The Path To Power: Ambition, Status, Strength & Respect - Robert Greene (4K)

Robert Greene is an author and historian. Robert is one of the most legendary writers in the world on human nature and today we get to go through some of my favourite lessons from him on seduction, confidence, happiness, masculinity and Niccolo Machiavelli. Expect to learn the biggest problems with modern philosophy, why acquiring knowledge and skill are always the most important thing, why you must protect your reputation at all costs, why you are so often your own worst enemy, which lessons from Machiavelli most people miss, advice for young men wanting to make it in the world and much more… - 00:00 Robert’s First Appearance on Modern Wisdom 02:48 The Problem With Modern Philosophy 10:21 Knowledge & Skills Are Like Gold & Silver 20:25 Why You Shouldn’t Be Cynical 24:52 Stupid People Are More Dangerous Than Evil People 30:19 The Power of Your Reputation 44:39 Your Weirdness is Your Strength 1:06:48 How to Stop Wasting Your Time 1:18:11 The Curse of Immediate Success 1:30:53 Why You Should Relish Being Attacked 1:34:57 Use Absence to Increase Respect 1:44:49 Most Important Lesson From Machiavelli 1:52:36 Advice for Young Men Who Feel Lost 2:00:26 Robert’s Forthcoming Book 2:04:54 Where to Find Robert - Get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Robert Green, welcome to the show.

• 0:01Robert Greene?

  Thank you for having me, Chris. My pleasure. We finally get to meet after all these years.

• 0:05Chris Williamson?

  The first time that you came on the show was episode 78.

• 0:10Robert Greene?

  Where are you at now?

• 0:11Chris Williamson?

  Five years ago, I'm on 820.

• 0:14Robert Greene?

  Wow.

• 0:15Chris Williamson?

  The show is 400 times bigger than it was when you first came on, so I wanted to say thank you.

• 0:19Robert Greene?

  Only 400? Come on, Chris.

• 0:21Chris Williamson?

  I know, I know.

• 0:21Robert Greene?

  I'm disappointed.

• 0:22Chris Williamson?

  I know, I really did try to impress you. I wanted to hit that 500 number before we got to meet.

• 0:26Robert Greene?

  That's pretty good.

• 0:26Chris Williamson?

  But I wanted to say thank you for coming on very early.

• 0:29Robert Greene?

  You're very welcome, you're very welcome.

• 0:31Chris Williamson?

  I also wanted to say thank you for sending me the special edition of 48 Laws of Power.

• 0:36Robert Greene?

  Ah.

• 0:36Chris Williamson?

  Which is the coolest book.

• 0:40Robert Greene?

  Ah.

• 0:40Chris Williamson?

  For the people that haven't seen it, it's leather bound, gold embossed, 48 on the front. And then as you look at the side, it's gold, like just like a gold boundary on the outside of the paper. But as you splay the pages out in one direction, it's your face. As you splay the pages out in the other, it's that famous portrait of Machiavelli. So cool.

• 1:01Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:02Chris Williamson?

  So cool.

• 1:03Robert Greene?

  I can't really totally take credit for it. My partner on the first three books, he did it. He's a brilliant designer. He consulted me on it, but he's really the genius behind that, but.

• 1:14Chris Williamson?

  It's the sort of thing you can't not take a photo of.

• 1:17Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:17Chris Williamson?

  It's so, I mean, it's the most basic technology as well. And stuff that's been around, you used to get it in serial boxes to, you know, look at things from different angles to be able to make it work, but no one's ever applied it to a book before.

• 1:30Robert Greene?

  Well, he, he, he's a very strange guy. He's Dutch. He's very interesting. We had a good combination, we had a good kind of rapport. And he researched and he found in the 18th century, this was the techniques that they would use on the edging of books, where you would flip through it and you would see an image. And he studied how they did it and then he was able to replicate it through digital technology. But, you know, that's pretty genius. That's pretty interesting. So, yeah.

• 2:01Chris Williamson?

  Who is that guy?

• 2:02Robert Greene?

  His name is Joost Elfers. You'll see his name on my books, the Joost Elfers book, my first three books. And he's the one that. If it weren't for him, I wouldn't be here. I'd either be dead or I'd be still working in Hollywood and probably be dead anyway. He discovered me. I've told the story many times, but he uh basically gave me my first break and he subsidized me while I wrote the forty eight laws of power. He produced it, he designed it. Together we designed it, but so I have, I have a lot to owe him.

• 2:35Chris Williamson?

  And he's still involved?

• 2:37Robert Greene?

  Yes. He designed the cover of the Daily Laws. And I'm hoping he'll, yeah, sure, we're still together, yeah.

• 2:46Chris Williamson?

  What do you think is the problem with modern philosophy? Where did we go wrong?

• 2:54Robert Greene?

  Well, I mean, it's a huge subject and you know, there are lots of different aspects of philosophy.

• 3:02Robert Greene?

  But like, um, everything, it's so much in our culture, it's kind of lost its soul. So, um, you know, years ago, um, we kind of somewhere went off on the wrong path. We lost faith in just our thinking in our brains, in our minds, right? So Socrates or Nietzsche, or if you know, skipping here two thousand years, they didn't sit there and, and go through scientific journals about the origins of consciousness and do studies and data and mathematical formulas to figure out how the brain works or what makes a human being. I'm doing a lot of things on Socrates right now because I'm writing about him.

• 3:46Robert Greene?

  The stuff he's saying about is absolutely brilliant. It's mind blowing and it's incredibly relevant to our world today. But if he were around today, then people would laugh at him. Oh, it's all speculative, right? It's just subjective. Where's, where's the data? Where's the hard facts there? Psychology is even more infected with this kind of mindset, but philosophy is like that. I can't read that stuff. You know, for me, philosophy, it has to have like a direct connection to my life, to living, to my soul, to my day to day affairs, to what I have to think about when I wake up in the morning kind of thing, you know? It can't be all about this, this ethereal abstract stuff. I can't get my brain around it. I want to know how to live. I want to know how to think. I want to know how to breathe.

• 4:31Robert Greene?

  I do a lot of, I'm heavily into Zen meditation and Zen philosophy. To me, that is like one of the most beautiful forms of philosophy. And it's all about how to ground your day to day life. And you can say Zen, it can be described as the ultimate realistic philosophy, the realist philosophy. It's taking you back to what is truly real. Okay. Yes, they, they, they kind of, the language could be very strange. Like they, they try and present these riddles to you to alter your consciousness. But the essence of it is very relatable. And they want you to be able to take their philosophy and live in your day to day life and not have a separation between the two.

• 5:15Robert Greene?

  So I can't read that stuff that goes on now. I just can't read it. I mean, there's some people whose things I like, but they're usually not considered philosophers. One of my favorite writers that nobody will have ever heard of. He died a couple of years ago, so he's sort of contemporary. Is a man named Roberto Coloso. He writes the most fantastic books, I would consider it philosophy. He's Italian. He ran a, a, a publishing company for many years. But he writes books about the ancient world and he mixes it in with, with stories and anecdotes. He has a book called The Ruins of Koshe. That's just one of the most brilliant books you'll ever read.

• 5:59Robert Greene?

  That to me is philosophy because it stirs my soul. It makes me think, it makes me imagine the world, makes me rethink about the life I'm living. But so many of this stuff, other stuff, I just can't read. I'm not saying it's their fault, maybe it's my own fault. But for me, it's kind of gone down this, this wrong path, down a rabbit hole.

• 6:19Chris Williamson?

  Well, if you're having to work that hard to resonate with the entire world's worth of philosophy. I don't know, I feel like. It's probably not a you problem. If there's a lot of, you're trying your hard, you're opening yourself up and you're only finding small glimmers here and there.

• 6:36Robert Greene?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, um, so there's a philosopher, and you have to excuse me, my memory is not what it used to be.

• 6:46Robert Greene?

  Maybe his name will come to me. He wrote an essay, very famous essay about what is it like to be a bat? I thought it was great, I'm so excited about it. And I did, I bought the book that it's, that's in. He's a very famous philosopher, he's actually quite smart, very interesting. But the essay is, um, you're looking up right now.

• 7:08Chris Williamson?

  I am, Thomas Nagel.

• 7:09Robert Greene?

  Yes, Thomas Nagel. He's written some very interesting books, but they're not, they don't grab me the way that, that Nietzsche or Schopenhauer or Heidegger even grabs me.

• 7:23Robert Greene?

  But his idea about what it's like to be a bat, he's trying to essentially say, we can't know, right? Because that kind of consciousness is so different from ours, right? It's echolocation. We have nothing to compare it to, therefore get out of your arrogance, you can't know it. And a part of me understands it, but a part of me disagrees with it. And I, cause I wrote a chapter in my new book about animal consciousness and how we can put ourselves inside even something as strange as a bat or a spider. And I had wrote a lot about how spiders think. Yes, there are limits to it, and that's what the point of his essay.

• 8:06Robert Greene?

  But so many times with, I find particularly now in the world today, particularly in academia, is the necessity to say you're against something, you're reacting, you know? He's reacting against people who put too much empathy and anthropomorphize things. Okay, so I'm gonna write a book that says the opposite and I'll get attention and I'll get in the New York Times Review of Books and people will listen because I'm standing against something. So academia is all about like having some novel stance, usually from some cultural perspective. Whereas the truth is more rounded, it's more, it's, it's not so hard set, just reacting and go in the opposite direction, you're not arriving at the truth. So maybe it's a combination of the two, maybe.

• 8:52Robert Greene?

  There are limits to what we can know about a bat and how it thinks. But we have amazing capacity to put ourselves inside of other beings and to kind of get a feel, not an intellectual sense, but a feel of what it might be like to

• 9:07Robert Greene?

  echoing, echoing, you know, we can get a feel for that. And I talk about spiders and how their more, their form of intelligence is all about vibrations. They feel in, in their eight legs and the bottom of their eight legs. They feel the wind blowing, they feel the vibrations on the web. They feel the weather, they know a storm is coming, they can sense a creature that has landed on their web just by the vibrations. And elephants have a very similar power in their feet. They can, they can sense an earthquake from 10 miles away. But we can, we can sense that because we can feel vibrations. And, you know, I can't really know a spider, but spiders are intelligent.

• 9:49Robert Greene?

  And the idea that they're intelligent and that they think is a radical idea. So I don't know, I'm going off on, on some tangent here, but that's trying to answer your question.

• 9:59Chris Williamson?

  There's a spirit of play in that, which is fun, I think. And I know what you mean. There is a sort of this odd,

• 10:08Chris Williamson?

  highly scrutinous, skeptical.

• 10:10Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 10:11Chris Williamson?

  There's a lack of play.

• 10:14Robert Greene?

  That's, you said it perfectly. Thank you. That's, that you hit the nail right there.

• 10:18Chris Williamson?

  I learned something else that you taught Billy Oppenheimer.

• 10:21Robert Greene?

  I do.

• 10:21Chris Williamson?

  That said, above all else, focus on acquiring knowledge and skills. Knowledge and skills are like gold, a currency you will transform into something more valuable than you can imagine. It's similar to one of your tweets, which is eventually the time that was not spent on learning skills will catch up to you and the fall will be painful. What's that mean?

• 10:42Robert Greene?

  Well, um.

• 10:46Robert Greene?

  You know, uh, life can be kind of difficult, right? You don't really know sometimes where you're headed. Nobody kind of gives you any kind of guidance in this world, right? And they don't tell you when you graduate college, go ahead, go Robert, you go study this. This is what, you know, and you know, this is what your brain is suited for, et cetera, et cetera. You have to find your own path. And so for me personally, I spent years in the wilderness. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna give this a personal spin because I think that helps a little bit. Because what I can answer it inside my own body here. So I, I know I want to be a writer, but I can't figure out what the hell I'm gonna write.

• 11:32Robert Greene?

  So I leave college and I tried journalism because I have to make a living. I have to support myself and I don't really like it. It doesn't suit me. He writes an article and then a week later it's forgotten. Nobody reads about it. And as somebody who studied ancient Greek and Latin in college, I think in terms of thousands of years and not in three days or a week, you know? I want something that I write to be read in thirty, twenty four, you know? Sorry.

• 12:03Robert Greene?

  So wasn't a good fit. So I quit. I wander around Europe, trying to write a novel with my backpack. I live in London. I live in Paris. I lived in Ireland. I lived in Greece. You name it. I taught English in Spain, trying to write a novel. I had no discipline. I couldn't do it. It didn't work and I get, starting to get depressed. Then, um, my dad isn't well. I decided I'm gonna move back to Los Angeles. Hey, I'm gonna get a job in Hollywood, right? That, that'll be, I'll make, I'll make a ton of money and I'll be writing and you know, et cetera. How glamorous, how sexy, you know? Movie star starlets on my, knocking on my door, et cetera. Okay, terrible, terrible fit. Because I'm a control freak.

• 12:47Robert Greene?

