"The Modern World Is In Chaos" - Win The Game Of Life & Outsmart Everybody Else | Robert Greene

Netflix has become shorthand for uh you know just sort of a meme life of a guy sitting in a dark room smoking weed red eyes not going to bed almost sort of staying up out a spite to like you know you to my boss who I guess controls my day and so by me staying up late I'm I'm controlling my time but I have a feeling that what's going on is people aren't in control of their emotions so they're not framing this hard time that they are legitimately going through they're not framing it in in a way that will allow them to act productively so they then feel a way they don't want to feel they don't see an outlet through Behavior to fix it so they start consuming consuming consuming alcohol weed porn Netflix whatever which all of those things can be fun in the right amounts at the right time um does that seem true to you that this is ultimately them trying to numb out effectively well well um it's very difficult to be a human being let's let's start at a very basic level going back to our earliest ancestry so unlike animals we are not programmed now animals aren't completely programmed that's a myth but they're much more programmed than we are by their instincts so a leopard doesn't wake up in the morning and go what am I going to do today am I going to hunt this animal or that no I think it's kind of cloud no they don't they don't have that choice we do and that's what makes us aimless that's what makes us wake up in the morning go man what am I going to do so what that means what that translates into is the human being has emptiness has a hole inside of ourselves a hole that we need to fill in some way because we have incredibly active Minds The the brain if you break it down as I said earlier we should be fetishizing it if you study the brain in in a larger sense it's absolutely astounding the powers that it has the amount of neural Pathways that connect the complexity of it and the activeness of it I meditate every morning and as I try and still my mind whoa thoughts are coming like this you can't believe how active your mind is you're just not aware of it and but we have this emptiness we don't know what to fill it with this mind is active we're not programmed we don't know what to do and because of that emptiness we have to fill it with something we're restless and and if we don't know what to fill it with we're just going to consume consume consume consume consume as a way to kind of deal with that empty feeling as you say to numb ourselves we're going to eat eat eat we're going to watch movies we're going to binge watch we're going to get addicted to porn because it's filling that emptiness it's taking that AC of mind and it's dumb it's numbing it and it's like you know it seems satisfying because we don't have to deal with these other things so you have to be aware that you have this emptiness inside of you everybody does I have it everyone does but my life the way I go and I don't mean to be put the focus continually on me is I wake up every up every morning now because I've reached this position and I want you to have this this privilege that I have I'm not saying that I feel so great I want you to have it I have this feeling I wake up in the morning I know what I have to accomplish I know what my goals are I know what I have to do that particular day I know what I have to do that particular week these are the things that I can do to fill that emptiness to program to give myself a purpose to have that North Star that you're talking about and yes within those parameters I can waste some time reading about the Lakers on on lakersground.net you know it's website that I that I lurk in or I can read articles that have nothing to do with my life you know I can go on and on I can waste time but I have a general parameter I don't have that gnawing emptiness that has to be continually filled by consuming consuming consuming so be aware that your mind is so active that you have to have something to fill it but it's your choice whether you're just going to consume mindless stuff or you're going to actually use that Restless active brain of yours and put it to some incredible function how do they figure out what incredible function to put it to well that's the million dooll question and that's why I wrote my my fifth book Mastery um so I have a chapter one in Mastery called um discover your life's task and it's not easy and I don't have like a formula for it but I I kind of lay out the process that could lead you to it so if you're 22 or or younger then it's it's pretty clear what you have to do and it's not so difficult if you're 29 30 gets more complicated if you're 40 it's very difficult if you're 50 it's almost impossible so the younger you go through this process the better and what it entails is figuring out what makes you unique in life and I don't mean like total weirdness unique I don't mean that you have to be like some flamboyant rock star Etc it can be what makes you unique as an entrepreneur as a business person what makes you unique as a social individual as somebody who likes to interact with people what makes you unique in any Endeavor right going into looking at your childhood and being honest with yourself and saying I'm I'm mening this thing now that I'm 22 but it's not really me it's what my parents want me to be interested in it's not really me because it's what other peers think is cool right now it's not really me because of blah blah blah blah blah what is really me okay so you got to peel away these layers and you got to come at so when you were born I like into what a seed is planted that seed is your uniqueness because a your DNA has never existed in the history of the universe and never will exist again okay it's impossible it's so unique B your parents are not like any other parents and they're going to raise you in a way that's different from any other parenting couple in in the history C you're going to have early experiences that are not like anybody else that is unique that is you that is what separates you from the 100 billion I I I narrowed it down how many humans have left lived in the because I had it in one of my chapters I think it's 100 billion somewhere around that 110 billion ever This Is What Separates Me from Homo sapiens let's draw that line who have ever lived before okay and it's real it exists and it's not like a single thing it's not like oh I was meant to be a fireman oh I was meant to be a politician it's vaguer than that it has to do with things that attract you whether it's Sports and and your body whether it's mathematics or music music or whether it's words and literature or whether it's social things or whether it's building building a house carpentry or building a business Etc what is it that excites me what is it that I'm drawn towards what I call your Primal inclinations going through that process and figuring out digging up that seat and figuring out what it is is the most should be the most exciting process in your life because if you do it all the stuff that we're talking about all the bad circumstances of the world everything you're facing you will reverse that power you will discover your superpower you will be motivated you will find the energy right you will know what to ignore it's not worth my time to be watching this podcast to reading this book it's not worth my time to be wasting my energy doing this that or the other I know what I want okay when you're 21 or 22 man you could go if you figure that out it doesn't have to be so specific it just has to be this is the general direction I want in my life these are the people that I want to end up being like even though I'm going to be myself in that within those parameters then the world will open up for you and you'll have a little bit of that radar that will guide you through life okay if you're 30 years old it's different in the 30 years old you go through the thing of where did I go wrong because you wouldn't be going through this process unless you went wrong if you're going right then you don't need you can ignore everything most likely you where did I go wrong why am I in this [ __ ] job why am I unhappy why am I drinking why am I addicted to this the other thing my frustration my unhappiness is speaking to me it's telling me something it's telling me that I took a wrong turn all right now go back and figure out where you took the wrong turn and what it was where you how you can perhaps correct your path how do you solve for that how do you go back and figure out where the wrong turn was well you're um so often times uh you choose a wrong path for reasons that have to do with money with what you think is status what other people think is cool so um look at your first choices like you're 23 years old and you decided to go work for like a big Corporation and now it's sucking your soul out and you feel empty and frustrated okay I'm frustrated I'm unhappy well I chose to work in this kind of soulless environment and I quit when I was 27 and then I started working as a barista okay okay I went wrong there all right so that's not where I was meant to go all right what was it out of college that I really wanted to do what was it that excited me what is the path I would have taken perhaps if I hadn't listened to my parents or I hadn't followed this I this dumb idea what is it that that I could have done and at that point if you can be have just a tincture a little flash of Enlightenment about that then you can start building on it and you start going all right I took this wrong path all right now I have to head it in a different direction I'm not going to give up I'm not going to stay being a barista because that's not going to lead anywhere I have to figure out a career for myself that I can't give up the eight years I spent out of college because that's that's us useless that's not going to go anywhere you're not 22 anymore all right I have to adapt what I learned in that time and I have to apply it in a different direction so you're going this way your decision now isn't to go this way it's to go this way or this way a subtle little deviation closer towards what you were meant to what excites you and I have people who've written to me about the course Corrections they've taken they went from being a lawyer to being a writer about legal issues they went from a lot of podcasters believe it or not have a very similar story they went into the wrong profession and then they discovered that what they really liked was podcasting and they applied so I just had a interview recently with Andrew huberman you know one of the most successful podcasters of our era brilliant man a neuroscientist he was a neuroscientist working for a university Etc he was really really unhappy about all the politicking and he told me that he read Mastery and Mastery had a very huge impact on him and I I don't want to take credit but kind of to him it saved his life wow he decided he had to get into podcasting that he loved interviewing people that he loved the interaction with other people instead of having to do all the research he wanted to be able to take that research and apply it to his interviews and interview fascinating people okay it's a very common scenario among people in the podcasting business but there are other scenarios that people have written to me about who have made that course correction in their late 20s I talk about in master I talk about Paul Graham who was a master in artificial intelligence in the 70s when it was just a little baby about to be born was just in the first instances and he was a computer hacker and he didn't enjoy it he hated working for companies so he went off and became an artist he just studied painting in Italy he came back to New York he was kind of living in a loft and in New York very poor but he was kind of enjoying it and then he heard an ad on on the radio for this new online this is 1994 mind you this new online world of advertising and marketing and selling products that was about to happen and he got very excited and he goes well I'm poor I don't mind being poor but maybe I could make some money and and still have my life and so he decides he's going to take all his computer skills and he's going to combine them with all that he learned in art and he's going to design a very aesthetic a very pleasing a very userfriendly site for selling products on the internet it ended up turning to something that Yahoo bought for $5 million back then and then he became a billionaire on and on and on he made a course correction kind of thing so it's possible it's very common scenario when you're 29 30 years old it's not so common when you're 40 but I have heard some stories it's pretty much I've never really heard it when you're in your 50s so tell me about that so what is it that makes it impossible is it just the people can't muster the will because they don't think they have enough working years left is nothing is impossible so I overstated the case but it's unlikely first of all you're said is it unlikely due to a char flaw or well as you get older you get rigid you think you know all the answers you're used to you have habits you my life isn't at all what I thought it would be I'm 50 years old but I know all the answers yeah that's terrifying yeah uh um I I have habits is you're not aware of it but you're not so fluid you're not so flexible you think you know what you know what what right path is you're not willing to admit your mistakes because then that throws open when you're when you're 30 you go okay I made eight years of mistakes when you're 50 I made 28 years of mistakes and that's a painful realization and we don't like to have painful realization what's your advice though to somebody like that because let me tell you if you and I are friends I'm dangerously close to 50 as it is but if I get to 50 and I'm like hey uh made a lot of mistakes picked the wrong path I I want you to kick me in the ass make sure that I don't just resign what would you say to somebody in that position well it's it's actually not so difficult because you have accumulated hopefully a set of skills maybe one skill maybe two skill maybe three skills if it were in the case of you it was creating a product marketing it then being a podcaster then creating this this Animated World then this educational stuff you've got four five sets of real skills there but you're not satisfied how can I take these skills and a package them and move in a different direction that is a new frontier for me that excites me that builds on what I have so it's actually an advantage in a weird way but the disadvantage is you're rigid you're set in your H in your ways you think you know the answers you're not so fluid anymore you're not willing to make a change in your thinking to going it's 2028 whenever you turn 50 I'm just speculating and uh the world is really different now it's not the way it was in 2012 when I was building my Empire etc etc am I willing to now face 2028 and the altered landscape which means altering how I think and how I adapt and not not being so said in ways like Robert Green is about AI maybe AI is a fantastic tool you know I realize my limitations I know I'm an old man I know I'm a dinosaur I'm aware of that but am I willing to shake myself up and go it's 2028 the world is different people are young they don't think the way I think anymore it's a whole new generation I have to I have to be sharp I have to alter my game I take those skills that I have I adapt it to this new world to this new AI Frontier I hate to say it kind of makes me nauseated but okay I have to adapt myself to this new frontier can I do it cuz when you get older it's hard to do that it's hard to say I'm dealing with a new generation I'm dealing with a new landscape I'm dealing with my own obstacles and my set ways of doing things can I overcome them you know kind of thing okay so if I did all that calculus and I was like yeah no I'm uh I'm done I don't I don't have it in me to keep going um what would you say well um you have to find energy and love in life and so maybe um there's something that you're doing that maybe isn't going to be so thrilling like this new career path that I'm saying but it will be more energizing you have to challenge yourself so a lot of um feeling stale and lifeless is you've run out of challenges you've conquered you've done with certain things but now it's it doesn't it's not you don't need to rise to the occasion anymore you've kind of reached this Plateau you need to create a challenge for yourself so within the business that you have that you've been doing whether you're working at a in an office for someone else or you've started your own business I'm going to do something a little bit bold I'm going to start a new Venture that's just like my old Venture based on all the same skills but it's a bit of a risk to take a risk to shake yourself up a little bit you know it's not a similar thing but with me and my books I never try and do the same book over right because I know if I did I'd be bored as hell I need challenges my mind is so active I can't even describe it's terrifying sometimes and if I am bored I don't have the energy and I get frustrated I get depressed so each book has to be different has to challenge me it has to go you've never done this before you might fail you might not make it what you thought you did you better you better be up to the challenge it excites me so if you're stale you need challenges doesn't mean you have to make a career change but you have to take some kind of risk if you come to me after this next book which I'm sure will be amazing and you even half reach towards the I'm tapping out Bell uh if you're just done and retired and you're super passionate to go travel or something like that cool I'm going to clap and I'll help you ring the bell but if you're doing it because some part of your spirit has been broken I'm going to be Hey listen this is an identity problem right now you are allowing yourself to be uh cowed by a terrible set of [ __ ] values and you need to right now decide what ought someone do with their life like what should you be doing with your life and this is where everybody [ __ ] hates moralizing but I think people need to moralize in their own life people need to have a sense of like what should life be like when we look at the landscape of a life well-lived what what ought it be for me you should be trying to ring every bit of potential out of your life so cool maybe your last book bored the [ __ ] out of you fine do something totally new I'm here for it but find something that's going to make you feel feel alive I have done jobs that made me feel the exact opposite and I would give up Creature Comforts I would give up money I would give up just about anything to feel alive and so when I watch people live lives of quiet desperation most men lead lives of quiet desperation thorow whoever said that so it's like hey no way like that is crazy people need bright lines in their life I I will never get addicted to drugs because I just would tell myself there's a bright line you can't do whatever substance more than twice a week three times a week whatever the second I'm doing it more than that I know that I have a violation and I'm going to immediately address it it's like if I'm feeling I'm not going to allow myself see how many people I can piss off with this I'm not going to allow myself to sit in depression I may not be able to stop myself from getting depressed but I'm not just going to allow myself to sit and wallow in it this goes back to I'm not going to trust my emotions I'm going to ask myself what my value system is is my value system that hey if you're suffering you just sit it no so it's like people need to address this stuff so having a biological experience there's something going on in in my brain in that case or gut and I need to address it and so figuring out what exactly that is and then making sure that I'm making changes based on value system frame of reference beliefs to ensure that I'm moving towards my North Star and I can only imagine if somebody doesn't know me and they're hearing this for the first time this is going to sound so paana everything in my life is because that's how I respond to everything every time I've had just a grotesque challenge uh yeah Jesus Christ the number of things that I've been through in 20 plus years of business uh it's crazy and inevitably you hit hard times brutal times soul sucking times whatever whatever and I have realized that all of my SE success is predicated on one simple thing never quit and I don't quit because I'm able to recharge Myself by going through the process that I just walk through should you come to me and say that yeah some part of my spirit has been broken well I don't think that'll happen you're not talking about me personally no I'm just saying like this is obviously at the end I'm talking to myself in all of this as a reminder to how I'd want to react but I really do try to frame episodes around okay there is a person watching the show they are in this case uh they're feeling hopeless they are being consumed by this moment in time and the realities of their life because I the most horrible thing about excuses is that they're valid and so people have valid reasons to feel hopeless but and now what like what are you going to do and so if people just allow themselves to sit in that that that is a value system problem you have to build a frame of reference that moves you towards your North Star and unless hopelessness is your North Star there's clearly a problem yeah yeah so um to me that North Star is a sense of purpose which makes everything else kind of fold into what you're talking about and fit so you don't need anything else so when you have a sense of purpose when you know what makes you unique when you know what your calling is in life then if you hit a moment where you want to quit you know all right I'm not going to quit I just need to go a slightly different direction here because I know that that this is what I was meant to do these are my strengths these are my good qualities Etc and you know I'm I don't like talking about myself so much but here I here I go talking about myself again um when I was in my mid 20s I was you know in my journalism career I was very unhappy it wasn't working for me I was depressed so I go and I leave and I go to Europe and I travel Europe and I had a heck of fun I was seducing I was seeing incredible things I was learning languages I was trying to write novels but I was poor and I was starting to get older and I was going God this isn't working and I got very depressed then I came back to Los Angeles and I go I know I'm going to become a screenwriter it's Hollywood hooray I'm going to make money but I'm going to write it's going to be fine I like theater it's going to be exciting I start going in I hate Hollywood it's soulless I'm not very good at it I start getting very depressed probably the most depressed I've ever been in my life at that point in my one-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica as I said I probably had moments where I was slightly suicidal I know I did I'm not wasn't slightly I was I was depressed and I was like God damn it what am I meant to do in life and then I had a fortuitous encounter with a man who produces books he asked me for an idea for a book and I kind of improvised the 48 loss of power and it all fell into place but my lesson is my long my long-winded story is I got depressed I got down on myself but I never gave up I kept saying I'm meant to write I'm a good writer I have a way with words I'm undisciplined I have flaws I'm not good at anything else but I can write I have a message I have something to say say and it kept me going it kept me going after all of these circumstances in which I think a lot of people would have given up at that point and I didn't give up because I had that inner voice saying you're meant to write you're you're good at it you've developed skill don't give up keep trying keep trying keep trying it picked me up every single time and so when I look at people and I go they don't have that and I understand that it's very sad because if they