Pod Insights The Daily Stoic Premium (🔓) Ask Daily Stoic: Ryan and Robert Greene Discuss the Laws of Human Nature About this episode Today's episode features a 2018 interview in which Ryan talks with author and strategist Robert Greene. They discuss the core message of Robert’s latest book (The Laws of Human Nature), the research process that he uses to put together his books, and more. Robert Greene is a bestselling author and strategist. Across his six books he has combined intense research with powerful stories from history and myth to uncover the key motivations behind human behavior and strategy. This episode is brought to you by Future. Future pairs you up with a remote personal trainer that you can get in touch with from your home. Your trainer will give you a full exercise regimen that works for your specific fitness goals, using the equipment you have at home. It works with your Apple Watch, and if you don’t already have one, Future will give you one for free. Sign up at tryfuture.com/stoic and get your first two weeks with your personal trainer for just $1. This episode is also brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business. And right now, LinkedIn is helping companies like yours find the essential workers that they need in these trying times. Visit http://linkedin.com/stoic to post your healthcare or essential job for free, or to post another job for your business. This episode is also brought to you by Four Sigmatic. Four Sigmatic is a maker of mushroom coffee, lattes, elixirs, and more. Their drinks all taste amazing and they've full of all sorts of all-natural compounds and immunity boosters to help you think clearly and live well. Four Sigmatic has a new exclusive deal for Daily Stoic listeners: get up to 39% off their bestselling Lion’s Mane bundle by visiting foursigmatic.com/stoic.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanholidayInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanholiday/Facebook: http://facebook.com/ryanholidayYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicAnd follow Robert Greene:Twitter: https://twitter.com/robertgreeneInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/robertgreeneofficial/Homepage: https://powerseductionandwar.com/Get Robert’s latest book, The Laws of Human Nature: https://geni.us/pmH4See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Ryan Holiday? Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time, and we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,
0:46 Ryan Holiday? to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.
0:53 Ryan Holiday? Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. As you know, I recently had one of my heroes, Robert Greene, on the show. We talked about the pandemic quarantine. We talked about a lifetime, dead time. You know, we talked about political sensitivities, how one learns to tamp down their triggers, the things that they disagree with, the things that make them angry, as Robert talks about in his book, The Laws of Human Nature. And we also talked about sort of what great leadership in times of crisis looks like. Well, I wanted to also share another interview that I did with Robert. This one in the fall of 2018. Robert Greene was putting out The Laws of Human Nature,
1:38 Ryan Holiday? and suddenly, as I've talked about on this podcast before, suddenly had a stroke, and it looked like the whole launch was thrown into doubt. And he wasn't going to be able to do any media appearances. He wasn't going to be able to travel. It was really touch and go for a long time. And I actually thought they should pause the whole thing. I was much too worried about his health to think that any book launch was worth it, as amazing as the book was. I thought we should just wait until the spring. But anyways, they ended up proceeding. And so what Robert asked me to do was come out to Los Angeles. To interview him on his couch, where he didn't have to travel, where he could trust the person interviewing him, where we could just have a conversation about the ideas in the book and put those ideas out in the world.
2:23 Ryan Holiday? And it was obviously an honor to do it. I agreed in two seconds. Any chance I have to have the opportunity to spend time with with Robert Greene, who I just love and adore, obviously going to take. So I flew out there and we had this conversation and it was a great one. And it sort of has existed out there in Limbo. I put it on my YouTube channel. I put it on Robert's Facebook. But so much time has passed. We've had so many new subscribers. And I do think the ideas in his books are so timeless, so I wanted to to run that as today's episode for you. We talk about a bunch of important things in the interview. We talk about Morfati. We talk about Memento Mori, obviously Robert's brush with death, which is a sort of a deeply Stoic concept.
3:04 Ryan Holiday? We talk about the importance of illustrating ideas through stories, which has obviously influenced my writing a great deal. You know, this is just a touching interview. I look back at that time now and I'm on the one hand so glad that he's come as far as he has. And then it's also incredible for me to be sitting here in in 2020 and think about just the just all the things that have happened in the world since then. I mean, it's incredible. We talk about Morfati and Memento Mori in the interview. And who would have thought that, you know, in that intervening period, just the things that would happen? I mean, that we would be dealing with a pandemic that that has rippled through the world. And I guess that's really what Stoicism is about, right?
3:45 Ryan Holiday? It's like when we look back at the past, we we have this sense of how naive we were, how much we were taking for granted, how all the things we weren't thinking of. And so revisiting this conversation was a reminder of that for me and something I wanted to share with you. And of course, if you haven't read The Laws of Human Nature, it's an absolute must read. Robert is a master of his craft, certainly the master I believe I am apprenticing under. If you haven't read his other books, like The Forty Eight Laws of Power, Thirty Three Strategies of War, one of my favorites, Mastery, you absolutely should. You can follow his email list, which is great, at powerseductionwar.com. On Instagram, he's Robert Green Official. On Twitter, I believe he's at Robert Green.
4:30 Ryan Holiday? I think he's one of the great living nonfiction authors of our time. And again, the theme ultimately of this piece is just how even the great living masters can quite easily become the not living masters. And we should cherish people while we still can. So enjoy this interview, be safe out there. And we'll be back with another episode for you in just a few days. So I'm here talking to Robert Green about his new book, The Laws of Human Nature. This book is how many years in the making?
5:00 Robert Greene? I would say between five and six, but it's probably more like 58 years in the making. You know?
5:09 Ryan Holiday? Why did you decide to write this book? So you came off Mastery, which is about how we sort of find our life's task and how we achieve mastery over it. Why did you decide to go from there to Human Nature?
5:24 Robert Greene? Well, in Mastery, we have chapter four on social intelligence. And one thing was readers really responded to that chapter. They really liked it, but I got the sense that they wanted more. Like, could you expand this? People kept asking me, well, how do you read people by their body language? Things that I kind of opened up in that chapter. So I sensed there was a hunger for this kind of knowledge, dealing with social intelligence, but sort of from a different angle. You know how I don't look at things from the usual self, how positive, Pollyannaish angle? I look at it from the dark side.
