#1068 Robert Greene On Power, Seduction, War, and Human Nature

Robert Greene is the author of "The 48 Laws Of Power", "The 50th Law Of Power", "Mastery", and "The Laws Of Human Nature" In this conversation, we go deep into Robert's mind, including how he thinks of nature, social media, and where the world is headed. ======================= Exodus is leading the world out of the traditional financial system by building beautiful and user-friendly blockchain products. With its focus on design and user experience, Exodus has become one of the most popular and loved cryptocurrency apps. It’s supported on both desktop and mobile, allowing you to sync your wallet across multiple devices so you can have access to your funds anywhere. You can instantly exchange around 100 different cryptocurrencies straight from your wallet. Interactive charts let you view an asset’s price history and your portfolio’s performance over time. And maybe the best part, Exodus is integrated with the Trezor hardware wallet - making advanced security easy for everyone. Visit exodus.com/pomp for your free download or search Exodus on the App Store or Playstore. ======================= The Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep is the most advanced solution on the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking. Even better? Eight Sleep recently launched the next generation of the Pod. The new Pod 3 enables more accurate sleep and health tracking with double the amount of sensors, delivering you the best sleep experience on Earth. Go to eightsleep.com/pomp to start sleeping cool this Summer and save $150 on the Pod. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. ======================= If you’re trying to grow and preserve your crypto-wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative as trying to find the next hidden gem. Alto IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax-advantaged ways to help you preserve your hard earned money. Alto CryptoIRA lets you invest in more than 200 different coins and tokens with all the same tax advantages of an IRA. They make it easy to fund your Alternative IRA or CryptoIRA via your 401(k) or IRA rollover or by contributing directly from your bank account. There are no setup or account fees, and it’s all you need to do to invest in crypto tax free. Let me repeat that again: You can invest in crypto tax free. So, ready to take your investments to the next level? Diversify like the pros and trade without tax headaches. Open an Alto CryptoIRA to invest in crypto tax-free. Just go to https://altoira.com/pomp =======================

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Robert Greene is one of the bestselling authors in history. He's wrote in great books like The Forty-Eight Laws of Power, The Fiftieth Law of Power, Mastery, and The Laws of Human Nature. In this conversation, we go deep into Robert's mind, how he thinks about human nature, social media, and where the world is headed. I really enjoyed this conversation with Robert, and I hope that you all enjoy it as well. Today's episode is brought to you by Exodus, the world's leading desktop, mobile, and hardware crypto wallet. They offer beautiful, user-friendly blockchain products that sync across all of your devices, making it easier to send, receive, and exchange over 150 or

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:32Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:14Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:57Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:42Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:49Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 4:12Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, ladies and gentlemen, I've got Robert here with me. Robert, one of the key things in a number of your books and interviews is nonverbal communication. We obviously live in a digital age. Many people who listen to this podcast, they are very excited about the digital world, whether it be Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, whether it's other kind of digital products, or even things as kind of forward looking as the metaverse, whatever that ends up being. How do you see nonverbal communication playing out in a world where we may not be able to see each other's real faces, or see body language in the same way that we could if you and I sat down at a coffee shop?

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Well, you know, the great things about the digital world, and as we were talking before, I love the whole podcasting environment, but there are real dangers in this. I mean, if you think about the human animal as it evolved over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, a lot of who we are, a lot of how our brain developed is an interpersonal communication. Well, before language was written, we learned to pay attention to other people, to their body language, to the signals they gave off, and we could read their behavior. I have this belief, and other people have written the same, that our early ancestors before, maybe even before language was invented, had almost telepathic abilities to understand the thoughts

• 5:35Speaker 02

  of the people in their group, in their tribe. Their very survival depended on these nonverbal cues that they were picking up. And so our brains are developed for that. They're developed for learning from a person, a master, for learning how to make a tool, for learning how to play an instrument, a language, etc., from that person-to-person contact, and picking up the cues that aren't verbal. And so, so much, someone has estimated that 95% of human communication is nonverbal. You're not necessarily conscious of it, but if you thought about it deeply, if you looked at yourself in the course of a day in the office

• 6:18Speaker 02

  or wherever you are, you're constantly picking up cues about people. It's registering either on the conscious level, on the slightly unconscious level, or even unconsciously. You're picking up their energy, their degree of security, their insecurities, their weaknesses, their strengths, etc. You're continually monitoring them.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  But the problem is, is that this is a language that has to be learned and developed. It's like a muscle that you use. And when you spend a lot of your time in the virtual digital world, you're losing that power, you're losing that ability. Yes, you can pick up cues like people watching me now can read Robert's nonverbal behavior and come up with negative or positive feedback based on that. But it's not the same as in person, picking up people's energy, picking up the things that you can't get virtually on a screen. And so, when you, you know, back a couple hundred years ago,

• 7:24Speaker 02

  just put yourself back in that, in those days, for instance, in the early 19th century, you had no other forms of entertainment. There was no television, obviously, no internet. The only thing you had is maybe theater, et cetera, or music. The main form of entertainment was interacting with people, with social interactions. That was what you did in order to entertain yourself, to get rid of your boredom or whatever. And so you spent most of your time dealing with people and you became extremely sensitive to them. And so I tell people that you're actually damaging something. You're learning, you're using, you're letting a tool that's extremely valuable in any realm, in business or wherever,

• 8:08Speaker 02

  you're letting it go to waste by not practicing this, by spending too much time locked in your phone and you're not like dealing with people and learning this language. And in the laws of human nature, I have a chapter on nonverbal communication. And I could have written an entire book on it, not all books have written on it, but things like posture, tone of voice, the way the eyes move, how a fake smile or a real smile, whether people are genuinely interested in you or they're faking it, whether they want to see you or they don't really want to see. These are all things that you don't get from people's words, but you get from their nonverbal communication. So your task in the modern world is what I often say is you have to swim against the current.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  And if the current is pushing you to have less and less interpersonal reactions, interactions, you have to try and do the opposite. You have to try and go out more. You have to go out to bars or clubs or wherever, wherever you can meet people. And actually develop, redevelop this skill that you had probably when you were three or four years old, but is lying there kind of fallow and needs to develop it. So that's sort of my take on that.

• 9:19Anthony Pompliano?

  As you kind of extrapolate that out, obviously, the rise of social media and technology, there's many people would argue that's been a net positive, right? A company like a Facebook or a Twitter allows people to share ideas. It allows for people to learn. It allows for families to reconnect or old friends. And then you can kind of go off of the social media platforms, other pieces of technology that have definitely had a positive impact. But it sounds like you're making a nuanced argument, which is although there are very many positive impacts of that technology, one of the downsides, or maybe one of the steps backward for society, is that we spend less time face to face with that human interaction. Is that okay? Because there's a positive impact from the technology and, you know, not everything

• 10:03Anthony Pompliano?

  is 100% good. Or do you think that actually society would be better off maybe without some of the social media platforms or kind of the activities that people do on their phones every day?

• 10:13Speaker 02

  Well, imagine this, imagine you didn't have your access to all these things that you have. And the human animal is made so that we need constant stimulation. Our brains are continually needing things to feed on to process. And so if you don't have your phone, you don't have your computer, you're left on your own, what are you going to do? You're going to become extremely creative with what, with your time, with how you've, you're going to find ways to entertain yourself, often in a group situation. And I remember when I was a child, I'm not trying to sound like I'm a Luddite or anything. I'm just answering your question as best I can. But the fact that, you know, I, we had television and of course, that was a big thing

• 10:57Speaker 02

  because I grew up, I'm so old, I grew up in the sixties and the seventies. But mostly, you had to make up your own games. You had to constantly create things to keep yourself from being continually bored. And that kind of develops the mind, it develops your imagination in a very positive way. And I remember back in the early years of the internet, which, you know, strangely enough, is like some twenty years ago, where it had more of that, that kind of interactive possibilities than it, than it comes since then. So I remember, for instance, like on Amazon, something that was really exciting to me was I would look for a particular book and then it would suggest other books, which it

• 11:41Speaker 02

  still does, but it would also suggest communities of people that you could interact with who also were fans of this book or might be interested in this kind of subject. I thought this was great and I was actually connecting to people, I even made some friends, people who, who were like Nietzsche fanatics like I am, or particular forms of philosophy, et cetera. And soon, Amazon got rid of that because the, um, the algorithms, something like that isn't making any money for Amazon and the need to continually generate profit made it so that everything was, was designed for, for selling things. And so, excuse me, thank you.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  And so, um, uh, so, you know, people, that kind of interpersonal thing where you could create a community of like-minded people and connect is something that's been degraded over the years and it's turned into, into something else in a way. And I think people are kind of hungry for more real human interaction. I, I'm sensing this in Gen Z, in, in young people who are, who are growing up now, that they're a little bit tired. weary of the hours that they're being sucked into things like Instagram, which I, you know, I, I use quite a bit. I'm at fault as well. I, I think it found me, I'm very seductive.

