, Altered States.

Exactly. Yeah, isn't it funny how a movie can just start a trend like that? Yeah. I found out about Altered States when I was in high school. I watched the movie in high school or right after it came out. Maybe I actually saw it in junior high because it was 80. I wasn't in high school yet. But I got into isolation tanks when I first came to California because they had them here. And I never knew that there was a place where

you could get into one. And through talking about it on the podcast, the entire industry has got this massive bump now. And there's isolation tank centers opening up all over the world that credit me talking about it on the podcast and YouTube videos that I talk about it. I have one in my basement. Oh, man. Fantastic. How often do you do it? All the time.

I think I was in yesterday. I think it's the most important tool. Actually, yesterday. I'm lying. The day before yesterday. I didn't go yesterday. I think it's the most important tool that I've ever discovered for meditation. How long did you sit in it?

At least an hour. I think an hour is the right amount of time. Is there somebody that wakes you up and gets you out? No, I have a timer. You have a timer. I set a timer if I have to. But sometimes I'll go in there if I don't have a time limitation. You lose all sense of time.

You have no idea what an hour is. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. My brain seems to know when two hours is. Two hours seems pretty standard for me. Like if I don't have any time constraints, two hours seems to be what I really, depending on whether or not I'm sober or not when I go into it, never drunk, but marijuana is usually the intoxicant of choice,

especially edible marijuana, which provides a much more hallucinogenic effect. Yeah, yeah. I think it enhances the experience of the psychedelic state inside the tank. You don't freak out or anything? I like freaking out. I like freaking out. I think freaking out's important. I'm a big fan of freaking out because then much like the stress of exercise or discipline

through the experience of complete freaking out, there's lessons to be learned. Confront your demons and stuff. Yeah, the psychedelic state that you can achieve inside an isolation tank on edible marijuana is pretty fucking intense. Wow. But it's just that environment for meditation. I mean, there's no better environment ever created for meditation.

In fact, it's the only environment like it on Earth. You're successful, man. How come you don't have one of those? I don't have a basement. You don't need a basement. Well, I don't know why my girlfriend would want that in our house. Tough shit. Get a new one. Get a new girlfriend? Moving on. She tried to

keep you from having an isolation tank. What's she trying to do? Keep you from enlightenment? Alright, I'll try that on her. But Zen meditation. You wrote the artist's introduction. Yeah, come on, man. You're talking about your own laws. You're violating them right now by saying that. Did your girlfriend tell you what kind of car you could drive to?

No. No, but sometimes you've got to give in to the other person. You know, a relationship's a little bit about compromise. Not if it's about an isolation tank. No, you're right, you're right. No fucking reason. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry I was beating you over the head with your own work.

That's all right. Everybody does that. But Zen meditation is sort of like the isolation tank because the point of it is to cut off all stimuli. And you don't have to rely on this environment that you're putting yourself into. So your eyes are open when you're meditating, but you're not looking at anything. And you're not getting in any stimuli at all.

So you're not hearing anything. I mean, there can be sounds outside, but you're not paying attention to them. And you enter the state that's similar to what the isolation tank is. I can enter a state like the isolation tank without the isolation tank because I cut off all stimuli and I enter my own mental space and incredible things can happen. So you just ignore the stimuli until the point where it's not reaching the mind. Is that the idea behind it? It's training. It's years of meditation where you're not good at it. And still to this day, thoughts invade your head, which probably don't so much. Well, they do when you're in an isolation tank.

Of course they do. But if you go, it's called samadhi. And samadhi is a state where you're, the samadhi tanks. Yeah. Yeah. That's the name of the company. Right. That's right.

I remember that. I remember that. Yeah, that's the name of the company. Right, that's right. I remember that. I remember that. Well, samadhi is a kind of mindless state, or that's not exactly the word, but there's no thinking going on, and it's just incredibly euphoric. You can reach that through meditation,

but maybe after 20 minutes or 25 minutes you get to that state. But you're cutting off all stimuli. That's one of the reasons they founded yoga was to make it so that there was less stimuli coming from your seated ass, you know, and the way that your legs were folded when you're meditating, because all of that noise that an isolation tank filters out, and I love the tank, it's most effective for me, but, you, but they would do yoga so that they could sit in that pose and have less of that stimuli yelling for longer so they could reach those states in which they could find that. Well, I also personally find that yoga releases some form of psychedelic chemicals in the mind. Yeah, it's its own practice.

I've gotten high, like legitimately high from yoga to the point where not i want to say intoxicated like i'm like diminished in some way or affected like i can't form sentences or anything like that but like i feel like a chemical effect or a biological effect some sort of a real tangible effect from yoga definitely which i've always I mean, my thought process was, why would these people do all this for so long? Like, why would they have this practice for thousands of years unless there was something to it?

And there's something to it. I do a lot of swimming, and I find swimming the absolute ultimate form of exercise because there's no stimuli. I mean, you're not sitting there thinking about the water anymore and your brain just zones out and after you do long distance swimming you can reach very interesting alpha states yeah i agree i i find it incredibly um not just beautiful in that sense where you you achieve states but it's really taxing like it's really hard to swim like most people think of swimming as like a recreational activity like i do a lot

of swimming with my kids and we play around but when i do laps like fuck it's fucking hard yeah swimming is hard to do man you look at a dude like michael phelps that's a bad man you know that guy has achieved this incredible ability to move through the water like a fucking fish. That's not easy. That is a real, legit, difficult accomplishment. Yeah. I like the mental pain involved in swimming because I like to swim long distances

where you're like, I just can't do this anymore. It's so boring and it's so painful and I'm just, you know,'m gonna drown i can't i'm taking you know whatever and then you just push past that and you swim like two miles and you get out oh man what a great feeling so what do you just do laps in the pool over and over and over again yeah you're not one of those crazy fucks that gets in the ocean are you i would love to but uh i live not close to the, and it's cold and polluted. If I lived in Hawaii, I'd be swimming in the ocean.

