How to Master the Art of Getting Anyone to Like You | @RobertGreeneOfficial Ep. 581

the people that are really kind of reach the apex of power like an elon musk or a steve jobs or or a rock star or people in politics they're weird they're strange right and it's because they're not afraid of what makes themselves makes them different so what happens when you're younger when you're four or five you know something strange about you you're kind of connected you're in a dream world and then you enter school and people start saying oh that's weird and the the idea of being different kind of gets a negative connotation but to the degree that you know what makes you different and you lean into it and you exploit it that's where the realm of power lies [Music] so i did we did a show about two years ago and i went through a lot of the laws of human nature and uh your newest book is kind of i don't want to say a calendar but it's the day it's daily it's meant to be consumed day by day and of course like any kind of weirdo interviewer i plowed through the whole thing in about two days in audio form which is to do it day by day you're supposed to have taken 365 days i guess we didn't have that much time though no i was i was going to say i could have taken a year to prep it but it would have been really really slow and grueling process uh this i i'll mention this in the intro to the show this is going to be a little bit of an all over the place conversation because of what the book is that's what the book is right yeah and there's pieces where i'm like that had nothing to do with the previous day but oh well so that's that's why the show is going to be a little weird it's a psa for the audience okay i do want to start with why you write these books because i think and i've looked at some of your negative reviews on amazon and elsewhere there are negative reviews believe it or not there's at least one or two and people will say this guy is a sociopath and he's creating more sociopaths this guy is truly has evil on his mind because otherwise why would he create this monstrosity that people are reading to learn how to hurt other people and i know that that's not why you wrote these books well they're not evil obviously according in my opinion um you know when i first came up with the 48 laws of power way back in 95 i wasn't writing from a position of power right i never had any power up until that point i had been kind of a failure in life to be honest with you i had 60 some different jobs i tried journalism yeah on and i counted one day we got up to like 64. and then i said i know i'm forgetting some things there's probably more like 80 but we counted 64. she commented because she knew me back then she said god you've had so many different jobs in the three years i've known you i said well you should just go back further so anyway i never had any positions of power right but i had observed i was a very keen observer i had some of the worst bosses you can imagine you know what we might classify today is psychotic bosses i had every variety of it and i'd seen all of these power moves going on and it struck me that this world is intensely hypocritical it really really pissed me off that this is what goes on in almost every single office people or you put three people together politics takes over egos take over the person who has the power and the leverage tends to go as far as they can with it right they use their power they can they intimidate they manipulate they do all these things not every boss right don't get me wrong but i don't do that with my team right guys okay well i'll talk to them later yeah but um you know my experience had been this right and so but the books don't describe that the books describe power as if it's all about being compassionate empathetic being a team player you know cooperating these are what management and self-help books were all about they're going this isn't my real this isn't the reality of the work well it's [ __ ] it really pissed me off that no one was writing about the truth about the kind of power games that go on particularly in hollywood where i was working oh yeah but i worked in a detective agency i worked you know in a hotel in paris i worked for newspapers magazines you name it i did all sorts of different kinds of jobs and this was what i had seen it was this was the truth and everyone nobody really wanted to write a book about that so i wanted to rip away the curtain show people this is what really goes on in the world of power because i had been on the wrong end of it i had suffered because of my naivete my natural naivete after graduating university and thinking everybody was just so interested in ideas and getting things done and then i had this rude awakening that no people are interested in their egos and kind of promoting themselves so i wanted to sort of show the reality of what goes on in this world right and sort of help people like myself who are naive right deal with these kind of power games that are going on and so i wrote from that perspective but there is a level of irony involved which tricks people and makes people make those kind of comments so when i say play on people's need to believe to create a cult-like following you know people are going robert is teaching people how to create a cult well nobody's going to use that chapter to actually literally create a cult what i'm telling you is the world we live in now there are cults everywhere political groups are cults all kinds of organizations are formed like a cult it's part of our 21st century and so i'm showing you i'm opening your eyes up to the nature of the world right now right when i say always get other people to do the work but take the credit for it right you know realistically people who do that which is the nature of a lot of a lot of jobs you know in hollywood i've done great with that just look at this podcast yeah yeah so far so good yeah exactly so um so when i uh in hollywood i would do all the writing for a screenplay you know bits of dialogue my name was never put on it never right you so that's kind of the nature of things when politicians give a speech they never write the speech you never know who wrote the speech right this is the nature of the world i'm just revealing it to you and in the chapter i describe how you want to how you deal with that when somebody does it to you so and i know from the emails i've gotten since that book came out 23 years ago you're talking about 48 laws of character because that's the most evil is that how old the book is yeah well i know it's older than a lot of my readers yes it is so since 1998 when it came out i've received thousands of emails from readers right and occasionally there'll be someone who'll say i'm certain that my boss read your book and did this bad maneuver to me and i feel kind of bad but 98 of them are saying you know i didn't realize that i was outshining the master law number one your book opened me up to that reality and saved me so most of the readers coming to my book the real sharks out there don't need to read a book like that this is their nature already it's their nature already the people who need it are people who like myself what kind of came out of the universe were kind of naive by nature and needed some awakening needed to kind of learn the rules the laws of power so that they could play the game so you know a lot of the power game traditionally was kind of older white men at least in my experience in hollywood right and so you know i wanted to like open the doors up and show everybody how the power game worked and which kind of um affirms what i'm saying here today right now is that among the first readers of the book the ones who loved it the most who gave it its kind of popularity were hip-hop artists and people in the african-american community because they had traditionally been locked out of the game of power and people like 50 would tell me i wrote a book with 50 cent would tell me later that you don't call him fitty you call him 50. that's i don't want to sound like a fake it's pretty that's pretty robert yeah right brain i don't even call him curse i just say 55-0 whatever you want right i'm a nerd he knows that i know yeah i think as long as all the cards are on the table it's fine okay anyway um he said you know he dealt crack on the streets of south side queens he said nothing prepared me for the music business that was the most hardcore power games he'd ever seen and the book the 48 laws of power really really helped him navigate that world so i think that kind of shows that that's really the kind of the essence of the book it's sort of a handbook for those who've never had power how to deal with this kind of environment uh yeah rappers like rick ross do use your material and love it i interviewed him a few weeks ago he's pretty amazing he's really smarter than i would have kind of expected just based on the music i mean not that you can really assess someone's intelligence but i figured anybody focused on this is not really going to be thinking about no he's looking for chicken places to buy and looking for cars that are going to cause value yeah the highest order really we're going to be doing an event with him in december oh really ted a live talk here in l.a he was yeah he mentioned your stuff in his newest book and or on my show i can't remember which one it was but yeah i heard your books are banned in prisons and i remember writing you an email about this a long time ago are they banned or is it just popular both both um it depends on the state and the particular prison okay so like the state of utah i believe correct has banned it the state of pennsylvania i believe has banned it okay um certain states um i don't think like the art of seduction is banned because nobody in prison is going to be i hope is reading well you never know you never know yeah i hope not but um i believe the war book and the power book are banned right yeah and um that's be and i've gotten a lot of emails from people in prison who said you know robert thank you this book has helped me because if you think about it i mean i'm saying hollywood is bad i'm saying the music business is bad but imagine being in prison yeah that makes hollywood look like kindergarten to be honest with you right i would imagine it does i don't have that much experience in prison um that we know hollywood is yeah that i'm willing to talk about in public hollywood is bad uh i've you know i'm not a movie star or anything like that well i guess it's worse for people who aren't right i suppose if you have power and leverage maybe it's great yeah but you know in in prison all gloves are off and it's not just violence it's all kinds of weird mind games going on to kind of create a hierarchy i'm the dominant person in this block etc and so people would write me saying you know i was so confused and people were you know i just didn't know what to do or what who was where and the wardens were which side people were on and your book really helped give me some clarity and sometimes somebody would rate write and say i didn't quite feel comfortable with this i used your book to take over cell block a then okay i don't know about that well maybe maybe you need to do something good who knows but um the fact that they're writing you emails from prison though should tell you that they're not following all the rules because i'm not sure how allowed that is yeah i think a lot of these people wrote to me after they got out that makes sense you know yeah but you know a lot of people in prison um so like i the 50 had a uh 50 50 had an assistant uh his name will come to me in a minute because i want to give him a shout out he's a great guy um anyway he had been in prison for like 20 years he was in that caught up in that new york law where if you had three drug offenses yeah you were put in prison it was just ridiculous because he was like not a dealer or anything yeah it was so unfair and anyway um it was before my book came out right so he can't say but he told me you know what the kind of the life was like in prison and he said that your book really described it and he could understand why people would find it extremely helpful because he was not the powerful person he was kind of like this this kind of small guy who was just sort of not used to that kind of environment and it was extremely frightening oh man i i can't even imagine stay out of prison stay out of prison as the moral of the story yeah that's uh third time's the charm uh the book is designed to make you a radical realist or many of your books are designed to make you a radical realist and that for me is tell me what that means and why it's important yeah well it's really the kind of the goal of the daily laws in a weird way um but the idea for me is we have to deal with so much illusion and [ __ ] and crap in our world our when we leave university we're filled with all of these misconceptions about people from our parents from our peers from just the atmosphere of being in school what