Robert Greene almost died. Here’s what it taught him about living

Get Sam's top 9 books for entrepreneurs (+ his reading strategy): https://clickhubspot.com/rhagt Episode 881: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) and Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) talk to Robert Greene about living a more meaningful life. — Show Notes: (0:00) People Are Suffering (2:00) Everything Is Amazing and No One Is Happy (10:45) Go Outside (14:20) Feeling Flat (18:00) The Immense and the Impossible (29:35) Say Less Than Necessary (30:05) Disappear (35:30) Robert's AI Prediction (40:55) Handwriting a 400-Page Book (41:25) Surviving Near-Death Experiences (49:20) Mythical Leaders (59:10) Brimming With Confidence — Links: • The Law of the Sublime — Robert Greene (new book)https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634294/the-law-of-the-sublime-by-robert-greene/ • The 48 Laws of Power — Robert Greenehttps://powerseductionandwar.com/books/ • Mastery — Robert Greenehttps://powerseductionandwar.com/books/ • The Art of Seduction — Robert Greenehttps://powerseductionandwar.com/books/ • The Laws of Human Nature — Robert Greenehttps://powerseductionandwar.com/books/ • The 33 Strategies of War — Robert Greenehttps://powerseductionandwar.com/books/ • The 50th Law — 50 Cent & Robert Greenehttps://powerseductionandwar.com/books/ • The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World — Jonathan Freedlandhttps://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-escape-artist-jonathan-freedland/1140945882 • Man's Search for Meaning — Viktor E. Franklhttps://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/206272/mans-search-for-meaning-by-viktor-e-frankl/ • Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences — Susan Blackmorehttps://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Dying-to-Live/Susan-J-Blackmore/9780879758707/ • Everything Is Amazing and Nobody Is Happy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbIGbZ6gq_Y • Robert Greene's Official Website - https://powerseductionandwar.com/ • Robert Greene's Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/robertgreeneofficial/ — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Shaan uses Mercury across all of his companies. you can too: http://mercury.com/ Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N. A., Members FDIC • I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out: beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Have you ever taken psychedelics?

• 0:02Speaker 01

  Have I?

• 0:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  You wrote this new book, Sublime, and it's interesting because if I look at the books you're popular for, you're famous for, you've got forty eight laws of power. Power, I mean, self-explanatory. It's like a very masculine, very sort of forceful, grab-it-by-the-neck sort of word. You have seduction, another one, control, mastery, another one about control. And it seems like Sublime is saying the, almost the exact opposite. It's about letting go and being small rather than being larger than life. Can you explain what the book is and how it relates to the other books?

• 0:50Speaker 01

  It comes out of personal experience, I have to say. You know, I, as you probably know, I nearly died eight years ago. People are suffering from the narrowness of their experience, a lot of it coming from technology. There's something incredible about just simply being alive. And so many things about, that science is uncovering about the world that we live in is so awesome and so amazing. And we have such hunger for something larger than just the daily struggle. And I felt it very deeply in coming so close to death and how the world looks and feels differently after that experience.

• 1:32Speaker 01

  And I want people to feel something like that in their own lives. It's a book where you don't have to nearly die in order to have it. I'm trying to show you how you can bring these kind of experiences into your day-to-day life. It's a very practical book on that level. But I feel like there's something people are really, really, really missing. A sense of not being connected to other people, connected to their environment, to the world that we live in, and to themselves, disconnect from themselves. And so that's what this book is about.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  There's this funny Louis C.K. bit. It's called, "Everything is amazing and nobody is happy." And he's on Conan, I think, and he's like talking about how like, "Everything's great, but we're all miserable." And I think it was forty eight laws of power. I forget which book it was, but you, there was one story that I might be butchering, but I think you said that, like, some of the first bits of writing ever discovered was about one generation complaining about the next generation saying, "They're lazy. They're, they don't, they care about all this new technology, like, their music sucks."

• 2:36Speaker 00

  Is that real? That's like one of the first writings ever? Is that?

• 2:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was like on a stone tablet. I think it's like ancient Babylonian or something like that. And it's like one of the oldest pieces of writing, and it's complaining about the young generation.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  And, well, my takeaway when I read that was like, it was this really important feature, which like, everyone thinks something is different with their generation, you know? We are either better, or you'll hear people say all the time, they go, "In this economy? What are you talking about?" It's like, well, the economy could be booming, and everyone will always say, "In this economy, it sucks." Or they'll always say like, "Well, crime these days, it's so high." It's like, no, it's actually way lower than ever before. But there's something where you want to like say, "This period is the worst." And my question to you is, is that actually true? Is this time, is this time actually different? And how do I be happy?

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Well, it's a very legitimate question. And I don't think you can quantify is the problem. Because, you know, you look in movies from the twenties and thirties, and everybody is smoking and drinking like you can't believe. They're like four, five whiskeys at dinner, you know? They're having martinis left, right, and center, right? That is the equivalent in the past of antidepressants, right? So people were feeling that then, most definitely, and cigarettes, they needed all of these stimulants continuously. It's kind of shocking. And then in the past, you know, in England, for instance, people didn't drink water. They drank ale, right?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  And to quench their thirst. And so people were continually drunk and on all sorts of things throughout history. So it's a very good point. How can you compare that to now? We have technology on this new level, social media on this new level. And in some ways, it's altering people. It's altering our minds. It's rewiring our brains in ways that aren't necessarily healthy. And this is a new phenomenon. So if your experience is coming so much from your phone, if you're interacting so many hours of the day with your phone, a lot of that is stuff that is, if it's on Instagram

• 4:52Speaker 01

  or X or TikTok, it's being programmed by other people, algorithms, et cetera. It's not your own experience. People are telling you what your life should be like. They're programming what you see, what you feel, what you hear. This isn't like a human quality. We are animals that want agency. We want to be able to control something about our own lives. I feel like people have a sense of powerlessness, that they're on this ride, that technology is taking them on. And particularly with AI, the fears that, you know, we're creating something that we're not going to have any control over. That is the only element that I think is different now, that would make me say that

• 5:35Speaker 01

  there's a level of crisis that maybe didn't exist in the past. But as I said, I don't have data to back that up, and I could be wrong.

• 5:46Speaker 00

  Well, we do have first-end kind of experience with the way the world around us feels and how it operates. You know, if we just kind of, as a thought experiment, I think of Americans who are like, you know, of adult age, ninety-plus percent have a smartphone. Of people who have a smartphone, how many would you say are addicted to their phone? Meaning, they are using it more than they want to, and it is, in some ways, kind of like become the main source of pleasure in their life, is taking a larger and larger chunk of their life. I would say that number is probably also like-

• 6:18Speaker 02

  Everyone I know, myself included.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  So you have this thing that exists in the world, where if, you know, somebody came from the past and you're like, "Yeah, there's this thing now." It's affecting ninety-plus percent of people. And of the people who have it, ninety-plus percent of them are addicted to it. And then how often they take the dosage? Like, seven hours a day. You know, it's like, whoa, what is, what is that? That is like a wild State of the Union, you know, just to walk into.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  No, your point is very valid. I know, I've told this before on other podcasts, but I have a special bicycle because I can't hike or anything. It's a recumbent bike, and I got like the lightest weight one I can because we have these incredible hills here. And I go way up where there are no cars, way up into these hills. And it's incredibly beautiful. And I'm just like, whoa, this is so therapeutic. And then people are walking by me and they're like this, you know? They're walking in the most spectacular, in Los Angeles, in this beautiful, you know, bucolic, part nature, part park. And they're like this, right? They're talking to someone, or they're like reading something on Instagram while they're walking outside.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  That, to me, is like mental illness to me. Because being healthy, you have to be observing, you have to be connected to your environment, you have to be connected to what's around you. You know, you have situational awareness, to use a military term, you know? And that, that level of disconnect is very troubling. The other thing is, and I talk about this in my Sublime book, we're gifted with this brain that is one of the most incredible, amazing things in the universe. This insane product of evolution, the human brain. And in a very short period of time, on the scale of evolution, forty thousand years,

• 8:15Speaker 01

  we've taken this brain that we evolved with language, and look at the world that we've created. And that brain operates with certain laws and certain, has a certain tendencies. It's extremely restless. It consumes a lot of our energy, physically, a lot of our energy, right? And it wants to learn, it wants to conquer things, it wants to develop skills. And when you have a generations of people that everything is fast and easy and quick, you can get things at the tip of your fingertips without any effort, it's rewiring the brain, it's rewiring human nature, it's creating people who are spoiled, who expect everything to be fast and easy, who have no patience to write an essay, who have no patience to

• 9:00Speaker 01

  read a four-hundred-page book because, wow, I could just get AI to give me the paragraph on it, you know? That, to me, is what scares me, and it's very dangerous.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Well, I think everyone agrees with you, but what's the, how do I fix that? I mean, I'm an addict as well, like, and you said something cool, and so like-

• 9:19Speaker 00

  I am, Sam, and I too have a problem.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, right. It's like, smartphones anonymous here.

