The Pomp Podcast - #1068 Robert Greene On Power, Seduction, War, and Human Nature

Episode Date: August 1, 2022

Robert Greene is the author of "The 48 Laws Of Power", "The 50th Law Of Power", "Mastery", and "The Laws Of Human Nature" In this conversation, we go deep into Robert's mind, including how he thinks of nature, social media, and where the world is headed. ======================= Exodus is leading the world out of the traditional financial system by building beautiful and user-friendly blockchain products. With its focus on design and user experience, Exodus has become one of the most popular and loved cryptocurrency apps. It’s supported on both desktop and mobile, allowing you to sync your wallet across multiple devices so you can have access to your funds anywhere. You can instantly exchange around 100 different cryptocurrencies straight from your wallet. Interactive charts let you view an asset’s price history and your portfolio’s performance over time. And maybe the best part, Exodus is integrated with the Trezor hardware wallet - making advanced security easy for everyone.  Visit exodus.com/pomp for your free download or search Exodus on the App Store or Playstore. =======================  The Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. Even better? Eight Sleep recently launched the next generation of the Pod. The new Pod 3 enables more accurate sleep and health tracking with double the amount of sensors, delivering you the best sleep experience on Earth.   Go to eightsleep.com/pomp to start sleeping cool this Summer and save $150 on the Pod. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. ======================= If you’re trying to grow and preserve your crypto-wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative as trying to find the next hidden gem. Alto IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax-advantaged ways to help you preserve your hard earned money.   Alto CryptoIRA lets you invest in more than 200 different coins and tokens with all the same tax advantages of an IRA.They make it easy to fund your Alternative IRA or CryptoIRA via your 401(k) or IRA rollover or by contributing directly from your bank account.   There are no setup or account fees, and it’s all you need to do to invest in crypto tax free. Let me repeat that again: You can invest in crypto tax free.   So, ready to take your investments to the next level? Diversify like the pros and trade without tax headaches. Open an Alto CryptoIRA to invest in crypto tax-free. Just go to https://altoira.com/pomp =======================

what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there now let's kick this thing off robert green is one of the best-selling authors in history he's wrote in great books like the 48 laws of power the 50th law of power mastery and the laws of human nature in this conversation we go deep into robert's mind how he thinks about human nature social media and where the world is headed I really enjoyed this conversation with Robert, and I hope that you all enjoy it as well. Today's episode is brought to you by Exodus, the world's leading desktop, mobile, and hardware crypto wallet. They offer beautiful, user-friendly blockchain products that sync across all of your devices,

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Open an Alto Crypto IRA to invest in crypto tax-free. Just go to altoira.com slash pomp. That's A-L-T-O-I-R-A dot com slash pomp. Start investing in crypto tax-free today. This episode is brought to you by 8sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer and the 8 Sleep Pod is the ultimate sleep machine. Consistent good sleep can help reduce

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Go to 8sleep.com slash Pomp today and you'll save $150 when you buy that new pod. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, ladies and gentlemen, I've got Robert here with me.

Robert, one of the key things in a number of your books and interviews is nonverbal communication. We obviously live in a digital age. Many people who listen to this podcast, they are very excited about the digital world, whether it be Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, whether it's other kind of digital products or even things as kind of forward looking as the metaverse, whatever that ends up being. How do you see nonverbal communication playing out in a world where we might not be able to see each other's real faces or see body language in the same way that we could if you and I sat down at a coffee shop? Well, you know, the great things about the digital world, and as we were talking before, I love the whole podcasting environment, but there are real dangers in this. I mean, if you think about the human animal as it evolved over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, a lot of who we are, a lot of how our brain developed is an interpersonal communication. Well, before language was written, we learned to pay attention to other people, to their body language, to the signals they gave off, and we could read their behavior. I have this belief, and other people have written the same, that our early ancestors before, maybe even before language was invented, had almost telepathic abilities to understand the thoughts of the people in their group, in their tribe.

Their very survival depended on these nonverbal cues that they were picking up. And so our brains are developed for that. They're developed for learning from a person, a master, for learning how to make a tool, for learning how to play an instrument, a language, et cetera, from that person-to-person contact and picking up the cues that aren't verbal. And so, so much, someone has estimated that 95% of human communication is nonverbal. You're not necessarily conscious of it, but if you thought about it deeply, if you looked at yourself in the course of a day in the office or wherever you are, you're constantly picking up cues about people. It's registering either on the conscious level, on the slightly unconscious level, or even unconsciously. You're picking up their energy, their degree of security, their insecurities, their weaknesses, their strengths, etc. You're continually monitoring them.

But the problem is, is that this is a language that has to be learned and developed. It's like a muscle that you use. And when you spend a lot of your time in the virtual digital world, you're losing that power. You're losing that ability. Yes, you can pick up cues like people watching me now can read Robert's nonverbal behavior and come up with negative or positive feedback based on that. But it's not the same as in person, picking up people's energy, picking up the things that you can't get virtually on a screen. And so when you, you know, back a couple hundred years ago, just put yourself back in those days, for instance, in the early 19th century, you had no other forms of entertainment. There was no television, obviously no internet.

The only thing you have is maybe theater, et cetera, or music. The main form of entertainment was interacting with people, with social interactions. That was what you did in order to entertain yourself, to get rid of your boredom or whatever. And so you spent most of your time dealing with people and you became extremely sensitive to them. And so I tell people that you're actually damaging something. You're learning, you're using, you're letting a tool that's extremely valuable in any realm, in business or wherever. you're letting it go to waste by not practicing this by spending too much time locked in your phone and you're not like dealing with people and learning this language and in the laws of

human nature i have a chapter on non-verbal human communication and i could have written an entire book on it not all books have written on it but things like posture tone of voice the way the eyes move, how a fake smile or a real smile, whether people are genuinely interested in you or they're faking it, whether they want to see you or they don't really want to see you. These are all things that you don't get from people's words, but you get from their non-verbal communication. So your task in the modern world is what I often say is you have to swim against the current. And if the current is pushing you to have less and less interpersonal reactions, interactions. You have to try and do the opposite. You have to try and go out more. You have to go

out to bars or clubs or wherever, wherever you can meet people and actually develop, redevelop the skill that you had probably when you were three or four years old, but is lying there kind of fallow and need to develop it. So that's sort of my take on that. As you kind of extrapolate that out, obviously the rise of social media and technology, there's many people would argue that's been a net positive, right? A company like a Facebook or a Twitter allows people to share ideas. It allows for people to learn. It allows for families to reconnect or old friends. And then you can kind of go off of the social media platforms to other pieces of technology that have definitely had a positive impact. But it sounds like you're making a nuanced argument, which is,

although there are very many positive impacts of that technology, one of the downsides or maybe one of the steps backward for society is that we spend less time face-to-face with that human interaction. Is that okay? Because there's a positive impact from the technology and, you know, not everything is 100% good. Or do you think that actually society would be better off maybe without some of the social media platforms or kind of the activities that people do on their phones every day? Well, imagine this. Imagine you didn't have your access to all these things that you have. And the human animal is made so that we need constant stimulation. Our brains are continually needing things to feed onto, to process. And so if you don't have your phone, you don't have your

computer, you're left on your own, what are you going to do? You're going to become extremely creative with your time, with how you're going to find ways to entertain yourself, often in a group situation. And I remember when I was a child, I'm not trying to sound like I'm a Luddite or anything. I'm just answering your question as best I can. But the fact that, you You know, we had television, and of course, that was a big thing because I grew up, I'm so old, I grew up in the 60s and the 70s. But mostly, you had to make up your own games. You had to constantly create things to keep yourself from being continually bored. And that kind of develops the mind.

It develops your imagination in a very positive way. And I remember back in the early years of the Internet, which, you know, strangely enough, is like some 20 years ago, where it had more of that kind of interactive possibilities than have come since then. So I remember, for instance, like on Amazon, something that was really exciting to me was I would look for a particular book and then it would suggest other books, which it still does. But it would also suggest communities of people that you could interact with who also were fans of this book or might be interested in this kind of subject. I thought this was great. And I was actually connecting to people. I even made some friends, people who who were like Nietzsche fanatics like I am or particular forms of philosophy, etc. And soon Amazon got rid of that because the the algorithms, something like that isn't making any money for Amazon and the need to continually generate profit made it so that everything was designed for for selling things. And so that kind of interpersonal thing where you could create a community of like-minded people and connect is something that's been degraded over the years, and it's turned into something else in a way. And I think people are kind of hungry for more real human interaction.

