The Jordan Harbinger Show - 582: Robert Greene | The Daily Laws Part Two

Episode Date: November 4, 2021

Robert Greene (@RobertGreene) is the author of multiple New York Times bestsellers on power and strategy. His latest book is The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations on Power, Seduction, Mastery, Strategy, and Human Nature. [This is part two of a two-part episode. Make sure to catch part one here!] What We Discuss with Robert Greene: The benefits of cultivating profound dissatisfaction with your own work while it's still in the process of being created. Why the attitude you have of the world has a feedback effect on the way the world sees you (and how you can change that attitude if it doesn't serve you). The emotional self thrives on ignorance: how focusing on the rational instead of succumbing to your feelings deprives those who prey on your emotions of their power. How you can balance the need to be rational, cautious, and skeptical with the benefits of being curious and open-minded to new ideas. What you can do to train yourself to see past the front that people put on and discover the signs of their true character. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/582 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. But I talk about the conviction bias, which is if somebody talks with so much conviction, so much anger, so much emotion, so much righteousness, we tend to think that there's something real about it. They wouldn't be faking these emotions. Therefore, there must be something true to what they say. And this is what makes people on television multimillionaires. the angrier they appear, the more truthful they must be and the more audience that people will reach you.

Because we have a propensity to want to have our emotions stirred, to want somebody who appeals to them, and we want to believe someone who kind of spews the anger that we're not necessarily comfortable with expressing, right? Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game. Astronauts, entrepreneurs, spies, psychologists, even the occasional billionaire investor, national security advisor, or former jihadi. Each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works

and become a better critical thinker. Now, if you're new to the show or you're looking for a way to tell your friends about it, our starter packs are a good way to do that. These are collections of top episodes organized by topic that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do, here on the show, Jordan Harbinger.com slash start has them. And we've got Spotify playlists on there as well. For those of you that use Spotify, you can just click it and it'll take you right to the list

of episodes. Now today, part two with Robert Green. If you haven't heard part one yet, go back and listen to it. This is a continuation of that conversation. And if you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing folks like Robert Green, it's because of my network. And I'm teaching you how to build your network as well for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course.

dig the well before you get thirsty. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe and contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now here's part two with Robert Green. Retain the craftsman mindset. This is another concept from mastery slash the daily laws.

The work is the only thing that matters is what you wrote. The idea that you give is cultivate profound dissatisfaction with your work. I both love and hate that because of course, we're always dissatisfied with our work and we want it to be better. but doesn't that kind of make you miserable in the process if you're never happy with what you create or are those two different things? The mistake that most people make in building something, so first of all, I want you to think of yourself as a builder. You're literally building a house or a table or whatever it is.

So that's starting your own business, that's writing a book, that's working on some project in your office. So think of it like you're literally building something with your hands. It has to have a foundation. It has to be on something solid. It has to stand up. It has to look, you know, reasonably symmetrical, et cetera. So you're actually like a craftsman, okay? So use that kind of mindset because it's a very powerful, very human mindset because we are natural builders. That's what makes us kind of human and powerful. Okay. So the problem that most people have and believe me, I know it, when you're writing something or working on a project, is you have no distance. You have no ability to analyze. your own work. You think that everything you do is just golden and beautiful,

or you think everything you do is awful or terrible, right? Yeah. So you can have other people look at it and who can kind of bring you back to reality and say, this is what's working, this isn't what isn't working, but oftentimes you can't trust other people, right? First of all, maybe they don't really know. Maybe they're not as knowledgeable on the subject. And also they might have a political axe to grind or whatever.

So you have to become your own critic. You have to be able to see the flaws and what isn't working in your own creation, right? And sometimes, you know, it's very hard to do that. You tend to kind of gloss over the things that aren't working. I know when I write a chapter, I lose perspective after time because I've spent so long on it that everything seems natural and good to me. And then when I come back to it, a month later, goes, no, that's not working around, that's not working at all.

And so that critical voice inside of me that says that isn't working is what pushes me to make something better and better and better and better. Now, you can go crazy with that. You can reach a point where you never end up finishing whatever you're making because you're always criticizing it. At some point you have to say, it's done. It's 95% there. I'm never going to get to 100%. Okay, that's fine. I understand that.

But to the degree that you're able to look at your own work with some distance and say, this isn't working for me. It could be better is what's going to end up making it better, right? And so a lot of people have a hard time with that. I get that a lot when I read other people's books or manuscripts, et cetera. It kind of works, but God, this could be so much better. You didn't take the time. You didn't go through the process I'm just describing.

You didn't think of how somebody else would read it, how an outside eyes would read it. You didn't think of what might be boring. you assume that everyone's going to be interested in something that they're not going to be interested in. So take the time and learn how to criticize your own work and make it better and better and better. It's extremely important. It seems like there's a point of diminishing returns when it comes to this. For example, I'll listen to an episode that's three years older, two years older, and I'll go, okay, there's a couple missed opportunities. I used to listen and go, ah, cringe, this is awful.

Why did I release this? Now I listen and I go, okay, there's a couple of things I could have changed or added. or, man, our audio quality has improved a lot since then, something along those lines. I remember hearing about, I think it was David Letterman, who used to watch tape of every show he did until 3 or 4 a.m., just beating himself up and treating himself like crap. Was his show five days a week? I mean, that's a lot of time to spend telling yourself that you suck at your job and beating yourself up over every little opportunity or missed opportunity.

