Robert Greene: How to Resist MANIPULATION and Be a Lone Wolf (Brad Carr Clip)

[Music] what is it if the sublime is so exciting that brings us into conformism there's two ways of attacking that first um we're social animals by nature and it plays an incredibly powerful um role in our lives we are defined as by other people we our ability to learn language our culture all of our thoughts we're hybrids we're part so our parents live inside of us our siblings live inside of us our teachers we have bits of other people right there's no escaping that there's really in truth no such thing as an actual individual right we're social creatures by nature okay and so we pick up the emotions of people the moods their feelings on non-verbal levels it has a profound impact on us it's the whole secret behind marketing behind virality behind viral you know by behind memes right we're very susceptible to imitating what other people are doing because we're very vulnerable to their moods their emotions and so that's a continual a continual danger i mean it's got a positive side it it allows us to be who we are to create we're so one of the most amazing skills that we have is our empathy our mind reading ability which we see in some primates but it's pretty much a unique uh human ability to put ourselves in the skin of other people and and try and figure out what their world is like and very interesting psychologists have studied children and how from the age of one and two to three they start developing this mind-reading skill it's extremely powerful these are social skills that we that are absolutely phenomenal that have led to who we are but the dark side is the tendency to conform the tendency to want to fit in so there have been fascinating studies of people who live in isolation that could be either in in um in prison where you're in isolation block where you're by yourself for long periods yeah or there was this book called alone by one of the antarctic explorers antarctica who was trapped in this in this little hut for like three months by himself there'd been other experiments and what happens when you're alone is you lose a sense of being alive being a human being you go literally insane so we need to see other people to look at their eyes to make us feel like we're alive like we're human like we're aware and conscious right so to feel isolated to feel like you've been banished from your group almost feels like death to us we have incredible impulse to want to belong to whatever group it is and it determines a lot of our behavior so when you're getting back to the sublime i'm now trying to circle back to this very long tangent here i talk about there's the sublime and there's the false sublime so we can't escape the desire to somehow be connected to something larger than who we are because we feel trapped in our bodies we feel trapped in our mortality we want to attach ourselves to a great cause to some religion to something bigger than who we are right yes it's deeply human and so there's the true sublime there are false negative ways of getting that right so addictions are to me a kind of false sublime because they give you a sense of kind of they titillate you they give you an excitement right or a lot of movies are kind of like that they're they're manipulating your emotions they're making you feel like there's something weird strange out there but it's not coming from within you it's like somebody telling you how to think or how to behave the sublime has to be something active so the difference between the false and the real is are you being passive and manipulated or are you actively engaging in the process are you being actively social are you using those empathy skills that mind reading creating some kind of following or some powerful social movement or are you passively just trying to be part of the herd so that's to me the difference between the two how how can we know if we're if we're in that active phase or if we're being influenced especially as we get so much information these days through as we've talked about earlier platforms that are meant to influence us well it's a great question and if i had the complete answer i'd i'd be a multi-billionaire but um so the thing is it's all relative you know once you you know you realize at a certain point maybe it's with age that there are no hardcore answers so you're never going to arrive at some perfect truth at some perfect reality outside of manipulation right because we're always being manipulated and we and if we and the whole point of manipulation is you don't realize it right so a good manipulator and believe me i've written a lot about that if you're being manipulated and by someone who's really smart you have no idea you have no clue you'll go yeah i did that because i want to do it you don't realize the marketing person the the little machiavellian genius who's knows how to use the 48 laws of power they don't you don't realize that your will is actually being you know the puppet strings are in somebody else's hands right so i'm i'm constantly being manipulated and i write about it so it's impossible to totally get out of that it's but what you want is the moment you think you're this powerful independent autonomous individual that's dangerous you want to be aware of your own limitations you want to be aware that you are being manipulated don't fool yourself into thinking that you're the one person on this planet that has somehow escaped uh the news media or or or facebook and and social media or instagram or all the other little forces operating on us you're not you are being manipulated and just knowing that you have that weakness that you have that frailty that you're human that it's natural is almost enough because now you you have the ability to step back and look at yourself sometimes and go honestly is that coming from me or is that coming from someone else now you can as a i'm getting back to what i said you can never know for sure because you think it comes from you and what you really desire when you buy that product but maybe there's a little bit of you something from your parents from your childhood that you're not aware of but to the degree that you can open the lens up and see the forces operating on you you have a degree of control you can become active instead of passive so that's the difference i see and how do we know what those forces are in us is that back to the meditation practice is this a journaling thing yes yes it is and it's it's all you know i said in the very beginning that this one thing i'm telling you is like the key to the whole universe right yeah and it really truly is i mean i don't know if i expressed it well enough but that ability to step back and look at yourself and not give into the emotion and for just three seconds analyze why you're thinking this why you're feeling it is almost enough to be able to have that power it's not the complete answer as i said have some humility in life you are not as powerful as you think you're not as good as you think you're not as smart as you think right you are open to manipulation but just being able to see yourself that's the whole bloody point of the laws of human nature now that book is thick right yes the longest book i've written i apologize to everyone for that okay but i'm trying to drum this into your head to be aware of the fact that you have these frailties that you feel envy that you are self-absorbed that you can be irrational