Before You WASTE Your Life Away, WATCH THIS! | Robert Greene

[Music] hey everybody welcome to another episode of conversations with tom i am here with somebody that if you don't know your brain is about to get melted he's written so many best-selling books it's insane it is the one the only robert greene robert welcome back to the show man thank you for having me tom my pleasure dude i could not be more excited you are somebody that um the way that you think i find so intoxicating um you talk a lot about the things that i think people are shy to talk about power seduction war the sort of underlying nature of humanity and i am obsessed with that topic because to accomplish anything in your life you have to be in step with what is real and some of the things that i've been hearing you talk about now which are certainly echoes of the books you've written um are just you know what what's going on right now you've referred to as a culture of bs and that the world needs like a nice uh slap of reality and thought it would be really interesting to have that conversation given the the moment that we're living in when you talk about like magical thinking and a culture of bs what do you mean well um you know we're we humans are gifted with a form of consciousness as far as we know it there's no other animal on this planet that has it perhaps on another planet there's something similar we don't know yet but it comes with a price you know basically it's the same sized brain that was developed through the course of evolution hundreds of thousands of years ago in circumstances that are completely different from where we are now right so evolution is a very slow process so our brains haven't really changed that much what has increased is the incredible exponential explosion of our knowledge particularly in the sciences and but at the same time that part of our consciousness our awareness lays on top of a brain that is very primitive in this nature i mean you know the brain is structured in a kind of a hierarchical manner and at the very bottom are those most primitive layers but it's often in cliche terms called the lizard brain but it's very real and then there's a kind of a mid brain that's more you know evolutionary that's more where our emotions come from and kind of a connection between the the lowest part and the highest part anyway so we have this knowledge this ability to think of to stand back from our immediate circumstances and contemplate possibilities oh i don't have to react like an animal to this thing happening i can step back and i can think perhaps i could do a b or c and as opposed to just reacting and that is incredibly powerful it's what has made us who we are today but the problem with it is we don't know how to use our brains because we still are trapped in that very primitive model that we have and so we feel emotions and emotions tend to govern so much of our thinking because they're much more powerful than the than the kind of weak little signals that come from the frontal cortex and so we're not aware of how deeply our emotions are infecting our decisions in our day-to-day life and the people who know this the best are people in marketing because they have been studying since the 1950s all of the amazing psychological experiments about how you can kind of manipulate people how if you if you're a salesman and you just lightly touch somebody on the arm as a friendly gesture they're 80 more likely to buy your product right if you use their name all these other little tricks they've been studying it and they know deeply how much that emotional part of us governs our decisions when we buy things they call it the effective heuristic it means that our decisions are largely based on emotions and the problem that we face is we're not aware of that that was the whole subject of the laws of human nature we walk around thinking that we're making decisions rationally that when we buy a product or that when we choose a partner to get involved with you know to marry or whomever that we're basically basing this on certain kind of rational you know protocols but we're not at all we're infected very very deeply with emotions and so that lack of awareness that belief that we are rational when we're not rational is very very dangerous because answer me this time how many people do you know who admit to the fact that they are rash irrational that the decision they made in life even when that was a mistake came from an irrational part of them that it wasn't something that was thought through that it wasn't something as strategic i bet you could count them on one hand you know and i'm as guilty of that as the next person it's very much part of our nature to deny the fact that mostly we're governed by emotional responses to the world around us yeah the one of the things that i find the most interesting in psychology are the studies of people that have you know one brain defect or another i think it was vs ramachandran that did the study on um i forget what the damage was to the guy's brain but he had no short-term memory so a doctor would come into the room and they did this test and they put a pin the doctor put a pin in his hand and he shook hands with the guy and it jabbed him and you know the guy jerks backs like what the hell dr leaves comes back three minutes later goes to shake the guy's hand and the guy won't shake his hand now remember he has no short-term memory so the doctor says oh why won't you shake my hand and the guy's like well you know i'm really uncomfortable with people in white coats and you know obviously he's doing it because some part of his brain retained the fact that when he shook hands with this guy that it caused pain and the the conscious mind though is pasting over some rationalization to explain away this weird behavior and the fact that our minds are working so rapidly to deliver these socially acceptable reasons for why we're doing something when a reality that isn't at all why we're doing something that gets really scary really fast but the other thing and i've heard you talk about this before again one of the most interesting things i've ever come across where people's brains get damaged and they no longer have access to their emotions and so now they're frozen out they cannot make a decision because when you're trying to you know think your way through something we're relying on a feeling an embodied feeling of one is better than the other so if it is impossible for us to move forward without emotion and dangerous to be unaware of our emotions how how do we move forward well it's it's not that complicated so you bring up a good point um a lot of people have a misconception that rationality is the ability to repress your emotions to somehow subtract them from your decision-making process and that is exactly the wrong way to approach it because think of it in your own life if you meet somebody who turns out to be very toxic like a toxic narcissist you're you're going to get a gut reaction and emotional response from them right this something's wrong with this person and then that causes you to start thinking about maybe i shouldn't involve myself in a partnership with this person maybe i shouldn't get in a relationship so your emotion will trigger a dangerous response which was sort of the reason why we have emotions a fear response oh there's a lion hanging out over there i better be you know aware of it that emotion then triggers your kind of awareness so emotions are essential to the rational process the problem is you have no distance from your emotions you're not able to take a step back and analyze is this a rational response is there really a lion over there well you know i live in los angeles there's probably not a lion over there it could be a coyote or something right so i'm able to step back and kind of analyze the nature of the thread the nature of what could be something exciting or not so that's the dividing line you know some i'm sorry that'll go away i was like it sounded like it was coming from my side i'm like i've never heard that ring before in my life i should unplug it there's gonna be one more ring hopefully it's telemarketing i'm just getting inundated lately with telemarketing um anyway so the ability to step back and analyze your emotions and tell yourself why am i feeling this way why am i angry why am i excited that is the key point that is what divides people who are truly able to be rational from those who can't be right so you have to train yourself it's not natural to who we are because our nature is to simply react right so the ability to stand back and say no i better wait maybe i should wait a couple of days before i send it let's see how i think tomorrow and then tomorrow shows you that it was irrational that your emotion wasn't really proportional to the event so if your emotional reaction is proportional to the threat or to the opportunity then you know then there's a reason for it but so often particularly in this hyper social media environment where it's kind of like we're all feeling constant rage and anger a lot of times it's not related to anything real or is out of proportion to the actual problem or threat so you you don't try and repress your emotions you can't write a book you can't start a business you can't make a decision about what you want to do without the richness of emotions the brain is an organic thing everything works together so people who have had that damage where they can't feel the emotion that the emotions are blocked and there are brain damage that causes that it's been shown that they can't make rational decisions because they can't decide they can't feel what is what is good or what is bad what is an opportunity what is dangerous so you want your emotions you need them you're not trying to repress them repressing emotions will lead to other problems what you want is just that tiny little bit of distance that ability when you're feeling it to go back and go hmm why am i really feeling this what are the roots of it that's very powerful ability that you can use that you can develop through practice just like exercise will develop your muscles through being able to think before you react it will slowly become natural to you but you have to practice it you have to be aware of that's the source of your problem do you have a method for how you practice that well the main thing is to be aware of it because you know we're we're creatures that definitely don't like anything kind of painful we want our lives to be pleasurable we've had painful experiences in our life generally in social situations i maintain the most pain is psychological it comes from bad social interactions okay so you don't want pain in your life obviously everyone's going to answer that right so you don't want to make bad decisions you don't want to have your emotions dragging you along and causing all kinds of havoc so if you understand that that's the problem you're now motivated to then try and tackle it so i could give you the best techniques in the world but it won't matter at all if you don't feel that need for it that that hunger for the ability to have a slight degree of control over your own actions i practice meditation every morning and um i i highly advocated it's i think it's been one of the best things i've ever done for myself i've been doing it now for over 10 years it's like a ritual and as you're meditating and you're emptying your mind suddenly emotions and things will start welling up you don't even know