ROBERT GREENE | The Laws of Power and Human Nature

robert thanks for joining us on the podcast i've been looking forward to uh to this conversation my pleasure ryan i'm looking forward to it myself yeah you know we live in no problem we live in such uh such an interesting time and and as i knew we were going to be having this conversation uh i've been reading your works and studying what you do and it seems to me that if more people knew of your work and what you did that i think we would struggle less than we currently are with our lack of emotional resilience and dealing with people that we don't always agree with so it's it's it's a fascinating time yeah it sure is you know it's sometimes the weirdest and toughest and most unpleasant times are the most interesting as well so it's all good what do you think makes uh you say the weirdest and toughest times what do you think makes these some some strange and interesting times from your perspective anyways well i think we're going through some massive paradigm shifts here um i wrote about this in my last book the laws of human nature where i talk about the zeitgeist and the formation of generations and how generations tend to fall into these patterns and the pattern that we're seeing right now is we're in what's called a crisis generation and basically what it means is the young people people in their 20s maybe even in their 30s are entering a world that doesn't really make much sense to them it doesn't have much connection to their reality they've grown up in with you know a different model they've grown up with technology unlike my generation and so they have different values different tastes different fashions etc and yet the world and the politics and the culture don't really reflect it and so there's a lot of turmoil and a lot of tension and a lot of friction and it's one of those generations where people are very confused and they don't know really know what's what's next but they're yearning for change but they're not sure what that change would be so that creates a lot of confusion and that what generally ensues and i think is awaiting us in the next decade or so is a kind of revolutionary generation where a new generation emerges generation y or z or whatever they call them um that sorry that we'll create something new will create new values new forms new structures new ways of doing things that will reflect more of the spirit of the times because right now there's a kind of disconnect and the boomers that have so much dominated the the theater stage for so long are slowly getting older they're dying they're losing they're not in positions of power so there's going to be a great shift but in the meantime it's very confusing and difficult and tough to live through and then of course you throw in pandemic and you throw in the effects of social media and you throw in all of the division in our country you know it from from a very close perspective it looks pretty awful but in a larger sense if you pull back there's some interesting things that are kind of brewing underneath the surface you know it's it's interesting because as you're talking about this younger generation having a yearning for change but not quite knowing what that is i i think there's probably some common ground or some common interest between older generations or even mine which i would say is in between your generation and and younger generations it seems to me the older generations want to cling to what they have and the younger generations want to completely remake everything without turning to their elders for what has worked and what hasn't i'm sure there's a middle ground though how do we find that middle ground well you know generally people um young people are rebelling against the generation that's just above them and i find that it's a natural process so to take it on an individual level uh when we are 16 17 18 years old in the grips of adolescence i think it's a very natural and healthy phenomenon that we rebel to some degree against our parents because we want to create our own identity but doing that leads to some foolish behavior undoubtedly and i can look back on some of my own very foolish behavior when i was that age because just reacting against something isn't often smart but on the other hand it's necessary because if you don't do that you're going to end up a stunted individual you're going to end up in your 20s and 30s not knowing who you are not separating yourself from your parents doesn't mean your parents are awful just means you need to find who you are you need to differentiate yourself and you you can see that on a wide generation level where it's not often healthy or great you know some of the cancer culture stuff some of the woke things are just going way too far and it's getting kind of irritating you know but on when i say when you pull back and you look at it from a distance you can understand it it's part of a process where people are finding themselves they go too far in that process then they have to pull back but if you don't go too far you never know what is too much you know so it's a necessary thing to do so you know personally for me i like history and i think there's some great things in the past some values that we want to hold on to some great cultural achievements that we should be proud of so all of the stuff where people are just you know canceling or disavowing you know naming dropping the name of abraham lincoln high school or whatever you know that's just silliness it's stupid it's pure stupidity but on another level i can understand where it comes from and i think hopefully at some point it will even itself out and people will realize they've gone too far and they'll find a way to create change but change it's a little bit more rational i might be wrong there i don't know i don't have a crystal ball but that's my hope well i i can certainly uh i can certainly hope that as well and uh you know i think one of the biggest challenges with younger generations that we see and i can i can definitely appreciate your comments on the desire to rebel because i had that you had that everybody has that and it is healthy you know i see my oldest son for example uh he's 13 years old and he's getting a little bit more mouthy to me than he has in the past and he doesn't want me around as much as he used to and as as as hurtful as that can be as his father who has been accustomed to having him be around me and want to be around me all the time and look at to look to me as some sort of you know idol it's good and i see that as being a good thing but one of the problems that i think the younger generations have is they have access to social media which is not something i had when i was younger and you as well and so we get these these these horrible ideas that aren't tested in reality and then they start to spread where i don't know that they would have spread 30 years ago like they do today give me an example uh you know we talk about this cancel culture for example yeah cancel culture is a prime prime example of that because uh people that were misguided or chose to be offended by quote unquote microaggressions uh didn't have the opportunity to rally together the way that they do now and be outraged as an organization before they just had to deal with it and you just moved on with your life and got to whatever it is that you were doing it was unimportant so we make things that are unimportant more important than i think they really are it's very very true um a lot of it is it gets it's very hard in the era of social media to have a kind of emotional intelligence to have some sort of distance from your own emotions you