The Manipulation Expert: You're Setting Your Child Up For Misery! Most People Don't Realise They're Narcissists! | The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Everybody has narcissistic tendencies and we're all self -absorbed, but nobody wants to admit it.

It's always somebody else.

It's always Donald Trump.

It's always Elon Musk.

But everyone has a manipulative side.

There are no saints in this world.

But can you use it productively?

Yes, most definitely.

There's deep narcissists who are very problematic.

And there's healthy narcissists.

And knowing the distinction between the two will help save you years of misery.

What if I'm dealing with a narcissist?

I want you to do this following.

I want you to... Robert Greene is one of the most influential writers in history.

Unraveling the secrets of power, strategy, and human psychology that are essential for purpose, resilience, and success.

What is it about human nature that we just don't want to admit?

One is that envy is deeply ingrained in all of us.

In fact, always wanting to be better and superior to others is the most motivating factor of 90 % of human behavior.

But if you don't admit it to yourself, that ugly emotion is like a nuclear bomb to all aspects of life.

It will seize you by the throat and make you miserable.

But there's also understanding things like we all judge on appearances that everyone has a dark side and that we are all actors.

And I will get into the nitty gritty of all of them because it's really about how powerful people use those traits for their success.

People are lonelier than ever.

And when you look at the impact that's having, it's equal to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

What is the antidote for this?

I empathize with it very much so because when I was younger, I was losing in the game of life.

I was very depressed and even suicidal.

I don't know what lifted me out was.

I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button, wherever you're listening to this.

I would like to make a deal with you.

If you could do me a huge favour and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better.

I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button the show gets bigger which means we can expand the production bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to doing this thing we love if you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button wherever you're listening

to this that would mean the world to me that is the only favor I will ever ask you thank you so much for your time Robert at this moment in time what you believe your followers your fans the people that love your books?

What do you believe that they're struggling with the most?

And I'm asking this question because I imagine you get thousands of DMs and messages from these people.

What are the common themes?

Well, the most common question I get, particularly from people in their 20s, is they don't really know where they're headed.

They don't know what their career is, what I call in mastery, their life's task.

And I talk a lot about it in interviews and in the book mastery and I make it the point that it's most important decision in your life figuring out what you were destined for why you were born what you were created for what makes you unique and I say that everything from that realization from that understanding

kind of stems from that your sense of fulfillment your happiness everything will come from that one realization and a lot of young people are very confused right now and I don't blame them these are very very confusing times that they're going through much more confusing than anything I had to deal

with particularly I think the influence of technology and social media and what I mean by that is to know who you are to know what you were meant to do in life what what why you were born what makes you unique requires a lot of reflection on yourself self -awareness self -knowledge you have to go inward

and when your attention is always focused so much on what other people are doing what other people are saying, you know, what they think is hot, what they think is cool, you become kind of a stranger to yourself, right?

So when I talk about that concept to them, it's like, it sounds interesting, Robert, but I have no idea what that is.

I don't know what my life's task is.

Now, that's maybe 30 % or 40 % of the emails that I get.

It's quite high, but it's not all of them.

But it is a trend I've noticed with young people who are going through, I think, very, very confusing times.

and I'm very empathetic to it because I was actually someone who was quite lost in my 20s and I know the pain that that can cause.

Not feeling like your life has any meaning, you know, I think that's something that really is tormenting a lot of young people.

What does life mean?

What will give me a sense of meaning, right, to what I'm doing, to where I'm headed, to my daily experiences?

And not having that is deeply disturbing.

And I've been through that myself.

I think I'm getting a lot of that kind of feedback and a lot of those emails among others.

And is there a strategy that young people or really anybody that feels lost or aimless in their life should and is able to deploy to find their purpose, to find the direction, the thing they should be aiming at?

well you know you have to get out of this this this way of thinking that that so many people have which everything has to be simple and linear and I'm headed in this direction there's got to be a solution like I'm hacking my way to the truth life doesn't work that way life is very complex so I can't

give you a single track answer to finding your life purpose you as an individual But I can give you kind of clues.

I can kind of direct you towards certain paths that have worked for me and that have worked for hundreds of thousands of other people who've become masters or very successful in their field.

And the first thing is you have to go inward.

So you have to resist the pull that our culture gives you.

You have to also really want this.

That's probably what it really comes down to.

Are you unhappy? Are you frustrated?

Are you hitting kind of rock bottom?

Is this a turning point in your life where you realize if I keep going this way in five years, it's going to be really serious?

Okay, it has to be important to you and you have to have a sense of urgency.

And with that sense of urgency, you have to make some decisions.

And one of the decisions that's absolutely essential is to pay less attention to what other people are doing, to pay less attention to what other people are saying, to pay less attention to what people are telling you you should be doing, and to go inward and think about yourself and think about what you

love and what your interests are that have nothing to do with what people are doing on social media.

The things that grab you, that excite you deeply inside in a way that's almost irresistible.

Now, for me, I can say that it was always been writing, okay?

And I just couldn't figure out what kind of writing.

But there's also things like when I ever read anything that has to do with ancient history, particularly the origins of of humanity hundreds of you know tens of thousands of years ago i am so excited i can't i can't i can read every single article about that every discovery that takes place in africa about our

origins it just puts my mind in a spin to think that this is who we were a hundred thousand years ago this is who we are now i want to know more that's like this one of these things that hits you in the gut well the people out there you have that there's something like that you had it when you were a child.

You had it when you were 2, 3, 4 years old, 5 years old, and you've lost it because you're listening too much to other people.

So it's kind of like archaeology would be the metaphor.

You have to dig and dig and dig and find those bones and those relics and those artifacts from your past, the things that really excite you, as well as the things that you hate.

Now, if I were to go, you know, kind of do a reverse engineering, which I do with a lot of people who are successful like yourself, I could go back and kind of find that with you where that hit you because you had a particular path that led you to doing these podcasts.

I know it wasn't a straight line.

You deviated. You were in some other job that you hated, and then you slowly found your way.

Each of those stories, there's a lesson for people, right?

And that's what I compiled in mastery.

But it all begins from a sense of urgency.

I can't go on this way.

I have to find something that I love.

When you're 20 or 21, maybe you don't feel that urgency because you're so young.

You know, you look good, you have lots of energy, the world's kind of open to you.

But you have to be careful because time passes really quickly.

Those years in your 20s, they go by faster than you think.

And if you turn 30 and you never thought about this, and you're kind of been wandering around trying things, it starts to get a little difficult, much harder for you.

So it's better if you have that sense of urgency when you're 21 or 22.

And the other thing I would say is you don't learn anything if you're not excited by it.

So you have to have a sense of fun and adventure about this.

So discovering what your life's task can't be this dreary, boring thing that Robert's advocating you do.

Oh, I have to spend time with myself i have to look you know do a journal blah blah blah no it's fun it's an adventure trying different things that fit into this general shape of what you were destined for it's a blast you know when i was in my 20s i had more fun than anybody i had an amazing time it

was the best years of my life i was trying all sorts of different things i was exploring i was traveling at adventures so i don't want your life to be boring i want you to learn i want you to have adventures but you have to have a sense of direction a sense of purpose to guide that kind of those those

different adventures that you go on.

Do you think it's harder to find your sense of purpose and what you're deeply connected to as you get older?

Yeah I think so your mind gets a little bit more rigid you think you know all of the answers right but what happens with a lot of people i also get correspondence from or let's say turning 40 or even a little bit older and they're coming to those crossroads is it's even much more painful than when you're

in your 20s because there's a sense of regret there's a sense that you've wasted your time and to get back to a path that will suit you can be very difficult as you mentioned but there's also another another side to that, which is you probably have been learning some skills in your life.

You probably have had some experiences that have changed you.

Because when you're 21, 22, you don't know the world.

You don't know people.

You think you know everything, but you don't know anything, right?

You've never had any experiences in life.

You never had to suffer.

Maybe you have, but not really suffering like you do when you get older.

Okay. So you're 40.

You've had tough experiences.

you've been hardened.

You got, you know, you're not so fragile.

And you've learned things.

If you change your mindset at that age, and you go, I'm going to take what I have, my experiences, my skills, what I've learned, and I'm going to redirect it towards something more exciting for me, then it will work for you.

Right. But as you say, it can be harder because you're more set in your ways.

And you've bought a life, you've bought a network, you've bought a reputation for being this thing, whether it's lawyer, doctor, dentist, whatever it might be.

And so there's an element of shedding that might have to occur.

Shedding people, shedding a city that you live in, shedding a way that people know you, an income.

And that's deeply difficult.

And I think some people would prefer the certain misery of their current situation to the uncertainty and the shedding that occurs when they go in search of something else.

Yeah, but I mean, the pain that you feel when you get older and, you know, we humans have very active minds.

We're gifted with the most powerful organ in the entire universe, the human brain.

The billions of possible connections in our brain is greater than anything in the entire universe.

It is the most amazing instrument and our brains are very active.

And when you get older and you don't have anything to put your brain onto and things are slowing down, you don't realize that that's making you depressed.

You don't realize that the fact that you haven't been able to fulfill what you were meant to fulfill is actually the source of your misery and unhappiness.

You will blame it on other people.

You will blame it on the world.

You will blame it on politics.

You won't look at yourself and realize that it comes from you and the sadness comes from you and the fact that you're not maximizing, you're not exploiting this gift that you were given.

So it might be difficult to shed all of that.

But I've talked to people, I'd say more like around 30 years old, who say, Robert, I'm at this horrible job.

You know, I'm in a fast -food place or something.

I don't remember what it was or I'm a barista, whatever.

You know, I'm so unhappy.

I have a wife and I have two kids.

What do I do, right?

And I go into their misery a little bit and then I say, okay, let's first figure out something that you think you would really want in life, something that will have an income because you have to pay for your wife and your children.

You can't just go off and write poetry or become a rock star.

You have to support yourself and your family.

What could that possibly be?

And we dig and we dig and we dig.

I say, all right, we have an answer, a kind of an idea.

I want you to do this following.

I want you to carve out two hours or as much as you can at night where you start exploring this field on the internet and you start considering maybe going to night school, okay, and taking classes that change this course.

And then I want you to think of five years where you're going to be a goal five years ahead.

and they tell me, overnight, just having that has changed them.

Suddenly from their depression, they have hope and they feel a million times better and they have energy.

Just from realizing that there is a possibility, it's going to take hard work, but there is an answer, there is a place to go.

And so it changes it when you have some sense of direction.

There'll be so many people listening to that now and they'll be thinking, I have a plan, I have an idea, or at least a kernel of an idea, but I've spent the last three months, six months, 12 months, 18 months, two years thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking.

And not doing. And not doing.

Yeah. People stop me all the time and they'll say, Steve, I'm thinking of starting a podcast.

And I'll say, how long have you been thinking about this?

About two and a half years.

Yeah. You know, I talk in mastery about something called a concept called learning by doing.

And back in the Middle Ages, they used to have an apprenticeship that you would go through.

Seven years, you would learn to be a craftsman, right?

You'd first go from being an apprentice to a journeyman to a master.

By doing things, the brain learns.

But if you never do anything, you're never going to learn.

So if you suddenly said, I've been thinking about a podcast, I would say, get off your ass and start the podcast tomorrow.

and it fails. You have learned so many things.

You've learned more in those three months of failure than you have been two years thinking or five years of getting an MBA from some school and putting yourself in massive debt.

Learn by doing, learn by failing.

Why is planning and procrastination that comes with the prolonged planning so tempting for people?

Like why do we love to plan, plan, plan, plan, plan?

Because you're afraid of failure, quite honestly.

I mean, Freud has a word for it in German, Erfolgsangst, which means fear of success.

Because this is something that afflicts a lot of adolescents.

Because if you're successful, you now have responsibility.

You now have a reputation.

You now have succeeded and your next venture could fail.

right there's pressure that comes with trying something and putting your name out there and if I don't ever try anything if I don't bother if I blame the world I blame my parents I blame my education system I blame my partner this that the other then you never have to worry you never have to have that responsibility

you never have to have that fear of success and that holds people back so it's easier to not do anything and stay in your little bubble and go, God, if only I had had money, I would have written this great novel.

I would have, you know, done this, this, and the other.

It's just crap. You're trying to delude yourself, and you're afraid of actually putting your neck out on the line.

That's what it comes down to.

It's a common syndrome among adolescents.

I was reading, I think it was the book, The Courage to Be Disliked, and it was talking in one of the sections about how some people would, like, they prefer to live in the like realm of possibility and the realm of possibility is the space you live when you declare to the world that you're going to

do something and be something and before you actually do it so when I tell my friends listen I'm going to become an actor for example the year and a half where I go around saying that I live in the world of possibility where there's been no feedback to disprove me yet yeah which is nice yeah but I'm

kind of getting the credit for being the type of person that's aspiring to change yeah and that like realm of possibility before you get feedback or try, is a very nice place to be for some.

It is. And it's very addicting and it's kind of a narcotic.

But the thing is, so you've got this realm of possibility, which you could become anything.

I could become an actor.

I could become a great novice.

I could become a CEO.

I could be Elon Musk the second.

But the way the world works is you don't achieve anything unless you have limits.

Having limits and hitting that wall and that resistance is what makes you learn is what makes you great is how the human brain functions.

And what I mean by that is, let's say you're learning the piano.

You can't just start out playing anything and just doing all the notes.

It's very limited what you can do, right?

And you have to go within those limits and those walls and learn the first things first.

And then those walls start to expand a little bit, but you're constantly pressing against limits.

And those limits make you stronger and stronger it's like when you're swimming the resistance in the water is what makes your muscles bigger right the resistance of limits is what makes your brain bigger makes you more successful makes you learn but if all you do is live in that nebulous world of possibility

you're never developing you're never getting any muscle you're never getting any strength you're not developing life skills it's a tough world even you know that people can be very cruel.

It could be very mean -spirited world.

You have to have a thick skin in this world.

You have to develop some toughness.

And you develop that toughness by trying things out and by failing.

And if you fail, you know, like my wife's in the film business and we know a lot of actors.