I'm sensing this in Gen Z, in young people who are growing up now, that they're a little bit tired, weary of the hours that they're being sucked into things like Instagram, which I use quite a bit. I'm at fault as well. I think I'm very seductive. But I think they're hungry for something a little more real, a little more experiential, a little more interactive and interpersonal. And I think actually that is the future, combining the immense powers of the digital world, which we all know and appreciate and love, with something a little more personal and human, where you use this immense tool for something where, you know, okay, we now can create a group and we can meet people, you know.

but you know the thing that's revolutionized my life to highlight the positive aspect is just in if i have some idea like i'm researching a story about a particular man who there are not many books written about for my new book and i can just go on google and put his name in with like two other words of a subject that he's interested in and all these things pop up. It's insane. It's the kind of thing that would like a Leonardo da Vinci would have like just gone crazy over. The powers of it are absolutely immense, but it could be used, I think, sometimes for better purposes. That's my only point. What is your process for writing? Your use of the technology over the years has obviously changed. If I understand correctly,

probably in your mid thirties or so is when you pitched your first book. You've written seven of them since you're now working on your eighth. What does that process look like today when you go to write a book? Well, it's not very sexy, I can tell you that. Basically, I have a subject that obviously, you know, human nature, I'm writing a book now on a subject that I call the sublime that I think a lot of my readers understand, because I've talked a lot about it. and that part of the process is very exciting. It's like I fling the doors wide open and I try and read as many books on the subject as possible. Now back in the day when I started in the dark ages of the late 1990s, I would literally go to a library if you can believe it. Like we have one

really great library in Los Angeles at UCLA at the university here and I would scour the bookshelves. And it was actually really fun and exciting because I would, you know, like in 48 Laws of Power, I had an interest in con artists and charlatan and swindlers, which is a major theme in the 48 Laws. And I would go to the show where there was one book on the great con artist, Yellow Kid Vile, who I wrote a lot about in the 48 Laws. There'd be all these other books about charlatans and con artists etc and it just would open up to me it was so exciting and i obviously i don't go to libraries now i do a lot of my research on the internet through amazon through a books or through other internet searches and you get some of that quality in the library

but some of the serendipitous element where you should come up on a book you would have never thought about is kind of missing, and I wish I had more of that. But I've been doing research for so many years that I'm kind of, I'm really good at it. I kind of know how to do this. So I read hundreds of books on a subject. I read a book. I take notes in the margins. If you saw my books, it would look like I'm insane. I'm writing little notes to myself, little stars next to this, underlining that, saying, you know, fuck you for something I really hate or whatever. And making, you know, different colors, et cetera. And then a month later, I go back to the book and I put it on note cards and I divide up each of the things that are in that book into themes.

And I create maybe 20 or 30 cards for a book. And then slowly I compile them in a kind of a shoebox. So this part of it is very analog, very undigital, I'm afraid. I put it in a shoebox and slowly it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. It's kind of exciting. It's like some organic thing that's growing, this monster that's growing and growing and growing. And then suddenly you've got like 500, 1,000 cards.

It's almost filling a shoebox. I go, all right, fun's over, Robert. You've got to organize this material. And I go through and I see the themes in there and I start creating chapters based on that. So in the laws of human nature, I saw certain basic themes were kind of emerging from the cards, like our irrationality, like narcissism, like short sightedness, like envy. And I would create these chapter headings and I would slip the cards into them. And then months later, I'd have this. To me, it's almost like for me, it's exciting.

it's almost like a work of art. Suddenly, this massive material turns into these definite categories with chapters and headings and everything, and the book is there. And then it frees me up. I don't have to remember months later that some person's had this quote in the 19th century that's exciting. It's there on my card. I don't have to stress my memory system, which as you get older, it gets weaker and weaker. And so right now I'm in the process of writing my book and I'm using all of my note cards. And it kind of tells me what to do now, now that I have all the themes there, but I have to leave. This is a lesson I tell people in any creative endeavor. You have to leave some room for discovery, for having some fun and adventure.

If I made it too rigid a system where everything was spelled out before I wrote the book, I personally would get bored. And if the writer is bored, the reader is going to get bored. That's rule number one of writing anything good. If you're excited, generally you will communicate it to the reader if you learn how to write to some degree. So I have to be excited. So I leave myself some wiggle room. I'm still discovering as I'm writing a chapter. I'm still coming up with new ideas. And so I'm kind of creating it as I go. But it's this kind

of organic, weird piece of yeast or whatever that's growing and growing and growing, and I'm shaping and shaping it. And it's exciting, but it's also a lot of hard, tedious work involved. When you're reading the books in preparation to write the book or as part of the research process, do you read books kind of front cover to back cover and read every word? Do you skim through them? Are you looking just kind of for themes? And then if something catches your eye, you'll dig deeper into it. How do you kind of approach, you have to read so many books to do this. What does that process on a book by book basis look like? Well, it's very easy to answer that. If it's a great book, and I'd say maybe 10 to 20% are

great books, I might be inflating a little bit. I read every word. I'm so excited. This is like what I live for. It's like discovering a gold mine for me. I'll read everything. And a great book will turn into 40 or 50 cards. If I'm reading a mediocre book, which is unfortunately the majority of them, I won't read so deeply. I'll kind of skim. I'll go, this is crap. This is stupid. This is irrelevant. I just skip to the relevant parts and it'll yield maybe 20 cards. and then there's a plethora of bad books out there which i've wasted money on um and i'll that's where i'm writing in the notes god you're an idiot etc etc and the margins are even crossing whole parts of the book out and then um you know i'll get maybe three or four cards out of it and

i will really skim that quickly so it depends on the quality of the work and the depth of people's ideas. If I sense it's challenging my mind, I have to think or to understand what they've written and it's challenging me in a good way, I'll read every word of it. But if I feel like this person knows a hell of a lot less than me and I'm not challenged, I'll go through pretty quickly. When you're consuming this information, obviously reading books, somebody's taking the time, they've put their ideas down, they've edited it, they've tried to make it as concise and clear as possible. But in this new digital world, we have audiobooks, we have podcasts, we have YouTube and many other forms of content. How much of it your research and process is still rooted in books

versus maybe some of the other forms where you may go listen to someone on a podcast or watch a YouTube video to do some of the research? I don't really do research that way. I'm pretty much books and occasionally articles and internet, things I find digitally. But mostly it's through books. I'm old school that way. I'm looking for ideas. I'm an idea hunter. People back in the days, they would hunt for various animals. I'm hunting for interesting, weird, novel ideas that I think are going to shake the reader up and really excite them in a way, something they haven't thought about before. And so I don't find, if I'm watching a podcast and I watch all I've watched like Jordan Peterson's podcasts or Joe Rogan's.

