Robert Greene: Why People Manipulate & How to Protect Yourself

Have you ever felt like other people understand power better than you do — like they know the rules of the game and you don’t? In this episode, I sit down with The 48 Laws of Power author Robert Greene to talk about what power really is, how to use it without becoming manipulative, and why feeling powerless can quietly wreck your life. We get into communication, self-love, boundaries, and how to spot people who don’t have your best interests at heart, plus a preview of his new book The Law of the Sublime and what surviving a near-death experience taught him about appreciating life. Order The Next Conversation Workbook: https://www.jeffersonfisher.com/workbook Thank you to our sponsors: Cozy Earth. Upgrade Your Every Day. Get 40% off at cozyearth.com/jefferson or use code JEFFERSON at check out. Monarch Money. 50% off your first year at https://monarchmoney.com/jefferson Momentous. Visit https://www.livemomentous.com/ and use code JEFFERSON for 35% off your first order. BetterHelp. Click ⁠https://betterhelp.com/jeffersonfisher⁠ for a discount on your first month of therapy. Order my new book, The Next Conversation, or listen to the full audiobook today. Like what you hear? Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a 5-star review! Suggest a topic or ask a question for me to answer on the show! Want a FREE communication tip each week? Click here to join my newsletter. Join My School of Communication Watch my podcast on YouTube Follow me on Instagram Follow me on TikTok Follow me on LinkedIn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon Fall Drop, because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's Fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com.

• 0:30Jefferson Fisher?

  If you haven't heard of the book, The Forty-Eight Laws of Power, you might be living under a rock. Today, I am privileged to talk to the man himself, the author of The Forty-Eight Laws of Power, Robert Greene. Robert, thank you so much for coming.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me, Jefferson. I appreciate it.

• 0:49Jefferson Fisher?

  This is a conversation I'm very much looking forward to, because your book is one that often when I make content or I'm speaking, there will typically be somebody who comes up and says, "Have you read The Forty-Eight Laws of Power?" And I say, "Yes, I have." And what I want to talk about, and what the listeners are going to get, what you're going to get in this episode is we're going to talk on, can you use power?

• 1:16Jefferson Fisher?

  And can you also maintain your own integrity? Because a lot of the times, people find those to be conflicting in some way of, they hear manipulation, they don't hear anything that is descriptive, prescriptive, that can improve their life. Robert, how would you define power? What does power mean to you?

• 1:40Speaker 02

  Well, power is a tool. It's totally neutral. Like a hammer, you can use it to build a house, or you could clobber someone over the head and kill them with it. So power is simply a tool. It's neutral. It is neither good nor bad. It can be used for evil. It can be used for great good. But power is a sense of having control over the immediate environment, over events that are occurring in your life. So to use this, to flip it around to the negative, if you sense in your daily life that you have no ability to influence your children...

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Your spouse, your partner, the colleagues at work, your boss, the people in your company. It's a miserable, miserable feeling. You have no power, you have no control, you have no influence. You can't tell people to do, you tell people to do something and they don't listen to you. Right? Or they do things to you that, that kind of block your path. And you have no way of, of getting them to stop this. That feeling of powerlessness is, is something that human beings cannot endure very well. And if you feel powerless for very long, you get, something is going to warp inside of you psychologically. You're going to turn inward, you're going to become resentful.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  You're going to become angry, you're going to have pools of anger, you know, developing inside of you deeper and deeper and deeper. And you're not going to have control over yourself. So power is the sense first, the first sense of control is over yourself, over your emotions, so that you're not always reacting and getting angry. So that you have a little bit of detachment. So when it comes to those situations, where you need to move or influence people like your children, your spouse, your colleagues, your boss, you're able to step back a half step, a full step, couple steps and think and go, what is it that will actually move that person in the direction that I want?

• 3:44Speaker 02

  How can I actually influence them effectively? So they don't hate me, so they don't resent me, so that they actually do what is in my interest without maybe even realizing it with, or that the interests align in some way. So that is power for me, right? It begins with yourself. It begins with a sense of detachment from the events happening to you. It's the ability to strategize and think in each situation in life. This is a move that will gain me a little degree of control over events. You can never, ever have complete control. Life happens, things happen, pandemics happen, black swans happen.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  You can't control everything, right? But that little bit of margin of control is enough to kind of help you glide through life a little bit more smoothly.

