Robert Greene "The 33 Strategies of War"

stay on between the lines of past guest of our program whose book changed the lives of many viewers including mine the best-selling author of the 48 laws of power and the art of seduction Robert Greene unburied kubrick with his latest book the 33 strategies of war Robert once again helps us gain mastery in the modern world his newest book is a comprehensive guide to the subtle social games of everyday life conformed by the most ingenious effective military principles get ready for all the psychological ammo you'll ever need to overcome patterns of failure and forever gain the upper hand in life I'm a fighter today because I was a reader when I was 11 years old and able to do in me does need you do not need to prove your state of happiness realism motion these features were as much as a month in separation characters the Joseph Hooker seekers of truth in and the story that that involves a lot of garage engagements really talk about what's and the person [Music] Robert welcome back as I said in the introduction and as I told you before the 48 laws of power had a major effect on me in a positive way and I'm so glad to have you here with the 33 strategies of war but I have to say something even the study of power I'll never forget the emails I got it's a very funny feeling when you talk of power because people are afraid of power some people want more power when you go into war though I'm already set for the battles and email so 33 strategies of war did you just do this to bug people well not at all I mean I know that there's a sort of prejudice this general thought of war as being something very violent and aggressive where it's sort of barbaric and people are killing each other but this is kind of ridiculous because there's a whole other side to warfare that's just so fascinating and it's basically the mental the rational the strategic side of war and essentially if you study war at all you understand quite simply that it's the mental part the strategy the thinking that goes behind it that is much much more important than the physical aspect of actually fighting and that's what fascinates me about it and in fact the what fascinated me was even the very beginning when I started getting involved in it was the war with ourselves there's a tremendous amount of that in fact even when you take it outside of yourself when you really look at all the strategies you really do have to go back within everything starts with your own mind so strategy is a mental process and so I have the first part of the book I call it self-directed warfare it's almost a spiritual concept all of the great religions in the Old Testament the New Testament the Bhagavad Gita they all talk about a kind of spiritual warfare with your own human nature and I talk about there in the first part of the book that you're at war with certain parts of your mind that constantly present obstacles and you could know all of the strategies you could have a lot of knowledge but if don't fight these mental habits none of it's worth nothing I'm telling you if I didn't have a good medic in my wife I would never have gotten through half the battles but right there that they're coming from within and and again I want to shed another light is when you use Sun Tzu's the art of war as you say in here it is true victory is bloodless there is not even a battle that needs to be fought well son who is was this a genius and that's and the reason I mean his book has stood the test of time 2500 years he's still read to this day and he has a concept where he defines the art of war which I believe will never be surpassed and he says the art of war is basically to win with minimum bloodshed and minimum violence an army that goes in and mows down the enemy and kills a lot of people and destroys the city simply creates an escalating cycles of violence so the whole game in war is to win with the minimum amount of bloodshed and the minimum amount of violence and a strategist must try and get as close as possible to that ideal I think that has incredible relevance and application to any struggle any fight you're going on in your life you need to win with the minimum amount of resistance now before we get into the book I want to say something else about the book it's one of the very few books that actually says it's a production and it's a juste elvers book it's kind of an interesting thing because the structure of the book is as not as it's the context in this case is way more fascinating but the structure is beautiful I want to show people just briefly how this is structured because it starts off with the strategy and the historical battle that reflects it and they'll be seeing these different images the interpretation of what that strategy is the keys to warfare the reversal of the strategy which is sometimes as interesting as the strategy itself you even do an image where you you write in the text the way you want someone to visualize it and as well as an authority on the subject and more support in the read writing it's by the way it's like three books four books actually by the unfortunately for me by the time I got through it it was really reading for a booklet but each one supports in another way the sea and the and the possibilities that exist well there's two things to say on that uh one of my favorite books of all time is actually the II Ching which is a Chinese book an oracle books going back to ancient times which has a sort of a similar very I find a very fun structure that draws you in the second thing is I always believe I I have a chapters in my and the power book and in this book that the structure of something the way you format the form or structure itself is actually an incredibly important decision very strategic in itself and I'm trying to communicate in different ways I'm trying to communicate with an image as you say with sort of stimulating thoughts from all different directions so it's all very conscious well you know what also does is it it helps people if maybe a person is more able to focus on a strategy another person on an image another person on the wisdom of someone so it really allows a person to get fully wrapped around the subject which I like but I want to even before I get