Well, that's not at all what I'm talking about. Okay, yeah, it's different. Okay. So after I finish a book, I know. I never read it again. I never look at it again. Really? I have no desire to look at it again. In fact, it kind of repulses me. That's funny. It's like, you know, I created it. Get out of me. I don't want to look at it. I'm on to the next thing. So there's no point in the post-mortem. There is a point in things that you've done in life, in your interactions with people, to go through that kind of post-mortem process, to go, what could I have done differently that didn't create this particular problem? Okay. I highly advise that. So if you had a podcast that got you in trouble, then go through that post-mortem process

to see what you might have done that caused it. And so you can learn the lesson is extremely important. But that's different from going back and criticizing a podcast that's already been created and it's out there. What value are you going to get? You're just going to be beating up on yourself, as you say. I mean, you could look at it constructively and say, you know, I could be doing it a little bit better, right?

it's all in the spirit that you do things in. So you could improve yourself. My thing with my work is once the book is published, there's nothing I can do about it, right? It's true. It's out there. And in the process of writing, I've kind of learned already what it was that I didn't do quite right and what I can improve on. So the idea is to get, I think, the essence of what we're talking here, is the point isn't to beat up on yourself. The point isn't to make you feel bad about your own work, because that'll work against you. You have to kind of love and have a sense of excitement about the work itself. The idea is that you're able to kind of have some detachment from it.

At certain key moments, you're able to look at it from a distance and to look at Jordan Harbiger on the screen and say, he needs to be doing this a little differently, as if you're looking at it from the outside is very, very powerful skill. So the goal isn't to become so critical of yourself that you can't ever do anything in life. You need to have a degree of innocence about it. But if you have no voice inside of your head telling you that some things aren't really working,

a voice that's somewhat like an outsider, then you're never going to be able to improve your work from the inside. Yeah, this is something that I think a lot of creators struggle with because also, as much as you want to have external critics or cultivate your own critical eye, it is for many of us hard to do without beating ourselves up or without attaching some sort of meaning to it. But it doesn't, that's not productive to do. I guess I don't understand that. Maybe it's because maybe I am because I'm Jewish. I always kind of criticizing myself. Yeah.

How can you not do it? You know, kind of was sort of beaten into me. But when I'm writing something, I never get too attached to what I'm writing, right? Because I know that's really dangerous. Maybe it's because I've been, this is my eighth book that I'm working on right now. Maybe I've learned that. Yeah. But I never get too attached to it because I know that that's going to be very problematic down the road.

And I always know in the moment after I've written something that's very arduous and I go back to it and I go, this isn't working. Yeah, it's painful, undoubtedly. Because we're all kind of lazy by nature. We tied the ribbon. We finished the screenplay. We did the project. It's over. I want to move on.

Right? That's natural. Yeah, it's Johnny Depp not watching his own movies, right? Right. But you don't want to rush to the end because, you know, things can always get better. And your natural tendency is to be in a hurry because you want the product out there. You want all the accolades, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But if you develop this voice, if you're able to look at it with some detachment, it ends up becoming kind of an interesting game where you feel like I can always make something better, better, better, better. it's kind of a very satisfying feeling to improve something and to be able to say that my first iteration was kind of weak and I've really strengthened it right now, as opposed to sending it out there early, and then you have a little bit of doubt, and then it isn't quite clicking together and people start criticizing it. So it's dovetails nicely with our section here on self-sabotage that I'd love to go into.

This is from, I think, the laws of human nature. The attitude is if we are fearful, we see negative in every circumstance. We don't take chances. We blame others for mistakes. If we are suspicious or negative, we make others feel those same emotions. Then we create those outcomes for ourselves at home and at work. There's a lot in here. That's not your exact wording, I don't think, but the idea that we can almost project our own insecurities onto other people and then have it come back at us, and then it looks to us like they're causing the problem. This is an eye-opening moment for, I think, a lot of people when they realize this is the case. Well, I can illustrate it with a very simple example. You're at a party and somebody comes up to you you haven't met before or you go up to them and they're kind of nervous

and insecure and they're kind of sweating a lot and their eyes are kind of blinking a lot. You find yourself getting very nervous in their presence, right? Yeah. You start even feeling a bit insecure. Maybe I'm causing that reaction. And that as I get insecure in their presence and my talking gets a little halting. The insecure person gets even more insecure. Like this person isn't really interacting with me. Weird around me. Yeah. And then it gets back and forth, back and forth. It gets worse and worse and worse. Or the opposite happens. You go up to that person, they're very confident. They're very secure in themselves. They're very calm. They have a calm energy. It just calms you down. And the conversation that ensues flows in this very natural, easy way. And then that person feels that you're kind of

engaging, they engage more on and on and on and on. So the idea is, is that we all humans operate on a level that we're not aware of, which is on a nonverbal level, right? So we pick up the attitude, the vibrations, to use a 70s term. Yeah, man, groovy. You're on my wave, do you hear me? Yeah, I'm on your wavelength. Okay. We picked those up from the other person in ways we're not even aware of and it influences how we are. So your attitude towards life, you have a an attitude, and I call it the way you look at the world. It's a lens. That attitude can be complex, but it usually has a single dominant component. It could be anxious. You're anxious about everything worried. It could be insecure. People are looking at me strange. Do people like me, et cetera?

I think I have all of those so far. Continue. No, I hope not. Or your attitude can be very adventurous. Everything seems exciting to me. I want to explore there. I want to go there. You're very open to things, right? Okay, so when you have that attitude, it goes out in the world. People sense it in a pre-verb, non-verbal way, in that animal way. They feel it off of you, right? And then it makes them respond in a certain way. And so if you have that anxious attitude, you're going to create all kinds of situations that are going to feed your anxiety.

It becomes what I talk about in that chapter, a self-fulfilling prophecy. You're going to find anxiety at every corner that you come upon, right? because you're nervous, you're making other people nervous, you're supposed to take an action, you hesitate, and then it doesn't go very well because you hesitated. That makes you more nervous, etc. So you have to get the idea that you are sabotaging yourself with your attitude, right? And there have been some amazing books written on this aspect of human psychology that actually were kind of mind-blowing to me to use another 70s expression. Sorry, man. Oh, we still use that one.