• 4:38Jefferson Fisher?

  When I think of power.

• 4:42Jefferson Fisher?

  I think what you said is a perfect definition of it. The ability, one's ability to control or influence another's behavior, maybe including even their own. You have the personal power. You have relational power, like who in the dynamic might have more influence over the other between husband, wife, or partner. And maybe there's political power, the ability to construct, influence others, the ability to write laws, implement laws socially. And what I find, the people that I get to talk to are always looking for power of themselves and how they're going to improve their life.

• 5:24Jefferson Fisher?

  And where I teach is communication and the power of words. And this is why I really like, there's a number of the laws that you have out that are specific to communication, like using less words in particular. How do you find that communication and power intersect?

• 5:51Speaker 02

  They're obviously completely intertwined. So, but communication has to be strategic. Okay, and that's the problem that a lot of people have in this world. They think if they just talk, if they just say, this is what I want, this is what I need, please come and help me, that that's communicating. All you're communicating is your insecurity and your needs. True communication is effective, it's strategic. It hit, other people are naturally resistant to helping you or aligning themselves with your interests. Everybody has their own problems in the world today. We're all stressed, we're all working too hard, we never have enough time, right?

• 6:33Speaker 02

  So you talk to me about what you want, okay, I'm kind of half listening, but you're kind of irritating me because you're just spewing things from your side, right? True communication is what I was saying before. You take that step back and you put yourself in the other person's shoes, right? You get out of your own head because you're so self-involved that you don't realize that your words are just landing nowhere. You get out of your head and you go. I'm dealing with another person. They are not me. They have their own problems, their own wishes, their own issues, right now in the present, right? What is that? What is it that is going on in their head, in their world? Sometimes you have to do some research. Sometimes maybe you know them well enough,

• 7:18Speaker 02

  maybe you don't know them at all, but you have to figure that out. It's a puzzle. Once you figure out their side, not your side, what they want, what they need, now you have some power to craft what you say to actually influence them, to appeal to their self-interest, which is one of the laws of power, a very powerful, one of the most powerful laws of all, right? So if I say something, and I'm trying to influence, trying to move them like on a chessboard in my direction, right? If I say something that appeals to their self-interest while it's also helping me, their eyes will light up, all those defenses that they have will start to go down. So communication is absolutely worthless unless it's strategic.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  And always say less than necessary is important because the natural tendency for a human being without self-control is just to spew words, you know, just like verbal diarrhea. This is, you know, my problems, my life, this is what's going on with me, this is what I need, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Just shut up, talk less, and think more about what the other person needs, and craft your communications strategically.

• 8:31Jefferson Fisher?

  You know, I, I wrote a book recently, and it's hard not to, I can't imagine writing a book and not having pieces of yourself in it. When you were writing this book, was, what was coming up for you in your own life? Are you just studying these elements of influence and control and power? Is it something that you were writing to yourself or for other people? Where did that, where did that come up for you?

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Well, it came from two things. First of all, a very... Deep desire to help people in this world. I don't, my books, I think very, very deeply, this, I'm working on my eighth book now, so Power is my only book. But I think very, very deeply of my audience, right? It's a form of communication to get back to that, right? And I wanna help people. I wanna help people deal with their problems in a real way, not just to satisfy my own ego. So I have to think about how my words can actually be absorbed into your daily life. So that's one side. The other side is, the book came from a lot of pain, right?