Well, then you'd get radioactive. The shit coming from Japan. You're right. If I lived in the Yucatan, I'd be swimming in the ocean. Ah, there you go. That's it. That's the spot. The long ocean swims move to the Yucatan.

That is a beautiful patch of water, though, by the way. Tulum? You ever been to Tulum? No, I've been to Chichen itza oh chichen itza yeah it's amazing yeah incredible yeah that's a freaky spot you know being around those uh ancient ruins is one of the most bizarre moments i think i've ever had just walking around knowing that people were playing football with human heads where i was standing this is just a sc,500 plus years ago or whatever it was. So these altered states that you achieve with Zen meditation, do you find them to be psychedelic?

Do you find that you can hallucinate? Well, you're not supposed to. That's not the goal. They have this word called makyo, which means a demon. And what it means is after a certain point in meditation, demons start appearing in your brain where you've cut out all sensory stimuli. And suddenly images start coming up that are just weird and random and somewhat frightening. And that happens to me all the time. Like you almost are like in a dream state.

You know how in dreams, their thoughts and images that seem so random and sometimes scary by how random they are. You're consciously getting that in your head as you're entering deeper and deeper into the state, but you're trying to push past that. You're trying to push to the state where there's nothing coming in at all and you kind of transcend this sort of thinking state that you're constantly in. I can't really put it in words.

I don't even want to try and put it in words. So the goal isn't really to have these vivid hallucinations, but they happen. And they're very interesting. That's fascinating, though, that. And they're very interesting. That's fascinating, though, that it's thought to be demons. Yeah, in the traditional Zen form, that's what they call them. And I know that they have in Japanese iconography these very frightening looking demon-like figures. And they do actually have a concept of hell in Japanese culture that came into Zen Buddhism. And I know Hakuin talks

about these very vivid images of demons that he had when he was a child. He was so afraid of them that he decided he had to get into Buddhism and Zen to overcome them. So I don't know exactly, I'm not going to be hallucinating these Japanese demons that were probably very much in their minds and in their culture. But if you, you know, it's interesting, this is a total, I don't know how far we're getting away from things here, but- No, there's no getting away. Okay, there's this concept in ancient times. There's a great book called The Bicameral Mind.

I don't know if you're familiar. I've heard of it. I've never read it, though. The idea in this book is that for ancient people, consciousness was almost like a voice in their head, and it flipped them out, and they couldn't understand it, and they were constantly, like on drugs, hearing their own thoughts. And that's why they had to project it onto gods and demons and other things that are out there in the world. But literally hearing their own thoughts was almost like a continual trip for them. It's hard for us to imagine because we're so used to the chatter in our minds. But originally, according to this man, this was how they experienced consciousness.

Was this in the early days of language? Yes. So this was a fairly recent phenomenon? Is that what the idea behind it is? Yeah, I think 6,000, 7,000, 10,000 BC. I can't remember the writer's name, Julian something, or his last name is Julian. Great book.

But if you read books like about Buddhism, which I do voraciously, the history of it, early people in meditation and early adherence to Buddhism were constantly talking about that chatter in their mind as if it were hell. It was like hearing this noise of thoughts was just awful. It was claustrophobic and frightening. And they had to get into meditation and Buddhism just to calm the mind down and not hear that voice in their heads. Now, this is a totally alien notion to us because we're so used to it. It's almost not a good thing that we're so used to it.

But I think that that's sort of the idea of the demons. Constantly hearing this voice, these things in your head that aren't, you're not willing them. You know, like you're not willing these thoughts that are constantly coming up into your mind. Where are they coming from? There's a great Zen koan called, who is the master? Where are your thoughts coming from? Who is the master calling up these thoughts in your head, particularly in your dreams, or particularly when you're not, when you're maybe tired and suddenly this image comes up? You're not calling it up. Well, where is it coming from? That's where I think this idea of demons is connected. This reminds me a lot of going through a psychedelic experience like ayahuasca.

In that path, you reach this very visual point in the experience, which is generally, it can either be incredibly beautiful or it can be incredibly hellish. Like what would be an example of it? Well, incredibly hellish. For example, I have different spiders going inside of me and laying eggs and exploding and bugs are coming out of me. There's eels coming inside, eating through my intestines and going, eating all my organs coming out. I'm sliding naked through a vine, down a vine of thorns. It's ripping up my flesh. These are all images that happen in an ayahuasca trip or incredibly beautiful, the most beautiful colors you've ever seen, the most beautiful lights, images, things. And, you know,

I get a lot of people asking me about these trips and And for them, that is, who haven't done it very much, they focus very much on those visions. But those visions are almost like the fireworks and the chatter to what's going to come after. And what comes after is this kind of oneness with your thoughts and your highest consciousness and your highest being that is past all that. And maybe that brings up resistances, things you can overcome. Maybe it helps you with some thoughts, but the real value of it in ayahuasca or DMT or any kind of psychedelic is that period after where these demons or these visions or everything goes away. And to me, that's the real end goal. That's the real gem. Well, that's really similar to the Zen meditation because you're going through,

Well, that's really similar to the Zen meditation because you're going through, let's say I meditate for 35, 40 minutes. The first 25, I'm having those demons. I'm hearing my thoughts. I'm trying to get over them. And then I finally reach that state. It only lasts for 15 minutes. Oh, it's the best state at all. So it's kind of a similar process.