face situation like that they do they give up and then they they go funnel down a dark tunnel a dark path in life and so that's why I wrote Mastery I don't want you to get into that that downward syndrome I want you to see the fact that you have an overall frame an overall purpose that gives you that radar so when things are bad you don't give up you just say I need to make a slight course correction to where I'm going in life life yeah it's interesting I think people have a really hard time building out the road map I think that uh to be nearly 40 for things to not have worked out I think as you well know that's a very hard place for people to be in I think the scarier thing is to want to be a writer but you're not a good writer and I can imagine there's a lot of people that finally figure out okay this is what I was quote unquote meant to do but they actually suck at it it's very true and people have presented that to me as if it's like maybe a kind of a flaw in my theory and I and I and I knock my head against it and the only thing I can say is if you were young if you were three or four years old or five and you decided that you wanted to write then you would have built the right skill you would have known that because you had a flare you had a love of language and you realized it because you were reading books and you just were attracted to words and you would have built those skills you would have developed them but the reason you're a bad writer is you chose writing when you were 10 12 15 years old because you thought it was cool because you read a book you thought H this would be something you thought it was easy you thought I I write everybody writes I can become a writer I think you chose a false path now maybe I'm justifying that to myself but I I think if you had a true love of words you would have found yourself a niche to where you would have mastered you would have spent Life Time developing those skills like I spent 18 years more developing writing skills I was terrible I failed again and again but I was developing skills you weren't developing those skills because you were kind of half asked about it and that's why you failed it wasn't what you were meant to do and you know somebody once said Robert you talked about 10,000 hours which some people dispute is actually valid Theory blah blah blah which I think is [ __ ] but I've been painting since I was 18 years old I'm now in my 50s I've put in my 10,000 hours and I'm not Leonardo da Vinci what are you talking about well I go you put your 10,000 hours in over 33 years if you had put those 10,000 hours from the age of 18 to 24 and starved because you couldn't make a living instead of becoming Insurance Brokers which is what you are you would have developed those skills in that year you would have put the 10,000 hours in a condensed period of time but you didn't because you really heart wasn't into it your heart was into making money and being comfortable because to be an artist you have to be willing to starve I was asked by an online coach if they needed to build their own app in order to launch their business I told them what I'm telling you now focus on what you're great at and leave the tech to online tool Builders like kajabi with their allinone platform it's easy to turn your skills passions and experiences into online courses membership sites podcasts communities coaching and more and you get to keep 100% of your Revenue because everything is owned and controlled by you kajabi also has robust analytics easy payment options email marketing tools and customizable website templates all built in and right now Now kajabi is offering a free 30-day trial to start your business if you go to kajabi.com impact Theory that's K Aja bi.com impact Theory kajabi.com impact Theory and join the creators and entrepreneurs who have made over $6 billion to be a writer you have to be willing to be a failure and you have to be willing to be alone do you know how lonely it is is to be a rider you're not out there having drinks with friends going to parties you're in your goddamn office alone without any distractions you have to have a stomach for a loneliness for facing a blank piece of paper it's not easy and if you're not truly into it you won't make the effort to get over that mountain and develop the real skills so that's why I think people generally become like a mediocre writer 40 they go [ __ ] man Robert Green is wrong I I don't this isn't meant for me blah blah blah it's interesting I think all of that is true the only thing I disagree with is I don't think anybody's meant for anything I think there are definitely things you're going to get a disproportionate return on but I'll give you an example of a uh no longer super young man that I know uh who went to film School graduated thought he would get the three picture deal he didn't he went into business as a way to get rich so that he could build his own studio uh thought it would take 18 months it took 15 years and in the end he realized oh my God I spent 20 years plus now at this point uh this he is me um it's you oh yeah I always knew I wanted to be a Storyteller but I got to my mid-40s before I actually was able to put time and energy into doing it and so for you could certainly say that I made a whole series of bad choices it's hard to cry about it recording this in my fancy house uh but the reality is if I had to do it over again I would certainly do it differently and but the way that I approach it is that now I just need to get good at the thing so what I worry about is that what people are really doing is measuring themselves against a financial yard stick or they're measuring themselves against how that person has a bestselling book and I don't and my thing is okay you're asking yourself the wrong question the question people think they're supposed to ask themselves is what would I do uh if I knew I couldn't fail terrible [ __ ] question what you should be asking yourself is what would I do and love every day even if I were failing because hey the odds of you failing are very high but if you're pursuing something that you actually love and care about then it's like cool pour yourself into getting good at it value yourself for this sincere Pursuit maybe you never get there but man if you actually value yourself for the sincere Pursuit and you're pursuing something that you actually enjoy the doing of which is the only part of it I can guarantee because no one can guarantee success then cool you I won't say you can't lose but I will say that man do you take the sting out of that loss by being like I've really enjoyed this so for instance when I first founded impact Theory the number of people that offered me ownership in a company come run this new uh food company or whatever so I had so much credibility in that space and I turned them all down and they were why I'm starting a media company I'm going to beat Disney and everybody was like well that's dumb because you don't have any experience in that area you just had a historic exit from a food company you should be doing food and that would have made me more money but that would have also made me miserable and so I had to figure out what do I value myself for because if I build my self-esteem around money success accolades whatever I'm going to be miserable but if I build my self-esteem around the sincere pursuit of something that makes me feel alive cool now now we're in but you have to be very thoughtful about what you value yourself for okay a couple of things um so it's very hard to keep at something if you get no validation for it so if you want to write and I know this from personal experience and you never get anything published and or you get it and only a few people read it and you get bad reviews it's very hard to keep going it's very difficult to keep pushing and pushing and pushing right and so if you I actually believe that if you spend the time that apprenticeship phase and you are earnest about it and you're self-aware and you're looking not just at yourself and what you love but you're aware of what the world is and what the market is for books that you will find an audience that you will find a niche but you somewhere went wrong and where you went wrong was you didn't pay deep attention you didn't pay deep attention to your to where your business was going to the times to your audience and you failed in that way so it's not just a matter of the 10,000 hours it's also being aware of the cultural moment that you're living through and being just aware in general of how things are changing and what your audience is and what will feed the public right now as it is and so you failed at that and and if you hadn't guarantee that you'd be a successful author now as far as your story is concerned I have a much different take on it but I'm not you which is nothing you did was wrong everything you did was right and it and it was a link and a chain that led you to your mid-40s or you're about to have fantastic success so if you were 30 and you went through a different process and you go I'm just going to go right ahead into animation I'm not going to do this other stuff that's that distracted me I don't I don't know if I'm going correctly into your story but something else would have happened something else would have turned wrong but everything fits into place Amor Fati everything has a purpose You Were Meant To Go off into these side roads and discover yourself and you're tougher for it and you're stronger and you've learned incredible lessons that are now going into what will be a mega successful business I have that attitude because I think it's the best attitude to have have no regrets everything what I learned from so even my bad jobs and I've had do you know how many bad jobs I've had I've worked in in construction in Greece a miserable job I worked in a hotel I worked in a detective agency which might sounds like fun but it was very depressing I was a waiter I had a whole string of crap jobs I know what that's like you know but I learned from every single one of them I learned about human nature I learned about how horrible can people can be which went into the 48 Laws of Power I learned how manipulative people can be which went into the 48 Laws of Power I learned how to observe people I learned what I didn't love everything my motto in life on my Tombstone is everything is material everything is wood for the fire as to quote Marcus aelius it's all going into that fire and it's all for a reason and a purpose and maybe it's not true but it's the most beautiful philosophy you can adopt in life it's interesting um we have we are achieving the same outcome but viewing it incredibly differently so for me I I don't mind being wrong I don't mind having mistakes and so I don't mind and this may just be how we think about the word regret I don't mind having regrets I don't I don't mind that I would do it differently if I had to do it over um I can't do it over and I love the way my life turned out and I don't have a beef with it it's just I don't want to lie to myself and say uh oh no no I did it perfectly everything happens for a reason I don't think things happen for a reason other than that you when it when it goes Ary it is because I am dumb and did the wrong things uh that that is a reason um but yeah I don't know that doesn't bother me in fact I find it more empowering to say oh yeah I [ __ ] that up but I learned from it and so that was useful in the end anyway that's the same thing that I'm saying that's what I mean we've we've come to like the same conclusion but through a different means okay um because very much I I don't know why I rebel against the idea of Fate uh I suppose I can quote The Matrix and say I just hate the idea that my life is not in my control um so it's far more interesting to me to say oh things don't happen for a reason there is no net under this tight rope I'm walking on if I fall I may truly fall to my death things don't happen for a reason there is no grand plan here no one's coming to save me I have to do this myself and I won't do it perfectly I will make mistakes and so I'm not going to Value myself for doing things perfectly that's a suicide mission but I never said it it's perfect all the twists and turns of my life weren't perfect they were terrible they led to depression but they happened for a reason they made me stronger I learned from them so you can have a bad experience and you can throw your hands up in the air go damn it why did that happen I should have done something differently or you can go this is what Amor Fati means I can learn from it it happened for a reason it taught me something it taught me that this was the wrong thing I should do it taught me that I am intended to do something differently everything in life is a lesson is teaching me and I do believe in fate and I do believe in in do you believe your whole life is on Rails though no this that's mechanistic for me well there's a great book written by Robert Hillman that I recommend for everybody called the soul code and he explains in modern terms that's not so woo woo about what that fate can mean can you Channel it I'm getting tired and it's hard but I'll try um so you have your genetics okay you don't control your genetic makeup right it's sending you on a path you think that it's all luck and chance but no you you have genetics you have DNA that is controlling some of your behavior and it's setting you into patterns of behavior okay some of those patterns can be very positive and some of them can be negative but what you were what happens in life is kind of actually under your control and the Fate is saying that because it's something that is sort of inscribed in your genetic code it was meant for you to to happen that way and you see it and you actualize it and you make it a positive thing you discover what that seed is what you were meant to accomplish in life you realize your fate so there's a quote that I use in Mastery by pindar I hope I can remember um see who you are by becoming who you are so you see what your fate is and you become that fate and you realize it by your self-awareness so a lot of people don't realize what they were meant to accomplish in life and then they they're just failures and that's what their fate is right but I realized what my fate was it guided me it didn't mean I was destined to work at Esquire magazine when I was 23 years old and and hated didn't mean that I was destined to work for this director in Hollywood and have a terrible experience it just meant that I was faded to have paths in life that didn't lead to what I wanted and I would realize and go I need to keep doing this it meant I was meant to be a writer and I hung on to it I'm not giving robbert Hillman justice as I said I'm kind of tired but that's that's how I look at it it's not this woow woo thing that everything in life is determined do you understand the difference I do I feel like um for me it's almost certainly just semantics there might be some uh real thing that I just don't like cuz clearly Robert your life's amazing so if that's the way that you have dealt with everything uh then that's phenomenal and it works for you and the last thing I'd want to I'm not trying to convince you my way is right I'm just um laying out the way that resonates with me is that I like to remind myself that sometimes things go wrong because I was stupid and I didn't think about it properly um I'm not it wasn't faded for me I don't need to love what happen happened I can just say cool learn from this and so there is a a self I'm poking in the ribs to remind myself hey if you go on autopilot again odds are you going to make that same mistake so you need to be we're just arguing over semantics because we're saying the same thing in the end okay maybe I think we are we'll see there could be second and third order consequences I'm not anticipating but yeah look no I think that we ultimately get keep getting to the same place through a slightly different means yeah cuz I'm not saying that my mistakes were perfect I'm just saying that they it's the same thing we're just are we should we should move on here because I believe we're saying the same thing it's just that I am stupid I have flaws I make mistakes but I learn from them I realize that they happen for a reason and they're teaching me something about myself so we're saying the same thing I believe yeah it's interesting I want to let it go but you use the words it's teaching me and I think it's important for people to understand it's not going to teach you [ __ ] you're going to have to learn like you have to be the active participant in this it won't happen by accident anyway we'll stop there with that yeah but if if if you're aware of what you were meant to accomplish in life you will learn yeah I don't agree with that all right all right so interesting uh so what's that arante what does that mean that means just forward in Spanish okay perfect forward we go uh let's let's build people back up we've talked a lot about the problem we've talked about how you can find yourself in in some pretty Dire Straits um so for me it would be all right you have to figure out where you want to go you have to know that with with a Clarity that's terrifying yeah you have to have a set of values and beliefs that are going to essentially force you to act in the ways you would need to act in order to accomplish that um what's your setup for people if they want to well the problem with with how you laid it out is it sounds kind of dire it sounds kind of dreary man I have to go through all of that yes that's like man I don't it's not even worth it I'm just going to give up I'm just going to keep smoking pot it's a lot more fun if that were true I'd leave people alone I think what I try to appeal to people is it's fun when you figure it out life becomes thrilling it becomes an adventure you know that okay I'm in my 20s I I can go out and have fun I can waste some time I can have this adventure but I'm learning from it and it's helping me grow and I know that I have a sense of direction so you know if you want to be um be a great basketball player or a chess master in the beginning it's tedious it's boring it's hell you're frustrated 5 years down the line it's kind of getting easier and better 10 years down the line you're able to shoot 60% on three-point shots you become a a Grandmaster or whatever the step below that is you're having fun it's exciting so following this path is actually the most thrilling thing you can be on because you're not going to do it if you think it's all drudgery and pain and I've got to spend so many years self-sacrificing not being able to no man you're going to have fun overcoming challenges getting good at something is the greatest high you can have if you want to be an entrepreneur and you're 23 years old and you go nah I'm not really ready for it I need to go back to business school okay no you start your business now and it fails and it's painful and you go [ __ ] I don't know then you go I'm going to do it again because I learned some terrible lessons and you do it again and it succeeds and this is like 7 years later man what a feeling you've overcome yourself you you've mastered your own weaknesses you're having fun people are admiring you you have the attention that you want women are flocking to you whatever you want to however you want to say it it's a high it's great so mastering something becoming great figuring out what you want to do is not painful it's the most fulfilling decision you can ever make and it involves some tedium it involves a couple some years of frustration but if you can if you can delay immediate gratification if you can say it'll come to Something in three or four years if I'm focused if I'm energized then you're going to reap the rewards I guarantee you because that's how the human brain is structured so I like to flip the script and make it seem like something that's incredibly fun and that's why I wrote Mastery where the last two chapters are about being creative and about the feeling of being a master at something where you have an intuitive feel it's like a superpower at that point and it's an incredibly intoxicating sensation and I set it up that way because I wanted you to realize that this is a goal that you can have and it's incredibly it'll give your life a sense of direction so um I just want you to feel that there's another path even in these miserable times even with all the problems there is a path that will lead to something so different and it'll turn your life around and and I I mean I know it's hard to convince people with words and that's why I wrote that book but I honestly believe that powerlessness yeah corrupts more than power yeah it's a quote of Malcolm X actually okay tell me more well um so we all desire a degree of power and control in life and you have to understand the word power is not just like about politics or about Elon Musk or anything I'm talking about in our day-to-day Liv Liv right how we interact with people the sense that I cannot influence my boss my colleagues my wife my children the people around me is deeply deeply miserable for us right it makes us feel powerless and when we're powerless we either we turn in on ourselves we end up hating ourselves and we get depressed or we become passive aggressive and we start manipulating other people in way ways in which we can justify to ourselves as oh no I'm not really doing that I'm actually a good person but it's actually can be very very harmful so you have to admit that you want a degree of power you want the the ability to influence people and you're not going to be hypocritical you're going to be honest with yourself you know niceness is okay is a good quality if it's under control if you understand it and if you use it and you know how to use it strategically and it's maybe it's a part of your personality it's authentic but it doesn't govern you you are in control of it and what happens is if you're the pleasing type which is your whole strategy in life is pleasing other people getting them to like you which is you know a quality that a lot of people have men and women right it doesn't come from a place of security it comes from a place of deep deep insecurity you're not you don't understand really who you are and so you can't control it and so so you're always trying to please people and when we can sense we can smell people's insecurities and when it comes to like seduction with between men and women women have a sick sense of they can smell an insecure man right and you can they can smell it in you they can smell it in all kinds of ways and trying so hard to please and trying so hard to be nice secretly indicates that you're actually very weak inside and it's very much a turnup is very anti- seductive and so you want to be nice but you want to be strategic about it you want to know sometimes I don't want to be nice sometimes I want to show create boundaries sometimes I want to pull back I want to play the coet I want the woman to know she does she can't take me for granted right I'm not interested in her the moment you show her that you're not interested in her she's going to be much more interested in you you're willing to play a little bit that tough part of it you're in control you're strategic you know when to use absence and when to use presence when to to text them and call them and when to disappear for a c a week or so and make them feel like they don't you know they they can't take you for granted so know when to be nice and you can use it to to effect but you also know when I don't want to be nice in this world and that pertains to all sort of situations and negotiation Etc if you're always so nice in business you're you're going to be a doom you're not going to survive very long I come at this from a evolutionary perspective and so the reason because I was so bad with women for so long and then figured out how to quote unquote play the game and it worked literally on a dime from what literally from one day to the next I could not be successful with women to I felt like within my sexual market value let me not oversell this but within my sexual market value I could be successful sort of when I wanted to