• 9:43Speaker 02

  So I started, entered life like most people, kind of naive, kind of innocent. I wasn't a good player naturally, necessarily at power, right? I made mistakes. I talked too much, probably. I outshone the master, right? On and on and on, I could go through the laundry list of the things that I violated. And I didn't realize that the world is political. I thought when you enter the work world, what matters is having results, is getting things done, is doing things well. But no, I had many, many, many painful experiences, particularly working in the film world.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  But as I've said in many interviews, I've had fifty different jobs in my life, more than fifty, in all different aspects, in every little possible avenue of life, I've had a job. And I suffered deeply, and I suffered deeply from the sense of, people are so political. Their egos are involved in everything. You can see their egos as they walk past you, right? I would notice in the office that there was these hierarchies. I worked, remember, I worked for a while at the magazine Rolling Stone. And there were these hierarchies. There was the boss and you could just see this massive ego walking back and forth. Then there were all the smaller little people working

• 11:06Speaker 02

  right under him and their egos. And there was little me in the corner as a copy editor, little tiny, tiny little ego. But that's what mattered. That's what made things run, was how well you impressed him, how you talked to the boss, in this case Jan Wenner. And I thought, this is silly, but this is the real world. And you have to take the real world seriously. You have to succeed in the real world. So the book came from deep pools of pain from my own mistakes and from a deep desire to help other people because I feel it's the source of a lot of depression and misery in life. You know, you say something,

• 11:49Speaker 02

  you do something, thinking that you're on the right track, it's going to help you. And the next thing you know, you're fired or you're deported. You don't know why. I felt, you know, I see people around me having these problems. So those are the two strands of the book, a deep desire to help people and a realization that the world is political, full of egos, and that mistakes are very costly and painful, and I made plenty of them.

• 12:16Jefferson Fisher?

  Yeah, well, you're not alone. We've all made a lot of mistakes. Looking back at it now and knowing the impact of the book, and I want to talk about the book specifically that you're writing and going to be releasing soon, is for those who haven't read it, or those who might go, you know what, now that I've listened to this episode, I want to pick it up again. Maybe they have it on their shelf and haven't looked at it in a while. How do you find, and especially being the one that wrote it, that this topic can also be very healing?

• 12:53Speaker 02

  I get a lot of emails from people that, you know, it's helped them, it's turned their life around, or they've started a business because of the book. Of course, it's anecdotal, so I'm sure there's a lot of stories out there. People have been hurt, who've been on the other side of the manipulation. I understand that.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  But what's healing and liberating is to finally have that little light turned on inside of your brain, that this is how the world works. I didn't realize that. I thought what mattered was just being myself. I thought that I could just do my job, say the things that I like, dress the way that I like to dress, just be myself, and it was enough. And no, I'm suffering from it. And just seeing that little switch go on in your brain that no, the game is different. It's played differently. There are rules to this game. You can't just come in and play poker and just do whatever you want. There are rules for poker.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  There were rules for chess. You don't know the rules. You're just playing terribly and you're suffering. And just that little bit of switch inside going, maybe I'm entering this game, maybe I'm from the wrong angle, maybe I'm being too selfish, egotistical, I'm too self-absorbed, and I'm not thinking enough about the players in this game. That little switch of your perspective, of how you look at it, can be deeply healing and enlightening because it's not natural to us. As I said, it wasn't natural to me. So I think in that sense, that's what has helped a lot of people, a lot of people who

• 14:39Speaker 02

  like myself, enter the work world a little bit innocent and a little bit on the naive side.

• 14:47Jefferson Fisher?

  This episode was brought to you by Cozy Earth. One of the reasons I love Cozy Earth is because their products are just that dang good when it comes to anything that I want to wear that is soft and comfortable. I'm talking about hoodies, sweatshirts, sweatpants, which I am wearing a lot of right now, now that in Texas it is less than 60 degrees, which means it's freezing here. From our bed sheets to our bath towels to everything that is quality product, that's Cozy Earth and I love talking about them because I use their stuff all the time. Go to cozyearth.com/Jefferson, use the code Jefferson and get 40% off. cozyearth.com/Jefferson, get the code Jefferson for up to 40% off. If you're looking for anything in the holidays, you need to go check out Cozy Earth.

• 15:32Jefferson Fisher?

  You will not be disappointed and you will find something that you go, oh, I need this and I need to get it for somebody else, but I definitely need it for myself. And now, back to the episode. How can you tell if somebody is trying to manipulate you?