• 13:05Speaker 02

  But I think they're hungry for something a little more real, a little more experiential, a little more interactive and interpersonal. And I think actually that is the future. Combining the immense powers of the digital world, which we all know and appreciate and love, with something a little more personal and human, where you use this immense tool for something where you know, okay, we now can create a group and we can get, we can meet people, you know? But, you know, the, the thing that's revolutionized my life to, to highlight the positive aspect is in just in, if I have some idea, like I'm researching a story about a particular man,

• 13:49Speaker 02

  who there are not many books written about for my new book. And I can just go on Google and to put his name in with like two other words of a subject that he's interested in. And all these things pop up. It's insane. It's the kind of thing that would like a Leonardo da Vinci would have like just gone crazy over. The powers of it are absolutely immense. But it, it could be used, I think, sometimes for better purposes. That's my only point.

• 14:17Anthony Pompliano?

  What is your process for writing? Your, your, your use of the technology over the years has obviously changed. If I understand correctly, probably in your mid thirties or so is when you pitched your first book. You've written seven of them since. You're now working on your eighth. What does that process look like today when you go to write a book?

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Well, it's not very sexy. I can tell you that. Basically, I, I have a subject that obviously, you know, human nature, I'm writing a book now on a subject that I call the sublime, that I think a lot of my readers understand because I've talked a lot about it. And that part of the process is, is very exciting. It's like I fling the doors wide open. And I try and read as many books on the subject as possible. Now, back in the day when I started in the dark ages of the late 1990s, I would literally go to a library, if you can believe it.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  Like, we have one really great library in Los Angeles, at UCLA, the university here. And I would scour the bookshelves. And it was actually really fun and exciting. Because I would, you know, like in Forty Eight Laws of Power, I had an interest in con artists, and charlatans, and swindlers, which is a major theme in the Forty Eight Laws. And I would go to the show where there was one book on the great con artist Yellow Kid Vile, who I wrote a lot about in the Forty Eight Laws. There'd be all these other books about charlatans, and con artists, etc. And it just would open up to me, and it was so exciting. And I, obviously, I don't go to libraries now.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  I do a lot of my research on the internet, through Amazon, through Abebooks, or through other internet searches. And you get some of that quality in the library. But some of the serendipitous element, where you come upon a book you would have never thought about, is kind of missing, and I wish I had more of that. But I've been doing research for so many years, that I'm kind of, I'm really good at it, I kind of know how to do this. So I read hundreds of books on a subject.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  I read a book, I take notes in the margins. If you saw my books, it would look like I'm sane. I'm writing little notes to myself, little stars next to this, underlining that, saying, you know, "Fuck you" for something I really hate, or whatever. And making, you know, different colors, etc. And then, a month later, I go back to the book, and I put it on note cards. And I divide up each of the things that are in that book into themes. And I create maybe twenty or thirty cards per book. And then slowly, I compile them in a kind of a shoebox. So as you, this part of it is very analog, very undigital, I'm afraid.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  I put it in a shoebox, and slowly it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. It's kind of exciting, it's like some organic thing that's growing, this monster that's growing and growing and growing. And then suddenly, you've got like five hundred, a thousand cards. It's almost filling a shoebox, and go, "All right, fun's over, Robert. You gotta organize this material." And I go through and I see the themes in there and I start creating chapters based on that. So in the laws of human nature, I saw certain basic themes were kind of emerging from the cards, like irrationality, like narcissism, like shortsightedness, like envy. And I would create these chapter headings and I would slip the cards into them.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  And then months later, I'd have this, to me, it's almost like, for me, it's exciting. It's almost like a work of art. The, um, suddenly this mass of material turns into these definite categories with chapters and headings and everything. And the book is there. And then it frees me up. I don't have to remember months later that some persons had this quote in the 19th century that's exciting. It's there in my card. I, you know, I don't have to stress my memory system, which as you get older, it gets weaker and weaker. And so right now I'm in the process of writing my book and I'm using all of my note cards. And, um, it kind of tells me what to do now, now that I have

• 18:36Speaker 02

  all of the themes there. But I have to leave, this is a lesson I tell people in any creative endeavor. You have to leave some room for, for discovery, for having some fun and adventure. If I made it too rigid a system where everything was spelled out before I wrote the book, I personally would get bored. And if the writer is bored, the reader is going to get bored. That's rule number one of writing anything good. If you're excited, generally you will communicate it to the reader if you, if you learn how to write to some degree. So I have to be excited. So I leave myself some wiggle room. I'm still discovering as I'm writing a chapter, I'm still coming up with new ideas.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  And so I'm, it's, I'm, I'm kind of creating it as I go. But it's this kind of organic weird piece of yeast or whatever that's growing and growing and growing. And I'm shaping it, shaping it. And it's, it's exciting, but it's also a lot of hard tedious work involved.

• 19:36Anthony Pompliano?

  When you're reading the books in preparation to write the book or as part of the research process, do you read books kind of front cover to back cover and read every word? Do you skim through them? Are you looking just kind of for themes? And then if something catches your eye, you'll dig deeper into it? How do you kind of approach? You have to read so many books to do this. What does that process on a book by book basis look like?

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Well, it's very easy to answer that. If it's a great book, and I'd say maybe 10% to 20% are great books, I might be inflating a little bit. I read every word. I'm so excited. This is like what I live for. It's like discovering a gold mine for me. I'll read everything. And a great book will turn into 40 or 50 cards. If I'm reading a mediocre book, which is unfortunately the majority of them, I won't read so deeply. I'll kind of skim. I'll go, this is crap. This is stupid. This is not, this is irrelevant. I just skip to the relevant parts and it'll yield maybe 20 cards. And then there's a plethora of

• 20:40Speaker 02

  bad books out there, which I've wasted money on. And that's where I'm writing in the notes, God, you're an idiot, et cetera, et cetera. And the margins are even crossing whole parts of the book out. And then, you know, I'll get maybe three or four cards out of it and I will really skim that quickly. So it depends on the quality of the work and the depth of people's ideas. If I sense it's challenging my mind, I have to think or to understand what they've written, and it's challenging me in a good way, I'll read every word of it. But if I feel like this person knows a hell of a lot less than me, and I'm not challenged, I'll go through it pretty quickly.

• 21:23Anthony Pompliano?

  When you're consuming this information, obviously, reading books, somebody's taking the time, they've put their ideas down, they've edited, they've tried to make it as concise and clear as possible. But in this new digital world, we have audiobooks, we have podcasts, we have YouTube and many other forms of content. How much of it, your research and process is still rooted in books versus maybe some of the other forms where you may go listen to someone on a podcast or watch a YouTube video to do some of the research?

• 21:49Speaker 02

  I don't really do research that way. I'm pretty much books and occasionally articles and internet, things I find digitally.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  But mostly it's through books. I'm old school that way. I'm looking for ideas. You know, I'm an idea hunter. You know, people back in the days, they would hunt for various animals. I'm hunting for interesting, weird, novel ideas that I think are going to shake the reader up and really excite them in a way, something they haven't thought about before. And so I don't find, if I'm watching a podcast and, you know, I watch all I watch like Jordan Peterson's podcasts or Joe Rogan's, it goes by so quickly, I can't think about it enough. I'll take some notes. But then what I need to do, if I take some notes on something that Jordan Peterson has said,

• 22:43Speaker 02

  I have to go find a book that's about that. I can't, I have to read something before me. And that's a weakness of mine. Probably in the future, people will be more used to finding these great ideas on the internet, but I need to have a material thing in front of me. I mean, I also use Kindle as well, but I need a material thing in front of me that I can underline and that I can go back to. And if I were smart and savvy in my twenties, I would figure out how to watch a YouTube video and take little clips and compile them and then turn that into some kind of written format. But I'm afraid I'm not, I'm not young enough to be able to figure all that out. So I'm mostly a book person, I'm afraid.

• 23:26Anthony Pompliano?

