BONUS: Ryan Talks with Robert Greene On Today's World

On this special bonus episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan speaks with Robert Greene about the irrationality that runs through our society, the increasing frequency of scams and cons and how to deal with them, and the best strategy for focusing your political participation. Watch Ryan's talk with Robert Greene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kM3MCxCqq5sThis episode is brought to you by Neuro. Neuro makes mints and gums that help you retain focus and clarity wherever you go. Made with a proprietary blend of caffeine, L-theanine, and other focus-building compounds, Neuro’s products are great for anyone who needs help focusing in these trying times. Try out Neuro’s gums and mints at getneuro.com—and use discount code STOIC at checkout to save 15% on your order.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicAnd follow Robert Greene:Twitter: https://twitter.com/robertgreeneInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/robertgreeneofficial/Homepage: https://powerseductionandwar.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time, and we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, this is Ryan Holiday. Obviously, one of the perks of my life is that I get to have conversations with the great Robert Greene, I think one of the best living writers on the planet. You know, we have these phone conversations every couple of weeks. And so what he and I thought we would do is, we said, "Why are we just doing this privately? What if we just got on Zoom and recorded and people could listen? Because maybe some of the things that we're going through, that we're thinking about, some of the stuff that's influencing his writing could be beneficial to everyone. So I'm really excited to have this episode for you." We talk about the rampant irrationality of our time. We talk about political polarization. We talk about falling for scams and cons,

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  which I think is its own pandemic these days. We talk about conspiracy theories. We talk about how one, if one wishes to be politically or socially engaged, how one does that strategically, how one does that rationally, how one does that and actually has some real effect or impact on the world. Talk about all this and more. I love talking to Robert. I feel like I've been having these conversations with him since I was 18 or 19 years old. It has transformed how I see the world. It's helped make me into the writer that I've been lucky enough to become. So I'm so excited to share this with you. Here is my interview with the great Robert Greene. Obviously, you should check out all of his books.

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  And of course, if you have checked them out and want to follow him online, he's at Robert Greene Official on Instagram. You can also go to his website, sign up for his email list at powerseductionandwar.com. Really excited to chat. I feel like in a world that seems like it's sometimes tearing itself to pieces. There's this line from Churchill that I like where he talks about, as World War II is breaking out, he says, "It felt good today to put 1,000 years between me and the 20th century." Meaning, he was reading and writing about history as a way of calming himself down and getting perspective. And I feel like your books are a great opportunity

• 3:08Ryan Holiday?

  for people to understand the present by looking at the past.

• 3:14Robert Greene?

  Yeah, I agree with that. And I agree with the fact that it's kind of calming. It gives you perspective. It makes you realize that the bad days will end, that we're in a particular cycle of history and that nothing lasts forever. In my last podcast, I was talking about irrationality. And I brought up the story of Pericles and of the plague that hit Athens, kind of drawing a comparison a little bit with COVID. Although, obviously, I recognize the plague is not the same thing as the coronavirus. But it was sort of as a metaphor for what we're going through and the kind of irrationality that erupted in Athens, kind of triggered by this very powerful plague,

• 3:58Robert Greene?

  to give people a sense of 2,000 years, essentially, of perspective on this, or more than 2,000 years, of how these cycles occur and how outbreaks of irrationality occur even in the richest times in history, which is 5th century B.C., Athens, the height of what we would call rationality. And that it led to a whole century, the 4th century B.C. in Athens, of incredible irrationality, of superstitious beliefs. There's also the period of Plato and Aristotle. So it was very contradictory, but. These things happen in waves. People go crazy, they go insane collectively.

• 4:39Robert Greene?

  It's not just a pandemic of a virus. It's a pandemic of emotions, of irrationality that people can't handle. So very much I agree with you. History gives you a deep sense of perspective and can help you lift some of the depression that comes from being mired in a moment that seems so chaotic.

• 5:00Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's interesting. Yeah, you read your books and it's filled with stories of irrational people and con men. And it's filled with stories from history. And I think maybe we look at those and we go, oh, that was a long time ago. It's different now. And then we're surprised when we see those traits or those tendencies reemerge in our modern world.

• 5:27Robert Greene?

  Well, you know, it's hard for a human being to have perspective, particularly on its own period of time. And you said, this time it's different. That's the classic phrase that people used when there was like some kind of bubble, like the South Sea Bubble or the crash in 2008 or the depress, you know, some new scheme comes for making money, which is clearly like an elaborate.

• 5:50Ryan Holiday?

  Cryptocurrencies and.

• 5:52Robert Greene?

  Yeah, right. It's obviously an elaborate type of Ponzi scheme. And everybody kind of points to, well, look at the past, there were all these other kind of, you know, schemes going on and like how they ended. They go, no, this time it's different, you know? But one thing I talk about in the 48 Laws, I think is very relevant. I talk a lot about how to form a cult.

• 6:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 6:14Robert Greene?

  Barlatins and con artists. And the thing about a cult is when you're in a cult, you have no idea that you're in it. So you might be in one right now, you Ryan Holiday or me, Robert Greene, but I wouldn't realize it because the nature of a cult is it envelops you in a narrative, a narrative of this is what the world is. These are enemies out there. This is our cause. This is what unites us. And it creates this kind of fake and very simple and vague narrative of what the world is like. And when you're in that bubble, you don't realize that you're in it because by the nature, if you did realize you were in a cult, you wouldn't be in a cult any longer. So that's the kind of danger that people are living in right now.

• 6:57Robert Greene?

  You know, this is a time where con men and charlatans are proliferating. As I said in the book, when you go through a period of transition where great big grand belief systems such as Christianity or organized religion, particularly in the West, or communism or something like that falls apart, people need to believe in something. It's a deep human need. And when that disappears, we're going to start believing in these little microcosms, little mushrooms that emerge after the rain with all these sort of little kind of belief systems that kind of combine technology and religion, et cetera.

• 7:33Ryan Holiday?

  I'm not sure I've ever been in a cult, but certainly, and I know you saw some of it, American Apparel, Dove Charney was able to create kind of a cult-like atmosphere inside the company. And one of the things I found to be most strange about it, and I kind of had one foot in, one foot out, especially towards the end, because I always was doing my other own things, but it would be when there would be obvious flaws or faults. So, you know, you're being criticized, or it's being sued, or there's the front page of the New York Times is arguing this or that. What I noticed is that instead of that waking people up, it drove them deeper into the narrative.

• 8:15Ryan Holiday?

  And obviously, the scientific term for this is cognitive dissonance. I'm curious how you see cognitive dissonance playing out these days.

• 8:23Robert Greene?

  Cognitive dissonance is like the golden principle right now. And essentially, what it means is you believe in something, you come to believe in something for whatever reason. And when evidence comes in that what you believe in is patently false, it confronts you with a dilemma. Either you were kind of stupid in the beginning to believe in this in the first place. And as the philosopher Schopenhauer says, "People will admit to anything, but they will never admit to being stupid or having less intelligence than another."

• 8:57Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 8:57Robert Greene?