Okay, all right. Things like the Pygmalia. in effect, which I hope in the next 20, 30, 40 years, people study more seriously in sciences and explain. But the idea is, in studies like teachers and schools, if a teacher thinks that the students are good and smart and deserving to go to Yale and Harvard and they're all brilliant, but never says anything about that. It's just they think it. It has an effect where the students work better. They get better grades. They're more excited. The attitude speaks to them. they feel it, right? So if you go up to somebody and you already anticipate that they're not very good, that they're not going to succeed in life, it's going to create that feeling in them.

So you have the power to make people feel a certain way by the attitude that you have, right? So the bad news is you are born with an attitude. There's a genetic component to it. My kid is really careful. Way more careful than me. Yeah, and that's something wired into him or her. Him. Soon to be a her in the picture, but that's, yeah, we're talking about Jaden. He's the most careful baby at the park. He's very, look, is this stable?

And I know that's not exactly what you're talking about, but it's a, I mean, the heart wiring is there. Well, the classic example is an introvert or an extrovert. And the man who came up with that was Carl Jung, the great psychologist. He believed that there was definitely a genetic component in that, that people are born with a tendency to being introvert or born as an extrovert. And naturally the parent will have an influence on that. But that is very deeply ingrained into you, that attitude. So that's the bad news, right, that you're born a certain way. If you're anxious, you're born with an anxious attitude.

The good news is that you can change it. It's plastic. You can work around the edges. You can soften it. You can make it better. If you're anxious, you're not going to suddenly become this open adventure-exploring type person, okay. But you can become less anxious.

You can realize that it's causing you problems. and then you can work to kind of alter this attitude, right? And so the first thing is you have to be aware of what your attitude is and the problem that it's causing and how it's infecting your relationships. And the second thing is to be aware of how you can take small steps to slowly begin to alter this attitude. So I tell people, for instance, who are born very anxious. And I understand that because I have a bit of that myself.

Yeah. It doesn't paralyze me, but for some people it paralyzes them. What I suggest is tomorrow you do something that you're not quite comfortable with. Not too radical. You're not suddenly going to go out naked in the streets, running, et cetera, right? You're going to do something that you normally, that's a little bit outside your comfort zone. It's a little bit different from what you would normally do. Let's say that's going up to a stranger in the office or a social affair and engaging them in conversation.

I'm going to, whoa, I can't do that. Do it. All right? And you'll find, so explore those markets. of what you wouldn't normally do that aren't dangerous. That person isn't going to kill you, hopefully, for going up to them. But try these things out. They're going to be able to, you'll see, though, I don't need to be so anxious. And that by being open and wanting to talk to this stranger, they started talking to me on a level I've never experienced before. It's exciting,

right? So your attitude is like your work of art. It's something you create. You're born with it, but you can change it. It's the power that you have. Yeah, you mentioned that it's, and I think you said this earlier in the show that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's almost like if you expect someone to disappoint you, there's a higher chance of that happening. It's not metaphysical or something like that. A lot of people think it's some sort of magic, but it's simply how you create the, I'm trying so hard not to use the word energy because it sounds metaphysical, but you're creating that environment around you. You're creating the vibes. That's very scientific, yes. The one example I thought it was really weird in the book that I thought was so interesting.

This woman, it's a story of a woman who had a boss who was kind of abusive and was always criticizing her. And it just, she didn't know how to react. No matter how she reacted, he only got worse and worse and worse. And a psychologist told her to when you go into work, think of him as this great guy. He's, I can't do that. Now, to listen to me, just go in there and think in your head. He's actually a wonderful person.

He's got some problems, some issues, but he's actually really interesting person. and he's very complex. She said, what do you mean? Just do it. She did it. And suddenly he reacted in a way she had never expected before. He was kind of put off by it

because he noticed she was acting different. He acted different in there. I thought this was really interesting. She never said anything. She only thought it. And this wasn't to 14-year-old students. This was to like a 40-year-old boss. He suddenly went on a different track

because he detected something. You have a look of disbelief on you. I just feel like it's, It's not disbelief. It's actually, I know that this would work on me if we're using it as a technique. I know if somebody came with a totally different type of, to use your scientific lingo vibe with me, that it would completely change the way that I react to them. Like, as much as I like to think I'm, and a lot of us like to think, oh, I just am the way that I am, I know 100% that this would have an effect of me.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's a look of complete agreement. Oh, well, I read you wrong. Yes. Yeah. Maybe you need to read more of your own books. Maybe I do.

But then you would never want to do that. No, I don't. You do mention becoming aware of our own attitude and observing it. And this seems useful. I think one of the reasons the rationale you give for this is do we instinctively blame others for things? How do we react when challenged? How do we judge and think of people when they're not around? This seems like a great way to reprogram a lot of negative behavior.

If I'm the person that says, man, Ryan came over to film and he was late. That guy, his whole. life is a mess, right? We all know people that do that kind of thing. We don't want to be around them. They're annoying to work with. It pays for us if we are that person to nix that stuff as soon as possible. How do we observe our own attitude? That seems easier said than done. Well, first of all, you kind of notice you have an overall tenor or an overall mood to you, right? So if you are an anxious person. It's pretty obvious. You don't need like Sherlock Holmes to kind of decipher that for you, right? When something new or novel comes up, your first reaction isn't, wow, I'm excited.

It's, oh no, I'm nervous. This makes me uncomfortable. How you react to things in a general way in a kind of a neutral circumstance, right? So you're thrown into some novel situation. You find yourself in a foreign city, is your first instinct to take all your clothes out and go exploring and finding everything there and getting away from Americans and seeing what the culture is? Or is it to kind of stay in your hotel room and kind of watch American television or things like that? In certain patterns in your life, how you react to things that are different or new will be extremely telling to whether you're an introvert, whether you're an extrovert, whether you're anxious, whether you're adventurous, on and on and on, right?

So observe yourself in kind of these key moments. I don't think it's rocket science. I think it's pretty clear. I know, for instance, that I am an introvert, you know, that my tendency is to be, I'm more on the shy side, although I've learned to kind of overcome that, right? And I see that in my social interactions. So, you know, you might think in your apartment building when you're alone that you are Napoleon Bonaparte, you're so bold, so adventurous. so exciting, so dashing. Then the moment you go out in the world, it's extremely different.

