Robert Greene on the War in Ukraine

Bismark says that “Fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others.” The best way to understand the present is to study the past. That’s what makes Robert Greene’s work so great. He crystalizes the best historical lessons about war, strategy, and power that can help us make sense of the problems that we face in the modern world. In today’s episode Robert Greene brings you his take on the war that is taking place in Ukraine, seen through the lens of his book the 33 Strategies of War. Robert Greene is an American author known for his books on strategy, power, and seduction. He has written six international bestsellers: The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law, Mastery, and The Laws of Human Nature. His new book The Daily Laws: 366 Meditations on Power, Seduction, Mastery, Strategy, and Human Nature is a daily devotional designed to help you seize your destiny. Get signed copies of Robert Greene’s books at the Painted Porch Bookshop. Follow Robert Greene: Twitter, Instagram, Homepage, TikTok, YouTubeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:06Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Weekend Edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:49Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:55Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another Weekend episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I said before that the way to understand what's happening in the present is almost always by studying the past. Because although there are great news reporters and news outlets out there, they are subject to the wicked incentives of their medium, which I talk about, and trust me, I'm lying. They have agendas, they can be biased. They're also just dealing with an incomplete picture, and they're dealing with real-time information. And unless you're a hedge fund trader or directly involved in politics, you don't need real-time information. What you need is perspective. You need an understanding of the whole picture,

• 1:40Ryan Holiday?

  not the micro elements of the small picture. And I think reading is the best way to do this almost always. But the other way is to talk to someone who has studied this topic and many other topics like it for their whole life. They don't necessarily have to be a credentialed expert, but they should be a master of the subject. And when I'm trying to understand world events, geopolitical events, trying to understand...

• 2:08Ryan Holiday?

  Wars, etc. One of the people I talked to is the great Robert Greene. And as I was struggling to sort of understand the terrible events of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and Robert and I have both been active in donating the royalties from our Ukrainian and Russian additions to resistance fighters and aid workers in Ukraine, which I'll link to below. Anyways, I've had some long conversations with the one and only Robert Greene about this. And so I was very pleased when he called Brent, who works with me here at Daily Stoic,

• 2:47Ryan Holiday?

  to ask if he'd come out to Robert's place in LA so Robert could shoot like an in-depth video slash podcast episode about his understanding of what's happening in Ukraine, what we should take out of it, how we should understand it, what actions we should take because of it. And I know this isn't technically what we talk about here in Daily Stoic, but I think what we're after is truth, we're after understanding, we're after being informed citizens. And so I wanted to share this deep dive into the subject matter that Robert Greene put together. It's about 40 minutes, which I know isn't the shortest, but you're going to take a lot out of it. And I think Robert's book, The Thirty-Three Strategies of War, is one of the great books

• 3:31Ryan Holiday?

  on strategy and politics and power ever written. It was a life-changing book for me. And anyways, I won't belabor it, you don't need my introduction here, but listen to Robert Greene do a deep dive into what's taking place in Ukraine, seen through the lens of his book, The Thirty-Three Strategies of War. And look, if you haven't read The Forty Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The Fiftieth Law, Mastery to the Laws of Human Nature, and his new book, The Daily Laws, well, you're missing out, and you absolutely should. So I'll leave this here. Thank you to Robert Greene for letting me share it, and I hope you take a lot out of this.

• 4:03Robert Greene?

  Hello, everyone. This is Robert Greene. I want to talk to you today about the war that's going on in Ukraine, my analysis of it through the lens of my book, The Thirty-Three Strategies of War.

• 4:17Robert Greene?

  Okay, hello everyone, this is Robert Greene, as you know. And today I wanted to talk to you about the Ukraine war. Now, at the very end, I will give you my emotional appeal because I'm obviously sympathetic to the Ukrainian side, what I think we can all do to support them. But first, I kind of wanted to look at the war through the lens of my book, The Thirty-Three Strategies of War, which also is really reflected through the lens of the three, to me, greatest strategists in history: Sun Tzu, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Karl von Clausewitz, who are kind of the guiding spirits of the Thirty-Three Strategies of War.