That's it. Yeah. So it's not so much about the visions. It's about what happens after the visions. It seems to me very much like what you're saying. Yeah, that state after very difficult yoga sessions, it doesn't last very long. But there's a period of intense relaxation and enlightenment that you achieve where you kind of have a better perspective of things. But it only comes through this very difficult work of the hour and a half of yoga that you have to do to get to that spot. That's right.

And if you half-ass it anywhere along the way, you don't reach that spot. I don't reach that spot every time. I reach it a lot, but I don't reach it every time. It's very tricky, isn't it? Yeah, you never know. And I don't know if it's the same with archery or the things that you do like that, but when you start the meditation, you bring a mood and it's never the same. Someday for no reason, it just falls into place. And some days you don't

know why this anxiety is gnawing on your inside. You never can figure out what you bring to it. It's interesting. It really is. Do you have a very rigid schedule when it comes to your meditation and your, your discipline? Like how do you structure your days? You're obviously self-employed, you know, you're a writer. So do you, do you have a structure like I must write for this amount of time? I must meditate. Like, how do you, how do you do it?

No, I, every morning I wake up and I meditate, uh, for 35 minutes. Um, and nothing will stop me. Really? If I'm sick or even if I'm traveling or whatever, every day. Do you sit a particular way? I have the proper pillows and I have a little place and I have a little clock that goes off with bells. And I sit in the lotus position until my legs are like screaming with pain. So you can do that?

You can pull your legs up in that spot? Yeah. It's hard to do, huh? I've been doing it for many, many years. But then I recently broke my foot and I couldn't do it for about three months. So now I'm fine and I can do it. So I'm back to having some pain again. But the pain is good, as we all know.

And then I'm not usually writing because my books require so much research. So right now I'm in a research period where I'm reading voraciously books about human nature, psychology, etc. And then in about a year, I'm going to start writing. And then I go on to a kind of a different routine where I'm a little more crazed and hard to be around. That's fascinating. So you research for a full year before you write. Do you discipline the research aspect of it? Oh, man, I'm so disciplined. It's probably bordering on OCD. I read, you know, 300, 400 books, and I read them. I don't skim them. And then I go back and

I do these note cards, and it's the note cards that's excruciating. That's like the Bill Bradley part. I put every book onto maybe 10, 20, 30 cards, depending on how good a book it is. And at the end, I'll have two, three thousand cards. Handwritten. Handwritten. And I can take these cards and move them around, and the book is created out of the cards. So the cards are the beneficial aspects of whatever book you're reading or what strikes you? But I'm able to break a book down that could be chaotic. So, for instance, for this new book, I happen to love Nietzsche a lot.

I've loved him since I was a kid. The Übermensch. The Übermensch. This is a book about the Übermensch, my next book. And there's a book that I've read for him, an early book called Human All Too Human. It's just the most amazing book. But it's chaotic. It's all over the place. He's got all these aphorisms and these thoughts, and it's just like entering a rat's maze. I, with my cards, can organize all of his ideas and all of his thoughts

and bring some order and show you the amazing pearls of wisdom this guy has gleaned out of his mad syphilitic brain. Did he have syphilis? Oh, yeah. He went mad at the age of like 44 and spent his last eight years

in basically a... Too much pussy, huh? No. You're crazy. Well, he probably had not enough pussy. Really? So he got syphilis pussy. He probably went to a prostitute when he was in the Prussian War and then got syphilis.

And then he didn't get laid enough. That was certainly probably his problem. That was why he was obsessed with the Ubermensch? Syphilis is probably why he got obsessed with the Ubermensch. Probably not the not getting laid. What did they do back in those days when you had syphilis is probably why he got obsessed with it it's probably not the not getting laid what did they do back in those days when you had syphilis there was no cure right yeah give you an apple or something like that yeah it was before penicillin right yeah yeah nothing much to do i think some some people were smart enough to start you know trying

silver i think silver had some use in some of these things but it's not very effective not like not like an antibiotic yeah it's uh fascinating because i was trying to explain to my kids the plague uh because we were reading a book and my five-year-old and my three-year-old were sitting in bed reading before bedtime and the story involved the plague a plague upon you was uh one of the lines and uh you know they were like what's a plague i'm like that's some shit before doctors when they didn't really have doctors when all doctors could do was like cut off broken limbs they uh they had diseases that would kill giant chunks of people my kids are like what the fuck i'm like yeah not that long

ago by the way they wrote about it so they had language. Yep. You know, what we were talking about earlier about the evolution of civilization and the amount of time, the very brief window between us and when we were animals in relationship to the length of time that things have been alive on Earth. Very small. It's very small. We're going through the most crazy and chaotic time pretty much ever. The wheel description that McKenna used to use about the exponential growth of technology was about sending a ball around the top of a funnel. And then it takes a long time to get around the top. But that we're somewhere towards the bottom of the funnel now where that fucking thing is going around the tunnel, going around the funnel so quickly.

It's hard for us to really wrap our heads around, but when we talk to children about it, when I talk to children about it, it really sends it home. When I try to describe to my kids what a fucking plague is. Yeah. Yeah, and I just reminded myself of when you read actual accounts of the true pirates, like Blackbeard and things like that, one of the things that they would barter with for the most, like when they were making deals with the British ships or different things and striking deals, was venereal disease medicine, like syphilis medicine. I could be like, we'll give you all the gold, but you have to bring over a chest of, of medicine to cure the venereal disease. I think that was a, probably a much bigger problem in ancient history than not,

well, not completely ancient, but in past civilization that we give it credit. When was the first venereal disease? I don't know. I have no idea. What a fucking dirty trick. You know,

I mean, think about how few diseases kill you that you catch just walking around, like the flu. But, you know. I think it might be nature's way to keep the population down a little bit. Most likely, right? Yeah. I mean, it seems like what's going on. There's always a battle, right?