be and it it was so it was such a set of rules that I was following that I actually had to laugh out loud I was like I cannot believe it took me this long to just figure out that oh I have to present myself a certain way that uh you don't want to go for the cloth right away that you really this is about um a strategic revealing of your personality it's about understanding what's going to get them exciting you might hate this description but it's marketing once you understand that you're a brand you have to establish what your brand means you have to make them feel some kind a way about you the way that you're establishing your brand better be real and one of the things I'm sure we'll talk about today is I take all of this I I've been married to the same woman for 21 years we've been together for 23 to me that we had to seduce each other in the beginning and then at some point that becomes a a deep long-term pair bond which is a totally different game and I really hope everybody can get good at both games because that's really how you end up having an amazing love life that will ride with you through the ups and downs but seduction is real people need to stop pretending that it's not from my perspective this is based on Evolution that women and it's interesting because I think you pushed back a little bit on looking at the 30,000 foot view of men and women I'll make a case for it if you hate it tell me you hate it but here's my case there's a quote I forget who it's by forgive me whoever said this this is a paraphrase any individual woman is a mystery but taken as a whole they're a mathematical certainty was technically said about men but you get the idea and that makes sense to me and so I you're right like ultimately I had to figure out my wife I didn't just have to figure out women as a general thing I had to figure out my wife but every time I think of my wife as thinking like me I can't predict her behavior the second I lump her in the mathematical certainty of women are like this then I'm way closer to being able to predict her behaviors and so I think it's very important understand the distinction between how men think and how women think what we fantasize about how we approach sex what we think of as seductive but you're not going to get that from a book so you can read all of the facts about this is how women think etc etc the best way to do that is by observing them so if you pay attention to the person that you're trying to if you P if you start paying attention to women as young ear at the earliest possible age you will see these qualities in them you will see the fact that they are interested more in stories that they want that they don't want to be feel like it's just about sex and you're in a hurry to get them to that point these aren't great Mysteries that you need to read from a book it's pretty clear if you pay attention right so I just want to get men out of the M because we are so goddamn analytical it's such a problem that reading a book reading a text having algorithms is the only way we can think get the [ __ ] out of there and pay attention to the person develop your your mirror neurons develop your observational skills develop the human part of you that observes that feels what the other person is feeling if you depend so much on things that you've learned from The Art of Seduction or from a book it's going to make you a bad Seducer but to the degree that you can click into those human qualities that we all possess where you sense the emotional tone of the other person you sense what their vulnerable vulnerabilities you sense what they're missing in life yes maybe 60% of women are missing a similar thing that there are patterns to and maybe reading about it can kind of click that into you okay fine I'm not going to say that that's all bad but the main thing you want is to be getting out of your head and into your emotions and into observing and into feeling what the other person is feeling and not being so head oriented not being so analytical you know that I think is the main problem that a lot of men face it's really interesting my experience was I needed to understand it analytically because I didn't have the intuition for it and it may be that I just didn't look I don't believe people are born with intuition I think that it develops over time so for whatever weird reason the intuition I developed was that if I wrote poetry and showed up with flowers on the first date which I actually did multiple times uh that that would get me somewhere and it did not get me anywhere I was actually once this is where you ask any kids listen in the car to you turn the radio down whatever uh but this is a true story I was in bed with a woman we were getting naked we were rounding third base and I managed to mess that up because I displayed what I will call uh at a moment where I should have been confident and uh masculine you might hate that word but um I displayed what I will now God I don't even like saying this out loud but it's true uh I displayed a more feminine trait and was like let's not go any farther unless this means something which isn't what I was feeling those exact words which isn't what I was feeling it was what I thought she wanted to hear and it was not and it put the breakes on the whole situation well it's very easy to explain why that would happen because that makes her think that oh maybe he's not so into it maybe I'm not that attractive women secretly want to feel that you desire them that you're that she is so attractive that you're going to lose control and you didn't lose control in that moment and you blew it you [ __ ] it up so it's very obvious why that didn't work yeah obvious to you now where were you back then Robert Green uh because I still want to punch myself in the mouth for that entire evening so yeah less and learn we've all made mistakes like that though yeah I'm going to guess that that one's pretty bad uh so what I had to really begin to understand was what women actually were going to respond to and not the Terrible assumptions that I had built up in my mind yeah and what I began to realize is that um there are things that women want that don't they are not the same as what I want and so when I started realizing okay making that person my like what you just said you're losing control making and that's where I think you get like the billionaire archetype of okay this is somebody that has everything that is normally this you actually talk about this in your book you say normally men get completely lost and what I think you refer to as masculine Pursuits how often are you checking your credit score afraid of identity theft or account breaches we all use the internet every single day for important things like Personal Banking and remote work so why not protect yourself with our sponsor Aura Aura is an all-in-one cyber security service that keeps you safe online Aura identifies data Brokers exposing your info and submits opt out requests on your behalf Ora also monitors your credit tracks your pass passwords for data breaches and secures your online activity with VPN and anti malware protection you can try Aura for free for 2 weeks by clicking the link in the description or scanning the QR code and so I read that to mean hyper pursuit in business being myopically focused on something working yourself to death which certainly resonates with the life my wife is living right now where I I work an obscene amount now if you ask my wife what does she want she'll say quality time which is another way of saying I want this person who's made a ton of money who's at the top of the business Heap I want him to stop all of that because I'm so irresistible that he's only going to pay attention to me and the way that makes her feel when I'm just completely focused on her I'm not touching my phone I'm not my mind isn't wandering I am locked in on her I'm making her feel physically attractive I'm making her feel the truth which is she is my mental equal like all of that that she's a woman I have to contend with that she's captured my imagination that she has taken this wild stallion as evidenced in and I don't mean stallan Studley I just mean this unbroken cult that is you know off running in the world of business she's gotten a saddle on me slowed me down got me to pay attention to her I mean this is the Beauty and the Beast mythology where she is so special that she has been able to capture the attention of the person who never had their attention captured before now I've never thought about this before I've only ever told my wife uh that I love you I've never told that to another woman because I was never in love before so for my wife it really was the um what in literary circles they call in erotic literary circles they called the magic hoo-ha so for my wife she was the only one that was able to break me out of that she's the only person that's ever gotten me to slow down in my ambition to pay attention to her and once I could see it from not just my wife's perspective but the general that's what women are looking for perspective and I was like oh wow like I really get now why she wants my attention that that isn't something I should be frustrated by that yeah this is even now 23 years in it's a seductive tool that I can play which is you've completely capture my attention like if I see my wife and she's looking good I'm going to stop whatever I'm doing and tell her and make sure she knows and feels it viscerally and all of that required me to understand just the psychology of the whole situation mhm I have no problem with that is it something that I seem to have disagreed with no not at all that's just me um appealing to the nice guys out there of I get you either may it may be insecurity which mine was certainly driven by that or you may think it's a winning strategy I get that but it isn't well one thing that I think is very seductive that I can point out here and it has a little bit to do with what you're saying is what I call generosity generosity is is a very powerful seductive quality it doesn't mean money as as you might necessarily assume it can mean money but it means that you're generous with your attention you're generous with with what you're G giving to the other person right so you know the main thing for a man who's we tend to be very linear focused mono focused on this one thing and there's an evolutionary reason for that for tens of thousands of years hunting we had to just focus on one thing women were focusing on many different things at the same time you know they're they're they could multitask we can't um so getting out of that mono rail that you're in with your attention and being able to give to the other person and give them attention and in the initial phases sh them with the attention that they're not getting from other people although you can go a little too far with that so you sometimes you have to step back and kind of be absent for a little bit so they they don't feel like it's you're not like a stalk you're not like it doesn't come from an insecure place you're in control of it but the sense of being generous with your personality with the time with the attention you get is incredibly credibly seductive the sense that you're not generous and stingy with money you like take them to a cheap restaurant you ask them to pay you're kind of you know you that's a sign that you're not generous in general so uh maybe that's part of the the billionaire appeal where you assume that that person's going to be very generous at least with their money so the sense of being closed inside yourself and stingy and not wanting to give to the other person give of your time your attention your money all these other things that is deeply deeply anti seductive what do you do you think that we're living in a time right now that is complicated in a negative way by um changing gender Norms I don't know if I want to get into that that Hornet's Nest but um you know in seduction I I I make it clear and I made it clear in my human nature book that we're a mix of qualities that nobody is complet completely masculine and no woman is completely feminine men have feminine qualities women have masculine qualities some men have more feminine qualities than masculine some women V we're a mix it's a chemical thing and there's no way to predict that right and it's always been that way but um there's ways that kind of element of androgyny for instance can be very very seductive and very powerful if you know how to use it right so I'm not going to say that um that's overly complicating things in fact the sense of kind of crossing boundaries with gender is actually a sign of some of the periods in history where thing where things were the most open to seduction so for centuries women could not seduce men and I you I can I can delineate that period I mean going through all throughout ancient history and I talk about it my new book because to be interested in a woman so much that you wanted to give them attention and time meant that you were feminine right and men were masculine they were warriors etc etc they weren't interested in the inner worlds of women women were there to clean the house and to make babies essentially so seduction was not something that really existed in the ancient world except with some exceptions like Cleopatra Etc so the idea that you're interested in a woman and in her world is already admitting there's a feminine element within you and so I look at moments in history and I just wrote about this like in the Middle Ages where our whole notion of Love Came From at least the Western notion or you look in the 18th century the grand epic of of Seduction with Casanova and all those characters you look at the 1920s in America and in Europe a period of incredible Sexual Energy freedom and seduction these were periods where there was a lot of androgyny going on so I don't necessarily think that that's something that's going to limit the the seductive qualities and the energy that's in the atmosphere I think what's hindering us is not the gender Norms it's more our kind of defensiveness our closed Spirit our desire to be completely in control of of our circumstances by by withdrawing into our egos and being afraid of of being hurt being afraid of being wrong being afraid of of not being strong etc etc I think that has more more an inhibiting Factor on on seduction in the world why do you think young people are having so much less sex right now well for men a lot of it has to do with porn I mean I'm not sure I'm not a scientist I'm not a sociologist but that would be my estimation where first of all they're having a lot of sex virtually and second of all they're IDE a of sex and what is pleasurable what a what a woman should be like comes from those ideals in pornography and the look etc etc and so it's not as much of a need for them Etc to to kind of physically we become much more virtual in how we get pleasure in life um also I think there's an element of fear as I said I mean young people have grown up in these in these periods of massive uh economic in stability they've had to deal with the' 08 collapse with the pandemic and everything that's happened there so they've had to deal with circumstances that are very powerful and that are going to make them anxious as well as all of the helicopter parenting that many of them had to to live through so they're filled with much more anxiety right now than I think in my generation and that anxiety makes you want to kind of retreat into your own inner world and having sex at least for a man and you can probably relate to this it's a feeling of you're almost like it's almost like too much you're almost like weak afterwards you're almost like afraid of it you're afraid of the power that a woman has over you right you obviously get over that very quickly and you deal with it but there's an element of fear involved and especially when you're in adolescent especially when it's when you're younger and so I think the levels of fear and anxiety that young people are having in the world and rightly so I don't condemn that for that is probably why there's less physical ex sexual and psychological interactions with members of the opposite sex yeah I think it's inevitably going to be a very complicated issue and like you I'm not a scientist but um I am always willing to talk about things that I know nothing about just to walk people through how I think about a problem uh so looking at it I think that a big part of the problem is what you're talking about with insecurity I think that the way the world is set up right now whether it's um pornography whether it is uh a society that's really spent the last several decades telling men that they their masculine impulses are bad and for better or worse I think that sexuality male sexuality is tied up in power and I think sex itself is uh dances around power dynamics it's one of the the main things in female erotica is power dynamics and it man you want to dive into a hornet's nest like power dynamics people get real weird about this subject um but with all of that if men are either because the economy is weird and they're not able to get on the property ladder and they've got you know $180,000 in debt and they don't feel like they're going anywhere and they're lost in a sense of hopelessness they have easy access to pornography um they're just not feeling powerful and if they're not feeling powerful then they're going to uh struggle to feel confident in the bedroom and I mean just to really put it all out there um I think a guy has to feel confident and Powerful not in a weird like I'm a dominant way but strong and confident rooted in his body and feeling good about himself to get and maintain an erection like you're not going to see a lot of people who are insecure scared uh sporting erections those are sort of flip sides take a lot of viagara or something I guess but do you really think like I would be surprised it just that puts you in and also just bodies right so diet nutrition hour so horrible that I have to imagine a lot of people are just physically not in a place where they're feeling good about themselves uh you wrap that all up and you get to what I'm is the tip of a very large iceberg that I've grossly oversimplified but no no no I think you you touched upon a point that's very valid I and I didn't touch upon I think it's very true is that um it's it's not a good time to be a man right now it's very confusing you know our role models are very mixed up we don't really know what is a positive virtue for a man we think that we look at somebody like Andrew Tate as possibly an icon a lot at least a lot of young people do which I don't at all I think that's I think it's really gross and vulgar and full of all kinds of insecurities a man like that a kind of an icon sort of a sense of strength from either a political figure a leader or an actor or anything that used to be in the culture we don't really have that and men are are seen as something kind of ugly in our culture you know it seems like ugly energy that comes from men and every time I read the newspaper I I see that kind of that kind of slant on things that anytime a man is sort of revealing a kind of atavistic trait of being kind of dominant and strong ill ugly oh he's you know he's awful he's he's primitive he's not you know etc etc and so it's very very confusing and I remember being a young man myself growing up I'm such an old person that I can remember like the late 60s you know and it was kind of confusing then and I was struggling and I had a good role model with my father father he was very he was very gentle but he was also quite masculine Etc and I remember being confused about it and kind of straining and trying to find a proper masculine role model and it was a struggle and and I found it sometimes with my teachers my professors in school and other people I later gravitated to but the sense of this is what it means to be a man these are good qualities the quality of being a leader of being strong of even being kind of dominant and being able to dominate a group and dominate a room or to be so powerful that your voice can carry these are all positive traits we wouldn't be here right now Tom Talking you and I if men didn't have those traits right if they didn't have the courage to face you know enemies with Spears etc etc these are all positive qualities just have to be channeled in in socially productive ways which is what an Andrew Tate doesn't do but if only we could craft a Frankenstein monster of what an ideal male figure would be like it would be very very helpful for young men and I don't mean to craft it in a fantasy way it would be great if there were really people like that you know in this world today so you know um to me a masculine quality is a kind of inner strength a confidence that doesn't need to yell it doesn't need to scream it doesn't need to bully people it's just so strong that people are attracted to it and it emanates it radiates itself and people can feel it you know so you don't have to yell at someone I remember when I was at on the board of directors of American Apparel and the CEO um who we ended up firing he was a good friend of mine he's brilliant in some things but he could he was yelling at people left right and Center he thoughts that's what power is that's what being masculine is and I thought it just showed incredible weakness the ability to set an example to tell people this is how you should be by how I'm behaving Etc take taking responsibility these are that's a masculine quality not blaming other people we need to redefine what it means to be masculine and what are the positive aspects of it I think is very very critical for our culture talk to me about aggression I think men should have a gear that is aggressive should be a gear I don't think they should live there what do you think completely I mean and you know my wife can attest this I'm an insanely compe person right to the degree that it's almost maybe unhealthy right so like I'm bicycling up a hill and people pass me God damn it you can't pass me I'm going to pass you even though right now I can because I'm physically weaker I'm still trying to do that on my stupid recumbent bike Etc I'm very very competitive and that competitive energy I think a lot of men have it's what directs us towards Sports you know and I'm I'm a Sports Addict Etc compet being competitive is aligned with being ambitious and getting back to seduction a man who seems ambitious is very very seductive and having no ambition is very unmasculine and very anti- seductive but we have we see the word ambition as being kind of ugly as if it's like egocentric as if it's selfish but Dam this world was built by people who are ambitious they created it right you wouldn't be here you wouldn't have the internet you wouldn't have all your little tools that you whine and complain about if it weren't for people who were incredibly ambitious ambitious people have created the world so men have aggressive energy it's the testosterone flowing through us right you can't you can't repress it you can't get rid of it it's there and how you Channel it is the key you can become very self-destructive you can Channel it towards violence you can Channel it towards pushing people around or you could say I'm going to I'm going to channnel it towards being competitive to towards being the best person at what I'm doing we talked I think last time I was here when I talk about the human nature we talked about Kobe Bryant a man who had a dark side he is so competitive to the degree would could have killed him it was just awful and he acknowledges it he channeled it into the basketball court and it made him Fant made him the one of the greatest players ever it's how you take that energy that testosterone that aggression and what you do with it that's the critical factor and that's where I think a lot of men are confused about it for the people out there who believe that their life is boring and that they're wasting it what trap have they fallen into and what advice do you have for them to get out of that sense well you were talking to me about we were talking earlier about diet and problems with your health and you're saying get at the root cause so