ROBERT GREENE | The Laws of Human Nature

Robert Greene is a New York Times best selling author. You can be a genius in your field and know all the things you need to know, but if you're bad with people you will totally neutralise your brilliance and can face many difficulties and pains in life... Today we're talking about Robert's new book The Laws Of Human Nature, as we delve deep into understanding people’s drives and motivations, even when they are unconscious of them themselves. Robert names this most recent publication "the culmination of the last 20 years of his work" - so get ready for some fantastic insights. Extra Stuff: The Laws Of Human Nature - https://amzn.to/2KtfADb Why We Are Fated To Be Lonely - https://youtu.be/AtCR6P5rsXU Follow Robert on Twitter - https://twitter.com/robertgreene Check out Robert's Website - http://powerseductionandwar.com/ Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Robert Greene?

  I maintain that seduction or exciting people or persuading them is a game of absence and presence. So if you're continually present, if you're so obvious, if you're always in people's face, you give them no room to use their imagination to think, "Oh, Robert might be this very exciting, mysterious person." You're so in their face, they have no room to imagine, they just see who you are. If you step back and you're not there so often, if instead of being seen every day, you're seen every other day or every three days, you give space for the imagination to imagine, "Maybe this person is actually quite interesting." So you feed other people's imagination, you make them think about you when you're not

• 0:44Robert Greene?

  there. And as they think about you, they start idealizing, they start imagining qualities that maybe aren't there. But if you're too absent, if you're there only once a week, for instance, then people might start forgetting about you. So you have to know how to play that game of back and forth, absence and presence.

• 1:05Chris Williamson?

  Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I am joined by Robert Greene. I'm sure he needs no introduction, but Robert, thank you very much for coming on. I can't wait to sit down and talk with you today.

• 1:16Robert Greene?

  My pleasure, Chris. Thanks for inviting me.

• 1:19Chris Williamson?

  So I have a very lovely story to tell you, actually, about one of the guys behind the Modern Wisdom Project, a guy called Jordan, who said that your book, Forty Eight Laws of Power, was the sole reason that he studied history at university. Apparently, apparently somehow Tesco, big supermarket in the UK, randomly had it on a shelf. He picked it up at the age of 13, and that was the reason he studied history at the age of 18. So congratulations.

• 1:45Robert Greene?

  Exciting. Thank you. I've heard such stories before, but that's always nice to hear. Thanks.

• 1:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's, it must feel, it must feel very, I guess, scary to think when you reflect on stuff like that and realize the sort of impact that your work has on people.

• 2:01Robert Greene?

  Well, if I can get people to read, you know, what more can I ask? Um, you know, my, my view of history is that it's not something that should be thought of as boring, as something that's just buried in the past and has no relevance to today. I want to make history come to life. So when you're reading about Julius Caesar, you can feel what he felt like when he was on the battlefield, when he decided to cross the Rubicon. And, you know, Pompeii. So I try to make history come to life and if readers feel that way, if they feel inspired to study, God, that's, that's the greatest compliment I can receive.

• 2:39Chris Williamson?

  Well, I think you've, you've definitely been paid that by Jordan. So Forty Eight Laws of Power, I'm, I'm a, a massive fan of, but we're talking about The Laws of Human Nature today, which is your new book as of October last year?

• 2:53Robert Greene?

  That's correct.

• 2:54Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. So first question that I wanted to ask was how, how does this book relate to your past work? Forty Eight Laws of Power, Art Seduction, et cetera, et cetera.

• 3:05Robert Greene?

  Well, I kind of see it as the culmination, sort of the, the distillation of all that I've learned over, excuse me, over 20 years of writing books and doing a lot of consulting work and just sort of observing people. And I wrote a book prior to this called Mastery. And I had a chapter in Mastery about social intelligence. And the idea is that you could be absolutely brilliant in your field. You could know all the technical things you need to know. But if you're really bad with people, you'll completely neutralize all of your brilliance. You could even be a genius. If you don't know how to work with people, if you irritate and alienate them, then you're gonna, you're gonna have a life of misery and pain.

• 3:49Robert Greene?

  And I wrote that chapter, this is one element of becoming a master in your field is being able to work with people. And readers really responded to that and they said, you know, Robert, I really liked that chapter, but I need more. Can you give me more? I felt like, you know, this is an area where people really need help. You know, I needed help when I was just starting out in the work world and this kind of, this kind of knowledge. You know, we live in a world where people are increasingly self-absorbed. They're just lost in their smartphones, whatever. They're not paying attention to people. They're not interacting as much as we used to interact with people. And so we're losing some basic social skills.

• 4:32Robert Greene?

  The ability to judge people and see their character and not just simply be taken in by their appearances. So I felt this was a culmination of all I've studied and learned over twenty some years. And I'm also trying to meet a really deep need that people have right now in the world today.

• 4:52Chris Williamson?

  I couldn't agree more. Uh, I recently interviewed Robin Hanson, author of Elephant in the Brain. Um, and mo- secret motives in uh, the way that people behave was. It is um, a way to expedite your um, movement through the world and and avoid pitfalls, I suppose, with other people, isn't it? Um, so I wanted to, I wanted to kind of ask something you've already basically answered, which is, why is understanding drives and motivations important for normal people? Like, you'd think maybe it's the sort of thing an evolutionary biologist might be interested in, but how how does, how does that relate to the normal layperson?

• 5:34Robert Greene?

  Well, um, you know, if you want, for instance, take a common scenario in life. You either with your children or your boss or your spouse. They have some sort of irritating behavior that gets on your nerves and you want to change them. You want to somehow find a way to change them. It's a very common scenario. Well, the normal thing that most humans do in that situation is to kind of preach, to tell them, look, this is what you're doing. It's irritating me. You've got to change or else there's going to be consequences, you know? And we don't realize when we're in that situation and we talk like that, even if we're being polite, that we're making people defensive. We're actually making the situation worse.

• 6:18Robert Greene?

  We're making it harder to get them to change because people don't like being told what to do. They don't like being told that they have to, they're forced to do something to change themselves. And so, when you're in that kind of scenario, you know, you have to understand something basic about human nature. You have to understand that people have an opinion of themselves. They like to think of themselves as basically good and decent, as basically autonomous, that they're in control of their own lives and their destiny, and that they're basically intelligent. It could be, in some, if it's your teenage son, it could be he thinks he's intelligent with video games. It doesn't matter. People think they're intelligent.

• 7:00Robert Greene?