6:04 Ryan Holiday? Right.
6:05 Robert Greene? That people are actually hiding a lot of inner turmoil and aggressive impulses. And I felt that there was a hunger for more of that kind of knowledge. But also,
6:19 Robert Greene? In the 20 years, 20, over 20 years of writing Power and researching it and consulting with many different powerful people, I had this feeling that people are really difficult. It's what I write a lot about. And we spend so much of our time, particularly now in the 21st century, dealing with technology, dealing with our phones, dealing with algorithms. It's like we're immersed in this. But the source of our misery, the source of our pain, the source of why we're so fucking messed up right now is we don't understand people. People can't be reduced to an algorithm. You can't figure them out through your smartphone. And I've dealt with people who are very powerful, who are brilliant in their field,
7:04 Robert Greene? and they come to me with the simplest psychological problem, a political problem. I can't handle this partner. So I had this feeling, you know, when I wrote Mastery, I sensed that we're losing a sense of how to make things. And I really wanted to address that. Well, I also felt in this book, we're losing a sense of psychology of what makes people tick. And it's causing cascading problems in the world. So I felt an urgency to kind of address something that people don't talk about.
7:35 Ryan Holiday? And so mastering the social intelligence, as you call it, why is that something that the average, the average person needs to know? I get why maybe the president needs to master social intelligence. But if I'm a writer, or I'm an athlete, or I go to a football team, what, walk me through the case for...
7:56 Robert Greene? Well, I mean, I've dealt, consulted with athletes. A very high-level NBA basketball player. He came to me, I won't say his name, because the owner of the team was messing with him. Like, he was obviously wanting to trade him, but publicly he was saying all sorts of, he couldn't figure him out. And it really was, was hurting him psychologically, and it was affecting his game, and it was messing with his relationship with his wife. So it's ridiculous to think that in some field, you're not having to deal with people. If you're a parent, you have to deal with your child. And children are extremely difficult. They're extremely resistant to your will.
8:41 Robert Greene? They don't want to do what you want them to do. How do you deal with that? If you're bad at dealing with people, if you don't understand their psychology, if you push them too much and they resist you, you respond and react and you get kind of defensive and bitter and resentful. And what happens is your mind is consumed 24 hours a day with, "Damn it, this person didn't answer my email. Damn it, this person didn't do that, this." It's wearing away at you. It's eating your mental space. You have no mental space for creative endeavors, for actually doing your work. It drains you. It emotionally drains you. You're imbalanced because you're constantly thinking about what people aren't giving you. I want you to reverse that perspective and think of what you're not giving people,
9:25 Robert Greene? other people, so that you can actually begin to change this dynamic and get out of that sense of waiting and passivity.
9:33 Ryan Holiday? And when you sit down to research a book like this, walk us through your research methodology. Because obviously, I was your research assistant and so I know it and it changed how I come up with ideas and brainstorm and collect information. But how does that process work for you as you start to hone in on an idea?
9:50 Robert Greene? By the way, you were the best researcher I've ever had.
9:53 Ryan Holiday? Thank you.
9:53 Robert Greene? I wish I could clone you.
9:55 Ryan Holiday? I would like you to let me keep doing it, but you won't.
9:59 Robert Greene? You're too powerful. I saw that you were like number six on Amazon's Business Writer list. How can I hire someone like that to do my research? It'd be ridiculous. But anyway, I'll consider that for the next book.
10:12 Ryan Holiday? Okay.
10:12 Robert Greene? But, well, the research process is very laborious, but there's a method behind the madness, which is I try and keep an open mind. Now, I have a bias towards human nature, towards people. My bias is negative. I tend to think people are actually worse than they probably are.
10:34 Ryan Holiday? Okay.
10:34 Robert Greene? As opposed to Steven Pinker, who thinks that people are probably better than they actually are. I admit my bias.
10:41 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
10:41 Robert Greene? So that helps me. I know that that's there. But I want to combat my bias and open my mind up to all the information. So my process was... To start reading books that would kind of open up different vistas on human nature. So a lot on neuroscience, Ramachandra and Antonio Damasio, about how we process information and things about our emotions and how the brain processes emotions. I read a lot of books by psychologists from the classic period, the period when people, these people aren't very fashionable now, like Carl Jung, like Heinz Kohl, like a man named Ronald Fairbairn, Bion, Wilfred Bion.
11:26 Robert Greene? Incredible resource of amazing information about people. Like, for instance, there's a psychologist named Melanie Klein, who spent her whole life studying infants and psychoanalyzing infants. Can you imagine what that's like? Now, if you're looking at from a mastery point of view and 10,000-hour point of view, she spent 20,000 hours studying infants and their psychology. She understands them on a level that's amazing.
11:54 Ryan Holiday? Right.
11:55 Robert Greene? So these people have incredible resource, these psychologists. So I went into that. I went into anthropology. My particular bias is that humans have always been aggressive and have these sort of darker impulses and have been irrational. And so there are a lot of anthropologists that have been discussing that lately, about how primitive people were quite warlike and had very high murder rates. But there are other people who argue against that, so I had to read the other side. All sorts of other fields that I went into. A lot of philosophers are very wise about human nature, people like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. And then novelists. I actually read novels
12:40 Robert Greene? because some of the most perceptive people are writers who understand, you know, are great observers.
12:47 Ryan Holiday? So speaking of that, one of the things I think is interesting in the genre that you write in, and I think you were a pioneer in this, is that, so you did all this academic research and most of the time when people do that, then they're like, "This study says X", or they write about from their own personal experiences. You've always relied on historical stories, or in some cases myths, to illustrate your points. Why do you talk to the reader through story? Why have you always done that?
13:18 Robert Greene? Well, I'm very focused on the reader. I'm always thinking when I'm writing, how are they going to absorb this information? Right? And, you know, a lot of, there's a problem that psychologists have noticed that if you're a teacher, you assume that your student has the same knowledge that you do and then for you're a bad teacher. I know that my readers don't know necessarily what I'm talking about. They don't know if I'm talking about Carl Jung. If I throw out jargon, they're not going to get it. So I have to make it understandable to the average person.