into the strategies and we know from last time with the 48 laws we're never going to get into all 33 is that okay and the beauty of the show is I get to pick my favorite one but beforehand I want to talk about the fundamental ideals which you you know you really bring out and they're as important as the strategies right themselves look at things as they are and don't let emotions color them right I joked before with the 48 laws of power and how important the number one law is this seems to be very important as well well they think about warfare which i think is applicable to life is the closer you're able to get to reality to what is really going on in the situation to what people are doing to you or what is happening around you the better your strategies will be and the main block that you have to understanding to being as close as possible to this reality is yourself your mind your emotion you tend to see what you want to see in the world your feelings of hatred or love or lust or greed they're constantly coloring what you see in very subtle ways and so the process for a strategist is to get rid of as much of that emotions that are coloring your viewpoint and getting the capacity to see the world for what it is on the other side Sun Tzu talks about it you want to make it harder for your opponents to see reality you want them to be mistaking things to being to deceive them but you yourself have to get your mind as close as possible to what is really happening well I want to go a little further than about about the self because number two is judge people by their actions I think that was obvious to some extent but I love the subtlety of this line it is your own bad strategies not the unfair opponent that are to blame for your failures and I think we're very apt to quickly blame someone when again quicker look inside not to blame yourself no but to make yourself aware yes I mean this is the the liberating part of warfare when when it's a very brutal ruthless arena war and when a general loses a war nobody cares about his good intentions all they care about are the results and so I'm saying in life it's not a question of beating yourself up and saying why did I do this why did I do that it's a matter of being more realistic and if you begin to think of yourself as the master of your own destiny you you're the master strategist commanding your own army it's actually very empowering liberating idea as opposed to something where you just sort of beat yourself down and get down on yourself it's more the fact that anytime something goes wrong in life it you can look at it and say you were responsible for that in some way you could have done things differently go back analyze what you did in this mistake you made whatever and see hmm if I had done a instead of B it would have turned out differently and I you know I think you can do this for any decisions that you have in life but I think again the key is to not beat yourself up on it and I found that personally and again I thank you for the 48 laws of power and as well as the guidance in here that's one of the first things I found that I had to deal with was when I would make what seemed like the same mistake again I would almost feel like punishing myself right and and that seems be that one thing you want people to avoid when they're even doing battle with themself a difficult concept what I want to I really want to emphasize that right I mean your morale how you feel about yourself is very important and I have chapters in this how you have to go into battle and I think life is full of battle all of the time you can't go into battle with with negative feelings feeling that you don't have confidence so your own confidence your own self-esteem has incredible importance in how you end up going to warfare so the idea is just to be realistic and to learn from your experiences if you don't learn from your own experiences and they have no value to you and so you have to constantly assess this is what I did in the situation this was right and this was wrong and I think it's a very powerful tool let's play on a few of them that don't you deal with here the do not fight the last war is the second strategy and it says that what often weighs you down and brings you misery is the past yes and again I have a feeling that goes a little bit to what I was saying before is how you're viewing your past if you're doing so with this guilt Laden and this sort of punishing of oneself that's what you want us to pluck away even as we look back at our past right exactly and it's a delicate game I think this is one of the most important chapters in the book and I think it's the foundation of any person of any good strategist is your capacity to let go of the past and to not fight the last four and what that means is the last war will have two effects on you either it was a defeat it will bring you down and you'll become more timid and you'll carry that into your next battle and you'll become cautious and worried and cetera number two if it was a victory you will become elated you will become drunk on your own success and you will rule think I just have to repeat what I did the last time which is a great mistake and lots of mistakes in warfare have been because of that I talk in the book I say we all want to get recapture our childhood we want but a lot of times we think of that we want to recapture our good looks or that kind of happy feeling we have when we were children I'm saying what you really want to recapture from your childhood is your mind the fact that you have this very fluid mind that was open to experiences that could take things in for what they were and learn from them and absorb that kind of mental fluidity is the foundation of any great strategist and oddly enough the greatest of them all like Napoleon Hannibal they all have this kind of childlike capacity to just simply take what was coming at them and not bring their own preconceptions to what was going on you know you use both of them a lot in in the read margins and in the other as well as Churchill and again many of the classic war strategists that you apply to our own selves one of them in the counter balance strategy which i think is one of the first actual strategies of war was the counter