Hello, friends. Welcome back to the show.
My guest today is Robert Greene.
He's an author and a historian.
Robert is one of the most legendary writers in the world on human nature, and today, we get to go through some of my favorite lessons from him on seduction, confidence, happiness, masculinity, and Niccolo Machiavelli.
Expect to learn the biggest problems with modern philosophy, why acquiring knowledge and skills are always the most important thing, why you must protect your reputation at all costs, why you are so often your own worst enemy, which lessons from Machiavelli most people miss, advice for young men wanting to
make it in the world, and much more.
This was an awful long time coming.
This episode we were supposed to do last year and then we couldn't and we rearranged.
I took an entire 12 months to get Robert back on and the guy's a hero.
He has this real no -nonsense approach, which I very much respect.
And yeah, he's one of the greats.
He's one of the all -time greats.
This is so much fun.
I really, really hope that you enjoy it.
But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Robert Greene.
Robert Greene, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me, Chris.
My pleasure. We finally get to meet after all these years.
The first time that you came on the show was episode 78.
What are you at now?
Five years ago, I'm on 820.
The show is 400 times bigger than it was when you first came on, so I wanted to say thank you.
Only 400? Come on, Chris.
I'm disappointed. I know.
I really did try to impress you.
I wanted to hit that 500 number before we got to meet.
That's pretty good.
But I wanted to say thank you for coming on very early.
You're very welcome.
You're very welcome.
I also wanted to say thank you for sending me the special edition of 48 Laws of Power, which is the coolest book for the people that haven't seen it.
It's leather bound, gold embossed 48 on the front.
And then as you look at the side, it's gold, just like a gold boundary on the outside of the paper.
But as you splay the pages out in one direction into your face, as you splay the pages out in the other, it's that famous portrait of Machiavelli.
So cool. So cool. I can't really totally take credit for my partner on the first three books.
He did it. He's a brilliant designer.
He consulted me on it, but he's really the genius behind that.
It's the sort of thing you can't not take a photo of.
Yeah. It's the most basic technology as well in stuff that's been around.
You used to get it in cereal boxes to look at things from different angles to be able to make it work.
But no one's ever applied it to a book before.
Well, he he saw he's a very strange guy.
He's Dutch. He's very interesting.
We had a good combination.
We had a good kind of rapport.
And he researched and he found in the 18th century, this was the techniques that they would use on the edging of books where you would flip through it and you would see an image.
And he studied how they did it.
And then he was able to replicate it through digital technology.
But that's pretty genius.
That's pretty interesting.
So who is that guy?
His name is Joost Elphors.
You'll see his name on my books, the Joost Elphors book, my first three books.
And he's the one that if it weren't for him, I wouldn't be here.
I'd either be dead or I'd be still working in Hollywood and probably be dead anyway.
He discovered me. I've told the story many times, but he basically gave me my first break and he subsidized me while I wrote The 48 Laws of Power.
He produced it. He designed it.
Together we designed it.
But so I have a lot to owe him.
And he's still involved.
Yes. He designed the cover of The Daily Laws.
And I'm hoping he'll...
Yeah, sure, we're still together, yeah.
What do you think is the problem with modern philosophy?
Where did we go wrong?
Well, I mean, it's a huge subject and, you know, there are lots of different aspects of philosophy.
But like everything, it's so much in our culture, it's kind of lost its soul.
So, you know, years ago, we kind of somewhere went off on a wrong path.
We lost faith in just our thinking in our brains, in our minds, right?
So Socrates or Nietzsche or, you know, skipping here 2 ,000 years, they didn't sit there and go through scientific journals about the origins of consciousness and do studies and data and mathematical formulas to figure out how the brain works or what makes a human being.
I'm doing a lot of things on Socrates right now because I'm writing about him.
The stuff he's saying about is absolutely brilliant.
It's mind -blowing. And it's incredibly relevant to our world today.
But if he were around today, people would laugh at him.
Oh, it's all speculative, right?
It's just subjective.
Where's the data? Where's the hard facts there?
Psychology is even more infected with this kind of mindset, but philosophy is like that.
I can't read that stuff.
You know, for me philosophy, it has to have like a direct connection to my life, to living, to my soul, to my day -to -day affairs, to what I have to think about when I wake up in the morning kind of thing, you know?
It can't be all about this ethereal abstract stuff.
I can't get my brain around it.
I want to know how to live.
I want to know how to think.
I want to know how to breathe.
I do a lot of heavily into Zen meditation and Zen philosophy.
To me, that is like one of the most beautiful forms of philosophy.
And it's all about how to ground your day -to -day life.
And you can say Zen, it can be described as the ultimate realistic philosophy, the realist philosophy.
It's taking you back to what is truly real, okay?
Yes, the language can be very strange.
Like they try and present these riddles to you to alter your consciousness.
But the essence of it is very relatable.
And they want you to be able to take their philosophy and live in your day -to -day life and not have a separation between the two.
So I can't read that stuff that goes on now.
I just can't read it.
I mean, there's some people whose things I like, but they're usually not considered philosophers.
One of my favorite writers that nobody will have ever heard of—he died a couple years ago, so he's sort of contemporary—is a man named Roberto Colosso.
He writes the most fantastic books I would consider it philosophy.
He's Italian. He ran a publishing company for many years.
But he writes books about the ancient world, and he mixes it in with stories and anecdotes.
He has a book called The Ruins of Kosh that's just one of the most brilliant books you'll ever read.
That, to me, is philosophy because it stirs my soul.
It makes me think. It makes me imagine the world.
It makes me rethink about the life I'm living.
But so many of this stuff, other stuff, I just can't read.
I'm not saying it's their fault.
Maybe it's my own fault.
But for me, it's kind of gone down this wrong path down a rabbit hole.
Well, if you're having to work that hard to resonate with the entire world's worth of philosophy, I don't know.
I feel like it's probably not a you problem if there's a lot of—you're trying your hard, you're opening yourself up, and you're only finding small glimmers here and there.
Yeah, I mean, so there's a philosopher—you have to excuse me, my memory is not what it used to be.
Maybe his name will come to me.
He wrote an essay, a very famous essay, about what is it like to be a bat.
I thought it was great.
I was so excited about it, and I did.
I bought the book that it's in.
He's a very famous philosopher.
He's actually quite smart and very interesting.
But the essay is—you're looking up right now— I am.
Thomas Nagel. Yes, Thomas Nagel.
He's written some very interesting books, but they don't grab me the way that Nietzsche or Schopenhauer or Heidegger even grabs me.
But his idea about what it's like to be a bat, he's trying to essentially say, we can't know, because that kind of consciousness is so different from ours.
It's echolocation. We have nothing to compare it to.
Therefore, get out of your arrogance.
You can't know it. And a part of me understands it, but a part of me disagrees with it.
Because I wrote a chapter in my new book about animal consciousness and how we can put ourselves inside even something as strange as a bat or a spider.
And I wrote a lot about how spiders think.
Yes, there are limits to it, and that's the point of his essay.
But so many times I find, particularly now in the world today, particularly in academia, is the necessity to say you're against something.
You know, he's reacting against people who put too much empathy and anthropomorphized things.
OK, so I'm going to write a book that says the opposite, and I'll get attention.
I'll get in the New York Times review of books and people will listen because I'm standing against something.
So academia is all about like having some novel stance, usually from some cultural perspective, whereas the truth is more rounded.
It's not so hard set, just reacting and going the opposite direction.
You're not arriving at the truth.
So maybe it's a combination of the two.
Maybe there are limits to what we can know about a bat and how it thinks.
But we have an amazing capacity to put ourselves inside of other beings and to kind of get a feel, not an intellectual sense, but a feel of what it might be like to echoing, echoing.
You know, we can get a feel for that.
And I talk about spiders and how their form of intelligence is all about vibrations.
They feel in their eight legs, in the bottom of their eight legs, they feel the wind blowing.
They feel the vibrations on the web.
They feel the weather.
They know a storm is coming.
They can sense a creature that has landed on their web just by the vibrations.
And elephants have a very similar power in their feet.
They can sense an earthquake from 10 miles away.
But we can sense that because we can feel vibrations.
And, you know, I can't really know a spider, but spiders are intelligent.
And the idea that they're intelligent and that they think is a radical idea.
So I don't know, I'm going off on some tangent here, but I'm trying to answer your question.
But there's a spirit of play in that, which is fun, I think.
And I know you mean there is a sort of this odd, highly scrutinist, skeptical.
There's a lack of play.
You said it perfectly.
Thank you. You hit the nail right there.
I learned something else that you taught, Billy Oppenheimer, that said, above all else, focus on acquiring knowledge and skills.
Knowledge and skills are like gold, a currency you will transform into something more valuable than you can imagine.
It's similar to one of your tweets, which is eventually the time that was not spent on learning skills will catch up to you and the fall will be painful.
What's that mean? Well, you know, life can be kind of difficult, right?
You don't really know sometimes where you're headed.
Nobody kind of gives you any kind of guidance in this world, right?
And they don't tell you when you graduate college, go ahead, go, Robert, you go study this.
This is what, you know, this is what your brain is suited for, et cetera, et cetera.
You have to find your own path.
And so for me personally, I spent years in the wilderness.
So I'm going to give this a personal spin because I think that helps a little bit because I can answer it inside my own body here.
So I know I want to be a writer, but I can't figure out what the hell I'm going to write.
So I leave college and I try journalism because I have to make a living.
I have to support myself and I don't really like it.
It doesn't suit me.
He writes an article and then a week later it's forgotten.
Nobody reads about it.
And as somebody who studied ancient Greek and Latin in college, I think in terms of thousands of years and not in three days or a week, you know, I want something that I write to be read in 3024, you know, sorry.
So it wasn't a good fit.
So I quit. I wander around Europe trying to write a novel with my backpack.
I live in London. I live in Paris.
I lived in Ireland.
I lived in Greece. You name.
I taught English in Spain trying to write a novel.
I had no discipline.
I couldn't do it. It didn't work.
And I get starting to get depressed.
Then my dad isn't well.
I said, I'm going to move back to Los Angeles.
Hey, I'm going to get a job in Hollywood.
Right. That I'll make.
I'll make a ton of money and I'll be writing and, you know, et cetera.
How glamorous, how sexy, you know, movie star starlets on my knocking on my door, et cetera.
Okay. Terrible, terrible fit because I'm a control freak.
I don't like people coming in and changing everything I say, and I don't like conforming and I don't like compromise.
Sorry, that's bad thing about me, but I didn't want to have to lower my, my I standards to, to what they were asking me to do is a terrible fit.
All right. Now comes the chance.
I meet this man, Yost Delfer, as we mentioned earlier in Italy, and he says, he asked me if I have any ideas for books and I kind of improvised the 48 loss of power.
The point of my long -winded story here is I had spent 18 years or so acquiring high levels of skill in writing.