know things like twitter etc they're like rage factories you know all of their algorithms are bent towards what will get the most views and it's things that are outrageous things are gonna get your blood blood things are gonna make you angry and pissed off and so their masters at that their masters at that marketing device but they're playing to the greatest weaknesses in human nature which i kind of point out in my last book you know we're basically emotional creatures and you know you see that in your own life your first impulse is to always react and be upset angry or happy or excited it's not to sit back and think you know about plato and think about ideas and be rational it's not natural you have to go through a process that's part of becoming a human being it's part of becoming self-aware and not just reacting to everything that happens so it's what you were saying is a very good point because it's very dangerous when you're at the age of 13 14 15 within the most formative years where they're not giving you the space to kind of reflect a little bit everything is so much in your face i know when i was a kid i'm not trying to make out as if i had a superior childhood because there were many things that were wrong with my childhood you know i had wonderful parents but one thing i had i was alone a lot i had time to be alone i had time to reflect i had created my own games my own fantasy well i didn't have somebody always in my face telling me what to think telling me what to feel tell me what's cool telling what's not cool i can kind of you know grow in my into what my own weirdness into what makes me different and so i can have a lot of empathy for young people it's not their fault really we you have to give them some slack because they didn't invent social media they didn't choose to be born into this world they think it's fine i think it's wonderful they think it's like the air they breathe but they don't understand that it has it's very dangerous and it's something very hard to control so i can understand you know the problems that it's kind of creating for people particularly when you're in your formative years i i think you're right and when when you say that we can't blame them but i also believe and i think you would have tested this as well that we have a moral obligation to teach and to coach and to instruct and guide but it seems to me that generally we're just talking about on a macro level that we're more interested in making sure that their feelings are protected and they don't feel left out or that they don't feel unimportant and i had plenty of that when i was a child you know i got left out and my i got kicked off the teams and you know i went through my fair share of hardship and that actually made me a more resilient individual as an adult i fear that our children aren't receiving those painful opportunities and lessons most definitely i completely agree i mean um you know i i can think back on my own experience of of all the kind of difficulties that i went through and basically what happens is you know when you leave college if you go to college or you leave high school and you enter the work world you're suddenly not there with your comfortable little cushy life with your parents if you have a reasonable income say you're not growing up in poverty and suddenly you're smacked gobsmacked in the face with a harsh world where people can be nasty people can be manipulative but they're playing all kinds of power games all kinds of egos are entering and you've not grown up with this and you can get shrivel up and you can become like tissue paper because you have no inner strength and the slightest thing can offend you and you have no inner resources to protect you from the kind of harshness of life you need some of that when you're a kid you need to know that your team didn't win and that you lost there are winners and there are losers deal with it losing hurts but when you know that you lost it makes you feel like well i got to get better i got to compete more getting a bad grade is a good thing i remember because i was very grade conscious in high school i remember english was a subject i loved obviously because i'm a writer and i remember i did an essay that i thought was the greatest thing in the world i thought i had rewritten abraham lincoln's getty birth address i thought you know i was amazing and my teacher sent it back and it was the worst grade i ever received and i was shocked and it's i've never forgotten that moment because i asked him what i thought this was wonderful he went and he listed all of my faults as a writer that i was too too um self-important that i was too nurse i was thinking about my the loveliness of my words and not about communicating ideas well that shock and that kind of hit in the face it really woke me up and it changed me as a writer you need those when you're growing up you need criticism you need to fail you need to be criticized you need to hear from your parents that that was wrong you didn't go too far but they're generally those are healthy things so of course you know we can't blame young people for the environment they grow up into we can't control social media but you're right as a parent you have a responsibility to not give in to this really weak weak idea that you have to call a kid the kids are so fragile that you have to envelop them in bubble wrap they can't have anything happen to them children and young people are actually incredibly resilient they they actually can and actually criticizing them gives them a sense that that their love that you care for them where it's always coddling them doesn't make doesn't feel like that so you have space to to give them some tough knocks because that's what's gonna you know the worst people in the world are those who are born with a silver spoon in their mouth who inherit lots of money who inherit and get get you know shifted right through the the past track to yale or harvard and they have no inner resources they have no skills but the kids i did a lot about this in the 50th law when i was writing the book with 50 cents 50 cent but people who've had it hard who've only known the worst side of life they're often the ones that figure it out the best because they understand the reality of how harsh life is and they've developed inner strength and they can deal with it a lot better than the caudal little you know little pampered babies that the the other that the well-off have you know sometimes i feel like i feel like we're doing good work here with this movement and you know we've been doing this for six years and then at times i feel like we're preaching to the choir that the only people who are listening are the ones who would agree with everything that you're saying and everything that i say and my question is how do we then reach out to those individuals who could actually benefit from seeing things a little bit differently building in some resilience and toughness and grit and fortitude not only into their own lives but into the lives of their children and the people they have a responsibility for how do we reach across the quote-unquote aisle to reach these other people who need to hear these messages well there's there's two possible routes there's the more important one of our culture at large which needs to change some of its values it's been heading in this direction for probably 40 years with helicopter parents etc where parents tended to dominate all aspects of their children's lives and probably there's a reason we it's we're not going to go into it now because it'll probably be kind of boring why this evolved the way it did why parents have become so