13:52 Ryan Holiday? Right.
13:53 Robert Greene? Well, in The Art of Seduction, I talked about how telling a story lowers people's resistance, makes the mind open up. When we were like two or three years old, the sense of being carried by our parents or not, or playing peek-a-boo, of not knowing what comes next is very deeply ingrained in human psychology. So if I tell you a story about Rockefeller to illustrate aggression, I know as the reader is being pulled into this story, they don't know what I'm telling. They don't know who is the aggressor in this story.
14:28 Ryan Holiday? Right.
14:28 Robert Greene? They don't know the lesson that I'm trying to derive. So they're going to want to read. They want to go further and further and further. I've tricked them into coming to page eight. Whereas if I immediately hit them with Jung and this study and sociology, their mind closes off, they're falling asleep. That's the mistake 98% of people who write books out there make. They don't think about the reader. They assume that the reader is as interested in the material as they are. You have to seduce the reader, so I tell stories.
14:58 Ryan Holiday? Is that a form of social intelligence then? You're sort of going, what am I? You're not thinking, oh, I'm right, or this is a fact. You're thinking, how do I effectively deliver? What's the most effective way to deliver what I'm trying to do or get the end result that I want to get?
15:14 Robert Greene? Yes, it's a very good point. So a lot of problems that people have in the social realm is they're not practical. So if you're thinking in terms of what you really want, it changes the whole game. If you want somebody to do your bidding, to help you, to finance your film, or whatever it is, if you come at it from, "Oh, this is what I deserve. Please give me this. I'm so brilliant." It has no effect. But if you think in terms of how they think, the stories they want to hear, what will please them, what will interest them, the game changes. You have the power to influence them. So I have the power to influence the reader when I start thinking about what the reader wants,
15:58 Robert Greene? how to draw them in. The key to my method of writing, I wrote a kind of a secret code to how I write books.
16:07 Ryan Holiday? Okay.
16:08 Robert Greene? It was chapter 31, I think, or 30 in the strategy book, the 33 Strategies of War. Communication, I used Machiavelli as the prime example, and how you communicate, and what are the ways of styling your work that will have the greatest effect. So speaking in an authoritative tone, saying things that are kind of strong are ways to get a reaction out of the reader. You want to get a reaction. You don't want that kind of mind-numbing feeling that you get when you read most books.
16:42 Ryan Holiday? Right.
16:45 Ryan Holiday? Hey, it's Ron. So your book is obviously about human nature.
16:49 Robert Greene? Yeah.
16:49 Ryan Holiday? And you said to me, you said the number one law of human nature is that we deny there is such things as human nature. And you have a quote from Horace in the book where he says, "You can throw human nature, you can throw nature out with a pitchfork, but it always comes back."
17:04 Robert Greene? Right.
17:05 Ryan Holiday? So as we study human nature, what is it that, what do we discover? Like, what are we trying to understand as we study human nature?
17:18 Robert Greene? Very simple. You don't know who you are. You walk around in your world and you're kind of sleepwalking. You assume you have an identity, an opinion, an image of yourself that is actually somewhat false. You think you're maybe greater than you are, you think you're, whatever that image is. But there's something else going on inside you. You don't know the source of your emotions. You don't know what really motivates you, what makes you tick. And they say the same thing about other people. So, look at it this way. We evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. Throw away, it's not like we suddenly changed in 1970 and became this incredibly technocratic,
18:04 Robert Greene? sophisticated, pinker-like human being.
18:07 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
18:07 Robert Greene? We started out as primitive, you know, Homo sapiens and before that.
18:13 Ryan Holiday? Right.
18:13 Robert Greene? Homo erectus, et cetera. And in that period, we were formed, so many things were formed about us, such as, just take one example, how we are so susceptible to the emotions of other people.
18:26 Ryan Holiday? Sure.
18:27 Robert Greene? Virality, memes, et cetera. Well, that's something deeply ingrained because in our earliest ancestors, the ability to be affected by the emotions of other people was a key to their survival.
18:39 Ryan Holiday? Sure.
18:40 Robert Greene? Well, that is so deeply a part of us now, and we don't think of it, we don't understand that. So when you're interacting with people, you're being influenced by them in ways that you're not even consciously aware of because of this susceptibility to other people's emotions. I call these primitive forces that are operating in you. These primitive forces, there are 18 of them, are, is what I call human nature. And so they're actually governing your behavior, and you're not very aware of it, and they're governing other people's behavior. I'm trying to open up this world to you and give you like a key to decoding some of the things that are so mysterious.
19:21 Ryan Holiday? One of the primitive forces you talk a lot about in the book is envy. How either we're driven by envy and this is motivating us, we don't understand, or how we need to be cautious of and aware when other people are driven by envy.
19:34 Robert Greene? Yeah.
19:34 Ryan Holiday? And that this is something we want to be both aware of and cautious about.
19:38 Robert Greene? Yeah, I differentiate passive envy to active envy. Okay. So passive envy is something all of us feel. And I'm trying to, what I really want you to do in this book is I want you to start being honest with yourself. Because I think if you're honest with yourself, you become a better human being and you're happier. So, nobody likes to admit that they're envious, but everybody feels it. So, you were my disciple, or whatever you want to call it, mentee. Yeah. Not disciple, apprentice, not disciple. That's a bad word. Protege? Protege, thank you. You know, and then I read that you're higher up on the business list of readers, of writers than I am.
20:23 Robert Greene? Okay, I can't. That was only because my book was for sale for a dollar. So it's very temporary. Okay, it doesn't matter. I'm just trying to be hon, inject some honesty. I can't help but feel a pang of envy. Right. Okay, everybody feels that. And I explain why we feel it. Chimpanzees feel envy. It's extremely ingrained in our primate nature. Right. We are always comparing ourselves to other people. It's how the human brain operates. On a very basic level, we process information by comparing. Yeah. How is this different from that? We do this socially. How does that person have more than I do? Why are they getting this attention and I'm not? You are feeling envy. Everybody feels it.