• 4:58Robert Greene?

  So I want to first look at the person who is the complete architect of this war, which is obviously Vladimir Putin. And I want to go inside for a minute into his psychology, into his mindset, because I think in doing that, we can figure out a lot of the puzzles of this war. And the person that Putin minds me most of in history is obviously Joseph Stalin. And in The Loss of Human Nature, I have a chapter that I describe, I go into depth on Stalin, called "Complete Control", where Stalin's main objective in life, his main goal, his main ambition, was to gain complete control of every aspect of the Soviet Union.

• 5:43Robert Greene?

  And I describe a scene towards the end of his life, where he has all of his top people in the Soviet Union. They would come over to his dacha outside Moscow. He'd get them drunk, and then he would put on a record, and he would force them to dance with each other, these men, these middle-aged men. And it was completely humiliating for them, but they were like puppets, that he so controlled in their minds, in their actions, that he could literally make them dance with each other. And so I feel that Putin is motivated by the same desire for gaining complete control over everything around him. And so what is the opposite of control?

• 6:28Robert Greene?

  The opposite of control is chaos or unpredictability. And so whenever Putin encounters any slight bit of unpredictability or chaos, he makes these moves to gain control over it so that he never has to experience that again. And so slowly, bit by bit, over the 20 years of his reign, he has created this empire, this world, where one man controls every single aspect of Russian life, a country, the largest country by far on our planet, an immensely complex society. One man governs this completely. And, you know, the way to do that is to create,

• 7:12Robert Greene?

  is to work on psychology, to create a myth, an illusion of this power. It's because one person can't control all of that. It depends on creating a lot of these kind of magical illusion-like effects. So let's go into that for a moment. The first layer of his control would be the oligarchs, the men who control the wealth of Russia largely through oil. And early on in his career, he saw that some of the oligarchs weren't really obeying him. They weren't really on the same page as he was, like Kodorovski. So he made his moves to gain control over them. He eliminated any kind of laws that protected their wealth.

• 7:55Robert Greene?

  And so he created a situation in their wealth depended on, completely on him. If for some reason he decided that they were turning against him, he would create laws and he would take their, their money, their wealth away and give it to somebody else. Then there's also the, what is known as the siloviki, which in Russian means the men of force. These are the most powerful men around Putin in, in government who kind of have his ear. And he's made them complicit in the many crimes he's created. And he's created a situation that if Vladimir Putin falls, they fall with him. Their power, their access to power completely depends on him.

• 8:38Robert Greene?

  So that's one incredibly critical layer of his control. The second layer would be the government itself, this vast bureaucracy. Early on in his career, it seemed that alternative parties, political parties could evolve that perhaps challenge him. And a few people won governorships in other regions of Russia that were in opposition parties. As somebody who that needs control, he could not stand that sense of losing it. So he created new laws, obviously, making these parties basically illegal. Basically making so governors in Russia were something that he appointed no longer elections. And elections are essentially a farce.

• 9:21Robert Greene?

  And so as it's evolved, any, the slightest opposition party is eliminated. And so to this day now, there's not even a trace of any kind of opposing political will left in Russia. So now he controls the oligarchs, the men of power and the government. Then there's the media. Early on in his career, it seemed that there were some voices in television, et cetera, that were challenging him. So he basically bought all of the television stations. He essentially controls them. And then he spread it to all the various different forms of press. Internet was allowed to kind of go on its own, but now he's completely crushed that.

• 10:04Robert Greene?

  So with now his fingers completely on every level of the media, he controls the narrative of Russia for the Russian people. He's able to play on their greatest insecurities as, you know, Russia's being threatened by the West, et cetera. He's able to dominate the story that people absorb in Russia. He's able to manufacture whatever truth he wants to spread. A lot of people support him for the reasons I've just mentioned, because of this control and because in some degrees they maybe admire somebody who seems so strong. But then there are little pockets of opposition, little pockets of people who oppose him like Navalny, etc.

• 10:47Robert Greene?