  So it's very difficult to admit that you were stupid. You know, it's like the last thing someone will confess to. So the alternative is, instead of believing the evidence, you double down on your initial belief, and you say, "It's the other person who's wrong." And you see this all the time, like... So for instance, there's this scare that Antifa is coming to Idaho and it's coming to your small town. And it's just like Facebook hoax. It's a complete hoax. Somebody was pulling their leg. And so hundreds of people come out with their AK-47s to defend their little town in Idaho against the Antifa that are coming. And of course, they never come. Then they say later on, it's clear that it was a hoax, but they say, no, we

• 9:40Robert Greene?

  scared them from coming because we were there. Or that congressman in Texas, Gohmert, you know, he's ranting against masks being the helping in the coronavirus. And then he catches the coronavirus, the ultimate irony.

• 9:55Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 9:55Robert Greene?

  And then he says, it was the masks that forced him to have it. These are cognitive biases that are happening at left, right, and center. And, you know, if you, the main thing would be like, if you, and everyone's gonna see through this, but if you voted for a president, for instance, or a leader, and it ends up that that person is not what you thought he was or she, it's obviously a charlatan, a con artist. That's the ultimate thing that you have to admit that you were con. And nobody wants to admit that. So you'll double down on your belief that this person is right and you will, then you'll be even fiercer in your defense against these enemies that he or she is facing.

• 10:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I feel, I feel like that's kind of the ultimate message through all your books, whether we're talking about planning a strategy in 33 Strategies, or whether we're, you know, trying to, to, to build some power dynamic, or we're trying to achieve mastery in a field. I feel like the, the thread through all your books is this sort of an unflinching commitment to reality, even when it's inconvenient, even when it means you have to go, oh, man, that was so dumb. Why did I do that? Or, or, or whether it's taking responsibility for a failure or a mistake, that it seems like, and I think you, you, you say like, we have to take to reality like a spider to its web.

• 11:14Robert Greene?

  Right. I mean, you probably know this. I mean, you have to understand people. It's not like I'm accused, like I'm somehow exempt from human nature. So I understand the process. But, you know, I often, I, I'm actually not as secure and certain of myself as people think I am. Whenever I hold a belief or I'm writing a book, I always, I always start with the premise that I'm probably wrong. That I'm actually quite ignorant, that my idea is pretty stupid. And I look at the evidence on the other side and I examine it. And I try and convince myself that what I my initial idea was right. And if it isn't, then I change it. But it's very painful because you want desperately to hold on to those beliefs that you had initially.

• 11:59Robert Greene?

  So the the number one thing about reality is confronting yourself. The fact that you are a limited human being with a limited cognitive abilities. You're are emotion based. And so your relationship to the world is usually through thick layers of illusions that come from the media, that come from your childhood, that come from your culture that you live in. And that it you have to cut through those layers, but you have to confront yourself and see yourself as the source of them. I mean, have you ever come to the ever realized that you made a terrible mistake about something? And had to reassess you, Ryan Holiday and your own intelligence? Isn't it quite painful?

• 12:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's like we'll do just about anything to avoid having to do that.

• 12:42Robert Greene?

  Right. So I mean, the thing you want to do in life, I'm a great believer in in looking at the evidence. So and looking at facts and things that are happening, information, historical context, etc. And it's the evidence and the facts. That's how I write my books. It's probably how you write your books. It's the evidence and the facts that tell me what reality is. They don't begin with my own preconceptions. I let I let the stories tell me what's going on.

• 13:12Ryan Holiday?

  And don't you think like from a like a from an individual in terms of like who you're married to, who your friends are, and then from a leadership perspective, you know, who who is on your board of advisors, who works for you, what what? How information bubbles up through the hierarchy? I think the the other thing, like if if our mind is inherently sort of not our friend in that respect and and tries to deceive itself, it seems like we have to build systems and relationships that counterbalance those forces. So we we have access to reality through somebody else's perspective. It can be like, Robert, you're being an idiot. What are you doing?

• 13:54Robert Greene?

  Well, that's why you read books. I mean, it's great if you could have intelligent people around you to have discussions and tell you, Ryan, that idea is shit. You're stupid. But first of all, people will never do that because everyone is so political. Everyone is so sycophantic. They'll say, Ryan, I love your idea. Your book is fantastic. It's very hard to get objective criticism.

• 14:15Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 14:16Robert Greene?

  When you read Nietzsche, when you read Marcus Aurelius, when you read Thucydides or any of these writers, you're getting a perspective on reality that has nothing to do with you personally. But they don't know you. So you don't have to get upset if they're bringing up facts and ideas that kind of challenge you. It's kind of an exciting process. And I often love the fact of reading great books from hundreds of years ago that literally challenge how I think. You know, I'm reading now for my new book, Things of Descartes, who's somebody I don't like, who, his philosophy is very strange to me. But I'm forcing myself to read it. I'm entering his world, and it's really having a profound effect on me.

• 14:59Robert Greene?

  So entering someone's different reality, that's what books do to you. They enrich you, and they show you that your own look on the world is limited. And you can look through it through the lens of another culture, another gender, another period in time. And if you're not reading books, then you're going to probably be in those layers of illusion are going to be so damn thick, you're never even going to realize it.

• 15:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's a quote I've liked from General Mattis. He says, "If you haven't read hundreds of books, you're functionally illiterate." You know, we think like, oh, I can read, but the reality is if you're not reading, what good is that skill?

• 15:37Robert Greene?

  Right.

• 15:39Ryan Holiday?

  So I think, and I think we should talk about conspiratorial thinking, but that's so loaded that maybe I thought I'd start with something else that I think is equally prevalent. And I was just writing about. I think we're also seeing a lot of magical thinking. So conspiratorial thinking is, you know, like, these people are out to get us. This is how things are operating behind the scenes. But I think, you know, magical thinking is, oh, the coronavirus will just disappear. Or, oh, a vaccine will will happen and all of this will go back to normal. Or, you know, my ex is going to come rushing back through the door any day now. She's going to realize what a mistake she made.

• 16:18Ryan Holiday?

  It feels like people are living in a fantasy world of their own, you know, kind of magical thinking.

• 16:26Robert Greene?

  Yeah, and that's very true. And, you know, it's obviously the source of falling for a con game or falling into a cult or believing in a conspiracy.

• 16:37Ryan Holiday?

  Like, I'm seeing it a lot where, like, parents seem to think, like, oh, school is important.

• 16:43Robert Greene?

  I know, I remember my thought.

• 16:44Ryan Holiday?

  Is it like, I'm seeing it like, these parents are like, school is important. So I'm going to send my kid to school. When it's like, school is important, of course, but it's also the middle of a pandemic. So just because you like something or just because you need something, doesn't like, you know, if I would have wanted to visit my relatives in Europe during the Second World War, my need for doing so does not change the fact that there are German U-boats patrolling the Atlantic and I'm going to get sunk if I try to go see them.

• 17:14Robert Greene?

  Yeah, but if you say that, Ryan, like I tried to say on my last video about the plague, and people are going to be coming, or are you comparing coronavirus to World War II? You know, people don't know how to think in metaphors anymore.

• 17:26Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 17:27Robert Greene?

