- This is Julian, and I'm here with best selling author Robert Greene who just released his new
book, The Laws of Human Nature. I put a link to it here
below, as it is a must-read, and what I thought we could
do here is just jump right in on the importance of
learning about human nature. Why someone should learn this, and I wouldn't even say
importance, I would say necessity. Why someone is really screwed without learning about what
you talk about in this book. - The point of my book,
is that the major source of pain in your life is
people, the people around you. You're not maybe thinking in these terms, but I'll explain what I
mean in the following way. So, we wanna be able
to feel, like in life, with our friends, our colleagues, our loved ones, that
we can influence them. That we can move them in our direction, that we have the ability to persuade them to do something that's in our interest. And the feeling that we can't
do that is deeply painful. It causes lots of amounts of
frustration and resentment that can sit inside of us, and linger, and kind of ruin our
attitude towards life. Sometimes there are toxic
people in this world, and they enter our lives
and we didn't foresee them. Someone who's a raging
narcissist or whatever, and we get dragged into
a relationship with them, or we hire them as a business
partner or an employee, and they ruin our lives,
and they cause all kinds of emotional damage that
can take years to get over. And then another level
is, we have friends, and partners and spouses, and sometimes the connections between us are very fragile and thin. Our friendships are
continually breaking up, our friends do something that
surprises us and upsets us. And so we often find that our
relationships with people, we're not connecting to
them on a deep level. So you add all this up, sort
of frustration and resentment that we have no influence over people. Bad types that enter our lives and cause us residual pain,
and then relationships that aren't really strong
and aren't connecting. You add all that up and you can have, as a social animal that can
equal a great deal of pain. We don't associate it this way, but a lot of illnesses and heart disease are associated with loneliness, and I think a lot of
people feel especially in this world today, a bit of alienation and disconnect from other people. And so this is a book that I
think can reverse that process. I believe that in the world
that we're living in today with social media and technology, that most of us find
ourselves withdrawing. We're immersed in our
smartphones, et cetera. We're not connecting in any deeper ways so these tendencies and this pain that I'm talking about is
actually getting worse. And so this a book about
how to reverse that, how to recognize those toxic
people well in advance, before you get entangled in their mess, before you become
enmeshed in their dramas. Learn the real way towards
influencing people, towards working with their will-power to get them to do what you want, so you don't feel this
constant frustration. And then, how to connect to people on a much deeper level as a human being. I talk a lot in this book about empathy, and as a social animal that we are, we have this ability to understand people in a way that's non-verbal,
we can connect to them in a visceral way through our empathy. I can begin to understand
what it's like to be Julian. I'm not you, I can't be inside your head, I can't know you from the inside out, but I can get closer to that. We have an almost telepathic
power if we tap into it, but we don't tap into it
because we're so immersed in ourselves, we're so self-absorbed. - Yeah, there's a quote that I love, it says that today we're
more connected than ever with social media, Facebook,
Instagram, our phones, but we're also more alone than ever. We do live in that virtual world. Right now, the example I always use is, you don't even have to, if
you think of say pursuing a purpose or pursuing
something that you love, you don't have to go out
of the house to do that. Someone could get lost in a video game. Back in the day it was World of Warcraft, and in that game you
could just stay at home, and it virtually fulfills all
of your needs to some extent where you can create tribes,
you can socialize in there, you can level up so you have
that sense of accomplishment, there's different quests, and
you never leave the house. Because of that you lose
touch with what you said, that empathy, the dynamics
of understanding a person, 'cause you're just in
this 2D virtual realm. - I think we've all had this experience. If you've ever been, for
whatever reason, alone a lot, let's say you had an illness
or let's say you're depressed, or let's say you're in a foreign country, you'll notice that when you're
suddenly thrust among people you feel a little bit awkward. It takes a little while to adjust. But in the opposite,
if you're very social, if you're always around people, you're going to events, and
you're meeting a lot of them, something kicks in and it's
easy to be around them, and you're more attuned to people. Well we're not around people enough. We're not interacting with them, we're interacting with them virtually, or we're immersed in our technology. And so just by the fact that
you're out there socializing with people, one-on-one communication, you're gonna develop this skill. We're animals, we're
living, breathing animals. We have blood, and heart, and we connect to people
viscerally, physically. I see your eye contact, I'm
able to connect with you on that level, I'm able to
hear the tone of your voice, I'm able to read your body language. We read people in a way that
we're not even conscious of. We pick up signals that
people are giving off through their non-verbal communication. When you're not paying attention,
I notice in restaurants there'll be couples, and neither of them are looking at each other,
they're both like this-- - Buried on their phone, yeah. - So, you're missing
all of this information that people are giving
out about themselves, about their likes,