you have to get at the root cause of your boredom and most often and you're looking at it superficially you're thinking I just don't have enough stimulation in my life I need to travel more I need to get rid of my girlfriend or boyfriend and find a new relationship my career is bothering me I need to change jobs that's the superficial way of dealing with the problem it's deeper you have to look at yourself and you have to see the possible root causes of what is making you bored a lot of it is the fact that you are looking for external stimulation whereas looking Inward and seeing who you are and what drives you and what your motivations are what makes you different you were talking about diet and how all the intricacies and how each person responds to Foods differently and it's very inexact science well you are an individual and you have your own little weirdness and everything about you is different and you have all these little grains inside of you that react differently to things you don't know who you are you're alienated from yourself you're alienated from your nature you're finding career paths that don't suit you just like I might be eating things that don't suit me I'm sorry to keep going back to that no right you're getting in you're involved with people that don't suit you you don't know who you are you don't know your core your essence you don't know what ex really excites you what Abraham maslo calls impulse voices you have these little voices inside of you that are saying I like this I love this this is what excites me you're not listening to them that's drowned out by social media by your parents by everybody else so you don't know who you are and because of that you choose things that aren't right for you and when you choose things that aren't right for you you're not engaged emotionally and when you're not engaged emotionally you get bored and you get restless and you reach for got to travel to Bali got to start playing the guitar I got to quit my job I've got to go find a new you know a model to start dating or whatever you don't and it doesn't it ends up like you do it and for a week or two it's exciting and then it doesn't lead any to anything lasting and then you you're bored and you're restless and you go on to the next thing it's exactly what I'm writing about right now in my book on the supply I'm just quoting the chapter I just wrote I love that I actually didn't I mean I know that you're writing about the sublime I had no idea that it was about that specifically I know how could you so true and in fact I I want the the viewers to hear that I am desperate for your next book to come out I really do think of you as a legend man rereading the daily laws and prep for this I am freaked out by how accurately you get a certain aspect of the Human Condition so with that in mind is it that people don't have the balls to look at who they really are is it just that things are getting drowned out and they don't know how to create the silence like why is it so hard for people to understand themselves well it's hard and our default position is to take the path of least resistance about what is easy you know so right now um and I should hardly talk but PE people are extremely interested in drugs right in like psychoactive drugs mushrooms that trust me I did a lot of that in my 20s I have nothing against it right but you have the capacity in you to be continually high on life to almost have a drug-like effect we have these remark arable senses with our ability to pick up colors etc etc you could be continually tripping you don't need drugs your brain is wired for this kind of this kind of interaction with life that doesn't feel true to me so how do we tap into that what am I well because it takes effort whereas popping a pill whereas just doing the easy thing whereas looking at yourself and introspecting requires effort and it requires pain right because when I look at myself as I do with my meditation every morning God Robert you've got a lot of problems man why do these thoughts keep popping up you think you're so great but you're not so great your your mind is veering towards these Petty issues let's work on this right so my meditation this morning this very morning I was thinking my problem Robert is you don't let go you've got to let go and I just kept repeating myself let go let go let go every time a thought came in I was like all right let go of it okay but it painful because you realize what your what Your blocks are what your limitations are what you're doing wrong we don't want to face ourselves it's so much easier to look externally to look out in the world to find a guru or a coach who will help you to find a book that will help you to find a drug that will help you to find some kind of to go on online porn you know anything as opposed to looking Inward and seeing who you really are yeah so looking Inward and seeing who you are is definitely heavy it's definitely hard it is also I would say the thing that leads most assuredly to success now the reason that I say that is I have found that by acknowledging my own pettiness is my insecurities all of that I can better understand other people when I can better understand other people I can better navigate the world yeah so the method that I use to figure that out is when I feel something uncomfortable I one I distrust my emotions so I don't just think oh I have an emotion I should enact it I'm like M that may have a a dark underbelly I want understand I uh my wife and I were arguing and she says something that just makes me so pissed off and I'm like what the [ __ ] how dare you like I cannot believe that you would say whatever it is that she said and what I learned early in our marriage was anytime time I had that impulse she had tripped an insecurity of mine right but if I didn't know that I was insecure about it I would get the surface level em motion it felt so real it just felt like she had said something she shouldn't say and I would never take the time to figure out why shouldn't she say that and so the emotion gave me righteous indignation I would push back on hey why' you say that and never get into oh I see I'm super insecure about this thing which is what's triggering the emotion so it's what she and I call arguing about the tea so you're at the surface level going back to your early point you stop at the the part that's easy to identify I am angry because I am angry then I just do what the anger tells me to do which is push back shut her down get her to take it back whatever rather than go whoa like why does that bother me so much but in understanding why it bothers me then I'm like okay now I see this is an insecurity so when I see somebody get angry at me I'm like oh [ __ ] they're insecure about this that's interesting and so now let's drill into and why are you insecure I mean look there are certain conversations where you're never going to ask that but it's it gives a lot more clarity which is why I ask like I think it's that the reason people don't identify what's really going on inside of them is twofold one it takes a certain level of understanding about the human animal just generically about the way emotions come about Etc ET and then testicular fortitude to look at something and say oh man I'm not as cool as I wish I were yeah right so how do we get beyond that well um you know you don't have to read books about human nature or or or make it a study just look at yourself and you'll find out all that you need to know right you'll know that you have the flaws that you naturally think you see in other people so I always find when people are particularly angry about some character trait in me or others they're actually more often than not projecting unconsciously they have the same trait so God damn it that person's a narcissist well you're not that's your way of kind of hiding from yourself your own narcissism so by looking at yourself you're inevitably going to see your flaws and your limitations which was the whole subject of the laws of human nature we have these negative qualities built into the way are we evolved as human beings right we evolved a million years ago under circumstances that are completely different now that don't have any relationship that aren't functional to the high-tech worlds that we live in and so we have a lot of qualities that that constantly create problems for ourselves okay you think that it's other people that have these problems you think other people people are aggressive other people are passive aggressive other people are self-absorbed no you have all of these traits as well okay so it's painful right and if you know one thing about human beings if there could be one law about human behavior and it's true I suppose of every animal we avoid anything painful and we Veer to what it's pleasurable or easy okay so how do you overcome that that's your million-dollar question that you're asking sometimes you have to hit rock bottom sometimes you have to go nothing is working in my life I'm miserable I'm depressed my career isn't going in the right way okay maybe I'm the source of it and when you hit rock bottom you're willing to take anything the pain of looking at yourself isn't maybe as bad as the hole that you've dug yourself into okay the other way is you don't necessarily have to hit rock bottom but you are really motivated to change your life right you you're Ambi ious you want to be successful you want to have some degree of power we're a social animal you want to get along with people you want to know how to navigate these complicated social environments that we inhabit right and so it's not working for me right now I'm getting in my own way okay so I have to step back and I have to look at myself and I have to study who I am and I have to do some heavy work on myself now nobody says that's easy if it were easy everybody would be doing it and we'd be living in Paradise but we obviously don't right do you think it's a an intellectual level that people have to be at in order to do that or is there a process that people can run to figure this out I'm a big believer that intellect is vastly overrated that we are emotional animals the problem is emotional I hate to keep saying it but I'm about to be giving a talk in a few weeks and this is exactly what I'm giving my talk about which which is you have to change your orientation right your problem is emotional not intellectual our first U when we're having a problem our first because what I'm I'm I'm giving a talk about is how to deal with change in the world whenever we think that we we don't understand something or we're having a problem we think that knowledge is the answer we have to accumulate more knowledge it's intellectual we have to know more data we have to read studies we have to understand these things better the problem is emotional the reason you can't deal with change or you're not looking at yourself is you have emotional blocks you're full of fear and we're turning away from the emotion is it that we're turning away from the emotion that causes the problem like why is being emotional stalling people out it's not being emotional that's stalling people out it's the kind of emotions that you that are kind of blocking you so there are emotions that are very positive like confidence like boldness like fearlessness like openness to experience adventurousness these are all brilliant expansive emotions I contrast expansive emotions with constricting emotions ego pettiness fear impatience that Clos you down and narrow the scope of what you're willing to try out okay so fear I compare it to a tree fear is the root of all of this and the branches we find impatience we find ego you know we find is all of this The Human Condition or the fear of change or the inability to change well you know we are anxious creatures by Nature it's kind of built into our system as well and so we're kind of primed to feel fear Etc but these things are subtle so you're not aware that fear is the source of your problems right because you're not attuned to who you are you think that it's um because I don't know enough about the world or other people are blocking me or I wasn't I didn't get good enough education blah blah blah blah blah right it's hard to see the effects of fear because it's very subtle it's going to block you in ways that you're never really aware it's like this kind of poisonous gas that you can't see and it's seeping into you so getting back to what I'm talking about how you deal with change which is an incredibly important issue particularly in the world now that's changing so quickly right you have to be able to be open to what's happening in the present Mo moment with people with events etc etc but because of fear you're slipping further and further behind you're lit locked in the past you think that ideas that you had um are are exactly what's happening you're not paying attention to the things that are around you because pay attention is hard and it's difficult and it means letting go of some of your most cherished ideas about the world and just being open to experience so with people for instance let's say I'm working with you Tom right and we've been working together for a year or so I have a certain impression of you right probably from our first interactions and that impression kind of freezes in my mind mind and as I'm dealing with you I'm always sort of seeing this kind of image that I have of you and I'm not paying attention to who you are in the moment how you are changing how things are adapting maybe my first impression was wrong maybe you're actually quite different but that takes some courage that takes some effort to be alive in the moment to say I don't know I don't know Tom Bila I don't really know who he is I don't know what motivates his behavior I need to pay attention but the idea that I know the answer actually stems from Fear So In This Moment of radical change so I I think there's two things at play I'd be very interested to see what you think of this so I think we're living through a very um weird moment as the the Chinese um proverb I'm not even sure what to call it but may you live in interesting times supposedly meant as a curse I think we're living in interesting times and I mean that as a curse and uh when I think about it I think that a lot of what's playing out is some change is bad and and I consider myself hyper malleable it's one of either my greatest strengths or my greatest weakness I'm not entirely sure in fact when you started off by saying you have a hard time letting go I have the exact opposite problem uh I find it very easy to let go of anything everything my identity all of it like it to a point where it it may border on not useful but anyway so you've got we're living in a time where I don't think all change is good and then on top of that I think that when people feel weak no when people are weak they have a feeling that ah like things are not going the way that I want they don't understand that their fear is coming from weakness and actual inability to be effective in the world and because they have the will to power in the nich way they begin grabbing on to whatever tool they have at their disposal and right now the thing that people are using is shame and shouting people down effectively and so mix and this is super complicated with social media and all that but those two things and I'm just beginning to like think through this so thank you for letting me think out loud but those feel like the the twin heads of this Dragon right now what are the twin heads again some changes bad so some things that are happening are actually we're going in the wrong direction and then some of the um lashing out that people are doing is because they are weak and they don't know a positive way to navigate the world to manifest the will to power in a way that has to do with personal responsibility getting better at moving through the world so instead they use the easier tools which are shouting people down which makes them feel powerful but in reality is fear of their ideas but they don't know how to get stronger in their own convictions they don't know how to be open-minded to learn and so new ideas scare them some ideas actually are bad but they feel weak and so now they're just lashing out somewhat blindly yeah of course um some changes are not good but in in the larger picture of it change I believe has an inherently positive quality to it because the worst thing that can happen to a culture to a civilization is to be in these static moments so let's say we're going through a moment where the political correctness where the social justice Warrior is in the ascendant and I agree with you it's a negative it's a kind of a negative change in a way right well first of all you have to understand these changes so even if they're negative it's not that you Embrace everything that's going on in the world that you understand them on a on a deep level but let's say that this is a negative change that is occurring in the world but it's occurring for a purpose it's a reaction against something that occurred earlier on it's not going to last have a larger picture of history and of the world nothing that we humans do lasts very long and particularly now in this accelerated moment of change in 10 years from now the Generation Z and the new generation coming up they're going to be so [ __ ] tired pardon my language of all of the truth virtue signaling and everything they're going to go in the opposite direction it's going to swing back and forth and back and forth and back and forth right so don't get so caught up in the moment and think that this is this is like where we're heading like a hundred years from now we're all going to be like these Grand inquisitors that the social justice movement will reach this insane end point we've had these moments before in history where people get extremely tight and constricted and upset and uptight and worried about things and angry and take taking it out on everybody else we've been through it so many times before so have some perspective that it won't last okay do you worry at all though that with the historical lenson it also has killed a lot of people this is the first time in my life where I'm like uh I have a feeling that there are going to be consequences to the way that Society is going now I couldn't be more open to realizing that I'm wrong so if you have an Insight that I missing you mean people being cancelled and their careers being red being executed being beheaded for it uh yes I do mean I don't I'm not thinking literally of guillotines though that has been one of the historical ways that this played out but like I am I am very aware of the truth of the statement all that evil needs is for good men to do nothing and so it is right now it feels like division is running just in opposite directions and as somebody that has uh who does a lot of time talking on camera I think a lot about okay how do I how do I grapple with some of the issues and then what is the way to sort of present ideas to people that will hopefully gently nudge them in a more useful Direction so I think all about usability it's why I love your book so much because you're like if I was going to boil you down really simplistically I would say your core message is deal with the world the way that it is not the way that you wish it were and that idea is very powerful to me so looking through the lens of okay what is useful what is the way that I can behave that is useful so you started by saying no thyself I think that's incredibly useful one it helps you navigate your own emotions two it helps you understand other people okay so that advice is good because it's incredibly useful then I look at the world running in opposite directions algorithms social media exacerbating that problem the rapidity with which ideas burn through Society is really fascinating and historically humans tend to go so wrong before they swing back in the other direction that millions of people do die with a high and distressing degree of frequency now do I think that we're right on the precipice no I think that we have plenty of time and space to calm everybody down but I do think for the first time in my life anyway here in the US it's worth going hey this can rev up to the point of being actually dangerous yeah well I don't I don't disagree with you but then the question is what do you do about it I mean you can't change like whole groups of people in Mass like people like they used to think in communist countries where you could change Human Nature by creating a different system we know that doesn't work unless you happen to believe be a communist and you believe that's possible so it has to occur on an individual level right and how do you change that in a culture where it is where we're engineered to be angry and emotional where all of the social media that people spend 85% of their lives on I don't know I'm just taking that number out of my you know what it's way too low but yeah okay all right um you know it's engineered for that right you know just to give an example something that really gets under my to show my own outrage um you know on my on my feed I get these these notices from next door you know what next door is right and everything is about crime and about and I know in my neighborhood there's some crime but but if you read next door it's it's like giv you the sense that there everywhere like there's murderers next door to you like rapists are all around you right it freaks you out the algorithms are there they choose those posts to put in your feet that are going to get you emotional that's just is next door Facebook is a master of it you know Instagram they all just use these algorithms to hit your most basic emotions right how do you fight that well you have to fight that on an individual level you have to tell people you are being manipulated right and in order to say that you're being manipulated you're hitting their ego you're telling them you're not as in control of yourself as you think you are and I know this from myself I know that I am manipulated by these different algorithms but it means I have to have that kind of humility to say I am a person who can be manipulated but most people go around thinking oh I'm not manipulated I'm in control of my thoughts I know what my feelings are I behave according to what I want to do [ __ ] you're continually being manipulated by these various these various platforms okay you can't change it as an individual I can't go and get Mark Zuckerberg to suddenly stop doing all these dastardly things it's impossible right so what do you do you have to try and awaken people one by one by one that's sort of why I write books like the laws of human nature to a waken you up and it's a incredible theme in that book you might hate it but I hit that again and again about how we are being manipulated by social media how it's playing to our most Basic Instincts how Envy which is a most powerful human emotion it defines Us in so many ways why Envy why Envy well it's just one of the 18 chapters but why why did I choose that no why is it so powerful because it is wired inside of us our brains work by comparing um different pieces of information on the most basic level that's how our brains our neocortex operate a piece of information comes up we compare it to something else our our minds operate through continual comparisons when you create a social animal whose survival depends on getting along with other people that comparison device is continually in operation with other people what do they have that I don't have why are they getting that attention that I don't have why are they getting these these gifts and these rewards and I don't have any of them it was a problem that existed in Hunter Gathering societies if you've ever studied primitive cultures you come upon a very strange custom of theirs which is the moment anyone receives a gift of food or anything what is the first thing they do they give it to someone else it's like a ritual because you're definitely afraid that if you keep that gift people are going to have envy and they will murder you right so it's it's a continual ritual so it's bread into us even chimpanzees are known to feel