  And so, you're pushing against that by telling people what to do. You're making them feel that they have no control, that they're not autonomous, that they have to be forced into changing their behavior. You tell them they're not very smart. You're making them feel that they're not a good person. And so, all you're doing is making the situation worse because you don't understand a very basic principle of human nature, that instead of pushing against what people think about themselves, instead, you have to validate what they think about themselves. You have to make them feel comfortable about who they are. You have to feed their idea that they are good and autonomous and intelligent. And once you validate and recognize the other human being you're dealing with as a human being, as an individual,

• 7:46Robert Greene?

  then suddenly, they're open to suggestion, they're open to change. But, because you've worked with some basic human psychology, on and on and on. So, constantly in life, we're dealing with, hitting against walls with people. We're frustrated, we're disappointed, we can't get them to change their behavior. We don't know why they're acting this particular way, you know? I have a chapter on envy, and I discuss how dangerous envy is in the world today, and how it's like a, it's like a secret gas. Nobody admits that they're envious until you're suddenly attacked by an envious person and you find, you know, something awful is happening to you.

• 8:30Robert Greene?

  Nobody comes with a sign saying, "I feel envy, I'm attacked." Reason, right? So you have to understand where envy comes from, why it's a very basic human emotion, why you feel envy as well and I feel envy, and why some people are toxic in this direction. I could go on and on in all of the different chapters, but your ignorance of human nature, of what motivates human behavior, of why we are simply, many of us are prisoners of things that are wired into our brain from millions of years ago, is absolutely essential to navigating these very complicated social worlds that we inhabit.

• 9:08Chris Williamson?

  I couldn't agree more. I think that especially the modern workplace with its serendipitous open office plans and multiple emails, multiple meetings, it becomes a Petri dish for these sort of interactions, doesn't it?

• 9:26Robert Greene?

  Yeah, that's a good way of putting it, yeah.

• 9:28Chris Williamson?

  So I wanted to talk about narcissism. It was an interesting chapter that you touched on. I wanted to ask about whether it's a negative emotion. I think when most people hear the word narcissism, they think immediately negative emotion.

• 9:44Robert Greene?

  No, I don't think anything is negative actually in the human realm. I'm trying to make you realize that this is part of who we are, this is part of human nature. It's not good or bad, it's simply the qualities that we have. And when we look at something like narcissism, or envy, or aggression, it's actually part of human nature to say that it's not me, I'm not narcissist, I'm not aggressive, I don't feel envy, it's always him or her or other people. And I wanted to put hold of a mirror to your face and say, "Look, you are also a narcissist." It is human nature that we become self-absorbed at a very early age. It's very essential for a child who feels very vulnerable in

• 10:26Robert Greene?

  an adult world to develop a degree of self-love, so that they're in situations where you're not getting enough attention from your parents, not getting enough attention from your teacher or classmates, you can withdraw into yourself and feel that you're actually good. You can withdraw into your own imagination and sense that you are worthy of a love and attention. It's a very healthy process to develop a degree of self-love. And what happens is, so I believe everybody is narcissistic to some extent. And what you see in the world is there are people in early childhood

• 11:07Robert Greene?

  who never developed that kind of self-love, that anchor inside of themselves. They can't get a feeling of being a good person, of being validated from within. It has to come from outside. So they spend their whole lives trying to get attention from other people. And that's what a deep narcissist is. You know, a classic example is President of the United States. Never feels satisfied from within, from the attention that he's getting. So he constantly has to act out and get other people to validate who he is. So deep narcissists are incredibly insecure.

• 11:48Robert Greene?

  And the only way they can get, they can kind of get over that feeling is to get attention, is to be extremely dramatic. And the problem that happens is a lot of times people like that are very brilliant. They're very charismatic. They learn as children to be very dramatic and have a flair and get a lot of attention that way. And it's when you get in a relationship with them, either as an intimate partner or they become your boss or they're your colleague. It's only after months and months that you realize this person doesn't care about me at all. They only see me as an object that they can use to sort of feed their narcissism.

• 12:30Robert Greene?

  So I want you to recognize that there's a spectrum that at a certain point... Um, like, let's say with zero to a hundred. And at the halfway point, fifty is where most of us are. We have a degree of self-absorption. And when we feel comfortable about ourselves and we're not insecure, we rise slowly above that level and get up to seventy-five or eighty. And as we get higher and we feel comfortable, we can get outside of ourselves and pay attention to other people and transform that self-love that we have, that narcissism, into actual empathy. But if we fall below that fifty percent mark, we get lower and lower and lower.

• 13:11Robert Greene?

  And we've all been through moments like that, moments of depression, et cetera. We become more and more self-absorbed. It becomes very hard to get outside of ourselves and get into the skin of other people. And that's what happens to deep narcissists. They can never rise above and get outside of themselves. And they're actually quite miserable. So I want to take away the judgment that narcissism is necessarily a bad thing. I call it a, I call it healthy narcissism. So there are two forms of taking that sort of self-love that we have and turning it into something healthy. That's getting outside of ourselves, either into other people, putting our attention into other people and caring about them

• 13:55Robert Greene?

  and getting inside their world, or into our work and pouring all of our energy into our work. So you'll notice a lot of great artists, even scientists, et cetera, can actually be very narcissistic. But they pour a lot of their energy into their work and they're able to kind of transmute or transform that, that ugly energy into something positive. So there's nothing wrong with being a narcissist. We all have that degree of self-love. It's whether we've become so self-absorbed that we can't get out of our own little prison.

• 14:29Chris Williamson?

  I, I totally agree. I'm sure that a lot of the listeners will be able to think of people in their lives who are constantly searching for attention, who can't find that sense of self-worth from within themselves. Um, is there any strategies that you can recommend for someone who is around another person who is like that? For potentially the, the first lady of the United States?

• 15:00Robert Greene?

  Well, it's very difficult. I mean, really often, the best strategy of all is to learn about how to recognize a deep narcissist. Because as I said before, they don't go around with a sign saying, "I'm a deep narcissist." You know, watch out. They can be very charming and charismatic. And so you want to look for signs early on that they're not really paying attention to you. What are some of those signs? Well, you'll notice that they're... when you talk about yourself, they seem to be listening, but they're not really listening. Their eyes are kind of dead. They don't really engage with you. They're not really interested in your ideas and who you are.

• 15:45Robert Greene?

