Speaker 1: Today we are welcoming author Robert
GREENE to the program, who's written seven international bestsellers, including the 48
Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The Laws of Human Nature, and Others, most of which
I've read. Robert, really appreciate your time today. Speaker 4: Thanks for having me. David. My pleasure. Speaker 1: So one of the things maybe we could
start with is I've read a little bit about your process. When you write a book and the wealth of material
that you will read and then how you will sort of catalog and have a repository of the things
you've read in preparation for the books that you write. One of the things that I struggle with personally,
and I know many in our audience do also, is how to have a system to determine what is
worth reading, studying or paying attention to today. And of course, with social media and endless
streaming content and sports and history and economics and all of the different things
that people could spend time reading and learning about, what's your process for, even at the
top level, determining what is worthy of our attention in 2023? Speaker 4: Well, I'm very aware of the dangers
of trying to digest too much information and overloading the brain. So when I write a book, I try and make it
as focused and concentrated as possible. Excuse me. I cut out as many distractions as is humanly
possible. And so in the beginning, I choose a subject
that can be rather wide ranging, like Power or my fifth book, Mastery. And then I read. I try and find all of the books that deal
with that subject that I think are going to be direct and realistic and practical. My method is I'm trying to really change the
way you look at the world, change the way you think from the inside out. And the only way to do that is to actually
have a really solid basis in research in reality so I can make the book as practical as possible. So I sort of start by casting a wide net and
I read all the great books out there on and excuse me, for instance, on power. And then slowly I start narrowing it down
to things that are a little bit more specific. And it's kind of a fun process. So if I just kept it too narrow and I just
focused on very small little bits of books about power, it wouldn't be fun for me. Part of the excitement because if I'm excited,
I think the book tends to have be exciting to the reader. Part of the excitement is finding things that
I never expected to find. So I go from one book and then I look at the
bibliography. It references another book. It excites me on and on and on. By the end of the process, I've read two or
300 books to be able to write one book. And so I'm, you know, I'm reading an awful
lot, but I have to kind of organize the material and where a lot of books, I think, fail, it's
they they don't they're not organized well. So I've created a system with cards where
I put I read a book and then I put all of the material on and cards and organize it
by subject by category. And then I could show you, if I ever if you
ever wanted my system of cards. I have thousands of cards for one book. So I try and keep my attention very focused
on the things that are incredibly important and practical to give my book a kind of this
grounding in reality. And then I organize the material in a very,
almost fetishistic way so that I can make it so that the reader doesn't feel like I'm
overloading them with information, even though I myself have consumed vast amounts of literature
on the subject. Speaker 1: Do you have any overarching approach
to, as a consumer of media in which I would include books and all of the other forms of
media that are out there? If people in our audience have at their disposal
books of all sorts of different genres, as well as audio, visual content, music, all
of the different things playing video games, etc.. What is an approach to figuring out what is,
quote, worth spending time on versus not worth it, which certainly would vary from person
to person? Is it objective based in terms of what it
is you are looking to achieve over a period of time and which forms of information consumption
will get you closer? Or how should the average person think about
this? You know, reading your books versus novels,
watching sports, reading narrative nonfiction about Teddy Roosevelt or whatever it may be? What is there an approach that you could suggest? Speaker 4: Well, it depends on the individual. And so one thing that I think is really important
is that you have a very firm. Understanding of who you are and what your
life is about and your objectives in life and what makes you different from other people. So, so many people don't have that deep connection
to what to what to what their vocation is in life, their calling. And so they read anything because they don't
have a filter. So I think it's very, very important and I
talk a lot about this in my book Mastery, as you have a very, very firm sense of this
is where I want to go in life. This is what connects to me. This is what excites me. So without that kind of filter, without that
kind of focus, then you're kind of lost at sea and you're reading all kinds of things
that aren't going to help you in the end. I mean, at some point I myself like to waste
time, you know, like anybody else. So I will get on and I'll look at YouTube
videos or podcasts or read material that isn't directly related to my work. And I think it's important to sometimes relax
and not be so rigid about this. But I think you have to have a sense of where
of who you are, what you like, what's important to you, what matters what and where your career
is going. And then from there you determine what's important
for you to read. Because the problem we're facing today, quite
frankly, is we're just inundated with too much information, with trivia that just clogs
the brain up. It makes it very, very hard for you to focus. It makes it very hard for you to actually
think about your own priorities in life. So you can't find an app or some teacher that's
going to help you do that. It has to come from within. You have to have a sense of who you are, what
makes you different, what's important to you, what your values are. From there you can then filter out the information
is completely useless, or that's more important for you. Speaker 1: Do you think that at this point
in time? It is still the case that there might be some
core curriculum of sorts. The idea of some kind of you know, at one
point it was the classical education where there were certain works that no matter what