Envy like if another chimp gets a delicious piece of grape and the other one has a cucumber he's like whoa what the hell what's going on here that study is hilarious you can find on YouTube for anybody watching it's saying yeah so it's who we are but what do you think social media is it's an engine of Envy it's making you continually aware of what other people have and what you don't have oh he's vacationing in Bali oh he's dating a supermodel etc etc look at my poor pitiful life well that person who's they're only posting the most positive things they're not showing their their kind of unhappy their misery of their daily life but you're feeling Envy so how do you overcome that you have to first be aware that you're feeling envy that it is motivating you that you feel this and that means what we bring you back to looking at yourself so we can't fight these negative changes in a global context we have to hit individual people we have to awaken their own their Consciousness we have to make them look Inward and the best thing I can do is for me personally is to write books about this I don't know any other way so we're making them look Inward and we're we want them to understand that they're having an emotional problem not a logic problem which I think is a really interesting Insight I think so in business I realized pretty early on in my career that the thing that separated me from other people was I could self soothe so I was stung by whatever happened whether it was somebody chastising me or embarrassing myself or being embarrassed on purpose by a narcissist or whatever the situation may be and it broke most people like it would derange it would push them underground would the either they're embarrassing themselves being chastised somebody going out of their way to embarrass them all the power games that you talk about and and you and you were able not to soothe yourself and I could soothe myself it still hurt I still went through the same emotion but I was so obsessed with my goals that I would just ask myself what is going to move me forward well that's an that's an amazing um example of the process that we're talking about and the power behind it I couldn't have chosen anything better in fact I don't think I could do anything better than what you do because I try and do what you're talking about and I don't even know if I've quite reached that level but that's exactly what the point I'm trying to make and that you are illustrating here that when you look at yourself when you look at what really is driving your behavior and let's first admit that we really don't know who we are and that there's a core that we will never understand right we can't really see completely inor ourselves we can't really totally understand what motivates our Behavior there's an element I'm a big believer in humility may not believe it because I write these books that don't seem humble at all but the humility to say there are parts of me that I'm never going to understand okay that's good that's all right that's a powerful thing because the idea that you know yourself so completely and I've gone through this process and I know who I am and I've got these problems it's [ __ ] you don't know who you are there's always a core that you'll never ever understand and that's a beautiful thing in life because it means Mysteries are great they're fantastic it means you have more work to do but all we're talking about is increasing that margin of knowledge so let's say in the end just to pick another number out of my you know what 70% of ourselves we're never going to know right for most people it's 95% or 98 or 99 if you can lower that number a little bit if you can have a deeper understanding if you can understand that what you're doing is that it's all about your ego that you really want to be right and not about getting ahead or having success or power if you can learn these little things the world opens up for you because what power is really about in life people always ask me for definitions is it's about having more options okay so when you're so narrowed down inside yourself about you know you have the right answer you know that you know you're can argue with people and everyone else is wrong etc etc you're you're limiting what you can do in life you can only take path A or B because that's what you're Geared for that's what's going to soothe your ego that's what's going to make you feel better as you thought when you're trying to shout to get the right Echo okay but when you let go when you're open to the fact that you don't know who you are that there are other things that could be going on and then you figure out that ego is tripping me up Suddenly doors open I can do c I can do d i can do E I can do what you just said where I can stop I can learn more I can shut my own head the voice in my head and I can pay attention I can learn the world starts opening up you start having options you have maneuverability you can do different things in life things open up for you that's all I'm ever asking for people is to get out of these kind of narrow Corners that they back themselves into a lot of people are feeling hopeless right now and they are gravitating towards alcohol porn Netflix Etc but nobody is coming to save them if they want to get out of that hole they're going to have to do it themselves so what is it that people can do and quite honestly avoid doing if they want to stop being aimless and make their dreams a reality well um sometimes you have to get deep enough in that hole that you really really want to get out so the key factor in life is motivation is desire is the energy that you bring to it so if you don't believe in yourself if you only half-heartedly are reading my books or listening to Tom or listening to me and you go yeah I kind of want to change it won't matter it won't change anything you'll just go back to your old habits right because habits are very powerful you're a product of the cultural moment it's very hard to resist it it's very hard to swim against the tide of the times that we live in so if you don't have the motivation if you don't have the energy if you don't have the idea that damn it I'm going down fast if I don't turn this around I'm you know you're only alive once it's you know YOLO and um it goes past really fast I can tell you that is now as I get older faster than you think so you've got to be desperate you've got to tell yourself I've got to get out of this I've got to change my life I've got to swim against the tide of the times that I live in I have to change my ways because if not when I'm 32 when I'm 35 all of my hopes all of my horizons will narrow so much that it it's going to look very very Bleak right so the younger you are the better and you have to have that desire you have to look yourself Square in the eye and the number one thing to think of is you have much less time than you imagine right it goes B past really quickly your 20s will go past faster than you could imagine suddenly you're 30 you go whoa what am I going to do then you're 40 [ __ ] it's too late you know okay so just realize you don't have as much time as you think you have now the other thing you have to realize is um what builds strength what builds character is resistance right so if you're trying to make your body physically stronger you need resistance you need weights because weights are are natural resistance you need to swim water is resistant you need to run you know gravity is resistant Etc that resistance builds muscle builds strength builds aerobic power etc etc life mentally it's the same thing the times that you live in are providing incredible amounts of resistance towards success towards power towards a sense of fulfillment they are flooding your face with all kinds of qualities that you have to resist and to the degree that you're aware of these qualities and to the degree that you resist them you will build inner strength you will build the kind of life skills that are necessary to survive and a and thrive in a very very tough world so one of these resistance factors is social media is the level of distractions that we're all facing right there never ever ever been so intense and you have to realize you don't let everything into your body you don't eat all this sugar I hope at least you don't eat all the pizza that you think is great for you you understand that you have to limit your diet to be healthy particularly as you get older you have to limit your sugar intake among other things Etc okay you have to limit the amount of stuff that's coming into your head you have to put your head on a diet you have to go I can't be distracted I can't absorb all of this information the human brain we can only retain so much in our short-term memory let alone our long-term memory you're flooding it with too much and what happens is you're losing the ability to focus on simple things right so to be successful you have to have primarily the quality to focus to concentrate and that begins on small banal tasks like I mean this is this is you know a simple example but if you're playing the piano or you're want to be a Chessmaster you have to learn the basics you have to learn the moves the different games you can play you have to learn how to do scales etc etc you have to be very focused and attentive to it so if you're trying to learn scales and learn how to play the piano and your mind is in 20 different places you'll never Master it you have to develop the ability to concentrate to focus and the times that you are living in are making it increasingly so difficult for you that it's splintering your brain and your attention into a thousand different pieces to the point where you can't even focus on your body on yourself on who you are what makes you strong so you got to put your brain on a diet and that means you got to limit how much social media you let into your life you have to limit how many different sources you're listening to you can't be listening to a hundred different podcasts every week although you should be listening to Tom's podcast right so put yourself on a diet and say what is it that matters what is important and then that brings you to the second question which is tied to the first one which is by far the most important step in your life with all of these things coming at you that are creating resistance that are going to make it hard for you which is who are you what makes you unique what makes what were you born to achieve in this world you have to be aware of that and to be aware of that you have to be able to focus you have to have introspect introspection is a is a skill it's not given to you the ability to tune out things and to look at yourself and go in W and go this is what matters to me this is what I hate I realized early on I've said this before I hate politicking I hate office politics I hate working for other people they annoy me I I feel like I can do a better job than they can so I hate that therefore Robert you need to be an entrepreneur you're not meant in this life to be working for other people so you have to be attuned to yourself you have to look in and go this is what I hate this is what I love and you have to be honest because you can fool yourself you can think that you love rock music and that you're meant to be a rock star but it's only that's because of the culture that you're living in what your friends think is cool that isn't necessarily who you are you have to look at yourself you have to focus deep you have to go through a process being honest and going what excites me what do I feel like makes me unique and what the the the power that you have in life is minding that you uniqueness minding that individual quality in whatever field you go into even in business or being an entrepreneur and so you can't have that self-awareness if you can't focus if you can't concentrate if you can't be bored and take a notebook and start writing things out about your childhood about who you are about what you love and what you hate if you can't do that I'm sorry but there's there's no hope for you there's really no hope for you so you have to be able to put yourself on that information diet and go into that introspective process that that's really heavy and I think a lot of people are going to they're going to hear that there's no hope for them that's going to feel right and before you and I started rolling you said um things really are bad for them and if I grew up in their generation I would probably be in the same boat why why is it bad right now what what is it that's creating this sense of hopelessness well we live in a very nihilistic culture and I find it in our entertainment you know so the idea of having a set of principles that guide you in life man that seems so oldfashioned that seems so fussy so no man I'm just going to be who I am you know and and the the values that are implanted in in in entertainment are completely nihilistic they give you no Focus they give you no Direction They Don't tell you what actually matters in life right they give you all of these faal these Illusions about what life is about and so some of it stems from the kind of fractured society that we live in so fractured in what way well most cultures up until the 21st century had a kind of cohesiveness to it there were certain myths that people ascribe to that that set the boundaries this is what unites us all these are the things that are good good these are the things that we hate these are the values that are good these are the values that are bad now sometimes those cultures those conventions those myths were not good but then you had something to rebel against so me as a product of the 60s and then in the 70s when I came of age you know and I'm in college I didn't like the culture that was there the kind of monolith the myths and things I wanted to Rebel but I had something to rebel against what are you going to rebel against now you don't even know what to rebel against now because there's nothing it's just pure chaos I can't point my fig finger to what are the guiding myths of our particular cultural moment maybe in a hundred years they'll be clear but I think a lot of our myths come from technology you know so my study of history is every cultural moment has a kind of guiding metaphor for it something I'm writing about right now and so like in the 18th century The Guiding metaphor was theater life is like theater we're all actors we're all playing roles early in the 20th century it was the unconscious and Freud and discovering the unconscious and exploring that which had a huge impact on culture there were other myths but i' point to those today it's technology it's AI it's it's all those other things right and so but that is like that kind of devalues the human element so I recently um gave a a couple of talks with a conversation with Ryan holiday and uh you can look at these on YouTube it was like an hour and a half here in LA and in Seattle and Ryan asked me my thoughts about Ai and I went on a kind of a rant I'm not a lite I understand and I use technology Etc but my point was instead of fetishizing AI and Chad GPT which I admit I've seen it it's powerful how it goes like that whoa It's like magic fetishize the human brain fetishize human powers fetishize our soci abilities our theory of Mind theory of mind is what makes humans human and what that means is we have the ability to put ourselves in the minds of other people to imagine what they're thinking what they're doing that's what makes us a preeminent Social Animal which is the source of our power what is your power your power is your ability to be social is your ability to navigate difficult social environments your second power is your brain and all the incredible things it has one of them is the ability to focus one is the ability to learn is the plasticity of the brain so the guiding metaphor if it's all technology it kind of makes us think that you know with your smartphone you have all all of these powers and you can't believe it it makes you so impatient everything should be like my phone everything should be instant everything should be at my fingertip if my inet cervice goes down for a few hours I get so cranky you're like a little baby whining and crying right no what really should matter is not you don't have those Powers you can't press a button your brain isn't designed that way it takes years to develop true skill to be a master at something you need to go back to these Elemental Primal human qualities are sociability so get out of the virtual realm learn social skills which is what my book the laws of human nature will kind of help you and grind you ground you in as well as the 48 Laws of Power and you need brain skills you need to develop skills actual skills that you can use in this world man that's really interesting so the idea of the guiding myths um that's something that's sort of been in the back of my mind but I hadn't pulled forward so thank you for that because now that you say that I think one of the biggest issues that I see people struggling with I would have used different words but it's the same idea um people look at the world they look at the here in the west they look at the game that we're playing they say capitalism e this is gross like it's predatory whatever and because they have such a Negative view of the system because the system right now isn't working for their generation they just want to opt out but it creates this incredibly C incredibly aimless incredibly hopeless Vibe and uh I think you and I agree that's dangerous now I I I will say for my own sake I think it's dangerous for them I think the punchline of life is all about fulfillment I think that's what people should be pursuing I think fulfillment has an evolutionarily um imbued formula and that recipe maybe is a better word is you're going to have to work really hard to gain a set of skills that you about for your own intrinsic reasons that allow you to serve yourself and others if you do that you're going to be fine if you don't you're going to have a profound sense of disease because people want to check out of the system they are to your point ask they're throwing the baby out with a bathwater so they're trying to check out of a system which by the way I think is a phenomenal system and I advise people not to check out of it but anyway even if you want to check out of that system if you then just dive into uh a any setup that isolates you you're going to be in for a bad time because we the brain works in a certain way and so I've said many times in the show on my Tombstone I wanted to read you're having a biological experience and the reason I want people to understand that is because your brain works a certain way there are certain things you can do that will align yourself to Feeling Good Feeling engaged feeling fulfilled loving communication connection meaning and purpose all that and there are things that you can do that will lead you exactly away from this and so uh rejecting the system but without a cause so Rebel Without a Cause style is not going to move you towards anything that's a pure move away from play and if you're just moving away from something you're going to find yourself accelerating that sense of aimlessness and so I there's a a compounding variable here which is people there's a rising sentiment burn it all down and then we'll build Utopia for of a better word in its place and that is people that don't understand the absolute Hellfire of chaos that will rain if your meaning and purpose becomes destroying instead of building because if if they really do succeed in tearing down a system uh you don't have scaffolding left to build upon and that bad things happen in that vacuum well first of all also it's not possible to tear things down because the world is larger than just individuals it's larger than a movement it's larger than your generation I'm afraid to say so you don't even have the power to tear things down because the world will go into its own kind of system it's on the human unconscious has moved us throughout history Human Nature has it's going to continue it's beyond it transcends you as an individual so you don't have as much power to burn things down as you imagined so just get over that that childish fantasy but the second thing I would say is I began by saying what matters is your level of energy your level of motivation in life right and when you're cynical and when you're nihilistic it just drains you of energy why do anything man it doesn't matter you know 10 years down the road with climate change we're all going to be dying anyway what matters okay but I'm writing a book right now on the sublime in which I'm trying to say the world that you live in is not ugly it's not horrible it's not destructive it's insanely beautiful the fact of being alive is one of the most weirdest things I even have a chapter called awaken to the strangeness of being alive it's chapter number two and so just the fact that you are alive now as a human being is an incredibly unlikely set of circumstances that occurred so the world that we live in is utterly Sublime and utterly weird and a lot of that interesting stuff comes from science so at the same time that technology is kind of making our brains into mush scientists are uncovering things that just are so fantastic they're extraordinary what we're learning about the cosmos what we're learning about the origins of Life what we're learning about Evolution what we're learning about the brain I mean if you just think about it it's staggering and so being part of that wave of knowledge that's overwhelming us right now should be incredibly exciting but if you have no excitement in life if you think it's all just crap and it's better just to not care and you know what that comes from it's a common adolescent pose and I probably had it when I was 16 years old man I don't care you know let's screw everything you know it comes from insecurity it doesn't it's not strength being that kind of rebel without any reason for against nothing is actually a sign of incredible weakness and you know where it comes from comes from from the fear of failure so if I don't try to do anything if I just say oh it's all going to hell I'm just going to go in my van I'm just going to tour around the United States I'm just going to take videos and things I you know what the hell let you know as as King Louis the 14 said a mo Del after me the delu I don't care if that's your attitude towards life you know then that's what that's what you're going to get so um you have so it comes from a fear of failure it doesn't come from strength because to try something to try to build a business to try and write a book to try and make a film puts your you're putting yourself out on the line and you could fail and with failure comes criticism and with failure you're exposing yourself you're exposing your ambition you're exposing that you weren't up to the task better to not even try and to just say oh I don't care because then you're not exposing yourself so that kind of pose is is is actually a form of childish insecurity that you need to get over but you need to have a sense of excitement and if you don't if you think everything is just gray and equal and bad and we're all heading to Hell in a hand basket then that's that's what you becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy so I'm writing a book to just make you get that energy that excitement again and you know what when you were a child you had it I don't care if you grew up in this culture now that is kind of I think deadening things what you're a child children have this energy that nothing can can suppress if you you actually live in a world of Enchantment things are like amazing to you you want to learn you want to read books you want to explore you want to explore you want to Adventure you had it when you were a child and you've lost it you've lost it in adolescence you lost it when you were 12 you lost it because the culture sucked it out of you but it's there it's still waiting to come back to you but if you don't have that enchantment about life if you don't see something really amazing about the one life that you have that can go back go by very quickly then nothing will ever change you