  And so what somebody who's trying to gain and spread this complete control depends on is the use of fear, intimidation, and even terror. So if you oppose him, the consequences are going to be fierce. With the control that he has created, with these, what I call, outsized effects. Because keep remembering, one man has this insane amount of power, okay? So a key element is the military. And he has developed this milit- he's put all of the money and resources into technology, into weaponry, into missiles, into hypersonic missiles, into tanks, etc.

• 11:29Robert Greene?

  Now, war is an arena that's notoriously fickle. It's called the fog of war. So if Vladimir Putin, like Stalin, cannot stand the slightest shred of chaos or unpredictability, how can you possibly have that in warfare? The most unpredictable of all environments? Well, he has created his own kind of strategy, based on what we've talked about. Psychology, terror, fear, and intimidation. With all of the money that he has stolen, basically, from the people and invested in these weaponry, what he does is, he bombs the hell out of places like he's done in Syria, like he's done in Chechnya.

• 12:13Robert Greene?

  And so, within days, he's created this terror, this sense of invincibility, right? He doesn't have to have a complex organization of an army. If he literally destroys the infrastructure, if he terrorizes the civilians, if he makes anybody daring to oppose him quake in fear over the consequences, then he wins psychologically first, and they surrender. If you bomb the hell out of cities, if you level them... Then you control the dynamic completely. And he's used this brilliantly prior to these wars on the world stage. In thirty-three strategies of war, law number fifteen is called control the dynamic,

• 12:58Robert Greene?

  forcing strategies. And what it is, is it's the ultimate of offensive warfare. So on the world stage, he has used this, the same thing that he has applied to the country of Russia, where he makes everybody react to him, or he completely controls the dynamic. So meddling in our elections, you know, fiddling with Europe and European politics, you know, invading Crimea, et cetera, continually putting other people on their heels and making them react to him, which is a form of control, just like Stalin controlled the men around it and making them dance to his tune. He's making everybody in the world react and dance to what he creates. Okay?

• 13:42Robert Greene?

  So war is hard to manage that, but he's created this method of warfare that allows him to have this complete control. But what it depends on, as it depends on Ukraine, is very quickly creating the sense of terror and intimidation and surrender through the bombing campaign, and then using local quislings. The word quisling means people in a country who basically are going to support another country and betray their own, their own nation out of money or et cetera, and they've kind of become puppets of the invading army. Those are quislings.

• 14:23Robert Greene?

  He's very effective in using them in Syria, in Chechnya, in Georgia, et cetera. Okay? So it depends on this strategy of a very quick lightning strike with his missiles, his weaponry, his air force, creating terror, creating surrender, and using his puppets from within to gain control politically of the situation. Okay, so now we entered the Ukraine war and let's look at it now through this lens of Putin and his mindset of control. Think of this control as a kind of bubble that envelops him, where he controls everything around him. There's no, there's no holes in that bubble, right? There's nothing that can possibly threaten him.

• 15:08Robert Greene?

  Okay, so when it comes to the Ukraine war, because all of the people around him, the military leaders, live in terror of him, of fear of him, of displeasing him because they've bought the myth of this incredibly powerful person's one man, right? So when it comes to the planning stage of the, of the war, the invasion of Ukraine, they're definitely afraid of telling him the truth. He has this belief that what worked in Syria worked in China. Yeah, it might be a little more complicated in Ukraine, but it will definitely have the same effect. Ukraine will fold and collapse. Zelensky will flee. He'll put in his puppet. The West will get a little bit upset, America and Europe,

• 15:53Robert Greene?

  but they depend on his oil, they'll collapse as well. The generals, many of which have revealed this later on, know that that is not the truth. They know that the Ukrainian people are not going to collapse like that, that they don't want the Russians to liberate them and become part of the Russian totalitarian system. But they're definitely afraid of telling him. And so he creates a plan of war that already has a flaw in it because it's not based on reality. So if we think of that bubble, this is one little prick in that bubble, one little element of chaos that can now enter because he has a false perception of the goals and the power

• 16:35Robert Greene?

  and the effectiveness of his invasion, okay? Then the second little prick in that bubble comes in the following. In order to win in this kind of warfare, With this lightning strike, you have very little logistics. You're very light on logistics. Logistics means the support teams that go, that every army needs. The teams of medical, uh, teams that will help the wounded soldiers. The food supplies, the spare parts for the tanks, the ammunition, et cetera. That's very costly and can weigh and slow down an army. But when you have this lightning quick strike, you don't need to put a lot of money and time into logistics. All right?

