"The Modern World Is In Chaos" - Win The Game Of Life & Outsmart Everybody Else | Robert Greene

Netflix has become shorthand for you know, just sort of a meme life of a guy sitting in a dark room smoking weed, red eyes, not going to bed, almost sort of staying up out of spite to like, you know, you to my boss who I guess controls my day and so by me staying up late I'm I'm controlling my time. But I have a feeling that what's going on is people aren't in control of their emotions so they're not framing this hard time that they are legitimately going through. They're not framing it in a in a way that will allow them to act productively. So they then feel a way they don't want to feel. They don't see an outlet through behavior to fix it. So they start consuming, consuming, consuming alcohol, weed, porn, Netflix, whatever, which all of those things can be fun in the right amounts at the right time. Um does that seem true to you that this is ultimately them trying to numb out effectively? Well, um it's very difficult to be a human being. Let's let's start it at a very basic level going back to our earliest ancestry. So unlike animals, we are not programmed. Now animals aren't completely programmed, that's a myth, but they're much more programmed than we are by their instincts. So a leopard doesn't wake up in the morning and go, "What am I going to do today? Am I going to hunt this animal or that animal? No, I think it's kind of cloudy." No, they don't. They don't have that choice. We do. And that's what makes us aimless. That's what makes us wake up in the morning and go, "Man, what am I going to do?" So what that means, what that translates into is the human being has emptiness, has a hole inside of ourselves. A hole that we need to fill in some way because we have incredibly active minds. The the brain, if you break it down, as I said earlier, we should be fetishizing it. If you study the brain in in a larger sense, it's absolutely astounding The powers that it has, the amount of neural pathways that connect, the complexity of it, and the activeness of it. I meditate every morning, and as I try and still my mind, woah, thoughts are coming like this. You can't believe how active your mind is. You're just not aware of it. And but we have this emptiness. We don't know what to fill it with. This mind is active. We're not programmed. We don't know what to do. And because of that emptiness, we have to fill it with something. We're restless. And if we don't know what to fill it with, we're just going to consume, consume, consume, consume, consume as a way to kind of deal with that empty feeling, as you say, to numb ourselves. We're going to eat, eat, eat. We're going to watch movies. We're going to binge watch. We're going to get addicted to porn cuz it's filling that emptiness. It's taking that active mind, and it's it's numbing it. And it's like, you know, it seems satisfying because we don't have to deal with these other things. So, you have to be aware that you have this emptiness inside of you. Everybody does. I have it. Everybody does. But my life, the way I go, and I don't mean to be put the focus continually on me, is I wake every up every morning now cuz I reached this position, and I want you to have this this privilege that I have. I'm not saying that I feel so great. I want you to have it. I have this feeling I wake up in the morning. I know what I have to accomplish. I know what my goals are. I know what I have to do that particular day. I know what I have to do that particular week. These are the things that I can do to fill that emptiness, to program, to give me self purpose, to have that North Star that you're talking about. And yes, within those parameters, I can waste some time reading about the Lakers on on Lakersground.net, you know, this website that I that I lurk in or I can read articles that have nothing to do with my life, you know, I can go on and on. I can waste time but I have a general parameter. I don't have that gnawing emptiness that has to be continually filled by consuming, consuming, consuming. So, be aware that your mind is so active that you have to have something to fill it. But, it's your choice whether you're just going to consume mindless stuff or you're going to actually use that restless active brain of yours and put it to some incredible function. How do they figure out what incredible function to put it to? Well, that's the million-dollar question and that's why I wrote my my fifth book Mastery. Um So, I have a chapter one in Mastery called um discover your life's task. And it's not easy and I don't have like a formula for it. But, I I kind of lay out the process that could lead you to it. So, if you're 22 or or younger then it's it's pretty clear what you have to do and it's not so difficult. If you're 29, 30, it gets more complicated. If you're 40, it's very difficult. If you're 50, it's almost impossible. So, the younger you go through this process, the better. And what it entails is figuring out what makes you unique in life. And I don't mean like total weirdness unique. I don't mean that you have to be like some flamboyant rock star, etc., etc. It can be what makes you unique as an entrepreneur, as a business person. What makes you unique as a social individual, as somebody who likes to interact with people. What makes you unique in any endeavor, right? Going into looking at your childhood and being honest with yourself and saying I'm I'm interested in this thing now that I'm 22, but it's not really me. It's what my parents want me to be interested in. It's not really me because it's what other peers think is cool right now. It's not really me because of blah blah blah blah blah. What is really me? Okay? So, you got to peel away these layers and you got to come at So, when you were born I liken it to where a seed is planted. That seed is your uniqueness because A your DNA has never existed in the history of the universe and never will exist again. Okay? It's impossible. It's so unique. B your parents are not like any other parents and they're going to raise you in a way that's different from any other parenting couple in the in the history. C you're going to have early experiences that are not like anybody else. That is unique. That is you. That is what separates you from the 100 billion I I I I narrowed it down how many humans have lived lived in the because I had it in one of my chapters. I think it's 100 billion somewhere around that 110 billion. Woah. ever. This is what separates me from Homo sapiens. Let's draw that line. Who have ever lived before, okay? And it's real. It exists. And it's not like a single thing. It's not like, "Oh, I was meant to be a fireman. Oh, I was meant to be a politician." It's vaguer than that. It has to do with things that attract you. Whether it's sports and and your body, whether it's mathematics or music, or whether it's words and literature, or whether it's social things, or whether it's building building a house, carpentry, or building a business, etc. What is it that excites me? What is it that I'm drawn towards what I call your primal inclinations? Going through that process and figuring out, digging up that seed and figuring out what it is is the most should be the most exciting process in your life because if you do it, all the stuff that we're talking about, all the bad circumstances of the world, everything you're facing, you will reverse that power, you will discover your superpower. You will be motivated, you will find the energy, right? You will know what to ignore. It's not worth my time to be watching this podcast or reading this book. It's not worth my time to be wasting my energy doing this, that, or the other. I know what I want, okay? When you're 21 or 22, man, you can go if you figure that out, it doesn't have to be so specific, it just has to be this is the general direction I want in my life. These are the people that I want to end up being like even though I'm going to be myself in that within those parameters. Then the world will open up for you and you'll have a little bit of that radar that will guide you through life, okay? If you're 30 years old, it's different. In the 30 years old, you go through the thing of where did I go wrong? Because you wouldn't be going through this process unless you went wrong. If you're going right, then you don't need you can ignore everything. Most likely, you where did I go wrong? Why am I in this [ __ ] job? Why am I unhappy? Why am I drinking? Why am I addicted to this, that, or the other thing? My frustration, my unhappiness is speaking to me, it's telling me something. It's telling me that I took a wrong turn. All right, now go back and figure out where you took the wrong turn and what it was, where you how you can perhaps correct your path. How do you solve for that? How do you go back and figure out where the wrong turn was? Well, you're um so often times uh you'd choose a wrong path for reasons that have to do with money, with what you think is status, what other people think is cool. So, um look at your first choices. Like you're 23 years old and you decided to go work for like a big corporation and now it's sucking your soul out and you feel empty and frustrated. Okay, I'm frustrated, I'm unhappy. Well, I chose to work in this kind of soulless environment and I quit when I was 27 and then I started working as a barista. Okay? Okay, I went wrong there. All right, so that's not where I was meant to go. All right, what was it out of college that I really wanted to do? What was it that excited me? What is the path I would have taken perhaps if I hadn't listened to my parents, if I hadn't followed this I this dumb idea. What is it that I could have done? And at that point, if you can be have just a tincture, a little flash of enlightenment about that, then you can start building on it and you start going, all right, I took this wrong path. All right, now I have to head it in a different direction. I'm not going to give up, I'm not going to stay being a barista because that's not going to lead anywhere. I have to figure out a career for myself that I can't give up the 8 years I spent out of college because that's that's useless. That's not going to go anywhere. You're not 22 anymore. All right, I have to adapt what I learned in that time and I have to apply it in a different direction. So, you're going this way, your decision now isn't to go this way, it's to go this way or this way, a subtle little deviation closer towards what you were meant to towards excites you. And I have people who've written to me about the course corrections they've taken. They went from being a lawyer to being a writer about legal issues. They went from a lot of podcasters, believe it or not, have a very similar story. They went into the wrong profession, and then they discovered that what they really liked was podcasting. And they applied So, I just had a interview recently with Andrew Huberman. Mhm. You know, one of the most successful podcasters of our era, brilliant man, neuroscientist. He was a neuroscientist working for a a university, etc. He was really, really unhappy about all the politicking. And he told me that he read Mastery, and Mastery had a very huge impact on him. And I I don't want to take credit, but it kind of To him, it saved his life. Wow. He decided he had to get into podcasting, that he loved interviewing people, that he loved the interaction with other people, instead of having to do all the research, he wanted be able to take that research and apply it to his interviews and interview fascinating people. Okay, it's a very common scenario among people in the podcasting business. But there are other scenarios that people have written to me about who have made that course correction in their late 20s. I talk about in Mastery, I talk about Paul Graham, who was a master in artificial intelligence in the '70s when it was just a little baby about to be born, was just in the first instances. And he was a computer hacker, and he didn't enjoy it, and he hated working for companies. So, he went off and became an artist. He just studied painting in Italy. He came back to New York. He was kind of living in a loft in in New York, very poor, but he was kind of enjoying it. And then he heard an ad on on the radio for this new online This is 1994, mind you. This new online world of advertising and