Fan Favorite: Robert Greene on Breaking Free From Mediocrity in a Chaotic World

Settling for your day to day routine is one of the best ways to ensure a boring unfulfilled life. When you feel unfulfilled and like everyday is filled with going through the motions, it becomes easy to turn to unhealthy, self-destructive habits. Without understanding why you feel this way, affairs, drugs, and other unhealthy addictions have the opportunity to creep in. Robert Greene is well known for books that have shaped culture, challenged beliefs and p*ssed quite a few people off. The Daily Laws, Mastery and The 48 Laws of Power are just a few of his bestselling books. Robert joins Tom in this epic conversation about how to look inward and uncover the root cause of the boredom that leaves you feeling like your just wasting life away. Fulfillment is key if you really want to change your life around. The path to fulfillment involves mastery and Robert breaks down our need for stress in order to get there. ORIGINAL AIR DATE: 11-8-22 Native Son by Richard Wright: https://www.amazon.com/Native-Son-Richard-Wright/dp/0061148504 SHOW NOTES: 0:00 | Introduction to Robert Greene 0:25 | Why Your Life Is So Boring 10:03 | Can’t Handle Change 23:40 | Admit You’re Out of Control 35:12 | Everyone Is Seeking Power 44:42 | This Is The Goal of Mastery 55:01 | Self-Absorption Kills Fulfillment 1:06:51 | Competing Ideas Can Both Be True 1:14:05 | Pain of Challenged Viewpoints 1:20:40 | This Will Transform Your Skills Follow Robert Greene: Website: https://powerseductionandwar.com/ What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business:see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** Join me live on myTwitch stream https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ. I'm live daily from 6:30 to 8:30 am PT atwww.twitch.tv/tombilyeu https://impacttheory.co/4fitmnJ ********************************************************************** LISTEN TO IMPACT THEORY AD FREE + BONUS EPISODES on APPLE PODCASTS:apple.co/impacttheory http://apple.co/impacttheory ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices 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.

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. What's up, guys? Today, I am bringing you the man known for his unflinching look at the darker side of humanity around the laws of strategy, power, and even seduction. In his fourth round here on Impact Theory, Robert Greene is exposing the traps you may be falling for that makes life feel boring and how it can leave you alienated from your true self.

• 1:28Tom Bilyeu?

  He also explains why overlooking your flaws and limitations is a big mistake. I hope you guys love listening to this episode as much as I enjoyed recording it. I love my time with Robert, and if you do, please leave a review on our podcast. It really is the best way to support us so that we can get the show out there to more people like you that really want to get more out of their lives. I am Tom Bilyeu, and welcome to Impact Theory.

• 1:53Tom Bilyeu?

  Robert Greene, welcome back to the show.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Tom. I think this is my fourth time.

• 1:59Tom Bilyeu?

  I think you're right. So for the people out there who believe that their life is boring

• 2:06Tom Bilyeu?

  and that they're wasting it, what trap have they fallen into? And what advice do you have for them to get out of that sense?

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Well, you were talking to me about, we were talking earlier about diet and problems with your health. And you're saying get at the root cause. So you have to get at the root cause of your boredom. And most often, you're looking at it superficially. You're thinking, I just don't have enough stimulation in my life. I need to travel more. I need to get rid of my girlfriend or boyfriend and find a new relationship. My career is bothering me. I need to change jobs. That's the superficial way of dealing with a problem that's deeper. You have to look at yourself and you have to see the possible root causes of what is making you bored. A lot of it is the fact that you are looking for external stimulation.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Whereas looking inward and seeing who you are and what drives you and what your motivations are, what makes you different. You were talking about diet and how all the intricacies and how each person responds to foods differently and it's very inexact science. Well, you are an individual and you have your own little weirdness. And everything about you is different. And you have all these little grains inside of you that react differently to things. You don't know who you are. You're alienated from yourself. You're alienated from your nature. You're finding career paths that don't suit you, just like I might be eating things that don't suit me. I'm sorry to keep going back to that.

• 3:36Tom Bilyeu?

  No.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Right? You're getting in, you're involved with people that don't suit you. You don't know who you are. You don't know your core, your essence. You don't know what really excites you. What Abraham Maslow calls impulse voices. You have these little voices inside of you that are saying, I like this. I love this. This is what excites me. You're not listening to them. It's drowned out by social media, by your parents, by everybody else. You don't know who you are. And because of that, you choose things that aren't right for you. And when you choose things that aren't right for you, you're not engaged emotionally. And when you're not engaged emotionally, you get bored and you get restless. And you reach for, gotta travel to Bali, gotta start playing the guitar. I gotta quit my job.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  I gotta go find a new, you know, a model to start dating or whatever. You don't, it doesn't, it ends up like you do it and for a week or two, it's exciting. And then it doesn't lead to anything lasting. And then you, you're bored and you're restless and you go on to the next thing. It's exactly what I'm writing about right now in my book, The Sublime. I'm just quoting the chapter I just wrote.

• 4:45Tom Bilyeu?

  I love that. I actually didn't, I mean, I know that you're writing about the sublime. I had no idea that it was about that specifically.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  How could you know?

• 4:52Tom Bilyeu?

  True. And in fact, I want the viewers to hear that I am desperate for your next book to come out. I really do think of you as a legend, man. Rereading The Daily Laws and Prep for This. I am freaked out by how accurately you get a certain aspect of the human condition. So with that in mind, is it that people don't have the balls to look at who they really are? Is it just that things are getting drowned out and they don't know how to create the silence? Like, why is it so hard for people to understand themselves?

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Well, it's hard. And our default position is to take the path of least resistance about what is easy, you know? So right now, and I should hardly talk, but people are extremely interested in drugs, right? In like psychoactive drugs, mushrooms. Trust me, I did a lot of that in my twenties. I have nothing against it, right? But you have the capacity in you to be continually high on life, to almost have a drug-like effect. We have these remarkable senses, our ability to pick up colors, et cetera, et cetera. You could be continually tripping. You don't need drugs. Your brain is wired for this kind of, this kind of interaction with life.

• 6:09Tom Bilyeu?

  That doesn't feel true to me, so how do we tap into that? What am I doing?

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Well, because it takes effort, whereas popping a pill, whereas just doing the easy thing, whereas looking at yourself and introspecting requires effort and it requires pain, right? Because when I look at myself, as I do with my meditation every morning. God, Robert, you've got a lot of problems, man. Why do these thoughts keep popping up? You think you're so great, but you're not so great. Your mind is veering towards these petty issues. Let's work on this, right? So my meditation this morning, this very morning, I was thinking, my problem, Robert, is you don't let go. You've got to let go. And I just kept repeating myself, let go, let go, let go. Every time a thought came in, I was like, alright, let go of it. Okay?

• 6:56Speaker 01

  But it's painful because you realize what your blocks are, what your limitations are, what you're doing wrong. We don't want to face ourselves. It's so much easier to look externally, to look out in the world, to find a guru or a coach who will help you, to find a book that will help you, to find a drug that will help you, to find some kind of, to go on online porn, you know, anything, as opposed to looking inward and seeing who you really are.

• 7:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, so looking inward and seeing who you are is definitely heavy. It's definitely hard. It is also, I would say, the thing that leads most assuredly to success. Now, the reason that I say that is I have found that by acknowledging my own pettinesses, my insecurities, all of that, I can better understand other people. When I can better understand other people, I can better navigate the world.

• 7:51Tom Bilyeu?

  So the method that I use to figure that out is when I feel something uncomfortable, I, one, I distrust my emotions, so I don't just think, oh, I have an emotion, I should enact it. I'm like, hmm, that may have a dark underbelly I want to understand.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Second.

• 8:09Tom Bilyeu?

  My wife and I were arguing, and she says something that just makes me so pissed off. And I'm like, what the fuck? How dare you? Like, I cannot believe that you would say whatever it is that she said. And what I learned early in our marriage was anytime I had that impulse, she had tripped an insecurity of mine. But if I didn't know that I was insecure about it, I would get the surface level emotion. It felt so real. It just felt like she had said something she shouldn't say. And I would never take the time to figure out why shouldn't she say that? And so the emotion gave me righteous indignation. I would push back on, hey, why'd you say that? And never get into, oh, I see, I'm super insecure about this thing, which is what's triggering the emotion.

• 8:54Tom Bilyeu?

  So it's what she and I call arguing about the T. So you're at the surface level, going back to your early point. You stop at the part that's easy to identify, I am angry. Because I am angry, then I just do what the anger tells me to do, which is push back, shut her down, get her to take it back, whatever, rather than go, whoa, like, why does that bother me so much? But in understanding why it bothers me, then I'm like, okay, now I see this as an insecurity. So when I see somebody get angry at me, I'm like, oh shit, they're insecure about this, that's interesting. And so now let's drill into, and why are you insecure? I mean, look, there are certain conversations where you're never gonna ask that. But it's, it gives a lot more clarity.

• 9:37Tom Bilyeu?

  Which is why I ask, like, I think it's that, the reason people don't identify what's really going on inside of them is twofold. One,

• 9:48Tom Bilyeu?

  it takes a certain level of understanding about the human animal, just generically about the way emotions come about, et cetera. And then testicular fortitude to look at something and say, oh, man, I'm not as cool as I wish I were.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 10:07Tom Bilyeu?

  So how do we get beyond that?