afraid and so fearful so a cultural shift has to happen a generation has to rise up that says it's okay to to to have some pain it's okay to be afraid it's okay to have some tough things happen to you i want my children to have that you know i don't so um that has to happen on a level that you and i can't control it has to come from leaders it has to come from teachers it has to come from culture and the entertainment industry and something a wider movement which would be wonderful and if if i saw it i would pile on and do whatever i could to give it more momentum do you see if i can interrupt really quickly before you get to the individual level do you see small movements or isolated elements of this that we could potentially latch on to i know obviously we can read books and we can listen to podcasts like these and we can do those things but there are other movements that you've been aware of that we should ought to look into and ought to consider as we attempt to change the culture to this one of sacrifice and struggle and meaningful pain i don't see a movement per se i wish i did and maybe i could be wrong because i don't have my finger on everything i read things sometimes an article or or a book that kind of is talking about the same thing so i know that my mind is aligning with them there's a great book called anti-fragile by talib i don't know if you've read it i forget his first name excuse me you have that's a great book it's about the exactly the same thing in a very philosophical way but in a very direct way about you know our anti-fragile culture and how dangerous and nefarious it is so i see other people seeing the same problem but it's it's weak you're swimming against the tide you know when you read things that kind of are reflect the general culture like the new york times or washington post or you watch the news or whatever that kind of the cultural influence is there it's sort of like the the air that people breathe it's you can't really change that and that is you know has effects on all of us so i don't really see the little seeds yet i know that human nature being what it is people are going to rebel against this because we as humans are defined by our resilience it's what made us who we are right now you know i write about this in several of my books we're actually physiologically very weak creatures right we don't have chimpanzees and gorillas could crush us in a second there's so much hunger a leopard could could eat us in a minute and they did they were feasting on us back several million years ago you know we don't have physical capabilities that are very powerful in the in in actually in nature but what we did have was our social skills our ability to work together and our resilience our toughness because we lived in in a ruthless environment in which we had to learn how to cope and how to deal with a very harsh environment and look at where we are today and and the amazing things we've accomplished it's only because of how the hardness of the world that we have to push against so humans need resistance continual resistance the environment needs to press on them and make them go god i don't want this i've got to figure out a better way and then we become incredibly inventive right so but if you take that pressure away if everything is easy and nice and wonderful and and you don't feel the environment pressing it on you then we opposite happens we become we just melt we become decadent we don't have any inner skills it's the end of all of the great civilizations of what doomed ancient rome and perhaps it's happening to us right now so but we like we crave actually some kind of resistance if you like to exercise like i like to exercise it's you know only like by swimming the water is resisting you lifting weights it's resisting you running you know that's what makes you stronger and tougher and you actually enjoy that feeling of something pushing against you and so i think that at some point people will be so sick of this that they'll rebel against it they'll crave some kind of you know one thing i do see is i see a lot of people engaging in kind of what looks like from a just close-up self-destructive behavior you know they're they're doing their their parkour and whatever you call it they're mountain climbing and the most dangerous things but that's great that's great because you realize that you want to put your life at risk you want to do something kind of dangerous and risky so on individual levels when i see that i find that as a kind of rebellion against the fearful safe culture that we live in and you notice i don't do mountain climbing anymore because i've physically not you know i've had a stroke and everything but there was a whole movement about mountaineers two movements one is the 90 percent of people who do rock climbing it's all about safety and the best technology and making things as easy as possible for it for you making giving you maps to go exactly to where you want to go and find your phone you know and just it's a another ten percent hate that right look i want it to be hard i want it to be tough i want to risk my life the risk factor is what makes the adrenaline rush it's what makes it exciting and they're rebelling against that so those kind of movements i mean those are small little trivial things but those kind of rebellions on an individual level that we see in people are signs of this this culture is kind of gross i don't want any i want to rebel against it on the question of how to influence people you have to be very careful because people have their mindset and you know i wrote about that in my last book sorry to keep bringing that up no if you want to influence people you have to not hit them in the head and say you're wrong you're coddling your kids you're going to create a monster you've got to do it my way that's going to actually in for reinforcing they're going to think that you're an they're not going to listen to you doors will walls will come up that will never go down sure more rebellious nature of course comes into play again right yeah exactly so you have to get inside their world you have to get inside how they're thinking and you have to implant little seeds inside of them you know and you know if i had a particular instance i could i could kind of spell out because i do this sometimes with people who who have problems with their children i could spell out kind of ways to make that kind of conversation where you kind of almost seduce them into thinking into realizing the power of of criticism or the power of of failing you know um but it's mostly you have to be very gentle you have to be very strategic you have to think it out so yelling and hectoring at people never works yeah you know that that's all i can say on that on that front no i think that's absolutely true i mean anybody's ever tried it specifically over some sort of social media we know we know that doesn't go well you know i am really interested in how people perceive not only you as an individual but your message because you're talking about things for example knowing human nature and how to you use the word influence which i think is is a powerful word and a powerful idea but then i'm sure you run across people who would say that it's manipulative behavior which i don't think is inherently bad but that has a negative connotation for a lot of people uh how do you how do you have conversations with people who don't agree with what you're doing or the way that you approach human nature or the laws of power these types of things well the main thing is i try to never get defensive because the moment you hit defensive you've lost it your ego