from where like anger and all those kind of pissy stuff and things about your parents and about all your bad relationships etc and now you're thinking why am i thinking about that now the sun is shining i'm trying to empty my mind why is this garbage welling up in me and you start to have some distance and you start to see i try to picture it like my thoughts and my emotions they're out there they're like two feet away from me they're not inside my head they're over there and i could watch my mind create this little theater of all these little problems and dramas that's a beautiful thing i catch myself now because i'm not perfect i'm very human and i have the same problems that i'm talking about but i catch myself maybe 50 percent of the time now wow you're reacting here that emotional idiot part of you that lizard part of you is taking over and i can step back so meditation is a very powerful tool uh ryan holiday you know my good friend friend of yours he has very much advocated the use of journaling of writing things down and i do that as well so you can analyze yourself but the main thing is you've got to train yourself so in the course of a day what i tell people is let's say tomorrow something triggers an emotional response and it happens every single day in our lives right something somebody says something somebody you read in the newspaper or online triggers it okay practice this one thing just ask you one thing tomorrow try and do this one little step and go back and go okay what am i feeling right now i'm feeling anger all right okay first that's the first step what am i actually feeling all right what is the cause of this anger all right this person is saying something that really really annoys me that really gets my gets my goat etc okay why what are the roots of that anger is it something that i personally experienced does it go back to my childhood or is it just something that's in the media sphere that's kind of that i'm catching it's contagious from what other people are getting angry about just try and do that one thing tomorrow where you something happens and you step back and you go through that process what am i feeling why am i feeling it what are the roots of it and is it something that's real or is it real and then if you just do that once you'll it'll be very interesting because you never do it and then maybe you'll be inspired to try it a second and a third time that's sort of kind of the process that you can go through there's a one-two combo as i'm hearing you explain that that um i worry about so one i don't know as you were walking through that and you were differentiating between is this something from my past was this something in the media sphere and i thought oh dear god like do most people actually have that layer of nuance uh in in terms of being able to understand themselves and then also who when i think about how easily we like i will put myself in this but how easy all of us humans are swayed by the media by other people like if somebody knows more about a topic than us it is all too easy to just be like oh that must be true because we don't know enough about it to question it and when when we first started talking and you said you know there's this one exponential thing that we're not used to and i thought for sure you were going to say the rate at which information comes out yes because that's the thing that's really freaking me out is information is coming at us so quickly it is very hard to have the level of um self-understanding that you're talking about where even if you're willing to do the work to turn inward and ask the questions will you be able to understand discern all of the different things that could be influencing you which i want to talk about childhood at some point i've heard you talk about that before we'll stay focused here for now but like the number of things that could be influencing you that you may be totally blind to and then on top of that you've got just so much data coming at you so fast it feels hopeless to keep up with it all yeah well um you have to you know one thing that happens to me that in my meditation that's very interesting is i realize how deeply i have been conditioned and that how deeply we've all been conditioned by what by other people by what we hear by what we read by the people who talk to us by our environment by the culture that we're in by the times that we're living the separation from being conditioned is what is truly my own thoughts what comes from within me now it's a very artificial dividing line because really none of my thoughts totally come from me i've inherited language that goes back thousands of years i was conditioned by my parents to respond a certain way right and you know i've obviously a lot of my ideas come from books that i've read so not all of the the dividing line between what's truly me and what's not is is fluid but there is something that you can say is me it's like this is how i think this is what my needs are this is where i am right now in december 2020. this is my reality right okay it's who you are it's what your needs are and what your experience is and then there's that artificial element of all the stuff that you mentioned that's so blasting in our faces from our culture at like you know light years speed incredible speeds that are just filling our brains with junk with information that we don't need with heated opinions that really aren't our own opinions right so you have to be able first of all to be able to turn that [ __ ] off i'm sorry to use that language here you've got to be able to turn it off you know if you can't you know take breath breaks from social media from your instagram account from facebook from twitter then you're a prisoner of it you know just just admit it to yourself i am a prisoner of social media i can't control it it controls me and they we talked earlier about marketing mark zuckerberg facebook these people are masters at marketing they know exactly how to put press all of your buttons they know that if they give an a topic that's very controversial that's maybe not necessarily true but is very heated they'll get more views more likes more posts more reposting etc they know how to use certain colors to grab your eye to grab your attention they know sounds little beeping noises on your stupid smartphone i like that word your stupid smartphone that are going to like engage you go whoa wow i better pay attention they are manipulating you you are conditioned you are a prisoner of social media you are not in control of it you're not you think you're the one that's posting all these things that you want to post about your life but really you're not you're responding to what everybody else is doing you're being a conformist if you really want to control it you wouldn't have some distance you would know all right here's something that's really affecting me as an individual that's part of my life that i'm excited about i want to share that with people and it comes from instead of the need to get attention instead of the need to get people to like you instead of the need to just bait your rage it's something that like i want to express a reality that i've discovered an idea how many times is social media used for the spreading of an actual idea that's been rationally thought out well then that if you're able to do that then you are the one in control of this monster this beast and you can be you can use it for your own purposes but just think about and i'm not getting on a high horse here i am as much guilty of this as anybody i know how powerful it can be i know how when i meditate i go whoa where's that idea coming from robert you have been conditioned you've been brainwashed by the media around you so i'm just as guilty as anyone it's very difficult you're submerged in it we're social animals we're creatures of our culture of our times it's not easy but you have to be able to realize the first step is to realize that you are someone who's been conditioned just as deeply as one of pavlov's dogs in those experiments right right so that idea of being conditioned is um it's something that really worries me in terms of beginning to craft your identity so i think a lot about sort of two things i think about how do we help kids and make sure that they're they don't have to go through this huge unwinding process so that their mindset their belief system their conditioning for lack of a better word is actually moving them in a direction that leads to a fulfilling life an enjoyable life and i think about how we unwind the conditioning that you're talking about whether it's from parents whether it's from media or what have you how do you think about that process and we'll take the harder one for an adult for somebody that realizes like man having just gone through an election cycle the the like absolute sense of urgency with every message at all like it's life and death like ah pay attention and everybody's like fighting and it really feels sort of terrifyingly divided right now and so thinking about okay people are splitting into camps they're conditioning themselves more and more be team players think in the the right way how can people begin to unwind that so that we can be more open-minded more mentally flexible finding a way to um find a common ground forward i'm not sure my real question is around conditioning how do we recognize it and how do we recondition ourselves well the process is always sort of the same i'm going to sound kind of monotonous in it but it comes down to awareness which is the key to all the things that i talked about in the laws of human nature you know so let's assume then that we go okay cool i'm aware of the fact that this is happening now how do i take control of that process like are is it be careful about the books you read be careful about the tv shows you watch or is there something beyond that awareness will spark everything it means all right now instead of reacting i'm going to think and i'm going to study okay and it's actually you know we humans we want things to be fun and pleasurable but trust me the process of analyzing things instead of reacting is one of the most fun pleasurable mental exercises you can ever go through because now whenever i see a television show whenever i see an outraged talking head on television or whatever i'm going hmm i'm studying their body language i'm going what are the non-verbals they're communicating where are their ideas coming from is this something real and stepping back and analyzing is incredibly exciting and it's more entertaining than just getting all emotionally involved in it so if you know that you're conditioned if you know that for instance um and they've i think it was i can't remember who it was that wrote an article recently about how social media and media in general is designed to hit those anger buttons right that's how they've been met that's how they've been navigating these whole four years of trump you know it's why their ratings have been through the roof so you know that's what they're doing you know that's what's happening now it's exciting to actually see how they're doing it wow i can okay i pressed on that button that zuckerberg wants me to press on not zuckerberg but the technicians there okay why why did i do that robert why am i getting sucked into that you know i i recently i in the you know because i say i'm guilty of it myself so you know i'm not a trump supporter i'm on the other complete other side so let's just get that out of the