Okay. I could, I learned in journalism how to write under a deadline, under pressure, how to make it dramatic, how to make the opening sentence exciting enough to make you read all further.
Trying to write novels taught me about creating stories, which is a huge part of my writing.
Working in Hollywood, I learned how to research, which is a huge element.
And then the theatrical element, making things dramatic, also story.
Okay. All of that time, slowly by slowly, brick by brick, I had developed real level skill.
So when it came time to write the 48 loss of power, I could do it.
I had learned all this discipline.
I had learned how to write under a deadline.
I learned how to make things entertaining, the whole, the whole bag.
Okay. And so the world opened up for me.
Prior to that time, I was miserable.
Really, really was.
I'm going to have good moments too.
You're young. You're always happy when you're young.
But a lot of times I was miserable and I didn't know why, but I was acquiring skills, not even aware of it.
And so the reason I write that is when you develop that skill, when you're serious about it, because I was very serious about writing, you change your brain, you rewire your brain.
It's like, and this is a remarkable power of the human brain that people don't realize, something I'm also writing in my new book.
This one writer, his name is Schwartz, I believe.
He's a UCLA neuroscientist.
He wanted to help people who had OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder.
And usually it's drugs and it's talking therapy.
He wanted to find out something more effective.
And he found that through certain strategies that he developed, that they could use in their life, that they would get over their disorder.
And the point isn't what the strategies were.
The point was he did brain scans.
And through the strategies that he gave them to do, which I can't remember right now, the brain scans show that they changed the brain.
And his point was through thinking, through developing skills, you literally change matter.
You change your brain.
So something non -material like thoughts can literally change material things like the wiring of your brain.
You learn skills, you're changing your brain, you're changing the matter of your brain.
Things are connecting that weren't connected before.
And slowly, if you do it, if you're serious enough, a point will be reached like it was reached in my life, where either you will start a business or someone will ask you to do something like write a book or make a film, and the world will open up for you.
And you'll be able to do it because you have that, you've laid the ground, you've laid the soil, everything is there, it's rich.
And now something great, amazing will sprout up out of it.
When you have no talents, you have no skill, life is a series of endless confusion.
You hit this road, you go here, then something else, you go here, then you go here, you end up in a circle and you don't know where the hell you are.
When you've got skills, it's Zoom, you know where to go.
It's not Zoom, it's more like, put your head somewhere.
Yeah, it's not, I don't know for being filmed, but so yeah.
So that's my answer to your question.
Isn't it interesting that the accumulation of skills period at the time can be a little bit like being in the trenches?
You have no promise of glory, you don't know if this is even going to work.
You have no idea whether this is worth it.
And you don't even have the context of how the journalism with the novel, with the Hollywood, with the interpersonal skills, with the guy that you meet in Italy, with Germany, blah, blah, blah.
It's only in retrospect that you get to piece this entire arc together.
And I think it's one of the reasons why reserving judgment on whether or not the situation you were in right now is good or bad is probably a pretty good idea because you just don't know what's around the corner that you've been preparing for that you didn't even know existed.
Yes, but there are parameters to it.
It's not like you're totally, it's total mystery in the moment.
So going back to what bothers me about philosophy, we're so caught up in things that are rational, things that can be put into numbers, quantifiable, data, big data, AI, et cetera, et cetera.
But the human consciousness is more subtle than that, is more fine grained.
No numbers can actually approximate what human consciousness is capable of.
And what we have sometimes is we have an intuition about things in the moment.
So maybe in retrospect, I'm creating a story that didn't really exist back then.
But at the same time, I kind of knew the future.
I kind of knew that this would happen.
I had a feeling of fate.
It was always there.
It's weird. I know it sounds woo woo.
I'm sorry to say, but it's very real.
And I've studied millions of successful famous people, and a lot of them report the same thing.
Sometimes you don't realize it, but your body and your brain has a sense of even the future and of where you're headed, but you're not totally aware of it.
So I knew that I wanted to be a writer.
So if people don't know that they want to be a writer, they don't want to go into engineering, they'll never make those little connections that I was able to make.
And having that sense that you want to be a writer, that you want to make films, that you want to start a particular kind of business, you're interested in technology, creates a framework in your brain that kind of changes how you make decisions.
You're not totally conscious of it, but not everything in life you're totally conscious of.
Things are operating below the level.
So it's something, it's the chapter I'm writing right now about my sublime book.
There is something in you that is guiding you towards certain things, right?
Guided you towards podcasting.
I don't know your life, I don't know your biography before then, but something inched you towards that.
What is that? It's interesting to find out.
It's not all just chaos and random is what I'm trying to say.
That's beautiful, and I agree.
Do not be the court cynic.
The ability to express wonder and amazement and seem like you mean it is a rare and dying talent, but one still greatly valued.
Yeah, I mean, I can recall my own childhood, for instance, growing up here in Los Angeles.
I had a very vivid imagination, which I'm not unusual, like that most children do, but I was always inventing games.
I loved inventing sports games, games with when you rolled dice and you created this whole world.
I created war games, all these different things that my imagination was doing.
And then when I take walks and stuff, I was like seeing, I was thinking about the world.
I was going through all kinds of fantasies.
I was dreaming about the future, okay?
I was innocent, like children are supposed to be.
And in their innocence, I was opening up to the world and I was experiencing the world as it is, because the reality is we are born into a very, very strange and mysterious and wondrous world, which is the subject of my book, right?
You take everything for granted, but you don't realize that to be alive, the odds against you being Chris Williamson are absolutely astronomical.
To be around with all this technology where we were as humans 20 ,000 years ago, something you can't even begin to fathom.
And when you're a child, you ask these questions.
Albert Einstein said the same thing.
He said, genius is able to keep questioning to be that child, to keep wondering about things, right?
So your ability to wonder, to ask questions, to not feel like you know all the answers isn't a beautiful thing.
It's not just to make you more intelligent.
It also makes you happier.
So cynics start from a place where they know everything.
The world is just so rotten.
It's just everybody is out for power.
People accuse me of saying that, but it's not true.
Everyone's out for power.
Everyone's like, I'll tear your motive.
It's all just about these, you know, you're really not interested in other people.
Robert, you're interested in making money, right?
Cynicism reduces everything to this one level.
It has nothing to do with reality because reality is much richer and weirder and more mysterious than that.
So when you're a cynic, you're missing the beauty of life.
But also people don't like to be around cynics.
The court cynic is, to get back to your question, because yeah, people like maybe some sarcasm.
I don't deny that. But people want to feel that sense of innocence.
They want to feel excited.
They want to feel enthusiastic.
And if you're a Debbie Downer, if everything is like, oh, that's what's really going on here.
You're not really blah, blah, blah, blah.
People will be like, yeah, they'll be laughing at your joke, but eventually they're going to push you aside because they don't want to hear that kind of stuff.
Play and enthusiasm.
Play and enthusiasm again.
We're coming back to play.
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Yeah, I'm cultivating that sense.
Similar to another tweet you had, which I loved.
The stupidest people are always the ones who think they have the right answers.
Yeah, so getting back to my studies of the ancient world, which is the main part of me, one thing that always excited me was this concept of the ancient Greeks, that more harm is caused in this world by stupid, incompetent people than by evil people.
And there's a word in Greek called phronesis, which is a form of wisdom to use your title here, but it's a form of practical wisdom to be able to get things done, to navigate through life, navigate through people, to be balanced and get things done.
So what makes people stupid, and right now we have a lot of stupid people in this world.
There always have been stupid people because there are more people on the planet.
Exponentially, there are more stupid people on the planet.
What makes people stupid, and I'm sorry, I'm just going to tell it like it is, is their certainty that they have all the answers.
This is what's going on with our government.
This is what's wrong with this or that.
This is what people should be like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So you're narrowing your focus to this little tiny, little rail, something that you heard from somebody else.
It's not even your own stupid idea.
You absorbed it on the internet, whatever, and you're going down on this kind of monorail path.
Meanwhile, the world is all around you, and you're just going like, zoom, like that, because you're so certain you have the answer.
And when you have leaders, this is to get back to the Greek thing, when you have leaders who are so certain, they enter a country into a war that they haven't been thought out of.
And so the paradigm in ancient culture was the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta, the war that ended up kind of being the end of Athenian democracy and of their golden era.
Right? And it was the idea and Thucydides, one of the greatest writers who ever lived, wrote the history of the Peloponnesian war living at that time.
He was saying that people, the leaders thought, oh, this will be so easy.
And think of all the great things when we go and we take Sicily and we conquer that, the whole world will and the Sparta will be destroyed, right?
It wasn't thought through.
They were so certain of the answer that they didn't think of the parameters, right?
They didn't think really on a grand strategic level.
So people who are certain of things are very stupid.
And when they have power, they're very, very dangerous.
I'm not saying evil people aren't dangerous, but incompetent, stupid people who are so certain who haven't thought things through are just as dangerous as evil people.
I think there's far more stupid people than there are evil people as well.
Probably. Probably, yeah.
Yeah. It's very interesting to think about where the Venn diagram intersects for people who are always cynical and people who always have the right answer or who always know.
They go hand in hand.
Correct. Totally overlap, yeah.
Correct, yeah. So one of your fellow countrymen from 200 years ago, exactly 200 years ago, a gentleman named John Keats, a poet, came up with a concept called negative capability.
And negative capability, he wanted to answer the question, why is Shakespeare another one of your countrymen?
Why was Shakespeare so brilliant?
Well, his characters were so realistic because he made them as real human beings and what he could do was they weren't stick figures.
Shakespeare could think of a person and entertain two things about them at the same time.
They could be both evil but also have a strain of goodness inside of them.
They were complex. Human beings are complex.
And negative capability is the essence of being creative.
It means you can hold two thoughts in your head at the same time, two thoughts that apparently contradict each other, but you can entertain them and not grasp at one or the other.
No, past judgments immediately.
Yeah. So you're kind of able to deal with ambiguity and you're able to say life isn't that, it isn't that.
It's kind of both at the same time.
That is creativity, that is real thinking, you know?
I mean, I could go on and on about my ideas, about live ideas and dead ideas, but this is real live thinking.
I have been playing with an idea that's basically the same thing, just repurposed with a silly meme from me, which is a cognitive superposition.
So like how in physics...
Yes. And then when you decide you collapse the superposition down.
But that I try to, you know, think in superpositions as much as possible.
There's a very good book written about like that.
It's not perfect. It's a pretty good book called The Possibility Principle.
You can look that up.
He tries to apply those kind of ideas in physics to day -to -day life and psychology.
It is interesting. It's worth looking at.
So much depends on reputation.
Reputation is the cornerstone of power.
Through reputation alone, you can intimidate and win.
Once it slips, however, you are vulnerable and will be attacked on all sides.
Never let others define it for you.
Yeah. You know, so when I wrote The 48 Laws of Power, I tried to...