  You mentioned that you're an idea hunter and I think that's an interesting concept. Tell me more about that and how you think of hunting for the idea.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  Well, you know, we live in a world that's full of so many facts and so much data. It overwhelms you, right? And it overwhelms me. And I'm not interested in learning a bunch of facts and things about the economy, about where we're headed, about the war with Russia and Ukraine. I'm interested in what it means in the higher level picture. So for instance, in my war book, which is kind of a sort of an important book for me, one of my less popular books, but it was very meaningful for me. I write about grand strategy and the idea of strategy, strategic thinking or grand strategic thinking is to continually elevate your mind, to not get mired in the day-to-day things

• 24:17Speaker 02

  that people are telling you, in the little battles going on around you, what people are saying on the internet or in the office, but looking for what's behind it. What's the meta idea there? What's really governing these things that are happening before our eyes? Kind of like, it's sort of like Plato's metaphor in the cave, where you're seeing these passing shadows and they're not really real. And so a lot of this data and stuff we're getting isn't connecting to reality. You have to think about it on a higher level. What does this mean? Who is connecting the dots? And a lot of times, the great, incredibly smart people out there who are connecting the dots, for me, for instance, on various subjects.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  And when I come upon an article like that in some great magazine or online magazine, I'm extremely excited and I take note of that. And then I go through a process where I take ideas and I try to make them my own. I put my little spin on them. I make them, I try and turn them into something that's more relevant to what I'm writing about or what I'm thinking about. And so sometimes, so for instance, I'm writing right now about this man that nobody, as I mentioned, has heard of. His name is Gurdjieff. He's this Armenian-Russian kind of weird philosopher, mystic. And I read in his book, something about called, this exercise called self-remembering.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  I go, whoa, that's really weird. That's really interesting. I've never heard of that before. It excited me because I'd never heard of it and it also seemed like it was something that was potentially very interesting for my readers, an exercise that I could then develop out of it. And so I see a line like that where I go, I've never heard of that before. And it's linked to something larger, right? It's got a higher level perspective. So it's like climbing up a mountain. When you're at the bottom of the mountain, you have no idea what things are like on the ground. You have no perspective. If you go halfway up the mountain and you look down, you now have a kind of a perspective about

• 26:27Speaker 02

  what's going on there, but you're missing part of the picture. You get to the top of the mountain, you have this 360 degree view of everything. You have a complete perspective. And what you thought was reality halfway down the mountain or at the bottom, you end up realizing is false. So I'm looking for people who take me up that mountain, take me to the top of the mountain and maybe see things that I've never seen before. So, you know, that's some of what I'm talking about here.

• 26:54Anthony Pompliano?

  What's fascinating to me is you described yourself as a little bit of old school and you focus on books for part of your research. But I know that podcasts and YouTube have played a very big part in you marketing yourself and your books, not necessarily from a desire to simply market them, but that's where you've had, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of conversations. That's where you've learned a lot from an experienced standpoint. Talk a little bit about the importance of these new forms of media, maybe compared to the mainstream media that was available before podcasts or YouTube got popular.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  Well, that's, that's what, that's the greatest thing for me about the internet for me personally, and I'm extremely in love with it. So as we were talking about earlier, back in the days when I was starting, and then the late 90s, you know, it was mainstream media. You would go on a television show, like I'd be on the O'Reilly Factor or on this business show, I can't even, Power Lunch with this guy, I can't even remember, on CNBC. And it was very impersonal and very, not very pleasant. Like, I remember the first time I was on live television. I thought I was waiting to be guillotined or something. I'm sitting there in the green room, like, god damn it, the whole world is, a whole country's gonna be watching me live. And what if I say something stupid?

• 28:14Speaker 02

  Or what if I've got something dangling out of my nose? How awful is that? I was terrified. And then you're like on the spot. You're facing this person who's like media trained, who's wearing tons of makeup. They've got this kind of weird doll-like expression on their face. And they're interviewing in this rapid-fire manner. You're having to be in the moment. It's so inhuman and it's so not what, you know, somebody who likes to think and give detailed answers for. It's just a bad fit. It didn't fit me at all. And so somewhere around 2006, 2007, 2008, when the whole podcasting world was just kind of in gestation, really. And I remember some of the first ones, you know, we would do it on Skype, et cetera.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  I got really excited because here, instead of some idiot on some TV show who's just, who's just like a face, who's never read your book, because they just have notes from some assistant, who kind of condenses it into two pages full of inaccuracies. They didn't even have your birth date right, et cetera. Here, I'm talking to somebody. I can't remember the first guy I remember, but he was really interesting guy. He was like, what we call a transhumanist, whatever that means. I remembered very well. He was like my first podcast. And he like had read my book. He was asking me detailed questions. It was clear that, you know, maybe he didn't like everything I said, but he had read it.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  Wow, what a novel idea. Somebody's actually read the book that's interviewing you. And it was like personal, you know? He, we were looking at each other in the eye. We could, I could talk for several minutes. I could answer him. I loved it. I fell in love with that, that moment. And from then on. There's no looking back, you know? And it gives the author a degree of control. So I can now reach hundreds, thousands, millions of people around the world. And since things like Instagram and TikTok have taken off and YouTube, man, the power is just unbelievable. So I can take videos like from this podcast and others, and I can, you know, put them on my own platforms.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  So last in June, my wife and I, we were in London. And people, this had never happened to me before. People were coming up to me. They actually recognized me in London, you know, like security guards at museums, et cetera. And they were very excited. They saw my podcast. It opens you up to this worldwide audience that is just fantastic. And I love every aspect of it. And I'm very grateful that I'm able to have experienced both worlds. Because people who were born nowadays or just starting out, they don't understand how ugly, depressing and demeaning it was back in the days of mainstream media. And people who only lived back in mainstream media,

• 31:07Speaker 02

  they only had that horrible experience of people like you're like being interrogated on this live show. But I have kind of bridged the two. And I know there's no going back. This is a beautiful ecosystem out there.

• 31:20Anthony Pompliano?

  What's fascinating about this is that I think in America, the cable network kind of subscriber base is somewhere between 65 and 75 million people, which seems like a very large number, tens of millions. But YouTube's monthly active users globally is over 1.8 billion. And so when you compare those two, it's just not even anywhere near the reach and scale, both geographically, but also just aggregate audience size that you're targeting.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  It's unbelievable. And it's exploding now. In the last three or four years, it's kind of taken this exponential growth with through YouTube and Instagram and TikTok, where now, you know, your little video clips are reaching, as opposed to a podcast that would reach thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, you're now reaching millions, maybe even some people, billions of people around the world, you know? I'm getting messages on Instagram from people from India, Pakistan, Iran, et cetera, who are looking at these video clips. The sense of power is incredible and you can almost get a little bit drunk on it. You have to be a little bit careful. You have to realize you have a responsibility to kind of say things that are meaningful and

• 32:35Speaker 02

  realistic and realize that with this kind of power comes a degree of responsibility. But it's absolutely insane and if nobody living 50 years ago, a writer or an entertainer, could ever imagine that they could have this potential reach for their product. And so that's probably the, as I said a hundred times, it's the best thing for me personally about the digital age and I'm completely addicted to that part.

• 33:06Anthony Pompliano?

  What we're talking about to some degree here is a transition or an evolution in trust, right? Your attention goes where kind of your trust is. And so now, whether I listen to a podcast or I listen to the mainstream media, I'm still consuming information, usually around ideas, current events and individuals. And so we can see anecdotally in our day to day time spent that that trust is shifting. We also know from surveys and various other kind of data sources that institutions are losing trust with both people here in America, but also globally. How do you think about that evolution? Is that a positive development? Is that a negative?

• 33:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Should we try to reverse course and drive more trust back to the institutions? Or is this a healthy situation that's kind of unfolding?

• 33:57Speaker 02

  It's very healthy. I mean, if the institutions reflected reality, if they reflected who we are, if there was some kind of connection to our daily lives, then you know, maybe we should flow back to that kind of trust. But that's not the reality that we live in. I've been reading from researching for my new book. I read a couple of very interesting books. One of them is called, I believe, Deep History. I can't remember if that's the exact title. But what he's trying to show is that, because in my new book, I'm going a lot into the neuroscience of the human brain, is that

• 34:32Speaker 02

  Our brains are basically very chemically oriented. And we have these kind of hormonal impulses and charges and electrical charges passing through our brain continually. And humans since time has begun searching for ways to kind of control the chemical environment of their own brains. They did that in the past through ingesting certain drugs, which has deep history among humans going back thousands of years. They had rituals that they would go through in which they would challenge themselves. They would almost go near death and change their own brain chemistry and have ecstatic experiences. Or they had religion.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  But this element of being able to alter your own brain chemistry is something that has been used also for other purposes by people in power to kind of create ways of programming you, of programming your thoughts, of telling you what to think, how to think, what is true, what is real. And it's been a very dangerous thing throughout history. It's sort of the history of dictatorships and fascists and someone like a Hitler or Joseph Stalin took that power to an incredible degree. And today, that kind of negative suggestibility power that is built into the way the human brain is now, our chemistry is so susceptible to being influenced either actively or

• 35:58Speaker 02

  passively. The powers are both very positive and very, very negative and very dangerous. And so, there's a reason not to trust a lot of these platforms. You know, things like Facebook or Instagram, they're based on algorithms and things that are manipulating, that are manipulating how you think, how you feel. They're programming for you material, content. And when they program it, they're literally programming your mind, they're making you think of what they want you to think about. You need to take control of that, and you have the power to control, to take control

• 36:39Speaker 02

  of that through what you're saying now that you have access to all these different podcasts, to all these different sources of information. And so you don't have to follow the large, you know, institutions and conglomerates and giant tech corporations that are trying to program your world and trying to program how you think. And I'm not trying to sound like I'm some insane conspiracy theorist because that's not where I'm coming from. It's more like you're not aware to what degree they're feeding you material and that you're not actually in control of this process. And so just to this extent that you can choose what you listen to and you can have a degree of cynicism and distrust and go, where is this person talking from?