• 15:48Speaker 02

  Well, sometimes if people are clever, you're not going to realize it. Like if people are really good at the manipulation game, if they know the 48 laws of power, if they know how to seduce you, how to wrap their words and make you seem like they're just wonderful, that they're out for your best interest. If they're really good at it, you won't realize it until it's too late. And so, in my book, one of my, I think my last book, The Laws of Human Nature, what I tell people is, you need to identify these people before they enter your life or before you start listening to them.

• 16:31Speaker 02

  You need to be able to identify the manipulative types before they start charming you, before they start enchanting you, before they start wrapping you up in their dramas. Because if you don't, if you fall into that trap, it's going to probably be too late. Most people aren't such good manipulators. And you can sense it, right? They're very passive aggressive. They say things that they want to get from you, but there's a subtext involved, right? And a lot of the bad manipulators, you can feel it. You have an intuitive sense. You can understand it. There's something in their body language, something in how they speak. It doesn't seem sincere.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  But the main thing is to be able to sense people's character, to be able to identify the types of people out there. So, as I said, there's some people out there who are brilliant at the manipulation game, for whatever reason, not because maybe necessarily they read my book, but because it's in their DNA, they're just naturally good at it, right? People who are very political, okay? So your task is to be able to see through these people. Because the problem that a lot of people have, you see, I have to kind of circle around here a little bit. The thing that I try to say in the Forty Eight Laws of Power is that it's a game of appearances.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  Appearances matter so much in this power game. How you present yourself, how people see you. You know, act like a king to be treated like a king, right? Recreate yourself. Your appearances is what people are judging you by, right? So at the same time, you have to control your appearances so people see you as powerful. But you have to see like a laser through other people's masks, through other people's games that they're playing, through the appearances they're trying to create. So the great manipulators out there, right, they have signs, they're not perfect. They give little clues, little crumbs that reveal that they're trying to play this kind of game on you. And that's why I wrote The Laws of Human Nature,

• 18:46Speaker 02

  where I give you tools for identifying the great narcissists out there. Because most of the master manipulators are toxic narcissists. And you have to be able to identify them before they enter your life. How to identify people who are full of envy. They are a very dangerous type. They'll become your best friend in order to hurt you, to sabotage you, because they feel envious. You have to identify them before they get into your life, on and on and on down the line. So that's sort of my advice. There's no simple answer how to identify a manipulator. It's in their character, it's in their body language, it's the little signs that they give out.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  And you have to be able to see through people's masks and not always take appearances for reality.

• 19:36Jefferson Fisher?

  The people who...

• 19:39Jefferson Fisher?

  Would read this book. And let's say they've read it, they really understand it. They're putting it into practice. And they're somebody who wants to have, as we've defined, more power in their life. Whether it's for good or whether it's for bad. And through that, they're gonna be able to, as a verb, manipulate people for good or for bad to their purpose. Do you find that the people who read this book are doing it with ill intent or for good intent? Like you, I know you've heard, you have to have had a lot of feedback from this book over the last many years.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:23Jefferson Fisher?

  And I'm curious, would you speak to that?

• 20:25Speaker 02

  Well, let me clear up one thing, though, that not all of the laws are about manipulation. Right?

• 20:31Jefferson Fisher?

  Right.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  I mean, I guess it's how you define manipulation. But creating compelling spectacles, one of the, one of the laws, is, you know, creating something that draws a lot of attention. Right? Which is what a lot of life and social media involves. And you can say, in some ways, it's manipulation, but it's also just trying to please people, just trying to bring pleasure into the world, just trying to create a spectacle that attracts attention. I don't necessarily see every law in there about manipulation. But to get to your point, you know, I've said this before, the people who are really, really nasty and evil