An actor, you know, you think it's all glamorous, but it's actually like 99 % rejection.

People are constantly rejecting you.

And they're rejecting you for things that you have no control over like your looks you know and so what separates the actors who succeed and the ones who don't are those that have a bit of a tough skin they don't take that rejection oh i'm so uh i'm so unworthy i hate myself oh the world's so awful

they go all right i'm gonna go on to the next one i learned what wasn't working there and you develop some toughness if you don't develop that toughness you're never going to get anywhere in life and you get it by trying and trying and working at it And when you're in that sort of first chapter of your

professional life, is there anything from all of the work that you've done, the writing that you've done, that a young person should be trying to acquire?

And I say that, should they be aiming at knowledge, skills, reputation, money, network?

Definitely not money.

Definitely not reputation.

Perhaps, I mean, yeah, or fame.

Perhaps network can help.

but what you really want to do in this world in the 21st century in our decade is skills.

You want to be learning skills.

The more skills you have, and I mean true skills, I don't mean trying something out for a year and then going on to something else for another.

I mean getting real skill at something, right?

Whether it's in computers, whether it's in the arts, in any field.

Real skill. And then if you can develop two or three skills by the time you're in your 20s and still have some fun, the world is going to open up to you because what you're going to be able to do when you turn 30 is you're going to go, I can take that skill that I learned in computers, I can take that skill

I learned in media and in creating a podcast or whatever, and I can create a business that's going to combine the two in a way that no one has ever thought of because I'm a unique person.

The world will open up to you.

Skills are the gold of the 21st century.

And if you're seduced by money, if you think about money, you're doomed because that's not what matters in life.

Because let's say you have two job offers.

One is at Goldman Sachs, opening position for $150 ,000 a year, and one is at some startup for $30 ,000 a year, and you're living in New York and you're going to be starving.

You're going to be sharing a miserable little flat somewhere in Bushwick, whatever, okay?

Take the $30 ,000 a year job because you're going to learn so much.

You're going to be hands -on.

Whereas in that other job, you're going to be lost in there.

You're going to be among hundreds of other young people and you're not going to have responsibilities.

Here you're going to have responsibilities.

So money is not what matters to you.

Because when you're in your 20s, you can starve.

You can live on less food.

You can have it a little tough because you're young.

I know myself. i i lived i was very poor i lived in london had a job in london in 1984 i believe yeah 84 and i was making i think it was 30 pounds a week maybe it's less than that it was by starting salary and my girlfriend at the time the only thing we could eat was turnips and cauliflower cauliflower

cheese was our main dish but i was 25 i can handle it so you can handle not making money and learning because that's what's most important i don't think many young people in that first season of life realize how long life is so you know we we try and take shortcuts we try and get to the money as fast

as we can but you're telling me to take a longer road which is the acquisition of skills even at the cost of some of those short -term rewards that are very tempting to post on my Instagram.

Yeah. Well, I mean, also, you know, you look at somebody like Steve Jobs.

I can relate to that because he wasn't interested in money at all.

It was never the motivating factor.

It's never been my motivating factor.

Right. I wanted to have fun and I wanted to be successful and I wanted to be able to write.

He wanted to design the most beautiful pieces of technology in the world.

It ended up he was like the richest man of the world at the time, but he never cared about money.

It wasn't what motivated him.

I never cared about money and now I'm not as rich as Steve Jobs, but I'm doing fairly well.

Because it'll come to you.

If you play the game right, if you learn the skills when you're young and then you develop your own business, by the time you're 35, you'll be making four times what you would have made at that Goldman Sachs job, right?

That's how the game is played these days.

Starting your own business being an entrepreneur being an entrepreneur is the most powerful position you can attain for aim for some people aren't are you know destined for that it's not in their DNA but to me that's what we should all be aiming for to be your own boss because personally I hated working

for other people but being an entrepreneur starting your own business one that has a niche in this world you're going to make all the money that you'll ever need it's quite painful being an entrepreneur though.

I think it was actually Elon that said, building his businesses is like chewing glass and staring into the abyss.

And I can relate to some degree of the businesses that I've built over the years and just the immense hardship and uncertainty.

And, you know, I guess there's at times a subtle envy for your team members who are unaware of the chaos that one has to endure to make sure everybody's paid on time and you know make sure everything's everyone's happy okay but um the lesson for me and all of that is altering your sense of what pleasure

and happiness is so in the moment it's painful right and we don't like pain nobody likes pain I don't like pain right but if your sense of what pleasure is and happiness is only like here from the present moment to here It's going to be very hard to get out of that.

But if your sense of pleasure and happiness is here.

Long term. Yeah. Then you've got power.

You've got maneuverability.

You have room to maneuver.

And that's the key to the whole thing.

Okay. So you're saying that if I have a short term view on happiness, I expect it today, now and every day.

Yeah. Then my life's not going to be great.

But if I expect happiness to be a long term.

Yeah. So, I mean, look at you now is what I'm trying to say.

you're pretty happy, I imagine.

You're pretty fulfilled, right?

Yeah. And you wouldn't have gotten there if when you were 24, whatever, you just gave up because it was so painful.

I better just go grab that easy job working for a bank or something.

You'd be miserable now.

Whereas look at you now.

That's what I'm trying to open people's minds to.

Follow Stephen Bartlett here.

That's the model. One of the things that I think helped me get here is my dark side.

You talk about dark sides a lot.

And when I say my dark side, I mean the insecurity, the shame, the wanting to fit in, all of those kinds of things that acted as a driving force.

And a lot of people have a dark side.

I've heard you talk about how all great achievers have a bit of a dark side in them.

How do we channel our dark side so that it's productive and not destructive?

I was talking to someone the other day who is a very successful entrepreneur.

and they have their own story of like shame and embarrassment and trying to run away from a certain life they used to have.

And that made them successful.

But now they work 18 hours a day.

They're just like almost addicted to their work.

So I wonder if it can go too far.

Yeah. But they say they're happy.

They do? Yeah, they say they're really happy.

Do you believe it? It's hard to distinguish true happiness from the contentment that you get when you are successfully escaping your dark side.

Do you know what I mean by that?

Because this individual has successfully ran away from their darkness and they appear to be in a state of contentment because they're succeeding in their pursuit of running away from their past.

But I don't know if that's happiness.

Some yogi might tell me that happiness is when you stop running.

Well, you know, I worked for somebody, I was on the board of directors for this company, American Apparel, which no longer exists.

And the CEO, Dov Charney, was the founder of the company, an incredible entrepreneur, who from one little shop here in Los Angeles, when I met him, created this empire and it was incredibly rewarding and he was a i'd say a very fulfilled person but he couldn't stop he couldn't stop it was like a demon possessed

him he had to have more he had to have he had to build more buildings he had to have more american apparels all over the world he leveraged himself and then when the crash occurred in 2007 just before the company just after the company went public he was so in debt that it the company never recovered

right He tried too hard.

He didn't know the limits.

So part of this isn't, when I said if money motivates you, then you're going to have that demon.

If fame and reputation motivates you, then that demon is going to seize you by the throat and going to make you work 18 hours until everybody eats your dust and you humiliate all your enemies.

And you're miserable, right?

So knowing who you are and knowing what matters is going to save you from that kind of demonic possession.

Because you're actually not going to be very successful if you're like that.

You're going to burn yourself out.

You're not going to have very good ideas.

What happens to a lot of people when they become successful is, first of all, it goes to their head.

They think they have the Midas touch.

They think they've got the golden touch.

and then their minds start going in this kind of unit, this singular direction.

They learned how to do something and they're just doing it, doing it, doing it, doing it and doing it and they don't know how to learn.

They don't know that there's other ways of doing things, right?

And that's what happens when you become completely possessed and your mind isn't open and isn't free and isn't expanding and you're not creative anymore.

To be creative will require you to try something different, to not expand your company endlessly like he did, and instead to take the five branches that you have here in Los Angeles and make the product better and be more creative with it and don't be possessed by money and fame and reputation.

That's the answer, I think, there.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does, yeah.

Yeah, something that I think many a person struggle with, which is in part this idea of focusing on the thing in front of you versus getting too distracted with other opportunities.

And I wanted to talk to you about this idea of focus and how important you think it is for mastery.

I meet so many young people who will say to me, oh, I'm doing this little crypto thing here and I've got this hair business here and I've got this other thing here.

What would you say to those people that are trying to become a master in this world as it relates to focus?

It's funny because I'm helping the son of an old friend of mine who's who's who's got that problem and he's incredibly successful I hope he's not listening to this he's 20 years old he's very wealthy he's done amazing things but he's one of those people who spread himself out to all these different

things he's and I can't find a through line what connects them all except making money and having connections and stuff and it's very alluring in this world particularly you know where there's so many possibilities where You can get on the Internet.

You can learn this out of the other.

People are doing these things.

You can get into crypto.

You know, you can start your own business here.

You can get into the health and fitness world.

And then later on try to figure out how to connect them all.

But life doesn't work like that.

That's not how the brain functions.

That's not what we were meant for.

Because it doesn't start from you.

The whole thing has to start from you.

It can't start from the world.

It can't start from what other people are doing.

It can't start from what's sexy.

It has to come from within.

If it doesn't come from within, then you're going to be floundering for years and years and years.

And so what I've done with this young person, whose name I won't mention but I love dearly, is what is it that really is in your heart?

What is it that you really, really love?

How can we connect this crypto with this media business that you're starting, with the sports world that you're starting, with this fitness thing?

What connects them all, you know?

And to me, I was thinking, I was getting the sense, we haven't solved it yet, but he's kind of excited by celebrities and by that world, and that's fine.

I think there's nothing wrong with that.

So I'd say, well, maybe what connects all this is the film business, right?

Because the film business is pretty wide -ranging.

To be a producer, to raise money, You're dealing with all kinds of different people.

You're networking. You're meeting starlets.

You know, it's a glamorous life, but it's focused, okay?

So, you know, when you focus on something, the world just kind of opens up, but you have to be focusing on the right thing.

So if you were meant to be a writer and then you decide because you want money to go into law school and then you focus very deeply on law school, what will happen is for a year or two you'll be able to skid by but then you'll the wheels will start going slower and slower because you're not interested

in it you're not connected to it you get bored and your focus will start falling to pieces but if it's something you love you can focus on that for seven eight 10 12 years and never get bored from observing a certain family member of mine do a very similar thing part of it as well is that when she would start

one pursuit starting x business it would get hard as it always does and when you look over at the person across the road they seem to be having a much easier life with their thing or with their crypto with their whatever yeah and they tell you the story of how much money they've made and how easy it

was whatever so you get tempted into believing that the grass is greener you pursue that so now you're doing two things now your first thing starts to suffer yeah and i think especially in the early season of life when you don't have elon musk resources much of the game is focusing enough on one thing

to build those resources so that you have the chance of being able to do it more than one thing or spreading your bets a bit more but in that first season when you're in resource accumulation phase i think my early investors in my company i remember one day emailing my first investor who's a very successful

man and saying i've got an idea and it was an idea other than the one he'd invested in and i remember the email he i was 18 years old and he hit me so hard on that email he was like if you don't focus on one thing you will never you were the one that was interested in this other yeah i was trying to

he was the one yeah so he my investor he was a very successful man and i emailed him this other idea which i thought was amazing yeah yeah yeah and he sent me this email back which was like being hit by a whip and he was like if you don't focus on one thing now you will never be successful because also you

rob yourself as you said of the chance of accumulating deep skills?

Yeah. Yes, it is. Yeah, I remember this is something that wise people know.

And if you're young, if you have like a mentor like you did who could tell you the truth, the ropes as they are, it will help save you years of misery.

I remember when we were at American Apparel, it was the year 2007.

The company was just about to go public.

I was about to be put on the board of directors And this man came to me who was like your investor and he said, Robert, just make sure that Dove doesn't mindlessly expand.

Make the brand focused.

Have it focused on one thing and then he will be successful.

At the time I thought that was interesting but I didn't really have the guts to like explain that to Dove.

But there are people out there who understand the truth of this.

But the other thing about envy, like you say, you see your other friend doing crypto and they're having so much fun and making so much money.

Tell you it's bullshit.

They're not having as much fun as you think, right?

People create a front on Instagram or TikTok or wherever where life seems so glorious.

But they're never having as much fun as you might imagine, you know.

In my book, Laws of Human Nature, I talk about Aristotle Onassis, who in the 60s was the wealthiest man in the world.

He was married to John F.

Kennedy's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, Jacqueline Onassis.

Who could be happier than that?

He had yachts, et cetera.

He was the most unhappiest, miserable person in the world, as Jacqueline Kennedy explained in her autobiography.

He was such a mean -spirited, unhappy person.

Yet everybody envied him because he had this beautiful wife and all that money.

The people you envy are not doing nearly as well as you think.

So don't let that influence your decisions in life.

I've never forgotten a certain Johnny Ive clip that I watched many, many years ago.

I think it must have been five years ago now, where he talks about working with Steve Jobs.

And this is what he says in the clip, and I've never forgotten it.

Never forgotten it.

this sounds really simplistic but it still shocks me how few people actually practice this and it's a struggle to practice but is this issue of focus Steve was the most remarkably focused person I've ever met in my life and the thing with focus is it's not sort of like this thing you aspire to or you

decide on Monday, you know what?

I'm going to be focused.

It is every minute a, why are we talking about this?

This is what we're working on.

You can achieve so much when you truly focus.

And one of the things that Steve would say, because I think he was concerned that I wasn't, he would say, how many things have you said no to?

and i would honestly i would have these sacrificial things because i mean i wanted to be very honest about it and so i say well i said no to this and no to that and um but he he knew that i wasn't vaguely interested in doing those things anyway so there was no real sacrifice what what focus means is saying

no to something that you with every bone in your body you think is a phenomenal idea and you wake up thinking about it but you say no to it because you're focusing on something else yeah amen that's you know that's the church of focus i agree with completely i mean i hate using my own examples because i'm

I'm a rare avas, you know, I'm a rare bird.