attack if I if I remember in the book you say presence of mind again what we go back to that joyous sense of letting the mind be fluid and I thought that I thought again if people could really grasp as crowd out feelings of panic by focusing on simple tasks and one of the people in the book constantly is Churchill and a viewer sent me a line a woman named Peggy sent me a wonderful line where she said Churchill says the chain of Destiny can only be grasped one link at a time and I couldn't help but think of your book as I was was reading through that as you have to take care of that task oftentimes you may even use the simplest task right that you can knock down and get out of the way not even the one that may be no pressing on you but easy one well presents people often wonder well what does war have to do with what daily life well one of the great concepts in warfare talked about by a great philosopher of Carl von Clausewitz a great person wrote about war is this concept of presence in mind in there's nothing more intense more violent more stressful than battle or warfare and presence of mind is simply the capacity of certain throughout history to maintain their mind to maintain their mental balance and make the right decisions in this ultimately stressful environment and so what is it that allows them to do this well I analyze that I show they have this counterbalancing capacity to control their emotions and I read one instance of a fighter pilot who I forget who it was I'm sorry but and he was facing a terrifying situation in which they was surrounded by enemy fighters and it looked really grim and he was panicking he was hyperventilating and he found it's the only way to overcome this was to focus on little tasks that he had to do you know buttons he had to press and things like that and then he was able to sort of calm himself down and make the right decisions and then he formulated this into a whole philosophy of how to maintain your presence of mind in such situations so I think this this is one of the ideas that you know people can you can learn a lot from in warfare you have one that originally sounds like almost cliche and that's pick your battles carefully and of course we've heard that hundreds of times but here's my thought that I think separates it value what you have not what you wish you had I want to repeat that value what you have not what you wish you had and then use that as your strategy right that's it you can't lose by that can you right the concept is that I titled that the perfect economy strategy and the idea is that we all have a certain economy we have we only have so much energy we only have so much time on this planet and the game is to use this to the maximum and you can go in one of two directions as a mistake you can try too much you can take on too much in your life where the the task at hand is beyond your capacity you'll tend to fail and beat yourself up or you can take on something that's below your capacity that's so easy and you're not challenging yourself and that's another form of failure the game is to have this sort of perfect level where what you're doing in life matches exactly the energy and the resources that you have and it's the same thing for an army an arm the fights best when it is fighting with this sort of perfect economy so I'm just simply saying I kind of make the analogy of someone who's a swimmer I have them to swim a lot when you're swimming right you're not creating resistance in your path the water is smooth before you and that's how it should be in life you're making the most of what you have you know you could tell I enjoy playing this with you Robert turn the tables no matter 9:00 again here's the part that I want to bring out never see a situation as hopeless your own weakness can become strength with clever manipulation now it plays a little bit off of that other one but now we're even talking about my personal weakness never looking at whatever the situation is as hopeless and then taking that weakness and turning it into a strength well the quote I have in there from Sun Tzu is about that I love this quote but the person I used to illustrate it is Napoleon Bonaparte who was a grand counter attacker that was his favorite strategy in life and Napoleon was a very weird character he actually loved bad situations he almost had a way of putting himself deliberately in situations that were very adverse where everything was against him because his whole mind would rise to the occasion and his philosophy was anything negative anything bad happening to you contains the seeds of a turn around you can turn it around into something positive and you know this could be the fact that your opponent in the battle is suddenly getting a little bit aggressive and carried away and arrogant you can use their arrogance to turn it around I think you know this is sort of a beautiful philosophy and life if you will well that's the whole book is is a beautiful philosophy of life let's play with another one and again as I say I think in the back of your mind I know you're goofing on us sometimes because I know you like to you give us that little battle mentality and then we see what is what is really here and this one here maneuver them into weakness nothing ever happens as expected if you meet the dynamic situations of life with plans that are rigid you are doomed but keep it simple and again each one of these plays off of the other one yes I mean I mentioned earlier about reality in your mind coming closer to reality well the main thing about reality is its chaotic you can't control it there's the famous concept of the chaos of war the chaos of war means nothing will happen how you think it will happen according to what you imagine it and so if your mind is rigid if you come up with a plan that's just very linear and going you know you going from A and B to C and you just know this is where you're going to go you're going to fail because life or war will come up with things that you don't expect once again the icon in that chapter was Napoleon I use Napoleon a lot because he was a genius but Napoleon's genius was in the planning stage he was a master at organizing and planning and what he did was he looked at everything of the situation