  They give a kind of a surface impression that they are. But it's... so sometimes with a deep narcissist, you'll notice on their facial expressions that they'll be smiling a lot as they listen to you and nodding their head, but there's a deadness in their eyes. They're not really engaged with you. They're not really... the eyes reveal a lot about how deeply people are looking at you and interested and engaged. And there's a kind of sheen there. They're not paying really attention to you. They're not interested in your ideas. Look at their past and their broken record of how many people they've alienated

• 16:25Robert Greene?

  and how they can't stay very long in a relationship. See the patterns of that. But most of all, notice that people who are extra dramatic, who even seem charismatic, they tend to be... narcissists learn how to charm you, to get the attention that they need. It's called the narcissistic feed. They need to be fed all the time. And so...

• 16:53Robert Greene?

  They're always searching for that attention. So be able to look at people like that from a distance. If you know someone who's extremely dramatic like that and you find it interesting, perhaps your antennas should go off and think, maybe all of that drama and all of that excitement that they generate is just to get attention, it has nothing to do with you. So sort of look for the signs beforehand. And so the best strategy is to not get involved.

• 17:21Chris Williamson?

  The best strategy is to avoid them all costs.

• 17:24Robert Greene?

  It is. You know, most of us have degrees of narcissism and we should be empathetic to that. And you can draw people out by getting them involved in a relationship or getting them interested in your life. Or if you have a child that you suspect might have that tendency, getting them to become extremely excited by some field, some work, some object, something they can study to get outside of their self-absorption. But with someone who's an adult, who has these tendencies, you're not really ever going to change them. So the best strategy is either to not avoid a relationship or to somehow manage it so that they're not kind of destroying your life.

• 18:08Chris Williamson?

  One of the points that you touched on there, which I found very useful and very interesting was curiosity in what someone else is saying as being a useful strategy for bonding and for making people feel like the conversation's going in the right direction. Listeners may remember a recent conversation I had with David Perel, where he spoke about most conversations being two intersecting monologues, almost like a game of tennis. And as a solution to not coming across as too self-absorbed, genuine curiosity, like actually caring about what the other person is saying and genuinely wanting to know what they think about things, appears to be a really good rough-hewn antidote to that.

• 18:56Robert Greene?

  Yes, very much so. I mean, it's kind of a cliche to say that people don't listen well and you just need to become a better listener. And I don't think that's gonna really change people's behavior. The problem why you're not really listening to other people in a conversation while that kind of tennis game of monologues, of two monologues going on, is because you're not really that interested in what the other person has to say. You find your own problems, your own life, your own interests more fascinating than what they have to say. You're worried about, you know, what you're gonna do tomorrow, whether this woman is interested in you or not. You're absorbing your own anxieties and problems and what people are talking about aren't as interesting to you.

• 19:40Robert Greene?

  So the only solution is to somehow get yourself to a place and realize that the people you deal with are actually very interesting. They're fascinating. You want to understand them. They're weirder than you imagine. People are weird. They have strange dreams, just like you have strange dreams, right?

• 19:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 19:59Robert Greene?

  We watch movies because we're fascinated by the characters and we wanna get inside what's motivating that evil person in that movie. Why is that person a murderer, etcetera? We wanna get inside their worlds. We're fascinated by characters in a movie. Well, the people you're dealing with on a day-to-day basis are like characters in a movie. They have depths that you haven't begun to see or suspect. They have fantasies. They have a dark side. They have a shadow side that they're trying to hide. So if you approach life like it's theater, like it's just all like a movie and that people are interesting and you wanna figure out who they are, it suddenly changes the game.

• 20:44Robert Greene?

  So that when you're sitting down tomorrow now with that friend who you've had endless boring conversations with, nobody ever listening to them, if suddenly you stop that... And you actually stopped your interior monologue and you paid attention and you looked at their body language and you looked at the way their eyes shift as they're talking about something or how their eyes light up when a certain subject is touched. If you suddenly stop and really pay attention, you're going to learn things and it's going to be fascinating and you're going to be able to apply that knowledge in many, many ways. But none of this, all of my talk, all of my books, all the books ever written, won't matter at all if you don't find people inherently interesting.

• 21:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think there's some people in your life that you have to put up with the conversations with, like you're not gonna stop speaking to grandma like when she wants to come around, but there's a, yeah, there's an upper bound on how far you can take that. But yeah, definitely, especially my experience having done this podcast and, you know, recording two, three hours of deep conversations every week for a year. I've certainly noticed in myself that that instantiation of genuinely being interested in a normal guest is now bleeding into my discourse day to day with other people and that's making my conversations with other people so much more interesting than they ever were before. But I've not become any more interesting. Well, maybe a tiny bit, but obviously after speaking to

• 22:13Chris Williamson?

  you, Robert, I'll be an awful lot more interested. But yeah, the, I'm not that much more interesting, but I'm more interested in what they have to say, which elicits a better response from them, which raises the, the level of the conversation up. But yeah, I totally agree. I wanted to move on to some of my favorite stories from the book and I wanted to ask why Bill Clinton was a successful politician and how this relates to wearing masks.

• 22:40Robert Greene?

  That's strange because I took that, what story are you referring to? The Ireland story?

• 22:45Chris Williamson?

  The one where he was talking about why, how Bill was able to curate himself and his accent towards different audiences.

• 22:55Robert Greene?

  Okay. Well, um, he was, you know, Bill Clinton was kind of a master actor. Um, and I have nothing against people being actors in life. In fact, I'd say it's essential. We are all actors. We're all performing. Some of us are good actors and some of us are bad actors. But when you're interacting with your boss, you're not the same person as you are when you're interacting with your intimate partner. You change, you put on a different mask, you change your body language, the way you talk. We do that with everybody that we deal with. And so people who are really good at this game,

• 23:35Robert Greene?

  who get far, who have high level of social skill, know how to kind of blend into the audience, to the people that they're dealing with. They can, um, sometimes, you know, change their accent a little bit, like he would do. He, you know, if he wanted, if he was talking to a working class group, he would kind of, you know, emphasize his own working class, southern roots. But if he was talking to a group of intellectuals, he would kind of soften his southern accent a bit, on and on. A lot of people find that false and manipulative. I don't. I think being able to adapt to the people that you're dealing with is a high level of social skill. Because what it means is you're thinking about who that audience is, about who the people you're dealing with.

• 24:21Robert Greene?