• 21:13Speaker 02

  at the game of power, and they're out, they're out there, I would, I would say maybe 3% to 5% of the population would be like that. Maybe I'm overestimating the number. They don't really need a book like The 48 Losses of Power. Right? They've been learning this from a very early age. They probably had troubled childhoods. I don't want to get too deep into the psychology of that, but. They've been wounded in their childhood, right? And they learn from the age of six, or seven, or eight. This is how you get people. This is how you string people along. This is how you get attention. This is how you be dramatic. This is what you say. This is how you get mommy and daddy to pay attention to me.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  This is how, you know, you get the teacher to like me. They've learned this step by step at an early age. By the time they enter the work world in 22, they've been dealing, doing this in high school. They've been doing it at college or wherever. They're getting better and better at it. Then this book comes along, The Forty Eight Laws of Power. Well, they don't need to believe that. If they read it, it's just going to confirm the things that they've kind of intuitively understood. Now, I don't deny that there's going to be a percentage of people who read that book, go, wow, I can really be nasty in the world. I can really use this now and get a lot of power. And they are using it for bad purposes.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  I understand that, and I have to own up to that and not, I'm not completely naive about how the book is used. But the vast percentage of people, and I know this from the emails I get, I get hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of them in the last 20-some years, probably hundreds of thousands in the end, are people who are like myself, who are naive, who didn't understand how the game is played, who entered the work world with all kinds of illusions that were bred into them. Because your parents don't tell you, your teachers, your parents and your schools, don't tell you that there are people out there who are manipulative,

• 23:24Speaker 02

  that the world can't be political, that everyone out there has egos. Nobody teaches you this. All of the books are so sweet and sugary, telling you self-help books, you know, just cooperates, this is how to be a good human being. And you enter the work world and nobody prepared you for the slap that you have from people being so nasty, political and ego-ridden. Nobody taught me this. They glom onto the book like it's, you know, water in the desert. Wow, he's teaching me something real. That's the majority of readers, I believe. I could be wrong. There's no science behind it. I don't have data. Anecdotal data, though, is sort of how I believe it.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  These are the readers that are attracted to the.

• 24:11Jefferson Fisher?

  What I have found in my own life is so, so much of what I have seen and ran into with, especially in what they would, early childhood trauma, like you just talked about. People who have, people who are proficient at lying or manipulating or exercising, as we can define, power is because at that point in time in their life, there was an actual utility to it. They were able to get mom and dad to stop arguing. They were able to keep the family together. They were able to not get in trouble, to keep themselves from getting abused,

• 24:51Jefferson Fisher?

  or whatever it is, that so much of it, they have already learned. And whereas some people might be, like you said, they think everything's roses and they just get hit with the tidal wave as soon as they enter the real world of, wow, this is, it doesn't matter how nice I am, they're gonna be rude to me. It doesn't matter how clean I play, I'm never gonna get anywhere if I don't do X, Y, and Z. Nobody taught me the true, the hard knock rules.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:19Jefferson Fisher?

  Is that fair?

• 25:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I've read a book about warfare and one of the concepts called 33 Strategies of War, and one of the concepts in there is what we call asymmetric warfare. And that's what is also called dirty warfare, right? People who like terrorism, okay, or like guerrilla warfare, where the rules are thrown out, where you're willing to do anything. Usually it comes from armies that have, that are much smaller and weaker. And that's certainly the origin of terrorism, right? You're gonna leverage your smallness, your small size, your small army,

• 26:01Speaker 02

  but being as nasty and amoral and you'll do anything to get power to hurt the enemy. Okay? And what happens is oftentimes, the enemy.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  Doesn't plays by rules is good. And so in asymmetric warfare, right? It's an ethical, there's also an ethical asymmetry. So I think of things like Putin in Russia, for instance. Okay. He's somebody who's willing to play, do anything for power. As nasty and as dark. Whatever works for him and his country is what he will do. When you have these European countries with their democracies and their rules and their organization and their bureaucracies. And they're continually at a disadvantage. Facing somebody who's willing to do anything, much more than they're willing to do.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  We find this as well in American politics. Okay. So in life, the same thing happens. When there are people out there in your office. Who have, who their ethics and their morals are thinner than yours. They're willing to do much things that you would never consider doing. You're at a continual disadvantage. You're not willing to do the dirty things that they're doing, right? How do you defend yourself in a world where some people are willing to do things that you would never consider doing, right? Well, you have to become strategic and you have to understand. That you don't have to do, you don't have to be evil.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  You don't have to lower yourself to the level, you don't have to play fire with fire. You could do different things to upset them, to be strategic, to deter them from hurting you, et cetera. But there's the fact that there are asymmetries of it. There are people who are willing to do things that you're not willing to do is the source of a lot of problems and pain in your life and suffering. And you're going to suffer throughout your life because of that. You know, those toxic narcissists?