that was happening he analyzed everything he put it all on these note cards etc if I did a how will the enemy respond if they respond with that what I'll do this this and this he could and then out of all of this he would create a plan that was very loose he would place himself in a position in which he could go this direction that direction or whatever the enemy gave him this was so so brilliant and so novel and I think this is a model for how we can plan in business and politics but also in anything that we have to do in life you know Robert I want to give your website out because I know you are the person that will respond to people if they want more and and this will really be give them a chance to do that it's ww3 three strategies of war right I want to make sure we have it right and it's the number three three so I'm going to give it out it's www.stevekuban.com Oh Robert I gotta tell you you're laughing but and you met my boys they'll tell you that's my natural thing is to go right into that breach mode and and your words are and and you know it's funny it's my natural thing with my kids yet I believe the opposite so I have to just train my own self and be disciplined because you want the people to uncover and discover what you want them to discover rather it's so much more effective right you you have to think of working with people from the inside out you want to plant your ideas inside them and so then they when the idea takes seed inside their brain they think that it was their own idea but in fact it is you that have put it there then it becomes that first of all they're not resentful they don't think oh this is some you know we all have a tendency when someone's preaching at us to nod our heads say yes yes yes but in fact we don't believe a word that they're saying and it even has the effect of we're perverse and we want to believe the opposite the game that you're trying to do is to put the idea in the other person's mind as if it's their own and then it takes root and then they have no resentment and it's sort of the ultimate sort of form of control if you will I I talk in the book of Machiavelli who was a genius at that the idea is the form of your communication is as important as what you say well you notice I spoke to you earlier I said when I began following even the 48 laws of power which one of them by the way hits on something similar to that and when I read it again and I said ah but with my own children it was very funny I had it laid out very well with business and I found with my own kids I was doing the opposite right until today all right boys I know you're in the green room until today but you know it is hard and here's where I want to pick your brain app sure when you're dealing with the passions of life that's when it would seem like you most need to be reminded of the strategies because that's when they seem to escape a lot easier a passion has its own place in the strategy game in fact in my second book the art of seduction I talked about charisma which is a very important element in seduction and a charismatic is a person who feels very deeply about something and when they communicate it to the world it's very seductive and you know you tend to be caught up and infected by their emotions so this isn't about becoming some kind of cold mechanical person who doesn't feel anything that's not going to influence anybody as well it's more of the fact that sometimes when you're trying to persuade a person instead of getting caught up in yourself and how you feel about it you have to think about how the other person is thinking you have to think what are their resistances and laugh and what are their what is their viewpoint and working from their direction and getting inside their way of looking at it that's how you have to focus instead of on yourself and what you want to say and when I'm capable of creating that right it does work it is no that's not easy and that's what I would apps where that's where I was going right it's not you have to be very mindful right not to the point of it being obsessive but almost it is something you'd bite for this I guess that would be the right term it's important right it's more that you're you're thinking it's a you know it's strategy and the point is you look at another person I mean you're wondering why is this in the book on warfare well I say communication is actually a form from floor you're dealing with another person who has like a wall there like a castle and you're trying to penetrate their defenses and as we know in anybody who has ever tried to bring down a castle you can't just hit at it from the front you have to try and either go underneath or come to the side so you're looking at people is something that you have to actually attack and strategize the whole point is to communicate an idea you have to be strategic you just can't just say whatever you want to say and think that your belief will will convince people you have to be strategic unfortunately I wish there was a strategy to give me more time but ours is up and I want to end with your words events in life mean nothing if you do not reflect on them in a deep way thank you sir for reflecting on them in a deep way thank you sharing them with us thank you and thank you for joining us now before Robert leaves I would like to leave you with these words from the 33 strategies of war true strategy is psychological a matter of intelligence not Material Force everything in life can be taken away from you and generally will be at some point but if your mind is armed with the art of war there is no power that can take that away from you I'm Barry Kubrick it is always a matter of mind look closely between the lines for that is we're wisdom lies and no power can take that away from you thank you Robert thanks Vic if you'd like a tape of our show or would like to become a member of our book club and receive our weekly email show updates just write us at Barry kibera at aol.com [Music] [Music]

Channel: Barry Kibrick

Views: 134,523

Rating: 4.8921094 out of 5

Keywords: barry kibrick, pbs, robert greene, war, 33 strategies of war, full episode, between the lines

Id: fVpYlBzcjTQ

Length: 26min 49sec (1609 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 13 2017