gets intrudes and you start getting emotional you get angry and you say stupid things so i never take it personally in fact i think it's a good thing if people disagree with me because it shows they have some spirit and then i try and think of what it is that you know the the source of their anger or their or their or their problems with my work and i've been doing this now for 22 going on 23 years since the 48 laws of power came out and i've been getting feedback from people you know and i've i've seen a pattern of types of people who really dislike my books and get upset with them they're usually people who have an illusion i i mean i'm obviously i'm revealing my own prejudices who have an illusion about life and the illusion is that we're basically these angelic creatures where basically humans are basically good and uh we need to appeal to that there may be a few really bad apples in the world and they we have to fight against them but basically most people are good i would never manipulate i would never do anything like that i'm not interested in power i'm i'm always interested in the betterment of mankind and helping other people and i find those are the ones who really really get upset with my books because i'm touching a cord and i'm hitting a nerve where they realize unconsciously maybe that's not true maybe i have a manipulative side maybe there's a dark part of my nature maybe i'm not as saintly and as good as i as i think i am when you touch that little raw nerve they react and they get very upset and they go the opposite direction they direct their anger at me and they're really upset at me you know for revealing what they think is is taboo and so um i have to be very careful it's like it's like surgery you know if you cut two with a too thick a knife you're going to cut the brain open if you're very delicate with these little instruments that you apply and you have to say well for example do you ever think about um you know children for instance you know children we think of as really angelic sweet and nice but have you ever had children they'll i'll i'll ask them do you do you remember the kind of nasty side of your children when they were growing up horrible how rough they could be and how they would they would manipulate you how they would play on all of your emotions all of your love to get exactly what they wanted out of you oh sure yeah yeah sure i remember that well if children are like that at the age of four or three you don't think that says that there's something deep in human nature they haven't yet been socialized they haven't yet had all that drummed out wouldn't you say that there's a manipulative side to human nature that's kind of ingrained and that we sort of repress or try to disguise as we get older if i can win that small point if i can get that wedge in there i have a little opening then to bring my heavier artillery in there but i have to first sort of create a little space and i'll use an example like that you know or then i'll say in the area of seduction because i wrote a book called the art of seduction which some people will criticize but a lot of people will criticize for being too manipulative blah blah blah blah blah and i go all right when you're have you ever been interested in a man or a woman whoever i'm talking to and that you really really want them you you want them in your life you want to have sex with them you want to have a relationship yeah sure okay um on that first date did you just simply wear what you normally wear you simply talk how you normally talk did you like go out pizza and beer did you go to a nice restaurant did you try to impress them and kind of kind of tailor what you said to bring out your best side well yeah okay would you consider that manipulative would you consider that being direct and honest no you were trying to impress them which is natural there's nothing there's no shame about it it's part of courtship it's part of what you have to do if you just reveal how relaxed and lazy you are and how you eat normally kind of bad food and how you dress poorly and how you have you like you know the worst kind of films and you watch a lot of porn they're never going to be interested in you right so you show them your best side yeah okay then i've got my little wedge in there and i got them to reveal the fact that in matters of love they do tend to manipulate at least what i would call manipulation so that's how i would approach it yeah that makes sense it seems to me that and and i'm guilty of this too i'm not pointing fingers at anybody that i wouldn't be willing to point at myself uh but it seems to me that we're a little bit delusional about how we show up our desires even if they're maybe not righteous or virtuous desires it seems though that the more that we acknowledge our natural human tendencies to be lazy and immediate gratification and want the result without the effort when we actually recognize that in ourselves we give ourselves the opportunity to address it in an appropriate way that will help produce positive outcomes for ourselves and the people that we we care about our wives children friends clients etc etc well it comes down to to one very important question are you interested in actually having results in life are you actually interested in in getting what you want and having a better life or are you interested in just whining and cleaning and complaining and feeling aggrieved and feeling like the world is against you what matters to you most okay well if it matters getting results and let's look at it this way let's say you want to get somebody interested in your idea or you want to change your son's behavior but let's say you want to have your film funded and you need money and you're looking for backers for it okay now you have to then make a decision are you going to think about them and what they want in their world and their values and their ideas are you going to be wrapped up in your ego and just go simply tell them i have this great idea for a film it's gonna be so great give me your five million dollars please because it's gonna make you a fortune etc which is honestly because i live here in hollywood and i know it very well that's how 98 of people approach any kind of pitch meeting or any kind of cell they're thinking of themselves they haven't done any research they haven't gone into the mind or spirit of the other person right so if you want success if you want things to happen you have to do the work you have to expend the effort because normally we take the path of least resistance and we want things easy we always want to dream about the great results so you have to be strategic in life and then you have to go to the next step all right what can influence this person to want to fund my film right who are they what have they funded before what are they looking for what is their family life like what are their friends like what is their world like what are their values all right now i have an idea i have an idea about that all right what might appeal to their self-interest right now some people might step back go wow you're being kind of manipulative there you know you're kind of like playing on their psychology and their weaknesses to give what you want man that's not good that's not healthy but it's no it is because i want to get results i don't want to waste time i don't want to i don't want to get gratify my ego i don't want to tell my friends how wonderful i am i want to actually get the thing funded and once that gets funded the world opens up for me so when you think of results and you think of being practical then you have to enter the realm of manipulation of