You realize your weaknesses, your limitations. So being out interacting with people is going to reveal 100% your attitude towards life because you can't control it. In your room, you can be Walter Middy. You can be imagining yourself as anything out there, right? But when you're with people, it becomes very clear that you're shy or that you're extroverted, that you're out there wanting to engage with people. So the key to discovering your attitude is to see how you are with people, right?

How you interact. So, you know, somebody new approaches you, like that scenario I said earlier, is your first reaction, oh, no, get away from me. Or, hmm, an interesting person, because somebody new to meet, right? Those are very clear signs of what your attitude is. I mean, there are other things as well, how you respond to criticism, right? from other people. So...

Get defensive, tear them down privately in my own mind. Right. That's your reaction. Yes. Is that healthy? No.

So the other reaction... Didn't mince words at all. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. The other reaction is, they're right. I'm a worthless worm.

Got how awful I am. Okay. That's another kind of reaction. Or the third reaction is, hmm, there's something interesting there. I could learn from that. Maybe there's truth to it, you know? Maybe I have to take it seriously. You have to look at the person making the criticism and see and judge whether they have a valid

point, whether they have no political acts to grind. I can remember when I was about 24 years old, I was in New York working as a journalist. I thought I was a hot shot journalist. Sure. New York, journalist, 24. It all adds up. Okay. I wrote this article about, it was kind of for a travel magazine that I was working for. I wrote this travel article about Italy, about the Amalfi Coast. I thought it was the greatest thing since Gore Vidal. I was, wow. And then the editor invited me for lunch. Okay. He's going to tell me. I'm getting promoted. Yeah, yeah, right. And then after his like third martini or whatever he was drinking, he goes, Robert, you are not a writer. You are not writer material.

that article was all over the place. You have no discipline. Your language is going in all directions. You're not connecting to the audience, to the reader. If I were you, and I don't mean this harshly, I would go to law school or business school, and I would get out of writing. Oh, my God.

I'm cringing for you, and this is like years, decades later. Yeah. It's hard to hear. So I was trying to remember the name of this guy the other day that I can't remember his name. I can see him very clearly. And I had this image in my mind

that's very vivid. I mean, look, if he has three martinis at lunch, he's dead already, so it doesn't matter. So the image that played in my mind was like a house that on the outside kind of looks good, but if you looked at the attic and the interior of it, you'd see that the wood is all rotten and the termites have kind of eaten it away and things are about to fall. That was what the image that came into my mind of what was going on in the inside of this man. But afterwards, I was very obviously pained by it. I thought, what an asshole. He's wrong. Then his time, went by, I processed it and they go, no, there's truth to what he was saying. I don't really like journalism. And because I don't really like and I don't really fit, my language is a little bit odd for

the genre. It was a little too literary what I had written, right? Maybe I was meant to be a novelist or a screenwriter or to write something else. So there was validity in what he said. And I got out of journalism and I decided I'm going to go to Europe and I'm going to wander around and I'm going to write a novel kind of thing, and then that ended up failing. Well, yeah, you ended up working construction in the home of the mid-tahar. Nearly dying in a hospital, yeah. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Robert Green. We'll be right back.

Thank you for listening to and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps us going. To learn more and get links, all those URLs, all those codes, you don't have to write those down. They're all in one place. Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals is where you can find it. Please consider supporting those who support us. And don't forget, we have worksheets for many episodes.

if you want. Some of the drills the exercise has talked about during the episodes of this show. Those are all in one easy place as well. That link is in the show notes. Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Now, back to Robert Green. I mean, look, if the guy needed, and I made a dark joke earlier, but it sounds like he was, he needed three martinis to break bad news to you. He actually was probably a really nice person for doing that. He didn't want to do that. He did it for your sake. Probably. Yeah. Yeah. But I didn't take his advice to Hart because... No, you're a writer, so I guess he failed.

I knew that I had something there. It's just I was in the wrong genre. Writing insufferable articles about the Amalfi Coast. Let's talk demagogues. I mean, I told people the show is going to be all over the place, demagogues. This is unfortunately, according to my feedback Friday inbox, as half the nation is working for a demagogue. There's demagogues in every level of politics from the police all the way up to the White House, depending on who you ask, right? I think this might be useful, whether we have one in the office or whether we're electing them to office. When in the presence of a demagogue, focus on the rational even more to avoid their emotional pull, is what you say in the beginning of this particular

section. This is very profound, but it also sort of implies, well, it does imply that demagogues use emotional pull to, would you say, influence us or control us? Well, yeah, I think that's fairly obvious there. I mean, you don't have to call that thing out. That makes me sound less intelligent. Okay, Captain obvious. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Yeah, but it's true. It's true. All I did was

rephrase something and I'm supposed to people go, wow, Jordan really, he understands the things that he looks at. Wow, Jordan, that was really, you really understand me. Yeah, I really do read carefully. So yes, the obvious that demagogues thrive on the emotional pull that they have over us. Well, I mean, the obvious element is they're not appealing to us through reason. Right.

Right. So in the laws of human nature, I have a chapter on irrationality. It's chapter one. And I talk that we humans have certain irrational biases built into our brains. And one of them obviously is the confirmation bias that everyone knows about. But I talk about the conviction bias, which is if somebody talks with so much conviction, so much anger, so much emotion, so much righteousness. We tend to think that there's something real about it.

They wouldn't be faking these emotions. Therefore, there must be something true to what they say. And this is what makes people on television, multi-millionaires. The angrier they appear, the more truthful they must be and the more audience people will reach. Because we have a propensity to want to have our emotion stirred, to want somebody who appeals to them. And we want to believe someone who kind of spews the anger

that we're not necessarily comfortable with expressing, right? That's a good point. Yeah, we see this on the extreme left and extreme right on television because then those shows where they're yelling at each other and that's all they're doing. Or someone says, can you believe these idiots are doing this and this and this?