professors teach us so we don't have a real grip on reality and then when we enter the work world we're usually kind of bitch-slapped by it and sorry for the no all good and you're the one who's going to get canceled not me that word is cancelable everything is yes that one for sure yeah of course no okay i don't know i'm not the arb if i knew what could get cancelled i'd have to say you've got female dog slapped yeah um it's even worse somehow but go ahead um so suddenly reality is like right in your face and you don't know how to deal with it and you make a wrong step here and there you know you you get in you take you get involved in some kind of emotional drama it kind of creates a wound that lasts forever you end up going down this rabbit hole that you can't escape on into your late 20s etc and you started off on the wrong foot so i time tell people imagine the following scenario you have all these illusions about yourself right you think you're probably greater than you are you have a bit of grandiosity you don't really know what you're good at what you're bad at what you were meant to do in life what i call your life's task so imagine that you could be have this radical realism where you understood who you were what you're really good at what your strengths are what you're not good at what you were meant to accomplish in life you had real deep clear clarity about what you were destined to create in this world that would be incredibly powerful and liberating for you then imagine dealing with people in your life your bosses your peers your children etc you're walking around and you have no idea what's going on in their minds people wear masks they pretend to love you they smile i love your screenplay jordan it's fantastic while they're actually thinking god that guy's the worst ride i've ever met right i'm not saying this personally no i mean it's true i would never if i had a screenplay it would be terrible okay so you have no idea what's going on in the minds of people right it's our nature we're born actors so imagine also you have this radical realism where you could see into them you could actually see through the opaqueness of people and understand what's going on not completely you have a better idea if they really do like you if they really are interested in your ideas if they are planning to help you or plan to sabotage you think of all the mistakes you would avoid and all the powerful forms of connection you could create with people it would be awesome and then finally think about the world at large so the world has what we call the zeitgeist since you speak german i'm going to use some german spirit of the times yeah okay so the top we have a spirit of the times right and this thing is always changing it's never static right so you walk through life you don't really know where the world is headed you don't realize that in two or three years your career is going to be hitting a wall you're going to be downsized you're going to be out of work you don't know you know what's the next step what's the next move to make and and then also you start a business not realizing that that business is is not you know going to be viable in six months right imagine finally that you have that ability to see what's going on in the world to see realistically the trends happening so radical realism is the most powerful form of thinking that you can have in my world and it's not it's not something that's depressing it's not people think of realism as kind of ugly and drab they think fantasy is wonderful and beautiful and reality is kind of but actually radical realism is very inspiring it's very beautiful way of looking at the world to sort of accept this these this is the world as it is as opposed how i want it to be or wish it to be is actually a profoundly moving and almost i hate to use the word poetic but you know to see the world to see things as they are is is very very powerful and very inspiring i find so it's like a superpower the way that you phrase it though as well right because if we no one can see the future but if i have a conversation with my boss and i say i think that went really well he's going to support my ideas but really it's become so clear to somebody who's trained or read your work for example that what he's going to do is use this conversation against me the first chance he gets it would pay if i knew that right i would i should already be looking for another job based on what i know and how that conversation went but a lot of us we get blindsided and every friday we give advice on our feedback friday episodes people write in with problems and there's a lot that can't be foreseen or foretold so to speak but there's a lot where i think i've read this letter and it's really clear from the details that this person sees the writing on the wall maybe they read your book not quite sure but they they just go i don't can't put my finger on it but this happened before and that happened before and now with this happening i'm pretty sure that i'm on the outs and i say look you don't know that you don't know if that's true but you should plan almost as if that were true and you know we give them a strategy for that and it sure pays to be ready especially if you're going to get let go from a job or you're going to be forced to move or you're dealing with something in a relationship so yeah it's almost like a superpower there's so many notes that i have about uh allaying people's insecurities and so the so-called dark side stuff that we kind of talked about in the beginning of the conversation but maybe we actually flip the script a little bit or change gears and start start with some positive career advice uh because it is tempting to stay with the dark side of the force when we have conversations about power and influence i think and uh and not a lot of people probably go with the positive stuff when you're sitting in front of them right i don't know i could be wrong uh you do mention in in some of the daily laws there's uh there are chapters about reconnecting with your childhood passions i would love to talk about this because a lot of people i think the majority of people like you said go even go to school and through school having no idea what they should do uh and reconnecting with your childhood passion seems like a really good way to to at least get started on the path of figuring that out well the first chapter in mastery was called discover your life's task and so the first month of the daily laws is about that the month of january because it's it's really if i had to say it jordan it's the most important thing in your life right now particularly if you're younger you know if you're in your 50s or 60s it's getting a little bit late i'm sorry to say but it's never really too late but if you're younger man that is the most important thing you can learn i can't emphasize it enough because i have studied throughout my years and the thousands of books i've read from my research biographies of the most successful famous creative people and i've done consulting with people on the highest level so i've seen this firsthand and i've done it in my research and inevitably these are people who understood at some point in life that this is what i was destined to follow this is a path for me now that my path might have been most people it's like a zigzag you don't have a straight line this is what i was meant to do it's never like that it wasn't for me but you kind of have an idea and it becomes clearer and clearer and you find that path and it leads to so much power you become so creative and so energized because you enjoy your work you learn faster you're engaged emotionally with what you're doing it is so important and a lot of people who are successful had a clear idea when they were five or six some people discovered it at the age of 12 or 18. me i really didn't discover until i was about 35. is this 60 jobs later or 80 jobs later probably 80 jobs later when i when i got to write the 48 laws of power but anyway so it's not easy and a lot of people get confused and why do you get confused well the the psychologist abraham maslow who studied a lot of children for instance he said that children you'll maybe know this with your two-year-old they have what he calls impulse voices and these are voices that say i like this i don't like that i like i like this kind of food i hate this i'm gonna spit it out right i like this person i can't i don't like that person they're very clear they know what they like and what they don't like it's so obvious to them in an almost pre-verbal sense binary yeah it's just yeah there's almost no lukewarm with my kid anyway he's either open-minded or it's not happening yeah there's exactly on and off and that's it that's exactly so you everyone had that because it's the nature of being an infant in this world right because it's natural it's a voice that's naturally inside all of us and then as you get older you start listening to mr harbinger and mrs harbinger telling you don't do this jaden do this you know this is what you should behave like this don't behave like that and the kid starts getting a little confused so i say well my voice tells me to do this but i'm told not to do that and slowly you go through a process where you're not hearing it anymore you're hearing what teachers tell you you're hearing what parents tell you you're hearing what peers are telling you about what's cool what's not cool you're hearing what social media nowadays is telling you i'm talking about like your career what you were meant to do and then you arrive you're 18 19 years old and you haven't a clue because you can't hear that voice anymore and you're going to try this that that the other not based on things that are deep inside of you but based on what other people have told you you should do or what they think is cool and you're going to end up trapped you're going to end up choosing a career path that seems seductive and interesting and lucrative and five years down the line you realize it doesn't really interest me and you hit a wall and you go [ __ ] man what's going on with my life you start maybe drinking i know i'm giving a little exaggerated scenario but you start drinking i thought you were just narrating my exact life story to continue so far you're spot on addicted to online porn you know on and on and on and on right that's funny okay so and then you're 30 and then it's starting to get a little late yeah right okay so the problem is how do you clear away all of that note that noise that white noise that's drowning out your impulse voices and actually hear what was your voice when you were two years old right and so it's a process i've done it in consulting with people trying to help them figure it out people will say robert i have no idea so you know i haven't a clue what i was meant to do in this world right you talk about my early childhood i can't remember anything okay so it's not a lot of people it's not obvious or easy and i understand that but there's we go through a process if i'm able to do that with them you know online or in person sometimes where we reconstruct some of the early memories of things that really excited them when they were a kid and things that they hated and a book that i always recommend to people it's on the shelf somewhere right behind you i don't see it right now called the five frames of intelligence by howard garner a really good book we'll link to that in the show notes okay the idea is we normally associate intelligence with kind of book learning and intellectual learning but he says there are five different kinds of intelligence and each is equally valid and important one of them will be obviously words and language it was something that i was attracted to some of it will be with figuring out patterns leads to like a mathematician or somebody interested in statistics another one's a little more abstract i can't remember which one that is leads to like music um then there's kinetic intelligence athletes yeah it's all about your body and that's a very high form of intelligence we don't think of that way but it is a form of intelligence there's a social intelligence where it's all about people right and he's makes the point that a child has one of those forms of intelligence that dominates inevitably some people might have a sub another one that's kind of in the background but one of them inevitably dominates them right and if you choose a career that's not really in alignment with what you're naturally gifted for your brain was wired in a particular way it's genetic okay right and if you're not following that forget it you'll never you'll never get anywhere so we go through a process of trying to figure out what is just in the most general way let's not get so specific about your actual career choice what is that form of intelligence that you're inclined towards you know it's not difficult were you really attracted to sports and movement do you find you're most joyous when you're like dancing or running and that's what gets you