strategy of persuasion and influence and it changes the whole game it's inevitable it's inevitable in life with human beings if you want to accomplish things i'm not sure i answered your question no i i think you're right on i i think people get so hung up on the term manipulation and it's really kind of an amoral term it's not good nor bad it's just really how you use it you know i had a chiropractor for example come to my house a couple of days ago and he was quite literally manipulating my spine you know he's pushing on this area and that area and he was doing it for a reason to get the spine back and alignment et cetera et cetera and i think as long as your motives are are pure there's a lot of opportunities for we'll use the term manipulation because that's what we've been using where where interests are aligned this podcast is a great example our interests are aligned you would not have agreed to come on this podcast if there wasn't some thing that you felt you could benefit from and i wouldn't have invited you if there wasn't something that i didn't think i could benefit from by having you here so yes maybe we looked after each our own interest and we appealed to the other person's interests but it aligned and we created a win-win opportunity and situation here that's right that's right and it's how you have to think in the world i mean i don't think there are enough people on that on that level because so many so much behavior seems all about winning ego points and about proving you're right if you enter an argument and it's all about i want to prove that i'm right and you're wrong then then give up right then but if you enter an argument you go i want to maybe change their opinion i want to maybe have an effect on them i want to maybe slowly make them realize that maybe there is a different way of looking at the world not better but different way of looking at the world okay once you make that decision in your head then the whole game changes then you have the ability to perhaps alter their opinion or influence them if you think you can go through life without that ability you're a right you're going to have a life full of misery because you're going to be running into people like bowling pins and knocking them down and no one's going to like you yeah people might smile you'd be lonely people smile and you say yeah i love you but they'll never agree with you they'll never do what you want they'll secretly rebel so you have to be aware of this aspect of human nature where a social animal and people naturally think of their own interests in any kind of situation they're resistant to change they have their own ideas they don't just love your ideas because you're you and you have to deal with that you have to find a way to overcome that and you have to be strategic so you know if if i can't get people to believe that and agree with me on that then i don't even there's no point in even discussing it because we don't we don't see the world in the same way you know right but you know i make a point in my books this last thing i'll say i deliberately in my book the 33 strategies of war i brought in the character of mahatma gandhi because here you have the most saintly figure in history people always appoint to him about civil disobedience no guns no violence etc and i show in the 33 strategies of war this man was incredibly strategic he waged a war against colonialism against the english in india with very precise marches that he knew would get his his followers beaten up by the police which show up in the newspapers in england and would affect liberal opinion in england he was incredibly strategic and he was brilliant and he he won that war so if mahatma gandhi was a strategist what the is keeping you being such a higher you know holier-than-thou person with things you don't have to enter into that kind of dirty sort of way of thinking anyway well you know so this is an interesting this is an interesting vein that we can take on this because even these individuals we're using the term strategy if you're not going to be a strategist right and so we'll hear these individuals complain about microaggressions and being triggered and offended about every little thing and that i'm that i'm better than you or virtue signaling and more righteous i actually think that a lot of these individuals know exactly what they're doing and we aren't quite giving them credit for it they're using whining complaining bitching moaning virtue signaling as a tactic a strategy to get exactly what they want and many of us write it off as they're morons they're dumb but they're actually not they're being very tactical in their approach they're just using this method to get what it is they want which is attention or money or notoriety or fame or whatever yeah i would agree and i think it's an example of there's a kind of i don't know what the metaphor comes to my mind but there's this kind of gravity among humans where we naturally want power that's what i say in my first book right the feeling of having no power or control over your life makes you miserable the fact that you can't influence your children your spouse your boss your colleagues will make you a very bitter and angry person right so we how we want a degree of control over our environment over the people around us not complete control obviously that's impossible not even that much just enough to influence them just to get them to not bother and upset us so we begin from premise a we all want that power well people naturally like water falling off a cliff will find their way to how they can get that power and they will find it in some way by hook or by crook and if they can get power by complaining by getting a lot of attention by being very passive aggression passive aggressive i talk a lot in my books about path of aggression strategies because i see a lot of that in our culture and i don't mean to to get you know to seem like i'm a paragon of virtue because i notice in myself a lot of passive aggressive behavior traits that i'm aware of and i try and not try and get rid of but they're there because it's very much entrenched in our culture but um people will find a way like water to where they can get they can get some power and if it comes from seeming more saintly than other people if it seems like they are on a higher moral ground they will use whatever they can whatever weapons are at their disposal and yeah they will they will find you know now i want to make one point clear i understand a movement like black lives matter very well i i find it there's a lot of you know truth to it you know um i understand they're in the incredible the insane history of of racism in this culture and what they've had to deal with police so i don't want to make the impression that i think that something like that is is totally out of bounds that they're protesting about that etc but there's a side other side to it in other areas that definitely goes way too far where it's not about getting any kind of results it's not really about changing the world it's it's not about practical solutions or making changing the police mentality and actually you know make creating some kind of justice it's about just you know appearing saintly or virtue signaling so i differentiate that okay with people who who are fighting an injustice and they're practical and they're strategic i'm totally on board with it i think it's great it's healthy and it's human but those whose strategies are all towards geared towards getting attention and whining and complaining yes they'll get some kind of power in our culture but it's a power that doesn't lead to anything it doesn't lead to