about what excites them, about what makes them an individual. You're missing all of that, because you're not paying attention-- - I would see it for years,
'cause I've taught it for years when it comes to just
interacting with other people. Learn about the different
dynamics, learn about the context. Who's this person, what
are they feeling right now, what is appropriate to the situation, while still remaining authentic. And I would see less
and less of this skill, 'cause it is a skill, it's
something you develop. And it would shock me, I'm like
how do people not know this? To the point where it was even during say a seminar room context,
that's the context, because people are so used to
taking in information online like watching this video here, there's the comment box below. Or if you're watching a
webinar there's the chat box where you can just leave your
comments, ask your questions, and I would see it where in seminar rooms, I would be, quite a few
times, randomly interrupted. Someone just raisin' their hand
and blurting something out, 'cause they're like, well
where's the comment box? Where is it? And they weren't aware of the context that it's a seminar room,
there's real people. By just spending so much time online, you try to act in the real world with the online rules, but
that's not how it works. I would in all honesty
attribute a lot of my success, where I'm at today, due
to social intelligence, learning how to read people. If you don't know this, you
close off so many doors. If you're at the bottom
and you're starting out and you want to enter different scenes, or network your way up, or
even, there's that famous quote, surround yourself with the five people, those are the people who
influence you the most, if you don't have the
basic social intelligence to create just no downside,
you're not gonna move up at all. And then of course in
terms of reading yourself, and that's what I love about this one too, of course reading other people, but then always turn the
mirror around on you. Like, how am I doing this? What about me, what is running me? - The most important law of human nature is that we deny that there is
such a thing as human nature. So I have chapters on all of
these sort of primal forces that I believe govern us. Our irrationality, the fact
that emotions control us, the fact that we tend to be self-absorbed and that we're all sort of narcissists. That we are prone to feeling envy, constantly comparing
ourselves to other people, that we have a dark side, that we have aggressive tendencies. But when we think of these things it's always the other person. I'm rational and you're irrational. I care about people,
you're the narcissist. I'm a nice, wonderful person, you're aggressive or passive-aggressive. I never feel envy, I don't
really have a dark side. We have a tremendous need, to feel of ourselves as being superior. Now I'm not trying to bum
you out with this book or make you depressed, but I think, by understanding yourself better, by understanding that you're not nearly as great as you think you are, that you do have these tendencies, you actually can begin to change yourself. The self-help genre is a huge genre, I'm definitely within it, but
a lot of books, we read books and they don't really lead
to any kind of change, because they don't challenge us. They're not looking at
the reality of who we are, and I believe you can't change yourself, and can't get out of these bad patterns that you're probably locked into, unless you actually look at who you are, you actually understand
that you are subject to many of these forces that I talk about. - Yeah, it's true, most
traditional self-help books that we read is all
about positive thinking, or something that'll reinforce
how good of a person I am. We kind of scan through
it, and we have that bias where you just block out
things that challenge us. It's like, how amazing you are! Of course I'm gonna read that, tell me how amazing I am, as opposed to, here's what's really goin'
on beneath the surface. Do this in-depth audit on yourself. Confront your inner
demons, that's like, no! - But the beauty of the book,
of what I'm trying to say is that we are all the same, that nobody is exempt from this, that nobody is actually superior. So it's not like you're
worse than other people, it's just, this is who we are. Because of our nature,
because of how we evolved from millions of years
ago, we have a tendency to get caught up in the
emotions of other people, viral effects, emotional contagion. Why would it be that some people are exempt from that and others are not? No, we are all subject to these forces and it's better to be
realistic and look at it, than to be someone who's avoiding
the truth or the reality. I think too many self-help books try and compliment the reader. Holding up a kind of idealistic
image of who they are. I'm the opposite, I'm trying to show that you're actually as
screwed up as other people are and it's better to confront it
and turn this around somehow. - Yeah, no that I absolutely love and it's what I talk about
in a lot of my videos too. Confronting, as you'd
call, like your shadow, or Corleone, the shadow,
like face those inner demons. Stop living in this state
of denial with this split inside of us where we're just
like, I'm this acceptable me. No, own everything that
is you and dive into that. And then of course we
have layers and layers of resistance to doing so,
but as you said, until you do, it's there either way, and
it's active and running you, whether you're aware of it or not. So become aware, and then be
thankful that you're aware so then you can do something about it, which you talk about in your book here. - You do have aggressive tendencies, we all have aggressive tendencies, it's our nature and I
explain why we have them. And if you're aware of that, you can take that energy that we all have and actually channel it
into something productive. If you stop denying it, and you realize that you have this energy, you can turn it into being ambitious and pouring that aggression
into becoming something great, and to making something great, and to using that energy