21:06 Robert Greene? Most of the time, it's not toxic. It's just part of social life, just accept it. Right. But then there's the toxic, active form of envy. Okay. And I talk in this book a lot about toxic people. And I have a quote in there from Schopenhauer, saying that we think that evil people walk around with horns on their head. Yeah. Or that fools have cap and bells. Yeah. But people who are toxic are masters at disguising it. They've learned since they were three years old to present a normal, saintly front to the world. Envious people, and there are envious people out there, don't go announcing themselves that they're envious. They become your friend in order to wound you.
21:50 Robert Greene? They ingratiate themselves out of a secret desire to find a way to punish you.
21:57 Robert Greene? I'm trying to teach you how to identify these types before they harm you. And I have many different.
22:03 Ryan Holiday? So the idea of toxic people is definitely a theme in the book. What are some signs that you want to look for for toxic people? I know you talk about Schopenhauer. He's like, you should tell someone good news about yourself and then judge how they react as a sign. To see if they're an envious person or not.
22:23 Robert Greene? Yeah, in the envy chapter, I talk about. And it's also in the chapter about body language, micro-expressions, which is a sort of a fashionable word. Now, Paul Ekman kind of brought that out where you look at people. They have a half of a second of a reaction and then they put the mask back on. Envious people will have that little slight for half a second. You will notice if you tell them some bad news about yourself, a little smile will appear on their face. Or if you tell them some good news, a little bit of something unpleasant will cross the face for just a millisecond. And Schopenhauer said, you can find these people out by deliberately telling them something good that's happened to you or something bad, and they will reveal themselves.
23:08 Robert Greene? But you know, there are certain chapters that I focus on very toxic qualities like envy, like the shadow, like the repression, like aggression, like short-sightedness, people who can't think past their nose. And I'm trying to give you ways to identify them. So one of the most important keys is extreme behavior. So when someone reveals to you something, a very, what I call emphatic character trait. They are hyper-confident, hyper-secure, hyper-aggressive, hyper-masculine,
23:49 Robert Greene? hyper-sensitive or temperamental, or very snobby about things. They're concealing something. They're generally concealing.
23:59 Ryan Holiday? Compensating for something?
24:00 Robert Greene? They're compensating. They're concealing what is probably the opposite quality. And they've learned that from very early on. So if you're an aggressive person. Always trying to get what you want from other people. You know, you learn by the age of 11 that that turns people off. So you learn to present a different front, like a charming front, and lure them in. So I want you to be aware of appearances are deceptive. People don't announce their toxicity to you with a trumpet blaring.
24:31 Ryan Holiday? Right.
24:32 Robert Greene? They disguise it, and they'll disguise it by presenting often the opposite appearance. So if somebody is so nice to you, you meet them, and they're immediately wanting to do your favors, and they're like, love your work, and they'll do this, that, and the other. Probably there's something else going on under the surface.
24:52 Ryan Holiday? Right.
24:52 Robert Greene? Probably they're feeling, they're probably passive aggressive. So there are other signs, and each sort of toxic type has its own kind of identifying mark. Like I talk about aggressive people, and how you can decode them often from their body language, their tone of voice. But the other thing about aggressive people, which is a toxic type, and I don't mean, we're all aggressive, so I try to get that out of the way. It's not like, oh, some people are aggressive and some others. All humans are aggressive, but there are toxic aggressive types. What I want to train you, the reader, to look at is to not look at people's, what they say or their appearance, but to look at their actions
25:34 Ryan Holiday? Right.
25:35 Robert Greene? and the patterns of their behavior. So for instance, I talk about Howard Hughes in chapter four as somebody who's got a very weak character, who was a horrific businessman, and people were lured in by his image of this sort of maverick aviator.
25:52 Ryan Holiday? Right.
25:52 Robert Greene? Kind of, you know, great Hollywood person, et cetera. But if you looked at the patterns of his behavior, you would have seen that he was actually quite toxic. So stop looking at what people say about themselves and look at their actions.
26:08 Ryan Holiday? And what's the expression now, when someone tells you who they are, you should listen? Or shows you who they are, you should listen?
26:14 Robert Greene? Yeah.
26:15 Ryan Holiday? Yeah. One of the things you talk about in this book, and I think it's kind of a theme in all your books, is the art of persuasion.
26:22 Robert Greene? Yes.
26:22 Ryan Holiday? And you sort of lay out how understanding human nature and our own nature, I think the phrase you use in the book is a master persuader, like how to become... What does a person need to know to be better at persuasion?
26:36 Robert Greene? Well, the first thing that I try and do, and there's a chapter in there, what I call is, people have a self-opinion. And what I mean by that is, you, Ryan, have an idea of yourself. Right. And that idea of yourself is, I'm very self-reliant, I'm very disciplined, I'm a good person, I'm conscientious, I don't know what else is, I'm a good father. Sure. They're mostly positive things, but there'll be negative things in that opinion of itself, you know, I could be better at that. It's how you think of yourself, okay? Yeah. And it anchors everything that you do. If you go buy a car, you're gonna buy a car that sort of meshes with that self-opinion. Right.
27:19 Robert Greene? If you think of yourself as being extremely good with money and successful, you'll buy a Mercedes. But if you think of yourself as very conscientious and saintly, you'll buy a Prius. It governs so many of your choices. Right. Okay? When you are trying to persuade somebody or have influence over them, you are generally not thinking of this opinion that they have of themselves. Right. You're coming from yourself, you're thinking of what you want, you're projecting onto them qualities that they don't necessarily have. Or see in themselves. Or see in themselves. And if you inadvertently say or do something that crosses,
28:03 Robert Greene? that doesn't mesh with their self-opinion, a door will close that will never open again. You've lost them, right? So if you think of yourself as being really an independent person who makes up your own mind about things, and I try and say, "Oh no, Ryan, I think you've been manipulated." Well, man, you're gonna get really angry. That's not how I think of myself. You're gonna, you're not gonna show it, but you're gonna kind of inwardly turn away, turn against me. Well, that's the sin that most people commit. They don't understand that the other person has their own psychology, their own belief about who they are. Instead of violating their self-opinion, you want to validate it. There's a quote in there from William James is,
28:48 Robert Greene? "The single greatest human need is to be recognized." People want to feel validated for who they are.