anything practical it just leads to a lot of fear and a lot of intimidation so you know that's all i just want to bring that up do you so do you believe that that that power is the fundamental motive for everybody do you think everybody is driven by that of course we're driven by other things too as well but do you think that at its at its root that it's that everybody is after some form of power at least the way that you define it in the way that you talk about it i i think so um it's it's part of the chapter that i'm writing in my new book but there's you know my favorite philosopher in the world as most people will know is friedrich nietzsche who i devoured since i was 16 years old and he's like i love all his books and he wrote a book that's kind of was published after he died called the will to power and he defined his idea of the will to power changed over the years but in the end the idea was basically it's built into any living organism the desire that you want to live and that you want to expand you want to have you want to expand in your environment you want to have more room more room as a predator you want more space if you're if your prey um you have a will to some kind of power or control with your environment and he built that into his definition of life itself as a kind of organic violet he was arguing actually against darwin because he thought that that was the motive force in biology now you can argue against that or whatever but i found a lot of truth to that and i think it's the evolution i just want to step in here for a second that so nietzsche that evolution was a byproduct of our desire and quest for power am i understanding you correctly yeah it's it's not power in the sense that we think of power it's not the power you know in politics or whatever so the word because we're translating the word mocht from german and it has a different connotation and so it's not that kind of you know human power that we're talking about it's a desire to ex i think the word that he would use is expand expand your your your territory expand your circumstances expand your possibilities right and where he disagreed with darwin was darwin believed it was mostly random evolution occurred through random processes that there was no the word is teleological there's no purpose behind evolution there's no god guiding it it's just random and nietzsche said that there is something guiding it in a way it's not god but it's the desire for east or each organism to expand and to have this kind of more power within its environment and that was driving evolution now of course most biologists and scientists would find it kind of silly and i understand that he's not a scientist but i think there is some validity to what he was saying so if you extrapolate that to humans i think there's something built into the life force that kind of wants this expansiveness that that's what being alive means you know being dead means nothing changes you're just decaying you're not different you're distracting you're you're reducing you're not expanding yeah right so just by breathing and just by being alive and by being as we are omnivores uh you're trying to expand your what you your range of possibilities in life that is a will to power and i believe it's it's extremely natural and i give the point as i said earlier if you look at your child even at the age of one or two they're displaying this already maybe even younger i don't even know three months old they're displaying it already oh from the time they're born because what do they do they cry because they need something so that is their their built-in biological system saying i need something and you need to give it to me yeah yeah exactly why do people reject this idea then why i mean not everybody but there's a there's a large percentage of people that that reject this idea of power is it because we put a negative connotation i mean the only thing i could think is that we we might assume that power exclusively means and i think this is a growing trend in society that if i have something or i obtain some level of power or growth or my bank account increases then it came at the expense of somebody else i think that's a big problem that a lot of people have or assume is the case well it probably did come at the expense of somebody else but that's the nature of life you know when one fish eats another fish to survive it came at the expense of that smaller fish now i'm not talking in a darwinian sense of of you know the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest but there's not always win-win situations you know if two people are vying for the same source of money to to finance a project and one gets in the other doesn't one one and one lost sorry that's life and what losing should make you do is it should make you try that much harder god i'm sorry i forgot what the original questions remind me i had an idea and i well i like that i'm talking about that no no problem i like that you were talking about that but what i was what i had said earlier was uh why do people have such a negative connotation of power okay the concept of it well because they they we live in in a very moralistic culture and um it's probably a little bit of a relic of the 1960s where power was sort of associated with these nefarious backroom people in government or leading the vietnam war or with watergate etc so the sort of idea evolved that power was this ugly thing it was them versus us right and so uh i don't want power so the the saintly approach was i'm not interested in power i'm not really an ambitious person and if you say to people in a social sense you know i actually want power people are going to judge you negatively they're going to fix something wrong with you i think you're anti-social if you say you know i'm an ambitious person some people they might not be quite so negative but most people will think god he's probably an you know he's probably just after like getting a lot of money and screwing people right so there's that association with the word and i think it's a cultural thing that has evolved over time a kind of embarrassment you know a lot of it happened from the united states was the most powerful country in the world in the 60s and still is to this day we emerged from world war ii as the preeminent power we went through the 1950s and we consolidated in the 60s we just took off and a lot of people were kind of embarrassed and ashamed about that and i remember a quote from gore vidal i can't remember the exact quote but he was saying that people have this illusion that they want to believe that america became the most powerful country in the world just by being good just by being decent there was no kind of games being played no kind of exploitation no kind of warfare and then he said look at franklin delano roosevelt and this is something i've written about he was an extremely power-hungry ambitious manipulative politician who accomplished amazingly great things for us brought us through the worst depression in our history brought us through the worst war in our history he was ex but look he was very much interested in power so we're embarrassed about it we're ashamed about being human itself and that's what i write about the laws of human nature we're actually rebelling against being human because being human means to be a complete individual is to have aggressive impulses is to have dirty nasty thoughts about other people it is to be envious it's also to be cooperative it's also to be intelligent but we want to repress all that dark stuff and just imagine that we're these you know as this one woman said that we're descended from angels instead