The Manipulation Expert: "You're Being Manipulated!", "Use Jealousy To Manipulate People!" & "How To Know If Someone Hates You!"

Understanding the laws human nature is one of the most crucial skills in life, so why do so few of us take the time to learn them? Robert Greene is a New York Times bestselling author, whose books include, ‘The 48 Laws of Power’, ’The Art of Seduction’, and ’The 33 Strategies of War’. In this conversation Robert and Steven discuss topics such as, how to avoid a midlife crisis, ways to eliminate self-doubt, how to use body language to get what you want, and the dark truth about human psychology. (2:00) Why did you write a book about human nature? (3:59) How do we reverse a lack of self-awareness? (6:26) How to get rid of qualities we don’t like about ourselves (11:20) Where does our dark side come from? (14:54) How to pursue that thing you’ve always wanted to do (27:19) The unseen importance of creating a sense of urgency (29:12) How to know if you’re following a false purpose (35:42) Should a young person just be saying yes to everything? (39:39) How to manage other people that get in the way of what we want to do (42:31) Do we have to lie to be successful? (51:16) How to read someone's body language (53:57) A smile says loads about how someone feels about you (56:16) People's personalities are contagious (56:43) Frenemies, what they mean and how to spot one (1:06:07) What's the most controversial point from your book? (1:08:50) Does equality exist when we all strive for power? (1:11:54) Becoming the best, what it really means (1:17:36) Is death a motivator for you? (1:24:14) The importance of relationships (1:26:26) How to deal with dark thoughts (1:28:34) Advice for people going through self-doubt & hard moments (1:32:42) Why did you write this book, The Sublime? (1:37:08) What would be your parting message to the world? (1:42:59) How can we rise above our emotional reactions? (1:44:40) How has your research influenced how you view politics? (1:52:03) The last guest's question You can purchase the special 25th anniversary edition Robert’s book, ‘The 48 Laws of Power’, here: https://amzn.to/3TA1NOm Follow Robert: Twitter - https://bit.ly/48V4gaG Instagram - https://bit.ly/3Vj8TYE YouTube - https://bit.ly/43lMjRf Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/3kxINCANKsb My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://smarturl.it/DOACbook Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Shop the Conversation Cards: https://thediary.com/products/the-cards 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?

  You need this skill. If there's somebody in your life and you don't know whether they're a snake or they're genuinely your friend, approach them from an angle and surprise them. And for a second, you detect what we call you should become aware of that.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Robert Greene is one of the bestselling authors in history.

• 0:17Speaker 02

  An internationally renowned expert on power strategies.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  He's been referenced in songs by Jay-Z, Kanye West.

• 0:24Robert Greene?

  The godfather of power, seduction and mastery. We have this idea that if I apply myself really hard, I should be successful. But I kept noticing this blind spot that people had. They were terrible in dealing with people. And if you're not careful and constantly misreading people, they could manipulate you, they could wound you. But if you follow the process that I lay out, it will be the best defense you could ever have in your life. You know all the tricks people are playing on you. We have to learn to look behind people's masks. Being a human being means we lie. But you know what doesn't lie? Body language. Eyes are hard to lie. The smile tells you a hundred different things if you know how to read it. But the problem that you have is you think it's a natural skill. I'm a human being, I know how to read people.

• 1:09Robert Greene?

  You don't. You're operating in darkness. But I do believe everybody has that potential. So the first thing you do is

• 1:19Steven Bartlett?

  frenemies. Do we all have frenemies?

• 1:21Robert Greene?

  Yes. They sabotage you, hurt you, and you don't want them in your life. And one common sign of a frenemy is

• 1:38Steven Bartlett?

  Robert, you wrote a book about human nature in 2018 called The Laws of Human Nature. Why did you write that book?

• 1:48Robert Greene?

  Well, it's the fruit of a lot of experiences that I've had. So I wrote The Forty Eight Laws of Power. And prior to that book, I was somebody who never had any power in life. I was sort of a failure, you know? I had gone through so many different jobs. And then, all of a sudden, I write this one book, and people are coming to me for advice. It was kind of shocking, right? And I started noticing a trend. And the trend is, we live in this intense technological age, where we have so much power at our fingertips, right? And it's so easy to get attention, and on, on, and on. And we have this idea that everything in life should be easy.

• 2:30Robert Greene?

  It's all about just, well, if I apply myself really hard, I should be successful. But I kept noticing this blind spot that people had. They were terrible in dealing with people. They were making all of these mistakes. Everybody wears a mask. You wear a mask, I wear a mask when we're out in the public realm. We don't exactly say what we think, right? We're all a bit strategic. And if you're not careful, you're constantly saying the wrong things. You're constantly misreading people. You're doing things at your job that you think are going to impress, but they have the opposite effect. And then something bad happens, and you're confused and you're emotional. It was like this circle, atmosphere of pain around the globe,

• 3:14Robert Greene?

  of people suffering because they don't know how to handle the people in their lives. And because we're so virtual, and we're so locked in our phones, they were becoming worse and worse at reading other people, at understanding them. You know, when I'm sitting across from you, I can see your body language, I can see your nonverbals. I can see all sorts of things. I can deal with you as a human. But when I spend 95% of my time behind a screen, da, da, da, da, you know, and that's even how I date, basic human skills of understanding, of connecting, of empathy, of reading, they're getting hopelessly degraded. That's my long-winded answer for why I wrote that book.

• 3:54Steven Bartlett?

  If there's someone listening out there and they can relate to certain parts of what you've just said, maybe it's a lack of their own self-awareness, or maybe they have poor sort of awareness of others, is there a starting place to reversing that? Is there maybe a most important skill that we need to master as at the foundation of that transformation?

• 4:13Robert Greene?

  Yeah, it's very simple. It's to get down on your hands and knees and realize you're bad at dealing with people. The problem that you have is you think that it's a natural skill. Yeah, I'm okay at it. I just kind of wing it. I understand what I'm doing. I'm a human being. I know how to read people, etc. You don't. You're operating in darkness. You're groping around. Just realize, first of all, that you need this skill. And once you realize that, the first thing you do is you look inward. You look at your own nature. You look at the things that I write about in the book, about narcissism, about irrationality. And instead of searching for the people around you that fit those categories, look at yourself. So it all begins with self-awareness.

• 4:57Robert Greene?

  You are the best subject of human nature. So when I was writing this book, it was actually quite painful. So I'm writing a chapter on narcissism, one of the longest chapters in the book because it's a very important subject. And I'm telling myself, Robert, you're quite a narcissist. You didn't think of yourself that way, but you have all of these classic tendencies that you're writing about in the book. It was painful. But in order to come to understand narcissism in other people, I had to sort of understand it in myself. So step number one is, I need this knowledge. I'm actually not very good with dealing with people. It's caused me problems. Go back and review the problems and mistakes you've made, mistakes I've made as well, many, many times.

• 5:42Robert Greene?

  And then, when you realize that you want this knowledge, then you begin by looking inward. But if you think that it's not needed, that you're not, it's just, oh, it's kind of interesting, or maybe I'll sort of dabble in it, it won't mean anything to you. You have to feel that pain that you've been through in life, and it's kind of an ongoing pain. It's one that I still have, even though I wrote the book, where I misread people, where I inadvertently hurt them when I didn't mean to hurt them, you know? And I feel that and I suffer from it. And so, the pain that you feel, the emotions that this turns up, motivate you then to become better at understanding other people.

• 6:21Steven Bartlett?

  What if you find things in yourself, like you said, that you don't like? You find narcissism in yourself, you find darkness in yourself. What are we meant to do with that? Are we meant to heal it, resolve it?

• 6:34Robert Greene?

  You're meant to look at it. You're meant to confront it. I have in the book a quote from the great writer Anton Chekhov that, "People can't begin to change themselves until they know who they are, until they understand themselves." Right? So, we all want to change. We all want to be better at ourselves. But until we know who we are, until we realize our flaws and our weaknesses. So, the main law of human nature, if I could summarize it, is, we don't like to look at ourselves. It's always the other person. They're the ones with the problem. They're the ones who are aggressive or passive aggressive. They're the ones who feel envy. They're the ones who are rational. But me, no. No, I'm a paragon of virtue. I'm always moral. I'm always good. I'm always smart, et cetera.

• 7:19Robert Greene?

  So, the point isn't to beat yourself up and go, "Damn it, I'm an awful human being." We're all humans, come from the same source. We all have the same ancestors. We all have the same flaws in our brain. It's not like you're exceptional. It's not like you're the one person that doesn't have narcissism, that doesn't have self-absorption. So, realizing that you're connected to all these people, that we all have these flaws and weaknesses, is actually not a bad thing. It's a good thing. And then by examining yourself deeply, you can begin to change some of these things. You know, it's just like you... I don't go like, "Oh, damn it, I'm a narcissist. I'm self-absorbed. I think a lot about myself.

• 8:02Robert Greene?

  I love talking about myself, which is something I'm afraid I do like to do." Right? The point isn't, "Well, oh, well, I'm just depressed. There's nothing I can do." Once I'm aware of it, I can begin to change it. But if I'm always repressing it, if I'm always thinking, "No, I'm good. I don't have those problems." Then if you can't see them, how can you change them? How can you deal with them? How can you become a better person? How can you change those qualities that you don't want? One of the most important things in the laws of human nature is that you have patterns, that you are compulsive.

• 8:37Robert Greene?

  It comes from your character. These patterns that you see in your intimate relationships. You always fall for the wrong person, or you sometimes fall for the wrong person. You see it in your work world. I make these mistakes. I get fired for this reason, et cetera, et cetera. And they're good patterns. But we tend to repeat over and over and over again, these compulsive behavior. Being aware of these patterns, being aware of these things, you can now begin to, you have the power to change them.

• 9:06Steven Bartlett?

  A lot of people climb the mountain of awareness. And I was thinking about people in my life that have climbed the mountain of awareness, and in my own life. Things that I'm aware of, darkness within me that I'm aware of, or challenges, or patterns I'm aware of. Taking the next step from... So I think becoming aware is painful. And then doing something about it is difficult.

• 9:28Steven Bartlett?

  It's painful because there's a lot of cognitive dissonance associated with figuring out that you're not who you want to be. You know? And then doing something about it requires breaking what feels like old neurological pathways in my brain. You know, trigger. You think about the habit cycle. Breaking that is difficult.

• 9:50Robert Greene?

  I look at it very differently, I'm afraid. So I think, actually, it's worse when you're not aware of who you are. When you walk around in this world with all of these false ideas about who you are. You don't even know who you are. You're wearing this mask. You're not authentic. You're behaving in the world as if you're somebody else. And you're not aware of that, but it's causing you pain. It's making you suffer because you're not aware of the real person that you are. You're not authentic. And coming to terms with some of these dark qualities is actually a very enlightening experience. It actually can be euphoric. You go, I am an animal. I'm not this saint. I'm not this paragon that I thought I was. I'm an animal with flaws.

• 10:36Robert Greene?

  I can embrace that. We're all like that, and it's a good thing. And feeling like you have this and you're coming to terms with it. I have a chapter on the dark side of human nature. Everybody has a shadow side. I have it, you have it, right? And seeing that shadow side, which is something you've been repressing since childhood, and dealing with it and confronting with it, is actually one of the most wonderful experiences you can have in life. Because repressing all of these things is what is making you miserable in life. But coming to terms with who you are and being aware of it is actually liberating, you know?

• 11:15Steven Bartlett?

  Where does it come from, our dark side? What you talk about in chapter nine of the book?

• 11:22Robert Greene?

  Well, I think it comes from childhood. So when you're a child, when you're three or four years old, you're like this complete person. I compare it to like this round ball. You have good qualities, you have loving qualities. You love your parents, perhaps. You love your siblings, perhaps. But you also have these other darker qualities, these kind of aggressive impulses. Sometimes you hit people, sometimes you say nasty things, right? But you're a complete person. It's natural, it's who you are, it's how you were born. It's like a round ball, and it's complete. And then slowly, year by year, month by month, you have to cut off that dark side, that backside of yours.