• 37:24Speaker 02

  Is Robert Greene actually being paid by some third party that we don't know about? He's trying to tell us something. Let me research. Let me find out if Anthony's show is legitimate or if there's something behind it. Do your research. Don't be so naive. Don't be so trusting. And I think it's a very, very healthy development in that way.

• 37:44Anthony Pompliano?

  As you think about programming or being misled, consuming content that's kind of fed to you, whether it's doom scrolling on the internet or it is kind of cable network television, one of the ideas that has become very popular from folks like Elon Musk and many others is this idea of the brain-computer interface, kind of the ability to use computational power embedded into the brain and augment human intelligence. Given that you spent so much time thinking about human nature and now you're writing a book about kind of neuroscience and some of the ways that the brain actually functions, how do you think through augmentation of the brain with something like these brain-computer interfaces or other types of technology that people may want to at some point incorporate?

• 38:28Speaker 02

  Well, it's very interesting. I'm actually writing a chapter on that very subject right now. So it's very close to my mind at this point. Basically, my idea, and you can believe it or not, is that we are actually not realizing, just we're only realizing in our day to day lives, a tiny portion of the power of our brains, of human consciousness. We have so much, we have incredible potential for so much more. We're essentially not really using our, what our brains could be doing. And so I'm looking into various experiments in ways that people have learned to kind of

• 39:10Speaker 02

  open their minds, to expand their thinking process, to expand what their senses take in, to expand every, to expand that potential. I'm, I'm saying that in my book, I'm comparing the human mind and our experience to this kind of circle, this, you know, a certain dimension. And we live inside that circle. And inside that circle is all the rules and conventions and ways we're supposed to behave and ways we're supposed to think that we consider to be reality and we consider to be socially acceptable. And that circle can get narrower and narrower and narrower, depending on the culture and the times that you're living in. And right now it can get pretty damn narrow. And so you want to be pushing you outside of that circle.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  You want to be having thoughts that people aren't thinking about. You want to be coming up with ideas that no one has thought of yet. You want to have experiences that are new, that are expanding. Because that is what human destiny is. That's why we have this insane instrument, which is human consciousness. It's unbelievable. If you study the details of the human brain, it'll absolutely astound you. It is by far the most complicated. It, it, it far surpasses what any computer ever invented or will ever invent, the powers that we have in this one brain. Now, as far as augmenting it through technology, that would be fantastic.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  The thing that I am most emphatic about though, is the difference between active and passive energy. Right? So it's true that ingesting drugs can give you that expansive experience. And I had that in my early twenties. I admit it, I've talked about it before. I experimented a lot with, with psychedelic drugs, instead of mostly mescaline and peyote.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  And that, but it's kind of a passive thing. It's sort of something that happens to you. And then you don't know really what to do with it. But to the degree that you make this expanding process active, where you're exercising your brain, where day in and day out, you're training your senses to look at the, to see the world literally in different ways, to look at light and color and shapes and people in ways you never thought of before. Through that exercise, it becomes something that's active, that you control, and your mind can slowly expand. But if you're just passively clicking on something, if somebody has programmed for you a way to kind of do this, and you're not actively engaged in it, then I don't find it as valuable.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  And right now, um, so I'm doing a lot of stroke therapy because I had a stroke four years ago, nearly died from it. And it's a very painful process, can't really walk very well. I do hours of therapy every day. And I've learned that the difference between active and passive is huge. So they create these devices or these surgeries or things that they, people promise you will, will suddenly reverse the effects of your stroke. And I've wasted thousands and thousands of dollars on these things, and they're useless. But when they're active, when they make you actually exercise every single day, an hour a day with your foot, your arm, your fingers, they're powerful, they're incredibly powerful.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  So you want to make your minds active. And if there are, and I've had some of these technological devices, and some of them are very interesting and potentially could be great. But that's, that's where the, to me, the difference lies. Are they engaging us actively in a process where we are able to kind of slowly change how we think, slowly change how we look at the world? Or are they, are we being fed this material? I don't know if that makes any sense.

• 42:51Anthony Pompliano?

  It makes a ton of sense. You've obviously studied human nature. You studied the way that people interact, communicate, both verbally and non-verbally. You also are now studying the brain. But I find it fascinating. Some of the people that you've spent time with, that you've worked with, or surrounded yourself with. One of the individuals that I think surprised people initially was 50 Cent. You even wrote a book with him, The 50th Law. Talk a little bit about why somebody who comes from the hip-hop world and you get together and write a book. What drew you to him? Or why was it kind of a friendship right out of the gate that ended up leading to doing some business together and writing the book?

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Well, I can tell you it was never planned. It was kind of a serendipitous thing, which I'm extremely grateful for. So I didn't write the book intending it to be something so popular in the hip-hop world. But when I found out, like in the early 2000s, that people like Jay-Z were starting to quote it, I got very, very excited because I've always been someone who's extremely been attracted to African-American culture. It's been, it's a deep part of me, the films, and particularly the music. And I have a particular relationship to hip-hop, where I lived in Brooklyn in the early 80s, kind of just when hip-hop was starting out. And I saw it and saw the roots of it, and I saw some performances.

• 44:13Speaker 02

  And I got hooked in it, and I really loved it. It was amazing. So seeing that connection to the hip-hop world was very exciting for me, much more exciting than than people on Wall Street who were reading the book. And so in around 2005, I believe, or 2006, 50 contacted me through through an intermediary, and he wanted to meet. And I had no idea why he wanted to meet or what this was for. And it was, I was actually a bit nervous because, you know, I'm this, as you can tell, this nerdy white guy, middle-class kid from Los Angeles. I don't really have the background that he has. He's a kind of an intimidating presence. I was a little bit nervous, but I'm very open to new experiences if you know

• 44:58Speaker 02

  anything about me, and I'll try. Anything new or different or weird. So I flew out to New York. I met him in the back room of a steakhouse in early, I believe, two thousand and six. He was with his entourage and I was by himself. I was by myself. It was like something out of a movie or like The Godfather in this, in this private room in the back of a steakhouse. And I just remember the incredible bling that he had. He was with there with his son Marquis. And the two of them had these, these diamond bracelets that were just, the bling was just unbelievable. I'd never seen anything like it, never seen anything like it since. And I was also very impressed by him. He wasn't what I expected and I wasn't what he expected.

• 45:43Speaker 02

  He expected this kind of old grisly Henry Kissinger type guy who knows all about power. And I'm not really like that. I'm more friendly and approachable. And he wasn't this intimidating thug. He was actually very smart, very thoughtful, very calm, very friendly, very engaging. And I, we took to each other immediately. And one thing I've always, I've said on prior podcasts is I never have a feeling like I fit into any world. I've had this feeling since I was a kid. Like, you know, I'm in high school and you're supposed to be, you know, either you're, you're either a football player or you're, you're a nerd going to university or you're fitting in this group or that.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  I never fit into any category and I never felt like comfortable in this particular group or that particular group. I always was attracted to people who were very different from me. So I was interested in, in the parts of my high school, the kids who were from the wrong side of the tracks, who were doing drugs, who maybe were even involved in some kind of semi criminal things. I was attracted to that dark side, right? Or to some people who were very different. So to have somebody like this, who comes from a completely opposite world than me, be interested in me and maybe we could write a book together, which was sort of what we came out of that meeting with, was very exciting. Because the problem in America, if I get on my soapbox here for a minute,

• 47:11Speaker 02

  is we live in, we live with these kind of walled cultures, you know, there's people in academia, there's people in business, there's people in entertainment, there's people in, in media, et cetera. And they never kind of cross boundaries. And that also includes different cultures, et cetera. And I'm always interested in actually the opposite, in what I can make connections. So what 50 and I have in common, not what we have that's different about us. You know, it's obvious what we have different about us. But what we have in common is a way of thinking about the world that is very strategic. I learned from him that being able to overcome fears is the source of this power. And I've always been someone who's tried to experiment with risk and getting over any kind of fear that I had.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  So we connected on this higher level, the level of ideas, to go back to what we were talking before. And I thought, how exciting to get away from all the bullshit of the categories of, you know, you write a book about this and you're not supposed to meet these kinds of people. Let's get rid of all those walls. Let's put our two brains together, our two lives together, and write a book about something that's very powerful and timeless, which is the power of overcoming all of your different fears in life. It was one of the greatest experiences I've ever been through because for six months I was immersed in his world. I went to South Side, Queens, where he grew up. I met the people that he was dealing drugs with, his oldest friend, the house he grew up in.

• 48:40Speaker 02

  I went to his house in Connecticut, which is, used to be Mike Tyson's house, a really strange house, it's more like a hotel, very interesting, very weird. I hung out with him in New York and all of his businesses. I went to Las Vegas with him and went to various meetings. And then I went to a party at Floyd Mayweather Jr.'s house with 50, his entourage. It was, it was like a mad adventure, you know, it was fantastic. It was one of the highlights of my life. So hopefully the book that came out of it, people appreciate it because I think it's a very good book.

• 49:10Anthony Pompliano?