• 10:10Speaker 01

  Well, you know, you don't have to read books about human nature or make it a study. Just look at yourself and you'll find out all that you need to know, right? You'll know that you have the flaws that you naturally think you see in other people. So I always find when people are particularly angry about some character trait in me or others, they're actually more often than not projecting. Unconsciously, they have the same trait. So, goddammit, that person's a narcissist. Well, you're not, that's your way of kind of hiding from yourself, your own narcissism. So.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  By looking at yourself, you're inevitably going to see your flaws and your limitations, which was the whole subject of the laws of human nature. We have these negative qualities built into the way we evolved as human beings, right? We evolved a million years ago under circumstances that are completely different now, that don't have any relationship, that aren't functional to the high-tech worlds that we live in. And so, we have a lot of qualities that constantly create problems for ourselves, okay? You think that it's other people that have these problems. You think other people are aggressive. Other people are passive-aggressive. Other people are self-absorbed.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  No, you have all of these traits as well, okay? So it's painful, right? And if you know one thing about human beings, if there could be one law about human behavior, and it's true, I suppose, of every animal, we avoid anything painful, and we veer toward what is pleasurable or easy, okay? So, how do you overcome that? That's your million-dollar question that you're asking. Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom. Sometimes you have to go, "Nothing is working in my life. I'm miserable, I'm depressed. My career isn't going in the right way." Okay? Maybe I'm the source of it. And when you hit rock bottom, you're willing to take anything. The pain of looking at yourself isn't maybe as bad

• 12:14Speaker 01

  as the hole that you've dug yourself into, okay? The other way is, you don't necessarily have to hit rock bottom, but you are really motivated to change your life, right? You're ambitious. You want to be successful. You want to have some degree of power. We're a social animal. You want to get along with people. You want to know how to navigate these complicated social environments that we inhabit, right? And so, it's not working for me right now. I'm getting in my own way, okay? So I have to step back, and I have to look at myself, and I have to study who I am, and I have to do some heavy work on myself. Now... Nobody says that's easy.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  If it were easy, everybody would be doing it and we'd be living in paradise. But we obviously don't, right?

• 13:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you think it's an intellectual level that people have to be at in order to do that? Or is there a process that people can run to figure this out?

• 13:12Speaker 01

  I'm a big believer that intellect is vastly overrated, that we are emotional animals. The problem is emotional. I hate to keep saying it, but I'm about to be giving a talk in a few weeks. And this is exactly what I'm giving my talk about, which is you have to change your orientation. Right? Your problem is emotional, not intellectual. Our first, when we're having a problem, our first, because what I'm giving a talk about is how to deal with change in the world. Whenever we think that we don't understand something or we're having a problem, we think that knowledge is the answer. We have to accumulate more knowledge. It's intellectual. We have to know more data. We have to read studies. We have to understand these things better. The problem is emotional.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  The reason you can't deal with change or you're not looking at yourself is you have emotional blocks. You're full of fear.

• 14:05Tom Bilyeu?

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• 14:47Tom Bilyeu?

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• 15:31Tom Bilyeu?

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• 16:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Is it that we're turning away from the emotion that causes the problem? Like, why is being emotional stalling people out?

• 16:24Speaker 01

  It's not being emotional that's stalling people out. It's the kind of emotions that are kind of blocking you. So there are emotions that are very positive, like confidence, like boldness, like fearlessness, like openness to experience, adventurousness. These are all brilliant expansive emotions. I contrast expansive emotions with constricting emotions. Ego, pettiness, fear, impatience that close you down and narrow the scope of what you're willing to try out. Okay? So fear, I compare it to a tree. Fear is the root of all of this. And at the branches, we find impatience, we find ego.

• 17:09Tom Bilyeu?

  Is all of this the human condition or the fear of change or the inability to change?

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Well, you know, we are anxious creatures by nature. It's kind of built into our system as well. And so we're kind of primed to feel fear, et cetera. But these things are subtle. So you're not aware that fear is the source of your problems, right? Because you're not attuned to who you are. You think that it's because I don't know enough about the world, or other people are blocking me, or I didn't get a good enough education, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? It's hard to see the effects of fear because it's very subtle. It's gonna block you in ways that you're never really aware.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  It's like this kind of poisonous gas that you can't see. And it's seeping into you. So getting back to when I'm talking about how you deal with change, which is an incredibly important issue, particularly in a world now that's changing so quickly, right? You have to be able to be open to what's happening in the present moment. People, with events, et cetera, et cetera. But because of fear, you're slipping further and further behind. You're locked in the past. You think that ideas that you had are exactly what's happening. You're not paying attention to the things that are around you because paying attention is hard and it's difficult.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  And it means letting go of some of your most cherished ideas about the world and just being open to experience. So with people, for instance, let's say I'm working with you, Tom, right? And we've been working together for a year or so. I have a certain impression of you, right? Probably from our first interactions. And that impression kind of freezes in my mind. And as I'm dealing with you, I'm always sort of seeing this kind of image that I have of you. And I'm not paying attention to who you are in the moment, how you are changing, how things are adapting. Maybe my first impression was wrong. Maybe you're actually quite different. But that takes some courage, that takes some effort,

• 19:24Speaker 01

  to be alive in the moment and to say, "I don't know." "I don't know Tom Bilyeu. I don't really know who he is. I don't know what motivates his behavior. I need to pay attention." But the idea that I know the answer actually stems from fear.

• 19:41Tom Bilyeu?

  So in this moment of radical change, so I think there's two things at play. I'd be very interested to see what you think of this. So I think we're living through a very weird moment. As the Chinese proverb, and I'm not even sure what to call it, but "May you live in interesting times," supposedly meant as a curse. I think we're living in interesting times, and I mean that as a curse. And when I think about it, I think that a lot of what's playing out is some change is bad. And I consider myself hypermalleable. It's one of either my greatest strengths or my greatest weakness. I'm not entirely sure.

• 20:25Tom Bilyeu?

  In fact, when you started off by saying you have a hard time letting go, I have the exact opposite problem. I find it very easy to let go of anything, everything, my identity, all of it, like to a point where it may border on not useful, but anyway. So you've got, we're living in a time where I don't think all change is good. And then, on top of that, I think that when people feel weak, no, when people are weak, they have a feeling that, ah, like, things are not going the way that I want. They don't understand that their fear is coming from weakness, an actual inability to be effective in the world. And because they have the will to power in the Nietzsche way,

• 21:07Tom Bilyeu?

  they begin grabbing on to whatever tool they have at their disposal. And right now, the thing that people are using is shame and shouting people down, effectively. And so mix, and this is super complicated with social media and all that, but those two things, and I'm just beginning to like think through this, so thank you for letting me think out loud, but those feel like the twin heads of this dragon right now.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  What are the twin heads again?

• 21:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Some change is bad. So some things that are happening are actually we're going in the wrong direction. And then, some of the lashing out that people are doing is because they are weak, and they don't know a positive way to navigate the world, to manifest the will to power in a way that has to do with personal responsibility, getting better at moving through the world. So instead, they use the easier tools, which are Or shouting people down, which makes them feel powerful. But in reality is fear of their ideas, but they don't know how to get stronger in their own convictions. They don't know how to be open minded to learn. And so new ideas scare them. Some ideas actually are bad, but they feel weak. And so now they're just lashing out somewhat blindly.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course, some changes are not good. But in the larger picture of it, change, I believe, has an inherently positive quality to it. Because the worst thing that can happen to a culture, to a civilization, is to be in these static moments. So let's say we're going through a moment where the political correctness, where the social justice warrior is in the ascendant. And I agree with you, it's a negative, it's a kind of a negative change in a way, right? Well, first of all, you have to understand these changes. So even if they're negative, it's not that you embrace everything that's going on in the world, that you understand them on a deep level.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  But let's say that this is a negative change that is occurring in the world. But it's occurring for a purpose. It's a reaction against something that occurred earlier on. It's not going to last. Have a larger picture of history and of the world. Nothing that we humans do lasts very long. And particularly now in this accelerated moment of change. In 10 years from now, the generation Z and the new generation coming up, they're going to be self fucking tired, pardon my language, of all of the truth, virtue signaling and everything. They're going to go in the opposite direction. It's going to swing back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, right? So don't get so caught up in the moment and think that this is, this is like where we're heading.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Like 100 years from now, we're all going to be like these grand inquisitors. That the social justice movement will reach this insane endpoint. We've had these moments before in history where people get extremely tight and constricted and upset and uptight and worried about things and angry and taking it out on everybody else. We've been through it so many times before. So have some perspective that it won't last.

• 24:12Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you worry at all, though, that with the historical lens on, it also has killed a lot of people? This is the first time in my life where I'm like, I have a feeling that there are going to be consequences to the way that society is going. Now, I couldn't be more open to realizing that I'm wrong, so if you have an insight that I'm missing.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  You mean people being canceled and their careers being ruined?

• 24:33Tom Bilyeu?

  No, I mean like-

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Being executed, being beheaded for it?