marketing and selling products that was about to happen. And he got very excited, and And goes, "Well, I'm poor. I don't mind being poor, but maybe I could make some money and then still have my life." And so he decides he's going to take all his computer skills and he's going to combine them with all that he learned in art and he's going to design a very aesthetic, a very pleasing, a very user-friendly site for selling products on the internet. It ended up turning to something that Yahoo bought for $5 million back then. And then he became a billionaire. On and on and on. He made a course correction kind of thing. So, it's possible, it's very common scenario when you're 29, 30 years old. It's not so common when you're 40, but I have heard some stories. It's pretty much I've never really heard it when you're in your 50s. So, Tell me about that. So, uh what is it that makes it impossible? Is it just that people can't muster the will because they don't think they have enough working years left? Is there is impossible, so I overstated the case, but it's unlikely. First of all, you're setting due to a character flaw or Well, as you get older, you get rigid. You think you know all the answers. You're used to you have habits. You used isn't at all what I thought it would be. I'm 50 years old, but I know all the answers. Yeah. That's terrifying. Yeah, uh um I I have habits. It's you're not aware of it, but you're not so fluid, you're not so flexible. You think that you know what you know what what the right path is. You're not willing to admit your mistakes because then that throws open When you're 30, you go, "Okay, I made 8 years of mistakes." When you're 50, "I made 28 years of mistakes." Man, that's a painful realization. And we don't like to have painful realizations. What's your advice though to somebody like that? Because let me tell you, if you and I are friends, I'm dangerously close to 50 as it is. But if I get to 50 and I'm like, "Hey, uh made a lot of mistakes, picked the wrong path. I I want you to kick me in the ass, make sure that I don't just resign. What would you say to somebody in that position? Well, it's it's actually not so difficult because you have accumulated, hopefully, a set of skills. Maybe one skill, maybe two skill, maybe three skills. If it were in the case of you, it was creating a product, marketing it, then being a podcaster, then creating this this animated world, then this educational stuff. You've got four, five sets of real skills there. But you're not satisfied. How can I take these skills and a package them and move in a different direction that is a new frontier for me that excites me, that builds on what I have. So, it's actually an advantage in a weird way, but the disadvantage is you're rigid, you're set in your hat in your ways, you think you know the answers, you're not so fluid anymore. You're not willing to make a change in your thinking, to go and it's 2028, whenever you turn 50, I'm just speculating, and uh the world is really different now. It's not the way it was in 2012 when I was building my empire, etc., etc. Am I willing to now face 2028 and the altered landscape, which means altering how I think and how I adapt, and not not being so set in ways like Robert Greene is about AI, maybe AI's a fantastic tool. You know, I realize my limitations. I know I'm an old man, I know I'm a dinosaur. I'm aware of that. But am I willing to shake myself up and go, "It's 2028, the world is different, people are young, they don't think the way I think anymore. It's a whole new generation. I have to I have to be sharp, I have to alter my game." I take those skills that I have. I adapt it to this new world, to this new AI frontier. I I hate to say it kind of makes me nauseated, but okay. I have to adapt myself to this new frontier. Can I do it? Cuz when you get older, it's hard to do that. It's hard to say I'm dealing with a new generation. I'm dealing with a new landscape. I'm dealing with my own obstacles and my set ways of doing things. Can I overcome them, you know, kind of thing. Okay, so if I did all that calculus and I was like, yeah, no, I'm I'm done. I don't I don't have any to keep going. Um what would you say? Well, um you have to find energy and love in life. And so maybe um there's something that you're doing that maybe isn't going to be so thrilling like this new career path that I'm saying, but it will be more energizing. You have to challenge yourself. So a lot of um feeling stale and lifeless is you've run out of challenges. You've conquered. You've done what certain things. But now it's it doesn't it's not you don't need to rise to the occasion anymore. You've kind of reached this plateau. You need to create a challenge for yourself. So within the business that you have, that you've been doing, whether you're working at it in an office for someone else or you've started your own business, I'm going to do something a little bit bold. I'm going to start a new venture that's just like my old venture based on all the same skills, but it's a bit of a risk. To take a risk, to shake yourself up a little bit, you know? It's not a similar thing, but with me and my books, I never try and do the same book over. Right? Because I know if I did, I'd be bored as hell. I need challenges. My mind is so active, I can't even describe. It's terrifying sometimes. And if I am bored, I don't have the energy and I get frustrated. I get depressed. So, each book has to be different. It has to challenge me. It has to go, "You've never done this before. You might fail. You might not make it what you thought you did. You better You better be up to the challenge." It excites me. So, if you're stale, you need challenges. It doesn't mean you have to make a career change, but you have to take some kind of risk. If you come to me after this next book, which I'm sure will be amazing, and you even half reach towards the I'm tapping out bell, uh if you're just done and retired and you're super passionate to go travel or something like that, cool. I'm going to clap and I'll help you ring the bell. But, if you're doing it because some part of your spirit has been broken, I'm going to be, "Hey, listen. This is an identity problem. Right now, you are allowing yourself to be uh cowed by a terrible set of [ __ ] values. And you need to right now decide what ought someone do with their life? Like, what should you be doing with your life? And this is where everybody [ __ ] hates moralizing, but I think people need to moralize in their own life. People need to have a sense of like, what should life be? Like, when we look at the landscape of a life well lived, what what ought it be? For me, you should be trying to ring every bit of potential out of your life. So, cool. Maybe your last book bored the [ __ ] out of you. Fine. Do something totally new. I'm here for it, but find something that's going to make you feel alive. I have done jobs that made me feel the exact opposite, and I would give up creature comforts, I would give up money, I would give up just about anything to feel alive. And so, when I watch people live lives of quiet desperation, most men lead lives of quiet desperation with Thoreau, whoever said that. So, it's like, "Hey, no way. Like, that is crazy. People need bright lines in their life. I I will never get addicted to drugs because I just would tell myself there's a bright line. You can't do whatever substance more than twice a week, three times a week, whatever. The second I'm doing it more than that, I know that I have a violation and I'm going to immediately address it. It's like, if I'm feeling I'm not going to allow myself See how many people I can piss off with this. I'm not going to allow myself to sit in depression. I may not be able to stop myself from getting depressed, but I'm not just going to allow myself to sit and wallow in it. This goes back to I'm not going to trust my emotions. I'm going to ask myself what my value system is. Is my value system that, "Hey, if you're suffering, you just sit in it?" No. So, it's like, people need to address this stuff. So, having a biological experience, there's something going on in in my brain in that case or gut, and I need to address it. And so, figuring out what exactly that is and then making sure that I'm making changes based on value system, frame of reference, beliefs to ensure that I'm moving towards my North Star. And I can only imagine if somebody doesn't know me and they're hearing this for the first time, this is going to sound so Pollyanna. Everything in my life is because that's how I respond to everything. Every time I've had just a grotesque challenge. Uh yeah, Jesus Christ. The number of things that I've been through in 20-plus years of business uh is crazy. And inevitably you hit hard times, brutal times, soul-sucking times, whatever, whatever. And I have realized that all of my success is predicated on one simple thing. I never quit. And I don't quit because I'm able to recharge myself by going through the process that I just walked through should you come to me and say that yeah, some part of my spirit has been broken. Well, I don't think that'll happen. You know, talk about me personally. No, I'm just saying like this is obviously at the end I'm talking to myself in all of this is a reminder to how I'd want to react. But I really do try to frame episodes around okay, there is a person watching the show. They are in this case uh they're feeling hopeless. They are being consumed by this moment in time and the realities of their life cuz I the most horrible thing about excuses is that they're valid. And so people have valid reasons to feel hopeless. But and now what? Like what are you going to do? And so if people just allow themselves to sit in that that that is a value system problem. You have to build a frame of reference that moves you towards your North Star and unless hopelessness is your North Star, there's clearly a problem. Yeah. Yeah, so um to me that North Star is a sense of purpose which makes everything else kind of fold into what you're talking about and fit. So you don't need anything else. So when you have a sense of purpose, when you know what makes you unique, when you know what your calling is in life, then if you hit a moment where you want to quit, you know, all right, I'm not going to quit. I just need to go with a slightly different direction here because I know that that this is what I was meant to do. These are my strengths, these are my good qualities, etc. And you know, I'm I don't like talking about myself so much, but here I here I go talking about myself again. Um When I was in my mid-20s, I was you know, in my journalism career, I was very unhappy. It wasn't working for me. I was depressed. So, I go and I leave and I go to Europe and I travel Europe and I had a heck of fun. I was seducing. I was seeing incredible things. I was learning languages. I was trying to write novels. But, I was poor. And I was starting to get older and I was going, "God, this isn't working." And I got very depressed. Then I came back to Los Angeles and I go, "I know. I'm going to become a screenwriter. It's Hollywood. Hooray! I'm going to make money, but I'm going to write. It's going to be fine. I like theater. It's going to be exciting." I start going and I hate Hollywood. It's soulless. I'm not very good at it. I start getting very depressed. Probably the most depressed I've ever been in my life at that point in my one-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica. As I said, I probably had moments where I was slightly suicidal. I know I did. I'm not wasn't slightly. I was. I was depressed. And I was like, "God damn it. What am I meant to do in life?" And then I had a fortuitous encounter with a man who produces books. He asked me for an idea for a book. And I kind of improvised the 48 Laws of Power and it all fell into place. But, my lesson is my long my long-winded story is I got depressed. I got down on myself, but I never gave up. I kept saying, "I'm meant to write. I'm a good writer. I have a way with words. I'm undisciplined. I have flaws. I'm not good at anything else, but I can write. I have a message. I have something to say." And it kept me going. It kept me going after all of these circumstances in which I think a lot of people would have given up at that point. And I didn't give up because I had that