Just like we were talking about the battle between discipline and success, the battle between being uncomfortable and doing things that are hard to do and reaping the rewards of that. Yeah. There seems to be a battle in nature of trying to fucking kill us so we get stronger. I mean we don't like to think that, but it's been directly proven that many plagues and many diseases, certain traits have risen through those diseases which have made the human race actually stronger. Although they say our Cro-Magnon ancestors, for instance, lived longer than we do. Really? Yeah. I've never heard that.

Wow, that's amazing. I thought they died at like 12. I mean, I know in the Bible, but who believes the Bible? Oh, 600 years ago. Yeah, like Moses died at the age of 193. Yeah, that's a little shaky. I know it is. They didn't know what a year was back then, though.

They were just making shit up. You know, the calendar sucks. It's written on a rock. I mean, you can't really, yeah, there's a lot of shit in the Bible. It's fucking tough to swallow. Yeah. So where did you read that crow magnon lived longer than us uh well first one thing that's for certain they were bigger than we were really yeah

they had uh they were taller that's a known fact before agriculture uh we did not have certain diseases that we have now if you talk to the paleo people and they can fill you in with all that stuff. But before we started having grains and all that bad stuff, people were perhaps living longer. They were certainly bigger. Cram Magnum was 5'7 to 5'9. Oh, you're showing me wrong. But they were taller than the people that came after them. Oh, okay.

Well, they say that there are – that's the average. But large males stood as tall as 6'5". Oh, okay. So not really taller than us. Okay, but taller than the people living – Than the humans of those. After. Yeah, in ancient Greece or whatever.

Nothing like the internet to be able to show that i'm wrong about you know 10 years ago there was no way you would have been able to prove me wrong we've had so many examples of people stating and i know you're not doing it but there's been a lot of people that have bullshitted us yeah unfortunately and i've spread information so now i have to be like diligent about that what is that wikipedia Wikipedia? This is Wikipedia, but it has references. If you'd like me to find the scientific references, they're in there as well. Don't get crazy. I think the path back between what we're talking about is that, you know, life itself needs resistance just as masters need resistance.

You know, I mean, there is no life that's worth living if everything is, you know, like that Alan Watts video, if we could make everything absolutely perfect and nothing is a surprise and there's no resistance out there. It doesn't become what it is. It's not as rich anymore. It's not filled with the magic that life can be. I mean, pick us off is part of that resistance. And the fact that all of these forces are aligned against someone who's trying to become a master, the pain, the sacrifice, whatever people are saying, all of that, that is required for a master to be created. You know, that's, it's all part of the same thing. You know, it's this kind of dualism of, of force and opposition. The average life expectancy of Cro-Magnon was 35 years. All right. I meant the height. I meant the height.

Sorry, dude. Yeah, okay. Well, then I've got something. Maybe it's not Cro-Magnon. I better shut up. No, it's all right. 45 would be exceptionally old for a Cro-Magnon, man. So if I was Cro-Magnon, I'd be the fucking old wise man in the village.

I think it's compared to the people who got into agricultural settlements after Cro-Magnon. They didn't live to be 35 years old? Well, that age is also factoring in infant mortality, war, things like that. Things that don't happen. Disease mortality. It doesn't mean that the healthy crow magnet wouldn't live longer that's the big thing is factoring infant mortality that's a big one right yeah mother's dying in childbirth shit that doesn't happen anymore you know that raises or as much yeah yeah

um but when i came back to what you were saying there in the preface to mastery i try and say um the times that we live first of all i make the point that we need masters in the world now. This is a time where we have incredible opportunity, largely through the Internet, where access to information, the ability to learn things, to develop skills, to have an isolation tank, to learn archery, to do all of these things, the world has opened up and the ability to develop skills and master something and create something is just completely unprecedented. At the same time, the distractions and the resistance that we have to go through is equally unprecedented

with the internet, with iPhones, with all the other things that are making it so much harder for us to focus. And I want you to think of all of these things as the kind of the water that you have to swim against. And if you're able to swim against all of these distractions that the world throws at you, you're going to become a real kick-ass master in whatever it is because you've overcome something that 90% of the people in this world just submerges them under because they're too weak. There's also the cliche, and it's very important to point out that there is no end result, that it's a journey. And this journey does not mean becoming a master. There's no end point. You continue to get better at everything

you do or you start to suck. And that's what happens. You will get better. If you do not continue to get better, you are getting worse. Yeah, it's true. And, you know, you take someone like Einstein, one of the greatest masters. He discovers the second theory of relativity at the age of 26 and nothing after that. You know, he tried to do his unified theory and it just never... You know why?

Why? Pussy. Started getting all that scientist pussy. It was too much. Oh, you mean he had too much pussy? Yeah. Einstein was a famous pussy hound. A lot of people don't know that.

It's true. It is true. Yeah, Einstein loved it. He was smart. So was Feynman. Two guys with the most brilliant minds of the 20th century loved pussy. I don't think that's a bad thing.

You see that big old smile on Einstein's face? He had a fucking whacky hair. He had a fucking whole image going on. Women loved him. Why wouldn't you? You talk about all the favorable traits for evolutionary success. Talking about one of the most brilliant men

scientifically ever. Yeah, I would think that a lot of women would want that seed inside of them. You know, look at him. He's like, see this? Look at that, ladies. Fuck Gene Simmons. Look at that. That's the tongue of a fucking super genius with his own hair.

That guy was, he was, excuse me, he was a, you know, a very unique individual. And that uniqueness, I'm sure there was some motivation behind that, not just the scientific motivation, but the actual natural motivation to be exceptional for breeding purposes. That women would find him exceptional. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But you're right. It is a process so that you never can sort of rest on your laurels and say, ah. So the way I do it, I'm not saying that I'm a master, so don't misinterpret me, but the way I do it for myself is every book that I write, I'm back at square one.