  As I hear that story, one of the things that Amelia jumps to mind is that so many people from his life, or kind of where he came from, he claims that they already were implementing some of the things that he read in the 48 Laws of Power. They just didn't have, I think he says, the technical definitions of them, or the technical terminology, but they were already naturally doing that. Which begs the question, how much of kind of the street Culture that some of the folks from the hip hop community come from was just nurture versus nature. How much is it they just learned because they saw other people doing certain things and they picked it up and it was human nature and naturally they end up

• 49:52Anthony Pompliano?

  in the same place as you having written the book and studied it versus no, there is some innate component to it that maybe isn't so easy to identify until you really study it and understand kind of how this stuff comes together.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  Well, there are two things. There's being a hustler on the streets and having kind of a feral sense, a wild sense of what people are like and the dangers and risks involved. But the question I always asked in writing the book is why was 50 different from the other thousands of kids that he grew up with? Why did he turn into this mega success? Whereas a lot of his friends ended up either dead or in prison or in very low paid jobs. And so you can have street smarts, you can be a hustler, but there's a limit to the game and it's a limit to the game of life in America where you know, you don't have opportunities that I had going to university, etc. And so you

• 50:47Speaker 02

  kind of hit a wall with all of that. And what I've noticed talking with through years, because I've met many hip hop artists since 50, I've hung out with Drake recently, I've been friends with Jeezy and many others, is that all the street experiences in the world will not prepare you for the dangerous games that go on in the business world, right? So Hollywood, I experienced firsthand, I worked in it, is a very Machiavellian environment. But the music industry is even more Machiavellian. So you, as a musician, as an African American artist, you create this music that's hugely popular, but you don't own it. Some large label, some Interscope or Columbia

• 51:31Speaker 02

  Records owns your material and they'll discard you in a minute, you know, once they're no longer interested in you. Your careers, your potential for power are very limited. And so.

• 51:43Speaker 02

  People in the hip hop world, in the late 90s, a lot of African Americans were starting to become managers of their own company. People like Chris Lighty, who started Violator. And they realized that they had to kind of think on a new level now. All of their street and hustling intelligence will not prepare them for this very shark-infested environment they're in, where people will smile, they say, "We love your work, you're fantastic." But then behind closed doors, they're stabbing you in their back, they're sabotaging you. They never had to really deal with that because on the streets, people could be sabotaging and backstabbing, but pretty much you knew where people were coming from and you knew the bad apples. Here, people were smiling, you never could see who the really dangerous types were.

• 52:27Speaker 02

  So, reading my book was very helpful for them. So they knew, "All right, always say less than necessary." Okay, when I go into a meeting, 50 told me that this was a law that was extremely important for him. You go into a meeting, you don't sit there talking and blab and say whatever in your mind, because that makes you look weak and you're probably gonna say something stupid. Just be in control of yourself. Just say, "Uh huh, okay, yeah, maybe, all right, I'll see." And that instantly gives you an aura of power, right? So these little kind of things that I wrote about, sort of, they had it in their heads about the street smarts, the hustling game, in a very kind of instinctual way, which is can be very powerful.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  But now this kind of made it on another level, more on something they could think and intellectualize and make part of their own daily awareness and actually have some practical value on it. So, you know, there are, I've seen people in business who have that kind of hustling mentality, African American and white, et cetera. And it's, it's good, it's a very important skill, but it's never enough. You need that to be able to think on a higher level and to extrapolate certain rules and laws that govern these different businesses.

• 53:44Anthony Pompliano?

  It's very obvious what 50 learned from you and how he was able to implement that. And I think he gives you a lot of credit for kind of helping him in the business world. What would you say you learned from him throughout the entire process? Is there one or two lessons that you took away from that entire experience spending with him? Kind of going from parties to business events to his house, where he grew up, et cetera?

• 54:06Speaker 02

  Well, as I said, we kind of aligned in a very interesting way, but there were things that I learned. So as I said earlier, I'm somebody who always thought I was kind of fearless. So, you know, I've done things that are, looking back on, I don't think I'd ever do again. You know, when I was 18 years old, my friend and I, we drove around the country completely on our own and had all these really weird experiences. I did every imaginable drug that you could take. I spent eight, my twenties, wandering around Europe with a backpack, working like 20 different jobs in all these different cities. I took tons of risks. I like taking risks. But when I met 50, I suddenly realized, man, Robert, you're actually a very fearful person compared to him.

• 54:51Speaker 02

  He literally, I saw him once, and we wrote about it in the 50th law. Is he was, he had a single that was coming out in like a record that was going to drop in September and a single that was coming out in August. And they were going to kind of debut on this radio show in New York. And then it got leaked on the internet and people had heard it before it got released. And his managers and his team were freaking out because this would, the record label would be upset. The artist that he did it with would be really upset. It's going to create a mess. They were running around like, you know, totally in a panic state.

• 55:35Speaker 02

  And here he was, completely calm, completely in the moment, like a zen master. And he goes, alright, I'm not gonna try to imitate him because I can't. But here's what we're gonna do. Listen up. They all got very quiet. And he said, we're gonna make this work for us. And he proceeded, he said, they were watching me. He took, he took down the large screen TV from the wall and he smashed it on the ground while they were filming this. And then he took his phone and he threw it against the wall and smashed that as well. And then he like hit the table and did a few other things that created some damage. And they were all watching with wide eyes because it was clearly he was acting. He wasn't angry, they knew he wasn't angry.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  He said, now we're gonna create this meme on, on the internet. That fifty blew up when he heard this news. He was so upset that heads were gonna roll. And we're gonna use this to get more and more attention on the internet. Because he understood that you had to be kind of extreme to get attention and create a story, create something viral. And through that, he would control the process and make sure that the single would now get talked about, that people were gonna watch it. And though, even though it spoiled the rollout, it actually made, made it very controversial. People were talking about it and it made it even more successful, which is what we talk about in that we're calling turning shit into sugar. And I go, I could never do that. I wouldn't have that kind of calmness.

• 57:02Speaker 02

  I would get all emotional and react. And it taught me that I need to become a little more, a little more detached from my own emotional responses. I need a little more, a little more of control of who I am. I'd like to be able to do that in a stressful situation. I was envious of him, I thought, because I've been in stressful situations before. And I find I get caught up in people's panicky emotions, et cetera. And I'm something I still work on to this day. But the ability to step back and not get upset and turn a possible negative into something positive, I thought was immense, immensely powerful and I was very envious. I also learned a lot about him as a seducer.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  I heard him on the telephone. You know, I wrote a book on the, called The Art of Seduction. And believe it or not, I thought I was a pretty good seducer when I was in my twenties, when I was a young man, living in Europe, you know, young and excited. But man, he fifty was on another level. I heard him on these phone calls with these, these female celebrities, et cetera. He was so charming, so smooth, you know, so in the moment. He even seduced my mother, you know, who, who has nothing to do with hip hop. She's like the polar opposite. And so something about his calm energy, I found immensely powerful and I was very envious of it and I wished I'd had it. And that calm energy, to be honest with you, comes from the fact that he was shot nine

• 58:34Speaker 02

  times from right, point blank range, right here, through the side of his head, into his mouth and came this close to dying. And once you've experienced that, what's gonna faze you? Nothing in life's gonna faze you. So that's sort of the source of that power, but I've always wanted to be able to tap into it myself.

• 58:53Anthony Pompliano?

  That's an amazing story. The last thing I want to ask about Fifty Cent is you've referenced him as kind of Machiavelli's example of a new prince. Describe the concept of new prince and why you think he fits it?

• 59:07Speaker 02

  Well, you know, you have old princes, people who've kind of inherited their power and their situation, people who have privilege, who come from a wealthy or well-to-do family. They're sent to Yale, Harvard, the greatest business schools, et cetera. They have this kind of look on their face, they're sort of, we're talking about non-verbal communication, I can always pick them out of a crowd. Yeah, that's, that's an old prince. That's somebody who grew up with everything on their side, right? And then, and, and they're, they're very limited because they're rooted in the past, they're rooted in their comforts and their security, and they become very conservative

• 59:49Speaker 02

  because they want to hold on to the privileges that they already have. And the new prince to Machiavelli is somebody who rises up from the lower classes, who rises up without any of those little things that come with privilege, right, who has energy. He calls it vir, which is the Latin word for power, you know, literally related to the word virile. This is kind of gendered thing, this kind of masculine energy. And this person rises up from the bottom. They're not tied to the past. They're completely in the moment. They see what the old princes can't see, that things are changing, that an energy is waiting to be exploited,

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  that there are new means of communication, new technologies, new ways of acting in the world. And they sweep away all the bullshit and all the privilege that the old princes have, and they create what Machiavelli calls a new order, right? A new order, a new way of doing things. The old ways and means are gone. This is to him the source of richness and culture. It's the new princes that rise up from the bottom that kind of make the soil fertile again. Things can grow and the culture can change and adapt. Well, fifty is sort of epitomized as that. And the way that he epitomized it is, he didn't come up with all of that baggage that I'm talking about. It's in the early 2000s.