way but um uh so during when things were getting really heated i guess about eight or nine months ago i was starting posting things that revealed that i don't like trump right and then i would get in these arguments with these people and then and i was going god damn why am i doing that it's so pointless you're not going to convince anybody of reality on a facebook argument they're the most meaningless things why are you doing it robert and then i go through a process of looking at myself and looking at how i get sucked into that sphere how easily facebook does that and how you it's so easy to respond to the emotions of other people so i'm telling you first okay i have been conditioned why am i thinking this way why do i hold this opinion all right now i'm watching something or i'm seeing something on instagram or wherever that you wherever you navigate and you find for a split second you're getting that reaction that you used to get analyzing it is incredibly exciting and self-empowering right because it starts to show in what way i'm not i can see why you as somebody who really enjoys understanding why people do what they do that doesn't strike me as something universal and when i think about okay people are conditioned most of them are blind to it and most of them unlike robert greene are not going to enjoy the process of unwinding that they are going to enjoy the rage porn of it they do want to get in screaming matches with people they i mean do they feel like it's a job well done going on and yelling maybe but it's like when i think about for something to to be for you to say that it's better to you know to really self-analyze it makes me think you have a goal what what is your goal maybe for your life that might be the right place to start like what to you is is a life well lived in the context of you judging doing the self-reflection and understanding how the way the world works becomes this exceedingly fun thing for you well i mean you're asking really good questions and i'm glad you're pressing me on that i i like that um but it comes down to what you want with for yourself right so are you somebody that's interested in actually having power in this world are you someone that's interested in being successful in your venture in real life define power for me most people think it's a dirty word you've sort of made your your life around that dirty word you've got a problem and usually the people who think power is a dirty word are the people who are the most manipulative and passive aggressive animals on this planet because that's interesting we humans naturally want power we want a degree of control over our lives so imagine the scenario where you can't control anything about your children they just run wild you can't influence them you can't control any of the behavior of your spouse that's irritating the [ __ ] out of you you can't control your colleagues who are plotting all these things you have no and your boss is making you crazy you have no control that's a recipe for incredible not only misery but depression for turning into all kinds of health problems returning to drugs and alcohol for going off the deep end by the time you're 40 right so you want power in your life power is i have goals i have a fate i have a destiny in life i want by the time i'm 40 to reach them the ability to reach that to have control over yourself and your and to a degree of your emotions not repressing them but some control right will help you realize those goals that is power power isn't like some politician up there kind know weaving all these machiavellian things to hurt and destroy people that's the cliche you've been watching house of cards for too long i know nobody watches that anymore but whatever the new show is so that's not power power is the ability to guide yourself in a through a very dangerous world very competitive world where every we're almost all having to kind of work for ourselves where we don't get much help or cooperation from the world we're thrown out of the university if we go to college and here we're in this world where there are no rule books telling us how to navigate it it's very complicated very difficult and you make mistakes that you can suffer for and power is knowledge is ideas is understanding how to navigate a very dangerous world okay so you want that to get back on track to what i was saying so you want that right you want to be this is something that i talk about in mastery the idea of wasting your potential of never realizing your goals of never being able to to to create that business you wanted to create or make that film that you think is in you or start the business that you're starting tom you know that's what you want in life and if you don't want that there's nothing i can say that'll help you right i'm starting with the assumption that you want that and i think most people do want that okay so your your rage you're you're constantly being wasting time on the internet you're constantly being effect infected by the emotions of other people is wiping away day by day second by second all of your own power right because what is your power your power as you tom is to be able to realize what makes you different what makes you unique you had i don't quite remember the full trajectory of your career but i remember you early on with the health company that you had started and all this and then you had a plan your plan is to create this kind of emperor i'm not trying to reveal your secrets here but you have i'll reveal a way you have this idea of creating a new kind of empire sort of a new disney right and that comes from something within i'm assuming that there's something of the child in you that wants that that you've wanted that for a while that it represents something that's unique about you it's not something that comes from social media or the people around you that could play a small role but it's mostly something from within you it's you okay and that's you what makes you different or unique is your source of power and the days you spend getting angry about things that aren't have nothing to do with your day-to-day life they're where they're corroding that uniqueness of you and they're making you a conforming pavlovian dog that's just like everybody else out there in the world if you look at the people who are truly successful and powerful see them as kind of models or icons to reach okay it's not to say that we all have to be incredibly successful to feel fulfilled i'm not saying that i know people who are really great carpenters who are great at that and that's really fulfilling and i know people who uh who just want to be parents and that's their life's task and it's tremendously fulfilling but the people who are really successful even at those things we can say that they're that they're unique that they're one of a kind but there's nobody else like them and that is the source of your power right so you want that if you don't want that i can't help you but if you do want that you're the time you're wasting getting enraged and being manipulated and feeling all these things and just getting into that lizard part of you is time you're wasting it and your life is is a lot shorter than you think it is whoo ending on a on a big one there um before we get to mortality death all that which i think is incredibly powerful um i want to talk about that the idea of carl young and the shadow side so no i don't think there's anybody writing today that speaks as eloquently as you do about the shadow about the sort of dark energy that we all have inside of us that can be extraordinarily powerful and i know you well enough to know your beliefs around this are nuanced but listening to you as you were talking there it's like you know don't get sucked into rage you're going to be wasting your life life shorter than you think um that is true but there's also an element of capture that rage my friend leverage that rage point it at something that makes sense and this is where it gets incredibly complicated because if you have a goal and there's something that you want to go after letting something piss you off can actually be quite powerful and i talked to my students in impact theory university about this idea of having an animus having something that that literally animates you that you you can't live in a world where that thing is true and holding on to your anger enough to to turn it into something usable so you're not just flailing around reacting freaking out but it's like hey i'm not this is not okay i'm gonna fan the flames of that not going to let them burn me to death but i'm going to fan the flames of that get angry and go do something about it so how do you think about that as you point out very aptly that the the anger can cause you to waste your life but also it's a tool how do you help people reconcile that idea well these are all great another great question um well you know i'm thinking back on on myself and the anger that propelled me to where i am today which was largely my experiences in hollywood and um just to tell that story very briefly i worked in hollywood from like the very late 80s into the mid 90s and i saw a lot of very very manipulative people and a lot of hypocrisy where it was supposedly all about creating great art making a film but really it was about power it was about using people and getting what you wanted out of and getting more power than the other person getting recognition and that was the true subtext of what everybody motivated most people in hollywood and man that pissed me off the hypocrisy of that pissed me off okay now is that something that comes from is that just sort of a superficial reaction to me feeling like because i wasn't successful was i just simply hurt was it more like envy because i wasn't very successful myself in hollywood to be honest or did it come from something deeper and in analyzing it yes it came something very deep since i was a child i've always been very very sensitive to people's hypocrisy to people pretending to be something that they're not and i think a lot of children are like that they're very they have antennae for that and it really angered me and then you could ask yourself well why why does that anger you because i feel like you know it's like people pretending to be something that they're not you know and you just have an inherent value that that's a bad thing it's not just an inherent value it's just that we're all flawed creatures and i must have been aware since i was a child that i am a flawed individual robert i have dark emotions i can be kind of bitter and aggressive and ambitious and hurtful right i knew from very early on of my own flaws and it really irritated me that people pretended to be something else you know but they weren't you know they weren't true to themselves and you could i could see that in children who were pretending to be the little princess or the prince in their family like they were perfect they were really good and then i would see the other side when we you know for mommy and daddy they were all perfect but then when we played i could see the little nasty little rascal come out right i hated that you know okay we could go we could dig deeper and deeper why did i hate that but i think it came from something very real about something about me so my irritate my anger at hollywood wasn't really i don't deny that there was an element of you know i didn't get success so i feel kind of envious because we all feel that but i don't think that was the full