And it's just a bunch of people at home going, yeah, I hate that. Yeah. They're the worst. Yeah. I mean, the person I think who really does that is like Tucker Carlson. Yeah.

I'm not going to, you know, go political here on you because there are people on the left who do it as well. There are, yeah, to be fair. You know, Chris Cuomo can be a little bit like that. But Tucker Carlson, yeah, it's like his snark, his disdain, his anger, his vitriol is what people love. That's what makes them tune in. And they assume that he must be telling the truth because there's so much conviction behind it. So as opposed to a professor who gets up there in a very calm demeanor and sort of explains what's really going on in the world. We're going, uh, what an egghead. You know, he's got some

axe to grind because he went to Harvard or something. Yeah, he's an elitist. He's an elitist. Exactly. Thank you. Okay. So we are wired to have our emotions appeal to us. It's part of our nature because we're at heart emotional animals. Emotions, to give you a very brief physiological lesson, when you feel an emotion like anger or frustration or excitement, hormone, chemicals are released into your bloodstream that are very powerful. The cortex, the frontal cortex, where your thinking goes on, those are like little electrical impulses that are not nearly as strong as those hormones that are charging through you, making your adrenaline pump, right? Yeah, I rarely get fired up about like logical math problems or something like that. It would never get

me sort of charged up. Having to do my math homework instead of watching a movie or a show that I wanted to, That triggers that cortisol or whatever it is, adrenaline reaction. So by nature, we're wired to pay attention to our emotions, whereas our thoughts, yeah, we kind of listen to them. But when we feel something, it engages so much of our body physically that we have to pay attention to it. So we are emotional creatures by nature. We are not these rational thinking animals that we like to believe that we are.

And people who do marketing and PR, they know that we're. We are emotional creatures. They know how to appeal to the animal in us. It's an art that they have developed, that they have honed, right? They call it the effective heuristic. People buy things based on emotions, not based on rational decisions. Are you saying I didn't need the upgraded camera in the iPhone 13 Pro Max? Are you sure about that?

Well, there was probably some ad that you saw or some, yeah, it probably wasn't a rational decision. No, it wasn't a rational decision. No. Okay. Completely irrational. Yeah. So get over the idea that you're a rational being, you're very emotional based, and a political figure in any walk of life or your boss or whatever, if they're like always emoting and they're like

out there expressing something with so much conviction and anger and righteousness, you can believe that they're hiding something, right? They're trying to convince themselves of the truth of what they're saying. They're trying to lie to themselves that what they're saying is true, but by putting on that act, that extra bit of anger, et cetera, right? So con artists have always known since the beginning of con artistry that the more you feel sincere, the more you tell people believe in what you're selling is like gold. You know, you have a gold mine instead of that you're selling or the Eiffel Tower, the more people are likely to believe you, right? So I just want people to be more skeptical in this world when someone is spewing all kinds of emotions. And I've noticed,

in our age, now the social media age, that you see a lot of righteousness, that people are seem, I am so right about the cause I believe in. Outrage, yeah. Outrage. It gives me, you know, license to say whatever I want to be as angry and violent as I want to because I'm on the side of truth. You see it a lot nowadays. I want you to be super skeptical of people like that.

They're probably hiding something. They're feeling very insecure about the subject. they may very well be lying about it. You want to have some distance and be able to analyze what they're saying with some degree of rationality and some degree of detachment. Yeah, you say the emotional self thrives on ignorance.

What these people require is for us to not stop and think about, not have any sort of skeptical bone in our body, but to go, yeah, and then blindly follow with whatever they're asserting. Exactly. You say once we become aware of this, it loses its pull. So awareness being like group, bias, insecurity, ego is the greatest danger here, I think, is something that either you or I noted. And not the ego of the person telling you what to do, but the ego that might say,

maybe I just got worked up and I'm wrong about this. Well, that's the confirmation bias. And it's something sociologists have said determines like 95% of human behavior. Really? Well, I just pulled that. Okay, you just made that out. You know what. Yeah, we got it. I was like, that's a huge, that's a large, majority. But it's higher than you think, let's just say that. So what happens is if you believe something once, if you voted for this particular person once, right? And then evidence comes in that they're not who they said they were, that they're a hypocrite, they're deceptive, et cetera. Your propensity is not to believe what other people are telling you, but to double down on your

original attitude and say, the person telling me this has an action. to grind. They're being political. It's their fault. I was right in my choice. The reason for confirmation bias is you never want to believe that you were stupid. You never want to believe that you were conned, that somebody pulled the wool over your eyes, that you are not rational, that you did not come to your decision based on proper analysis. So you're wired, you have the bias already to believe in, to believe in what you want to believe in. So you're going to look for the evidence that confirms what you've already believed. And trust me, it does motivate a huge percentage of people's behavior. It makes you why you don't want to change what you're already

doing. Because to change what you're doing is to change your way of thinking and to admit that you were wrong, that you did something kind of stupid or that you were going in the wrong direction. Very, very hard for humans to do that. I think you're right. I mean, we see this happening all the time and when it comes to the news or politics or anything like that, nobody wants to turn around and go, yeah, I did that and that was wrong and there were profound consequences, especially if there were profound consequences for themselves or others. How do we balance the need to be rational, cautious, skeptical with the benefits of being curious and open-minded to new ideas? Well, so you can be too rational. You can be too cautious. You can be too logical in your

attitude towards life. So the metaphor that I like, like to use. It's something I talk in the Daily Laws that in my books is of a... Don't worry. We'll link to your books on the show notes. We're going to sell those books. Am I doing it too much? No. It's probably the first time. I'm just giving you a hard time. I had to pay you back for the Captain Avi's comment early. That hopefully made it in... I deserved it. Yes. The metaphor I use is of a horse and the person riding the horse. So I'm saying that the horse is your emotional self. It's all that animal energy.