excited and you think about that okay well that's probably in some ways where your brain is wired you know is it words and some just the sound of words that kind of obsess you and fascinate you like it did when i was a kid you should probably be involved in some form of writing right okay so we go through that process what is your frame of intelligence we kind of determine that and then we kind of reconstruct certain key moments in your childhood where you did something and it felt right now a lot of people don't have that i maintain it everybody has it you just you have to kind of dig but you did something and in the process of doing it it felt like there was kind of a nat an ease to it as opposed to learning math when you don't like math there's no ease involved right for some people that ease is in math okay let's talk about that let's kind of put our finger on that for a little bit on and on and on and then as we get older i like to look at what people hate so when i was 23 i discovered that i hated working for other people well that's why i had 60 some different jobs and that makes sense you know i don't like the political games i don't like all the [ __ ] i don't like all the stuff all the things you have to play and pretend i'm an entrepreneur it took me a long time to figure it out because i kept i never had a job more than 11 months in my entire life it took me time okay i should be working for myself because i don't like working for other people so if we detect in this person that they don't like that and that's a lot of people i'm afraid of the world today yeah you should be an entrepreneur you should be working for yourself eventually so that's part of the process that we go through it's it's more complex than that but that gives you an idea of what it's like i love this because when i was a kid i learned how to build out of like little parts from radio shack an fm radio transmitter and it was kind of interesting because i would solder these little things in and my dad was a mechanical engineer and he goes wow i wonder if my kid's going to be an electrical engineer and then when i built it and it didn't work it was frustrating but someone helped me fix it and then i could transmit my voice to the radio probably like you know 50 feet away and that was the part that was the most interesting and i realized i didn't really care about making the thing as much as i cared about somehow being able to talk to my friends and things like that so i wanted to to turn the power up on this thing and i learned that you could do that by elite like breaking federal law and attaching a high gain antenna and then and then communicating with the russians yes yeah accidentally communicating with the russians yeah this is like an 80s disney movie or something like that like uh cloak and dagger um but i wanted to be i said i want to be able to talk to everyone in the neighborhood on their radios and they were like that's super illegal you can't do that my mom sort of put the kibosh on that project then i go through this whole path and i'm good at studying and i go through college and i get good grades and i decide i guess i should go to law school because more school is better so then i become a lawyer but i already knew i didn't want to become a lawyer and then i start the podcast in my second year of law school and i end up on sirius xm satellite radio and then i quit law and i come back to this and i didn't remember that when i was a kid i wanted to be on the radio wow i only remembered it probably eight years plus after doing it that's a perfect example yeah yeah if i'd freaking listen to myself i could have gone to broadcasting school no no everything's for a reason it was better that way first of all your law career taught you some interesting things that you're never gonna forget that's true there's some skill sets that were created then and then if you had found your way to podcasting too early it wouldn't have the same meaning to you now you're so excited that you found the right thing because you kind of hated law in law school that it means much more and you you actually are more motivated to to follow it through like if i had been offered the to write a book when i was 24 this does as opposed to 35 36 it would have never worked i didn't have the experience i didn't have the desperation etc that makes sense i mean i didn't even get into podcasting because i thought it would be fun to do a show i got into podcasting because i was recording a lecture of a course that i was teaching and i needed to put it online wow and podcasting was the only way to put it in like 80 different jobs yeah i mean this was during law school i was uh i was teaching a networking class and i kept giving i said i'm giving them the same damn talk every week i need to record it on my sony minidisc minidisc player take it and then get it to my computer make an mp3 file and put it on the internet but there was no soundcloud there was no youtube you know so my friend said hey there's podcasting you can put these files online and that was the birthday what you were talking about 2006 that was just the beginning of podcasting i think we were one of the first 800 or first thousands i cannot i can only remember my first podcast was like an 08 and i was like whoa what is this yeah it's like a downloadable radio show yeah yeah yeah anyway yeah and here we and here we are so you're right it it sort of makes sense because if someone said hey you should start a podcast i'd probably i'd go well i'm not going to be some guy who records stuff in his basement that's dumb and then i did that for a long time and here we are yeah when do we what do we do when we realize we've chosen the wrong career like if we just get up and we realized look i'm not just burned out i'm not for years i'm finally gonna do something about it what is that thing that we do well one thing just to backtrack a minute here one thing i left out the reason why you want to follow this path isn't just because it's some kind of mystical destiny sort of idea the human brain works best we learn fastest when we're emotionally engaged when we're interested and excited by something the brain opens up we become like a sponge because we want to learn and our attention is much deeper and so we learn faster so if you choose the wrong career for whatever reason you know like you go to law school and it was you're kind of half listening as the professor is droning on you're kind of half reading the books you're not in involved in it and so you're not learning fast enough right and if you don't learn fast enough creativity which is what we all want is a function of the intensity of your knowledge of your info the information you have absorbed the faster you absorb information the more thoughts and associations you create in the brain it starts going all the time and ideas are coming to you if you take five years to learn something that stuff going on the brain won't happen so that's why we want to do it okay so you're going to find out in your career that you are not emotionally engaged that isn't happening the gears aren't connecting you're tuning out you're not paying attention right and you kind of realize that okay so that's you have to be able to realize that and not a lot of people are going through their 20s for instance because they're going after a big paycheck they're unaware that they're actually not really attuned to what's going to this to what they're supposed to be learning okay but once you have that moment it kind of depends on how old you are so there's not like a single formula for what you should do so if you're 24 and you realize you made the wrong choice that's great now we can go through a process and you can make a fairly radical shift in your career decision because you haven't wasted i'm not saying wasted that's too harsh a word but you haven't spent 15 years in something not relevant to you it's only been a couple years all right let's go through the process of figuring out what you should do and let's kind of change your skill set right let's start heading in that towards that direction of what you were intended to do you can make a more radical shift but if you're in your 30s it's i wouldn't recommend that because you need to make a living right you have learned things you have learned certain skills so what i recommend is not a radical shift but a more subtle shift heading more in that direction and that might include keeping the job that you have but at night going to school or online learning some new skills that you now can quit your plan is to quit this job in two or three years but you will have learned things that will allow you to to quit and go on to this other path or you figure out a way to kind of shift it so i knew a woman um she uh alice and hope winer i don't know if you know her she has a podcast um many people have there are two point whatever millions i thought you everyone knew each other yeah we all hang out yeah it's a really really big cafe anyway she like you she studied law and then she realized that she wanted to be a writer and so what she did is she went into legal journalism that was how she made a shift you know because that was she could still make a living she could become a writer and then she learned true writing skills and then she could like maybe write a novel if she wanted to at that point kind of thing so that's the kind of more gradual shift if you're in your 40s right it's even more gradual that you have to do but the thing is you've all your life you've been accumulating experiences you have to keep that in mind so even when i was working in greece because i landed on the island of crete one summer and i got very sick and i ran out of money and i was in the hospital oh my gosh and then i came out and i had no money to get back to paris wherever i was living i had to go work in construction you were literally stranded in crete crete like the the isla is that where the minotaur lives is that the yes yeah yes wow well he doesn't live there anymore but he was from there right it was yeah that's where he was from yeah that's a that's a and this is like not there's no internet at this point you can't just be like hey i'm somebody wiring me is money if if i told you what year it was you'd be you'd be shocked yeah i don't want to make you feel uh yeah yeah we're talking you know prehistoric period no no internet nothing i mean you could have i could have made a phone call and had money wired sure but i was embarrassed i didn't want to have to involve my parents i didn't even tell them i was in a hospital oh wow um so i'm working in construction and it was a really weird world where the boss was greek and all of the people working for him doing the construction work were like australians and americans in english all blonde blue-haired and blue-eyed blue-haired blue eyes you know it was like the reverse of here because we were all people who had been stranded yeah everyone got into the hospital yeah so i was like ripping nails off of boards etc man i hated it it was the worst job i know that i'm not destined for doing construction so the long-winded point of the long-winded point of this this anecdote is that i learned everything taught me what i'm good at what i hate i know i'm not good with my hands that only made it clearer to me etc yeah you went through a long process of elimination to get there so the point is you know you're learning don't just like say oh i did this job i i got nothing out of it you get something out of everything and if you're in your 30s for instance combining your skill sets so combining writing with law is very powerful because we live in a world where you have such access to information that the best entrepreneurs are combining things that nobody ever thought of exactly and starting a kind of business that involves kind of very strange skill sets but is so unique that it takes off so never give up never say that this was wasted time nothing is wasted i love the idea the the tip for lack of a better word of the instruction that you can compare the moments that you did what others wanted you to do versus what you felt and the moments when you did what you wanted to do especially if you can remember those as a kid to bring out to bring out the ideas or or at least an idea of what might be right for you because if i look back and my parents go oh my gosh you bugged us and you rode your bike to radio shack 500 times and you bugged us for money to buy these extra pieces and you wanted to take the antenna off the house that we used to get cable and connect it to your device you know that was the stuff that was really lighting me up and getting later on getting in trouble messing with the phone system and things like that you know people thought you're going to become an engineer but really i liked the communication element it just didn't really occur to me um because i was too busy stealing long distance calls from mobile you could have been a criminal too i was probably i was i was just juvenile