picture there was something very real about it and because i've been feeling it throughout when i was a kid it was feeling it throughout my 20s it was the subject of all the short stories novels and plays and screenplays i was trying to write so it came from a very deep real place so when it came time to write my first book the 48 laws of power beginning in 1996 i had to draw on that anger you know and if it had been something that wasn't really me if it was something that like was just a gimmick i don't think it would have worked so if your emotions don't come from something that's very profound about who you are about that dark side isn't something that's you are it but it's like a gimmick you're just pretending to be angry and there are a lot of people who do that or you're pretending to have some other kind of emotion we humans we can smell that we can sniff out phoniness fairly well but i felt it very deeply and i disguised it in the 48 laws i channeled it into a book where you never really knew that it was from hollywood and mike's i never talked about myself but you could feel the subtext of some kind of a little bit of anger there people's hypocrisy right so i took some an emotion that was part of who i am right and i used it in very constructive channeled productive way which is what i say about the dark side so you know to get back to the to the theory behind it you know when you were a child you were what i call like you were like a round ball a ball that had a front side and a dark side that's not visible like the dark side of the moon right the front side was you're saintly you're sweet you're nice and loving to your parents you treat your sister and your brother so well you get along with all your friends but the dark side was wow man i really hate that kid i'm gonna pull her hair i'm going to mess his homework i'm going to do all the things that kids naturally do because we have an animal nature we have aggressive impulses this includes boys and girls i'm not certain girls can be just as as part of this as boys are okay and then as you get older that you're like cut your head that ball in half and you only prese that only it's not only that you just present the good side is that you kind of forget about that other half and it drops away from you and you just pretend to be this good person because you're socially motivated to make people think that you're a nice pleasant socially aware person and then that all that dark energy gets repressed and repressed and repressed but nothing ever goes away that's the law of human psychology things you felt when you were three or four or five they don't go away they just sit in you and they either sit in you and stew and then explode when you're 30 into some irrational behavior or you're aware of it you're aware that i feel this way you're aware that i feel envy you're aware that you feel aggression and anger you're aware that you sometimes actually want to hurt people okay you're aware that you're a full human being and you're not a [ __ ] hypocrite like so many people are out there i have a dark side it's part of who i am all right but don't you try to keep that in check i mean it's not like what's your prescription on that is it like what does it mean to integrate the shadow it means uh we keep coming back to this you know so i'm so boring here because i keep repeating the same idea it means you're aware of it right but being aware that i'm angry or that i have bitterness or whatever like isn't it really the because what i'm trying to figure out is uh you and i react very differently to the sort of [ __ ] of hollywood's a great example because now i as you have exited i am now trying to enter and because i am so hyper aware of how people talk about hollywood i came in and said look i'm just going to make my reputation on i'm always going to tell you where i'm at so when i see somebody being fake full of [ __ ] whatever because i'm attuned enough to see it for the most part i'm sure people pull some things over on me but for the most part i feel like i can sniff it out like you were saying before but i have like almost a sadness that that's the only tool that they've learned to leverage and so i don't get the sort of anger towards people that are manipulative or whatever good that's fine but what's your point so where i'm going is where how do you get to the point where now you're not just being aware of it but you're using it so it's how how can somebody who's listening to this go i am going to take my so you gave us the example of how you channeled it into your book but now just like in terms of daily life i'm guessing when you see somebody being fake you don't rage out on them so you are restraining so in in when i talk about integration is it the awareness leads to just being able to hold it back or is there like i will use it if somebody's bullshitting me and they're trying to be aggressive to me then i just be aggressive back and so there's an element i feel like i can control it aggression anger are tools in my tool belt and i pull them out when i think they're appropriate yeah well that's good but you know you're are you conscious are you aware that you're doing that or are you just simply reacting to people are you able to i that's certainly been an evolution so they're able to use it in a somewhat strategic way so for instance there's somebody you come across in hollywood who is a manipulator and you can smell it but you go if you like simply call them out on it you might create some problems for yourself you might create a counter reaction that will work against you are you able to step back and go hmm i need to be strategic with this [ __ ] i need to not just simply react i need to say something that will either show him or her this is what they're being like or i need to take some kind of action that will thwart them are you able to do that or are you just simply getting angry in response it's uh i'm very strategic but at the same time i want i want to feel good about who i am as i walk away from that exchange so i don't want to feel like i'm just bullshitting people either so normally i i put it into asking questions about like what's your goal or i'll even say like it feels like you're angry with me or upset with me and i don't understand why um you know and if you can help me understand i'm certainly not trying to piss you off um and it has like i won't say it i i haven't been in it long enough to know what the long-term repercussions of my strategy are going to be it's created awkward moments it has certainly ended potential relationships um but i am i'm constantly trying to think about who i want to be in the exchange when i walk away and what i want my long-term reputation to be and that means having the uncomfortable conversation up front so that what i say to you doesn't end up being different than how i actually move if that makes sense but how is that your dark side well so what i'm trying to figure out in terms of the what what you mean by integrating so i'm guessing it hey here's what i do which is if somebody's being aggressive towards me and it seems like the right answer then i will like let off like that little valve of instead of repressing everything i will let a little bit come out but i don't know the only way that i leverage my shadow is as energy when i'm alone so i don't know that i'm integrating it in an intelligent way in these exchanges and and i think that's part of what i'm looking for is feedback on if there's a way that i haven't got so here's how i present it to people that ask me and i say 80 of your time should be in the light should be in the beautiful things the wonderful things you want to create optimism hope uh compassion 20 of the time you're gonna lean on i call it the dark energy the shadow side where it is i for instance when i am [ __ ] exhausted to my core and i just do not have energy to keep going in those moments i think about the people that want me to fail and i'm like [ __ ] them i am not going to let them be right i am not going to let them see me fail it is a dark ugly petty energy and it's [ __ ] intoxicating and it gets me up and it gets me going and it keeps me pushing your question right there you're answering my question there's your integration right there you're taking an emotion that could be destructive if you acted on it in the wrong way and you're using it as a way to motivate yourself you you're not you're not spewing this at people you're making it sort of sharpen your own ambition your own goals and go i better get up in the morning and prove this idiot that they're wrong about me you're not hurting them but you're channeling it into something productive so you just answered your question that's very much integrating it it's whether your dark side is used for destructive purposes i'm not advocating that you hurt people i didn't go out and ever name a single name of anybody in hollywood ever did you could read my book you'll never know that that's what it was about right i didn't want to hurt people i don't like you i don't like hurting people it makes me feel ugly and that ugly feeling ends up costing me more than any kind of benefit i might have gotten from venting it right i don't want that but so you're not actually trying to hurt people you're using it to make yourself more productive so for instance you know you have a business you have ambitions you have goals and you use all the people who doubt you like you're doing and you're going to make that a motivating device that's very powerful let's say you're an artist and you've had a lot of your parents were really nasty to you they were very abusive and you carry that around with you and it's like this 500 pound rock on your your whole life it's just pressing you down and now in your in your play or your book or your movie you let it out and you you you don't say this is who they are but you express it indirectly about very manipulative people and you show your kind of anger in a work of art and some of the greatest works of art have an underpinning of some kind of motivating anger that's productive let's say there's something that really pisses you off in the world some form of injustice whether that's sexism racism whatever it is instead of like just getting on facebook and posting all kinds of stupid little things and not getting anywhere you go out and you decide i'm going to start a movement i'm going to create some kind of social movement that's going to actually get something done i'm actually going to contribute to society instead of just venting and spewing my own personal pet peeves you're taking that dark energy and you're channeling into something productive that's the integration you're not using it to hurt people you're using it to motivate you to create something and the other thing is we live in a culture that is so politically correct where people are so worried about if i use this pronoun am i going to offend that person if i say this am i going to lose my career we're all so repressed that to see somebody who expresses some of that of that repressed emotion in their work particularly in a work of art it's like wow that's great it's an attraction it's a form of charisma that we'll have because you're less repressed than other people so i'm trying to tell people that dark side contains incredible creative energy incredible motivating power like you said when you get up in the morning and use it don't be afraid of it but use it does that kind of answer what what your oh