• 9:26Speaker 00

  By the way, everybody listening to this is listening to this on their phone instead of, you know, enjoying wherever they're at in the moment.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  But like, you have this thing in the book where you talk about like the circle. You're like, life's a circle, and like, a lot of technology be on your phone, it like shrinks that circle, so you're only looking through the small thing. And I noticed that. We actually did a podcast on like this, the feeling of awe. And in my opinion, I, my circle is tiny right now, and the only way I'm ever able to like expand it is through travel, like being in places or experiencing the emotion of awe, which-

• 9:55Speaker 00

  Or your kids, getting your kids to experience awe, then you start to notice it too. Like, you know, wow, look at this.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, and what I want to know is like, what can I do to get out of this?

• 10:06Speaker 01

  So I normally tell people like-

• 10:09Speaker 02

  You only have to listen to a few minutes of Robert Greene to realize that all the information that he's getting for his books, which are amazing by the way, is from reading tons and tons and tons of other books. Well, I try to do the same as well. I read about a book a week, I devour books, and they've changed my life. And so what I did with the HubSpot team was they asked me which nine books shaped my year, shaped 2026. So I put together a list, and I also added a whole bunch of information on how I read so much. Hint, I'm not actually a fast reader. I just have a methodology for consuming a lot of information and I think also retaining it. And so if you want to see which books have changed my life this year and how I read so much information, how I retain it all, then click the link below and you can get the guide right now.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Get outside your house, go out into nature, go out into Central Park, or go into Connecticut somewhere and leave your goddamn phone behind, lock it in a drawer. You can't possibly access it now and you're hopefully with a friend who doesn't, didn't bring their phone along with you. So you're forced cold turkey to go out there. And what it'll do for you, just on that one level is you're gonna have like that addiction sense of, wow, I, I, I need to know what's going on with sports. I need to know who won the election. I need to know, but you can't do it. And so your mind is now gotta be focused outwardly. It's gonna be focused on what is around you, on the sounds,

• 11:35Speaker 01

  on just the sense of your body moving, right? Like climbing a mountain is incredibly, it can bring you that sense of awe as you get higher and higher up in the sky. And you're forced to interact with things that aren't human, right? That take you out of your daily little, that little small circle and will give you that sense of awe. I had planned originally to write the book. I was gonna go travel all over the world and have all these sublime experiences before my stroke. And then obviously with my stroke, I can't do any of that. I'm like trapped in this room that you now see me in, where I spent practically seven years writing the book. I, I had no outlets for doing the things. I couldn't travel.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  So I was forced to find it in everything around me, in just looking up at the sky, just interacting with my pets, my animals, with my wife, just watching people, just looking, just the sense of being alive. And in the book, I try and make it clear, the things that science is uncovering about the strangeness of the world that we have been born into. You're, you're born, you're kind of thrown into this world. And when you're a child, you're three or four years old, you don't understand it. It looks, everything looks strange and you've got that sense of awe and wonder like constantly. Like a two-year-old is like, whoa, what is that?

• 13:02Speaker 01

  What is this? What is that color? They're just looking at everything. You once had that feeling and you've lost it. But you can get it back by slowing things down, by putting your phone away, by doing simple things like taking a walk, by just giving yourself some time to be alone and withdrawn to yourself and just reconnect to your body. It's a lot of it is putting a lot of that technology away and opening your senses up to the world. And each of the chapters in the book, I have exercises at the end of the chapter for kind of realizing what I've just talked about. So I have a chapter in the book about childhood. Because as I said, when you were a child, the world was naturally sublime.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Was, I mean, unless you had a very troubled childhood, don't get me wrong. But for most children in the world, it's naturally weird, strange and wondrous, right? And I have exercises for how you can recapture the feeling of time that you have when you were a child, where it wasn't all schedules and past, present and future. I gotta get this done and blah, blah, blah. But to feel the, the flow of time within you. It's not gonna make you more successful in your job. But if you have moments like that, where you can spend an hour doing some of these exercises, slowing things down, feeling just the sense of actually being alive inside your body, you will naturally return to something that is more human

• 14:31Speaker 01

  and that will connect you in some way to the sublime.

• 14:35Speaker 00

  You had this amazing line in your, in your book where you're talking about how, why chasing things, why we, you know, adults feel flat inside. And there's something about us feels flat, so we chase things. But then even when you get them, you still feel that sense of flatness. What, why is that?

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Because, you know, it, it becomes like an addiction. So you, you're constantly looking for external stimulation. As I said, you're born into this world with this restless mind. And if you ever tried to meditate and, and just sit down on some cushions and kind of empty your brain, empty your mind, you will realize how it's impossible. The mind is just going like mile a minute. Thoughts are just coming left, right and center. It's in a very, very restless organ. So we as humans need continual stimulation. And you can get that stimulation in one of two ways.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  You can get it externally and nowadays that is the source of possibly our problems. You know, if you're bored, you want entertainment, two seconds flat, you get something on Netflix. You get something streaming, watch it on your phone. You know, you don't have to, you don't have to do anything to get this kind of external stimulation that you, that you crave, right? And you get it and then it leaves you kind of empty because now you want more, you want something else, right? And so you have to find another source of external stimulation. Even travel can get like that if, you know, you just bring your own problems to Bali, for instance. And you're sitting on the beach and you're just thinking about your schedules

• 16:18Speaker 01

  and about your social media and your, your Instagram feed. You're just bringing your problems with you. And then you come back to, to your job, wherever, and you're back to your nervous self, you know? So it can't come from without. I mean, I'm, I'm saying like when you take your hike, you're, you're absorbed in the world. But that is a sense of something coming from within you. That is your own experience. And when you're doing it through your own experience, and it could be love of another human being, cause I have a chapter on love, or it could be coming with your connection to an animal or could come through some physical adventure. The experience is your own. Nobody is programming you.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Nobody is telling you what to feel, what to think. It is yourself. And as you go through that, the feeling is very exciting and fulfilling and you want more of it. It's not like this addiction where I need somebody, you're like this baby that needs constant stimulation from somebody else. You can climb a mountain and you can feel not only spiritually uplifted, but physically uplifted. Your body and your mind are, are responding to these things. And you can't get that from your goddamn phone. You can't get that feeling of climbing a mountain. I did something difficult, arduous, but I feel, wow, look at this, right? There's no, there's no experience that could be programmed on your, your stupid phone

• 17:45Speaker 01

  that can ever give you that kind of sensation.

• 17:48Speaker 02

  The best part about your, your writing is you find the, the best stories, which do an even better job of teaching this stuff versus just the theory, which is also good. Can you give some examples of what you're talking about with some cool stories?

• 18:01Speaker 01

  One of the, I have a chapter in there, I think people are gonna relate to most because it's similar to my other chapters. It's called Measure Yourself Against the Immense and the Impossible. And the idea in, it's called the Dynamical Splendor. And the idea is we humans have powers that we don't even realize that we have. If I plucked you right now onto an island in the Pacific that's uninhabited and you're alone, suddenly you would discover, because you had to, all of these skills, hopefully, other you're gonna die, that you have for like finding food sources, for making things, for building a shelter, right?