and didn't get caught right i did get caught once but that's a different story that we'll uh i'll have to bring that out on another show but the advice i think that you wrote about in the daily laws i think you phrased it always stick to what makes you strange and weird and that's surprisingly really good advice right well um yeah i mean the people that are really kind of reach the apex of power like an elon musk or a steve jobs or or a rock star people in politics who we kind of hold as like icons you can honestly see that there's nobody else like them right they're one of a kind they're weird they're strange right and it's because they're not afraid of what makes themselves makes them different so what happens when you're younger when you're four or five you know something strange about you you're kind of connected you're in a dream world and then you enter school and people start saying oh that's weird and the the idea of being different kind of gets a negative connotation right and you want to conform you want to be part of the group you want to you can you know there's peer pressure and so the idea of being different and strange kind of has a negative tint although we might ostensibly say oh it's good to be different and weird we actually are afraid of it deep down inside because it comes with criticism it comes with people kind of making fun of us etc so the your source of power in life is actually what makes you weird and strange right you know it makes you different so i make the point in mastering in the daily laws that there's never going to be another jordan harbinger in this world your dna has never occurred before and will never occur again and your parents and how they their dna and their genetic component and how they raised you will never be replicated so you are one of a kind by nature it's irrefutable right okay so there's something so very different about you and it's hard to put into words because some of it's genetic some of its early education and that what makes you different is the source of what you want to lean into because if we can say that you know there are 20 jorban harbingers out there they all have the same idea there's no power behind it right you can be replaced by 19 other jordan harbingers who are doing the same thing but if you're the only one thinking of this thing if you're the only one creating it that is the ultimate in power now that's the ideal it's hard to reach right but to the degree that you know what makes you different and you lean into it and you exploit it that's where the realm of power lies now i don't want to seem egocentric here so i have to be a little bit careful but it's okay look it's a podcast you could blow it like no blow as much as the greatest is anyways anyway no i'm just kidding um but to talk about myself here for a second go for it um you know i as i as i said my arc was i kind of had a failure i was a bit of a loser by the time i was 35 36 i tried all sorts of different things and then i was asked if i had any ideas for books and i kind of described this process in the daily laws and it was this very interesting manuel stelfords who was a book packager we were in italy at the time and i kind of improvised this idea that turned into the 48 laws of power it was sort of a nice chance encounter it was a beautiful day in venice italy and i gave a really great pitch right and so when i created the book because he he got so excited he said robert i'll pay you to live while you write half the book and then we'll sell it so when i started the process naturally my mind gravitated towards other books out there sure right you know and then i just wasn't comfortable with that and i just sort of thought i want to tell stories i love telling stories when i first pitched the idea to this man i told him a story that's how i naturally am i'm actually more of a novelist in some ways i like creating drama and stories and so i started writing stories like little parables for the 48 laws of power and then i thought i want to be able to tell the meaning of this story and not just leave it out there so i wrote this as what's known as the interpretation of the story is this like the director's cut on a dvd where they're narrating how they made the movie a little bit a little bit even what i'm doing right now no just uh no no uh the meaning of the story because i you know as a non-writer i'm i'm not super familiar with that well i i didn't know what i was doing i was just i was just groping in the dark and basically the the long the short end of it is i was kind of creating my own thing right kind of in a haphazard way i was following in this path that was me that was weird creating stories kind of interpreting them then giving you some theory then having quotes that are in kind of shapes and then having things on the side side material with passages from fairy tales and fables you know you know how right those little like boxes sidebar or whatever yeah yeah we call those they're called side material anyway i ended up creating this book that you could hate it for very many reasons but you can say there's nothing else out there like it it doesn't look like another book page by page it doesn't read like another book because the structure is something that no one has ever done before you know it's my own idea right and and so it's like one of a kind and then the publisher when they first got the book they loved it they gave us an advance and somewhere in the process they said you know robert i think this book is just a little too weird let's kind of soften it a little bit let's make it more like other books so that business with the story and the interpretation get rid of that just just write a story and kind of talk about it yeah and okay and then fortunately the man who i mentioned here yoast the dutchman who who paid me he stood by me and i s cause i said i don't want to change it this will either sink or swim the way it is you know it's a weird book but weird sells that's what makes it a powerful right so we stuck by it and we said no we're going to do it our way so the moral of the story is if i tried to make it like other books i wouldn't be here talking to you right now my book will not have succeeded so by sticking to what makes me different to what makes opened me up to ridicule in fact is what made the book so successful so anyway this point really is well taken because there's a another guest on the show ramit sethi talks about financial things one of the points he made on an earlier podcast was i'm going to butcher the the quote here but it was something along the lines of the market and people out there want to make you vanilla yeah but as soon as you become vanilla they dump you because they already have vanilla so you really want to be tutti frutti yeah or like neapolitan at the very least yeah is that what that is yeah [Laughter] so like i think yeah i could be wrong i'm gonna maybe not maybe not it sound i feel like tutti frutti would be fruitier than yeah yeah yeah it wouldn't have the chocolate yeah there'd be less chocolate yeah you're right okay well i i don't know if i'm right i'm just speculating but the the idea is hey you got to take those those unique angles because if somebody and i've gotten lessons for interviewing and coaching and things like that and i i do sometimes discard the advice because they'll say you know if you just do it this way this is how most journalists do it and i'm thinking oh that's good and then i'll do it and i'll go this is really boring and my show now sounds like every other interviewer exactly and that's there's a reason for that because it's formulaic yeah and i'll get a lot of feedback hey just ask questions don't add any stories don't add any color just ask the questions and it used to make me feel bad but i realized this is just people trying to make me vanilla who will immediately stop listening to the show once i become vanilla those same people will write in and go show's just lost something that you had before i can't quite put my finger on it i'm going i took your advice that's the problem i took your advice i should have ignored you like i do everybody else um the book is you're supposed to be read chapter a chapter a day did you think about what you were going to put it to be okay did you think about what you would put for february 29 did you agonize over what's going to go on that day i think um i thought about it i don't remember what was on that day it's adopt the hacker mindset yeah it's only going to be read once every four years so i figured yeah to be honest with you jordan i'd be lying if i said there was some incredible ulterior motive behind it but i did think about it at the time like i don't want to put a really common powerful idea that everybody needs to read on february 29th right yeah not to say that you don't want to read that but maybe read it only every four years yeah that's funny i thought about that i thought oh i bet this is something he thought this isn't that important i'll just put it in there i'll put it on everything's important but it's not as important right yeah it's the 365th most important 66. three oh yeah 366 the most important concept retain the craftsman mindset this is another concept from mastery slash the daily laws the work is the only thing that matters is what you wrote and the idea that you give is cultivate profound dissatisfaction with your work i both love and hate that because of course we're always dissatisfied with our work and we want it to be better but doesn't that kind of make you miserable in the process if you're never happy with what you create or is the are those two different things well you know people who are craftsmen or craftspeople if we have to say you're gonna get canceled i'm telling you okay so you're like building something a table or anything you know something out of wood and you don't have like a perfectionist attitude the table will fall apart right or it will be lopsided so you learn to kind of make things symmetrical you see the faults and the defects and what you created you work with the wood itself and you try and create something that's as perfect as possible the mistake that most people make in in building something so first of all i want you to think of yourself as a builder you're literally building a house or a table or whatever it is so that's starting your own business that's writing a book that's working on some project in your office so think of it like you're literally building something with your hands it has to have a foundation it has to be on something solid it has to stand up it has to look you know reasonably symmetrical etc so you're actually like a craftsman okay so use that kind of mindset because it's a very powerful very human mindset because we are natural builders that's what makes us kind of human and powerful okay so the problem that most people have and believe me i know it when you're writing something or working on a project is you have no distance you have no ability to analyze your own work you think that everything you do is just golden and beautiful or you think everything you do is awful or terrible right yeah so you need you can have other people look at it and who can kind of bring you back to reality and say this is what's working this isn't what isn't working but oftentimes you can't trust other people right first of all maybe they don't really know maybe they're not as knowledgeable on the subject and also they might have a political acts to grind or whatever so you have to become your own critic you have to be able to see the flaws and what isn't working in your own in your own creation right and sometimes you know it's very hard to do that you tend to kind of gloss over the things that aren't working i know when i write a chapter i lose perspective after time because i've spent so long on it that everything seems natural and good to me and then when i come back to it a month later goes no that's not working wrong that's not working at all and so that critical voice inside of me that says that isn't working is what pushes me to make something better and better and better and better now you can go crazy with that you can reach a point where you never end up finishing whatever you're making because you're always criticizing it at some point you have to say it's done it's 95 there i'm never going to get to 100 okay that's fine i understand that but to the degree that you're able to look at your own work with some distance and say this isn't working for me this it could be better is what's going to end up making it better right and so a lot of people have a hard time with that you know they they i i get that a lot when i read other people's books or manuscripts etc it kind of works but god this could be so much better you didn't take the time you didn't go through the process i'm just describing you didn't think of how somebody else would read it how an outside eyes would read it you didn't think of what might be boring you didn't you assume that everyone's going to be