you're just going to end up is As I said it'll be a self-fulfilling prophecy of Doom okay I agree with all that it's easy though to step into their shoes and look back at you and say Hey listen old man who remembers the late 60s uh that worked because of the time you were in and demographics are Destiny and the time that I'm born it's just an absolute [ __ ] show uh baby boomers are hoarding all of the wealth they refuse to leave the workforce I can't buy a property you and when you were first getting on the property ladder it was like $150 to buy a house in Beverly Hills and so yeah it seems great for you and Ops uh I've taken on $180,000 in college debt it's non-dischargeable even in bankruptcy uh so you found a way to put me in indentured servitude and I can't expect my oh I'm not done I can't expect my Social Security to be there when I get there because you [ __ ] won't die uh so that's how they're going to look back at you what do you say to somebody with that frame of reference well you know there's obviously some truth to that and I said I understand why people are the way they are you know but not every time is this sort of golden period in history you know I lived through the 1980s which I thought was a really really ugly period in history I found it very Bleak and very horrifying and I didn't have this kind of golden thing that you might imagine I did not have success until I was 39 years old I struggled I I was more like how people are nowadays and in that I wandered from job to job I had 60 different jobs I never held a job for more than 11 months in my entire life okay so I know and I got very depressed I even had moments of being suicidal I lived in a crappy one-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica I know Santa Monica is very nice but back then it wasn't so nice and so I know what it means to struggle I didn't have debt but I didn't have any money I was very poor living in many most of my life I was very poor so it's not as golden as you think for me individually but I understand the baby boomer scenario and everything that you're facing but so what stop whining stop whining about the circumstances my parents grew up in the depression it's not that's nowhere near this times are nowhere near what they had to deal with my grandparents really more but even my parents to some extent so stop your goddamn whining it was pretty awful back then they faced the stock market crash in 1929 they had to live through the depression of the 1930s then they had World War II you think you have it bad try having to deal with the Nazis and the Japanese attacking you both at the same time the 1960s we had the Vietnam War I was of the age where I had a draft number my draft number was so low that I was certain to be drafted but fortunately the draft ended like six months before my age came of whatever so you know you think it's the worst ever it's not the worst ever I can point you a 100 other periods in history that were equally incredibly Bleak the generation that came out of World War I do you know the massacre that young people faced in World War I that's why we had the 1920s where the flappers because people didn't want they wanted to drink themselves into Oblivion millions of young men died for a senseless stupid War okay you have no historic sense you have no sense of proportion just because you live in the 2020s you think that this is the worst time you don't read history you don't understand that it's not the worst ever so stop your whining there are plenty of humans that have dealt with things far worse than you've ever dealt with our ancestors who were Pioneers in the 19th century they F face privations and poverty that you would have no conception over you have it much better than a lot of other people in the past so stop your goddamn whining people had it worse in the past a lot of times you don't have it so bad okay you have a lot of debt all right you have to make a plan you have to be strategic but if you give up if you just say oh it's the Baby Boomers oh I can't own a home if that's your energy then that's going to be the faith that you have there are always circumstances that are going to be resistant to you I understand the resistance factors now are very powerful but are you going to meet them or are you just going to give in and surrender you can make that choice and that's fine if you want to live on a organic farm and organ I have nothing against it and I'm not making fun of it because that is a good life that could be fine if that's your ambition but maybe you can't make it that way because it's not that's not an easy life either right so you have to make a choice do I want something else for myself or do I just want to wallow in self-pity and blame other people and you can blame other people and there's a lot of things to blame just as when I was growing up I had a lot of things I could blame but you have to look at it differently and you have to say that kind of energy is self-destructive how can I get out of that energy I can only get out of I have to control what I can control I have bad student debt I have $100,000 in debt or I got to make a plan for the next five years first of all you didn't have to get that $100,000 in debt so you take a little bit of responsibility for that you know I mean I know they had little things that you signed that you weren't aware of but for a long time we've been aware of some of those predatory practices in lending so is partially your responsibility a little there but okay you have your $100,000 in debt you make a plan I'm going to I'm going to have to work it off this way I'm going to have to get a job that pays well but at the same time I'm going to be building other kind of life skills Etc I'm going to get myself out of this hole I'm going to have hope I'm G to have energy fine that's that's the alternate path but if you don't have that if you don't think that it's possible then there's nothing really that I can say I could just waste a lot of words it won't mean anything but don't think that you have it worse than other people because you have no sense of History you're living in this bubble this illusion of the present you don't know what people like were living in the Middle Ages in the 18th century in America in the 19th century World War I the depression the Vietnam War Watergate era the the recession we had then stop it you don't understand you're not reading history and I I agree with that very much the way that I think about it because one uh I have a feeling that even with the like intense energy you say that from a place of you want to see them do well uh you don't want to see them be stuck and that's certainly where when I get riled up on this topic it's from that perspective and what I used to ask people that would you know come to me and say look I've got it really hard for whatever reason and I've worked in the cities so I've seen poverty just absolutely demolish people it it's really brutal to see up close and the only question that I can think of is okay you've got $180,000 in student debt uh boomers are sucking up all the oxygen in the room whatever whatever all the bad things terrible economy no way to get on the property Market all that climate change the the question that remains is and now what and if your answer to and now what is I give up I will say that that is not a life frame of reference that I'll I'll refer to it as that that is going to lead you anywhere neurochemically advantageous now okay going back to you're having a biological experience so when I say A neurochemically advantageous uh experience what I mean is you're not going to feel good it's just going to feel terrible and so it's an incredibly self-destructive frame of reference to adopt now we all see the world through a distorted lens that's what I mean when I say frame of reference so your frame of reference is a pair of glasses that you wear and those glasses are distorted and they do not show you reality they show you a distortion of reality the great news is uh even though it doesn't seem like it you get to shape those lenses and the thing that worries me is that people have shaped the lens to show them a world that is uh against them it is a hostile Universe well and let's say that these all these things are real like the they're very real I don't deny them and I don't deny the reality of people living in inner cities and I have a huge readership among people from inner cities who've used my books and have helped them a lot and I did a book with 50 c who's I agree understand as an exception but he came from the worst part of America and he managed to pull himself up in an incredible story so I I understand that but let's say that these are the circumstances that you have and you're young and when you're young you're idealistic which is part of cynicism is just the flip side of idealism so your idealism you can't really hold on to so it just flips into cynicism but the two are very much related and so if you believe that these things that that are so injust in this world then there's your energy there's where you put yourself there's your cause your cause isn't to to destroy is to say wow there's a lot of Injustice in this world there's a lot of poor people that are suffering because there's no opportunities out there Boomers have created this awful world all right how do I construct a better world how can I create a movement how can I how can I create um more opportunity for other people how can I start a business that will employ thousands of people instead of just wasting away and not and not contributing at all how can I contribute to helping climate change you know it kind of ticks me off that there's so much technology in Silicon Valley that goes to entertaining us to masturbating our mind so to speak with all kinds of trivial [ __ ] things that don't matter in life take all of that Brilliant Energy and do it to solving some real problems that we're facing problems that we've just outlined here about the lack of opportunities about home ownership about climate change but pour your energy into something productive if you feel that way and then contribute a sense of cont contribution you know it will fulfill you in a way as a social animal the sense of I just didn't whine and give up I actually did something to help change this world and if you think that's impossible if it's just like donot tilting at windmills then fine and that's that's what end up happening but even Don kote had this illusion that he was actually going to change it so you need to have those Illusions even if it's not true that you can change this world you need least need to believe that you can kill those windmills with your sword you need to at least believe in the illusion and then then you energy will change so if there's so much against you there's so much Injustice in the world there's your cause there's your energy there's your hope so if it really is an illusion uh why would they be better off believing in an illusion than trying to contact ground truth figure out what is real and how to operate moving forward so that they can make whatever change it is that they want to change well I'm not sure quite I understand I mean what I meant by illusion is maybe you as an individual can't really stop climate change obviously you can't and it's bigger problem that you than than than what any of us can really uh tackle but believing that you can make a difference will give you the energy to create something to do something as I said in human nature change your attitude to change your circumstances so if you believe in it then you will you will do something towards that and maybe it won't be enough but if enough people believe that then it will be enough you know but what was the second part of your question that was it I wanted to know so my thing is it's what I call the only belief that matters so the only belief that matters is that if you put time and energy into getting better at something you'll actually get better at it yeah so if like my advice would be very different if I actually thought there was nothing they could do the reason that my advice is to ask and now what and to come up with a positive vision for their future is that they really can make a change I mean there's just the litany I mean you've already gone through the Litany of of people that have had it way worse and they've still managed to do something productive with their time anybody that doesn't know Winston Churchill story it is truly incredible this was a guy that was watching his City be bombed nightly he was constantly in danger he was on the front lines of World War one being shot at like this was not somebody who was tucked away and he had severe bouts of depression indeed and he was he just always said you know one I'm grateful that I live at such a pivotal moment in history so that we can do something about this so to your point it's like if you really see a lot of things you want to make change on then it's like okay what do I need to do in order to make that change so going back to frame of reference if your frame of reference is cynical and there's nothing I can do it it becomes that self-fulfilling prophecy because only behaviors matter but your behaviors are Downstream of your beliefs so if you don't get your beliefs right that hey if I engage in this if I go do something uh if I want to pay off my student loans there is a path to getting this done and that doesn't mean that the deck isn't stacked against people it doesn't mean that there aren't worse times in human history but at the same time if you the only way to make a bad time worse is to have a negative attitude about it and I mean look there's two books written about a schwitz where that's the punchline man search for meaning and then um the book is called the choice I forget the woman's name uh she's still alive as far as I know she was doing podcasts very recently and her whole family is killed in the Holocaust she was in the Holocaust um and she was a dancer and the Nazis used to make her dance while they were like selecting people to be killed it was crazy just like unimaginable amounts of psychological torture and she realized I have a choice to make now that I've survived is that going to be my life or am I going to find a way to find meaning and purpose and and go after something yeah and so it's I I don't want to adjudicate whether worst time not worst time I just want to say such is The Human Condition yeah that everyone is going to encounter difficult things your frame of reference is going to control what you do and what you do will control the quality of your life I mean aitz I mean who had it worse than that can you imagine and I've read many many accounts of it as somebody who lost a lot of my ancestry in in the Holocaust um and I I highly I can't recommend enough reading Man's Search for meaning Victor Frankl it's an amazing book that accounts what he lived through but also a philosophy of life that will serve you very well in exactly the struggles that we're talking about people when they have this sort of negative view of power damn it that makes me so angry it triggers all of my buttons I'm sorry to say because I I am an emotional creature I have to admit because everything is about power right the idea that you don't want power that you say oh I'm not interested in that I'm I'm I'm All About truth and Justice and what's good for Humanity that's a form of power I'm sorry to say you are seeking power you are seeking power over other people you know some of the most heinous crimes have been committed by people who think they're doing good for for others right okay but you want power right and I look at academics who have these very lengthy very powerful arguments about the world etc etc it's all about power they don't want to admit it they want to admit it's just about ideas it's just about intellect about you know the realm of of of exchanging ideas [ __ ] it's about power you want this sense of expansion you want people to love you you want you love that feeling that what you're doing is influencing ing others that you have hit the right answer everything you do the everything you breathe in is a desire for power is a desire for expansion look in the mirror and admit it and let's get away from the negative connotations that we have with it yes power can be used for bad purposes but as Malcolm X said um you know absolute power corrupts but powerlessness corrupts even more so the feel that you don't have any power that's so important so the feeling that you don't have any power is even more corrupting because it makes you passive aggressive it turns you into these Warriors who think they're doing something and you're not even aware of what you're really after so that was the whole point of the 48 Laws of Power it was an inflection moment in our culture in our history where I was getting really upset with all of the political correctness and all of the squid self-help books out there right and trying to appeal to our good side and etc etc and things like ambition or power were ugly words man I hated that I thought it was so hypocritical because my experience in Hollywood for instance where I dealt with a lot of film directors and powerful people is they would project this image of being extremely liberal and for all the good causes but they were wanted power they really wanted power and they would often treat people in a poor fashion despite being for all the great causes and the hypocrisy just really rankled me and that's sort of why I wrote the 48 Laws of Power to expose that but I want people to admit you we saying look at yourself that you have this desire for power it can twist you you can you can look for it in wrong ways most definitely but at least come to Jesus come to Muhammad and admit that that's who you are that that's what's motivating you in your behavior and from there we can start seeing well maybe there more constructive forms of power that I can go after it's so interesting because when I was maybe 25 something like that 26 maybe I bought the domain seeking power oh and I 20 years ago yeah very long time ago so a couple years after my book came out but I'm not saying there was any unfortunately I had not read it yet I wish I had you would have saved me a lot of Stu but um I that felt true to who I was I was like I come seeking power and it was it felt so light and so expansive and so positive so it's weird to me that the word power is taken on like these dark evil connotations but I was like I want to get better I want to get more powerful and my whole youth I had felt so weak and getting into business I had finally encountered the idea that you could get better than other people you could outperform them and in outperforming them you could transform your life and you could do things that other people couldn't do I wish unfortunately Kobe Bryant didn't exist back then in any way that I was aware of anyway uh and he has this whole idea of booze don't block dunks and that you can get so good at something that no matter how much people hate you want to stop you whatever you can outplay them and you can still dunk over them and I was like oh my God God like this is so amazing so all I have to do is get good at things now to your point if you're using that for evil I've got no time for that but in your own life if it's you know whether in business if you don't acknowledge that it's a competition you're going to get eaten alive so recognizing okay like this is a competition I'm not out to hurt other people but I'm absolutely out to outperform them and life became way more fun when I realized oh I can come seeking power I can sit at somebody's feet and learn from them and want want to grow more powerful and that's why like this whole moment that we're living through now feels like the wrong way to go about the change that people want to see in the world because it's like if you own okay I I want this outcome and to get that outcome I need to Garner a set of skills I need to get better at my performance and then I can do it when it's out in the open and you're taking personal responsibility in fact here's the the easiest way to sum it up as Gary ve says there are two ways to build the tallest building in town you can knock everybody else's building down or you can build a building that's taller than theirs great and if you're spending time knocking people's buildings down which is the energy I feel coming off of a lot of people that's not interesting to me and people do it in the name of oh no no no like they were just their building violated some invisible code you know where that comes from it comes from Envy EnV is a huge Mo motive motivator of people's behavior now so the drive to bring other people down is is really truly motivated by feelings of Envy inferiority that other people are better than you are so it's it's a leveling process that's going down where we want to bring everybody down to the same level nobody's excellent nobody's accomplished anything oh they just accomplished great things because they had money or because their parents sent them to Yale or Dartmouth or because you know they had all this privilege you know we're all you know so it's like bringing everyone down but I think that it's Envy is is is the root cause of it so going back to the where we started that people are bored they feel like they're wasting their life but you were saying you know wherever you go there you are that this is an internal problem you have to master your emotions how do you begin to tile that together for somebody that wants out of that they want to love their life and feel like they're making the most of it you talked about like we actually have the ability to get a drug-like effect by looking Inward and and what is it and improving ourselves and just falling in love being honest about what we actually like in pursuing it like is is that an act of the will to expansion what what's driving that well um you know there are many ways to look at that it's um but in Mastery I I my way of describing it is a very high form of fulfillment because I like to think of fulfillment over happiness happiness seems like a kind of an immediate thing where you know getting some kind of stimulation or drinking whiskey will make you happy but it won't make you fulfilled fulfilling fulfillment is a longer lasting emotion it comes from wow I spent two years doing that I made what I went out set out to create I feel fulfilled it's a wonderful feeling it's the greatest high in the world I think okay so my one Avenue to get towards what you're saying is through your work I'm not saying it's everything because I understand relationships and people and children all these things are very important okay but I'm looking at through your work to reach a level of feeling of that sense of power and expansion and fulfilled and when you have that feeling you don't want to hurt other people you don't there's no need for it there's no need to push people around for no reason you feel comfortable with yourself all right so the number one thing the most important thing is to figure out the path towards that kind of fulfillment through your work or through your career right now some people don't like that I've been criticized before I went once and gave a talk at Stanford and they were thinking that that was just so elitist like fulfillment well through your work like this one woman said my father was a truck driver his whole life are you saying that he wasn't fulfilled you know that kind of criticism what did you say to that I said well that's actually very elitist on your part you're saying that that's all your father was ever capable of achieving maybe you know if he was happy being a truck driver if that excited him if that's what he was destined to create if he felt comfortable with that fine I have no problem but a lot of people in very working class jobs aren't necessarily so happy their lives are full of routine there's no kind of intellectual challenge to it and if you know anything about the human animal and the human brain we're V our brains are voracious we need constant stimulation so if you're driving a truck all day that's all you have if that's fulfilling for you maybe yes