• 1:01:16Speaker 02

  The world is so exciting and weird to him. He grew up in the worst circumstances you could have in America. You know, his mom dead when he was at the age of, very early age, killed, she was a drug dealer, raised by his grandmother, no supervision, dealing drugs on the streets at the age of nine. And I went and visited his neighborhood, South Side, Queens. And man, it was an eye-opener. And it was a lot worse than the time that he was growing up in. Okay, so, you know, he rises up in this world. So now he's got all this power, this money, and it's like he's in a candy store. This is incredible. And he's seeing things that all the old white guys in the music industry don't understand. He's seeing that for an artist, you've got to create...

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  Your own business, you can't just become a rap artist because that's to have no power in this world because the record label or even the audience will get rid of you after a couple of years. You need to become a business person. You need to start your own clothing line. You need to start your own book line. You need to start merchandise, et cetera. He was in the forefront of that, you know, deals with Smartwater, et cetera. And he was open to everything. And he was particularly open to what was going on with new technology. He was one of the first rappers to really, really grab onto the internet and create like web spaces, internet spaces to sell his music with on. So that's the power of a new prince.

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  They're not tied down by all of the rituals and traditions of the old world and they create new traditions and new world. And so that's why I called Fifty a quintessential new prince.

• 1:03:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it makes so much sense. Another person in your life that's fascinating that you interacted with is Ryan Holiday. He was an apprentice for you for a number of years. Talk to me about what did you see in Ryan, who's now gone on to have a great career as an author so early on? Why spend your time to teach him as your apprentice?

• 1:03:25Speaker 02

  Well, Ryan has violated law number one of the 48 laws, never outshine the master. He's completely outshone me. I'm now living in his shadow. It's Ryan's world. Excuse me. But Ryan was like 19 years old, if you can believe it, when he first approached me back in 2006, I think, somewhere like that. We had a lunch, a very weird lunch, if you can imagine, that that lunch was Tucker Maxx and Neil Strauss and me and Ryan. You know, that's a weird mix of people, if I remember it correctly. And anyway, Ryan was very eager and he was very big fan of my books. And he wanted to, you know, see if there's some

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  kind of something that we could do where he could do research for me.

• 1:04:14Speaker 02

  The time I was finishing up my war book and I was getting ready to do the fifty book. And I never really had had anybody help me on my books before. But there was something about him that I probably sensed at that time, hopefully if I can give myself credit for something. Where I could sense that he was first of all, very smart. That he was very eager and that he had good character. Now, I have often been wrong in those judgments before with people. But for something I detected in Ryan was actually correct. And I said, sure, I'll try you out. And because I wasn't totally convinced and I gave him kind of a test on the research for the book.

• 1:04:57Speaker 02

  And he did a good job. He did it on time, which is important. He didn't, I gave him a few days. He didn't take weeks or months. And then I read what he had and it was good, but it wasn't great. So I gave him criticism. I said, look, this isn't bad. But really what I, you have to think on this other level, you know, when I'm looking for stories for my books. They have to be something that's very entertaining, but also has a lesson. That's kind of a high bar and you were slightly missing that. And most time you tell people that, and this has been my experience since. They kind of wither up like, like an ice cube in the sun. It just kind of melts. They get all whiny and insecure. You can see it in their body language.

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  They're pretending that they go, okay, okay. You can tell from their nonverbal communication that they're upset, they're insecure. You'd be like criticizing. I thought it was so great. Ryan was the opposite. He was fine. He took it in. He actually kind of enjoyed the criticism. You know, go, wow, this is amazing. I can actually have somebody here where I can beat up a little bit and he's going to enjoy it and he's going to take it to a higher level. From that moment on, there was no looking back. This guy's going to work for me. And we kind of, he kept learning from the process, which was really important to me. In other words, he didn't kind of. Take one idea I had about what I told you about stories and just kind of glom onto

• 1:06:23Speaker 02

  that, repeat it, which is what I get with a lot of researchers and assistants. He became creative and he kept thinking, well, how can I be more of what Robert wants? And how can I listen to him? And, you know, finding somebody like that who's intelligent, who's smart, who's got a good character is like finding a piece of gold. It's a rare opportunity in life. And I remember very clearly, I had a Wikipedia page in which there was some nasty things that were on it. And I said, and I don't think I even asked him, I think he just did it on his own. He completely fixed my Wikipedia page. And for an old guy like me, that was, guy's like a magician, he can go in there and he can fix a Wikipedia page for me. And at the time, I was working at American Apparel.

• 1:07:08Speaker 02

  I was on the board of directors for the company. Cause I was kind of friends with the CEO, Dove Chongi.

• 1:07:17Speaker 02

  And Dove was complaining about his Wikipedia page. And I said, I've got the man for you. This guy's gonna fix your Wikipedia page. He's like a magician. He did it. And like me, Dove was like totally impressed. He hired Ryan. Ryan became like a marketing executive at the age of like 22 or so and quickly rose up in the ranks at American Apparel. And so he's got a kind of ambition that's a positive ambition, right? A lot of people in this world, particularly young people who are ambitious, they're very egocentric. It's all about themselves. I have an agenda. I want to get something out of this. I want credit. I want attention. I want people to notice me.

• 1:08:01Speaker 02

  I'm in a hurry to make a lot of money and have power. Now Ryan is an extremely ambitious person. He was in a hurry to have success in his writing and, and to make money. But he all, he wasn't like this ego-driven person, which is very true considering he wrote a book called Ego is the Enemy. He could learn, he could take criticism. And so you mix ambition with that kind of character where the spirit is open, not closed, where you want to learn, where you can take criticism, where you can handle stress. And man, you're going to rise to the top. And you combine that with energy and with somebody who's got a very interesting mind like he does. You know, the sky's the limit.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  He's going to outshine the master one of these days and he already has. So Ryan's one of the great things that's happened to me in my life, I have to say.

• 1:08:53Anthony Pompliano?

  That is a fantastic story. You spend an incredible amount of time, either as an advisor, a friend, or with business relationships with some of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, investors, musicians, celebrities, athletes, et cetera. What are some of the takeaways that you've had from those experiences? Are there one or two common traits that you see in these individuals who have all reached great degrees of success that maybe you haven't covered in the books? Or things that over the last couple of years kind of stand out in your mind?

• 1:09:23Speaker 02

  Well, you know, it's one thing to sit in my office by myself, reading books about mostly dead people and then writing books, you know, about them. You know, that's easy, right? But you imagine being an athlete on a pro basketball team or entertainer or an actor or a CEO, the stress is much different. It's on a much different level. You're having to, you know, I'm writing in a book, theoretical stuff. You're in the actual laboratory, dealing with mean, nasty, egocentric, agenda-driven people in real time, not through books with dead people. So I have to be very admiring of them and I have to be very forgiving of them as well because they come to me with problems. Right?

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  So people don't come to me full of themselves and going, you know, Robert, you know, I'm so great, don't admire me. They say, There's a little bit of humility there like, "I fucked up. I hired this person and they're terrible." "The manager of this, general manager of this team, "they're saying all kinds of nasty things behind my back, "trying to ruin my reputation on the internet." "I wasn't expecting it. I was naive. Help me." "And so, I have to kind of tone it down and realize "that that is something that I would definitely be happening to me as well." "'Cause it's one thing to talk about this in a book, "it's another thing to have to live this in a day-to-day life, "deal with the stress and the pressures of having "that amount of attention and celebrity."

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  "But the other thing is, is that "most people nowadays have, who rise to the top, "like an Elon Musk, that have very good technical skill. "They understand business, or finance, "or, or sports, or, or whatever their, their business is. "But they don't understand people. They have a blind spot, right? "We all have that blind spot, even I do, and I've, "I admit that I've misjudged people's character, "even me, who's written books about how to judge people's character. "I still make mistakes." "But, um, this is their blind spot "because they haven't spent years observing people like I have.

• 1:11:33Speaker 02

  "They haven't spent years kind of seeing what's behind the masks that people have. "And imagine that you're suddenly somebody who's extremely powerful and successful in this world, "right? "And you, it's almost overnight, "and everyone around you is saying, "man, 50, that's the best idea. You're fantastic. You're wonderful." "They, you know, they're, they're doing all the kind of "sycophantic things that people do in any kind of inner circle, right? "And if you're not smart, if you don't see through that, it goes to your head. It's like a drug." "And you go, "Yeah, I am great. Yeah, my ideas are perfect. Yeah, I know everything. "Yeah, it's true that I'm, I'm genius. Yeah." "Okay, and then you start losing contact, touch with reality,

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  "and you start saying and doing things that actually are alienating people, and you get in trouble." "And so, a lot of these times, I have to kind of "bring people back down to earth. "I have to kind of help be the critical voice and say, "no, those ideas aren't very good, actually." You've been listening to the wrong people. They're saying, yes, yes, yes. But in their mind, they're going, no, no, no. I'm telling you, no, no, no. And it's real. I'm not going to bullshit you. I'm not going to feed you what you want to hear. A lot of times, people come to me, they want to hear what they already wanted to hear. And I'm not giving anything to them. And then, most of the time, they're grateful. Sometimes they go and they run away. I never hear from them again. But that's fine, right?