• 17:20Robert Greene?

  So this lightning quick strike, the bombing, the air, the controlling the airspace, et cetera, it doesn't work. Ukraine doesn't collapse. Kiev doesn't fall within a couple of days. And Ukraine is an enormous country. It's the size of France, basically. It would be the largest country on the European continent besides Russia. So you have this army that's invaded, and the lines are immense, right? Of the tanks, the military, et cetera, stretched out for miles upon miles. And they have very, very little logistics, very little logistical support. So things are breaking down. Tanks are falling apart. There's no spare parts for them.

• 18:05Robert Greene?

  Food supplies, even food supplies are dwindling. Oil and fuel for all of the vehicles, they're in short supply. And so more and more little bits of chaos are entering into the system, into the perfect ideal of war that he's trying to create. He's losing control, it's slipping away from him. The other element is, because he wants this complete control, the Russian military is structured in the most top-down hierarchical manner, right? So normally, it's an axiom of military, of warfare, that you want unity of command, that you want essentially one general on top, who oversees the whole thing.

• 18:49Robert Greene?

  But oddly enough, there doesn't seem to be somebody like that in Russia. It seems to be actually all funneling up to perhaps the Defense Minister, or perhaps to Putin himself. We don't know. So what happens is, orders come from on top down to the soldiers on the field. Tanks move here to part, to point A, right? They're never told why they're moving there, just this is where you go, this is what you do. And as they react to what's actually happening on the field, there's no way to communicate that to those on the top, because the system doesn't allow it. Everything must come from the top down. Those on the field don't have any influence over the overall strategy

• 19:32Robert Greene?

  of the brilliant person in charge of all this. So essentially, what that means is, the army, the soldiers on the field, have no way of adapting to the changing circumstances in warfare. And as we said, war is an incredibly unpredictable environment. What would closet, it's called friction. And the Russian army can't adapt to all of this friction, which is creating more and more of that chaos that we've been talking about. Another element is the Russian soldiers themselves, right? In the end, the war depends on their ability to fight on the field or in the airspace. Okay?

• 20:14Robert Greene?

  The soldiers know that because there's no logistical support for them, or very little support for them, those in top don't really care about them. Their fodder thrown into this army. In fact, most of the soldiers in the Russian army are these nineteen and twenty-year-old conscripts from villages in, outside of the major cities in Russia. They're not even told that they're going to invade Ukraine until the last minute. And once they're there, they're not even told why they're there, or they're given this idea that the Ukrainians will greet them as liberators. And so as they experience the actual terrors of the war, as opposed to Putin sitting up in his little bubble in the Kremlin, they are seeing that things aren't going well.

• 20:59Robert Greene?

  They are actually terrorists, they're demoralized by what's happening, right? And so the morale is slipping and slipping, and the performance of the army is slipping, yet another little prick into that bubble that Putin has tried to create. And so, we can see many examples of this inability for the Russian army to adapt, and the devastating effect it is having on morale. So look for instance at tanks. Putin has invested a lot of money into tanks. And they're kind of a symbol of who he is in a way. Because the tank is this incredibly intimidating weapon, right?

• 21:43Robert Greene?

  It looks so large and impressive. Who can resist a tank? And it looks great on the military squares when it's Victory Parade Day in Moscow. All these hundreds of tanks rolling down the streets near Red Square, etc. It looks great and it has a psychological effect. But modern warfare, at least in the last 10 years, has revealed that tanks are essentially useless. Because these very, very powerful anti-tank weaponry has evolved that can completely destroy a tank with one well-aimed missile. There are even drones that can do that. And so tanks are actually a great show, but they're very ineffective.