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Their gamut of what they're willing to do is like this and yours is like this. And so, you know, you're constantly being hit by things and you're not necessarily understanding because you're a good person. You don't necessarily register all the dark things that they're doing until it's too late.

• 28:30Speaker 03

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• 29:00Jefferson Fisher?

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• 29:42Jefferson Fisher?

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• 30:23Jefferson Fisher?

  Understand, people will constantly attack you in life. One of their main weapons will be to instill in you doubts about yourself, your worth, your abilities, your potential. That's in transform self-love into empathy. My question is, how do we build communication habits that handle these attacks on ourselves, that instill doubts in us, without internalizing them? Or how do you handle people trying to instill doubts in you?

• 31:01Speaker 02

  You talked about self-loves from my book, The Laws of Human Nature. So, to the degree that you are insecure, to the degree that you don't really love yourself. So, we have to clear up a misconception that people have. There's a difference between narcissism and true self-love, right? So, if you learned at an early age, three, four, or five years old, that you're actually a good person, that you're worthy of love and affection from other people, you know, that you have skills and abilities as you get older, that are actually worthwhile, that will contribute, right?

• 31:45Speaker 02

  Then you have an anchor in your life. You have a degree of love of yourself, a confidence. So, every time later in life where you have blows, where people hit you with doubts, where they try and sabotage you, they try and insinuate that maybe you're not so good, or they play these games that we're talking about, you're gonna get this blow, and it's gonna depress you, and it's gonna lower you down. And it's gonna affect you, we're all like that. Nobody can, can, can't suffer from that, myself included. But what happens is, if you have that level of self-love that you developed at an early age, you will rise back up. You will start going... No, it's not true that I'm this way.

• 32:30Speaker 02

  It's not true what they're trying to tell me. You know, I'm actually worthy and I know it because I've done things in my life. I've accomplished this. I've helped this other person. It raises you back up. It's like a thermostat that you have inside of yourself. Okay. So the degree that you have that that love will bounce you back up and you'll be able to tell yourself. At first their doubts kind of hit you because we're all human. But then you go, no, it's crap. They're playing a game. I'm not going to fall for that. But if you were wounded very early on and you never developed that self-love and you have a lot of doubts about yourself already and you're insecure

• 33:15Speaker 02

  and you're riddled with like bullet holes and wounds inside of yourself where things can leak through. And people tell you those things. It's going to bring you down and you're going to not rise back up. You rise back up a little bit. Then another person will hit you. You keep going down, down and down. You get depressed and you'll find it very difficult to rise back up.

• 33:38Speaker 02

  So the way you have to handle it in life. If you're in your twenties or thirties or forties or even in your fifties. Wow, I just saw a coyote walk right by.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  You know, you have to develop it. You have to go back and go. I'm beating up on myself. I have all these insecurities. They're effective. These people are effectively manipulating them because I'm allowing them to manipulate me. So when bad things happen to you in life, you have two choices you can do. Right? This is probably the most important thing I can tell everybody out there. You have two things, ways you can go. You can blame other people. You can say, oh, that evil person out there, he's manipulating, she's manipulating me. They're doing this and the other. Oh, woe is me. I'm being the victim, blah, blah, blah. They're evil, they're bad. Okay, you do that in life, you're never going to get anywhere. Right?

• 34:37Speaker 02

  You're going to always be looking for things to blame, looking at external things. You're never going to grow, you're never going to develop. The other thing is every time something bad happens. You look inside of yourself and you go, "That person manipulated me. That narcissist got into my life and did all kinds of damage." "What is it about me that allowed them into my life? What is it about me that was so innocent, that was so stupid, that believed the things that were saying?" Okay, so if you're able to learn and grow from these events and look at yourself and go, "Why was I allowing them to hit me and hurt me and instill these doubts?