I'm nobody. I have no history. I have no readers. I'm not successful. I have to make my next book work or I'm a total loser. That's exactly the same process involved in stand-up comedy. Oh. Stand-up comedy, you put out a new special,

and then once you have that new special, you throw all that material out and you start from scratch, and you write all new material. And if you do it that way, that's the only real way to do it in this day and age because too many people have the internet too many people have I mean everyone has the internet obviously too many people have access to your previous work I should say right and in comedy you constantly need new material unlike

in music so be rough it's not it's great it's rough but it's great yeah the roughness is the great part of it yeah the but that that whole process of mastery you know you say you're not a master I think you are but I think there is the great part of it. But that whole process of mastery, you say you're not a master. I think you are, but I think there is none. This is what I think. You are a master,

but there's no ultimate mastery. A master is someone who is very good at the process, but there's no end. I think that's very right. Yeah, the end doesn't exist. There's no where it becomes easy. There's no golden age of retirement. That's a bunch of horse shit that they fucking sell you to keep you

in your job. There's no golden age. You're fucking dying, man. You're going to get old and you're going to reach that point where you can't really work anymore, so you don't have to work anymore and then you've got to watch your money. This selling point of one day you'll retire and everything will be groovy. Fuck it, Will. It's not going to be groovy.

There's a path only. Waiting for something to drop on you. Even the religious belief that you go through this life and just do your work and then you get to heaven. Yay. Or you go through, if it's not religious, this capitalist belief, you work in this job and it's going to suck, but then you get to retire.

Yay. Bullshit. You got to enjoy that every minute along that path that you're going on or choose a different path. Fuck the money. Fuck everything else. Do what you love to do the whole time. And you'll smile at the end when your, when your time is up. Yeah. And if you do use the wrong motivations, you will not get the results you desire. You know, I know a guy who has been trying to get famous forever, and he's trying to do it in all the wrong ways.

He's trying to become famous instead of focusing on whatever art form you choose to make you famous. He just wants fame, and it just escapes him, like sand through your fingers. You just can't hold on to it. You just can't get a quantifiable amount in your hands. And the motivation is incorrect. It's like if the motivation was just on his art, I think probably he would be far more successful. But instead, the motivation is based on the green demon of looking at all these other people becoming successful and not being able to find out why he can't achieve it himself. I mean attention is never the goal in mastery, and it's actually a negative. Yes.

But learning, learning is what gets you high. Learning is what you love. If you love the attention more than the learning, then you're fucked. You're never going to make it. Yeah, and that need, the need for acceptance. It's the very opposite of what you should be striving for. Yeah. We were talking about people that become really successful and then lose their way

and how you can learn so much from that. In comedy, my guide for that was always Sam Kinison because I think that Sam Kinison was the greatest comedian of all time from 1986 to 1987. I mean, I'm not kidding. I think maybe before that, you know, I found out about him in 86. I mean, I'm not kidding. I think maybe before that, I found out about him in 86. I mean, probably he was the greatest in 85

and maybe even in 84. But that's it. From then on, it's dog shit. If you try to listen to Sam Kinison from 89 or 88, it's terrible comedy. I went to see him live. He was awful. I saw him live several times

because I was such a huge fan of his work in 86. But the drop off was so there's guys who have good cds and you know they'll have like hills and valleys myself i have stuff that i really love and then stuff i was like that wasn't my best one but then more motivation to do better in the next one there's just you know sometimes creative glitches or what have you a part of the process but with kinnison there's this fucking monster peak and then this crazy drop off coke and hookers coke a lot booze a lot you know we had mark maron on the podcast who was uh palling around with kinnison in the heyday at

the comedy store when mark was a young kid and he told some amazing stories about just the amount of substances mark hung out with kinnison and he had to escape he left la and he hit it so hard that he was hearing voices in his head for like almost a year like literally he was psychotic and i met mark soon after that i met mark in boston like after he had been hanging out with Kinison, after Kinison was, you know, riding the wave. And, you know, he, I met Mark, I think in 88 was when I started and I met him soon after that. So he had already gone through all this and he was, you know, a young guy working at the comedy store and he got to see this, the overwhelming amount of substances that Kinisonison was consuming and it massive and it

just destroyed him he never recovered from that yeah coke and alcohol i mean that killed his brain it wasn't writing either his brother his brother wrote about it there's a book called my brother sam it's a great book about kinnison written by his brother who was i think also his manager at the time who wrote about how there was a he wrote wrote about the tangible drop-off in his writing. He didn't write new material anymore and was sort of like just partying. Yeah, I mean, I talk in the book about this myth that drugs will just instantly make you more creative.

In fact, it's often the opposite. And I have the example of Coltrane, who is probably maybe one of the greatest jazz artists who ever lived. And he got hooked on heroin for a while. And people have this myth that that's what made Coltrane so great was the drugs and the heroin and the coke. And in fact, he said it was the worst. He did his worst work in that period. And he got off of it like in 58 and never touched to drugs or drinking

after that and did his better work after that much better work that's because to create something requires so much discipline and so much mindfulness and focus that you just can't do it if you're constantly drugged out you know yeah especially those two those very depressive ones and very like coke and heroin probably two of the worst. But there seems to be a connection between heroin and deep soulful music. Like maybe it helps them for a small time reach a state, but then ultimately the abuse of it destroys your body so much that you can't keep it up. Yeah, you mean like a Velvet Underground or something like that? Yeah, like there's something, well Hendrix, and well, you know, people will argue Hendrix wasn't

really into heroin. But if you look at that photo behind me of his mugshot, that is from the fucking Toronto police department when he was arrested for heroin. So there's a little problem with that. Yeah. A little heroin in the system. I don't know what drugs. I mean, I know he was also involved in acid and, you know, Morrison was into heroin.