• 18:44Speaker 01

  We have, we're incredibly inventive, persistent, willful creatures. That's who we are. And when we face something that's impossible, so difficult, something almost superhuman can happen. And I tell the story and there's a famous story of this plane that crashed in the Andes in Argentina in 1971, 72, with a rugby team from Uruguay going to Chile. And there were like 45 people on the plane and a lot of them died in this crash. They crashed at the foot of this incredible 14,000 foot of a high mountain. So they were trapped. They had only like their spring clothing

• 19:26Speaker 01

  because they didn't expect to be trapped in the Andes. They were just traveling to another city. So they had spring clothing. They had no equipment. They were these young kids that have never climbed a mountain before or got in such a situation. And they were facing death every single day. It was horrifying. They ran out of food and so they ended up having to like eat the corpses of some of the people who had died already just to stay alive. And one of the young men, Nando Perado.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  He lost his mother and sister in the crash. And he was thinking of his father and his father back in Uruguay. If he died, Nando died and the mother and the sister died. The father would die because he was a family man. It was his whole life. And so he goes, I've got to get out of here. I've got to get out of it. I've got to find a way out of this trap. Right? People had tried to climb it in their, in their group and they couldn't get halfway up this hill because the altitude would kill them, the cold. They had no equipment to climb a 14,000 foot high mountain in, in the winter, in the Andes. You need, you need all these kind of ropes and, and pylons and all sorts of equipment. They had nothing. He decides, I'm gonna get over this mountain. I don't care what happens.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  I'm gonna, I gotta get back to my father. And so he chooses two people and they start this climb. The two other people are like, ready to give up. He keeps climbing and climbing. The altitude's making his heartbeat like crazy, but he keeps climbing, climbing. He reaches what is close to the summit and it's like the side of a skyscraper. It's just pure rock and ice. How the f**k am I gonna get up that? Right? He just takes, he's got like the equivalent of a pick that was built from the, uh, the detritus of the airplane and he kind of cuts a little bit of a, a hole in the ice rock. He puts his hand in there. He's able to put his foot in there. He climbs like for two hours that way because he's so determined.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  He gets to the top and he realizes that he, that there's more mountains are surrounding them. So now they're gonna have to somehow get over another set of mountains. There's no way they could do it. They don't have food. So, but then he sees that maybe there's this like gap between the two mountains that could possibly be a way out toward the green fields of Chile outside all these mountains. And he convinces one other person to co with him on this. And first of all, then on top of this mountain, they spend night. They're probably the first humans who've ever seen this, the stars and, and, and at night in this particular location. And he's like, amid all this suffering and death, this world is so beautiful. It's such a strange thing.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Anyway, climbing down the mountain on the other side is harder than going up because it's the, the steepness of it. The long story short, they finally get to the bottom. They finally find people. They finally get rescued. And about 18 of the 50 people on the plane survived. And they get a helicopter to go back and rescue the people that they had left behind with the original crash. They're going, how the hell did you ever get up this mountain? Experienced climbers can never get up this mountain. How did you do it? It's impossible. I don't even believe that you did it. And so the story to me is about having a sense of purpose.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  Like my father, the love of my father, I have to help get back for him. And facing an impossible situation, we put limits on what we think we can do, but there are actually no limits. You put people in difficult situations that either crushes them or they rise to a new level. They discover new resources in themselves. And that kind of power and that determination to me is what makes the human animal incredibly, incredibly sublime. So that's one of the stories.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  That's a great story. I am kind of messed up. I like reading a lot of like World War II and Holocaust books and

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  It's crazy. Like there's this one called, um, The Escape Artist. And it's one of the only guys to escape from Auschwitz, uh, one of the only Jews.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  I never heard of this.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  It's fantastic. I mean, it's, you know, I don't know, fantastic as you describe it, but it's definitely riveting. And he tells the story about how he basically, um, hid under a bunch of dead bodies for many hours for the, uh, three days, actually. And then he eventually walks across Poland. And it's like, when I read these stories, my instinct, I started reading some of these crazy stories because if I ever feel down and depressed, I'm like, I gotta read this. So I know that like life is perfect, but it's actually cool to have a different takeaway now, reading a bunch of these books where it's more so like, I can do anything. If these guys could do this, surely I could have a difficult conversation.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Well, there was a man, Victor Frankl, who wrote a book, Man's Search for Meaning, very famous book. He was in Auschwitz. He was in concentration camp and his, he later became a psychotherapist. And his discovery was that the people who survived that kind of the most awful circumstances were the ones who had some kind of purpose for their life. They, they had something to get to live for once they got out, if they ever got out. Right? They had a book they had to write. They had a, a family member they had to save. They had some reason for trying to stay alive and that's what kept them alive.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow. Well, the Breeze Assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft a campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content, you create content that converts. Check out hubspot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. I'm curious, Robert, do you have a definition for yourself, what your purpose is?

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Well, um, it tends to make me seem kind of arrogant and grandiose, but what the hell? I'll throw it out there anyway. I felt like all of the miserable jobs that I had, I had 60 different jobs back in the eighties, nineties, because I'm an old guy. And I was very depressed and very miserable in my mid 30s and no success. But in the back of my mind, I'm living for writing because I've always wanted to be a writer. I hadn't quite given up my dream. And then I got a chance, I met a man who was the book package who asked me at one point in Italy if I had any ideas for a book. And I kind of improvised what turned into the 48 Laws of Power.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  And he ended up paying me to live while I wrote the book and we became partners on the project. It felt like to me that all that misery, all those bad jobs, all that stuff in Hollywood that I'd gone through, there was a purpose for it. And the purpose was for me to be able to write that book that I think, call me, as I said, grandiose, has helped a lot of people deal with very difficult power situations. And then I had my near death experience. I was driving a car in Los Angeles. My girlfriend, now my wife, was sitting next to me. And she basically saw something going on that was very wrong.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  She called 911, she didn't pack, she called 911. And it was a matter of seconds. If they had arrived 30 seconds later or a minute later, I'd either be dead or I'd have intense brain damage. And so I survived that. I'm alive. There must be a reason for that. There must be a reason, a purpose behind it. And the purpose was for me to write one more large book, The Sublime, despite all the physical limitations that I had. And that I, I was staying, I was kept alive for a reason to write this particular book. So, and quite honestly, without that sense of mission or purpose, I would never have

• 27:35Speaker 01

  made it because it was such a difficult thing to do when you can't type and you have to handwrite an entire book. So I definitely have had that, that, those feelings of, of something larger pushing me forward.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  I, uh, I think I, I read a lot and I've noticed that, um, reading should fall into one of two categories. The first one is just entertainment and the second one is education. And when I really want to learn something, it's, most people tend to get 10 books on the same topic and they think that's going to master it. And what I have found, it's probably better to get one, uh, cornerstone piece and reread it multiple times and truly master it. And I have felt this way, you're going to think that, uh, this is too grandiose and ridiculous. I have felt that with 48 Laws of Power, Mastery, Artist Seduction, uh, maybe, maybe Art of War, but for sure, um, it sounds like Sublime and 40 Laws of Power as well, where

• 28:29Speaker 02

  I was like, man, I wish I would have dedicated two years to mastering these like four texts. Because like human nature, I'm like, This is applicable to everyone. Why wouldn't? This is the number one thing I should ever learn, actually. Is there a world where this should just be like a two year or one year mat like course, like a, like a college thing where, where I'm just going to like master some of your texts? I mean, that exists for, I would imagine for Machiavelli, that probably, that exists for some of the great philosophers and psychologists.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, you could take a course on Shakespeare and go through all his works, right?

• 29:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, has anyone ever proposed doing that for Robert Green books?