• 24:36Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, I do mean, I don't, I'm not thinking literally of guillotines, though that has been one of the historical ways that this played out. But like, I am, I am very aware of the truth of the statement, "All that evil needs is for good men to do nothing." And so, it is, right now, it feels like division is running just in opposite directions. And as somebody that has, who does a lot of time talking on camera, I think a lot about, okay, how do I, how do I grapple with some of the issues? And then, what is the way to sort of present ideas to people that will hopefully gently nudge them

• 25:21Tom Bilyeu?

  in a more useful direction? So I think all about usability. It's why I love your book so much, because you're, like, if I was going to boil you down really simplistically, I would say your core message is, "Deal with the world the way that it is, not the way that you wish it were." And that idea is very powerful to me. So, looking through the lens of, okay, what is useful? What is the way that I can behave that is useful? So, you started by saying, "Know thyself." I think that's incredibly useful. One, it helps you navigate your own emotions. Two, it helps you understand other people. Okay, so that advice is good, because it's incredibly useful. Then I look at the world, running in opposite directions, algorithms, social media exacerbating that problem.

• 26:03Tom Bilyeu?

  The rapidity with which ideas burn through society is really fascinating. And, historically-

• 26:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Humans tend to go so wrong before they swing back in the other direction that millions of people do die with a high and distressing degree of frequency. Now, do I think that we're right on the precipice? No, I think that we have plenty of time and space to calm everybody down. But I do think, for the first time in my life, anyway, here in the US, it's worth going, hey, this can rev up to the point of being actually dangerous.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I don't disagree with you. But then the question is, what do you do about it? I mean, you can't change like whole groups of people en masse, like they used to think in communist countries, where you could change human nature by creating a different system. We know that doesn't work unless you happen to be a communist and you believe that's possible. So it has to occur on an individual level, right? And how do you change that in a culture where it is, where we're engineered to be angry and emotional, where all of the social media that people spend 85% of their lives on, I don't know, I'm just taking that number out of my, you know what?

• 27:22Tom Bilyeu?

  It's way too low, but yeah.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  Okay, all right. You know, it's engineered for that, right? You know, just to give an example, something that really gets under my, to show my own outrage. You know, on my feed, I get these notices from Nextdoor. You know what Nextdoor is, right? And everything is about crime and about, and I know in my neighborhood, there's some crime. But if you read Nextdoor, it's like, gives you the sense that there's everywhere, like there's murderers next door to you, like rapists are all around you, right? It freaks you out. The algorithms are there. They choose those posts to put in your feed that are gonna get you emotional. That's just Nextdoor. Facebook is a master of it.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  You know, Instagram, they all just use these algorithms to hit your most basic emotions, right? How do you fight that? Well, you have to fight that on an individual level. You have to tell people you are being manipulated, right? And in order to say that you're being manipulated, you're hitting their ego. You're telling them. You're not as in control of yourself as you think you are. And I know this from myself. I know that I am manipulated by these different algorithms. But it means I have to have that kind of humility to say, "I am a person who can be manipulated." But most people go around thinking, "Oh, I'm not manipulated. I'm in control of my thoughts. I know what my feelings are. I behave according to what I want to do." Bullshit.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  You're continually being manipulated by these various platforms. Okay? You can't change it as an individual. I can't go and get Mark Zuckerberg to suddenly stop doing all these dastardly things. It's impossible, right? So what do you do? You have to try and awaken people one by one by one. That's sort of why I write books like The Laws of Human Nature, to awaken you up. And it's an incredible theme in that book. You might hate it, but I've hit that again and again, about how we are being manipulated by social media, how it's playing to our most basic instincts. How envy, which is a most powerful human emotion, it defines us in so many ways.

• 29:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Why envy?

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Why envy? Well, it's just one of the 18 chapters. But why did I choose that?

• 29:37Tom Bilyeu?

  No, why is it so powerful?

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Because it is wired inside of us. Our brains work by comparing different pieces of information. On the most basic level, that's how our brains, our neocortex, operate. A piece of information comes up, we compare it to something else. Our minds operate through continual comparisons. When you create a social animal whose survival depends on getting along with other people, that comparison device is continually in operation with other people. What do they have that I don't have? Why are they getting that attention that I don't have? Why are they getting these gifts and these rewards, and I don't have any of them?

• 30:21Speaker 01

  It was a problem that existed in hunter-gathering societies. If you've ever studied primitive cultures, you come upon a very strange custom of theirs, which is, the moment anyone receives a gift, a food or anything, what is the first thing they do? They give it to someone else. It's like a ritual. Because you're definitely afraid that if you keep that gift, people are gonna have envy and they will murder you. Right? So it's a continual ritual. So it's bred into us. Even chimpanzees are known to feel envy. Like if another chimp gets a delicious piece of grape, and the other one has a cucumber, he's like, wow, what the hell? What's going on here?

• 31:01Tom Bilyeu?

  That study is hilarious. You can find on YouTube for anybody watching. It's insane.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's who we are. But what do you think social media is? It's an engine of envy. It's making you continually aware of what other people have and what you don't have. Oh, he's vacationing in Bali. Oh, he's dating a supermodel, et cetera, et cetera. Look at my poor, pitiful life. Well, that person who's, they're only posting the most positive things. They're not showing their kind of unhappiness, their misery of their daily life. But you're feeling envy. So how do you overcome that? You have to first be aware that you're feeling envy, that it is motivating you, that you feel this. And that means what would bring you back to looking at yourself. So we can't fight these negative changes in a global context.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  We have to hit individual people. We have to awaken their consciousness. We have to make them look inward. And the best thing I can do is, for me personally, is to write books about this. I don't know any other way.

• 32:01Tom Bilyeu?

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• 32:44Tom Bilyeu?

  My link gets you an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14-day trial. There's no credit card payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com/impact to get started. Again, that's pipedrive.com/impact, and you can be up and running in minutes. So we're making them look inward and we're, we want them to understand that they're having an emotional problem, not a logic problem, which I think is a really interesting insight.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 33:13Tom Bilyeu?

  In business, I realized pretty early on in my career that the thing that separated me from other people was I could self-soothe. So I was stung by whatever happened, whether it was somebody chastising me, or embarrassing myself, or being embarrassed on purpose by a narcissist, or whatever the situation may be. And it broke most people. Like it would derange them, it would push them underground.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  What would?

• 33:39Tom Bilyeu?

  The, either they're embarrassing themselves, being chastised, somebody going out of their way to embarrass them, all the power games that you talk about.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  And you, and you were able not to soothe yourself.

• 33:48Tom Bilyeu?

  I could soothe myself. It still hurt. I still went through the same emotion, but I was so obsessed with my goals that I would just ask myself, what is gonna move me forward?

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Well, that's an, that's an amazing example of a process that we're talking about and the power behind it. I couldn't have chosen anything better. In fact, I don't think I could do anything better than what you do. I try and do what you're talking about, and I don't even know if I've quite reached that level. But that's exactly what, the point I'm trying to make and that you are illustrating here. That when you look at yourself, when you look at what really is driving your behavior, and let's first admit that we really don't know who we are and that there's a core that we will never understand, right? We can't really see completely into ourselves. We can't really totally understand what motivates our behavior. There's an element, I'm a big believer in humility.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  You may not believe it because I write these books that don't seem humble at all, but the humility to say, there are parts of me that I'm never going to understand, okay? That's good, that's all right, that's a powerful thing. Because the idea that you know yourself so completely, and I've gone through this process, and I know who I am, and I've got these problems, it's bullshit. You don't know who you are. There's always a core that you'll never, ever understand. And that's a beautiful thing in life because it means, mysteries are great, they're fantastic. It means you have more work to do. But all we're talking about is increasing that margin of knowledge. So let's say in the end, just to pick another number out of my you-know-what, seventy percent of ourselves we're never gonna know, right?

• 35:25Speaker 01

  For most people, it's ninety-five percent, or ninety-eight, or ninety-nine. If you can lower that number a little bit, if you can have a deeper understanding, if you can understand that what you're doing is that it's all about your ego, that you really wanna be right and not about getting ahead or having success or power. You can learn these little things. The world opens up for you. Because what power is really about in life, people always ask me for definitions, is it's about having more options, okay? So when you're so narrowed down inside yourself about you know you have the right answer, you know that, you know, you can argue with people and everyone else is wrong, et cetera, et cetera.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  You're, you're limiting what you can do in life. You can only take path A or B because that's what you're geared for. That's what's gonna soothe your ego. That's what's gonna make you feel better as you thought when you're trying to shout to get the right echo, okay? But when you let go, when you're open to the fact that you don't know who you are, that there are other things that could be going on, and then you figure out that ego is tripping me up, suddenly, doors open. I can do C, I can do D, I can do E. I can do what you just said, where I can stop, I can learn more, I can shut my own head, the voice in my head, and I can pay attention, I can learn. The world starts opening up. You start having options. You have maneuverability.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  You can do different things in life. Things open up for you. That's all I'm ever asking for people, is to get out of these kind of narrow corners that they back themselves into.

• 37:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, the fact that people don't know themselves, I didn't really think, I didn't think almost at all about it until I got into business. And then it was like, okay, why do some people succeed and other people don't? And started thinking about, okay, so the people that stop at the level of emotion, they're unable to walk a path of usefulness. And so that's a big thing for me. I'm always hungry for myself, for sure, because I'm not above this at all. But I'm constantly trying to optimize for how do I get my ego and my emotion out of the way? So I can figure out what's truly useful and move forward. But certainly wanting people on my team as well that are doing that, that are looking at the, not to make it clinical, but they're looking at the data, like, did this work? Whether it's, you know, the 48 laws of power.