It goes by so quickly. I can't think about it enough. I'll take some notes, but then what I need to do, what if I take some notes on something that Jordan Peterson has said, I have to go find a book that's about that. I can't, I have to read something before me. And that's a weakness of mine. Probably in the future,

people will be more used to finding that these like great ideas on the internet, but I need to have it. a material thing in front of me. I mean, I also use Kindle as well, but I need a material thing in front of me that I can underline and that I can go back to. And if I were smart and savvy in my 20s, I would figure out how to watch a YouTube video and take little clips and compile them and then turn that into some kind of written format. But I'm afraid I'm not young enough to be able to figure all that out. So I'm mostly a book person, I'm afraid. You mentioned that you're an idea hunter. And I think that's an interesting concept. Tell me more about that and how you think

of hunting for the idea. Well, you know, we live in a world that's full of so many facts and so much data, it overwhelms you, right? And it overwhelms me. And I'm not interested in learning a bunch of facts and things about the economy, about where we're headed, about the war with russia and ukraine i'm interested in what it means in the higher level picture so for instance in my war book which is kind of a sort of an important book for me one of my less popular books but it was very meaningful for me i write about grand strategy and the idea of strategy strategic thinking or grand strategic thinking is to continually elevate your mind to not get mired in the day-to-day things that people are telling you and the little battles going on around

to what people are saying on the internet or in the office, but looking for what's behind it. What's the meta idea there? What's really governing these things that are happening before our eyes? It's sort of like Plato's metaphor in the cave, where you're seeing these passing shadows, and they're not really real. And so a lot of this data and stuff we're getting isn't connecting to reality. You have to think about it on a higher level. What does this mean? Who's connecting the dots? And a lot of times, the great, incredibly smart people out there who are connecting the dots for me, for instance, on various subjects. And when I come upon an article like that in some great magazine or online magazine, I'm extremely excited and I

take note of that. And then I go through a process where I take ideas and I try to make them my own. I put my little spin on them. I make them, I try and turn them into something that's more relevant to what I'm writing about or what I'm thinking about. And so sometimes, so for instance, I'm writing right now about this man that nobody, as I mentioned, has heard of. His name is Gurdjieff. He's this Armenian-Russian kind of weird philosopher, mystic. And I read in his book something about called this exercise called self-remembering I go whoa that's really weird that's really interesting I've never heard of that before it excited me because I'd never heard of it and it also seemed like it was something that was potentially very interesting for my readers

an exercise that I can then develop out of it and so I see a line like that or I go I've never heard of that before and it's linked to something larger right it's got a higher level perspective so it's like climbing up a mountain when you're at the bottom of the mountain you have no idea what things are like on the ground you have no perspective if you go halfway up the mountain you look down you now have a kind of a perspective about what's going on there but you're missing part of the picture you get to the top of the mountain you have this 360 degree view of everything, you have a complete perspective. And what you thought was reality halfway down the mountain or at the bottom, you end up realizing is false. So I'm looking for people

who take me up that mountain, take me to the top of the mountain, and maybe see things that I've never seen before. So that's some of what I'm talking about here. What's fascinating to me is you described yourself as a little bit of old school, and you focus on books for part of your research. But I know that podcasts and YouTube have played a very big part in you marketing yourself and your books, not necessarily from a desire to simply market them. But that's where you've had, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of conversations. That's where you've learned a lot from an experience standpoint. Talk a little bit about the importance of these new forms of media, maybe compared to the mainstream media that was available before podcasts or

youtube got popular well that's that's what that's the greatest thing for me about the internet for me personally and i'm extremely in love with it so as we were talking about earlier back in the days when i was starting um and then the late 90s you know it was mainstream media you would go on a television show like i'd be on the o'reilly factor or on this business show i can't power lunch with this guy i can't even remember on cnbc um and it was very impersonal and very not very pleasant like i remember the first time i was on live television i thought i was waiting for to be uh guillotined or something i'm sitting there in the green room like god damn it the whole world is a whole country's going to be watching me live and what if i say something stupid or what

if i've got something dangling out of my nose how awful is that i was terrified and then you're like on the spot you're facing this person who's like media trained who's wearing tons of makeup they've got this kind of weird doll-like expression on their face and they're interviewing this rapid fire manner you're having to be in the moment it's so inhuman and it's so not what you know somebody who likes to think and give detailed answers for it's just a bad fit it didn't fit me at all. And so somewhere around 2006, 2007, 2008, when the whole podcasting world was just kind of in gestation, really, and I remember some of the first ones, you know, we would do it on Skype, etc. I got really excited. Because here, instead of some some idiot on some TV show,

who's just who's just like a face, who's never read your book, because they just have notes from some assistant who kind of condenses it into two pages full of inaccuracies you don't even have your birth date right etc here i'm talking to somebody i can't remember the first guy i remember but he was really interesting guy um he was like what we call a transhumanist whatever that means i remembered very well he was like my first podcast and he like had read my book he was asking me questions detailed questions it was clear that you know maybe he didn't like everything i said but he had read it wow what a novel idea somebody's actually read the book that's interviewing you and it was like personal you know he we were looking at each other in the eye we

could i could talk for several minutes i could answer him i loved it i fell in love with that that moment and from then on there's no looking back you know and it gives the author a degree of control. So I can now reach hundreds, thousands, millions of people around the world. And since things like Instagram and TikTok have taken off and YouTube, man, the power is just unbelievable. So I can take videos like from this podcast and others, and I can, you know, put them on my own platforms. So last in June, my wife and I, we were in London and people, this had never happened to me before. People were coming up to me. They actually recognized me in London, you know, like security guards at museums, et cetera. And they were very excited. They saw my

podcast. It opens you up to this worldwide audience that is just fantastic. And I love every aspect of it. And I'm very grateful that I'm able to have experienced both worlds because people who were born nowadays or just starting out, they don't understand how ugly, depressing and demeaning it was back in the days of mainstream media and people who only live back in mainstream media they only had that horrible experience of people like you're you're like being interrogated on on this live show but i have kind of bridged the two and i know there's no going back this is this is a beautiful ecosystem out there what's fascinating about this is that i think in america the cable network uh kind of subscriber base is somewhere between 65

and 75 million people, which seems like a very large number, tens of millions. But YouTube's monthly active users globally is over 1.8 billion. And so you compare those two, it's just not even anywhere near the reach and scale, both geographically, but also just aggregate audience size that you're targeting. It's unbelievable. And it's exploding now. In the last three or four years it's kind of taken this exponential growth with through youtube and in instagram and in tiktok where now you know your little video clips are reaching as opposed to podcasts that would reach thousands maybe hundreds of thousands you're now reaching millions maybe even some people billions of people around the world you know i'm getting messages on instagram from people

from india pakistan iran etc who are looking at these video clips the sense of power is incredible and you can almost get a little bit drunk on it you have to be a little bit careful you have to realize you have a responsibility to kind of say things that are meaningful and realistic and realize that with this kind of power comes a degree of responsibility but it's absolutely insane. And if nobody living 50 years ago, a writer or an entertainer, could ever imagine that they could have this potential reach for their product. And so that's probably the, as I said a hundred times, it's the best thing for me personally about the digital age. And I'm completely addicted to that part. What we're talking about to some degree here is a transition

or an evolution in trust, right? Your attention goes where kind of your trust is. And so now, whether I listen to a podcast or I listen to the mainstream media, I'm still consuming information, usually around ideas, current events, and individuals. And so we can see anecdotally in our day-to-day time spent that that trust is shifting.

We also know from surveys and various other kind of data sources that institutions are losing trust with both people here in America, but also globally. How do you think about that evolution? Is that a positive development? Is that a negative? Should we try to reverse course and drive more trust back to the institutions? Or is this a healthy situation that's kind of unfolding? It's very healthy. I mean, if the institutions reflected reality, if they reflected who we are, if there was some kind of connection to our daily lives, then you know maybe we should flow back to that kind of trust but that's not the reality that we

live in i've been reading from researching for my new book um i read a couple of very interesting books one of them is called i believe deep history i can't remember if that's the exact title but what he's trying to show is that because in my new book i'm going a lot into the neuroscience of the human brain is that our brains are basically very chemically oriented. And we have these kind of hormonal impulses and charges and electrical charges passing through our brain continually. And humans, since time has begun, have been searching for ways to kind of control the chemical environment of their own brains.