  I don't like people coming in and changing everything I say. And I don't like conforming and I don't like compromise. Sorry, that's a bad thing about me, but I didn't want to have to lower my I standards to what they were asking me to do is a terrible fit. All right, now comes the chance. I meet this man, Joe Stelfer, as we mentioned earlier in Italy. And he says, he asked me if I have any ideas for books. And I kind of improvised the 48 Laws of Power. The point of my long-winded story here is I had spent 18 years or so acquiring high levels of skill in writing.

• 13:31Robert Greene?

  Okay, I could, I learned in journalism how to write under a deadline, under pressure, how to make it dramatic, how to make the opening sentence exciting enough to make you read on further. Trying to write novels taught me about creating stories, which is a huge part of my writing. Working in Hollywood, I learned how to research, which is a huge element. And then the theatrical element, making things dramatic, also story. Okay, all of that time, slowly by slowly, brick by brick, I had developed real level skill. So when it came time to write the 48 Laws of Power, I could do it. I had learned all this discipline. I had learned how to write under a deadline.

• 14:15Robert Greene?

  I learned how to make things entertaining, the whole, the whole bag. Okay, and so the world opened up for me. Prior to that time, I was miserable, really, really was. I mean, I had good moments too. You're young, you're always happy when you're young. But a lot of times I was miserable. And I didn't know why, but I was acquiring skills, not even aware of it. And so the reason I write that is when you develop that skill, when you're serious about it, because I was very serious about writing.

• 14:48Robert Greene?

  You change your brain. You rewire your brain. It's like, and this is a remarkable power of the human brain that people don't realize. Something I'm also writing in my new book. This, this one writer, his name is Schwartz, I believe. He's a UCLA neuroscientist. He wanted to help people who had OCD, right? Obsessive, you know, compulsive disorder. And usually it's drugs and it's talking therapy. He wanted to find out something more effective. And he found that through certain strategies that he developed,

• 15:29Robert Greene?

  that they could use in their life, that they would get over their disorder. And he, the point isn't what the strategies were. The point was he did brain scans. And through the strategies that he gave them to do, which I can't remember right now, the brain scans show that they changed the brain. And his point was through thinking, through developing skills, you literally change matter, you change your brain. So something non-material like thoughts can literally change material things like the wiring of your brain. You learn skills, you're changing your brain, you're changing the matter of your brain. Things are connecting that weren't connected before.

• 16:09Robert Greene?

  And slowly, if you do it, if you're serious enough, a point will be reached like it was reached in my life, where either you will start a business or someone will ask you to do something like write a book or make a film. And the world will open up for you and you'll be able to do it because you have that, you've laid the ground, you've, you've laid the soil, everything is there, it's rich. And now something great, amazing will sprout up out of it. When you have no talents, you have no skill, life is a series of endless confusion. You, you hit this road, you go here, then something else, you go here, then you go here. You end up in a circle and you don't know where the hell you are. When you've got skills, zoom, you know where to go. It's not, it's not zoom, it's more like. But your head is somewhere.

• 16:53Chris Williamson?

  Meander.

• 16:53Robert Greene?

  Yeah, it's not.

• 16:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 16:56Robert Greene?

  I don't know for for being filmed, but so, yeah. So that's that's my answer to your question.

• 17:03Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it interesting that the accumulation of skills period at the time can be a little bit like being in the trenches. You have no promise of glory. You don't know if this is even going to work.

• 17:15Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 17:16Chris Williamson?

  You have no idea whether this is is worth it. And you don't even have the context of how the journalism with the novel, with the Hollywood, with the interpersonal skills, with the guy that you meet in Italy, with the so on, Germany, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's only in retrospect that you get to piece this entire arc together. And I think it's one of the reasons why reserving judgment on whether or not the situation you were in right now is good or bad is probably a a pretty good idea because you just don't know what's around the corner that you've been preparing for that you didn't even know existed.

• 17:53Robert Greene?

  Yes, but there are parameters to it. It's not like you're totally, it's total mystery in the moment. So, um, you know, going back to what bothers me about philosophy, we're so caught up in things that are rationable, rational, things that can be put into numbers, quantifiable data, you know, big data, AI, et cetera, et cetera.

• 18:20Robert Greene?

  But the human consciousness is more subtle than that, is more fine grained. No numbers can actually approximate what human consciousness is capable of. And what we have sometimes is we have an intuition about things in the moment. So maybe in retrospect, I'm creating a story that didn't really exist back then. But at the same time, I kind of knew of the future. I kind of knew that this would happen. I had a feeling of fate. It was always there. It's weird. I know it sounds woo woo. I'm sorry to say, but it's

• 19:00Robert Greene?

  very real. And I've studied millions of successful, famous people, and a lot of them report the same thing. Sometimes you don't realize it, but your body and your brain has a sense of even the future and of where you're headed, but you're not totally aware of it. So I knew that I wanted to be a writer. So if people don't know that they want to be a writer, they don't know, they want to go into engineering, they'll never make those little connections that I was able to make. And having that sense that you want to be a writer, that you want to make films, that you want to start a particular

• 19:39Robert Greene?

  kind of business, you're interested in technology, creates a framework in your brain that kind of changes how you make decisions. You're not totally conscious of it, but not everything in life, you're totally conscious of. Things are operating below the level. So it's something, it's the chapter I'm writing right now about my sublime book. There is something in you that is guiding you towards certain things, right? Guided you towards podcasting. I don't know your life. I don't know your biography before then, but something inched you towards that. What is that? It's interesting to find out. It's not all just chaos and random is what I'm trying to say.

• 20:22Chris Williamson?

  That's beautiful. And I agree. Do not be the court cynic. The ability to express wonder and amazement and seem like you mean it is a rare and dying talent, but one still greatly valued.

• 20:37Robert Greene?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I can, I can recall my own childhood, for instance, growing up here in Los Angeles. And

• 20:52Robert Greene?

  I had a very vivid imagination, which I'm not unusual like that most children do. But I was always inventing games. I loved inventing sports games. Games where you rolled dice and you created this whole world. I created war games, all these different things that my imagination was doing. And then when I'd take walks and stuff, I was like seeing, I was thinking about the world. I was going through all kinds of fantasies. I was dreaming about the future, okay? I was innocent, like children are supposed to be.

• 21:32Robert Greene?

  And in their innocence, I was opening up to the world and I was experiencing the world as it is. Because the reality is, we are born into a very, very strange and mysterious and wondrous world. Which is the subject of my book, right? You take everything for granted, but you don't realize that to be alive, the odds against you being Chris Williamson are absolutely astronomical. To be around with all this technology where we were as humans 20,000 years ago? Something you can't even begin to fathom. And when you're a child, you ask these questions. You know, Albert Einstein said the same thing, you know?

• 22:13Robert Greene?

  He said genius is able to keep questioning to be that child. To keep wondering about things, right? So your ability to wonder, to ask questions, to not feel like you know all the answers, isn't a beautiful thing? It's not just to make you more intelligent, it also makes you happier. So cynics start from a place where they know everything. The world is just so rotten. It's just, everybody is out for power. People accuse me of saying that, but it's not true. Everyone's out for power, everyone's got like an ulterior motive. It's all just about these, you know, you're really not interested in other people, Robert. You're interested in making money, right?

• 22:57Robert Greene?

  Cynicism reduces everything to this one level. It has nothing to do with reality, because reality is much richer and weirder and more mysterious than that. So when you're a cynic, you're missing the beauty of life. But also, people don't like to be around cynics. The court cynic is, to get back to your question. Because, um, yeah, people like maybe some sarcasm. I don't deny that. But people want to feel that sense of innocence. They want to feel excited. They want to feel enthusiastic. And if you're a Debbie Downer, if everything is like, oh, that's what's really going on here. You're not really blah, blah, blah.

• 23:39Robert Greene?

  People will be like, yeah, they'll be laughing at your jokes, but eventually they're going to push you aside because they don't want to hear that kind of stuff.

• 23:46Chris Williamson?

  Play and enthusiasm.

• 23:48Robert Greene?

  Huh?

• 23:48Chris Williamson?

  Play and enthusiasm again.

• 23:50Robert Greene?

  We're coming back to play.

• 23:51Chris Williamson?

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• 24:33Chris Williamson?

  Right now, you can get $350 off the Pod4 Ultra by going to the link in the description below or heading to eightsleep.com/moderndwism and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's E I G H T sleep.com/moderndwism and MODERNWISDOM at checkout. Yeah, cultivating that sense, similar to another tweet you had, which I loved. The stupidest people are always the ones who think they have the right answers.

• 25:00Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 25:02Robert Greene?

  Yeah, so getting back to my studies of the ancient world, which is main part of me.

• 25:12Robert Greene?

  One thing that always excited me was this concept, the ancient Greeks, that more harm is caused in this world by stupid incompetent people than by evil people. Right? And what they, there's a word in Greek called phronesis, which is a form of wisdom, to use your title here. But it's a form of practical wisdom to be able to get things done, to navigate through life, navigate through people, to be balanced and get things done. Okay? So what makes people stupid? And right now, we have a lot of stupid people in this world.

• 25:56Robert Greene?

  There always have been stupid people. Because there are more people on the planet, exponentially, there are more stupid people on the planet. What makes people stupid, and I'm sorry, I'm just going to tell it like it is, is there certainty that they have all the answers? This is what's going on with our government. This is what's wrong, you know, with this or that. This is what people should be like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you're narrowing your focus to this little tiny little rail, something that you heard from somebody else. It's not even your own stupid idea. You've absorbed it on the internet, whatever. And you're going down on this kind of monorail path. Meanwhile, the world is all around you and you're just going like zoom like that because you're so certain you have the answer.

• 26:38Robert Greene?

  And when you have leaders, this is to get back to the Greek thing. When you have leaders who are so certain, they enter a country into a war that they haven't been thought out of. Because, and so the paradigm in ancient culture was the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta.

• 26:59Robert Greene?

  The war that ended up kind of being the end of Athenian democracy and of their golden era. Right? And it was the idea and Thucydides, one of the greatest writers who ever lived, wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War, living at that time. He was saying that people, the leaders thought, oh, this will be so easy. And think of all the great things when we go and we take Sicily and we conquer that, the whole world will end, the spartan will be destroyed, right? It wasn't thought through. They were so certain of the answer that they didn't think of the parameters. Right? They didn't think really on a grand strategic level.

• 27:40Robert Greene?

  So people who are certain of things are very stupid. And when they have power, they're very, very dangerous. I'm not saying evil people aren't dangerous, but incompetent, stupid people who were so certain, who haven't thought things through are just as dangerous as evil people.

• 27:57Chris Williamson?

  I think there's far more stupid people than there are evil people as well.

• 28:00Robert Greene?

  Probably, probably, yeah.

• 28:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Chris Williamson?

  It's very interesting to think about the, uh, where the Venn diagram intersects for people who are always cynical and people who always have the right answer or who always know.

• 28:17Robert Greene?

  They go hand in hand.

• 28:18Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 28:18Robert Greene?

  Totally overlap, yeah.

• 28:20Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yeah.

• 28:22Robert Greene?

  So, um, one of your fellow countrymen from 200 years ago, exactly 200 years ago, a gentleman named John Keats, a poet, came up with a concept called negative capability. And negative capability, he wanted to answer the question was, why is Shakespeare another one of your countrymen? Why was Shakespeare so brilliant? Well, his characters were so realistic because he made them as real human beings. And what he could do was they weren't stick figures. Shakespeare could think of a person and entertain two things about them at the same time. They could be both evil, but also have a strain of goodness inside of them. They were complex. Human beings are complex.

• 29:07Robert Greene?

  And negative capability. Is the essence of being of being creative. It means you can hold two thoughts in your head at the same time. Two thoughts that apparently contradict each other, but you can entertain them and not grasp at one or the other.

• 29:22Chris Williamson?

  Not pass judgment immediately.

• 29:23Robert Greene?

  Yeah. So you're kind of able to deal with ambiguity and you're able to say, life isn't that, it isn't that, it's kind of both at the same time. That is creativity, that is real thinking. You know, I mean, I could go on and on about my ideas about live ideas and dead ideas, but this is real live thinking.

• 29:44Chris Williamson?

  I have been playing with an idea that's basically the same thing, just repurposed with a silly meme from me, which is a cognitive superposition. So like how in physics.

• 29:54Robert Greene?

  Physics.

• 29:55Chris Williamson?

  Yes. And then when you decide you collapse the superposition down. Um, but that I try to, you know, think in superpositions as much as possible.

• 30:04Robert Greene?

  There's a very good book written about like that. It's not perfect. It's a pretty good book called The Possibility Principle. You can look that up. He tries to apply those kinds of ideas in physics to day to day life and psychology. It is interesting. It's worth looking at.

• 30:19Chris Williamson?

  So much depends on reputation. Reputation is the cornerstone of power. Through reputation alone, you can intimidate and win. Once it slips, however, you are vulnerable and will be attacked on all sides. Never let others define it for you.