  And you're trying to get into their spirit. And you're not just simply looking at them as something from a distance, like objects that you manipulate, you know, to win an election. You actually care about them and you're getting into their world and into their mindset. And so I want to take away the guilt that we humans have for who we really are. That's the main theme in all of my books. We're so goddamn guilty about the desires that we want for power, for instance. That was the subject of the Forty Eight Laws of Power. And we're so, we feel so guilty about this idea that we might be manipulative, that we might be actors, as if we're being fake or inauthentic. It's just a lot of bullshit in my mind, because we are all acting all of the time.

• 25:06Robert Greene?

  Look at yourself in your day-to-day interactions. You change your mask, you change your expression, your words, depending on who you're dealing with. You never tell people, "Damn it, you've put on forty pounds, you're not looking." Saying, no, you look great today. Wow, you know, I loved your screenplay. It was great. You don't tell them the truth. Just admit that you do that and stop being this kind of fake saint that everybody's trying to pose like they are. So I applaud someone like a Bill Clinton, who knows how to be a consummate actor and change according to who he's talking to.

• 25:40Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think we are so guilty about our natural human natures? Is that because we are only exposed to the highlight reel of other people? So the sort of the darker depths of them is never really shown with that same degree of fidelity that we get to see our own kind of biases at work and our darker parts?

• 26:02Robert Greene?

  Well, you know, I was, a few years ago, I was in Sydney, Australia, and I went to the zoo there. And I was kind of transfixed by the chimpanzee compound that they have at the Sydney Zoo. It's amazing. It's this very open space where you can observe an entire community of about thirty chimpanzees. And what shocked me more than anything, I was sat there for two hours watching them because they were so human. It was just like looking at an office situation with the alpha male and all the others kind of. But what was equally fascinating was all the young people who would stop by, and they were very embarrassed by looking at the chimpanzees. They were giggling. They were made uncomfortable about it. And my,

• 26:46Robert Greene?

  the point I'm making is, I think we feel uncomfortable about our own animal nature, about our own primate roots, about the primitive part of ourselves. We want to think of ourselves. Angela Carter, the English writer, she said, "We like to think that we're descended from angels instead of primates," you know, but we are descended from primates. And primates have tendencies that are embedded in us, our tendency to feel envy, our own aggressive impulses. These are things that come from millions of years of evolution, but we're uncomfortable with it. We want to think of ourselves as these sort of 21st century, incredibly sophisticated people, that we don't have these sort of dark...

• 27:29Robert Greene?

  Animal-like impulses, but just spend a couple of weeks on social media on the internet. And you see that primate part of our nature is out there in full display, even though it's the most sophisticated tool of communication ever invented.

• 27:43Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 27:44Robert Greene?

  You will never see so many displays of envy as on social media. You know, envy was a terrible problem among hunter-gatherer cultures hundreds of thousands of years ago.

• 27:55Chris Williamson?

  Why is that?

• 27:57Robert Greene?

  People would be murdered because you had a little group of thirty people, your clan, your tribe. And if some people felt envy that others had more food or more wealth or more goods, they would get very angry and they would murder someone for that. And so because we're, the human brain is always comparing ourselves to other people. Our brains operate by a comparing mechanism. It's how we learn. And we're also, because we're social animals, we're also comparing ourselves to what other people have. So hunter-gatherer tribes, it was a terrible problem. And that's why they invented all kinds of rituals. So the moment you received a gift, you had to share it with everyone else or give it away.

• 28:39Robert Greene?

  You never felt comfortable if you received more than other people had because you knew that was dangerous. You had to give it away. But here we are hu- hundreds of thousands of years later and envy is even worse than it was.

• 28:52Chris Williamson?

  Still, still suffering that artifact of, of a quarter of a million years ago.

• 28:57Robert Greene?

  Yes. So we're no more sophisticated in so many ways than we were, but we don't like to confront that.

• 29:05Chris Williamson?

  I think a lot of people would do so well to read a, a tiny bit of evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology. There needs to be, I've been thinking about this for a while, there needs to be like a, a ten-page booklet cheat sheet with big pictures that's just like the absolute eighty to, like the ninety-nine to one of exactly what people need to know. And you're totally right. The more educated you become about these biases and why we feel the way we do, people accept.

• 29:39Chris Williamson?

  Uh sensations like envy as uh this sort of emergent property that's just a law of the world, the same way that gravity is, whereas it's it's it's not, i- it's it is this artifact of a time gone by where we needed it. And we don't now, but we're somehow still at its mercy. I find it, I find it so fascinating. So I I I really enjoyed getting into learning about it recently.

• 30:04Robert Greene?

  Yeah, I mean, another aspect that that's similar to that is um our ass, going into the evolutionary biology part is

• 30:14Robert Greene?

  before the invention of language, we as a social animal, our survival depended on our ability to communicate with the group. And so we humans developed complex emotions, more emotions than other animals have, that could be displayed on our face and in our body language that would communicate to people. So if we felt fear about a situation, we would have, you know, chimpanzees and other animals have the hair stand on the back of their neck. We had many more ways of signaling fear, and this would communicate itself to the entire group. And the whole group would feel that fear and they would know we better run away, you know, better get out of this situation.

• 30:54Robert Greene?

  But other other emotions like joy, et cetera. So the group, we were primed evolutionarily to feel the emotions of the group, to be susceptible and vulnerable to what other people are feeling as a form of communication in survival. Well, fast forward to hundreds of thousands of years later, and that kind of viral susceptibility that we have to the emotions and ideas of other people is in full display on social media, in in our politics, et cetera. We're extremely susceptible to the moods and ideas and opinions of other people. We like to think, well, I'm I'm, you know, I'm left wing, I have all my ideas are my own.

• 31:37Robert Greene?

  I, nobody ever told me, but you'll notice if if they if they explain their ideas, they're just exactly the same as thousands of other people. Why do they share all of the same ideas about the same subject as thousands of other people? It's because they're conforming to the group. It's because you're susceptible to that pressure to feel like you're fitting into the group and you're you're very vulnerable to what other people are saying and doing. We're constantly imitating and we're constantly being influenced by people and not realising it. So that's just another aspect of how something very ancient that served a purpose for our ancestors is now something that doesn't serve so well for us in the modern age.

• 32:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think people being very careful about the circles that they expose themselves to online is an incredibly useful tool. I think I went on to your Twitter earlier on. Am I right in saying that you follow 68 people on Twitter or a very low number of people? Yes. So I'm on 66, which is, I found it very interesting to see that you've done the same. And I'm going to presume that it is because your newsfeed is to be curated to only see things that you want to see.

• 32:53Robert Greene?