  You know, what I was going to say was, I don't know if this is accurate. It's a thought that came to me and maybe I need to think it through more deeply. But I think a lot of it comes from 60, 70 years of an entertainment industry that envelops us in these stories that have like drama and then a happy ending and a consequence and a conclusion.

• 17:49Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 17:49Robert Greene?

  And it creates this kind of way of thinking that the world is just like this, right?

• 17:55Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 17:56Robert Greene?

  And, and so we're kind of, and ideas have to be entertaining, you know? So if I give it, I noticed this one time when I gave a talk in Toronto and I was one of the top speakers, there was like 12 of self-help gurus, including Anthony, what's his name?

• 18:14Ryan Holiday?

  Tony Robbins.

• 18:15Robert Greene?

  Tony Robbins. And they were like yelling and stomping around the stage and yelling and had videos and it was just like a clown show.

• 18:23Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 18:24Robert Greene?

  Right. And then I got on the stage and I had no video and I'm just sort of talking about mastery. And then I realized you've got to entertain people. You've got to put your ideas inside these little sugar pills. You've got to make them titillate them and excite them.

• 18:38Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 18:39Robert Greene?

  Been going on through television, through radio, through television, through the internet, through social media. And now people think that the only ideas that are legitimate are these ones that fill into these little capsules like a log line for a screenplay.

• 18:54Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 18:54Robert Greene?

  What reality is, you know, the pandemic, it's plandemic. It's, it's

• 19:01Ryan Holiday?

  Right, it rhymes. It must be true.

• 19:02Robert Greene?

  5G.

• 19:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 19:04Robert Greene?

  It's whatever it is. These little tiny tidbits of information that people glom onto. It's very entertaining. It's sexy. It's nice to believe in. And as you say, it's complete magical thinking. I don't know if my theory is totally whack, but it came to me the other day that that was sort of.

• 19:19Ryan Holiday?

  No, I, I think, I think that makes sense. It's funny, Musonius Rufus, one of the Stoics, he was saying, if you see the audience, like if the audience is, is, is responding, it's a sign the philosopher is not delivering hard truths. He was like, they should be sitting there in complete silence because their mind has been blown. But no, I, I think you make a good point. Like, we've lost the ability, or maybe we've never had it, but we're struggling with the idea that a lot of truths are uncomfortable, a lot of truths are complicated. And a lot of times, an idea is maybe the, the difference between the path we should take and the path we shouldn't take, there might only be three or four percentage

• 20:02Ryan Holiday?

  points of difference between the two. Like, you know, I think, like, you're, you're also seeing this in the pandemic. There's got to be some magical drug that just treats it. Or there's got to be, you know, e- even masks, like, oh, so I'm wearing a mask, now I can just go about my normal life as if everything is fine. And it's like, no, actually, we're trying to chip away at this thing from all these different angles. And, and that this, there is no one silver bullet solution, but, but, uh, you know, um, but, but a lot of bullets that you, that you eventually kill this thing with. And we, we don't seem to be able to do that. We want to glom onto the one thing and then that's the only thing.

• 20:43Robert Greene?

  Yeah, I mean, the, a, a virus is a very boring thing, right? It's not a living organism. First of all, you can't anthropomorphize it. Right. You know, we're gonna kill this thing. It's not a living organism. It's very boring. It simply lives by this rigorous math, right? Right. You know, they have the number one, one point one. It infects more than one person at a time. It can expand exponentially. Right. And exponential increases are very hard for us to understand. Sure. And they're very powerful, right? So, and then the solution is also really kind of boring. It's so simple and, you know, like, wearing a mask and being socially distant and putting up with that kind of sacrifice for four months.

• 21:27Robert Greene?

  How unmanly, how unmasculine. Wear a silly little mask. I mean, you know, oh, my God. No, it's much better to believe in something much, a vast conspiracy, that this was some nefarious Chinese person planted it so that it would destroy America. That some kibble of people somewhere in, in, in Eastern Europe are doing this to destroy Donald Trump. Or that, you know, on and on and on. And that maybe, yeah, as you say, you know, one thing will solve it. It's as if people can't think of two things at the same time. It's such, it's magical thinking, but it's also black and white thinking. Right. So, if, if some reason it comes out that masks aren't the only solution, that, you know, there are limits to masks.

• 22:13Robert Greene?

  Well, then, that was totally false. Fauci was wrong. Trump is right. Masks are silly. No, there's nuance. Science is full of nuances. Masks help. They don't do the whole thing. You have to do this other thing. It's not very sexy or exciting. It's not like CSI Miami. It doesn't have an exciting ending. It's not all masks and it's not people shooting with guns. It's very simple. People don't want to believe in something so simple and boring as that, you know.

• 22:42Ryan Holiday?

  I think this goes to the point of your book Mastery too, which is like, people want to think that to become great at something, it's 100% genetics. Or they want to think it's 100% hard work. Or they want to think that it's, you know, it's, oh, it's 10,000 hours. So if I put in 10,000 hours, I automatically become this, you know? And the reality is it's complicated. That I think a lot of these things are art more than they are a science. And we, what I like about your book is you're like, no, no, it's really, really hard. But if you follow these basic principles more often than not, you will get close to where you want to end up.

• 23:25Ryan Holiday?

  And I think that's also with the 48 Laws of Power. I hear people do this all the time. They go, but some of the laws contradict each other. So therefore the whole book must be false. It's like, it's, yes, life is complicated. Sometimes you have to do this and sometimes you have to do that. How is that hard for you to understand?

• 23:42Robert Greene?

  Well, even taking it a step further, I said in the intro, and I used the last law to say I am contradicting myself. Be formless.

• 23:52Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 23:53Robert Greene?

  Don't listen to a writer. Think sometimes that maybe he's wrong. And every chapter ends with a reversal, saying that this law sucks, that you have to look at it from the opposite angle. And still people go into that black and white thinking that, you know, he's contradicting himself. But the thing with Mastery was I was actually worried that this book would not sell at all. Because the message is so kind of not what people want to hear, right? Particularly in an age where you've got your phone in front of you and it has such power and you can do whatever you want to a degree that nobody in history has ever experienced. And so it creates this belief that you can have the same kind of effect with anything in life,

• 24:37Robert Greene?

  that things should become easily, that you should be able to hack your way quickly through, you know, some app that comes that you get or whatever and get power really quickly and easily. And so I thought, God, I am swimming against the tide because I'm telling you, I'm delivering some bad news. The human brain evolved millions of years ago. And, you know, over the course of,

• 25:04Robert Greene?

  You know, let's say hundreds of thousands of years. And in one generation, you're not going to change the human brain because of technology. So you have to understand that our brains are designed to practice things, to learn, to be patient, develop discipline. What a bleak message. Oh, I've got to put in that many hours. Oh, I have to be disciplined. Oh, I have to learn how to fail. Oh, my God, I don't want to hear that. But the good news is the book has sold well and it's really resonated with a lot of people. So I think in this culture of so much bullshit, of so many sugar pills, of feeding people so much crap. And I think a lot of people, their human nature revolts against it. Something inside says, I don't want that anymore. I want a dose of reality.

• 25:48Robert Greene?

  I want somebody to splash some cold water on my face.