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, um, I would have to probably get involved in that because there's a, there's a, a gap, a gulf between the knowledge that's in a book and putting it into practical effect. I've consulted with individuals before. The problem with a course is if you're, I think it would have great value for the 48 Laws of Power, for instance, if in college, somebody were to teach that. But I don't know where, because college isn't supposed to be practiced, supposed to be teaching you about power, it's supposed to be teaching you about things that are useless, that you're never going to do in your life. But I could see a course, you know?

• 29:53Speaker 01

  It would probably have to be like in a business school, to be honest with you. This is the work world you're going to enter. And here's some laws that you're going to learn that are going to help you deal with the egos and the politics of people.

• 30:05Speaker 00

  If we were sitting there and it's lesson one, or there's like, you know, a 15 minute thing that actually stuck with people, what do you think that thing would be? From the power course, what would it be?

• 30:14Speaker 01

  I'll always say less than necessary. People talk way too much. They're always talking, talking, talking, talking, particularly in the era of social media. They're just revealing way too much about themselves. Learn to withdraw. Power is about absence and presence. If you're always present, people take you for granted and they grow bored with you. If you're always absent, you have, there's nothing to talk about. But if you know the dialectic between presence to disappear sometimes, to not talk, to not be there, to not be there for like a week or so, and then people are starting to talk about you again. So I would teach them that, that would be my first course. The second course, the second week would be about egos. Never outshine the master.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  Know who you're dealing with. Play the perfect quartier. These are the dangers of, of people's egos out there and you've got to be careful and you've got to not inadvertently offend the wrong person. So that would be like the second week or so.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  But how do you apply that to like Sean and I or yourself as well? I'm looking at your Instagram page, it's awesome. You have, you have five videos that you posted yesterday. They're amazing. I follow you. How does that apply to people who are trying to like promote shit?

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Well, I'm out there now a lot because of the Sublime book, but I, I disappear for quite a long time and I never ever post about what I had for breakfast or photographs from, you know, where I've traveled to or, you know, my cats in the house. I only post interviews from podcasts that have information that are practical, that are going to help people. You don't know my private life, so there's a level of mystery there. If I was completely transparent about my private life, then I'd be violating a lot of the 48 Laws of Power. But I know certain things that I've got to like withhold from the public.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Do you guys, so you're a Laker fan, so you, you, I was going to ask you about this guy, but I was like, I don't know if he knows about this, but if you're a Lakers fan, you do. Do you know who Josh Kushner is?

• 32:24Speaker 01

  He's the new owner of the Lakers?

• 32:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, man, Josh Kushner is interesting. Brother of Jared, so Josh Kushner is someone who would fit in your book in a variety of ways. So basically Josh grew up in a very wealthy, prominent New York real estate family. His father had a fall of grace because he did some messed up stuff and went to prison for it. And then Jared married Ivanka Trump and became Trump's right-hand man, very polarizing. But Josh is, um, he, he, I believe he's a liberal, he's like, speaks about it occasionally. And he became an investor where at the age of 21, he was one of Instagram's first investors. And he now is probably the, he's probably had the best, probably 10 year run as a venture capitalist. And he is so wealthy now, he's probably worth $15 billion. He's 41 years old.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  He so, is so wealthy, he just bought the Lakers. And Josh is interesting because he is a textbook case study on implementing a handful of the laws of power. He really doesn't have social media. He, um, he is quite silent. You know that he dates this beautiful woman, but you don't really see him ever take photos. He enters with boldness into certain situations. I mean, he bought the Lakers when he's 41 years old. It's a very interesting case study. Would you agree, Sean, on like how this guy has risen? Because money, when you're investing, money's a commodity. So a company, whoever's taking your money, has to choose you based off a variety of weird characteristics.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  And the characteristic that he has is this mystique about him. And I think that it's been, I think he knows exactly what he's doing. And it's like, he's just like playing the game perfectly.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it could be a combination of, he might be somebody who's not comfortable in the limelight. And then he leans into that and he creates a kind of a weird sort of power out of it. I get a lot of, um, not a lot, but I get some celebrities who come to me, whose name I will not mention, who say, you know, Robert, I've got to be out there all the time. How do I create an air of mystery? When social media depends on always having something that people can see? And I tell them, you know, um, you can disappear for a week, it's not going to kill you. And in fact, it's going to make people wonder, why have you, where have you gone during that week?

• 34:48Speaker 01

  So I say like Beyonce would disappear for like a year and a half without posting anything at all, and then would suddenly emerge with a new record. And now she would be out there in that time that she wasn't out there. People were going crazy speculating on what's going on in her life. So knowing that you have to some points, even if you're a celebrity, even if you depend on people's views and likes, disappearing for a while and creating some air of mystery is absolutely critical because people are, are going to grow tired of you. There's an attention economy. And if you're flooding them with your image, at some point they go, oh God, I'm so sick of that.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  And then somebody else will come along who's like younger and fresher and different, and they'll be looking at them. So you have to, you have to learn how to withdraw sometimes and create that mystery that makes people want to, to hear you when you come back.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  Given that you've read thousands of history books and you have seen cycles, do you have any predictions on what will happen with AI in the next 10 years or so? It's the same thing as, um, this time is different, that energy is, is happening right now. And people are saying crazy stuff like, this is the last machine that will ever need to be built. Uh, cause this will build everything else is, do you have any, um, do you have an outlook?

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Well, um, I'm, I'm a born pessimist. Uh, I have a negative bias to my brain. And I'm always the one that will raise my hand and say, I, I don't really buy that hype. So first of all, I think there's a deep, deep wells of resentment and fear among the public about AI. And you have that on the bottom, the huge numbers of people. And then you have the people at the top who are kind of dominating the field and are kind of controlling this new technology. And the people from the bottom can eventually have a very, very powerful effect

• 36:55Speaker 01

  on the evolution of AI in, in the sense of politically, people are so upset that they demand that there are laws in place that are going to regulate AI, that are going to put, they're going to limit, cap these data centers that people are, are getting tired of. And so there's an energy and that level of fear among the public can actually translate into something very real. But on the other hand, I mean, I know the scenarios of the singularity and it takes over. What drives me crazy with these techno, these new technologies is that I wrote a whole book, Laws of Human Nature, about how humans have a dark side,

• 37:39Speaker 01

  irrationality, grandiosity, envy, short-sightedness, you know, on and on and on. There are 18 of them, I only listened to four, self-absorption, okay? When you create a new piece of technology like this, it's not like something that's, that just comes out of nowhere. It's humans that created it. And now that dark side of human nature is going to be able to use this new technology for very, very dangerous purposes. The levels of phishing and scams that we're now receiving on our phones is mounting every day. And just imagine what it's going to be like in a couple of years, you know? How criminals are going to be able to use this for all kinds of nefarious purposes?

• 38:24Speaker 01

  How the information to build a, a dirty bomb, a biological weapon, is at the hands of some crazy person somewhere, I don't know where, right? Yes, it could cure cancer. Yes, it could cure climate, global war, but I don't know. But it could also lead to an apocalypse just as easily. So I'm very fearful of that scenario. And I'm very afraid of what it's going to do to the human brain among young people. Being able to write an essay and read a 400 page book is absolutely an essential skill in the 21st century, right? But you're not developing any mental skills. You're not developing any discipline. You're not developing the ability to put something on paper and then edit it

• 39:08Speaker 01

  and then change it with your own thoughts. And eventually that's going to catch up to you because you're not going to be able to ever think on your own. You're going to always be depending on technology to answer every single one of your questions. I have fears, you know, and those are my fears is the dark side of human nature takes it over. People aren't going to be having the patience to learn anything anymore. And that it's going to create massive amounts of resentment among the masses of people who feel like they have no control over the future of their career. Why did I study this field? Why did I become a lawyer? The profession of lawyers is going to be decimated by AI. Absolutely decimated, right? Why have a lawyer?

• 39:53Speaker 01

  I mean, it's actually, this is one possible good thing about AI, I don't deny. But you can get any answer you want about some lawyer, a legal problem. So you'll never need a lawyer anymore.