It's those hormones coursing through you and making you excited or angry, et cetera. And the rider of that horse is your rational self, is your frontal cortex or your executive decisions where you go through a rational process of coming to a decision about what needs to be done. Okay? So if you've ever ridden a horse, I did when I was younger. It's very much more. It's so much harder than it looks.

Yeah. If you remember that. Yeah. Well, horses are very sensitive creatures. They pick up your energy very quickly, right? They can tell by the way your legs are kind of hugging it, whether you're nervous or not. And they're very, very sensitive, okay?

So if they sense that you are not controlling them, that you're worried, that you're fearful, that you're kind of like, you know, you don't know how to control this horse, they're going to take control. They're going to be the alpha in the situation. They're going to go wherever they want to go. They're not going to listen to you

because they don't think you have the stuff in you. you're not stern enough, right? And so you'll find they'll be riding all over the place. They'll be going a lot faster than you want, and it can be very dangerous. But if you hold the reins too tightly, if you're the opposite type, where you're too much trying to control them,

you're holding the bit in their mouth really tightly, you're trying to make sure that they only do exactly what you want. The horse isn't comfortable, right? It doesn't like that, because horses have been broken, but they have a wild streak to them, right? So they're either going to rebel, they're not going to go necessarily do what you want, or they're going to go very slowly, et cetera, and you won't really be able to ride them with any

kind of ease. They'll be very halting. They'll suddenly stop and chew the leaves on a plant when you want them to move ahead, et cetera. So the perfect balance to make this metaphor come to life is you want to have some hold on the reins, but you also want to let the animal have some of its own power because that horse is very powerful. Horses are amazingly powerful creatures. You want to be able to use their energy to channel their energy for your own purposes, right? So think of your emotions as that horse. They contain incredible amounts of energy and power. You can't write a book. You can't start a business. You can't do anything in life if you don't have a degree of emotional energy behind it. You have to feel excited. You have to feel excited. You have to

motivated. You have to want something very, very badly. If you're holding on the reins too tightly and trying to be too controlled and everything like that, you're never going to be able to get anything off the ground because you're not going to have any energy behind it. But if you let that go everywhere you want to, then nothing will get made because you won't be able to structure. You won't be able to organize. You won't be able to discipline yourself. You won't be able to make executive decisions. Say, we've got to do this instead of that. So you want to balance, right? So you don't want to be too rational, too controlling. You want to be able to let go it sometimes

and let your emotions lead you and be inspired, but be able to have some distance from them to know that you can pull it back, you can control it. Now, I forgot what your original question was. It was how do we balance the need to be rational, cautious, and skeptical with the benefits of being curious and open-minded? Yes, see, the curious and open-mindedness is that horse kind of exploring things

and wanted to try new things out, right? So there's, the idea of being curious and open is an emotional quality, right? You're not curious, you know, because of something going on in your frontal cortex. There's an excitement level that makes you curious about something. You're interested.

There's an emotional component, right? You have to let go of that sometimes, of the need to be so rational and so controlling. So in life, you have to know when to let go. you have to know when to let go of control and let things happen to you and let things come to you. If you try and control everything too much, then, you know, things won't happen. You won't have the space for surprises, for the unexpected. If you're a scientist, some of the best discoveries are things you never expected or planned for.

It just happened upon you. And if you've already assessed what you think is going on, you're not going to be open to the new information that comes in. So the balance is in what I'm talking about. You know that being too rational will cause you problems. You won't be able to get anything done and you won't be able to explore with your ideas. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Robert Green. We'll be right back. And now for the rest of Part 1 with Robert Green.

From a practical level, you mentioned that we should observe how people behave around others, how they interact, their emotions, etc. and compare that to how they behave towards you. Is there frustration, micro expressions, anger, contempt, and then ask what reason there could be for this. So there's a lot of practicals and dealing with, all right, if I'm looking at how other people are acting, are they acting the same way around me? Are we looking for hidden? I'm trying not to be sort of hyperbolic here. Are we looking for people to show their true colors because we know they'll have a facade up when they're talking to us, but maybe not with others? Well, that could possibly, but that's not really the point of this here. The point is to have access to information about what's really going on behind the facade,

the mask people are wearing, and that might be totally benign. It might be that they do like you. It might be that they're not as interested in as you as you think they are. But that doesn't mean they're going to go out and harm you in some way. It just means you think they're excited by your idea, but they're not really so excited. So we all have this experience where in the presence of one person, like our wife or a colleague or husband, we act a certain way, and then we're in the presence of someone else. We act totally differently, right, because they have a different energy.

So the way we talk and move and our body language in front of our boss is not the same as it is when we're talking with our child, with a two-year-old, et cetera, or with a younger, an older person like that. So we're continually changing who we are when we're in the presence of different people, right? So when you go up to someone, they're responding to your energy, right? And some of it's coming from you, and you can't really disentangle what is you and what is actually coming from them. But if you observe them with another person, right, you get better information. You get more dispassionate information.

So you judge them with you. They're this way and that way, et cetera. But with this other person, they act totally differently, which is the real self. Well, you don't really know, but at least now you realize that what they were responding to you is only like a quarter of the picture, right? So you want to see how people interact in a variety of situations. It'll give you more clues as to what's really going on in their heads. Another practical is train yourself to see past the front people put on. So this is sort of very similar. Train yourself to see their mythology. Look for signs of their true character or true signs of their character. How do we do this? The example you give in the book is,

Howard Hughes. He was actually a terrible businessman, but yet most people think of him as this brilliant creator. And meanwhile, he was, according to the Leonardo DiCaprio movie, peeing in bottles in a room and made a plane that didn't fly. Right. Or at least didn't fly well. Right. Well, the idea is that people have patterns in life, right? And the patterns reveal what I call their character. And character is something very deeply ingrained in a person. It's that genetic component we talked about earlier. It's the early education part of them. It's something so deep inside that they can't control it.