inner voice saying, "You're meant to write. You're You're good at it. You've developed skill. Don't give up. Keep trying. Keep trying. Keep trying." It picked me up every single time. And so, when I at people and I go they don't have that and I understand that. It's very sad because if they face a situation like that, they do, they give up. And then they they go funnel down a dark tunnel, a dark path in life. And so that's why I wrote Mastery. I don't want you to get into that that downward syndrome. I want you to see the fact that you have an overall frame, an overall purpose that gives you that radar. So when things are bad, you don't give up, you just say I need to make a slight course correction to where I'm going in life. Yeah, it's interesting. I think people have a really hard time building out the road map. I think that uh okay, to be nearly 40, for things to not have worked out, I think as you well know, that's a very hard place for people to be in. I think the scarier thing is to want to be a writer, but you're not a good writer. And I can imagine there's a lot of people that finally figure out, okay, this is what I was {quote} meant to do, but they actually suck at it. It's very true and people have presented that to me as if it's like maybe a kind of a flaw in my theory and I and I and I knock my head against it. And the only thing I can say is if you were young, if you were three or four years old or five and you decided that you wanted to write, then you would have built the right skill. You would have known that because you had a flair, you had a love of language. And you realized it because you were reading books and you just were attracted to words. And you would have built those skills. You would have developed them. But the reason you're a bad writer is you chose writing when you were 10, 12, 15 years old because you thought it was cool, because you read a book, you thought, "Hmm, this would be something." You thought it was easy. You thought, "I I write. Everybody writes. I can become a writer." I think you chose a false path. Now, maybe I'm justifying that to myself, but I think if you had a true love of words, you would have found yourself a niche to where you would have mastered You would have spent lifetime developing those skills. Like I spent 18 years more developing writing skills. I was terrible. I failed again and again, but I was developing skills. You weren't developing those skills because you were kind of half-assed about it. And that's why you failed. It wasn't what you were meant to do. And, you know, somebody once said, "Robert, you talked about 10,000 hours, which is some people dispute is actually valid theory and blah blah blah, which I think is bullshit." But I've been painting since I was 18 years old. I'm now in my 50s. I've put in my 10,000 hours, and I'm not Leonardo da Vinci. What are you talking about? Well, I go, "You put your 10,000 hours in over 33 years. If you had put those 10,000 hours from the age of 18 to 24 and starved because you couldn't make a living instead of becoming insurance brokers, which is what you are, you would have developed those skills in that year. You would have put the 10,000 hours in a condensed period of time. But you didn't because your really heart wasn't into it. Your heart was into making money and being comfortable because to be an artist, you have to be willing to starve." I was asked by an online coach if they needed to build their own app in order to launch their business. I told them what I'm telling you now. 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You have to have a stomach for a loneliness, for facing a blank piece of paper. It's not easy. And if you're not truly into it, you won't make the effort get over that mountain and develop the real skills. So, that's why I think people generally become like a mediocre writer 40 and they go, "Shit, man. Robert Greene is wrong. I I I don't This isn't meant for me. Blah blah blah." It's interesting. I think all of that is true. The only thing I disagree with is I don't think anybody's meant for anything. I think there are definitely things you're going to get a disproportionate return on, but I'll give you an example of a uh no longer super young man that I know uh who went to film school, graduated, thought he would get the three-picture deal. He didn't. He went into business as a way to get rich so that he can get build his own studio. Uh thought it would take 18 months. It took 15 years. And in the end, he realized, "Oh my god, I spent 20 years plus now at this point uh this he is me. Um It's you. Oh, yeah. I always knew I wanted to be a storyteller, but I got to my mid-40s before I actually was able to put time and energy into doing it. And so for you could certainly say that I made a whole series of bad choices. It's hard to cry about it recording this in my fancy house. Uh but the reality is if I had to do it over again, I would certainly do it differently. And but the way that I approach it is that now I just need to get good at the thing. So what I worry about is that what people are really doing is measuring themselves against a financial yardstick or they're measuring themselves against so that person has a best-selling book and I don't. And my thing is, okay, you're asking yourself the wrong question. The question people think they're supposed to ask themselves is what would I do uh if I knew I couldn't fail. Terrible [ __ ] question. What you should be asking yourself is, what would I do and love every day even if I were failing? Because hey, the odds of you failing are very high. But if you're pursuing something that you actually love and care about, then it's like cool, pour yourself into getting good at it, value yourself for the sincere pursuit. Maybe you never get there, but man, if you actually value yourself for the sincere pursuit and you're pursuing something that you actually enjoy the doing of, which is the only part of it I can guarantee cuz no one can guarantee success, then cool, you I want to say you can't lose, but I will say that man, that do take the sting out of that loss by being like, I've really enjoyed this. So for instance, when I first founded Impact Theory, the number of people that offered me ownership in a company, come run this new uh food company or whatever cuz I had so much credibility in that space. And I turned them all down. And they were, why? And I'm starting a media company. I'm going to beat Disney. And everybody was like, well, that's dumb because you don't have any experience in that area. You just had a historic exit from a food company. You should be doing food. And that would have made me more money, but that would have also made me miserable. And so I had to figure out what do I value myself for? Because if I build my self-esteem around money, success, accolades, whatever, I'm going to be miserable. But if I build my self-esteem around the sincere pursuit of something that makes me feel alive, cool. Now now we're in it. But you have to be very thoughtful about what you value yourself for. Okay, a couple of things. Um So, it's very hard to keep at something if you get no validation for it. So, if you want to write, and I know this from personal experience, and you never get anything published, and or you get it and only a few people read it and you get bad reviews, it's very hard to keep going. It's very difficult to keep pushing and pushing and pushing, right? And so if you I actually believe that if you spend the time that apprenticeship phase, and you are earnest about it, and you're self-aware, and you're looking not just at yourself and what you love, but you're aware of what the world is and what the market is for books, that you will find an audience, that you will find a niche. But you somewhere went wrong, and where you went wrong was you didn't pay deep attention. You didn't pay deep attention to your to where your business was going, to the times, to your audience, and you failed in that way. So, it's not just a matter of the 10,000 hours, it's also being aware of the cultural moment that you're living through, and being just aware in general of how things are changing, and what your audience is, and what will feed the public right now as it is. And so, you failed at that. And and And you hadn't, guarantee that you'd be a successful author. Now, as far as your story is concerned, I have a much different take on it, but I'm not you, which is nothing you did was wrong. Everything you did was right, and it it was a link in a chain that led you to your mid-40s where you're about to have fantastic success. So, if you were 30, and you went through a different process, and you go, "I'm just going to go right ahead into animation. I'm not going to do this other stuff that's that distracted me." I don't know I don't know if I'm going correctly into your story, but something else would have happened. Something else would have turned wrong. But, everything fits into place. Amor fati. Everything has a purpose. You were meant to go off into these side roads and discover yourself, and you're tougher for it, and you're stronger, and you've learned incredible lessons that are now going into what will be a mega successful business. I have that attitude because I think it's the best attitude to have. No regrets. Everything what I learned from. So, even my bad jobs that I've had, do you know how many bad jobs I've had? I've worked in in construction in Greece, a miserable job. I worked in a hotel. I worked in a detective agency, which might sounds like fun, but it was very depressing. I was a waiter. I had a whole string of crap jobs. I know what that's like, you know? But, I learned from every single one of them. I learned about human nature. I learned about how horrible can people can be, which went into the 48 Laws of Power. I learned how manipulative people can be, which went into the 48 Laws of Power. I learned how to observe people. I learned what I didn't love. Everything My motto in life, on my tombstone, is everything is material. Everything is wood for the fire. As to quote Marcus Aurelius. It's all going into that fire and it's all for a reason and a purpose. And maybe it's not true, but it's the most beautiful philosophy you can adopt in life. It's interesting. Um we have we are achieving the same outcome, but viewing it incredibly differently. So for me, I I don't mind being wrong. I don't mind having mistakes and so I don't mind and this may just be how we think about the word regret. I don't mind having regrets. I don't I don't mind that I would do it differently if I had to do it over. Um I can't do it over and I love the way my life turned out and I don't have a beef with it. It's just I don't want to lie to myself and say uh oh no no no, I did it perfectly. Everything happens for a reason. I don't think things happen for a reason other than that Well, you when it when it goes awry, it is because I'm dumb and did the wrong things. Uh that that is a reason. Um but yeah, I don't know. That doesn't bother me. In fact, I find it more empowering to say, "Oh yeah, I [ __ ] that up, but I learned from it and so that was useful in the end anyway." That's the same thing that I'm saying. That's what I mean. We've we've come to like the same conclusion but through a different means. Okay. Um because very much I I don't know why I rebel against the idea of fate. Uh I suppose I can quote The Matrix and say I just hate the idea that my life is not in my control. Um so it's far more interesting to me to say, "Oh no, things don't happen for a reason. There is no net under this tightrope I'm walking on. If I fall, I may truly fall to my death. Things don't happen for a reason. There is no grand plan here. No one's coming to save me. I have to do this myself." And I won't do it perfectly. I will make mistakes and so I'm not going to value myself for doing things perfectly. That's a suicide mission. But I never said it is perfect. All the twists and turns of my life weren't perfect. They were terrible. They led to depression, but they happened for a reason. They made me stronger. I learned from them. So you can have a bad experience and you can get throw your hands up in the air and go, "Damn it, why did that happen? I should have done something differently." Or you can go, and this is what Amor Fati means, "I can learn from it." It