• 40:05Speaker 02

  Were you using it for Sublime for research?

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Never.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  Not once?

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Well, nowadays, if you Google something, a question, that the little AI box comes up. So I should say.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  Close my eyes, scroll past it.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  No, no, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not going to lie to you occasionally. But I never did any like major, no research things, just like little itty bitty things like when did that person die or facts like that, but.

• 40:39Speaker 00

  He's like, besides the apocalypse, mass resentment and the loss of human mental cognition.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  I think it would be great. I have, I had to write in notebooks for the Sublime book. And I had two notebooks, I'd write in one and then I would rewrite it in another notebook, literally rewrite word for word and edit as I'm rewriting it, right? In the end, I probably have 120 of those notebooks.

• 41:06Speaker 00

  Have you seen that guy who bear crawled a marathon? That's like you.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  That is like me.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  Well, like I, I think you and Ron Chernow are the two authors that I like to read most. And whenever, and whenever I get into either one of your books, every sentence is, is important. Who had to type that out? What did you guys do?

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Well, so I wrote it in one notebook, I edited another book, then I'd go back and rewrite it that way, then I'd go back, probably four or five times. Then when it finally seemed decent and not suckable, because a lot of my first drafts are absolutely awful, I would dictate it and then I would print it out and hand edit on the paper, right? And then eventually that was good enough, I dictated again. And then with one hand, I would edit it on the computer because I only had one hand that was available.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  Holy shit. No wonder it took seven years. So a lot of times people at the podcast, they'll reach out to me and they're wondering, hey, Sam and Sean, how do you meet all these amazing entrepreneurs? How do you find all these stories? Well, I have a hack. You see, I actually have a community called Hampton. It's a community for entrepreneurs doing at least three million revenue, although we do on average, something like $25 million a year in revenue. We have the founders of DoorDash, of Figure, of BlueChu. All these amazing companies are part of Hampton. And what's interesting is because of the environment in Hampton, which frankly is very similar to my first million, we have a very unique, high trust environment. When people apply and go through the vetting process, they're put in groups of like eight or nine other entrepreneurs and they get real about everything that's going on in their life and in their business.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  And sort of like when people listen to MFM, they get inspired to come up with new solutions for business. That's what happens in real life in Hampton. It's life changing. And so if you're a founder of a startup that does at least three million in revenue and you just want to go ahead and pull forward five or 10 years worth of success, then check it out. The URL is joinhampton.com. Again, the URL, joinhampton.com.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Robert, can I ask you a question? You had a near death experience. You hung out and wrote a book with 50 Cent, who had this kind of near death experience. There was a guy who came on the podcast that was, he had studied a lot of people who had near death experiences. I think there's books written where, you know, somebody dies for 15 minutes and they come back and you want to know, what'd you see? What was it? Have you kind of looked into that? I haven't. What would I find if I go talk to people or go read about people who've had near death experiences? What, what do you find?

• 43:33Speaker 01

  I have, the last chapter of the Sublime book is about the death sublime. And I go into near death experiences and I described four of them because the literature, literally since the 1960s and advances in medicine, millions of people have had near death experiences. So we have all of this data on them. It runs a gamut. So 85% more or less of near death experiences are actually quite positive. You feel uplifted, you feel like, not just that you were grateful to be alive, but that death isn't something horrible, there's something peaceful and beautiful about the experience. Your eyes were opened to a different way of perceiving the world.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  15% or so, don't quote me on the exact number, are hellish experiences of near death experiences where it's absolutely a nightmare and you're so grateful that you got out of it. So there's, there's a gamut. You can't completely generalize. Some people have like religious experiences where they see angels, where the presence of God is there, where they go through their whole life's history is recounted in a matter of seconds, you know, things like that. And in, among that group is very interesting, there'll be people who are hardcore atheists and rationalists like Richard Dawkins type, who suddenly come out of it and now they believe in God and now they believe that there is an afterlife.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  It is very strange literature to read a lot of this. Some people don't go that direction. They still remain kind of skeptical, but something strange has happened to them and they'll never be the same. There's a very great book I enjoyed a lot by a skeptic, and I'm not a skeptic, but I like reading all the different aspects. This book called Dying to Live by this woman, I think it's Susan Blackmore is her name. She's a neuroscientist and she tries to explain where all of these things happen, like you have visions of a tunnel and light coming through and you relive your whole life's past. She explains it as something strange happening to the human brain as it's dying, right?

• 45:43Speaker 01

  And it's scrambling how you normally perceive the world, how you normally experience time and all these other things. And so the brain dying has a very powerful effect on you. And that I think is, is the most, the most I can generalize about it because it happened to me, that strange things are going on neurologically and physiologically as the brain is beginning to die, as it's preparing you for it. And you have, you can have visions, you can have sensations, they're impossible to describe, but they make you aware of the fact that your brain constructs the world that you see. You don't realize that it isn't reality what you're experiencing right now.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Your brain is constructing what you consider to be reality. And when the brain is dying, that reality that it's been constructing for you throughout your whole life breaks down and now you're actually seeing things as they, as they are without the brain meddling in this. That's to me, the most fascinating aspect of the near death experience.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  Has it worn off?

• 46:50Speaker 01

  Definitely worn off, but it comes back. It keeps coming back. So I had sensations of my bones dissolving and a weird taste in my mouth and kind of strange things with light. Upon times that it comes back in a sensation, I go, wow, it's there and I can access it. When I first woke up from my coma, the sky looked different to me. And in California, Los Angeles, we have like insanely blue sky. It's just, that's one of those beautiful things about here. But the sky was even more bluer than I've ever seen it before. It was like, it was like incandescent, it was like on fire.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  And I can still get, I can still see that because it's, it's, it's, it's like very deep in my, in my unconscious and I still feel it and I can still see it. So these sensations come back to me in waves. Sometimes it can be months that I don't and it gets a little depressing, but then.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  It sounds like taking psychedelics a little bit.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, a little bit.

• 47:56Speaker 00

  Have you ever taken psychedelics?

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Have I?

• 47:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 48:04Speaker 00

  Is it similar?

• 48:06Speaker 01

  It is in some way, but you know, when you have like a very powerful like LSD or something, you kind of, I think you're like almost hallucinating things. You're seeing things that aren't really there. You're seeing colors and waves of light that I don't, I can't necessarily say are actually there when I'm not on LSD.

• 48:27Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  But when I'm seeing the sky this way. I believe that I'm actually seeing what it looks like. When you actually stare at it and look at it and without the brain and without the familiar film that the brain puts over everything you see. I believe it's actually, I've actually seen what things are. But there are some similarities, there is. So like, you know, they have demonstrated the effect of psychedelics on the brain and it kind of removes that filter that makes everything look so familiar to you.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  Well, did it make you fearful? Are you afraid to die now?

• 49:04Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it's impossible for a human being not to have that fear because it's, it's part of, of, of our life instinct. But no, I, I, I'm, I'm, I'm kind of not really afraid of it. But sometimes I almost like yearn for the, for the peace that it, that it represented.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Because of your experience or because you were?

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course, I, I go back and forth. But I had a feeling of like deep, deep connection to something. Um, and when you feel like you're connected to something greater than yourself, then it takes a little bit of the sting out of the fear of dying. I don't think I'll ever lose that fear because it's, it's inherent to every living creature. But it, it, it's been, it's been kind of softened. The blow is softened by what I experienced. I don't fear nearly as much.

• 50:05Speaker 02

  That's crazy. You, you almost makes like having a stroke sound, uh, envy like.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't go there because it's, you know, like you have cancer, like I had a friend who had cancer. He completely recovered and now he's like walking and doing those other things. Jesus Christ, I wish I had cancer. Uh, then you have people with heart attacks and they recover and then they're, with a stroke, you don't recover. You don't get back your leg. You can't hike. You can't walk. You can't swim. I would not wish this on my worst enemy. I'm sorry. But I mean, it has its positive elements as I've mentioned in my book, but I, please, please don't have a stroke.