• 30:37Robert Greene?

  Yeah. Um, you know, so when I wrote the forty eight laws of power, I tried to. I've somebody through my whole life loves playing games. I don't mean that in the abstracts. It's, I mean, literally like chess, backgammon, sports, poker, whatever. And, um, I like the cleanness of a game. It's like you do this and you can win, et cetera. But there's also a psychological element in it. So particularly when you're playing poker and you're bluffing and you're, and I was always fascinated by this. It's a game of chance. You don't really know what cards you're going to get, but that fellow over there,

• 31:21Robert Greene?

  he's been bluffing. He bluffed before, I'm sure he did. He's going to do it again. Right? So the psychology starts entering into the picture in a game of chance. It's not a game, there's skill, certainly skill involved, but a lot of it's chance. And because he bluffed before and he's got that look in his eye, it could be a woman, I don't mean to generalize. All right, I'm gonna fold, okay? So you don't realize that so much of the game of power has nothing to do with data and you being a better person at something. A lot of it is pure psychology and intimidating people and winning before you even enter into a battle. So if you have a reputation, you carry it with you.

• 32:06Robert Greene?

  And the reputation doesn't have to be real. Personally, I don't know how valid this is. I have this reputation now of being this Machiavellian character, you know? And so if Robert's five minutes late for a meeting, it means he's playing a game, even though it's probably just the traffic. But my reputation now kind of put people a little bit on their heels, you know? Where it's not necessarily true about me, but it kind of goes ahead of me and it makes it influences. Reputation precedes you. Yeah. And so it's an extra form of power. So the idea you have to, the overall arching idea to pull this out of the specific is power is pure psychology.

• 32:51Robert Greene?

  Pure psychology. And what I mean by that is the CEO of a company, he doesn't get there based on, it's not like baseball where his balls and star soccer. Sorry, you probably don't understand. I'm a Ranger, I'm a Texas Rangers fan, I'll have you know. Oh, okay, all right. Well, it's not like baseball where it's balls, you know, you hit, you have a good batting average or OPS. All right, you're, you're, you're, you're gonna get in the lineup, they're gonna bat you in the, in the cleanup spot. Okay? Life isn't like that. So the way somebody rises to CEO, and I know because I was on the board of directors of a publicly traded company,

• 33:32Robert Greene?

  is not about metrics, it's not about things that they've actually done, it's about psychology, right? People rise to positions of power because they know how to play the game and they know how to play the game of psychology. They know how to appear, they know how to play the optics, they know how to intimidate, they know how to say less than necessary. They know all the psychological little gambits. And that's why I wrote the Forty Eight Laws of Power. It's kind of like. This is the game of life, the game of power. The rules are a little bit nebulous. But here's how you play. You play by mastering these little psychological bits. One of them is your reputation.

• 34:12Chris Williamson?

  I'm fascinated by reputation and credibility, especially given what I do now. But my previous life, I was a club promoter. I ran.

• 34:20Robert Greene?

  You were what?

• 34:21Chris Williamson?

  Club promoter. I ran nightclubs for a very long time.

• 34:24Robert Greene?

  Clip promoter. What do we call that here?

• 34:27Chris Williamson?

  Club, it would still be, it would just be a promoter it's called. So marketing for nightclubs, essentially. The guy stood on the front door with the guest list and the bands for VIP and all of the hot girls' names. And then after a while, we owned a group of guys that did that. And then we owned a group of guys that owned a group. And you start to build up this company. And um

• 34:49Chris Williamson?

  in that

• 34:51Chris Williamson?

  every single nightclub that you've ever been to is the same thing. It's people getting drunk in a room to music. It'll never be anything else. You can dress this one up pink and give out inflatable flamingos on the door. Or this one's really cheap, or this one's on a Wednesday and it's sort of naughty that you shouldn't be going out on a Wednesday. Dress it up however you want. It's people getting drunk in a room to music. That's all it's ever going to be. And what I realized from doing that was the power of reputation. Now, this isn't the reputation of a person. It's the reputation of a brand. But if your company is known for always putting on good parties, then you get to benefit from that. And.

• 35:27Robert Greene?

  And what happens is when you have a reputation for good, putting on good parties.

• 35:31Chris Williamson?

  People come.

• 35:31Robert Greene?

  More people come. So you have better parties.

• 35:34Chris Williamson?

  Yep, correct. So this is the, this sort of odd, and this is the really important point. Never let others define it for you. And when you are vulnerable, you will be attacked on all sides. Because as it's going up, it, it does, it precedes you. It continues to do work for you exponentially, growing and growing. But when you're starting to go down, even your best work will sometimes be derogated to be worse than it is. So you have done something that is good, but because of your reputation, you're a liar, you're a phony, you're a grifter, you're a shill, you're a fake.

• 36:04Robert Greene?

  That's right.

• 36:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, credibility is the one thing that you should never sell because you cannot buy it back. There is no return policy on your credibility.

• 36:13Robert Greene?

  And, and people are so, getting back to the word stupid, I mean.

• 36:17Chris Williamson?

  It's a theme today.

• 36:18Robert Greene?

  They post things on social media.

• 36:22Robert Greene?

  When they're young and not realizing that five years later and they're trying to get a job at a law firm, they're like, you know, sure, they're doing incredibly ridiculous things on Instagram and that's part of their reputation. Everything you do is reflected through the social world, right? Nothing is in isolation. People are continually judging you. So you have to be aware, you have to think before you post, you have to think, how are people going to take this? If I say this stupid rude thing that comes right out of me because I don't control my tongue, it's going to ruin my, one false step will ruin your reputation.

• 37:04Chris Williamson?

  There's a British MP who is receiving, on the receiving end of a tweet from 2009, which has come back around.

• 37:12Robert Greene?

  I think I've read about this.

• 37:13Chris Williamson?

  Like, get these Estonian retards out of my house right now.

• 37:17Robert Greene?

  So I don't mean to laugh, but it's terrible. Estonians are very smart people.

• 37:23Chris Williamson?

  Get these Estonian retards out of my house right now, or I want these, whatever. And she's had to do this groveling apology.

• 37:30Robert Greene?

  Oh, God.

• 37:31Chris Williamson?

  But I mean, you know, when was Twitter, when did Twitter start? Probably 2008 or so. This is, you know, this is early, this is the equivalent of the Big Bang, you know, this is the, whatever it is, microwave cosmic background of tweets. And, um, yeah, I just love that. I really, I really think that the reputation point can't be overstated. And, you know, I've got to see in this industry as well, both whether it's authors, podcasters, YouTube, there are some people who have traded reputation and credibility for money or for short-term trades that didn't make sense and they've not ended up coming off in one form or another. They've tried to cash it in.

• 38:11Robert Greene?

  Like, give me an example. Like going to Spotify and...

• 38:15Chris Williamson?

  No, no, not that.

• 38:17Robert Greene?

  Do not name names.

• 38:18Chris Williamson?

  No, not that.

• 38:20Chris Williamson?

  Interestingly, with Joe's move to Spotify, that was something that he got an awful lot of credibility for. And that's one of the interesting things. Had it have been with a different platform that didn't carry as much weight, gravitas, they have their own reputation, it becomes multiplicative as opposed to sort of subtractive.

• 38:36Robert Greene?

  Yeah, I know, of course.

• 38:37Chris Williamson?

  Like, getting a Nike sponsorship is cool, hooray for you, that's not you selling out. But getting a sponsorship with some brand that everybody thinks is really lame, that is selling out, you're obviously only doing it for the cash. But, you know, there's a ton of guys that have held political positions, or have swayed with the wind, just blown with the way, whatever it goes this way, whenever it goes that way. And the interesting thing is, even if they've made a ton of money from it, even if it's been advantageous in one domain, I actually think that if you gave them the opportunity, they would give all of it back and some, to be able to regain their reputation. I think they would give anything they could to be back in the cool kids club. And there's no return policy on credibility.

• 39:21Robert Greene?

  Well, the other thing about reputation and credibility is it has to be consistent. So you have to like, it's like a brand, you're known for something, you're known for being strong, you're known for being self-confident, you're known for being Machiavellian, or whatever it is.

• 39:38Chris Williamson?

  Funny, or lighthearted, or, yep.

• 39:40Robert Greene?

  And there's a certain kind of, you know, shape to it. And if you're like, all over the map, and you're going over here, your reputation is about that, it's about this, it looks weak, it makes it look like, because we want to feel like, people judge on appearances, they don't judge on the reality of who you are, they don't know who I am or who you are, they judge on what they see and what they, how we appear. And if those appearance, they want to have something consistent that they can grab on to, they want to say something simple, that guy is funny, and that's who he is, you know, this guy is that, they want a very simple formula. And if you can't be consistent, if you're all over the place...

• 40:23Robert Greene?

  If you're changing your ideas, you're conservative, then you're liberal, blah, blah. And you're trying to to tack with each wind to get power. Yeah, you'll get some power that way, but it'll make you look weasely. It'll make you look distrustful and people won't like that. And your reputation will be one of somebody who has no soul, who has no core. So reputation also has to have a consistency, a core to it, a soul that binds it all together.

• 40:48Chris Williamson?

  Especially if it seems like it's being done for a contrived reason. You know, I think people are fine with people changing their mind as long as show me you're working. Explain to me how you got from that position to this one. Don't do it beyond the sort of tolerance level that we all have of this is a little bit too much. I've updated, I used to be pro this, now I'm anti that.

• 41:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I I really do think an awful lot about the value of of reputation. And um.

• 41:20Chris Williamson?

  In another way, it's very, never let anybody else define it for you. Um, you know, allowing that sort of vacuum to to seep in loses you your power over your reputation. And it allows other people to derogate it.

• 41:32Robert Greene?

  On the other hand, if you're very Machiavellian person, poke holes in your enemy's reputation and you will destroy them. Bring up things that are inconsistent with the reputation and you will have ruin be like a popping a balloon. It'll just go like that, you know. And I talk about how in that chapter, how P T Barnum played that game to ruin other people's reputation. And make people wonder, is he really like that? I guess not, because I just saw this fact that contradicts it. So I'm giving you some very evil Machiavellian advice out there if you have enemies.

• 42:08Chris Williamson?

  One of the meanest things, I'm not a mean person, I don't like being mean.

• 42:12Robert Greene?

  Yeah, sure.

• 42:13Chris Williamson?

  It's true, but. I spent a thousand nights on the front door of nightclubs with drunk people. So you need a few defence mechanisms. And what you realise, especially when people have had alcohol, is that people fall into only a small number of buckets and behaviour is usually pretty predictable. And one of the things that we realised as kind of a script that we could run when somebody was getting a little bit mouthy, remembering that we're flanked by big British gorillas. But you're right, you've got door staff all around you. Not you. No, not me. I was, I was the guy that, I was the dude in the skinny jeans with the clipboard. I had the, you know, six foot six dudes with leather gloves on either side of me. They were, give me your ID, et cetera, et cetera. And, um, one of the things that used to work, it was so mean, but it worked so well.

• 42:56Chris Williamson?

  If somebody started, they'd been ejected or they hadn't been allowed into the club or something had happened, we'd always say, mate, sorry, you need to get away from me. Your breath stinks.

• 43:07Chris Williamson?

  It's completely unfalsifiable because unless someone's going to come over and smell it, they can't say, no, it doesn't. And it just immediately enters this person into this, you just watch the colour drain from them. So yeah, I, oddly, breath, apparently halitosis is reputation as well. Or, or just body odor. Yep. That's great. Any smell, it's just, it's so. I'm going to remember that. It's really good. It's really, your breath stinks, I need to just, can you give me a little bit of room? Oh, it's just used to pull people apart. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Element. For the last three years now, I have started my morning every single day with Element. It is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't.

• 43:48Chris Williamson?

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• 44:33Chris Williamson?

  That's drinklmnt.com.

• 44:38Chris Williamson?

  Modern wisdom. Always stick to what makes you weird, odd, strange, different. That's your source of power, which is similar to occupy your niche. Embrace your strangeness, identify what makes you different, fuse those things together and become an anomaly.

• 44:54Robert Greene?

  Yeah, well, um.

• 44:58Robert Greene?

  You know, uh.

• 45:01Robert Greene?

  In this world, if, if you're replaceable, you will be replaced. Right? So if in your job, you're in your twenties and you're doing something that other people could do. By the time you become 28, they can hire somebody 24 when they hired you, but for less money, they will do that right away. It's a brutal world. So if you're replaceable, you will be replaced. So the only defense about that against that is to be irreplaceable in this world. And the good news is that you are at, at your core irreplaceable. There is something strange and weird about you. Once again, I hate to say it, but it's a chapter that I'm writing right now for my,

• 45:45Robert Greene?

  my sublime book. Okay. And so, and I explain in mastery where that comes from biologically, your DNA, how you are marked as a unique individual at birth. The combination of variance in your chromosomes. It's mathematically impossible for it to ever be replicated. Yes, the variations are marginal. The differences aren't great between you and me, but those little differences are the differences between me liking this kind of hip hop music and you liking a different kind of hip hop music. Right? It creates your inclinations. It creates your tastes.