and stupid that you're short-sighted that you have a dark side that you're aggressive that you have grandiosity on and on and on the only way to get out of those negative emotions is to be aware of the fact that they're in you denying it is a sure thing that you actually have the problem so denying that you're manipulated denying that you don't control yourself means that you are being controlled means you are being manipulated denial is a very powerful human thing and freud said when the human brain denies something it is actually unconsciously admitting the opposite and that's what's going on okay so just being able to look at yourself and go i'm not going to deny it i'm going to admit to myself that these forces are operating on me is almost enough now how do you identify those sources that's a whole other issue you know i could give some deep thought to that but just first be aware that it's happening to you and don't and don't think that you're the one exception out there yeah when you wrote the 48 laws of power um that book was different you know for people who hadn't seen things like it it took probably a lot of courage to write something like that and to put it out in the world how did you overcome the pressure to conform especially you know as a new author you don't have a track record to come out and do something like that it's a great question um and you know there's probably a little bit of illusion where i'm looking back and kind of creating a reality that wasn't there at the time because mind you i started that book 26 years ago and my brain isn't as sharp as it used to be so i've tried and think about it as deeply as i can but i've always been a very rebellious person and it's not always good but it's why i had 60 70 different jobs before i became a writer i didn't like working for other people people pissed me off i had some terrible bosses instead of trying to accommodate to himself i said and i just left yeah right i was kind of an angry rebellious kid for a lot of my life right i don't like things the way they are i i want something new i want something different i was hungry for that so at the time i wrote the 48 laws the power was at a very low moment in my life i've talked about it before i was in my mid to late 30s i had no real success in life and i was i didn't really have i had no money i was living in a small little apartment in santa monica and so um there was a bit of desperation there but when it came to writing this book and i i had a partner who saved my life basically yo stelfers who was the packager of the 48 lost power a brilliant man a great designer when i pitched the book to him he got very excited but i had learned in life you know one of the laws of power is interaction with boldness right i had learned in life in my experiences in hollywood and all the 80 different jobs that people who really succeed stand out they're bold they have coconuts to use an expression you know what i mean yes right they you know and it applies to women too um you know they they they're confident they feel strong about themselves they have a point to reach those who who are trying to follow all the trends they might sell a book they might make a movie but they don't have impact right so i started writing the 48 laws of power and i know power is power is that boldness itself right and i'm feeling it as i'm writing and i'm doing all these research and i'm getting very excited and i'm kind of creating what turns out to be a very weird book in the structure and the form there's no other book out there like that for better or worse the way it looks literally on a page but i'm doing it it's just who i am right and at a point is reached where um my girlfriend at the time was looking at it she was going you know i don't know if this is going to sell really i don't know if people are going no she's usually always right and i trust her opinion but she was wrong that one time no it's gonna work if it doesn't work i don't care i tried i did my best and then when we turned the book in to the publisher of penguin the editor who's a very smart woman um she's saying robert this book is a little bit strange i think what you need to do is i think you need to get rid of all of those sections that you have and make it just kind of one continuous narrative i go that's not the book i've written right yeah and every structure is your signature yeah yeah and we've been given a very large advance at the time you know after the name numbers but for me it was a huge amount and so i talked to yoast my partner who as i said was extremely helpful wonderful man i said look if they don't want this book we'll return the advance we'll find somebody else who buys it the way it is which was a very bold act on our part right and we said that to them and they backed down right so um trying to remember your question originally your courage to do something so you know weird well because it's for better or worse because it's gotten me a lot of trouble in life i'm not trying to say i'm some paragon that everyone should follow me my rebelliousness and my weirdness has gotten me in a lot of trouble before it led to a lot of non-success but i understood that if you're going to make something and you want to reach the stars you want to hit the gold you know get the pot of gold at the end you want to really strike it rich you have to be bold you have to so that book could either be an abysmal failure which is very likely could have been or it will be a great success and um i tell people this all the time i think it's a very important lesson to have don't be afraid of failure don't be afraid of losing don't be afraid of people rejecting you right stick to your guns if your motivation is always cramped and oh i want to fit in oh they might not like me oh this book this might be too different oh my podcast might not be like other people that fear it just withers the soul it makes what you create just like everything else out there it leads to all the kind of boring crap that's out that's populating our media right but when you think no i'm gonna be myself i'm gonna mind what's different about me i'm gonna be bold and confident i'm going to be very i'm going to put a lot of work into it it's not going to be just like i'm going to do anything to work very hard but i i feel confident about this i feel bold mastery the book mastery is a key component of that so it's not just so when i wrote the 48 laws of power i had 20 years of experience behind me with all kinds of jobs bad bosses i took i was a journalist for many years i learned how to write i i developed real skill so i could be bold because i felt confident i knew i had real skill i knew i had learned a lot about history and life that i could do this if i was just 23 or 24 thinking wow i'm the greatest piece of that everything that ever walked the planet earth i can write this book it would have failed sure i had the boldness because i knew i had the skill so if you know you have the skill you know you have a great idea just fill yourself up with energy and excitement about it and stop listening to so many piggly little petty voices around you trying to tell you to fit in to be like other people [Music]

Channel: Brad Carr

Views: 675,421

Keywords: robert greene 2022, human nature, friends, power, brad carr, interview, manipulation, group, individual

Id: J4PGYYjqQgQ

Length: 16min 58sec (1018 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 16 2022