• 37:48Tom Bilyeu?

  And it's like, oh, the story that you opened with about where you were thriving in your job, but your boss hated you. And you're like, what the hell am I doing wrong? And then you realize, ah, never outshine the master. It's like, you ran an experiment in that environment. Did killing it at your job allow you to move forward in the company? Yes or no? No. Oh, shit, then there's something I'm not understanding. And so getting people to take that feedback, assess, go inward and go, okay, what didn't work? Going back to the idea of root cause medicine, why didn't it work? Oh, I see people are insecure. I triggered her insecurities. Okay, now I get it. Rule number one, never outshine the master.

• 38:32Tom Bilyeu?

  It's interesting, reading your books is like, uh, it's a marker in your life, depending on what stories jump out to me, what I remember, what laws, I'm like, oh shit, I've been dealing with that recently. It's really interesting. But, so getting people to do that, so effectiveness. Did I get the result that I was looking for? And that was the big thing, going back to that story of in work where I was arguing for my ideas because I wanted to feel a certain way, was like, oh, wow, I didn't even understand what my real goal was. I had the goal that I would say, because it was what I was supposed to want, or some part of me did want it. But I was totally blind to, but I actually steer my life towards what makes me feel smart.

• 39:15Tom Bilyeu?

  And I was like, wow, it was like being slapped in the face.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:19Tom Bilyeu?

  And so, once I understood that, then I could really begin to navigate well. But I first had to grapple with effectiveness.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:30Tom Bilyeu?

  And coming back to the thing that I'm obsessed with right now, and I've been dying to talk to you. You were like the first person I thought of when I started reading this. So I've managed to make it to forty-six without ever being, ever encountering knowingly Nietzsche. And so, I'm taking the great courses on Nietzsche. I don't know what it, what, it was the idea of the will to power. And I think something in me had an intuitive understanding that the moment we're living through right now is this will to power. So I've never understood the woke movement because it doesn't align with the natural thing that I do, which is, it is people that have found a very useful tool to gain control of a situation

• 40:15Tom Bilyeu?

  that I was blind to. And once I started learning about Nietzsche, it was like a puzzle piece clicked into place, that we have this innate drive for, I'll say power, or control. Because I think power is gonna, it's a word with a lot of baggage. So, but people have this innate drive to control the environment, themselves, whatever. But they want to be in control. And there, if you aren't able to, in full view of everybody, out-compete, you still have this drive for control, and then people go underground.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  It's the whole theme of the forty-eight laws of power.

• 40:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Correct.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  What I wrote about in the preface to it. Yeah, the thing about Nietzsche, because, you know, he's my, he's my idol, he's.

• 41:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Really?

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 41:07Tom Bilyeu?

  Why do people have such a dark view of him? I don't know him well enough to understand why.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  He's in all of my books. I was reading him when I was sixteen, seventeen years old. And oftentimes, what happens in your life, people that you read when you were that age, and you're now, I'm now in my sixties, I'm sorry to say.

• 41:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Wow.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  And.

• 41:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Congratulations, by the way.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Thank you. Forty-six seems like a kid.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  You know, things that I read when I was eighteen, I don't know, I don't like anymore. Nietzsche is like a through line. I'll never get bored with him. I'll never tire with him. He's just absolutely the greatest. But his will to power is something that got misunderstood. It's like, it's not necessarily what you think it is. It's "De Vilez Machte", and the concept of machte, or power, in Nietzsche is, it's control, it's more like expansion. That's what the word really means. And he takes it down to a biological level, that every organism wants to expand its circle, wants to expand its environment, wants to have more mobility in the world that it's in, right?

• 42:13Speaker 01

  So it's a native biological need that all creatures have for expanding themselves, for having more influence. So what it means for a human is to have more power and more influence and able to move in greater circles, to have more control, yes, control is part of it, okay? But people, when they have this sort of negative view of power, damn it, that makes me so angry. It triggers all of my buttons. I'm sorry to say, because I am an emotional creature, I have to admit. Because everything is about power, right? The idea that you don't want power, that you say, "Oh, I'm not interested in that. I'm all about truth and justice and what's good for humanity",

• 42:57Speaker 01

  that's a form of power, I'm sorry to say. That's what I'm finally realizing. You are seeking power over other people, you know? Some of the most heinous crimes have been committed by people who think they're doing good for others, right? Okay, but you want power, right? And I look at academics who have these very lengthy, very powerful arguments about the world, et cetera, et cetera. It's all about power. They don't want to admit it. They want to admit it's just about ideas. It's just about intellect, it's about, you know, the realm of exchanging ideas. Bullshit, it's about power. You want this sense of expansion. You want people to love you. You want, you love that feeling that what you're doing is influencing others, that you have hit the right answer.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Everything you do, everything you breathe in is a desire for power. It's a desire for expansion. Look in the mirror and admit it. And let's get away from the negative connotations that we have with it. Yes, power can be used for bad purposes. But as Malcolm X said, you know, absolute power corrupts. But powerlessness corrupts even more. So the feeling that you don't have any-

• 44:11Tom Bilyeu?

  That's so important.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  So the feeling that you don't have any power is even more corrupting because it makes you passive aggressive. It turns you into these warriors who think they're doing something and you're not even aware of what you're really after. So that was the whole point of the 48 Laws of Power. It was an inflection moment in our culture, in our history, where I was getting really upset with all of the political correctness and all of the squishy self-help books out there, right? And trying to appeal to our good side and et cetera, et cetera. And things like ambition or power were ugly words. Man, I hated that. I thought it was so hypocritical. Because my experience in Hollywood, for instance,

• 44:55Speaker 01

  where I dealt with a lot of film directors and powerful people, is they would project this image of being extremely liberal and for all the good causes. But they wanted power. They really wanted power. And they would often treat people in a poor fashion despite being for all the great causes. And hypocrisy just really rankled me. And that's sort of why I wrote the 48 Laws of Power, to expose that. But I want people to admit, if you were saying, "Look at yourself", that you have this desire for power. It can twist you. You can look for it in wrong ways, most definitely. But at least come to Jesus, come to Mohammed,

• 45:37Speaker 01

  and admit that that's who you are, that that's what's motivating you in your behavior. And from there, we can start seeing, well, maybe there are more constructive forms of power that I can go after.

• 45:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Hmm, it's so interesting because when I was- Maybe 25, something like that, 26 maybe. I bought the domain Seeking Power.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 45:58Tom Bilyeu?

  And I-

• 46:00Speaker 01

  That's 20 years ago.

• 46:01Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, very long time ago.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  So it was a couple of years after my book came out, but I'm not saying there was any connection.

• 46:05Tom Bilyeu?

  Unfortunately, I had not read it yet. I wish I had. You would have saved me a lot of suffering. But I, that felt true to who I was. I was like, I come seeking power. And it was, it felt so light and so expansive and so positive. So it's weird to me that the word power is taken on like these dark, evil connotations. But I was like, I want to get better. I want to get more powerful. And my whole youth, I had felt so weak. And getting into business, I had finally encountered the idea that you could get better than other people. You could outperform them. And in outperforming them, you could transform your life and you could do things that other people couldn't do.

• 46:50Tom Bilyeu?

  I wish unfortunately Kobe Bryant didn't exist back then in any way that I was aware of anyway. And he has this whole idea of boos don't block dunks. And that you can get so good at something that no matter how much people hate you, want to stop you, whatever, you can outplay them and you can still dunk over them. And I was like, oh my God, like this is so amazing. So all I have to do is get good at things. Now, to your point, if you're using that for evil, I've got no time for that. But in your own life, if it's, you know, whether in business, if you don't acknowledge that it's a competition, you're going to get eaten alive. So recognizing, okay, like this is a competition. I'm not out to hurt other people, but I'm absolutely out to outperform them.

• 47:32Tom Bilyeu?

  And life became way more fun when I realized, oh, I can come seeking power. I can sit at somebody's feet and learn from them and want to grow more powerful. And that's why like this whole moment that we're living through now feels like the wrong way to go about the change that people want to see in the world. Because it's like, if you own, okay, I, I want this outcome. And to get that outcome, I need to garner a set of skills. I need to get better at my performance and then I can do it. When it's out in the open and you're taking personal responsibility, in fact, here's the, the easiest way to sum it up. As Gary Vee says, there are two ways to build the tallest building in town. You can knock everybody else's building down, or you can build a building that's taller than theirs.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  That's great.

• 48:18Tom Bilyeu?

  And if you're spending time knocking people's buildings down, which is the energy I feel coming off of a lot of people, that's not interesting to me. And then people do it in the name of, oh, no, no, no. Like, they were just, their building violated some invisible code.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  You know where that comes from? It comes from envy. Envy is a huge motivator of people's behavior now. So the drive to bring other people down is really, truly motivated by feelings of envy, inferiority, that other people are better than you are. So it's a leveling process that's going down. Well, we want to bring everybody down to the same level. Nobody's excellent. Nobody's accomplished anything. Or they just accomplished great things because they had money, or because their parents sent them to Yale or Dartmouth, or because, you know, they had all of this privilege. You know, so it's like bringing everyone down. But I think that envy is the root cause of it.

• 49:14Tom Bilyeu?