There was a lot of alcohol involved with a lot of those guys as well. But the ability to escape your inhibitions was, you know, they were chasing the dragon in a sense. Yeah, but look how long it lasts. 27. Yeah. They all died at 27. Janis Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison. It seems to be the most dangerous path to embark upon

if you're looking to gain something. I think one of the things I got from one of your books was a story about Fyodor Dostoevsky. Was that in 48 Laws of Power? I think it's in the 33 Strides to the War and in the 48 Laws. Well, basically, after he would be successful with the book, he would find that he was unable to really write and he didn't have that creative fire anymore to create another great work. So he would take all of his life savings and go to the

casino and just gamble it away in a night so that he was desperate and hungry again. He was penniless. Penniless. And at that point, he had to write something great to get himself out. So these people use these different strategies. And he did that over and over again. That takes guts. You've got to be a fucking crazy person. That's hilarious.

Well, I call that death ground. Putting yourself on death ground. It comes from Sun Tzu. He says a general would deliberately put his army on death ground, meaning he would deliberately put their back against an ocean or a mountain, and they either had to defeat the enemy that's confronting them or they would die because they had no escape route. No safety net.

No safety net, no escape route. Yeah, safety nets are something that I've argued against ever since I was a child, which was another thing that my parents instilled in me that I had to have a safety net. And I've always told everybody who would listen, don't ever have a fucking safety net because if you have a net, you will fall, all right?

You might not make it without the net, but you will not make it with the net so there's that there's that i i i had an interesting experience with mastery uh where in writing the book where i'd written four of the six chapters but i was getting really late in delivering the final result. And the publisher basically said, you have like 11 weeks to finish the book or we're canceling the project or postponing it. And the two chapters left were the longest, the hardest, the most abstract, and the most important. And I was like, there's no way.

I'm exhausted. I just can't do it. But I had no choice because if they cancel or postpone it, all of my hard work would be thrown out the window. So that was Death Ground. And finally, after three days of torturing myself and whining and bitching at myself, I decided, all right, I'm going to do it. I'm just going to try. I'll just do what I can. And it was the most incredible writing experience I've ever had in my life. I had to work harder than I've ever had to work.

I got on this high where thoughts were just coming to me and my dreams and my, you know, I'm having sex. It's just the most amazing. And they worked. And I was sitting there writing about creativity and intuition while this was happening to me. And it just demonstrated to me that the limits that I thought I had are just sort of self-imposed. And if I stopped complaining and stopped saying that I had these limits, I could explore beyond them and explore what I was capable of that I never thought I was capable of prior to that.

You know, Hunter Thompson wrote Hell's Angels. capable of prior to that. You know, Hunter Thompson wrote Hell's Angels. He finished the last X amount of chapters in two days on cocaine. He just got coked up. He had a deadline. Maybe I should have tried that.

Have you ever seen... I could have written it in two days. Maybe. Maybe you need Adderall. Have you ever seen the Hunter S. Thompson documentary? Not Fear and Loathing. What was it called? What?

Gonzo? Yeah, Gonzo. Years ago. What is it? The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson? Is that the name of it? I got it saved on iTunes. I should just pull it up on iTunes.

The documentary just from a couple years ago? Have you seen that? Oh, just from a couple years ago? No, I haven't. It's a fairly recent documentary, but God damn, it's good. God damn, it's good. I think it's Gonzo, the Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson. Is that it?

Yeah. I watched it in a hotel in Seattle and fucking spent the... That's it. Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. It's so good. It's so good. A 7.8. Get that fucking blast me off there.

It's not a 10. That just shows you there's cunts no matter what you do in this life. That documentary is a goddamn 10 and incredibly inspirational. And I watched it in Seattle at a hotel room and just on a whim, just, all right, we'll watch this. I was alone. I was doing some work. And, you know, I fucking wrote all night because of that documentary. I just got on the keyboard and just smashed keys all night.

Oh, nice. Yeah, it's those things that, you know, you catch these bursts of inspiration. And Thompson, who's a personal hero of mine, used to call them fuel. You know, and he said that he personally believed that with the right song, you could drive further in your car. You know, your car would figure out a way, if the right song was playing, to go miles past the E. Theoretically, obviously. Not even theoretically. It was just...

It's a metaphor. Metaphor. Yeah, metaphor. Thank you. Metaphorically. He was just great at figuring out how to put these abstract ideas into a tangible form that your mind accepted. And never met a deadline. And his whole thing was like putting things off until the last minute.

And then this fury of fucking teeth gnashing, slamming against the keys. But it's almost like he forced himself into this back against the wall. What did you call it? Death ground. Death ground. He forced himself into a death ground in order to complete. Oh, I wish I'd done that. I would have included it in my book.

You do. So, you know, I know you talking about comedy. You like following someone like Joey Diaz, who is hilarious, right? Because you've talked about how that makes, you know, that would make some people, you know people a little bit scared and a little bit nervous. But you like it because it's going to bring out your best following somebody that's that great. You know what I mean? Haven't you kind of mentioned, isn't there something there in that same philosophy with that? Maybe, but my philosophy in that is that I think that not working with funny, really, really funny people is a twofold problem.

One, it's famine thinking. Like, they think that there's a lot of really selfish comedians out there, and one of the things that they like to do is they like to stack the deck. So they'll bring, there's guys that are national touring headliners that bring the worst fucking comedians you've ever seen in your life to open for them. Because these guys go up there and eat dick for a half an hour and then you go on stage this crowd has been tortured waiting for actual entertainment and you're the hero you're the conquering hero so nobody outshines you that's right it is

incredibly common and I think it's gross I think it disrespects the audience first of all I think it disrespects the fact that these people have paid money to see you they deserve entertainment not just from, but from other people as well. And you shouldn't be scared of other people being funny doesn't take away from you being funny. The only way it would take away is if the person on before you is stealing your material or what's called stepping on your material.