• 46:24Robert Greene?

  And so what the game of life is involves is knowing your uniqueness, is knowing who you are, is knowing what makes you weird and what makes you odd. Okay? And the problem is, is that we're social animals and the pressure.

• 46:42Robert Greene?

  Continually honest is to fit into a group, is to be like other people, to have their ideas, to have their values, to have their tastes, to dress like them. Okay. And that happens when you're young, you're in your adolescence. We all go through that phase. I went through that phase. But if you keep on that track when you're in your twenties and on, which is happening a lot today through social media, you're going to lose that sense of what makes you odd and different. Hmm. I compare it to a voice. When you're very young, that little voice in you is going, Robert, you should be a writer. Chris, you should be a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't know what it is, right? It's telling you something.

• 47:27Robert Greene?

  And as you get older, you don't hear it anymore because you're hearing all the other voice, hearing your voices of your parents, the teachers, the culture around you, your peers, your friends telling you this is what's cool. This is what's not cool. And that little voice comes completely drowned out. And so you don't know who you are anymore and you're afraid, particularly young people today. I mean, maybe it's always been that way. They're so afraid of being different. They're so afraid of being odd. But look at all the powerful people in this world. Look at your Elon Musks. Look at your celebrities in, in entertainment, in business and politics. They're one of a kind. They, they have like, you, I hate that word, but it's like a brand.

• 48:12Robert Greene?

  They're different. They stand out for something that's truly different. You know, even Albert Einstein, there's nobody else like Einstein. There's nobody like Da Vinci. Okay. That's where your power lies. And you'll go, oh, but Robert, those are people that were brilliant, that were talented. I'm not like that. I don't have that. Well, bullshit. You do have that. It's just you, you're, it's you're not, you're forgetting about it. You don't want to put the effort into it. I talked in mastery of a woman named Temple Grandin, who was born with severe, severe autism. And she was able to find her way to become a very brilliant professor, academic, writer and about animals, animal behavior and about autism itself.

• 48:58Robert Greene?

  She found her way to it. When she couldn't, when she was three or four, she couldn't even speak any language. She was gonna be hospitalized. You have that potential. It's just you're not putting the effort into it. You were lazy. You wanna fit into the group. You wanna conform because it's easy. But your oddness, what makes you weird, what makes you different? That little strange quirk in how you wanna dress yourself? That little strange quirk in your musical tastes? That little quirk in the food that you like to eat? That is who you are. Those are signs from deep within, from your core, from your soul. There's, this is who you are. And if you lose that, not only are you not gonna be successful in life,

• 49:44Robert Greene?

  you will also lose yourself and you will be miserable, you'll be unhappy, you'll be unfeeling. You'll be alienated from who you are. And you can get away with that when you're young because you're happy, you look good. You've got energy, things are going right. You get into your thirties and you're like everybody else. You don't know who you are and you don't know what you like anymore. You're just following the trends. You start to get depressed and you start going down this, this rabbit hole and things can turn really ugly. So you need a bit of courage in life. You need to go, okay, I am weird. I am strange. You know, lean into it. So, um, when I had the forty-eight laws of power,

• 50:28Robert Greene?

  when it first, when I first wrote the book, um, without it being published yet, it was a very strange looking book and it reflects my own strangeness. Things on the margins, stories, everything broken up, images, quotes here and there. It's kind of how my brain is, a hodgepodge, kind of a mess really. And the publishers... They bought the book, but then they came back to us and they said, Robert, can you kind of maybe make this more like other books? Can you get rid of all those sections and everything? And I said, no, take it or leave it. This is the book as it is. It's odd, it's strange. They didn't like that because if it doesn't fit into all the other books that have had successful,

• 51:13Robert Greene?

  it's too big of a risk. If this movie isn't like the movies that were made last year, who knows who will go see it? People are so conservative. But because it was odd, it stood out and it was successful. If I had succumbed and I compromised and made it more like other books, I wouldn't be here talking to you. So sometimes you need a little bit of cojones, you need a little bit of courage. You need to stand up and say, I'm okay being different.

• 51:40Chris Williamson?

  It's fascinating that lots of people, maybe most people want to be extraordinary in some way, but also don't want to stand out in a way that allows them to be mocked. But you know, the latter is the price of the former. You can't behave the way that everybody else does and expect to not get the results that everybody else gets. It's like, I think about regressing to a mean that doesn't exist.

• 52:05Chris Williamson?

  You know, that everybody is idiosyncratic and unusual in their own way. And we're all imagining this sort of odd 50th percentile avatar that is the most acceptable. But when we think about why we love the people that we love, we don't love them for how average they are. No one's ever said, you know what it is? I'm just besotted with how predictable all of her opinions are. No one's ever said that. We love people for their eccentricities. And a friend, George, has the idea of non-fungible people, like non-fungible tokens, that it's irreplaceable. There is nobody else like them.

• 52:41Robert Greene?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 52:41Chris Williamson?

  If you think about your favorite memories from your favorite people, it's not from the things that are easily replaceable. It's from the fact that they were just obsessed with football. And when the football was on the TV, you could talk to them and they wouldn't even turn to you. Or it's the fact that they hated violence or they loved dogs. Every dog walked into the room and they would be gone, they would be away. That's what we love people for. And my favorite strange person from history, Salvador Dali. And I would take it one step further. You said you kind of have this, it's advantageous and also psychologically healthy for you to embrace who you are fully. I actually think in some ways it's a Maybe I would go as far as to say that it is our duty to humanity. I think it's

• 53:24Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 53:24Chris Williamson?

  Our duty to embrace the things that only you can do.

• 53:29Robert Greene?

  Yeah, well, in in nature, the diversity of species in a habitat make it vital, make it alive, make it sustainable. And that comes from mutations in the genetic code. Some insect has a mutation and therefore a whole new species, a whole new thing splinters off from that and it creates variety. Well, in human culture is like a habitat in a way. So you're marked with uniqueness by your genetic code. Insects don't really have individuality. We have individuality and they are like mutations. And so your mutation, your difference, you being Chris, is for a purpose.

• 54:15Robert Greene?

  You're marked that way because by mining your uniqueness, your weirdness, your oddness, your little quirky tastes, you're going to contribute something new to the culture. And in contributing something new to the culture, you enrich it and you keep it turning around and round and round. Cultures in the past that die on the vine don't have any variety. You know, you can look at like the Soviet Union at its most, you know, decadent or when it was really at its worst phase, like in seventies, eighties, there's no change, there's no variety. Early on, there was all sorts of weird, different voices. They ended up getting imprisoned and murdered. Okay, but a culture has to have variety. It has to have a diversity of voices.

• 54:59Chris Williamson?

  Like a gene pool or an immune system.

• 55:01Robert Greene?

  Yeah. And so you, by being odd, you're contributing to that. You're contributing to the culture. By not doing that, you're not contributing at all. And it's a real waste of what nature gave you.

• 55:14Chris Williamson?

  I always think again about Dali. I spent quite a bit of time researching him and think as brilliant as they were, Michelangelo didn't do Dali, Da Vinci didn't do Dali. In fact, there's that famous job application that Da Vinci sends, I think, to the King of Italy and Da Vinci is sort of listing all of the different things that he can do. I can make machines for war and a trebuchet and a blah, blah, blah. The final paragraph, he writes the sentence, also, I can paint. I always think about also, I can paint. What is the also I can paint that I don't see in myself? What are the things that my friends really value? Perfect example, the guy that I was talking about earlier on, George, I

• 55:55Chris Williamson?

  am, I've been learning a little bit about myself and I discovered over the last year that I'm a people pleaser in some regard. And I was lamenting this to him over Christmas as we were driving to go and get food. And I'd sort of brought up something I'd done with him, which was he sort of being overly cautious that I would have done something that would have annoyed him or stepped on his toes in some manner. And he said, I just want to sort of stop you there because I'm aware that to you, you've been able to frame that as people pleasing in this thing that is malignant and you want to get rid of. But to me, that's you thinking about me first, which is actually one of the things that makes

• 56:35Chris Williamson?

  me love you as a friend. So be very careful sort of labeling areas, creating an unnecessary value judgment. And I think getting and getting another perspective and that that really gave me pause. I just thought, yeah, I'm so agreeable with all of these things and I hate disappointing people and I think that other people's emotional states are my responsibility and so on and so forth. And then I bring it up to a friend and he says, yeah, that's why I love you. Yeah. And I was, it was interesting. Yeah, I mean,

• 57:04Robert Greene?

  It's good to have a little bit of control over something. So if in certain situations, sometimes it's good to be able to not be so pleasing because I'm a people pleaser too. It's my nature. So I understand that. And sometimes you have the feeling that it's not coming from the right place.

• 57:23Chris Williamson?

  Correct. You're not choosing to, you're obligated to by your nature.

• 57:26Robert Greene?

  And you're feeling a little bit of fear involved in it.

• 57:29Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 57:29Robert Greene?

  Fear of displeasing, a fear of rejection, a fear of being different. And it probably goes back to childhood and to my parents. We probably have similar parental dynamics. So, but what's good about what you're saying is, and I completely agree, and I wrote about this, I think in human nature, is that you have this quality. You can't really control it. It's who you are. You know, it's either genetic or it comes from the first couple of years with your mother or father. So make it work for you. Find the way that it's a strength and see it as a strength and use it and don't have

• 58:10Robert Greene?

  second thoughts about it. Use it for power, right? And don't be so conflicted about it. It's all how you look at it. And there's a reason why you're a people pleaser. And you can, if you weren't a people pleaser, you wouldn't be doing podcasting. To be this asshole, I would never have agreed to be on your podcast, right? So it's just that in moments you wish you could control it a little bit.

• 58:34Chris Williamson?

  It's kind of like the grass is greener thing that we were talking about before we got started. You know, this assumption that the thing you don't have is more valuable than the one that you do, or that things would be fixed if only you could have that. But what else comes along for the ride? You know, if you got rid of your people pleasing nature, what are the little parasites that your lack of people pleasingness would also have attached to it? Are you sure? You really sure that that's the thing that you want?

• 59:00Robert Greene?

  Exactly.

• 59:02Robert Greene?

  Yeah, well, that's where it comes down to knowing yourself and knowing what makes you different and knowing these are things you can't really change. So my wanting to be a writer or Tiger Woods wanting to be a golfer when he's like two years old, there's probably some genetic component in it. And maybe there's some early bonding, but there's probably genetic component to it. You can't control it. It's who you are. And maybe that you can't control it is a good thing. And maybe it's there for a reason. And maybe if you wanted to do something

• 59:43Robert Greene?

  else, it wouldn't work out. So my knowing that I wanted to be a writer instead of, you know, a businessman or a lawyer like my parents wanted to be, probably saved my life, to be honest with you. So knowing what makes you different is kind of going to guide you past these, these dangerous moments in life to and make you want to do to change who you are, because you feel pressure, social pressure to change who you are.

• 1:00:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, to regress to this imaginary mean. Yeah, two elements, I think of me that are genetically predisposed, or at least very deeply embedded. The first one is I've always liked to talk and ask questions. And as a child, I always used to get in trouble in school, because unfortunately, my voice appears to carry further than everybody else's. So even though the naughty kids would be genuinely being naughty poking other people with fucking protractors or something, I would be the one that was heard. Even I wasn't misbehaving as much, I would be the one that was heard. You're being nosey, you know, children should be seen and not heard. You stop being so no, why are you

• 1:00:58Chris Williamson?

  asking all of these questions? Would be one of them. And the other one is solitude. I'm an only child. I spent a lot of time listening to audiobooks in my room, playing with toys on my own, throwing a ball off the wall and seeing if I could kick it off that wall and then catching it. Hours, hours and hours and hours. I didn't have anybody else, didn't have anybody else to play with. And you think, well, God, you know, this, the, the things that you're punished for when you're a child are the things that you think are malignant. When you're a child, you're often rewarded for if you can just find a way to alchemize them as an adult. So I'm sure that your ability to sit and read or go to a cabin or write in your room and you, nobody's come and gone and you haven't noticed.

• 1:01:38Chris Williamson?

  And you think, well, my solitude as a child was maybe something that I lamented or, or that I saw as a weakness or something like that. And yet it's a superpower when I become an adult, if I can find the way to channel it. And the same thing for the, the question asking or the listening to audiobooks, you know, what's the 2024 internet version of an audiobook? It's a podcast. It's what I'm doing right now.

• 1:01:58Robert Greene?

  Uh huh. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, you know, it really just comes down to, um, being aware of, of who you are, what makes you different and being comfortable with it. And so you're going to have moments where you're not comfortable with it and you want to conform and you want to be like other people. And, you know, you went through that and I went through that in adolescence in particular, all through the twenties. You make some changes to things because you think it's cool. But you keep coming back. You keep coming back to being alone.