I've somebody through my whole life loves playing games.
I don't mean that in the abstract sense.
I mean literally like chess, backgammon, sports, poker, whatever.
And I like the cleanness of a game.
It's like you do this and you can win it.
But there's also a psychological element in it.
So particularly when you're playing poker and you're bluffing and you're...
I was fascinated by this.
It's a game of chance.
You don't really know what cards you're going to get.
But that fellow over there, he's been bluffing.
He bluffed before. I'm sure he did.
He's going to do it again, right?
So the psychology starts entering into the picture in a game of chance.
It's not game of chance.
There's skill, certainly skill involved, but a lot of it's chance.
And because he bluffed before and he's got that look in his eye, it could be a woman, I don't mean to generalize.
All right, I'm going to fold.
Okay. So you don't realize that so much of the game of power has nothing to do with data and you being a better person at something.
A lot of it is pure psychology and intimidating people and winning before you even enter into a battle.
So if you have a reputation, you carry it with you.
And the reputation doesn't have to be real.
Personally, I don't know how valid this is.
I have this reputation now of being this Machiavellian characters.
And so if Robert's five minutes late for a meeting, it means he's playing a game, even though it's probably just the traffic.
But my reputation now kind of put people a little bit on the heels, where it's not necessarily true about me, but it kind of goes ahead of me and it makes, it influences you.
And so it's an extra form of power.
So the idea you have to, the overall arching idea to pull this out of the specific is, power is pure psychology, pure psychology.
And what I mean by that is the CEO of a company, he doesn't get there based on, it's not like baseball, whereas balls and soccer, sorry, you probably don't even know.
I'm a Texas Rangers fan, I'll have you know.
Oh, okay, all right.
Well, it's not like baseball where balls, you have a good batting average or OPS.
All right, you're going to get in the lineup, they're going to bat you in the cleanup spot.
Okay, life isn't like that.
So the way somebody rises to the CEO, and I know because I was on the board of directors of a publicly traded company, it's not about metrics, it's not about things that they've actually done, it's about psychology, right?
People rise to positions of power because they know how to play the game and they know how to play the game of psychology, they know how to appear, they know how to play the optics, they know how to intimidate, they know how to say less than necessary, they know all the psychological little gambits.
And that's why I wrote the 48 Laws of Power.
It's kind of like, this is the game of life, the game of power.
The rules are a little bit nebulous.
But here's how you play, you play by mastering these little psychological bits.
One of them is your reputation.
I'm fascinated by reputation and credibility, especially given what I do now.
But my previous life I was a club promoter.
You were what? Club promoter, I ran nightclubs for a very long time.
Club promoter. What do we call that here?
It would still be, it would just be a promoter, it's called.
So marketing for nightclubs, essentially.
The guys stood on the front door with the guest list and the bands for the IP and all of the Hot Girls names.
And then after a while we owned a group of guys that did that and then we owned a group of guys that owned and you start to build up this company.
And in that, every single nightclub that you've ever been to is the same thing.
It's people getting drunk in a room to music.
It'll never be anything else.
You can dress this one up pink and give out inflatable flamingos on the door or this one's really cheap or this one's on a Wednesday and it's sort of naughty that you shouldn't be going out on a Wednesday.
Dress it up however you want.
It's people getting drunk in a room to music.
That's all it's ever going to be.
And what I realized from doing that was the power of reputation.
This isn't the reputation of a person, it's the reputation of a brand.
But if your company is known for always putting on good parties, then you get to benefit from that.
And what happens is when you have a reputation for putting on good parties, people come.
More people come. So you have better parties.
Yep, correct. So this is the sort of odd and this is the really important point.
Never let others define it for you and when you are vulnerable you'll be attacked on all sides because as it's going up, it does, it precedes you.
It continues to do work for you exponentially growing and growing.
But when you're starting to go down, even your best work will sometimes be derogated to be worse than it is.
So you have done something that is good but because of your reputation, you're a liar, you're a phony, you're a grifter, you're a shirley, you're a fake.
That's right. Yeah, credibility is the one thing that you should never sell because you cannot buy it back.
There is no return policy on your credibility.
And people are so, getting back to the word stupid, I mean...
It's a theme today.
They post things on social media when they're young and not realizing that five years later when they're trying to get a job at a law firm, they're like, you know, sure, they're doing incredibly ridiculous things on Instagram and that part of their reputation.
Everything you do is reflected through the social world, right?
Nothing is in isolation.
People are continually judging you.
So you have to be aware, you have to think before you post.
You have to think, how are people going to take this?
If I say this stupid, rude thing that comes right out of me because I don't control my tongue, it's going to ruin...
My one fault step will ruin your reputation.
There's a British MP who is receiving, on the receiving end of a tweet from 2009, which has come back around.
I think I read about this all the time.
You like, get these Estonian retards out of my house right now.
So I don't mean to laugh, but it's terrible.
Estonians are very smart people.
Get these Estonian retards out of my house right now.
I want these as... whatever.
And she's had to do this groveling apology.
But I mean, you know, when was Twitter...
When did Twitter start?
Probably 2008 or so?
This is, you know, early...
This is the equivalent of the Big Bang.
You know, this is the whatever it is, microwave cosmic background of tweets.
And yeah, I just love that.
I really think that the reputation point can't be overstated.
And, you know, I've got to see in this industry as well, both whether it's authors, podcasters, YouTube, there are some people who have traded reputation and credibility for money or for short -term trades that didn't make sense and they've not ended up coming off in one form or another.
They've tried to cash it in.
Give me an example.
Like going to Spotify and...
No, no, no, no. Do not name names.
No, not that. Interestingly, with Joe's move to Spotify, that was something that he got an awful lot of credibility for.
And that's one of the interesting things.
Had it been with a different platform that didn't carry as much weight, Gravitas, they have their own reputation, it becomes multiplicative as opposed to sort of subtractive.
No, of course. Like getting a Nike sponsorship is cool.
Hooray for you. That's not you selling out.
But getting a sponsorship with some brand that everybody thinks is really like lame, that is selling out.
You're obviously only doing it for the cash.
But, you know, there's a ton of guys that have held political positions or have swayed with the wind, just blown with whatever it goes this way, whenever it goes that way.
And the interesting thing is, even if they've made a ton of money from it, even if it's been advantageous in one domain, I actually think that if you gave them the opportunity, they would give all of it back, and some, to be able to regain their reputation.
I think they would give anything they could to be back in the Cool Kids Club.
And there's no return policy on credibility.
Well, the other thing about reputation and credibility is it has to be consistent.
So you have to like, it's like a brand.
You're known for something.
You're known for being strong.
You're known for being self -confident.
You're known for being Machiavellian or whatever it is.
Funny or light -handed.
And there's a certain kind of, you know, shape to it.
And if you're like all over the map and you're going over here, your reputation is about that, it's about this, it looks weak.
It makes it look like, because we want to feel like people judge on appearances.
They don't judge on the reality of who you are.
They don't know who I am or who you are.
They judge on what they see and how we appear.
And if those appearances, they want to have something consistent that they can grab onto.
They want to say something simple.
That guy is funny, and that's who he is.
You know, this guy is that.
They want a very simple formula.
And if you can't be consistent, if you're all over the place, if you're changing your ideas, you're conservative, then you're liberal, blah, blah, blah, and you're trying to tack with each wind to get power, yeah, you'll get some power that way, but it'll make you look weasily.
It'll make you look distrustful, and people won't like that.
And your reputation will be one of somebody who has no soul, who has no core.
So reputation also has to have a consistency, a core to it, a soul, that binds it all together.
Especially if it seems like it's being done for a contrived reason.
You know, I think people are fine with people changing their mind as long as, show me you're working.
Explain to me how you got from that position to this one.
Don't do it beyond the sort of tolerance level that we all have of, this is a little bit too much.
I've updated, I used to be pro this, now I'm anti that.
Yeah. I really do think an awful lot about the value of reputation.
And in another way, it's very, never let anybody else define it for you.
You know, allowing that sort of vacuum to seep in loses you your power over your reputation and allows other people to derogate it.
On the other hand, if you're very Machiavellian person, poke holes in your enemy's reputation and you will destroy them.
Bring up things that are inconsistent with their reputation and you will have ruined be like a popping a balloon.
It'll just go like that.
You know, when I talk about how in that chapter, how P .T.
Barnum played that game to ruin other people's reputation and make people wonder, is he really like that?
I guess not because I just saw this fact that contradicts it.
So I'm giving you some very evil Machiavellian advice out there if you have enemies.
One of the meanest things, I'm not a mean person.
I don't like being mean.
Yeah, sure. It's true.
But I spent a thousand nights on the front door of nightclubs with drunk people.
So you need a few defense mechanisms.
And what you realize, especially when people have had alcohol, is that people fall into only a small number of buckets and behavior is usually pretty predictable.
And one of the things that we realized is kind of a script that we could run when somebody was getting a little bit mouthy, remembering that we're flanked by big British guerrillas.
You've got door staff all around you.
Not you? No, not me.
I was the guy that I was the dude in the skinny jeans with the clipboard.
I had the six foot six dudes with leather gloves on either side of me.
They were, give me your ID, et cetera, et cetera.
And one of the things that used to work, it was so mean, but it worked so well.
If somebody started, they'd been ejected or they hadn't been allowed into the club or something had happened, we'd always say, mate, sorry, you need to get away from me.
Your breath stinks.
And it's completely unfalsifiable because unless someone's going to come over and smell it, they can't say, no, it doesn't.
And it just immediately enters this person into this.
Do you just watch the color drain from them?
So, yeah, I oddly breath, apparently.
Halitosis is reputation as well.
Or just body odor. Yep.
That's great. Any smell.
It's just, it's so...
I'm going to remember that.
It's really good. Your breath stinks.
I need to just... Can you give me a little bit of room?
Oh, it's just used to pull people apart.
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Always stick to what makes you weird, odd, strange, different.
That's your source of power, which is similar to occupy your niche, embrace your strangeness, identify what makes you different, fuse those things together and become an anomaly.
Yeah, well, you know, in this world, if you're replaceable, you will be replaced, right?
So if in your job, you're in your 20s and you're doing something that other people could do, by the time you become 28, they can hire somebody 24 when they hired you, but for less money, they will do that right away.
It's a brutal world.
So if you're replaceable, you will be replaced.
So the only defense about that against that is to be irreplaceable in this world.
And the good news is that you are at your core irreplaceable.
There is something strange and weird about you.
Once again, I hate to say it, but it's a chapter that I'm writing right now for my sublime book.
And so I explain in mastery where that comes from biologically, your DNA, how you are marked as a unique individual at birth, the combination of variants in your chromosomes, it's mathematically impossible for it to ever be replicated.
Yes, the variations are marginal.
The differences aren't great between you and me, but those little differences are the differences between me liking this kind of hip -hop music and you liking a different kind of hip -hop music, right?