being a good driver and getting there on time and delivering Goods maybe that is a road to fulfillment but maybe your father was frustrated maybe he was drinking or something maybe it didn't really fulfill him so how can you say that people just should just settle for what they have right because a lot of people aren't happy and they may think they're happy they may kind of they may kind of deceive themselves but deep down inside they're frustrated and that's why they turn to having Affairs that's why they turn to alcohol that's why they turn to drugs that's why they turn to addictions etc etc etc there are all kinds of signs of that so I'm not necessarily assuming that your father was fulfilled by his truck driv I could be that's how I answered her she wasn't happy with that okay anyway um so some people criticize this notion of work but no we are animals that love to make things somebody wants to find us as homop Faber the animal that likes to build things to make things that's our hands we became powerful through making tools Etc also by being social animals don't get me wrong but we're creatures that are designed to make things to build things to create right and I don't I'm not an elitist I think every human being on the planet has that desire right they wanted that fulfillment and I don't care if they're born poor and they're poverished or they're homeless they still have that need and they have that capacity to become a master in what they do so the most important thing in life is to figure out what is your path what is the kind of work that will bring you that sense of fulfillment okay so so some people it's being an entrepreneur it's being in business other people it's the Arts or It's Entertainment of some sort other people it's writing it's words it's literature other people it's the body it's Sports it's dance it's whatever I don't care I don't have a hierarchy I don't say writing books is better than building wood things wooden things with your hands it's all the same to me right it's all a form of a skill it all can lead to Mastery but you have to find out what that is and then you have to build towards it and when you reach that point let's just look at the end point so in your 20s which is the most important part of your life I think we really yeah I don't want to derail but okay we should come back to that it's where you're discovering yourself it's where all the seeds are planted for what's going to happen to you of course they're planted in your earliest years don't get me wrong but I do think that's the most critical phase right you're exploring you're trying things out you're experimenting with different uh careers Etc you're gaining skills because you're learning you like you said you wanted to learn right and then you're 3233 and you start a podcast a website your own business Etc and maybe it fails but you're excited it's your own and then you learn from it and then you create something even better man it's like the greatest feeling in the world you don't need anything else you know you've accomplished something you set a goal and you reached it it is to me a feeling of high so when I write a book it's painful there's a lot of pain involved stress etc etc but man there's nothing in the world I would give up I even had a stroke probably because of that I wouldn't give up any of that for that sense of I could look back I wrote that book I can die tomorrow and I'm happy I did what I thought I needed to do I reached not all my potential but a good portion of my potential to me that is if everybody had that open to them then I think we would live in a much better world if we live if people knew that as a value and went towards it and I think the greatest periods in history the kind of the golden eras we can look at Athens we can look at Renaissance Italy we could look at the 1920s in America the Jazz here and all the great cultural movements pick your whatever period you like some people like the 60s some people hate the 60s I don't care whatever you think is a golden era their era of richness of diversity of all kinds of creative people doing all kinds of interesting things it's an openness and everyone is experimenting and that this kind of change it's brewing and experimentation that's to me is a high point of human culture and it comes from more and more individuals doing taking this path that I'm talking about do you have a a math equation for lack of a better word for fulfillment how would that be a plus b kind of so here I think that so I agree with you so violently I want to bite through the table uh so I might not be the best use of my teeth uh so I have a rough formula of what I think leads to fulfillment I think about this a lot so I'm always looking for somebody that can help me refine but I think it goes like this it has to be hard and there's reasons for this from an evolutionary standpoint but it has to be hard it has to be something that you get more energy from than it takes so it's something that you inherently enjoy and it has to be something that allows you to transform your potential into skill set and that skill set has to be something that serves you and the group if you do all of that you will be fulfilled if any one of those pieces are missing it's really hard it's something you love you're improving your skill set but it only serves you you won't be fulfilled if all of it but it only serves a group and not you you won't be fulfilled it it seems to me that it has to have all of those elements yeah I mean I think there are people unfortunately who get that fulfillment without the group part do you do you think they're actually fulfilled yeah I mean um if you like artists who write to do some kind of great art but they're not necessarily the best people in the world world you know it might be a total dick but if their art which I think is its own punishment PS but they may find fulfillment in their art if they get feedback from the group the group is moved it's Sublime you know and so their art creates the desired feeling in that person they have contributed to the group in my estimation but if that same artist made art and nobody gave a [ __ ] about it I don't think they would feel fulfilled well you know I don't want to split hairs with you cuz you're largely correct but I do I can't think of examples of people who were ignored in their lifetime and it was painful but they knew they were right they knew they had created something brilliant they knew they had created some invention and it was ignored and nobody cared and nobody liked them and Tesla Nicola Tesla yeah he was pretty miserable yeah so despite doing all this incredible [ __ ] being out of step with your time is rough you are the shout and the echo so even though when Einstein was asked what's it like to be the most brilliant man alive he said I don't know you'll have to ask Nicola Tesla despite that Tesla died very unhappy by all accounts I obviously did not know him certainly alone and broke and so there was something was missing he could never get I'm I am definitely psychoanalyzing somebody I have no right to but I have a gut instinct that because he could not figure out the echo part of doing something in a way where people reflected back that yes this is amazingly valuable that even though now we all reap the benefits was very little consolation I can't think of it because my mind is slowing down but I was talking recently uh with my wife about artists and composers Etc who had no success in life she's going really yeah never sold any books their music was ignored but my research of them they they had just in the work itself in the absorption of the mind and composing This brilliant thing or in writing this thing they had that flow yes so the pain is definitely there I'm not arguing against you because they said you might be right I mean I'm utterly FAS splitting hairs but the the thing is is the sense of flow because what happens is what makes you miserable is your self-absorption in many ways right the worst form of therapy is to sit there and talk about your problems the best form of therapy is to get outside of your brother the people are going to be like the record just skipped for a lot of people go back the worst form of therapy is talk therapy what what what yeah yeah I well I mean maybe not the worst but it's not to me the most productive therapy to just talk about your problems really why because it's like it's like accentuating your self-absorption right whereas what you need is to get outside of yourself not into all of your your problems now of course I'm I'm contradicting myself because I talked about introspection that's a different thing we're not introspecting about my problems what my parents did to me more and more oh I'm so miserable blah blah blah I'm sure there are forms of talking therapy that are good so I shouldn't generalize that but what I think I don't know something feels intuitively right about this yeah well I just wrote sorry I keep doing that about um this man people won't have heard of him he's he's a a Russian Mystic whatever you want to call him gerg Jeff who had these exercises name but I don't know um and one thing he taught his students was to not vent your unpleasant emotions so we had this exercise called self-observation where you to go observe yourself like you did in the most deepest way not just your thoughts but about your body and how your body and your mind interact in this insane continual blend there's no separation so one kind of thought will affect your body but a feeling in your gut will affect your thinking you're all this observe yourself observe yourself observe yourself and he said you will discover in observing yourself that most of your thoughts revolve around unpleasant emotions it's a very bad thing to realize but it's true I use the number 95% but I I as I said I'm pulling it out of you know what again um okay so most of it is dealing with frustration resentment anger bitterness etc etc etc okay and he said look at those emotions see them do not judge them do not say they're bad or good or whatever and don't ever talk about them don't vent them to people you can look at them but don't talk about them and the people who experience go whoow by not talking about them they start they start to go away I didn't really feel them because I never expressed them so expressing them was kind of what makes them stronger and more embedded inside of you I feel like we're doing that culturally right now yes most definitely I mean look what is the Crux of the problem in people today if I had to summarize it or and I don't mean people I'm include myself in them us because I'm a human being as well as far as I know I've heard we're self-absorbed right I think that's the root cause of so many of our issues right because we are creatures that are actually built for empathy for actually putting our minds into other things into people into animals into solving problems into our work that's who we are and we've turned that around where all of that voracious brain energy that we have as I said I just wrote a chapter on the brain and it's this insanely powerful instrument that is so complex people say it's the most complex piece of matter in the universe right it's so powerful and when you turned inward it just eats Us Alive inside it's like a bacteria eating us from within as opposed to exteriorizing it into work into creating things into building things into empathy into working with other people and if we're getting all ranty and outraged about Justice etc etc what you really need to do is to get outside of that and out helping other people genuinely helping them right if your cause is and it's my cause is as well as the environment which I believe ex a lot where my charity goes to then ranting and complaining online and making people feel bad is useless go out and start a movement create something do something you'll feel so much better about yourself and you'll be contributing it but what we don't need is more of that self-absorption it's like a centri centripedal force that's drawing us further and further and further in my problems my parents my education my brother and sister my wife more and more inward more problems that gets deeper deeper more inas erasin inside of ourselves right you want to get out of yourself right and put it into your work so you know let's say you're an artist right I have great respect for artist I kind of wished I had been an artti I'm a failed artist this is a guy who's written incredible bestselling books I've walked through bookstores and watched them bring in stacks of books that you wrote decades ago oh yeah but I wanted to be a a novelist you know so fascinating it is so weird to me that you can sell at your level and still be like oh but I wanted to be this I'm the same which is why I have such response to that because I am not good at the things that I wanted to be good at and the things that I am good at that other people Envy me for I'm like like that's not very interesting what is it that you wanted to be that list is very long I my if I could Snap My Fingers I would be Elon Musk that is like my fantasy of fantasies you have plenty of time you're young yeah we'll see a I'm 46 what's he like 47 48 like he's barely older than me if he's over 50 Now 51 52 I mean he's like was certainly within Striking Distance and look I am honest enough with myself know thyself as Robert Green would say uh that I don't my brain doesn't process data the way that his does now he warns people like me not to want to be like him because he says having the intrusive thoughts that he has around engineering and problem solving he said it's you know it's like having this thing turned on that you can't turn off any wish could interesting but I I would pay that price so before we started rolling you and I were talking I'm I am very enamored with what you've created and put into the world and you've you still fill a niche that so few people are able to fill I think it's utterly fascinating you I said once in our earlier interview that when I read your books I can hear wolves howling in the background but in real life you're so lovely and kind and considerate so most people that write dark books are [ __ ] dark and they don't even realize they're writing a dark book but like your stuff really deals with an underbelly of The Human Condition but yet you're this lovely person anyway what you've put in the world think is absolutely incredible and so I totally understand the the impetus to be good at one thing to wish you were good at something else but it is a very fascinating part of the human psyche well probably if I had been a novelist I would and I was at this age and I was successful I'd say you know I really wanted to write non-fiction books correct The Grass Is Always Greener so who am I to say yeah it's such a weird [ __ ] thing but so the what I find interesting about what you were saying is that this idea and I haven't thought a lot about this so um I'm thinking out loud here but the idea that if you're repeating something over and over and and I have said many many times whatever you become what you repeat so if you're saying to yourself like hey I can figure this out I can learn I can grow then you will act in accordance and I find that there's something about this moment where we are obsessing over things I'm not even saying they're not real but we're obsessing over them to to the point where it's becoming counterproductive like we're seeing things where they aren't necessarily or we're exaggerating things that are there but like now we're making them seem just absolutely terrifying and I think that there's something that people have to be careful about there that you can you can make your own life worse by obsessing over the things that are wrong rather than like you said making it somehow external or creating a piece of art around it something I don't know creating something like I said I'm thinking out loud I don't have my finger fully on why I can sense that there's a problem with it but there's a problem with oh I think most definitely we can feel it in the sight guys it's kind of ugly it's an ugly energy it's an ugly energy I normally hate that kind of loose talk but because I don't I don't yet know how to articulate it that feels really right so you talked about this earlier and I I can't remember where I first heard this but the idea that some things make you feel expand and some make you constrict this moment feels like a mass constriction and that's why I worry yeah and the feeling of openness which I say occurs historically because we're social animals and things occur in these kind of cultural Globs these generational moments is because of like memes and and being infected by the people around us and in moments of expansion your I your minds are open you're adventurous you're exploring it often comes in in these kind of revolutionary periods where people are just so sick of the past 20 years and all the accumulated baggage and all the ways of doing things they're just tired of it they want something new and so they're exploring and they're hungry and they're adventurous for new ideas and people come up with wild things but who cares it's wild but it's interesting it's new there's discussion there's argument but people aren't killing each other over it right these are great moments in history and it's an feeling of expansion and adventurousness so if you have an adventurous Spirit which I think is an incredibly positive um Quality to have that means you're continually open to life you're continually open to what happens what it brings to you and you're seeking it out you want new things you're learning you're not closed off you never have a moment where I'm know what I know what this is happening Etc you have what the poet kei's called negative capability I don't know if you're familiar with that con I am but because of you oh yeah talked about it in Mastery it's basically the fact that you can carry in your mind two contradictory ideas and not be upset about that because quite honestly sometimes things are contradictory and they're true right it's weird but it's true right it could be a it could be be black it could be white and they're both correct the fact that you can hold two things that seem opposing in your mind at the same time he considered the foundation of creativity he thought that was Shakespeare's greatest quality it's what makes a great scientist a great inventor great entrepreneur a great inventor etc etc do you have any examples I I agree most wholeheartedly but I'd be hard pressed to give an example off the top of my head well I'm going to I'm going to mess it up horrifically because I don't remember it so well but there's the story of Louie Pastor we're talking about invention um and of sort of the whole science of Immunology right and here I'm having to strain my my neurons here to Fe to remember it but um basically he had these chickens that had been injected with small poox or whatever the disease is right and then they all died okay and then he brought in a new batch of chicken he's trying to figure out how to solve small poox or whatever it was brought a new batch of chickens in he injected them and then they survived some of them survived and he couldn't figure out why and then um he injected them again and I know I'm missing it up so please out there scientists don't don't don't flame me for this you know he's trying to figure out why they survived and basically it was because the small pox that he that he had injected them with the second batch was weaker it had been left outside and so they had developed immunity from it by having this smaller less intense version of small pox injected into them so the next time they got injected they had the antibodies now we think we we take this for granted now but nobody had a concept for antibodies back there back then it was a totally novel concept and so when he saw these chickens that survived he was like why you know why what happened and he submitted this to other scientists and they came up with all kinds of ideas that were basically the same ideas rehashed you know it was an accident you have to redo the experiment or they survived because of this that and the other and he asked himself well no maybe it's something that nobody ever considered maybe what had happened was by having the weaker batch they were able to somehow survive so he asked a question that was counterintuitive right which is injecting someone with something will give them a better chance of surviving it which is like whoa that's like a contradiction in terms how can that happen he was able to entertain this very bizarre idea that contradicted everything in medicine at the same time he had negative capability and he displayed it in other aspects of his life as well and he invented one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of medicine there are other examples I could give of artists because it's most common with artists but you know people like Einstein had it as well Etc so um that that you asked for example I give you a bad one but no that's actually really that's a great one uh I've one in business was just thinking about and cuz I talk about this in um impact Theory University a lot you have to be able to hold two competing ideas in your head at the same time and the the one that I encounter the most is as a leader you have to understand that people are Intoxicated by certainty in a way that is almost distressing and in fact we just impact Theory just had our sixth birthday and one of the founding members thank you very much one of the founding members recorded a video of an early memory and she was like I remember Tom had so much conviction about what we were going to build cuz I had to convince all these people like to you know do the startup starting literally from scratch and she was like Tom had so much conviction that we were going to be able to pull this off and so one of the things I teach is you have to be able to create a narrative you have to be able to say this is what's going to happen this is exactly how we're going to do it and if you can like show people that you just really believe to the core that this is going to work uh then they'll follow you the problem is that if you're blinded by your own narrative you're G to get blindsided and so you have to have this narrative you have to present it with conviction you have to believe it but then you have to question the [ __ ] out of it and make sure that like is this really working like am I getting the data that I should be getting because any conviction like that should make a prediction if your predictions aren't coming true then you're in trouble so it's like you have to be convicted and at the same time be hypers skeptical of your own Vision that's perfect except exle I couldn't have said it better thank you people can't like that's hard it's hard it's hard but it's very high level of creativity you know and if you can reach it it's it's like gold you said something earlier that I want to go back to I've been holding it my head because it was so intriguing to me woman yes at the Stanford talk the one who uh was annoyed that you said that you could find fulfillment in your work why do you think it made her mad I understand you rebuttal to her but why did it make her mad well I think there's a context first of all this was like the a group of psychologists AC very heavy Academia right high level and here was this self-help writer from Los Angeles coming to the Stanford behavioral School telling us about what is fulfilling there was an IM immediate snobbery going on on I could sense it and I think that was a large part of it it was like when I went to France although this was not nearly as bad an example of this American is going to teach us about seduction come on we're French right we taught the world how to seduce I could laugh then I thought they were right you know and I felt kind of humbled about that but this woman I got a sense of it wasn't necessarily what I was saying it just it rankled them that um that I was saying the other thing that rankled her was that I was saying that as an individual you could change yourself and I have brought up the example because