• 12:06Robert Greene?

  In school, you're told, "Don't ever show that part of you." Your parents are, "Come on, you gotta be nice, you gotta get along. We want to be proud of you." All of those aggressive impulses that you have, all of those feelings where you felt envy about somebody, whatever, you wished you had what your brother or sister had. So they all go underground, right? You force them down. You don't want to deal with them, but they're still there because you're a human being. Those emotions don't leave you, they just get pushed down, and they go into the backside of your head. That round ball now becomes cut off. It's like the moon with a dark side and a front side. And when you're out in the public, and you're in work, or in a social situation,

• 12:48Robert Greene?

  you're only showing people that bright, happy side, the good side. And you're doing the damnedest to conceal all of that dark energy inside of you. And then suddenly... Because you're not aware of it, it comes out in explosions. Very typical thing is you suddenly get angry and you burst out with an angry email or you yell at somebody, you say something kind of nasty. And then you look back and you go, where did that come from? That's not really me, I'm not really like that, I feel ashamed about that. But what you must realize is that's part of your shadow that's speaking, it's coming out, you're just not aware of it, you're trying to control it too much.

• 13:29Robert Greene?

  And I say, the best thing in life to do is not to take out this dark side and just throw it around the world and be nasty and aggressive. That won't work. But you have to find ways to take that energy, because that dark side contains a lot of energy, a lot of power, and use it and channel it into ways that are productive. So, I happen to be someone who has a fair amount of aggression, I have to admit. I'm extremely competitive, right? Even in card games, I don't like losing. So I've channeled it into my books, I take all of that energy and I put it into making the best books that I can, into ambition.

• 14:11Robert Greene?

  So if you're ambitious, channeling that energy into becoming the best and beating the competition is a productive way of using that dark energy. If you feel angry about a cause or something that pisses you off about the world, some injustices, instead of whining about it, et cetera, you go out and you do something, you do something, you get involved in a movement or whatever, you channel that energy into something productive. That's the way to deal with the dark side and that's, you can't go throughout life imagining that you're the saint, because you're not, you have these qualities.

• 14:50Steven Bartlett?

  In your book about the strategies of war, the second strategy of war that you write about is do not fight the last war. And when I read that, what I understood it to kind of mean was about not being rigid.

• 15:06Steven Bartlett?

  You know, how does one dismantle their, the prison of convention that they live in? So for that lawyer or for that person that's working in the financial district, who is, you know, forty seven and they're a lawyer, they're a stockbroker and they're miserable. They have somewhat been imprisoned by their own identity, which is like a set of ideas from the past. And I'm really obsessed with how we get out of the way of our own identities that we can live our most fulfilling lives. Cause even me, you know, there's, and probably even you, I've created this perception of who I am and I'm like following the instructions every day.

• 15:43Robert Greene?

  Yeah, it's a trap. You know, you can't fall into that. So one of the laws of power that I have, one that I think is very important, I think it's twenty five or twenty six, I don't remember the number, is recreate yourself. So the moment people start, uh, know who you are, they, they, they identify, they create your identity. Oh, Robert Greene is this person who writes these dark Machiavellian manipulative books. Then I'm trapped. I'm trapped by their perception of me and I always have to be like a little dog performing for them. Right. And I don't want to fall into that trap. You have to recreate yourself. You have to use your personality and who you are as clay that you are molding. You're like an artist. And so you, you change yourself.

• 16:28Robert Greene?

  For each person, it's different. So for me, it means I don't write forty eight laws of power, part two. I write now a book that's not like the forty eight laws of power at all. For you, it's doing your podcast, but changing it up. Or maybe you do a different podcast, or maybe you do, go into a different career set. Maybe you become a CEO or an entrepreneur in a different direction. I was recently on Andrew Huberman's podcast, right? One of the most successful podcasts besides yours in the world. And. He, I don't want to, it's gonna sound like bragging, but the book mastery helped him a lot because he was a professor, I believe at Stanford, I hope I have it right.

• 17:13Robert Greene?

  Everything was going well, he was on a fast track in neuroscience, but he was miserable. He hated the politicking. He hated all the bullshit that you have to go through in academia. And then he read the book and he goes, I don't know how old he was. He must have been in his early 30s. He goes, I don't want to do this. I want to change. I want to recreate myself. He decided to go into podcasting and to take all of his knowledge about science and neuroscience and bring it into a different medium. And so that's, that's extremely powerful because if you'd stayed in academia, he would have gone down the path that we're talking about. It sounds a little sexier than being in finance in your 47, but being stuck in academia when it doesn't fit you

• 17:57Robert Greene?

  with all the nasty politics that go on in universities, et cetera. That is a path for misery if he doesn't fit. So you have to kind of go through this process all the time and not let other people tell you who you are.

• 18:12Steven Bartlett?

  In the case of Andrew Huberman, who transitioned from an academic to a podcaster, it's quite a feat because there's lots of forces that try and hold our existing identity in place. A lot of people. And to sort of cross the chasm, get past all of that force that says, no, we want you to stay with us, Andrew. We want you to be an academic. Who do you think you are being a podcaster? You know, that, that force I'm so intrigued by because everyone, regardless of where they are now, if they're going to try and venture to somewhere else, a better place, they're going to encounter that. How does one work through that? What is that? How do we understand that force that's trying to keep us down?

• 18:53Robert Greene?

  It usually happens when you're successful that people start giving you these identities that kind of define who you are. And if you're okay with it, that's fine, you know, if it doesn't. But I'm a big believer in listening to your own pain and listening to your own frustration. So when you feel frustrated in life, you have to go through a process, you have to look at it and you have to go, what is the source of it? Normally, the first thing you'll do is you'll blame other people. You'll blame the world. You'll blame your spouse, your children, whatever, right? And you won't really look at what it is, why you're frustrated. And if you look at it deeply enough and you go,

• 19:35Robert Greene?

  "I'm really frustrated because I'm not enjoying my work. I'm making money, I'm going there every day and I'm going through the motions, and I'm successful and people admire me, but I'm not happy. I'm frustrated, I'm upset." You've got to lean into that pain, you've got to lean into what frustrates you and go, "I can't go on another five years like this." Because the mind and the body are tied in, there's no difference. We're all one, we're all a unity. And so, when you start having these frustrations, these desires that you're not acting upon, it creates physical problems. You're not aware of why suddenly your blood pressure is rising,

• 20:18Robert Greene?

  why suddenly your back is having pain like I'm having right now. It's all interconnected. And when you're not doing something that you're not engaged with, your whole being goes out of whack. Everything doesn't work. You've got to listen to it, you've got to understand it. And you've got to go, "I want some joy, some excitement in my life, I want a challenge." It takes some fearlessness because leaving a prestigious job at Stanford, where you've got money, I don't know if he had tenure or not, or perhaps he did. You know, it takes some guts because you're leaving something that you know that's a convention, that's stable, et cetera, et cetera. But you've got to go, "It's not worth the price.

• 21:02Robert Greene?

  It's not who I am, I'm going to suffer for it down the road." And so, you know, let's say he decided to go into podcasting and it failed. All right, so be it. Then he learns that and he's somebody who's very smart. He would have figured out another way, another direction to go in. If my book, The Forty Eight Laws of Power, hadn't been a success, I don't know what would have happened to me, but hopefully I would have figured out another way to go, because I also had to drop a career direction that I was going in. But you've got to try. You've got to be able to try and you've got to go, say yourself, It's actually a great thing in your 30s, let's say, to go,

• 21:44Robert Greene?

  I need something new, I need something completely different, I need a new challenge. I'm gonna drop this, I'm gonna start something. You won't believe the energy that will suddenly rise up in you, right? You'll suddenly feel invigorated, you'll suddenly feel youthful again. I'm not stuck in this thing, I can try something else.

• 22:03Steven Bartlett?

  I'm so intrigued by two things within that. One of them was, going back to the case of Andrew, who left Stanford and became a podcaster, was my brain, you said, um, he's an intelligent guy, he would have figured it out if he'd failed. My brain also was saying, he could have always gone back. And there's a real illusion sometimes, I think, in most of our lives where we don't realize that if we mess up in this thing, as I think Jeff Bezos calls it, this is probably a type two decision where we can walk back through the door. But it's this sort of illusion that we're gonna really lose something great if we fail, that stops us taking that first step. And the other thing I was curious about is this idea that pain is a catalyst for change. And do people need to get to that point in their lives where they go, oh, I'm just so sick of this?

• 22:46Steven Bartlett?

  To change, can someone change before they get there?

• 22:51Robert Greene?

  Unfortunately not. Sometimes the bottom has to drop out before you realize what you really want and what you really, you know, need to get in life. I wish it weren't that way. But feeling like you're suffering and that you need a change and that if you go on this way, bad things are gonna happen, is the greatest motivator of all. Because if you're moderately discontented with your job, you're gonna constantly be justifying it to yourself going, ah, it's alright, it'll get better. There'll be a new boss, or I can always move from this job to another company similar. You'll justify, you'll never get out of it. And the trap will just close in on you and you'll never get out of it, right?

• 23:36Robert Greene?

  It's those moments where, damn it, I hate this, I can't go on. You know, I'm heading to suicide, I'm heading to depression, I'm heading to drinking. I'm hitting bottom. I don't like where I'm going. It doesn't have to be quite so drastic, I know I'm exaggerating. But you have to feel a degree of pain and frustration to say, I need to make a major change in my life, you know? The other thing I say is, In the same book you were quoting about warfare, I have what's called the death ground strategy, where you feel like, so he's going into podcasting. And if you go in with the attitude, "Well, if I fail, I'll just go scurrying back to Stanford."

• 24:20Robert Greene?

  That's a recipe for failure in itself already. Your attitude is already half-assed. You're already half into it. You go to yourself, "I've got to, of cutting my ties at Stanford. If this podcast doesn't work, I'm not going back." It gives you the energy, the motivation, the desire to actually make it successful. But if you're always going through life, kind of with half measures going, "Well, if I start this business and it fails, I'll go back to living with my parents and I'll do this other job." You're not going to put your full energy into it. You're not going to give all of yourself into it and it's probably going to fail.

• 24:57Steven Bartlett?

  It's really, it's so true. It reminded me of something I was reading in one of the psychology journals about a study they did with participants, where they asked them to do a puzzle and offered them a delicious snack as a reward. And then in one group, they said, "This is the only way to get the snack if you do this puzzle." And then in the other group, they said, "By the way, the same snack is also available in the vending machine down the hall." And then the people in the second group, where they had a plan B, were less committed to doing the puzzle, spent less time trying to solve it and did worse in the puzzle. And it's this idea that a plan B actually psychologically does distract you from your plan A.

• 25:36Robert Greene?

  Yeah. We're animals, right? We have, we have a certain nature, which is what I talk about in human nature. And our earliest ancestors, to go back to something I was talking about, our brilliance, the power of our species is we are actually very physically weak compared to like chimpanzees and cheetahs and lions, et cetera, et cetera. But we use our brain and feeling the necessity, feeling that we're going to die unless we don't solve these problems, right? If we don't use our brits, if we don't create tools, if we don't work together as a team, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna die, we won't survive, is what makes us inventive, it's what makes us creative.

• 26:21Robert Greene?

  It's almost like a barometric pressure, I like, that's the metaphor I like to use.

• 26:26Steven Bartlett?

  What's that?

• 26:27Robert Greene?

  When you feel that pressure inside of you, and it's very heavy, like, like weather that's very, you know, heavy and thick, you're motivated, you feel it, I've got to get up in the morning, I've got to do this, I've got to accomplish this. When that pressure goes away, and, and you don't feel any pressure in your life, you can do anything and there's no consequences for it, you'll just waste time, you'll waste years, you'll waste months, you'll never accomplish anything. You give somebody a deadline, right? They'll accomplish in two months what it would take somebody two years to do without a deadline. It's that necessity, it's that sense of, there's a, there's a sword at my back, I've got to get it done. It makes you get things done, it gives you the energy.