It creates your inclinations, it creates your tastes.
And so what the game of life involves is knowing your uniqueness, is knowing who you are, is knowing what makes you weird and what makes you odd, okay?
And the problem is, is that we're social animals, and the pressure continually on us is to fit into a group, is to be like other people, to have their ideas, to have their values, to have their tastes, to dress like them, okay?
And that happens when you're young, you're in your adolescence, we all go through that phase, I went through that phase.
But if you keep on that track when you're in your 20s and on, which is happening a lot today through social media, you're going to lose that sense of what makes you odd and different.
I compare it to a voice.
When you're very young, that little voice in you is going, Robert, you should be a writer, Chris, you should be a blah blah blah blah, I don't know what it is, right?
It's telling you something.
And as you get older, you don't hear it anymore, because you're hearing all the other voices of your parents, the teachers, the culture around you, your peers, your friends, telling you this is what's cool, this is what's not cool, and that little voice comes completely drowned out.
And so you don't know who you are anymore, and you're afraid, particularly young people today, I mean, maybe it's always been that way, they're so afraid of being different, they're so afraid of being odd, but look at all the powerful people in this world, look at your Elon Musk's, look at your celebrities
in entertainment, in business and politics, they're one of a kind.
They have like, I hate that word, but it's like a brand, they're different, they stand out for something that's truly different.
You know, even Albert Einstein, there's nobody else like Einstein, there's nobody like Da Vinci, okay?
That's where your power lies, and you'll go, oh, but Robert, those are people that were brilliant, that were talented, I'm not like that, I don't have that, well, bullshit, you do have that, it's just you're forgetting about it, you don't want to put the effort into it.
I talked in mastery of a woman named Temple Grandin, who was born with severe, severe autism, and she was able to find her way to become a very brilliant professor, academic writer about animals, animal behavior, and about autism itself.
She found her way to it.
When she was three or four, she couldn't even speak any language, she was going to be hospitalized.
You have that potential, it's just you're not putting the effort into it, you are lazy, you want to fit into the group, you want to conform because it's easy.
But your oddness, what makes you weird, what makes you different, that little strange quirk in how you want to dress yourself, that little strange quirk in your musical tastes, that little quirk in the food that you like to eat, that is who you are, those are signs from deep within, from your soul,
this is who you are.
And if you lose that, not only are you not going to be successful in life, you will also lose yourself and you will be unhappy, you'll be alienated from who you are.
And you can get away with that when you're young, because you're happy, you look good, you've got energy, things are going right.
You get into your 30s and you're like everybody else, you don't know who you are and you don't know what you like anymore, you're just following the trends, you start to get depressed and you start going down this rabbit hole and things can turn really ugly.
So you need a bit of courage in life, you need to go, okay, I am weird, I am strange, you know, lean into it.
So when I had the 48 Laws of Power, when I first wrote the book, without it being published yet, it was a very strange looking book and it reflects my own strangeness, things on the margins, stories, everything broken up, images, quotes here and there.
It's kind of how my brain is, a hodgepodge, kind of a mess really.
And the publishers, they bought the book but then they came back to us and they said, Robert, can you kind of maybe make this more like other books?
Can you get rid of all those sections and everything?
And I said, no, take it or leave it, this is the book as it is.
It's odd, it's strange.
They didn't like that because if it doesn't fit into all the other books that have had successful, it's too big of a risk.
If this movie isn't like the movies that were made last year, who knows, we'll go see it.
People are so conservative.
But because it was odd, it stood out and it was successful.
If I had succumbed and I compromised and made it more like other books, I wouldn't be here talking to you.
So sometimes you need a little bit of cojones, you need a little bit of courage, you need to stand up and say, I'm okay being different.
It's fascinating that lots of people, maybe most people want to be extraordinary in some way, but also don't want to stand out in a way that allows them to be mocked.
But the latter is the price of the former.
You can't behave the way that everybody else does and expect to not get the results that everybody else gets.
I think about regressing to a mean that doesn't exist.
Everybody is idiosyncratic and unusual in their own way.
We're all imagining this odd 50th percentile avatar that is the most acceptable.
But when we think about why we love the people that we love, we don't love them for how average they are.
No one's ever said, you know what it is, I'm just besotted with how predictable all of her opinions are.
No one's ever said that.
We love people for their eccentricities.
A friend, George, has the idea of non -fungible people, like non -fungible tokens, that it's irreplaceable.
There is nobody else like them.
If you think about your favorite memories from your favorite people, it's not from the things that are easily replaceable.
It's from the fact that they were just obsessed with football.
When the football was on the TV, you could talk to them and they wouldn't even turn to you.
Or it was the fact that they hated violence.
Or they loved dogs.
Every dog walked into the room and they would be gone, they would be away.
That's what we love people for.
And my favorite strange person from history is Salvador Dali.
And I would take it one step further.
You said you kind of have this, it's advantageous, and also psychologically healthy for you to embrace who you are fully.
I actually think in some ways it's a, maybe I would go as far as to say that it is our duty to humanity.
I think it's our duty to embrace the things that only you can do.
In nature, the diversity of species in a habitat make it vital, make it alive, make it sustainable.
And that comes from mutations in the genetic code.
Some insect has a mutation and therefore a whole new species, a whole new thing splinters off from that and it creates variety.
Well, in human culture, it is like a habitat in a way.
So you are marked with uniqueness by your genetic code.
Insects don't really have individuality.
We have individuality and they are like mutations.
And so your mutation, your difference, you being Chris is for a purpose.
You are marked that way because by mining your uniqueness, your weirdness, your oddness, your little quirky tastes, you're going to contribute something new to the culture.
And in contributing something new to the culture, you enrich it and you keep it turning around and round and round.
Cultures in the past that die on the vine don't have any variety.
You can look at the Soviet Union at its most decadent or when it was really at its worst phase like in the 70s and 80s.
There's no changes, no variety.
Early on, there was all sorts of weird different voices.
They ended up getting imprisoned and murdered.
But a culture has to have variety.
It has to have a diversity of voices.
Like a gene pool or an immune system.
Yeah. And so you, by being odd, you're contributing to that.
You're contributing to the culture.
By not doing that, you're not contributing at all.
And it's a real waste of what nature gave you.
I always think, again, about Dali.
I spent quite a bit of time researching him.
I think as brilliant as they were, Michelangelo didn't do Dali.
Da Vinci didn't do Dali.
In fact, there's that famous job application that Da Vinci sends, I think, to the king of Italy.
And Da Vinci's sort of listing all of the different things that he can do.
I can make machines for war and a trebuchet and a blah, blah, blah.
The final paragraph, he writes the sentence, also I can paint.
I always think about also I can paint.
What is the also I can paint that I don't see in myself?
What are the things that my friends really value?
Perfect example, the guy that I was talking about earlier on, George.
I've been learning a little bit about myself, and I discovered over the last year that I'm a people pleaser in some regard.
And I was lamenting this to him over Christmas as we were driving to go and get food.
And I sort of brought up something I'd done with him, which was sort of being overly cautious that I would have done something that would have annoyed him or stepped on his toes in some manner.
And he said, I just want to sort of stop you there, because I'm aware that to you, you've been able to frame that as people pleasing in this thing that is malignant and you want to get rid of.
But to me, that's you thinking about me first, which is actually one of the things that makes me love you as a friend.
So be very careful sort of labeling areas, creating an unnecessary value judgment.
And I think getting another perspective, and that really gave me pause.
I just thought, yeah, I'm so agreeable with all of these things, and I hate disappointing people, and I think that other people's emotional states are my responsibility, and so on and so forth.
And then I bring it up to a friend, and he says, yeah, that's why I love you.
And it was interesting.
Yeah, I mean, it's good to have a little bit of control over something.
So if in certain situations, sometimes it's good to be able to not be so pleasing, because I'm a people pleaser too.
It's my nature, so I understand that.
And sometimes you have the feeling that it's not coming from the right place.
Correct. You're not choosing to.
You're obligated to by your nature.
And you're feeling a little bit of fear involved in it.
Yep. Fear of displeasing, a fear of rejection, a fear of being different.
And it probably goes back to childhood and to my parents, who probably have similar parental dynamics.
But what's good about what you're saying is, and I completely agree, and I wrote about this, I think, in Human Nature, is that you have this quality.
You can't really control it.
It's who you are. It's either genetic or comes from the first couple of years with your mother or father.
So make it work for you.
Find the way that it's a strength, and see it as a strength, and use it and don't have second thoughts about it.
Use it for power, right?
And don't be so conflicted about it.
It's all how you look at it.
And there's a reason why you're a people pleaser.
And you can, if you weren't a people pleaser, you wouldn't be doing podcasting.
To be this asshole, I would never have agreed to be on your podcast, right?
So it's just that in moments you wish you could control it a little.
It's kind of like the grassy -screener thing that we were talking about before we got started.
You know, this assumption that the thing you don't have is more valuable than the one that you do, or that things would be fixed if only you could have that.
But what else comes along for the ride?
You know, if you got rid of your people -pleasing nature, what are the little parasites that your lack of people -pleasingness would also have attached to it?
Are you sure? Are you really sure that that's the thing that you want?
Exactly. Yeah. Well, that's where it comes down to knowing yourself and knowing what makes you different, and knowing these are things you can't really change.
So my wanting to be a rider or Tiger Woods wanting to be a golfer when he's like two years old, there's probably some genetic component in it.
And maybe there's some early bonding, but there's probably a genetic component to it.
You can't control it.
It's who you are. And maybe that you can't control it is a good thing.
And maybe it's there for a reason.
And maybe if you wanted to do something else, it wouldn't work out.
So my knowing that I wanted to be a rider instead of, you know, a businessman or a lawyer like my parents wanted to be, probably saved my life, to be honest with you.
So knowing what makes you different is kind of going to guide you past these dangerous moments in life.
Two. And make you want to do to change who you are because you feel pressure, social pressure to change who you are.
Yeah. To regress to this imaginary mean.
Yeah, two elements, I think, of me that are genetically predisposed or at least very deeply embedded.
The first one is I've always liked to talk and ask questions.
And as a child, I always used to get in trouble in school because, unfortunately, my voice appears to carry further than everybody else's.
So even though the naughty kids would be genuinely being naughty poking other people with fucking protractors or something, I would be the one that was hurt.
Even though I wasn't misbehaving as much, I would be the one that was hurt.
You're being nosy, you know, children should be seen and not heard.
You stop being so, no, why are you asking all of these questions?
Would be one of them.
And the other one is solitude.
I'm an only child. I spent a lot of time listening to audiobooks in my room, playing with toys on my own, throwing a ball off the wall and seeing if I could kick it off that wall and then catching it.
Hours and hours and hours.
That didn't have anybody else to play with.
And you think, well, God, you know, the things that you're punished for when you're a child are the things that you think are malignant when you're a child you're often rewarded for if you can just find a way to alchemize them as an adult.