of primates you know we want to get rid of that primate origin of ours and just imagine that we're these sort of angelic creatures right and so there's an embarrassment about being human itself about our basic drives about the dirty aspects of human behavior and it's a tremendous amount of shame of it and i think it's it comes i i mean i'm not going to spend we could spend five hours talking where that comes from because i think it has roots all the way going back into the 18th 17th century so it's something that's building up it actually goes back further than that but you don't see that kind of shame and embarrassment in ancient cultures and more indigenous cultures it's more something that's evolved among us going back maybe 800 years in western civilization but it's very much ingrained in us to be embarrassed by the primate animal side of our nature that's all that's the best way i can look at it yeah that makes sense and and i think there's an element and i've heard people say things like this that we've we've gotten better right we've evolved to be better that that's no longer a thing you know that argument that argument makes me so angry i can't tell you it's the stephen pinker argument enlightenment now are better angels okay mr pinker let's look at the facts this is the 20th century where we've evolved okay we had the death camps in nazi germany we had auschwitz okay we had we had soviet union probably the greatest mass murderer in the history of mankind was joseph stalin estimated that 80 million people perished in his labor camps and in world war ii by his stupid mistakes etc you look at the chinese communists and the you look at mccarthyism you look at rwanda you look at the turks fighting against the armenians and that genocide you know what's going on in the middle east it's going on in africa right now you know and all the wars within vietnam war oh we've gotten that much better we've gotten better at disguising some of those things so people don't see it we don't see all the deaths and all the mayhem in our face although we might see it on the nightly news we've gotten better at kind of keeping it a secret but we're why would we suddenly have become these angelic creatures you know we evolved from primates and obviously unless you disagree with that i don't know who does chimps okay and we had aggressive violent impulses built into us over millions of years that's how our brains were wired we're also very cooperative creatures we have two sides to our nature but do you think in just the last 200 years we've been through culture we've been able to rewire our nature our brains so that we've somehow become these better people i find that massively irrational there's an argument people can make against me and i've read it and you know i listen to it and maybe i'm wrong but i find it very irrational very illogical that we would be able to rewire our nature it's altered obviously we're not clubbing people over the head we're not like those scots and kilts in that movie um braveheart you know obviously we're not in brave heartland anymore that much has changed but it's less direct so what i wrote about in the 48 laws about power is you won't be beheaded for making a terrible mistake at your job as you might have been back in the days of chesari borja but you'll be fired and all kinds of ugly things will happen and people will be mean to you but it's less direct it's less bloody but it still is very aggressive so i that argument i'm sorry i i revealed my own little weakness that that argument gets me gets my blood boiling i find it so absurd well i i think and i tend to agree with you and i and i think that it's a better way to approach life because the alternative is to assume that everybody has their your best interest at heart that they're going to leave you alone that they don't want what you have that everybody's like you said angelic and perfect and of course we know that when we do that we let our guard down because we think people have noble intentions and then we expose ourselves and we make ourselves weak and vulnerable it's just not a great way to live it's better to us i'm not going to assume that everybody's a horrible person but to assume that people have negative thoughts that they are after their own self-interest that they are greedy and as long as we are aware of that then we can maintain our own interests the way that we see fit in the way that other people are relying on us to do yeah there's the old latin expression desire piece but prepare for war um basically i you know there's i call it kind of asymmetric warfare and normally asymmetric warfare we defined as guerrilla fighting or terrorism or that kind of thing where you're sort of leveraging your weakness the fact that you have less a smaller army or less weaponry into a strength right but there's another kind of asymmetric warfare which is fought on the ethical ground and where i talk about that or think about that is someone like vladimir putin and russia where if you have less scruples if you have less morals than the other side it gives you a tremendous advantage unfortunately in the battles of life right so here's putin who doesn't live in a democracy who basically will do anything to screw with the united states right all bets are off he's not going to face reelection he's not going to face a senate or how a congress is going to say don't do that vladimir you can do whatever he wants he's going to mess with you so not to say that we're not guilty sometimes of similar things but he'll do whatever he can to mess with our elections to infiltrate you know our cyber security etc he'll he'll he'll poison people and then pretend that he never did it he'll invade a country and said he never did it because he doesn't care he'll do anything so if you're a moral if you have no scruples your menu of options is now a to z limitless you're moral and and you have a congress and you have a balanced power your menu is a to c not a to z it gives you an advantage well in life there are vladimir putin's all around you they're not everyone you're not supposed to be paranoid but i would estimate 1 out of 10 120 people in your environment in your office in your work will are like him maybe more maybe the percentage is higher i don't know they have less scruples than you they're more manipulative than you are they're more aggressive than you are they're willing to do more than you are to advance their own strategic their own agendas right so if you're all naive and wonderful and think that they're great you're going to get screwed so you're the game is to be aware that there are the putins out there there are people who are willing to do things that you're not willing to do and to be a and to be more strategic in defending yourself and defending your interests once again i forgot what your question is but i think i i hope i don't know what it was at that point either but i i enjoyed i enjoyed what you were talking about there i was just enthralled by that so i forgot sometimes i get off into these things i don't know where i i get lost in the forest i don't know how to get my way back but anyway i do like that you were talking earlier about the win-win versus win-lose scenarios because we do hear in the in the popular narrative is that create win-win scenarios it's like well i'm competing for that job so i don't want that individual to win i want to win and again i think this is a more realistic approach so that we can still operate within the confines of our own moral code i think that's important but do it in a way that's at least open to and aware of the possibility that others are operating outside of