• 27:11Robert Greene?

  It's get rich or die trying, to quote somebody.

• 27:15Steven Bartlett?

  You, you talk about that in the strategy, um, the book about the strategies of war, that chapter four, or strategy number four is about creating a sense of urgency and desperation. And when I was reading that, I was thinking, to be fair, I don't know any great leader that isn't a little bit urgent and a little bit desperate. And even if they feign that desperation to galvanize people, there's something about creating urgency and desperation in your life that is incredible tailwind. Is there any practical ways that you think the average person can create a, the required sense of urgency in their life so they can get things done?

• 27:52Robert Greene?

  Well, it's kind of like a level here. So, you need challenges in your life, that's what, that's sort of what the death ground is about, you're challenged, you better rise up to it. If the challenge is too great, if you're, like, I'm, I'm 24 and I've never written a book, but I'm gonna write the best book ever, you're, you're gonna fail because it's too far above you, you're never gonna reach it. If it's too low, you're never gonna have the energy, it's too easy, it's not gonna motivate you, but there's a sweet spot, I don't know, I'm just, you know, just drawing it here, be like here, where it's a challenge, it's above what you can do, can do right now, it's not so far above that you can't possibly do it. But it's enough of a challenge to mean,

• 28:37Robert Greene?

  God, I better get my act together. I better get the energy to get together. I better, you know, change my habits. I've got to get up earlier. I've got to work harder. It's not like I have to get up at four and force myself and work out, etc. I can get up at six, six thirty, an hour earlier, and I'm going to meet this challenge that's a little bit above my level. That's a powerful way of motivating yourself. You need challenges. You need constant challenges in life, or you're going to stagnate. It's just the law of nature.

• 29:07Steven Bartlett?

  You talk about false purpose as well.

• 29:10Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 29:10Steven Bartlett?

  What is false purpose? And how do we know the difference?

• 29:14Robert Greene?

  Your purpose in life is something that you're born with. It's like your destiny. This is what you were meant to accomplish. This was what you were meant to be, which you were meant to do. And we were going through, we were talking about that in terms of your childhood, etc., right? But we humans are not born with that purpose engraved in our heads. We don't wake up when we're seven and go, that's my purpose. If it were that easy, it would be that simple, right? But because we don't have any direction, you know, animals don't wake up in the morning if they're not nocturnal and go, what am I going to do today? I can go here, I can hunt for this animal, I can hunt for that animal. I could eat this. No, they don't. They operate by instinct. They don't, they have a purpose.

• 30:00Robert Greene?

  It's automatic almost. Okay, we don't have that. We have to find our purpose. And because it's so deep and so important that if we don't find it through this authentic process I'm talking about, we'll find it somewhere else because we need a purpose in life. We need something to live for. What will that be? It will be drugs. It'll be some kind of cult that I have to join. It will be some kind of political movement where I can get out all of my anger, invent all of my frustrations. You know, it'll be on and on and on. It's something that has nothing to do with who you are personally, but it's something that you can believe in and can give you a sense of purpose.

• 30:44Robert Greene?

  But it's not really who you are. It's like a drug. It's drugging you into believing that you have a purpose. But it's not the real purpose that you were born for. That's what I mean by false purpose.

• 30:56Steven Bartlett?

  And when we find our purpose, if we are able to and lucky enough to discover it?

• 31:04Steven Bartlett?

  What's the variance in what someone's capable of that's found their purpose versus someone that hasn't, do you think? Like, what's the difference in how they show up, how they deliver, the results they create, the impact they have?

• 31:15Robert Greene?

  When you find your purpose, it's like everything falls into place, right? You don't need to, you don't need to almost do anything. You'll find whatever you need to find. Good things will come to you. I know that sounds woo-woo. I know that sounds mystical, but I definitely believe it, right? And so it's not like you have to try so hard. Yes, you have to learn skills. Yes, you have to apply yourself. Yes, you have to work hard, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But things just go so much more smoothly when you have it. So, for instance, one thing that happens when you have a sense of purpose, and I hate, it's something that I feel, so I know my narcissism is coming out again.

• 31:59Robert Greene?

  I know what I don't want. That's, you don't know the power of that. You can't imagine how powerful that is. So people come to me all the time with, "Robert, we can make a lot of money doing this. We could try this. Let's make a TV show out of the 48 Laws of Power. Let's do this, let's do that, let's make a game." I'm not interested. It's not my purpose. No, I don't want it. If I didn't have that radar, I'd be spreading myself out into eight different venues and I'd be, you know, all of my energy would be, would be scattered. I wouldn't have that focus and I'd probably end up being pretty miserable because I would have lost my purpose. But when you have a sense of purpose, it's like, "No, I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that. I want to do this." Yeah, it can be rigid.

• 32:44Robert Greene?

  You have to be a little bit flexible. So if somebody comes to me and goes, "Robert, what about this?" I'm open to it. That sounds moderately interesting. All right, maybe I'll try it, you know? And I, and I do open things, things like that. I'm going to be doing, in a month, I'm going to be recording a French version of, you know, The Masterclass. There's a French version of that. So, you know, I'm not so rigid where I can only write books. I can try other things because I can see value in it and it interests me. It's a challenge. Being able to say no is so important and is so empowering. And that's what a sense of purpose will give you, among other things.

• 33:25Steven Bartlett?

  There's a quote that says something like... Distractions come dressed up as opportunities. And to even know what a distraction is, you first must understand what your goal and what your purpose is, or else it's impossible to distinguish between a distraction, Robert, let's go start a game, or an opportunity, which is, sounds much more like that mastermind thing. And I think about this all the time. You know, the more clear I am on the goal and what my purpose is, the much easier it is to understand what a distraction is versus an opportunity, because they do look the same when they come into my inbox.

• 33:57Robert Greene?

  Yes. Well, the other thing I do is I kind of game it out. So somebody comes to me and they go, let's do a television show of the 48 Laws of Power. And believe me, I've been through that about 85 times, people coming to me that, and we have even attempted it. But I go, I've worked in Hollywood, I've worked in television before, before I've had my books. I know the process. I know how miserable it can be. I know how you have no power. I'm a writer now where I write books and I have all the power, I have all the control. You go into Hollywood, you go into television or film, 85, you know, 800 other people join in and they all have their ideas and they change this, that, you have no power.

• 34:41Robert Greene?

  And it's meetings and meetings and meetings and talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. I game it out and I go, I don't want to get into that trap. I don't want to be spending a year having meeting after meeting after meeting, hearing about this possibility, having it changed by this producer. I game it out and I go, no, I don't want to do it.

• 35:00Steven Bartlett?

  Can you do that when you're younger? Can a 21 year old?

• 35:03Robert Greene?

  No. Takes a lot of, takes a fair amount of experience in life. Because when you're 21, everything looks great and exciting. Man, yeah, I'll do that, why not? Yeah, it'll be fun, I'll meet some, I'll meet some hot girls, I'll do this and the other, great, you know, et cetera, et cetera. You know, you, you don't, you don't have that radar, you, everything looks exciting and enticing. It takes the pain, I keep going back to that, of things that you wasted your time in and things that failed, things that you didn't like to teach you, the ability to say no and to save your energy for what you really love.

• 35:37Steven Bartlett?

  Should a young person just be saying yes to everything?

• 35:42Robert Greene?

  You know, the problem that we have is everything has to be this way or that way, has to be black or white, and it's not like that. It's kind of in between. You can learn to dance in life. You don't have to go this way or that way. You can kind of do both. So the best advice I give people is your twenties are the best years of your life. Actually, I think the thirties are, but let's just say for argument's sake, your twenties. You're young. You probably look pretty good. You're healthy. You know, you've got all these things going on for you. I want you to have some fun and I want you to have adventures. I don't want you to be 22 and go and get a job at Goldman Sachs for the rest of your life.

• 36:24Robert Greene?

  So you need fun, you need adventure, you need some looseness. You know, you want some experiences, but it has to have some direction to it. It can't just be, I'm going to write poetry, I'm going to do rock and roll, I'm going to go and learn chemistry, I'm going to, you know, become, you know, this, that and the other. No connection at all between all of these things, just trying everything for the sake of novelty. That's a recipe for not being successful because what you want to happen is, you're 30 years old now, your twenties are behind you. It's usually a time of reckoning where you go, shit, I'm not so young anymore. Okay, you know, I'm getting older. All right, I've had my fun, I've had adventure, I'm ready for something serious and I've

• 37:08Robert Greene?

  learned some real skills in life. I've, for me personally, I learned how to write or whatever it is. You didn't just go try 80 different things. You kind of had four or five that you did, you experimented with. All right, now I know what I love. Now I can go down that path. And in mastery, I often tell the story to people of, one of the masters I interviewed was Paul Graham, who was the man who started Y Combinator. You've probably heard of Y Combinator.

• 37:39Robert Greene?

  He was somebody who got into AI when he was like eighteen, nineteen years old. He was like at MIT, I believe, right? Back in the late seventies, when nobody was even thinking about it. Okay? He was a hacker because his father was a scientist who had computers back in the seventies. And he learned how to hack early on. Okay? So he went down the process of going into academia, of going into programs of computer programming, et cetera, et cetera. And he was on a track, just like Huberman, at MIT to become a professor, to become proficient in it. And he hated it. It was soul sucking. He didn't like the politics. He didn't like dealing with the people. He didn't like academia.

• 38:22Robert Greene?

  So he quit and he became a painter. Because he loved design and he loved visuals. He comes back to New York. He's living in a loft. He's painting. He's happy and he's not making any money. And then he hears an advertisement on the radio for, I think it was maybe Netscape, one of the earliest, you know, internet, whatever you call it. And they're saying, "The future for computers is being able to buy and sell products on the internet." He ends up creating the first, I think, what the prototype for all the things that we have now. Yahoo ended up buying it for like five million dollars. And then the rest is history.

• 39:07Robert Greene?

  He spent his twenties trying something out, learning real skills. He went somewhere else, learning something that he loved. And then he's thirty and he combines the two together. And he's a classic example because he gets very bored easily. So why a commentator is worth billions of dollars, extremely successful? He sells it and gets into something else because he likes writing, et cetera. He's always, he's kind of a prototype for a lot of what we're talking about.

• 39:35Steven Bartlett?

  We've spoken a lot about self-awareness and self and all those kinds of things. What about other people? You know? The only thing that seems to stand in the way of all of our goals in life are other people. So if I, if I want to become exceptional, understanding the human nature of other people and using it in my favor, where do I start there? What are the sort of foundations of being great at? Using other people's human nature to my advantage. That sounds very narcissistic and very awful, but it's

• 40:07Robert Greene?

  It's

• 40:08Steven Bartlett?

  It is what it is.

• 40:08Robert Greene?

  Part is it is what it is, exactly. People, as I said, the main mistake we make in dealing with other people, and it's a common mistake that I make as well, is we take the appearances for reality. We take their masks for how they appear to us, for their politeness, for their smiles, for their saying, "Oh, I loved you," et cetera, for the reality. And we have to learn that to look behind people's masks. We have to learn what's really, really going on behind them. And we have to learn some basics about human nature. People like to believe that they're essentially good, you know, saintly virtues, however you want to do it. People want to believe that they're intelligent.

• 40:53Robert Greene?

  They're, you never want to feel like, "I'm not stupid, I'm intelligent." And the other third thing is that their willpower, that they're in control of their lives. They do things because they decided to do it. To tell, to make people feel insecure about their intelligence, right? To make them feel like they're not moral, or they're not good. To make them feel like they do things not because they choose to, but because they were forced to, or because they're not aware of themselves. They hate that. They're gonna hate you. They're gonna resent you. They're gonna resist you. Knowing some basics about people like that gives you the power to use that for influence, for persuasion, okay? Understanding envy in the human world.

• 41:37Robert Greene?