• 1:13:01Speaker 02

  But the other thing is, is that what separates, to me, a person of power from someone who's got limitless potential for power, is are they willing to listen? Are they willing to change? Are they willing to adapt? That's what happens with like the new Prince or someone like 50, or someone like Ryan Holiday. You don't come to me with preconceived notions of what's great, what's good, how to deal with people, how, what's... You're open to some new ideas. You're open to some critical thinking, to some criticism about you. And that is what makes a great leader. You know, and this is something that comes strictly from Machiavelli himself. He said, "A lot of people rise to power based on one single quality."

• 1:13:45Speaker 02

  It could be extreme, extreme aggression, where they intimidate everybody. It could be great persuasive powers, whether just the best order in the world, have incredible sensitivity to psychology. They get to the top because the times are right for that aggressive person or that persuasive person. And then the times start to change, as they inevitably do. And they keep being aggressive. They keep being soft and persuasive and seductive. And the times change, and it doesn't work anymore. And they're destroyed by that. They go from up here to down here. It's an incredible downfall. And he says, "The person who can adapt, who can change their character, who can go from being aggressive to being soft when it's necessary,

• 1:14:30Speaker 02

  that is a person of power who has no limits." And so I tell that to people, and hopefully they listen to me. But that's sort of the main takeaways I have from my consulting work.

• 1:14:41Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a timeless principle of humans are incredibly adaptable. Another thing that you talk about is how individuals uniqueness is a source of their power. How do you usually talk through with folks to figure out what their uniqueness is? Right uniqueness is something that obviously each individual can either pursue a process or somehow think through to identify what is that power that they have. Is there any tips or tricks that you have there for people listening in terms of how they can identify what their uniqueness is?

• 1:15:13Speaker 02

  Well, I wrote a whole book on it. So it's, you know, if you give me like four hours, I'll give you the best answer. But trying to condense that down. The first thing you have to realize is you have to come to the mountain. You have to get down on your hands and knees and go being unique, being weird, being different is my source of power. Most people pay lip service to that or they don't, but they don't really believe it. They don't really understand it. So I try to explain why that is your source of power. Okay. And I point out, look at those people who are successful in the world who you may admire, artists, people like an Elon Musk, people like a 50 Cent, people like a Jay-Z, et cetera.

• 1:15:57Speaker 02

  There's only one of a kind. They're different. There's nobody else like them in this world. They're truly weird. They're truly unique. Right? Okay, they didn't try and become like everybody else. If you become like everybody else, then there's no power in it. Right? Because you've just imitated what the trends are. There's a million other people out there like you on Instagram and social media. So why you, you, what makes you different? What makes you weird? What makes you strange is your source of power. Right? It's your kryptonite, et cetera. And so I explain also why you are unique. I explained the genetic component, how your DNA has marked you as unique and why your

• 1:16:40Speaker 02

  experiences in this world from the age of two or three and on and your parents is unique. There's nobody else ever in the history of the world that will be like you or will ever be like you. So why run away from that? Running away from that is cowardly and it's stupid and it's counterproductive. Okay. And I drum that into people. I drum into the idea, the desire. To mine that uniqueness, that's gotta be step number one. Because if you don't want it, you're never gonna get it, right? And you have to want it with a kind of a desperation, right? So I knew, fortunately for me at a young age, that I wanted to be a writer. I couldn't figure out what I wanted to write, but that's what it was.

• 1:17:22Speaker 02

  And when people tried to push me away from that, like sometimes my parents or my peers, people early in my career, I get so fucking angry. No way, man, this is what I'm doing. You can go, you can go whatever, do whatever you hell you wanna do, but I'm gonna be a writer, get the hell out of it. Don't tell me what to do with my life, it's my life. That's because I knew what it was and it engaged me emotionally. So I could put up with people's criticism, I could put up with the years of failure, sir, because I was on a mission, right? I want other people to have that feeling. I don't want it just to be me, I want everybody to have that feeling. Okay, so you connect emotionally to it, that's step number one. If you never go there, forget about it, it won't happen, alright?

• 1:18:05Speaker 02

  Number two is, what is that uniqueness? Well, it's a process. So you tend to think in these simple terms, you tend to think of, oh, I wake up one day, I'm gonna be a writer, I'm gonna write books, I'm gonna be a, a, a research scientist in this particular field, I'm gonna be a great musician or better. That's not how it works. It's a process, it's a process of discovery, it's hit and miss. You don't wake up one day and decide, this is what I'm gonna do. It comes to you, right? Are you open to it? So I never knew that I would write books like The Forty Eight Laws of Power, that never was my plan. But when the opportunity came to me and a man asked me for an idea of a book,

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  and this is the idea that I improvised, I was open, I was ready, I have skill, and this is where my life took off. I never planned it that way. So stop thinking that it's like this simple, single idea that will come to you, that you gotta follow it like the straight line. It's an adventure, it's a journey you're on, it's a process. What is that process? It's discovering what you actually love, what makes you different from other people, what attracts you. So if you, if you're involved in, let's say, math, you're learning math when you're 10 years old and it doesn't connect with you, you're kind of half learning, you kind of hate it, don't really like it, it's drudge work, you do it at home.

• 1:19:31Speaker 02

  But then there's like sports, baseball or basketball or football. And man, you're totally in there. You're in it a hundred percent. You love it. It's there. You don't have, it's not tedious to go to practice. You like lifting weights and getting in shape. You like the, the exercises you have to do. That's it. Things like that are it. It's where your energy is engaged and you feel connected to it. And you feel that things are easy and to a degree that's fun. And if they're tedious, you can push past it. And so it doesn't have to be something as like basketball, which we're not all gifted for. Or writing, it could be starting a business, being an entrepreneur.

• 1:20:15Speaker 02

  And I explain to people the kind of signs that, that show at the early age in high school and in college. Cause if you're an entrepreneur theoretically, you really want to be thinking like that in your early twenties. Here are the signs of that when you were young. You don't like working for other people. You have a rebellious streak. You know, people telling you what to do, you think they know it all, but don't, they piss you off. You're an entrepreneur in training. You've got the DNA. Let's go with it. Let's discuss it. Let's figure out what kind of entrepreneur you should be, right? So there's signs of it. There's signs. And I suggest a book that I've suggested a million times to people on podcasts called Frames of Mind by Howard Gardner.

• 1:20:58Speaker 02

  And he tries to get rid, help me get rid of this idea that the only kind of intelligence in this world is intellectual book intelligence, which our culture unfortunately emphasizes far too much. There are other forms of intelligence. There are pattern thinkings. There's, um, there's like musical thinking. There's sports and kinetic energy. There's abstract visualization. He explains it much better than I'm doing right now. Or there's social intelligence where your intelligence is geared towards other people. You have one of these frames of mind. You have that inclination, that bend. For me, it was clearly words and linguistics. For others, it'll be something else. You at least have to know which one of those categories you fit in.

• 1:21:42Speaker 02

  It's a process of knowing yourself, the source of all human wisdom, right? So that you know what makes you different. You know what you value. You know what you're potentially good at, what you're not good at. And I also flip the script and I say, let's investigate what you hate, right? So hating working for other people, hating group office politics, which is my profile. These are all signs, right? Things that you dislike, or you might be the opposite. You might dislike being completely on your own and being alone. You need to be around other people. Gotta learn that you gotta know who you are, what makes you different.

• 1:22:21Speaker 02

  Once we figure out, we have a frame, a general outline of what that could be, what I call your life's task. Then we start mapping out a way to possibly begin this adventure that I'm talking about, this journey. And you know, it depends on if you're 22, 32, or 42, or even 52. At 52, the journey is going to be, your options are a lot narrower. At 22, the world is totally open. So the earlier you start this process, the better. And I talk in my book Mastery, which I go into this. I talk about Charles Darwin, the great scientist, and the particular path he took.

• 1:23:02Speaker 02

  And it literally was an adventure that took him to South America, where he discovered what he was actually great at. Because he was a very mediocre student in England. His father and his famous family were very disappointed in him. He suddenly discovered, he goes on this grand adventure to South America. That's the paradigm. You're on an adventure. You may not go to South America, but it's an adventure. It's a journey. You're going to discover things about yourself, about other people, about what you love and what you hate. But it's got to be exciting and you got to want it. And you have to realize that this is the source of your power. So that's, that's my 10 minute version of the four hour version I should be.

• 1:23:42Anthony Pompliano?

  That's incredible. The last question that I have for you is around morality. And you've written a number of different books, many of them documenting your understanding or kind of the product of your research as to how human nature works, how the laws of power work and many others. If we look at something like the laws of power, there are things like selective honesty, keeping others in suspended terror, or posing as a friend while we're Working as a spy. And I always think about morality is this weird question because most people can't explicitly define it in a math or science kind of confined.