  Yeah, but you know, you can take that too far because, you know, you do sort of want to expose yourself to what other people are saying and thinking, you know. So you do want to not just read the same blogs and the same podcasts that confirm what you already believe.

• 33:11Chris Williamson?

  The echo chamber effect's dangerous.

• 33:13Robert Greene?

  Yeah, so sometimes it's good to expose yourself to what Trump supporters are saying on the internet. I find that fascinating. And I don't, I don't demonise them because they are human beings. I do want to understand why they have fallen to the spell of this madman. So it's good to like, not just consume the ideas that support and confirm what you already believe. But also, you're right, you do have to regulate it as well because that anger that you can feel when you read something so frustrating and irritating can ruin your whole day.

• 33:48Chris Williamson?

  It's, oh, it blows my mind. So the listeners at home will know mine and the team's personal feelings with regards to notifications on phones. But if you are listening to this perhaps for the first time because you've seen that we've got Robert on, I'm going to sing the song to you right now, which is, please go on to your iPhone settings or Android or whatever you're using and just turn off the notifications on your social media. Check them at your will, not at the will of the of the machine that's in your pocket. Because this

• 34:18Chris Williamson?

  Sort of unscheduled dopamine release that we're at the mercy of throughout the day. I mean, it must, especially for you, Robert, as someone who's been understanding human nature for such a long time, presumably before the advent of smartphone, social media, and then seeing, I guess, all of these human characteristics that you've known for so long, get amplified and then broadcast to the world. It must have been a very interesting, fascinating sort of experiment and also terrifying, I'm going to presume.

• 34:50Robert Greene?

  Well, if you read books by marketing people and the psychology of marketing, you'll understand how insidious that can be. These are people who study psychology more than anybody else, who understand why, how the human brain works and how to pass information along without giving the appearance that you're giving people news, how to be so sneaky with how you can influence human behaviour. And you better believe that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, has studied in-depth all of these marketing tools and has applied them to a great degree on Facebook.

• 35:31Robert Greene?

  So just the idea of that pinging noise, of creating a noise, like for a child, that kind of has that dopamine effect that you have, on and on and on. They know, they know completely all the viral effects that they can create.

• 35:46Chris Williamson?

  The reason why the badge colour is red, because red is a high alert colour, right?

• 35:52Robert Greene?

  Right, exactly. So we're all just being dupes of a great marketing team, of people who know how to feed upon the vulnerabilities in human nature, you know? And I've read a book a while ago, a French book, I don't know how to translate the title, has to do about a guide to how to manipulate people is basically what it's called. It was written by two social scientists in France who revealed all of the tricks that marketing people, all of the studies that they've used. You know, in universities around the world, psychology departments are doing studies about human behaviour, where they actually do experiments with people. The number one audience for reading those studies are people in marketing.

• 36:36Robert Greene?

  So they know, for instance... They knew about virtue signaling well before we ever heard about it. They know that people like to share the fact that they're giving to causes. You look on Facebook and you see all that time for your birthday. I want to contribute, you know, $1,500 to the Save the Gorilla Fund or whatever. They know this is a supreme marketing skill that people want to signal to others. You know, so it increases their look, how many people look at it, how much traffic they have. So don't be naive about social media. These people are geniuses, evil geniuses.

• 37:15Chris Williamson?

  Listen, everybody that's listening, just unfollow everyone from Twitter. Then go follow myself and Robert and then slowly begin to build it back up. Obviously you need us two first and once you've got us two, you can start to build it up from there. Um, I, I don't know, just to bookend that, I don't know if you're familiar with Tristan Harris from the Center for Humane Technology. So he used to be the design ethicist at Google. Um, and has now, he is the equivalent of like an Edward Snowden for social media. Uh, and Tristan Harris, I'll send you it once we're done and I'll link it in the show notes below to anyone who is interested.

• 37:55Chris Williamson?

  Um, his podcast with Sam Harris, no relation, um, is mind blowing, unbelievable about the, the psychology of persuasion and all of the different tactics that are being used. I think you're going to find it fascinating, Rob.

• 38:07Robert Greene?

  That's great. Thank you very much.

• 38:09Chris Williamson?

  Really good. Um, so I wanted to talk, moving on to things that are interesting. I wanted you to try and explain why mystery is seductive.

• 38:18Robert Greene?

  Why mystery is seductive?

• 38:20Chris Williamson?

  Mystery in another person. I, I thought.

• 38:22Robert Greene?

  Like, why does that need to be explained? It's so obvious to me.

• 38:29Chris Williamson?

  Well, it was, it was news to me when it happened. I, it's something that when it's explained to you, they say the best books are ones that tell you something you already know, right? It was something that, uh, implicitly I maybe knew, but explicitly I don't think I'd thought of before.

• 38:46Robert Greene?

  Well, it's the whole reason why we're interested in stories, in drama, in films, in theater, in plays, in anything having to do with fiction, is we don't know what's happening next. So there's an element of surprise. What does the writer have in mind? What are we gonna read about next that happens to this character? And so I relate it to when we're a child and we're being, and our father, for instance, picks us up and carries us and twirls us around. We don't know where he's taking us. He doesn't, we don't know where it's going to. We were on a ride at an amusement park. The excitement is, whoa, what's gonna happen next?

• 39:29Robert Greene?

  So we're inherently, we're primed for surprises. We want surprise. We want drama. We want this feeling. It's a mixture of anxiety and pleasure. Like, we're anxious, like, is the murderer right behind that door? Is he gonna come in now and kill someone? Oh, he is. And so it's like pleasure that we anticipated it. And so we're, the sense of mystery comes from, we don't know exactly what's going to happen. And so the opposite of mystery is complete familiarity, is banality. So if you're in a relationship with someone

• 40:11Robert Greene?

  and you know everything about them, there's no surprises left. Everything has, you've seen everything that's going, you're ever going to see. It's always the same. Some people might say, well, that's, that's a really good marriage. That makes, that makes for a very good relationship. Well, no, it's not. Because the human brain needs a sense of, there's something I don't know about them. I have to discover something. It's what actually kills a lot of relationships. That people become too familiar with each other. They stop seducing. There, there's nothing left to learn about someone. We want to feel like we can learn something, that there are surprises, that there is mystery. And so...

• 40:53Robert Greene?