  And on social media, envy is just an, is like a nuclear bomb. It's just exploded, our tendency to feel envy, to compare ourselves to other people. You've got to use that for power. There's great power in that in a marketing publicity sense. Virality, what, getting other people to be interested in what other people are doing. That's how things sell themselves. If you try and tell people what they should buy, as opposed to, "Look at what other people are doing." I want to join in on that, right? Knowing about these basic qualities in human nature, about how we like to compare ourselves, how we have these certain opinions about ourselves, et cetera, et cetera, gives you all of this power to take that human nature

• 42:19Robert Greene?

  and use it for whatever purposes you want, for good, or unfortunately, some people use it for bad.

• 42:26Steven Bartlett?

  Do we have to lie to be successful? And I say this because through reading some of your work, I heard sentences such as, "You should keep your true intentions hidden in social situations." You say a lot about cloaking yourself in various ways. You talk about showing up as an actor, that sometimes we do need to show up as an actor in our lives. So in order to be truly successful, I know it's a little bit of a difficult question, but do we have to lie?

• 42:52Robert Greene?

  Look, Stephen, being a human being means we lie, right? The moment you open your mouth and you speak, you are essentially not telling the truth. You know what doesn't lie? Body language, nonverbal communication, the way you smile, the look in your eyes. You can't lie about that. But children three or four years old are already learning to craft what they say to mommy or daddy to get what they want. They're very clever, they're very strategic, right? They know that if they say what they exactly want, they won't get it. They learn to kind of whine and complain and put a certain tone in their voice.

• 43:35Robert Greene?

  And to be an actor, a social animal like we are, we are actors in life. Get over this idea about guilting about it. I'm so sick of that. We are actors. We are descended from chimpanzees. Chimpanzees are consummate actors. Read the literature on that. They know how to deceive incredibly well and they don't even have language to deceive, right? So we are actors. The moment you go out in the public, you're not telling people, "Oh, you're fat, you're ugly, your riding socks, da-da-da-da-da, I don't like what you're wearing." You never do that. You're an actor. When you see your father, you act a certain way.

• 44:20Robert Greene?

  When you see a little kid, you act a certain way. When you see a little kitty cat, you have a certain tone in your voice. When you deal with your boss, the person who pays for your podcast, I don't know if there is such a person. You act a different way. You're constantly changing who you are and how you act. One moment you're Robert De Niro, the next moment you're, I don't know what other actor you are. But you're changing your roles depending on who you're dealing with. I'm so tired of people not recognizing this fact that we are all actors, that we are constantly deceiving. Yes, there are differences, there are qualities of lying. You know, I understand that. There's Donald Trump lying, and there's the lying of the everyday white lies

• 45:04Robert Greene?

  in which we have to say certain things to get ahead. There are degrees, I understand that. And some lying can be very harmful and very counterproductive in the end. But the moment you enter the world and the moment you open your mouth, you are in some ways already an actor and you are already using forms of deception.

• 45:26Steven Bartlett?

  Why can't we be our true selves?

• 45:29Robert Greene?

  Because it would irritate people, because it would grate, you know? I don't know about you, but I appreciate politeness, right? I go somewhere and I know someone's being polite. I know that they're not necessarily meaning it, but it's nice, right? It's kind of smooth, it kind of makes everything sort of smooth. If people weren't polite, I'll be grating and like two pieces of metal constantly hitting each other. It'd be so annoying, you'd want to kill yourself. Or you'd want to kill people, you'd become a murderer, you know? Social life depends on that kind of smoothness, those interactions. So we need that to some degree. If we were just always telling people what we really thought,

• 46:15Robert Greene?

  our world would collapse tomorrow.

• 46:17Steven Bartlett?

  What about showing our weakness? I've got this quote from you that says, "If you are weak and ask for little, little is what you will get. But if you act strong, making firm, even outrageous demands, you will create the opposite impression. People will think that you are confident and that it must be based on something real. You will earn their respect, which in turn will translate to real leverage."

• 46:46Robert Greene?

  Well, it's about certain situations. So I don't want you to apply that idea to everything in life. And some people make the mistake when they read the 48 Laws of Power. They think, wow, I'm going to use that everywhere. No, it applies to certain situations. So let's say you're negotiating. And I know I dealt with this myself. I'm actually a fairly timid person by nature. But I've learned to cultivate the opposite. So if you're negotiating a price for what you want, for your time, for your services, and you're not very confident and you kind of ask for a little, that's what you're going to get. Because people aren't going to, they're assuming that you're not really up to the task.

• 47:31Robert Greene?

  You say, all right, $20,000 is enough. That's what they'll give you. But if you raise your price high and you say it with the right voice and you believe in it, they're going to go, wow, that person is confident. And if they turn you down, that's fine. Because somebody else will give you that price. If you set your own value by what you believe about yourself. If you think that you're worthless, if you're not very good at it, other people pick that up.

• 47:58Steven Bartlett?

  As you were talking, I was thinking about Adam Newman from WeWork. And this conversation I heard with him and the founder of SoftBank in the back of a taxi, where Adam Newman's asking for a billion. And then the owner of SoftBank, this very eccentric Chinese, very rich Asian man goes, do you know what, Adam? The only problem with you is that you're not ambitious enough. And he writes him a check, I believe, for like $5 or $10 billion in the back of this taxi after like something like 12 minutes of being with him. And I always thought about that and thought, Jesus, what if I just started asking life for way more? If I just multiplied all of these emails that I send and requests I make by 10? What would happen to my life over this course of 10 years?

• 48:42Robert Greene?

  Well, yeah, probably you probably would have gotten a lot more than you got without asking for that. Yeah, because we're creatures that, as I said before, we look at the appearances of things. Look, it's a very easy metaphor here.

• 49:01Robert Greene?

  You go into a social situation like a party, and you go up to somebody who's kind of nervous and insecure and anxious. And I'm not criticizing that because we all have insecurities. I have many of them myself. But you go up to somebody like that, and it makes you feel kind of nervous and insecure, right? And you're kind of fumbling for words. And it kind of goes, a bit of awkwardness happens. Reverse that, and you go up to somebody else, and they're kind of confident. They look you in the eye. You know, their voice is strong, their body language is strong. They connect to you. Whoa, you think, it brings out that part of you who's like that.

• 49:42Robert Greene?

  You might be intimidated, but it also might bring out your own kind of confident self. I remember being around 50 Cent, who's a very charismatic, confident to the point of ridiculousness. And it was very infectious. I felt that way after being around him for a couple of hours. I was with him for several months. It rubbed off on me, right? We have these kind of viral contagious effects by people. So if you project strength and confidence, you know, and I understand it's a little different for women, which is an interesting subject, because sometimes projecting that for a woman will rub the wrong way because people will think that,

• 50:26Robert Greene?

  and it's a terrible quality thing about us, that women are judged by a different standard, where that'll seem like they're a bitch or something like that. So I understand there are nuances here, and that the game is different for women as it is for people of other ethnicities as well, you know? So it's not just one way or the other, but to the degree, even for the woman, that you have this air of confidence, that you believe in what you're doing, that you believe you're worth it, it projects itself to other people. You don't have to scream and shout, and you don't have to demand $10 billion. But if you feel confident, if you feel you're worth this amount of money, it will project outward to other people.

• 51:11Steven Bartlett?

  Body language.

• 51:12Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 51:12Steven Bartlett?

  I'm gonna talk about that. Does it, you know, you said earlier, it's one of the things we can't lie about. Is there anything that you still look for in today when you're trying to read someone? Their body language? Are there certain cues, is there postures or?

• 51:27Robert Greene?

  Well, you know, you got to, in reading nonverbal communication, it's a different form of intelligence. It's not algorithms, it's not formulaic. It's human, it's emotional, it's empathetic. It's a reading without words. It's attuning yourself to other people. So I attune myself to people's emotions, to the vibe that they give off. In an overall sense, a gestalt is one thing that I like to do. So if I had to give it a word, I would say anxious. Or I would have to say outgoing and extroverted. Or I would have to say impatient or whatever. There's an energy that kind of defines them. It's a word and that word is not precise.

• 52:12Robert Greene?

  But there is an overall feel that I get from a person. And then I'm always looking at specifics. It's not like I'm sitting there consciously in my head, going through a checklist. I'm just feeling certain things. And I'm feeling that the eyes are kind of dead.

• 52:34Robert Greene?

  They're not engaging with me. And you can't put that into words, but you know the feeling. So when someone's looking at you, but they're not really looking at you. You know what that feels like, don't you? And a lot of psychopathic people, a lot of narcissists do that. So part of their face pretends to be interested in you. They are looking at you in the eye, but they're not really looking at you. They're thinking of something else. They're seeing in you what they can get out of you. They're seeing you as an object, right? Eyes are hard to lie. They tell you something. Now actors, very skilled actors can kind of create some of these impressions.

• 53:18Robert Greene?

  But one thing that they can't fake is the tone in their voice. And actors will tell you that it's the hardest thing to actually consciously control. So the voice of a person tells you a lot about their confidence levels, tells you a lot about.

• 53:35Robert Greene?

  You know how, just about their general emotional tone, about their character, about who they are, it's very difficult to fake. And when it's hesitant, when it's like stammering, when it's not, you know, you can kind of sense something from people's voice and it's very hard to fake. And then the smile, the smile tells you a hundred different things if you know how to read it. There's the authentic smile, which I'm not going to fake right now, but well, I just, it lights up the whole face, you know? Like you really feel joy, you can't, you don't can't forget it, your eyes go up, your cheeks go up, everything kind of connects together, right?

• 54:18Robert Greene?

  The fake smile, you know?

• 54:22Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 54:23Robert Greene?

  We've all seen the fake smile.

• 54:24Steven Bartlett?

  Just when the mouth goes up from the rest of the face, doesn't bother.

• 54:27Robert Greene?

  Stephen, I really like you, you're really wonderful, you know? Most of the time, most smiles are fake, but you can kind of, when you see the genuine smile and you go, that's what caused the genuine smile, you should become aware of that. And then body language tells you a lot, like, is somebody, when they're talking to you and you're standing up at a, at a party, is their body kind of facing another direction while they're talking to you? Are they kind of looking out that way while they're talking to you? That means they're not really interested in you, they're not really engaged in you, right? Also, when you catch people by surprise and they don't have the time to put on a fake

• 55:09Robert Greene?

  smile, I often tell people to do this, like, there's somebody in your office and you don't know whether they're a snake or that they're actually genuinely your friend, you suspect, go either way. You kind of approach them from an angle, right?

• 55:27Robert Greene?

  And you surprise them and you come up to them, you go, they look at you. And for a second, you detect what we call a micro expression of disdain. And then they put on the smile. That micro expression, which scientists, psychologists have studied lasts for like less than a second, much less than a second. You have to be able to read it, but it reveals whether they actually like you or they're totally false, they can't fake it. So if you come to straight on, they'll, oh, hi Stephen, I love it, great to see you. They come to you, oh, they kind of pretend, then they try and act and you can get clues like that. There's so many ways to read body language. It's such a fascinating subject, I could go on for hours about it.

• 56:11Steven Bartlett?

  How important is it, you know, you're talking about colleagues and team members there, and earlier you said that people are contagious. How important do you think it is to the success of our lives? And I pause there because success means it's a personal thing, it's a professional thing, to surround ourselves with the right group of people and to be intentional about that.

• 56:33Robert Greene?

  It's very important. I have a chapter in, excuse me, in the Forty Eight Laws of Power about infection. And I think it's an experience many of us have had where you're around somebody who seems at first glance to be very interesting. And they become your friend, maybe. They're very dramatic and they have all these stories to tell. And they seem almost slightly larger than life. And you engage with them and then you become friends. And then slowly, slowly, slowly, it becomes clear that they're a little bit nuts, right?

• 57:16Robert Greene?