They did that in the past through ingesting certain drugs, which has deep history among humans going back thousands of years. They had rituals that they would go through in which they would challenge themselves. They would almost go near death and change their own brain chemistry and have ecstatic experiences. Or they had religion. But this element of being able to alter your own brain chemistry is something that has been used also for other purposes by people in power. to kind of create ways of programming you, of programming your thoughts, of telling you what to think, how to think, what is true, what is real. And it's been a very dangerous thing throughout history. It's sort of the history of dictatorships and fascists and something like

Hitler or Joseph Stalin took that power to an incredible degree. And today, that kind of negative suggestibility power that is built into the way the human brain is now our chemistry is so susceptible to being influenced either actively or passively the powers are both very positive and very very negative and very dangerous and so there's a reason not to trust a lot of these platforms. Things like Facebook or Instagram, they're based on algorithms and things that are manipulating how you think, how you feel. They're programming for you material content. And when they program it, they're literally programming your mind. They're making you think of what they want you to think about. You need to take control of that. And you have the power to

control of that, to take control of that through what you're saying. Now you have access to all these different podcasts, to all these different sources of information. And so you don't have to follow the large institutions and conglomerates and giant tech corporations that are trying to program your world and trying to program how you think. And I'm not trying to sound like I'm some insane conspiracy theorist, because that's not where I'm coming from. It's more like you're not aware to what degree they're feeding you material and that you're not actually in control of this process. And so just to this extent that you can choose what you listen to and you can have a degree of cynicism and distrust and go, where is this person talking from? Is Robert Greene actually

being paid by some third party that we don't know about? He's trying to tell us something. Let me research. Let me find out if Anthony's show is legitimate or if there's something behind it. Do your research. Don't be so naive. Don't be so trusting. I think it's a very, very healthy development in that way. As you think about programming or being misled, consuming content that's kind of fed to you, whether it's doom scrolling on the internet or it is kind of cable network television, one of the ideas that has become very popular from folks like Elon Musk and many others is this idea of the brain computer interface, kind of the ability to use computational power embedded into the brain and augment human intelligence. Given that you spent

so much time thinking about human nature, and now you're writing a book about kind of neuroscience and some of the ways that the brain actually functions. How do you think through augmentation of the brain with something like these brain computer interfaces or other types of technology that people may want to, at some point, incorporate? Well, it's very interesting. I'm actually writing a chapter on that very subject right now so it's it's very close to my mind at this point um basically my idea and you can believe it or not is that we are actually not realizing just we're only realizing in our day-to-day lives a tiny portion of the power of our brains of human consciousness we have so much we have an incredible potential for so much

more we're essentially not really using our what our brains could be doing um and so i'm looking into various experiments in ways that people have learned to kind of open their minds to expand their thinking process to expand what their senses take in to expand every to expand that potential i'm i'm saying that in my book i'm comparing the human mind in our experience to this kind of circle um there's you know a certain dimension and we live inside that circle and inside that circle is all the rules and conventions and ways we're supposed to behave in ways we're supposed to think that we consider to be reality and we consider to be socially acceptable and that circle can get narrower and narrower and narrower depending on the culture and the times that you're living in

and right now it can get pretty damn narrow and so you want to be pushing you outside of that circle. You want to be having thoughts that people aren't thinking about. You want to be coming up with ideas that no one has thought of yet. You want to have experiences that are new, that are expanding, because that is what human destiny is. That's why we have this insane instrument, which is human consciousness. It's unbelievable. If you study the details of the human brain, it'll absolutely astound you. It is by far the most complicated. It far surpasses what any computer ever invented or will ever invent the powers that we have in this one brain. Now, as far as augmenting it through technology, that would be fantastic. The thing that I am most

emphatic about, though, is the difference between active and passive energy, right? So it's true that ingesting drugs can give you that expansive experience. And I had that in my early 20s. I admit, I've talked about it before. I experimented a lot with psychedelic drugs, et cetera, mostly mescaline and peyote. But it's kind of a passive thing. It's sort of something that happens to you, and then you don't know really what to do with it. But to the degree that you make this expanding process active, where you're exercising your brain, where day in and day out, you're training your senses to see the world literally in different ways to look at light and color and shapes and people in ways you never thought of before

through that exercise it becomes something that's active that you control and your mind can slowly expand but if you're just passively clicking on something if somebody has programmed for you a way to kind of do this and you're not actively engaged in it then i don't find it as valuable and right now um so i'm doing a lot of stroke therapy because i had a stroke four years ago nearly died from it and it's a very painful process can't really walk very well i do hours of therapy every day and i've learned that the difference between active and passive is huge so they create these devices or these surgeries or things that they people promise you will will suddenly reverse the effects of your stroke. And I've wasted thousands and thousands of dollars on

these things and they're useless. But when they're active, when they make you actually exercise every single day, an hour a day with your foot, your arm, your fingers, they're powerful. They're incredibly powerful. So you want to make your minds active. And if there are, and I've had some of these technological devices and some of them are very interesting and potentially could be great but that's that's where the to me the difference lies are they engaging us actively in a process where we are able to kind of slowly change how we think slowly change how we look at the world or are they are we being fed this material i don't know if that makes any sense it makes a ton of sense you've obviously studied human nature you studied the way that people

interact communicate both verbally non-verbally you also are now studying the brain but i find of fascinating. Some of the people that you've spent time with, that you've worked with or surrounded yourself with. One of the individuals that I think surprised people initially was 50 Cent. You even wrote a book with him, The 50th Law. Talk a little bit about why somebody who comes from the hip hop world and you get together and write a book, what drew you to him or why was it kind of a friendship right out of the gate that ended up leading to doing some business together been writing the book? Well, I can tell you it was never planned. It was kind of a serendipitous thing, which I'm extremely grateful for. So I didn't write the book intending it to be something

so popular in the hip hop world. But when I found out like in the early 2000s, that people like Jay Z were starting to quote it, I got very, very excited because I've always been someone who's extremely been attracted to African American culture. It's a deep part of me, the films and particularly the music and i have a particular relationship to hip-hop where i lived in brooklyn in the early 80s kind of just when hip-hop was starting out and i saw it and saw the roots of it and i saw some performances and i got hooked in it and i really loved it it was amazing so seeing that connection to the hip-hop world was very exciting for me much more exciting than than people on wall street who were reading the book and so in around 2005 i believe or 2006

50 contacted me through through an intermediary and he wanted to meet and i had no idea why he wanted to meet or what this was for and it was i was actually a bit nervous because you know i'm this as you can tell this nerdy white guy middle class kid from los angeles i don't really have the background that he has he's kind of an intimidating presence I was a little bit nervous but I'm very open to new experiences if you know anything about me and I'll try anything new or different or weird so I flew out to New York I met him in the back room of a steakhouse in early I believe 2006 he was with his entourage and I was by himself I was by myself it was like something out of a movie or like the godfather in this in this private room in the back of a steakhouse

and um i just remember the incredible bling that he had he was with there with his son marquise and the two of them had these these diamond bracelets that were just the bling was just unbelievable i've never seen anything like it never seen anything like it since and um i was also very impressed by him he wasn't what i expected and i wasn't what he expected he expected this kind of old, grisly, Henry Kissinger type guy who knows all about power. And I'm not really like that. I'm more friendly and approachable. And he wasn't this intimidating thug. He was actually very smart, very thoughtful, very calm, very friendly, very engaging. And we took to each other immediately. And one thing I've always, I've said on prior podcasts is I never have a feeling

like I fit into any world. I've had this feeling since I was a kid, like, you know, I'm in high school and you're supposed to be, you know, either you're either a football player or you're a nerd going to university or you're fitting in this group or that. I never fit into any category and I never felt like comfortable in this particular group or that particular group. I always was attracted to people who were very different from me. So I was interested in the parts of my high school, the kids who were from the wrong side of the tracks, who were doing drugs, who maybe were even involved in some kind of semi-criminal things. I was attracted to that dark side, right? Or to some people who were very different. So to have somebody like this,

who comes from a completely opposite world than me, be interested in me, and maybe we could write a book together, which was sort of what we came out of that meeting with, was very exciting. because the problem in America, if I get on my soapbox here for a minute, is we live with these kind of walled cultures. You know, there's people in academia, there's people in business, there's people in entertainment,

there's people in media, et cetera. And they never kind of cross boundaries. And that also includes different cultures, et cetera. And I'm always interested in actually the opposite in what I can make connections. So what 50 and I have in common, not what we have that's different about us. You know, it's obvious what we have different about us.