man powerfully no that's i totally get that now when you think about um that sort of charisma that can be born of that and you think about the pc culture that we're living under now what do you think about that like is is this moment um crushing creativity is this moment of filter for the people that have the balls to speak up like do you want to see us get on the other side of this how are you conceptualizing this moment that i will say is it's certainly unlike anything i've ever seen in my lifetime now i don't you have a much broader view of history to know if we just constantly loop through moments of this sort of pc madness or if this is unique to this time but where do you come down well as somebody who reads a lot of history um i tend to oh never think that that a moment is unique because i've read about the moments like this throughout history and i'm definitely a believer in cycles that we go through trends in culture that we have this illusion that that we're just progressing and evolving to some higher place and my conception of history is that it goes around and around and around and around uh but round round and so there's cycles of incredible conformism and we could say how often does it have i i'm not i don't have a numerical answer to that but there are periods of incredible conformism where people are all upset and there's like standards and conventions and codes that become very rigid so it's not like something new we humans always have codes and conventions of behavior because we don't like anarchy we don't want people going around saying whatever they feel like and doing whatever they feel like we always have codes and rules you can say this you can't say that and the people who rant against politically political correctness are often very guilty of it themselves because they have their own conventions it's just that they don't like your conventions they prefer their own conventions and rules okay so it's human nature to do that right but there are moments of incredible looseness like the 1960s and the incredible moments of very rigidity like the 1950s it was a reaction against all the conformity and the codes and the mccarthyism and all that kind of rigid stuff that was going on in the eisenhower era right so these things go in cycles now i could be wrong it could be that we're just going further and further and further to some incredibly puritanical you know era where you just better say and do the right thing or you're in trouble kind of like 1984 you know thought speak or whatever it was called um thought control i forget the word doublespeak and it was double speak yeah okay you know so we could be going up in that way i don't have a crystal ball i can't say but my instinct is to say that this will turn around why because we're creatures that really actually love freedom it's something i'm writing about a little bit in my in my new book it's that our brains have incredible capacity to think anything that's our a benefit of our human brain and the deficit of it so we can imagine anything we can imagine unicorns we can imagine you know um uh whatever it's called in in nevada where they're space aliens we can imagine all kinds of things that aren't real there might be i'm not saying that those aren't real but we can imagine anything right but we love that mental freedom and so a repressive puritanical pc culture is actually counter to our nature and my feeling is it's going to press down and down and then it's going to explode and people are going to be so tired of it that a generation particularly a new generation younger people because they're the ones that are going to express this this enough of this already that it'll happen because that's that's our spirit that we actually love freedom and liberty and we want our minds to be as free as our bodies are free we want to be able to express things so in that sense i would be a little bit hopeful that there will be an incredible reaction against all of the stuff that's not to say some of it isn't legitimate you know it's not to say that that there that there is something real about the racism that went on in the course of american history it's something very real and so to be aware of that and to be aware of how it's embedded in our culture in our language etc is not a bad thing it's a very positive thing but sometimes you know with some forms of identity politics i'm not going to say which forms because there are good things about we all identify with our tribe it's human nature but some of it goes way too far you know because in the end i might be get criticized this i might be pollyannish but we're all huma we're all part of the same race that it doesn't matter things like race are actually completely artificial constructs we all come from the same source in africa we all share the same genes we all share the same dna all forms of life come from the same source so we're all in this together and so a lot of this identity in tribalism is very false and very destructive and i just think at some point people are going to be so tired of it because it's just so repressive there's going to be an explosion but as i said i'm not nostradamus so you know i know sir damas but i know that you're pretty well versed in generational dynamics and the way that generations move in these relatively predictable cycles um and i've heard you say that preceding every crisis generation is the revolutionary generation and there are many people that have called millennials the um the crisis generation and if that's true then you've got gen z coming up behind them as sort of the natural torchbearers for the revolution generation um when you say revolution do you mean like literal overthrow the government revolution or do you just mean a cultural revolution like we saw from the 50s to 60s it could be both i have no problem with either one whatever it feels real you know um people who get all and i've had people criticize my own videos about this who get really upset about the idea of a political revolution well i'm sorry but the united states was formed by a political revolution against you know a monarchy right and so england had its own revolution the french had their own revolution yes they're destructive elements and and they can go way too far but political revolutions if they happen they happen for a reason that the politics no longer serve people's interests i'm not necessarily advocating political revolution but they happen and they often can have in the long run positive um effects you know they always also be negative but also i'm talking about cultural revolution it's not up for me to decide i'm not 18 years old right now i i'm an old borderline boomer borderline gen x or whatever you call it you know so i'm i'm i'm a dinosaur do you do you feel like old people should old depending on where we draw that line but do you feel that there is an age at which you reach that you should sort of remove yourself from that discourse well you shouldn't remove yourself because you have experience you have things to say and you have things to teach people but you should just get off your high horse and think of you this this natural superiority that you have to the younger generation and you should get off the idea that you're going to impose on them your own values and your own judgments if young people have certain desires and things that they don't find are happening in the culture around them don't get your back up and be this kind of reactionary person defending everything from the past understand that you were like that when you were in your 20s you wanted something that was more ref you were interested in change you were interested in new kind of fashions and new ideas right you've just lost touch with your own younger self right so it's not like you have to go off and retire somewhere so that you have to let young people give them some space start creating a new world but if i were 18 right now i would feel a bit of anger and the anger would come from the boomers and the older generation they've kind of dominated the world and they have certain values in politics and culture that they feel kind of dead to me they don't relate to to my experience they don't relate to the the kind of digital world that i've grown up in i'm hungry for something that relates to me and my generation and and where i'm at and so i'm going to use that to create something new and different and so that's where the gen z could be a revolutionary generation it could happen on the level of culture i also believe it could happen on the level of politics because our politics is pretty much very static and very dead right now i don't think it relates very well to people's realities so whatever that i don't think would be a full bloodshed you know guns in the streets revolution but some political change would be healthy in a way so it's more like this world doesn't fit me it doesn't fit who i am and i know i had that feeling when i was 20. i'm walking into a world of my parents who come from the world war ii generation and their values they don't fit me i don't feel comfortable with them i'm not comfortable with their music i'm not comfortable with their books that they read i'm not comfortable with their values i want something that's more myself and so you know you have that agitating spirit and i think that's a positive thing because if in in nature and in in culturally change is to me always a good thing and and some change could be negative but in the overall macro picture change is always positive because it's what it's what we humans thrive on it's what it's what drives all the innovation all the changes that have been positive throughout our our incredible evolution so like machiavelli because he's sort of my one of my prophets change is something that's extremely healthy even in the moment it feels wrong or painful or step back in the long run it's always for the better for the for for humanity it's interesting um we'll have to go farther in defining terms here before i know if i agree with you so when i think about change for the sake of change i don't think is um it isn't always good so you're there are going to be times where you go backwards and people are not benefiting benefiting from that but for a long time i was really hardcore about the idea of i wanted to live forever and i really started to think about why has nature because there there is at least jellyfish that are truly eternal and in barring something violent they will live forever and what's interesting though is for them to accomplish that feat what they do is they grow and do a full-blown jellyfish but then they collapse back into like almost an embryonic mush and then they grow back again so it's very interesting that the strategy that's deployed is to go again into something that resembles sort of a neonatal state and i thought is it possible that the reason that nature has not favored one thing living forever is that it stagnates and that you just aren't getting that fresh take whether it's physiologically fresh right so it is not the strongest of the species that survive nor the most uh nor the most intelligent but rather the most adaptive to change is it that like you just constantly iterate iterate iterate and you basically have to kill the old so that the new can come so i thought maybe that's it like maybe the reason that it would actually be problematic for one person to live forever is that it is so hard not to become dogmatic and i think i do a good job like i hunger for