But, you know, I have this book that I'm writing, okay?

And it's on a very specific subject.

And I get distractions all the time.

People want, you know, I can do this speaking engagement in India where I've never been before or Egypt, you know, kind of thing or get involved in this television project.

and I'm actually never really seduced by it because I just love writing.

But where it really comes down to is I'm writing this book and it's been going really not well.

It's because I'm not focused on the actual thing I'm trying to say.

So you can bring that level of focus down to the finest, finest point of your business or your writing or whatever.

What is it you're trying to say.

What is it you're trying to accomplish?

What is your brand really about?

Get into the nitty -gritty, get into the little fine grains of sand and know what that is.

So every time I'm writing my chapter and I start writing about something that's not directly relevant to what it's about and what the reader is going to be interested in, I'm making a mistake and I make the mistake for several weeks and then I realize it and I pull back.

So that level of focus has to have a lot of energy behind it because you're so in love with what you're doing that when you deviate from it this little radar inside of your brain goes you're off you're off you got to get back to it right and it's painful but when you do get back to it and when do things

do click it's incredibly pleasurable so the focus for young people that seems so painful god damn it everyone else is having so much fun and i'm having to learn this just keep telling yourself that you're doing something that your brain is going to reward you with several years down the line so that friend

of yours that seems to be having so much fun in three years they're going to be sliding down the ladder working at some crap job whereas you're going to be rising up so just keep your mind on the on the on the larger issue there and know that working with what your brain is works well with will pay

incredible rewards down the line this when they talk about compounding returns in life they always say that it's slow than it's fast and even this podcast if you look at the graph of this podcast for the first three years of me recording in my cupboard on sunday nights alone completely flat no one's

listening and then by year maybe i'd say year four or year five it goes straight up yeah and that's a consequence of those first three years were acquiring skills, understanding what people liked and why they like listening to the show and actually getting better as a talker, a speaker, an interviewer,

etc. And what most people miss is they miss that internship of the slow, lonely, unrewarding couple of years because they lose focus.

No one's clapping, no downloads.

I've never seen another route.

I've never seen another path there.

I've never seen the overnight success.

Well, I mean, I know I can name five other podcasters who have the same story as you who told me that Lewis Howes, Chris Williamson, Jay Shetty, they all have the same story for several years, nothing with crickets.

And I knew these people when they were just starting out.

And then that happens.

I remember when I was working with 50 Cent on the book, The 50th Law, you know, people look at rap stars and they I go, wow, the glamour, the fun, the excitement, the sexiness, the lifestyle.

But he said, you know, I knew him because I was with him.

Nobody worked harder than 50.

He was incredibly disciplined and incredibly focused.

And when he made it in the music business, it took incredible years of difficulty, hardship, and failure.

But nobody ever sees that.

They only see them in concert and all the glamour and all the fun.

They never focus on the years of grit and near failure.

He got shot, he nearly died.

His record label dropped him.

He had to work his way back up into the music industry from the very bottom until Eminem finally noticed him.

But we don't see that in these celebrities, all the grit and the hard work that took them to get there.

We just see the success and we get seduced by the success.

I've heard you reference before Howard Gardner's frames of mind theory of multiple intelligences book and in that book it says that there are five types of intelligences logical intelligence linguistical intelligence interpersonal intelligence spatial intelligence and bodily intelligence and it defines

them quite differently logical is the ability to reason and solve problems and think in abstract terms like scientists and mathematicians linguistical intelligence is things like writers lawyers and poets you're one of those writers.

Interpersonal intelligence are leaders, psychologists, and teachers.

Spatial intelligence are architects, artists, and pilots.

And lastly, body intelligence is athletes, dancers, and surgeons.

How important is it to know your form of intelligence to be successful in life?

So figuring out what that is, is incredibly important.

And the reason why I like this book so much is we tend to think of intelligence as intellectual, as, you know, computer programming or mathematics or whatever it is, you know, having a PhD in this field.

But that's not intelligence.

Intelligence is also bodily intelligence.

Like somebody like Kobe Bryant in basketball is as intelligent as Albert Einstein, but in a different way.

So you have a parent who's always geared towards you know going to the best school and being an intellectual giant and their child wants to do ballet or sports or something and you kind of look down on that and you say no no no you're setting your child up for misery recognize what one of these frames

are for your child and press on it and let them go in that direction because it's what they're naturally gearing towards.

It's what's fun, right?

So for me, it was linguistic intelligence, words.

Since I was a child, words bewitch me.

I can't believe that we have words to name things, and that there are these symbols with letters that have sounds, but a lemon isn't a lemon, it's just a word.

And I would like, five years old, what the hell can that be?

That's so interesting you know and that you could take a word apart and spell other words with it so I knew from very early on that it was words words words words and I absolutely stink at one of these intelligence is is build is mechanical intelligence knowing how to build things I'm terrible at that which is very

odd because my father was brilliant at that and he wasn't good at any of the others and I didn't inherit it so that goes all you know that kind of debunks genetics right there but But, you know, so figuring out which one of those and leaning in it and making that direction of your life is so, so important.

So if your thing is interpersonal intelligence and you understand that and you're not heading into a job in which you're social and around people, you're going to be so miserable.

But if you know that what your thing is interpersonal intelligence, you've got like a hundred different directions you can head into.

You know, that doesn't mean you have to only be a social worker.

It just means you have to be a leader of people because you understand you like being around people, you like working with others, you're very empathetic.

There could be a hundred different kinds of jobs.

But once you know that, it gives you a sense of direction.

It's by far the most important step for people.

And I always recommend people reading this book because it's very, very important.

Much of the reason we lose focus, as I've seen in my own friendship group and my own family, is because of envy.

Yeah. How important is it to get control of one's envy?

I've heard you describe it as the ugliest emotion.

Well, it's ugly in the sense of, you know, it's an admission that you feel inferior, that you feel that somebody is better than you are.

And who wants to admit that?

You know, there's a very famous psychologist named Alfred Adler from the 20s.

He was a disciple of Freud.

He thought this ability of always wanting to be better and superior to others was the most motivating factor of 90 % of human behavior, that we always want to feel at least that we're superior in some way.

And the sense that we're inferior creates what he calls an inferiority complex.

So it's very, very painful to tell yourself that this person is doing better than you are or that they're younger and better looking than you are, that their wife is more interesting than you or their kids are doing better because it means it's a slight on you.

right we are very prone to envy genetically by the way our brains operate so it's known factor that chimpanzees are prone to feeling envy right if you give one chimp a banana or a grape and don't give another one they'll be giving you that kind of evil eye that we the stink eye that we associate with envy.

So it's something that's in primates.

And what it comes from, I believe, is our brains operate by comparison.

That's how we learn, that's how we understand things.

We understand that this is a wild animal because it's not that other thing over there.

Our brains compare bits of information to decide what is what, what's different from what's the other thing.

So our brains are geared towards comparing.

And when you create a social animal, we are the most social animal on the planet.

And you have that brain that's constantly comparing.

We're using that mechanism to compare ourselves to other people and always wanting what other people have.

And they've noticed in hunter -gatherer societies from back in 30 ,000 years ago, the feud that still had existed in the 20th century, that envy was a huge problem among them.

And so that when one person was given a gift, everybody in the tribe was so upset and angry that the person who was given the gift had to give it to other people so that they wouldn't be the target of envy, because it could lead to being murdered, right?

So envy is deeply ingrained in all of us.

We're constantly comparing ourselves to others, okay?

But we don't want to admit it.

So if I compare myself to some other writer who I think is having a better life than I am, who's sold more books than me, what I'll do in my mind instead of saying, he deserves that or she deserves that because they are actually a better writer, I'll go, they don't really deserve it.

They're a hack. They're just doing that because they know what the public wants.

And they're not, I'm going to be, my books are going to be read a hundred years from now, but nobody will read their books in five years.

I justify it to myself, right?

I don't feel envy. No, no, no.

I'm not saying that person's superior.

In fact, they're actually inferior to me.

That's the games that we play when we envy other people.

And it's something that social media is like a nuclear bomb of envy, right?

So 60 years ago, I wouldn't have known what my neighbors or friends from college are doing and how much more money they're making and how happy they are.

But now you know what everybody on the planet is doing and how good they are and how happy they are and these incredible trips they're taking and you know the the great schools that their children are getting into on and on and on so it's this machine for manufacturing envy and it's infesting our political

system as well it's seeping into all aspects of life but nobody wants to talk about it and nobody wants to admit it.

The main thing with envy is to admit that you feel it, okay?

So I will say, I will get on my hands and I will say, you know what?

Sometimes I actually envy Ryan Holiday.

He's 30 years younger than I am.

He's written already more books than I have.

Before I even wrote my first book, he's got a family, he's got these great homes, he's doing really well.

Yeah, sometimes I feel envy.

I'll admit it, okay?

If you don't admit it to yourself, then it just festers and something ugly will happen.

And so what I'm able to do with the feelings of envy that I might have is I think, God, Robert, there's no reason to feel that way.

Go through a process and go, he's actually deserved all the success he's had.

You know, he deserves it because he's worked really, really hard and he's a really good person.

He's ethical. He deserves it.

And so you should be happy for him, which I am.

I'm incredibly happy for him.

But I have that first little twinge of envy.

You have to admit it to yourself.

And it's not an easy thing to admit because it means you're admitting you feel inferior for a moment.

Can you use it productively?

Yes. At envy? Yes, most definitely.

And I talk in Laws of Human Nature about strategies for doing that.

One of them is there's somebody that you envy in the world.

Well, instead of festering with that ugly emotion, make that a spur.

Instead of envy, feel what's called emulation, where you feel competitive and you're going to be as good as they are or better than they are.

You're going to use that sense of inferiority to motivate you to work harder and harder and harder.

Another thing is, so when somebody has failure, and we're actually kind of gleeful about it, it's called schadenfreude, right?

The opposite of schadenfreude is a phrase that Nietzsche called mitfreude, which means instead of feeling pleasure in their pain, you feel their pleasure as well.

So instead of feeling envy, try and feel happy for the other person.

And you'll say, I can't do that.

But yes, you can. You have to practice it.

There's a great psychologist named William James who called it an as -if strategy.

So just tell yourself that I'm actually happy for their success.

And when you do that, it's actually a really great feeling to actually feel good about somebody else doing well is a very ennobling feeling it kind of raises you up instead of lowering you down and making you feel ugly it makes you feel noble it makes you feel better about yourself and it kind of opens

up your whole emotional life so those are I have other strategies in the book but those are a couple I was wondering why your book power is still selling unbelievably well.

I mean, most books, when they come out, they have their moment and then they're done.

But for some reason, what you write in this book is as compelling, tempting and attractive to people now more than ever.

And one would then assume that's because people feel more powerless.

And when they see the book, it offers them a promise of something that they so desperately want.

Is that an accurate assessment?

I think it is. I think it is.

I mean, I've noticed in the last six years or so the sales have been higher than they've ever been before.

And a lot of it, you know, young people went through the crash of 2008.

Then they had to deal with the COVID and the pandemic.

And in those years where the world seemed upside down, the book was selling better than ever.

So I think helplessness and feeling a loss of control, and feeling like there might be something out there that can guide me a little bit in this very confusing anarchic times that we're living through, can be very seductive and very appealing.

So, I mean, there's always change in our world.

There's always chaos.

But when the book came out in 1998, it wasn't nearly as chaotic as it is right now.

so I think you're right I do attribute the success not necessarily to my brilliance or the brilliance of the book but to the fact that people are feeling more and more helpless people are lonelier than ever according to many of the stats and when you look at the impact that's having on people it's equal

to smoking 15 cigarettes a day according to some reports um they're more likely to live alone they're more likely to feel lonely to report feeling lonely.

They're more likely to feel that they have no, nobody to turn to in a time of crisis, according to some studies as well.

They're more addicted than ever before.

You can class that in a number of ways, chemical addictions, but social media addictions and other things.

And that's the state of, especially young men, you know, it's, it's young women too, are having their own struggles, especially with anxiety and the comparisons and those kinds of things we've talked about.

But young people generally, and especially young men are killing themselves at higher rates than ever before.

Suicide, as you know, is one of the biggest killers of young men.

What is the antidote for this, this sense of powerlessness, loneliness, isolation, addiction, aimlessness?

Well, you know, our tendency would be to bring it down to the individual level, but I think it's also a cultural problem.

I think our culture is contributing to it.

The kind of aimlessness in our culture where we don't really talk about the skills that are necessary to get ahead.

Our culture promotes all kinds of bad values.

It emphasizes fame and celebrity.

It doesn't talk about discipline.

It doesn't give young men a sense of purpose and direction.

It doesn't value them.

You know, right now, a lot of young men feel like, you know, it's women that are getting all the attention, that what is my purpose here?

So I think it's a cultural problem more than anything else.

And when I say that, that kind of absolves individuals.

But I don't mean to do that as well, because you are an individual, you live in this culture, and you've got to get yourself out of that kind of hole that this culture is imposing on you.

And so I have a lot of sympathy for it, because I don't think it's completely your fault that you feel lonely or that you're isolated or that you don't have friends that you don't know how to socialize.

You know, I didn't have this phone in my hand when I was in my formative years and I had to meet women when I wanted to, you know, at that point in my life in the 70s when I was in my 20s.

And so I had to go out there and suffer from rejection.

I had to go to clubs.

I had to put myself out there and meet them.

And it was tough. And I learned skills, seduction skills, whatever you want to call them, but just social skills about, you know, women think differently than you.

They have different values than you.

What are their values?

Get outside of yourself and think about what it's like to be them and what you can do that's going to please them and get them how you can enter into their world.

You can have none of that now, none of that.

It's all, you know.

Swipe, swipe, swipe.

Yeah. So you're not going out.

You're not developing that muscle.

You're not putting yourself live interacting with people where you're feeling their body language, their nonverbal communication.

So no wonder your social skills are atrophying.

And as your social skills atrophy, it becomes harder and harder and harder to go out there and put yourself on the line because you're not good at it.