  They're always talking about how this person screwed them, how that person screwed them, how this boyfriend or girlfriend was so awful and so nasty. You get to realize, is this true or is it maybe they're the problem? They are the problem. But now they're your friend and now you're emotionally attached to them. And now they have room to play all these kind of games on you and all of their drama starts infecting you. And it's like, god damn it, I want to get away from this person, but I can't. They've infected you with their negative energy and it gets under your skin. And so you have to avoid people like that. You have to read before you get involved with them that they are a drama queen or a drama king because there are just as many men out there who have this quality.

• 58:01Robert Greene?

  You have to see that they are, that they play the victim of everybody else, but actually they kind of bring it on to themselves. Some people are genuinely unfortunate. Bad things have happened to them and it's not their fault. I'm never saying it's a misconception about that chapter, that you should avoid everybody who's unfortunate. There are people and a lot of people out there whose circumstances have put, made them, you know, in their, what's going on. It's not their fault, right? But there are other people you have to recognize. The bad things that happen to them are things that they have brought on because they have this infecting power. It comes from deep insecurity. You don't want them in your life.

• 58:45Robert Greene?

  Being around insecure people will make you insecure. Being around confident people who kind of know what they're doing, who've got their act together, who are trying to make things and accomplish things. Because there's so many people out there who talk and talk and talk, but never do anything. Being around people who do things, who get things done, who've made a business, who've made this, that or the other. Their goal to be around because they'll infect you with their positive energy.

• 59:13Steven Bartlett?

  Frenemies.

• 59:16Robert Greene?

  Yeah.

• 59:18Steven Bartlett?

  Do we all have frenemies and how do we spot frenemies?

• 59:22Robert Greene?

  Well, hopefully we all don't have them. But in The Laws of Human Nature and in several of my books, I talk about the phenomenon of envy, which is a very, very powerful human trait. It has roots, very ancient roots. We know that in hunter-gatherer societies.

• 59:41Robert Greene?

  For thousands of years ago, envy was a real problem. And so they create all kinds of rituals to avoid envy. Where the moment somebody in a tribe received a gift, they had to give it to other members so they wouldn't face envy. Because facing envy, you could be murdered for it. So you learned all of these rituals. And we've noticed that chimpanzees feel envy. You give some, one of the higher up chimps, because they're very hierarchical, a grape. And all of a sudden, all the other chimps are very wanting that grape as well. And they feel envy, et cetera, et cetera. So it's an extremely human emotion. The thing that we don't realize, though, that the people most likely to feel envy, first of all, we all feel envy. We're all comparing ourselves to other people.

• 1:00:25Robert Greene?

  I feel it all the time. Right now, I envy Ryan Holiday. Because he's, you know, so 30 years younger. He's sold so many books. You know, he's got all this great stuff. I know, I know what envy is like. I feel it. We all feel small degrees of envy. But there are people, I call it passive envy. But active envy means people act on it. They do something to hurt you. They sabotage you in some way. Frenemies are the classic scenario. So somebody who feels envious of you ends up befriending you. And consciously, they may not be even aware of that. They think, well, I do want to like them. But unconsciously, they feel envy.

• 1:01:10Robert Greene?

  They think that you have success that you don't necessarily deserve. That you have what they want, right? They become your friend. And they charm you, et cetera, et cetera. And then low and behold, you start noticing all kinds of behavior that's very ugly, that you weren't expecting because they're your friend. They start saying bitchy comments that get under your skin. That make you feel insecure. They take things from you. They act in ways that are hurtful. But because they're your friend, your first instinct is to blame yourself. Well, maybe it's my fault that they've done this. Maybe I'm actually to blame for what they're saying, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:01:52Robert Greene?

  So I believe behind the frenemies phenomenon is this phenomenon of envy, where the person secretly wants what you have, and they're becoming your friends so that they can wound you. And what's best to do is to recognize that. And one common sign of a frenemy of somebody who's befriending you out of envy is they're in a rush to be your friend. Normally, we like to take it a little bit slow. We just don't let anybody into our lives. We like to vet them a little bit beforehand, right? We don't trust everybody. But the person who feels envy is like, "I love you. You're fantastic. I want to be your friend. We've got to hang out. Let's go out for dinner the next night, et cetera, et cetera."

• 1:02:37Robert Greene?

  They're in a hurry. That's a sign that something else is going on, because that's not natural.

• 1:02:43Steven Bartlett?

  What about when friends become frenemies? Because sometimes, through the process of us changing, we might inspire that envy.

• 1:02:52Robert Greene?

  Yes, like your status changes. We've all had to deal with that. I've had to deal with that as well. You have success, and you came from a background where you weren't so successful, and your friends are still there, and they envy you, and they're not very nice to you. And, you know, it's not a good quality. And I understand the quality. I understand where it comes from. And I wrote about it in Human Nature, where we're all aware of what we call schadenfreude. Schadenfreude means you take pleasure in other people's pain. So you hear a friend didn't get the job that they wanted to get,

• 1:03:37Robert Greene?

  and you go, "Oh, I'm sorry." But deep down inside, you're kind of happy, you know? We all go through that, right? The opposite is mitfreude. It's an expression that Nietzsche coined, which means you feel joy for other people. I like to try and cultivate some of the higher qualities in life. So if something good happens to somebody... My first thing is I might feel a twinge of envy, but then I go, it's great for them. I'm actually very happy. I'm excited. I share their joy in what has happened, right? But it's not natural. So when somebody that you know and you've known for a long time has success in life, your first thing is to be, they didn't deserve it. They kind of cheated their way to it.

• 1:04:23Robert Greene?

  Okay, as we talked about in the very beginning, you confront that ugly emotion in yourself and you go, that's not who I want to be. And you go, I'm going to make myself feel the opposite. I'm going to make myself feel happy for their success. It's not natural and most people don't go through that. And I know personally, from people I knew before I had any success in life, they're the ones that give me the fewest amount of compliments for my books. They never read my books in the first place. They're very spare with what they say. They've got a pinched look on their face. Whereas people I've never met before in my life give me all kinds of compliments.

• 1:05:02Steven Bartlett?

  Why is that?

• 1:05:03Robert Greene?

  Because they're envious. They're upset.

• 1:05:05Steven Bartlett?

  Are you threatening them? Because they see themselves like you because they knew you and you're from where they were from. So you're even more threatening. You're holding up a mirror to them in a way that makes them feel even more uncomfortable.

• 1:05:17Robert Greene?

  Well, they're not going to feel that way. So what people will go through in that sense is, and this is how I think through, oh, Robert sold himself out. He wrote a book that's evil, that's nasty, that's manipulative. I didn't think he was like that. I thought he was this nice person. Oh, I don't like his book. It's ugly. They'll go through that process. They'll stay my friend because we've had years and years together. It's very, very common. At least I know that. They do that with my books. Even though my later books aren't like the 48 Laws of Power, they still have it in the grain that this guy who used to be so sweet and nice wrote these nasty, evil, manipulative Machiavellian books. He sold out.

• 1:06:02Steven Bartlett?

  What is it at the heart of the 48 Laws of Power that some people are triggered by? Like, what was the single most triggering concept? Or the most controversial? Or the concept that people just had a surface level allergic reaction to on sight? Without even really reading it, they just, oh, I don't know.

• 1:06:26Robert Greene?

  Yeah, they read the back of the book. They read the names of the laws and they go, oh, that's, that's ugly. And a lot of times, they've had to deal with ugly people in their lives. And so that's when I see, I see the authentic disgust reaction. I understand it, that they had to deal with someone who was very manipulative and they find it disgusting. Of course, when I get to have a rational discussion with them and I calm down their emotional reaction, I said, "Look, if you had the 48 Laws of Power before this person manipulated you, they would have never been able to manipulate you. That book is the best defense you could ever have in your life. It's like a shield. Once you've read it, you know all the tricks people are playing on you, right?

• 1:07:10Robert Greene?

  They know they're posing as a friend and acting like a spy, right? They're concealing their intentions, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's showing you all of these tricks. Okay, but that's when they calm down and are able to say that. But the idea that we're not angels, that we don't all have the, the best intentions in life, that I'm writing a manual, they think, for how to manipulate, how to deceive, how to con people, triggers people very much. A lot of people who've, who've suffered in life, who've had a lot of pain, understand that there's irony in the book. They don't read it the same way.

• 1:07:54Robert Greene?

  They read it knowing, yeah, I've had this happen. This is what people are like. I'm okay with it. I'm cool with it. And I must say, I don't know if this will come off wrong, but a lot of the readers who responded most positively to the 48 Laws of Power early on were African Americans, people like 50 people in the hip hop business, et cetera. They didn't have any illusions about human nature, about how good we are, because they've seen the side all throughout their lives, right? 50 Cent, when he got into the record business, he was shocked at how political people were, how manipulative they were. So they weren't having that same reaction. They weren't having the guilty reaction, like... Oh, that, I don't want to read about that.

• 1:08:39Robert Greene?

  Why do we, why do we even have to discuss that? That's not, that's not positive. That's not helpful. That's, I think, a lot of what triggered people.

• 1:08:46Steven Bartlett?

  It's funny, because I was speaking to a CIA agent recently. And he said something at the end of our conversation to me. He said, you know, one of the things I've come to learn from being in the CIA is that I no longer believe that equality is possible. And he said-

• 1:09:00Robert Greene?

  Equality.

• 1:09:01Steven Bartlett?

  Equality, yeah. Because that's just not the way that the human world works. And we all pretend we want equality. We all pretend we want everyone to be equal. But if you look at every game we play, whether we're politicians or we're business people or whatever, it's all about hierarchies and power and getting ahead. Even the sheer nature of being a politician is campaigning to get into a position of, you know, objective power. And I wanted to know what you thought about that.

• 1:09:27Robert Greene?

  Well, I mean, there's some truth to it in the sense of there's something in our nature that is hierarchical, that has deep roots in us. But I do believe in one form of equality. And that is, everybody at their birth has the possibility for following the path that I talk about in Mastery, for being great, for fulfilling their destiny, for being the unique individual that they are at birth. So everybody is born with a DNA that will never be replicated in the past or in the future. Right? There is a uniqueness about every person. And, and there's a uniqueness about your parents, about your background, about your early years. Right?

• 1:10:11Robert Greene?

  And that uniqueness is a seed that if you play, if you cultivate it and you, and you use it and you know your purpose and you, you mine it for power. In Mastery, I interviewed, one of the master I interviewed was a woman named Temple Grandin. Who was born with severe autism. At the age of two, she was about to be committed to a hospital for the rest of her life. She was, she was like, almost like in a walking coma. So for some reason, they got her a teacher to teach her language. And she started emerging a little bit. And then slowly she blossomed. And she realized because it was something common to a lot of autistic people.

• 1:10:55Robert Greene?

  That she had an incredible connection to animals. A lot of autistic people have that. She couldn't connect to people. They were so tricky and deceptive. She, she didn't know how to deal with them. But animals, give her a horse, a dog, a cow. She felt like she was one of them. She ended up following that path and becoming a high level animal behavioral scientist who, um, she was born with autism. About to be committed for a hospital. And it, she achieved incredible success in life as a scientist. I do honestly, and I'm not faking. I do honestly believe that everyone has that potential. But it, it's not equal in the outcomes of that.

• 1:11:40Robert Greene?

  There are a lot of people, the majority of people don't follow that path. But I do believe everybody has that potential.

• 1:11:49Steven Bartlett?

  Is that potential like objective greatness? Or is it our own subjective greatness? I, I can become the greatest version of Steven. Or do you believe that everyone could become great in the context of, you know, the very best in the world, like, you know, Steve Jobs or?

• 1:12:06Robert Greene?

  No, they're not gonna, you don't have to be the very best in, in the world. I mean, I, uh, when I, when Astoria came out, we were, uh, the New York Times wanted to do a story about my house in the home section. Okay, well, why, but all right. I never get any publicity from mainstream media, so okay, fine. So I had to quickly upgrade my house. Cause they were to come over with photo, photographers. And we got a man over to do the tile work on my patio, which looked like hell. And I told people, this guy was a true master. He wasn't like making six figures. Nobody would ever write an article about him. He will die and no one will ever know that.

