Become a modern Machiavelli | Robert Greene on power

[Music] [Music] good evening good morning good afternoon to all of you tuning in from wherever you are in the world and hello to everyone who's watching on the replay i hope you're all doing very well my name is luke i'm a producer here at how to academy and welcome to what i'm sure is going to be an absolutely brilliant event today we are joined by robert greene robert is an internationally renowned expert on power strategies and the number one new york times bestselling author of the 48 laws of power the 33 strategies of war the art of seduction and mastery his most recent book the daily laws is out now today robert will be in conversation with economist and entrepreneur pippa malmgro a former white house presidential advisor she now advises the british government and the world's largest financial and military organizations a best-selling book signals forecasted the great financial crisis the slowdown in china brexit and the rise of american nationalism so after a 45 minute or so conversation with pippa robert is going to take questions from you the audience so please type any you have in the q a box wherever it is on your screen well that's more than enough from me so without further ado it's my absolute pleasure to welcome robert and pippa pippa over to you excellent thank you so much for organizing this and robert it's just a total delight to meet you oh thank you the same here yeah i've had the privilege of reading your books since you came out with the very first one on the laws of power and i want to open for the audience because your your new book is so fascinating it's basically like a daily set of exercises but to be clear about how to live and how to improve yourself but it's also super interesting that you know you're talking about things that are so powerful that there are prisons in america that have banned your work correct yeah so just tell us a bit about why it is that what you write is considered so shocking and so powerful to people well it's kind of the the same sort of notoriety that machiavelli has from the 16th century the great florentine diplomat and writer i'm not putting myself on his level but just the name machiavelli kind of conjures up used to be a nickname for satan himself and i think we human beings are uncomfortable with our own nature right we want to imagine that we're these kind of angelic saintly technologically sophisticated creatures wandering about in the 21st century and i'm trying to tell you you're not really like that you have a very some very primitive impulses going on at the same time and one of them that is embedded in us from hundreds of thousands of years ago is this desire for power this desire for expansion for having influence over people for having some kind of control over our lives and this motivates so much of our behavior and if we're not clear about it and if we're not comfortable with it it leads to kind of passive aggressive strategies to sort of manipulations and we're not really even aware of how deeply we are attempting to manipulate people and this makes a lot of the public very uncomfortable they don't want to imagine this they think that we're much different like oh yeah maybe there are a few sharks out there you know maybe two percent or kind of manipulators etc but not me i never engage in that kind of behavior and i'm trying to rip away that mask and say no you're engaging that kind of behavior but you're just not aware of it i think that's a bit of the of the nature of the notorious taboo element there and it's so interesting it's this kind of carl young notion that everybody has a dark side and you only become a whole person when you integrate your light side and your dark side together so your new book seems to be a kind of a road map to how to integrate into a hole is that a is that a good description of what you're trying to get people to do yes my previous book the laws of human nature that is in essence what that is about and i'm trying to make you aware of your own nature aware that you have these this dark side as you mentioned i talk about envy i talk about aggression irrationality grandiosity all those kind of juicy subjects and i'm trying to say that we're all come from the same root the same source where all our brains are wired in the same way envy is something that all human beings are extremely prone to and i explain why in this book in that book and in daily laws and so i'm just trying to make you aware that this is going on in your head and is going on in your behavior and is motivating so much of what you do and in the awareness just simply being aware that you have a dark side that you have a shadow and in that book i go very deeply into where the shadow comes from is enough to make you begin to integrate it into your daily life but it sounds to me from from my reading of your books and and this new one did you at some point in your life uh have confrontations with people who were manipulative towards you did you how did you learn about these kinds of behaviors was it an internal process or did you bump into people who uh who were exemplified this way of thinking well experience is the best teacher of all so you know like so many people i emerged from the university at the age of 21 or so and i was very naive right i had all of these notions these kind of romantic notions about the world i was going to be a novelist i was going to write this and you know and everybody you know this is how the world works and then you enter i started off working in new york in journalism and suddenly you see that it's not what you expected that people can be very political that people have egos and i started observing this i observed it in two ways first things were happening to me where i would make mistakes inadvertently i wasn't aware of it and second i would observe the very powerful people in the many different offices where i worked and i decided there's this weird kind of language of power in which very powerful people understand certain basic principles right and this is i never had access to it's not anything people teach in the university it's nothing your parents tell you it's nothing the culture tell you tells you there are no books written on it you just have to find out for yourself and a lot of it involves a lot of pain and so i had a fair amount of very painful experiences particularly when i came back to los angeles and i worked in hollywood you know where law number one is never outshine the master i outshone the master on a few occasions and i was fired and didn't understand why etc etc and i think a lot of people have gone through that process that is really what the real world is like it's not like what how most