  So going back to where we started, that people are bored, they feel like they're wasting their life. But you were saying, you know, wherever you go, there you are, that this is an internal problem, you have to master your emotions. How do you begin to tie all that together for somebody that wants out of that? They want to love their life and feel like they're making the most of it. You talked about, like, we actually have the ability to get a drug-like effect by looking inward. And what is it? And improving ourselves? And just falling in love? Being honest about what we actually like and pursuing it? Like, is that an act of the will to expansion? What's driving that?

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Well, you know, there are many ways to look at that. But in mastery, my way of describing it is a very high form of fulfillment. Because I like to think of fulfillment over happiness. Happiness seems like a kind of an immediate thing, where, you know, getting some kind of stimulation or drinking whiskey will make you happy. But it won't make you fulfilled. Fulfillment is a longer-lasting emotion. It comes from... Wow, I spent two years doing that. I made what I went out, set out to create. I feel fulfilled. It's a wonderful feeling. It's the greatest high in the world, I think.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Okay, so my one avenue to get towards what you're saying is through your work. Now, I'm not saying it's everything, because I understand relationships and people and children, all these things are very important, okay? But I'm looking at through your work to reach a level of feeling, of that sense of power and expansion and fulfilled. And when you have that feeling, you don't want to hurt other people. You don't, there's no need for it. There's no need to push people around for no reason. You feel comfortable with yourself, all right? So the number one thing, the most important thing, is to figure out the path towards that kind of fulfillment through your work or through your career, right?

• 51:20Speaker 01

  Now, some people don't like that. I've been criticized before I went, once I gave a talk at Stanford, and they were thinking that that was just so elitist, like.

• 51:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Fulfillment?

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Well, through your work. Like this one woman said, "My father was a truck driver his whole life. Are you saying that he wasn't fulfilled?" You know, that kind of criticism.

• 51:40Tom Bilyeu?

  What'd you say to that?

• 51:42Speaker 01

  I said, "Well, that's actually very elitist on your part. You're saying that that's all your father was ever capable of achieving? Maybe, you know, if he was happy being a truck driver, if that excited him, if that's what he was destined to create, if he felt comfortable with that, fine, I have no problem." But a lot of people in very working-class jobs aren't necessarily so happy. Their lives are full of routine. There's no kind of intellectual challenge to it. And if you know anything about the human animal and the human brain, we're voracious, our brains are voracious. We need constant stimulation. So if you're driving a truck all day... That's all you have? If that's fulfilling for you, maybe, yes,

• 52:26Speaker 01

  being a good driver and getting there on time and delivering goods, maybe that is a road to fulfillment. But maybe your father was frustrated. Maybe he was drinking or something. Maybe it didn't really fulfill him. So how can you say that people should just settle for what they have? Right? Because a lot of people aren't happy. And they may think they're happy. They may kind of deceive themselves. But deep down inside, they're frustrated. And that's why they turn to having affairs. That's why they turn to alcohol. That's why they turn to drugs. That's why they turn to addictions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There are all kinds of signs of that. So I'm not necessarily assuming that your father was fulfilled by his truck driving. He could be, and that's how I answered her.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  She wasn't happy with that. Okay, anyway. So some people criticize this notion of work. But no, we are animals that love to make things. Somebody wants to find us as homo faber. The animal that likes to build things, to make things. That's our hands. We became powerful through making tools, et cetera. Also by being social animals, don't get me wrong. But we're creatures that are designed to make things, to build things, to create. Right? And I'm not an elitist. I think every human being on the planet has that desire. Right? They wanted that fulfillment. And I don't care if they're born poor and they're impoverished or they're homeless. They still have that need and they have that capacity

• 53:56Speaker 01

  to become a master in what they do. So the most important thing in life is to figure out what is your path? What is the kind of work that will bring you that sense of fulfillment? Okay? So some people, it's being an entrepreneur. It's being in business. Other people, it's the arts or it's entertainment of some sort. Other people, it's writing, it's words, it's literature. Other people, it's the body. It's sports, it's dance, it's whatever. I don't care. I don't have a hierarchy. I don't say writing books is better than building wood things.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  With your hands, it's all the same to me, right? It's all a form of a skill that all can lead to mastery. But you have to find out what that is, and then you have to build towards it. And when you reach that point, let's just look at the end point. So in your twenties, which is the most important part of your life, I think.

• 54:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Really?

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:52Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't want to derail, but okay, we should come back to that.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  It's where you're discovering yourself. It's where all the seeds are planted for what's going to happen to you. Of course, they're planted in your earliest years, don't get me wrong. But I do think that's the most critical phase, right? You're exploring, you're trying things out, you're experimenting with different careers, et cetera. You're gaining skills because you're learning. Like you said, you wanted to learn, right? And then you're thirty-two, thirty-three, and you start a podcast, a website, your own business, et cetera. And maybe it fails, but you're excited it's your own. And then you learn from it, and then you create something even better. Man, it's like the greatest feeling in the world. You don't need anything else, you know?

• 55:37Speaker 01

  You've accomplished something, you've had a goal and you reached it. It is, to me, a feeling of high. So when I write a book, it's painful. There's a lot of pain involved, stress, et cetera, et cetera. But man, there's nothing in the world I would give up. I even had a stroke probably because of that. I wouldn't give up any of that for that sense of, I could look back, I wrote that book. I can die tomorrow, and I'm happy. I did what I thought I needed to do. I reached not all of my potential, but a good portion of my potential. To me, that is, if everybody had that open to them,

• 56:19Speaker 01

  then I think we would live in a much better world if we live, if people knew that as a value and went towards it. And I think the greatest periods in history, the kind of the golden eras, we can look at Athens, we can look at Renaissance Italy. We could look at the nineteen twenties in America, the jazz era, and all the great cultural movements. Pick your, whatever period you like. Some people like the 60s, some people hate the 60s. I don't care. Whatever you think is a golden era. Their era of richness, of diversity, of all kinds of creative people doing all kinds of interesting things. It's an openness and everyone is experimenting. And that this kind of change that's brewing and experimentation, that's to me is a high

• 57:02Speaker 01

  point of human culture and it comes from more and more individuals doing, taking this path that I'm talking about.

• 57:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you have a math equation, for lack of a better word, for fulfillment?

• 57:12Speaker 01

  How would that be? A plus B?

• 57:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, kind of. So here, I think that, so I agree with you so violently, I want to bite through the table.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Go ahead.

• 57:23Tom Bilyeu?

  So I, it might not be the best use of my teeth. So I have a rough formula of what I think leads to fulfillment. And I think about this a lot, so I'm always looking for somebody that can help me refine. But I think it goes like this. It has to be hard, and there's reasons for this from an evolutionary standpoint. But it has to be hard, it has to be something that you get more energy from than it takes, so it's something that you inherently enjoy, and it has to be something that allows you to transform your potential into skill set, and that skill set has to be something that serves you and the group. If you do all of that, you will be fulfilled. If any one of those pieces are missing, it's really hard, it's something you love, you're

• 58:08Tom Bilyeu?

  improving your skill set, but it only serves you, you won't be fulfilled. If all of it, but it only serves the group and not you, you won't be fulfilled. It seems to me that it has to have all of those elements.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think there are people, unfortunately, who get that fulfillment without the group part.

• 58:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you? Do you think they're actually fulfilled?

• 58:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, if you like artists who write, who do some kind of great art, but they're not necessarily the best people in the world.

• 58:39Tom Bilyeu?

  They might be a total dick, but if their art, which I think is its own punishment, P.S., but they may find fulfillment in their art if they get feedback from the group. The group has moved, it's sublime, you know? And so their art creates the desired feeling in that person. They have contributed to the group, in my estimation. But if that same artist made art and nobody gave a shit about it, I don't think they would feel fulfilled.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I don't want to split hairs with you because you're largely correct. But I do, I can't think of examples of people who were ignored in their lifetime. And it was painful, but they knew they were right. They knew they had created something brilliant. They knew they had created some invention. And it was ignored and nobody cared and nobody liked them.

• 59:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Think about Tesla, Nikola Tesla.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was pretty miserable.

• 59:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, so despite doing all this incredible shit, being out of step with your time is rough. You are the shout and the echo. So even though when Einstein was asked, what's it like to be the most brilliant man alive? He said, I don't know, you'll have to ask Nikola Tesla. Despite that, Tesla died very unhappy by all accounts. I obviously did not know him, certainly alone, and broke. And so there was something was missing. He could never get, I'm, I'm definitely psychoanalyzing somebody I have no right to. But I have a gut instinct that because he could not figure out the echo part of doing something in a way where people reflected back that, yes, this is amazingly valuable.

• 1:00:11Tom Bilyeu?

  That even though now we all reap the benefits, was very little consolation.

• 1:00:16Speaker 01

  I know, I can't think of it because my mind is slowing down. But I've been talking recently with my wife about artists and composers, et cetera, who had no success in life. She's going, really? I said, yeah, never sold any books, their music was ignored. But my research of them, they, they had, just in the work itself, in the absorption of the mind in composing this brilliant thing or in writing this thing, they had that flow. Yes, so the pain is definitely there. I'm not arguing against you because they said.

• 1:00:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, you might be right. I mean, I'm utterly.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  Splitting hairs, but the, the thing is, is the sense of flow. Because what happens is, what makes you miserable is your self-absorption in many ways. Right? The worst form of therapy is to sit there and talk about your problems. The best form of therapy is to get outside of yourself.