28:56 Ryan Holiday? Right.
28:56 Robert Greene? They want attention, they want to be recognized. I don't care who you are, that's what you want. If you can give that to people, if you can feed that self-opinion, if you can show that they are who they think they are, or you can kind of say that you could even be better at what you're doing, then suddenly, they're open up to you. And now you have room to influence them, to change their behavior, to divert them in the direction that you want. So, the number one principle is to stop thinking of yourself. When you find yourself in a moment where you want influence, when you want to persuade something, whether it's your boss, your child, your spouse, your first reaction is, "My needs, what I want, who I am."
29:41 Robert Greene? If you can train yourself, and it takes time, to stop that and to think of them, and to put yourself in their position, to think of their psychology, and of how they think about themselves, you've already come an incredibly long way towards having the ability to persuade them.
29:58 Ryan Holiday? It's kind of remarkable to me, given your book's reputation as being ruthless, and heartless, and aggressive, that probably the number one theme in the laws of human nature is empathy. It appears in almost every law, on every page, about the importance of empathy. That's sort of what you're saying there, that if you want to persuade someone, you first have to understand what they want and how they think, and not yourself.
30:23 Robert Greene? Well, one thing I would correct on that is, yeah, people do think of me as being amoral, Machiavellian. But all of my books are all about getting inside the psychology of the other person. So I've always talked about that. I just never used the word empathy before. That's what people are gonna think that I've changed, but I haven't. But... The idea there is, we have a power, a hidden power. It's almost like a Superman-type power that we don't use. And that power is empathy. It's our ability to think inside other people, to think inside of even other objects. It's sort of the origins of science itself. And so, this empathy is not something that's intellectual.
31:04 Robert Greene? I like to take a lot of the things in this book, I try to take away from the intellectual realm. It's a visceral emotional quality that we have. We can feel what other people are feeling. I can't really know what Ryan is thinking right now. You're, you're, you're, you have a screen there, it's impossible. But viscerally, I can sense your moods through your body language, through things that communicate itself non-verbally. And so, this ability to get inside the moods of other people, their emotions, their quality, their tone, is, to me, the essence of empathy. And if you think about it, our ancestors from hundreds of thousands of years had to survive in a world with predators, with saber-toothed tigers,
31:49 Robert Greene? with animals that were gonna kill them in an instant, and warring tribes, before the invention of language.
31:55 Ryan Holiday? Sure.
31:56 Robert Greene? Right? And how did they communicate? They communicated non-verbally. They understood each other in a visceral way, through non-verbal communication.
32:05 Ryan Holiday? Right.
32:05 Robert Greene? We have this power. And I have an icon in the book. Milton Erickson, a great psychologist, who's sort of the inventor of hypnotherapy, who is a master at, at non-verbal communication. A sort of, this is sort of the ideal world that we could somehow reach at some point.
32:24 Ryan Holiday? One of my, one of my favorite parts in the book is, related to empathy, you talk about, most people go around and we have this idea of schadenfreude, where we're sort of rooting for other people to fail, or we take pleasure in defeats. And then you talk about, is it mittenfreud?
32:41 Robert Greene? Mitfreud.
32:42 Ryan Holiday? Mitfreud.
32:43 Robert Greene? Yeah.
32:44 Ryan Holiday? What does that mean and why is it important?
32:46 Robert Greene? Well, it's actually a phrase from Nietzsche. He says, "We feel shanfreida, really we should feel mitfreida." And mitfreida, literally, freida means joy. Shanfreida means pain in joy. Getting pain in the, getting joy in other people's pain. Mitfreida means joy with, mit meaning with. And it means when other people have something good that happens to them, you feel their joy. So it's very unnatural. If somebody comes to you with good news, your immediate reaction is, most often is, "Oh, I'm a little bit uncomfortable. Why not me?"
33:24 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
33:24 Robert Greene? "Why you?" "Oh, maybe you're just lucky." Or, you know, "You don't really deserve that." You're not, you know, you may not be honest with yourself, but that often happens.
33:33 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
33:34 Robert Greene? Can you train yourself to actually feel the joy that other people feel when something good happens to them? It kind of opens up your whole mind, your whole spirit. One of the most important chapters in this book is the chapter on attitude and how your attitude towards life affects what happens to you. And I talk about Anton Chekhov, a Russian writer, who's, to me, one of the great icons for this book. And he had a horrifying childhood. His father beat him every single day, never even knowing why he beat him. They grew up in poverty. His father abandoned the family when he was young. He had nothing in life and he lived in this miserable, small town,
34:18 Robert Greene? the most miserable town in Russia you can imagine. And one day, he decided, in the depths of his misery, after he was left alone in this town to look after himself at the age of 16, he said, "I want to not feel this burden by all of these bad feelings towards other people. I'm going to start thinking that my father can't help himself, that he was born a serf and he's been bred to be this awful person. And my mother can't help herself, and my siblings. It's just human nature." I'm going to accept them and I'm going to love them for who they are. And he felt this insane wave of freedom.
34:58 Robert Greene? He was free of all his own negative emotions that were burdening him day in and day out. And it changed the course of his life. So that's sort of the essence of mid-freude in another way of kind of accepting people for who they are and the sort of the freedom that ensues from that.
35:17 Ryan Holiday? That connects to the thing that you and I made together, which is the Morfati coin.
35:22 Robert Greene? Yes.
35:23 Ryan Holiday? Which is the idea that it's also in Nietzsche phrase of sort of loving everything that happens to you, not resenting it, not fighting against it, not carrying around a grudge or a burden, but sort of embracing it and finding the good in it.
35:38 Robert Greene? Yeah.