But what we have in common is a way of thinking about the world that is very strategic. I learned from him that being able to overcome fear is the source of his power. And I've always been someone who's tried to experiment with risk and getting over any kind of fear that I had. So we connected on this higher level, the level of ideas to go back to what we were talking before. And I thought, how exciting to get away from all the bullshit of the categories of, you know, you write a book about this, and you're not supposed to meet these kinds of people. Let's get rid of all those walls. Let's put our two brains together, our two lives together, and write a book about something that's very powerful and timeless, which is the power of overcoming all of your different fears in life. It was one of the greatest experiences I've ever been through because for six months, I was immersed in his world. I went to Southside Queens where he grew up. I met the people that he was dealing drugs with, with his oldest friend, the house he grew up in. I went to his house in Connecticut, which used to be Mike Tyson's house, a really strange house. It's more like a hotel, very interesting, very weird.

I hung out with him in New York and all of his businesses. I went to Las Vegas with him and went to various meetings. And then I went to a party at Floyd Mayweather Jr.'s house with 50 of his entourage. It was like a mad adventure. You know, it was fantastic. It was one of the highlights of my life. So hopefully the book that came out of it, people appreciate it because I think it's a very good book. As I hear that story, one of the things that immediately jumps to mind is that so many people from his life or kind of where he came from, he claims that they already were implementing some of the things that he read in the 48 Laws of Power.

They just didn't have, I think he says, the technical definitions of them or the technical terminology, but they were already naturally doing that, which begs the question, how much of kind of the street culture that some of the folks from the hip hop community come from was just nurture versus nature? How much is it they just learned because they saw other people doing certain things and they picked it up and it was human nature and naturally they end up in the same place as you having written the book and studied it? versus no, there is some innate component to it that maybe isn't so easy to identify until you really study it and understand kind of how this stuff comes together. Well, there are two things. There's being a hustler on the streets and having kind of a feral sense, a wild sense of what people are like and the dangers and risks involved. But the question I always ask in writing the book is, why was 50 different from the other thousands of kids that he grew up with? why did he turn into this mega success whereas a lot of his friends ended up either dead or in prison or in very low paid jobs and so you can have street smarts you can be a hustler but there's a limit to the game and it's a limit to the game of life in America where you know you

don't have opportunities that I had going to university etc and so you kind of hit a wall with all of that and when I noticed talking with through years because I've met many hip-hop artists since 50 I've hung out with Drake recently I've been friends with Jeezy and many others is that all the street experiences in the world will not prepare you for the dangerous games that go on in the business world right so Hollywood I experienced firsthand I worked in it is a very Machiavellian environment. But the music industry is even more Machiavellian. So you, as a musician, as an African-American artist, you create this music that's hugely popular, but you don't own it. Some large label, Interscope or Columbia Records owns your material and they'll discard

you in a minute, you know, once they're no longer interested in you. Your careers, your potential for power are very limited and so people in the hip-hop world in the late 90s a lot of african americans were starting to become managers of their own company people like chris leidy who started violator and they realized that they had to kind of think on a new level now all of their street and hustling intelligence will not prepare them for this very shark infested environment they're in, where people will smile. They say, well, I love your work. You're fantastic. But then behind closed doors, they're stabbing you in their back. They're sabotaging you. They never had to really deal with that because on the streets, people could be sabotaging and

backstabbing, but pretty much you knew where people were coming from and you knew the bad apples. Here, people were smiling. You never could see who the really dangerous types were. So reading my book was very helpful for them. So they knew, all right, always say less than necessary. Okay, when I go into a meeting, 50 told me that this was a law that was extremely important for him. You go into a meeting, you don't sit there and talk and blab and say what's ever in your mind, because that makes you look weak and you're probably going to say something stupid. Just be in control of yourself. Just say, uh-huh, okay, yeah, maybe, all right, I'll see. And that instantly gives you an aura of power, right? So these little kind of things that I

wrote about sort of they had it in their heads about the street smarts the hustling game in a very kind of instinctual way which is can be very powerful but now this kind of made it on another level more on something that they could think and intellectualize and make part of their own daily awareness and actually have some practical value on it so you know there are i've seen people in business who have that kind of hustling mentality, African-American and white, et cetera. And it's good. It's a very important skill, but it's never enough. You need to be able to think on a higher level and to extrapolate certain rules and laws that govern these different businesses. It's very obvious what 50 learned from you and how he was able to implement that. And I think

he gives you a lot of credit for uh kind of helping him in the business world what would you say you learned from him throughout the entire process is there one or two lessons that you took away uh from that entire experience spending with him kind of going from parties to business events to his house where he grew up etc well as i said we kind of aligned in a very interesting way but there were things that i learned so as you as i said earlier i'm somebody who always thought i was kind of fearless so you know i've done things that are like looking back on i don't think i'd ever do again. You know, when I was 18 years old, my friend and I, we drove around the country completely on our own and had all these really weird experiences. I did every imaginable drug

that you could take. I spent eight of my 20s wandering around Europe with a backpack, working like 20 different jobs in all these different cities. I took tons of risks. I like taking risks. But when I met 50, I suddenly realized, man, Robert, you're actually a very fearful person compared to him he literally i saw him once and i wrote we wrote about it in the 50th law is he was he had a uh a single that was coming out in in like a record that was going to drop in september and a single that was coming out in august and they were going to kind of debut on this radio show in in new york and then it got leaked on the internet and people had heard it before it got released and his managers and his team were freaking out because this would the

record label be upset the artist that he did it with would be really upset it's going to create a mess they were running around like you know totally in a panic state and here he was completely completely calm, completely in the moment, like a Zen master. And he goes, all right, I'm not going to try and imitate him because I can't, but here's what we're going to do. Listen up. They all got very quiet. And he said, we're going to make this work for us. And he proceeded, they were watching him. He took down the large screen TV from the wall and he smashed it on the ground while they were filming this. And then he took his phone and he threw it against the wall and smashed that as well and then he like hit the table and did a

few other things that created some damage and they were all watching him wide-eyed because it was clearly he was acting he wasn't angry they knew he wasn't angry he said now we're going to create this meme on on the internet that 50 blew up when he heard this news he was so upset that heads were going to roll and we're going to use this to get more and more attention on the internet because he understood that you had to be kind of extreme to get attention and create a story, create something viral. And through that, he would control the process and make sure that the single would now get talked about, that people were going to watch it. And even though it spoiled the rollout, it actually made it very controversial. People were talking about it and it made it even

more successful, which is what we talk about in that book called Turning Shit Into Sugar. And I go, I could never do that. I wouldn't have that kind of calmness. I would get all emotional and react. And it taught me that I need to become a little more detached from my own emotional responses. I need a little more control of who I am. I'd like to be able to do that in a stressful situation. I was envious of him, I thought, because I've been in stressful situations before.

and I find I get caught up in people's panicky emotions etc and I'm something I still work on to this day but the ability to step back and not get upset and turn a possible negative into something positive I thought was immensely powerful and I was very envious I also learned a lot about him as a seducer I heard him on the telephone you know I wrote a book on the called The Art of Seduction. And believe it or not, I thought I was a pretty good seducer when I was in my 20s, when I was a young man living in Europe, you know, young and excited. But man, 50 was on another level. I heard him on these phone calls with these female celebrities, etc. He was so charming, so smooth, you know, so in the moment. He even seduced my mother, you know, who has

nothing to do with hip-hop she's like the polar opposite and so something about his calm energy I found immensely powerful and I was very envious of it I wish I'd had it and that calm energy to be honest with you comes from the fact that he was shot nine times from right point blank range right here through his side of his head into his mouth and came this close to dying and once you've experienced that what's going to phase you nothing in life's going to phase you so that's sort of the source of that power, but I've always wanted to be able to tap into it myself. That's an amazing story. The last thing I want to ask about 50 Cent is you've referenced him as kind of Machiavelli's example of a new prince. Describe the concept of new prince and why you

think he fits it. Well, you know, you have old princes, people who've kind of inherited their power in their situation. People who have privilege, who come from a wealthy or well-to-do family, they're sent to Yale, Harvard, the greatest business schools, et cetera. They have this kind of look on their face. They sort of, we're talking about non-verbal communication. I can always pick them out of a crowd. Yeah, that's an old prince. That's somebody who grew up with everything on their side, right? And they're very limited because they're rooted in the past, they're rooted in their comforts, in their security, and they become very conservative because they want to hold on to the privileges that they already have. And the new prince to Machiavelli is somebody