• 22:27Robert Greene?

  And the Ukrainian army has been brilliant at ambushing these tanks and hitting them with these missiles. And so the soldiers now who are having to deal with this, what do they do? They're sitting ducks out there in these long lines while the Ukrainians are picking them off one by one with their mobile forces. Okay, we're gonna go hide our tanks in forests and woods so they can't come up, sneak up on us and ambush us. And I saw one video that was really chilling and very interesting in which Ukrainian army has these drones that have thermal imagery on them, right?

• 23:12Robert Greene?

  They're able to detect heat. And so the Russian soldiers are sitting in their tanks in these forests, trying to hide because they're terrorized with any moment being exploded in this machine, this claustrophobic machine that you can't escape.

• 23:33Robert Greene?

  Imagine for yourself the terror that would inflict, knowing that any moment that could happen, right? Okay, so it's freezing cold in Ukraine in the winter. So they have their engines on to kind of heat themselves in these woods that they're hiding in to kind of keep themselves warm during this frigid winter. And these drones are hovering over above the woods, invisible to them, able to detect the heat that's coming out. And to the Ukrainian soldiers, these little bits of heat appear as white dots on the screen that they're using. And they're shooting at these white dots one by one, picking off these tanks they're supposedly hiding in the woods, creating even more terror. How do you adapt to that?

• 24:18Robert Greene?

  How do you possibly react when nobody in your military has ever had to deal with it, has ever had to plan for this? Another element of incredible incompetence and inability to adapt is in the Russian system of communications. Now, keep in mind that Putin fetishizes technology and high-powered weaponry and the latest gadget that can, you know, he can invest his money in. So they invested millions of dollars in this new era encrypted communication system. But when the Russian army invaded Ukraine, they knocked out all of the 3G towers so that the Ukrainians' military could communicate. But the new era encrypted communication system

• 25:03Robert Greene?

  depends on 3G towers. So they're completely useless, they're completely ineffective. So what you have is Russian commanders using their cell phones to communicate to their armies that they command, now flung out on these incredibly long lines, on cell phones, which the Ukrainians are able to listen in on and then kind of figure out exactly, because they speak Russian, what exactly is going on, giving them yet another advantage. So you add up all of these layers here and you see more and more little bits of chaos entering the system, the fog of war, the unpredictability of war, creating a kind of a mess.

• 25:48Robert Greene?

  All right, so... It's an axiom in warfare that an army reflects the citizenry, the politics of the nation that it's supposed to represent, right? A democratic army has a particular feel. An authoritarian army has a much different feel. And so, the government of Russia is based on one man in control of this vast, vast bureaucracy, is extremely hierarchical, top-down. It doesn't value the creativity of those in government, those serving him. Everything is supposed to come from the top, right?

• 26:29Robert Greene?

  There's zero amount of engagement of the citizenry of the people in the actual governance of the country. And that's how the military is structured. It's extremely rigid, just like the Russian government is extremely rigid and ossified, okay? And in the history, in military history, the army that, to me, most resembles that is the great Prussian armies of the 18th century, led by Frederick the Great, who created what was at the time the most devastating military power on the European continent.

• 27:11Robert Greene?

  And the source of Frederick the Great's power of this Prussian army was the incredible discipline that he invested in them. And so, the Prussian soldier was like a robot, an automaton. They were so disciplined that they knew exactly how to behave. They were brilliant at marching. And they would intimidate opponents by the sheer force and psychology that they would instill fear in these disciplined Prussian forces that were fearless, marching on an enemy. And for decades, they were the preeminent military power on the continent of Europe,

• 27:54Robert Greene?

  which is, to me, similar, very rigid army, similar to Putin's army, where control is everything. And that was sort of Frederick the Great's mantra. But then what happens? In the 1790s, a young man enters the scene named Napoleon Bonaparte, a product of the French Revolution. And Napoleon Bonaparte is going to affect the greatest revolution in military history ever, right? So he's not weighed down by all these principles of warfare that govern Frederick the Great's army. He's completely free and loose and very young. And so he creates, first of all, a new form of army, a people's army,