35:39 Ryan Holiday? Where does that fit in with our human nature?
35:43 Robert Greene? Well, it doesn't fit in because it's not natural to us. Our natural frame, our natural starting position is when something bad happens, why me, you know? To feel sort of a grievance, to feel that things aren't fair, to feel that other people aren't giving you what you want or what you deserve. We start from a position of feeling kind of sorry for ourselves.
36:08 Ryan Holiday? Right.
36:09 Robert Greene? We deserve more than what we're getting. And so a lot of what I'm talking about in this book is overcoming some of these natural elements in human nature and turning them around and using them for another purpose, another way. And Morfati is very powerful in that you train yourself to accept everything that happens. It's sort of a banality to say that things happen for a reason, but there's some truth to it. It's like for Nietzsche, it was, this is life. Life involves pain. Life involves adversity. You're going to die one day and it's not going to be pleasant.
36:51 Robert Greene? Your friends and family members, they're going to die one day and it's not going to be pleasant. You're going to have failure in life. People are going to hurt you. But that is life. That's what it is. So to resist that, to be angry about that means to not love life itself. And he wanted to turn that around and for you to embrace life, because you only have one go at it, and to embrace even the pain. He was struck at a very early age. There was this woman that entered his life named Lou Andrea Salome. I talk about her in The Art of Seduction. And she wrote a poem about how I embrace the pain that life has given me. I love it.
37:35 Robert Greene? I not only accept it, I love it. And he was so shaken by that. And he thought this was such a powerful way of thinking and being. So that you're going through and you're accepting life as it is and not wanting things to be otherwise is not natural, but it's extremely powerful. And I show you, I give you ways of how you can adopt this philosophy in your life.
38:00 Ryan Holiday? Obviously, you've gone through some adversity in your own life recently.
38:02 Robert Greene? Yeah.
38:03 Ryan Holiday? It's easy to talk about Amor Fati.
38:05 Robert Greene? Yeah.
38:06 Ryan Holiday? Especially when you're talking about, oh, I'm gonna love that my plane is delayed or, you know, that my, there's some trouble with the printer in my book or something. How have you tried to practice Amor Fati recovering from a stroke?
38:19 Robert Greene? Well, you know what that's like. You were writing a book about Stoicism and obstacles, the way. And then you got robbed and you had all these things happen.
38:25 Ryan Holiday? Sure.
38:25 Robert Greene? And you were being tested. Well, I had a stroke and it's like the ultimate test for me. I've never had to go through something like this because I'm somebody who's very physically active and independent. And suddenly, I can't use the left side of my body and I'm completely dependent. And the initial reaction is the natural reaction. Oh, man, damn, why this had to happen? This is so unfair. Why me? You know, if only I could just keep swimming and doing my life the way it was. I'm so upset. And I talk in the book, your natural reactions, you don't have to fight them. You have to go take the next step, which is the next day after you've gone through this,
39:10 Robert Greene? is to analyze your own emotions and why you're feeling that way. So I've had to go through that process and it's actually been extremely powerful for me. I've had to learn to accept this as the ultimate kind of training for me for being stronger. This woman wrote to me, she was trying to give me advice. She said, "Look at this as a sort of a new experience in your life and you're going to discover new things." And I thought that was really a brilliant way of putting it. So I have to retrain my body. Every day I have to learn how to use my fingers again, like a baby. And I'm learning how the mind works. I'm learning about patience and frustration, about my own limits.
39:53 Robert Greene? And I can't necessarily say I love my stroke. I think that would be false of me to say something like that. I don't love that this happened, but I've accepted it and I've discovered how it can make me a better and stronger person. And so, you know, you write a book and it's kind of intellectual and then something real happens. And what you write about is something that you yourself have to overcome. And it's really been like the most, the most major test in my life so far.
40:21 Ryan Holiday? And not, not to fast forward because there's some other things I want to go back to, but I think it's related to what you conclude, what you conclude the book with is this sort of extended memento mori, this meditation on our mortality.
40:35 Robert Greene? Yeah.
40:36 Ryan Holiday? And, you know, perhaps the, if the first law of human nature is we deny human nature, the second or the last law of human nature is our denial of death and our mortality. Why is it so, why did you decide to conclude this book, which the laws of human nature I sort of see as the culmination of all your work? Why did you conclude?
40:59 Ryan Holiday? Why did you give the most valuable real estate in your book to death?
41:04 Robert Greene? Well, it is the end, so why shouldn't it be the last chapter? It's sort of like, if I'm talking about how we have certain qualities that we have to accept and through accepting them, try and move past them. So I'm trying to tell you, you feel envy, accept that, and now find a way to make envy useful. And I explain how you can start, instead of feeling envy, you can start feeling sorry for people who have less than you. You can start using your envy of powerful people to emulate them, et cetera. Well, death is the ultimate barrier for all of us, not just physically, but psychologically. I maintain that human beings are messed up,
41:48 Robert Greene? screwed up in so many ways because of their awareness of death and their fear of death. It is through this fear that we created all kinds of superstitions, that we created the idea of an afterlife. And so, it's like Montaigne, I end the book with a quote from Montaigne. And he says, "The ability to think about death and overcome the fear of death is the ultimate freedom." You're enslaved by this fear, you're not aware of it, it's controlling you. Overcoming it is the ultimate freedom. I have to end the book on that. But the idea is, most people are gonna say, "Oh, that's not me", as they say for all of these chapters.
42:29 Ryan Holiday? The other people, they're irrational, not me.
42:31 Robert Greene? Yeah. "Oh, I'm not really afraid of death. I play video games and I'm always killing people. I watch movies and people are always dying, so I'm not afraid of it." That's a cartoon version of death. Our culture was permeated with cartoon versions of death. Your death is something physical, it's going to happen to you. It's a very visceral thing. You are afraid of it. No matter how many video black ops games you play, you are still afraid of your own death. And that fear creates what I call latent anxiety. It makes you fearful of a lot of things in life and you're not aware of it. It makes you cautious about failure. It makes you cautious about taking risks.