interested in something that they're not going to be interested in so take the time and learn how to criticize your own work and make it better and better and better it's extremely important it seems like there's a point of diminishing returns when it comes to this for example i'll listen to an episode that's three years older two years older and i'll go okay there's a couple missed opportunities i used to listen and go ah cringe this is awful why did i release this now i listen and i go okay there's a couple of things i could have changed or added or man our audio quality has improved a lot since then something along that those lines i remember hearing about i think it was david letterman who used to watch tape of every show he did until three or four am just beating himself up and treating himself like crap after every was his show five days a week i mean that's a lot of time to spend uh telling yourself that you suck at your job and beating yourself up over every little opportunity or missed opportunity well that's not at all what i'm talking about okay yeah it's difficult so after i finish a book i never read it again i never look at it again really i have no idea i have no desire to look at it again in fact it kind of repulses me it's like you know i created it get out of me i don't want to look at it i'm on to the next thing so there's no point in the post mor there is a point in things that you've done in life in your interactions with people to go through that kind of post-mortem process to go what could i have done differently that didn't create this particular problem okay i highly advise that so if you had a podcast that got you in trouble then go through that postmortem process to see what you might have done that that caused it and so you can learn the lesson is extremely important but that's different from going back and criticizing a podcast that's already been created and it's out there what value are you gonna get you're just gonna be beating up on yourself as you say i mean you could look at it constructively and say you know i could be doing it a little bit better right it's all in the spirit that you do things in so you could improve yourself but my thing with my work is once the book is published there's nothing i can do about it right it's true it's out there and in the process of writing i've kind of learned already what it was that i didn't do quite right and what i could improve on so the idea is to get i think the essence of what we're talking here is the point is to beat up on yourself the point isn't to make you feel bad about your own work because that'll work against you you have to kind of love and have a sense of excitement about the work itself the idea is that you're able to kind of have some detachment from it at certain key moments you're able to look at it from a distance and to look at jordan harbinger on the screen and say he needs to be doing this a little differently as if you're looking at it from the outside is very very powerful skill so the goal isn't to become so critical of yourself that you can't ever do anything in life you need to have a degree of innocence about it but if you have no voice inside of your head telling you that some things aren't really working a voice that's somewhat like an outsider then you're never going to be able to improve your work from the inside yeah this is something that i think a lot of creators struggle with because also as much as you want to have external critics or cultivate your own critical eye it it is for many of us hard to do without beating ourselves up or without attaching some sort of meaning to it but it doesn't that's not productive to do i guess i don't understand that maybe it's because of the way i i maybe i am because i'm jewish and i'm always kind of criticizing myself yeah how can you not do it you know kind of was sort of beaten into me but um when i'm writing something i never get too attached to what i'm writing right because i know that's really dangerous maybe it's because i've been this is my eighth book that i'm working on right now maybe i've learned that but i never get too attached to it because i know that that's that's going to be very problematic down the road and i always know so in the moment after i've written something that's very arduous and i go back to it i go this isn't working yeah it's painful undoubtedly because we're all kind of lazy by nature we tied the ribbon we finished the screenplay we did the project it's over i want to move on right that's natural that's johnny depp not watching his own movies right right but i think that's who that is but uh i don't know i had no idea yeah i think he like refuses to watch his own move there's a few actors that just say i'm never watching my own well that's the same thing i don't want to read my own books yeah it's like very similar yeah but you don't want to rush to the end because you know things can always get better and your natural tendency is to be in a hurry because you want the at the product out there you want all the accolades etc etc etc but if you develop this voice if you're able to look at it with some detachment it ends up becoming becoming kind of an interesting game where you feel like i can always make something better better better better it's kind of a very satisfying feeling to improve something and to be able to say that my first iteration was kind of weak and i really strengthened it right now as opposed to sending it out there early and then you have a little bit of doubt and then it isn't quite clicking together and people start criticizing it so you know self-sabotage this dovetails nicely with our section here on self-sabotage that i'd love to go into this is from i think the laws of human nature the attitude is if we are fearful we see negative in every circumstance we don't we don't take chances we blame others for mistakes if we are suspicious or negative we make others feel those same emotions then we create those outcomes for ourselves at home and at work there's a lot in here that's not your exact wording i don't think but the idea that we can almost project our own insecurities onto other people and then have it come back at us and then it looks to us like they're causing the problem this is an eye-opening moment for i think a lot of people when they realize this is the case well i can illustrate it with a very simple example you you're at a party and somebody comes up to you haven't met before or you go up to them and they're kind of nervous and insecure and they're kind of sweating a lot and their eyes are kind of blinking a lot you find yourself getting very nervous in their presence right yeah you get sort of you starting feeling a bit insecure maybe i'm causing that reaction and that as i get insecure in their presence and my talking gets a little halting the insecure person gets even more insecure like this person isn't really interacting with me am i doing weird around me yeah and then it gets back and forth back and forth it gets worse and worse and worse or the opposite happens you go up to that person they're very confident they're very secure in themselves they're very calm they have a calm energy it just calms you down and the conversation that ensues flows in this very natural easy way and it and then that person feels that that you're kind of engaging they engage more on and on and on and on so the idea is is that we humans operate on a level that we're not aware of which is on a non-verbal level right so we pick up the the attitude the vibrations to use the seventies term yeah from the you're on my way do you hear me yeah i'm on your wavelength okay um we pick those up from the other person in ways we're not even aware of and it influences how we are so your attitude towards life you have an attitude right and i call it the way you look at the world's lens that attitude can be complex but it usually has a single dominant component it could be anxious you're anxious about everything worried it could be insecure people are looking at me strange do people like me etc i think i have all of those so far no i hope not or your attitude can be very adventurous everything seems exciting to me i want to explore there i want to go there you're very open to things right okay so when you have that attitude it goes out in the world people sense it in a pre-nonverbal way in that animal way they feel it off of you right and that it makes them respond in a certain way and so if you have that anxious attitude you're going to create all kinds of situations that are going to feed your anxiety it becomes what i talk about in that chapter a self-fulfilling prophecy you're going to find anxiety at every corner that you you come upon right because you're nervous you're making other people nervous you're supposed to take an action you hesitate and then it doesn't go very well because you hesitated that makes you more nervous etc so you have to get the idea that you are sabotaging yourself with your attitude right and there have been some amazing books written on this aspect of human psychology that actually were kind of mind-blowing to me to use another 70s expression sorry man we still use that one okay all right things like the pygmalion effect which i hope in the next 20 30 40 years people study more seriously in sciences and explain but the idea is in studies like teachers and schools if a teacher thinks that the students are good and smart and deserving to go to yale and harvard and they're all brilliant and but never says anything about that it's just they think it it has an effect where the students work better they get better grades they're more excited the attitude speaks to them they feel it right so if you go up to somebody and you already anticipate that they're not very good that they're not you know that they're not going to succeed in life it's going to create that feeling in them so you have the power to make people feel a certain way by the attitude that you have right and think of that attitude so this the bad news is you are born with an attitude there's a genetic component to it my kid is really careful way more careful than me yeah and that's that's something wired into him or her him him um so um seemed to be her in the picture but that's uh yeah we're talking about jaden he he's the most careful baby at the park he's very like is this stable and i know that's not exactly what you're talking about but it says no i mean the hard wiring is there well the classic example is an introvert or an extrovert and the man who came up with that was carl jung the great psychologist he believed that there was definitely a genetic component in that that people are born with a tendency to being introvert or born as an extrovert now naturally the parent will have an influence on that but that is very deeply ingrained into you that attitude so that's the bad news right that you're born a certain way if you're anxious you're born with an anxious attitude the good news is that you can change it it's plastic it has some you can work around the edges you can soften it you can make it better you're not going to if you're anxious you're not going to suddenly become this open adventure exploring type person okay but you can become less anxious you can realize that it's causing you problems and you can work to kind of alter this attitude right and so the first thing is you have to be aware of what your attitude is in life and the problem that it's causing and how it's infecting your relationships and the second thing is to be aware of how you can take small steps to slowly begin to alter this attitude so i tell people for instance who are born very anxious and i understand that because i have a bit of that myself it doesn't paralyze me but for some people it paralyzes them what i suggest is tomorrow you do something that you're not quite comfortable with not too radical you're not suddenly going to go out naked in the streets running etc right you can do something that you normally that's a little bit outside your comfort zone it's a little bit different from what you would normally do let's say that's going up to a stranger in the office or at a social fair and talk engaging them in conversation normally whoa i can't do that do it all right and you'll find so explore those margins of what you wouldn't normally do that aren't dangerous that person isn't going to kill you hopefully for going up to them but try these things out they're going to be able to you'll see though i don't need to be so anxious and that by being open and wanting to talk to this stranger they started talking to me on a level i've never experienced before it's exciting right so that's sort of you know your attitude is like your work of art it's something you create you're born with it but you can change it this is the power that you have yeah you mentioned that it's and i think you said this earlier in the show that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy it's almost like if you expect someone to disappoint you there's a higher