happened for a reason. It taught me something. It taught me that this was the wrong thing I should do. It taught me that I am intended to do something differently. Everything in life is a lesson it is teaching me. And I do believe in fate and I do believe in it there's a there's a whole life is on rails though? No, this this that's that's mechanistic thinking. It's not Well, there's a great book written by Robert Hillman that I recommend for everybody called The Soul's Code. And he explains in modern terms that's not so woo-woo about what that fate can mean. Can you channel it? I'm getting tired and it's hard, but I'll try. Um So, you have your genetics, okay? You don't control your genetic makeup, right? It's sending you on a path. You think that it's all luck and chance, but no. You have genetics, you have DNA that is controlling some of your behavior. And it's setting you into patterns of behavior, okay? Some of those patterns can be very positive and some of them can be negative. But what you were what happens in life is kind of actually under your control and the fate is saying that because it's something that is sort of inscribed in your genetic code. It was meant for you to to happen that way and you see it and you actualize it and you make it a positive thing. You discover what that seed is, what you were meant to accomplish in life. You realize your fate. So, there's a quote that I use in mastery by Pindar. I hope I can remember. Um See who you are by becoming who you are. So, you see what your fate is and you become that fate and you realize it by your self-awareness. So, a lot of people don't realize what they were meant to accomplish in life and then they they're just failures and that's what their fate is, right? But, I realized what my fate was. It guided me. It didn't mean I was destined to work at Esquire magazine when I was 23 years old and and hated didn't mean that I was destined to work for this director in Hollywood and have a terrible experience. It just meant that I was fated to have paths in life that didn't lead to what I wanted and that I would realize and go, "I need to keep doing this." It meant I was meant to be a writer and I hung on to it. I'm not giving Robert Hillman justice as I said, I'm kind of tired, but that's that's how I look at it. It's not this woo-woo thing that everything in life is determined. Do you understand the difference? I do. I feel like um for me, it's almost certainly just semantics. Yeah. There might be some uh real thing that I just don't like cuz it clearly, Robert, your life's amazing. So, if that's the way that you have dealt with everything, uh then that's phenomenal and it works for you and the last thing I'd want to I'm not trying to convince you my way is right. I'm just um laying out the way that resonates with me is that I like to remind myself that sometimes things go wrong because I was stupid and I didn't think about it properly. Um I'm not it wasn't fated for me. I don't need to love what happened. I can just say, "Cool, learn from this." And so, there is a a self I'm poking myself in the ribs to remind myself, "Hey, if you go on autopilot again, odds are you're going to make that same mistake. So, you need to be more just arguing over semantics cuz we're saying the same thing in the end. Okay? Maybe. I think we are. We'll see. There could be second and third-order consequences I'm not anticipating. But yeah, look, no, I think that we ultimately get keep getting to the same place through a slightly different means. Yeah, cuz I'm not saying that my mistakes were perfect. I'm just saying that they It's the same thing. We're just We should move on here because I believe we're saying the same thing. It's just that I am stupid. I have flaws. I make mistakes, but I learn from them. I realize that they happened for a reason and they're teaching me something about myself. So, we're saying the same thing. I believe. Yeah, it's interesting. I want to let it go, but you use the words "it's teaching me." And I think it's important for people to understand it's not going to teach you [ __ ] You're going to have to learn. Like, you have to be the active participant in this. It won't happen by accident. Anyway, we'll stop there with that. if you're aware of what you were meant to accomplish in life, you will learn. Yeah, I don't agree with that. All right. All right. So, interesting. Okay, so what's that? Adelante. What does that mean? That means just forward in Spanish. Okay, perfect. Forward we go. Let's Let's build people back up. We've talked a lot about the problem. We've talked about how you can find yourself in some pretty dire straits. Um so, for me, it would be All right, you have to figure out where you want to go. You have to know that with with a clarity that's terrifying. Yeah. You have to have a set of values and beliefs that are going to essentially force you to act in the ways you would need to act in order to accomplish that. Um what's your set up for people if they want to really do something? problem with with how you laid it out as it sounds kind of dire. It sounds kind of dreary. Man, I have to go through all of that? Yes. That's like man, I I don't It's not even worth it. I'm just going to give up. I'm just going to keep smoking pot. It's a lot more fun. If that were true, I'd leave people alone. I think what I try to appeal to people is it's fun. When you figure it out, life becomes thrilling. It becomes an adventure. You know that okay, I'm in my 20s. I I can go out and have fun. I can waste some time. I can have this adventure, but I'm learning from it and it's helping me grow and I know that I have a sense of direction. So, you know, if you want to be um be a great basketball player or a chess master, in the beginning, it's tedious. It's boring as hell. You're frustrated. Five years down the line, it's kind of getting easier and better. 10 years down the line, you're able to shoot 60% on three-point shots. You become a a grand master or whatever the step below that is. You're having fun. It's exciting. So, following this path is actually the most thrilling thing you can be on because you're not going to do it if you think it's all drudgery and pain and I've got to spend so many years self-sacrificing, not being able to No, man. You're going to have fun overcoming challenges, getting good at something is the greatest high you can have. If you want to be an entrepreneur and you're 23 years old and you go, "Nah, I'm not really ready for it. I need to go back to business school." Okay, no. You start your business now and it fails and it's painful and you go, "Shit, I don't know." But then you go, "I'm going to do it again cuz I learned some terrible lessons." And you do it again and it succeeds. And this is like seven years later. Man, what a feeling. You've overcome yourself. You've mastered your own weaknesses, you're having fun, people are admiring you, you have the attention that you want, women are flocking to you, whatever you want, however you want to say it. It's a high, it's great. So, mastering something, becoming great, figuring out what you want to do is not painful. It's the most fulfilling decision you can ever make, and it involves some tedium, it involves a couple some years of frustration. But, if you can if you can delay immediate gratification, if you can say it'll come to something in 3 or 4 years, if I'm focused, if I'm energized, then you're going to reap the rewards, I guarantee you because that's how the human brain is structured. So, I like to flip the script and make it seem like something that's incredibly fun, and that's why I wrote mastery, where the last two chapters are about being creative and about the feeling of being a master at something where you have an intuitive feel. It's like a superpower at that point, and it's an incredibly intoxicating sensation. And I set it up that way because I wanted you to realize that this is a goal that you can have, and it's incredibly it'll give you life a sense of direction. So, um I just want you to feel that there is another path, even in these miserable times, even with all the problems, there is a path that will lead to something so different, and it'll turn your life around. And I I I mean, I don't know, it's hard to convince people with words, and that's why I wrote that book, but I honestly believe that. Powerlessness Yeah. corrupts more than power. Yeah, it's a quote of Malcolm X, actually. Okay. Tell me more. Well, um so, we all desire a degree of power and control in life, and you have to understand the word power is not just like about politics or about Elon Musk or anything. I'm talking about in our day-to-day lives, right? How we interact with people. The sense that I cannot influence my boss, my colleagues, my wife, my children, the people around me is deeply, deeply miserable for us. Right? It makes us feel powerless. And when we're powerless, we either we turn it on ourselves, we end up hating ourselves, and we get depressed, or we become passive-aggressive, and we start manipulating other people in ways where in which we can justify to ourselves as, "Oh, no, I'm not really doing that. I'm actually a good person." But it actually can be very, very harmful. So, you have to admit that you want a degree of power. You want the the ability to influence people, and you're not going to be hypocritical. You're going to be honest with yourself, you know? Niceness is okay. It's a good quality if it's under control, if you understand it, and if you use it, and you know how to use it strategically, and it's maybe it's a part of your personality, and it's authentic, but it doesn't govern you. You are in control of it. And what happens is, if you're the pleasing type, which is your whole strategy in life is pleasing other people, getting them to like you, which is, you know, a quality that a lot of people have, men and women, right? It doesn't come from a place of security. It comes from a place of deep, deep insecurity. You're not You don't understand really who you are, and so you can't control it. And so you're always trying to please people. And when we can sense we can smell people's insecurities. And when it comes to like seduction with between men and women, women have a sixth sense of they can smell an insecure man, right? And you can they can smell it in you. They can smell it in all kinds of ways. And trying so hard to please and trying so hard to be nice secretly indicates that you're actually very weak inside and is very much a turn off, is very anti-seductive. And so, you want to be nice, but you want to be strategic about it. You want to know sometimes I don't want to be nice. Sometimes I want to show create boundaries. Sometimes I want to pull back. I want to play the coquette. I want the woman to know she does she can't take me for granted, right? I'm not interested in her. The moment you show her that you're not interested in her, she's going to be much more interested in you. You're willing to play a little bit that tough part of it. You're in control. You're strategic. You know when to use absence and when to use presence. When to to text them and call them and when to disappear for a couple of week or so and make them feel like they don't, you know, they they can't take you for granted. So, know when to be nice and you can use it to your to effect, but you also know when I don't want to be nice in this world. And that pertains to all sorts situations in negotiation, etc. If you're always so nice in business, you're you're going to be a doomed you're not going to survive very long. I come at this from evolutionary perspective. And so, the reason because I was so bad with women for so long and then figured out how to quote unquote play the game and it worked literally on a dime from what literally from one day to the next, I could not be successful with women to I felt like within my sexual market value. Let me not oversell this, but within my sexual market value, I could be successful sort of when I wanted to be. And it it was so it was such a set of rules that I was following that I actually had to laugh out loud. I was like, I cannot believe it took me this long to just figure out that oh, I have to present myself a certain way. That you don't want to go for the close right away. That you really this is about, um, a strategic revealing of your personality. It's