• 28:38Robert Greene?

  filled with hundreds of thousands, millions of French citizens who believe they are fighting to spread the message of the French Revolution on the continent. Now, a lot of that is an illusion, you know, created by Napoleon, but it basically created incredibly motivated army. The second thing was Napoleon realized, and I remember we're saying that warfare is an arena of chaos, friction, and fog. Napoleon realized that instead of reacting against that friction, like Frederick the Great had, "I'm going to use it. I'm going to use chaos to my advantage.

• 29:19Robert Greene?

  I am going to create, deliberately create chaos on the battlefield. But the chaos is going to be more hitting more the enemy than me because I'm prepared for it. And I'm going to react to the chaos faster than the enemy. And whoever can react faster has the control. So I am going to deliberately make more chaos on the battlefield." How did he do that? He loosened up the structure of the army. He created divisions that he would fling. The Prussians would advance in this one line, and Napoleon would throw four or five armies from all different directions, divisions coming in these free-flowing manners. The enemy would go, "What the hell? I don't know who's attacking, from what side, behind, or whatever." And they would collapse.

• 30:04Robert Greene?

  He would make these very rigid Prussian generals react to this increasing chaos. And the key element of that was he would give his lieutenants on the field incredible leverage, incredible leeway. They could do what they want. They didn't have to wait for Napoleon's orders. They could see what was happening on the battlefield. They can adapt to it, they could change, and they could create even more disturbance and more problems for the enemy in that way. So he let them kind of act on their own. Also, he had created these brilliant channels of communication. So the soldiers in the field would be able to communicate to Napoleon himself,

• 30:48Robert Greene?

  the man in control of it all, the equivalent of a Putin, what exactly was happening on the field in real time, before the era of telephones, before the era of telegraphs or anything. You know, they would march on their horses, they would say, Napoleon, this is what's happening on the field, this is what the soldiers experience. Okay, let's change our strategy. So he had communication, he had a free-flowing method, and he dominated, absolutely for ten years, dominated European warfare in a way that has never been repeated since. And then slowly, he fell for the idea of trying to control things, trying to overwhelm the enemy with firepower instead of mobility.

• 31:30Robert Greene?

  And he himself fell apart, and he had ten years of decay. But those ten years of brilliance had completely revolutionized modern warfare to the idea of creating maneuver warfare and the value of mobility and communication. And a man came along named Karl von Clausewitz, who was a Prussian officer, who realized the brilliance of the essence of Napoleonic warfare. And he adapted it for the Prussian army itself, the most rigid army that ever existed, right? He adapted the Napoleonic system. He created what's known as the Auftragstaktik, the mission statement, where you give your army an idea of the mission they're to accomplish,

• 32:14Robert Greene?

  and you let them do it on their own and adapt to what's going on on the field, okay? So now let's look for a second at the Ukrainian army. Because I said, an army is a reflection of the country and the politics from which it comes. It's not just this sort of branch of power that exists on its own. It's a reflection of the form of government that it serves. Okay, so the Ukrainians had a series of revolutions, starting in 2004, then starting with the Orange Revolution and the Maidan Revolution. They were trying to split off from Russia and create something different.

• 32:56Robert Greene?

  But there were still very many remnants of the Russian system in Ukraine after the split up of the Soviet Union. There was a lot of corruption. There was a lot of power being held by oligarchs, et cetera. And then Zelensky comes into power several years ago. And he came into power with the promise of reforming Ukraine and making it more democratic, making it more like a European country. And one of the most important things he did was to extend the reforms to the military. He and the defense minister that he hired, whose name I'm gonna butcher, but it's basically Zageronyuk, who's sort of the equivalent of the Ukrainian Von Clausewitz,

• 33:39Robert Greene?

  decided, learning the lessons from the wars they had fought against Russia in Crimea, we're going to create an army that is incredibly free-flowing, mobile, adaptable, that's going to be able to communicate from top to bottom and adapt to the situation on the ground. And I just want to read you a quote. There's a Ukrainian filmmaker who decided to fight with the military once this war started. And he was interviewed by a reporter. And the reporter said, "When I asked him his rank, lieutenant, captain, major, he said he didn't have one. When I asked him his unit's designation,

• 34:23Robert Greene?

  a platoon, a company, or even a battalion, he said they simply called themselves a squad. Rank and formal military terms weren't something they worried about."