• 1:02:39Robert Greene?

  You keep coming back to doing, throwing the ball against the wall in some metaphor.

• 1:02:44Chris Williamson?

  No, no, no, no, no. I'm, I kid you not. The way that I like to relax now in between sessions of work, I get a tennis ball and throw it against a wall. It's the most bizarre thing.

• 1:02:54Robert Greene?

  I, I had the same thing, but I, uh, cause I'm American, mine was baseball. And I, I had a ball and I'd throw it against the garage door. And I would play all these different games with my glove on and I would catch it and, and I would imitate the crowd cheering me and I had, this was a homerun, this was setter. You know, and if I had, if I could do it today, I still would. So I understand that. But. You come back to these things because they're so strong in you.

• 1:03:21Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:03:21Robert Greene?

  And you can't help it and they give you relief and they give you comfort and they know who you are. And so it all comes down to, do you come back to these things? Or do you change because of the pressures of other people? And what is the difference? Why are some people like that and some people are not? And that's the million dollar question.

• 1:03:41Chris Williamson?

  I think it's swimming upstream or swimming downstream is working against or working with your nature.

• 1:03:46Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:46Chris Williamson?

  And trying to find a way to make it work for you as opposed to trying to change it so that you can find a way to make it work.

• 1:03:52Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Chris Williamson?

  Makes a lot of sense. Sean Puri, who does My First Million, very, very smart guy. I remember one of the first conversations I ever had with him on Zoom. He had a sort of small leather black basketball in his hand. And we were just talking and he was a little bit further back in his desk and he was tossing it like this and rolling it along the desk. And sort of you throw it in the air like, what? We're on his, so it wasn't like we were writing anything. It was a casual conversation between friends. I said, what, what are you doing? He says, I grew up playing basketball. I'm happiest with a ball in my hand.

• 1:04:23Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:24Chris Williamson?

  And I thought, holy fuck, that's me. Every time that I go to the park, if there's a tennis ball, that's now mine for the rest of it. And I'll bounce it in my hands until we finish up. And then I'll, you know, the tennis ball charity pool that it goes back, it goes back into the park. And I thought, holy fuck. So I came up with a name for that, which is a weirdness role model. And it's somebody who does a thing that sort of breaks the ceiling on what you thought was acceptable behavior. You've seen this guy do a thing and you go, oh my God, like, maybe I could have a ball on my desk. Maybe I could have a tennis ball or a cricket ball on my desk. And that means that I can, because I've seen this guy do it and it's, it's a weirdo role model or a weirdness role model.

• 1:05:01Robert Greene?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I think we all need that in our life.

• 1:05:06Robert Greene?

  People who are different, I remember in, in high school.

• 1:05:10Robert Greene?

  I had an English teacher who kind of changed the course of my life. And he was very weird. He was very different. His way of thinking was different and how he talked about writing and literature was very odd. And I, other students hated him and I thought he was just fantastic. So it's kind of interesting what you said, that was a role model. I could see. And he was just a high school teacher, so it wasn't like a career path for him, but I could see that having that kind of quality was a good quality and I was attracted to it.

• 1:05:44Chris Williamson?

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• 1:06:29Chris Williamson?

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• 1:07:01Robert Greene?

  Yeah, um, well, I like to think of uh who the the human animal is. I like to take this out of the little specific and go into the meta area here. And um what it meant to be human. We're a very creative species, right? We have language, we have consciousness. We have immense powers. Those powers developed under the pressures of necessity, of having to get things done, of having to survive in a very brutal, ruthless world, where a leopard could pop out tomorrow and eat me.

• 1:07:43Robert Greene?

  Where there were dangers all around, where there was food was scarce. And under the pressure, we had to think, we had to be creative, we had to be inventive, we had to be strategic. The human brain evolved under immense amounts of pressure. Okay, that's how the brain works. And I almost like to think of it in terms of barometric pressure. So in your brain, when you're feeling that barometric pressure, it's like, I gotta get this done. Or I'm gonna fail and I'm not, this project won't happen and people will laugh at me. You work like a fiend. Energy, your whole body responds, right? Your blood gets moving. You accomplish things

• 1:08:28Robert Greene?

  that would normally take you months, you do it in days because you feel that pressure. You take away that pressure and you don't know what to do. And I've got like three years, I could do this or that. Another, you just wander around, you're lost, you have no energy, you have no focus. You know, you're maybe playing video games, maybe you're watching porn, you're kind of distracting yourself in the moment. But it's

• 1:08:54Robert Greene?

  but your energy is just being dissipated in like 20 different directions. So your brain needs pressure, it needs constant pressure. And stress and pressure is not a bad thing. We have this thing where we feel like stress is bad. It's bad for you, bad. You know, you need to relax, man, you need to chill. Stress will kill you. No, being bored will kill you. Not having anything to do will kill you is much more dangerous than stress. Yes, you can work too hard. You can work where there's no soul involved. I work like a fiend because I'm writing a book. And it's a very hard process for me. And I'm working far too much, but man, I love it. It's fantastic, right?

• 1:09:39Robert Greene?

  And it could kill me, the stress could kill me, gave me a stroke. But I'd rather die under the stress than be bored and have nothing to do. Okay, so feeling that pressure. It makes your eyes pop open, it makes your brain focus, it makes you alert. It makes you want to live, it makes everything seem exciting to you. You've got to get things done. So I'm writing a book right now. I could take 12 years to write it. But that wouldn't be very, I wouldn't feel good about it. So I give myself deadlines. I gave myself a deadline of finishing this chapter by July 31st. Here it's August 7th, I haven't finished it. But now I'm working double hard to try and finish it in time. Because if I didn't have a deadline, I would take forever. Manana, manana, manana.

• 1:10:24Robert Greene?

  Yeah. So. Create pressure for yourself is a good thing, you know? I gave a talk recently. In which I talked about Thomas Edison, the great inventor. And Thomas Edison was a young man, he's in his early 30s. He'd invented the phonograph and a new wave for the telegraph. But he wasn't, hadn't really had any major inventions. He had started Menlo Park, his industrial park for doing research. We're talking about the 1870s, I believe.

• 1:10:55Robert Greene?

  But he did something very interesting and very strange. Um, I don't know how conscious it was, but he gave an interview with a newspaper. And he said, I've been working on creating the incandescent light bulb. Now, before that, there was the arc light, which was a light that was really powerful. It used far too much energy, you couldn't use it in the house. The way houses were lit was with gas light. Gas light was dangerous, it was explosive. And it, and the companies in America that, that had a monopoly on it. So the prices, it was very corrupt business. So he goes, I'm working on the incandescent light bulb. The reporters went, that's interesting.

• 1:11:38Robert Greene?

  Yeah, I'm close to, I'm close to getting, I'm close to nailing it. Wow. And he goes, yeah, and in five years, I'm going to light the entire city of New York with the incandescent light, with electric light. Whoa, they go crazy. They published this article and the stock prices of gas start going down, down, down, down, down. Money flows into his coffers because the cheapness of a light bulb, the profits are just insane. So money is pouring in. He goes back to his Menlo Park, where he develops ideas and his employees who are reading about this go, Mr. Edison,

• 1:12:18Robert Greene?

  what are you thinking? You had just tinkered with the incandescent light bulb. We're not even near inventing it. We're not even near creating it. And the idea of lighting New York, it's, what were you thinking? What were you smoking? The equivalent thereof. And he goes, well, gentlemen, I said it to this major newspaper. We better get to work. We better make it happen. What happened with all the money that came in, he could now hire the people to do it. But the pressure of getting that done in five years made him do it in five years. It was a monumental work of persistence and discipline and detail. But he had a deadline. He didn't want his reputation. He didn't want to disappoint the public. He

• 1:13:01Robert Greene?

  had to get it done in five years and he did get it done in five years. So he created his own pressure by using the publicity angle.

• 1:13:08Chris Williamson?

  And people are going to expect it. When's it happening? Has it happened yet? You said it was going to have happened by now?

• 1:13:12Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think Naval Ravikant talks about how when he was at one of the first companies he ever worked for in Silicon Valley, and he started telling people, I'm going to start my own startup. And six months later, he was still there and everyone said, I thought you were starting your own startup. And that was the push out of the door for him. He couldn't bear the expectation that he'd put not on himself, only on himself, but also from other people too. So I suppose our need to

• 1:13:48Chris Williamson?

  Be socially consistent can be bad when it's maybe derogating your uniqueness, your idiosyncrasies and your weirdness. But if you can funnel it to motivate you to go forward.

• 1:13:59Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:59Chris Williamson?

  It's the reason why, you know, I don't think that I would be particularly successful.

• 1:14:05Chris Williamson?

  Being a journalist, for instance, despite the fact that I do three episodes a week for, it's been four years that we've done that. It's been six years the show's been going. But this is because my need to not look silly in front of other humans and how much I am enthused by the presence of others, even whilst being quite introverted, means that by doing a podcast, I've never not shown up. I've never canceled because of something that hasn't been, you know, justifiable reason. So I don't want to look silly in front of the person I'm sat opposite. If it was me and a blank piece of paper, God, the motivation to do that, you know, every three times a week, I need to come up with a new column of a thousand words.

• 1:14:46Chris Williamson?

  That'd be, whereas for the person who wants to just write on their own and come up with headlines and stuff, I sit down with a person again, have a conversation with them and ask them questions. And that's not my sort of thing. So yeah, being able to use the social mores to kind of pull you to where you want to be, to understand again, your own fallibility and insecurities and attach those like a south and a north magnet, sort of use that to pull you along.

• 1:15:14Robert Greene?

  Yeah, I always like to riff on what you're saying. I always like to challenge myself. So I never, each book that I do, I'm now on my eighth book, is different from the other one. Right. And my books take several years to write. They're not like, I can't put them out in six months. Each one is different from the last one. And I'm taking a risk because my readers are expecting Robert to write about strategy and power. Now he's writing about mastery.

• 1:15:44Chris Williamson?

  Seduction.

• 1:15:45Robert Greene?

  Seduction, yeah. Now he's writing about the sublime. But the hell, what's his problem? Okay, to challenge.

• 1:15:52Robert Greene?

  And the challenge is good because it gets my energy levels going. But if I took a challenge that was too difficult, so there's a level here. So I could go here and write another forty eight laws of power would be like this. It would be kind of easy. I could go here and write a book on how to build a skyscraper out of tents. I don't know, whatever. Okay, I could never write it. I can never, it's too big of a challenge. Or, you know, the history of all human ideas. Okay, that would be the equivalent there. Okay, no, I kind of go here. It's a challenge. It's not here, boring forty eight laws of power, part two.

• 1:16:34Robert Greene?

  It's not history of world ideas, four thousand pages. It's here. It's a little bit above me. It's going to get my energy going, but it's not impossible. And that's the, that's the game of life. So if Edison had said, I'm going to light the entire world in five years. No way. New York was, was a pretty hefty lift.

• 1:16:55Chris Williamson?

  I'm going to light New York in fifty years also.

• 1:16:59Robert Greene?

  Yeah, exactly. Which is probably more realistic. You know, it was a challenge. It was a pretty big challenge, but it was not an impossible one.

• 1:17:09Chris Williamson?

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• 1:17:53Chris Williamson?

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• 1:18:16Robert Greene?

  Yeah, the proverbial one-hit wonders.

• 1:18:22Robert Greene?

  You know, what happens is, you know, there was, there was a real syndrome in hip hop. And, you know, I talked a lot about that with 50. Where you come from, you come from the hood. And you've never had any kind of money.

• 1:18:41Robert Greene?

  And then overnight.

• 1:18:44Robert Greene?

  You've got, you know, six figures, seven figures. You've got women like, you know, left, right, center coming to you. You've got all this power and attention and celebrity. And it goes to your head. And you start partying. And you start thinking, like, well.

• 1:19:07Robert Greene?

  Okay, I better put out another album. But you get a little bit conservative now because.

• 1:19:14Robert Greene?

  You want to keep going and you think that you've got a formula for it, right? And then your second album doesn't do nearly as well. So, but if that first album didn't do well. And you were smart about it. It would have taught you a valuable lesson about, about the music industry. So 50.

• 1:19:34Robert Greene?

  He, he did his first album called Power of the Dollar. And I, I, I have a kind of a bootleg copy of it he gave me. It's, it's absolutely fantastic. You, you, it's available now pretty much on the internet. It's absolutely fantastic, but. Right before it was to be launched, he got shot. And the producers dropped him on the prod, dropped his, the album, they didn't release it. And they dropped him from Columbia Records. It's too dangerous. It was a drug beef and. We can't have this guy touring if he's going to be, there's going to be violence. And so he was thinking, you know, the failure, instead of it had been a big hit, would have gone to his head, he'd, you know, who knows what would have happened to him.

• 1:20:19Robert Greene?