• 25:52Ryan Holiday?

  Do you think, I know you're fascinated with eastern philosophy. I think western philosophy tends to be so logical and it tends to be so rational. Do you think there's maybe some additional merit then in the eastern stuff where it seems like these sort of Zen koans? And these riddles and some of these questions they ask. It almost seems like they're embracing the paradoxical nature of reality and the contradictions and the unknowableness of it all.

• 26:22Robert Greene?

  Yeah, very much so. Where I found that the most interesting was when I did my war book and I got into strategy and Asian strategy. And you know, you would think strategy is a very kind of heavy western concept. You know, you do this and this results. It's very cause and effect, consequential. A will lead to B, will lead to C. And you plan out and you map it, you know, von Clausewitz, whoever. And then you go into Sun Tzu and it's like, whoa, what is he saying? It's like this, this reality that we're dealing with is very nuanced. It's, it's, it's very hard to say, it's like an artist, you say, and you, you take action A. And it won't lead to B, it could lead to C, it could lead to D.

• 27:08Robert Greene?

  So where do you go? And I was confronted with this. I decided I would read a version of The Art of War that went through all of the Chinese characters. I obviously don't read Chinese, but it explained literally what each character meant. So you were reading a much more direct translation. And then it made me realize that this is not how we think, right? Sure. So to give you an example, he talks about potentiality of power. So you want to put, the art of war is to put yourself in a position, this could be in business or any strategy, where you have the potential of great momentum, of great power, right? It's not about A will lead to B.

• 27:53Robert Greene?

  It's about a position. Right. And that position is, this can be somewhat nebulous. And what are these positions of power? He compares it to a stringing of a bow that bow has potential force behind it, or a boulder on top of a mountain. And then he talks about how you can do that in warfare. And I thought, this is a whole other way of thinking. It's much more holistic. It's much more nuanced. It's much more artful. And it's more closer to reality. So to get back to your point, people think of Zen as a kind of religion. And it is theoretically a religion, something that I'm filled into very deeply. But more than anything, Zen is a philosophy of reality. It's trying to connect you to what the world really is like.

• 28:37Robert Greene?

  And it starts from the premise, which Buddhism does, that your mind is inherently living in illusion because you're separating yourself from the world. And the world isn't like that. You actually are a part of the world that you're in. So that way of thinking deeply, deeply excites me because it contains, you know, possibilities of things being the opposite. So something that's so extreme turns into its opposite, which is something very kind of, a very powerful part of Chinese philosophy. And in the laws of human nature, I talk about how people who appear to be so one quality are actually disguised in the opposite quality and they continually turn into each other, you know, the shadow

• 29:20Robert Greene?

  side of human nature. These are things that I've, you know, absorbed from years of reading Asian philosophy.

• 29:27Ryan Holiday?

  I wanted to go back to this idea of sort of people have some of these irrational beliefs. They've picked up these stories, this entertainment sort of bias that we have. Nassim Taleb talks about, he's like, stories are powerful. And he says, the only way to beat a story is to replace it with another story. And I was curious, given your writing on seduction, which to me, I sort of expand seduction out from just, you know, sort of sexual or relationship seduction. But it seems like what you're really talking about is if you want to combat this propensity for entertainment or this magical thinking, we have to combat it with

• 30:10Ryan Holiday?

  a better story or something, you know, you know what I mean? So how do you suggest leaders and people think about like, if you, let's say you knew someone who was starting to believe in plandemic, you can't just go, that's stupid, you're an idiot. How do you walk them back from that?

• 30:27Robert Greene?

  Well, it's not easy. If I had the magical answer to that, there's no magical pill for that either.

• 30:33Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 30:34Robert Greene?

  But you have to kind of enter their world first a little bit to order, understand, you know, where, where these things come from. So, you know, part of that, as you say, is understanding their story. And you would have to maybe watch plandemic, which I'm afraid I did, gave me a headache.

• 30:53Ryan Holiday?

  You weren't convinced?

• 30:55Robert Greene?

  No, I wasn't convinced. What I did see through was all of the tricks, the music, the narrator's voice. I totally deconstructed in my mind, all the little tricks that it used to create this illusion of some kind of menace, et cetera. But I watched it and I could see its seductive power in the sense of what we were talking about, where people want to believe in stories. They want a villain. They want something simple and easy to digest. They want a kind of vague conspiracy in which they can. Project their own little neuroses and problems. I saw it seductive appeal. And so maybe in that sense, what you're talking about is I would have to create a kind of counter narrative that also was seductive.

• 31:38Robert Greene?

  But I don't know how you do that. Sometimes people need to be confronted with reality.

• 31:43Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 31:44Robert Greene?

  But they need to be confronted with reality in a way that doesn't offend, that doesn't say you're stupid. You know, I talk about that in human nature and I see that every day in the world. You know, there's somebody you disagree with, you think they're wrong. In fact, you're sure of it and you'd call them on it. All you're doing is making them more certain that they're right. Cause nobody wants to admit that they're stupid. So you have to be able to understand people's insecurities and what led them to believe in plandemic in order to create a possible alternative scenario. So I don't know what that would be. I've had moments where lucid moments where I thought of a way to maybe appeal to people in this, in the sense of creating a kind of narrative

• 32:29Robert Greene?

  of the science of it and the virus and kind of the excitement that comes from, you know, actually, you know, cause one thing that, that irritates the hell out of me is people generally love and trust science. They do it tacitly. They do it because they drive a car and they assume that the technology is there.

• 32:50Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 32:50Robert Greene?

  In a plane, they go to a doctor when they have a disease and they, they tacitly believe that there's an expert and there's science and it will solve problems for them. But science isn't sometimes very sexy, you know? It doesn't, it doesn't necessarily please you.

• 33:06Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 33:07Robert Greene?

  Convenient truth. And so you have to find ways to narrate the, the idea behind science, which is a lot of what I'm doing in my new book.

• 33:16Ryan Holiday?

  I was just thinking, yeah, it's like if you're.

• 33:18Robert Greene?

  I mean, what would be your, what would be your counter narrative?

• 33:21Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I don't know exactly, but like, let's say we're thinking in someone's a someone lives in some Rust Belt town in a in a mobile home. You know, they're they're not in good shape because they, you know, they don't eat well because they live in a food desert. Maybe their community has been decimated by opioids. And the job market is not robust for someone who isn't educated. When you hear this idea like, let's make America great again. That is, that taps into exactly how you're feeling. And I think I think the rational community, if you will, and I think that can include a whole swath of the political spectrum has seems like has not done a particularly good job.

• 34:04Ryan Holiday?

  You know, I forget who said it, but the the idea leaders are dispensers of hope. You know, we there's not really a narrative that dispenses hope, that dispenses agency, that dispenses anything worth believing in.

• 34:16Robert Greene?

  Yeah, I misunderstood your question. Yeah, I completely believe it. I completely agree with you. And so like a mistake that the people in the Democratic Party or on the left will make is not having a counter slogan to make America great again.

• 34:29Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 34:30Robert Greene?

  Slogans, people love slogans is build back better is so awkward.

• 34:36Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 34:37Robert Greene?