  I maintain that seduction or exciting people or persuading them is a game of absence and presence. So if you're continually present, if you're so obvious, if you're always in people's face, you give them no room to use their imagination to think, oh, Robert might be this very exciting, mysterious person. You're so in their face, they have no room to imagine. They just see who you are. If you step back and you're not there so often, if instead of being seen every day, you're seen every other day or every three days, you give space for the imagination to imagine, maybe this person is actually quite interesting. So you feed other

• 41:35Robert Greene?

  people's imagination, you make them think about you when you're not there. And as they think about you, they start idealizing, they start imagining qualities that maybe aren't there. But if you're too absent, if you're there only once a week, for instance, then people might start forgetting about you. So you have to know how to play that game of back and forth, absence and presence.

• 41:56Chris Williamson?

  We had a discussion on a relationships episode that we do, which is a series we have ongoing at the moment, which discussed the fine art of when it's right to text someone after the first date and then how frequently to do it thereafter. And you are totally correct that there is this, this spectrum where there's a Goldilocks zone that appears somewhere in the middle. And for some people, they may be shifted right down to the bottom and for some, they may be right up to the top. There's a video from Alain de Botton, who runs the School of Life YouTube channel, unbelievable. Anyone who hasn't watched it already, I implore you to go and have a look because there are some wisdom drops of five minutes on there. However,

• 42:39Chris Williamson?

  he does a video which is why we dislike people who like us. And he talks about how people that are very forthcoming, it feeds into our own self, sort of worry and self hatred and insecurity about the fact that, well, why are they liking me? There's something wrong with me. They shouldn't like me. Therefore, there must be something wrong with them. So I'm going to know this, this, this isn't for me. And bizarrely, we chase after the person who doesn't give us any attention. It's, it's so, it's so hilarious.

• 43:13Robert Greene?

  Yeah, and that's often why narcissists can be very seductive and charismatic. Because they're not that interested in you. And we want to be the one that makes us chase after them. We want to get them to be interested in us. We want to get their attention sometimes. So, you know, that's a very known phenomenon. But, you know, the idea that the number one law of human nature of psychology that you must understand, particularly when it comes to persuasion and influence, is that people want to have their willpowers engaged. They want to feel like they're the ones who are active, that they are doing something.

• 43:57Robert Greene?

  That's why in marketing and in advertisements, if you bombard people with information, they know it's an ad and they don't care and they don't listen, they tune it out. But if you create a viral effect, where everyone is talking about this particular product, then you no longer feel that you're the dupe of an advertiser. You feel like that you've come to it through your own decision because other people talked to you about it and now you go out and buy it because you feel like it's you who's doing it, you're being active. So we like to feel that we are active. And what a person who's mysterious, who has a step back is, our imagination is active. We get to think about who they are. We get to imagine that there's somebody great.

• 44:42Robert Greene?

  And, you know, that element is extremely powerful as opposed to being told who they are by constantly being in our face.

• 44:50Chris Williamson?

  That's a fantastic point. I suppose influencer marketing now with the advent of social media is increasingly trying to make more and more subtle these steps that we take to get us to this recommendation for a product. And yeah, I wonder where the future of that lies. I wonder how much more subtle and subversive the tactics can get. We're just going to riff on social media. Stop the podcast, Robert. We're just going to complain about social media for the rest of it.

• 45:22Robert Greene?

  Subliminal advertising, which was the big subject back in the sixties when people would put in one frame of a soft drink in a movie and see that people, you know, pass so quickly you couldn't realize it. And then everybody at the intermission would go buy a Coca-Cola. You know, that got joked about because, you know, nobody does that anymore. It's illegal, in fact, to do that in the United States. But subliminal advertising, using subliminal effects, is extremely powerful. And it's at the level of what you do for an infant. So people know that certain sounds have a certain effect. Movies are now designed by

• 46:01Robert Greene?

  sound designers who know how not to use music, but how to create that continual drone that's going to have the precise effect of creating horror and anxiety or raising. They are masters at manipulating you on a subliminal level. That's the future. That's the scary matrix future that we have, that hopefully we can control and not get into. That you know so well how to affect people subliminally on that infant level of, oh, there's a mobile up here. I want to touch and play with this pretty little things. But that's how they operate. That's very powerful and very insidious.

• 46:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it really is. One of the chapters that I really, really resonated with me, I work in club promo, so I run nightclubs. As a part of that, I'm exposed to a very high velocity, wide range of personality types. And the toxic types of people that you identified, particularly the big talker and the drama magnet, as I'm sure you can imagine, working in nightlife, they really, really resonated with me. I wondered if you might be able to just.

• 47:14Robert Greene?

  Should I?

• 47:15Chris Williamson?

  I should. I should. Honestly, the.

• 47:20Chris Williamson?

  Observations of human behaviour in nightclubs is I feel like I should be an anthropologist, just sat on the front door observing what happens and.

• 47:31Robert Greene?

  Big, big book, I'm telling you.

• 47:33Chris Williamson?

  Well, maybe, maybe that might be, that might be the next step. But yes, I wanted to just ask yourself about what toxic types of people you have seen consistently in your life, the ones that swim in the academic circles perhaps, or the ones who you think that are more common to yourself, I would be interested to find that out.

• 47:58Robert Greene?

  Yeah, I notice a lot of academic people, intellectuals, they're very aggressive, but they put all of their aggression into argument, into certain style of arguing, and they're masters at putting you down. So I, you know, I get a lot of grief for writing The Forty Eight Loss of Power, for being kind of manipulative, for being, for writing a popular bestselling book, and it's not, you know, not really weighty enough for them.

• 48:32Robert Greene?

  And so people who are intellectuals have very subtle ways of putting you down, you know, of saying, wow, Robert, I see that your book has sold very well amongst people on Wall Street, you know, so there's complimenting you that your book is selling well, but they're also dissing you for the fact that you're appealing to sharks out there, you know. So the subtle put down that kind of disguises envy, I get a lot from people who are, who are academic intellectual types.

• 49:07Robert Greene?

  You know, I, I found I do a lot of consulting work with people who are high level in business, and I was on the board of directors of a publicly traded company. And when I talk about a narcissist, a kind of a toxic, deep narcissist, believe me, I know what I'm talking about because I've dealt with them on a very person-to-person level. So this CEO that I was working with, who was head of this company, I was on the board of directors. He was very charismatic, very dramatic, and I was seduced by him. I fell for him. I thought this guy is brilliant. He's a genius. And it was only as evidence piled up, as I tried to give him advice and I tried to tell him,

• 49:53Robert Greene?

  the company is heading downward quickly. You need to do this, this, and this. And I realized he wouldn't listen to anything I said, even though he hired me for my brilliant forty-eight laws of power advice. So, you know, there are a lot of people, you know, like Elon Musk, have this kind of quality, where they attract a lot of followers, and they seem so exciting and interesting, but they're actually disguising a lot of deep-rooted emotional problems. And the person in the laws of human nature that really resonates with me on that level is the story of Howard Hughes, whom, you didn't read that part.