So I'm sure that your ability to sit and read or go to a cabin or write in your room and nobody's come and gone and you haven't noticed.
And you think, well, my solitude as a child was maybe something that I lamented or that I saw as a weakness or something like that.
And yet it's a superpower when I become an adult if I can find the way to channel it.
And the same thing for the question asking or the listening to audiobooks.
You know, what's the 2024 internet version of an audiobook?
It's a podcast. It's what I'm doing right now.
Uh -huh. Yeah. Yeah.
And, you know, it really just comes down to being aware of who you are, what makes you different and being comfortable with it.
And so you're going to have moments where you're not comfortable with it and you want to conform and you want to be like other people.
And, you know, you went through that and I went through that in adolescence in particular on through the twenties.
You make some changes to things because you think it's cool, but you keep coming back.
You keep coming back to being alone.
You keep coming back to doing throwing the ball against the wall in some metaphorical way.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
I kid you not. The way that I like to relax now in between sessions of work, I get a tennis ball and throw it against the wall.
It's the most bizarre thing.
I had the same thing, but because I'm American, mine was baseball.
I had a ball and I'd throw it against the garage door and I would play all these different games with my glove on and I would catch it.
And I would imitate the crowd cheering me and I had, this was a home run, etc.
You know, and if I had, if I could do it today, I still would.
So I understand that.
But you come back to these things because they're so strong in you.
And you can't help it and they give you relief and they give you comfort and they know who you are.
And so it all comes down to, do you come back to these things or do you change because of the pressures of other people?
And what is the difference?
Why are some people like that and some people are not?
And that's the million dollar question.
I think it's swimming upstream or swimming downstream is working against or working with your nature.
Yeah. And trying to find a way to make it work for you as opposed to trying to change it so that you can find a way to make it work.
Yeah. Makes a lot of sense.
Sean Purry, who does my first million, very, very smart guy.
I remember one of the first conversations I ever had with him on Zoom.
He had a sort of small leather black basketball in his hand and we were just talking and he was a little bit further back in his desk and he was tossing it like this and rolling it along the desk and sort of you throw it in the air.
Like what? So it wasn't like we were writing anything.
It was a casual conversation between friends.
I said, what are you doing?
He says, I grew up playing basketball.
I'm happiest with a ball in my hand.
And I thought, holy fuck, that's me.
Every time that I go to the park, if there's a tennis ball, that's now mine for the rest of it.
And I'll bounce it in my hands until we finish up.
And then I'll, you know, the tennis ball charity pool that it goes back, it goes back into the park.
And I thought, holy fuck.
So I came up with a name for that, which is a weirdness role model.
And it's somebody who does a thing that sort of breaks the ceiling on what you thought was acceptable behavior.
You've seen this guy do a thing and you go, oh my God, like maybe I could have a ball on my desk.
Maybe I could have a tennis ball or a cricket ball on my desk.
And that means that I can, because I've seen this guy do it and it's a weirdo role model or a weirdness role model.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think we all need that in our life.
People who are different.
And I remember in high school, I had an English teacher who kind of changed the course of my life.
And he was very weird.
He was very different.
His way of thinking was different.
And how he talked about writing and literature was very odd.
And other students hated him.
And I thought he was just fantastic.
So it's kind of interesting what you say.
That was a role model I could see.
And it was just a high school teacher.
So it wasn't like a career path for him.
But I could see that having that kind of quality was a good quality.
And I was attracted to it.
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You are your own worst enemy.
You waste precious time dreaming of the future instead of engaging in the present.
Since nothing seems urgent to you, you're only half -involved in what you do.
Yeah, well, I like to think of who the human animal is.
I like to take this out of a little specific and go into the meta area here.
And what it meant to be human, we're a very creative species, right?
We have language, we have consciousness, we have immense powers.
Those powers developed under the pressures of necessity, of having to get things done, of having to survive in a very brutal, ruthless world where a leopard could pop out tomorrow and eat me, where there were dangers all around, where there was food was scarce.
And under the pressure, we had to think, we had to be creative, we had to be inventive, we had to be strategic.
The human brain evolved under immense amounts of pressure, okay?
That's how the brain works.
And I almost like to think of it in terms of barometric pressure.
So in your brain, when you're feeling that barometric pressure, it's like, I got to get this done, or I'm going to fail and I'm not, this project won't happen and people will laugh at me.
You work like a fiend.
Energy, your whole body responds, right?
Your blood gets moving.
You accomplish things that would normally take you months.
You do it in days because you feel that pressure.
You take away that pressure and you don't know what to do.
And I've got like three years I could do this or that.
You just wander around, you're lost, you have no energy, you have no focus.
You're maybe playing video games, maybe you're watching porn, you're kind of distracting yourself in the moment.
But your energy is just being dissipated in like 20 different directions.
So your brain needs pressure, it needs constant pressure, and stress and pressure is not a bad thing.
We have this thing where we feel like stress is bad.
It's bad for you, bad.
You need to relax, man, you need to chill.
Stress will kill you.
No, being bored will kill you.
Not having anything to do will kill you.
It's much more dangerous than stress.
Yes, you can work too hard.
You can work where there's no soul involved.
I work like a fiend because I'm writing a book and it's a very hard process for me.
And I'm working far too much, but man, I love it.
It's fantastic, right?
And it could kill me, the stress could kill me, it gave me a stroke, but I'd rather die under the stress than be bored and have nothing to do.
So feeling that pressure, it makes your eyes pop open, it makes your brain focus, it makes you alert, it makes you want to live, it makes everything seem exciting to you because you've got to get things done.
So I'm writing a book right now, I could take 12 years to write it, but I wouldn't feel good about it.
So I give myself deadlines.
I gave myself a deadline of finishing this chapter by July 31st, here it's August 10th, I haven't finished it, but now I'm working double hard to try and finish it in time because if I didn't have a deadline, I would take forever.
Manana, manana, manana, manana.
Yeah. So create pressure for yourself is a good thing, you know?
I gave a talk recently in which I talked about Thomas Edison, the great inventor.
And Thomas Edison was a young man, he was in his early 30s, he had invented the phonograph and a new wave for the telegraph, but he hadn't really had any major inventions.
He had started Menlo Park, his industrial park for doing research.
We're talking about the 1870s, I believe.
But he did something very interesting and very strange.
I don't know how conscious it was, but he gave an interview with a newspaper and he said, I've been working on creating the incandescent light bulb.
Now, before that, there was the arc light, which was a light that was really powerful, it used far too much energy, you couldn't use it in the house.
The way houses were lit was with gas light.
Gas light was dangerous, it was explosive, and the companies in America that had a monopoly on it, so the prices, it was a very corrupt business.
So he goes, I'm working on the incandescent light bulb.
Reporters go, that's interesting.
He says, yeah, I'm close to getting it, I'm close to nailing it.
Wow. And he goes, yeah, and in five years, I'm going to light the entire city of New York with the incandescent light with electric light.
Oh, they go crazy. They published this article and the stock prices of gas start going down, down, down, down, down.
Money flows into his coffers because of the cheapness of a light bulb.
The profits are just insane, so money is pouring in.
He goes back to his Menlo Park where he develops ideas and his employees who were reading about this go, Mr.
Edison, what are you thinking?
You were just tinkered with the incandescent light bulb.
We're not even near inventing it, we're not even near creating it.
And the idea of lighting New York, what were you smoking, the equivalent thereof?
And he goes, well, gentlemen, I said it to this major newspaper, we better get to work, we better make it happen.
What happened with all the money that came in, he could now hire the people to do it, but the pressure of getting that done in five years made him do it in five years.
It was a monumental work of persistence and discipline and detail, but he had a deadline, he didn't want his reputation, he didn't want to disappoint the public, he had to get it done in five years, and he did get it done in five years.
So he created his own pressure by using the publicity angle.
And people are going to expect it.
When's it happening?
Has it happened yet?
You said it was going to have happened by now.
Yeah, I think Naval Ravikant talks about how when he was at one of the first companies he ever worked for in Silicon Valley, and he started telling people, I'm going to start my own startup, and six months later he was still there, and everyone said, I thought you were starting your own startup, and that was the push
out of the door for him.
He couldn't bear the expectation that he'd put not on himself, only on himself, but also from other people too.
So I suppose our need to be socially consistent can be bad when it's maybe derogating your uniqueness, your idiosyncrasies, and your weirdness, but if you can funnel it to motivate you to go forward.
It's the reason why I don't think that I would be particularly successful being a journalist, for instance, despite the fact that I do three episodes a week.
It's been four years that we've done that, it's been six years the show's been going, but this is because my need to not look silly in front of other humans and how much I am enthused by the presence of others, even whilst being quite introverted, means that by doing a podcast I've never not shown up, I've
never cancelled, because of something that hasn't been a justifiable reason, because I don't want to look silly in front of the person I'm sat opposite.
If it was me in a blank piece of paper, God, the motivation to do that, three times a week I need to come up with a new column of a thousand words.
Whereas for the person who wants to just write on their own and come up with headlines and start, sit down with a person again, have a conversation with them and ask them questions, that's not my sort of thing.
So, yeah, being able to use the social mores to kind of pull you to where you want to be to understand again your own fallibility and insecurities and attach those like a south and a north magnet, sort of use that to pull you along.
Yeah, I always like to riff on what you're saying, I always like to challenge myself.
So, I never, each book that I do, I'm now on my eighth book, is different from the other one, right?
And my books take several years to write, they're not like, I can't put them out in six months.
Each one is different from the last one.
And I'm taking a risk because my readers are expecting Robert to write about strategy and power, now he's writing about mastery.
Seduction. Seduction, yeah, now he's writing about the sublime, but the hell, what's his problem?
Okay, it's a challenge.
And the challenge is good because it gets my energy levels going.
But if I took a challenge that was too difficult, so there's a level here.
So, I could go here and write another 48 Laws of Power, it would be like this, it would be kind of easy.
I could go here and write a book on how to build a skyscraper out of tensile, I don't know, whatever, okay.
I could never write it, it's too big of a challenge.
Or, you know, the history of all human ideas, okay, that would be the equivalent there.
Okay, no, I kind of go here.
It's a challenge, it's not here boring, 48 Laws of Power Part II, it's not history of world ideas, 4000 pages, it's here.
It's a little bit above me, it's going to get my energy going, but it's not impossible.
And that's the game of life.
So, if Edison had said, I'm going to light the entire world in five years, no way.
New York was a pretty hefty lift.
I'm going to light New York in 50 years also.
Yeah, exactly, which is probably more realistic.
You know, it was a challenge, it was a pretty big challenge, but it was not an impossible one.
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It is a curse to have everything go right on your first attempt.
Yeah, the proverbial one -hit wonders.