about understanding what's going to get them excited. You might hate this description, but it's marketing. Once you understand that you're a brand, you have to establish what your brand means. You have to make them feel some kind of way about you. The way that you're establishing your brand better be real. And one of the things I'm sure we'll talk about today is, I take all of this, I I've been married to the same woman for 21 years. We've been together for 23. To me, the we had to seduce each other in the beginning. And then at some point, that becomes, uh, a deep, long-term pair bond, which is a totally different game. And I really hope everybody can get good at both games, because that's really how you end up having an amazing love life that will ride with you through the ups and downs. But seduction is real. People need to stop pretending that it's not. From my perspective, this is based on evolution, that women, and it's interesting cuz I think you push back a little bit on looking at the 3,000-ft view of men and women. I'll make a case for it. If you hate it, tell me you hate it. But here's my case. There's a quote, I forget who it's by, forgive me whoever said this, this is a paraphrase. Any individual woman is a mystery, but taken as a whole, they're a mathematical certainty. It was technically said about men, but you get the idea. And that makes sense to me. And so, I you're right. Like, ultimately, I had to figure out my wife. I didn't just have to figure out women as a general thing. I had to figure out my wife. But every time I think of my wife as thinking like me, I can't predict her behavior. The second I lump her in the mathematical certainty of women are like this, then I'm way closer to being able to predict her behaviors. And so, I think it's very important to understand the distinction between how men think and how women think, what we fantasize about, how we approach sex, what we think of as seductive. but you're not going to get that from a book. So, you can read all of the facts about this is how women think, etc., etc. The best way to do that is by observing them. So, if you pay attention to to the person that you're trying to If you pay If you start paying attention to women as young at the earliest possible age, you will see these qualities in them. You will see the fact that they are interested more in stories, that they want that they don't want to be feel like it's just about sex and you're in a hurry to get them to that point. These aren't great mysteries that you need to read from a book. It's pretty clear if you pay attention, right? So, I just want to get men out of the mode because we are so goddamn analytical. It's such a problem that reading a book, reading a text, having algorithms is the only way we can think. Get the [ __ ] out of there and pay attention to the person. Develop your your mirror neurons. Develop your observational skills. Develop the human part of you that observes, that feels what the other person is feeling. If you depend so much on things that you've learned from the art of seduction or from a book, it's going to make you a bad seducer. But, to the degree that you can click into those human qualities that we all possess, where you sense the emotional tone of the other person. You sense what their vulnerable vulnerabilities. You sense what they're missing in life. Yes, maybe 60% of women are missing a similar thing. There are patterns to. And maybe reading a book can kind of click that into you. Okay, fine. I'm not going to say that that's all bad. But, the main thing you want is to be getting out of your head and into your emotions and into observing and into feeling what the other person is feeling and not being so head oriented, not being so analytical, you know? That, I think, is the main problem that a lot of men face. It's really interesting. My experience was I needed to understand it analytically because I didn't have the intuition for it. And it may be that I just didn't Look, I don't believe people are born with intuition. I think that it develops over time. So, for whatever weird reason, the intuition I developed was that if I wrote poetry and showed up with flowers on the first date, which I actually did multiple times, uh that that would get me somewhere, and it did not get me anywhere. I was actually once This is where you ask any kids listening in the car to you turn the radio down, whatever. Uh but this is a true story. I was in bed with a woman. We were getting naked. We were rounding third base, and I managed to mess that up because I displayed what I will call uh at a moment where I should have been confident and uh masculine. You might hate that word, but um I displayed what I will now God, I don't even like saying this out loud, but it's true. Uh I displayed a more feminine trait and was like, "Let's not go any farther unless this means something." Which isn't what I was feel Those exact words, which isn't what I was feeling. It was what I thought she wanted to hear, Yeah. and it was not, and it put the brakes on the whole situation. very easy to explain why that would happen, because that makes her think that "Oh, maybe he's not so into it. Maybe I'm not that attractive." Women secretly want to feel that you desire them, that you're that she is so attractive that you're going to lose control. And you didn't lose control in that moment, and you blew it. You [ __ ] it up. Mhm. So, it's very obvious why that didn't work. Yeah. Obvious to you. Now, where were you back then, Robert Greene? Uh because I still want to punch myself in the mouth for that entire evening. Well, So, yeah. Lesson learned. made mistakes like that, though. Yeah, I'm going to guess that that one's pretty bad. Uh so, what I had to really begin to understand was what women actually were going to respond to, and not the terrible assumptions that I had built up in my mind. Yeah. And what I began to realize is that um there are things that women want that don't they are not the same as what I want. And so, when I started realizing, okay, making that person my like what you just said, you're losing control. Making and that's where I think you get like the billionaire archetype of okay, this is somebody that has everything that is normally this you actually talk about this in your book. You say normally men get lost in what I think you refer to as masculine pursuits. 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Which is another way of saying, I want this person who's made a ton of money, who's at the top of the business heap, I want him to stop all of that because I'm so irresistible that he's only going to pay attention to me. And the way that makes her feel when I'm just completely focused on her, I'm not touching my phone, I'm not my mind isn't wandering, I am locked in on her. I'm making her feel physically attractive, I'm making her feel the truth, which is she is my mental equal. Like all of that that she's a woman I have to contend with, that she's captured my imagination, that she has taken this wild stallion as evidenced in and I don't mean stallion studly, I just mean this unbroken colt that is, you know, off running in the world of business, she's gotten a saddle on me, slowed me down, got me to pay attention to her. I mean, this is the beauty and the beast mythology where she is so special that she has been able to capture the attention of the person who's never had their attention captured before. Now, I've never thought about this before. I've only ever told my wife uh that I love you. I've never told that to another woman cuz I was never in love before. So, for my wife, it really was the um what in literary circles they call in erotic literary circles they call the magic hoo-ha. So, for my wife, she was the only one that was able to break me out of that. She's the only person that's ever got me to slow down on my ambition to pay attention to her. And once I could see it from not just my wife's perspective, but the general that's what women are looking for perspective, then I was like, oh, wow. Like I really get now why she wants my attention, that that isn't something I should be frustrated by, that yeah, this is, even now 23 years in, it's a seductive tool that I can play, which is you've completely captured my attention. Like if I see my wife and she's looking good, I'm going to stop whatever I'm doing and tell her and make sure she knows and feels it viscerally. And all of that required me to understand just the psychology of the whole situation. Mhm. I have no problem with that. Is this something that I seem to have disagreed with? No, not at all. That's just me um appealing to the nice guys out there, of I get you either may it may be insecurity, which mine was certainly driven by that, or you may think it's a winning strategy. I get that, but it isn't. Well, one thing that I think is very seductive that I can point out here, and it has a little bit to do with what you're saying, is what I call generosity. Generosity is is a very powerful seductive quality. It doesn't mean money as as you might necessarily assume. It can mean money, but it means that you're generous with your attention. You're generous with with what you're giving to the other person, right? So, you know, the main thing for a man who's we tend to be very linear focused, mono focused on this one thing, and there's an evolutionary reason for that for tens of thousands of years hunting, it's just focus on one thing. Women were focusing on many different things at the same time. You know, they're they're they can multitask. We can't. Um so, getting out of that mono rail that you're in with your attention, and being able to give to the other person, and give them attention, and in the initial phases shower them with the attention that they're not getting from other people. Although, you can go a little too far with that, so you sometimes you have to step back and kind of be absent for a little bit so they they don't feel like it's you're not like a stalker, you're not like it doesn't come from an insecure place, you're in control of it. But, the sense of being generous with your personality, with the time, with the attention you get, is incredibly incredibly seductive. The sense that you're not generous and stingy with money, you like take them to a cheap restaurant, you ask them to pay, you're kind of, you know, you that's a sign that you're not generous in general. So, uh and maybe that's part of the the billionaire appeal where you assume that person's going to be very generous at least with their money. So, the sense of being closed inside yourself and stingy and not wanting to give to the other person, give of your time, your attention, your money, all these other things, that is deeply, deeply anti-seductive. Mhm. What do you Do you think that we're living in a time right now that is complicated in a negative way by um changing gender norms? Well, I don't know if I want to get into all that that hornet's nest, but um you know, in seduction, I I I make it clear and I made it clear in my human nature book that we're a mix of qualities. That nobody is completely masculine and no woman is completely feminine. Men have feminine qualities, women have masculine qualities. Some men have more feminine qualities than masculine. Some women have We're a mix, it's a chemical thing and there's no way to predict that, right? And it's always been that way. But um there's ways that kind of element of androgeny, for instance, can be very, very seductive and very powerful if you know how to use it, right? So, I'm not going to say that um that's overly complicating things. In fact, the sense of kind of crossing boundaries with gender is actually a sign of some of the periods in history where things were things were the most open to seduction. So, for centuries, women could not seduce men. And I I I you I can I can delineate that period. I mean, going through all throughout ancient history and I talk about it in my new book. Because to be interested in a woman so much that you want to give them attention and time meant that you were feminine, right? And the men were masculine, they were warriors, etc., etc. They weren't interested in the inner worlds of women. Women were there to clean the house and to make babies, essentially. So, seduction was not something that really existed in the ancient world