your vocation or interests were, may be worthy or almost like a required reading of sorts. Does that idea still ring in any way true
to you today, or has sort of human life on earth in 2023 become so diverse that that
very idea maybe is no longer relevant? Speaker 4: Well, when I was going to school,
it was like these classics from I believe it was I forget the name of the schools like
Johns Hopkins. They had a list of all the great classics. I come from a humanities background, and so
there were books that I read that are sort of the canon in there that were kind of elemental,
but, you know. So right now we're in a period of time where
science, technology is dominating our schools, etc. Our way of thinking and the humanities have
kind of faded and are actually being kind of closed off. And many universities, people aren't interested
in them anymore. But I think it's very important to be able
to ground yourself in our history, in our culture, in our civilization. And some of these classics, I think, are still
extremely relevant and very, very important to read. The reason is, is it's not just important
what you read, but it's important how you read. Right. So my background in classics, because I studied
ancient Greek and Latin, which is probably the most irrelevant subject you could study,
but I think helped me very, very much my ability to organize my thoughts and organize material. So a lot of these books, they kind of train
you how to think, how to interpret, how to read, subtext, how to get inside of a book
and take it apart and see what somebody is really saying. The ideas behind the ideas, etc., etc.. I find that a lot of that is missing nowadays
in people's thinking. Is getting thinner and thinner and thinner
where they're not really analyzing and not going into any kind of depth on the subject
because they're so distracted and they're going from subject to subject to subject,
their scroll, etc., etc., etc.. When you read a dense text like I had to read,
like the city's history of the Peloponnesian War, it makes you focus on just one paragraph. What is he trying to say? What's the meaning behind it? It gives your brain focus and discipline. Right. So I think reading, going back to some of
that is extremely important even here in the 21st century. And I don't regret at all studying perhaps
the, as I said, the most irrelevant subject of all, because I think it gave me a discipline
of mind that I would not have had elsewhere. But that said, I think it's important to have
a wide ranging interest. I like to read a lot about science, for instance. I don't have a science background, but in
reading a lot of that for the books that I'm currently writing and it kind of opens my
mind up to different ways of thinking. It kind of it has a different logic to it
than literature or biography or history has. Every kind of subject has its own logic, its
own way of thinking, its own way of exploring reality. And the more you open yourself up to these
various different ways of looking at the world, you enrich your mind, but you also not just
in the content, but in how you think. So bringing a kind of scientific mentality
to my material has been very important for my thought processes. So I would I would throw a wide net out there
and read in many different disciplines, but kind of ground yourself in a way of analyzing
information instead of just digesting information. Having being able to be critical and analyzing,
I think it's very important. Speaker 1: Along those lines in the books
that you write, there is such a broad range of both sorts of folks that you write about
and subject matter that you've read about and you draw connections and parallels between
different eras in history as well as between different disciplines. In all of that, is there anything that seems
particularly different about the current time that we're living through that seems to be
an outlier based on the patterns and connections that you've studied so deeply in preparing
all of the books that you've written. Speaker 4: When you consumed so much material
and history, it kind of changes how you think. And so a lot of people nowadays who don't
read a lot of history, quite frankly, have this idea that everything that's going on
now is new and different and modern. It's never happened before. There's the old cliche in. Financial bubbles that this time it's different. You know, like in 2008 with the new way of
doing real estate equity, etc. this time it's different. You know, with I, this time it's different. It's never different. It's the same patterns repeating over and
over and over again throughout history. I'm reading a book right now about 12th Century
France. I'm writing about a couple of characters in
that period. It is incredibly modern. The ideas, the ways people are thinking about
love, about philosophy, about ancient history. There's like characters that I see right now
in here in Los Angeles. There's hipsters, there's guys with long hair,
there's people discussing love and freedom, etc. It's like they're like hippies. Wow. This is this is incredibly similar to our
times. We have this illusion that things are different. The only thing that's different is things
get more intense. So what social media has done is it's taken
qualities that are inherent in human nature that have existed for 5000, 10,000, 400,000
years, like our propensity for envy, our need to constantly compare ourselves, like our
self-absorption, like our aggressive impulses, and it simply gives them a way to accentuate
them. It gives them like a megaphone, for instance. So our kind of passive aggressive tendencies
or our hostility on the Internet and social media, it's like it's just exacerbated. So it's not like things are just like we rewired
ourselves. It's not like we've become different people. Social media is having an effect on our brains. It's changing certain things. It's making things worse. It's taking qualities that we already have
and making them more and more extreme. But we're the same animal that existed in
ancient Greece, in ancient Egypt, etc. It's just that we have tools now that we're
not really capable of handling in a in a in a rational way. Our minds were developed for a certain way
of life. That's completely different in the 21st century. So we have these tools that are so powerful,
but our minds are really adapted, aren't really made for it being able to handle them in a
very realistic way. But I don't think the more I read about history,