the code you set for yourself yeah i mean i'm not i'm not advocating that we become like putin or that we fight like he does no not at all that would actually give him a victory because then we're like lowering ourselves to his level it's good that you have values it's good that you're a decent person these are laudable qualities that you don't want to hurt people that you want to cooperate that you want to work as a team you're able to let go of your ego and work together on a project these are our values i espouse as well my only point is there are other people not operating by those the rules of that game right and a lot of the mayhem and trouble in life comes from people like that and that's where i wrote the 48 laws of power from it came from a place like that where i grew up basically a kind of idealistic young man who thought everyone's we're here in a job to get great things done together and i was smacked in the face by reality where there were people out there who didn't give a damn about getting things done they just wanted to gratify their ego and grab power and it hurt me i suffered deeply from my naivete so i want us all to keep our great values our pro-social values i just want us to be aware that there are other people not playing by those rules and also to be aware that if we want to accomplish anything if we want to create a better world if we want to have a movement that changes things that makes people more aware or whatever we have to be strategic we can't just go out and you know say all the wonderful things we believe in we have to actually step back and think and plot a course and sometimes we need to manipulate so i just want to take the guilt out of that but it doesn't mean that i'm saying we're all nasty we all have to become nasty i hope people don't misunderstand me on that level yeah i i appreciate saying that i think that is an important distinction uh you alluded earlier to a new book can you disclose or share any of that with us today it's kind of a hard book to describe it's sort of going off in a new direction it's a little bit it's it's not quite such a it's not a book about power manipulation really or anything like that it's a book about what i call the sublime and in the laws of human nature my last chapter is about directly that and then i had a chapter in the 50th law of the book i did with 50 cent about that and basically um the chapter is um i'm trying to say that by nature we humans live in a world that's kind of like a circle that circumscribes us we have certain codes and conventions that we all have to abide by these are things that we have to form the behavior that we have to adhere to or to be considered polite and civilized but it's not just our behavior it's our ideas our thoughts have to be within that circle we have certain ideas and values that come from our culture etc and just outside of that circle lies the realm of what i call the sublime exploring what is taboo or exploring where other people don't go or taking thoughts that no one has ever thought before and traveling beyond the boundaries of where we're supposed to be is an exciting innervating it makes you youthful again i don't mean the word entertaining it excites you it it enlivens you right it opens you up to life and that's the ultimate circle thing that creates a circle is death itself because that's the ultimate limit and so the word sublime means up to the threshold of a door and so you're moving up to the threshold of death itself and you're looking what might be beyond it what actually transcends you what actually it means to be dead to carry your own mortality within you and so i i ally it with the feeling of death itself and um it was a book that i intended to write so i have all kinds of experiences that i consider that way our relationship to the universe our relationship to life how we look how our relationship to history to animals to our own brains these are all insanely sublime things and i'm very fascinated by discoveries in science that i think are just mind-blowing that i think people need to be more aware of like how when we were children how discoveries and science wow that's true they took a photograph of a black hole they can now describe what it might be like to fall into a black hole these are things that that are so beyond what we normally can process that they they create a certain emotional resonance in them but anyway um i've been meaning to write the book 15 years ago or so and then i got um distracted by the book with 50 cent and then i got distracted by mastery and lost and now i'm going back to it basically um i came this close to dying myself a little over two years ago i had a stroke pretty severe stroke i was in a coma i was driving my car at the time my wife hadn't been there i would have been in an accident i would have not i would have either i had to be dead or have severe brain damage i came this close to dying so i wrote about that in the last chapter of the laws of human nature two months before i had my stroke and then suddenly it became my reality right and so now i'm i've had to deal with it on a personal level and and so it's not just a intellectual exercise as it might have been 15 years ago it's a very real visceral exercise for me because i know what it means to see through that door to open the door and see the other side of death because i felt it in me and i still carry that sensation in me every day of my life you know so it's opened me up to the fact that wow in california the sky is blue their birds are chirping their leaves on the trees and i'm alive to see it that's insane yeah seeing the world that we live in it's actually incredibly sublime and awesome we just go around immersed in in social media sudden we're not looking at how how incredibly wondrous this world is that we live around i'm not coming off as too pollyanish but it's a very sincere book in that sense well i think it sounds based on your description different than what you've written in the past i'm very anxious to get your hands on it and uh and have it yeah i hope i'm gonna disappoint some people i'm gonna find some new readers i'm gonna disappoint a few others well you're gonna regardless of what you put out there there's always gonna be people who are gonna be disappointed so we know we don't have to worry about that i know exactly particularly in this world yeah absolutely i don't think i don't think about that i think about what is right for me in the moment and what i think the culture wants so yeah and and also you know i i for myself anyways is what do i think is going to impact people positively and what is a message that i can personally share that i'm qualified to share that will help people in their own in their own way and on their own journey that's that's an important thing for me too yeah yeah you have to think that way otherwise you know you get kind of soulless if you're only thinking about money and pleasing people you lose your soul so i never think about those things i think about what i want what i think people need yeah yeah well robert i appreciate you your work has been uh deeply impactful in my life it's helped me to understand myself better and to understand other people better which makes me well frankly it just makes me more successful on whatever front i'm dealing with and and so i do appreciate you taking some time and joining us and sharing some of your wisdom with us well thank you very much it was a very intelligent discussion i really appreciate i don't get enough of them so it was a great interview i enjoyed it thanks robert

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Published: Tue Mar 02 2021