43:14 Robert Greene? So I'm trying to show you that your fear of death has infected you on many, many levels. And so I compare it to this. I use the metaphor in the book. I don't use many metaphors, but this is one I use. Is that death is like this vast ocean that we stand on the shore of. Most animals are not aware of their mortality. We are the only species, as far as we know, that's aware of its mortality. And here you are on the shore of this immense vast ocean. You don't know what death is or what it's going to be. And you're afraid of it and you turn your back to it. And we humans have the ability to explore things, to conquer our fear.
43:55 Robert Greene? And I want you, instead of turning your back, to actually enter that vast ocean and explore it. And I show you ways of exploring the actual thought of your own mortality and how it can free you and inspire you in many ways.
44:08 Ryan Holiday? Do you have any rituals or practices that you use in your own life? As far as meditating on your mortality?
44:16 Robert Greene? Well, I happen to be someone who's kind of obsessed with death. I have it since a child, so it's always in the back of my mind. And I meditate every morning and not every time, but often I will try and physically think about my death and think about... I often imagine it, like, for some reason, occurring in the afternoon. I've only seen one person die physically. And I talk in the book about how that's a real problem for us, that we no longer see anybody around us actually die. We don't even see animals die. We eat animals, but we never see them die except you. So I saw only one person die, that was my father. And it was a very visceral, powerful moment. I literally was holding his hand when he passed away.
45:01 Robert Greene? And I was very close to my father. And so I could sense, you know...
45:07 Robert Greene? In a very physical way, what that meant to me. And I think about that moment a lot. But also with the stroke. I came in probably an inch away from dying myself at that time. It wasn't like a brush with death like Fifty had where he was shot nine times in the head. I'm not trying to dramatize things. But the doctors said I was very close to having permanent brain damage and actually getting in a car accident because I was driving that could have been fatal. And so, you know, now that became something a lot more than just writing intellectually about it. And it's something I can think about all the time.
45:43 Ryan Holiday? And probably give you a sense of your own fragility, how you could be totally healthy and fine and then like that.
45:49 Robert Greene? And now I look at myself as someone who's been visited by death. And I see other people and I say that they haven't been visited by them. Like I'm separated them somehow. And I think people who've had a brush with death feel that way. I know Fifty expressed that to me.
46:05 Ryan Holiday? And that's sort of an amorphosis. You now have an experience that's additive that other people haven't had.
46:11 Robert Greene? Yeah.
46:12 Ryan Holiday? So you've written about Stoicism. Obviously, I've written a lot about Stoicism. You, and we talked a little bit about this earlier, I think. But to me, the Stoics believed, you know, we're sort of naturally rational. They talk a lot about our rational mind. They appeal to reason. It strikes me that the laws of human nature is sort of about the war between our two selves, our irrational self and our higher rational self. And I'm just curious how you think about that battle or that process of how do we get from one to the other? Or I guess descending from one to the other.
46:55 Robert Greene? Well, it's the paradigm for the whole book. It's the opening chapter. And I told you the paradigm is to understand who you are in order to change who you are. So law number one is we are governed by emotions. We are irrational. We think we're rational beings. We make rational decisions. We are not. We are irrational. And I pound that into your brain. Showing you instant after instant why you are irrational, why I'm irrational, why you're irrational. With that awareness, you can begin to overcome it. You can say, "Oh, I have this particular bias. I'm always looking..." the confirmation bias. "I'm always looking for the information of the news that will confirm what I already believe." When you admit that to yourself,
47:40 Robert Greene? you can do the disconfirming. You can look at other information. You're aware that you have, that your emotions come first, and then you think later.
47:51 Ryan Holiday? I know you're a lifelong student of the Stoics, and obviously I am too. And it's, you know, the Stoics talked about the importance and the power of reason, of being rational, of not falling prey to destructive or distracting emotions. And it strikes me that in The Laws of Human Nature, which is your new book, you're basically... Your whole book is about the battle between our sort of lower irrational self and our higher rational self. And how do we get from one to the other?
48:23 Robert Greene? Well, we get from one to the other by being aware of the lower self. So the lower self is the animal part of our nature. It's what makes us react emotionally to things. It's what makes us take the path of least resistance. We try and get shortcuts. We want immediate pleasures. We become addicted to things. We eat fast food. Our higher self is less strong. It's like a voice that's weaker in our brain. That higher self you've experienced when you actually had an idea and you accomplished it, you executed it, you felt incredible rush of excitement that you actually did something that you thought you were going to accomplish.
49:05 Robert Greene? You have that higher self when you are empathetic to other people and you actually care about them and do a favor for another person. You feel better about yourself. I could go on and on and on. When you overcome your own weaknesses, you feed that higher self. It's a potential that each one of us has, and it's what we want in life. Now, the Stoics talk about logos and rational self. And that's sort of what I'm talking about in this higher, this higher part of ourselves. And the paragon of that I have in the book is Pericles, the great ancient Greek statesman. And Pericles is the paradigm for how to get out of that animal lower self.
49:49 Robert Greene? And his decision was, as a human being, I am naturally emotional, and I want to worship something. I want to value something in life. I want to say, this is something that I love. For some people, it's money. For other people, it's wine and getting drunk. For other people, it's sex. You cannot escape that that's who I am. What is going to be the thing that I worship? It's going to be reason. It's going to be Athena. It's going to be thinking, nos in ancient Greek. I am going to worship rationality. I am going to love it as its incredible power. And I'm going to turn it into an emotional thing. I'm going to love thinking for itself.
50:32 Robert Greene? Because if you just say, oh, I'm just going to be rational, it's kind of worthless because
50:38 Ryan Holiday? Right.
50:38 Robert Greene? you're always going to be fighting your emotions. But if in each situation you say, what gives me pleasure is not reacting in the animal way, but thinking my way through it, analyzing who I am, analyzing what I'm doing, and getting actual pleasure from that process, then you can conquer the lower self. And he is an amazing example, not studied enough in this world, because he practiced this as the leader of a great democracy under incredible amounts of pressure, making very important decisions all the time. And he was able to step away from all the heated arguing and irrationality
51:21 Robert Greene? that was plaguing Greek politics and find out a way of, a middle course, a way of overcoming that in himself and in other people. So he's sort of the paragon for that.