So you fall into this hole of becoming lonely and lonely because it's harder and harder to get out of it, okay?

So I have tremendous empathy, and I would never, like, preach or blame young men in particular for the problems that they're having.

And I empathize with it very much so because I myself went through a phase where I felt very, very unhappy and even suicidal when I was younger.

And I understand how your life can turn that way.

So I don't mean to ever come across as somebody who has all the answers, because I think it's cultural.

But if you are an individual, you have to see that first of all, it's not a bad thing necessarily to be lonely.

Part of the problem of loneliness is it's got this taboo against it, this bad name, like it's terrible to be lonely, terrible to be alone, right?

And so you feel shamed for the fact that you're lonely.

But actually, it's extremely important in life to be alone sometimes and to be able to be on your own and to think about yourself and to kind of come to terms with who you are and to embrace what makes you different.

And you can't do that if you feel ashamed about being lonely or if you can't ever be alone.

So knowing how to be alone is very important.

It's what will make you successful.

It will bring you skills.

So don't think of it as something necessarily terribly negative in your life.

But the other thing is you have to force yourself.

You force yourself to go to the gym to develop muscles and become stronger.

You have to force yourself to interact with people and get out of your phone and have real experiences instead of virtual experiences.

and if you do that 10 times a month just like going to the gym 10 times a month your social skills will get better and better your social muscle will get better and better and you'll feel better about interacting with people on that point you um i remember law i think it's law 18 i'm just having a look

at isolation yeah do not build fortresses to protect yourself isolation is dangerous yeah solitude is not a defense because it cuts you off from valuable information allies and opportunities.

There's a difference, isn't there, between being lonely and being alone?

Because being alone is one thing, but the state of loneliness feels like it's a slightly different proposition.

Well, it's the difference between you feel very unhappy that you're not connecting to other people we're a social animal right and you feel like people don't like you they don't respect you that you can't interact with them on a level that's meaningful whereas the feeling of being alone for me wow I

don't have to be around ugly idiotic people I can just be by myself I can read a good book I don't have to interact with people whose ideas I don't like I can just be myself and be as weird as I want, wow, what a relief.

I'm so happy being alone.

Now, I'm not like that all the time.

It would be terrible.

But sometimes I do feel that way.

And that's the difference.

And that's a good thing.

I remember once I was on an airplane and I saw a young woman who was by herself.

And I could sense that it was driving her crazy.

And she had to use her phone to never feel alone, right?

Even in the middle where we're flying over the ocean, She had to, like, somehow connect onto the Internet and be sending emails and texts and anything.

And I got this kind of desperation in her, this intuition, this feeling that being alone was just horrifying for her, you know.

And I think that's not a good thing.

I think it's a terrible thing.

So, yes, isolation is bad.

You need to be, you're a social animal.

You're meant to be around other people.

But if you can't be alone, you can't ever figure out what makes you different and what makes you unique.

So you have to be able to play both sides of the game.

To listen to that voice.

Yeah. Inside, to turn inwards.

Yeah. It is hard to turn inwards when you never have moments of solitude, I guess.

When you were, you said you were suicidal in your earlier years.

Yeah. What lifted you out of that state?

Well, I had a girlfriend who was very understanding, who helped me a lot.

so I wasn't completely alone.

And then a little tiny voice inside of me was saying, you are, you have interesting thoughts.

You're a strange person, Robert.

I've always been strange.

I never was like other people, even in high school.

I was always something off about me, which could be made me lonely, which could make me be a problem.

But I kept saying, there's something different and off about you, right?

and you have skills as a writer, it's going to happen someday.

Don't give up, don't give up, don't give up.

Keep trying, right?

And so finally, I'm 35, 36 years old.

I was in Italy at the lowest point of my life.

And then I met this man there who was a book packager, Joost Elfers.

And he asked me if I had an idea for a book.

And suddenly, I almost get emotional just thinking about it, everything just shifted inside of me.

It's like, yeah, I could write a nonfiction book, and I just improvised what would turn into the 48 Laws of Power.

He got so excited. He said, I will pay you to write the, I forget what the word is, to sell it, you know, and then I'll pay you to live while you write it.

And so suddenly it went from darkness to light because I had a purpose.

And all of my misery, you know, I could take all of the bad bosses I had, all of the horrible psychotic bosses who were so stupid and so political and so manipulative, and I could go, wow, I've got all this material to write the 48 Laws of Power.

All my worst experiences can go into this book.

It all has purpose for it.

I'm not saying that's going to happen to everybody.

But I was literally at that moment before it happened, pretty much near rock bottom.

And I asked my wife, what would have happened if this didn't turn out?

Would I have committed suicide?

Would I, if I had gone the same path and gotten into, done some hack job, I'd probably be incredibly overweight and alcoholic and I might have already died of a heart attack.

Or maybe I would have found my way to something else, but it was a really, really low point in my life.

Purpose. Yeah. It's crazy how it can lift you out of darkness.

It can turn the lights on.

Yeah. It's just so unbelievably hard to find for so many people.

I mean, you're not going to find it in your bedroom necessarily, sat there thinking.

But you know, opportunities come.

You just have to be ready for them.

so I had this opportunity that came to me and you might say well that's lucky that's never going to happen to me but it will happen to you you're just not ready for it you're just not recognizing it some person will cross your path that can lift you out of what you're doing who could connect you but you're

not paying attention you're not ready for it you don't think you deserve it so there is opportunity every day of the week it's around you is what I'm trying to say There's so many studies and there was one on TV by, I think it was Darren Brown, the illusionist that show certain types of people are pessimistic towards

opportunity. And when you do studies where you, and there's one particular study where they have a newspaper and they give it to one group of people who I think are pessimists and one group of people that are optimists.

And the researchers say, when you find the 100 pound voucher, 100 dollar voucher, just come back to us.

And what happens is they scroll through the newspaper and the pessimists never find it but on the first page of the newspaper it says stop the stud stop go to the researchers now you've won a hundred dollars the optimists find it and Darren Brown did a similar thing the illusionist in the street where he

put I think it was a like a fifty pound or a hundred dollar note in the middle of the street as they were walking down the street and the optimists find it they see it but the pessimists just walked right past it yeah I think it was a winning scratch card potentially and that really opened my mind to

like my my state my mental state my psychology is determining whether I see these opportunities yeah or totally miss them and then it's almost a standward spiral because then I'll think god I'm such an unlucky person right without realizing that I'm playing a really important role in creating my own

fortune or misfortune right yeah I have a chapter in laws of human nature about the nature of your attitude creates your circumstances which is sort of the same thing you're saying which is there are two kinds of attitudes that i talk about one is a close as naturally it's closing that's constrictive

that's narrow and there's one that's expansive and open you could call that pessimistic and optimistic but the closed attitude is you're only seeing life through this narrow little spectrum where everything is bad people don't like you there's hostility all around you and what that means is you're not seeing

reality you're creating reality you're creating that reality.

You're seeing it and that's what happens to you.

The expansive attitude is life is amazing.

All these incredible things are possible.

I have hope. Any moment there could be an opportunity.

And that's not reality either.

But you're going to create that reality by feeling that way and taking, seizing an opportunity, the smallest crumb of an opportunity you're going to create those good circumstances so by your attitude you create the bad things that happen to you in life one of the um sort of adjacent points here about purposelessness

about loneliness about the struggles and plights of young men in the world that they face and and young women is the conversation around pornography if you go on many of the social media apps these days you will be exposed to pretty explicit pornography whether you were searching for it or not, there's

certain apps in particular where, even if I'm scrolling on my feed, certain things will pop up and I go, Jesus Christ, like, you know, I'm at work here.

And I was thinking about this more broadly because the studies show that about, I think it's like 80 % of men and about 40 % of women in the United States use pornography.

And I wondered if you had a view on how it robs us of the hard work it takes to form romantic relationships.

and if the act of consuming pornography is robbing us of the desire for the real thing well it's it's an addiction and you have to understand that you are being manipulated that you are being programmed that these people have figured out exactly the kinds of things the kinds of images that are going

to hook you and you're being played you're a fool they're playing with you, just like Mark Zuckerberg in Facebook knows all the algorithms to hook you to the news feed.

You're being played by the images they know how to create and keep you always wanting more, just like fast food has all these tricks to constantly be eating their Doritos or whatever it is, okay?

But the other thing is, so I'm not going to preach and moralize about pornography from a prudish aspect of it because I'm not a prude.

But I have a chapter in the book that I'm writing on the sublime on what I call love sublime and the act of loving not God, not the universe but another human being, an individual man or woman, gay or straight or whatever it is and how sublime that is And what it is is in that relationship, the boundaries

between the two of you are allowed to melt and your ego can soften.

And you can feel their world and they can feel your world.

And you have a connection that for a social animal is the highest form of connection.

It's superior to a religious connection.

I'm sorry. And what it requires is we have the expression falling in love.

And it literally is falling.

It's like you fall, fall, fall, fall, fall.

You're open and you're vulnerable and you're letting yourself fall.

And when you're not, what stops you from doing that is you don't want to be hurt.

You don't want to be vulnerable, right?

Because if you open yourself to someone else, you're likely to get hurt.

And so the moment there's a disagreement between you or there's a moment where a friend says something nasty about this person you're interested in, you stop falling.

You cut it off, and that romantic thing ends and dies.

But if you get past that and you allow yourself to open up completely and you just keep falling, falling, and falling, and falling, this incredible thing can happen.

I describe it to you, and I describe it, the dynamics of that and examples of that and why, for a social animal, it's like the ultimate experience.

And so pornography is completely robbing you of that because love of another human being is a sense of enchantment, right?

There's like this spark that's happening, this electricity.

And obviously sex is involved, so it's a very physical relationship as well.

But it goes beyond that.

It also has a kind of spiritual component, right?

But it's a sense of enchantment where the world becomes alive to you.

Everything is beautiful in the world in those moments, right?

And pornography is disenchanting you from everything.

It's making it all mechanical and ugly, and it has no romance to it.

It has no dimension to it.

It's almost as if the two humans involved in it or however are like machine parts, right?

They're not human anymore, and there's no emotion involved.

There's no kind of spiritual connection.

It's depressing. It's really, really depressing.

When I see it, I feel really sorry that I experienced this and I feel really sorry for the people who are in that industry.

I find it really, really ugly and alienating.

Now, I'm not, as I said, a prude And I can watch a great movie with a love scene in it.

And it's very exciting and beautiful.

But the seduction element, the element of, I saw a movie recently, a Japanese movie by the great director Ozu from the 50s.

And there was a man who was married and he was about to have an affair with this woman who was kind of seducing him.

And they had this kiss.

I go, wow, I was getting, I'd used the word turned on, but I was getting really excited.

It was so full of emotion and energy, and it made the sexual element so much more powerful by the element of romance, by the element of something kind of transgressive.

There was no nude bodies, there was no sex you ever get to see, but the lead up to it and the nature of the emotions involved made it, to me, deeply, deeply exciting.

And if young men in particular can't have that experience, if everything is so mechanical, is so computerized, it's going to be like AI.

It's going to be like AI sex, you know.

Then you're losing your soul.

You're losing your capacity for really falling in love, for really having that kind of dimensional experience, which, by the way, can be extremely physical.

And it can only last for three months.

I'm not saying it has to be 20 years with one woman or one man.

It could be for three months, but it enriches you.

It makes you more human.

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The other thing that a couple of psychologists on my podcast before have alluded to on this subject is that they told me about a study with rats where they messed with the part of the rat's brain that is responsible for causing dopamine.

And then when they put food in front of the rat's mouth, if the rat was like six inches from the rat's mouth, the rat would starve to death because they had impacted the rat's dopamine so it no longer had motivation.

And they speak of dopamine as this sort of motivation chemical.

It's the thing that gets you to take action.

So if you're frying your dopamine receptors by doing these sort of high dopamine activities, oh right right i'm wondering if you're going to if we're sort of breeding a a culture of lower motivation individuals and because of this thesis i was kind of looking at some some studies around this and it

does say that constant exposure to high dopamine activities can lead to dopamine desensitization right or deregulation of dopamine receptors and then this can lead to a significant reduction in your motivation and there's multiple studies here that point in this direction.

So I'm wondering how when I look at some of the stats around purposeless and people having less partners and being more sexless, if there's a through line here that when you make dopamine easy through pornography, we're less likely to go in, get up out of our bedroom and take an action.

Yeah, but it's not just pornography.

There's too much of that in social media as well on other levels.

So, you know, you have to understand what it means to be a human being, first of all.

And we're physical animals.

We can't be in our heads all the time.

We think with our bodies, right?

We think with the chemicals mixing in our bodies.

We're very physical and we're social animals to the core and that social animal what makes us superior is that we connect i can kind of look at you and i can maybe understand what you're feeling what you're thinking and we can have a discussion and our ideas can go back and forth and connect and go

to higher levels of understanding or lower levels of disagreement but that's what it means to be a human being.

You're not this fucking AI machine.

You're not a bot. You're not an algorithm.

You're not a little piece of data that Mark Zuckerberg can mix with.

You're a human being with a body, with physical problems, with hormones, with emotions that are coursing through you.

And you have to become a physical creature, which means doing things in the world, taking action, working, building a business, doing things with your hands, you know, exercise, meeting people, be inside of your bodies.

And when you're in pornography, you're disembodied, you're not in your body.

You might be wanking off as far as I know, you know, probably are, but you're not really inside of your body in any meaningful way.

And so it's like my hope, if there's any hope, And there's seeds of it in the world now where young people are going to start getting disgusted with this because the human spirit is still very powerful.

And it's still like, I don't want to be like this.

It doesn't feel natural.

It doesn't feel right.

And at some point, my hope is in 20, 30 years after I'm probably dead, there'll be a movement where people are going to be so against this that they're going to go in the opposite direction.

They're going to be returning to what it means to be a human being.

There'll be a rekindling of interest in our past, in the primitive past, in the pagan past, things I'm writing about in my book right now.

And I see things like that sometimes, like in the New York Times, they had an article a few weeks ago about a group of young people in college who hate social media and absolutely refuse it.