change i love change and but i will stop just short of saying that i like change for the sake of change i will say that change as an entity if that's what you mean like change as an entity must always exist things that calcify into dogma or ossify or you know whatever the right word is turning to solid stone that terrifies me and that that i i'm sort of equally terrified i'm terrified of chaos which is just change for the sake of change and then i'm terrified of ossification right so where exactly that balance is so i'm a little less rushing towards a bloody political revolution maybe than you but i do like the friction well you know to me change is on a higher level if you look at it from a higher level is to me always for the better that on an evolutionary scale talking about thousands hundreds of thousands millions of years that's where all of the innovations the new species it's how we emerged as an animal as the most powerful animal on the planet right and so and it's also how what was the engine that drove all of the civilizations and sciences and the arts etc so on a very high level to me it's always positive and static is always a negative right but of course there are things from the past values that are that are positive that are good that are worth holding on to so i don't like black and white thinking where it's either change or holding on to the past that there's no kind of slight little fluid fluidity to it all yes sometimes the change that you want is a return to the past is a return to the values so for instance if i were looking at it politically i would say the one american needs and so i'm imposing my own values on this and i'm aware of it is to return to its own core to the republic that we started in the 18th century that is a little bit outdated we're going to update it to the 21st century but at its core it had a kind of participatory democratic ideal that we've distanced ourselves from right it's can you can you say that again in a different way i'm not quite sure what you mean well it's not such a representative democracy so much anymore there are vested interests there are powers that have much more power than the single voter i think if our founding fathers were around right now they would be rather aghast at the power that you know certain media companies have that certain billionaires have over it right and so a kind of return to sort of i'm just throwing this out there i'm not saying that this is universally true it's just how i feel but sometimes a return to the past is actually the revolution that you want okay but there are things in the past i don't want necessarily to get rid of their values that are very good and human okay but so it's not just change for its own sake but then i think a lot of what i what comes to my mind is adolescence and for instance my own adolescence or the adolescence that many of us went through where you're 15 and you're 16 years old and you react against your parents you don't want to be like them you kind of find them you've spent your whole life kind of admiring them suddenly i don't know about that i i want something else right and you you join your your friends and you you have a little tribe there and you're reacting against your parents that is one of the most essential phases that any young person could go through if you don't go through that rebellious phase from your parents you're never able to establish your own identity right but some of that reaction is childish is stupid right you're just trying to be the opposite of your parent it's not very rational okay but on the higher level it's actually incredibly valuable because you're carving out your own space you're carving out who you want to be and that's a positive thing so if young people are reacting against the world of the boomers and they want something politically or culturally that's different some of it to me might strike me as foolish and stupid and anarchic but on a higher level i go it's for the better because people we need we need change we need new ideas we need constantly new values it's like water that has to keep moving otherwise it stagnates and it gets unhealthy and all kinds of bacteria start festering the water needs to be constantly circulating to be sort of a healthy a healthy environment and so culturally we need that constant circulation it's not change to me what i want is a culture that's dynamic i want dynamism i want the ability for a change to happen i want the ability for people not to be afraid and to be constantly recycling and going through this process again and again and again to me that's that's the healthy aspect and i talk a lot about it in my books i contrasted in the 48 laws of power the paradigm of athens perhaps one of the most creative dynamic cultures ever in the history of humanity what we look back to is a golden age and i contrast it with sparta its arch enemy this incredibly rigid militaristic society that one didn't want any change and for hundreds of years managed to keep out any kind of change in system whereas the athenians were all very fluid they were merchants they were making money they had all the arts and to me you know that is sort of the ideal that we all want to return to and sparta is what we want to avoid that's really interesting um talk to me about what made that a golden age i know that you're incredibly well versed in the classics and i've heard few people talk about um some of those things in as interesting a way as you do not the least of which was your take on athena and strategy and um yeah some very very interesting ideas so what what is it about that period that makes it something to sort of look at fondly what how did they keep that circulation going in a useful way well it didn't last very long it really only lasted for about 100 years even even less so it was kind of this fleeting moment but sometimes those fleeting moments are the richest in history the renaissance didn't really last that long either but um well it started from um you know this is the first true democracy in in the history of there were signs of it in other cultures i don't deny it there were little sparks of it but this was the first true democratic culture and to take that step was incredibly brave and incredibly dangerous so was there one particular ruler that had to give up power for that no what happened was they had a system that was democratic but people were kind of taking advantage of it and so i talked about in in human nature the kind of role of pericles to sort of realign athens back to back to its roots back to its democratic roots where it wasn't the oligarchs where the wealthy people weren't exercising uh power disproportionate power but you know so athens came out of this situation where they were they were started off as a commercial entity their power was commerce because they were a seafaring nature and so sparta its arch enemy was landlocked right so they had a land very kind that's why they were so rigid militaristically they had to control everything but the sea is this kind of fluid environment where you know it's very dangerous you have to take a risk to go on the sea there's no risk marching out from sparta and crushing your enemy in a land battle but going out to sea is inherently risky so the athenians were by nature risk takers and i'm always personally very attracted to people who aren't afraid of risk so they slowly built this kind of merchant commercial empire you know in in the in the early 5th century bc and and so people other cultures began to fear them began to fear them as a rising power particularly the persians and twice the persians mounted these vast mass armies with xerxes the second time to crush this empire completely destroy it wipe it off the face of the planet which would have completely altered his the evol you know our own history right and it was the odds were incredibly in their favor and this little tiny city-state with a much smaller population they were able to defeat this mighty mighty army and so out of that there was a tremendous fee rush of patriotism look with who we are look at what we did and the temptation in that moment would be to get conservative to be to become all kind of we need to hold on to what we're doing we need to hold on to our empire we need to you know build to sort of stay where we are and instead they've doubled down on their democratic routes and they created this incredibly dynamic culture that in which um power was constantly changing hands and um you know the explosion culturally was insane the theater the the visual arts architecture etc and the sciences it's what we all admire what we want but the idea of being able to change and to be able to embrace risk and to not be afraid of a kind of an archiculture because it was anarchic so they had things like they had this thing called the ostrocon which where our word ostracism comes from and every year you could vote to have one person banished from athens first what's the person that you hated the most and the word came from a piece of ceramic called an austracon and you would vote for who was that one person you hated the most and wanted to get rid of in athens and everybody voted and the person who got the most votes was thrown out of athens right even if nobody ever got more than seven votes or was there some sort of minimum there would always be someone who would get thousands of votes the most irritating demagogue in the culture right wow i had no idea yeah that's where our word ostracism comes from and um sometimes it was good and sometimes it wasn't so good because there would be rabble rousers who would who would say we got to get rid of this person and then get rid of them for all the wrong reasons but mostly it was this vent for the for the populace to say who they thought was dangerous and that we could get rid of him and it was incredibly populous it was incredible you know the people had of course we're talking about males so it's all relative women weren't voting and and slaves weren't voting i know i got to qualify all that that's true but for the time it was incredibly revolutionary the amount of power that the people had in athens was remarkable and so they they weren't afraid of that of course it all collapsed with the peloponnesian war and so this fleeting golden moment was very short-lived but it was no i know nothing about that so what what ultimately brings it down just weak military well no no um so pericles so sparta is trying to initiate a war against its rival athens are going to destroy it and pericles i talked about this in the first chapter of the laws excuse me of human nature pericles comes up with a strategy for how to defeat the spartans we're not going to fight them on land we're going to defeat them with our navy and he ends up dying from the plague that hits athens in that year i think it's 429 426 bc something like that and then everything kind of goes berserk because he's gone and the athenians kind of go insane that's why i use it as the paradigm of irrationality and they decide to get arrogant and hubristic and they think we're actually going to crush sparta now instead of just trying to defend ourselves we're going to turn around and we're going to crush them and get rid of them we're going to invade this town of syracuse which is on the island of sicilia now on the island of sicily which was a major ally of sparta and if we destroy them we've destroyed one of sparta's allies in there and they're going to fall they're going to sue for peace