• 1:01:09Tom Bilyeu?

  But the people are going to be like, the record just skipped for a lot of people. Go back. The worst form of therapy is talk therapy?

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I, well, I mean, maybe not the worst, but it's not to me the most productive therapy to just talk about your problems.

• 1:01:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Really? Why?

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  Because it's like accentuating your self-absorption, right? Whereas what you need is to get outside of yourself, not into all of your problems. Now, of course, I'm contradicting myself because I talked about introspection. That's a different thing. We're not introspecting about my problems, what my parents did to me, more and more, "Oh, I'm so miserable, blah, blah, blah." I'm sure there are forms of talking therapy that are good, so I shouldn't generalize that. But what I think...

• 1:01:55Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't know, something feels intuitively right about this.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I just wrote, sorry, I keep doing that, about this man. People won't have heard of him. He's a Russian mystic, whatever you want to call him, Gurdjieff, who had these exercises.

• 1:02:11Tom Bilyeu?

  I've heard the name, but I don't know him.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  And one thing he taught his students was to not vent your unpleasant emotions. So he had this exercise called self-observation, where you had to go observe yourself like you did in the most deepest way, not just your thoughts, but about your body and how your body and your mind interact in this insane continual blend. There's no separation. So one kind of thought will affect your body, but a feeling in your gut will affect your thinking, you're all this, "Observe yourself, observe yourself, observe yourself." And he said, "You will discover in observing yourself that most of your thoughts revolve around unpleasant emotions. It's a very bad thing to realize, but it's true."

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  I use the number 95%, but as I said, I'm pulling it out of you-know-what again. Okay, so most of it is dealing with frustration, resentment, anger, bitterness, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, okay? And he said, "Look at those emotions, see them, do not judge them, do not say they're bad or good or whatever, and don't ever talk about them. Don't vent them to people. You can look at them, but don't talk about them." And the people who experienced it go, "Whoa." By not talking about them, they started to go away. I didn't really feel them because I never expressed them. So expressing them was kind of what makes them stronger and more embedded inside of you.

• 1:03:40Tom Bilyeu?

  I feel like we're doing that culturally right now.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  Yes, most definitely. I mean, look...

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  What is the crux of the problem in people today? If I had to summarize it? And I don't mean people, I include myself in them. Us, because I'm a human being as well, as far as I know.

• 1:03:59Tom Bilyeu?

  I've heard, yeah.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  It's that we're self-absorbed, right? I think that's the root cause of so many of our issues, right? Because we're creatures that are actually built for empathy, for actually putting our minds into other things, into people, into animals, into solving problems, into our work. That's who we are. And we've turned that around. Where all of that voracious brain energy that we have, as I said, I just wrote a chapter on the brain. And it's this insanely powerful instrument that is so complex. People say it's the most complex piece of matter in the universe, right? It's so powerful. And when you turn inward, it just eats us alive inside. It's like a bacteria eating us from within,

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  as opposed to exteriorizing it into work, into creating things, into building things, into empathy, into working with other people. And if we're getting all ranty and outraged about justice, et cetera, et cetera, what you really need to do is to get outside of that and out and helping other people, genuinely helping them, right? If your cause is, and it's my cause as well, is the environment, which I believe a lot, and where my charity goes to, then ranting and complaining online and making people feel bad is useless. Go out and start a movement, create something, do something. You'll feel so much better about yourself and you'll be contributing it.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  But what we don't need is more of that self-absorption. It's like a centrifugal force that's drawing us further and further and further in. My problems, my parents, my education, my brother and sister, my wife.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  More and more inward, more problems. It gets deeper and deeper, more irascenated inside of ourselves, right? You want to get out of yourself, right? And put it into your work. So... You know, let's say you're an artist, right? I have great respect for artists. I kind of wished I had been an artist. I'm a failed artist.

• 1:06:04Tom Bilyeu?

  This is a guy who's written incredible bestselling books. I've walked through bookstores and watched them bring in stacks of books that you wrote decades ago.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I wanted to be a novelist, you know?

• 1:06:15Tom Bilyeu?

  So fascinating. It is so weird to me that you can sell at your level and still be like, oh, but I wanted to be this. I'm the same, which is why I have such a response to that. Because I am not good at the things that I wanted to be good at. And the things that I am good at, that other people envy me for, I'm like, ah. Like, that's not very interesting.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  What is it that you wanted to be?

• 1:06:39Tom Bilyeu?

  That list is very long. I, my, if I could snap my fingers, I would be Elon Musk. That is like my fantasy of fantasy.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  You have plenty of time. You're young.

• 1:06:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, we'll see. A on 46. What's he like, 47, 48? Like, he's barely older than me.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  He's over 50 now.

• 1:06:55Tom Bilyeu?

  51, 52? I mean, he's like, certainly within striking distance. And, look, I am honest enough with myself, know thyself, as Robert Greene would say, that I don't, my brain doesn't process data the way that his does. Now, he warns people like me not to want to be like him, because he says having the intrusive thoughts that he has around engineering and problem solving, he said it's, you know, it's like having this thing turned on that you can't turn off.

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  I didn't know that. That's interesting.

• 1:07:23Tom Bilyeu?

  But I, I would pay that price. So before we started rolling, you and I were talking, I'm, I am very enamored with what you've created and put into the world. And you've, you still fill a niche that so few people are able to fill. I think it's utterly fascinating. I said once in our earlier interview that when I read your books, I can hear wolves howling in the background. But in real life, you're so lovely and kind and considerate. So most people that write dark books are fucking dark, and they don't even realize they're writing a dark book. But like, your stuff really deals with an underbelly of the human condition, but yet you're this lovely person. Anyway, what you've put in the world thinks absolutely incredible. And so I totally understand the...

• 1:08:12Tom Bilyeu?

  The impetus to be good at one thing, to wish you were good at something else. But it is a very fascinating part of the human psyche.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  Well, probably if I had been a novelist, and I was at this age and I was successful, I'd say, you know, I really wanted to write nonfiction books.

• 1:08:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Correct.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  The grass is always greener, so who am I to say?

• 1:08:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it's such a weird fucking thing. But so what I find interesting about what you were saying is that this idea, and I haven't thought a lot about this, so I'm thinking out loud here, but the idea that if you're repeating something over and over, and I have said many, many times, whatever, you become what you repeat. So if you're saying to yourself like, hey, I can figure this out, I can learn, I can grow, then you will act in accordance. And I find that there's something about this moment where we are obsessing over things. I'm not even saying they're not real, but we're obsessing over them to the point where it's becoming counterproductive. Like, we're seeing things where they aren't necessarily,

• 1:09:18Tom Bilyeu?

  or we're exaggerating things that are there, but like now we're making them seem just absolutely terrifying. And I think that there's something that people have to be careful about there, that you can, you can make your own life worse by obsessing over the things that are wrong, rather than, like you said, making it somehow external or creating a piece of art around it or something. I don't know, creating something, like I said, I'm thinking out loud. I don't have my finger fully on why I can sense that there's a problem with it, but there's a problem.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  Oh, I think most definitely. We can feel it in the zeitgeist. It's kind of ugly. It's an ugly energy.

• 1:09:54Tom Bilyeu?

  It's an ugly energy. I normally hate that kind of loose talk, but because I don't, I don't yet know how to articulate it, that feels really right. So you talked about this earlier, and I can't remember where I first heard this, but the idea that some things make you feel expansive and some make you constrict. This moment feels like a mass constriction.

• 1:10:17Tom Bilyeu?

  And that's why I worry.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the feeling of openness, which I say occurs historically because we're social animals and things occur in these kind of cultural globes, these generational moments, is because of memes and being infected by the people around us. And in moments of expansion, your minds are open, you're adventurous, you're exploring. It often comes in these kind of revolutionary periods where people are just so sick of the past 20 years and all the accumulated baggage and all the ways of doing things. They're just tired of it. They want something new. And so they're exploring and they're hungry and they're adventurous for new ideas.

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  And people come up with wild things, but who cares? It's wild, but it's interesting. It's new. There's discussion, there's argument, but people aren't killing each other over it, right? These are great moments in history and it's a feeling of expansion and adventurousness. So if you have an adventurous spirit, which I think is an incredibly positive quality to have, that means you're continually open to life. You're continually open to what happens, what it brings to you, and you're seeking it out. You want new things. You're learning. You're not closed off. You never have a moment where, I know what is, I know what is happening, etc. You have what the poet Keats called negative capability. I don't know if you're familiar with that concept.

• 1:11:47Tom Bilyeu?

  I am, but because of you.

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I talked about it in Mastery. It's basically the fact that you can carry in your mind two contradictory ideas and not be upset about that. Because, quite honestly, sometimes things are contradictory and they're true, right? It's weird, but it's true, right? It could be A, it could be black, it could be white, and they're both correct. The fact that you can hold two things that seem opposing in your mind at the same time, he considered the foundation of creativity. He thought that was Shakespeare's greatest quality. It's what makes a great scientist, a great inventor, a great entrepreneur, a great inventor, etc., etc.

• 1:12:30Tom Bilyeu?

  Do you have any examples? I agree most wholeheartedly, but I'd be hard pressed to give an example off the top of my head.