• 35:22Speaker 02

  And why did they affect me? What's wrong with me?" Well, maybe I don't love myself enough. Maybe I don't have enough confidence in myself. How do I build that up? Well, I have to go back to my childhood. I have to think about the things that I've actually accomplished. I have to build it up slowly, slowly, slowly. And that's how you handle things. But if you can't look inside of yourself and go, "The bad thing happened and I have to learn from it and I had to grow and maybe some of it's my own fault", your sunken life for the rest of your life, you'll never, ever develop.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon Fall Drop, because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's Fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com.

• 36:27Jefferson Fisher?

  I want to take a quick second to tell you about Momentous. Momentus is a sponsor of this podcast. I am so excited to be talking about, because I use this stuff every single day. When I tell you I ingest it and I feel like I am making myself a better person every time I do, it's because that is the absolute truth. Momentus, they make the science of better performance simple. And you might be thinking, "Look, Jefferson, I am not huge on exercise. I'm not some athlete. I'm not running everywhere." I get it. I do. I get it. Momentous is giving me the nutrition that I know I'm not getting in my very busy day. So here's how I think about it. I know I want to show up my best. That means I need to start with what I'm putting in my body. That has to do with all of my nutrition. So what am I taking?

• 37:09Jefferson Fisher?

  I take a lot of Momentous stuff. I do their whey protein, which is grass fed. I use their creatine. I use their magnesium L-3-onenate. They have a whole sleep stack that I take, which helps me sleep at nights, restful. I take all their omega threes and it's in my fridge. I love this stuff and I used it before they were ever a sponsor. So when I'm pressing record to talk to you or I'm stepping on a stage to speak to people, it matters what I put in my body. You can go to livemomentous.com, use the code Jefferson and get up to 35% off your first subscription. That's livemomentous.com/jefferson. Momentous, when your moment matters, make it count. And now back to the episode.

• 37:51Jefferson Fisher?

  I want to make sure and touch on the project you've been working on. I believe it's called The Sublime.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  The Law of the Sublime, yes.

• 38:00Jefferson Fisher?

  Yeah, tell us about it. Is it, do you have a release date for it?

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Well, I'm very finally happy to announce that yes, it should be out in October of 2026.

• 38:14Jefferson Fisher?

  That's fantastic.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mean, I've been working on it for five and a half years now, you know, and so every day, constantly, it's been, it's been a roller coaster. So to see the end is, almost brings tears to my eyes. I almost can't even, I can't even

• 38:36Jefferson Fisher?

  That's wonderful.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  Handle it.

• 38:38Jefferson Fisher?

  This will be your ninth book?

• 38:40Speaker 02

  It'll be my eighth book.

• 38:43Jefferson Fisher?

  Eighth book, okay. Eighth book. Wow, that's incredible.

• 38:47Jefferson Fisher?

  Just a little preview of

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, well.

• 38:49Jefferson Fisher?

  The law of the sublime.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  So it's a little bit influenced by the near death experience I had eight years ago when I suffered or seven and a half years ago when I suffered a stroke. And I came this close to dying myself and my, my wife basically saved my life. I was driving my car here in Los Angeles. She saw my face just falling apart, something weird going on. I was driving. I wasn't aware of any of it. She got me, she forced me off the road. She called nine one one. They came quickly. If any of those little things hadn't happened. If they'd been a minute later, or she hadn't recognized it, I'd be, I wouldn't be talking to you right now. I'd either be dead or I'd be in a vegetative state.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  So life is this very thin thread, right? Where things can, you know, you can definitely slip off the edge. And you're not aware it can happen at any moment. And the sublime is this understanding.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  That to be alive, to simply be alive, to fully see the world, to see things as they are. To see birds, to see nature, to see human beings, to see that you and I are talking on this instrument right now, which 50 years ago would seem like something from some science fiction story. Is utterly mind blowing. But people don't realize that they walk through their lives with their phone stuck in their face. They're thinking about, you know, reading about what people had for breakfast. Their minds are getting smaller and smaller. They're shrinking down. They're not opening up to the infinite, to the vastness of this world, to the amazing fact. That we're on a planet with life in a cosmos.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  There's probably very little, hardly maybe no life at all. That it evolved to where we are today, that we're human beings, that we have what we have. Is utterly unbelievable. And I'm trying to open your eyes to each of the different aspects of what I call the sublime. Then I talk about childhood and how our childhood was so intense. All of our childhoods were so intense. We're naturally sublime and what that means. How the brain and consciousness itself is utterly weird sublime. How other animals and their consciousness and how we can kind of study and empathize with other species is utterly sublime. Love, which is a chapter, is a sublime quality.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  History in the past and our ancestors is an incredible thing. I talk about ancient civilizations. I described to you what the ancient city of Babylonia looked like. The ancient world, the cities back there were unbelievably beautiful in a way we can't even imagine, right? So I have 12 different chapters, each kind of going into some of those different aspects. And it's been a journey because this hand here that I'm holding up is kind of dead because this is my stroke. I can't type, so I've had to handwrite everything and then get it into the computer.