What happens is, there was a real syndrome in hip -hop, and I talked a lot about that with 50, where you come from the hood, and you've never had any kind of money, and then overnight, you've got six figures, seven figures, you've got women like left, right, and center coming to you, you've got all this power
and attention and celebrity, and it goes to your head, and you start partying, and you start thinking, like, well, okay, I better put out another album, but you get a little bit conservative now, because you want to keep going, and you think that you've got a formula for it, right, and then your second
album doesn't do nearly as well.
But if that first album didn't do well, and you were smart about it, it would have taught you a valuable lesson about the music industry.
So 50, he did his first album called Power of the Dollar, and I have a kind of a bootleg copy of it he gave me, and it's absolutely fantastic.
It's available now pretty much on the Internet.
It's absolutely fantastic, but right before it was to be launched, he got shot, and the producers dropped him on the prod, dropped the album, they didn't release it, and they dropped him from Columbia Records.
It's too dangerous.
It was a drug beef, and we can't have this guy touring if there's going to be violence.
And so he was thinking, you know, that failure, instead of it had been a big hit, would have gone to his head.
You know, who knows what would have happened to him.
Here it was, like, completely back to square zero.
In fact, worse. He had nothing.
He'd done all this work, and he had this price on his head, and nobody would come near him, and he wanted to learn what the lesson was from this, from this failure.
It wasn't really his fault, although it sort of was, because he had been a crack dealer, and it was like a previous beef that he hadn't really resolved.
So, you know, it was maybe partially his fault.
Anyway, he goes, well, the lesson is, I can't be dependent on a record label.
They're too conservative.
They're too cautious.
I'm somebody who lives on the edge.
My music plays on the fact that I was a crack dealer, that I live dangerously, that I'm the real thing, that I'm not a fake gangster.
I'm the real thing, okay?
So what am I going to do?
I'm not going to put out a record.
I'm going to do mixtapes, and I'm going to sell them on the streets of Queens, and then Brooklyn, and then Manhattan.
You know, just these little tapes, these singles, and I'm going to be as violent.
His first one that he puts out is called Fuck You.
He said, fuck you to everybody who ever doubted me.
Fuck you to try to kill me.
Fuck you to the record labels, pardon my language, et cetera.
So he learned from that.
He learned not to take success for granted, and he built on that.
And so he's not a one -hit wonder.
So sometimes success when you're in your 20s is the worst thing that can happen to you, because you have no discipline.
You have no perspective.
You think it's just going to keep going the way it is.
You're not aware of all the dangers out there.
You don't have life experience enough to realize how things can turn on you very quickly.
If I had been given the chance to write the 48 Laws of Power when I was in my 20s and I had success, it would have ruined me.
I probably wouldn't have had success.
Why? Because I wasn't ready for it.
Look, Chris, I had had so much failure until I was essentially 39 years old, pushing 40, that I had perspective, that I know what it's like to fail.
And so when I had success, it wasn't like, wow, I'm the greatest thing that ever happened.
I can just live off this forever.
My next book's going to be fantastic.
No, I have a little voice in me that says, Robert, you failed so many times, you're probably going to fail again, right?
You've seen so many people in Hollywood who started off hot and bombed.
I had experience to know that I can't take this for granted.
I have to be careful.
I have to be strategic.
I have to build on it and not let the success go to my head.
And it didn't go to my head.
When I wrote The Art of Seduction, I was so worried that the book would fail.
I was certain it was going to fail.
I felt that way about every single book I've ever written.
You know, I still feel that way.
You know, this next book, it's doomed to failure.
I better make it the best book of all.
So if you get drunk on your success, you know, and don't get high on your own supply, was the phrase that 50 would always say.
So, you know, you want to keep your feet on the ground.
You want to know that failure is nipping at your buds.
Your next podcast, Chris, could be the worst one of your life.
You'll say the wrong thing, and suddenly everything will start cratering.
That keeps you on the edge, and you don't take your success for granted.
Yeah, I'm very glad when I look back at the period that when we first spoke, up until the period, the second time that we spoke.
So we did about, it was about episode 78.
It was about episode sort of 350, something like that.
And that period, if you look at the graph of plays and followers and money is like that.
It's just flat. And the graph is just totally flat between the two.
There's a little upward tilt.
And it's the law of anything which becomes exponential that as you start to zoom out more, it makes the very beginning look even more paltry.
And it's that up to there.
But that's only been the last two years.
Oh, two and a half years.
It's there. And, you know, I tell the story that there was days in 2018, the year that we launched the show, where we'd been going for maybe 10 episodes, 20 episodes, something, you know, we're halfway through the first year.
And there was days where we do no plays.
I'm still releasing weekly episodes.
And there was days where there would be no one, no plays.
You know, my mum listened to every episode and I got friends.
I'm still in the guilt -ridden, you should listen to my new thing thing.
And zero plays, nothing.
And I'm like, that's insane.
And I'm glad, I'm glad.
It makes me, you know, every time that I get to find a random garage in the middle of LA and think, oh, we get to light this and make it look like a cinema movie, like a Hollywood movie in Hollywood.
How cool is that? And it's framed up against something which is smaller.
There's a documentary that I'd really love to get you to watch.
It's called How I'm Feeling Now by Lewis Capaldi.
So he's a Scottish singer.
You would recognize a ton of his songs.
And basically it charts this challenge that he has.
Scottish dude, a very non -typical, like a chubby young guy.
He's not like a harp -throb or anything, with Scottish accent as well.
And very self -deprecating, which is charming.
He's charming in that way.
But he writes these songs when he's 17.
He's playing them in working men's pubs all around Scotland.
And then he gets picked up by Universal Records and he releases this album and it goes beyond interstellar.
Just the biggest billions and billions of streams.
And he does a world stadium tour and Glastonbury main stage.
Everything, everything, everything, everything.
And then he has to do a second one.
He has to do it again.
And the stress of...
Another album. Yeah.
He has to do a second album.
And this is an interesting twist, I think, on It's a Curse to Have Everything Go Right on Your First Attempt.
Because he is someone that I think did learn the right lessons from it going right on his first attempt.
That he shouldn't take things for granted.
That maybe that was a fluke.
That he does still need to work hard.
Some of the lessons that failure would have taught you.
But he just has this unbelievable pressure.
Because the bar, he's taken the chairlift to the top of Everest.
And he goes, well, how am I supposed to top that?
You know, it's the classic thing as well, I suppose.
That you have a lifetime to write your first book.
And then, well, I mean, most people, maybe two years for you.
Six years. To write your second.
You've got this wealth, this big well to dig into.
Material for the first one.
And then it's like, congratulations.
Now do it again. You go, again?
But I just, I just did.
Yeah. But again, I think you'd love the documentary.
It's very heartwarming.
What's the name of it again?
How I'm Feeling Now on Netflix.
Well, a lot of it is, comes to your own level of wisdom about, do you have some perspective?
So it's possible that somebody could have success in their 20s.
And they would be able to handle it.
But it's probably because they came, they had a family background or something behind some kind of experience behind it.
Because by nature, we are always thinking that we're better than we are.
Our self opinion, we're really, I'm probably like this.
I think I'm like this, right?
Some people is like this.
The moment you have success, you think you have the golden touch.
People start, a lot of the worst thing that happens to you is the people that surround you.
And they go, my God, you're a genius.
You know, you're absolutely brilliant.
And then you want to bounce ideas off of them.
They go, that's fantastic.
Go ahead. Go, go on.
Whereas you want them to say, it's shit.
It's terrible. You have the worst idea.
But now you're surrounded by sycophants and yes people.
And they're telling you how great you are.
You see that with a lot of celebrities.
I wonder whether that was the role for the court cynic in some ways to offset the sycophants.
Are you talking about the court or the court jester?
I suppose so, but I don't know whether the court cynic is just like a colloquial term or whether there was a genuine role.
But I could imagine that it would be useful.
I know the jester was there to be the only one that could mock the king with impunity, basically.
But if I was a king in the medieval ages, if I was a noble king, a smart one, I would have employed a court cynic and I've employed the court cynic to only come up with counter positions.
But even if the entire room, the whole council thought that it was fantastic, tell me how this is wrong.
As part of my consulting with business people that I've had over the years, that's the role that I play.
Bring Robert in, he'll tell us it's shit.
But they don't listen to me.
That's the main lesson.
I tell people, think of all the things that are going to go wrong with your plan.
Let's game this out.
This could go wrong.
This could go wrong.
The public might react this way.
A competitor might be already anticipating the same thing will come out.
Let's game this out and let's make sure that the launch of your product is foolproof.
So we think of all the things that can go wrong.
All right, then let's alter the strategy.
Let's go here a little more.
Instead of going here, they never listen to me.
Have you tried telling them it's going to go right?
And then they might say, oh God, Robert said he was going to go right.
We definitely need to change something.
You mean reverse psychology.
I might need to try that.
That might be the next one.
Okay, I really like this one.
Being attacked is a sign that you are important enough to be a target.
You should relish the attention and the chance to prove yourself.
Yeah, well, you know, you want, if everything is easy in life, if everyone loves what you're going to do and you have no enemies, you have no opposition, nothing to resist, you're just going to be mush.
You're not going to amount to anything.
You're not going to be able to push yourself.
You're not going to be able to change, evolve.
Muhammad Ali said, if I didn't have Joe Frazier around, I would not have become the great boxer that I am.
I mean, he would have been a great boxer anyway, but a nemesis like Joe Frazier put me on a much higher level.
Is there not a line in Batman where the Joker says, I complete you?
If he doesn't, there should be.
It seems like the sort of thing that he glad you said in there, but it is the truth.
Without the Joker, what's the Batman?
I love the idea you should relish the chance to prove yourself.
Pressure is a privilege in that way.
When I was doing the book with 50 Cent, The 50th Law, I was very kind of timid and I decided to make it really a book about 50.
Because I was kind of like, he's the celebrity, who am I?
So I wrote a very 50 centric version of the book about his business, et cetera, and nobody liked it.
In fact, the publisher canceled the project.
And here I was, my reputation was on the line.
It could have been a humiliating blow to me.
And so another publisher comes in and he says, Robert, you need to change the idea.
You need to make it more about you, and not less about him, but more about you and your style and your ideas.
And the intersection.
Yeah. So, oh shit, I spent a lot of time working on this.
Because if you do that, I'll publish the book.
I go, my reputation, I'll be ruined if I don't, okay?
And so, all right, I'll do it.
He goes, okay, the bad news is you have eight months to do that.
Oh, man. I worked like a fiend.
Now, I didn't have an enemy here, so, but the challenge, it was like I was in a boxing ring with Joe Frazier, right?
I had to raise my game.
It was the first time in my writing career, writing books, that I was facing failure, real failure.
If I didn't succeed in that book, 50 would have thought something was wrong.
And we'd announced the publication.
I would have maybe recovered, but it would have been a major blow.
And I had to make that book happen, and it brought out the best in me.