• 34:38Robert Greene?

  So, this is the polar opposite of the Russian army. There's no worry about rank, or formalities, or who's in control, no sense of top-down. These are soldiers who not only are able to be creative in the moment, and the Ukrainian army has revealed 100 times more creativity than the Russian army, they're also supremely motivated. Obviously because they're fighting for their own land, they're defending their own families, but also because they feel completely engaged in the war. Their opinions, their reality that they're seeing on the field matters. They're able to contribute to what is actually, how they're actually fighting,

• 35:21Robert Greene?

  and that increases their motivation, their morale, which is infinitely higher than the Russian morale. So going back to our original point here about Vladimir Putin and his mindset. Remember that we said that a lot of it depends on creating this myth, creating this illusion of control and power and intimidation. And it's gone to the point where he's been so affected of that, that people in the West have even believed it. And so that when Putin even sneezes, people think there's some kind of ulterior motive going on, that he has some kind of plan behind it. And there, I've even read these incredibly idiotic articles

• 36:05Robert Greene?

  by so-called commentators and experts in the Western media that's saying, "This current campaign is exactly going to how Putin planned it, right? He planned to basically just take a part of Ukraine, and so everything is going exactly according to his plan." Which just means that these idiots have fallen for the myth of this illusion of control. And so, let's look for a moment underneath this idea of control and this myth that he's created. What really underlies it? What makes somebody want to gain such control? What is the psychological profile of this type of person like a Stalin or like Putin?

• 36:51Robert Greene?

  Well, essentially, what underlies it are deep layers of fear, right? Because life is inherently unpredictable. Life is inherently chaotic. You cannot control how human beings react to what you say. You cannot control how they respond to you. You cannot force them to follow your will. People are notoriously stubborn and fickle and willful. So, when you confront that, a certain type of person can't handle the chaos of life. They are deeply afraid of it. And it could stem from some kind of childhood trauma. I don't want to go into the particulars of that.

• 37:31Robert Greene?

  But underneath this facade of incredible power that a Stalin or Putin radiates are these deep, deep layers of insecurity. When Putin feels slightly threatened, as we said before, by opposition oligarchs, opposition politicians, people who disagree with him, revolutions going in other countries, he's quaking in his boots. He's deeply fearful that that could threaten him, right? And he knows the fall of a tyrant can be brutal and bloody, and he's afraid of it. So beneath this illusion of power and strength and intimidation are deep, deep levels of fear and insecurity.

• 38:17Robert Greene?

  And it's kind of an axiom in warfare. And I also say it's an axiom in life. That the more you try to control things, in the end, the less control you have. The more things kind of slip away from you, right? And I hate to compare, it seems almost obscene to compare what's going on, the brutality of this war with daily life here in the United States. But in my consulting with people in business or in sports or et cetera...

• 38:47Robert Greene?

  The, those who try and micromanage, try and control every aspect of the business, or who try to coach a team where every player has to respond exactly to how where they're supposed to be, are the companies that do the poorest, right? They don't engage the will, the energy and creativity of those people that are working for them. And if life is chaotic, our modern world is even more chaotic and unpredictable than ever, right, with all the technology involved, with social media, et cetera. And so, those who cannot respond to this with fluidity, with mobility, with flexibility, with openness to the chaos, who learn the great lesson, Napoleon,

• 39:32Robert Greene?

  that instead of fighting chaos, you need to accept it and you need to use it to your advantage. Those are the ones that are going to succeed. And what happens with people who are these control freaks, who are these micromanaging types is, when chaos starts entering the system, like I believe it is entering into the system for Vladimir Putin, they do not know how to react, they become very emotional, they become erratic. And people who've seen Putin recently, who know him well, like President Macron of France, et cetera, have said something's changed and something seems a little bit different. This is something completely new to him, he's never had to deal with this before.