It's almost like a fraternity or a sorority.

They will not allow anybody into their group, whoever looks at their phone, I'd go, yay, yay, right on, brother.

If I'm in college right now, I would join that.

Not that I think everything is evil.

I have my own phone, et cetera.

But if I were young, that sense of, this is a nasty world.

I want to return to what it means to be a human being.

I want to spark a movement, a revolution that goes back to that.

I hope that that's going to happen.

I hope that's in the cards.

What is it about human nature that we just don't want to admit?

it well um first of all we don't want to admit um where we came from our our primitive roots that we are animals you know that before we invented language you know we were living like any other animal on the in the outdoors right and um I remember one day I was I was in Sydney, Australia about 10, 12

years ago, and they had this amazing zoo.

I hate zoos because I'm an animal lover and I think zoos are like prisons.

But I wanted to see the strange exotic animals there.

And they had this amazing chimpanzee compound, right, where the chimpanzees could kind of roam around freely.

I was fascinated, and I sat there for like two hours because it was like watching an office in Manhattan or something where there was the alpha male and all the other males were kind of falling behind him, like the CEO of a company.

And I was looking at it around and I noticed all the people were like giggling and they were so embarrassed and they couldn't, they were laughing, that was their reaction because it made them so uncomfortable to see this animal that's so much like a human being, but is also still an animal.

They were just so uncomfortable by it.

It made me realize that we're very, very uncomfortable with that aspect of ourselves, right?

The part that we can't really control so much that isn't logical, that isn't rational, that isn't clean, doesn't, you know, all these civilized things.

So we're in deep denial of our animal roots, but we're also in denial of our own nature.

So we want to imagine ourselves to be these kind of saintly, moral, rational creatures, always thinking about what's good for other people, you know.

And it's just a fairy tale.

That's not the world as it is.

You know, it's the world more like I described in the 48 laws of power, where people are manipulative, where people are playing games.

Not everyone, but everyone has a manipulative side.

Everyone has a dark side.

We actually are deeply irrational creatures.

We don't want to admit it.

We don't want to admit the parts of ourself that reflect this kind of animal nature, our irrationality, our aggression, the envy that we feel towards other people.

It's always other people who are like that.

So I give the example of narcissism, and I try to make the point in the book.

In narcissism, you know, I make the point that everybody's self -absorbed, you know?

When you're reading a book and you see your birthday happens to be there, which is a fact, you're like, whoa, that's my birthday because it's you, your astrological sign.

That's me. We all are interested in ourselves.

We're all self -absorbed, right?

And when somebody suddenly talks about us, our ears prick up.

I'm not moralizing it.

it's just the truth it's me it's everyone we don't want to admit it it's always somebody else it's always donald trump is a narcissist always elon musk is a narcissist everybody has narcissistic tendencies that's human nature and we're we want to deny it and should we be aspiring to not be narcissists

or does one just accept their narcissistic tendencies and lean into it because much of what I read in the book about power is how narcissism seems to get you ahead to some degree.

That's, that's, that's debatable.

But, um, but I mean, look at some of the people that, you know, we've been talking about that have reached the very top of the professional pyramid in life, you know, the presidents and such, they've got narcissistic traits.

Sure, sure. And, uh, and some of them are, are kind of what I call deep narcissists who are very problematic.

And some of them are healthy narcissists so a lot of artists are what I would call a healthy narcissist so a lot of our artists aren't necessarily the best people right they're not often you know you wouldn't maybe want to be their friend they're maybe not the most faithful person as as far as a partner

is concerned but they put all of that narcissistic energy into their work and they They create beautiful things that contribute to humanity.

Steve Jobs was not a very nice person, right?

He was very aggressive.

He was very assertive.

And he was a control freak.

But look what he created, okay?

That's healthy narcissism.

What's the first thing they tell you in AA?

I've not been in AA, but I know it.

It's admitting that you're an alcoholic.

If you can't admit you're an alcoholic, how are you ever going to stop being an alcoholic?

You first have to admit it.

So if you want to stop being a narcissist, you have to get on your hands and knees and admit that you are a narcissist.

Because if you deny it and you say everybody else is, if you can't look inward, how can you ever change that?

And even the most saintly person on this planet, the Mahatma Gandhis, the Martin Luther Kings, they had definite strong narcissistic tendencies.

There are no saints in this world.

Everybody has these tendencies.

tendencies. So get off your high horse, look inward and see those traits that are narcissistic within you.

What if I'm dealing with a narcissist?

Well, who isn't? In this world today, you're always dealing with a narcissist.

What do I do about that?

Do I, because I was thinking about some of the laws in your book where you say things like don't outshine the master.

If I'm dealing with a narcissist, should I hide my strengths and my weaknesses in order to sort have pander to them and not outshine them yes but as part of law number one is this is the great thing about being a human being you can do two things at once you can be consciously playing the game of i'm

not going to outshine them because he's he's she's going to fire me because i'm going to make them feel insecure but at the same time in my head i'm going i'm not that person isn't better than me.

They don't deserve their position.

They're actually kind of incompetent and stupid.

And someday by being loyal and learning from them, I'm going to rise up and I'm being smart because I have to, I'm a social animal.

And then at that point I can just say, get away from me.

I don't need you anymore.

I'm better than you.

You can outshine them, but you play the game.

But the worst thing is if you internalize it and go, I actually am inferior.

I'm not going to outshine because I'm not a good person.

I don't deserve it.

And then you've internalized this sense of inferiority and it's going to haunt you the rest of your life.

So you can play both sides of the game at the same time.

You talk about acting in life to get ahead.

Do we have to be actors, in your view?

Well, this is where I start getting a little bit cranky, Stephen, because everybody's an actor, right?

Nobody admits it, though.

when you're three years old you're already acting right you're crying because you're trying to get your parents attention you're making trouble with your siblings because you're trying to get something that you want you're learning to be manipulative children are very manipulative children are consummate

actors they learn that they can get what they want by behaving a certain way if I'm an angel mommy will give me this and the other thing even though I know I'm not an angel.

We are a social animal and we have words and we have language.

And with words and language, we can say one thing and be another.

We can lie, we can deceive, we can tell people, I loved your screenplay.

You were fantastic in the movie.

Man, you're looking so great today.

We don't mean any of it, but we can do that because we have words and we can lie about that.

We are all actors. If everyone went around saying exactly what they felt about the other person no one would ever get along we would have killed ourselves off by now you're always telling the boss the things that they want to hear you're always telling your partner you're always kind of hedging exactly

what you feel you're an actor I don't know understand what's so complicated about that I don't understand why people can't see that they're every day of their life and in another instance you're never the same with two different people the way you are in front of your father as you are in front of your

son or in front of a colleague.

You're a completely different person.

Your jokes are different.

Your body language is different.

You're an actor. Okay.

Some people are good at it.

Some people aren't, but you're an actor.

Well, I think the root of this is there's something ugly about being manipulation, lying, acting.

So no one would want to volunteer that they are doing that.

But from what I'm inferring from what you said is that in order to get ahead in life you're going to need to lie a little bit manipulate and act.

Well you you are it's not like you need to be you are doing that even though you may not admit it you are doing that.

You see the thing is it's getting back to that scene at the Sydney Zoo where people are deeply uncomfortable with these aspects of their own character and their own personality and I don't want you to go around thinking god it's great to be manipulative.

It's great to just screw people over and get what I want and not care about them.

No. But it's better to admit that you are capable of manipulation, that you do it often unconsciously and often in a passive aggressive manner.

It's better to admit it and it's better to be able to play the game when you have to, like always say less than necessary.

It's going to save you a lot of pain.

You don't have to go around all your life practicing these things.

I don't think you want to.

What was that law? Always say less than necessary.

Law number four. Can you explain that one to me?

In looking at powerful people, the person who talks less always gives off a greater aura of power than the people that are yabbering all the time that are talking, that can't control their tongue.

And the idea is, if you can't control your mouth, if you just keep talking and talking, it gives an aura to other people that you can't control anything else.

You have no self -control.

And that is very unpowerful aura.

And obviously the more you talk, the more you are prone to say something kind of stupid and irrational that you're going to regret.

And so powerful people know to command an audience, they sit there, they let other people talk and argue, and then occasionally they utter something that's maybe a little bit ambiguous.

The sniffers go, whoa, whoa, that's very interesting.

Robert said that. What does that mean?

You look powerful, right?

You give off an air of mystery.

You give off an air of control.

And so a lot of people have a hard time with it because they think, oh, should I just be able to say whatever I want and just talk?

Well, no, you don't.

Not in the social world, not in the work world.

It's going to get you in trouble.

Learn to control what you talk and learn that there are moments that saying less is actually much more powerful than just yammering on and on.

I was through my years of business running businesses and stuff I came up with this idea which I've shared with a few people called your contribution score and much like we have a credit score where if we you know we're reckless with our finances our credit score gets lowered.

I think the same applies for the contributions we make in group settings but just generally the contributions we make and I came to learn this over time because in one of my offices many years ago in a different company there was this one individual who in the meeting rooms would when people were brainstorming

before they'd thought of what they were going to say they'd interject and say what about um if we do a we could do like a pop -up with maybe we'll do like and you could they were thinking out loud and what was what i would observe as the ceo is the minute they spoke it was almost like people rolled rolled

their eyes and tried to cut them off because they developed this contribution score which says when x person contributes it's always ill -formed um not productive and takes too long but then there's this other guy who i remember from my manchester office who went he hardly spoke and every time he spoke it

was important so the minute he starts speaking it's like the room shifts towards him like with bated breath exactly so there's an art of protecting one's contribution score Yeah, I remember 50, I would go to meetings with him.

50 Cent? Yeah, and he would hardly say anything.

And people would be trembling.

Like, God, he's not talking.

He's not saying he's interested in my ideas.

He'd just sit there with this kind of wry smile on his face.

And then when he'd say something, oh, they were let out of breath.

Oh, he's saying something.

It'd be very short and curt.

But he completely commanded the room because he just sat there as if he wasn't really happy with what people were doing.

and it made them compete to make him happy.

Interesting. Really interesting.

He's a master of the 48 Laws of Power.

The other law that I was thinking a lot about, if we're jumping back to the laws of power, is let others do the work but take the credit.

Your face when I said that.

Well, you know, some of the 48 Laws is irony, and, you know, people have to be able to understand and read what's ironic.

So like I have a chapter in there, play on people's need to believe to create a cult -like following.

And I'm not really saying go out and create a cult.

I'm showing you why you might be in a cult right now because this is how cults operate.

Okay, so when I worked in Hollywood, I worked at one point for a film director.

and we had this process where we would sit in a room and we would talk about the story and we would discuss the dialogue stuff and I would give all of this dialogue and ideas in there and he'd be writing it down.

And I'm not saying half the screenplay but at least a third or a fourth were like my ideas, my contribution, my dialogue.

I never got a single credit for any of it.

It was always his name that was on there.

People go, wow, that was so funny.

that was really brilliant.

I love that line. It was my line, okay?

So I learned this is the law of the jungle.

When you're working particularly in entertainment and media, people take your work and they put their name on it.

So like when you're watching a television show with some news broadcast or whatever or an interviewer, their jokes aren't their own.

They didn't write those jokes.

They have a team of people writing it.

All those great facts that are coming up, A team of researchers are putting there, you never hear their names, you never know who they are.

They took their work and they put their name on it.

That's the law of the jungle.

And the law of the jungle is, don't get upset about it.

It's part of the game.

You know, I got upset when that happened.

I didn't say anything, I didn't do anything, but I got resentful.

Nobody's recognizing my work.

Whine, whine, whine, whine, whine.

The adult, if I had been smarter, was, that's just how it is, Robert.

Just calm down. At some point, people will see your screenplays or your books or whatever, and you'll be fine.

But just I'm trying to show you this is how the world operates, and don't be so naive.

And don't think it's not like that.

And if you had kicked up a fuss, you might have accidentally outshone the master.

Oh, I've been fired.

It's interesting because there is an element of this where it can, where like trying to take the credit can really also lead you to being fired.

Because I remember back in a previous company that I'd started, had a big team about 200 people in Manchester.

And there was this one kid in his early 20s who would always sulk if in our public company channel, someone just innocently forgot to include his name in credit when credit was being handed out.

And it would happen maybe once every six months.

You just like forgot that he had contributed to the project.

And that happens in all businesses.

People don't tag you sometimes.

And I remember hearing that he was outside on the steps, bitching, that's the best way I can describe it, just like complaining to other younger team members that he hadn't been included in that message.

And it developed this horrible reputation for him as someone that was always complaining and always trying to take credit because it's ugly to be seen as trying to take credit.

Well, so if you read the law carefully, It's really about how powerful people use this.

So if you're an underling and you do the work, you don't want to take credit for it because it's going to get you in trouble, right?

But powerful people have used for centuries the labor of other people and put their name on it to make themselves look powerful and to make them seem like they've got endless energy.

Okay, so you have to apply that law with intelligence.

If you're an underling and you're doing some project, it's a group project, don't go out there and take credit for it because people are just going to laugh at you and you're going to make a terrible fool of yourself.

So every law has a context, you know.

But that's powerful people use that law.

And if you don't think that's how it operates, I'm sorry, but you're in for a world of pain.

I think there's an overarching thing here which can be discovered in your other book, the laws of human nature about mastering your emotional self.

Yeah. Because none of these things are going to be possible if you don't have mastery over your emotions.

I'm not going to be able to refrain from snatching credit.

I'm not going to be able to outshine my master if I don't have this sort of foundation of emotional control.

Is that true? Is emotional control really where this all begins?

Yes, it is self -control.

Of course, you can take it too far where you have no emotions and you're just a cold fish out there?

You know, it's good.

Emotions are important.

You're not going to write a book.

You're not going to start a business unless you're excited, unless you have that emotional energy.

So I'm not talking about stifling your emotions.

That would be incredibly counterproductive and unpowerful.

But there are emotions that are going to get you in trouble, particularly as a social animal.