• 50:34Chris Williamson?

  I must have missed that bit. Please tell us.

• 50:37Robert Greene?

  Well, no, he, Howard Hughes, as you know, was a great, they did the film about him. He's the great aviator who started, you know, a very important airline company, manufacturing airplanes, Hughes Aircraft. And he had this reputation for being this incredible maverick, for being someone who would fly a plane and risk death and do all sorts of crazy things. And so he got this reputation and people thought this is, he's like an American icon. We venerate him. And he started this business, this airline company. And if you add up the number of failures that he had in business,

• 51:21Robert Greene?

  he has to be probably the worst businessman that ever lived. He lost more money than anybody that I can think of in history through various ventures. On and on and on. He's the army. Commissions him to build this air, this new airplane. He can't, he can't do it. He can't bring it to pass. He creates one of them, the largest plane ever invented. If you saw the movie, you saw it, but it can't fly anywhere. It can't do anything. There's only one of them. It was never used. He had other commissions like that. He was an incredible failure. But time and again, people funded him and, and supported him. Because they fell for this belief in the myth about how great he was.

• 52:05Robert Greene?

  And a lot of what happens to people is, I talked in the book about grandiosity. When you have success like he had, or you get attention like that. You think that you're a god. You think that you're infallible. That no matter what you create or produce is going to be, you know, absolutely perfect. And so you kind of believe in your own myth. That's a very big sort of toxic type that I've met in my consulting work. People in business, they've had some success and they think that nothing they can do is wrong. So they don't listen to anybody and they feel like they can control everything. Kind of micromanager type of profile.

• 52:48Robert Greene?

  That's one toxic type. I, I could go on and on.

• 52:51Chris Williamson?

  I'm sure, I'm sure that you could. I did want to ask you a question, actually, that Sam Harris asked Daniel Kahneman. When they did a podcast recently. And he said, how much of your writing is advice for yourself versus for others? And does the understanding of these laws help your behavior? When Sam asked Dan Kahneman this, he said, I, he's, he's no better at avoiding his own biases. Just more cognizant when it happens and more regretful after the fact. And I found it so hilarious.

• 53:25Robert Greene?

  Well, that's true. I mean, I can see that, but I'm a little more hopeful than maybe Dan Kahneman is. I think that if you recognize your own biases, it gives you a degree of control over them. So I say that we humans aren't rational, that we're basically driven by our emotions, which is something that he talks a lot about. They call it the affective heuristic, that when people buy economic behavior is not driven by rationality, it's driven more by emotions. And so, you know, I have these biases obviously as well. So when I'm writing the book on human nature, I have a bias, which is I have a negative bias.

• 54:08Robert Greene?

  I tend to view people through a negative lens. I don't think we're so great as we think we are. I think we're more violent and aggressive than we want to admit. So it's a bias of mine, and the tendency is to go read books that confirm that bias. And so I deliberately made a point of being aware of that. And so the percentage of books that I read probably were weighted for sure on the negative side. I can't help it. Sixty, seventy percent weren't on the negative side. But I overcame my bias to some degree in order to include books by like Steven Pinker, whom I hate, who I can't stand his books. But I read them, sort of forced myself, like our better angels, you know? Yep.

• 54:53Robert Greene?

  And Enlightenment Now, whatever. I read his books. You know, he's a very important thinker. He's brilliant. He's, you know, Harvard and all that. Just to balance out my own biases. But, you know, it's a margin there. You're never, as Dan Kahneman's saying, you can never really completely overcome those biases that you have because they're built into you. But if you can recognize them, change, you can open your mind a little bit up to some information that won't necessarily confirm what you are already looking for. So my books have helped me in that sense of...

• 55:34Robert Greene?

  When I wrote the book, I I sort of had to come to certain realizations. Number one, I had to realize I'm not as great a person as I thought I was. I'm actually more of a narcissist than I imagined. I'm actually, writing that chapter on aggression was a real eye opener to me because I go, wow, Robert, you are actually a very aggressive person. You manage to disguise it. People think you're so nice and polite, but you're actually, deep down, very aggressive. And it was kind of painful for me. But coming to terms with these sort of qualities that I have have made me sort of more aware of how I'm operating in the social realm so that I can control it better. So I disagree a little bit with him.

• 56:17Robert Greene?

  It has given me not complete control, but more self-awareness.

• 56:22Chris Williamson?

  I think finding out things about yourself through learning concepts and these sort of biases is one of the most rewarding things that I've done through my sort of self-directed learning, reading books, reading books like yours and Danny Kahneman's and Robin Hanson's. And it it's like discovering a treasure that's sort of inside of you and has always been there and some of sometimes they're terrifying and sometimes they're embarrassing or things that you don't like, but they're never not fascinating. We touched on Alain de Botton from the School of Life earlier on. He has a video that the listeners will be familiar with, which I love, which is called Why We Are Fated to Be Lonely.

• 57:05Chris Williamson?

  And he talks about how people whose views are more alarming contrary or subtle to society at large are by their very nature likely to be out on the tails of the normal distribution of normal, whatever normal is. And he says loneliness is a kind of tax that we have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind. And I just wanted to get your thoughts on that brief little little thought from Alain. I always wanted to ask you what your thoughts are on people's uniqueness and their disability

• 57:45Chris Williamson?

  to be categorized into tropes or these archetypal roles, I guess even Jordan Peterson would say, about what your thoughts are on that and what their usefulness or their potential pitfalls are for people.

• 58:01Robert Greene?

  Are you asking me whether I'm lonely or not? Not at all. Well, um, yeah, I mean, um, you know, there's a price that you pay for trying to be more of who you are and be more of yourself and for not fitting into categories. But I don't know if I completely agree. It's hard for me to completely align it with my own experience. So I felt from very early on, I don't like talking about myself so much, but I'll just bring this up. I always felt that I was sort of strange, not like other people.

• 58:46Robert Greene?