Like, say, if you had a very particular subject that you were famous for. Like, Jim Gaffigan likes to talk about Hot Pockets. He does his whole Hot Pocket bit. It's really hilarious. If you went Gaffigan likes to talk about Hot Pockets. He does this whole Hot Pocket bit. It's really hilarious. If you went on before him and started talking about Hot Pockets, you would kind of step on his bit. And people will do that.

The same shitheads like that actor that I told you that would like to go up to my friend and say he was fat right before he would go and read his lines. That's that same sort of thinking, that same sort of famine thinking. She's like, another person's success should be inspirational to you. It shouldn't be detrimental to you. And so I – and then the other thing is I'm a fan of comedy. I want to laugh. So I bring Joey Diaz, who I personally think is the funniest guy who's ever lived.

I bring him to open for me because I want to be in a hilarious state before I go on stage. I want to be laughing. I'm not worried about not being funny because if I've done my job, I've done the work, it's going to be good. Don't worry. You can't worry about that. That worrying is the enemy of comedy. Fear.

Yeah. It's pathetic. I bring murderers with me, man. Everywhere I go, Duncan, Ari, Joey, I just bring the biggest killers that I could find. I take headliners with me. I've taken Greg Fitzsimmons on the road with me. I mean, I like doing shows with guys who are fucking awesome. I think it's really important.

But it's not because I want to die. It's not because I want to put my back up against the wall. I want the audience to get their money's worth, and I want to be around my friends. And I also want to support my friends. Part of the reason of bringing Joey and Ari and Duncan on the road with me all these years is it's selfish, because I want to have a good time, and I want to be with them, and I want to enjoy myself. So there's that.

But also, I want people to know how good these guys are. And a lot of these guys are good in a really fucked up way that's not really palatable for Comedy Central. It's really hard for them to get on HBO. For a guy like Joey Diaz, the only way for that guy to get famous is the internet. That's what made him famous. And my help, helping get him out there in front of thousands of people that would never have had an opportunity to see him, and telling as i introduce him ladies and gentlemen please welcome the funniest motherfucker

that ever stepped foot on earth joey diaz and i would bring him on stage like that all the time i i tell everybody he's funnier than me he's the funniest guy ever doesn't mean i'm not funny you know it's just it's not bad for things to be great other than you. It's good. You should be inspired. The greatest people want those people who are great alongside them to push them. Although Bird and Magic were nemeses, you talk to them now how thankful they were that they had each other on opposing teams. Oh, for sure. All of these people.

You need greatness around you. You need them. You need yin to have yang. Which one's good? Which one's negative and which one's positive? Yin is passive. Yang is active. You need that yang to have yin. You need both. Yang makes yang.

The universe has... The tide comes in, the tide goes out, Bill O'Reilly. There's something... Don't talk to me about Bill O'Reilly. Isn't that the greatest fucking... You can't explain it. Yes, you can, you fuck. It's called gravity.

They figured it out a long time ago, shithead. You ever seen that thing that he did where he was talking about God? No. Where he was talking about the tide goes in, the tide goes out. You can't explain it. I'm going with God. It's so disingenuous from a Harvard graduate. He's such a fucking...

I have my own Bill O'Reilly story. Really? Please tell it to me. Well, 48 Laws of Power just come out in 98, and Bill O'Reilly decides to have me on the O'Reilly factory, which was big then, but not as big as it became later on. And so I'm like, this is like one of my first shows I've ever been on. You know, nothing like this ever happened to me before. And basically, you go to a studio in Los Angeles where he's in New York. And you're in this room and there's nothing around you. And they put an earphone in your head and you're staring at a camera.

You don't see anything. You just hear Bill O'Reilly's stupid fucking voice in your ear asking you questions. It's like you're on drugs and it's so disconcerting. It's like the guy who's trying to put you off your game before you're already put off your game the moment you start. Anyway, he interviews me and I prepared like shit for this interview because I knew the questions coming. It was all about Monica Lewinsky and Clinton and the scandal and the 48 laws, and I nailed it. And he said, oh, that was a great interview, Robert. I'm going to have you on again. Okay, wow. And so I'm like feeling pretty good about myself. So four weeks later, I trudge back to that office, and I sit in that same chair with a little earphone in my head, and he proceeds to

just rip me to shreds. About what? Well, essentially, he hated the 48 Laws of Power. He liked the writing or whatever, but he was just using it. You're exposing his game. He was just, oh, completely. He was just using it as a way to attack Clinton, which I wasn't wanting to do. What? Why that? So anyway, he was just like totally messing with me.

And I was so expecting the opposite that I was like – And then he goes – and then he says, well, what about this law about you selective honesty? And I said, well, it's something that politicians and business people use all the time like Lyndon Johnson, for instance. And then I was about to explain how Lyndon Johnson used it and he cuts me off. He goes, yes, the same man who sent 58,000 men, of our young men, to death in Vietnam. Let's break for a commercial. And that was the end of the interview. Oh, God.