who rises up from the lower classes, who rises up without any of those little things that come with privilege right who has energy he calls it vir which is the latin word for power um you know literally related to the word virile this is this kind of gendered thing this kind of masculine energy and this person rises up from the bottom they're not tied to the past they're completely in the moment they see what the old princes can't see that things are changing the new that an energy is waiting to be exploited that there are new means of communication new technologies new ways of acting in the world and they sweep away all the bullshit and all the privilege that the old princes have and they create what machiavelli calls a new order right a new order

a new way of doing things the old ways and means are gone this is to him the source of of richness and culture. It's the new princes that rise up from the bottom that kind of make the soil fertile again. Things can grow and the culture can change and adapt. Well, 50 is sort of epitomizes that. And the way that he epitomized it is he didn't come up with all of that baggage that I'm talking about. It's in the early 2000s. The world is so exciting and weird to him. He grew up in the worst circumstances you could have in america you know his mom dead when he was at the age of very early age uh killed she was a drug dealer raised by his grandmother no supervision dealing drugs on the streets at the age of nine and i went and visited his neighborhood south side queens and man it was

an eye-opener and it was a lot worse from the time that he was growing up in okay so you know he he He rises up in this world. So now he's got all this power, this money, and it's like he's in a candy store. This is incredible. And he's seeing things that all the old white guys in the music industry don't understand. He's seeing that for an artist, you've got to create your own business. You can't just become a rap artist because that's to have no power in this world because the record label or even the audience will get rid of you after a couple of years.

You need to become a business person. You just start your own clothing line. You just start your own book line. You need to start merchandise, et cetera. He was in the forefront of that, you know, deals with smart water, et cetera. And he was open to everything. And he was particularly open to what was going on with new technology. He was one of the first rappers to really, really grab onto the Internet and create like web spaces, Internet spaces to sell his music with on. So that's the power of a new prince. They're not tied down by all of the rituals and traditions of the old world, and they create new traditions, a new world. And so that's why I called 50 a quintessential new prince. Yeah, it makes so much sense. Another person in your life that's fascinating that you interacted with is Ryan Holiday. He was an apprentice for you for a number of years. Talk to me about what did you see in Ryan, who's now gone on to have a great career as an author so early on? Why spend your time to teach him as your apprentice?

Well, Ryan has violated law number one of the 48 laws, never outshine the master. He's completely outshone me. I'm now living in his shadow. It's Ryan's world. Excuse me. But Ryan was like 19 years old, if you can believe it, when he first approached me back in 2006, I think, somewhere like that. We had a lunch, a very weird lunch. You can imagine that that lunch was Tucker Max and Neil Strauss and me and Ryan.

You know, that's a weird mix of people, if I remember it correctly. And anyway, Ryan was very eager and he was a very big fan of my books. And he wanted to, you know, see if there was some kind of something we could do where he could do research for me. The time I was finishing up my war book and I was getting ready to do the 50 book. And I never really had had anybody help me on my books before. But there was something about him that I probably sensed at that time, hopefully, if I can give myself credit for something, where I could sense that he was, first of all, very smart,

that he was very eager, and that he had good character. Now, I have often been wrong in those judgments before with people. But for something I detected in mine was actually correct. And I said, sure, I'll try you out. And because I wasn't totally convinced. And I gave him kind of a test on the research for the book. And he did a good job. He did it on time, which is important.

He didn't, I gave him a few days. It didn't take weeks or months. And then I read what he had. It was good, but it wasn't great. So I gave him criticism. of them, I said, look, this isn't bad, but really what I, you have to think on this other level. You know, when I'm looking for stories for my books, they have to be something that's very entertaining, but also has a lesson. That's kind of a high bar and you were slightly missing that.

And most time you tell people that, and this has been my experience since, they kind of wither up like an ice cube in the sun. They just kind of melt and they get all whiny and insecure. You can see it in their body language they're pretending that they go okay okay you can tell from their non-verbal communication that they're upset they're insecure you like criticizing i thought it was so great ryan was the opposite he was fine he took it and he actually kind of enjoyed the criticism you know go wow this is amazing i can actually have somebody here or i can beat up a little bit and he's going to enjoy it and he's going to take it to a higher level from that moment on, there was no looking back. This guy's going to work for me. And we kind of, he kept

learning from the process, which was really important to me. In other words, he didn't kind of take one idea I had about what I told you about stories and just kind of glom onto that and repeat it, which is what I get with a lot of researchers and assistants. He became creative and he kept thinking, well, how can I be more of what Robert wants? And how can I listen to him? And, you know, But finding somebody like that, who's intelligent, who's smart, who's got a good character, is like finding a piece of gold. It's a rare opportunity in life. And I remember very clearly, I had a Wikipedia page in which there was some nasty things that were on it. And I said, and I don't think I even asked him.

I think he just did it on his own. He completely fixed my Wikipedia page. And for an old guy like me, I was like, whoa, this guy's like a magician. He can go in there and he can fix a Wikipedia page for me. and at the time i was working at american apparel i was on the board of directors for the company um because i was kind of friends with the ceo dove charney and dove was complaining about his wikipedia page and i said i've got the man for you this guy's gonna fix your wikipedia page he's like a magician he did it and like me dove was like

totally impressed. He hired Ryan. Ryan became like a marketing executive at the age of like 22 or so and quickly rose up in the ranks at American Apparel. And so he's got a kind of ambition that's a positive ambition, right? A lot of people in this world, particularly young people who are ambitious, they're very egocentric. It's all about themselves. I have an agenda. I want to get something out of this. I want credit. I want attention. I want people to notice me. I'm in a hurry to make a lot of money and have power. Now, Ryan is an extremely ambitious person. He was in a hurry to have success in his writing and to make money. But he wasn't like this ego-driven person, which is very true considering he wrote a book called Ego is the Enemy.

he could learn he could take criticism and so you mix ambition with that kind of character where the spirit is open not closed where you want to learn where you can take criticism where you can handle stress and man you're going to rise to the top and you've combined that with energy and with somebody who's got a very interesting mind like he does you know the sky's the limit he's going to outshine the master one of these days and he already has so ryan's one of the great things has happened to me in my life, I have to say. That is a fantastic story. You spend an incredible amount of time either as an advisor, a friend, or with business relationships with some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, investors, musicians, celebrities, athletes, etc. What are

some of the takeaways that you've had from those experiences? Are there one or two common traits that you see in these individuals who have all reached great degrees of success that maybe you haven't covered in the books or things that over the last couple of years kind of stand out in your mind? Well, you know, it's one thing to sit in my office by myself reading books about mostly dead people and then writing books, you know, about them. You know, that's easy, right? But you imagine being an athlete on a pro basketball team or an entertainer or an actor or a CEO, the stress is much different. It's on a much different level. You're having to, you know, I'm writing in a book, theoretical stuff. You're in the actual laboratory dealing with mean, nasty,

egocentric, agenda-driven people in real time, not through books with dead people. So I have to be very admiring of them. And I have to be very forgiving of them as well, because they come to me with problems, right? So people don't come to me full of themselves and going, you know, Robert, you know i'm so great don't admire me they say there's a little bit of humility they're like i fucked up i hired this person and they're terrible the manager of this general manager of this team they're saying all kinds of nasty things behind my back trying to ruin my reputation on the internet i wasn't expecting it i was naive help me and so i have to kind of tone it down and realize that that is something that i would definitely be happening to me as well because

It's one thing to talk about this in a book. It's another thing to have to live this in a day-to-day life, deal with the stress and the pressures of having that amount of attention and celebrity. But the other thing is, is that most people nowadays have, who rise to the top, like an Elon Musk, have very good technical skill. They understand business or finance or sports

or whatever their business is, but they don't understand people. They have a blind spot, right? We all have that blind spot, even I do, and I admit that I've misjudged people's character, even me who's written books about how to judge people's character. I still make mistakes, but this is their blind spot because they haven't spent years observing people like I have. They haven't spent years kind of seeing what's behind the mask that people have.