So it's not like you stifle your emotions.

You learn how to channel and control them.

And you learn that certain behaviors are going to be read as unpowerful, as hysterical, as somebody who can't get things done, as ineffective, incompetent.

So as an actor, you learn to sort of present the right front, the right facade.

And that requires a degree of emotional control.

Yes, for sure. It's very important and it's not easy because when you're young particularly you're very you're wired to be emotional and you're going to learn this the hard way which is how i learned it i'm trying to teach you some lessons so maybe you won't make as many mistakes but it's a hard thing

you learn and you learn it by the mistakes you make by saying something foolish that costs you your job by outshying the master that costs you your job you learn it from the mistakes you make is there any practices that you know of that would enable me to increase my self -awareness because you know

we're all going through experiences in life but it seems that some people are learning from those experiences and becoming more wise and more effective and then other people are kind of repeating the cycle over and over again and I think I ask this in particular because you're a writer so you spend

a ton of time thinking thinking about what's happened to you your jobs experiences, your feelings.

If you do a foolish mistake, there are two ways to go.

And the common route is that asshole, they screwed me over.

It's their fault, you know, right?

Or I made that mistake.

But, you know, if circumstances been better, if I had more money, if this person supported me, it would have all would have gone well.

That's what we naturally do.

And that's the kind of person that never learns from life so your first instinct must always be and not your first instinct i correct myself your second instinct because your first instinct is always going to be that there's a great book i can't remember what the writer's name was mistakes were made

but not by me i recommend that book highly it came out about 10 years ago i think it's elliot aronson oh yeah oh very good book anyway your first instinct always will be it was a mistake, but I'm not to blame.

Everybody does it, I do it.

Your second instinct is to step back and go, whoa, wait a minute, that's not right.

I'm fooling myself.

Actually, I played a role in what happened there.

And what is that role that I played?

What could I have done differently?

Maybe it's very subtle.

Maybe it was something in my body language that turned people off that made them not like me.

Or maybe it was something I said or I did that could have changed the circumstances.

What is it that I did?

Then you can learn from the experience.

And if only 10 % of it is your responsibility, at least see it as 30 % so that you can learn from it and exaggerate your role and the mistake because then you can learn from it.

You can understand that you can correct these mistakes, right?

So initially, you can always blame the other person.

Then you're going to step back and you're going to go through this little dance you're going to go no i think i i've definitely played a part in what went wrong here things go wrong and we leap to blame and once we leap to blame we often leap to revenge yeah we want to take revenge we want to right

the wrong that's happened to us we want to correct the injustice and you talk about this as part of human nature but also give us some advice i think it was in it was actually in the law of power book about, I think it was law 36, when we feel like we've been wronged, Robert, when we feel like there's

been an injustice, what is the best course of action?

It depends on the wrong and then the injustice.

So let me give you an example.

Someone at work said, I heard they said something to my boss and it's cost me my promotion and they're talking about me behind my back and it's annoying me?

Well, there are several avenues that you can go.

Everything depends on circumstances.

So if you're going to be a strategist in life, which is what I recommend, you have to look at the particular parameters and not just go, there's one answer.

There's several possibilities here.

So number one, maybe you're in an awful job with awful office politics.

I have a thing that I get talked about in one of my recent talks of you can scale a culture of a group on a scale of zero to 100.

100 is what I call a reality group where people are only interested in getting the job done and everything is on results.

Zero is where everything is political and everything is personal and everything is about who knows who and how you brown nose your way with the boss.

Okay. So if you're at a company that's at that 20 % level, then get your ass out of there.

Okay? You have a colleague like that, but there are probably other colleagues like that, and that person is probably always causing problems.

Do you need to be at this job is the main thing you have to first ask yourself.

And if you do need it, you need the job, and it's only this one person, then you have to go through a few steps.

Number one, is it worth taking personally?

what if I not take the high road because I hate that that phrase but what if I say it's not really worth it for me to get upset it's better off in the long run to just act like you know it didn't happen and to end up getting the promotion on my own in a different way and proving myself as success is the best

revenge you know and how can I get there kind of thing.

Ignoring him or her and what they did and only focusing on what you can do to get back, to get the promotion that you deserve.

The third possibility is sticking it to this other person, which is always something that I think is something you might have to consider doing, right?

Which is playing the game back at them.

So when you're dealing with people who are unethical, like a Putin kind of type, where they're willing to do anything to get power and you're not.

It's asymmetrical warfare.

They have more options than you do, okay?

This person that did that to you, they're going to do anything for power, and it puts you at a constant disadvantage.

What do you do? You have to do what they have in warfare called a deterrent strategy.

You have to show this person that you're not somebody you can mess with, that you're going to do something to hurt them, but it's controlled and it's a one -time thing.

You're going to damage their reputation.

You're going to spread some nasty rumor about them, but you don't have to feel like you're lowering yourself.

It's just I'm doing it one time to show them that from now on, you better not mess with me because damn it, I've got a gun in my back pocket and I can use it.

you can't just roll over because they're going to keep doing it to you time and again so you've got three options and you've got to choose what's the best one if you hate your job and you can't get around this person, quit if you don't feel comfortable going the low road and if you think it's a better

strategy in the long term for you and your soul and your safety to simply focus on your job and get revenge that way, that's probably the best solution of all, but sometimes you need to have a shot across their bow to say look you can't attack me because if you do they're going to be consequences to

pay because these types of people they they prey on those who seem weakest right predators love prey yeah but if you do the option number two and you show that you don't really that they didn't affect you and you kind of act like it didn't matter sort of thing but you still work hard and you're still doing

your job, they're going to wonder like, hmm, that's pretty impressive.

That's interesting.

This person has self -control.

And they're maybe going to be afraid of you in that sense by the fact, by the composure that you show them.

So everything depends on who you are, your nature, and the nature of this Machiavellian character that you're facing.

you know but um be alive to the moment in the circumstances and play for the long game so sometimes the long game means showing that you can mean action because then they're going to leave you alone for the next couple of years when we zoom out on what's going on in the world um a lot has changed a lot

has changed one of the things that's changed is our society is i think I've heard you say, is less united by some of these great myths of religion.

And I've heard you talk about democracy and all these kinds of things.

And as a result, people no longer believe in the same ideas because every form of authority is now under question.

And you're someone who studies history.

You're someone that understands the cycles of history.

What cycle of history are we in at this moment in time?

And how does one navigate it?

Well, you have to take a big picture especially if you're someone like me who studies history a lot so there are always these moments in history of cycles of chaos where and it could be caused in the past by a plague by some terrible war that goes on like the hundred years war in europe where people

feel genuinely powerless and helpless and there's a crisis of meaning in the world and i could point to specific moments in the ancient world in asia in europe but it goes on and on it's a cycle that happens and when people feel powerless and helpless and there's all this chaos going around them then

they tend to be attracted to authoritarian figures to easy solutions they get much more irrational they're much more likely to fall for cults and for belief systems that offer simple solutions and easy one -sentence answers, like make America great again kind of thing.

Wow, that's simple.

It's easy. Yeah, we'll vote for that.

So in moments of chaos and helplessness, people are going to grab for something that anchors them, that gives them a sense of meaning, but it's often something very, very dangerous.

So we're in a moment like that right now.

I think around the world, it's not just the United States.

Believe it or not, things can happen under the skin and are subtle, like climate change.

There are a lot of people who don't believe in climate change, but it's affecting everyone.

It's making everyone a bit neurotic, this sense that we can't control our climate, right?

That these disasters are going to keep happening and happening.

That's a major sense of helplessness.

The global economy where now your business is at the mercy of something that's going on in Indonesia or Japan or China is a tremendous sense of helplessness and a lack of control and your political figures don't seem to be responding to you in any way like their actions their talk doesn't lead to the kind

of results that you want.

So you're very prone to following what demagogues say who offer you like easy solutions.

Okay. So if you're living in a time like that, and it's more dangerous now than in the past because of social media and because of memes and because of the viral effects that are sweeping through humanity, right?

They didn't have that during the bubonic plague, during the Hundred Years War during the French Industrial Revolution, which was another period of incredible dramatic change in Europe at the turn of the 19th century, right?

So they didn't have that, which adds to the brew and makes it much more dangerous.

So having a longer view is to say, well, you know, this is a moment, a moment of chaos, and I'm going to be in control of what I think and what I believe.

So I'm going to have a degree of distrust of what people are telling me.

I'm not going to get so emotional when people start saying, this is what's evil, this is what's wrong with the world.

And to be very, very, very wary of people with simple solutions who say, if we just do this one thing, everything will be great.

If we just add tariffs, if we just get rid of all the immigrants, America will be fabulous.

These are fairy tales that are being peddled to you.

I'm not trying to be political because the other side peddles their own kinds of fairy tales.

Believe me, I understand that.

Can I ask you a question about this book, which is kind of linked to what you're saying now, The 48 Laws of Power?

What demographic emails you the most about the book?

Young men. Young men voted for Trump.

I know. You're someone that I sense and from what I've understood from my research isn't a big fan of Trump.

And so what do you say to those people about why you have that position and what their misunderstanding potentially?

The thing I do want to say is that you want to be able to think for yourself.

OK, so let's say you think Trump is the answer.

He's going to have he's going to solve all of our problems.

Well, be capable of stepping back and going, maybe some of the things he's doing, I don't agree with, aren't right.

You know, have some discrimination, have some self -distance, be able to criticize your own side.

So I'm on the left, on the Democratic -Liberal side.

They are buffoons. They are fools.

They are absolutely incompetent, and I'm afraid to say it.

They make terrible mistakes.

They blew this election.

They're stupid. And it's painful to say that because it's the side that I support, but I do not believe in everything that they promote.

There are things I disagree with them on.

Some of their woke policies I just find are ludicrous, okay?

So be able to stand back and say, I don't agree with everything he says.

Have some dignity, have some self -worth, say that I can think for myself and not get so emotional, right?

So you think being masculine and being a bro is to just say, oh, Robert, F you.

You're such an idiot.

You're so blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, put YouTube comments because I get them all the time.

You know, F you. You can fill in the blanks, right?

That's not being masculine.

That's not being tough or strong.

That's being an idiot because you're not able to think for yourself, right?

Being emotional isn't masculinity.

Because masculinity is self -control, I'm afraid.

Being masculine is being able to step back and go, this isn't necessarily the right thing to do.

I have to think about it.

I have to do something that's more productive, that's positive.

I have to criticize myself sometimes.

Weak people can't criticize themselves.

So if you're listening to me, at least be willing to say that maybe some of my ideas are wrong.

my ideas and your ideas, right?

That to me is strength.

That to me is a masculine virtue.

Being able to criticize your own side and not get always so emotional and overheated and leaving nasty YouTube comments, as I'm sure I'm going to get right now.

You made me reflect on something I read the other day.

I think it was on X.

And it was a study that shows that when the more testosterone you have, again, which we can use as like a proxy for masculinity in studies you're more likely to think for yourself so they had two groups of um two groups of people and they gave one group of um people testosterone i think it was a group

of men testosterone they both had to do this test and the ones who had the higher testosterone levels had been given like the artificial testosterone they were less likely to cave in to external social expectation wow which i thought was it's a proxy for what you're saying which is potentially real

masculinity is having the strength of your own convictions and being able to ignore social pressure to conform.

You talked about wokeness and the left and how they messed it up.

I consider myself to be, I'd say apolitical, but it's more, it sounds like a strange thing to say.

I can just see the merits in things on both sides.

So I really struggle to identify with the side.

I think, okay, that's good for the economy.

That's good for different social classes and stuff.

And so I also just have, I think, a very strong negative reaction to the binary choice that you're kind of forced to make.

Yeah, right. I agree.

So I've always kind of stayed out of it in that regard.

But in terms of this wokeness and the way that the left have screwed it up, what have they got wrong?

Well, um... And what's Trump got right, I guess?

Well, I don't know.

It's too painful for me to say what Trump got right.

Well, you've got to be able to.

I know. I'll tell you what he gets right and what he's really brilliant at, which is communication and messaging.

So the Democrats completely suck at that.

They couldn't craft a message to save their life if everything depended on it.

They're just terrible at it.

They don't know how to communicate.

They don't know how to make a simple message.

Now, I said simple messages can be deceptive, but in politics, you have to have something like that.

You have to stand for a vision for something straight, and you have to be strong and you have to be willing to fight for it.

So I do have the ear of some people in the Democratic Party, and I say, what you got wrong and what Trump got right is to show the public that you are fighters, that you are strong, that you believe in something, and that you're willing to upset other people, other groups, because you believe in certain things.

A large portion of the public he doesn't care about.

He's interested in his base.

He doesn't care if he's hated.

OK, Democrats, don't care if you upset this special interest group or that special interest group.

People have to hate you.

Being hated is a good thing.

Stand for something and be willing to fight.

You got that all wrong, he got that right, so I can admit that.

And he's much better at communicating and messaging, OK?

When it comes to policies, there's a pretty big gulf between us about what I think is good and bad.

But, I mean, wokeness is an ideology that isn't really connected to everyday life, to what's going on around us, right?

It's kind of a purity test of these are certain things that we hold and you better either, if you believe in them, you're on the good side.

And if you don't believe them, you're on the wrong side.

It's a polarity. It's a black and white binary way of looking at the world.

And that's not reality.

That's not how things are.

Things aren't black and white.

Things have a gray zone.

Yes, there are things that are evil.

Murder is evil. You know, social injustice.

We can all agree on certain social injustices.

Yeah. But it's not like this purity test of if you don't believe in this, you're an evil bad person, you know.

So on the Israel -Palestine issue, for instance, now I happen to be Jewish, right, and I've never been a Zionist my whole life.

I'm very happy to be Jewish.

I was bar mitzvahed and I have nothing against it and I'm not a practicing religious person in Judaism.

I understand because I lost a large part of my ancestry during the Holocaust, was deeply part of my childhood, a very traumatic thing that even my parents were still recovering from.