So he, like, made me look like I was supporting. Lyndon Johnson. Massacring 58,000 Americans in Vietnam. He manipulated me and humiliated me. And the whole thing was he hates the 48 Laws of Power because it's all about manipulation and ugliness. And he's the most fucking manipulative interviewer you could ever imagine. Look how he manipulated me. He completely set me up by making me think this was going to be

like a softball interview where we were just, you know. Well, he's a hater. He just hated that someone else wrote something brilliant. That's all it is. That guy's a fucking hater. He's the ultimate hater. And it was a special type of looking glass that allowed people to see Bill O'Reilly for the fucking monster that he

was. Yeah, and I find it incredibly ridiculous that that guy got to interview Obama. Not that I think Obama's particularly unique and special human being, relatively to what his position is, and what could have been done by a guy like that

in that position, but I think that having Obama being interviewed by this fucking buffoon, I think Obama has the most thankless job, probably, in the history of the world, and maybe the most impossible job. I don Obama has the most thankless job probably in the history of the world and maybe the most impossible job. I don't think he's done the best that he could with it, but I don't think anybody can. I think it's your setup.

I've come to, the more I think about being a president, the more I think about dealing with the House and dealing with Congress and the Senate and all the fucking laws. Just look at what's happened to his hair. Yeah, the gray. Yeah, well, that happens to all of them.

Receding and gray. But in the course of a year, it just suddenly turned gray. I don't think we can even imagine the kind of pressure that you'd have to be to be the leader or the supposed commander-in-chief of the greatest superpower the world has ever known, which wants to consume the earth. You know, this crazy superpower that literally thrives on consuming the earth. I think we can gain so much from listening to Eisenhower's speech about the military-industrial complex when he was leaving office,

the intense speech warning the people about the military-industrial complex and the dangers of it and the influence of it. I don't think we can even imagine what that is actually like when you're in office. I mean, I'd like to think that Obama one day will write a book explaining everything and we'll be like, oh, I get it. Because I don't get it. I don't get how he could have made the decisions that he's made based on what he said before he got into office.

Unless he's totally full of shit, which I'd like to think that he's not. That said, him getting interviewed by a fucking buffoon like Bill Reilly, it's just like it's watching that and just like why is that guy talking that he's one of the most popular people but it's so silly it's so silly that he's one of the most popular people on television it's so fucking silly it's just it's just you'll get no argument from me well it's it's unnecessary and i think i personally believe that that style of television is like fucking silent films. Where you debate a very important issue on a split screen for six minutes.

And, you know, people yell over, yell, yell, Oh, Bill, that's not the case. And fracking doesn't produce any negative results. The hippies and the liberals, we'll be right back. No, we won't be right back. This is not the way to talk. This is not the way to address complex issues. This is not the way to and the liberals. We'll be right back. No, we won't be right back. This is not the way to talk. This is not the way to address complex issues. This is not the way to have interesting discussions.

Did you ever see Jon Stewart on the firing line years ago? We almost, five minutes. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, we're on. You know what? I'm supposed to pimp something that I forgot to pimp. What are you supposed to pimp?

Some special offers for getting the book mastery. Oh, yeah, that's right. Didn't somebody email you that or something like that? Is it too late to do that? No, no, not at all. We've probably lost everybody by now. No, everybody's still here. It's like five people still.

What are you talking about, man? Everybody's still in. You'd be amazed. These people stick in to the end. Most of the people listening to this are commuting or they're on the treadmill or they're on a plane or something like that. But a huge majority of them are hanging out to the very end.

You'd be completely shocked. And it's like archived. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This will reach fucking probably close to a million people. Well, we have all sorts of offers for the book and for special bonus things that I used to give away when the book first came out. And you need to go to Power, Seduction, and War. The book first came out. And you need to go to powerseductionandwar.com

slash joe. Yes, I got it right here. I'll put this up on Twitter right now. Copy link address. And what is the special offer that people get? There's some things that are not included in the actual book itself. The full interviews that I had with some of the contemporary masters like Freddie Roach. Some material that never got included in the book for reasons that don't have anything to do with the quality of it. And then this kind of essay that I wrote about the writing of the book itself and things that I explained today about my deadline. How would you explain it in a tweet to give it to people? Like I'm writing a tweet right now. How would you explain it?

Explain what? Explain what this offer is. Like what is getting free? You're getting free bonus material that's not in the book itself. Okay. He really gives insight into some of Robert's process, because I've looked at some of these, gives insight into his process,

how he did this, plus bonus content and stories that almost didn't make the cut. Kind of like the director's cut. Thank you. It just got out to 1.28 million people. Oh, oh. And for those of you thinking about reading... A little bit more than five.

For those of you thinking about reading Mastery, I've read it, and it's been an invaluable tool, along with the rest of your books. Really, you know, you allow people to get the best out of themselves, and that's something that I'm incredibly passionate about, and I think these are incredible tools to have. And you decide what to do with these tools. You're a unique individual, but there's no doubt that knowledge is power in itself. And you can use that power for however means you want to do it. It's up to you. But the books have knowledge. And when you consume those books, that knowledge will translate into your

own personal power. Clichés are real, ladies and gentlemen. Robert Green, you're a bad motherfucker. Aubrey Marcus, you're a bad motherfucker This has been an enjoyable podcast I really appreciate having you on It's been a real treat to pick your mind Thank you very much Thanks to our sponsors Thanks to Stamps.com Go to Stamps.com, click on the microphone

On the top of the page And enter JRE for your special $110 bonus offer Which includes a free digital scale and up to $55 in free postage. Thanks also to LegalZoom. Go to LegalZoom.com and use the code word ROGAN

in the referral box at checkout for more savings. Thanks also to Onnit.com. Go to O-N-N-I-T. Use the code word ROGAN and save 10% off any and all supplements. Tomorrow, Greg Proops will be on, one of the finest comedians in the land, in any land, and the host of the Smartest Man in the World podcast. Just a real treat having him on any time he's on.

He's a fucking awesome dude, and he's goddamn smart and hilarious. And we'll be back tomorrow with big kisses for all. Mwah! Thank you. Greg Prude. ... ... ...