they end up in launching this enormous all of their wealth and all of their ships go into to this invasion of syracuse and it's a disaster and they're humiliated and they're defeated and it's pure hubris and sparta is now has the upper hand and in the course of a few years they completely crush athens they take it over and the democracy is essentially finished by about 404 bc and if you ever want to read one of the greatest books ever written it's the history of the peloponnesian war by thucydides the ancient greek writer it's amazing one of the most amazing documents you can't believe that this is something that you're reading from the fifth century bc it is so modern and his way of thinking is so beautiful and he kind of chronicles the rise and fall of athens in a very kind of iconic way and what were his key insights that it was hubris and and that is sort of the what really took them down or yes more or less they kind of lost a sense of their ideals and they they got drunk with the idea of empire as opposed to preserving their democracy they began they became drunk on power and they thought that they could assert themselves all over the mediterranean and kind of rule by force instead of by persuasion and they kind of got distanced from their own values and generations of dem it's very kind of oddly um similar to what we're going through where a series of demagogues and and populists rose to the top and kind of perverted the values of athens and led to its its destruction so it's it's this incredible parable of what can happen to any civilization so yeah all right if i were watching this interview back i know i punched myself in the mouth if i didn't go back to this idea of anarchy and there being elements of that that are good tell me more i i have always had a default assumption i will admit i have never thought about anarchy as having anything positive to offer so i'm open-minded bring me in tell me why anarchy is is has elements that may be used it's not anarchy per se it's it's it's change i mean so let's go through an example that i know very well which is the french revolution something that i've studied a lot and i'm very it excites me for some reason and here you have a monarchy in france that has existed for at the time 700 years very static in control of france by the time we arrived in the 18th century it's kind of ossified into this very silly culture with marie antoinette and and louis xvi with these silly rituals and these courtiers and everything and and the populace is suffering from famines and you know they're going they're starving to death and this incredible inequalities of wealth and it's basically a dead culture and then slowly the fans of revolution start churning beginning in the early 1780s there's some revolts against the famine etc and against the king and then it explodes in 1789 right and you know we're all more less aware of what kind of ensued with the guillotine and the terror and how it goes way too far and it turns into something a bloody nightmare you know okay and then after the after that falls apart the napoleon kind of rises to the top and he's sort of part of the french revolution and then he slowly turns it into something very conservative etc on and on and on but the argument that most people have is you know the french revolution all that bloodshed what good what what was it for you know why that kind of anarchy as you might put it what did it lead to what good was it well it led to the formation of what became modern europe it led to the decline of all monarchies it became an ideal it showed the people of europe there is another way of being there's another way we don't have to live in these incredibly rigid cultures that that that were pretty ossified like in the austrian hungarian empire etc and or in spain that the ideal of revolution which spread to south america which spread you know of course saw some of it was from the united from our own revolution which preceded the french revolution but other people have shown that the conditions before the revolution were actually a lot worse the people there were many more deaths and executions and suffering than after the french revolution so it was bloody it went too far it created a reaction but in the long run decades later it had a very positive impact because it broke up this incredibly rigid system that had a strangling europe was strangling it culturally economically and politically so that's an example of change that at the moment looks negative and bloody and anarchic and unruly but in the end created a very positive effect i'm not saying that happens all the time it's not a law but oftentimes what seems to be anarchic and ugly and awful in the moment does end up serving a higher purpose because we need dynamism in our culture we need change so because that sounds so horrendous because all of us only have one life to live and if you're the one living through the guillotine and like i've heard stories about how absurd it got where it had that sort of um was it in world war ii where people were like clapping oh no it was i think it was in china where people are like so terrified to stop clapping for um i think it was mao that you know they'd be there for like two hours like just clapping clapping clapping clapping clapping and because you could get ostracized or killed if you were you know considered the first one to stop clapping or i've read the gulag archipelago and like the nightmare that it would be to live through that moment and i get it from a macro perspective it's like we want that change so robert greene is going to tell us how to do revolution the right way please tell me what i meant so the russian revolution began with that where it began with these sort of peasant rebellions but from the beginning the bolshevik revolution was an incredibly conservative movement it was not a revolutionary movement it was a movement about amassing power for the state for lenin and the state and stalin it was a very repressive machine from the beginning so it's not at all what i'm talking about and the chinese revolution is very obviously incredibly interesting story because mao began with this idea of like the trotsky idea of a permanent revolution we're going to have a culture that's constantly changing etc etc and then it turned into this incredibly rigid conservative ossified culture and i wrote about in the laws of human nature the cultural revolution in the 60s in which he wanted to completely turn things upside down like what i'm talking about so here i'm going to contradict myself here i'm going to show my own here i'm wrong robert's wrong here was a chance he wanted to turn everything upside down and it became a nightmare and it turned into massive conformity like what you're talking about where you better keep clapping or if you stop right it turned into a nightmare so that kind of just change for its own sake can lead to something very destructive i don't deny that and and look what happened to china afterward after a moment like that they turned extremely conservative and rigid in the late 70s and it's something that still affected them to this day so you know history is not like a this logical little thing like science or physics where these things all happen the same way i can pull up examples of change that lead to something very negative i understand i agree and there are exceptions to what i'm talking about in the long run in the higher picture from looking from above i'm more worried about cultures that are rigid that are ossified that cannot change that don't have that kind of constant churning of the waters and it's not just culture or or politics it's also business it's also technology it's also the ability to innovate you know social media was a great thing with the 90s and the early aughts we were all so excited about it kind of the freedom of it the ability to communicate with anybody and it's turned into this kind of rigid megalith you know like dinosaurs chomping around these giant brontosauruses that now dominate the landscape and nothing else can thrive right so that's kind of the dynamic where having something it's not good for us we want that we're the country the country that that sparks all of the innovation because that's what america is we're a country of change that's why europe admired us we weren't hold we weren't beholden to the past we were willing to take risks and create new kinds of businesses etc so do you worry at all that we're moving to with the pc culture with cancel culture all that that we're moving closer to something like you better not stop clapping very much so very much so so you know and this is the way of all cultures so we started off with a kind of a pioneer spirit where you know it's it's the rugged individual and it's a kind of a culture where people can kind of be different and express who they were and even in the 19th century in a time very different from our own where you know there were some kind of rigid codes of how to behave there was incredible freedom going on when you look about at some of the weird kind of um cults that were forming the the kind of utopian societies and some of the writers and some of the things that were going on it was a and even the business environment which was very cutthroat with the robber barons it was incredibly dynamic period of time where where we celebrated the entrepreneur and we celebrated people kind of creating their own you you could you know the rags to riches myth that is so much a part of america and we've really you called it the rags to riches myth yeah well tell me more why is it a myth well it's not a myth in the sense that it's wrong because myth is mis interpreted nowadays to mean false it just means it was part of our culture just like athena and and zeus was part of the greek myths that people believed in it was an ideal maybe that's the better word than myth but it was part of what held up all americans could reach for that ideal whereas in europe you couldn't you know sort of thing so maybe myth was the wrong word but um you know and so the reason i've written about this before and talked about it before but the reason that was there that that started was we it was a culture that was hungry that we were we we we felt um we felt that there were risks out there that if we didn't do this that america was going to suffer something that we we felt compelled to create new things right and you look at it in the arts and the sciences in technology it was incredibly vibrant and then you can kind of watch it slowly slowly slowly get get snuffed out that spirit's kind of dying on the vine then kennedy in 1960 he saw what was happening particularly in the eisenhower era and he wanted to get back to that what he called pioneer spirit and he launched what he called the new frontier which is part of the space race and you know and the space race was what created the internet if it wasn't for nasa we wouldn't have the internet and the space race generated i can't tell you how much of the technological innovation that that powers everything nowadays so yeah we're very much straying from that spirit with with the cancel culture and everything like that you know so we're afraid of people with different opinions we're afraid of of things that threaten our own preconceived ideas and that kind of to me runs counter to some of the spirit of our country it's not we're not we've never completely lived up to our ideals but that is the ideal that i think drove us for so many generations