• 1:12:51Robert Greene?

  But I could see in the quiet quality and how well he understood it. And the care that he took in it and how much he enjoyed, you know, creating a beautiful effect with tile work, that he was a master. He doesn't have to be the best ever. You don't have to be famous and successful. There are grades of this, there are degrees of it. Some people, it's just being a great parent. They're very social, they're very empathetic. And they're not maybe going to become extremely successful finance person. But they're really good at raising their children and they put, they put a lot of effort and care into it. That's fantastic. You don't have to be famous, you don't have to be Steve Jobs. There are levels of it, right?

• 1:13:36Robert Greene?

  But the sense of this was what I was meant to accomplish. And I'm following it. And I'm happy what I do. I feel fulfilled by my work and I can go on doing it. I take it seriously, I care about it. I do believe that, that anybody can have that level of power in their life.

• 1:13:56Steven Bartlett?

  I think I struggle with that, if I'm being honest.

• 1:13:58Robert Greene?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:13:59Steven Bartlett?

  On a personal level. I struggle with enough being enough. And also I think I've grown up in the generation where there's so much comparison. Everywhere we look, when we open up our phones and Instagram, that you kind of always are led to believe that you're not quite there yet. Now, I've contended with the idea that maybe that's a good thing. Because it drives you forward, it's that pressure you described. It's that creates that urgency, that desperation. So maybe I should never believe I'm there yet. But then also I wonder, am I going to defer happiness off into the future? Because I think it's behind some kind of accomplishment or job title or, you know, success in my life. And, you know, when I hear about that Tyler, I go,

• 1:14:42Steven Bartlett?

  that person that was tiling your patio. I'm really jealous because they sound contempt with much less than would make me contempt.

• 1:14:52Steven Bartlett?

  What is the correct, correct answer? Is it to be the happy Tyler who's tiling the patio? Or is it to be the impatient Steve Jobs that's striving for the personal computer?

• 1:15:08Robert Greene?

  Well, it depends on who you are. We're all individuals. We all have our, our unique energies. It's the fact that you engage, you love, that you're emotionally connected to, that it gives you a sense of fulfillment, that you're not looking over your shoulder, oh, I could be doing this instead. I'm fine with that. It doesn't have to be the Steve Jobs who's continually dissatisfied, who's Faustian, who always has to have more. I'm not against that either. I don't know why we have to be so judgmental. If people are following the path and they are in love with what they do, and they have a genuine connection to it, I'm not going to judge it because they're not famous

• 1:15:48Robert Greene?

  or because they're not trying to be the greatest, the Michael Jordan of tiling or whatever, et cetera. I think it's fine. And you, you're not happy. You want to, you want to crush it. You want to be, have the number one podcast. That's fine as well. Why can't we have, you know, that kind of diversity in our world?

• 1:16:09Steven Bartlett?

  The most important thing for both those types of people, the, the people that have that sort of insatiable sense of ambition, but also the people that are content with whatever they're doing in their lives. From what I heard there is they both love what they're doing. And they both have those cool components that you described earlier. Like they both feel the challenge in their work still. And that challenge might be, okay, I'm going to do a bigger patio today. Or it might be, I'm going to launch a billion dollar business tomorrow for someone else. And it's really about those cool components of like challenge, meaning, purpose.

• 1:16:42Robert Greene?

  Yeah. Yeah, because what you don't want is you don't want to be in your 50s, in your 60s, facing death. You know, because your days are numbered. Who knows how long you're going to live? And you're going to go, damn it, I could have done something with my life. When I was a child, I had these dreams. I thought I was going to be really great at it. And I never realized it. I went off on these other paths. I was lost. I thought I was happy, but I never really fulfilled any of those childhood dreams or those fantasies. You know, it's a terrible, terrible feeling, and I want people to avoid that. As long as it's something that engages you, that's connected to that child that you were,

• 1:17:27Robert Greene?

  it's something that you love and that you could create these challenges for you. Is death a motivator for you? Well, it certainly is now. You know, because my days are literally numbered. You reach a certain age and you know, you can literally count the numbers of the days that might be left to you. And I nearly died several years ago with my stroke. Came this close to dying. You know, I was driving my car. And if my wife hadn't suddenly seen something, I wouldn't be talking to you here right now. Either I would have crashed and died, or I would have had such bad brain damage that I'd be a vegetable.

• 1:18:12Robert Greene?

  So I know about death. I feel it in my body. Every day I wake up, I do my morning meditation. I'm aware. There's a practice that I have in my meditation where this could be my last thought. I could die 10 seconds from now. What do I want in my head in those last seconds? Do I want to have some petty little thought about somebody who did this or said that? Or do I want to have something else greater in my head? I'm constantly aware of my mortality. And with the book that I'm writing, it's always, it's always in my mind. Because frankly,

• 1:18:53Robert Greene?

  I'm aware that I might die before I finish the book. So now I've written two thirds of it. If I die tomorrow, the book can be published. And it's okay, I can live with that. But, you know, I'm in a hurry to get it done because I know it could happen at any moment. You know, and it almost happened to me. So I'm continually aware of it, but not in a bad sense. In a way of, it kind of makes, gives meaning to my life. It makes me aware of how, you know, valuable each moment is. And how things that everybody, I look out my window. I see people doing things that I can't do anymore. And I go, they take it all for granted.

• 1:19:38Robert Greene?

  They walk around unaware of their mortality, of how their body could break down at any day now. I'm aware of it. So I'm not going to feel envy because I, my mind is at a different level. I'm aware of the, of the ephemeral nature of life. And it makes everything kind of beautiful to me. Makes me appreciate everything around me. I don't mean to be too saccharine about this because it could come off that way. Because there is a dark side to it. And I definitely, in my dreams and in my thoughts, I have a lot of that darkness. But I believe the awareness of death is, is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

• 1:20:19Robert Greene?

  It's, it's, it's, it makes everything intense and makes everything aglow.

• 1:20:26Steven Bartlett?

  With that awareness, if you were my age, I've just turned 31.

• 1:20:31Robert Greene?

  Wow, you're a kid.

• 1:20:34Robert Greene?

  Jesus Christ, man.

• 1:20:37Robert Greene?

  I hate you.

• 1:20:42Robert Greene?

  I was 31, I was the biggest loser and it's amazing.

• 1:20:45Steven Bartlett?

  If I could transplant that awareness from your head to my head.

• 1:20:50Robert Greene?

  It's hard.

• 1:20:51Steven Bartlett?

  That you've got from the life you've lived, but also from that stroke incident and the perspective of your mortality that it gave you and the ephemerality of life that it showed you. How do you think I would live my life differently? How would you have lived your life differently when you were 31?

• 1:21:07Robert Greene?

  Uh, you know, I, I make a point of, I never go through that exercise because I believe in something called amor fati, which means love of your fate. Everything happened for a purpose. I wouldn't have done anything differently if I had to go back, because it all led to the right things. So if I'd been in a hurry when I was 22 to be successful as a writer, I would have never been able to write the books that I wrote. It would have all gone askew. Who knows where I would have ended up? I'm very, very happy with, I don't regret anything. But if you're young, what often happens is, because your life, the pattern of your life, if you think of it as a weaving, is only like, for you, is only like a third woven, right?

• 1:21:50Robert Greene?

  For me, it's like two-thirds woven. So I can see all of these patterns that you can't see in your life. But at your stage, you know, you tend to think, I've got all of this time ahead of me. I'm so young. I can do this, I can, I can go travel here. I can do this business and that business, et cetera, et cetera. You don't feel that sense of urgency. You don't realize that tomorrow you could be hit by a car. Tomorrow you could suddenly be diagnosed with cancer. People are dying now in their 30s and 40s. I read, unfortunately, when you get older, a bad habit is you start reading the obituary pages. I don't know why. And you start reading about people, a lot of people who are in their 40s and 50s

• 1:22:36Robert Greene?

  are dying left, right and center today for various reasons. It can happen. And what it does to you is it says, I only have so much time. I wanted to accomplish this one thing that I've been putting off. Okay, you wrote your book. Maybe there's something else that you've always wanted to do, but you have never done. And you're kind of putting it off. A sense of urgency, a sense that your time is relatively short, is a good thing. The other thing is, it makes, as I said, it makes everything a little more intense, a little more aglow is the word I like to use. So. I used to swim like three days a week.

• 1:23:18Robert Greene?

  And I would swim long distances and I loved it. It was my greatest therapy. I just love getting out of my head and just going, being in the water. Okay. But I never appreciated it until now, and I can't do it. So I want you to appreciate you going to the gym, having your health, to being able to do these things. Don't look at it like, take it for granted. And it pisses me off that young people take all this stuff for granted. They think that I'm privileged because I have this success. When you're young, you have all those privileges. You have your health. You have other things that could be taken away from you. Don't take for granted these things in your life that you have that are not going to last forever.

• 1:24:02Robert Greene?

  Think in those terms and think of, of how more intense everything around you becomes when you have that mindset.

• 1:24:09Steven Bartlett?

  One of the things I think I worry that I take for granted is my romantic relationship with my partner. And, you know, hearing your story of being in that car that day, it's literally evident that your romantic partner can save your life.

• 1:24:26Robert Greene?

  She did, and yeah. You know, we've been together for a while. I'm not going to say how many years because she doesn't like hearing that. Because, um, so, you know, we have a, a, a deep, rich past. And it, and it's a wonderful thing. And she saved my life and saving someone's life. Man, it really is important. It really means a lot, it changes things. And in my book that I'm writing now, I wrote a chapter on love, which is something I've never written about, obviously. Written about seduction, et cetera. But I've never written about love. And I wrote about the incredible, the sublime quality that you can have

• 1:25:09Robert Greene?

  when you allow yourself to go deeper and deeper and deeper into that falling process. Where you get rid of your, your ego, you get rid of your defenses. You get rid of all the resistance and you just let yourself fall, fall, fall, fall, fall. And you connect to someone on that deeper, deeper level. It's, as I say, it's a chapter on the sublime because it is a very sublime experience. And the reason I wrote it is I feel like people are missing that now. Because they're so, they don't want to be vulnerable. They don't want any pain. And falling for another person and letting go of your defenses opens you up to pain. Right? And we just want to, we don't want to experience that. We want to be invulnerable.

• 1:25:56Robert Greene?

  And it's like cutting off all the richest experiences in life. And so I wrote that chapter addressing that and say, let go of your defenses, let go of your resistance. Let yourself go into that process of falling. But feel what it feels like to have your ego dissolved in the presence of another person and care more about them than you care about yourself.

• 1:26:21Steven Bartlett?

  You mentioned a second ago, dark thoughts and dark dreams. We all have dark thoughts. Our dark thoughts are our own. How do you go about dealing with dark thoughts and what are those dark thoughts that you're able to share?

• 1:26:38Robert Greene?

  Well, you know, in my dreams, I'll be doing all kinds of weird things. A lot of times there'll be guilt. Like, did I actually murder that person? Are the police actually after me? Damn it, what's gonna happen? What's gonna happen to my reputation? Then I wake up, you know? So all that kind of stuff happens. But also doubts about myself and depression and about, I've dealt my whole life with feelings of like not being very worthy. Like even doubting my success, doubting that my work is any good, doubting that I deserve it.

• 1:27:24Robert Greene?

  I had, you know, a lot of periods in my life where I wasn't successful. And I kind of had it ingrained in me that I could do better, I could do better, I could do better. I wasn't a good parent to myself. I was very tough on myself. And a lot of my dark thoughts are I'm still very tough on myself. And it's like,

• 1:27:47Robert Greene?

  You know, the other dark thoughts that I have is I can't do the things that I used to be able to do. Is life even worth living when you can't like hike, when you can't swim, when you can't go out on your bicycle, when you can't travel normally? Do I, is it really worth it? You know, maybe, maybe death wouldn't be so bad compared to that. I go through that and then I go, yeah, I talk myself out of it again and again and again. But my dark thoughts are about, about myself and my doubts and about the state of my body as it is right now, kind of thing.