  It's not the same, doesn't have the same ring. So it's they're very Democrats have always been so weak in that because they believe they're technocrats. They believe that if they just tell people the truth about the economy, but it's not seductive. And I always go back to the only Democrat in my memory who did this was John F. Kennedy. He was a genius at marketing on the level of of Trump, because that is the one element that Trump is good at. You know, Kennedy had the new frontier. You know, he realized that we're emerging out of the boring Eisenhower years, which really weren't so boring.

• 35:10Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 35:10Robert Greene?

  You know, he created this idea. And now we're returning to our pioneer myths. Our frontier is now outer space. We're going to go to the moon. We're going to be the first people to go to the moon. We're going to be so technologically advanced that we're like the pioneers in the 19th century. It was really powerful and seductive, and it worked brilliantly. I agree with you completely. You need us, you need to seduce people, and you can't be afraid of doing that. You know, even, you know, like Bernie Sanders, he created a cult like following that's say it what it is.

• 35:41Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 35:42Robert Greene?

  But he was actually pretty good at creating these kind of slogans and these kind of quick ideas that people could digest about the 1%, etc. You might hate him, but he was good at it. But so many Democrats, particularly the ones that we nominate, suck at it. And they suck at it royally because they think they just need to deliver bullet point, a list of things that we must do, must do this for education, this for health. You can just see people falling asleep as they do it. I completely agree with you. I misunderstood your question.

• 36:13Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, I think it implies the pandemic too. Like, I'll talk about that in a second. But yeah, I remember in the campaign, in 2016, Hillary's response to "Make America Great", which is actually, you know, as nationalistic and stupid as it is in a lot of ways, it makes sense. There's a sort of an immediacy that makes sense. And her response to that, instead of a better story, was, "America is great because it is good." You know? And it's like, good is not as good as great. That's what words mean. And second, you're telling people who are unhappy that actually they're wrong to be unhappy because America is already great. Do you know what I mean? Like, you're not, you have to tell a better story and it seems like we struggle to do that.

• 36:57Robert Greene?

  Well, the thing is, you know, to be a leader today, to win an election, is extremely complicated because we're very divided.

• 37:03Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 37:04Robert Greene?

  We have these little niche groups, these little beliefs, you know, identity politics, wherever you want to term it. And even on the right, they have their little niche groups. So to unite the country to win an election, you have to create a narrative. You have to tell people, this is what it means to be American.

• 37:21Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 37:22Robert Greene?

  And nobody ever does that. I can't recall in my lifetime, you know, you could say Trump somehow, some does a Ronald Reagan perhaps did, is an example. But what does it mean to be an American in 2020? It's a very strange time we're going through. We're a very diverse country with all of these, you know, it's not the same in Wisconsin as in California and New York, and we have these different isolated pockets. What will unite us? What will create a grand sense of, we are a country, we don't need to hate each other. I can actually appreciate. A Trump follower in Michigan, he's an American as I am. He has the same frustrations with the healthcare system that I do. What unites us?

• 38:06Robert Greene?

  How do you create a narrative that makes people emotional? That makes people actually want to think that this is the future of America? Damn it, if I could just get inside a politician's head to create that narrative. That's like the one thing that's so missing and there's so much potential power behind that.

• 38:23Ryan Holiday?

  Well, no, I was.

• 38:24Robert Greene?

  Scary power, it's not like a Nazi type power.

• 38:27Ryan Holiday?

  But, but, but it is very volatile power. Like, I mean, we're recording this the day after the 19th anniversary of nine 11. And to think, you know, there was, there was all that energy, you know, those planes crashing to those towers. And government, the United States government has an opportunity. What story are we going to tell ourselves about this event? And then how are we going to direct that energy? You know, the war on terror is a story. It's just probably the wrong story. And we ended up telling a story that, you know, cost America trillions of dollars, thousands of lives and, and almost certainly made us less safe than we were before.

• 39:10Ryan Holiday?

  And why is China ascendant and America somewhat stagnant? It's, you know, China didn't spend several trillions of dollars, you know, for very little gain in the Middle East over the last 20 years.

• 39:21Robert Greene?

  Yeah, I mean, the narrative that you create has, has to be reality based to some extent. And it has to be pro-social, you know? So the reality, the narrative of, of this is our enemy. We must destroy them. The war on terror was kind of the false way of uniting people. So I agree with you. There is a kind of cult-like Nazi way of uniting people behind a cause that is very evil, that can take the energy in a crowd and can make it very, very dangerous. So yeah, I agree with you. But, you know, if I'm talking about a narrative nowadays that unite people, it's look, we're the most powerful country, well, we used to be.

• 40:05Robert Greene?

  I don't know how long, we're a lot longer, we can say that. But in quotes, we're the most technologically powerful country in, in the, in the world. Look, look what we've done. Look at the science, look what we've created, look at our business, look at our, our culture, et cetera. And why can't we see this, this is, this is our new forefront, the new frontier to do Kennedy, to bring back to Kennedy, we're going to solve all the incredible problems in the world through being a magnet for the greatest thinkers in the world. We're going to, we're going to solve global warming and we're going to make it economically profitable. You can make that narrative pro-social, it doesn't have to be evil and cult-like.

• 40:46Robert Greene?

  And I think Kennedy's was like that, or even Reagan's to some extent, you know?

• 40:51Ryan Holiday?

  No, I, I, I totally agree. How do you personally, when you see all this happening and it's, it's aggravating and it's frustrating and it's disappointing, how does one prevent themselves from giving in to despair? I mean, that, that's something I think about, like, how, how do you not just go, this is crazy, I'm going to be like Montaigne and I'm just going to retire to my tower and read my books for the rest of my life?

• 41:19Robert Greene?

  Well, that is kind of what I'm doing. I'm kind of being like Montaigne, I am kind of retired to my tower and working on my next book. I mean, I'm, I'm an exception, so it's not really easy, fair for me to say because, you know, thank God I have books to write and I can absorb myself in 3,000, over 3,000 years of history and get outside of this time. But, you know, some perspective will help. And, you know, I, I had a chapter in my Laws of Human Nature about the generation phenomenon and how, there's a great book called Generations by these two writers that came out in the 90s that show these incredible patterns through history that happen in sequences of four. And

• 42:03Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, the Fourth Turning, right? Is that what it's called?

• 42:06Robert Greene?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 42:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 42:07Robert Greene?

  That's the title of the book.

• 42:08Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, okay.

• 42:08Robert Greene?

  Generations. And there's a kind of a crisis generation, which I believe is what is millennials, people who lived through 20, this crash of 08 and now this. And then there's the revolutionary generation where something new is created, where people are so tired of what's going on in the world, particularly young people, because it's only young people that ever really create change. And change is very necessary in this world. And so The only hopeful thing is that I think young people are so sick of the narrative they've been fed about the world, particularly from boomers, about this is what America is, this is what prosperity is, this is what our future is, that they're so sick of it,

• 42:52Robert Greene?

  they're so tuned out of it, that if they could ever get the energy together, they could create something very powerful and new. My only hope is that people are going to get tired of this, and that this is what has saved us in the past, that we've gone through these deep moments, and sometimes these moments can last well over a hundred years. There can be the dark ages in our history that last four centuries or something like that, you know? But at a point is reached where the human spirit rebels and returns to its origin and returns to something powerful and healthy. Because we know, we don't like, you know, if you eat a lot of junk food, you feel sick. Your body feels sick.