And you have a character and I have a character. And what it does over time is it creates patterns. We end up falling into patterns in life, in our work world, in our personal relationships, etc. And you can see this over time. And that reveals that essence, that core that we are, often in a more negative light. And so Howard Hughes had this pattern of enticing people into this kind of business venture because he was very ambitious, very grandiose. And then he wouldn't deliver.

And he wouldn't deliver for various reasons. One thing is he was an insane micromanager. He had to oversee every single detail of that plane. But he couldn't because he's only one person. And he'd get overwhelmed with information and he'd become paralyzed. And the project would never happen. He would be asked to build 200 enormous transport jets for the Defense Department, and he'd build only one, you know, the goose or whatever that thing was.

Spruce goose, I think, your name? Yeah, okay, because he was so paralyzed, but he had to control everything, et cetera. It spilled over when he was produced films, and he directed films, and he had the same mentality. And each time it failed, and yet people would not pay attention to those failures because they got sucked in to the aura of Howard Hughes, this adventurer, this pilot who would risk his life doing things, which was true. He was very almost reckless in his flying planes, etc.

So they bought the legend of Howard Hughes, and they weren't seeing the reality, was that this man was an awful businessman. He was just a terrible businessman, and the clues were all there, and yet they were falling for the appearance of this really smooth, charismatic man. And it became comic by the end

because he had four or five or six failures in his past, and still he managed to convince people up until like the 50s or 60s to fund his wild projects. So the idea is, to sum it all up, is stop paying attention to people's charm, their presence, their facade, to how excited they are when you first meet them, to their resume, to the fact that they went to Harvard or Yale, etc.

and look at their character what lies underneath. So if you looked at Howard Hughes' character, you would have seen someone deeply insecure and deeply controlling to the point where he can never finish anything. And if you saw that, you would have never signed on to one of his projects and lost millions of dollars, right? So people give signs of this.

They give signs of their behavior. They give signs of the fact that they're not a team player. Character, I'd like to judge, is either strong or weak. You want a strong character for a partner in intimate relationship, for a business partner, for a colleague at work. A strong character can take criticism. That's the number one thing.

A person who is strong inside can take criticism and can use it constructively. They don't become defensive. A strong person, when they're stressed, they don't crumble. They suddenly don't become this whiny little baby. They can handle it. They have presence of mind.

A strong person can work with other people. They're not dominated by their ego. They don't have to have everything on their own terms. A weak character is all the opposite of those traits. So you hire somebody based on their charm, and then you discover when there's stress, that they crumble into pieces, right? You discover that when you criticize them,

they get a whiny and defensive and they can't learn. You discover that they can't work together as a team they only want to advance their own gender. You learn that too late because they're already working for you. So judge them before you get involved with people, and I should talk in my books, but how there are always signs what the underlying character is. And if people want more practicals about this, obviously in the books, which will link all of them in the show notes, we did an episode probably going on to maybe even three years ago now,

hard to say, which I'll also link in the show notes. And that one is full of envy and jealousy and human nature and control and defensive against it. All that sexy stuff. All the dark side stuff, exactly. I will wrap on one final thing here. And this is, now that we have cryptocurrency going crazy and people, the stock market is super high. Many times, this is your idea here, many times we run on a reactive program. We get caught up in the moment. Perfect example, the crypto run the economy. Even wise people fall prey to this. Oh, Bitcoin's at an all time high. Look at how high the Dow is going. We need to funnel more money into these things. We have to zoom out and take a longer view of time. But how do we do this? How do we zoom out?

Even when we don't feel like it, which is really what's going on here, I feel like buying more of that stock that's going up. I feel like I need to get on the Bitcoin rocket ship. We have our phomo, our fear of missing out is in full swing. How do I short circuit that? Because it's easy for me to say when Bitcoin is zero and the Dow's losing money that I need to not invest. It's really hard when I feel like I'm the only one who's missing out. Well, I wrote a whole chapter in there about that. It's called our short-sighted nature. And I describe the phenomenon of bubbles, economic bubbles. And the original bubble was aptly named the South Sea bubble. And I narrate the story in the laws of human nature. This took place in the 1710s in England. And the idea behind it is

is that when other people are buying things, you're not, are doing things. We're a viral creature. We look we're social animals. We're very much wrapped into what other people are doing and we get caught up in the kind of herd mentality. If other people are buying something excited, there must be a reason I don't want to miss out on it, right? And so this is what's behind a lot of Ponzi schemes, etc. The more people that get involved,

the more it seems like it's real and substantial. And so the South Sea bubble was this kind of comic event. It was like the original Ponzi scheme. and Sir Isaac Newton was investing his life savings in the South Sea bubble and he ended up losing like all of his savings in there. The king of England was putting his name behind it, the brother of the king. I can't remember which one it was. Yeah, it's hard to say. I vaguely remember this from your work. So everyone got cut up in the smartest people around and the stupidest people. So when you find yourself in a dynamic like that, this is part of human nature. It was the two

Lipomania. I was going to say it's like the tulip mania where people are buying tulips for the price of gold or something like that. It's 17th century. You had the railroad mania in the 19th century. You had the tech bubble in the 1990s. You had the real estate bubble in the early 2000s. Who knows what the bubble is now? Maybe it's cryptocurrency. I don't know. But when you find yourself and it's, what motivates you is that other people are doing something, I have to get involved. A little red flag should go up in your brain and go, uh-oh, I'm probably, probably this weak part of human nature is getting involved here. I'm getting sucked into this dynamic where the social aspect of my nature is telling me that other people are doing something. It must be great.

It must be interesting. I have to get involved. No. The moment you feel that one that's happening, step back. This is one situation where in the rudder and the horse, you want to be holding the reins a bit tighter. because, you know, your money, a lot of money could be at stake. So it's a delicate thing. I mean, who knows in the beginning whether cryptocurrency is real or not.