self-help books describe it so it was a mix of kind of painful personal experiences and very keen observations of those in power and how how they're not what you think they are when the doors are closed they're using some of these laws of power that are kind of a secret that i wanted to reveal i know you've referred to a book called the obstacle is the way and it's this idea that defeat and failure and really bad experiences are the best thing that can possibly happen to you um and success is actually kind of the worst because it makes you buy into things to such an extent you stop taking risks can you just elaborate on this a bit well um you know we all of us have i call it our self-opinion what we think about ourselves and it's always a bit elevated above the reality right unless we have very low self-esteem and then it's the opposite but we always sort of overestimate ourselves we think that we're more moral and good than we actually are we think that that we're smarter than we actually are we think that we're more rational than is the truth of the reality but the discrepancy is not that big otherwise if it were we would be probably locked in a mental institution right we have to have some grasp on reality but when you have success that kind of discrepancy goes from here to like here here here and here everyone around you starts patting you on the back and saying how wonderful you are people are now motivated to kind of echo your ideas you start believing your own press you think that you have the golden touch that no matter what you write no matter what you do or your thoughts are so brilliant and you slowly lose contact with reality and this is what happens to a lot of people in business i've observed this firsthand i was on the board of directors of a new york stock exchange publicly traded company american apparel and i saw this happen to the ceo very smart guy but with his expansion success he began to lose his contact with reality and it basically destroyed him and the company it's something that's repeated throughout history in politics in business and entertainment wherever but failure on the other hand is where you actually learn and i have this happen to me personally when i write something that doesn't work and people tell me i now have feed i now have information what is that information telling me it's telling me that i have limits that i need to improve here that this bit of this idea isn't strong enough that this kind of a bit of language isn't working here through failure you kind of learned about your limits and you learn what you need to improve and what you need to work on right so failure is the best school of all so if you're thinking like you want to start a business or something and what's sort of stopping you is oh i'm not really ready i need to go back and get my mba i need to spend four more years piling up massive student debt at yale university so that i can then start my business that is precisely the wrong approach you need to start that business and fail and if it fails you will learn more in three months than four years that yale would ever teach you and it's not just my idea i've spoken to a lot of people in silicon valley who mirror that same philosophy so failure is the best thing well and i've had and i've had a lot of it which is so interesting because when i looked at your background and i i was struck by the fact that i think you've said you had something like 60 different jobs before you were like 36 and i can see how that might be seen as failure at that time but in fact isn't it like the success isn't it what's given you all the juice to write these fantastic books is that breadth of experience well at the time that it's happening you're not aware of that you know and so you're sort of thinking what am i doing with my life and your parents are starting to pressure you you're trying to say robert you know come on you know what's going on you got to get your act together you got to start making some money and you start you know doubting yourself right but there's you know people are complex and i'm as complex as anyone so at the same time that i'm doubting it in the back of my mind i'm kind of understand what i'm doing that by having all of these different jobs and these different experiences and traveling all around the world you know i worked in a detective agency here in los angeles i was a skip tracer i did construction work in in crete for a summer i worked in television in london i worked in a hotel in paris i did journalism hollywood you know you name it and so i kind of understood that for a writer you need all of that bad experience i just didn't know at the time that it would come together in the way it did it wasn't like a plan i'm 22 and i'm going to write the 48 laws of power i thought i was going to write you know then i was going to be the next hemingway to be honest and so it didn't fog you know this kind of logic that i thought it would but in the end life is weird and there is a kind of fate to it and it kind of worked out the way it should have worked out and you have to listen to where where destiny sort of leads you well that seems to be a key focus of this new book of yours as i read through it it's almost like you're asking people to get still with themselves enough that they can figure out their own personal dna like what drives them what are what are they really meant to be it's this kind of um it's the idea that maslow wrote about just before he died where he added another layer to the maswell hierarchy of knees and he said last one is to transcend and to become the fully individuated individual that you were meant to be right so walk us through a little bit what is for people who don't understand what is individuation what is it to transcend and become what you are meant to be because that's really what the book is trying to take us towards so help us understand what that's all about well that was specifically the subject of my fifth book i believe mastery um essentially what i'm trying to tell you is a very basic scientific fact that if you think about it and ponder it it'll actually be extremely powerful it will sort of be something you won't be able to forget which is your dna the genetics that you're wired with has never occurred in the history of the universe and will never be repeated again it is extremely unique right the way the chromosomes form etc also your parents they are equally unique and in their uniqueness they're raising you in a way that no one else has ever been raised before the experiences you have in life are also one of a kind nobody else has your experiences you are by nature a completely unique phenomenon in the history of the universe right and so what i'm trying to say