• 43:33Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 43:34Robert Greene?

  If you consume a lot of bullshit information and things that are just entertainment on the internet, you kind of also feel sick, like you're disconnected from, from who you are, from your own body, from the world. You rebel. You're sick of it. And so, we need, in some ways, I don't want to, people are going to kill me for saying this, but we also somewhat need a kind of second revolution in America of, you know, bringing all of the great things of our country and updating them to where the world is right now. And my only hope is that young people are so sick of the way things are, that they're going to be the catalysts of change. I could be wrong, and it may never happen, but that's what makes me not want to kill myself right now.

• 44:18Ryan Holiday?

  So let's say that some of this energy does come together, what I think, and maybe there have been moments, right? There have been marches in the streets, whether it's about George Floyd, or whether it's about the Parkland shooting, or whether it's about climate change, or the, you know, the Women's March, whatever it is. It seems like we get these moments of energy, but the wave crests before it has a chance to do anything. And, and I think part of the reason that that seems to happen is that the entrenched interests... Are so good and so used to sort of parrying these blows that that that that they don't end up landing. And so I'm curious, like, what what do you what's your advice to, you

• 45:03Ryan Holiday?

  know, an incipient activist movement that is fighting an enemy that is not playing by the rules? Like, if you're Belarus right now, and you are up against the full power of the state, what do you do?

• 45:18Robert Greene?

  You do what you're doing. And those are brilliant, beautiful examples that I'm following with great interest. I mean, look what happened in Ukraine. I was recently in Ukraine. Ukraine's an amazing, beautiful country. People are very smart there. There's a lot of great things of technology that are coming from Ukraine. They overthrew one of the most corrupt oligarchies in modern times. Now, things aren't perfect there. There's still levels of corruption. They're still fighting it. But, you know, I was reading in the paper this morning in the Washington Post about somebody I think you really need to include in your book on courage.

• 45:53Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 45:54Robert Greene?

  I think he's the most courageous person in the world today. And that's Alexei Navalny, right? The guy who was poisoned by the Russians.

• 46:02Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 46:03Robert Greene?

  Unbelievable brave. Read the Washington Post article today.

• 46:07Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 46:07Robert Greene?

  Unbelievably brave what he's put up with. Completely incorruptible. And his strategy for fighting the most entrenched, you think it's bad, maybe in the United States, try fighting against Putin and Russia, and you'll see that you're hitting a block of cement more than anything. But it's not impossible. And the the the solution is, because I've researched this a lot and thought a lot about it, is visibility. You need to be out there in the streets, and you need to not let your energy dissolve, and you need to be constantly publicizing the corruption. And you can't be naive. So what you're talking about is entrenched powers co-opting.

• 46:48Robert Greene?

  The anger on the streets. And so Citibank will have an ad saying, we're all with you. You know, George Floyd, blah, blah, blah. They're co-opting it.

• 46:58Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 46:59Robert Greene?

  They're co-opting your energy and they're turning it into their own thing. You must call them out on that. You must not be seduced by these little crumbs that they try and throw at you. You need to keep your narrative together, which is there is rampant corruption in this country. There are oligarchs, wherever country you're talking about. You need to be revealing that for what it is. And if you look at Alexei Navalny and why he's so brilliant, you talk about seduction. He creates these YouTube videos. I don't know if you've ever watched any of them.

• 47:27Ryan Holiday?

  No.

• 47:28Robert Greene?

  They have them with subtitles. They're fantastic. He has managed to create these, I don't know, 20 minute, I don't know how long they, I don't remember, videos detailing the corruption in Russia. He gets these, what do you call them? The fly in the air, sorry.

• 47:45Ryan Holiday?

  Drones.

• 47:46Robert Greene?

  Drones to pass over oligarchs mansions. And he films their ponds filled with ducks and swans and their tennis courts and their swimming pools. And he puts it together in a really powerful video and says, look Russians, this is what they're stealing. They're stealing your money. And this is how our president Medvedev has 1.4 billion dollars put into his estate. While meanwhile you are starving and you are dying from the pandemic, et cetera, et cetera. They're powerful. So you have to be entertaining and you have to be constantly visible. If you're marching in the streets, you can't let the energy dissolve. And you have to create a narrative that's strong and you can't be naive.

• 48:29Robert Greene?

  You can't let yourself be seduced by these people who are trying to co-opt you.

• 48:34Ryan Holiday?

  And I've been fascinated about the civil rights movement lately and reading a lot about it. I think maybe one of the things we get wrong about it too is that, you know, we think it's like, oh, you know, Martin Luther King just took people to the streets. And so we think like, oh, what we need to, you know, to get change is just to have a lot of protesters or demonstrators. Like when you really think about what Like the Montgomery Bus Boycott was, or some of his garbage boycotts. He was, he wasn't just demonstrating, but he was exerting real pressure that the leaders had to alleviate. And the only way to alleviate it was to get into his demands. And so I think that's what like, you know, we do this.

• 49:17Ryan Holiday?

  Remember after 2016, there was a March for Science in America or something like that's not exerting any pressure on anyone. And there's no goals of that move. Do you know what I mean? We just think that organization is key, but there has to be another component.

• 49:33Robert Greene?

  Well, I mean, but Martin Luther King definitely had what I'm talking about. He definitely wanted to keep these things visible constantly in the presence. His, but what you're saying is true. You have to be strategic. That's the difference.

• 49:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 49:47Robert Greene?

  Right? And Martin Luther King was a brilliant strategist. So he understood that the goal of his campaigns were the white liberals sitting in front of their television sets in Janesville, Wisconsin, or in Illinois. Right? They're going to see images of children 12 years old being beaten by brutal black cops and their dogs, et cetera. And they're going to be awakened to the reality of America. And to do that, he had to make things extremely visible. He had to be constantly out on the streets and he had to even provoke the other side. So one of the things that, you know, we tend to create these saints. And Martin Luther King was not a saint, but he was very human. But he had a decision in one of his rallies,

• 50:31Robert Greene?

  whether somebody proposed letting schoolchildren 11, 12 years old participate in the demonstration, which would probably end up violent. And people said, oh, Martin, you can't do that. That's terrible. It's going to, that's not ethical. And this very religious man, this preacher, this priest, you know, said, no, it's the right idea. And he did it. And it was very, very powerful. It was one of the key moments in the movement. So yeah, there are times when you can't exert pressure. Like, um, you want police departments to change and you're out in the streets. Or let's say the election is, you know, there's fraud and, and, and there's like the 2000 movement where the Brooks Brothers revolution could and they all, you know, tried to change the results in Florida.

• 51:16Robert Greene?

  You know what I'm referring to?

• 51:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 51:17Robert Greene?