chance of that happening it's not metaphysical or something like that at all some sort of magic but it's simply how you create the the i'm trying so hard not to use the word energy because it sounds metaphysical but you're creating that environment around you you're creating the vibes the vibes that's that's very scientific yes the one example i thought that was really weird in the book that i thought was so interesting is this woman it's a story of a woman who had a boss who was kind of abusive and was always criticizing her and it just she didn't know how to react no matter how she reacted he only got worse and worse and worse and a psychologist told her to when you go into work think of him as this great guy i can't do that no don't listen to me just go in there and think in your head he's actually a wonderful person he's got some problems and issues but he's actually really interesting person he's very complex what do you mean just do it she did it and suddenly he reacted in a way she had never expected before he was kind of put off by because he noticed she was acting different he acted different in there and so i thought this was really interesting she never said anything she only thought it and this wasn't to to 14 year old students this was to like a 40 year old boss he suddenly went on a different track because he detected something you have a look of disbelief on i just feel like it's this is uh i'm not it's not disbelief it's actually i know that this would work on me if that's if we're using it as a technique i know if somebody came with a totally different type of uh to user scientific lingo vibe with me that it would completely change the way that i react to them like as much as i like to think i'm uh and a lot of us like to think oh wait i just am the way that i am i know 100 percent that this would this would have an effect yeah yeah okay so i think it's a look of complete agreement and this is wrong yes yeah maybe maybe you need to read more of your own books but then you would never want to do that no i don't i don't you do mention becoming aware of our own attitude and observing it and this seems useful i think one of the reasons you give the rationale you get for this is do we instinctively blame others for things how do we react when challenged how do we judge and think of people when they're not around this seems like a great way to reprogram a lot of negative behavior if i'm the person that says man ryan came over to film and he was late that guy he his whole life is a mess right you know we all know people that do that kind of thing we don't want to be around them they're annoying to work with it pays for us if we are that person to [Music] nix that stuff as soon as possible how do we observe our own attitude that seems easier said than done well um first of all you kind of notice um you do you have an overall tenor or an overall mood to you right so if you are an anxious person it's pretty obvious you don't need like sherlock holmes to kind of you know decipher that for you right whenever a situ when something new or novel comes up your first reaction is in wow i'm excited it's oh no i'm nervous this makes me uncomfortable you know how you react to things in a general way in a kind of a neutral circumstance right so you're thrown into some novel situation you find yourself in a foreign city is your first instinct to open to take all your clothes out and go exploring and finding everything there and getting away from americans and seeing what the culture is or is it to kind of stay in your hotel room and kind of watch you know american television or things like that you know in in certain patterns in your life how you react to things that are different or new will be extremely telling to whether you're an introvert whether you're an extrovert whether you're anxious whether you're adventurous on and on and on right so observe yourself in kind of these key moments i don't think it's rocket science i think it's pretty clear i know for instance that i am an introvert you know that my tendency is i'm more on the shy side although i've learned to kind of overcome that right and i see that in my social interactions so you in your room in your in where you're kind of quarantining you could think that you're napoleon bonaparte that you're wonderful that you're amazing that you're you're so bold but then the moment you go out in the world it's it's extremely different you realize your weaknesses your limitations so being out interacting with people is going to reveal 100 your attitude towards life because you can't control it in your room you can be walter mitty you could be imagining yourself as anything out there right but when you're with people it becomes very clear that you're shy or that you're extroverted that you're out there wanting to engage with people so the key to discovering your attitude is to see how you are with people right how you interact so you know somebody new approaches you like that scenario i said earlier is your first reaction oh no get away from me or hmm an interesting person because somebody new to meet right those are very clear signs of what your attitude is i mean there are other things as well how you respond to criticism right from other people so get defensive tear them down privately in my own mind right that's your reaction yes is that uh is that healthy no so the other reaction didn't mince words at all yes sorry sorry the other reaction is they're right i'm a worthless worm god how awful i am okay that's another kind of reaction or the third reaction is there's something interesting there i could learn from that maybe there's there's something in truth to it you know maybe you have to take it seriously you have to look at the person making the criticism and see and judge whether they have a valid point that whether they have no political acts to grind i can remember when i was about 24 years old i was in new york working as a journalist i thought i was a hot shot journalist new york journalist 24. it all adds up okay i wrote this article about it was kind of for a travel magazine that it was i was working for or this travel article about italy about the amalfi coast i thought it was the greatest thing since gore vidal i was wow and then the editor had invited me for lunch okay i'm getting promoted yeah yeah right and then after his like third martini or whatever he was drinking he goes robert you are not a writer you are not writer material that article was all over the place you have no discipline your your language is too out is going in all directions you're not connecting to the audience to the reader if i were you and i don't mean this this harshly i would go to law school or business school and i would get out of writing oh my god i'm cringing for you and this is like years decades later yeah it's hard to hear so um i was trying to remember the name of this guy the other day but i can't remember his name i can see him very clearly and i have this image in my mind that's very vivid i mean look if he has three martinis at lunch he's dead already so it doesn't matter so the image that played in my mind was like a house that on the outside kind of looks good but if you looked at the attic and the interior of it you'd see that the wood is all rotten and and termites have kind of eaten it away and things are about to fall that was what the image that came into my mind of what was going on the inside of this man but afterwards i was very obviously pained by it i thought what an [ __ ] he's wrong right but then as time went by i processed it and i go no there's truth to what he was saying i don't really like journalism and because i don't really like and i don't really fit my language is a little bit odd for the genre it was a little too literary what i had written right maybe i was meant to be a novelist or a screenwriter or to write something else so there was validity in what he said and i got out of journalism and i decided i'm going to go to europe and i'm going to wander around and i'm going to write a novel kind of thing and then that ended up failing well yeah but he ended up working construction in in uh the home really in a hospital yeah i mean look if the guy needed and i made a dark joke earlier but it sounds like he was he needed three martinis to break bad news to you he actually was probably a really nice person for doing that he didn't do that he did it for your sake probably yeah yeah but i didn't take his advice to heart because now you're a writer so i guess because i knew that i i had something there it's just i was in the wrong you know genre genre writing insufferable articles about the amalfi coast um let's talk demagogues i i mean i told people the show is going to be all over the place demagogues this is uh unfortunately according to my feedback friday inboxes half the nation is working for a demagogue there's demagogues in uh every level of politics from the police all the way up to the white house depending on who you ask right so i think this might be useful whether we have one in the office or whether we're electing them to office when in the presence of a demagogue focus on the rational even more to avoid their emotional pull is what you say in the beginning of this particular section this is very profound but it also sort of implies well it does imply that demagogues use emotional pull to would you say influence us or control us well yeah i think that's that's that's fairly obvious there i mean um you don't have to call that thing out you i'm like that makes me sound less intelligent okay captain obvious yeah i'm just kidding i'm just kidding yeah yeah but it's true it's true all i did was rephrase something and i'm supposed to people go wow jordan really he understands the things that he looks at wow jordan that was really you really understand me that's really interesting i really do read carefully um so yes the obvious that demagogues thrive on the emotional pull that they have over us well um i mean the obvious element is they're not they're not appealing to us through reason right right so in in the laws of human nature i have a chapter on irrationality it's chapter one and i talk that we humans have certain irrational biases built into our brains and one of them obviously is the confirmation bias that everyone knows about but i talk about the conviction bias which is if somebody talks with so much conviction so much anger so much emotion so much righteousness we tend to think that there's something real about it they wouldn't be faking these emotions therefore there must be something true to what they say and this is what makes people on television multi-millionaires the angrier they appear the more truthful they must be and the more audience people will reach because we have a propensity to want to have our emotions stirred to want somebody who appeals to them and we want to believe someone who kind of spews the anger that we're not necessarily comfortable with expressing right that's a good point yeah we see this on the extreme left and extreme right on television because then those shows where they're yelling at each other and that's all they're doing or someone says can you believe these idiots are doing this and this and this and it's just a bunch of people at home going yeah i hate that though they're the worst yeah i mean the person i think who really does that is like tucker carlson yeah i'm not gonna you know go political here on you because there are people on the left who do it as well for sure yeah to be fair you know chris cuomo can be a little bit like that but tucker carlson yeah it's like his snark his disdain his anger his vitriol is what people love that's what makes them tune in and they assume that he must be telling the truth because there's so much conviction behind it so as opposed to a professor who gets up there in a very calm demeanor and sort of explains what's really going on in the world we're going uh what an egghead you know you know he's got some axe to grind because he went to harvard or something yeah he's an elitist he's an elitist exactly thank you okay so we are wired to have our emotions appeal to us it's part of our nature because we're at heart emotional animals right emotions to give you a very brief physiological lesson when you feel an emotion like anger or frustration or excitement hormones are really chemicals are released into your bloodstream that are very powerful whereas the pre the the cortex the frontal cortex where your thinking goes on those are like little electrical impulses that are not nearly as strong as those hormones that are charging through you making your adrenaline pump right yeah i rarely get fired up about like logical math problems or something like that it would never get me sort of charged up having to do my math homework instead of watching a movie or a show that i wanted to right that triggers that cortisol or whatever it is adrenaline reaction so by nature we're wired to pay attention to our emotions whereas our thoughts yeah we