except with some exceptions like Cleopatra, etc. So, the idea that you're interested in a woman and in her world is already admitting there's a feminine element within you. And so, I look at moments in history and I just wrote about this like in the Middle Ages where our whole notion of love came from, at least the Western notion. Or you look in the 18th century, the grand epic of of seduction with Casanova and all those characters. You look at the 1920s in America and in Europe, a period of incredible sexual energy, freedom, and seduction. These were periods where there was a lot of androgyny going on. So, I don't necessarily think that that's something that's going to limit the the seductive qualities and the energy that's in the atmosphere. I think what's hindering us is not the gender norms, it's more our kind of defensiveness, our closed spirit, our desire to be completely in control of of our circumstances by by withdrawing into our egos and being afraid of of being hurt, being afraid of being wrong, being afraid of of not being strong, etc., etc. I think that has more a more inhibiting factor on on seduction in the world. Why do you think young people are having so much less sex right now? Well, for men, a lot of it has to do with porn. I mean, I'm not sure. I'm not a scientist, I'm not a sociologist, but that would be my estimation. Where first of all, they're having a lot of sex virtually. And second of all, their idea of sex and what is pleasurable and what a what what a woman should be like comes from those ideals in pornography and the look etc. etc. And so it's not as much of a need for them etc. to to kind of physically we've become much more virtual in how we get pleasure in life. Um also I think there's an element of fear as I said. I mean young people have grown up in these in these periods of massive uh economic instability. They've had to deal with the 08 collapse with the pandemic and everything that's happened there. So they've had to deal with circumstances that are very powerful and that are going to make them anxious as well as all of the helicopter parenting that many of them had to to live through. So they're filled with much more anxiety right now than I think in my generation. And that anxiety makes you want to kind of retreat into your own inner world. And having sex at least for a man and you can probably relate to this. It's a feeling of you're almost like it's almost like too much. You're almost like weak afterwards. You're almost like afraid of it. You're afraid of the power that a woman has over you. Right? You obviously get over that very quickly and you deal with it. But there's an element of fear involved and especially when you're an adolescent especially when it's when you're younger. And so I think the levels of fear and anxiety that young people are having in the world and rightly so I don't condemn that for that is probably why there's less physical ex-sexual and psychological interactions with members of the opposite sex. Mhm. Yeah, I think it's inevitably going to be a very complicated issue and like you I'm not a scientist but um I am always willing to talk about things that I know nothing about just to walk people through how I think about a problem. Uh so looking at it I think that a big part of the problem is what you're talking about with insecurity. I think that the way the world is set up right now, whether it's um pornography, whether it is uh a society that's really spent the last several decades telling men that they their masculine impulses are bad. And for better or worse, I think that sexuality, male sexuality, is tied up in power, and I think sex itself is uh dances around power dynamics. It's one of the the main things in female erotica is power dynamics. And it, man, you want to dive into a hornet's nest, like power dynamics, people get real weird about this subject. Um but with all of that, if men are, either because the economy is weird and they're not able to get on the property ladder, and they've got, you know, $180,000 in debt, and they don't feel like they're going anywhere, and they're lost in a sense of hopelessness, they have easy access to pornography, um they're just not feeling powerful. And if they're not feeling powerful, then they're going to uh struggle to feel confident in the bedroom. And, I mean, just to really put it all out there, um I think a guy has to feel confident and powerful, not in a weird, like I'm a dominant way, but strong and confident, rooted in his body, and feeling good about himself, to get and maintain an erection. Like, you're not going to see a lot of people who are insecure, scared, uh sporting erections. Those are sort of flip sides of the same coin. a lot of Viagras. I guess, but do you really think I don't know. Like, I would be surprised. It just That puts you in And also just bodies, right? So, diet and nutrition are so horrible that I have to imagine a lot of people are just physically not in a place where they're feeling good about themselves. Uh you wrap that all up and you get to what I'm sure is the tip of a very large iceberg that I've grossly oversimplified, but no. I think you you touched upon a point that's very valid. I I and I didn't touch upon it. I think it's very true. Is that um it's it's not a good time to be a man right now. It's very confusing. You know, our role models are very mixed up. We don't really know what is a positive virtue for a man. We think that we look at somebody like Andrew Tate as possibly an icon. A lot at least a lot of young people do, which I don't at all. I think that's I think it's really gross and vulgar and full of all kinds of insecurities a man like that. A kind of an icon, sort of a sense of strength from either a political figure, a leader, or an actor, or anything that used to be in the culture. We don't really have that. And men are are are seen as something kind of ugly in our culture, you know? It seems like ugly energy that comes from men. And I every time I read the newspaper, I I see that kind of that kind of slant on things. Anytime a man is sort of revealing a kind of atavistic trait of being kind of dominant and strong, "Ew, ugly. Oh, he's you know, he's awful. He's he's primitive. He's not you know, etc. etc." And so, it's very very confusing. And I remember being a young man myself growing up. I'm such an old person that I can remember like the late '60s, you know? And it was kind of confusing then. And I was struggling and I had a good role model with my father. He was very He was very gentle, but he was also quite masculine, etc. And I remember being confused about it and kind of straining and trying to find a proper masculine role model. And it was a struggle and and and I found it sometimes in my teachers, in my professors in school, and other people I later gravitated to. But the sense of this is what it means to be a man. These are good qualities. The quality of being a leader, of being strong, of even being kind of dominant and being able to dominate a group and dominate a room, or to be so powerful that your voice can carry. These are all positive traits. We wouldn't be here right now, Tom, talking, you and I, if men didn't have those traits, right? If they didn't have the courage to face, you know, enemies with spears, et cetera, et cetera. These are all positive qualities. They just have to be channeled in in socially productive ways, which is what an Andrew Tate doesn't do. But if only we could craft a Frankenstein monster of what an ideal male figure would be like, it would be very, very helpful for young men. And I don't mean to craft it in a fantasy way. It would be great if there was really people like that, you know, in this world today. So, you know, um to me, a masculine quality is a kind of inner strength. A confidence that doesn't need to yell, it doesn't need to scream, it doesn't need to bully people. It's just so strong that people are attracted to it and it emanates, it radiates itself, and people can feel it. You know, so you don't have to yell at someone. I remember when I was at uh on the board of directors of American Apparel, and the CEO, um who we ended up firing, he was a good friend of mine. He's brilliant in some things, but he could he was yelling at people left, right, and center. He thought that's what power is. That's what being masculine is. And I thought it just showed incredible weakness. The ability to set an example, to tell people this is how you should be by how I'm behaving, et cetera. Taking responsibility, these are that's a masculine quality, not blaming other people. We need to redefine what it means to be masculine and what are the positive aspects of it. I think it's very, very critical for our culture. Talk to me about aggression. I think men should have a gear that is aggressive. Should be a gear. I don't think they should live there. What do you think? Completely. I mean and you know, my wife can attest this. I'm an insanely competitive person. Right? To the degree that it's almost maybe unhealthy. Right? So like I'm bicycling up a hill and people pass me. God damn it, you can't pass me. I'm going to pass you even though right now I can't cuz I'm physically weaker. I still try to do that on my stupid recumbent bike, etc. I'm very, very competitive. And that competitive energy, I think a lot of men have. It's what directs us towards sports, you know, and I'm I'm a sports addict, etc. Being competitive is allied with being ambitious. And getting back to seduction, a man who seems ambitious is very, very seductive. And having no ambition is very unmasculine and very anti-seductive. But we have to we see the word ambition as being kind of ugly as if it's like egocentric, as if it's selfish. But damn it, this world was built by people who are ambitious. They created it. Right? You wouldn't be here. You wouldn't have the internet. You wouldn't have all your little tools that you whine and complain about if it weren't for people who were incredibly ambitious. Ambition people have created the world. So, men have aggressive energy. It's the testosterone flowing through us. Right? You can't You can't repress it. You can't get rid of it. It's there. And how you channel it is the key. You can become very self-destructive. You can channel it towards violence. You can channel it towards pushing people around. Or you can say I'm going to I'm going to channel it towards being competitive to towards being the best person at what I'm doing. We talked, I think, last time I was here when I talked about the human nature. We talked about Kobe Bryant. A man who had a dark side. He is so competitive to the degree where it could have killed him. It was just awful and he acknowledges it. He channeled it into the basketball court and it made him fantastic made him the one of the greatest players ever. It's how you take that energy, that testosterone, that aggression and what you do with it that's the critical factor and that's where I think a lot of men are confused about it. For the people out there who believe that their life is boring and that they're wasting it, what trap have they fallen into and what advice do you have for them to get out of that sense? Well, you were talking to me about we were talking earlier about diet and problems with your health and you saying get at the root cause. So, you have to get at the root cause of your boredom and most often you're looking at it superficially. You're thinking, "I just don't have enough stimulation in my life. I need to travel more. I need to get rid of my girlfriend or boyfriend and find a new relationship. My career is bothering me. I need to change jobs." That's the superficial way of dealing with a problem that's deeper. You have to look at yourself and you have to see the possible root causes of what is making you bored. A lot of it is the fact that you are looking for external stimulation. Whereas looking inward and seeing who you are and what drives you and what your motivations are, what makes you different. You were talking about diet and how all the intricate season and how each person responds to foods differently and it's very inexact science. Well, you are an individual and you have your own little weirdness and everything about you is different and you have all these little grains inside of you that react differently to things. You don't know who you are. You're