And imagine that you're suddenly somebody who's extremely powerful and successful in this world, right? And it's almost overnight. And everyone around you is saying, man, 50, that's the best idea. You're fantastic. You're wonderful. You know, they're doing all the kind of sycophantic things that people do in any kind of inner circle, right? and if you're not smart if you don't see through that it goes to your head it's like a drug and you go yeah i am great yeah my ideas are perfect yeah i know everything yeah it's true

that i'm i'm genius yeah okay and then you start losing contact touch with reality and you start saying and doing things that actually are alienating people and you get in trouble and so a lot of these times i have to kind of people bring people back down to earth i have to kind of help be the critical voice and say no those ideas aren't very good actually you've been listening to the wrong people they're saying yes yes yes but in their mind they're going no no no i'm telling you no no no and it's real i'm not going to bullshit you i'm not going to feed you what you want to hear a lot of times people come to me they want to hear what they already wanted to hear and i'm not giving it to them and then most of the time they're grateful sometimes they

go and they run away and i never hear from them again but that's fine right but the other thing is is that what separates to me a person of power from someone who's got limitless potential for power is are they willing to listen are they willing to change are they willing to adapt that's what happens with like the new prince or someone like 50 or someone like ryan holiday you don't come to me with preconceived notions of what's great what's good how to deal with people had what's said you're open to some new ideas you're open to some critical thinking to some criticism about you and that is what makes a great leader you know and this is something that comes strictly from Machiavelli himself he said a lot of people rise to power based on one single quality

it could be extreme extreme aggression where they intimidate everybody it could be great persuasive powers, where they're just the best order in the world and have incredible sensitivity to psychology. They get to the top because the times are right for that aggressive person or that persuasive person. And then the times start to change as they inevitably do. And they keep being aggressive. They keep being soft and persuasive and seductive. And the times change and it doesn't work anymore. And they're destroyed by that. They go from up here to down here. It's an incredible downfall. And he says, the person who can adapt, who can change their character, who can go from being aggressive to being soft when it's necessary, that is a person of power

who has no limits. And so I tell that to people and hopefully they listen to me, but that's sort of the main takeaways I have from my consulting work. It's a timeless principle of humans are incredibly adaptable. Another thing that you talk about is how individuals' uniqueness is a source of their power. How do you usually talk through with folks to figure out what their uniqueness is? Uniqueness is something that obviously each individual can either pursue a process or somehow think through to identify what is that power that they have. Is there any tips or tricks that you have there for people listening in terms of how they can identify what their uniqueness is? Well, I wrote a whole book on it. So it's, you know, if you give me like four hours, I'll give you the best answer. But trying to condense that down. The first thing you have to realize is you have to come to the mountain. You have to get down on your hands and knees and go, being unique, being weird, being different is my source of power.

Most people pay lip service to that, or they don't, but they don't really believe it. They don't really understand it. So I try to explain why that is your source of power, okay? And I point out, look at those people who are successful in the world who you may admire, artists, people like an Elon Musk, people like a 50 Cent, people like a Jay-Z, et cetera. There's only one of a kind.

They're different. There's nobody else like them in this world. They're truly weird. They're truly unique, right? Okay. They didn't try and become like everybody else. If you become like everybody else, then there's no power in it, right? Because you've just imitated what the trends are. There's a million other people out there like you on Instagram and social media. So why you? What makes you different? What makes you weird? What makes you strange is your source of power right it's your kryptonite etc and so i explain also why you are unique i explain the genetic component how your dna has marked you as unique and why

your experiences in this world from the age of two or three and on and your parents is unique there's nobody else ever in the history of the world that will be like you or will ever be like you. So why run away from that? Running away from that is cowardly and it's stupid and it's counterproductive, okay? And I drum that into people. I drum into the idea, the desire to mine that uniqueness. That's got to be step number one, because if you don't want it, you're never going to get it, right? And you have to want it with a kind of a desperation, right? So I knew, fortunately for me at a young age, that I wanted to be a writer. I couldn't figure out what I wanted to write but that's what it was and when people tried to push me away from that like

sometimes my parents or my peers people early in my career I get so fucking angry no way man this is what I'm doing you can go you can go whatever do whatever you hell you want to do but I'm going to be a writer get the hell out of it don't tell me what to do with my life it's my life that's because I knew what it was and it engaged me emotionally so I could put up with people's criticism i could put up with the years of failure etc because i was on a mission right i want other people to have that feeling i don't want it just to be me i want everybody to have that feeling okay so you connect emotionally to it that's step number one if you never go there forget about it won't happen right number two is what is that uniqueness well it's a process so you tend to

think in these simple terms, you tend to think of, oh, I wake up one day, I'm going to be a writer, I'm going to write books, I'm going to be a research scientist in this particular field, I'm going to be a great musician or better. That's not how it works. It's a process. It's a process of discovery. It's hit and miss. You don't wake up one day and decide, this is what I'm going to do. It comes to you, right? Are you open to it? So I never knew that I would write books like the 48 Laws of Power. That never was my plan. But when the opportunity came to me and a man asked me for an idea of a book, and this is the idea that I improvised. I was open. I was ready. I had skill. And this is where my life took off. I never planned it that way.

So stop thinking that it's like the simple single idea that will come to you, that you've got to follow it like the straight line. It's an adventure. It's a journey you're on. It's a process. What is that process? It's discovering what you actually love, what makes you different from other people, what attracts you.

So if you're involved in, let's say, math, you're learning math when you're 10 years old, and it doesn't connect with you, you're kind of half learning. You kind of hate it, don't really like it. It's drudge work. You do it at home. but then there's like sports baseball or basketball football and man you're totally in there you're in it a hundred percent you love it it's there you don't have it's not tedious to

go to practice you like lifting weights and getting in shape you like the the exercises you have to do that's it things like that are it it's where your energy is engaged and you feel connected to it and you feel that things are easy and to a degree that's fun and if they're tedious you can push past it and so it doesn't have to be something that's like basketball which we're not all gifted for or writing it could be starting a business being an entrepreneur and i explain to people the kind of signs that that show at the early age in high school and in college because if you're an entrepreneur, theoretically, you really want to be thinking like that in your early 20s. Here are the signs of that. When you were young, you don't like working for other

people. You have a rebellious streak. You know, people telling you what to do. You think they know it all, but don't. They piss you off. You're an entrepreneur in training. You've got the DNA. Let's go with it. Let's discuss it. Let's figure out what kind of entrepreneur you should be, So there's signs of it. There's signs. And I suggest a book that I've suggested a million times to people on podcasts called Frames of Mind by Howard Gardner. And he tries to help me get rid of this idea that the only kind of intelligence in this world is intellectual book intelligence, which our culture unfortunately emphasizes far too much. there are other forms of intelligence there are pattern thinkings there's um there's like musical thinking there's sports and kinetic energy there's abstract visualization he explains it much better than i'm doing right now or there's social intelligence where your intelligence is geared towards other people you have one of these frames of mind you have that inclination that bend

for me it was clearly words and linguistics for others it'll be something else you at least have to know which one of those categories you fit in it's a process of knowing yourself the source of all human wisdom right so that you know what makes you different you know what value you know what you're potentially good at what you're not good at and i also flip the script and i say let's investigate what you hate right so hating working for other people hating group office politics which is my profile these are all signs right things that you dislike or you might be the opposite you might dislike being completely on your own and being alone you need to be around other people gotta learn that you gotta know who you are what makes you different once we figure

out we have a frame a general outline of what that could be what i call your life's task then we start mapping out a way to possibly begin this adventure that i'm talking about this journey and uh you know it depends on if you're 22 32 or 42 or even 52 at 52 the journey is going to be your options are a lot narrower at 22 the world is totally open so the earlier you start this process, the better. And I talk in my book, Mastery, which I go into this, I talk about Charles Darwin, the great scientist, and the particular path he took. And it literally was an adventure that took him to South America, where he discovered what he was actually great at, because he was a very mediocre student in England. His father and his famous family

were very disappointed in him. He suddenly discovered he goes on this grand adventure to South America. That's the paradigm. You're on an adventure. You may not go to South America, but it's an adventure. It's a journey. You're going to discover things about yourself, about other people, about what you love, about what you hate, but it's got to be exciting and you got to want it. And you have to realize that this is the source of your power. So that's, that's my 10 minute version of the four hour version. I should be. That's incredible. The last question that I have for you is around morality. And you've written a number of different books, many of them documenting your understanding or kind of the

product of your research as to how human nature works, how the laws of power work, and many others. If we look at something like the laws of power, there are things like selective honesty, keeping others in suspended terror, or posing as a friend while working as a spy. And I always think about morality is this weird question because most people can't explicitly define it in a math or science kind of confine. It is very much your morality versus somebody else's morality may be different. And so how do you think about the intersection of something that is much more qualitative than quantitative but still overlays with some of these concepts? Do you think about that at all? Or is it more so, hey, I'm documenting human nature and, you know, that's for somebody else to judge, you know, what's moral, what's not, what's the context of each individual situation? Well, in the 48 Laws of Power, it's a book that I call is basically amoral. And you can read that word wrong. It's not immoral, it's amoral. And I'm saying power can be used for good things. And clearly we have examples of that, like a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King or an Abraham Lincoln.