to fuel your persistence, to push past any kind of adversity. To be aggressive when it comes to getting your way and
getting what you want, and I even talk about the
positive aspects of anger and how to channel your
anger into your work. I use a lot of anger in my books, 'cause I am angry about
people's hypocrisies and the stupidity that
we constantly confront, and I use that anger to fuel my writing. But instead of getting angry at people and pissing them off and
making a lot of enemies, I channel it into my work, into my books. You can channel your anger and your frustrations into your work. There's many ways to take
that aggressive energy and make it productive
but you won't do that if you deny that you even
have these tendencies. - Even reading that and seeing as you said that it's not just you, I
think will also help relieve a lot of self-attack or
self-hate that we carry 'cause, it's really that
resistance to say feeling angry, 'cause we're conditioned that way. It's like, don't feel angry! So then when you're angry,
not only are you angry but then you're beating yourself up and you're angry that you're angry, and you're angry that you're
angry that you're angry, and when you see like, one
it's part of who we are, there's nothing wrong with you, you have a certain emotion for a reason, and two, this is everyone, it relieves a little bit of that angry of feeling angry, of feeling angry. And then also just seeing the value in every emotion, it's there for a reason. But what does eat us up inside is when we resist it too
much and then it becomes this permanent state that we just live in. You know, we can't escape it. And I love your first law too, it's that law of rationality,
where even going back to what we were saying before,
learning how to read someone. If you don't dive into yourself, and confront what is running you, you're gonna be projecting
that onto the person and you won't even have the
accurate data to read them. An exercise that I love doing
at some of my live events, say we've never met,
we're just sitting here, we're complete strangers and
we're paired up in a group. Pick the person, without telling them, that you dislike the most. Now you don't say it,
everyone picks a person, and then you gotta ask yourself, what about that person,
why did I pick that person? What about them? And then dive into that,
and you paint the picture. They're allowed to get negative, so it's like, you know what? That person, they seem
stupid, or that person, they seem like they're
above the rest of the group, they seem like they know it all-- - You say this, you actually say this. - I'll paint out some examples, but then they say it in their head. They won't say it to
the person, like, you! And then throughout the seminar they get to know the other person, and they realize how off they were, and how it all came from
them, and it's like, woh! If that's what you're projecting, and then you're trying to calibrate and read the person based on that, which has nothing to do with who they are, you're completely off, you know? - Yeah, look at it this way, I'm trying to tell you
that you don't understand the people that you're dealing with. You really don't know who they are. You're walking around thinking
that you know your wife, or your husband, your children,
your boss, your friends, but you really don't have a clue. You don't understand their
experience, you don't really know what they think of you actually, as well. Most of the time you're projecting onto them your own images. Let's say you had a
particularly bad relationship with your father, or your mother, and you don't like people in authority because of the relationship
to your father. And so you meet somebody who's
powerful, who has authority, and you hate them, you
have a bad instant reaction because you're projecting onto them some image from your own childhood. So you don't see the people
that are in front of you, you're not seeing them,
you're not understanding them. And what happens when
you operate in darkness, when you operate without
knowledge, you make mistakes, you say something very stupid
that offends the other person. You don't even realize
that you've offended them, and weeks later you notice
that they're kind of cold, and they're not responding to your texts and your emails, you have no idea why, because you probably did
offend them in some way, because you don't know who they are, you don't know their experience, you don't know what's
going on inside of them or what their likes and aversions are. So, if you stop for a
moment and tell yourself, damn, I don't know what
the people around me are really thinking about me,
it's a startling revelation, and you're gonna wanna change that. - Just realizing this, you're like woh! Like how much we project
and even how much, going back to the state that runs us, also colors our perception. Say you're someone who's
in a state of anger, that's gonna color your
focus, who you focus on. You're like, is it a little hot in here? What time is it, I'm a little
tired, et cetera, et cetera. If you're in a state of
fear, you're gonna be like, do I look good, what are
people thinking of me, it colors, literally what you see, even looking at another person. You don't see them for
who they actually are. I do wanna bring it back
to reading other people, and this what I loved. When you hear this, learn to read different queues, different dynamics. Of course there's the
classic body language, et cetera, et cetera, but
then what I'll hear is, look at the patterns
that are running them, or when they're triggered,
like what triggers them? It goes that layer deeper of
what is also running them? Not just the surface, but
really piercing through and understanding who they are, even linking it back to their
childhood, so on and so forth. - So I'm trying to say that
people have a character and what I mean by that
is, it's their core, it's who they are, it's
something very deep. It comes from their DNA,
there's a genetic component, it comes from their early childhood and the kind of attachment