is at your birth a particular seed is planted in the ground that seed is your uniqueness and to the degree that you nurture it and you kind of make that grow and you build that up and you develop it you're going to have power you're going to have success you're going to fulfill what i call your life's task right and the so you know if you look at very brilliant people geniuses masters in the history you'll see that they have a very clarity about that life's task it doesn't happen it'll happen to einstein when he's four it'll happen to steve jobs when he's seven or eight it happened to martha graham when she was 16 or 17 it could happen later in life on and on but at some point it all becomes extremely clear to you and you follow that line and if you think about very brilliant people or very successful artists or whoever they're one of a kind there's nobody else out there like a a pablo picasso or an igor stravinsky they're just unique they're weird they're different your problem is it's the problem that everyone has and i had is that uniqueness it's like a little voice maslow who you mentioned he called them impulse voices they're embedded when you're like one years old and they kind of tell you i like this food i hate that food etc and as you get older you start listening to your parents who tell you what you need to do what you think that what they want you to become you start listening to your teachers who start telling you you're good at this you're bad at that you start listening to your friends you enter the culture and you start listening to social media and soon you can't even hear that voice anymore you just simply become a reflection of everybody else's desire or everybody else's opinion of who you are you lose contact with your source of power with your what you call your individuation i call your natural uniqueness your primal uniqueness you enter the wrong career you go to law school when you were meant to write books and you know you kind of do well because you're young and you're excited you have energy but then you reach a point where you're not excited about it you're not engaged emotionally you start tuning out your life starts spinning in directions you didn't expect you started getting into drugs i'm not giving extreme example but you hit a wall and your life just kind of doesn't work for you anymore right and that's what happens to so many people and it's not like the cliche is you've got to live your passion i'm not in favor of that we all have to make a living we all have to live we have to be practical creatures you know we can't just go off and imagine we're going to be a rock star or a poet right so my idea is your life's task is actually more practical than anything else it doesn't have to be um you know i'm a musician i'm going to write music you could end up being a lawyer working in the music industry i know plenty of people who satisfy their their desire working in an ancillary sort of industry right but it's related to what connects to them but if you disconnect yourself from that seed from that voice from that source of power nothing good can ever come from it so that's how i describe it in my book i noticed actually let's start with that because you break the book into three-month uh sort of study sections and the first one was killing the external voices and finding your internal compass the second three months was the political nature of the work world and the third is real persuasion and influence and the last quarter of the year is on underlying motivations maybe can you elaborate a little on why that sequence why those things it's a little bit arbitrary you know it's not like a strict order because that's just that's not how life works anyway but you know i begin the first three months with figuring out your career to help you get aimed towards what i call mastery and you know it's the new year and we say new year new you it's generally that's when you have new year's resolutions you're kind of reassessing where you are right so those are sort of the first three months then i'm kind of imagining that now in the spring you know you're in your office you're working you're with people and things are political and things are different or difficult you know we all have to deal with toxic people around us i don't think there's a human on the planet that has never had to deal with someone in their family or someone at work who isn't toxic it's extremely common right and how you deal with people like that will have play a huge role in your emotional well-being and in your success in life because these people can ruin your own opinion about yourself and ruin your self-confidence for years so i want to kind of ground you in the idea that people have egos people can be political people can be manipulative and there are toxic people out there so i want to ground you in that reality then i'm leading you into you know the summer you're kind of happy you know you're taking off all your winter clothes now i'm talking about persuasion and influence and how to deal with the softer side of power which is the subject of seduc my art of seduction and some of the other other books the number one paramount idea there is to flip how you look at people instead of being so self-absorbed when you're always thinking about your ideas how great you are how your ideas are so brilliant you need to convince other people of that you need to think of other people first what their needs are what their interests are what their ego is about how they think and enter their world and that is the key to unlocking any attempt at persuasion or influence so i'm going to ground you in that reality right then the final three months about human nature what i talked about developing some awareness about yourself about the human animal kind of a guide to how the human animal operates which is the subject of the laws of human nature and then the cherry on top is the month of december where i kind of go a little wild i'm writing a new book which is called temporarily called the law of the sublime and i'm kind of having i discussed that which i discussed in the last chapter of the laws of human nature but i'm discussing in that book and kind of grounding you in how insane it is to just be alive and how wonderful and awesome it is and how you know your mortality is something that can guide you to that kind of belief if you confront it instead of running away from it so that's more or less how the book is structured the month of december kind of ends with the sublime and death and things like that which sort of seems a natural progression you

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Length: 21min 49sec (1309 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021