  Um, so the leverage in that particular case is only going to be by demonstration in mass numbers. I mean, that's, so that, where both components are important. In Belarus, it's the fact that 100,000 people in a small country are in the streets of Minsk, um, basically running the risk of being beaten or killed. And that is incredibly powerful. It's re-made the, the, the people in the, it has a, a snowball effect. Where everybody wakes up. So visibility and being on the streets is one component's very important, but you have to also be strategic and do what you're saying.

• 51:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, no, I think, I think that's right. And, and it, that does seem like something people who have kind of turned up their noses at your books right now, especially millennials, I think, need to be reading because they're, when the other side is not playing by the rules, you have to, you, although you do have to maintain the moral high ground, which you talk about. It's like, on the one hand, you, you gotta be kind of a Lyndon Johnson. You have to take the moral high ground here, but then in the smoke-filled rooms or in secret, you gotta know how to grab somebody by the balls and twist, you know? And, and I think we're, we're lacking that.

• 52:36Robert Greene?

  Yeah, I mean, I was thinking about it too, when I was reading the paper. I don't remember what the story is, where I'm seeing, you know, like, um, Republicans can play very dirty.

• 52:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 52:48Robert Greene?

  You know, they play this kind of asymmetric warfare where they're willing to do anything when it comes to limiting voting rights or working with the post office. They'll do anything to keep on power. And the Democrats, uh, I don't want to get involved in that kind of nasty stuff. You know, it's too dirty, we're pure, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Man, I've been hating that for my whole life. It makes me sick. You know, read about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of our greatest presidents and one of our most liberal. That guy, the person who wrote the best biography called it The Lion and the Fox. He was Machiavelli incarnate.

• 53:26Robert Greene?

  He was incredibly strategic. Nobody played more hardball than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He knew how to do it and he was successful at it. And so, you know, that's what the world is like. And if you're going to organize a movement, you have to realize that you can, your hands are going to have to get a little bit dirty. And then even Martin Luther King was willing to get his hands dirty in a demonstration. And even Gandhi, I talked about in my war book. Gandhi was incredibly strategic. He knew that if he was, did passive resistance and they were being beaten up by white British people, policemen, those in England be seeing this and they'd be revolted by it, disgusted by it. He was willing to have that happen. He was very strategic.

• 54:10Robert Greene?

  If Gandhi and Martin Luther King were strategic people who knew how to play tough and hardball, why can't you get off your high horse and, and be more strategic? And be willing to get your fingers a little bit dirty and play a little bit dirty and con- you're not going to lose yourself, you're going to win.

• 54:27Ryan Holiday?

  Well, no, it's like Bill Belichick talks about the patriot way and no ego and all that. And then, you know, he's also looking for every, you know, every possible thing he can do up to the line. And sometimes he's willing to, to see if he can get away with crossing the line. You know what I mean? And, and that's what it takes to be dominant at that level, I think.

• 54:50Robert Greene?

  Or, or look at Churchill in, in World War II. You know, read the book I recommended to you, The Bodyguard of Lies. A great book. You know, the levels of deception and this things that kind of cross an ethical boundary that you would normally never do in wartime. He was willing to do because the stakes were so high. Well, the stakes are pretty high right now. And sometimes you have to be willing to go a little bit past that boundary.

• 55:15Ryan Holiday?

  So I, I thought maybe we'd close with some of the, maybe to bring it full circle. It strikes me that there are some people who are just sort of being manipulated because they're uneducated, they're being manipulated because they don't have the training that we're talking about, they're being manipulated because they're vulnerable, whatever. And then it, but it also seems like there's a part of this that it's people, it's like there's this, that quota, you can't con an honest man. It seems like some of the, the, the people that are falling for this, they should know better. And in fact, why they don't know better is because they think they're the ones that are getting the better deal out of it. Do you know what I mean?

• 56:00Ryan Holiday?

  It's like manipulators are being, I think Machiavelli says like, he who deceives is most easily deceived because you, it just, I'm just curious what you think about that.

• 56:10Robert Greene?

  Well, I mean, look at Trump and Bob Woodward. Trump is the one who's, who's incredibly deceptive, who likes to, let's just call a spade a spade. He's, he lies a lot, you know? I don't think anybody, even a Trump supporter would deny that. And here comes Bob Woodward, who kind of says, you know, I'm gonna write a book. And Bob Woodward has 18 books behind him, revealing what he does. He like tick, rips you to pieces. He shows you your innards. He makes you look as ugly as you can. And he agrees to it. The deceiver was deceived. Con artists are often conned. I have the story in the 48 Laws of the Greatest Con Man That Ever Lived in America, Yellow Kid Vile, and how he was conned by these two very beautiful women on a, on a, on a boat once, you know?

• 56:55Robert Greene?

  And he realized that, you know, I'm very much open to it. The idea is, you know, when we look at the world, we like to think of evil people and victims. It's part of our black and white magical thinking. There are evil people out there and there's poor oppressed victims. And the thing about con, the way I try to show in con artists or with cults, is I'm fascinated by the psychology of people who fall for it. And it's not so much that they are victims in this particular instance. They want to believe in the con. There's an old Latin expression, I wrote it down here. Mundus vult de quipex, ergo de quipia tur. The world wants to be deceived, therefore deceive them, is the, is the expression.

• 57:40Robert Greene?

  People want to be fed some convenient, beautiful truth. You're gonna have easy money. We're gonna do this little thing here and you're gonna get thousands of dollars without ever doing anything, right? Wow, okay, I'll do it. You know, or whatever the story is, whatever the con is, you want to believe in it. You're a sucker, you're a dupe because of human nature and we all have that part of us. You want to believe in this easy route to power and money, right? So the end thing is you have to be responsible for yourself. You can't be whining that you were the victim, that you were conned or that you were deceived. Of course, you'll very rarely ever admit that.

• 58:23Robert Greene?

  You have to build rational defenses in your mind. You have to be willing, and this comes from a lot of reading, to question everything, to question your own beliefs, to say, "Am I actually in a cult? Maybe I am. Have I actually been conned? Maybe I, Albert Green, have been conned and I have been conned myself personally." You have to look at yourself. That is the last line of defense for any kind of world we live in with so much deceiving and conning going on.

• 58:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I remember you tell a story, I think it's in Forty Laws of Power, about this con they do where they approach someone and they say, "Hey, do you wanna fix a boxing match with me?" And then you're, you're, you're in the, you think you're tricking other people and then, and then they stage this elaborate ruse where one of the, one of the, the boxers gets killed and then they flee with the money, but you don't ever tell anyone about it because you would have to admit that you were fixing a boxing match.

• 59:20Robert Greene?

  Yeah, it's the old Russian trick of kompromat. So if you're compromised in the actual con, you're never gonna come out and go to the authorities because A, it shows how stupid you were and B, you're admitting guilt on your own part. So that's one of the oldest cons in the book, yeah.

• 59:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, a compromise is a fascinating and very relevant thing these days. And I think I was reading an interview with an FBI agent and they were saying, you know, it's not, people think that to be compromised means that you're a traitor, like you're somehow some double agent. And he's saying compromise, uh, being compromised just means there's a reason that you can't be fully honest. It's like you have a secret, or you have some shame, or you have something you don't want to admit, and that's what it is. And I think, you know, when people talk about this election interference and all this stuff, like, no, it's not just politics. I mean, there's college professors who've been taking research money from China.