they had to their parents, it comes from their early experiences with friends and teachers, and at school, and it makes them who they are, and their character tends to be revealed in certain things that
you must pay attention to. And the reason it's so important is, you wanna be able to judge
people by their character. You wanna know what runs
them from deep, deep within, because if you don't,
if you make a mistake you will hire them as a business partner or you'll get involved in a relationship, and it'll be a disaster
because you didn't see, that actually they have
very negative patterns and they only come out later. So I want you to be able to look at the people you're dealing with and literally see their character, and I give you some clues
and tips on how to do that. First of all, people have
patterns of behavior. Nobody ever does anything once. So let's say if somebody
sent you an angry email that offended you and then they go, oh, I'm sorry, but that's not who I was, something came over me,
I'm not that person. You will probably accept
that but the truth is they never did that once,
it probably is a pattern, they've done it many times. If they've screwed you in some way they've screwed 10 other
people in their past. You wanna see people's
patterns of behavior. That kind of compulsive element in them. That'll show you something
very deep in their core. You also wanna look at them in the moments where their guard is down. We all wear masks, we all
try to present ourselves as being noble and great, but the mask comes down
in certain elements. You wanna look at how
they treat their children, their spouse, their employees. They might be nice to you because they want something out of you, but when their back is turned and they're talking to other people, they're the biggest raging asshole around. That gives you signs if they're trying to disguise this from you. But in the little details of life they reveal who they are. You wanna see how they
react under pressure. People under pressure reveal something elemental
about themselves. If they get hysterical, if they get prone to pointing fingers and
blaming other people. If people have power, if
they suddenly gain power, if they're elected to an office or they're made manager or whatever, they suddenly will reveal
elements of their character. They will either become someone who's ugly and power-hungry and manipulative
or, which is much rarer, they will reveal that
they're very responsible, and they can handle power well. These are signs where people reveal, they almost ooze out
of them, unconsciously, of who their character is,
of who they really are, and I want to train you, the reader, not to look at people's appearances. Not to look at their smiles
and the masks they wear and the compliments they pay you, but to pay attention to
these other, deeper signs that they are revealing of
something much below the surface that is actually going on inside them. Look at the little signs
that people give off. If someone is habitually late, they'll say, oh, it's traffic, or I had so much work to do, whatever. But actually it's a sign that
they feel superior to you, that they feel that their time is more important than yours,
and these little details that people are constantly giving out, you see signs of who they really are, but you're not paying attention to them. - Another thing I love focusing on, I know you talk about it too. Looking into the eyes, into
the pupil and just seeing, like of course you can tell on the surface if someone's a little bit
more restricted, nervous, but otherwise going even deeper and asking yourself,
is someone even there? How present are they, as opposed to retracted, into the mind, like not fully present,
in their head analyzing, just not there, and you're
like, that's interesting. Or when they're you know, triggered, something takes over, what is there? - Well, think of it in
those moments in life when you're falling in love with someone, and through their eyes, the eyes are really connecting
in that moment, both eyes, sets of eyes are interacting,
and there's a powerful, powerful attraction going on through that, and the eyes, and that
kind of looking and gazing, and the pupils get dilated
and there's excitement, it lights up the entire face. The smile, the cheeks
are raised, et cetera. People give off these signs of excitement or detachment all of the time. So if you're trying to influence someone, or if you're trying to seduce someone, you wanna be able to pick up those signs that you're having an effect
on them through the eyes. I talk a lot about distinguishing between a real smile and a fake smile. A real smile lights up the whole face and it also lights up the
eyes, and then you know that you're connecting
with that other person. Whereas that fake, tight smile
that a lot of people have, you know that there is
no connection going on. - And building on that,
looking at the smile, but also when they smile and what topics, or dynamics turn them on, that too. You can even test someone, and
I know you talk about this, if you share some good
news, how do they react? As opposed to some bad
news or some gossip, what topics turn them on, and
you can get a better reading of what's running them, what's there? - Yeah, you can test people sometimes. If you think that you're dealing
with someone who's envious, or passive-aggressive, you can tell them some particularly good
news that you've had. There's a micro-expression,
which is something that a lot of psychologists
have documented like Paul Ekman, which is half of a millisecond, where for a moment
they're kind of friendly and then they put a fake
smile up to disguise that, and you can pick that up. They're not really happy
about your good news. Or you tell them something
bad that's happened to you, you lost this job, your
girlfriend left you, and you notice for a moment
the happiness on their face which they then try and hide by pretending to be sympathetic to you. So you can test people, but also, you wanna notice those things. So you're in a conversation with a person and you happen to touch upon