alienated from yourself. You're alienated from your nature. You're finding career paths that don't suit you just like I might be eating things that don't suit me. I'm sorry to keep going back to that. No. Right? You're getting in you're involved with people that don't suit you. You don't know who you are. You don't know your core, your essence. You don't know what really excites you. What Abraham Maslow calls impulse voices. You have these little voices inside of you that are saying, "I like this. I love this. This is what excites me." You're not listening to them. That's drowned out by social media, by your parents, by everybody else. So, you don't know who you are. And because of that, you choose things that aren't right for you. And when you choose things that aren't right for you, you're not engaged emotionally. And when you're not engaged emotionally, you get bored. And you get restless. And you reach for, "Got to travel to Bali. Got to start playing the guitar. I got to quit my job. I've got to go find a new, you know, a model to start dating or whatever." You don't It doesn't It ends up like you do it, and for a week or two it's exciting. And then it doesn't lead any to anything lasting. And then you you're you're bored and you're restless, and you go on to the next thing. It's exactly what I'm writing about right now in my book on the sublime. I'm just quoting the chapter I just wrote. I love that. I actually didn't I mean, I know that you're writing about the sublime. I had no idea that it was about that specifically. How could you know? So, true. And in fact, I I want the the viewers to hear that I am desperate for your next book to come out. I really do think of you as a legend, man. Rereading The Daily Laws in prep for this, I am freaked out by how accurately you get a certain aspect of the human condition. So, with that in mind, is it that people don't have the balls to look at who they really are? Is it just that things are getting drowned out and they don't know how to create the silence? Like, why is it so hard for people to understand themselves? Well, it's hard. And our default position is to take the path of least resistance about what is easy, you know? So, right now um and I should hardly talk, but peop- people are extremely interested in drugs, Mhm. right? And like psychoactive drugs, mushrooms that are Trust me, I did a lot of that in my 20s. I have nothing against it, right? But you have the capacity in you to be continually high on life, to almost have a drug-like effect. We have these remarkable senses, our ability to pick up colors, etc., etc. You could be continually tripping. You don't need drugs. Your brain is wired for this kind of this kind of interaction with life. That doesn't feel true to me. So, how do we tap into that? Well, it takes effort. Whereas popping a pill, whereas just doing the easy thing, whereas looking at yourself and introspecting requires effort and it requires pain, right? Because when I look at myself, as I do with my meditation every morning, oh, God, Robert, you've got a lot of problems, man. Why do these thoughts keep popping up? You think you're so great, but you're not so great. Your your mind is veering towards these petty issues. Let's work on this, right? So, my meditation this morning, this very morning, I was thinking, my problem, Robert, is you don't let go. Mhm. You've got to let go. And I just kept repeating myself, let go, let go, let go. Every time a thought came in, I was like, all right, let go of it. Okay? But it's painful because you realize what your what your blocks are, what your limitations are, what you're doing wrong. We don't want to face ourselves. It's so much easier to look externally, to look out in the world, to find a guru or a coach who will help you, to find a book that will help you, to find a drug that will help you, to find some kind of to go on online porn, you know, anything, as opposed to looking inward and seeing who you really are. Yeah, so looking inward and seeing who you are is definitely heavy. It's definitely hard. It is also, I would say, the thing that leads most assuredly to success. Now, the reason that I say that is I have found that by acknowledging my own pettinesses, my insecurities, all of that, I can better understand other people. When I can better understand other people, I can better navigate the world. Yeah. So, the method that I use to figure that out is when I feel something uncomfortable, I one, I distrust my emotions, so I don't just think, "Oh, I have an emotion, I should enact it." I'm like, "Mhm, that may have a a dark underbelly. I want to understand that." so I can Uh my wife and I were arguing and she says something that just makes me so pissed off. And I'm like, "What the [ __ ] How dare you? Like, I cannot believe that you would say whatever it is that she said." And what I learned early in our marriage was anytime I had that impulse, she had tripped an insecurity of mine. Right. But if I didn't know that I was insecure about it, I see. I would get the surface level emotion. It felt so real. It just felt like she had said something she shouldn't say. Right. And I would never take the time to figure out why shouldn't she say that. And so the emotion gave me righteous indignation. I would push back on, "Hey, why'd you say that?" And never get into, "Oh, I see, I'm super insecure about this thing, which is what's triggering the emotion." So, it's what she and I call arguing about the tea. So, you're at the surface level, going back to your early point, you stop at the the part that's easy to identify. I am angry. Because I am angry, then I just do what the anger tells me to do, which is push back, shut her down, get her to take it back, whatever, rather than go, "Whoa, like, why does that bother me so much?" But, in understanding why it bothers me, then I'm like, "Okay, now I see this is an insecurity. So when I see somebody get angry at me, I'm like, oh [ __ ] they're insecure about this. That's interesting. And so now let's drill into and why are you insecure? I mean, look, there are certain conversations where you're never going to ask that, but it's it gives a lot more clarity. Which is why I ask, like, I think it's that the reason people don't identify what's really going on inside of them is twofold. One, it takes a certain level of understanding about the human animal, just generically about the way emotions come about, et cetera. And then testicular fortitude to look at something and say, oh man, I'm not as cool as I wish I were. Yeah, right. So how do we get beyond that? Well, um, you know, you don't have to read books about human nature or or or make it a study. Just look at yourself and you'll find out all that you need to know, right? You'll know that you have the flaws that you naturally think you see in other people. So I always find when people are particularly angry about some character trait in me or others, they're actually more often than not projecting. Mhm. Unconsciously, they have the same trait. So god damn it, that person's a narcissist. Well, you're not That's your way of kind of hiding from yourself your own narcissism. So by looking at yourself, you're inevitably going to see your flaws and your limitations, which was the whole subject of the laws of human nature. We have these negative qualities built into the way our we evolved as human beings, right? But we evolved a million years ago under circumstances that are completely different now, that don't have any relationship, that aren't functional to the high-tech worlds that we live in, and so we have a lot of qualities that they constantly create problems for ourselves. Okay? You think that it's other people that have these problems. You think other people are aggressive, other people are passive-aggressive, other people are self-absorbed. No, you have all of these traits as well, okay? So, it's painful. Right? And if you know one thing about human beings, if there could be one law about human behavior, and it's true, I suppose, of every animal, we avoid anything painful and we veer to what is pleasurable or easy, okay? So, how do you overcome that? That's your million-dollar question that you're asking. Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom. Sometimes you have to go, "Nothing is working in my life. I'm miserable. I'm depressed. My career isn't going in the right way." Okay? Maybe I'm the source of it. And when you hit rock bottom, you're willing to take anything, the pain of looking at yourself isn't maybe as bad as the hole that you've dug yourself into. Okay? The other way is you don't necessarily have to hit rock bottom, but you are really motivated to change your life. Right? You You're ambitious. You want to be successful. You want to have some degree of power. We're a social animal. You want to get along with people. You want to know how to navigate these complicated social environments that we inhabit. Right? And so, it's not working for me right now. I'm getting in my own way. Okay? So, I have to step back and I have to look at myself and I have to study who I am, and I have to do some heavy work on myself. Now, nobody says that's easy. If it were easy, everybody would be doing it and we'd be living in paradise, but we obviously don't, right? Do you think it's a an intellectual level that people have to to at in order to do that, or is there a process that people can run to figure this out? I'm a big believer that intellect is vastly overrated, that we are emotional animals. The problem is emotional. I hate to keep saying it, but I'm about to be giving a talk in a few weeks and this is exactly what I'm giving my talk about, which is you have to change your orientation, right? Your problem is emotional, not intellectual. Our first uh when we're having a problem, our first cuz what I'm I'm I'm giving a talk about is how to deal with change in the world. Whenever we think that we we don't understand something or having a problem, we think that knowledge is the answer. We have to accumulate more knowledge. It's intellectual. We have to know more data. We have to read studies. We have to understand these things better. The problem is emotional. The reason you can't deal with change or you're not looking at yourself is you have emotional blocks. You're full of fear. And we're turning away from the emotion? Mhm. Is it that we're turning away from the emotion that causes the problem? Like why is being emotional stalling people out? It's not being emotional that's stalling people out. It's the kind of emotions that you that are kind of blocking you. So, there are emotions that are very positive, like confidence, like boldness, like fearlessness, like openness to experience, adventurousness. These are all brilliant, expansive emotions. I contrast expansive emotions with constricting emotions. Ego, pettiness, fear, impatience that close you down and narrow the scope of what you're willing to try out. Okay? So, fear, I compare it to a tree. Fear is the root of all of this and at the branches we find impatience, we find ego. You know, we find of this the human condition or the fear of change or the inability to change. Well, you know, we are anxious creatures by nature. It's kind of built into our system as well. And so, we're kind of primed to feel fear, etc. But, these things are subtle. So, you're not aware that fear is the source of your problems, right? Because you're not attuned to who you are. You think that it's um because I don't know enough about the world or other people are blocking me or I would wasn't I didn't get a good enough education, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? It's hard to see the effects of fear because it's very subtle. It's going to block you in ways that you're never really aware. It's like this kind of poisonous gas that you can't see and it's seeping into you. So, getting back to what I'm talking about how you deal with change, which is an incredibly important issue particularly in a world now that's changing so quickly, right? You have to be able to be open to what's happening in the present moment, people, with events, etc., etc. But, because of fear, you're slipping further and further behind. You're locked in the past. You think that ideas that you had um are are exactly what's happening. You're not paying attention to the things that are around