it was recently I was re writing about this with the 50 Cent book about the great African-American writer Richard Wright who wrote this fabulous novel called native son is that the name there is a book called native son I don't know if you wrote it but and um how he had overcome incredible adversity in his life and had written this book and then basically kind of kind of went downhill from them but he had resurrected himself through his work and he had overcome this horrific poverty that he grew up in the South Etc and I was detailing the process of him as a writer as an example of what I was describing about through your work you reached this level so there were two things there was the snobbery element of this Los Angeles because you know from La people are are appreciably Dumber further south you go in California right if you're in the Bay Area you're from Los Angeles you already have a mark against you interesting I know self-help writer from Los Angeles okay as bad as a guess yeah all right and then the other element of it's not about culture it's not about the super structure of society it's not about some Marxist theory about you know your level of income and your and all of the other things I was saying this person this individual overcame the worst kind of adversity not through a government program although I have nothing against government programs I'm not one of those Arch Libertarians I believe in necessity of government I'm somebody who's educated through Public Schools through my whole life and I and I love that but he did it on his own in a process that was very arduous and beautiful it's like well well this goes against everything we believe in that you can't do things on your own that you need an organization you need a structure you need politics you need the group you need you need a you need academics at Stanford to teach you how to get to that point right so I was nailed as the self-help writer from Los Angeles who is preaching about individualism and it fit all the cliches about the American etc etc etc right and that's not the trend in Academia the trend is trying to move away this goes back to the whole structuralist movement and deconstruction Etc it's not the individual that creates a work of art it's the culture right getting away from the idea that there's a writer there's a narrator narrator it's all about the culture it's impersonal so what I was saying went against all of the trends in Academia and it really upset them because maybe I'm wrong but I was challenging some of their deepest held principles at least for this one woman she was very she wasn't rude or anything but I could sense that I had rubbed her the wrong way and she was very kind of there was an there was an element of anger underneath her tone it's interesting you just opened up a whole new can of worm so the when you brought her up the first time you were talking about um she was in sensed that her father wasn't fulfilled as a truck driver and that the whole idea that somebody would find their fulfillment through work to her seemed crazy and I was when you were talking about it I was like okay why would she get mad about that well not not crazy but that everybody should do that way because I was saying that everyone should have that opportunity to me the ultimate anti- elitist belief that even her father who drove a truck could have done could have been an artist could have created something through driving or in some other Capac some other capacity interesting what about the idea of doing the driving so well that it becomes Artistry I said that that if that was what fulfilled him I have no problem with that and if what fulfills you is being a great parent then that is a form of Mastery when Mastery came out I had some Carpenters who were doing the tile work on my patio and I was interviewed by the New York Times about my book and I said he's just a good example of Mastery as Albert Einstein he was so careful and so precise did a brilliant job he got a great sense of satisfaction of seeing a beautifully done you know bit of craftsmanship right we craftsmanship is a high form of intellect to my my viewpoint it's actually a great thing and it's something that people used to Value you know I mean look at the cathedrals in Europe you know some of the most beautiful things ever created by human beings Craftsmen Masons Etc people who can make stained glass they were masters of it these are things we need to celebrate so I have no problem your form of Mastery whatever it is if it is driving a truck but maybe driving a truck isn't something that's fulfilling and maybe you should consider that about your father maybe I don't know ambition is seductive why why do women find ambition seductive I think you'd have to go to evolutionary reasons I think it goes back to something biological almost it shows that a man can provide he's he's going to be someone who's going to make a good living he can provide for me he can take care of me you know um I don't know how much of that is still alive in in human psychology but I believe that is the root of it that a man who doesn't have ambition H you know I can't lean on him for support phys materially and psychologically but an ambitious man he you know the he may be uncontrollable he may be a little bit dangerous but damn it he's going to be able to to survive in a very tough world and women know it's a tough world and you know so they need sometimes they need that kind of powerful figure as a support in their life even though they're they're often the Breadwinners now and they're they still have that desire for a man that shows that he can take care of himself he can take care of his world he can provide for them if they need it ET ET what's the difference between the way that a man would seduce a woman and the way that a woman would seduce a man well it's it's it's very Elemental I mean as of course it depends on the circumstances but as I outlining The Art of Seduction women will use the visual sense factors the senses that men are so vulnerable too you know how they dress how their body looks their perfume the uh the sound of their voice I say in The Art of Seduction that a woman's voice is perhaps one of the greatest Under undervalued tools that a woman possesses men don't realize it they don't think about it because they so think that only are looking at like the physical component but a woman's voice is very very powerful and I related to the voice of the mother and a kind of a sing song equality and I have known women in my life who's go wow that woman has an incredibly seductive voice it's very powerful tool so men are drawn to those sense cues and and and they're very they're almost like you can't control them and women have learned over centuries how to appeal to that they also know that men have a desire to pursue to hunt to to to go after something if that's the kind of man because all some men are not like that and so they know how to play the coet the coet was a feminine invention there are now men who are coets for sure but the original coquettishness is a female quality of I'm I I'm I make the man interested and then I pull back he has to chase me because they know men love to Chase and if I show that I'm not interested in him that excites his interest so those are the ways that women will seduce a man a man a man will seduce a woman by things we've already talked about the quintessential male Seducer is The Rake doesn't seem like he'd be very very uh attractive because he he he can only have as many women as he can find in his life right he's not willing to settle down but when a rake is is interested in a woman he's 100% attend attuned to them he's in their world he's listening to them for the one month or two month that he's with that woman she is his whole life right not in a scary sense but in a very interesting poetic sense he knows how to give the right kind of gifts he knows to take her to the right places he's very attentive his energy is focused on her and um and he knows how to lead so leading is not just forcing someone it's like I'm leading you into the story that I'm creating I'm taking you to certain places even literally to certain places but I'm leading you down a path and you're excited by the adventure and the Mystery of where is this is going and so you know those are those are two different kind of stereotypical strategies that men versus women will will utilize I want to go back to what you were saying about the female voice so this twice now at least twice where you've made reference to they do something that is modeled after the mom or like the mom obviously there's the old phrase that men marry their mothers and and women marry their fathers I've never really liked that um it I've always thought it might be closer to something like men marry women who make them feel the way their mom made them feel see that uh but what is it about the mom how why would that be a positive seductive trigger well it's not necessarily positive um but it's uncontrollable so a lot of our erotic desires what we're interested in are things we cannot control that go back to our first years in life right and we're not even aware of it we're not even conscious of it and so the mother figure for a boy for the for a male is extremely powerful it's extremely incred because if you think about it unlike a girl our first years of our lives are completely involved dependent on a woman the opposite sex right and so that has an extreme powerful impact on our personality and we internalize Her Image in our head and that turns into what we what Yung called the anim and animos you might believe that it's just nonsense but I happen to believe it's very very real it's very amazing Theory okay so that female figure from your mother gets under your skin and sometimes mothers are not good necessarily good figures maybe they're narcissists maybe they were so much involved in their own looks that they didn't pay you much attention so it's not always that they're a posit it's a positive thing but because that got under your skin in a way you're not even aware of you're attracted to women who have that narcissistic quality because you want to replay a lot of that drama that occurred in those earliest years um and I know people are going to go though that's such [ __ ] I can't you're not even aware that's happening I'm I'm sorry to say because it's occurring in your unconscious but if you look at it if you see the patterns in your love life and you see the kinds of women that you are attracted to you will inevitably see an element of what I'm talking about right sometimes it's a woman that has a physical resemblance to your mother and that's an extremely common pattern believe me but sometimes it's more a psychological quality the fact that she was very solicitous with attention and showered you and made you feel special man I never gotten that feeling again since I had with my mother you're not aware of that but you're looking for the for the woman that will give you that feeling again or as I said your mother was a narcissist she was just completely involved in herself and her clothes and her look I want to find a woman who's like that because maybe this time I can get that woman to really love me and give me the attention I never really got from my mother so these early early years have such a powerful impact on you you're you're not even aware and the flip side is the same for women with the father figure and um I think a lot of women will admit that the Father Figure had a very very powerful impact on what they're attracted to they're usually more honest about it because men um find the the whole issue of the mother kind of creepy the sense of being so dependent on a woman being so weak that I'm after my mother oh it's like a Freudian edle thing oh my God that's disgusting I don't want to admit it but it's very true it's very real yeah that one's uh that one's tricky all right you I didn't convince you um no that one I'm really just trying to sponge I've never quite understood it so you've given me another brick of information to lay down in my desperate attempts to map how this stuff all really works okay um like you and you said this at the beginning really the thing you want to get to is what really works like where does a rubber meet the road on all this stuff not not in fantasy land but like for real for real um somebody's going on a date they met them online never met them before there's like a screen check process you guys have had to do this sort of dumb some of the guys here will show me the way that they have to flirt on the apps in order to get to the first date so how one how do you set it up in the flirtation to get to the date and then how do we be maximally seductive on that date well you know I didn't grow up in the era of Tinder so it's um you know it's I don't really know I've never had to deal with it right do you think it's going to be a different set of rules I have a feeling it's going to be the same set of rules but it's a different playing field I will give you that but well the the main thing is that I would say in in in a kind of macro sense of is pay attention to the nonverbals so seduction is a language that does not involve words it involves what is not spoken it involves your body language your eyes your smile your face how you compose your face how you walk how you present yourself the um the places you take the woman to reveal who you are if you take her to a a pizza and beer joint that probably that says something as opposed to an elegant restaurant how you dress is part of that language are you just wearing your shorts and t-shirt or do you present yourself in a knce maybe those shorts and t-shirt for some wom would work but for a lot of women it shows you don't really care so pay attention to all the non-verbal things to the little signs that the woman is very very attentive to and be able to control that to some degree so you want to present yourself as you say the most anti- seductive quality is insecurity so it's hard to fake the nonverbal secure cues that are in the world and a lot of that centers around the eyes and the face and the mouth and how you smile Etc and there are weak ways of looking kind of and there are aggressive ways and confident ways that are directed Through The Eyes but if you don't feel it it's very hard to fake it so you have to put yourself in a mindset a kind of an as if strategy as William James said where you feel confident where you feel strong you talk yourself into that mood etc etc and you let the nonverbals kind of communicate themselves so you're strong you're taking them to a place but you're also attentive sensitive you're a you're willing to reveal that slight feminine streak in you but you're in control you know what you're going to do you know the exactly where you want to take them and you of course you're you're going to let see how things play out you don't have everything planned that would be very anti- seductive as well but you have a sense of this is who I am and this is how I'm going to present myself the flirtation is not in the words that you say but it's in the looks that you give in the energy that you that you radiate right and the strength that you show and and the fact that you're looking them in the eye but not in a scary way kind of thing and then mirroring behavior is is extremely uh a sign of of the other person is follow falling under your spell so you you smile in a certain way and you see if she responds in the same way right and you kind of learn how to kind of go with her energy in the moment as well but one thing you have to be care careful of is you have to use who you are so what's flirtatious for one guy is going to work for the other guy you know so if you happen to be good with words you know I I have to admit I'm I'm weak at a lot of things you know I wasn't that quarterback in high school Etc and all that stuff but I had a away with words you know and I had a way of kind of weaving a a a world with the words that I said with the metaphors with the things that I said and so I would kind of use my flirtatious style was to kind of envelop them in these kind of images that I would create and that worked for me sometimes it didn't work because some women weren't interested in that they wanted the quarterback but for a lot of women that that was my style what is your style I don't know what it is but it has to fit who you are I think that is very good advice um the thing that I would put out there is there the big click for me was when I realized that I needed to have absolutely no fear of loss and so going into uh a situation you met them online you guys have had some flirt flirtatious exchanges they're one of the things that's really anti-education go ahead one thing you have to keep in mind though is if the woman seems to be resistant and then you just Wilt at that moment you you you cut it off and you go oh this isn't going to work man they are so stupid you are such a bad Seducer women are testing you often and by they're showing you that maybe they're not interested they might actually be interested but they want to see are you willing to pursue them are you willing to deal with some obstacles in the way you know are you willing to like you know move past their resistance not physically forcing them but if they don't seem so receptive to you on that first date that doesn't mean you have to give up it just means give it a second date and and show that you're you're still interested in them is a very powerful message it means I can deal with maybe your kind of somewhat pissy side or your sort of negative side or your kind of pickiness you know I'm still there I'm still interested okay that shows that you're willing to jump over this one hoop that I've set for you so just immediately wilting is a bad sign no agreed my advice would be if somebody is in that situation somebody's displaying something they don't like I mean look I'm not going to say it at everything that comes up but for the most part I would try to be playful with that yeah and if you if you can really stay centered if you can be somewhat unfappable and what I always have said about the way that I was with Lisa was I was aggressively myself and so I wasn't afraid of losing her now I still strategic about the way that I packaged myself like I said this is a game of marketing you are going to be who you really are but you need to bundle that in a way that's going to communicate who you are well and if I know that one of the things that people are going to be most attracted to is somebody that is confident cool then I'm I need to to be confident in who I am and also if you really want to get people's attention be counterintuitive be be interesting like say things that they couldn't have predicted that are real they're true to who you are but if you can find those things where it's like oh wow I never thought about that that's you're coming at something from an oblique angle then it's like okay you're not exchangeable I can't this isn't just I'm trying on somebody that looks different but is exactly the same as everybody else it's like you're you one have the confidence to say something you're like I don't know how this is going to land but it is true and therefore I'm going to say it and the way that I see dating is you're throwing the bat symbol up in the sky you're not trying to win the person over I mean you're trying to seduce don't get me wrong there's there's an agenda there but you want to make sure you're seducing the right person and so in the beginning of this I'm just going to be this is who I am packaged in a way that is meant to uh elicit a response from the right person so I'm not going to make it hard to be interested in who I am and all of that but I'm going to be myself I'm going to say things that are unexpected this was the same Discovery I had with interviewing was uh in the early early days I did it was like my maybe fifth interview and I did the whole interview and at the end of the interview I said uh hey do you mind if we start over I want to film this again because I'm either going to quit doing this because I was bored out of my mind because I wasn't asking the questions I really wanted to ask I was asking the questions I thought I was supposed to ask and now I want to ask what I really care about and he was a game and so we refilmed it and that was the beginning of me actually having a career as an interviewer was when I was like I don't care if this is the question people want me to ask I'm going to ask the question I'm actually interested in and bringing out that kind of intrigue especially if you can focus it on them so if I'm asking you questions maybe other people haven't asked from an angle people haven't asked it or I have a follow-up question that is surprising and shows I'm really really paying attention I actually care it'll get pretty interesting pretty fast yeah I mean um a couple things that I would add to that first of all as I say in The Art of Seduction any kind of moralizing judging quality is very anti- seductive so you're very tolerant you're very open you're not you're not there to judge the other person and if they make a comment you don't want to go touch up on politics Etc but just the sense that you're it's a non-judgmental environment is is very St because we live in a world that's so partisan but the other thing is so when we talk about interviews I've done hundreds of these over the years podcasters including yourself you're one of my favorites thank you sir and I could notice a difference between interviewers the ones that come with a preset agenda of questions not just an opening question but a whole set of questions and they're not really paying attention to you and your answers and they're they're kind of in their heads and they're thinking about their next question Etc they make me uncomfortable and I don't do as well but if the person is interviewing me is in the moment they're kind of responding they're alive they're giving me you know body language verbal accuse their eyes and we're interacting then I open up to them and then then there's a nice flow it's a similar thing between a man and a woman you're in the moment I can't say that enough you're in the moment you're not in your head going does she like me am I going to have sex with her tonight you know do I find her that attractive you're in the goddamn moment you're alive you're attuned you're listening and I can tell you um my wife has said this and I've known it from other women before I met her is I would listen very deeply and then I would hear something that kind of signaled to me a sign of something that they were interested in or something that said something about who they are and then 4 hours later or the next day I would bring it up again wrapped in my own little way of wrapping things up and think whoa you don't have no idea how much that impresses a woman because it says I was paying attention I was listening to them and I and I brought back what they said later is very powerful so be in the moment don't be thinking about your next question your next step how you're going to you know what you're going to be doing next but be alive and be attentive and be in the flow check out my intense conversation with Patrick bed David about masculinity to truly be free you have to be strong enough to control your own life and many men today simply do not qualify many of you have been told the pursuit of power is disgusting you shouldn't do it many of you don't even have a clear definition of what it means

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 553,159

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Robert Greene, Impact Theory, interview show, podcast, mindset, success, motivation, personal development, empowerment, transformation, growth mindset, self improvement, leadership, generational differences, career fulfillment, pursuit of passion, system rejection, nihilism and cynicism, embracing life, wealth disparity, baby boomers, skill development, self-awareness, personal growth, emotional intelligence, fear and insecurity, regret and fate

Id: d70gMby3_KI

Length: 209min 35sec (12575 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2024