a subject that excites them. That's the kind of information that's extremely important to gather, and you can tell by
the tone of their voice and by the look in their
eye, they reveal that. I know for myself, if people talk suddenly about the Lakers, or basketball, I get really excited, I can't help it because I'm such a basketball junkie. My whole body language changes, but conversely if there's a subject that I really don't like
to talk about, like cancer, or some subject like that, my
whole body language changes. You're missing these signals
that people are giving out in your conversation,
but they reveal a lot about the likes and dislikes
of these individuals and how you can appeal to them. - And even turning the
mirror around on you. Like when, if you're watching
this, when do you light up? And it's not about judging yourself. You may be watching this and you're like, man, I do light up when it's
bad news, or when it's gossip. If something comes up it's
like (inhaling deeply) that's, it sounds weird
to say, when I feel alive. I remember myself way back in the day, if I was hanging around positive people, and say we're all jokin'
around, I could fit in but it required a lot
of energy and effort, and when I left that environment,
I would feel drained. I was like (deep exhale), now
I can finally go back to me, and my friends where we gossip and stuff. - Oh I see. That's interesting-- - The gossiping gave me energy. That's where I could feel at home, as opposed to the positive
people where it required effort. And then you can audit yourself there, like now it's more so
when I'm more positive I feel more energetic and alive,
as opposed to the opposite. So you follow what gives you energy? Around who do you feel at home? What topics do you feel at home? - It says a lot about who you are. - Yeah, so then it's
like turning the mirror, okay that's interesting,
and without going on this self-attack train it's
like, well why is that? Diving into yourself, and I really love how you keep bringing it
back too, to our childhood, 'cause we always tend to ignore that. You hear advice like, always focus on the
future, don't look back! But if you don't look back
you're gonna keep repeating the same patterns--
- Right, right. - You have to look back
to do something about it, to change the future. I know a lot of people have
resistance where they're like, well, my childhood was great. My parents were together,
they're a loving couple, I had a great childhood,
I don't have any of these frustrations or
patterns that run me, I haven't suffered any
kind of childhood trauma, but no one is exempt from this. And then it's really changing too, how small things impact
us, 'cause our perception is just so limited and
different as a child. Even being lost in a grocery
store could be traumatic. So everyone has this, and
then it's really going back and like, okay well, what did happen? What were my parents like? What did they value? What got passed on to me? How was their relationship like? 'Cause I'll see that a lot,
say your parents fight a lot. As a kid you're gonna look at that and you're gonna form this core belief of that's what love is. That's what a relationship is. And then you keep gravitating towards that in your adult life, 'cause
that's at the foundation of your map of understanding. Or if someone, your parents are divorced, you're gonna fall for
people who leave you, or who cheat on you, who
are not there for you. And it's these constant patterns,
and we refuse to dive back and analyze why, and
learn how to process that. So I love that you brought that in. - Everything that happens in the present, I want you to look back
and see the roots of it in your early past, and
think of it this way. When you were a child, you were extremely open and vulnerable, much more than you are now. As we get older, we become
defensive and walls go up, and we're more trying to
protect ourselves from people. But when you're a child
you're extremely open and extremely vulnerable to the energy of the people around you. Those first few months with your mother, if that's who you spent your first few months with, are critical. So much of the energy from
that mother was absorbed into your spirit, and
creates patterns of behavior. The same can happen with your father, and the same thing happens
with your siblings. And so, I want you to
examine this in depth. In each of the chapters I go and show you the roots in your childhood. So for example, I talk in the book about, let's say a boy whose mother
was not really there for him, whose mother was kind of a narcissist, and whom he almost had to
pay more attention to her, to make sure he didn't hurt
her, than she paid to him, the reverse of the usual
parental relationship. Well as that boy gets older, he's gonna tend to project
this onto other people. His greatest worry in life is that people are going to abandon him, like his mother abandoned
him when he was a child. And so he gets into a relationship into his 20s, and he's with a woman, and for a moment she acts in
a way that's not so friendly or a little bit cold, and he
immediately feels, oh my God, she's about to abandon me,
she's about to break up. And he gets hostile, and he initiates an argument of some sort, et cetera. He never realizes this person, that the root of this
pattern, of this animosity or this antagonism with his partner, stems from a great fear
that was embedded in him in his early childhood,
this fear of abandonment. And it constantly creates a
pattern throughout his life, over and over, and over again. He's the one that
abandons the other person before they can abandon him, so he doesn't have to
deal with that trauma. Well there's all sorts of things like that that are embedded in you. Even if you think you
had a golden childhood, nobody had as good a
childhood as they believe, because in retrospect you
think everything was wonderful. But actually children are very
insecure, are very vulnerable and are constantly
feeling emotions of fear, and anxiety and resentment,