• 1:28:30Steven Bartlett?

  If I said to you that I had those same doubts about, you know, if I was, if we were identical in every way, and I said, Robert, I'm having a lot of doubts about, I can't go out on my bicycle, I can't do the things I used to do, I'm wondering if life is worth living. And I asked you for advice, said, I don't know what to do about this self doubt I have about these books that I've written. What would you say to me?

• 1:28:52Robert Greene?

  Well, I would say, there's a lot of people who talk a lot in life, who bullshit their way, who say they've accomplished the sun and the other, and they've never done anything. You have a book out there that you can be very proud of, that you can die tomorrow, and it's like a memento that will live on forever. And you've accomplished it, you've accomplished this stuff with your podcast, you've actually made things. So focus on that, focus on the fact that so many people never get out of bed and amount to anything. So you've built things, you've accomplished things, focus on that. And then about your body.

• 1:29:37Robert Greene?

  Well, you know, when you're dead, it's all gone. Who knows what there is on the other side? But just think of the insanity of what it means to be alive. And that's another chapter in my new book. The odds against you, Stephen, of ever being born are absolutely insane. And I describe those odds in the book. And I go through from the very first cells that ever, from life forming on planet Earth, to the evolution leading to us sitting here, is unbelievable. So that you are alive is an incredible astounding thing. And you have to think about that.

• 1:30:18Robert Greene?

  And you have to think about just seeing the sky, just being aware, is an amazing thing. So I often think about people who are suicidal. There are a lot of people like that in life, particularly nowadays. And I know, because I went through that period most strongly in my early to mid 30s, as I was contemplating the lack of success in my life. You know, and what kept me going was I still believed that I could accomplish something. So even in my darkest moments, I managed to pull myself out. But then I think of people who maybe don't have that energy, who are kind of going down that hole.

• 1:31:01Robert Greene?

  And I know from my own experience that hearing somebody tell them that life is incredibly amazing fact won't have any effect on them. Right? Because it doesn't connect to them emotionally. And I often think, how could I connect to them emotionally? How could I make it clear to them that there's something there that's worth preserving? I don't have the answer here today, but I think about that all the time. Like, how would I deal with somebody who is suicidal? And I get people writing me like that. And we've had, I've had relatives in those situations before. So that's something I think a lot about.

• 1:31:41Steven Bartlett?

  It's a difficult question to answer. What you have to say to that person in that situation to get them to believe in the sublime, to get them to believe that there's, life is worth living. I ponder whether what maybe you need to do is to get them to take the first step to create evidence for themselves somehow. Whatever that small first step is.

• 1:32:06Robert Greene?

  Yeah, I think that's great. I think that's spot on. That's exactly what you have to do. They have to come to the realization themselves. And through some action that you get them to do, which makes them, gives them a little bit of an ounce of belief in themselves, then the spiral can turn around. So I think you're right. It has to be come from them and it has to come through something that they actually do. All the talk in the world won't really help them. What that is, is something that I, you know, I would like to think about and it's, and it depends on the individual, but I think that is the way to do it.

• 1:32:41Steven Bartlett?

  You're writing this book at the moment called The Sublime, right? Are you writing that book because of the situation you found yourself in after having the stroke and, and going through that journey of saying, why is life worth living? And going in search of the sublime that we all have inherently.

• 1:32:59Robert Greene?

  Well, to be honest with you, about 20 years ago, I had the idea for the book. I read a book on the subject. And I got excited about it because they were explaining it as, it's a kind of experience that's very hard to verbalize, that goes outside of what we normally experience. And I got very excited by the idea. And I planned to write that book. And then around, after war, that was going to be my fourth book. And my agent was getting all prepared to sell it. And then I got hooked onto 50 Cent. And I did that book instead. I put it on the back burner. And then mastery came up and I got hooked onto that. And suddenly it kind of got pushed aside.

• 1:33:44Robert Greene?

  And then in, in human nature, first of all, the last chapter in the 50 Cent book is on the sublime. It's about death and, and what 50 and facing it. Then the last chapter in human nature is about the sublime. It's about death and mortality. And the irony is that two and a half months after finishing that chapter in the book, I nearly died. But what I had planned originally was I was going to go to the Gobi Desert and walk across the Gobi Desert. I was going to go swim with whales, you know, literally whales in New Zealand. I was going to go to Tierra del Fuego.

• 1:34:26Robert Greene?

  I was going to have all of these sublime experiences and write about them. And now I can't do any of that, right? All I can do is sit in my little room in my house, at my desk, and write the book. It's all in my head. The book is so much better because of that. So it's changed. I can't go to the Gobi Desert. I can't swim with whales or I drown. I can't go to Tierra del Fuego. I can only sit in my office, look at the birds, go through the books that I'm reading, and write the book, keeping in mind other people and what's going on in the world and their life and my limitations.

• 1:35:07Robert Greene?

  So ironically, the book has become better because I had to go through this experience. But nearly dying was going, little bells were going off in my head. All right, it's time to write that book. You're not putting it off any longer.

• 1:35:21Steven Bartlett?

  And has it forced you to find the sublime in the everyday life?

• 1:35:25Robert Greene?

  Well, obviously, I mean, I'm writing right now a chapter on what I call the daemon, which is an ancient Greek concept that all of us are born with like a guardian spirit, right? I know it sounds very mystical, but a lot of psychologists, contemporary psychologists, have written about the daemon phenomenon, the idea that you have a second self, a kind of higher self, that in some ways guiding you. It has a lot to do with some of the things we've talked about, purpose, et cetera.

• 1:36:00Robert Greene?

  And I have to think about it, I have to think about it in terms of my own life. I have to think about, is there something else inside of me that's communicating to me? What does that mean? How does that connect with other ideas about the universe? I get to read books about it. It's a very, very exciting process. It's, it's keeping me alive right now. And then, you know, I write a chapter about animals and what's sublime about interspecies communication. And now I get to look at my cat. I don't look at my cat, or I don't look at the birds the same way as I did before I wrote that chapter. So it's changing me and it's lifting me out of the kind of... People who have strokes, we all have to go through terrible diseases, all of us unfortunately,

• 1:36:45Robert Greene?

  unless we die by an accident, cancer, et cetera. Strokes, the number one thing that happens is terrible depression. To suddenly lose your body and what you can do. And so this has kept me out of that depression, I have to say.

• 1:37:03Steven Bartlett?

  You said that all of your books have been kind of focused on different subjects, and that's very much the case. There's sometimes three lines between the different books, but they're all very much focused on a variety of different subjects. If there was a message that kind of brings all of your work together, if this was your last day on earth, what would the message that you would want to leave the world with be?

• 1:37:29Robert Greene?

  Wow, that's a really good question.

• 1:37:36Robert Greene?

  A lot of my books have to do with the reality of our life and what, not what we want to believe, not our fake ideas about it, not our illusions, et cetera.

• 1:37:53Robert Greene?

  But what life is really, really like. This is the human animal. This is how they behave. This is what will seduce them. This was what will turn them off. This is how strategies will get us what we want in life. This is how you can master your subject. Not the bullshit thing that people tell you about mastery, where you can take a drug, where you can hack your way to mastery. This is the truth. This is the reality. So all of my books, the through line is, this is what the world is really like. It's not ugly. It's not beautiful. It just is. And it's great to just relate to the world as it is, to see things as they are. It kind of is liberating. And in a way, it is kind of beautiful

• 1:38:38Robert Greene?

  to just connect to the reality and not being inside of your wishes about, why can't people be more like this? Why can't somebody tell me this? Why can't they give me this? Why can't I be successful? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Getting rid of your illusions and just looking at the way life is, is sort of, I guess, would be the through line of all of my books.

• 1:38:59Steven Bartlett?

  Do you see life as a bit of a game? And is that a healthier way to view life? A game where we need to learn the rules and then play the game versus fight against the injustice of the rules of the game?

• 1:39:12Robert Greene?

  Yeah, it's all a game. Definitely. There was a great man on the left named Saul Alinsky, who wrote a book called Rules for Radicals. He was a strategist for union organizing. And he hated, he would hate the world today with people with all of their virtue signaling and everything. He said, if you want to change life, if you believe that there's injustice, you have to be a strategist. It's warfare. You have to organize. You have to understand the rules that will lead to actual change in this world. And whenever you enter the realm of rules and strategy, it is like a game, you know?

• 1:39:56Robert Greene?

  And so, yeah, I believe that. And I believe people with all their moralistic ideas, who think just because they believe something is right, that it will get what they want. They're just living in it. They're fools. You have to strategize. If you don't, you're just bullshitting. You just pretend. You're just virtue signaling. You want people to see you as a saint. If you're not willing to get your hands dirty and to organize and to say, I've got to take this A, B, C, D. I have to figure out the process of getting there. Then all you're doing is just playing a game of appearances as opposed to the real game of getting things done in life.

• 1:40:38Steven Bartlett?

  What is the opposite of that strategy you're talking about? So I'm trying to figure out the the average person that is currently not strategizing in their life, what are they doing?

• 1:40:51Robert Greene?

  Well, you know, everybody, I guess you could say everybody has a strategy, but their strategies are extremely ineffective. Their strategies are full of illusions. So human beings have to strategize because to wake up in the morning and to go, I've got to make breakfast. You've got to strategize how you're going to cook and what you're going to make and what you're going to do to the day and what you're going to wear. You know, it's human, it's human nature. It's just people do it very, very badly. And they do it badly because they're so emotional. Now, I'm not against emotions and emotions play a huge role. And I'm writing a lot about it in my new book. But the ability to get things done, you have to be in control of your emotions.

• 1:41:36Robert Greene?

  You have to take a step back and you have to go, I'm not going to react. This person is pressuring me. They're saying these things. My natural tendency is to react, get my back up and bite back. No, I'm gonna step back, I'm gonna go. What's gonna make them shut the fuck up? What's gonna make them get out of my life? What's gonna make, what's gonna get rid of them? What's gonna defeat them if they're an adversary? All right? I made that decision not to react, to get emotional. All right, now I have to think. If I do this, they're gonna react this way. But if I surprise them with this angle, they won't know what to do. And then they'll, they'll react in a different way. And I'll be in control of the situation.

• 1:42:21Robert Greene?

  I strategize, I go through a process of, of gaming out the possibilities here. And that's to be a strategist. The opposite is a book that I meant to write after Seduction, which is a book about human stupidity. To not be strategic is to be stupid. And, and stupid, stupid people create more damage in this life than anybody else with their bad strategies, their bad wars, the bad things they lead people into, their bad politics, et cetera. So that's the opposite of strategy is stupidity.

• 1:42:55Steven Bartlett?

  I also have within there that sort of emotion, being emotionally driven is very much, it doesn't allow you to have effective strategies because you'll get caught up in.

• 1:43:05Robert Greene?

  Yeah, you'll get. Personal things.

• 1:43:06Steven Bartlett?

  Personal things and yeah, and things that probably don't matter. That ability to rise above though, I think we all wanna master that. I would love to master the ability to rise above in all situations at all times.

• 1:43:18Robert Greene?

  Well, you can. When you're younger, it's harder because, because you've got your hormones, you've got all that energy, you've got all that adrenaline, it's harder. As you get older, it gets a little bit easier.

• 1:43:28Steven Bartlett?

  Do you have a, a system that you use just to detach yourself from the emotion sometimes?

• 1:43:33Robert Greene?

  Well, I'm not always good at it. So I've learned to not react emotionally when people say something that I think is going to be triggering. I just don't do anything. I go into my Zen mode. Oh, it's just, it's just life, it's just words, it's just verbiage, it doesn't matter, it doesn't mean anything to me. I'm neutral, I'm unaffected, I'm in my citadel. Goodbye, fine, it's okay. If I get angry and I write that email, which I still do, I don't send it. I put it in my draft box. I look at it a week later, what the fuck was I thinking about? I'm glad you didn't send that, you know? You delay your reactions.

• 1:44:16Robert Greene?