  And I imagine most, a lot of people have that feeling as well. But, um, you know, so when it came to like making, creating something or writing a book, um, which was my first book, The Forty Eight Laws of Power, I was able to sort of, um, keep true to myself, to keep true to how my own strange way of thinking. And so I created a book that's not like anything you've ever seen before physically. It doesn't look like a normal book inside the way it's designed. It's all a reflection of my own strangeness, of my own weirdness. But that's precisely what made the book stand out and what's made it interesting.

• 59:27Robert Greene?

  So, um, on the one hand, you know, there is a little bit of loneliness in the sense that I don't fit into easy categories. Me, speaking of myself, I'm not an academic. I'm not, I don't have a PhD, but I'm not purely a self-help book writer. I'm not a coach. I'm not a guru. I don't know what category do I fit in. And so, you know, people are a little bit, they don't know how to approach me. But I have to say that the attention I've gotten from sticking to being myself, from sticking to my own weirdness, to putting out ideas that are kind of strange to a lot of people and not worrying about it,

• 1:00:08Robert Greene?

  has been the source of a lot of, of social attention and social validation. I was actually a lot lonelier before I wrote these books.

• 1:00:19Robert Greene?

  And before I had the acclaim, I couldn't connect to people. I felt like I had something strange to say, but no one would listen to me at all. So in some sense, I always preach to people, if you want to create something that's interesting and that lasts and that is meaningful, kind of stay true to what makes you different, to what, you know, is that quality that Alan de Botton is saying is going to make you lonely. In some ways, it's sort of the source of your power. It's the way, I think people are hungry in the world for something new, for some kind of new form of communication, from people who are coming from a different angle. And it's a source of power. And yeah, it brings loneliness,

• 1:01:03Robert Greene?

  but loneliness happens anyway, would have happened anyway, you know, I've always had that degree of being alone and kind of, I actually like being alone. I like being able to be away from the crowd or to have my distance and space. So that's just my slight little take on what you said.

• 1:01:24Chris Williamson?

  I totally get it. I think you have two choices when you're talking about how you how you view loneliness or how you view solitude, I suppose. And on one hand, like you say, you can have honesty or acceptability. And on the side of honesty, you have the virtue, you have creations of work like yours, or for me, at the moment, it's currently this podcast. It's me talking and being unashamed about the things that I'm interested in, whether it does or does not fit the heritage or the mold that I'm supposed to have. Again, to give you a very brief bit of background, I did some reality TV stuff. It would be

• 1:02:04Chris Williamson?

  the equivalent of The Bachelor, I guess, in the US. And for that kind of archetypal role, going and doing a podcast based in interviewing very successful and interesting authors and talking about the finer points of human nature, probably doesn't really fit. But you're totally right. You can have the choice of being lonely and truthful to yourself or lonely and compromising yourself.

• 1:02:34Robert Greene?

  It's gonna be lonely either way.

• 1:02:36Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely, absolutely. That's a really lovely point.

• 1:02:41Robert Greene?

  But one thing I say is loneliness is not a bad thing. I mean, it can get depressing, but it also gives you the space to kind of step away from the crowd and think for yourself and think about your own tastes and your own values and what you want to say in life. So a lot of times people have a hard time these days being alone. They always have to be surrounded by something that's, you know, attention, that they're phoned or whatever. But creating that space where you can reflect and have some distance from the world, I think, is very powerful and important.

• 1:03:14Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. For anyone who is listening, there's a very interesting definition of solitude, which Cal Newport uses from digital minimalism, and it's a different one to what most people will consider. A lot of people may think, well, I spend time on my own. I maybe drive, drive a lot, or I work from home, as I do, I work from home. But Cal's definition of solitude, which he says is important for us to develop particular qualities of mind, he defines it as time for your mind to be away from the input of other minds.

• 1:03:49Robert Greene?

  Right.

• 1:03:50Chris Williamson?

  And that's very different. Solitude in that way is different to what most people would consider when the phone's still on and emails still on or the, you know, I think that that distinction and the time that you can spend alone with your thoughts reflecting on the day or your bigger picture, I think is very important.

• 1:04:11Robert Greene?

  I agree. I agree with that definition.

• 1:04:14Chris Williamson?

  Robert, I've absolutely loved today. I know that your books take a very long time to write, but I really hope that you hasten the next one along because I want to sit down with you and talk again.

• 1:04:25Robert Greene?

  Okay. But we can always talk before the next book comes out because these books sometimes take several years. So you just let me know.

• 1:04:34Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. For the listeners at home, can you tell them where they can find you online and where they can look to find some more resources or some more info?

• 1:04:45Robert Greene?

  Well, the main site is my old website, which is power seduction and war dot com. Those are the titles of my first three books. Excuse me. Power Seduction, the word and spelled out and war dot com. And there you'll find links to the book. I did a, I wrote a book with 50 Cent called The 50th Law. My book Mastery and my new book, The Laws of Human Nature. And links to the Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and all the stuff that we were yelling about earlier. All that evil social media stuff that I was decried, but I still participated.

• 1:05:23Chris Williamson?

  We have to play the game.

• 1:05:26Chris Williamson?

  We have to play the game.

• 1:05:28Robert Greene?

  There, yeah, I know, we have to play the game.

• 1:05:30Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. Robert, I really appreciate your time. I can't thank you enough for coming on and I, I'm afraid that I'm probably going to hassle you for that. Before the next book podcast invite that you've extended my way. And I'm sure that the listeners are going to want it as well.

• 1:05:46Robert Greene?

  Yeah, I'd be happy to. I very much enjoyed it. Thank you so much. You have a great style, great podcasting style.

• 1:05:52Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. That's really, really kind to hear.

• 1:05:55Robert Greene?

  In the background.

• 1:05:56Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 1:05:57Robert Greene?

  What's the shark in the back?

• 1:05:59Chris Williamson?

  Oh yeah. Do you want to see him? Wait there.

• 1:06:01Robert Greene?

  Sort of subliminal.

• 1:06:05Chris Williamson?

  Have a look at that guy.

• 1:06:07Robert Greene?

  Is that a kind of a subliminal signal or something?

• 1:06:11Chris Williamson?

  I'm afraid, I'm afraid it's not a symbolic shark. It doesn't mean anything more than the fact that my black bedding without a fluffy animal on it looks a little bit kind of dull. So I just decided to put a shark on it.

• 1:06:24Robert Greene?

  All right. That's right. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

• 1:06:29Chris Williamson?

  And on that, we're going to end. Robert, thank you so much.

• 1:06:33Robert Greene?

  Thanks a lot, Chris. My pleasure.