It made me do things that I had never done before.
It built up my self -confidence.
So, it's the equivalent of somebody doubting you, because there were a lot of doubters around.
And a lot of people thinking, well, Robert's kind of finished here.
We thought he was this, but he's not really.
And so, having that kind of pressure, like we talked about deadlines, and having people doubt you, it can crush you, but it can also make you a lot stronger.
It can make you a better fighter.
Was there ever a 49th law?
You went straight from 48 to 50.
Well, he's 50 cent.
I know. I wondered if you'd ever thought, I'll get a 49th in, and then it means that I can...
No, there is no 49th.
The 49th law is there is no such thing as a 49th law.
Yeah, you don't talk about the 49th law.
That's what it is. Use absence to increase respect.
The more you are seen and heard from, the more common you appear.
If you're already established in a group, temporary withdrawal from it will make you more talked about, even more admired.
You must learn when to leave.
Cultivate value through scarcity.
Yeah, I mean, the problem that a lot of people have with my books and in life, is they're too black and white.
So they'll say things like, well, Robert, if I'm absent on social media, no one will have heard of me.
If I don't write this book, if I don't put it in another album, if I don't produce this product, how can I do that?
You know, what are you talking about?
Absence like that. That's very dangerous in the world.
Well, I don't talk about just absence.
I say it's a dance between absence and presence, right?
So it's not like you disappear so that you are a little bit less present.
You're able to disappear for a while and you make people wonder about you.
Napoleon said, if I show up at the theater every night in Paris, in my little emperor's box, people start taking me for granted.
If I show up every week, they'll be going, that's interesting, but he's coming every week.
If I show up once a month, it's like an event.
Oh my God, he came here.
When is he coming next?
Well, it's all this attention.
That's the dynamic of absence and presence.
If you come every two or three days, nah, if you come every week, nah, come a month, yeah.
If you come every year, people will forget about you, won't have any power.
You have to know exactly the dynamic.
Isn't it interesting that this is reflected neurologically with intermittent schedule reward, too, which is exactly what social media and slot machines and gambling, it's what they all work on.
Yeah. Well, what is that?
So if you press a button, perfect example of this, mice get to push a button.
You're into mice again.
You like the mice. I need to use something as a legitimate example here.
So mice get to push a button.
If it's every five times or 10 times or 20 times they get a piece of food, they will push the button, but then they will get sick.
If it's intermittent, they don't know when it's going to come, they will push the button way more aggressively.
And it's that the dopamine we get when we're not ready for it, when we're not ready to see Napoleon up in his emperor's box overlooking the ballet.
That's real. And ever since the second episode that we did, it's always in my mind.
And I always think about your face whenever I think of this particular sentence aloofness is alluring.
I always think about that.
And my housemate's dad has a similar idea, which is be good and be gone.
Yeah. And it's how he shows up at parties.
It's a good justification for the Irish goodbye, I think, as well.
But be good and be gone.
Oh, where was Robert?
He was. Yeah. Oh, he must have something.
The call it an Irish goodbye.
Leaving without saying goodbye to everybody.
Yeah. Oh, that's the opposite of a French goodbye.
It takes forever or you never leave.
Everyone's like kissing each other and talking to each other at the door.
They never leave. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, so people think that nowadays, so like in a dating situation is a common example.
If nowadays, because things are different, you have a date.
And if you're like texting her the next day or that evening, it's kind of like something is.
I don't know about this guy's a little bit desperate.
I'm not so sure about it.
If you text the next day, it's a little bit.
If you wait, take two days, but not three.
She's starting to think about you.
You're starting to go, um, this guy's interesting.
Maybe he doesn't like me or maybe he does.
I'm not sure. And she starts thinking about you, starts fantasizing about you.
Then the second day, your name pops up.
It has power. It has effect.
So if you're inundating somebody, you don't give them room to fantasize.
You don't give them room to think about you.
And then they start one of these days taking you for granted kind of thing, you know?
So people say, yeah, but in the world, like celebrities will tell me, I had this one female rap star, I'm not going to say her name, who would say, yeah, but Robert did social media.
I can't disappear. And I go, yes, you can.
I mean, it was before the social media era, but Michael Jackson would disappear for several years before a record.
Beyonce disappeared for like two years in between records, didn't reproduce anything.
Then when she came out with a record, whoa, what a splash.
You can still get away with it now.
You just have to know the sweet spot.
You have to know that maybe in social media, you can't disappear for a year or even a month.
But if you do it for a week, people will notice it and they start thinking about you.
So you have to kind of know how to play the game.
I think there's a momentum build as well that perhaps is a price that you need to pay in the beginning.
So there's a technique in erg rowing.
So when you sit on one of those indoor rower things, concept two, and what people will do in order to get the speed up more easily, they'll do little polls and then they'll do really long polls and that's when they start to get their power in.
And I often think about that when it comes to people beginning anything.
It's like, hey, if you haven't started your podcast, you don't get to be absent in the beginning.
That's just called not starting your podcast.
Delaying the publishing of your first book is not you being aloof and deluring, it's you just not getting the work done.
So there is a price, there is momentum and inertia that needs to be accumulated and then you break expectations.
So this shows that I don't have the can to show you.
I launched a product last year and we had fades, colored fades, orange to orange or yellow to orange, yellow to green.
And then the third can that we released was just pure white and I wanted to break the pattern.
I wanted to set expectations and then very quickly to break them.
And I thought about it kind of the same from a branding perspective there too.
I think I have a convention, I think I know what to expect.
Oh, that's a little bit interesting.
That's different to what I would have thought.
Yeah, but you do have created this setup for that.
Precisely correct. Breaking a convention before you've set a convention is just being sporadic and sort of scatter gunning everywhere.
Whereas it would be like if you'd released an article that was one of the laws from 48 Laws and then the next book was different or it was on a different topic and you go, well you haven't established enough of a style, you can't break an expectation that I don't yet have.
And this is surprise as well.
Well, that's why I say power is a game of psychology.
So you have to master these very subtle and invisible rules of psychology.
And so knowing, some people know it by instinct, they have a marketing sense that I need to break up expectations if everything is always the same, there's no surprise.
But you have to understand, you have to think about how people are going to respond, you have to understand the psychology involved.
That surprise gets attention.
That's what's not as expected stands out and people are excited, they're interested in it.
And also creating viral effects is like the flip side of this using absence, creating absence.
So I talk about this in the art of seduction.
If you pass by a restaurant where there's just one couple sitting there eating, and the menu looks good and the reviews are good, you go, I don't think we want to go there.
You go a few blocks further and there's this restaurant, people are packed, they're sitting there, they're all laughing, they're drinking.
All right, let's go there, the food could be crap.
But because you see other people doing it, you're drawn into it.
But you are speaking my language as an ex -club promoter, so we would do everything.
One of the strategies we used to have was outside of a nightclub, your cue, the length of your cue is the determinant of how busy it is inside, but the length of your cue is determined by how wide the cue is, not by how many people are in the cue.
So we kept a two wide cue.
So we would squeeze the barriers in and these people would be going two by two like Noah's Ark, but we would be able to create a cue that was 100 yards long.
Well, you see, these are things you just knew instinctively.
I don't know if some people maybe don't get that kind of thing, but that's the kind of psychology you want to play on.
I talked about how in P .T.
Barnum, he was a master of this.
He had the Museum of Audities in Manhattan, right?
And the whole game was to get people inside because once they were inside, there were all these odd, you know, really weird shit in there that was so strange and interesting, these curiosities, these deformed, you know, fetuses and animals.
How do you get them inside?
So he hired the worst possible band he could find to play really terrible music right near his museum, and they'd be playing so loud that people would run inside the museum to escape this music.
You know, that's the kind of thinking, you know.
Machiavellian cue organizing.
Actually, speaking of that, I mentioned I told you I'm going to Florence next week.
I'll be able to see Nicola's tomb.
Tomb, it's in Santa Croce.
I love Santa Croce.
What is a lesson from Machiavelli that you think most people gloss over or something sort of a hidden gem that you wish had more exposure, that more people knew?
There's so much there you're going to tease my adult brain here, but the idea that's the most powerful idea that he has, and he has a lot of powerful ideas, is that people rise to an elevated position based on a certain quality that they have that makes them stand out.
Let's say, for Chris Williamson, it's your pleasing ability, your bono me, your simpatico, whatever the language you want to use, makes you blah, blah, blah.
But a point is reached where the times change.
Things are different because life is always changing, and that thing that you relied on, that strength that you have, is no longer so in demand, is not so interesting.
The culture has moved on, but you don't know how to move on because you're addicted to the same way of doing things.
So when he was saying, what would be the perfect prince, to talk about the prince like in his book, The Prince, would be a man or a woman, but his time would be a man, who could continually adapt to circumstances, who just didn't have one form of power.
He compared it to fortune is constantly shifting.
You have to be able to shift with fortune and ride it and keep riding it upward and upward.
That would be like a superhuman being, who could always adapt to circumstances and not change who they are, not suddenly be a confident person who's now really timid, but to use your confidence in a different manner when the time asks for something different.
In my consulting, most of the people who fail in life, that I'm working with, have reached a level of power or position, but they can't go any further.
They hit a ceiling because they don't know how to adapt.
They only have one way of responding to circumstances.
So we think of Machiavelli as this rigid thinker with this sort of aggressive ideas.
He's actually a very fluid thinker, and it's all about being fluid.
One of his main metaphors is water, because there was a river in Florence and he was sort of obsessed with currents, kind of like in a Sun Tzu and Asian way, your ability to flow and change and adapt to circumstances.
And I wish people understood that and weren't so rigid about everything that they do.
They weren't so rigid in how they read the 48 Laws of Power.
They weren't so rigid in their politics.
They weren't so rigid in their creative life.
It's finding play again in some way, I suppose.
It's come up a lot over the last year or so for me.
I think that there is, not for me, I'm not doing it.
Someone, maybe not you either, you're busy, should write a book about play, about reintroducing a sense of play, what it does from a sort of psychological health standpoint.
One of the greatest books ever written, it's already been written on that subject.
It's a book called Homo Ludens by Dutchman Johan Hausenkha, written in like the 30s, I think.
Nobody could ever write a better book.
He talks about the history of play and he goes deeply into the psychology of it.
It's one of the best books you can ever read.
Homo, meaning man, Ludens is playing.
Playing man. Yeah, so there's Homo sapiens, thinking about our brain, he's saying we're Homo Ludens, we're the playing animal.
It's an absolutely brilliant book.
I could never top that.
Thinking about Machiavelli, I had Dr.
Alexander Lee on the podcast, so he wrote a phenomenal biography of Machiavelli.
He came on the show, he's a historian.
Which one? What was it called?
I can't remember the name.
I can't remember the name of his book.
Anyway, he told me this story.
I didn't realize that Machiavelli was such a tear away, sort of little lethario here and there.