and power could be used for awful mean horrible things and there are plenty of examples in history of that so power is neutral it's like an instrument that you pick up like a knife that knife could be used for carving something out of wood something beautiful or be used for killing people so power isn't inherently evil it's not inherently good either it's how you use it right and my idea in the 48 laws of power my version of morality was here's this knowledge that's kind of kept as a secret about how to succeed in this world. It's something that elites and people in power have known but have never wanted to share.

And it irritated and frustrated me that these kind of laws that I observed in Hollywood, for instance, it was like we were living in this fairy tale. People would pretend that this Hollywood director-producer was all about doing great things, good things, noble things, liberal values, whereas in truth, they were power hungry and they would do maneuvers that were extremely bad or even downright evil, right? And I personally was on the other end of it, oftentimes, or I'd witness it. I would be the victim of it. And I was naive. And I'm going,

naivete and stupidity in this world could cause more damage than anything else. that most people in this world suffer from their naivete and so i wrote that book with a bit of irony involved because you mentioned these chapters that on the surface are actually downright diabolical i don't deny and you even left out the worst one of all crush your enemy totally the one everybody loves to quote um but a lot of it is keep your eyes open this is what the world is like. Don't be so naive. Don't go bumbling into the work world in your 20s thinking it's all about people cooperating and loving each other and being wonderful and just having a group hug. That's not the reality. You're going to get in trouble. People are going to crush you. They're

going to get you to do the work and they're going to take the credit. They're going to be selectively honest with you. They're going to pose as a friend and work as a spy. Open your eyes. Don't be so damn naive. Now, occasionally, a dark soul in this world will come to my book and will use it for those nefarious purposes. And I could be wrong. I could be deluding myself, but I always believe those people don't need the 48 laws of power. It's in their DNA. They're already sharks. They know maybe the book clarifies a little bit for them. And I feel sorry about that. But I wrote the book basically to open the doors up and let everybody see this knowledge, see this is how people in power operate. But in the laws of human nature, I do take a slightly more different spin

on it a little bit and i say the source for me of true someone who's truly good if you want to use that word which is not fine happy with contentment is their degree of self-awareness so the people who are the most evil the most dark the most sinister in this world are those who think that they are so good and so righteous and so full of conviction and they don't realize that they're actually the opposite. They're full of this dark energy. Their idea that they're so convinced of their rightness is actually making them do awful, awful things and hurting people. They have no self-awareness. They think they're angels and they're not. They're actually devils in disguise. And so you want to be aware. You want to be aware that you have dark tendencies.

you want to be aware that you are not different from the billions of humans who have ever lived you have envy envy is deeply embedded in human nature come to terms with it look at yourself and try to transform your envy into something better and i give tips on that in the book try and understand that you are irrational that you are letting your emotions get the better of you that you your convictions your ideas of rightness is actually your emotions telling you what's right you have confirmation bias etc etc you are not rational come to terms with that become rational you think that you're that you're so uh giving and interested in other people but you're actually very self-absorbed we all have a touch of narcissist in us some people are worse

than others clearly but you have a touch of it in it look at that narcissism that self-absorption and transform it into loving other people, to empathy. On and on and on I go. I go with aggression. Look at your own aggression. Look at your own shadow, your own dark side. Look at your own kind of purposeless, your aimlessness in life, how you're not really clear about what you want to do.

Look at your tendencies for feeling grandiose about the world, your conformity, your conformist. You think you're such a hot individual, But actually, you're just following all the trends. If you're not aware that you have these tendencies, you cannot begin to change yourself. You were not born a perfect, angelic creature. It's a work in progress. You have to work on yourself.

And the only way you can reach that goal is by being aware of who you are. And by being aware of who you are, being aware that you have some, perhaps all of these negative qualities, you can begin to work on them and change them and turn that around and become a truly good person in this world. So that's sort of my more later, older take on the subject, if you will. Robert, I've really enjoyed this conversation. What do you want your legacy to be? When it's all said and done, what do you hope that people, when they think of Robert Greene, they say what? Well, that, you know, hopefully years after I'm dead, books are still being read. And so I've made my books in that vein. I don't make my books timely. In other words, I'm not sitting here in my books writing about events in 2022, because by 2029, the world will be so different. People will be laughing at what Robert said about the year 2022.

I kind of create this time's vision of what I think is going on. Human nature going back hundreds of thousands of years. So I want my legacy to be, it's the year 2075. Robert's been dead and buried for 30, 40 years, whatever it is. I'm 23 years old. I pick up the 48-mile spark. Wow, this is true. This is relevant.

That's, to me, the ultimate form of power. i could have and if that's my legacy that's fantastic because what it'll mean is i touched upon something real because there's so much bullshit in this world there's so many books written there's so many people bloviating and filling the air with all their bad ideas and stupid ideas and there's so much of it and i get so tired of it and maybe i'm part of it i don't know i hope not i can't be 100 certain but if somebody says now this is something that kind of gets into the reality of something it's like a knife that goes cuts into my gut it's not bullshit it's not hot air there's something real and it opens my eyes and it changes how i think

if i have that effect 50 100 200 years from now and that's my legacy i'll be the happiest dead man in the world you know that won't that word won't have any meaning anymore but thinking about that is my mission in life and it kind of informs how i write a book so i hope that is sort of my my legacy that i had touched upon something very real and it stays relevant 100 years from now that's so good where can we send people to find you on the internet or find any of the seven books that you've written in the eighth one on the way um well the eighth one isn't out there yet so give me a little bit of time. It's in here right now. I have this very ancient website. It goes back hundreds of years. It's called powerseductionandwar.com. The and is spelled out. So

powerseductionandwar.com. It was a website we started back in like 2003 or 2004. And there you'll find links to my other books the 50th law mastery human nature and my new book the daily laws which is kind of similar to ryan holiday's daily stoic if you know that book anyway um you find links to all that you find links to my blogs that i used to write back in the day when people wrote blogs you know 13 years ago or something and then you'll find links to my instagram tiktok um twitter uh youtube everything all the other things that you possibly might be interested in so and then there's even an email address to write to me um i get a lot of emails i have to say and i do try and read all of them just don't be upset or pissed off if i don't respond because

it's hard for me sometimes i also can't type now so i still have a left hand that's kind of dead so please you know be be a little uh patient with me um but that's probably the best side side for reaching me awesome well robert thank you so much for your time uh i've learned a ton uh i think i speak for many many people i've learned a ton from your books i've learned a ton from this conversation and uh just keep doing what you're doing you are a uh an absolute treasure of information i think people really enjoy uh the time that you spend writing the books and also speaking in conversations like this. So anyone who has not read, frankly, all of the books,

but specifically, I think, 48 Laws of Power or The Laws of Human Nature, I highly suggest going and checking those out and follow Robert online. And we will definitely do this again in the future when you come out with your eighth book. It will quickly make its way from your brain to the paper and then published, I have no doubt.

I hope so, I hope so. That's my fondest wish right now. All right, we'll talk soon. Thanks so much. Thank you so much for Anthony. I really enjoyed it. It was great. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode.

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