the more I have the sense that human human life, civilizations and cultures go in these
cycles that just keep repeating over and over and over again. Speaker 1: So along those lines, since you
brought up social media, a couple of different things in his two books, Amusing Ourselves
to Death and Technology, which predated Social media, Neil Postman has an analysis which,
if applied to social media or a critique, would be the question of whether social media
is a net good is a less important question. Then how can we maximize the good and try
to limit the bad? Cal Newport, on his podcast not long ago had
a piece about the effect of what he calls unrestricted social media use for young kids,
particularly girls, but both boys and girls. And he asserted that if the early data ends
up being what it appears to be in something like ten years, the idea of giving kids unrestricted
access to social media would be sort of like giving kids cigarets that it would be like,
Wow, how did we ever not realize that that was a really bad idea? So sort of a two part question, How interesting
do you think the question is of is social media a net good? And to what is your sense of how the relationship
to social media might change as the as it matures and we know more about its impacts? Speaker 4: Well, you know, things that technology
and things that we create aren't necessarily a net good or a net evil. They're just simply instruments that we can
use that are at our disposal that can help us, you know, So I remember in the early days
of the Internet as a writer, the incredible power that it gave me for researching, giving
me access to documents, to academic things, to books that I could normally never get or
find, it was amazing. So it can be an extremely valuable tool for
gathering information, for finding things that you have a simple question about how
to fix something in your house. 3 seconds later you have it. It's also an amazing tool for connection,
for communication, or I can communicate to people who have similar interest like I do
around the world. It can be fast food. It could be a wonderful tool, but it isn't
like that. It's turned into something rather dark and
rather ugly, and it's kind of decaying our minds, like too much sugar wood on our teeth. And the reason is, and I said it in my book,
The Laws of Human Nature is that this is what human nature is. Create something and we slowly, slowly kind
of degrades more, more and more down to the lowest common denominator. It happened with television. People are going, Whoa! Television. We're going to be able to use it now to educate. Our children are going to be educated on this
incredibly new level. People were that naive in the forties and
fifties. And then slowly we go, No, it's not like that
at all. So it's not the instrument itself that's potentially
good or bad. It's our minds. It's how we use them, how we bring human nature,
how we have no discipline, how we just simply use things without thinking about them. So the other thing that happens is something
like the Internet becomes a tool for making money instead of for information, for connecting,
for communicating. And how do we control that? We can't really control that because we live
in a capitalistic society, and that's the nature of these things. But we create these tools and we don't ever
think about how they're going to be applied or the negative consequences for them. Until it's almost too late. And so when I read now about A.I. and all
the people throwing their arms up about, oh, how dangerous it is, even Sam Altman, who's
the person developing this, is warning us about the dangers of it. I think it's rather ridiculous and absurd
for these people to be doing that. They're the ones creating it. They're the ones thrusting it upon us. Why aren't they thinking about that before
they create it? Why isn't someone like Steve Jobs imagining
the incredible deleterious effects that an iPhone could have on our brains? It's like it to me. It all comes back to human nature. If we think about the fact that we are very
short sighted, that we tend to be locked in the present, we don't have the instinct of
thinking ahead and going, what are the consequences for this particular action, for this particular
technology? We're going to be following again and again
and again and again into this trap. So I think one thing that could happen as
far as the second part of your question is that there is something in us that is that
is very real, that they cannot endure so much of this virtuality in our lives. We know that we're ruining our brains. We know that it's making it distract, distracting
us to death. To quote Neil Postman, that it's having a
net negative effect on our ability to focus. And my hope is that people who are younger,
who are in their early twenties, Gen Z, etc., they start rebelling against this. Like when I my age, I was rebelling against
the world of my parents and sort of the rigid and conventionality of it. The people go, We want something more real. We don't like this relationship, this, that
it's creating of of so that we're less and less social and we're more and more virtual. And there's a real rebellion and people realize
this is what matters. These are our priorities. But until we have a sense of what our values
are, of what's important, and to me what is important is that we're a social animal and
that we're able to interact with people on a deep and a profound level, that we're human,
that we're animal, that creates and builds things. In order to build things, you have to master
a subject. You have to understand it deeply. You have to be able to be patient and disciplined. These are things that I find as high art mega
values, better values that we must have discipline, mastery, social interaction, creativity. And if you have that kind of scale of values,
then when you create something new and you create something like social media and you
go, Well, how does that help us in these things? Is this going to have a negative effect? But if you live in a time where there are
no more values, whereas kind of nihilism, where there's no sort of there's nothing kind
of grounding us of what's matter, what matters or nothing will ever change. We'll never get a grasp of how to use these
things properly. Speaker 1: We've been speaking with author
Robert GREENE will be linking to a number of his books. Robert, really appreciate your time. I know you're busy and your time and insights
are very much appreciated. Speaker 4: Thank you, Dave. Thank you very much for having me.