• 1:24:24Anthony Pompliano?

  It is very much your morality versus somebody else's morality may be different. And so how do you think about the intersection of something that is much more qualitative than quantitative, but still overlays with some of these concepts? Do you think about that at all? Or is it more so, hey, I'm documenting human nature? And, you know, that's for somebody else to judge, you know, what's moral, what's not? What's the context of each individual situation?

• 1:24:49Speaker 02

  Well, in the 48 Laws of Power, it's a book that I call is basically amoral. And you can read that word wrong. It's not immoral, it's amoral. And I'm saying, power can be used for good things. And clearly, we have examples of that, like a Gandhi, or a Martin Luther King, or an Abraham Lincoln. And power can be used for awful, mean, horrible things. And there are plenty of examples in history of that. So power is neutral. It's like an instrument that you pick up, like a knife. That knife could be used for carving something out of woods, something beautiful, or be used for killing people. So power isn't inherently evil. It's not inherently good either. It's how you use it, right?

• 1:25:30Speaker 02

  And my idea in the 48 Laws of Power, my version of morality was, here's this knowledge

• 1:25:37Speaker 02

  that's kind of kept as a secret about how to succeed in this world. It's something that elites and people in power have known, but have never wanted to share. And it irritated and frustrated me that these kinds of laws that I observed in Hollywood, for instance, were not, were being, it was like we were living in this fairy tale. Like, people would pretend that this Hollywood director producer was all about doing great things, good things, noble things, liberal values, whereas in truth, they were power hungry. And they would do maneuvers that were extremely bad, or even downright evil, right? And I personally was on the other end of it, oftentimes, or I'd witness it. I would be the victim of it. And I was naive.

• 1:26:23Speaker 02

  And I'm going, naivete and stupidity in this world could cause more damage than anything else. That most people in this world suffer from their naivete. And so I wrote that book. With a bit of irony involved, because you mentioned these chapters that on the surface are actually downright diabolical, I don't deny, and you even left out the worst one of all, crush your enemy totally, the one everybody loves to quote. But a lot of it is, keep your eyes open. This is what the world is like. Don't be so naive. Don't go bumbling into the work world in your twenties, thinking it's all about people cooperating and loving each other and being wonderful. And just having a group hug. That's not the reality. You're going to get in trouble.

• 1:27:08Speaker 02

  People are going to crush you. They're going to get you to do the work and they're going to take the credit. They're going to be selectively honest with you. They're going to pose as a friend and work as a spy. Open your eyes. Don't be so damn naive. Now occasionally, a dark soul in this world will come to my book and will use it for those nefarious purposes. And I could be wrong. I could be deluding myself, but I always believed those people don't need the 48 Laws of Power. It's in their DNA. They're already sharks. They know already. Maybe the book clarifies a little bit for them, and I feel sorry about that. But I wrote the book basically to open the doors up and let everybody see this knowledge, see this is how people in power operate.

• 1:27:47Speaker 02

  But in the laws of human nature, I do take a slightly more, a different spin on it a little bit. And I say, the source for me of true, someone who's truly good, if you want to use that word, which is not fine, happy with contempt, is their degree of self-awareness. So the people who are the most evil, the most dark, the most sinister in this world, are those who think that they are so good and so righteous and so full of conviction. And they don't realize that they're actually the opposite. They're full of this dark energy. Their idea that they're so convinced of their rightness is actually making them do awful, awful things and hurting people.

• 1:28:31Speaker 02

  They have no self-awareness. They think they're angels and they're not. They're actually devils in disguise. And so you want to be aware. You want to be aware that you have dark tendencies. You want to be aware that you are not different from the billions of humans who have ever lived. You have envy. Envy is deeply embedded in human nature. Come to terms with it, look at yourself and try to transform your envy into something better. And I give tips on that in the book. Try and understand that you are irrational, that you are letting your emotions get the better of you. That your convictions, your ideas of rightness is actually your emotions telling you what's right.

• 1:29:15Speaker 02

  You have confirmation bias, et cetera, et cetera. You are not rational. Come to terms with that. Become rational. You think that you're so giving and interested in other people, but you're actually very self-absorbed. We all have a touch of narcissist in us. Some people are worse than others, clearly. But you have a touch of it in you. Look at that narcissism, that self-absorption, and transform it into loving other people, to empathy. On and on and on I go with aggression. Look at your own aggression. Look at your own shadow, your own dark side. Look at your, sorry, your own kind of purposelessness, your aimlessness in life. You're not really clear about what you want to do.

• 1:29:59Speaker 02

  Look at your tendencies for feeling grandiose about the world. Your conformity, you're a conformist. You think you're such a hot individual, but actually you're just following all the trends. If you're not aware that you have these tendencies, you cannot begin to change yourself. You were not born a perfect, angelic creature. It's a work in progress. You have to work on yourself. And the only way you can reach that goal is by being aware of who you are. And by being aware of who you are, being aware that you have some, perhaps all of these negative qualities, you can begin to work on them and change them and turn that around to become a truly good person in this world.

• 1:30:42Speaker 02

  So that's sort of my more later, older take on the subject, if you will.

• 1:30:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Robert, I really enjoyed this conversation. What do you want your legacy to be? When it's all said and done, what do you hope that people, when they think of Robert Greene, they say what?

• 1:30:57Speaker 02

  Well, that, you know, hopefully, years after I'm dead, books are still being read. And so I've made my books in that vein. I don't make my books timely. In other words, I'm not sitting here in my books, writing about events in 2022, because by 2029, the world will be so different. People will be laughing at what Robert said about the year 2022. I kind of create this time's vision of what I think is going on. Human nature going back hundreds of thousands of years. So I want my legacy to be, it's the year 2075. Robert's been dead and buried for 30, 40 years, whatever it is.

• 1:31:40Speaker 02

  I'm 23 years old. I pick up the 48 miles park. Wow. This is true. This is relevant. That's, to me, the ultimate form of power I could have. And if that's my legacy, that's fantastic. Because what it'll mean is, I touched upon something real. Because there's so much bullshit in this world. There's so many books written. There's so many people bloviating and filling the air with all their bad ideas and stupid ideas. And there's so much of it. And I get so tired of it. And maybe I'm part of it. I don't know. I hope not. But I can't be 100% certain. But if somebody says, now, this is something that kind of gets into the reality of something. It's like a knife that goes, cuts into my gut.

• 1:32:22Speaker 02

  It's not bullshit. It's not hot air. It's something real. And it opens my eyes and it changes how I think. If I have that effect 50, 100, 200 years from now, and that's my legacy, I'll be the happiest dead man in the world. You know, that word won't have any meaning anymore. But thinking about that is my mission in life, and it kind of informs how I write a book. So I hope that is sort of my legacy, that I had touched upon something very real, and it stays relevant 100 years from now.

• 1:32:55Anthony Pompliano?

  That's so good. Where can we send people to find you on the internet? Or find any of the seven books that you've written and the eighth one on the way?

• 1:33:04Speaker 02

  Well, the eighth one isn't out there yet, so give me a little bit of time. It's in here right now. I have this very ancient website, goes back hundreds of years. It's called powerseductionandwar.com. The "and" is spelled out. So, powerseductionandwar.com. It was a website, we started back in like 2003 or 2004.

• 1:33:31Speaker 02

  And there you'll find links to my other books, The 50th Law on Mastery: Human Nature, and my new book, The Daily Laws, which is kind of similar to Ryan Holiday's Daily Stoic, if you know that book. Anyway, you find links to all that. You find links to my blogs that I used to write back in the day when people wrote blogs, you know, 13 years ago or something. And then you'll find links to my Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, everything, all the other things that you possibly might be interested in. So, and then there's even an email address to write to me. I get a lot of emails, I have to say, and I do try and read all of them.

• 1:34:13Speaker 02

  Just don't be upset or pissed off if I don't respond, because it's hard for me sometimes. I also can't type now, so I still have a left hand that's kind of dead. So, please, you know, be a little patient with me. But that's probably the best site for reaching me.

• 1:34:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. Well, Robert, thank you so much for your time. I've learned a ton. I think I speak for many, many people. I've learned a ton from your books. I've learned a ton from this conversation. And just keep doing what you're doing. You are an absolute treasure of information. I think people really enjoy the time that you spend writing the books and also speaking in conversations like this. So, anyone who has not read frankly, all of the books, but specifically, I think, 48 Laws of Power, or The Laws of Human Nature, how they suggest going and checking those out. And follow Robert online, and we will definitely do this again in the future when you come out with your eighth book. It will quickly make its way from your brain to the paper and then published, I have no doubt.

• 1:35:16Speaker 02

  I hope so. I hope so. That's my fond wish right now.

• 1:35:20Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. We'll talk soon. Thanks so much.

• 1:35:22Speaker 02

  Thank you so much, Anthony. I really enjoyed it. It was great.

• 1:35:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand-new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies. Go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends, and I'll see you all for the next episode.