kind of listen to them but when we feel something it engages so much of our body physically that we're um we have to pay attention to it so we are emotional creatures by nature we are not these rational thinking animals that we like to believe that we are and people who do marketing and pr they know that we are emotional creatures they know how to appeal to the animal in us it's an art that they have developed that they have honed right they call it the effective heuristic people buy things based on emotions not based on rational decisions are you saying i didn't need the upgraded camera and the iphone 13 pro max are you sure about that well there was probably some ad that you saw or something some some yeah it probably wasn't a rational decision no okay completely irrational yeah so get over the idea that you're a rational being you're very emotional based and a political figure or any in any walk of life or your boss or whatever if they're like always emoting and they're like out there expressing something with so much conviction and anger and righteousness you can believe that they're hiding something right they're trying to convince themselves of the truth of what they're saying they're trying to lie to themselves that what they're saying is true but by putting on that act that extra bit of anger etc right so con artists have always known since the beginning of con artistry that the more you feel sincere the more you tell people believe in what you're selling is like gold you know you have a gold mine etc that you're selling or the eiffel tower the more people are likely to believe you right so i just want people to be more skeptical in this world when someone is spewing all kinds of emotions and i've noticed in our age now the social media age that you see a lot of righteousness that people are seeing i am so right about the cause i believe in yeah outrage it gives me you know license to say whatever i want to be as angry and violent as i want to because i'm on the side of truth you see it a lot nowadays i want you to be super skeptical of people like that they're probably hiding something they're feeling very insecure about the subject they may very well be lying about it you want to like to have some distance and be able to analyze what they're saying with some degree of rationality and some degree of detachment yeah you say the emotional self thrives on ignorance so if we are what what these people require is for us to not stop and think about not have any sort of skeptical bone in our body but to go yeah and then blindly follow with whatever you're asserting exactly you say once we become aware of this it loses its pull so awareness being like group bias insecurity ego is the greatest danger here i think is is something that either you or i knowed it and uh not the ego of the person telling you what to do but the ego that might say maybe i just got worked up and i'm wrong about this well that's the confirmation bias and it's something sociologists have said determines like 95 percent of human behavior really that well i i just pulled that okay you just made that you know what but yeah i was like that's a huge that's a large majority but it's it's high higher than you think let's just say that um so what happens is if you believed something once if you voted for this particular person once right and then evidence comes in that they're not who they said they were that they're they're a hypocrite that is deceptive etc your propensity is not to believe what other people are telling you but to double down on your original attitude and say the person telling me this has an axe to grind there's some you know they're being political it's their fault right i was right in my choice the reason for confirmation bias is you never want to believe that you are stupid you never want to believe that you were conned that somebody pulled the wool over your eyes that you are not rational that you did not come to your decision based on proper analysis so you're wired you have the bias already to believe what you already believe in to believe in what you want to believe in so you're going to look for the evidence that confirms what you've already believed and trust me it does motivate a huge percentage of people's behavior it means it makes you why you don't want to change what you're already doing because to change what you're doing means to change your way of thinking and to admit that you were wrong that you did something kind of stupid or that you had you were going in the wrong direction it's very very hard for humans to do that i think you're right i mean we see this happening all the time and when it comes to the news or politics or anything like that nobody wants to turn around and go yeah i did that and that was wrong and there were profound consequences especially if there were profound consequences for themselves or or others how do we balance the need to be rational cautious skeptical with the benefits of being curious and open-minded to new ideas well um so you can be you can be too rational you can be too cautious you can be too logical in your attitude towards life the metaphor i use is of a horse and the person riding the horse so i'm saying that the horse is your emotional self it's all that animal energy it's that those hormones coursing through you and making you excited or angry etc and the rider of that horse is your rational self is your frontal cortex or your executive decisions where you go through a rational process of coming to a decision about what needs to be done okay so if you've ever ridden a horse i did when i was younger it's very much more it's so much harder than it looks yeah if you remember that yeah well horses are very sensitive creatures they pick up your energy very quickly right they can tell by the way your legs are kind of hugging it whether you're nervous or not and they're very very sensitive okay so if they sense that you are not controlling them that you're worried that you're fearful that you're kind of like you know you don't know how to control this horse they're going to take control they're going to be the alpha in the situation they're going to go wherever they want to go they're not going to listen to you because they don't think you you have the stuff in you you're not stern enough right um and so you'll find they'll be riding all over the place they'll be going a lot faster than you want and it can be very dangerous but if you hold the reins too tightly if you're the opposite type where you're too much trying to control them you're holding the bit in their mouth really tightly you're trying to make sure that they only do exactly what you want the horse isn't comfortable right it doesn't like that because horses have been broken but they have a wild streak to them right so they're either going to rebel they're not going to go necessarily do what you want they're going to go very slowly etc and you won't really be able to ride them with any kind of ease they'll be very halting they'll suddenly stop and chew the leaves on a plant when you want them to move ahead etc so the perfect balance to make this metaphor come to life is you want to have some hold on the reins but you also want to let the animal have some of its own power because that horse is very powerful horses are amazingly powerful creatures you want to be able to use their energy to channel their energy for your own purposes right so think of your emotions as that horse they contain incredible amounts of energy and power you can't write a book you can't start a business you can't do anything in life if you don't have a degree of emotional energy behind it you have to feel excited you have to feel motivated you have to want something very very badly if you're holding on the reins too tightly and trying to be too controlled and and everything like that you're never going to be able to get anything off the ground because you're not going to have any energy behind it but if you let that go everywhere you want to then nothing will get made because you won't be able to structure you won't be able to organize you won't be able to discipline yourself you won't be able to make executive decisions say we've got to do this instead of that so you want to balance right so you don't want to be too rational too controlling you want to be able to let go at some times and let your emotions lead you and be inspired but be able to have some distance from them to know that you can pull it back you can control it now i forgot what your original question was it was how do we balance the need to be rational cautious and skeptical with the benefits of being curious and open-minded well so the cure yes the curious and open-mindedness is that horse kind of exploring things and wanting to try new things out right so there's the idea of being curious and and open is is an emotional quality right you're not curious you know because of some something going on in your frontal cortex there's an excitement level that makes you curious about something you're interested there's an emotional component right you have to let go of that sometimes of the need to be so rational and so controlling so in life you have to know when to let go you have to know when to let go of control and let things happen to you and let things come to you if you try and control everything too much then you know things won't happen you won't have the space for surprises for the unexpected if you're a scientist some of the best discoveries are things you never expected or planned for they just happen upon you and if you've already assessed what you think is going on you're not going to be open to the new information that comes in so the balance is in what i'm talking about you know that being too rational will cause you problems you won't be able to get anything done and you won't be able to explore with your ideas from a practical level you mentioned that we should observe how people behave around others how they interact their emotions etc and compare that to how they behave towards you is there frustration micro expressions anger contempt and then ask what reason there could be for this so there's a lot of practicals in dealing with all right if i'm looking at how other people are acting are they acting the same way around me is it are we looking for are we looking for hit i'm trying not to be sort of hyperbolic here are we looking for hidden enemies here are we looking for um [Music] people to show their true colors because we know they'll have a facade up when they're talking to us but maybe not with others well that could possibly but that's not really the point of this here the point is to have access to information about what's really going on behind the the facade the mass people are wearing and that might be totally benign it might be they do like you it might be that they're not as interested as you as you think they are but that doesn't mean they're going to go out and harm you in some way it just means you think they're excited by your idea but they're not really so excited so we all have this experience where in the presence of one person like our wife or a colleague or husband we act a certain way and then we're in the presence of someone else we act totally differently right because they have a different energy so the way we talk and move and our body language in front of our boss is not the same as it is when we're talking with our child with a two-year-old etc or with a younger an older person like that so we're continually changing who we are when we're in the presence of different people right so when you go up to someone they're responding to your energy right and that some of it's coming from you and you can't really disentangle what is you and what is actually coming from them but if you observe them with another person right you get better information you get more dispassionate information so you judge them with you they're very they're this way in that way etc but with this other person they act totally differently which is the real self well you don't really know but at least now you realize that what they were responding to you was only like a quarter of the picture right so you want to see how people interact in situations in a variety of situations it'll give you more clues as to what's really going on in their heads another practical is train yourself to see past the front people put on so this is sort of very similar train yourself to see their mythology look for signs of their true character or true signs of their character how do we do this the example you give in the book is howard hughes he was actually a terrible businessman but yet most people think of him as this like brilliant creator and meanwhile he was according to the leonardo dicaprio movie peeing in bottles in a room and made a plane that didn't fly or at least didn't fly well right well the idea is that um people have patterns in life right and the patterns reveal what i call their character and character is something very deeply ingrained in a person it's