• 42:06Jefferson Fisher?

  Wow.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  If you saw my process, you'd go, my God, I can't believe you even got one paragraph of this book out. Um, so.

• 42:18Jefferson Fisher?

  Well, that is incredibly impressive and I look forward to everybody taking a, making sure they can go take a look at it when it comes out there in October. It's very, um, that's something to very much admire. So I appreciate you sharing that with us.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  You're very welcome, very welcome.

• 42:37Jefferson Fisher?

  I wanted to wrap up with this question, one that you've probably gotten before. Now that you've had 20 plus years to, you know, look backwards.

• 42:48Jefferson Fisher?

  And you said, well, you know what? I stopped at forty eight. If there ever could be now looking at it, another law, maybe one or two, that you thought, well, I'd add this one. Do you have one?

• 43:01Speaker 02

  The forty ninth law is, there is no forty ninth law, right?

• 43:08Speaker 02

  You know, Jefferson, to be honest with you, when I finish a book, I kind of move on. I'm on to the next project.

• 43:15Jefferson Fisher?

  Yeah.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  I'm on to seduction. I'm on to war. I'm on to mastery. I'm working with fifty cent. I'm doing them all. I'm so absorbed in them, I don't really go back and think, what did I miss in that book over there? I try to tell myself psychologically, you covered it all, move on, on to the next project, don't look back, kind of thing. That's sort of my guiding philosophy in life.

• 43:39Jefferson Fisher?

  I think that's a pretty good philosophy, one I can, I can certainly relate to. Well, I appreciate, from me to you, I appreciate your dedication.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you.

• 43:48Jefferson Fisher?

  To your, to your art and to your projects and what you've chosen to share in the world. And I know that, you know, as I've read them, anybody can, same with my content, you can always take them in the way that you want to choose to receive them and how you accept them. But they are what they are. They, in many ways, power, like you've mentioned, is a neutral tool. And so what I've learned in our conversation today is, number one, power is the ability to control or influence another to your desired outcome. And those that don't have the power, they're the ones that they feel powerless. In many ways, feel like they got left behind and didn't learn these tools.

• 44:30Jefferson Fisher?

  These are the kind of lessons that you teach in that book, that you didn't just write off the top of your head. You research it from globally, from different ages to all across the world. And these are things that can help a lot of people, if anything, give them a really genuine perspective of what the real world is like. Two, when it comes to dealing with people that are attacking you and trying to put you down and instill doubt. Doubts in you. Their ability to do so is corresponding to those level of self-love that you have invested in yourself. And those with higher self-love, they're going to be less affected by those trying to sow doubts into them. And then three, I want to touch on the law of the sublime. It gave me just such a wonderful picture as you were even listening

• 45:15Jefferson Fisher?

  here and you saw a coyote run by. The appreciation for life and how precious it is, is something that we should never forget. Robert, thank you so much for taking the time to share with us in my audience.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  I hope you're able to see me. I see all this light coming in. God, I should have moved over.

• 45:30Jefferson Fisher?

  I just thought you were glowing. Yeah, you know, it really is. You're just glowing. That's awesome. Robert, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me, Jarvis, and I'm glad that we found it. Glad to be able to do this. Thank you. Take care, man.

• 45:41Jefferson Fisher?

  Me too. Absolutely. Yes, sir.

• 45:44Speaker 00

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon Fall Drop because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's Fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new Fall Arrivals in-store and online now at lululemon.com.