• 50:51Speaker 02

  Noted.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  Take it back.

• 50:56Speaker 00

  I'm curious, as a guy who studied, you know, has spent decades of your life studying both people who have executed the ideas as well as the core ideas themselves of power, of seduction, of mastery, of all these things. And then you get a chance to work with this guy, Tim Ryan. And, you know, obviously he didn't become president. So, you know, did you go in and believe that, hey, these tools, these ideas, if executed, could actually do this? And were you humbled in some way? I'm just curious what, what you make of that.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Well, um, first of all, I didn't work for his presidential campaign. We, we've been contacted through texting and then we've met several times. And it was more after he, he lost that. And he ran for Senate in Ohio and lost to J D Vance of all people. And so, you know, we were kind of, in, in that period, I was talking to him a lot and we were, we were despondent about the return of Trump and what it would mean and the corruption and the cruelty and what was happening to the American soul. We were deeply, deeply upset about it. And so, um, I didn't really think that it was an attempt at a particular election because he wasn't running for office anymore.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  He was trying to create some kind of committee or group and he had, he had Republicans in that group, like Steve Schmidt. Um, and so it was kind of a cross, you know, it, it crossed, uh, uh, party boundaries. And it was a look at, at, you know, how can we rebuild this country? And, um, you know, it didn't amount to anything. I can't say we had any effect, although we started a conversation that maybe in some way rippled out and spread somewhere. But when I hear, uh, what Tyler Rico was saying last night in Ossoff and Roy Cooper in North Carolina, and so many, so many, I was really amazed at how many women are now going to be in the Senate and the House of Representatives, which I think is a very, very positive thing.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Uh, but there's so many people who are articulating ideas that we were discussing. So I can't say I had any effect. I, I really don't think I did. But we were trying to widen the conversation, widen the vision beyond just, because Democrats, what's the undoing of Democrats is they just give a laundry list of policies. We're going to do this with healthcare. We're going to do this with gasoline prices. Yeah, it's important. Affordability is a very important issue, but there's got to be something else. There's got to be something a little more kind of mythic, I'd have to say, that kind of crosses, uh, party boundaries. And that's sort of what we were discussing.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  Can you actually elaborate on the mythic thing? Cause I actually totally agree with you where there's this like je ne sais quoi. There's this like thing with certain leaders where half the time I'm like, you know, I don't actually know what they stood for, but there's something about that guy that I want to like get behind you. And Sean was actually talking about that. And, um, a little JFK to me was a little bit like that. When it comes to great leadership, what are the qualities necessary to have that mythic, that mythic ability where people are willing to follow you because you have this special thing that most people can't verbalize?

• 54:13Speaker 01

  Well, we haven't had a leader like that in a long time, so it's almost hard to visualize. I, it comes from a different ideological angle than I do, but Reagan had a little bit of that. Um, he had the kind of folksiness and he was trying to appeal to a larger vision of America. A lot of it was looking back towards the fifties, but not completely. The thing about JFK is you're, you're right to talk about charisma. I heard you earlier. Um, it is an extremely important, uh, component in the, in the, in the media age with social media, with television. You have to have that kind of presence before the camera.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  And Kennedy was the very first president who actually used the medium of the television in a very, very powerful way. He was obsessed with Hollywood and he decided that he was going to be like that actor Montgomery Clift in one of those John Wayne, John Ford movies. He kind of modeled himself on that, the kind of coolness, the kind of cool charisma. He was like the new sheriff in town and he wanted to see how he could kind of exude charisma for the, for the television camera. And he had that very famous debate with Nixon in which people who heard it on the radio thought Nixon crushed him, but people who watched it on television thought Kennedy crushed him because he was.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. And like Nixon was all sweaty and like.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  He was all sweaty, his makeup was, he has like, is like a Halloween figure. That kind of element where you, you kind of create something a little bit larger than life, where you're, you're something, something mythic, as I say, appearing. And what is the myth of America? Well, to me, what made America great was, uh, how we're, we're builders. We create them. We're practical people. We're not ideological. We're practical. We like to build things. We like to make things. And that's always been our genius. And to go back to that kind of vision of, of individuals who are rugged, who aren't just so weak and are always complaining, but know, who, who have that kind of, I guess,

• 56:23Speaker 01

  pioneer spirit. To me, that is the American myth and we've completely lost it in the age nowadays where everything is so easy and fast and people have no patience for making anything. And so a lot of people are rebelling against that. And I think that kind of sense of, and I'll, I talk a lot about it actually in my new book, The Splines, is going back to things of the past and going back to who we actually are, what our spirit is, is to me, a way to kind of connect to what I consider the, that American myth.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  You see it a lot in sports. Um, you know, you may not see the most charismatic people, uh, in politics necessarily, but, um, as a sports fan, you, you, there's these people that just seem to rally, um, or moments or leaders that like emerge in different things. Sometimes it's coaches that have an aura and aura is like something people say a lot. What is aura? Aura is basically non-verbal charisma. It's, it's, it's without even having to do anything. It's just there. And, you know, every athlete eventually gets old and, you know, it ends. Uh, so it doesn't last forever, but there are these eras, like, uh, Sam and I are both fans of UFC and MMA. And there was a, a window of time where Conor McGregor went from this guy who was a plumber living on welfare, but almost spoke into existence in a mythical way.

• 57:43Speaker 00

  In fact, he nicknamed himself Mystic Mac because he would say, I could, you know, I predict these things. And he would, you know, he carried himself with such self-belief that he began, you know, you didn't even have to care about fighting or Ireland or any of those things because the guy stood for a different concept, which was self-belief. Um, the guy believed in himself and bet on himself more than anyone he'd ever seen bet on themselves. And so that was really inspiring to a lot of people during that era. And there's, uh, this famous tweet that Jaylen Brown did a few years ago, four years ago, the Celtics were struggling. And Jaylen Brown didn't go talk about X's and O's and policies and what they're going to do to, to make changes. And he just said, the energy is about to shift. And he tweeted that, it's a very famous tweet. They're the most winningest team since he did that. This is like, you know, years ago and they just went on this run. They went to the finals and they won the championship.

• 58:28Speaker 00

  And like, all these things happened over the next era. But it, but people who almost can simplify in a way, I think one of your laws of power is speak less. And one of the things that you do is like, you don't over explain how it's all going to happen. You just simply with certainty assert that the energy is about to shift. And that's kind of mythical in a way.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, you're talking to a diehard Laker fan here, so.

• 58:52Speaker 00

  Me too, me too. So I hated it.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  It's all right.

• 58:54Speaker 00

  I hated that the energy shifted.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  That's all right. No, I can appreciate what the Celtics did. Yeah. Uh, sports has that definitely for sure. But the, the great thing about sports, cause I'm a, I'm a sports fanatic is, you know, as they used to say scoreboard, it's like you win and you, you know, there's no denying, there's no crying, there's no saying, you know, you, you shouldn't, you cheated or whatever. And so there's clear cut winners and losers. The problem in, in American business and politics is a lot of people rise to the top who don't really deserve to be there. There are no metrics for determining why they are where they are as opposed to sports where you can pretty much look at statistics. I, you know, I thought Phil Jackson kind of embodied that.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  So in, in the art of seduction, I tried to literally kind of define charisma because as you say, it's kind of, and it's this intangible thing and how do you actually describe or where does it come from? And in the research that I did, you will find a very interesting phenomenon. About a huge percentage of people that we would consider charismatic come from very troubled backgrounds. They had very difficult childhoods. They were either abused or abandoned, were orphans, had very, very difficult childhoods. And so their whole life, their whole sense of getting power and love was through the camera, was through the public. They emanated this need to appeal to the public,

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  to get the kind of attention they never got from their family or their parents. And so they're very outer directed. And the other thing is a quality that's very charismatic is to have this kind of inner intensity. A lot of it is, can be anger, because that's a very powerful, powerful emotion, but could be love or something like that. But you don't have to say anything. You don't have to say a word. You don't have to say exactly how you feel, but people can read it in your face. Your whole face is lit up with this intense emotion that's inside of you, that's driving your gestures, your tone of voice, all the nonverbal things. And it's read through the public as here's someone

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  brimming over with this confidence and this inner power that they, they don't need to have to say anything, but it's, it's there, it's in that aura that you mentioned.