  But mostly, I've trained myself, and I must say my meditation practices helped me, to not react when people say things that are so annoying that they get under my skin. I just go, that's them, it's not me, they're another human being. They have a bad idea, I don't care, it's not my bad idea, it's their life.

• 1:44:36Steven Bartlett?

  Earlier, you mentioned the opposite of strategy was stupidity. So let's talk about politics.

• 1:44:42Steven Bartlett?

  It's a really interesting time in politics at the moment. I'm really obsessed with US politics in particular because it's more like a reality show over here than, in the UK, it's quite boring.

• 1:44:52Robert Greene?

  It is very boring over there, I must admit.

• 1:44:54Steven Bartlett?

  This year, Trump is running for reelection against Biden. The country seems to be very divided for a number of different reasons. It feels, I don't know, I just feel like it's more divided than ever. I do feel like the left has moved further left than ever before, to the point that I struggle to resonate with that side. And I still don't resonate with the right. So I kind of feel a bit trapped. What do you think of everything that's going on? And how does your kind of work inform what's happening and everything in between?

• 1:45:22Robert Greene?

  Well, we all have biases and I've come from more of the liberal side, the left side. I was actually rather extreme when I was younger. So I have that bias. So I'm not really going to be objective. So let's get that out of the way, right? You know, I have my emotional reactions, my triggering by what I see. But I'm very concerned about the overall spirit, the overall zeitgeist. So.

• 1:45:59Robert Greene?

  I worked as, I know this will sound like I'm going in a tangent, but bear with me. I was on the board of directors of a publicly traded company, American Apparel. And I was brought on there because I was friends with the CEO. But he thought of me as a strategist because he loved the 48 laws of power. And I started seeing that things were kind of going downhill. And I sort of had my finger on what the problem was. The problem was our demographic was basically young women, the ages 18 to 24. And it's a very difficult demographic to deal with because their tastes change very quickly. They're very viral, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:46:43Robert Greene?

  And so what worked early on with American Apparel, it was slowly becoming a cliche. Right? And it wasn't going to translate well to a new generation coming up, which ended up being Gen Z. And so I had the idea of like, we need to have these retreats, these yearly things where we step back from the day to day business and we think about the brand, where we're going, how we're going to adapt. We're not going to change it, but we're going to adapt, et cetera, et cetera. I presented to the CEO, "Oh, no, we don't need any of that." What I came away with was that the reason businesses are so awful, large businesses, why they suck, why they're never successful, why they're so damn annoying,

• 1:47:28Robert Greene?

  is because they're always dealing with the quarterly report, at least for publicly traded businesses. Right? They can't have a long-term vision because they can't afford it. They have to deal with what Wall Street will say to that quarterly report. And you know, what the investors are, how they're going to react. To sit there and step back and think about where you're going to be in a year or two? We might not even exist in a year or two, so forget it. Well, politics is the same thing. You've got to win elections. You're facing every couple of years, every four years. You don't have the luxury of thinking of the larger picture. And that's what we're suffering from right now. Because if you look at the political situation in America...

• 1:48:12Robert Greene?

  Nobody has any loyalty to anything. So in my age, when I grew up, you were a Democrat, you were a Republican, and you had kind of roots. And you believed in that because, well, the Democratic Party was for the working class. We were for the unions. We were for the common guy, the little guy, the FDR mentality, even to some extent Kennedy and Johnson. The Republicans, we were for big business, for lower taxes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You had a sense of connection to it. Now, people have no connection at all to any particular party, which is fine. I don't, I don't. But what that means is it's so volatile. So somebody will vote for Obama,

• 1:48:56Robert Greene?

  then they'll vote for Trump, then they'll vote for Biden, and then they'll vote for Trump again. And there are plenty of people in that situation. They have no roots. They're not connected to anything. And it's not people's fault. It's our politics' fault. They're not creating a sense of what it means to be an American. What is it? Can you give us a story, a myth, about what it means to be an American in 2024 that will connect us, that will kind of give us a sense of what is beautiful about our country? Because there are beautiful things about it. It's possible. It's very possible to create that kind of a vision if you can step back and you can think in longer term.

• 1:49:40Robert Greene?

  All right, maybe it's hard to do that for America. But what is it for the goddamn Democratic Party? What does it mean to be a Democrat? What does it mean to be, now to be a Republican, it just means to be a lapdog for Donald Trump, to believe everything he does. But the Democrats have their own problems, their own issues. It doesn't, you can't have a party that's just against everything. What are you for? I often tell people, I'm sick of hearing what you hate. I'm sick of hearing what you're against. I'm sick of hearing what you're complaining. Tell me what you want. Tell me what you're for. Tell me your vision of what a great country would be like. But you can't, they can't do that because they're only in this bubble of what I hate, what I'm against, what I'm trying to protect, et cetera, et cetera. So there's got to be a politician

• 1:50:25Robert Greene?

  that rises up at some point, that has a vision, that's not just a demagogue, that's not just a charismatic that's looking out for themselves. That can connect the dots, that can say, this is what it means to be in this party. This is our vision. This is what connects. This is the glue. Yeah, they're going to be little separate parts of it. Okay. But we're the party of the of the working class. Right? We're the party that's going to protect people, protect, make life easier for them. Or we're the party of business, et cetera, et cetera. I don't care what it is. But create a vision, a sense of who you are, of what it connects to. Hit people in their heart, in their...

• 1:51:09Robert Greene?

  You see, Trump succeeds because he has an emotional visceral effect on people, and he's very good at it. The Democrats can't learn that. It's always about a laundry list of we're going to do A, B, C, D, and E. We're going to hit the numbers. We're going to reduce inflation. We're going to create this amount of jobs, et cetera. It's all in the head. It's not in here. You've got to create, you've got to connect to people viscerally, emotionally. You have to create a myth that will connect people, even within their disparate little niches. And it's possible, because to believe it's impossible goes against the grain of history. Somebody will emerge, I might be dead when it happens, who will go through that some process via that,

• 1:51:53Robert Greene?

  because otherwise, everything will fall apart.

• 1:51:58Steven Bartlett?

  Robert, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest.

• 1:52:02Robert Greene?

  Oh, I didn't prepare.

• 1:52:05Steven Bartlett?

  It's okay. I'm sure I'm sure you can come up with one about the sublime, maybe. I don't know. We'll see. The question for you is... Okay, and you're not allowed to say nothing. If you could change one thing from your last 10 years, what would it be and why?

• 1:52:26Robert Greene?

  Well, I would have prevented my stroke. I would have realized that I was burning myself out, writing The Lost of Human Nature. I would have taken it slower. I would have realized that my body has limits. And I would have been easier on myself and not put myself... Because that book was very stressful and very difficult. I would have taken it slower, I would have gone at a different pace, and I wouldn't have had my stroke. And I'd be so much happier.

• 1:53:04Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think you could have prevented your stroke?

• 1:53:06Robert Greene?

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, it was a weird set of circumstances. But the stress of writing The Human Nature kind of ground me down. And then I had kind of high blood pressure already. And then I took a trip to New York where I forgot my blood pressure medication. And then I was hiking in a park and a wasp stung me here. And five days later, this whole area got inflamed to red. I was itching, I couldn't stand it. Went to the doctor. They prescribed me basically a steroid, which raised my blood pressure to the roof. And then when I had the stroke, my blood clot was exactly where that wasp sting was, in my neck.

• 1:53:52Robert Greene?

  So if I hadn't worn myself into the ground, if I hadn't forgotten my blood pressure medication, if I hadn't, if that doctor hadn't prescribed to me that nasty prednisone, if I had just been more careful like that, I probably wouldn't have had the stroke.

• 1:54:11Steven Bartlett?

  Are you able to forgive that sequence of events and the people involved?

• 1:54:15Robert Greene?

  Yeah, I have to. I've forgiven the wasp. You know, that wasp maybe died because of me, because I don't know if wasps die when they sting, bees do. But I've forgiven the wasp. I've walked past that spot where the wasp stung me and given my little prayer to it and said, "I'm sorry about your little life," etc. And yeah, I've forgiven. I've gotten over that and I've made my peace with it. You know what? It was meant to happen. Amor fati, it was my fate. And probably it happened for a good reason. I mean, I'm right now contradicting my answer to that person's question, but so is this life.

• 1:54:57Robert Greene?

  Because the way I think about it is, I was kind of reckless with what I thought I could do. And probably if I hadn't had my stroke, I probably would have, something else bad would have happened. Because I didn't realize my physical limits. I probably would have, and so I'm alive, I have my brain, and I'm writing this next book. So it happened for a reason.

• 1:55:22Steven Bartlett?

  If that bee wasn't there that day.

• 1:55:23Robert Greene?

  Wasp.

• 1:55:24Steven Bartlett?

  Sorry, that's my correction. If that was.

• 1:55:27Robert Greene?

  No, no precious eggbees, please.

• 1:55:29Steven Bartlett?

  If that wasp wasn't there that day, and I say this because I've been reading a few books recently about how throughout human history, these tiny little events, like the Nagasaki where they dropped the bombs, and all of these tiny little events with a cloud that flew over a city.

• 1:55:43Robert Greene?

  Butterfly effect.

• 1:55:44Steven Bartlett?

  All of the little butterfly effect things. Is there anything from the, how these tiny, seemingly insignificant chance events can have massive consequences?

• 1:55:54Robert Greene?

  You're gonna make me cry. Because what if there was like a little bit of wind and the wasp didn't come directly in my path? Yeah, I know.

• 1:56:04Steven Bartlett?

  It's horrifying. But is there anything, because that's the nature of the world we live in, where tiny little things that we cannot predict can determine our lives in huge ways, can sway our lives in huge ways. Is there anything that we can do about it?

• 1:56:22Robert Greene?

  No, there's nothing you can do about it. You know, it's Ryan Holiday will talk to you about it. What you can do is the Stoic philosophy is how you react to it mentally. You can't change the physical circumstances, but you can change how you think about it and how you react.

• 1:56:39Steven Bartlett?

  Robert, thank you so much for your time and your wisdom. And I'm so very, very excited for your upcoming book. Because if it's anything like your past books, it's really something worth waiting for.

• 1:56:49Robert Greene?

  That's nice to hear. Thank you.

• 1:56:51Steven Bartlett?

  Before we started recording, you told me about the process you're going through. You spent four years writing this upcoming book, Sublime.

• 1:56:56Robert Greene?

  So far, it's been four and a half. It'll be another year and a half.

• 1:56:59Steven Bartlett?

  So that'll be six total years.

• 1:57:01Robert Greene?

  Yes.

• 1:57:02Steven Bartlett?

  It's so incredible. It's so inspiring to me.

• 1:57:05Robert Greene?

  Well, keep this in mind, Stephen. I can't type. So I used to be a fast typist. And I can't go up, take a hike to clear my head. So everything, it's not like it takes double, it takes like, it's like one and a half times more. I have to write things out by hand. I have to edit by hand. I have to dictate into the computer. I have to edit with one hand. I have to clear my mind without hiking. So everything takes one and a half times more. That's probably, so it probably would have been like a four or five year book.

• 1:57:40Steven Bartlett?

  But as you said about your cycle, when you slow things down, sometimes you enjoy them more and you make better things.

• 1:57:45Robert Greene?

  Yes, it is. I think you're right. And probably the slower cooking will make a better book. Exactly right.

• 1:57:51Steven Bartlett?

  I can't wait. I hope everyone has your existing books because they're all, as everyone's witnessed today, they're all based on challenging but important enduring wisdom. Every single one of them. And I think we need more challenging wisdom in our society these days.

• 1:58:07Robert Greene?

  Well, thank you.

• 1:58:08Steven Bartlett?

  So thank you so much, Robert. You're a real.

• 1:58:09Robert Greene?

  You're welcome.

• 1:58:10Steven Bartlett?

  Here it to many. Thank you so much.

• 1:58:11Robert Greene?

  Okay. Thank you, Stephen. Thank you for inviting me back.