and anger and hostility, that we don't realize later on, but they're very much within us. And so, your childhood contains keys to who you are in the present, and not all of it's bad,
some of it's really good. So I have a chapter in
this book about discovering what you were meant to do in
life, your purpose in life, and the key to that is to
see who you were as a child, and what you were naturally drawn to, and what you were naturally repulsed to. The fields and the activities
that excite you the most. So your childhood also contains
keys to who you can become. - One can even argue with the patterns that nothing really changes, since your childhood,
until you address it. On the surface, the
physical world changes, but it's those same patterns. The friends and the role
you take on as a kid, you keep putting yourself
in those same situations. If you're someone who is the
class clown in the friends, or the person who's at the
bottom who people tolerate but they're not gonna go
out of their way to see you, you think that when you grow up or even you move, it'll change. Everything will change if I just move. But you just find your way back in that same role, just with new people. You project your father and
your mother on new people. Your ceilings of success,
when it comes to your health, your wealth, your relationship,
you keep sabotaging when you go above what
you believe you deserve and it just manifests in
all these different ways, so you think things are changing but it's just this repeat
of the same dynamics, the same trauma, so on and so forth. And, I love what you said too, with when you're a child
you're a lot more vulnerable. And it's true, we fail to see
that you're more vulnerable, you depend on your parents to survive or whoever is raising you, 'cause if they get rid of you you die, and your perception's very limited. You don't know what the
world is, or countries are. Even in a classroom, your
world is the classroom. If you don't fit in the classroom you think you're gonna explode, you know? And something as trivial
as even a parent saying, say you're at a restaurant, I love this example 'cause that was me. I remember, I was told, I don't remember, that I was in this restaurant and I said very loudly,
mom, is this dead cow? Like really loud, and
everyone was staring, and she was like, shh, don't say that. But even something like that, like shh! Be quiet in a restaurant,
their intention is good but then the way I interpreted that is, they don't love me right now. If they don't love me they
could abandon me, I could die. Traumatic--
- Right-- - And then like we start,
never be loud again, or in a classroom if someone
finds out that you like a girl and the whole class teases
you, that's traumatic as well. And then we fail to look at
that in our adult life where, as you call it like being triggered. It's like, go say hi to this girl, that same experience, like that same (groans) I'm gonna die if I do this that you had in your childhood surfaces, or speak up in public,
or in front of a crowd, (inhaling deeply) people can't do that. Public speaking is one of
the biggest fears people have 'cause it goes back to that,
and we try to find little tools to fight against it instead of get to what you harp on a lot, get to the cause, get to the source of it all. - Right, 'cause then you
can possibly change it and then you can begin to break out of those patterns that you have. So if you understand, that
you are the one projecting this fear of abandonment or hostility onto other people, then you can stop it. You can stop it and you could realize, that that woman that you
thought was about to abandon you was actually just in a bad mood or just was dealing with something else. And then you can break out
of this horrible pattern that's ruining your life, but
you can only begin to do that when you confront your own demons, when you confront these
elements in your character that are causing you to repeat, over and over again the same thing. One thing I want to do in this book, and I think it can really liberate you, is to not take anything personal. Now I know that sounds like an
idea that's really difficult, because we're always
taking something personal. If someone says something
and we get in an argument, or they say something that
we perceive as hostile, we assume that they're being personal, that they're attacking us, they're attacking us for who we are, and we really are upset about it. But nothing is really ever personal in the realm of social relations. Well not nothing, rarely is it. So that when a person
shows anger towards you, or resentment, or some
kind of negative emotion, 95% of the time they are
dealing with their own emotions, their own problems, their own traumas, something from their childhood. So if you realize in that moment, that they are frustrated
not because of you, but because of the day
that they were having, because of a phone call
they had earlier in the day, because of problems
rooted in their childhood, it frees you up from
getting resentful and angry, and creating these
spiraling misunderstandings. So if they are actually upset with you because of something that
happened earlier in the day and you take it personally,
and you get a little angry, you then make them have a worse
one than they already had, then they say something worse,
and then you get more upset-- - Just ping pongs back and forth-- - Yeah, it's a descending spiral here. So you wanna be able to break out of that, you wanna be able to feel free and not take things personally. People don't mean it that way, they're dealing with their
own shit, their own problems. - No one can ever truly know
you at all, except for you. I can get a feel for you, but I don't know every experience you went
through your entire life, how it felt, how you interpreted it, how you experienced it, even your parents or your closest friends, no
one knows that except for you. So because no one has all the facts, they can't actually approve
of you or disapprove of you, 'cause they don't know who you are. They can just speculate or project. And we take it as if they