• 40:17Robert Greene?

  The losing control, not only over the war, but over Russia's economy and over Russia's geopolitical relationship to Europe, with Germany now deciding to rearm, et cetera. He's never had to face this before. And people like that, you know, they can become dangerous and they can become erratic. So, the good news here, right now, is that Ukraine is winning this war. Strangely enough, despite what so many people are reporting, through their mobility, through their Napoleonic form of warfare, they are actually not only defending various points in Ukraine,

• 41:00Robert Greene?

  they are actually counter-attacking and winning. And to me, this is incredibly inspiring.

• 41:08Robert Greene?

  I compare this, in some ways, the war going on now, to the Greco-Persian wars of 5th century B.C. between Greece and the Persian Empire, in which there were two invasions of Persian forces, first under Darius and then under Xerxes, that were going to overwhelm the Greek democracies with incredible numbers, right? Numbers of like 100 to 1, the size of the Persian army, right? Not all the city-states in Greece were democratic, but most of them were. "We're going to destroy this experiment of democracy. We're going to get rid of these troublemakers in Greece." And what happened was, the army that was motivated,

• 41:53Robert Greene?

  had higher morale, and was much more fluid, ended up defeating first at Marathon, one of the most amazing battles of all time that we all know about, and then at the sea battle of the Battle of Salamis, even more brilliant, which I analyze in the 33 Strategies of War. They defeated this immensely much more powerful army, and they basically safeguarded Greek democracy, allowing for the golden era of Greece to emerge under Pericles and other leaders, the shining example throughout history of what a democracy can do, of the icon of Athens because of this war. So it had a kind of a mythic resonance throughout history.

• 42:38Robert Greene?

  I'm not saying that this war is quite on that level. It's a little too early to say, but I think it could have immense ramifications, because we've been seeing this kind of creeping authoritarianism on the planet, and this could be an example of, just with Athens, the power that a democratic army can have facing this overwhelming force, winning through mobility and motivation. Okay, so that's the good news, and that's the positive element. But war is notoriously fickle. And at any moment, things could change. The Russian army can continue its planning of just bombing things into the ground,

• 43:21Robert Greene?

  devastating the country and claiming that as a victory in some form. Things can change. This is a turning point, a critical moment in this warfare, where we must, here in the West, in the United States, do everything we can to support the Ukrainians so that we give them the power to inject more and more chaos into the Russian system and imbalance that man in top of all, of it all, Vladimir Putin. And so that means we need to give as much money as we can so that we help fund them. We tell our government, our political figures, that this is not the time to be so fearful and so worried about escalation of this battle. Because as we said before, Putin depends on he to being the one who intimidates

• 44:06Robert Greene?

  and he's the one that makes you afraid for these outsized effects. Let's not fall for that. Let's realize that the man is on his heels. This is the time to send more planes, more tanks, more missiles, more weaponry into Ukraine itself, in addition to the humanitarian aid. This is not the time to fall for the myth of Russia and Putin and to be on our heels, but instead to go on the offensive. So that's my message for you. And I just wanted to leave you, I hope it's not too hokey, but with a quote that I've always loved. It comes from Shakespeare. It comes from Henry IV, Part One.

• 44:49Robert Greene?

  "Oh, gentlemen, the time of life is short. To spend that shortness basely, we're too long. And if we live, we live to tread on the heads of tyrants." Now is the time to give all our support to Ukraine. And I'm going to have at the list at the end here of all the different places you can go to give your support. So humanitarian, how to send money for weapons for Ukraine and how to help fund the Ukrainian army itself. And addresses and links for writing your politicians and telling them that we must do more for Ukraine at this critical moment. That'll be at the end of all this. Thank you.

• 45:32Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. If you don't know this, you can get these delivered to you via email every day. Check it out at dailystoic.com/email.