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna mess it up horrifically because I don't remember it so well. But there's the story of Louis Pasteur. We're talking about invention and of sort of the whole science of immunology, right? And here I'm having to strain my neurons here to remember it. But basically, he had these chickens that had been injected with smallpox or whatever the disease is, right? And then they all died, okay? And then he brought in a new batch of chickens. He was trying to figure out how to solve smallpox or whatever it was. Brought a new batch of chickens in.

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  He injected them and then they survived. Some of them survived and he couldn't figure out why. And then he injected them again. And I know I'm messing it up, so please, out there scientists, don't flame me for this. You know, he was trying to figure out why they survived. And basically, it was because the smallpox that he had injected them with the second batch was weaker, it had been left outside. And so they had developed immunity from it by having this smaller, less intense version of smallpox injected into them.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  So the next time they got injected, they had the antibodies. Now, we think, we take this for granted now, but nobody had a concept for antibodies back there, back then. It was a totally novel concept. And so when he saw these chickens that survived, he was like, why? You know, why, what happened? And he submitted this to other scientists and they came up with all kinds of ideas that were basically the same ideas rehashed. You know, it was an accident, you have to redo the experiment or they survived because of this, that, or the other. And he asked himself, well, no, maybe it's something that nobody ever considered. Maybe what had happened was...

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  By having the weaker batch, they were able to somehow survive. So he asked a question that was counterintuitive, right? Which is injecting someone with something will give them a better chance of surviving it. Which is like, whoa, that's like a contradiction in terms. How can that happen? He was able to entertain this very bizarre idea that contradicted everything in medicine. At the same time, he had negative capability. And he displayed it in other aspects of his life as well. And he invented one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of medicine. There are other examples I could give of artists, because it's most common with artists. But you know, people like Einstein had it as well, et cetera.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  So that you asked, for example, I give you a bad one.

• 1:15:35Tom Bilyeu?

  No, that's actually really, that's a great one. I have one in business I was just thinking about. And because I talk about this in Impact Theory University a lot. You have to be able to hold two competing ideas in your head at the same time. And the one that I encounter the most is, as a leader, you have to understand that people are intoxicated by certainty in a way that is almost distressing. And in fact, we just, Impact Theory just had our sixth birthday. And one of the founding members.

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  Congratulations.

• 1:16:03Tom Bilyeu?

  Thank you very much. One of the founding members recorded a video of an early memory. And she was like, I remember Tom had so much conviction about what we were going to build. Because I had to convince all these people, like to, you know, do the startup, starting literally from scratch. And she was like, Tom had so much conviction that we were going to be able to pull this off. And so one of the things I teach is, you have to be able to create a narrative. You have to be able to say, this is what's going to happen. This is exactly how we're going to do it. And if you can like, show people that you just really believe to the core that this is going to work, then they'll follow you. The problem is that if you're blinded by your own narrative, you're going to get blindsided.

• 1:16:45Tom Bilyeu?

  And so you have to have this narrative, you have to present it with conviction, you have to believe it. But then you have to question the shit out of it. And make sure that like, is this really working? Like, am I getting the data that I should be getting? Because any conviction like that should make a prediction. If your predictions aren't coming true, then you're in trouble. So it's like, you have to be convicted and at the same time be hyper skeptical of your own vision.

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  That's a perfect example. I couldn't have said it better. Thank you.

• 1:17:10Tom Bilyeu?

  People can't. Like, that's hard. It's hard.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  It's hard, but it's very high level of creativity. You know, and if you can reach it, it's like gold.

• 1:17:22Tom Bilyeu?

  You said something earlier that I want to go back to. I've been holding it in my head because it was so intriguing to me.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  The Italian woman?

• 1:17:27Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes, at the Stanford talk. The one who was annoyed that you said that you could find fulfillment in your work. Why do you think it made her mad? I understand your rebuttal to her, but why did it make her mad?

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  Well, I think there's a context. First of all, this was like a group of psychologists, very heavy academia, right? High level. And here was this self-help writer from Los Angeles, coming to the Stanford Behavioral School, telling us about what is fulfilling. There was an immediate snobbery going on, I could sense it. And I think that was a large part of it. It was like when I went to France, although this was not nearly as bad an example of, this American is going to teach us about seduction? Come on, we're French, right? We taught the world how to seduce. I could laugh then, I thought that we're right, you know?

• 1:18:28Speaker 01

  And I felt kind of humbled about that. But this woman, I got a sense of, it wasn't necessarily what I was saying. It just had rankled them that I was saying. The other thing that rankled her was that I was saying that as an individual, you could change yourself. And I had brought up the example, because it was recently, I was writing about this with the 50 Cent book, about the great African-American writer Richard Wright, who wrote this fabulous novel called Native Son, is that the name?

• 1:18:59Tom Bilyeu?

  There is a book called Native Son, I don't know if you wrote it.

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  And how he had overcome incredible adversity in his life, and had written this book, and then basically kind of went downhill from there. But he had resurrected himself through his work, and he had overcome this horrific poverty that he grew up in the South, et cetera. And I was detailing the process of him as a writer, as an example of what I was describing about through your work you reach this level. So there were two things, there was the snobbery element of this Los Angeles, because you know from LA, people are appreciably dumber.

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  Further south you go in California, right? If you're in the Bay Area. You're from Los Angeles. You already have a mark against you.

• 1:19:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Interesting.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  A self-help writer from Los Angeles. Okay.

• 1:19:51Tom Bilyeu?

  Is that as bad as I guess?

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right. And then the other element of it's not about culture. It's not about the superstructure of society. It's not about some Marxist theory about, you know, your level of income and your and all of the other things. I was saying, this person, this individual, overcame the worst kind of adversity, not through a government program, although I have nothing against government programs. I'm not one of those arch libertarians. I believe in necessity of government. I'm somebody who was educated through public schools through my whole life, and I love that. But he did it on his own in a process that was very arduous and beautiful.

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  It's like, well, this goes against everything we believe in. That you can't do things on your own, that you need an organization, you need a structure, you need politics, you need this group, you need academics at Stanford to teach you how to get to that point, right? So I was nailed as the self-help writer from Los Angeles who was preaching about individualism. And it fit all the cliches about the American, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? And that's not the trend in academia. The trend is trying to move away. It goes back to the whole structuralist movement and deconstruction, et cetera. It's not the individual that creates a work of art. It's the culture, right?

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  Getting away from the idea that there's a writer, there's a narrator. It's all about the culture. It's impersonal. So, but I was saying went against all of the trends in academia. And it really upset them because maybe I'm wrong, but I was challenging some of their deepest held principles, at least for this one woman. She was very, she wasn't rude or anything, but I could sense that I had rubbed her the wrong way. And she was very kind of, there was an element of anger underneath her tone.

• 1:21:51Tom Bilyeu?

  It's interesting. You just opened up a whole new can of worms. So the, when you brought her up the first time, you were talking about she was incensed that her father wasn't fulfilled as a truck driver and that the whole idea that somebody would find their fulfillment through work to her seemed crazy. And I was, when you were talking about it, I was like, okay, why would she get mad about that?

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  Well, not crazy, but that everybody should do that way. Because I was saying that everyone should have that opportunity to be the ultimate anti-elitist belief, that even her father, who drove a truck, could have done, could have been an artist, could have created something.

• 1:22:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Through driving or in some other capacity?

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  In some other capacity.

• 1:22:34Tom Bilyeu?

  Interesting. What about the idea of doing the driving so well that it becomes artistry?

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  I said that, if that was what fulfilled him, I have no problem with that. And if what fulfills you is being a great parent, then that is a form of mastery. When mastery came out, I had some carpenters who were doing the tile work on my patio, and I was interviewed by the New York Times about my book, and I said, "He's just as good an example of mastery as Albert Einstein. He was so careful and so precise, he did a brilliant job. He got a great sense of satisfaction of seeing a beautifully done, you know, bit of craftsmanship." Right? Craftsmanship is a high form of intellect, in my viewpoint. It's actually a great thing, and it's something that people used to value. You know, I mean, look at the cathedrals in Europe, you know,

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  some of the most beautiful things ever created by human beings. Craftsman, masons, et cetera. People who can make stained glass, they were masters of it. These are things we need to celebrate. So I have no problem with your form of mastery, whatever it is, if it is driving a truck. But maybe driving a truck isn't something that's fulfilling. And maybe you should consider that about your father. Maybe, I don't know.

• 1:23:52Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I mean, I think the vast majority of humans never spill into that. And so this brings us back to the very first thing that we were talking about, is how people can get lost in their own life, and they think that it's the thing I'm doing versus the way I'm doing the thing. And...

• 1:24:11Tom Bilyeu?

  I don't want people to feel like, oh, I just need to change the way that I do the thing and never aspire to something else. Aspire to whatever you want. But just understand that no matter what you do, if you're not looking at it like, how do I get unbelievably good at this thing? And I don't know if Tony was the one that thought of it, but Tony Robbins certainly introduced the idea to me that progress is a foundational pillar of human happiness. That if you're not making progress, just there is something innate to the human animal that you will be unable to find profound... Would he say fulfillment? I don't know. But to me, that's how that became. When I really thought about what makes for fulfillment, you do have to be translating your potential into skill set.

• 1:24:53Tom Bilyeu?

  There is something so inherently pleasurable about, I couldn't do it and now I can.

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 1:24:59Tom Bilyeu?