yeah one thing i find just incredibly sexy is the idea of rugged individualism that's something that you know i'm i'm with you stagnation is bad change can be extraordinarily good change as a general element is incredibly important but when i think about the way things are going now where it's group identity over everything that really worries me and ultimately i think a group is only strong when the individual people are focused on like how strong can i become how much weight can i carry for the group and then the broader we make the group i think the better off everybody is but if you're not first leaning into like hey this is my sort of one shot at things i'm going to see how strong i can get i'm going to see how far i can push myself i'm going to think for myself act for myself that to me is where one you just get strong mental health because people are chasing fulfillment they're pursuing things that fill them up in a way that maybe nobody else gives a [ __ ] about but like they care about and they have the ability to pursue that and then you marry it to an idea that we flirted with at the beginning that i think now is the time to talk about which is mortality man like you've got precious little time on this planet and are you doing something that you think is rad you know regardless of whether other people are telling you that that's what you should do like is is it something that fills you up how do you so i know you've talked in other podcasts about your book so i don't think i'm talking out of school to say that you're working on a book loosely titled or maybe officially titled the law of the sublime and how that relates to mortality and the stroke that you had tell me more about how do you think about the fact that this is all finite how does that tie in because when i think of sublime i think of something so beautiful as to you know it's fleeting it's beautiful and almost painful in its beauty right is that close to how you think of it or is it there you think about it it's very wise it's very intuitive of you because the thing about the sublime that i'm trying to capture the essence of in the book is that it's a mix of pain and pleasure and that's what makes it so powerful so the that's really interesting so the idea of our mortality is obviously very painful right what could be more painful but the idea of transforming that into something beautiful into something enlightening into something that kind of fills us with a much different spirit which which motivates us to get something done which makes us appreciate what we can look at we're alive and the sky is blue and you know and all that so mortality has this ability to sharpen our senses to sharpen our appreciation of life and that turns the pain into pleasure but the pain and pleasure always go together so underneath that kind of ecstatic feeling that you feel when you're aware that that you know there's eternal time and that there are all these insanely wonderful things about around the world is always going to be mixed with that tincture of pain about how i'm going to be gone and i won't be here to appreciate it but that mix of the two emotions of what makes it so powerful and so insanely addictive right because pure pleasure on its own can almost get monotonous and it can almost go ah i'm tired of it you know i'm bored and pure pain but the combination of these two things and so in my book i'm talking about how every element of the sublime has the mix of those emotions and why neurologically that is such a powerful thing to us so you know people who've had ecstatic experiences what maslow the great psychologist called peak experiences let's say one of the paradigms for me is climbing a mountain right climbing mount everest or the guy who wrote that great book about touching the void simpson you know people who've had those kind of mountaineering experiences to get there whoa what pain man how awful you can't breathe you could die at any minute there could be an avalanche but you're so excited you're so happy because you're alive and you're tested you're testing your limits this is known as the dynamical sublime but you're testing your human endurance against the forces of nature and then you reach the top and you have this insane view that's like the paradigm of the mix of these two emotions now that might all sound kind of pointy toy to something very rare in life you know i'm not going to climb my mountain i'm not going to feel that way about death but i'm trying to bring it down to everyday things in your life so that the sublime is not just these rare moments where you climb a mountain or whatever it is but it's in your everyday consciousness right that's the goal that i have because i think what people are missing nowadays is they don't have a sense of awe and a sense of enchantment about the world around them they feel everything is kind of dead and everything is sort of the same but the actual truth of it is is that this world is so unlikely that you and i tom bilia are talking right now over skype about these very issues 5 000 years ago who could ever it's impossible it's insane it's a dream it's like it's not even real it's like the matrix who could even begin to believe it every moment of your life is like that but you're not [ __ ] aware of it you're so wrapped in banality that you're not aware of the insane awesomeness so my first chapter which i finally finished was so difficult was about the cosmos and about the big bang and about the universe and about the origin of stars and how the moon came from the earth um about four and a half billion years ago collided with this other mars-sized planet called thea it was this giant collision and the pieces of dust from that collision started spitting around the earth and by gravity kind of collected it became the moon and wow the moon is just like this dust that came from earth right and then in the beginning it was like much like a third two thirds closer to earth than it was now it was like this thing that was right there in your face you know to see the origin of the moon and to realize that that is unbelievable and that the moon that i'm looking at now you don't have to climb out everest you can go out now and even in the daytime you can see the moon that's the same moon that people in ancient babylonia were looking at and so you're having the same experience that they're having you know you can time travel and do a lot of time traveling in this book where you can experience what it was like five thousand years ago one million years ago you can travel through through art the internet is the most sublime thing ever invented now i'm writing this book i have one little question about a dinosaur that i'm wondering about and how it how it survived i do three little little clicks on my computer and whoa i've got all the answers of all these experiments it's insane it's insane the world we live in it is so insanely beautiful and sublime you're just not aware of it you know so i don't know if i'm answering your question i'm going off the deep end here but that's good no you you are and in your words and in the way that you're saying your words which is really interesting and um i think that putting it in context of what you've been going through in the last two years helps and what i love is that knowing that you had a stroke knowing that you were in a coma and i mean that's about as near death as anybody is going to get knowing that you've struggled and you know i know that you've said that you thought you'd be farther along in your healing than you are now and then one final piece to the puzzle which made what you just said so powerful is that i know that as a writer you normally write the thing that you need so the fact that you're turning towards the beauty and the sublime um would it be accurate to say that that this has been part of how you've reconnected to joy and wonderment as you've gone through sort of this incredibly difficult period yeah it's probably what's keeping me alive right now to be honest with you because it really fills me with because it's been very frustrating dealing with what i mean i'm not complaining there are people dealing with a lot worse in this world people with the with coronavirus etc but it's been very frustrating not being able to take a walk not being able to hike not being able to open things not being able to type just little frustrations but this it's weird because the book when i originally had the idea for the sublime book about 15 years ago i was gonna write it and then i got sidetracked by the 50 cent project and then i got sidetracked by mastering human nature and i'm coming back to it but when excuse me when i had the original idea i was going to travel to all parts of the world and i was going to see all these weird sublime landscapes in argentina i was going to go to antarctica i was going to go dive and be with the dolphins and the sharks and these waters i was going to have all these insane experiences and write about them okay now the irony is i'm doing the book and i can't i can't even walk outside my house right so my life is so limited that i have to find that now in my head but it's an advantage talking about turning [ __ ] into sugar that's that's how i'm turning that [ __ ] into sugar because it's the limitation is i have to use my own brain to experience it but for people out there who are trapped in a bad job who can't voyage to antarctica or argentina etc i'm trying to make the book something that's going to relate to you just like me if you feel trapped or you feel limited you can explore you can do all these things sitting at home and expand your mind and feel it and give yourself a greater sense of excitement about even the weirdness of just being alive right now so that horrible disadvantage that i've had where i can't do the book that i wanted is actually the best thing that could have ever happened to me i think in the end as far as how the book will eventually come out framing is everything robert thank you so much man i enjoy every second that i ever get to spend with you i'm super excited about your new book where can people engage with you in the meantime well um my my old website is still there i'm i i gotta ge i gotta get my social media a little better i i don't deny that talking about change so my old site is powerseductionandwar.com the and is spelled out and there you have links to all my other books and they have links to my instagram my twitter and my facebook accounts um and there's an email address where you can write to me but i if i get the time and i can get the energy going i am trying to kind of i also have a youtube channel that's that's new where i'm doing a series of podcasts so you can go visit that there's a link to that on my website but eventually the next time we speak i'll have a much more modern up-to-date real real looking social media presence because right now it's kind of well what's wrong with that guy well i look forward to it uh dude thank you again this is a lot of fun i really really do enjoy hanging out with you guys dive into his world if you haven't already read his books they are absolutely extraordinary and by the way we also have multiple episodes we've shot together i highly encourage you guys to go watch those they are amazing i've watched the episodes on his own youtube channel they are fantastic so be sure to check those out and speaking of something that's fantastic if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care [Music] so you