  Here he was, like, completely back to square zero, in fact, worse. He had nothing. He did all this work and he had this price on his head and, and nobody would come near him. And he wanted to learn what the lesson was from this, from his, this failure. And it wasn't really, it wasn't his fault, although it sort of was because he, he had been a crack dealer. And it was like a previous beef that had, he hadn't really resolved. So, you know, it was maybe partially his fault. Anyway, um, he goes, "Well, the lesson is, I can't be dependent on a record label. They're too conservative, they're too cautious.

• 1:21:03Robert Greene?

  I'm somebody who lives on the edge. My music plays on the fact that I was a crack dealer, that I live dangerously, that I'm the real thing, that I'm not a fake gangster, I'm the real thing, okay? So what am I gonna do? I'm not gonna put out a record, I'm gonna do mixtapes. And I'm gonna sell them on the streets of, of Queens, and then Brooklyn, and then Manhattan. You know, just these little tapes, these singles. And I'm gonna be as violent, his first one that he puts out is called Fuck You. He's saying fuck you to everybody who ever doubted me, fuck you who tried to kill me, fuck you to the record labels, pardon my language, et cetera." So, he learned from that. He learned not to take success for granted.

• 1:21:47Robert Greene?

  And he built on that. And so he's not a one-hit wonder. So sometimes, success, when you're in your twenties, is the worst thing that can happen to you. Cause you have no discipline, you have no perspective. You think it's just gonna keep going the way it is, you're not aware of all the dangers out there. You don't have life experience enough to realize how things could turn on you very quickly. If I had been given the chance to write the Forty Eight Laws of Power when I was in my twenties, and I had success, it would have ruined me. I probably wouldn't have had success. Why?

• 1:22:23Robert Greene?

  Because I wasn't ready for it. Look, Chris, I had had so much failure. Until I was essentially thirty nine years old, pushing forty.

• 1:22:35Robert Greene?

  That I had perspective, that I know what it's like to to fail. And so when I had success. Wasn't like, wow, I'm the greatest thing that ever happened. I can just live off this forever. My next book's gonna be fantastic. No, I have a little voice in me and says, Robert. You failed so many times, you're probably gonna fail again. Right? You've seen so many people in Hollywood who who started off hot and and and bombed. I had experience to know that I can't take this for granted. I have to be careful. I have to be strategic. I have to build on it and not let the success go to my head. And it didn't go to my head. When I wrote The Art of Seduction, I was so worried that book would fail.

• 1:23:20Robert Greene?

  I was certain it was gonna fail. I felt that way about every single book I've ever written. You know, I still feel that way. You know, I this this next book.

• 1:23:31Chris Williamson?

  Certain.

• 1:23:32Robert Greene?

  It's it's it's doomed to failure. I better make it the best book of all. So. If if you you can get drunk on your success, you know, and. Don't get high on your own supply was the the phrase that fifty would always say. So.

• 1:23:50Robert Greene?

  You know, you want to keep your feet on the ground. You want to know that failure is nipping at your buds at your next. Your next podcast, Chris, could be the worst one of your life. You'll say the wrong thing and suddenly everything will start cratering. That puts keeps you on the edge and you don't take your success for granted.

• 1:24:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I'm. Very glad. When I look back at the period that when we first spoke, up until the period, the second time that we spoke. So we did about, it was about episode seventy eight. It was about episode sort of three hundred and fifty, something like that. And. That period, if you look at the. Graph of plays and followers and that money is like that. It's just flat. The graph is just totally flat between the two. There's a little upward tilt and it's the law of anything which becomes exponential. That as you start to zoom out more, it makes the very beginning look even more paltry. And it's that up to there, but that's only been the last two years. Oh, two and a half years.

• 1:24:49Chris Williamson?

  It's there. And I, you know, I tell the story that there was days in 2018. Uh, the year that we launched the show where we'd been going for maybe 10 episodes, 20 episodes, something. You know, we're halfway through the first year and there was days where we do no plays. I'm still releasing weekly episodes and there was days where there would be no one, no plays. You know, my mum listens to every episode and I've got friends. I'm still in the guilt ridden, you should listen to my new thing thing. And zero plays, none, nothing. I'm like, that's insane. And, uh, I, I'm glad, I'm glad.

• 1:25:28Chris Williamson?

  It makes me, you know, every time that I get to find a random garage in the middle of LA and think, oh, we get to light this and make it look like a cinema movie, like a Hollywood movie in Hollywood. How cool is that? And it's framed up against something which is smaller. There's a documentary that I'd really love to get you to watch. It's called How I'm Feeling Now by Lewis Capaldi. So he's a Scottish singer. You would recognize a ton of his songs. And, um, basically it charts this challenge that he has. Scottish dude, a very non-typical, like a, like a chubby young guy. He's not like a heartthrob or anything, uh, with Scottish accent as well. And very self-deprecating, which is, which is charming. He's charming in that way.

• 1:26:12Chris Williamson?

  But he writes these songs when he's 17, he's playing them in working men's pubs all around Scotland. And then he gets picked up by Universal Records and he releases this album and it goes beyond Interstellar. Just the biggest billions and billions of streams. And he does a world stadium tour and Glastonbury main stage, everything, everything, everything, everything. And then he has to do a second one. He has to do it again. And the stress of

• 1:26:37Robert Greene?

  Another album?

• 1:26:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. He has to do a second album. And this is an interesting twist, I think, on it's a curse to have everything go right on your first attempt, because he is someone that I think did learn the right lessons from it going right on his first attempt, that he shouldn't take things for granted, that maybe that was a fluke, that he does still need to work hard, some of the lessons that failure would have taught you. But he just has this unbelievable pressure, because the bar, he has got, he's taken the chairlift to the top of Everest.

• 1:27:09Robert Greene?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:10Chris Williamson?

  And he goes, well, what, how, how am I supposed to top?

• 1:27:15Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:16Chris Williamson?

  That, you know, it's the classic thing as well, I suppose, that you have a lifetime to write your first book and then, well, I mean, most people, maybe two years for you, six years to write your, to write your second. You've got this wealth, this big well to dig into material for the first one. And then it's like, congratulations, now do it again.

• 1:27:37Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:37Chris Williamson?

  You go, again?

• 1:27:39Robert Greene?

  Right.

• 1:27:41Chris Williamson?

  I, I just, I just did.

• 1:27:44Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, but again. And he, I think he'd love the documentary. It's very

• 1:27:50Robert Greene?

  I will.

• 1:27:51Chris Williamson?

  Very heartwarming.

• 1:27:52Robert Greene?

  What's the name of it again?

• 1:27:53Chris Williamson?

  How I'm Feeling Now on Netflix.

• 1:27:56Robert Greene?

  Yeah. Well, um, a lot of it is, comes to your own, your own level of wisdom about, do you have some perspective? So it's possible that somebody could have success in their twenties and they would be able to handle it. But it's probably because they came, they had a family background or something behind, some kind of experience behind it. Because by nature, we are always thinking that we're better than we are. Our self opinion, we're really, I'm probably like this, I think I'm like this, right? Some people is like this. The moment you have success, you

• 1:28:42Robert Greene?

  think you have the golden touch. People start, a lot of the worst thing that happens to you is the people that surround you. And they go, My God, you're a genius. You know, you're absolutely brilliant. And then you want to bounce ideas off them. They go, that's fantastic. Go ahead, go, go on. Whereas you want them to say, it's shit. That's terrible. You have the worst idea. But now you're followed, you're surrounded by sycophants and yes people.

• 1:29:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:08Robert Greene?

  And they're telling you how great you are. You see that with a lot of celebrities.

• 1:29:13Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether that was the role for the court cynic in some ways to offset the sycophants.

• 1:29:17Robert Greene?

  Are you talking about the courts or the court jester?

• 1:29:19Chris Williamson?

  I suppose so, but I don't know whether the court cynic is just like a colloquial term or whether there was a genuine role. But I could imagine that it would be useful. I know the jester was there to be the only one that could mock the king with impunity, basically. But if I was a king in the medieval ages, if I was a noble king, a smart one, I would have employed a court cynic. And I've employed the court cynic to only come up with counterpositions. But even if the entire room, the whole council thought that it was fantastic, tell me how this is wrong.

• 1:29:53Robert Greene?

  That's part of my consulting with business people that I've had over the years. I, that's the role that I play.

• 1:30:02Chris Williamson?

  Bring Robert in, he'll tell us it's shit.

• 1:30:03Robert Greene?

  But they don't listen to me. That's, that's the main lesson. You know, I tell people, think of all the things that are going to go wrong with your plan. Let's game this out. This could go wrong. This could go wrong. The public might react this way. A competitor might be already anticipating the same thing will come out. Let's game this out and let's make sure that the launch of your product is foolproof. Okay. So we think of all the things that can go wrong. All right, then let's alter the strategy. Let's go here a little more instead of going here. They never listen to me.

• 1:30:39Chris Williamson?

  Have you tried telling them it's going to go right? And then they might, and then they might say, oh, God, Robert said it was going to go right. We definitely need to change something.

• 1:30:46Robert Greene?

  You mean reverse psychology? I might need to try that.

• 1:30:50Chris Williamson?

  That might be the, that might be the next one. Okay, this, I really like this one. Being attacked is a sign that you were important enough to be a target. You should relish the attention and the chance to prove yourself.

• 1:31:04Robert Greene?

  Yeah, um, well, you know, you want,

• 1:31:09Robert Greene?

  if, if everything is easy in life, um, if everyone loves what you're gonna do, and you have no enemies, you have no opposition, nothing to resist, you're just gonna be mush. You're not gonna amount to anything. You're not gonna be able to push yourself. You're not gonna be able to change, evolve. Muhammad Ali said, "If I didn't have Joe Frazier around, I would not have become the great boxer that I am." I mean, he would have been a great boxer anyway, but a, a nemesis like Joe Frazier put me on a much higher level.

• 1:31:43Chris Williamson?

  Is there not a line in Batman where the Joker says, "I complete you"? If he doesn't, there should be. But it's, it seems like the sort of thing that he, Gladys said in that, but it, it is the truth. Though, without the Joker, what's the Batman?

• 1:31:58Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:58Chris Williamson?

  And I, I, I love the idea you should relish the chance to prove yourself.

• 1:32:05Chris Williamson?

  Pressure is a privilege in that way.

• 1:32:08Robert Greene?

  Yeah. Um, you know, I,

• 1:32:13Robert Greene?

  I, uh, when I was doing the book with 50 Cent, The 50th Law,

• 1:32:21Robert Greene?

  I was very kind of timid. And I decided, um, to make it really a book about 50. Because I was kind of like, he's the celebrity, who am I? So I wrote a very 50 centric version of the book about his business, et cetera. And nobody liked it. In fact, the publisher canceled the project. And here I was, my reputation was on the line. It could have been a humiliating blow to me. Okay, and so, um, another publisher comes in and he says, "Robert, you need to change the idea. You mean to make it more about you?

• 1:33:02Robert Greene?

  And not less about him, but more about you and your style and your ideas."

• 1:33:06Chris Williamson?

  The intersection.

• 1:33:07Robert Greene?

  Yeah. So, oh shit, I spent a lot of time working on this. Because if you do that, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll publish the book. I go, well, my reputation, I'll be, I'll be ruined if I don't, okay? And so, "All right, I'll do it." He goes, "Okay, the bad news is you have eight months to do that."

• 1:33:31Robert Greene?

  I worked like a fiend. Now, I didn't have an enemy here, so, but the challenge, it was like I was in a boxing ring with Joe Frazier, right? I had to raise my game. It was the first time in my writing career, writing books, that I was facing failure, real failure. If I didn't succeed in that book, fifty would have thought something was wrong. And we'd announced the publication, people, you know, I would have maybe recovered, but it would have been a major blow. And I had to make that book happen. And it brought out the best in me. It made me do things that I had never done before. It built up my self-confidence.

• 1:34:11Robert Greene?

  So it's the equivalent of somebody doubting you, because there were a lot of doubters around. And a lot of people thinking, well, Robert's kind of finished you. We thought he was this, but he's not really. And so having that kind of pressure, like we talked about deadlines and having people doubt you, it can crush you, but it can also make you a lot stronger. It can make you a better fighter.

• 1:34:34Chris Williamson?

  Was there ever a forty-ninth law?

• 1:34:39Chris Williamson?

  You went straight from forty-eight to fifty.

• 1:34:41Robert Greene?

  Well, he's fifty cent.

• 1:34:43Chris Williamson?

  No, I wondered if you'd ever thought, get a forty-ninth in, and then it means that I can...

• 1:34:48Robert Greene?

  No, there is no forty-ninth. The forty-ninth law is there is no such thing as a forty-ninth.

• 1:34:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you don't talk about the forty-ninth law. That's what it is.

• 1:34:56Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:56Chris Williamson?

  Use absence to increase respect. The more you are seen and heard from, the more common you appear. If you're already established in a group, temporary withdrawal from it will make you more talked about, even more admired. You must learn when to leave. Cultivate value through scarcity.