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  Couldn't you teach someone to be more charismatic? And what would you teach them?

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  Well, confidence is by far the most charismatic quality that you could have. As you may know, I spent six, seven months with 50 Cent writing The 50th Law, my fourth book. And 50 has intense charisma. And his charisma comes from this incredible sense of confidence and inner strength. And where did that confidence come from? You know, so many people from his background in South Side Queens never made it, they don't have it. The difference is he had this near death experience that kind of transformed him. And what are you going to be afraid of

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  after you've got shot nine times at close range through a car window? You're not going to be afraid of anything. Shit man, I survived that. You know, you can't kill me. And so that sense of calmness and confidence that he had, to me, is very charismatic. Can you teach it? Well, you can't teach people coming from troubled backgrounds, but you can have a sense of your attention is outer directed. Because as I said, it's, it's a quotient of, of confidence. You can't fake confidence. You can, but people will read through it because it comes just as bravado. It has sort of an emptiness to it. But if you feel inwardly very secure and you're kind of on fire with some idea

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  or some cause that's important to you, and you kind of exude that confidence that I'm talking about, it will communicate as charisma. It may not be on the level of a Kennedy or a Malcolm X, who I think exemplifies charisma, or a Marilyn Monroe, but it will have some of that power to, to it. So it's teachable to that degree, but the really truly powerful charismatic people like a Churchill, et cetera, they're kind of creatures of certain circumstances.

• 1:03:24Speaker 00

  But all the people, except for Marilyn Monroe, all the people that you mentioned, Malcolm X, Churchill, JFK, one was leading America to space. One was trying to save England from Nazi Germany. The other one was trying, was fighting for black rights. Those are all, the, the, to, to play devil's advocate, those are all like the easiest causes ever to rally behind and say, I'm going to dedicate my life to this. So do you find a?

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  I, I, I, I'm sorry, but I disagree with that.

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  Great, that I'm, I'm, I'm prodding here on purpose, but like.

• 1:03:55Speaker 01

  Well, is a prime example. He came from a very bad family background. He was mostly pretty much abandoned and he was, felt completely unloved. And for years, he was in the wilderness. He, during World War One, he had the Gallipoli Campaign, which was a disaster. And he was a man that suffered deeply from bouts of depression. Okay? And so when World War Two came about and when Hitler rose to power, all the qualities that he had were, that, that would make him charismatic were kind of dormant in him. And they just came to life in that particular moment because he had suffered so much politically in his life as well

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  that he was, he could rise to the moment. He had learned so many valuable lessons. So he wasn't just a creature of Hitler, because there were a lot of English leaders at the time, like Chamberlain, who completely failed in that role. There was something about him that was, that was different, that came from within.

• 1:04:59Speaker 00

  But what I'm at, what I'm saying is, are these people, were they, um, did they become great? Like, does a, if I wanted to be more confident, would it be because I was, I am a confident human or I found a cause that was worthy of me becoming that?

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  Well, having a cause is extremely important for, to have that. Because as I said, it kind of creates this radiant thing emanating from you that, that's, that's very, very powerful. But you have to be able to embody that cause and it has to not be something that's just, that doesn't seem opportunistic, like. So, you know, obviously Malcolm X was, was in prison. He was a hustler, a drug dealer. And in prison, he discovers the prison library, which was his salvation. He discovers books and the power. And he researches the history of, of African American oppression in this country. And it comes from within this anger.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  He had tremendous feelings of anger for all that he'd been through in the prison system, growing up in Boston, tremendous wells of anger. And now he was able to draw on this using all that he had learned from history. So it wasn't like he was an opportunist that simply glommed on to the, to the cause of fighting for, for African American rights. It was something deep within him. Churchill, there was something deep within him. I'm bringing up Marilyn Monroe because it's not a cause. It doesn't necessarily have to be a cause, but because it is a quality that actors and people in the limelight can, can exude. And in her case, she was an orphan

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  who never really knew her parents, but who had this tremendous desire, hunger for love. And the only way she could get love was from the public, was from the camera, was from kind of creating this, this neediness in the camera that she wants and is drawing your attention and drawing your love. Is a quality that a lot of actors can have and it's something that some have learned. But in her case, once again, it was a lot, a function of really of where she came from.

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

  Can I ask you, you know, charisma? When somebody says charisma, I think that's a good thing. I want more of that. And what you're saying is two things. You said, well, by far the most charismatic trait is confidence. That's an internal thing, security internally. But then you're saying that a lot of these most charismatic people that you studied, because of their upbringing, they have this outer orientation. They crave the love of others and it pulls them towards this like highly external validation seeking path. And that way charisma, almost in these highly charismatic people, almost seem broken. It's almost like, I wouldn't want that. Actually, that sounds like a, a negative thing. And I shared on this podcast recently

• 1:07:57Speaker 00

  that I, I heard this coach who did this personality test on me. And he, and I scored extremely high, like all my things were really low. And there's one bar that was like over a hundred. And I was like, what is that? And it was narcissism. I was like, oh no, the worst. I'm a narcissist. There's no redeeming part about a narcissist. And he said, well, the way that, what it means in this, to this orientation was that you get very, you believe there's something special about you. You maybe can't put your finger on it and you look to the world to validate that that's true about you. And you, you get that. And you know, I'm like, oh, well, I guess I do have a podcast that's, you know, me basically sitting here showing everybody how smart and funny and interesting I am. I guess that is kind of what's going on every week, twice a week.

• 1:08:42Speaker 00

  So I guess I can't really argue with this idea that like, I guess I do seek some of that. I get high highs when it's validated and low lows when I'm not seen as special. That is true about me. So I guess in that way, it's true. Can you, I guess, is what I said, like, does that resonate with your research and what you believe?

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  First, I mean, um, you know, when the attention leaves you, when, when, when the camera isn't following you, when you're not in power, you're not fighting a Hitler, you know, you, you can get very, very depressed. And obviously Marilyn Monroe committed suicide. Churchill had these, I forget what his name was, Black something or others that he would kind of fall into where he just was deeply, deeply depressed. Kennedy, you know, he, he was, he had a lot of physical ailments. I don't really know, uh, because he died, he was assassinated when he was quite young. But so the idea is you become addicted to the attention and to the need to have a public all the time. And that can be debilitating.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  But you know, a lot of very great people aren't necessarily the nicest people on the planet. And that's, and they're maybe not necessarily the happiest, but they create great things. One of my icons in sports was Kobe Bryant because that guy was, had set levels of determination and persistence, channeling a lot of anger that he had from, probably from his childhood. And, you know, he was just so fierce on the court. And he was probably a difficult person in many ways to be around, although I think later in life, he kind of mellowed a little bit. But I think we have to get over this notion that being great and powerful also makes you a wonderful, loving, kind person.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  Because a lot of very creative people in the arts or in politics or in business get very far, but they're not the nicest people in the world. But so what? Why does everyone have to be these paragons of virtue? Steve Jobs was a raging asshole. He was terrible. He was the worst manager in the world. He learned some lessons later on in life. But, but he was, he was genius at what he did. And we, we need people like that. So we can't just be always looking for the most virtuous, saintly person and elevate them. Because those necessarily aren't people who are going to get anything done in this world.

• 1:11:02Speaker 00

  That's awesome. Is there someone who you look up to where they've checked the checks, all the boxes or many of the boxes where you think that they are a great person and also ethical and I admire them for how they treated their family, things like that? Because we have a lot of great people on here and there are very few people who we are like, I would trade my lives with that person or I admire them as a whole person. Whereas most people, it's like, I like that thing. I like that thing. The rest, I don't need that. And who do you admire the whole of or who, who is the outlier that accomplished the greatness, but was a great being as well?