  This is a big reason why I think that people should exercise and lift weights very specifically. There is something, your mind will be changed when you realize you walk in the gym one day and you can't lift a weight. And then after, you know, several months of like putting in the work and trying to get stronger, you can now lift something you couldn't lift before. That is one of the freakiest things that you can go through. And when you get that same realization in real life, that, and this goes back to my whole thing, that I can feel there's something going on in culture right now where people have lost, and maybe because of what you're talking about with the woman at Stanford, where it's like, no, it's not the individual, it's all culture. And people have lost the understanding. It isn't culture, it is the individual. And that's the only place at which you can actually get better at something,

• 1:25:44Tom Bilyeu?

  where you can then influence the world in some way. But understanding that you can translate that potential into skill and now you can actually move the needle, make change. But if you don't believe that's possible and you have Nietzsche's will to power or expansion, however you're going to think about it, you have this internal compulsion. I have to gain control. I have to expand my sphere of influence. But I don't think I can get better. And so the only thing left is... You start knocking other things down. I, that feel, like, as I'm saying it now, that cocktail of things feels like it pretty accurately predicts what we're going through right now.

• 1:26:29Tom Bilyeu?

  That you will have an impulse that you need to satisfy where I have to get control of this situation. But I don't think I can do it by falling in love with something and getting better at it and offering my art to the world in whatever form and getting the echo back because they are so moved by what I've created that it inspires them to create in their own way. Again, expansive versus constricting. But because you still have this need to expand, to gain control, that you start doing things that are coming from a place of envy, coming from a place of silencing, coming from a place of destruction instead of building up and thinking, "Oh, I don't want to feel..."

• 1:27:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Like, I don't want to feel that other people can outperform me or that other people have more control or recognizing that they do. And because I don't want to feel that way, I'm gonna get better. And that to me, like, if I, if I really think about, "Why do I put myself in front of camera? Why do I go through..." My life is fucking stressful. I'm already rich. What the fuck am I doing? When I think about why I reengage with the world as intensely as I do, it's because I understand how transformational that moment is. When you realize, "Oh, wait, I'm not powerless. I can get better." That's it. Like, that's the juice for me.

• 1:27:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And it's an ongoing process.

• 1:27:56Speaker 01

  There's an expression in Spanish that was like the artist Goya's motto, which is, "Aún aprendo." "I'm still learning." Means I'm learning my whole life. So you might be 46 and you're fabulously wealthy. I mean, look where you live, etc. But just living off your money and playing golf and going to the beach, you'll get depressed. What good does it have? You need constant challenges. You have an active, voracious mind. You need new things to be applying it to. So of course, you're gonna wanna keep challenging yourself. No matter, and even, and the stress. And as we said before, when we were talking, stress is good for you. I know it goes against everything that our culture wants us to believe.

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  Wants us to believe that you need to relax, you need to, you know, not, not stress yourself, not work too hard. You know, yoga, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I, no. Stress is great. Stress is a wonderful drug if you know how to use it. And I just wrote about in ancient cultures, where you had shamans and initiation rituals. They would put people through the most, the worst forms of stress. Right? They would suspend them hanging from things in their skin.

• 1:29:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Hooks in their fucking flesh.

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:18Tom Bilyeu?

  I've seen that live and in person, by the way. It's freaky.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:29:21Tom Bilyeu?

  But why, why do they do this?

• 1:29:23Speaker 01

  Okay, no, they, other things, the extremes of hot and cold, et cetera, et cetera. And then after that, they would then go dance incredibly fast or run up a mountain. And they would create what this one writer called the omnipotence feeling, the omnipotence effect. Basically, what they had done is they had mastered the neuroendocrine system. They had found a way to engineer the, our body chemistry to create feelings of ecstasy and euphoria. And I think you, a sense of euphoria is a very positive experience. I think it's an end in itself. It's a great thing. Humans are wanting that kind of peak experience, and it's very valuable and healthy.

• 1:30:06Speaker 01

  They had mastered, they had created the science of how to get there by creating stress. And then centuries later, neuroscientists realized how they had done it. Basically, by suspending them like you saw. They create the fear effect, which floods the body with adrenaline, right? And adrenaline is an incredibly powerful chemical. If you've ever experienced it, you know, in yourself, you know it if you faced a danger or there's some accident or your, you know, your life's at stake. That adrenaline floods your body. It gives you incredible amounts of energy. It makes your eyes pop open, you're alert, you're seeing everything around you. Animals have it, it's an animal type thing.

• 1:30:51Speaker 01

  It's there to make you survive, alright? And then, by creating, by running and doing all these other things, they then had released all these endorphins in the body. Because, this is neuroscience, I'm not gonna bore your audience with it, but nerve endings in the limbs and in the feet is where the endorphins are triggered most. And that's why long-distance runners have this endorphin addiction. Because endorphin is a painkiller. It's the most powerful painkiller ever invented. Your body creates a painkiller, right? And so when runners, they go running 50 miles, they feel incredible amount of pain. The endorphins kick in.

• 1:31:36Speaker 01

  The pain goes away, and they're ecstatic, they're euphoric, and they're addicted. They go one day without running their 20, 30 miles, they're depressed. They're addicted to that endorphin rush. These shamans had created, through mastering stress, through making, acclimating the body to stress and pressure, they had mastered it. So when you entered a situation like that, you felt confident and bold, and you knew that you weren't gonna die. And it created this endorphin release, that you had the energy from the adrenaline, you had the calmness and painkilling effect from the endorphin. You were high, you were euphoric, it was great, great. Stress, if you learn how to use it,

• 1:32:21Speaker 01

  if you build yourself up to it, can be a great thing. And so for me and my writing... You know, I'm continually creating stress for myself. Sometimes it's unhealthy, but often it's for a purpose, right? Because it makes me reach these levels that I hadn't reached before. And when I get there and I've created something that I know is right, when I hit it right, it's a high, I feel high. I use that energy that comes from pressure to actually excite me. And I say like, creating a deadline. So, Thomas Edison did this himself, right? He was going to create the first city lit by electricity.

• 1:33:04Speaker 01

  You know, before then it was all oil and gas lamps, et cetera, right? People laughed at it, a ridiculous idea, how can you do that? You know, and it was a ridiculous idea because it had, it required so much thinking, so much inventing, so much logistical stuff, that it was almost impossible to do. And what did he do? Soon after he had the idea that he was gonna light a city through electricity, New York in this case, he publicized it, he gave interviews, knowing full well that once he gave the interview, the pressure was on him. If he never invented this, if he didn't live up to it, he'd be humiliated. He deliberately created stress for himself,

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  so that he would have the adrenaline and the energy to stay up, you know, eighteen hours a day and create this thing that was one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind. So, learning how to use stress is a very positive thing. I don't know how we got into this.

• 1:34:06Tom Bilyeu?

  How we originally started talking about stress?

• 1:34:09Speaker 01

  Well, we were talking about you and your need for challenges, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:34:13Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I said, yep, that is exactly right. And then you said, but that's a good thing, stress is good for you. There's another angle to this, which is maybe more basic than where you came at it from. I actually hadn't thought about it the way you were talking about it. That makes a lot of sense to me. The more basic way that I've always thought about it, because this is my journey, is some people just need to toughen the fuck up.

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:37Tom Bilyeu?

  I just needed to toughen the fuck up. And the way that you toughen up is by realizing, as going back to Nietzsche, what doesn't kill me makes me stronger. And not just in like the, oh, I learned from this way, but in the like, oh damn, like, I actually realize how much I can endure. Oh, there's a great quote. I need to memorize this. I used to remember who said it, now I forget. But the paraphrase is, "To those that I love, I wish suffering, pain, failure, embarrassment, because that will show the only thing that matters, that one can endure." And I was like, damn, like, that feels so true to me.

• 1:35:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Like, that people need to go through some hard ass shit so that they can see, can you endure or not? And most people can, but they have to go through something before they realize it.

• 1:35:29Speaker 01

  That was a very valuable, important part of this ancient ritual, the shamans, that I was talking about.

• 1:35:38Speaker 01

  Where this guy who was studying it in the 1990s, trying to figure out why this happened, he was saying the missing ingredient was that sort of confidence and boldness and toughness. So that they went through these rituals over and over and over again. So they knew that they could survive, that they could withstand it. So it toughened them up. And without that element of confidence, the fear element that came from the adrenaline would just overwhelm them and crush them. Right? So that was, what you're talking about is a necessary component in this kind of chemical response that I'm talking, this equation.

• 1:36:11Tom Bilyeu?

  Yes. Dude, I could talk to you forever. Where can people find you?

• 1:36:16Speaker 01

  Well, I'm right here. Sorry.

• 1:36:19Tom Bilyeu?

  Rewatch the episode.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  They can find me. I have an ancient website, goes back thousands of years. It's called power, seduction, and war, the "and" is spelled out, dot com. Power, seduction, and war, dot com. And there you'll see all of my social media crap. The Twitter, the Instagram, the TikTok. Yes, I'm on TikTok.

• 1:36:46Tom Bilyeu?

  There it is.

• 1:36:48Speaker 01

  And an email address that if you want to write to me and tell me that I'm full of shit, you can write to me and do that. So that's the best place, [email protected] and my YouTube channel.

• 1:36:59Tom Bilyeu?

  I love it. Awesome. Guys, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break. And that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water, and you're done. You're getting 75 plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics, nutrient dense superfoods,

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