• 1:35:13Robert Greene?

  Yeah, I mean, um, the problem that a lot of people have with my books and in life is they're too black and white. So they'll say things like, well, Robert, if I'm absent on social media, nobody will have heard of me. If I don't write this book, if I don't put it on another album, if I don't produce this product, how can I do that? You know, what are you talking about? Absence like that? That's very dangerous in the world. Well, I don't talk about just absence. I say it's a dance between absence and presence. Right? So it's not like you disappear so that you are a little bit less present. You're able to disappear for a while and you make people wonder about you.

• 1:35:58Robert Greene?

  Napoleon said, if I show up at the theater every night in Paris, in my little emperor's box, people start taking me for granted. If I show up every week, they'll be going, that's interesting, but he's coming every week. If I show up once a month, it's like an event. Oh, my God, he came here. When is he coming next? Whoa, it's all this attention. That's the dynamic of absence and presence. If you come every two or three days, nah. If you come every week, nah. Come a month, yeah. If you come every year, people will forget about you, won't have any power. You have to know exactly the dynamic.

• 1:36:36Chris Williamson?

  Isn't it interesting that this is reflected neurologically with intermittent schedule reward, a variable schedule reward to, which is exactly what social media and slot machines and gambling, it's what they all work on.

• 1:36:47Robert Greene?

  Yeah. Well, what is that?

• 1:36:49Chris Williamson?

  So if you press a button, perfect example of this.

• 1:36:56Chris Williamson?

  Mice get to push a button.

• 1:36:58Robert Greene?

  You're into mice again. You like their mice.

• 1:37:00Chris Williamson?

  I need, I need to use, I need to use something as a legitimate example here. So mice get to push a button.

• 1:37:07Chris Williamson?

  If it's every five times or 10 times or 20 times, they get a piece of food, they will push the button, but then they will get sick. If it's intermittent, they don't know when it's going to come, they will push the button way more aggressively. And it's that the dopamine we get when we're not ready for it. When we're not ready to see Napoleon up in his emperor's box overlooking the ballet.

• 1:37:28Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:29Chris Williamson?

  That's real. And ever since the second episode that we did, it's always in my mind. And I always think about your face whenever I think of this particular sentence. Aloofness is alluring. I always think about that. And my housemate's dad has a similar idea, which is be good and be gone. And it's how he, how he shows up at parties. It's a good justification for the Irish goodbye, I think as well, but be good and be gone. Oh, where was Robert? He was, yeah, oh, he must have something.

• 1:37:58Robert Greene?

  They call that an Irish goodbye.

• 1:37:59Chris Williamson?

  Leaving without saying goodbye to everybody. Yeah.

• 1:38:01Robert Greene?

  Oh, that's the opposite of a French goodbye.

• 1:38:05Chris Williamson?

  It takes forever or you never leave?

• 1:38:06Robert Greene?

  Everyone's like kissing each other and talking to each other at the door and they never leave.

• 1:38:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:12Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:15Robert Greene?

  I mean, so people think that nowadays, so like in a dating situation, this is a common example. If nowadays, because things are different, you have a date. And if you're like texting her the next day or that evening, it's kind of like, hmm, something is, I don't know about this guy. It's a little bit desperate. I'm not so sure about it. If you text the next day, it's a little bit, if you wait, take two days, but not three. She's starting to think about you. She's starting to go, um, this guy's interesting. Maybe he doesn't like me or maybe he does. I'm not sure.

• 1:38:58Robert Greene?

  And she starts thinking about you. She starts fantasizing about you. Then the second day, your name pops up. It has power. It has effect. So if you're inundating somebody, you don't give them room to fantasize. You don't give them room to think about you. And then they, they start wanting to stay taking you for granted kind of thing, you know? So people say, yeah, but in the world, like celebrities will tell me, I had this one female rapper, so I'm not gonna say her name. Who would say, yeah, but Robert and social media, I can't disappear. And I go, yes, you can. I mean, it was before the social media era, but Michael Jackson would disappear for several years before a record. Beyonce disappeared for like two years in between records, didn't reproduce anything. Then when she came out with a record, whoa, what a splash.

• 1:39:44Robert Greene?

  You can still get away with it now. You just have to know the sweet spot. You have to know that maybe in social media, it's, you can't disappear for a year or even a month. But if you do it for a week, people will notice it and they start thinking about you. So you have to kind of know how to play the game.

• 1:40:02Chris Williamson?

  I think there's a momentum build as well that perhaps is everybody need a price that you need to pay in the beginning. So there's a.

• 1:40:13Chris Williamson?

  Technique in erg rowing. So when you sit on one of those indoor rower things, concept two, and what people will do in order to get the speed up more easily, they'll do little pulls and then they'll do really long pulls. And that's when they start to get their power in. And I often think about that when it comes to people beginning anything. It's like, hey, if you haven't started your podcast, you don't get to be absent in the beginning.

• 1:40:41Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:41Chris Williamson?

  Like, that's just called not starting your podcast, right? You know, delaying the publishing of your first book is not you being aloof and alluring. It's you just not getting the work done.

• 1:40:51Robert Greene?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:51Chris Williamson?

  So there is a price, there is momentum inertia that needs to be accumulated. And then you break expectations. So this uh

• 1:41:00Chris Williamson?

  shows that I don't have the can to show you. I launched a product last year. And we had fades, colored fades, orange to orange or yellow to orange, yellow to green. And then the third can that we released was just pure white. And I wanted to break the pattern. I wanted to set expectations and then very quickly to break them.

• 1:41:21Robert Greene?

  Right.

• 1:41:21Chris Williamson?

  And I thought about it kind of the same from a branding perspective there too. I think I have a convention. I think I know what to expect. Oh, that's a little bit interesting. That's different to what I would have thought.

• 1:41:30Robert Greene?

  Yeah. Yeah, but you need to have created the setup for that.

• 1:41:35Chris Williamson?

  Precisely correct.

• 1:41:35Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:36Chris Williamson?

  Precisely correct. Breaking a convention before you've set a convention is just being sporadic and sort of scattergunning everywhere. Whereas it would be like if you'd released an article that was one of the laws from 48 Laws. And then the next book was different or it was on a different topic. And you go, well, you haven't haven't established enough of a style. I haven't got the expectation. You can't break an expectation that I don't yet have. And you know, this is

• 1:42:07Chris Williamson?

  Surprise as well.

• 1:42:08Robert Greene?

  Well, that's why I say power is a game of psychology. So you have to master these very subtle and invisible rules of psychology. And so knowing, some people know it by instinct. They have a marketing sense that I need to break up expectations. If everything is always the same, there's no surprise. Okay, but you have to understand, you have to think about the, how people are going to respond. You have to understand the psychology involved. That surprise gets attention. That's what's not as expected stands out and people are excited. They're interested in it. Okay.

• 1:42:45Robert Greene?

  And also creating viral effects is another, is like the flip side of this using absence and creating absence. So I talk about this in the art of seduction. If you pass by a restaurant where there's just one couple sitting there eating and go, and the menu looks good and the reviews are good, you go, ah, I don't think we want to go there. You go a few blocks further and there's this restaurant. People are packed, they're sitting there, they're all laughing, they're drinking. All right, let's go in there. The food could be crap. But because you see other people doing it, you're drawn into it.

• 1:43:22Chris Williamson?

  Well, you are speaking my language as an ex club promoter. So we would do everything, we would, uh, one of the strategies we used to have was outside of a nightclub. Your queue, the length of your queue is the determinant of how busy it is inside. But the length of your queue is determined by how wide the queue is, not by how many people are in the queue. So we kept a two wide queue. So we would squeeze the barriers in and these people would be going two by two like Noah's ark. But we would be able to create a queue that was a hundred yards long.

• 1:43:51Robert Greene?

  Well, you see, now these are things you just knew instinctively. I don't know if some people maybe don't get that kind of thing, but that's the kind of psychology you want to play on. I talked about how in P T Barnum, he was the master of this.

• 1:44:05Robert Greene?

  He had the museum of oddities in Manhattan, right? And the whole game was to get people inside because once they were inside, there were all these odd, you know, really weird shit in there that was so strange and interesting. These curiosities, these deformed, you know, fetuses and animals. How do you get them inside? So we hired. The worst possible band he could find to play really terrible music right near his museum. And they would be playing so loud that people would run inside the museum to escape this music.

• 1:44:43Robert Greene?

  That's the kind of thinking, you know.

• 1:44:45Chris Williamson?

  Machiavellian Q organizing. Actually, speaking of that, I mentioned, I told you I'm going to Florence next week. I'll be able to see Niccolo's tomb.

• 1:44:56Robert Greene?

  Tomb, it's in Santa Croce.

• 1:44:58Chris Williamson?

  I love Santa Croce.

• 1:45:01Chris Williamson?

  What is a lesson from Machiavelli that you think most people gloss over? Or something, sort of a hidden gem that you wish had more exposure, that more people knew?

• 1:45:18Robert Greene?

  There's so much there, you're gonna tease my adult brain here. But the idea that's the most powerful idea that he has, and he has a lot of powerful ideas, is that people rise to a position, an elevated position, based on a certain quality that they have, that makes them stand out. Let's say for Chris Williamson, it's your pleasing ability, your bonhomie, your simpatico, whatever the language you want to use, makes you blah blah blah.

• 1:45:59Robert Greene?

  But a point is reached where the times change, things are different. Because life is always changing. And that thing that you relied on, that strength that you have, is no longer so in demand. It's not so interesting, the culture has moved on. But you don't know how to move on because you're addicted to the same way of doing things. So when he was saying, what would be the perfect prince? To talk about the prince, like in his book, The Prince? Would be a man, or a woman, but this time it would be a man, who could continually adapt to circumstances, who just didn't have one form of power. He compared fortune is constantly shifting.

• 1:46:43Robert Greene?

  You have to be able to shift with fortune and ride it and keep riding it upward and upward. That would be like a superhuman being who could always adapt to circumstances, not change who they are, not suddenly be a confident person who's now really timid, but to use your confidence in a different manner when the time asks for something different. And so, in my consulting, most of the people who fail in life,

• 1:47:12Robert Greene?

  that I'm working with, have reached a level of power, a position, but they can't go any further. They hit a ceiling because they don't know how to adapt. They only have one way of responding to circumstances. So, we think of Machiavelli as this kind of rigid thinker with this sort of aggressive ideas. He's actually a very fluid thinker, and it's all about being fluid. One of his main metaphors is water, because, you know, there was a river in Florence, and he was sort of obsessed with currents, kind of like in a Sansu and Asian way, your ability to flow and change and adapt to circumstances. And I wish people understood that and weren't so rigid about everything that they do.

• 1:47:58Robert Greene?

  They weren't so rigid in how they read the 48 Laws of Power. They weren't so rigid in their politics. They weren't so rigid in their, in their creative life.

• 1:48:07Chris Williamson?

  It's finding play again in, in some way, I suppose.

• 1:48:14Chris Williamson?

  It's come up a lot over the last year or so for me. I think that there is, not for me, I'm not doing it, someone, maybe not you either, you're busy, should write a book about play, about reintroducing a sense of play, what it does from a sort of psychological health standpoint.

• 1:48:28Robert Greene?

  One of the greatest books ever written has already been written on that subject. It's a book called Homo Ludens by Dutchman Johan Housencha, written in like the 30s, I think.

• 1:48:41Robert Greene?

  Could ever write a better book. He talks about the history of play and he goes deeply, deeply into the psychology of it. It's one of the best books you can ever read.

• 1:48:50Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:48:51Robert Greene?

  Homo, meaning man, ludens is playing. So it's

• 1:48:54Chris Williamson?

  Playing man.

• 1:48:55Robert Greene?

  Yeah. So, you know, there's Homo sapiens, thinking about our brain. He's saying we're Homo ludens. We're the playing animal. It's absolutely brilliant book. I could never top that.

• 1:49:07Chris Williamson?

  Thinking about Machiavelli, I had Dr. Alexander Lee on the podcast. So he wrote a phenomenal biography of Machiavelli. He came on the show, he's historian.

• 1:49:19Chris Williamson?

  What was it called? I can't remember the name. I can't remember the name of his book. Anyway.

• 1:49:28Chris Williamson?

  He told me the story. I didn't realize that Machiavelli was such a tearaway, sort of little lethario here and there.

• 1:49:38Robert Greene?

  Oh, he was total seducer.

• 1:49:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but he told me this story about him where he'd been on the road and he, I can't remember the term that he used, talks about something like a, like a, a nuptial longing or something. It's this sort of very proper British, he's horny. Machiavelli's horny and he gets taken in.

• 1:49:58Robert Greene?

  And he is, you would say.

• 1:49:59Chris Williamson?

  He gets taken into this brothel and there's a woman that he sleeps with, but the light is off. And he says that he decides to get the candle and bring it closer to her and he sees this

• 1:50:09Robert Greene?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:10Chris Williamson?