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it's kind of personal, but I, my former mentee, Ryan Holiday, I very much admire him because he's incredibly successful. He's, he's built this empire. He's a, a very decent, good person. He is, he's has raising a family. He's a great father. And I used, I got him to be my researcher because I saw that he had like a really good character. And so you ally that character with someone who's very smart and ambitious and you've got a really kind of great person. I've been, I've been blessed to be friends

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  with an NBA basketball coach. I hope he doesn't mind me mentioning a Mark Dagono of the Oklahoma City Thunder. They won a championship and two years ago. And the thing about Mark was he's very young. He was in the, he was a G League coach for the Oklahoma City Thunder G League team. He was very successful there. And then he gets offered the head coaching job, which he wasn't really silly wanting because he had a really good job. And to be an NBA coach, you have no idea, because I've talked to him, how insanely stressful that

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  is. Imagine having to lead 15 men, young men, who are making incredible amounts of money, who have their egos, who have their needs, who want all of this attention, who want to be stars, who are thinking of their future. You have to meld them into a team. And he had like three or four, five years where the team sucked and they were like at the bottom of the standings. And yet he had faith and he built the system and he's a very high character person. He's a very decent person who believes in treating his players well, not spoiling them, but treating them well. And I was so gratified to see

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  someone like that, within a very short period of time, reach the pinnacle in sports and winning a championship for a team from Oklahoma City, you know, like, okay, the Lakers, they can buy whoever they want, but you're not gonna buy-

• 1:13:53Speaker 00

  I don't know anything about Mark. Can you tell me the story? What made him special?

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  Well, he, he started out young as a G League coach. He might've been like 30 or something or 31, I don't know. And he's a strategist. So he's very, very intelligent and he's always studying. He's a student of the game and he pays deep attention to where the game is headed towards and what are the, what are the new kind of strategies he can devise. So he's been very, he's very smart and, and he, he's kind of an intellectual type coach in the, in the, in the same stamp as, as Phil Jackson. But at the same time, he's very empathetic and he, he, he is able, because he's young, which helps, he's able

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  to identify with his players. He wasn't like a pro. He played, I believe in the college level. Don't quote me on that. So he, he wasn't a player that could, could bond with his players that way. But he was young enough and he had a deep, deep empathy. He understands the pressures that they have. And so you mix that quality of someone who's social, who understands human beings, who understands human psychology, but is also a brilliant strategist. He created this new way of playing in the NBA that was unheard of, which was all about going for rebounds. I'm not going to get into the weeds here, but instead he loaded all his players up there to get offensive rebounds, which was unheard of because it

• 1:15:25Speaker 01

  was like you're exposing yourself, that kind of counter attack. It was a strategy that now most teams employ. He was ahead of the game. So he's creative, he's strategic, and he's got human, social skills. I wrote a book called Mastery and it's about mastering your career, mastering your profession, reaching that level where you almost don't have to think, where you just have a sense, a fingertip feel for what's going on. Okay. But one of the components in mastery that people have to learn is social skills. You could be brilliant in business or whatever, but if you're horrible with people, it's going to neutralize everything.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  So you get somebody with high analytic skills, technical skills, and you ally that with good social skills. You've got a very, very powerful person. Also, as I said, with somebody with a very good character.

• 1:16:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's awesome. Well, I'm glad you came on. I like having you on the podcast because-

• 1:16:27Speaker 01

  Oh, good.

• 1:16:28Speaker 00

  You're, you're so different than everybody else that we have on the podcast.

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  Also-

• 1:16:32Speaker 00

  Well, many ways. Your pace is different.

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:16:37Speaker 00

  That's like the first thing, because you know, people bring an energy into the podcast before they bring information. I think you bring a different pace of presence, like a gift of presence. Like I, I don't feel like you're anywhere else but here when you're doing this. And that's like something I want to do more of and be more like. I think also, you know, a lot of people who come on the podcast are helping you be successful, but at a certain surface level of life, right? Successful in your work, successful in your business, successful in your, your job. But you kind of go, you know, tap on the shoulder like, hey, come, come down a few levels. There's more to the game than just that. It's a different sort of, it's life wisdom. It's not just sport wisdom. And I think that the

• 1:17:18Speaker 00

  life wisdom, especially this book, this book is interesting to me because I feel like, my honest thing was like, I feel like, nobody even says the word sublime. I don't think there's anybody out there, like if the TAM of people who are searching for a book on sublime is zero, maybe, maybe, maybe three, you know, and they all work for you. And so I think that it's amazing. I, one thing I respect as a artist and also just as a man who just decides like, this matters to me and therefore that's enough. That's something I kind of wish I had more courage of in my life. I think there's always a, a voice in my head that's looking for the, well, the guarantee of some good result if I do all this work. If I handwrite this book for years and transcribe it from notebook to notebook

• 1:18:00Speaker 00

  to edit it, like, I would wish that there's like a, a clear pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. And I just really respect that you did it because you just felt like you were called to do it. There's an artistic courage to doing what you do that I envy and I want and I, you know, so I admire that, that part about what you're doing.

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, a lot of some people are going to be disappointed because they want the 48 Laws of Power, part two. I understand that. It's not the most sellable subject, but my strategy is you write a good book, you put all of effort into it, you have interesting ideas, you try and do something that hasn't been done before, and you will find your audience. And if you don't, then, then screw them. It's their fault. It's not my fault. So, it's my attitude.

• 1:18:53Speaker 00

  There, there was a, I did a podcast with, with the music, music artist, Mike Posner, and he has this great line, which is, because his first songs were mega hits. It was like, I took a pill of Ibiza and cool to me. And so he went like triple platinum. Then his second record was double platinum. Kind of a little, single. And then it was like, no platinum. And then he got shelved. The, the record label was paying him and owned his life, but didn't even want to pay to produce the music. So for years, he wrote songs that then would become Justin Bieber's hit or somebody else's hit. And he was just sitting there, not like, not even out there. And he, as he went through the whole thing and he came out the other side and he's back to having fun making music. He was like, his kind of guiding, like words that he said that stuck with me. He goes, I just make

• 1:19:38Speaker 00

  what's cool to me and sometimes the whole world agrees. And that was enough for him. And I just, I really love that. I think that's just such a better attitude than I think the default mode that most people have when they want to go make hits.

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  Well, you, you, you either have one or two patches you can do. You could write for what the market says will be the most marketable and lucrative, or you can write for what will satisfy you and, and what you need to express. Now, if, I believe that if you do something that you need to express and you feel very deeply like it's something I have to communicate, and a lot of books are written nowadays that don't have that, I believe that sense of purpose behind them. If you have a reason for writing or, or creating music, it will find an audience because the level of excitement and pleasure you feel will translate to the listeners, I believe. Maybe you won't go triple platinum, but

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  you'll go probably platinum or something like that. So that's always been my guiding philosophy to listen to myself. And as I'm listening to myself, to then think about my readers and how I'm going to connect to them on using the subject of the sublime kind of thing.

• 1:20:50Speaker 00

  Well, thanks for coming back, man. We, we're big fans. So I agree. This is always a, a nice change of pace and, and it sort of feels like we're in a good type of class whenever we talk to you, you know, you definitely, we, we, almost like mentor vibes. And so we appreciate you kind of letting us learn from you for a little while.

• 1:21:09Speaker 01

  Well, I, I love it. I really enjoy it. Thank you so much for inviting me. I, I'm, I'm very honored.

• 1:21:15Speaker 00

  That's it. That's the pod.

• 1:21:27Speaker 00

  All right, my friends, I have a new podcast for you guys to check out. It's called Content is Profit and it's hosted by Luis and Fonzie Camayo. After years of building content teams and frameworks for companies like Red Bull and Orange Theory Fitness, Luis and Fonzie are on a mission to bridge the gap between content and revenue. In each episode, you're going to hear from top entrepreneurs and creators and you're going to hear them share their secrets and strategies to turn their content into profit. So you can check out Content is Profit wherever you get your podcasts.