So when it comes to Israel -Palestine, I'm very conflicted because I've met Palestinians who had a terrible impact on me as they describe the horror of what happened to them and the loss of their land and how deeply, what a beautiful country Palestine was and how traumatic it was to lose their home but at the same

time jews were completely homeless from the holocaust and they did originate from this land i can see both sides and it's very painful and if i were to craft a solution first of all i i think netanyahu is is is a horrible person but there is a middle ground that could be had where there could be a two

-state solution but the woke people oh god forget it, man.

You're in favor of genocide.

Get out of here. That's not life.

That's not reality.

That's not how the world works.

It's not how things happen in this world.

You're not dealing with the real world.

You're just trying to act like you're morally pure.

You're not really willing to sacrifice to roll up your sleeves and come up with practical solutions.

You just want to yell and rant and act and look like you're the most virtuous person on the planet.

But isn't this one of the laws of human nature fitting into our tribes because i think being in the being in the sort of political middle or wherever i am you get attacked from both sides because sometimes you'll have a conversation with this person and they'll say oh my god you're your right wing then

i'll have a conversation with this person and they'll say oh my god you're a left wing and so you just you never fit actually my instinct is tempted my instinct my sort of like my primitive instinct is like just fucking pick a side steven and at least you'll have a bunch of people to protect you you talk

about that as well how having a group of people around you and not being in isolation offers protection yeah so it's tempting it's tempting but you're going to lose your soul you're going to lose your dignity in the process so it's fine to be part of a group i remember I was a young man in 1983.

I was on the left for sure, I don't deny it.

I went to Nicaragua to report as a journalist on the war going on between the Contras and the Sandinistas, and I was more on the Sandinista side.

And they've ended up, as things have rolled out, the Sandinistas are truly evil.

I mean, Ortega and what he's done to Nicaragua is truly evil.

But at the time, I thought they were pretty great.

And I remember one day there was this immense plaza that they had, and I was in Managua, and Managua had just suffered this incredible earthquake.

Half the city was in rubble still, but there was this immense plaza.

It was filled with everyone because the pope had come there, and it was a big deal because the Sandinista was like anti -God or something, which wasn't true.

Anyway, I was there with hundreds of thousands of people And the feeling of being in the group Where everybody was on the same side Was so intoxicating A ripple through me that I've never had in my life again Of just being connected to all of these people It was so joyous and exciting But then it's

also very dangerous as well So, you know, I liked having that experience, but as I got older, I go, I don't want to feel like that again because I think it can turn very ugly and dangerous as it ended up turning that way in Nicaragua.

You know, it's like a Hitler crowd kind of thing.

I'm always fascinated, weirdly enough as a Jew, by Hitler documentaries.

I can watch every single Hitler documentary.

It's just riveting to watch like these Nuremberg rallies.

My God, it's like a drug.

It's insane. All the people with their torches all marching in the same way with these insignias, everything.

You could understand how people would get caught up in that kind of mania, right?

But it's very dangerous.

And even that moment in Managua, later when I think back on it, maybe I should have had a little more self -distance from that.

Do you think we're in a similar time now where we're getting caught up in mania?

Yes, we're getting caught up in easy solutions and things that aren't really thought out.

I mean, what is human stupidity?

question that has obsessed me for a long time.

And in fact, the third book in my series was originally supposed to be The History of Human Stupidity.

But my publishers thought it was too negative a subject and it would have also been too long of a book.

But stupidity is the inability to think of the consequences of your actions.

To think that you are certain that you know the answers, to take action based on this certainty, but to not think of steps three, four, and five that are going to happen as a result.

And man, I'm seeing that all over the place on our political map, where people take action.

It's like our id is running the world, like adolescence, like, you know, I'll do this, man, this will be cool, this will be interesting.

You don't realize that you're going to get in a car wreck because you took this drug and you're driving your car.

We're getting a lot of that kind of adolescent mentality.

I'm going to take this action because it's fierce, it's angry, it's going to solve things.

But the consequences down the road five years from now are going to be horrific.

That is human stupidity.

You said that Trump is deploying the laws of power.

What laws of power has Trump successfully deployed?

Court attention at all costs.

He's the master of it.

He's, I remember I was on a book tour.

I can't remember where it was, some corner of the world.

Maybe it was Australia, maybe it was Singapore.

And everybody was talking about Donald Trump.

It was like the whole world is obsessed with him.

I don't think there's ever been a moment in history where anybody has had that kind of power.

Court attention at all costs.

He's the absolute master of it.

he's law number 27 play on people's need to believe to create a cult -like following he has a cult -like following right people nothing he does can be wrong he was actually god is on his side god is protecting him that's a cult i'm sorry but that's a cult this is politics it's not religion you know interaction with boldness

he knows how to interaction with boldness law 28, I believe, or 29.

So there's several laws.

He creates compelling spectacles, but there are a lot of laws that he violates as well.

At my company flight studio, which is part of my bigger company flight group, we're constantly looking for ways to build deeper connections with our audiences, whether that's a new show, a product or a project.

It's why I launched the conversation cards.

I've relied on Shopify before, who's a sponsor of today's podcast, and I'll be using them again for the next big launch which we'll hear about soon and i use them because of how easy it is to set up an online store that reaches all of you no matter where you are in the world with shopify the usual pain points

of launching products online disappear completely no matter the size of your business shopify has everything you need to make your business go to the next level and better connect with your customers all over the world to say thank you to all of you for listening to my show we're giving you a trial

which is just one dollar a month you can sign up by going to shopify .com slash bartlett that's shopify .com slash bartlett or find the link in the description below one one of the things i was thinking about over the christmas period was identity and the pitfalls of having an identity yeah in life and it

reminds me of law 48 in the 48 laws of power which is to assume formlessness yeah what do you think of the subject of identity because it's useful to some degree but it can also be a downfall as you alluded to at the start of this conversation when you say that you know someone gets to 30 40 years old

and they've almost have like a midlife crisis because they've not they're now like successful i don't know accountant yeah and that that's their identity that's their friendship circle i'm wondering what your perspective on identity is it's good not to think in in such concrete terms of this is who I

am to place labels on it, like I'm a lawyer, like I'm a right -wing Trump follower, like I'm an entrepreneur.

You're much more than that, right?

There's something else about who you are, right?

You have a soul. I know that's an old -fashioned concept, but I believe people have a soul, and it can be their character, their traits that they have, that almost they have when they were born.

It's what makes them who they are.

It's their sense of dignity that they return to that self.

But I can't put a label on it.

I can't put a word on it.

I can't say it's being a lawyer, being white, black, left, right, or whatever, right?

I like to think, and this will sound like I'm John Lennon in Imagine or some sentimental thing like that, But I like to think of myself as a citizen of the world, as a citizen of the universe.

So personally, maybe it's just me, I'm interested in every single culture, in every single religion.

You know, I am just as much fascinated by the Yoruba religion in West Africa as I am, by Buddhism, Islam, etc.

They all fascinate me.

Every country, every culture has something incredibly interesting about it.

I've been studying things like the Aztec culture I wrote about extensively in my new book.

Just an amazing story, amazing history.

It's not me, I'm not ethnically Mexican.

I'm not related to it through time or anything, but I'm related to it as a human being and I identify with it on a very deep level.

Which poem? The sense of magic, the sense of awe in the face of this universe, the incredible sense of spectacle that they created.

And I describe it in my new book.

The city that they created, Tenochtitlan, it was one of the greatest, most beautiful cities that ever existed, that mankind has ever created, on a par with Venice, Italy, completely destroyed by the conquistadors.

Nothing of it remains.

If you go to Mexico City, you'll see nothing.

They destroyed everything.

But the picture presented by the first conquistadors that arrived there, my God, this is like a fairy tale.

It is so beautiful.

Their artwork, their culture, their music just blows me away when I read about it.

Their philosophy, I identify with that.

If we only had some distance, if we only realized that we all come from the same roots, that there really is no such a thing as an ethnicity, that we all come from the same human beings, that it's all relative, that all the cultures are related, that all human beings are interrelated.

It's such a simplistic notion, but it kind of destroys all of our separations, all our partisanship, all of our niggly little sense of identity.

I don't get my identity from being from California or Los Angeles or being Jewish or being American.

I get it from being a human being with this incredible, vast history.

Nobody else is going to follow me in this.

I know it's just me.

It's my wish. And if human beings in 100 years could believe that, it would be so beneficial for us in some way.

It would mean we all have to protect this planet so that we can give it to our children, that, you know, climate change affects all of us, that we're all in this together.

I know I'm sounding not like the guy who wrote the 48 Laws of Power.

so excuse me for that.

The book you're referring to that you're currently writing and you're getting to the end of thankfully um is it called The Law of Sublime?

The Law of Sublime yeah.

You've progressed with that book since we last spoke so I'm just wondering if I ask you the question now what that book is about and why you're writing it you know you talked earlier on in this conversation about being really clear on why you're doing something why are you writing that book well i write

my books always with a sense of urgency like it's going to help people because we're facing a problem i felt the 48 laws of power was at a moment where people were too naive i felt the art of seduction where people didn't understand about the psychology of dealing with the sexes etc i wrote the war

book because i felt people were terrible at strategy the 50 cent book is different but mastery because people had lost a sense of how to master profession human nature because people were really bad at dealing with people now the problem i think is our minds are getting smaller and smaller and smaller

and smaller we're so absorbed in things that are so unimportant so banal so trivial so stupid at the same time science is showing us the most marvelous things you could possibly imagine you know about the big bang theory we're being able to understand what the first minutes of our universe were like

we're able to take a picture inside of a black hole and understand what's going on in a black hole we're able to understand the history of Earth someday we're going to know how life began it's insane what science is showing us about this world about the world that we were living in about this world

that we were born into and I want to open your eyes and expand your consciousness instead of shrink it to the dimensions of what we're actually facing in this world.

How insane it is to be sharing the planet with animals and their strange consciousness, how they think differently, but how we can connect to them.

We're the only animal that's conscious that we know of, but we can connect to animals on a way that is just insane.

I call it the interspecies sublime, right?

I'm talking about how our childhood was a moment of incredible sublimity, how we were so open.

Some people had a very painful childhood, but we were very open to the world and very imaginative about how strange it is to be alive, that very easily dinosaurs could be roaming this planet right now if a meteor hadn't knocked out the dinosaurs 60 -some million years ago, okay?

On and on and on. I talked about love, you know, I'm writing now about artworks and aesthetics and things that trigger the sublime in us, nature, death, which will be obviously the last chapter.

But I just want you to sense that there is something very strange about being alive in the 21st century and not take it for granted and not just be caught up in everything that's so familiar and conventional and banal.

and open your eyes because as you do this your emotions open up you're able to feel different things your thoughts open up you're able to have different ideas you become more creative your can't your consciousness expands anyway i could go on forever because i've been writing the book forever but that's

sort of what it's about and you think it'll be ready by 2026 if it isn't i don't know if I'll still be here because I it's literally it's hard to explain this even but I can't type and I can't take a walk and I can't do the things that I used to do to kind of decompress so I have to hand write everything

in two notebooks with sticky pads here and there it's like it's like a rat's maze and then I dictate it on the computer it's taken me this be like ends up being like six years of work because the process has been so difficult for me so my publisher i've written i'm going to finish in a few weeks the 10th

chapter i have two left i'm projecting to finish that by the end of the year which would give me enough time to have it published in 2026 i hope i pray because if not i don't know if my body can take it anymore do you mean that when you say that you're not sure if your body can take it anymore yeah

i can't man I can't take the focus.

It's like for three weeks now, I've been going, this isn't working.

This isn't working.

I'm not sleeping. My stomach is all churning.

I'm getting too old for this.

Then suddenly I break through, and then it comes back, and then it happens again and again.

When I start a chapter, the first couple months, I relax, I'm breathing, I'm fine.

Then when I'm near the end of the chapter, I turn into the tightest person you can imagine.

I'm so tight. and then i finish it so i can't take much more of this to be honest with you because i had a stroke i'm not a young man anymore so i you know i'm not gonna i'm not gonna be overly dramatic here i don't want to be a drama queen i'm gonna i'll live i'll be fine but seriously i i can't i

couldn't take another like two years of this wouldn't i couldn't make that two years of this book yeah no more you're gonna write another book though aren't you oh yeah yeah yeah i'm gonna write a book about kittens or about you know or about the lakers or something easy i don't know something nice

and simple yeah one of the um the clips that i saw the other day that's your one of the most viewed clips from you was about the primary law of human psychology is that people judge based on appearances this isn't a nice thing to confront although everybody knows it's true what does that mean?

Well, it was a talk that I gave recently in Atlanta, and I was trying to show the game of power as it's played, the rules of the game.

And the one thing that I was trying to emphasize is that power is a game of pure psychology.

And what I mean by that is when you have a sports, you have a game like baseball it's all statistics and data mostly right so and there's a winner and there's a loser they won the game five to nothing etc okay so there are parameters there's very little psychology involved although in sports and soccer

football there's some psychology but a lot of it's just playing and winning but power isn't like that So when we elect a leader like Donald Trump over Kamala Harris, you might say, oh, he got more votes.

But what is your judgment, your decision on voting for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris?

Was it you spent four hours with a spreadsheet going over all of their economic policies, deciding this is what's going to happen, this is how it's going to benefit me?

No, it was based on appearances, on psychology.

He seemed like a leader.

He seemed like he had more authority.

I kind of like his ideas, but you're not going very deeply into it, right?

It's his appearance that mattered.

CEOs are often hired because of their optics, because it's not based completely on the amount of money they've made.

And believe me, I saw this firsthand when I was on the board of directors.

People were hired not on their superior track record, but on their political skills, often.

Yeah. Political skills as in their ability to do sort of office politics and stuff like that yeah i mean there was some uh you know metrics involved but a lot of it was optics okay so the idea is success the power game the ruled laws of power are understanding human psychology never outshine the master

you're creating the appearance that you respect the master that they are better than you that you are going to obey them you're going to follow them you're playing that game always say less than necessary you're wearing the mask of somebody powerful who learns to control their tongue and control their

behavior court attention at all costs you know the behavior that will get people to look at you and attend to you do not build fortresses you understand that appearing isolated at somebody is very dangerous you know how to play the perfect court here you create the appearance of power and that is the power

game is creating the appearance of it.