  Hideous woman and he throws up, he's sort of, he's traumatized by this thing that he's done. And yet to hear Dr. Lee, the very sort of proper British historian, telling me this story about.

• 1:50:23Robert Greene?

  The thing is, what really gets my goat, what I can't stand is people use the word Machiavellian and they have this image of him as this evil, conniving person, you know, and they have the, the, the image of him and how he actually looks. He's like a rat and he's, he was incredibly warm, humane, human being, who was really very funny and witty. He was a total, a complete Renaissance man. So first of all, he understood politics on an extremely high level.

• 1:50:54Robert Greene?

  Absolutely brilliant. He was not a great diplomat, he was a low level diplomat, he had a very good sense of psychology. He was a great seducer of women, we know that, okay? He also wrote a play, he wrote plays and he wrote poetry. People don't realize that. He wrote the most scandalous play I think ever written, making fun of the Catholic Church, where there are rituals taking place in a church that are incredibly impious, you know, sacrilegious. It's called Madrigole, it's a hilarious play, trust me. It was performed in the Vatican, it was so good at the time, in the 1520s. People don't realize that this

• 1:51:38Robert Greene?

  man was a true Renaissance man. He was a poet, he was a playwright, he was a lover of women, he was a great strategist, you know. So, yeah, I have lots of anecdotes about him too as well in that sense, but yeah.

• 1:51:55Chris Williamson?

  He's fantastic. I really, I really enjoyed learning about the man. You know, it's odd that the ideas precede a person.

• 1:52:04Robert Greene?

  My favorite book about Machiavelli is called Machiavelli's Virtue by Harvey Mansfield. It's a fantastic book, I highly recommend it. One of the few academics that I actually really like. He understands Machiavelli, whereas most people are not on the level of him. And he writes about how relevant Machiavelli is to the world today, and how he foresaw everything going on in business and politics. Please, if you're interested in Machiavelli, Machiavelli's Virtue, it's one of my favorite books.

• 1:52:35Chris Williamson?

  One of the groups, I suppose, I think, that's looking for a lot of advice at the moment is young men feeling a little lost, like their place in the world is...

• 1:52:45Chris Williamson?

  So just uncertain. They don't, they don't really know or have the direction. What advice would you have for young men that are feeling a little lost in the modern world?

• 1:52:57Robert Greene?

  Well, you have to, um, you have to be comfortable with, with who you are and with your masculinity. So the word masculine has now got like this negative connotation around it, which is terrible because you're a young man. It's not every young man, some men don't feel this way. But a lot of young men, I remember myself, you've got this testosterone that's roaring through you. You're competitive, you're ambitious, you have goals, you have this energy, you want to assert yourself. But it's bad, it's bad, it's bad. You're not supposed to be like that, you know? And so, and the culture isn't about, there's no virtue in masculinity.

• 1:53:42Robert Greene?

  Okay, there is such a thing as toxic masculinity, most definitely. But there are virtues in, in being masculine and have to be redefined. And we have to have icons and role models for that. And so when I was growing up, oh God, I sound like, I hated that when people said that when I was a kid. So I know you're gonna hate me, but I'll say that anyway, I can't help it because it's true. When I was growing up, you know, I watched like a lot of westerns. You know, it was the, the, the silent hero kind of thing, the Gary Cooper thing. But my idea of masculinity growing up was a man who was in control of himself,

• 1:54:25Robert Greene?

  who wasn't mean, wasn't pushing people around, who was decent, who treated women well. So treating women well is a masculine virtue, is a good thing. It comes from a position of strength. You're not insecure about your masculinity. You don't have to prove that you're a man by demeaning women, by pushing them around, by calling them whores and bitches. So you'd have to take the Andrew Tate path in life. You can respect women and respecting them is a sign of your strength, is a sign of being secure in your masculinity. You don't need to put other people down to make yourself feel better. Okay. So we have to redefine these qualities, but there are no icons like out there.

• 1:55:06Robert Greene?

  You either have the Andrew Tates out there, or you have these wimpy men who are just so afraid of being masculine. Okay.

• 1:55:16Robert Greene?

  Your aggression, your assertiveness, your testosterone. It's a good thing. It's how things get done. It's what energizes you, what puts you in the world. It makes you ambitious. It makes you assert yourself and motivate yourself. It has to be channeled. It has to be disciplined. But you have to see. You know, we were talking about are people pleasing things? And how you reframe it? You have to see who you are and see the virtue and see the power in that. And it's a cultural problem because men are very confused. I didn't have that confusion when I was growing up. You know? So now it's very difficult because you're being told

• 1:56:00Robert Greene?

  that all these things that you feel naturally are negative. They're only negative if you can't control them. So self-control is a very masculine quality. You're able to control yourself. You're able to control your passions. You're able to not talk too much if you don't need to talk too much. I'm not saying that women don't have, that the opposite is wrong. These are things that men naturally have because of their biology. And I'm sorry, I do believe in these things. But they're good. They're just how you use them that can be bad. And so I just wish there were more positive role models out there. I know. I could be a real bastard.

• 1:56:45Robert Greene?

  I could be a real asshole. I'm very competitive. When I play games, I like to win. And I can be a little bit mean about it. Okay, I mean, I'm a pleaser, but I like winning.

• 1:56:59Robert Greene?

  I channeled it, all of my aggression, all of that testosterone. I'm not saying I have more than anyone. I just have normal amounts. I poured it into my books. I poured that edge, that aggression, that like, damn you, I don't really like you. I don't like the world into the 48 laws of power. Into here's how these manipulative, these how people manipulate. These are how people can be bad and cruel. And damn it, I'm gonna get all my aggression by exposing it and showing it and being as real and direct. I channel it into something as opposed to hurting other people kind of thing. So finding ways to channel your aggressive tendencies is a positive way of being a man. You have to find whatever that is. Sports is a great example, but there are other things as well.

• 1:57:45Chris Williamson?

  It feels a lot like alchemy in a way. Uh, or actually, it's even, it's, alchemy is taking something which is bad or useless and turning it into something which is valuable. This is taking, uh, something which is uncertain. It could go either way. You know, this desire for mastery, for conquer, for achievement, uh, and, and using it to propel you forward and hopefully making the world a better place. There's no reason that your desire to pursue and conquer and, and, and become masterful in a thing has to leave the world, well, it's not some weird zero, some thing where in order for you to become better,

• 1:58:28Chris Williamson?

  you need to take from the world. I think it, it's additive.

• 1:58:33Robert Greene?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, um,

• 1:58:39Robert Greene?

  you know, you have to, you have to be smart and, um, you have to be in control of yourself and you have to be disciplined. But let's just add discipline to one of those other masculine virtues. It just needs to be redefined. We need people out there, men and even women, who, um, feel comfortable with this, saying, these are the virtues. This was, these are the good sides of being, of being a man and being masculine. And so even mastering things and even being competitive is not bad. You build a business that kicks ass, that that that that does really well, that that

• 1:59:22Robert Greene?

  gives people certain things that they needed or they wanted. So it's just a matter of how you channel that energy and how you control it. And what the virtues are is self-control, not feeling like you have to put people down in order to raise yourself up, feeling confident, not having to boast. A terrible ma- um, toxic masculine quality is boasting and saying, look how much money I have, look how much women I've slept with, look at all this other other thing. You're just talking, it's just a lot of hot air. That's not strong, that's actually weak. Some, so many powerful qualities actually come from a position of great weakness and insecurity.

• 2:00:05Robert Greene?

  When I look at leaders who are always like boasting and talking about, you know, all the great things that they've done, I see a little insecure, little weak child having to say these things, right? So it just depends on whether it comes from something solid and strong, or it comes from massive wells of insecurity.

• 2:00:26Chris Williamson?

  Robert Green, ladies and gentlemen. Robert, I, I really, really appreciate your openness of being able to talk about this stuff. I think this line between human psychology and human nature is very much needed at the moment because, as you said about the masculinity portion, the role models, the archetypes, sort of, um, previous lessons and channels that we would have run through, many of them have been thrown up in the air by technology, by changing social positions. And, uh, I, I'm looking forward to you getting this sublime, which I'm sure that you are as well, getting this sublime thing finished.

• 2:01:10Robert Greene?

  Yeah. And then when it's finished, I'll be missing it.

• 2:01:14Chris Williamson?

  And ready to do the next one. What's your self-imposed, rough self-imposed submission date?

• 2:01:21Robert Greene?

  Well, it's gonna, hopefully it'll be out in 2026.

• 2:01:25Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 2:01:25Robert Greene?

  You're gonna have to wait two years because it's gonna take a year to finish and then a year to put it in shape. And, uh, I can say it's gonna be a very weird book.

• 2:01:36Chris Williamson?

  Coming from you, that is a extra special claim.

• 2:01:39Robert Greene?

  Yeah, it's the weirdest book, though, that I've ever written.

• 2:01:42Chris Williamson?

  Can you say why?

• 2:01:45Robert Greene?

  Well, I'm trying to shake you up. I'm trying to make you not see the world in the same way. I'm trying to make you realize that you've, you're looking at it in a very limited fashion. And so every chapter, I'm trying to challenge you and say that the world is different and actually much more exciting and interesting than you think it is. And so I would like to compare it to taking drugs without having to take the drugs, that it's gonna like, kinda alter a little bit how you look at things, as if you microdosed on something. This book's kind of like microdosing, you know? So it's gonna alter you, how you look at nature,

• 2:02:28Robert Greene?

  how you look at animals, how you look at yourself, how you look at people, how you look at your own childhood, how you look at history, how you look at art and music, and then how you look at death. Death is the final chapter, obviously. Because death is the ultimate sublime. You know, something I know quite intimately. So it's gonna be a weird book, and maybe it'll fail. Maybe I'll have ten readers.

• 2:02:57Chris Williamson?

  Well, you've been certain over the last eight, so, you know.

• 2:03:00Robert Greene?

  Yeah, but this could be the one that's, that fails. You never know.

• 2:03:04Chris Williamson?

  I've been thinking so much about awe and dread as two emotions that are pretty absent. And I imagine that they fit somewhere into the sublime. I think transcendent experiences like that are so important.

• 2:03:16Robert Greene?

  I mean, I know we're at the end here, but the sublime is an unusual thing because it's a combination of pain and pleasure, of awe and terror. And these two things in the human body, and I analyzed the neurology, the physiology of it, create a kind of vibratory effect in you. Where if it were just beautiful and pleasurable, well, okay. If it were just painful, ah, but the combination of the two is startling and it makes you look at it and it has an effect on your body and it gives you chills, you know? And so, um, so like when you look out at the night sky, it's infinite, it's awesome. But I'm so small, I'm so tiny.

• 2:04:00Chris Williamson?

  Significant.

• 2:04:01Robert Greene?

  I'm so meaningless.

• 2:04:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:03Robert Greene?

  Put those two together and you have the sublime.

• 2:04:05Chris Williamson?

  Well, I'm going to see, uh, Vivaldi's Four Seasons performed in Venice in two weeks. So I wonder whether I'll have some sublime or some awe or some dread. I'll, I'll take some.

• 2:04:18Robert Greene?

  What's the dread? Oh.

• 2:04:25Chris Williamson?

  Being in the presence of mastery like that throws into sharp contrast all of the areas where you haven't pushed yourself and you can feel dreadful for that. I often find whenever I see my friends who are in a rock band and they play like a huge gig and I'm there and, you know, I just watched them can command that thousands of people.

• 2:04:45Robert Greene?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:04:46Chris Williamson?

  And I go, what the fuck are you doing with your life? Like, why, so it's a, it's a beautiful blend of the two. I tell you before we do leave, um, first off, everyone needs to go and pick up, uh, the 25th anniversary edition of Forty Eight Laws of Power because it's beautiful and you get to do that cool thing with the edges of the paper.

• 2:05:04Robert Greene?

  And it's a limited edition, it's gonna run out.

• 2:05:07Chris Williamson?

  And that, uh, but also you've started, uh, pumping on YouTube as well. It seems like every few days, there's a, a new piece of content. So people can go and check that out, which I'm a massive fan of.

• 2:05:18Robert Greene?

  Yeah, yeah, I can't believe it because we started out with nothing and we're gonna be hitting two million subscribers this year, so it's.

• 2:05:27Chris Williamson?

  Wow, you join us in the muck and the mire of the content creator world.

• 2:05:32Robert Greene?

  Oh, my God, it's like pressure.

• 2:05:34Chris Williamson?

  Peace, peace signs and selfies and all the rest of it.

• 2:05:37Robert Greene?

  Yeah, the pressure, you can't, you have, you can't let up. It's, it's almost like a bad thing in some ways.

• 2:05:43Chris Williamson?

  Aloofness is difficult when you're doing that. Robert, thank you so much. It's been a long time coming to do it in person.

• 2:05:48Robert Greene?

  Yeah, thanks.

• 2:05:49Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig. On October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 2:06:06Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 2:06:10Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 2:06:13Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 2:06:14Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not admitted without parent.