that genetic component we talked about earlier it's the early education part of them it's something so deep inside that they can't control it and you have a character and i have a character and what it does over time is it creates patterns we end up falling into patterns in life in our work world in our personal relationships etc and you can see this over time and that reveals that essence that core that we are often in a more negative light and so um howard hughes had this pattern of enticing people into this kind of business venture because he was very ambitious very grandiose and then he wouldn't deliver and he wouldn't deliver for various reasons one thing is he was insane micromanager he had to oversee every single detail of that plane but he couldn't because he's only one person and he'd get overwhelmed with information and he'd become paralyzed and the project would never happen he would be asked to build 200 enormous transport jets for the defense department and he'd build only one you know the goose whatever that thing was bruce goose i think yeah okay because he was so paralyzed but he had to control everything etc and it spilled over into when he was he produced films and he directed films and and he had the same mentality and each time it failed and yet people would not pay attention to those failures because they got sucked in to the aura of howard hughes this adventurer this pilot this pilot who would risk his life doing things which was true he was very almost reckless in in his flying planes etc so they bought the legend of howard hughes and they weren't seeing the reality was that this man was an awful businessman he was just a terrible businessman right he he he you know and the clues were all there and yet they were falling for the appearance of this really smooth charismatic man and it came became comic by the end because he had four or five or six failures in his past and still he managed to convince people up until like the 50s and 60s to fund his wild projects so the idea is to sum it all up is stop paying attention to people's charm their presence their facade to how excited they are when you first meet them to their resume to the fact that they went to harvard or yale etc and look at their character what lies underneath so if you looked at howard hughes's character you would have seen someone deeply insecure and deeply controlling to the point where he could never finish anything and if you saw that you would have never signed on to one of his projects and lost millions of dollars right so people give signs of this they give signs of their behavior they give signs of the fact that they're not a team player character i like to decide to to to judge is either strong or weak you want a strong character for a partner in intimate relationship for a business partner for a colleague at work a strong character can take criticism that's the number one thing you a person who is strong inside can take criticism and can use it constructively they don't become defensive a strong person when they're stressed they don't crumble and then suddenly don't become this whiny little baby they they can they can handle it they have presence of mind a strong person can work with other people they're not dominated by their ego they don't have to have everything on their own terms a weak character is all the opposite of those traits so you hire somebody based on their charm then you discover when they're stressed that they crumble into pieces right you discover that when you criticize them they get all whiny and defensive and they can't learn you discover that they can't work together as a team they only want to advance their own agenda you learn that too late because they're already working for you so judge them before you get involved with people and i should talk in my books about how they're always signs what the underlying character is and if people want more practicals about this obviously in the books which we'll link all of them in the show notes we did an episode probably going on too maybe even three years ago now hard to say which i'll also link in the show notes and that one is full of envy and jealousy and human nature and control and defensively again all the dark side stuff uh exactly i will wrap on one final thing here and this is now that we have cryptocurrency going crazy and uh people the stock market is super high many times this is your idea here many times we run on a reactive program we get caught up in the moment perfect example the crypto run the economy even wise people fall prey to this oh bitcoins at an all-time high look at how high the dow is going we need to funnel more money into these things we have to zoom out and take a longer view of time but how do we do this how do we zoom out even if even when we don't feel like it which is really what's going on here right i feel like buying more of that stock that's going up i feel like i need to get on the bitcoin rocket ship right we have our fomo our fear of missing out is in full swing how do i short circuit that because it's easy for me to say when bitcoin is zero and the dow's losing money that i need to not invest it's really hard when i feel like i'm the only one who's missing out well um i wrote a whole chapter in there about that it's called the our short-sighted nature and i describe the phenomenon of bubbles economic bubbles and the original bubble was aptly named the south sea bubble and i narrate the story in the laws of human nature this took place in the 1710s in england and the idea behind it is is that when other people are buying things you're not or doing things we're a viral creature we look at we're social animals we're very much wrapped into what other people are doing and we get caught up in the kind of herd mentality if other people are buying something excited there must be a reason i don't want to miss out on it right and so this is what's behind a lot of ponzi schemes etc the more people that get involved the more it seems like it's real and substantial and so the south sea bubble was this kind of comic event where the man it was like the original ponzi scheme and sir isaac newton was investing his life savings in the south sea bubble and he ended up losing like all of his savings in there the most rad the king of england was putting his name behind it the brother of the king i i can't remember which one it was yeah it's hard to say um i vaguely remember this from your work yeah so everyone got caught up in the smartest people around and the stupidest people so when you find yourself in a dynamic layer this is part of human nature there was the tulipo mania i was going to say it's like the tulip mania where people are buying tulips for the price of gold or something yeah 17th century you had the railroad mania in the 19th century you had the tech bubble in the 1990s you had the real estate bubble in 2000 in the early 2000s who knows what the bubble is now maybe it's cryptocurrency i don't know but when you find yourself and it's you're what motivates you is that other people are doing something i have to get involved a little red flag should go up in your brain and go uh oh i'm probably probably this weak part of human nature is getting involved here i'm getting sucked into this dynamic where the social aspect of my nature is telling me that other people are doing something it must be great it must be interesting i have to get involved no the moment you feel that when that's happening step back you want this is one situation when the rudder and the horse you want to be holding the reins a bit tighter because you know your money a lot of money could be at stake so it's delicate thing i mean who knows in the beginning whether um cryptocurrency is real or not maybe it is like the new thing it's gonna but when you hear people say that this time it's different there's something new about cryptocurrency your [ __ ] meter must go rise right up because that's language that every swindler has ever used this is different this is not like anything in the past the rules of finance are being rewritten this is not you don't have to worry about it because this is totally new and different that is a hundred percent [ __ ] right the rules of finance have not been rewritten bubbles exist and they've been existing for hundreds of years because of human nature because of psychology and that's what's getting sucked sucking you into it and so you want to look at the classic bubble in our time was the one one that led to the crash of 08 where all these people were involved in these complicated real estate derivatives all these names that i can't even that's what i was doing on wall street mortgage-backed securities okay yeah and i remember thinking what happens if people can't pay their mortgage and the partner said real estate always goes up there's so many people in these pools they're not all going to default well real estate does tend to go up but this isn't real estate this isn't bound to property this is bound to things that were completely like financial chicanery they only existed on paper right and the smartest minds in the world got caught up in that bubble you can't believe the names of people who went to harvard yale business school ceos they all got caught up in the idea that this time it's different right we've created a new kind of financial mechanism the old rules you can throw them out the moment you hear that you know something is wrong right so all of a sudden the classic signs we've all lived through them if you're old enough i don't know if the people that young who haven't if you're 12 maybe no but if you're older than 12 you live through that crash and you know what really happened and that's the kind of herd mentality and kind of stupidity to put the right word on it that we all are prone to and when you find yourself getting emotionally attached to bitcoin to the point where if someone so much as breathes whispers something skeptical you get all emotional react oh come on you old fuddy did you dinosaur you don't understand the hypnosis this is the new thing you know that you you you're drinking the wine that you're you're drunk on this thing and you're in trouble so it's not necessarily that there's not anything to to go on the bitcoin metaphor there's still innovation there's still new things that result from this it could change the world but the idea that it is completely and new and different and not subject to the laws of every the laws that everything else has been subject to uh there's nothing we're not going to invent any machine on earth that's not sub or in the universe as we know it that's not subject to gravity well well the the metaphor i've given in human nature is human nature is so strong that it changes everything that we create it's like this impersonal force so just to to to finish this metaphor here the internet comes out in the 90s and then it starts to explain the late 90s and we're all using it and we're so excited there's this forum for all this free communication it's like the wild wild west it's so exciting it could lead to anything and slowly slowly yes yeah well slowly slow that's what it becomes slowly and slowly becomes this place to sell the worst kind of products it becomes the place for online porn it becomes the place for venting your outrage and being a troll it brings human nature changes this thing that we all thought was this liberating device that was going to open up the world into something kind of ugly and political a tool for china to spy on people to spy on its own citizens to gather and in this country too to gather information on private citizens right so human nature the dark side of it will take over so bitcoin might have started off this incredibly liberating thing but you better damn well believe that the forces that are out there are going to take it over and that's going to be somehow misshapen and malformed into what other things have been misshapen for in the past like the internet well fortunately bitcoin is decentralized and i'm going to get a lot of emails from people that are like he's wrong and here's why and i'm looking forward to those and this is a great conversation yeah thank you so much well i'm just saying you might be right but the fact that you think you're so right is the point is the problem just have be able to look at yourself and just entertain the possibility entertain it in the tiniest little corner of your brain that it could be a bubble that's all that's all

Channel: The Jordan Harbinger Show

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Keywords: podcast, interview, best podcast, top rated podcast, lifelong learning, the jordan harbinger show, jordan harbinger, soft skills, social science, social influence, social psychology, personal development, self development, podcast full episode, podcast clip, robert greene, robert green, laws of human nature, relationships, business, robert greene interview

Id: Id-gpEG3jyk

Length: 107min 30sec (6450 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 25 2021