51:33 Ryan Holiday? And why do you think, if you look at where we are right now politically, culturally, you know, in every way, if you pull up, someone puts a political comment on Facebook or you're watching television, it appears that irrational thinking
51:51 Ryan Holiday? Is the norm and that the lower self has taken over for almost everyone.
51:56 Robert Greene? It's getting worse and worse and worse out there. I don't know what it is, if it's social media, if it's, we're going through a period like, if you read a biography of Montaigne and where his moment when he was living in France, it was a moment of incredible turmoil and people were becoming insane and irrational. Maybe we're living through a moment like that. I talk in the book about, I have a book about generations and how things happen through history. And moments of great rationality in history are often followed by moments of extreme irrationality. It's what I call the animal spirits in us.
52:36 Robert Greene? We actually get pleasure from our emotions, from feeling anger, from feeling outrage. If your outrage and anger and hate can become addicted, it's the only way you feel alive. It gives you a rush of adrenaline. God, I hate that person. I hate Donald Trump. I want to kill Donald Trump. Which is actually something I won't go into, but it kind of becomes literally a physical addiction.
53:03 Ryan Holiday? Right.
53:03 Robert Greene? And people are addicted to these emotions. It's the only way that they can feel alive. And to actually sit back and have to think about what they're saying on Facebook or how they're responding is painful. It's unpleasant. It means accepting that they could be wrong, that maybe their convictions and their outrage is misplaced, that their anger is foolish. Nobody wants to admit that. It's better to think, I'm righteous. I know what's right. Fuck everybody else. And, you know, one of the main things in the book is we humans have aggressive impulses. I don't care who you are, the sweetest, most lovable person has aggressive impulses.
53:46 Robert Greene? And we have to find a way to channel them that are socially acceptable. Well, venting our outrage in social media and getting angry and saying, I hate these people. Screw them. I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna beat people up is a way to, you, to vent your aggressive impulses, but disguise it to yourself. Like, I'm not fighting because I'm violent. I'm fighting because I believe in a cause. Actually, you're fighting because you are violent. That is the primary motivation.
54:15 Ryan Holiday? Sure. So we can wrap up here. You have this book. It's now out everywhere. You've worked on it for all these years. What do you feel like you learned about yourself writing this book or going through what you've gone through and now putting it out into the world? That's either made you better or changed how you, you know, live or behave. What's the main thing that you feel like you said that sometimes you go through things after you've written a book and then you have to go back through and learn them and actually practice them? What do you think the main thing that you've taken away from this book? That maybe you hope readers will also take away?
54:56 Robert Greene? Well, it's altered how I look at other people. It's having lived with it for so long. I've always been someone that's kind of not accepting people's for their appearance, trying to figure out what's going on behind the mask. But now I'm armed with much more knowledge and awareness and thinking. But the other thing that's happened is it's made me in a weird way kind of humbler. In that you write a book, particularly the books that I write, thinking I've figured out the solution. I've answered this puzzle. I'm someone great. I'm God. And in writing this book, I realized, God, it's really, really difficult to understand people.
55:39 Robert Greene? The more I know, the actual, the less I know in a way. That people are really, really complicated. An example that always crosses my mind is in sports where we, so much now in sports is dominated by by data and algorithms. But when I watch like a baseball, like the World Series or something, there's a spirit to a team, a way that they cohere as humans, a way of relating to each other that no algorithm in the world could possibly solve. It's that element of the spirit, right?
56:14 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
56:14 Robert Greene? Of the esprit de corps that'll actually determine whether they win or not. And I don't care how, what nerd runs a team, you can't figure that out.
56:23 Ryan Holiday? Right.
56:23 Robert Greene? Right? So this, when you're interacting with people, it's complicated. It's like three dimensional, four dimensional chess.
56:33 Ryan Holiday? Sure.
56:33 Robert Greene? And so it's made me kind of humble in sense of, I don't really know people as well as I think. And it's kind of what Socrates-
56:41 Ryan Holiday? Yourself, probably.
56:42 Robert Greene? And even myself. So Socrates talks about, wants you to begin from a position of ignorance. That's the source of knowledge.
56:50 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
56:50 Robert Greene? The source of knowledge is that you don't know anything. And therefore, you're open to learning. So this has made me realize that I really, in some ways, don't know people as well as I thought I did. And I have to constantly learn and train myself and be open.
57:04 Ryan Holiday? And so the book then, sort of like, rather than being the end of your study of it, it's the beginning of it. It's like, I feel like the book poses a lot of big questions, rather than gives you definitive answers on everything. Because it's, you're giving data and stories. And then I'm, the reader is supposed to take that home and try to make sense of it.
57:25 Robert Greene? Yeah.
57:25 Ryan Holiday? Not just once, but over the course of their life.
57:28 Robert Greene? Yeah, I want the book, you know, this is kind of the longest book I've ever written. And I apologize for that. It's the longest book I've written. And I'm trying to immerse you in a whole way of thinking. I want to alter how you think about people from the inside out. So it's not like I've come to you with all the answers, that now you just read my book and you have to apply what I say, A, B, C, and you will somehow magically succeed in life.
57:59 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
57:59 Robert Greene? You have to take this information and apply it to yourself. You have to look at yourself and realize, think why you are irrational, when you feel envy, what your shadow is like, what your attitude is towards life. I'm posing a challenge to you. And the book is sort of, will you meet this challenge? So in that sense, it is kind of open ended and it depends on the reader.
58:22 Ryan Holiday? If you're liking this podcast, we would love for you to subscribe. Please leave us a review on iTunes or any of your favorite podcast listening apps. It really helps. And tell a friend.
Previous You Must Burn the White Flag Next Daily Stoic Sundays: 5 Life Changing Quotes from Marcus Aurelius Page updated September 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