Maybe it is like the new thing it's going to. But when you hear people say that this time it's different, there's something new about cryptocurrency. Your bullshit meter must be going to rise right up because that's the language that every swindler has ever used. This is different. This is not like anything in the past. The rules of finance are being re-rereferral.

written. You don't have to worry about it because this is totally new and different. That is 100% bullshit, right? The rules of finance have not been rewritten. Bubbles exist and they've been existing for hundreds of years because of human nature because of psychology. And that's what's sucking you into it. And so you want to look at the classic bubble in our time was the one that led to the crash of 08, where all these people were involved in these complicated real estate derivatives, all these names that I can't even remember. That's what I was doing on Wall Street, mortgage-backed securities. Okay, yeah.

And I remember thinking, what happens if people can't pay their mortgage? And the partner said, real estate always goes up. There's so many people in these pools. They're not all going to default. Well, real estate does tend to go up. But this isn't real estate. This isn't bound to property. This is bound to things that were completely like financial chicanery.

They only existed on paper, right? And the smartest minds in the world got caught up in that bubble. You can't believe the names of people who went to Harvard, Yale Business School CEOs. They all got caught up in the idea that this time it's different, right? We've created a new kind of financial mechanism. The old rules, you can throw them out. The moment you hear that, you know something is wrong, right? So all the classic signs, we've all lived through them if you're old enough.

I don't know if people that young who have been 12, if you're 12 maybe no, but if you're older than 12, you live through that crash. and you know what really happened. And that's the kind of herd mentality and kind of stupidity to put the right word on it that we all are prone to. And when you find yourself getting emotionally attached to Bitcoin to the point where

if someone so much as breathes, whispers something skeptical, you get all emotionally react. Oh, come on, you old thuddy, you dinosaur. You don't understand the hipness. This is the new thing. You know that you're drinking the wine, that you're drunk on this thing, in trouble. So it's not necessarily that there's not anything to go on the Bitcoin metaphor. There's

still innovation. There's still new things that result from this. It could change the world, but the idea that it is completely anew and different and not subject to the laws that everything else has been subject to, there's nothing, we're not going to invent any machine on Earth that's not sub or in the universe as we know it that's not subject to gravity for it. Well, the metaphor I've given in human nature is human nature is so strong that it changes everything that we create. It's like this impersonal force. So just to finish this metaphor here, the internet comes out in the 90s, and then it starts to explain the late 90s, and we're all using it, and we're so excited. There's this forum for all this free communication. It's like the Wild Wild West. It's so exciting.

It could lead to anything. And slowly, slowly, slowly. Yeah, well, slowly, slow, that's what it becomes. Slowly and slowly becomes this place to sell the worst kind of products. It becomes. It becomes the place for online porn, becomes the place for venting your outrage and being a troll. Human nature changes this thing that we all thought was this liberating device that was going to open up the world into something kind of ugly and political, a tool for China to spy on people, to spy on its own citizens, to gather, and in this country, too, to gather information on private citizens, right? So human nature, the dark side of it will take over. Bitcoin might have started after this incredibly liberating thing, but you better damn well believe

that the forces that are out there are going to take it over and that's going to be somehow misshapen and malformed into what other things have been misshapen for in the past, like the internet. Well, fortunately, Bitcoin is decentralized and I'm going to get a lot of emails from people that are like, he's wrong and here's why. And I'm looking forward to those. And this is a great conversation. Thank you so much. Well, I'm just saying you might be right. But the fact that you think you're so right is the problem. Just be able to look at yourself and just entertain the possibility. Entertain it in the tiniest little corner of your brain that it could be a bubble.

That's all. That's all. Going to get canceled. Don't hate me. Don't hate me. Too late. I have invested a little bit in it. Cancelled by Bitcoin and everybody else. Robert Green, thank you so much. Thank you, Jordan. My pleasure.

If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show to sink your teeth into, here's a trailer with our guest, Robert Green. If we just sit in our inner tube with our hands behind our head and crack open a six-pack of beer, the river of dark nature takes us towards that waterfall of the shadow. Yeah. So when we're children, if we weren't educated, if we didn't have teachers or parents telling us to study, we'd be these monsters. We're all flawed.

I believe we humans naturally feel envy. It's the chimpanzee in us. It's been shown that primates are very attuned to other. animals in their clan and they're constantly comparing themselves. Your dislike of that fellow artist or that other podcaster, 99% sure that it comes from a place of envy. For sure. You are not a rationality is something you earn.

It's a struggle. It takes effort. It takes awareness. You have to go through steps. You have to see your biases. When you think you're being rational, you're not being rational at all. You go around, everything is personal. Oh, why did he say that?

Why is my mom telling me this? And I'm telling you it's not personal. That's the liberating fact. People are wrapped up in their own emotions, their own traumas. So you need to be aware that people have their own inner reality. People are not nearly as happy and successful as you think they are. Acknowledging that you have a dark sight, that you have a shadow, that you're not such a great person as you think, can actually be a very liberating feeling. And there are ways to take that shadow and that darkness and kind of turn it into something else.

If you want to learn more about how to read others and even yourself, be sure to check out episode 117 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Always, always an incredible show with Robert. I've got a ton more in my notes we didn't even get to, as usual. Robert and I are planning another episode probably in 2022. We'll see how the pandemic works out and my travel schedule, but stay tuned for that. knowing ourselves and especially knowing where we are weak or routinely manipulable is one of the best forms of psychological self-defense. And further, if we know how this is done, then we can spot

when others are doing it to us and kick our defense systems into gear. Check out Robert's books. All of them are worth a read and then a reread. We will link those in the show notes. Please do use our website links if you buy books from guests on the show. It does help support the show. Yes, it works for audiobooks. Yes, it works in your country. We've got those. genius links. Worksheets for the episodes are in the show notes, transcripts in the show notes, videos on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also hit me on LinkedIn. I always enjoy connecting with people there. Speaking of connecting, our six-minute networking course is where I'm teaching you how to dig the well

before you get thirsty and it's free. There's no catch. Most of the guests on the show, subscribe and contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Again, Jordanharbinger.com slash course. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Miliocampo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is that you share it with friends

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