It becomes a self -fulfilling prophecy.

Now, of course, results do matter.

They do figure into the picture.

I won't deny that. But the main part of the game, the main part of the laws are understanding the role of appearances, being a good actor and knowing how to manage that properly in a group situation.

So if two people walked in here and one of them had the appearance of power and one of them didn't, what would the person who had the appearance of power be doing?

How would they be carrying themselves?

How would they be speaking?

Well, a lot of our idea of a leader and power is nonverbal stuff.

Because as I said, we're an animal.

We're a social animal.

We don't like to believe, understand that, but it's true.

And so a lot of it's the body language.

So a powerful person in a meeting is kind of relaxed.

They're kind of like this.

They can put their bodies anywhere, right?

The other person is all tight and nervous and aware.

A powerful person has a directed focus.

A weak person is always looking around, touching their hair, touching their face.

There's a word for it, I forget what it is, nonverbal communication.

But it's a sign of insecurity, right?

A powerful person is able to look at everybody in the room directly, whereas somebody who's weak is always kind of averting their gaze there are these these signs of kind of confidence and charisma where you feel you are powerful and it emanates outward your eyes have that certain gaze it's unfortunate

because for women it's a little bit harder to play that game because some of the things that read as powerful for men for women should read as powerful but often read as she's mean she's a bitch right so women have a harder time in playing this game of appearances because they're judged so much on their

looks and not about these other things so um it's complicated but they're these kind of cues that people give off that show that they've inwardly feel secure and powerful and it kind of emanates outward it's there's a law in there, act like a king to be treated like one.

If you feel like you're a king or a queen, people will believe that you are, right?

It becomes a self -fulfilling prophecy.

And I have this story in there of Christopher Columbus, who was like the son of like a grocer somewhere in like Portugal or whatever, but he convinced all of the kings of Spain that he came from nobility and it was a total con game and they believed him.

But he carried himself like that.

He believed it. And they gave him all this money to go and explore America.

That's sort of the iconic story that I use for that.

So you can fake it till you make it.

You can to a degree, but at some point, it'll catch up to you if you can't deliver results.

So if it's all just make -believe, if it's all just hype, if it's all just appearance and optics, you won't get very far because you have to end up producing.

And some of the laws are about that.

It's not all about that.

So plan all the way to the end is about, like, getting the results that you want by planning all the way to the end, you know?

So it's not just faking it.

That'll get you somewhere.

But at some point, you have to produce.

Real confidence, the real confidence to be relaxed in your chair, to hold eye contact with somebody.

Where does that come from when we think about confidence and power?

Well, it can come from one of two things.

It can kind of come from almost a form of insanity where you believe since you were a child that you were destined for something great.

I'm so amazing. I'm so wonderful.

And you feel it. And it's not completely made up.

You actually do get things done.

But you have that natural air that like a prince would have, right?

What if you don't have any confidence?

Can you cultivate it?

Yes, you can. You can.

The thing is the best way to cultivate it is to actually have results that show to actually have a record to go upon.

So you can kind of fake it like Columbus did, but Columbus already had achieved some things when he did that.

He'd already had some naval skills, I believe.

Don't quote me on that.

But it's good to have some things to hang your hat on that will help give you that confidence so it's not completely faked.

But William James, the great American psychologist, talked about as -if strategies.

And it's a very important concept in psychology from the early 20th century.

if you believe as if you were confident as if you are powerful it will tend to be read that way right and so like he had the analogy if you smile even though you don't feel like smiling you'll end up kind of maybe feeling kind of happy so the physical action will create the psychological action which is his belief

because he was very much a believer in the body things starting from the body so if you believe physically and bodily embodied that you are great that you deserve this it will kind of become part of your psychology and it will radiate outward but for those that don't they just don't have that belief

can you lie to yourself can you tell yourself i am strong and i am powerful well everybody has some good qualities right everybody i think almost everybody has something that they can can go back to in the past and go I was actually very good at that that was actually a good moment I actually was was you

know scored in that particular moment and you can think about that I mean actors do that all the time in movies when they want to express an emotion they go back into their past like they have to express sadness they go back and they think about their father or mother who died and they call that emotion up

you can call that emotion up of when you did something actually really great you might have only been in high school when you were on the sports team and you threw the touchdown or something okay think about that and it'll come back to everybody has something that they can be confident about I hope

if there was one law that the powerless amongst us who who feel powerless or lost in the current world, one law or one fact of human nature that people who are feeling lost and purposeless and adrift right now should be thinking the most about, which one springs to mind?

Well, there's no one sharp answer to this kind of thing.

But one law that I would highlight is interaction with boldness.

And what I mean by that is if you're feeling timid, if you're feeling that you're not confident in something, you will start a project and it will fail because you feel that way, because you don't enter into it with the right energy.

so if you take something and you do something boldly everybody loves the bold, everybody admires it even if it's stupid, even if it fails it will gain you that kind of attention and so let's say you're thinking about starting a business well just go ahead and do it and be bold about it and start it

and be as dramatic as you can and be as confident as you can and it creates a self -fulfilling dynamic people admire it they don't admire the timid and the insecure and the guy who spends two years talking about that podcast he's going to start they admired that bloke who just decided all right i'm going

to start it i don't care if nobody likes it fine you know i remember this guy interviewed me once he had a magazine called bad ideas and it was a really successful magazine in like the early 2000s and i said where'd you get that idea and he said my mother told me that to start that magazine was a really

bad idea right so i thought i'd put the title there you know and that would be the title of it and i just went ahead and started it and it was very successful because it was a great like marketing gimmick and it also worked and it was actually full of bad ideas of the thing but very in a very interesting

way um so being bold being different everybody nowadays i'm getting on my goddamn soapbox again and i'm so i apologize to everyone about this But everyone is so similar.

Everybody is so afraid.

Everyone is trying to be like everybody else.

You go out there and you start something that's different, that's you, that's unique, that's loud, that proclaims I'm a different voice on it, you're going to get attention.

So I want more bold people in this world.

We've got too much fear.

I'm not maybe a big admirer of in some ways of Elon Musk, but damn it, he's always bold and it always works for him.

He doesn't start just a minimal business about maybe sending rockets out there.

He starts thinking it's going to take you to Mars.

He's bold, and people love it.

The world moves out the way of boldness.

I was thinking as you were speaking about a memory of mine of being at a festival in New York City called Global Citizen.

It was like Beyonce was performing and stuff, all the biggest names in the world.

And my friend was drunk.

And we were in the VIP section behind the stage, but we could see that there was this access all areas artist section.

and because my friend was drunk i've never witnessed anything like it this guy gets me takes my hand goes come with me he walks directly at the two massive security guards with this boldness this conviction they just move out of the way i thought you were going to say they punched him no they just moved

out of the way because of the way he was walking they just thought well he must he must be in here yeah and they moved out of the way they didn't check his pass they just moved out of the way and he continued to do that all day and it was because he was drunk he's done a documentary about this he used

to be an alcoholic so he had this confidence when he was drunk where the world would just like move out of his way and he ended up going in what i believe to be the president of some asian country's dressing room again because he was just walking at things right and the way he he was walking it just

moved out of his way right but i've never forgotten that actually i deployed it today when i went for a run um with my girlfriend because i wanted to use a bathroom in a restaurant and i figured that if i just walk with a certain conviction the the staff will like let me pass they'll assume maybe i'm

sat here yeah and i ended up walking through a conference uh -huh you have to like it was like a conference hall in this hotel where they're checking people's badges just because i was the way i was walking nobody checked mine right and there's a metaphor here for life and you kind of allude to it in your

book about like the bolder you are the better um some of these subheadings i find really cool lion circle the hesitant prey boldness strikes fear and fear creates authority going halfway with half a heart digs the deeper grave yeah hesitation creates gaps boldness obliterates them yeah and audacity

separates you from the herd yeah yeah i want if one thing if i have one legacy if i create more bold people in this world i will be happy because we've got too many timid hairs out there we need more bold lions start your business write that book do it just do it please and then write me afterwards

and either blame me or thank me i wish i'd been bolder when i was um starting my entrepreneurial career i wish someone had said to me whatever your dream is steve when you describe it to people times it by 10 whatever number you're trying to raise in it as an investment that's for sure in negotiations

you ask for 200 000 that's what you get you ask for a million you maybe get 500 000 but it's 300 000 more than you would have gotten if you've been timid always a negotiation ask the higher price and mean it and say it with conviction right and make sure you think your price is high you'll get the higher

price it takes a certain confidence though and that's really what's i think at the heart of the problem maybe we just want to be a bit more drunk that's the lesson that's law well we have a closing tradition on this podcast okay where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest but knowing who they're

going to be leaving it for the question that's been left for you oh is close your eyes and imagine yourself 10 years from now where are you what are you doing and who are you with i'm hoping that i'm alive and healthy and that my uh walking has gotten better so that i can take a walk and that i'm i'm

with my wife and that we're climbing a mountain which i haven't been able to do i loved hiking and i'm able to do that i will be crying in that moment because i am so frustrated not being able to do what i love the most and if that moment arrives in 10 years god i don't know how i don't know i'll be

so joyous you know to be able to do something that i love so much and has been taken away from me to have it back i'm not asking to be you know an athlete or do what i could do before if i could just take a simple walk up a hill be so happy that's what i'm imagining it's a really important lesson because we

just take it also for granted don't we please don't please don't and other people i read about who've had experiences like this who were in an accident at a young age it's worse because i was already in my early 60s uh who've had this it's just like how do you deal with it you know people who are like

athletic who are energetic who are outdoors and then it's all taken away it's a terrible story but you learn life skills and you learn how to deal with it.

And then I still have my brain, so I'm able to write a book, thank God.

But I really, really want to be able to swim and hike again.

God, I'd be so happy.

It puts everything in perspective when you tell me that you'd be crying tears of joy to walk up a hill.

I, just to walk up straight up the hill where I'm on the street, I am, I would be crying.

My wife can attest to that.

Because I'm so frustrated, I'd be so happy.

You know, yeah. What would you say to someone like me who is quite clearly, because of the privilege that I have of my mobility, going to be taking it all for granted?

Well, you know, I want people walk by my window in my office.

I've told you, I think it was on my last conversation I mentioned this, so I don't want to keep repeating myself, but I see them walking their dog or riding their bicycle or jogging and I go, they don't realize how beautiful that looks to me.

they don't appreciate it.

And because they don't appreciate it, it doesn't mean that much to them.

It means more to me than it does to them.

They should be appreciating it.

They should be thinking.

I think of my neighbor.

He's just out in his driveway fixing cars, and he's listening to his music.

He should be so happy that he's got his body, that he's doing this, that he's in the moment, that he's present.

But he's not. I'm the one that's feeling his joy at being like that.

But you should be feeling that in your everyday activities, that you're alive, that you're a human being.

That walking, you take for granted walking.

As somebody who can't walk, I know like you're always balancing on one leg.

You don't realize that when you walk.

The miracle of a human walk is at every moment you're always on one leg.

That's a balancing act.

And you're able to do that and you're able to run and do it.

Don't take that stuff for granted, you know, because I can't, every step I take, I have to think about bouncing on that left leg of mine.

You had a wasp or a bee sting that resulted in a stroke, which is what changed your mobility.

If you could go back and speak to Robert before, that 20 -year -old Robert, and you could just whisper something to him.

I would whisper to 20 -year -old Robert, just don't think about it, Robert.

Everything's going to come out okay.

You know, don't, just be who you are.

Don't regret anything.

It's all working out for the best.

And just, I can't say, like I would say, enjoy the moment because I was enjoying my 20s immensely.

but maybe when I was 34 I would have said, you know, don't give up.

It's going to happen.

Everything's going to fit into place and you're going to have an amazing life.

You're going to be meeting Stevie Wonder, one of your idols, when you were a kid.

Bob Dylan is going to be mentioning you in a book and has read your book.

The people that you loved when you were a kid, you're going to be meeting and hanging out with 50 Cent.

You're going to be meeting presents.

You have no idea what's ahead of you.

Okay, I would have maybe said something like that But then maybe I would have gotten lazy and I wouldn't have written it because I would have thought, oh, it's all going to happen.

So maybe the doubt and the worry is useful.

And the neurotic energy, yeah.

Robert, thank you so much.

We're all very, very excited for your upcoming book.

Oh, yeah, so am I. So you talk about urgency.

We can't wait. Okay.

And we're very much looking forward to it because I know how much you pour into these books and you've expressed how much you sort of agonise over it being exactly what you wanted to say and not all authors are like that um some are a little bit more flippant um so i appreciate that so much and i appreciate

the time that you've spent on my show and the value that you've given my audience they i was looking at some of the comments earlier and it's just incredible the impact you've had on people by sharing your own story talking about the stroke and and the gratitude that that's given you for life and the gratitude

we need to have so thank you so unbelievably much well thank you for the opportunity for the honor of being on this incredibly exciting podcast of yours as i say every morning this is my third time i've always had like a i've always been in a good mood the morning before i don't know if it's a coincidence

or if it's something about being on your podcast so thank you the honor is all mine thank you you're welcome i find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of spotify and apple and our audio channels the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe

button wherever you're listening to this I would like to make a deal with you if you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe

button the show gets bigger which means we can expand the production bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to do in this thing we love if you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button wherever you're listening to this that would mean the world to me that is the only favor I will ever ask you thank you so much for your

time.

[Robert Greene: Mastering Power, Purpose, and the Human Condition]-[The Manipulation Expert: You're Setting Your Child Up For Misery! Most People Don't Realise They're Narcissists!]

📋 Summary

Unveiling the Human Nature

The Quest for Purpose and Mastery

The Strategic Use of Focus and Boldness

The Danger of Isolation and the Power of Solitude

Emotional Mastery and the Art of Appearance

Embracing the Sublime

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript