Robert Greene: How To Seduce Anyone, Build Confidence & Become Powerful

How do you achieve success in the modern world? This is the billion dollar question. Some people would say that you must gain a whole new variety of skills and knowledge to keep up in our fast moving times. Only a few people would say you should use strategies that haven’t changed in thousands of years, as human nature and the game of power hasn’t changed either. Best-selling author Robert Greene is one of these few people. Ever since he was a child he has been fascinated with seeing behind the polite masks that humans show to each other in civilised society, whilst underneath these disguises we all share a darker side and cravings for power. In this enlightening conversation Robert Greene discusses his life’s work, from the rules of power and seduction, to mastery and human nature. Robert explores how we can use the lessons of history to succeed in all areas of life. Follow Robert: Instagram: http://bit.ly/3LFt2n9 Website: http://bit.ly/3TIptyr Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Robert Greene?

  Some of the greatest seducers who are not good-looking at all.

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  What are the qualities of a great seducer?

• 0:07Robert Greene?

  I'm revealing stuff I shouldn't be revealing.

• 0:09Speaker 02

  Robert Greene is one of the bestselling authors in history.

• 0:11Steven Bartlett?

  An internationally renowned expert on power strategies.

• 0:15Speaker 02

  Been referenced in songs by Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Drake. Written six international bestsellers that have become legendary.

• 0:21Steven Bartlett?

  Why did you write a book about seduction?

• 0:24Robert Greene?

  Seduction is in high form of power. People will do what you want without ever even realizing. Seduction is a mating ritual. You can't just swipe and get it. But because of all the dating apps, if you are able to understand the language of seduction, you're going to have so much more power and success than anybody else. One thing about words is people can lie. But body language, it doesn't lie. You master that language, you can start deciphering all this people are giving you. It's about psychology and it's about how you carry yourself. If you feel confident, it will naturally radiate through your gestures.

• 0:57Steven Bartlett?

  But what is real confidence and how does one build it?

• 0:59Robert Greene?

  The confidence comes from...

• 1:02Steven Bartlett?

  We've talked about the topic of powers. But in 2018, you had a stroke. In that moment, it sounds like your power had been taken from you.

• 1:10Robert Greene?

  The left side of my body is paralyzed, and that was not easy. I've got to find a strategy to deal with all this shit. Please understand that the ability that you have now to run, to walk, to type, it can be taken away from you. It's miserable. Please don't take it for granted.

• 1:38Steven Bartlett?

  What do I need to know about you and your earliest years to understand the life that you went on, that journey you went on and the person you came to be?

• 1:47Robert Greene?

  Well, I grew up here in Los Angeles, not far from where we are, in a neighborhoods called Baldwin Hills. And then we moved to another neighborhood. Had a very nice childhood, very middle-class family. My father was a salesman his whole life, worked for the same company for 40 years. Just sold chemical supplies. And, you know, my parents kind of left me alone a lot. I was basically, my sister almost kind of raised me in a way. And, you know, I had a very nice childhood, kind of left alone, sort of an introvert. Books kind of shaped me. I became an avid reader at an early age. Knew I wanted to be a writer. Got heavily into drugs, I'm afraid, in high school.

• 2:33Robert Greene?

  Because that was the time where I went to school and in college. Had some great experiences. I look very fondly back even on my drug experiences, even though they got kind of depressing after a while. But it kind of shaped me in some ways. And, you know, that was me growing up, you know. And I had an attitude or a lens in which I looked at people from a distance. Like I was always sort of obsessed with... People wore masks the way I looked at it. Even when I looked at my parents and their friends and I said, "What is really going on behind the masks that they wear and all the social niceties going on? What is behind? What is really the human animal like?"

• 3:17Robert Greene?

  And so, these are kind of the themes that were a big part of me growing up.

• 3:24Steven Bartlett?

  From what I read, you had a lot of different jobs in a lot of different industries, up until the point when you wrote the first of your many books, called The Forty-Eight Laws of Power, back in 1998. And I was looking at all of these different jobs you'd had, and they all seemed to be completely different from one another. So then, trying to understand how you arrived at a moment where you then wrote a book on the topic and subject matter of power, having not been, you know, a psychology graduate or seemingly worked in any industry related to like, human psychology, seemed to be really peculiar to me.

• 4:00Robert Greene?

  Yeah, and also, I never really had a lot of power up until that point. So it wasn't like I knew everything about being a leader or anything. You know, a lot of things that happen in life are kind of by coincidence or serendipitous. You don't necessarily plan on it. Which is sort of, when you look back on it, you can see a kind of an odd plan going on, like a destiny or fate. But in the moment, I didn't feel that.

• 4:26Robert Greene?

  I had all of these different jobs, as you mentioned, some of them completely unrelated. You know, I worked in construction. I had a construction job. I worked in a detective agency. I was a tour guide. I helped write an encyclopedia. I taught English in Spain. You know, on and on and on and on and on. But I was searching, I wanted to be a writer and a writer needs experiences. I just was hungry for weird experiences. You know, I never really stuck at any one job. And by the time you're thirty seven, thirty eight, you know, my parents are starting to worry about me. I'm starting to worry about me. I'm getting a little bit depressed, even have moments where suicidal thoughts are floating in my brain. Like, I'm very ambitious. I know I could do something well, but it's never come together.

• 5:11Robert Greene?

  And so here's the serendipity part. I'm in Italy for a job, one of my eighty different jobs. And I meet a man who's a book packager there on this particular job we're on. And he's, he's a Dutchman. I'm not going to imitate him, but he asked me if I had any ideas for a book. And suddenly, all of the painful experiences in my life, working in Hollywood, all the assholes I've worked for, all these weird politicking, all the manipulative games, all the crap that I had seen, it just came like almost vomiting out of me. And I said, you know, here we are, twenties, well, this was nineteen nineties, twentieth century back then. Here we are in the late twentieth century.

• 5:54Robert Greene?

  And people don't dress like they did in the days of Machiavelli, right? They don't wear wigs and stuff, but it's the same damn thing. It's the same bloody battles going on, the same manipulations, the same kind of, you know, people don't reveal who they are. And it's a timeless game of power, just the same as Louis XIV or Cesare Borja or the people, the CEOs in the late twentieth century. It's this timeless thing. And I, as I'm telling him this, his eyes are lighting. He's, wow, this could be, this could really be a book. And, you know, he said, look, Robert, I'll pay you to live while you write half the book and then we'll sell it.

• 6:36Robert Greene?

  And as I told you before, I was desperate. It was my get rich or die trying moment. I went back to Los Angeles. I borrowed money from my parents because I was that poor. And I wrote a treatment and he loved it. And the rest is history. That's sort of my long winded answer to your question.

• 6:53Steven Bartlett?

  That's so interesting. It's crazy how in life, things can just take such a turn out of nothing. And you never know what that thing is going to be. And I mean, you say the rest is history there. Give me an idea of the success of that book, The Forty Eight Laws of Power. Because I mean, I've seen it everywhere for as long as I've been looking at books. So what's the, give me some quantify the global success of that book.

• 7:19Robert Greene?

  Quantify?

• 7:20Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 7:21Robert Greene?

  Well, here in the U S, it's it's sold quite a bit over two million copies, which is great. The weird thing is it's selling now more than it ever has sold before. In other words, the the percentage of books that we're selling here in two thousand and twenty three is greater than any period before. So it's accelerating, which is insane, you know? And even my English publisher is having the same, telling me the same stuff. So it's kind of accumulated. It it started off a little bit slowly. I mean, we got press, but it became this kind of cult thing. I've had very little publicity in mainstream media, which was big back then. It's not big anymore, thank God. But it was word of mouth.

• 8:06Robert Greene?

  It's like, have you heard about this book? It's kind of dark, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It got on a few television shows. There was this show, a reality show with boxers. I think it was called The Contender, in which the finalist held up a copy of the book and said, this book helped me get to where I am now. And it sold like crazy. It got into the hip hop stream, you know? Jay Z was the first person I ever saw quoting the book in in in print and in Playboy interview. And then, you know, fifty cent and all that and Drake and all these people. That really kind of set it into the stratosphere. So it's it's slowly become a bigger and bigger thing. And. I had no idea, you know, I thought it was a weird book and it could be successful,

• 8:49Robert Greene?

  but I had no idea the journey I was about to begin. It's weird.

• 8:55Steven Bartlett?

  That journey of writing this book, has your, have your feelings towards the book evolved or changed over time? Because society moves on, you move on as an individual, as a human, you learn new things, you mature, and then the book is kind of held in time.

• 9:10Robert Greene?

  Not really. My philosophy in life is never look back, regret nothing, you know, it's there, I did it. It came in a particular moment in my life and in the zeitgeist, and things have changed a little bit. But I was, it was a very serious effort to try and get at something timeless. Now, yes, there's a dark side to it, and maybe I've moved on from that. And I did, honestly, when I wrote my fourth book, Mastery, I was a little bit concerned that young people were getting to, were thinking that the whole game of life is about politics, manipulation. So I wrote a book to kind of counter that.

• 9:53Robert Greene?

  But I think the book is true and it's held up. I think if I look at business, what's going on in the business world, I kind of got, I think I hit it on the nail about what goes on in the dynamics and the power game. You know, I wrote a book on human nature, and the idea is, we were formed hundreds of thousands of years ago in particular circumstances. Our brains are wired a certain way. Yes, we're very sophisticated. Yes, we have the internet. Yes, I'm here being interviewed by you on a podcast. It's pretty insane. But we haven't fundamentally changed. The same raw emotions of envy, of aggression, of, you know, worrying

• 10:37Robert Greene?

  about our status, about having to disguise ourselves and appear like we're saintly and loving, that we don't have a shadow, which we all have. None of that has changed. So, yeah, I wouldn't write that book now because I'm at a different place in life, and I understand that. But. I have, I don't, I'm not ashamed of it in any way. I stand by it and I think I hit it something real.

• 11:00Steven Bartlett?

  What is in your, your definition, what is power? You know, I was really compelled when you're talking about the evolutionary roots of power, but like, at its essence, what is power?

• 11:11Robert Greene?

  It's not what you think it is. It's not, you know, Vladimir Putin, or presidents, or Biden, or all these political figures and these big games. Power is a feeling. It's an essence. It's an emotion. It's a, it's a human need and desire. And really, what power is, is a sense of understanding yourself and, and being able to control yourself. So the way I look at it, I like to look at it not through the lens of great power politics, but as an average, everyday human being here in the United States or in England. The feeling that you have with your children, with your spouse, with your colleagues,

• 11:53Robert Greene?

  the people who work for you, the sense that you have no control, that you can't influence them with your ideas, that you can't get them to maybe, you know, soften some of their ugly behavior if they, if they have that, that you can't get them interested in helping you with a project or whatever, is the most miserable feeling a human being can have. Malcolm X had a quote that I love, which is, absolute power corrupts, but absolute powerless corrupts even more.

• 12:25Robert Greene?

  I'm butchering it, but that was the gist of it. The feeling of powerlessness is actually more corrupting than the feeling of having a lot of power. You, it makes, it turns people into being passive aggressive, into playing all kinds of weird games, negative games to get power. You want to feel that you have a degree of control over events in your life, over people, over your future. And that to me is what power is, right? And so some of that involves these games that I, I mentioned in there. And some of it goes beyond the 48 laws of power, which I've tried to indicate in my other books. But it's the sense that I'm not helpless in this world.

• 13:11Robert Greene?

  I remember when I first entered the work world as a very naive college graduate with all these ideals and things I had read, because I was studying literature and languages. Man, this is weird. People are playing all these kind of games. I mean, over my head. I made mistakes. I got fired for being, you know, too brash for outshine the master. It was painful, right? And so, learning, you don't have to abuse the loss of power. I don't advocate crushing your enemy totally. I hope I don't have any enemies ever that I need to crush, ever. You just need to know these things so that when you enter the work world, you're not naive, you're not stupid, you don't make the same kind of mistakes that I made. You spare yourself the pain.

• 13:55Robert Greene?

  You understand the most fundamental thing about human nature. People have egos. Even your boss has an ego. You think he or she doesn't because they're powerful. They're even more insecure than other people. You need to be aware of these things so that you don't inadvertently make them feel insecure and suffer the consequences. So, um, that's, I don't know, that's sort of my idea of power that I was trying to describe there.

• 14:24Steven Bartlett?

  The way you describe it is more of a sort of intrinsic, um, force perception of yourself. When people think of power, they think of having control over others or their influence over others, but you've kind of made it more of a internal force.

• 14:40Robert Greene?

  Yeah, well, if you can't control yourself, then you're in a lot of trouble in this world, right? Because when you just naturally are yourself doing things, you're going to offend people. You learn early on, we're social animals. I have to tailor my behavior, you know? If you go on babbling about all about how you feel and think, et cetera, and you just say what's the first thing on your mind, you're going to end up having a very, very short career. You're going to be saying things that are going to offend people. You're going to be making a fool of yourself. You'd be saying things that you end up regretting, right? So you have no self-control. And if you see somebody who has no self-control, it makes them, it makes you look like you're not powerful. If you can't control yourself, how can you control anything in your environment?

• 15:25Robert Greene?

  How can you be a leader, right? So you have to learn certain things about, about your nature, about who you are, and, and not just, just be anybody. You have to kind of tailor your appearances as well. Because for good or for bad, I'm a believer in looking at the human animal without shame and embarrassment, just as we are, right?

• 15:49Robert Greene?

  And appearances matter. It's the animal part of our nature. We we're we look at we look we judge people by how they how they how they appear. How they dress, their tone of voice, their body language, et cetera, et cetera. It would be in an ideal world. We wouldn't judge people by appearances. We would just judge them by what's inside of them. Yes, I agree with that. But that we're not ideal. We're not descended from angels. We're descended from primates. So you have to understand that appearances matter. And this is part of of the game. And so you have to control your appearances a little bit. You have to tailor it. You have to be a bit of actor in this world on and on and on.

• 16:34Robert Greene?

  You know, these are things that people don't like to admit about ourselves. We like to think that we we're much more have much more idealistic, that we're that these things really don't matter in the end. And I wish it were that way, but it's not. And so I'm a bit more of a realist when it comes to things like that. But yeah.

• 16:54Steven Bartlett?

  As you were talking about this need to keep up appearances to some degree in order to survive and to fit into the the tribes that we form in our lives. It made me think about how many guests I've had on this podcast who work in maybe the the entertainment industry or other industries.

• 17:11Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 17:11Steven Bartlett?

  You know, they're they're famous, whatever. And they report that keeping up appearances had a really detrimental impact on their happiness and their fulfillment in life. Because in some cases, they, you know, it meant that they were doing a job as a presenter and had to always be happy when inside they didn't feel that. And maybe the contrast of reality and and perception caused them a lot of harm. Or they've built a life around things that they're not interested in. I think you you touched on some of that in mastery.

• 17:37Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 17:39Steven Bartlett?

  That's the that's the question I have, which is keeping up appearances and the impact that that has on your happiness, i.e. wearing a mask. And happiness. What's the relationship?

• 17:49Robert Greene?

  I talk about it in the Forty Eight Laws of Power, where you have to play this game in life. It's a kind, to me, it's a form of wisdom, which is, it's a wisdom that used to exist like in the 18th century. I read a book that had a big impact on me many years ago called The Fall of Public Man by Richard Sennett, in which he described like cafe life in London in the 18th century, or France. And he was saying back then, when you entered the public arena or your cafe, you knew you were an actor. You left the house, you put on the mask, and you had fun. You know, you knew it was like fun, it was play. You know, when you're a child, you like playing games,

• 18:33Robert Greene?

  you like putting on costumes, you like playing your parents or some character you saw on TV. It's part of human nature. We like to play these games. We're role players, we're actors. And he was saying in the 18th century, that was just a given in life, that when you entered the public realm, you knew you were an actor. And then when you went home to your wife, your family, or your husband, or wherever, you dropped the mask, you breathe a deep sigh of relief, go, now I can be who I am, right? And it wasn't a problem. It didn't create neuroses. It didn't create this like, what's wrong with me? I don't know who I am anymore. So people now, the problem now is we don't have distance from that social realm.

• 19:17Robert Greene?

  And so we think that if we're acting, that's who we are. But it's not. It's just that's part of being a social animal, is playing a role. You know, I did a book with 50 Cent, and he kind of exemplifies a lot of that. He plays a role in life. You know, when I met him, I thought, uh-oh. I was kind of intimidated, I was a little bit afraid. You know, the thug. This is a guy, when I met him, he was, you know, just a few years away from being shot and all this stuff. And I met him and he was the nicest person in the world. He was almost kind of sweet. He'd hate it if I said that word, but he was sweet. Right? He was very down to earth. He was very calm, et cetera. He's playing a role when he goes out and he plays that person.

• 20:02Robert Greene?

  He knows it. He knows it's like, he doesn't take it seriously. You know? He had this big beef with Kanye West back when I was doing the, the, the book with him. And then I met the two of them in Vegas when they were there for the awards. And they were like the best of friends. They were joking. It was just a game they were playing. Right? So what I tell people is we all are actors. Humans are born actors. We learn at a very early age to play that kind of game. It's kind of fun sometimes to do that, you know? Have a, enjoy that part of life, but don't think that it, don't get it confused with who you are in your essence. That's sort of the dance you're playing between those two things.

• 20:45Robert Greene?

  I understand what you're saying and a lot of it has to do, as you said, related to mastery, where people end up in a career that doesn't suit them. And I look, I, I, I, I think I understand what you're getting at. And I look at like presenters or people in the news and they, and they have to smile and be so cheerful. Like, man, what a drag. I'd hate to be like that. You know? That is so false. Don't you feel kind of, don't you want to take a shower after you being so cheerful and chatty and all that shit? You know? Yeah, I understand that. But if, if that's the profession you chose and you love it, then maybe you don't feel that way. I couldn't do it personally.

• 21:25Robert Greene?

  But you know, I think, I think it's okay to think of yourself as an actor. I don't think there's anything wrong about that.

• 21:33Steven Bartlett?

  Um, the second very curious law in your book that I uncovered was, was law number two. I'm talking about the 48 laws of power here where it says, never trust friends too much. Learn how to use enemies.

• 21:44Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 21:45Steven Bartlett?

  Do you trust your friends?

• 21:48Robert Greene?

  Okay, well, everything in the book is context. So when you take things out of context, it's a little harder to understand. And what I'm trying to say in that, I'm talking about in the work world, when you're out in the social realm. And one of the worst things that people do is you have a job, and I've been guilty of it myself, even after I wrote the damn book. You're out in the work world and you need to hire somebody. You need to find a colleague, you need to find a partner or an employee. Your mind naturally gravitates towards a friend, right? Because they know you, you trust them, you have a relationship, you know, and you feel comfortable with them. And it's a terrible mistake.

• 22:31Robert Greene?

  So many of the worst things that have happened in history are because of that very problem. Because friends, there's all these emotions involved between people, right? And those emotions confuse the issue. So what I'm talking about in that law is when you need to get results, you need to think, when you have a job or something, you have to think in practical terms, not in terms of emotions, not in terms of friendship, et cetera, et cetera. So you want to keep your work world separate. It's not everything about life is having to be friends and having nice things and everybody like you. Sometimes what matters is getting results done. And sometimes the best person to work with isn't your friend

• 23:16Robert Greene?

  because they don't have all this other stuff that we're talking about. In fact, a very powerful move is if there's an enemy out there, somebody who you never got along with. If you say, if you approach them and say, "Let's bury the hatchet." You know, "I have a job and I'd really like you to work with me. I know you're really smart." The turnaround of emotions is a very powerful thing where they're going... Wow. Yeah, sure. That's, that's great. I never expected that. And they're, they're highly motivated to now prove that they're worthy of, of your, of your change of mind.

• 23:56Robert Greene?

  So it's not about not trusting your friends in the realm of friendship in personal relationships. It's about being aware that the work world is different from the realm of personal relationships.

• 24:09Steven Bartlett?

  The other point I found really curious was, was point three about concealing your intentions.

• 24:14Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 24:15Steven Bartlett?

  I, I find this curious because I've never really known where to land on this. When people ask me for advice on the subject matter about how much of your hand should you show? Whether it's in business or life or whatever, there's a, there's a group of people that think you should always just keep everything you're doing and your intentions totally secret. Because then people might copy you or they'll attack you, whatever. And then there's another school of thought that says, when you're building something, when you're doing something, when you have a mission, you need to share it with as many people as possible. Because that will galvanize people to, to come along with the journey with you and they'll want to support you and help you. So when I read point number three about concealing your intentions, I wanted to, to ask you about what, what you think about that. Which side do you land on?

• 24:56Robert Greene?

  Well, everything depends on circumstances. So the laws are never meant to apply to every situation. Right? So when it's with your own team and you're trying to inspire them and you're trying to give them a vision, you're trying to get them on your side. Yeah, you share your vision with them. You share, this is where the group is going. This is where I want things to be in three years. Let's all get together. We're trying to do something very positive for the world. Okay, here, here's my plan. Right? But then there are circumstances where revealing everything that what you, about what you're planning to do is actually very counterproductive. Right? So the business world. In the 21st century is extremely competitive. It's getting worse and worse by the day.

• 25:40Robert Greene?

  As more and more people now are entering the power arena. And I think it's a great thing. Where it used to be just a realm where only older white men had power. And now it's the doors have opened to everyone. The level of competition is that much more intense. Particularly now even with the internet. You have rivals out there. You have competitors out there. Even as we talk right now, maybe you're not thinking about them, but they are. They're looking to steal your ideas. They're looking to take your business away from you, et cetera, et cetera. Just be aware of that phenomenon. And just always saying what you're planning on doing isn't always the wisest thing to do.

• 26:18Robert Greene?

  Sometimes if you're in a tricky situation, making, putting people off the scent and giving them a red herring and saying, I'm planning to do this one. In fact, you're planning to do that. It's a very powerful technique. It's deception, but all's fair in love and war and business, I'm afraid. So, you know, there are moments where you don't want to lay all your cards out on the table. Right? You want to either create a little bit of mystery so that people don't know what you're going to do next. And they're wondering what you're going to do next. And as they're wondering what you're going to do next, they're kind of on their heels a little bit. What's the next thing that Stephen is planning? I don't really know. Wow.

• 27:02Robert Greene?

  You know, it makes, it's a very powerful approach. There are other times and other experiences and moments in life where you do want to reveal what you're planning to do. Because there's a purpose behind it. I'm just saying, be aware. Don't just act in this world. Be aware, have a strategic mindset. Sometimes concealing is what you need to do. Sometimes not concealing is what you need to do.

• 27:26Steven Bartlett?

  It's funny, when we have this conversation about power and the darkness and the shadows that people have in them. I think a lot of people listening. And probably it seems that way because I'm the one asking the questions is if I'm questioning society that I'm not part of, they'll think they don't, they might think they don't play these games, right? They might, you know, so that's the question I have is like, have you ever encountered anybody? Do you believe there's anybody out there that doesn't play power games, manipulation, have shadows, have darkness in them?

• 27:55Robert Greene?

  No, I don't. But so in my war book, I read the biography of Mahatma Gandhi, one of the saintliest figures in history, right? And I realized that Mahatma Gandhi was actually a brilliant strategist. And I'm not saying his use of nonviolence and civil disobedience didn't come from the heart. He didn't mean it. He wasn't actually, he didn't actually believe in the peaceful method. He did. He was very sincere, but he was very strategic about it. And he planned a campaign, several campaigns, like the Salt March in the 20s, where he knew, for instance, that the English public was very liberal minded. They had

• 28:39Robert Greene?

  this ideal of themselves as being this very, they weren't colonialists, they weren't imperialists, they were doing the best for the world. And he deliberately had these marches where he knew that that they're on, they would be reading in their newspaper and seeing photographs of Indian people being beaten up by Englishmen and, and their Indian officers on the streets of wherever. It would have a terrible impact on the public. He thought in terms of strategy. Okay, so there's Gandhi. Then there's Martin Luther King, who's somebody I wrote about a lot in The Laws of Human Nature, another great icon whom I admire, who actually was inspired by Gandhi and had campaigns of civil disobedience. And there was a campaign,

• 29:24Robert Greene?

  I believe it was in Montgomery or Selma, I can't remember which one, where he was getting fed up, they weren't getting very far, the civil rights movement, they were reaching a stalemate, and he was getting very frustrated. And somebody, an advisor came to him, said, look, we're going to have this massive march and, and I can get a lot of elementary school and junior high school students to be on this march because they believe in you and they're very fervent. And I think it would be great. And his advisors go, God, you can't do that. You can't have put 13 year olds at risk. And Martin Luther King thought about it very deeply. He said, no, we're going to go ahead and do it.

• 30:05Robert Greene?

  Because damn it, I want the American public, sitting in there all fat and watching their televisions, to see these brutal, you know, Bull Connor, the police chief then. I want to see these children being water hosed and beaten. And it's going to have an incredible impact. He was being strategic and his advisors were shocked by it. But it ended up proving to be one of the most pivotal, important moments in the civil rights movement. So here you have Gandhi and Martin Luther King. I'm never, and Martin Luther King was a flawed individual, as we know, right? He had a private life that wasn't exactly in the same as his public life. I don't judge him for that because he was a brilliant man and I admire him. I love him deeply.

• 30:50Robert Greene?

  Reading his biography made me even admire him even more, seeing that he had a human flawed side to him. But these are icons that we set up and they reveal what I'm talking about in human nature. You can't escape it. Yeah, maybe there was some saint born in some century that I've never heard of that maybe got pretty far away from everything I've talked about. But, you know, we all have this idea like, in the laws of human nature, I write about irrationality, envy, aggression, or narcissism. Narcissism is a good one. Oh, they're a narcissist. I'm not a narcissist. I'm not self-absorbed, but they are. Yeah, yeah, I don't have any of those traits.

• 31:33Robert Greene?

  Well, damn it, every single human being has self-absorption traits. We can't help it. We naturally think of ourselves first. Yes, there are people who are much deeper narcissists in life, no doubt. And there are toxic narcissists, but we all have a touch of it. I want you to be a little more humble in this world and not be so arrogant and not think that you are somehow exempt from having a dark side, that somehow you were born with a halo over your head, that you were born different, you don't have human nature, that you're a saintly person, you're much better. Get rid of your moral superiority because I find that deeply offensive. We are all cut from the same cloth. We all have the same flaws.

• 32:16Robert Greene?

  And when you look at yourself, and when I wrote the laws of human nature, I'm going, damn it, Robert.

• 32:22Robert Greene?

  You have a dark side. You're a narcissist. You know, I had to come to terms with my irrationality, my grandiosity, my aggressive instincts. But it's the only way to change yourself is to be aware that you have these issues. I have the narcissistic tendencies. Now I see it. All right, now when they pop up, pop up, I can control it better. I can say, "Damn, Robert, you're being too self-absorbed. You should think more about the other person." But if you go around in life thinking, "I don't have any of these problems. I'm not a narcissist." You're never gonna have the awareness to stop the fact that you are actually one.

• 32:59Steven Bartlett?

  Being a narcissist, is that objectively a good or a bad thing? Because when you were, obviously, I know people that have it's a bad thing. Narcissists cause a lot of harm, and that's very true. But in the context of the human animal, and why the human animal develops certain attributes and qualities to, you know, maybe further its survival or its ability to stay within the social pact. Is it just a consequence of being a human to have these like shadow traits? And to be coercive and manipulative? Is it good or is it bad? Or is it neither?

• 33:31Robert Greene?

  It's neither. Neither. Because it just is. Right? So with narcissism, for instance, there's a reason why we're narcissists. So I explain in the book, it's not my own theory, it comes from some great psychologists like Kohut, the origins of narcissism, right? So when you're, have to leave, when your parents have to kind of not abandon you, but have to not give you as much attention as you used to have, and you're three years old or four years old, you don't remember it, but it was very painful. Like, "Oh, they don't love me as much. What's wrong with me?" Right?

• 34:14Robert Greene?

  You know, "I have to get that love and attention, not just naturally. I have to do things to earn it, et cetera, et cetera." And what happens with a lot of people in that situation when you're a child is... I have to develop my own, I have to be my own mother or father. I have to find a way of loving myself. When something bad happens, I have to retreat inward and go, "I'm really not so bad at all. I'm actually a decent person. I like my own tastes. I like the clothes that I wear, et cetera, et cetera." You're developing the shreds of self-esteem, right? And people who never developed that because they were abused, or they were abandoned, or even if they were suffocated,

• 34:59Robert Greene?

  never developed that self-esteem. And so what happens in life is, whenever, if you don't develop that and you get older, and people attack you and yell at you or criticize you, you can't retreat inward to that self-esteem, that love you have. The only thing you know is to get angry, to get, they call it narcissistic rage, and to yell at people and say, "God, get away from me. You're evil, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera." Right? And then the other problems evolve where the only way I don't have that inner self-esteem, the only way I can get people to love me is by being incredibly dramatic, and overly dramatic, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and always making myself the center of attention. That's what creates a deep narcissist.

• 35:43Robert Greene?

  That's their only way of getting the love that they need. So, children, we all need that degree of self-esteem, that anchor in our life. So narcissism, self-love, is not a bad thing. But what happens is, as you get older, if you go too deep into it, it becomes a problem. And so what I say is, you need to take that self-love, and it has a good function, and turn it outward as much you can, and turn it into empathy, and love and consideration for other people more. That's your task as you get older in life. That's how I approach all of these flaws. You can't run away from them. You can't run away from your shadow, your dark side. You can make it work for you.

• 36:28Robert Greene?

  You can make it positive and productive and healthy. You can become a healthy narcissist, which is a name that I use in the book. You can use your dark side for positive purposes. Let's say you have a lot of anger inside, and I had a lot of anger when I was younger. I was a very angry young man, right? Channel that into some kind of cause. Like, and you know, I have a lot of causes that I believe in very deeply. And when I was younger, I was like that. Channel that energy into something productive and helpful. And put it into something that goes to something that helps society. That's using your dark side for positive purposes.

• 37:12Robert Greene?

  Because the dark side of human nature has a lot of creativity, has a lot of energy. An artist has to have a dark side. You use your dark side because all those dark emotions, all the people that shatter on you in your life. They inspire you, they create your best work. Don't run away from your shadow, don't run away from your narcissism. Use it in a healthy way.

• 37:34Steven Bartlett?

  And acknowledge it. I think that's the hardest thing for people to do, right?

• 37:37Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 37:38Steven Bartlett?

  So few people, I think, including myself, like, have really fully understood what their their shadow and their dark side is. I mean, doing this podcast has really helped me because I learned things from other people vicariously. And then I look at reflect on myself or keeping a diary has helped me to understand that. But that first step in someone having the self-awareness to understand their dark side. I mean, there's even a lot of people who confronting their dark side would be so, it feels like it would be so impactful on their self-esteem, their negative sense, that they spend their life putting up a wall to never go there. I mean, there's some people who you even mention something to them and they would

• 38:13Robert Greene?

  Triggers.

• 38:14Steven Bartlett?

  Triggers them.

• 38:14Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 38:15Steven Bartlett?

  You know, we can all think of those people.

• 38:19Steven Bartlett?

  We can all think of those people. The really interesting thing there is the role that your early years play on your relationship with power. Because when I think about some of the nicest, I don't know if this is just a general stereotype or narrow observation I've had, but some of the nicest people I've met in terms of, you know, being the opposite of whatever a toxic narcissist is, seem to have really comfortable, loving, secure, safe, early experiences. And then is that broadly true in your view?

• 38:55Robert Greene?

  It's a generalization, but there is some truth to it. I mean, there's things called attachment theories where psychologists have looked at the kind of attachment you had to your parents and they categorize it in four different ways. And there's the ideal, the best one, where you have this incredibly loving mother and father, and they're giving you unconditional love, but they know also how to give you your independence, etc. It's not terribly common. I don't know what the percentage would be. Then there's levels and levels, and as you get to the fourth level, it's like the abandonment one, or abusive and abandonment, where you basically leave the child alone, you don't give it any attention, any love, and it's very crippling, right?

• 39:41Robert Greene?

  But the thing is, children are much stronger than we think they are. They're very resilient, they're very resourceful. They're gonna find their love, they're gonna find a way to compensate for it in some way. And what's something very interesting, when I was doing seduction in some of my other books, and I look at people who were like very charismatic, like a Malcolm X, like a Marilyn Monroe, I could go on and on and on. These are people that came from very, very bad families, right? They had no love. Marilyn Monroe was an orphan, essentially, raised in an orphanage, you know?

• 40:23Robert Greene?

  Her whole life was, I gotta get people to love me, I need love so desperately. And her way of doing it was to literally make love with the camera. Nobody ever done that before. You could sense that she needed it, and it was so powerful that you sensed it, that she drew it to herself. Great charismatic individuals. John F. Kennedy is someone who had a lot of charisma. He came from a very bad childhood, right? His father was very mean to him, etc. Some children, in the worst circumstances, it ends up bringing the best out of them. They have to find their way in life. And some people who have everything don't go very far because they don't know how to find things for themselves. So life is weird.

• 41:08Robert Greene?

  Some people who have great childhoods do well, some people who have great childhoods are spoiled and never learn how to get things on their own, and some people have the shittiest childhoods, learn how to be resourceful and get what they need on their own.

• 41:24Steven Bartlett?

  You mentioned seduction there, the art of seduction. Why did you write a book about the topic of seduction?

• 41:31Robert Greene?

  Seduction is a high form of power because you make people feel pleasure. You make them feel excited or interested in you. And then their resistance to your ideas slowly lowers. And you have the ability to influence them and to move them in the direction that you want. If you yell at them, like we were talking about your child and you tell them, do this, do that. They resent it and for good reason. But if you're subtler, if you're more seductive in your approach, if you're more indirect. People will do what you want or go in your direction without ever even realizing it. So it was a sub-theme in The Forty Eight Laws of Power.

• 42:12Robert Greene?

  And so I was sort of interested in the psychology of that and why some people are good at it and some people are awkward about it. So when I finished The Forty Eight Laws of Power, I thought this would be a natural segue, the next book.

• 42:25Steven Bartlett?

  What are the qualities of a great seducer?

• 42:31Robert Greene?

  Well, I like to distinguish between cold seducers and warm seducers. A cold seducer is something you don't want to be. That's the typical image that we might have of a male seducer, but even of a female seducer, like the great courtesans. Instead of whether just after money or the men are just after sex. That's not my ideal. My ideal is kind of a back and forth quality where it's not domination. It's sort of like a game that you're playing. It's like a mating game. It's like a courtship ritual where both part people are kind of seducing each other. And so what makes for a great seducer is very simple. I can summarize it very simply. You are outer directed.

• 43:15Robert Greene?

  So when you meet somebody for the first time, or you're on a date or whatever it is, you're not having that internal monologue going, does she like me or does he like me? Am I dressed well? Am I saying stupid things? What can I do to impress them? No, you turn it off and you're outer directed and you're listening to them and you're entering their spirit and you're hearing them say things that that give you idea of what they're missing in life, of what they want, of what their needs are, of what makes them an individual. You're absorbing it. You're entering into their spirit and then you can reflect it back to them. You can give them gifts. You can take them to places that show that you're attentive to them.

• 44:00Robert Greene?

  Because if you look at how we are in our day to day life, normally people never pay us attention. They're always so self-absorbed. They're never thinking about us. There you the I many the times where you get the sense that people are actually interested in who you are as an individual is pretty rare. If you give that feeling to someone, it's incredibly powerful because we all want to be validated. We all want to be recognized. So the seducer is not someone who's all worried about him or herself and thinking. They're involved in the other person. They're absorbed like a sponge inside their psychology, inside their world.

• 44:41Steven Bartlett?

  A lot of this is, you know, very applicable to romance and dating, et cetera, et cetera. It feels for whatever reason, I, you know, not necessarily something I've read much about in your work, but it feels like dating and romance and relationships have become much more complicated in the modern world. But it's it's become much more difficult to seduce somebody. What is the, what are the attributes of someone then that is not good at seducing?

• 45:08Robert Greene?

  Anti-seducer has many qualities. I have a whole chapter on the anti-seducer. I tried to define it. Uh, there, there are several of them. I can't, I don't have them all memorized, but one quality that's very anti-seductive is preaching and moralizing, is like telling people, oh, that's wrong what you just said, or your politics are ugly, or you're not a really, you're not really good at this or something or other. Having a moral superiority, a sense of sanctimonious sanctimony in a realm which should be about pleasure, where should be that kind of equality, that kind of back and forth dynamic, where you're asserting your moral superiority is deeply, deeply anti-seductive, the element of preaching to people.

• 45:53Robert Greene?

  Not being generous, and I mean, not just with money, money is important, but not just being generous with your spirit, right? You want to be open, you want to give as much as you can to the other person of yourself, of your time, of your money, of your energy, et cetera. So being all kind of crimped and, "I don't want to give, I don't want to spend money, I want to take you to the cheap place to eat, I don't want to give you much time," is very, very anti-seductive.

• 46:24Steven Bartlett?

  When you were talking a second ago about the person who goes on the date and they're thinking about themselves and what they, you know, what their hair looks like or whatever else, that spoke to an insecure person. Is insecurity a seductive quality or is it a anti-seductive quality?

• 46:44Robert Greene?

  It is anti-seductive. Now, there is a part of weakness that is seductive. So I would say vulnerability is seductive, but insecurity is anti-seductive. And there's a big difference.

• 46:57Steven Bartlett?

  Why does vulnerability draw people to you?

• 47:00Robert Greene?

  Because the sense, so if I can define seduction in simple terms, most of the time, we are closed to the influence of other people. Particularly now, we have these walls up because life is harsh. People are coming at us with their advertisements, with their pleas, with their wanting money, with this and the other. And we've all learned to be very defensive, right? And seduction is an openness, is the opposite of that. And you felt it when you were a child towards your parents. You felt very vulnerable and open. And there was an element of your parents and how they treated you that was very much like a seduction, right?

• 47:42Robert Greene?

  So seduction is about being open to the other person to the extent where you can even fall in love, you can fall under their spell. And the sense of letting go of your ego, letting go of your defensiveness and letting another person enter your world is being seduced. It requires vulnerability. If you meet, the typical scenario is of a man who's not vulnerable at all. He's so powerful and in control and everything, has no vulnerabilities. It's frightening, you know, for a woman. It could be very frightening. Like this, he's so strong, he's so invulnerable. There's something wrong about it.

• 48:25Robert Greene?

  You know, maybe he's a serial killer, maybe he's got skeletons in his closet. Something isn't right about that. What's seduces you about a puppy, about a child, about an animal? It's their vulnerability. It makes you wanna hug them, it makes you wanna help them, right? The sense which if you came upon a tiger that's there and that they don't need that, well, that's not seductive. I mean, on your screen it is, but if they're there in your living room, that's not seductive. But that puppy is, right? Vulnerability, the sense that somebody needs protection or help, brings out qualities in us that we don't normally have, that I think allow for seduction. So that is being vulnerable.

• 49:08Robert Greene?

  That is, I can be influenced by that other person. I am open to their spirit, right? That's being vulnerable. The word vulnerable, I hate to sound like a professor, so excuse me, seduction, comes from the root of it means a wound, vulnus. So you have a wound inside of you and you need healing. And the other person naturally wants to help you, right? But being insecure is the, means I'm so self-absorbed, I'm so worried about myself, that I can't get out of it. And we've all had that experience. When you meet somebody and you can sense, you can smell their insecurity in them.

• 49:52Robert Greene?

  I'm not judging them because we all have insecurities. It makes you feel insecure. It makes you feel a little bit awkward. Whereas if you meet someone who's not like that, who's confident, etc., it brings out that quality in you. So if you're on a date and there's someone who's, you smell that kind of insecurity, it makes you awkward and insecure, it creates a kind of a problem. So that would be the difference between the two.

• 50:16Steven Bartlett?

  There's gonna be a lot of people listening to this that are single and ready to mingle.

• 50:24Steven Bartlett?

  What advice would you give them in terms of being great at dating? You've talked about the importance of vulnerability there and how that kind of forms connection between humans in a very innate way. What else is great dating advice for the single people out there?

• 50:37Robert Greene?

  Well, the thing is, okay, there are several things. So first of all, we live in a culture where people think you don't, you shouldn't have to put effort into something like love and romance. You should just be who you are, man. I don't have to put on a role. I don't have to play a game. That's manipulative, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, I'm sorry. Love and romance is something that is almost biological. If you look at animals and mating rituals, they're incredibly elaborate. Seduction is a mating ritual. And so the worst thing you can feel is that this person isn't putting any effort into something. Let's just say it's, it's, it's from the woman's point of view, this man.

• 51:23Robert Greene?

  He just shows up wearing jeans and his usual sloppy outfit. He doesn't comb his hair, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. He takes me to the pub for dinner on our first date. You know, he, he's not thinking about me. He's not willing to put any effort into it. If he's not willing to put any effort into it, what's it gonna be like three months down the line? When he completely takes me for granted, which is what happens in a relationship? Am I not important enough? Right? Whereas the ability to have a little bit of effort, to think of it as kind of theater and drama and that there's nothing evil about it. So I'm gonna dress nicely. I'm gonna, I just have to be fancy.

• 52:06Robert Greene?

  Just that I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna put some effort into how I look. I'm gonna take her to a place that isn't, is, you know, I'm not talking about candle lights and roses and that kind of crap. Doesn't that, you can be creative. It could be somewhere that, that's scuzzy, that's on the wrong side of town, but it's different and it's appealing to, and you put some thought into it. There's a reason you're taking her there, right?

• 52:30Steven Bartlett?

  I have a friend who went on a date and she came back from the date and was complaining because the person that she dated, went on that first date with. Was using a took her to a spot where he had an available valid discount code.

• 52:46Robert Greene?

  Oh, awful.

• 52:49Steven Bartlett?

  And and

• 52:49Robert Greene?

  Talk about anti seduction. There you go.

• 52:52Steven Bartlett?

  Why is that anti seductive? In that case, one might say that male is being, you know, economically savvy, financially savvy, that, you know,

• 53:02Robert Greene?

  If you're not able to let go of your of your kind of tightness when it comes to a woman, something's wrong with you, man. Just let go. Spend some extra money. Spend the extra 10 quid that you might need to spend on taking her to someplace different. But it signals a kind of cheapness and it's not about money. It's about a cheapness in your spirit. Right? She's not worth, you know, letting go. Okay. Maybe you don't have that much, but my God, you have enough. It's not gonna like make if you're that poor than than, you know, okay, maybe, but probably not. You could afford it. Show that you that it

• 53:42Robert Greene?

  means something to you. Seduction is a language. It's not a language of words. It's a language of gestures that we're paying attention to. We're paying attention to people's body language. We're paying attention to their actions, to the things that they never say. So when you signal that discounts are so important to you that even on the first date, you have to have a discount, you're signaling that it's not there's something tight about you in your nature and it's not very pleasant.

• 54:14Steven Bartlett?

  I from doing this podcast and speaking about topics like love and sex and dating and, you know, dating apps even, one of the comments I saw quite frequently was from young men who are struggling to seduce a woman.

• 54:32Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 54:32Steven Bartlett?

  Or vice versa. Specifically, young men that, you know, and then I read some stats. I think Scott Galloway came on the podcast and talked about how. I'm gonna butcher these numbers, but a staggering amount of men haven't had sex in the, young men haven't had sex in the last 12 months. And then when I looked at the comments section specifically on YouTube, I saw, I kinda saw that energy reflected where it looked like young men in particular were struggling to seduce a mate, a partner in the modern world.

• 55:04Steven Bartlett?

  Is, is that real in your view? Is there, is there something that has changed in society? Has that always been the case? Is there anything we can do if we're, we're a young man that's struggling in the modern world because of the internet and computers and this and dating apps and?

• 55:19Robert Greene?

  Well, a lot of it is, I'm afraid to say is internet porn. Where you get the idea that, you know, sex is something that should be very easy and quick and that women should have, look, have that kind of body and physique, et cetera, et cetera. And that becomes your norm, et cetera. That can be, that can be very damaging. But the idea that things must come easy and quick is, is very prevalent. And to win over someone like, oh, say you're a man and it's a woman who might be reluctant to have sex for good reason, or reluctant to have a relationship, requires some effort. It requires some thinking. You can't just hack it, or you can't just swipe and get it.

• 56:03Robert Greene?

  You can, you can have your internet sex, but you're not gonna get that in real life. It doesn't work that way. It takes time. It takes patience, you know, and you're gonna have to work at, and you're gonna be rejected. Being with people is a skill, being a social animal. Although there's a part that comes naturally, if you spend all of your time here, you're losing that skill of how to respond to people's body language, you know? Half of the thing is you're sitting in a bar opposite, let's say it's a woman. And how she crosses her legs, how she sips her drink, how she looks at you, how she touches her hair, she's signaling things. It's a language, it's a beautiful language, right?

• 56:48Robert Greene?

  You have to learn it and you're not gonna learn it here because you can't. You have to be in person, it has to be skin to skin. You have to get a feel for what other people are thinking and feeling. And we're actually really, really good at that. Humans have, that's what makes us human. It's called mirror neurons. I can sense what's going on in your mind. I can read your body language. You have to get out in the world and you have to be, put yourself physically out there and try and try and try and have rejection. And I know it sounds awful, but it is a skill in a way where you're learning how to like, understand and deal with people and, and, and understand that what they're, who they are and get inside their spirit.

• 57:31Robert Greene?

  It takes time and effort and patience. So for young men, you have to realize that, right? If, if you think everything has to be easy and quick, it's never gonna work for you. And then I talk about the actor, the Hollywood actor, Errol Flynn, who is perhaps numerically the greatest male seducer ever, because estimated that he had seduced close to 3,000 women and he died when he was 50. And if I, I did the math one day, what, how can that possibly be? And I, I tried to research what was his secret and it was hard to find out. Finally, I found a book written by a woman whom he had seduced, another actress, and

• 58:14Robert Greene?

  she said, "He was so relaxed and so comfortable. It was like being, it was like an animal type thing. And then when I would sit with him, it was almost as if I had drunk two martinis, just sitting next to him. His comfort and his security and his confidence, his relaxed attitude, it just made me drunk." So feeling relaxed, feeling confident and not defensive and comfortable with yourself is a very powerful seductive quality. I mean, there are many of them, but that's one that I would point out.

• 58:48Steven Bartlett?

  Have you ever figured out what builds confidence? You, you, earlier on, you were talking about how children need to experience things firsthand. You can't just tell them, you can't just tell someone, for example, to be confident. Preaching doesn't seem to work. What, what is it in your view that, that does build that true or? You also can't fake confidence.

• 59:07Robert Greene?

  No.

• 59:08Steven Bartlett?

  I remember, I tell you, we talked about rejection a second ago. I was rejected by pretty much every girl that I was pursuing between the ages of Sixteen and I'd say twenty two.

• 59:20Robert Greene?

  Really?

• 59:20Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, like, and I, do you know what it was? I was faking confidence. It all changed when I was actually had a sense of security in myself.

• 59:29Robert Greene?

  Right.

• 59:29Steven Bartlett?

  But in the period where I was like faking confidence, I was pretending I was confident. It was like they could, they just could read past it. That's almost how I look back on the situation. So I came to learn that you can't fake confidence. You can't pretend to be it because there's so many sort of micro expressions that.

• 59:46Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 59:47Steven Bartlett?

  That you, that look, that end up reading more like insecurity than confidence. But what is real confidence and how does one build it in your view?

• 59:54Robert Greene?

  Well, you've kind of answered your own question there in a way. So, um, you know, fake confidence is like bravado, right? And you're, you're putting on an act. And particularly women who've had to deal with this for, you know, millennia. They can smell it, they can sense it. They don't have to, it's not in your words, it's the body language, et cetera, et cetera. Real confidence comes from actual actions, from your actual things you've accomplished. Right? So, you know, when you're twenty two, twenty one, it's hard to have that confidence. Because what is it based on? You know, maybe it's based, okay, maybe you're, you're really good looking.

• 1:00:36Robert Greene?

  If you happen to have that good fortune and you can feel confident about that and you don't have to try so hard. All right, maybe that might work. Or maybe you're really good at sports. Or maybe you're a really good dancer or you're a really great singer. But it's based on something real. You have a skill. You have something that separates you. You have something that you can do, that you can accomplish. Because when you're twenty one, it's hard to have those. You know, I look back on myself when I was that age, I had nothing. No wonder I got rejected, you know?

• 1:01:09Robert Greene?

  So it comes from what you do in life. Okay, the finest sense of confidence is actually creating things and having success and meeting goals and achieving things and having a record of that. You know, and maybe what goes with that is having some money, but it's not necessarily because you don't have to have a lot of money. And you don't have to be good looking to seduce. That's a myth that I try to explode in the art of seduction. Some of the greatest seducers, male and female, were not good looking at all. It's about psychology and it's about how you carry yourself. But the confidence comes from actually what you can do, not how you feel or what you say. Well, it is how you feel,

• 1:01:53Robert Greene?

  but the feeling is based on things that you actually can do, skills that you have that separates you, that make you feel really confident, you know?

• 1:02:03Steven Bartlett?

  So. Body language. Yeah, I find it fascinating that, you know, there's quotes and things that say eighty percent of our communication is nonverbal, et cetera, et cetera. Body language is so interesting to me because again, I think that's one of the things that it's just impossibly hard to fake. I was reading, you know, a couple of books on, there was a phase when I was, I don't know, twenty, probably just after being rejected all the time. When I was maybe twenty-two, where I started reading books from pick-up artists. And they would obsess on the topic of body language. And one of the things they'd say is, and I was explaining this to my girlfriend a couple of weeks ago, that when, when a man is lower confidence and when he's desperate, he does this thing called pecking in a nightclub where he'll like lean in and like shout in your ear.

• 1:02:47Steven Bartlett?

  And when he's higher confidence, he kind of leans out and he'll, he'll wait for you to lean in. Small things like that, subtleties like that, that intuitively we, we're reading and understanding and communicating and et cetera. But someone that doesn't have the confidence probably isn't even aware that they do. So when I reflect on my rejection phase, I think, gosh, my body language must have been exuding desperation and low status and low value, low self-esteem. What's your thoughts on body language?

• 1:03:15Robert Greene?

  And well, in my last book, Human Nature, I wrote a whole chapter on it. I quoted the figure ninety-five percent, but who knows what it really is. The thing it is that we evolved for hundreds of thousands of years before language existed, right? And our earliest ancestors depended on the group for their survival and getting along. And their powers came from observing other people and their body language. You could read it. So it's a skill that's wired into us, wired into our brains. It's a very unique skill that we humans have. It's just that you don't learn that. When you're a child, when you're two years old, you have it because your life depends on it.

• 1:03:57Robert Greene?

  You have to see what if your mother is loving you or your father is kind to you. Because if not, you know, you could be abandoned. Your life depends on it. You're great at reading that. And children are incredibly adept at picking up body language. So if someone is fake, if someone's an impostor, they hate being around children because children see through you, you know, like radar, right? Because they're so attuned to it. You had that skill when you were very young, but you lost it. Because you became so oriented with words and you became so self-absorbed that you're not paying attention. But it's extremely important, right? So the whole body is involved in it.

• 1:04:41Robert Greene?

  So you've got to first stop thinking about people's words so much. Because the one thing about words, unfortunately, is people can lie. They can say whatever they want. They can say, I love your screenplay. That was fantastic. You were great in that movie. I thought you were great, etc., etc. They can say anything to please, to flatter, to cajole you. But body language, man, it doesn't lie, right? So I talk in that book about the eyes and the fake smile. The fake smile is something you see every single day, but you're not paying attention. It's like, it's kind of tight, right? It's like, yeah, right? But a real smile, the whole face gets animated.

• 1:05:25Robert Greene?

  And there's a little crinkly thing here as your face, as it lights up, and your eyes light up. It's hard to even put into words, but it's there. You can see it. It's real, it's not faked. Knowing the difference between a fake and a real smile is really important in seduction, in business or whatever. To know if someone is like, yeah, I like that idea. No, they don't really. They're saying that to please you. They actually hate your idea. You master that language, you can start deciphering all this bullshit people are giving you. The face, you can disguise it a little bit. Actors know that. But you know what you can't fake? It's your voice. If you're nervous, not even the finest actors in the world can fake that.

• 1:06:10Robert Greene?

  Your voice betrays so many things about you. It betrays your weakness, it betrays your lack of confidence, or it betrays the other quality, et cetera, right? So pay really attention to the tone of people's voices, to how fast they talk. People who talk fast are very nervous. Someone who's talked, I know, I'm probably talking a little too fast here, sorry. My mind races, so I do that. Normally, I don't talk so fast. But, you know, you talk slowly, you have a certain tone, you have a certain intonation that kind of reveals confidence, okay? Body language, posture. You were talking about pecking, right?

• 1:06:51Robert Greene?

  When you go and look at a meeting of people, in a business meeting, you'll see all the employees kind of leaning forward, nervous, and you'll see the boss kind of leaning back, arms raised like this, you know? "I'm the powerful one, you come to me. I'm the leader, I'm the top dog," or she, it's a woman. "I don't need to be like this, I'm like this." Body language reveals a lot about leadership qualities, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, if you go, you're at a party, and you come up to someone that you're meeting for the first time, and they're talking to you, and you notice that their feet are angling away from you, that means that they're not really interested,

• 1:07:36Robert Greene?

  they're looking for any moment to try and walk away and escape. They're not really into you. Whereas their feet are facing you, they're engaged, they want to talk to you, right? This is a whole art you can learn. You can sit there and you can read it, and I talk about, I give the story in Laws of Human Nature of a man named Milton Erickson, the founder of NLP and hypnotherapy, probably one of the most brilliant psychologists who ever lived. When Milton Erickson was 19 years old, or so, he had polio. He nearly died, his entire body was paralyzed. The only thing he could move, the only muscle he could move were his eyeballs. Now imagine that. He was a young man with a very active mind. He can't talk, he can't do anything.

• 1:08:19Robert Greene?

  All he can do is move his eyeballs a little bit. He was so bored, can you imagine how bored you'd be like that? You can't read, you can't do anything. People would come in to visit him. All they could do was look at them and study them. He became the greatest reader of body language ever in the history of mankind. People said he almost had ESP. He could read everything about who they were just by looking. Cause he ended up recovering, he became a psychologist. Because his life depended on developing this skill. He was gonna just die from sheer boredom if he didn't learn how to read body language. He mastered that language, much like somebody could master French. And it's an incredibly powerful language that I can't emphasize enough.

• 1:09:05Steven Bartlett?

  You know, we can go about learning the language of body language, and I'm sure that will help. But it's such a complex.

• 1:09:15Steven Bartlett?

  Like there's like a thousand things with my body language at all times. Like how I'm speaking, my eyeballs, where I'm looking, my posture, my arms. Like, am I crossing my arms? Am I crossing my legs? All of these things. So the challenge of mastering all of that feels a little bit overwhelming. Am I right in assuming the easiest, the easier challenge to master is in fact just like my sense of self?

• 1:09:39Robert Greene?

  Very well put.

• 1:09:40Steven Bartlett?

  Because, you know.

• 1:09:41Robert Greene?

  If you feel confident, if you feel secure, if you're not all inward and insecure and worried about yourself, it will naturally radiate through your gestures. Yeah, you don't have to sit there and pay attention to your fingers, your arm, your ears, your eyes. It's just there, it's natural. So yeah, that is the solution. So the two parts of the game, it's your own body language. Be aware that people are judging you for that, right? And you can't, as you say, be monitoring everything or you'll drive yourself crazy and you'll look very weird. Right? So the best solution is to feel these certain things that are gonna radiate. And to not give the fake smile, but when you're really happy, to just show it and show your emotion that way.

• 1:10:26Robert Greene?

  And the other side, which is more, I think, really important, is learning other people's body language. And that can come from study and is much more a logical thing than constantly thinking about everything that you do.

• 1:10:42Steven Bartlett?

  Your next book that I have here, Mastery. Why did you write a book called Mastery?

• 1:10:50Robert Greene?

  Well, to be honest with you, it came, the idea for it was around the year 2010, 2009. I was getting a little worried that people who were reading my books, particularly young men, reading Power and Seduction, they were thinking, that's all I need in life, man. I just need to be a manipulator. I just need to play political games. That's what success is all about. And I was worried that, you know, if you don't understand how to make something, what's going to be the future of mankind? Are bridges just going to fall down? Are hotels going to collapse? People don't know how to make things anymore. We don't know how to use our hands anymore. Right? So being able to be good with people is extremely important as a social animal.

• 1:11:32Robert Greene?

  But perhaps higher up in the hierarchy is being able to do things to be able to have great skill and to be able to create something and know how to master a subject and to, you know, build something that can last. That's really important. And I'm feeling like because young people, this is back in 2010, imagine now,

• 1:11:55Robert Greene?

  have this idea that everything comes quick and easy because you can click, click, click, and things come to you, that everything in life should be that way, that we're becoming alienated from the human brain and how the human brain operates. Because the human brain requires time. If you know how the human brain operates, we have what are called neural pathways. And every time you repeat something, a neural pathway is created and strengthened and strengthened and strengthened. It's why we get addicted to things, but it's also why we develop skill. So if I'm sitting there shooting free throws day in and day out and day up, my brain is wiring it, it's learning it, it's learning that motor skill, that hand mind thing, and it's getting better and better and better at it.

• 1:12:38Robert Greene?

  It takes time. It takes repetition to build those pathways. And I explain in Mastery that you reach the proverbial 10,000 hours, which some people dispute nowadays. So it's just a number. It's not, it's not a fact. You've spent so long learning something that there's so many pathways. It's like this amazing. Inner landscape with all these connections going on in your brain. And now you can be creative. Now you can come up with things that nobody's ever thought of. You can play chess on a higher level. You can be Pele on soccer or Lionel Messi making passes that no one had ever seen before. Because you're not having to think, right? You don't have to think anymore. Your body just does, does what it wants.

• 1:13:23Robert Greene?

  Imagine 20,000 hours, which is possible, which is people sometimes attain in certain fields. You're almost like a genius. You're almost like superhuman, right?

• 1:13:34Robert Greene?

  If you're someone who's so locked into the internet, to getting things instantly, you can't get past 100 hours, let alone 10,000. You're never going to develop skill and you're going to find life really, really difficult for you. So I wrote the book because I was actually deeply worried that we were losing a part of how the human brain operates, something elemental part of our wisdom.

• 1:13:59Steven Bartlett?

  The interesting through line between that and the subject matter we've discussed in power and seduction is that by learning to master something, you build that sense of self-esteem and confidence that we're looking for to be good at the former topics mentioned. But on the topic of mastery, the first chapter in this book, and really the first question a lot of people ask is this question about finding your passion. And I've always had a difficult relationship with this question because it sometimes assumes that there's one of them and that you have to go in search of it somewhere. In the first chapter of your book, you talk about discovering your life task.

• 1:14:35Steven Bartlett?

  Why, why is it important? Is it the same thing? Is, is finding your passion and finding your life task the same thing?

• 1:14:41Robert Greene?

  No, I just recorded this yesterday on my own podcast. I went on a rant about how it's not about passion. It's not about finding your passion. I actually don't like that word passion. It kind of makes me cringe because if you think about it, passion, to succeed at anything requires time and effort and boredom and tedium. So let's just say a simple example, you're learning to play the piano. When you first sit down at the piano, you have to play these really insipid tunes. It's so boring. You have to learn, you know, what they call it, finger exercises and scales. On any instrument, you have to learn scales, et cetera. It's tedious, man. If you think it's got to be passion. Forget it, you're never gonna get far.

• 1:15:26Robert Greene?

  The thrill comes after a year of playing the piano, and you get better at it, better and better. And now it starts coming fun. Then 10 years, it's more fun. Then 20 years, it's fantastic, you know? I'm not, I'm not trying to name drop here, but the other night I had dinner with Stevie Wonder. It was the most amazing thing I ever seen. He's absolutely, I wish I'd interviewed him for my book. Speaking of genius, you know, and he's blind, obviously. Everybody knows. But I was watching him, he performed for us. We were over there with a group of friends at his recording studio. I was watching him play the piano, and he's blind, right? And he's, he's improvising. And it's just absolutely brilliant and amazing. And as I'm seeing this, I'm thinking,

• 1:16:11Robert Greene?

  I could see the thousands of hours he's been putting in just touching these keyboards and knowing where the, where the, where the keys are. You know, it was just mind-blowing how amazing it was. That is the power that the human brain naturally has through hours and hours and hours of effort. That's how it works. So, you know, he didn't get there because it was passion. He got there because he was a child prodigy. At the age of 11, he was signed to a contract with Motown Records, right? He was playing that as he was a kid, hour after hour after hour after hour. He had a love for the piano,

• 1:16:54Robert Greene?

  but it wasn't like every time he sat down, it had to be passionate about it. He had the patience to put up with all of the boring stuff, okay? So, you wanna discover what you were meant to, what you have a connection to, what you have a love for, right? When you're a child, hopefully, or when you're 18 or 19 or 20, that's the best time to discover it, all right? You decide, and it doesn't have to be something highfalutin or worth, you know, like intellectual. You could be great with your hands, you could be great with your body, you could be great with images and visuals, you could be great with words, you could be great in many different areas, okay? They're all equal, they're all great.

• 1:17:38Robert Greene?

  You as a child are naturally... So there's a book I always recommend for people called The Five Frames of Mind by Howard Gardner, in which he talks about the five forms of intelligence that humans have. Each brain genetically is wired in one direction or the other. You wanna know that, you wanna feel it inside of you. It's like a feeling, it's not an intellectual thing. You feel, when you're doing sports, that it's good, it's a natural thing, it's what I'm meant for. When you're involved with words, like I was when I was eight years old, it felt right, it felt like a natural fit. I have to follow this path. When you're three or four years old, and it's music like Stevie Wonder, and you're hearing

• 1:18:21Robert Greene?

  this in your head, wow, that's it for me, right? Okay? You feel it, you feel this connection. All right, now you fast forward to when you're 18 or 19 years old, and you're having to make a career choice. Okay, so, I call that your twenties, the most important phase of your life, that's gonna make or break you in some way. If you spend your twenties trying to learn skill in something that connects to you deeply, right? Then things are gonna happen to you by the time you reach 30. You've discovered your life's task. It may not be something so specific. For me, it was writing, words, but I didn't know what to write.

• 1:19:05Robert Greene?

  I tried novels, I tried journalism, I tried theater, I tried screenwriting. But you know it, it gives you a direction, and you try, and you try, and try, and you know that's what you were meant for, that's what you were destined for. You feel connected to it, you feel a love for it, and so when it comes time to do the tedious stuff, you're able to do it because you know, in the end, it'll pay rewards, you'll get better and better at it, and the connection is so deep, that to not do it would be miserable. So... You can't think of everything in life having to be pleasurable and having to be passionate. There's gonna be boredom, there's gonna be tedium. How do I deal with it? You have to feel a greater love than just mere pleasure or passion.

• 1:19:50Robert Greene?

  It's gotta be something so deep within you that to not do it will make you deeply unhappy. For me, not to write or be a writer, I don't think I'd be alive right now. I would have been so miserable, I would have been so alienated from who I am. So that's what'll get you through, that's what a life's task is.

• 1:20:06Steven Bartlett?

  When you think about that, in the book you talk about the first phase, which is, you know, your apprenticeship on your journey to mastery. When you're in that apprenticeship phase, you know, when you're maybe early in your career, you're early on your journey to becoming the pianist, the violinist, the podcast, the entrepreneur, whatever, what are the most important things to be selecting for as it relates to the job you take, the people you're around, that kind of thing? Like, if there's a 23-year-old listening to this that is, you know, an apprentice at a floristry shop, making bouquets of flower, and they're being offered five different jobs in the industry of floristry, which one should they be looking at if they're in the early steps of their apprenticeship?

• 1:20:48Robert Greene?

  Very easy question to answer, thank you. You wanna look for the job that offers you the most possibilities of learning. So if you're gonna go to a florist shop where there's only one other person there, it's like an entrepreneur who started it, and you're gonna be like their right-hand man or woman, and you're gonna learn, and the pay is half of what you could get at this very fancy, you could be working at the shop at some department store where they'd pay you triple, take the job that pays one-third, where you're gonna learn the most, you're gonna learn about the business, you're gonna learn from the ground up, and, you know, there's gonna be a level of excitement where... You know, we might not survive another few months.

• 1:21:32Robert Greene?

  We've got to work hard, we've got to be motivated. We're all on the same page here. A lot of people, when they're twenty three, they grab the job with the biggest paycheck. And that's a mistake. Because if you go to like a large, large firm, you're kind of lost, you don't have as much responsibility. You suddenly have to deal with all the political games, the forty eight laws of power. You're not paying attention, you're not developing skills as much. You don't have as much responsibility. Take the job that has one half, the salary, but you're responsible, you're going to be learning and it's up to you. That's, that's the most important thing you can do when you're at that point in your life.

• 1:22:12Steven Bartlett?

  You say there's three steps in that apprenticeship. Deep observation. Is that what you mean? When you say deep observation, you mean like being able to observe the job happening or do you mean something else?

• 1:22:23Robert Greene?

  Well, it means that. It also means. So most people, when they start a job, their whole, their first impulse is I've got to impress people. I've got to make them like me. That's that inward direction that's so deadly in seduction and deadly in life. You want to be outer directed. You want to observe the codes and conventions of your field, the social codes. You know, what, what's acceptable behavior, what's not acceptable behavior? The skills involved, the, the various heuristics, the various things that you have to learn that create skill. You want to be a sponge absorbing what's going on around you. What are the things you need to learn? What are the valuable skills? What are the things that aren't valuable?

• 1:23:07Robert Greene?

  What are, who are the people you need to avoid? Who are the people you need to emulate? You're a, a laser, you're just observing everything around you and not worried about yourself. That's the proper, that's deep observation.

• 1:23:20Steven Bartlett?

  You talked about skill there. It's all well and good seeing skills and knowing which skills are important. But acquiring those skills is point number two. When you're in that apprenticeship phase in life, skills acquisition. And this kind of goes to what you were saying with the working in a florist shop next to the entrepreneur. You're going to be hands on, you're going to be doing, which is also goes to what you said earlier about parents and children, like putting them in situations where they get to do stuff.

• 1:23:42Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:43Steven Bartlett?

  A lot of jobs don't offer that. A lot of jobs don't offer the difficulty, the challenge, right?

• 1:23:49Steven Bartlett?

  How important is that?

• 1:23:51Robert Greene?

  Well, we call it learning by doing. And you see, some things play into how the human brain operates. That's what you want. I give the image in the introduction to master the part in the alliteration here, but the brain has a grain to it. You want to work with that grain. You don't want to work against the grain because it's counterproductive. And one of the grains of the brain, sorry, is learning by doing. When, you know, flashback 300,000 years ago, and we're sitting there, we're making tools out of bones, out of wood, et cetera. The way the skill was passed on to other people and didn't die with one generation was you watched this person making the tool. And then you watched them and you learned and you imitated them.

• 1:24:36Robert Greene?

  Flash forward to the medieval period in Europe, where they had apprentices, apprenticeship schools. Seven years, you're learning masonry, you're learning carpentry, you're learning whatever. For seven years, you're sitting there watching somebody make things and you're doing it. That's how the brain operates. You learn by doing, not by thinking, not by thinking, oh, this is how things are fitted in mortar, you know, with mortars, et cetera, et cetera. No, I'm doing it with my hands. The human, the brain and the hand have the most connection of any part of our body because so much of our power as a species depended on our hands. We don't have much of that anymore.

• 1:25:16Robert Greene?

  But learning by doing things with your hands or making things is how the brain is wired. So you want to go with that grain. So you want to do things, you want to make things. You want to be learning through action, not through just a lot of talk and, you know.

• 1:25:33Steven Bartlett?

  One of the things that you referenced at the start of this conversation, I think maybe even off camera, was in 2018, you had a stroke. And that changed your life in a very fundamental way.

• 1:25:45Steven Bartlett?

  Can you tell me what what happened and how it's how it changed you?

• 1:25:49Robert Greene?

  Well, it was a terrifying experience. You know, I was in a coma. I emerged from it and suddenly I'm somebody who's very physical. I sports was a huge part of my life. I would swim very long distances. I love mountain biking. I was doing all kinds of hiking. It was extremely important to me. I was every single day I did something physical to take my mind off things. Suddenly it's taken away from me. The left side of my body is basically paralyzed. I have no control over it. To this day, I still have problems with it. Can't swim, can't mountain bike, can't hike, right? I can't take my mind.

• 1:26:34Robert Greene?

  I can't think while I'm taking a hike. I can't type for a ride if that's not much fun. I had to deal with crap that I've never had to deal with in my life. I had a pretty easy time compared to this. I had to learn new life skills when I'm already sixty two years old, you know? That isn't easy stuff. I don't want to whine or complain because people deal with worse stuff all the time. A lot of people get cancer, et cetera. But it's this, anybody who's had a stroke knows what I'm talking about. It's very hard because you can practice and practice and practice and practice hours and hours of therapy. I do over an hour of therapy every day and you hardly notice any results.

• 1:27:19Robert Greene?

  The frustration, it takes you ten minutes to tie your shoes. You can't button your thing. You have to get other people to do that. It's hard to cut food. You have to be patient. You have to accept this. You have to find another way of loving your life, of accepting these things that you took for granted before. And I tell people, I look out my window now where I'm riding and I see people walking their dog. And I put myself in their shoes and I go, God. That must be so great just to walk your dog down the street. What a pleasurable thing. They don't realize it. You take it for granted now. Please don't take it for granted. Understand that the ability that you have now to run, to walk your dog, to swim, to type,

• 1:28:05Robert Greene?

  it can be taken away from you. And just appreciate your life for what you have because the things that I love were taken away from me and I wish they hadn't been. So I've had to adjust myself.

• 1:28:16Steven Bartlett?

  You know, when something like that happens in life, when you, when you are the victim of a tragedy or instance or circumstance or something that happens, there's often a degree of unfairness surrounding it. And when I, when I read about that incident in 2018, I read that it was a bee sting that caused a clot that caused the stroke.

• 1:28:42Robert Greene?

  Yeah, I know. It's actually, I think, a wasp. But if that wasp had been like moving, the wind had been a little different and had moved this way instead of this way, I may not have had a stroke. You know, but I can tell you this. So in May of that year, the, the stroke was in August. In May, I'd finished The Laws of Human Nature, which took me five years. And when I finished that book, I felt like I was near death. I was so exhausted. I was so drained. You know, my wife was really worried about me because I just looked really haggard. Slowly, I kind of recovered, but then in July, I went to New York and I forgot my blood pressure medication that I'd take.

• 1:29:26Robert Greene?

  So my blood pressure was starting to rise. And then I came back to LA and I walked in this park and the bee, the wasp stung me here and my whole chest turned red and it was like the most unbearable feeling. So I went to the hospital. They gave me this drug called prednisone to relieve the itching. Prednisone increases your blood pressure. And so when I ended up having the stroke, the blood clot, it was right where the wasp sting was. So the neurologist said, probably all this cholesterol was released from that drugs, from that wasp. Wasping here, and that's where the blood clot occurred. Okay, but there were all these other circumstances that kind of led to a kind of a perfect storm.

• 1:30:08Robert Greene?

  And maybe if I hadn't had that wasp sting, it would have happened four months later, under different circumstances, and I would have died. Because what happened was, I was driving my car when I got my stroke. My wife was in the other seat. She saw something really strange going on my face. I didn't notice it. She forced me to pull over the side of the road. Ninety percent of the time, I'm alone. I'm swimming, I'm hiking, I'm driving. Could have happened four months from then. She wouldn't be there. I'd be dead right now. So I can't really think in terms of, oh, if that wasp had been diverted. It would be a good feeling, but it's too painful for me to imagine.

• 1:30:51Robert Greene?

  I like to think of, fortunately, someone was there who saved my life. Because it could have very well happened four months from then. Because I, my body was worn down, and something much worse could have happened.

• 1:31:06Steven Bartlett?

  That, that journey you described of having to rebuild and relearn and redesign your life. Yes, we've talked about the topic of power so much in this conversation. In that moment, it sounds like your power, to some degree, had been taken from you.

• 1:31:21Robert Greene?

  You know, um, you, you, you learn, like, at least for me, when I looked at people, I looked at people differently after my stroke. I had more empathy for them. I'm normally an empathetic person, but I was looking at people in the pandemic who got long COVID, who were having strokes or were having terrible circumstances. Or when I look at people who are disabled, because I'm essentially disabled now. I understand them. And, and also, the other thing is, when I look at people who are really poor,

• 1:31:58Robert Greene?

  who are struggling in life, they feel really dependent and helpless. I felt that physically. I don't feel that materially because I don't have that problem anymore, thank God. But I, I have more empathy. I understand it, not in intellectual way, but in a visceral, physical way. That sensation of, I don't know where my food's coming from. I don't know what's going to happen the next day. I'm weak, I'm dependent, I'm helpless. It's miserable.

• 1:32:26Robert Greene?

  I kind of understood that feeling now on a different level. On a level that affected me personally, it's a lot different than having it affect you in an intellectual way.

• 1:32:38Steven Bartlett?

  The phases in that journey to where you are today. The first phase after the incident, you wake up, you realize that your life has changed. What's going on in your psychology, what's going on in your mind? You talked about helplessness and depression.

• 1:32:53Robert Greene?

  Well, to be honest with you, what happened to me was right afterwards, there was a level of delusion in my mind. I kept thinking, well, in three months, I'll be back at it. I'll be in six months, I'll be swimming. In a year, I'll be hiking again. I diluted my, I wasn't aware of how hard the process was. And then six months, eight months, a year down the road, as I realized I was wrong. That's when the depression sat in, that's when it really started hitting me. I thought I'd be back. Here I am, four years on, I thought I'd be back to my life, but I'm not. You know, so that's what was the hardest struggle was actually a year in there and going. There's a phase where you kind of plateau, where you're not really progressing anymore.

• 1:33:38Robert Greene?

  That's the worst part of it. I'm progressing now again because I have a great therapist, but I had to deal with really bad depression about a year, a year and a half in when it started to realize this is my life, man, I'm going to always have this funny arm that's bowing in. I'm going to be walking like this.

• 1:33:59Robert Greene?

  I don't, I never expected this in my life, so I've had to deal with that and I've had to kind of find a way to not let it get me down, to find other pleasures and joys in life, et cetera, which I have.

• 1:34:12Steven Bartlett?

  How, how, how do you find a way to not let it get you down? I'm thinking now about people that are listening to this that might be struggling with their own subjective struggles in life. They've been, they've lost their job, they've, they've, you know, they've, they have a disability, whatever it might be. What are, what are the successful strategies you've deployed to try and remain?

• 1:34:32Steven Bartlett?

  How keep that peace of mind?

• 1:34:34Robert Greene?

  Well, I don't know how much of it is applicable because I'm at a phase of life where I don't have material worries, you know, and I could have had this kind of stroke where my physical element would have been untouched, but my brain would have been damaged, which is another part. That would have been worse because I wouldn't have been able to write another book. And I have a very active mind. So for me, being able to write another book is my salvation. So when it's three o'clock in the afternoon, when I get down to writing, it's the happiest moment in my life. I feel at peace. I'm back to my work and I love my work and I love what I'm writing about. It saved me a lot. I do meditation. I've

• 1:35:19Robert Greene?

  been meditating now for about 12 years, I think, more than that. Every morning, it's a ritual. I have to meditate. If I don't, something is wrong. And I've never missed a day, I can honestly say. And it, it just calms me down. It just gives me a strength throughout the whole day. So I get up, seven o'clock, you know, the sun's usually shining because it's Los Angeles. And I go, it's the morning. I'm greeting the morning. I'm greeting the sun. It's like I'm in, like I'm a, you know, somebody 4,000 years ago in a tribe. Here's the sun. It's, it's a miracle that there's even something like

• 1:36:00Robert Greene?

  that. The birds are chirping. I'm looking at the ivy. The sky is blue. I just calm myself down. Intrusive negative thoughts start popping into my mind. You didn't do this. You have a podcast today at two o'clock, Robert. You want to do this, that and the other. I'd get rid of them. I go, calm down, put that away. Ground yourself. It's helped immeasurably. The other thing is, always keep in mind that there are people who have it worse than you. So I don't want to feel sorry for, I don't like the sense of feeling sorry for myself. In fact, sometimes I turn it around and I look at that person walking, the dog or jogging, and I go, I actually feel sorry for you because. Because you're not aware of how precarious life is.

• 1:36:45Robert Greene?

  You're not aware of how this can be taken away from you. You're not aware of how precious it is to just be alive and just to see the sky and the birds. So I feel better than you in a way. I turned it around. I don't want to feel sorry for myself. There are things, there are people who have it worse. I read in the newspaper all the time, you know, cancer, you're in Ukraine or. I was dealing a lot with people in Iran right now, what they're dealing with. I don't have to deal with that kind of crap, like being in Iran and dealing with that daily life. How horrifying, you know? These are thoughts that take you out of the moment where you're feeling sorry for yourself and you're kind of grateful for certain things. So those are some of the strategies I've had to kind of create for myself.

• 1:37:31Steven Bartlett?

  I find it so, I find it so, I guess, powerful to hear those strategies because we all get caught up in our narrow perspective and our own subjective feelings that we're suffering or that life is against us. And then that kind of torments us in many ways. As you've post-stroke in 2018, is there anything else that you have learned about the nature of happiness from that incident? That we, that you might not have known before that incident, that I might not fully understand now? The things I heard you talk about are the importance of a sense of purpose, how perspective and gratitude are central to our feelings of happiness. But is there any other observations you've had?

• 1:38:16Steven Bartlett?

  That, I'm just saying this from my own selfish perspective because I want to know.

• 1:38:19Robert Greene?

  Well, first of all, I don't want to give the impression that I've solved everything because I'm a work in progress. I have moments where I get so frustrated. It's almost like I have Tourette's syndrome.

• 1:38:35Robert Greene?

  Like I can't, you know, I'm still four years in and my arm is still like this and I still can't brush my teeth the way I want. I get very frustrated. So I'm getting better, but it's still a work in progress. So I don't want to give the impression that I've somehow this I've mastered it because it has mastered me. I have a long way to go, but I'm getting a lot better, a lot better at it. Day to day.

• 1:38:59Robert Greene?

  You know, I don't know. I think I've kind of touched on everything only in the sense of.

• 1:39:05Steven Bartlett?

  What about connection? You talked about your wife.

• 1:39:07Robert Greene?

  Yes, she's helped me a lot. God bless her soul. She's had to take care of me, you know? And I was somebody who was always prided myself for being independent. I was trapped. That was another thing that was taken away from me. I was traveling around the world, doing book tours, going to book festivals, doing interviews, doing consulting in various different countries. I could still travel, but it requires a lot more. So I lost my independence. I had to have somebody help me with food every single day. I need things being done for me. And I feel terrible that, you know, she's been put in that position.

• 1:39:47Robert Greene?

  But she's been very gracious about it and she understands she has a lot of empathy because she knows what I've lost. So having somebody in your life, if I were alone, I couldn't deal with it, man. I wouldn't have been able to deal with it. It just would have been too much for me. It would have been too depressing. That depression that socks you after a year would have leveled me. It's just, I couldn't have made it. So that's an incredibly important aspect. And just appreciating the little things in life that I just. You know, it's a cliche and I hate saying cliches. But, um, you know, I have that feeling almost every day where I'm looking at somebody going,

• 1:40:29Robert Greene?

  man, that must be, I'm like riding my bike and I'm seeing somebody just sitting in a park, reading a book on a bench and I'm going. God, that is so much fun just to be able to do that. I can't do that anymore. But I put myself in their body. The little things in life that you take for granted are so filled with so much happiness and joy that you're not thinking about. If that person's sitting on a bench, reading that book, only realized what this person riding by thinks, maybe they wouldn't take it for granted. So so many of those little things that you don't think about have incredible importance, at least to me, having lost them. So I don't know if I'm... I wish I had something better, but that's...

• 1:41:12Robert Greene?

  I can only come from my own experience. I can't make it up.

• 1:41:16Steven Bartlett?

  Well, your books tend to focus on the nature of the human condition, what, how we are as humans, for better or for worse. And it was, it was interesting because as you were talking over several topics, when you're talking about seduction and the four laws of power and mastery, there's a part of me that's, you know, that started to feel a little bit, I don't know, feel the darkness that is innate within humans a bit, a bit too much, maybe. That we're a little bit too contrived and manipulative and conniving and whatever else. And I was thinking, do I really like humans? Yeah, I'm one of them. I'm very conscious of trying to separate myself. I hear people doing interviews when they're talking about society.

• 1:41:57Steven Bartlett?

  And I always think, you are society, but I am human. I'm all of the things you've described in many, many ways. But has your journey of learning about humans and human nature made you personally more loving towards humans, more optimistic about the human race? Or has it made you the, the opposite, honestly?

• 1:42:17Robert Greene?

  Well, it's made me more loving, but it hasn't made me more optimistic.

• 1:42:21Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:42:23Robert Greene?

  You know, there's so many things that are, are, seem to be going awry in the world today. Now, I happen to be, um, the form of meditation I do is Zen meditation. And in Zen meditation, there's this idea of what's called the tathagata, which means it was, it was another name for Buddha, and it means things as they are. And one thing you meditate is... The world isn't good, or bad, or ugly, or evil, or unjust. It just is. Things just are. This is just the way the world is. This is the karmic chain, the wheel of Dharma, that's been going on for thousands of years. It just is. It's just the state of affairs.

• 1:43:07Robert Greene?

  It's you're discriminating your mind. It's your mind that creates all of these things. Let go of that, and you can connect to the way the world is without judging it, and it becomes this very beautiful place. And so, a part of me wants to think of, this is just the way things are. But a part of me goes, this isn't good, the way things are, and I hope they're changed. So, knowing human nature, and knowing how human nature tends to twist things, how whenever we invent a new piece of technology, it could be the telephone, it could be the television, it could be the internet, it could be cryptocurrency, or it can be, you know, AI.

• 1:43:49Robert Greene?

  It tends to twist, and darken, and degrade, and pervert anything that was once maybe beautiful or interesting. It makes me worried about the future. So there, I turn pessimistic, and I'm worried. But then, I always think that there's hope with young people. And here I'm spouting another cliche. Damn, I'm gonna shoot myself after this interview. But I feel like when I was young, I was angry about things. I didn't like the way the world was. It was Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher, and yuppies, and ugly, you know, values I didn't have. And I thought there was something wrong with the world. I was angry, and I wanted to change it. Young people are still like that. And I think a lot of young people, Gen Z, or whatever the next one is,

• 1:44:34Robert Greene?

  whatever they call them, I don't know yet. They're growing up in a world that isn't healthy, that isn't right. And when you're young, you have all these energy, all this physicality, and you don't like it, you don't feel comfortable in it. And I know a lot of young people don't feel comfortable. And at some point, they're gonna rebel. And they're gonna say, I'm tired of all this virtuality. I want something real. I want some, I want real experiences. That spirit of rebellion that I see seeds of in science of gives me hope. And I hope that it continues. Because I remember once I had a dream, probably the most memorable dream I ever had. It was maybe about fifteen years ago or so.

• 1:45:18Robert Greene?

  And I dreamt that I was there in the year twenty seventy-two or something like that. I was walking around the year twenty seventy-two. It was the streets of New York. Wow, everybody looks so happy. Humans finally figured out how to do well in this world. They figured out how to, what matters. There's hope in this world. That was my moment in that dream. This has always sort of stuck with me. Maybe that will happen. Maybe it won't. I don't know. I'm not Nostradamus. But, you know, so this, I struggle with that. I struggle with part of me is pessimistic and part of me seeks seeds of hope, particularly in young people. And I really, really, really wish they figure it out because my generation and generations before,

• 1:46:03Robert Greene?

  we've kind of screwed this world over. Things aren't good right now. And I'm hoping that spirit of rebellion, that young energy will kind of come and, and kick the apple cart and say, screw all this, we want a different world.

• 1:46:18Steven Bartlett?

  We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're gonna ask it for. And the question that's been left for you to answer is, in adult life, when were you most happy and why? And then brackets, it says, are you this way now? And if not, why?

• 1:46:47Robert Greene?

  Well, I have to say, the happiest moment of my life came at that turning point when I was thirty-eight or so. And I was given the opportunity to write the Forty-Eight Laws of Power. And it came out. And my life had changed. And so the contrast from being in a, in a small apartment, um, rather poor, rather desperate, where people were beginning to worry about me. And suddenly, things were clicking together. And I was having fun and I was having all these adventures. And I had a reasonable lot of money. The shift was so radical and so dramatic

• 1:47:30Robert Greene?

  that it was extremely exciting, you know? And it was almost like a drug high. It was pretty damn intoxicating.

• 1:47:39Robert Greene?

  I don't have that now because it's 25 years ago. And I'm kind of still riding off of that. And, and the high has worn off. But I can remember in my body, how depressed I was and that feeling. And I never lose it. I'm very grateful for what I have because I know it could have turned out very differently. So I still feel that initial happiness. Cause I know if you have success when you're 24, you're not ready for it. You don't realize how evanescent it could be, how it can disappear and how important it is. I never had that because I struggled for so long. And, um, so many bad jobs.

• 1:48:22Robert Greene?

  So the happiness, the euphoria isn't the same. It's not the same intensity. But I'm still riding on that wave because I know where I was before it happened. And it's been an amazing journey. Uh, you know, my wife who's been there for it with it goes, can you believe that you were having dinner with Stevie Wonder? When you were 12 years old, you told me, Robert, that that was the first album you ever bought? Was Inner Visions? And what would you told yourself when you were 12 years old? That this was what's happening? Whoa, I would have, I would have flipped out. It's been an amazing journey. I can't, I can't complain. My whining complaint card was taken away from me in 1998 when I published that book.

• 1:49:07Robert Greene?

  And so I'm still feeling, still feeling the, the last vestiges of that euphoria from back then.

• 1:49:16Steven Bartlett?

  Robert, thank you. Thank you so much. I've been a tremendous fan of your work for what feels like forever in my life. And your wisdom, your willingness to confront difficult subject matter that a lot of people would avoid, because there is darkness enlaced in a lot of the subject matter that you've written about in some of your books. But it is very, it's very human, important, as you say, objectively neutral darkness that just is. And for you to confront that over and over again in your work is, makes it some of the most important work I think anyone could do, because it's the work that a lot of us avoid. But your vulnerability and openness today as well have been like a shot at my ass in terms of gratitude, and the importance of perception as it relates

• 1:50:01Steven Bartlett?

  to our happiness and our sense of self. So thank you so much. I've really enjoyed this conversation more than I could express in words.

• 1:50:07Robert Greene?

  Thank you so much, Stephen. It was a great interview. I was telling Chwama that I've done thousands of these podcasts. And I know, I can tell, I've done my 10,000 hours, I can tell, a great interviewer from a mediocre interviewer, and you're in that elite category.

• 1:50:24Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:50:24Robert Greene?

  Because you ask really great questions, and you're a great listener. And it's been really fun. So thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity.

• 1:50:31Steven Bartlett?

  It means a lot to me. Thank you, Robert.

• 1:50:32Robert Greene?

  Okay, you're welcome.