know everything that is us. And then, even looking at them, another benefit as you say
of looking past the mask, is that we stop comparing
everything that we know about ourselves with the
surface front that we see. 'Cause like we see that,
they're so perfect. I'm comparing that perfect front to all my baggage and everything about me, self-attack, self-hate, spiral down. - It all stems from what we
were talking about earlier, where you're not really
seeing the people around you. You're not really
dealing with the reality, you're dealing with an illusion. You're dealing with your own projections, and you're dealing with
the mask that they present. So, people are always
showing their best side. They love their job, they
have a great partner, a great family, et cetera, and they tend to disguise the
bad things, the depressions, or the negative emotions
that they're experiencing. And so you're feeling envy, you feel, why God, my life isn't
as good as their life? If only I had their childhood, if only I had their loving parents. But you're not seeing the reality, and probably if you got closer to them, if were inside their family and you saw how they interact with their
children and their spouse, you'd realize that their presenting to you this very idealized picture. It's not as rosy as it looks. And then you don't have to feel envy, you don't have to compare yourself. I don't know if you've felt this, you out there in the world, or you Julian, you're doing some project,
you're doing some work, you're writing something,
you're creating something, and you get into this flow, where your focus is so
deep on the work itself, and you feel really light,
and you feel really excited, and there's no emotional baggage,
you're just in the moment, dealing with this project
and making it great. And that's because, there's
nothing personal going on, you're not dealing with
issues with other people. You're just focused on
this, in a rational way, and getting the project done. Well if you could approach
social life in the same way, where you have this flow, where people are just facts of nature, they just are who they are,
they're not people that hate you or love you, et cetera, they
just have their own problems, their own issues, and it's
nothing to do with you. If you can get into sense where it's not about you and your emotions, you can feel that kind of light, liberating feeling that
you have in your work, where you're focused and
things are just what they are. It's a very light, liberating feeling. I think that we're all
dealing with an illusion. That we live in a world of illusion, that we don't really see
the people around us, that we're not dealing with who they are, we're dealing with this kind of mirage. And sort of the red pill moment is what I'm trying to give in the book. Imagine if instead of this mirage, this illusion that you walk around with, where people project these
images that aren't real at all, imagine if suddenly you could
see into who they really were. If suddenly you could
see behind the mirage, you could see what's
really motivating 'em, you can begin to understand their thoughts and their emotions, it
would blow you away, and the world would completely change you. Your whole vision of
the world would change, and you would be fascinated by this, and you'd wanna do more of it, you wanna see more and more and more, of what really lies underneath people. And I'm not saying I can do
that completely in my book, I don't wanna be so grandiose,
but that's my goal in there, is to get rid of those illusions and that mirage that
you have about people, and actually begin to
see who they really are. So I talk in the book, I have stories, each law is illustrated with a story. And in one chapter I talk
about this famous writer, Anton Chekhov, who had a really,
really horrible childhood. His father beat him
almost every single day. They lived in this
miserable little village, and they were poor, everyone
in the family was fighting, the mother was really weak, and the father was just really abusive. And then suddenly the family, the father and his
brothers moved to Moscow and they abandoned Anton at the age of 16, to live by himself in this
miserable little village where he can maybe finish his schooling. And he starts to feel like
insane amounts of resentment, and hostility towards his family. Towards his father who beat him everyday, towards his mother who
never stood up to him, and then at one point he realizes, he's walking in the streets in this miserable little
village and he realizes, what would happen to me if
I suddenly got rid of all of these negative emotions towards people that are obsessing my thoughts? What if I really tried
to understand my father, instead of hating him? And then he took a step back and he said, "My father was born a serf" meaning he was basically a
slave who was later freed. "And his father beat him, "and his father made him go
into a profession that he hated, "so naturally he became an alcoholic, "and naturally he beat
me, and he can't help it." And as he went through that process, he felt waves of love towards his father, like he could understand him, like he'd get inside his spirit, and he did the same with his mother. His mother couldn't help being passive, because that's how she
was brought up, et cetera. And no wonder his siblings were so wounded by this childhood. And as he went through that process of understanding people and
getting inside their story, he felt this insane liberation from all those negative feelings of hostility and
resentment and bitterness, oh, why was I born into this family, oh, why did I grow up in this village, and he realized it was all
for a purpose and it was fine. And in going through that process, he actually began to see his
father for who he really was, not for this projection that he had, and it completely liberated him from all of his negative emotions. So that's a bit of the kind of
feeling I think you can have, by going through some of these
processes that I describe. - One of the practices
that really helped me shed a lot of light on