Oh, who's a total seducer.
Yeah, but he told me this story about him, where he'd been on the road and he, I can't remember the term that he used, talks about something like a nuptial longing or something like this, sort of very proper British.
He's horny, Machiavelli's horny.
And he gets taken into this brothel and there's a woman that he sleeps with, but the light is off and he says that he decides to get the candle and bring it closer to her and he sees this hideous woman and he throws up.
He's traumatized by this thing that he's done.
And I get to hear Dr.
Lee, the very sort of proper British historian, telling me this story about...
The thing is, what really gets my gut, what I can't stand is people use the word Machiavellian and they have this image of him as this evil conniving person, you know, and they have the image of him and how he actually looks.
He's like a rat and he was an incredibly warm, humane human being who is really very funny and witty.
He was a complete renaissance man.
So first of all, he understood politics on an extremely high level, absolutely brilliant.
He was not a great diplomat.
He was a low level diplomat.
He had a very good sense of psychology.
He was a great seducer of women.
We know that, okay?
He also wrote a play.
He wrote plays and he wrote poetry.
People don't realize that.
He wrote the most scandalous play I think ever written, making fun of the Catholic Church, where there are rituals taking place in a church that are incredibly impious, you know, sacrilegious.
It's called Mandragole.
It's a hilarious play, trust me.
It was performed in the Vatican.
It was so good at the time, in the 1520s.
People don't realize that this man was a true renaissance man.
He was a poet. He was a playwright.
He was a lover of women.
He was a great strategist, you know?
So yeah, I have lots of anecdotes about him too as well in that sense, but yeah.
He's fantastic. I really enjoyed learning about the man.
It's odd that the ideas precede a person.
My favorite book about Machiavelli is called Machiavelli's Virtue by Harvey Mansfield.
It's a fantastic book.
I highly recommend it.
One of the few academics that I actually really like.
He understands Machiavelli, whereas most people are not on the level of him.
And he writes about how relevant Machiavelli is to the world today and how he foresaw everything going on in business and politics.
Please, if you're interested in Machiavelli's Virtue, it's one of my favorite books.
One of the groups, I suppose, I think, that's looking for a lot of advice at the moment is young men feeling a little lost, like their place in the world is just uncertain.
They don't really know or have the direction.
What advice would you have for young men that are feeling a little lost in the modern world?
Well, you have to be comfortable with who you are and with your masculinity.
So the word masculine has now got this negative connotation around it, which is terrible because you're a young man.
It's not every young man.
Some men don't feel this way.
But a lot of young men, I remember myself, you've got this testosterone that's roaring through you.
You're competitive.
You're ambitious. You have goals.
You have this energy.
You want to assert yourself.
But it's bad. It's bad.
It's bad. You're not supposed to be like that.
And the culture isn't about there's no virtue in masculinity.
There is such a thing as toxic masculinity, most definitely.
But there are virtues in being masculine and have to be redefined.
And we have to have icons and role models for that.
And so when I was growing up, God, it sounded like I hated that when people said that when I was a kid.
So I knew you're going to hate me, but I'll say that anyway.
I can't help it because it's true.
When I was growing up, I watched like a lot of Westerns.
It was the silent hero kind of thing, the Gary Cooper thing.
But my idea of masculinity growing up was a man who was in control of himself, who wasn't mean, wasn't pushing people around, who was decent, who treated women well.
So treating women well is a masculine virtue, is a good thing.
It comes from a position of strength.
You're not insecure about your masculinity.
You don't have to prove that you're a man by demeaning women, by pushing them around, by calling them whores and bitches, et cetera.
You'd have to take the Andrew Tate path in life.
You can respect women, and respecting them is a sign of your strength, is a sign of being secure in your masculinity.
You don't need to put other people down to make yourself feel better.
So we have to redefine these qualities, but there are no icons out there.
You either have the Andrew Tates out of there, or you have these wimpy men who are just so afraid of being masculine.
Okay? Your aggression, your assertiveness, your testosterone, it's a good thing.
It's how things get done.
It's what energizes you, what puts you in the world.
It makes you ambitious.
It makes you assert yourself and motivate yourself.
It has to be channeled.
It has to be disciplined.
But you have to see, you know, we were talking about, are people pleasing things and how you reframe it?
You have to see who you are and see the virtue and see the power in that.
And it's a cultural problem because men are very confused.
I didn't have that confusion when I was growing up, you know.
So now it's very difficult because you're being told that all these things that you feel naturally are negative.
They're only negative if you can't control them.
So self -control is a very masculine quality.
You're able to control yourself.
You're able to control your passions.
You're able to not talk too much if you don't need to talk too much.
I'm not saying that women don't have, that the opposite is wrong.
These are things that men naturally have because of their biology.
And I'm sorry, I do believe in these things.
But they're good. They're just how you use them that can be bad.
And so I just wish there were more positive role models out there.
I know I could be a real bastard.
I could be a real asshole.
I'm very competitive.
When I play games, I like to win.
And I can be a little bit mean about it, okay?
I mean, I'm a pleaser, but I like winning.
I channeled it, all of my aggression, all of that testosterone.
I'm not saying I have more than anyone.
I just have normal amounts.
I pour it into my books.
I pour that edge, that aggression that like, damn you, I don't really like you.
I don't like the world.
Into the 48 laws of power.
Into here's how these manipulate.
These are how people manipulate.
These are how people can be bad and cruel.
And damn it, I'm going to get all my aggression by exposing it and showing it and being as real and direct.
I channel it into something as opposed to hurting other people kind of thing.
So finding ways to channel your aggressive tendencies is a positive way of being a man.
You have to find whatever that is.
Sports is a great example, but there are other things as well.
It feels a lot like alchemy, in a way.
Or actually, it's even, it's, alchemy is taking something which is bad or useless and turning it into something which is valuable.
This is taking something which is uncertain.
It could go either way.
This desire for mastery, for conquer, for achievement, and using it to propel you forward.
And hopefully, making the world a better place along.
There's no reason that your desire to pursue and conquer and become masterful or anything has to leave the world worse.
It's not some weird zero, some thing where in order for you to become better, you need to take from the world.
I think it's additive.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, you have to be smart and you have to be in control of yourself and you have to be disciplined.
But let's just add discipline to one of those other masculine virtues.
It just needs to be redefined.
We need people out there, men and even women who feel comfortable with this, saying these are the virtues.
These are the good sides of being a man and being masculine.
And so even mastering things and even being competitive is not bad.
You build a business that kicks ass, that does really well, that gives people certain things that they needed or they wanted.
So it's just a matter of how you channel that energy and how you control it.
And what the virtues are is self -control, not feeling like you have to put people down in order to raise yourself up, feeling confident, not having to boast.
A terrible toxic masculine quality is boasting and saying, look how much money I have, look how much women I've slept with, look at all this other thing.
You're just talking, it's just a lot of hot air.
That's not strong, that's actually weak.
So many powerful qualities actually come from a position of great weakness and insecurity.
When I look at leaders who are always boasting and talking about how the great things that they've done, I see a little insecure little weak child having to say these things.
So it just depends on whether it comes from something solid and strong or it comes from massive wells of insecurity.
Robert Green, ladies and gentlemen.
Robert, I really, really appreciate your openness of being able to talk about this stuff.
I think this line between human psychology and human nature is very much needed at the moment because as you said about the masculinity portion, the role models, the archetypes, sort of previous lessons and channels that we would have run through, many of them have been thrown up in the air by technology, by changing
social positions. And I'm looking forward to you getting this sublime, which I'm sure that you are as well, getting this sublime thing finished.
Yeah. And then when it's finished, I'll be missing it.
And ready to do the next one.
What's your self -imposed, rough self -imposed submission date?
Well, hopefully it'll be out in 2026.
Okay. You're going to have to wait two years because it's going to take a year to finish and then a year to put it in shape.
And I can say it's going to be a very weird book.
Coming from you, that is an extra special claim.
Yeah. It's the weirdest book, though, that I've ever written.
Can you say why? Well, I'm trying to shake you up.
I'm trying to make you not see the world in the same way.
I'm trying to make you realize that you're looking at it in a very limited fashion.
And so every chapter, I'm trying to challenge you and say that the world is different and actually much more exciting and interesting than you think it is.
And so I would like to compare it to taking drugs without having to take the drugs.
That it's going to kind of alter a little bit how you look at things if you micro -dosed on something.
It's kind of like micro -dosing.
So it's going to alter how you look at nature, how you look at animals, how you look at yourself, how you look at people, how you look at your own childhood, how you look at history, how you look at art and music, and then how you look at death.
Death is the final chapter, obviously, because death is the ultimate sublime.
You know something I know quite intimately.
So it's going to be a weird book, and maybe it'll fail.
Maybe I'll have 10 readers.
Well, you've been certain over the last eight, so, you know.
Yeah, but this could be the one that fails.
You never know. I've been thinking so much about awe and dread as two emotions that are pretty absent.
And I imagine that they fit somewhere into the sublime.
I think transcendent experiences like that are so important.
I know we're at the end here, but the sublime is an unusual thing because it's a combination of pain and pleasure, of awe and terror.
And these two things in the human body, and I analyzed the neurology, the physiology of it, create a kind of vibratory effect in you, where if it were just beautiful and pleasurable, well, okay, if it were just painful, ah, but the combination of the two is startling and it makes you look at it and it
has an effect on your body and it gives you chills.
And so like when you look at the night sky, it's infinite, it's awesome, but I'm so small, I'm so tiny.
I'm so meaningless.
Put those two together and you have the sublime.
Well, I'm going to see the Valdez Four Seasons performed in Venice in two weeks.
So I wonder whether I'll have some sublime or some awe or some dread.
What's the dread? Oh, being in the presence of mastery like that throws into sharp contrast all of the areas where you haven't pushed yourself and you can feel dreadful for that.
I often find whenever I see my friends who are in a rock band and they play like a huge gig and I'm there and I just watch them command thousands of people, and I go, what the fuck are you doing with your life?
So it's a beautiful blend of the two.
I tell you before we do leave, first off, everyone needs to go and pick up the 25th anniversary edition of 48 Laws of Power because it's beautiful and you get to do that cool thing with the edges of the paper.
And it's a limited edition, it's going to run out.
And that, but also you've started pumping on YouTube as well.
It seems like every few days there's a new piece of content, so people can go and check that out, which I'm a massive fan of.
Yeah, I can't believe it because we started out with nothing and we're going to be hitting 2 million subscribers this year.
Wow, you join us in the muck and the mire of the content creator world.
Oh my God, it's pressure.
Soon you'll be doing peace signs and selfies and all the rest of it.
Yeah, the pressure.
You can't let up, it's almost like a bad thing in some ways.
Aloofness is difficult when you're doing that.
Robert, thank you so much, it's been a long time coming to do it in person.
Yeah, thanks.