• 1:00:20Ryan Holiday?

  We have, like, this is why I think ethical lines and holding yourself to a high standard is so important. You don't want to be compromised, because once you're compromised, you're not yourself anymore.

• 1:00:32Robert Greene?

  Well, it's, it's the chapter in, in Forty Eight Laws of Power about your reputation. And there is an element that isn't maybe so ethical in that it's a power thing, but it, it, it is ethical in the sense that your reputation is your most important thing that you have. And if you sully it in the least sense, particularly in this era with so much visibility in social media, where one, one, one wrong step will resonate, you know, those waves will go in, in a matter of minutes across social media, you have to be very careful. And you have to see that there are all kinds of compromising factors out there. So, yeah, I myself have been in a position where people have been offering me money from somewhat dubious sources.

• 1:01:14Robert Greene?

  And I say, no, no way, because I know it'll come out at some point. And people will go, oh, look, Robert Greene, how can we trust his books? He's actually receiving money from this somewhat corrupt group or that somewhat corrupt group. You know, I'm not saying that I'm pure, but I'm, I'm very much aware that I had myself have been the target of compromised campaigns before. And I take a step back and I go, no, my reputation is the most important thing that I have.

• 1:01:40Ryan Holiday?

  Well, no, and that's why, you know, controlling your ego is so important. I'm I I not at the same level, but every once in a while, you know, you get a television request to be on RT or something. And on the one hand, you're like, oh, that would be good. And then you're like, ah, I know why this is happening, right? And or or, you know, we can also corrupt ourselves. Like, how many people get themselves in trouble because three years ago, they said something dumb on Twitter because they couldn't control their emotions? And now, you know, uh, now they can't be president or whatever it is.

• 1:02:13Robert Greene?

  But it's, you know, it's we can under it's hard, you know, we we tend to um, separate ourselves from other people and point fingers. And I know how easy it is to fall for these things. I know, like, if you're in a group situation, you're working in an office like we have when we were in American Apparel, and we recently discussed this, the pressures that you're feeling to conform and to maybe do things that you normally wouldn't do because you're being asked to do it. And the group pressure is very powerful. And then you'll let slip some of those ethical principles that you have. I know I've felt that pull myself, and I maybe even at some points have have slipped a little bit. I'll admit that, you know? I understand how difficult it can be.

• 1:02:58Robert Greene?

  But as you as you say, at some point, you you look at yourself and you go, this is who I am. This is what I stand for. It's more important than any kind of momentary friction I'm going to get from the boss or from ever. And I'm not going to go past that particular limit.

• 1:03:15Ryan Holiday?

  No, I love it. Anything else we should cover that we haven't covered?

• 1:03:19Robert Greene?

  I don't know. I don't know. I think we've covered the the world as it is. How about you?

• 1:03:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I don't know. I think uh, I think the thing I struggle with, I'd be curious, like, it's so hard to know where we are in the sort of levels of emergency. Do you know what I mean? Like, when is this the early sign and there's still something that can be done about it? When is the, you know, it's like? Let's say it's a, just to take it out of the complicated political context. Let's say you're convinced that we're entering an economic bubble. So you could sell right at the beginning of the bubble and, you know, be totally safe. But as they say, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. And so there's this tricky balance of like, do you ride it up?

• 1:04:10Ryan Holiday?

  You know, and risk maybe taking it too far? Do you, or do you risk taking your chips off the table too early? And so I think in a political and a social context, we're in this weird environment where, you know, where are we on the spectrum of like, where are we on the spectrum from, you know, America, the dream and, you know, Russia or Germany? And how do you know?

• 1:04:37Robert Greene?

  Well, if I had that answer, I would be the most powerful man in the universe, you know? We don't have perspective. To be, even to be someone who writes books more, you have to have humility and realize there are limits to what you know. So I read a lot of history and I see a lot of patterns. And a part of me says that things are pretty damn dire, that certain guardrails in our democracy are frigerating away. But to be honest with you, what scares me more than anything is the levels of irrationality and magical thinking and people not able to kind of look at themselves and be somewhat self-aware. And that disconnect from reality, and as I say, I kind of think it's from decades of

• 1:05:22Robert Greene?

  being entertained and being kind of brainwashed, is what frightens me the most. Because even if, let's say Trump is gone, let's say people are coming in, they're fixing things, et cetera, that's not going to change this consciousness that people have that is, you know, kind of like the equivalent of eating junk food. So that thing, that part of it makes me a little bit... Depressed because you need to change people's consciousness more than anything on a deep level, you know, and the other thing that's very frightening now that we've seen before in history, it's not the first time, is the extremity of the partisanship of the tribalism that we're going through. And, you know, I could point through other moments

• 1:06:04Robert Greene?

  in history that have been equally tribal, of course, before social media, which has only exacerbated it. But it's kind of like this hall of mirrors that you enter. You can't argue with people anymore.

• 1:06:17Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 1:06:17Robert Greene?

  Because the moment you say, this is what I think, and you're challenging them, oh, you're, you're just this, you're just a liberal, you're just a Trump supporter, you know, you've drunk the Kool-Aid. I get that all the way. Oh, Robert, you've drunk the Kool-Aid. Whereas in fact, you're the one that's drunk it. But the people who drink the Kool-Aid think everybody else are the ones that have drunk it. That's the nature of it. Even in Jonestown, where the expression comes, you drank the Kool-Aid. They thought everybody outside of Jonestown had drunk their own Kool-Aid. That's the kind of world we live in. It's like Alice in Wonderland, which Jared Kushner was saying, ironically enough, kind of is the book that encapsulates the Trump presidency. But that's kind of the world we're living in.

• 1:06:58Ryan Holiday?

  No, gaslighting is the operative term too, not just because of what it means. Like, it's rooted in the, in the story of a man who's sort of flicking off the gaslights and slowly tricking, I think, his spouse about it. But if you just span that out, it's like some gas has leaked into the room and it's made us all irrational. And we can't think straight. And the worst part is, we can't think straight, but we think that we are thinking straight. And that about sums up the nightmare that we're in.

• 1:07:29Robert Greene?

  I think that sums it up. You're right. I can't think of a better way of putting it.

• 1:07:34Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it was amazing to talk to you, and let's do this again, for sure.

• 1:07:37Robert Greene?

  Yeah, and you have a book coming out, don't you?

• 1:07:40Ryan Holiday?

  I do, yeah. Lives of the, of the Stoics, September 29.

• 1:07:44Robert Greene?

  I encourage all of my followers and readers, if you don't, I mean, I'm sure all of you read Ronald Holiday, but you really should go out. This is gonna be a great book. When is it coming out?

• 1:07:53Ryan Holiday?

  September 29.

• 1:07:55Robert Greene?

  Okay.

• 1:07:56Ryan Holiday?

  Thank you. I appreciate it.

• 1:07:57Robert Greene?

  Welcome.

• 1:07:59Ryan Holiday?

  If you're liking this podcast, we would love for you to subscribe. Please leave us a review on iTunes or any of your favorite podcast listening apps. It really helps. And tell a friend.