what was running me, we all know like, if you have
a disease, what would change? What would happen if you found out, a horrible disease, like you
have cancer, what would change? And immediately, there's
less of that split, that denial, where like wow! We start becoming aware of all this stuff that we just keep blocking
off, or putting off. And what we don't realize is
that we do have a disease, and that's called being alive. None of us get out of
here alive, we all die. We could die tomorrow,
we could die in 20 years, you could die in a week, you have no idea, so just reflecting on that,
brings a lot more authentic data and gets you much more aligned with what is authentic
to you, in my experience. - Well, it's kind of personal to me because about three months ago I had a near death experience. I suffered a stroke, which
you can see signs of, I don't really have use of
my left side of my body. And that stroke, if it wasn't for my wife who was there next to me
in the car I was driving, I probably would of died. I would've gotten in a horrible accident, or I would've had irreparable
brain damage right now. I came very close to dying,
and it did shake me up and it did alter, so I wrote that chapter, and it's a chapter I
feel very strongly about. But it was brought home to
me in a very visceral manner. I remember I did a book with 50 Cent that you interviewed me about, and 50 had a near death experience,
much stronger than mine. Somebody shot a gun, that distance, right through his mouth, through his jaw, and he took nine bullets, and
he saw that proverbial light as he lay in this hospital bed, that light that comes
from, oh, I'm about to die. And I notice that people like that, or even with myself, after
that sense of experience, there's a certain calmness
that comes over you, like nothing really
will phase you anymore, because what could compare,
what could be worse, than what you've already been through? So I have this feeling that the fact that we live in a culture that's
very avoidant of death, human nature is such, that
even from primitive times, we're the only animal that's
aware of our own mortality. And it's had a profound impact on us. It's part of what led to
the creation of religions and the belief of an after-life, that we're all gonna maybe go to a heaven. So we're very much afraid, deeply afraid of this feeling of death. And in our culture, it
has a different form. We don't maybe believe in the after-life but what we do is we
deny death, very deeply. We deny it's presence. We never see anybody who dies. 200 years ago you were
around people in your house, or on the streets, you saw
literally somebody die. It had a very visible presence to you. You saw animals were being killed so that you could eat them, right? Death had a presence. We have now banished it to hospitals, and to factory farms where
chickens are slaughtered. We never have to confront
it, and when we watch movies, we see 100 people being
shot with a machine gun, but it's like a cartoon
that has no reality. So we're living in a world,
we are in deep, deep denial, the fact that we are mortal creatures, and I believe that with that denial comes a great deal of
latent anxiety in your life. It makes you anxious and fearful for a lot of little,
smaller things in life, which is why, somebody's who's
had a near death experience gets rid of that anxiety and doesn't have that kind of avoidant mentality. So I want to open up, we tend to turn our back towards death, and I want you to turn around, and face it square in the
eye, every single day. It's not a negative thing, it's an immensely beautiful thing. First of all, you are alive, you know you feel that you're alive, but by not realizing that you're dead, that you contain inside
of you your mortality, you're only half-alive, you're only dealing
with part of the truth. And so in Zen philosophy and Samurais, they want you to connect
with that death energy in your gut, in your heart, right here, so it'll make you feel more alive. And then realizing that the people around you are going to die, will make you connect with
them on a much deeper level. I was recently in New York City, and I was walking in the streets, and I saw all of these hundreds of people walking around me on 5th Avenue, and for a moment I was imagining that all of these people are
going to die at some point. In 70 years not one single
one of them will be around, and maybe I don't like them for this, that or the other reason, but
when I think about that fact, I have deep wells of empathy, that they are also confronting
the same reality that I am, and they're afraid and
they're fearful of it. So, confronting this mortality
connects you to other people, and it also opens your
mind up to something great. I call this the sublime, and
I think one of the things that really oppresses
people in the world today, is that our lives are
so immersed in banality, in triviality, in the day-to-day grind, and we have no sense of what
is immense about the world. And death is the most
immense, possible experience. We have no idea what it is, it's like this great, vast darkness. And I say by confronting this
thought of your own mortality, you open your mind up to other realities. You open your mind up to the
vastness of space and time, that is quite an overwhelming feeling, to realize that some three
or four billion years ago, life began on this planet, and the fact that you are alive now is extremely, extremely lucky, the set of circumstances
that led to your being alive. These kinds of thoughts
are sublime thoughts, and they come from the fact that you're confronting your mortality, and you're opening your mind up to this much wider experience, that when you're afraid,
there's the anxiety-ridden and avoidant attitude
that most of us feel. So, confronting your mortality is perhaps the most liberating step of all and is why I ended the book on that note. - Yeah, it's like the
ultimate, confronting reality, not the illusion, it's
like, life and death. - Right, it's the ultimate
red pill in that sense. - Thank you so much.
- I enjoyed it.