you because paying attention is hard and it's difficult and it means letting go of some of your most cherished ideas about the world and just being open to experience. So, with people, for instance, let's say I'm working with you, Tom, right? And we've been working together for a year or so. I have a certain impression of you, right? Probably from our first interactions. And that impression kind of freezes in my mind. And as I'm dealing with you, I'm always sort of seeing this kind of image that I have of you. And I'm not paying attention to who you are in the moment, how you are changing, how things are adapting. Maybe my first impression was wrong. Maybe you're actually quite different. But that takes some courage, that takes some effort to be alive in the moment and to say, "I don't know." "I don't know Tom Bilyeu. I don't really know who he is. I don't know what motivates his behavior. I need to pay attention." But the idea that I know the answer actually stems from fear. So, in this moment of radical change, so I I think there's two things at play. I'd be very interested to see what you think of this. So, I think we're living through a very um weird moment as the the Chinese um proverb, I'm not even sure what to call it, but may you live in interesting times. Supposedly meant as a curse. I think we're living in interesting times, and I mean that as a curse. And uh when I think about it, I think that a lot of what's playing out is some change is bad. And and I consider myself hyper malleable. It's one of either my greatest strengths or my greatest weakness. I'm not entirely sure. In fact, when you started off by saying you have a hard time letting go, I have the exact opposite problem. Uh I find it very easy to let go of anything, everything, my identity, all of it, like it to a point where it it may border on not useful, but anyway. So, you've got we're living in a time where I don't think all change is good. And then, on top of that, I think that when people feel weak, no, when people are weak, they have a feeling that ah like things are not going the way that I want. They don't understand that their fear is coming from weakness, an actual inability to be effective in the world. And because they have the will to power in the Nietzsche way, they begin grabbing onto whatever tool they have at their disposal. And right now, the thing that people are using is shame and shouting people down effectively. And so, mix in this is super complicated with social media and all that, but those two things, and I'm just beginning to like think through this, so thank you for letting me think out loud, but those feel like the the twin heads of this dragon right now. What are the twin heads again? Some change is bad. So, some things that are happening are actually we're going in the wrong direction. And then, some of the um lashing out that people are doing is because they are weak and they don't know a positive way to navigate the world to manifest the will to power in a way that has to do with personal responsibility, getting better at moving through the world. So, instead, they use the easier tools, which are shouting people down, which makes them feel powerful, but in reality is fear of their ideas, but they don't know how to get stronger in their own convictions. They don't know how to be open-minded to learn. And so, new ideas scare them. Some ideas actually are bad, but they feel weak, and so, now they're just lashing out somewhat blindly. Yeah, of course, um some changes are not good. But in in the larger picture of it, change, I believe, has an inherently positive quality to it. Because the worst thing that can happen to a culture, to a civilization, is to be in these static moments. So, let's say we're going through a moment where the political correctness, where the social justice warrior, is in the ascendant. And I agree with you, it's a negative it's a kind of a negative change in a way, right? Well, first of all, you have to understand these changes. So, even if they're negative, it's not that you embrace everything that's going on in the world, that you understand them on a on a deep level. But let's say that this is a negative change that is occurring in the world, but it's occurring for a purpose. It's a reaction against something that occurred earlier on. It's not going to last. Have a larger picture of history and of the world. Nothing that we humans do last very long, and particularly now in this accelerated moment of change, in 10 years from now, the generation Z and the new generation coming up, they're going to be so [ __ ] tired, pardon my language, of all of the truth virtue signaling and everything. They're going to go in the opposite direction. It's going to swing back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, right? So, don't get so caught up in the moment and think that this is this is like where we're headed. Like 100 years from now, we're all going to be like these grand inquisitors that the social justice movement will reach this insane endpoint. We've had these moments before in history, where people get extremely tight and constricted and upset and uptight and worried about things and angry and taking it out on everybody else. We've been through it so many times before. So, have some perspective that it won't last. Okay? Do you worry at all though that with the historical lens on, it also has killed a lot of people? This is the first time in my life where I'm like, I have a feeling that there are going to be consequences to the way that society is going. Now, I couldn't be more open to realizing that I'm wrong. So, if you have an insight that I'm missing you mean people being canceled and their careers being ruined, and being executed, and being beheaded for it? Uh yes, I do mean I don't I'm not thinking literally of guillotines, though that has been one of the historical ways this played out. But like, I am I am very aware of the truth of the statement, all that evil needs is for good men to do nothing. And so, it is right now it feels like division is running just in opposite directions. And as somebody that has uh who does a lot of time talking on camera, I think a lot about, "Okay, how do I how do I grapple with some of the issues?" And then what is the way to sort of present ideas to people that will hopefully gently nudge them in a more useful direction. So, I think all about usability. It's why I love your book so much because you're like if I was going to boil you down really simplistically, I would say your core message is deal with the world the way that it is, not the way that you wish it were. And that idea is very powerful to me. So, looking through the lens of, "Okay, what is useful? What is the way that I can behave that is useful?" So, you started by saying know thyself. I think that's incredibly useful. One, it helps you navigate your own emotions. Two, it helps you understand other people. Okay, so that advice is good because it's incredibly useful. Then I look at the world running in opposite directions, algorithms, social media exacerbating that problem, the rapidity with which ideas burn through society is really fascinating. And historically, humans tend to go so wrong before they swing back in the other direction that millions of people do die with a high and distressing degree of frequency. Now, do I think that we're right on the precipice? No, I think that we have plenty of time and space to calm everybody down, but I do think for the first time in my life anyway, here in the US, it's worth going, "Hey, this can rev up to the point of being actually dangerous." Yeah. Well, I don't I don't disagree with you. But then the question is, what do you do about it? I mean, you can't change like whole groups of people in mass, like people like they used to think in communist countries where you could change human nature by creating a different system. We know that doesn't work. Unless you happen to believe be a communist and you believe that's possible. So, it has to occur on an individual level, right? And how do you change that in a culture where it is where we're engineered to be angry and emotional, where all of the social media that people spend 85% of their lives on? I don't know. I'm just taking that number out of my, you know, what? It's way too low, but yeah. Okay. All right. Um, you know, it's engineered for that, right? You know, just to give you an example, something that really gets under my skin, to show my own outrage, um, you know, on my on my feed, I get these these notices from Nextdoor. You know what Nextdoor is, right? And everything is about crime and about and I know in my neighborhood, there's some crime, but it's but if you read Nextdoor, it's it's like you just sense that there's everywhere. Like there's murderers next door to you. Like rapists are all around you, right? It freaks you out. The algorithms are there. They choose those posts to put in your feed that are going to get you emotional. That's just Nextdoor. Facebook is a master of it. You know, Instagram, they're all just use these algorithms to get your most basic emotions, right? How do you fight that? Well, you have to fight that on an individual level. You have to tell people you are being manipulated, right? And in order to say that you're being manipulated, you're hitting their ego. You're telling them, "You're not as in control of yourself as you think you are." And I know this from myself. I know that I am manipulated by these different algorithms. But it means I have to have that kind of humility to say, "I am a person who can be manipulated." But most people go go thinking, "Oh, I'm not manipulated. I'm in control of my thoughts. I know what my feelings are. I behave according to what I want to do." [ __ ] You are continually being manipulated by these various these various platforms. Okay? You can't change it as an individual. I can't go and get Mark Zuckerberg to suddenly stop doing all these dastardly things. It's impossible, right? So, what do you do? You have to try and awaken people one by one by one. That's sort of why I write books like The Laws of Human Nature to awaken you up. And it's an incredible theme in that book. You might hate it, but I hit that again and again about how we are being manipulated by social media, how it's playing to our most basic instincts, how envy, which is a most powerful human emotion, it defines us in so many ways. Why envy? Why envy? Well, it's just one of the 18 chapters. But why why did I choose that? Now, why is it so powerful? Because it is wired inside of us. Our brains work by comparing um different pieces of information. On the most basic level, that's how our brains our neocortex operate. A piece of information comes up, we compare it to something else. Our our minds operate through continual comparisons. When you create a social animal whose survival depends on getting along with other people, that comparison device is continually in operation with other people. What do they have that I don't have? Why are they getting that attention that I don't have? Why are they getting these these gifts and these rewards and I don't have any of them? It was a problem that existed in hunter-gatherer societies. If you've ever studied primitive cultures, you come upon a very strange custom of theirs, which is the moment anyone receives a gift of food or anything, what is the first thing they do? They They it to someone else. It's like a ritual. Because you're deathly afraid that if you keep that gift, people are going to have envy and they will murder you. Right? So, it's it's a continual ritual. So, it's bred into us. Even chimpanzees are known to feel envy. Like if another chimp gets a delicious piece of grape and the other one has a cucumber, he's like, "Wow, what the hell? What's going on here?" That study is hilarious, which you can find on YouTube for anybody watching. It's insane. So, it's who we are. But what do you think social media is? It's an engine of envy. It's making you continually aware of what other people have and what you don't have. Oh, he's vacationing in Bali. Oh, he's dating a supermodel, etc., etc. Look at my poor pitiful life. Well, that person who's they're only posting the most positive things. They're not showing their their kind of unhappy their misery of their daily life. But you're feeling envy. So, how do you overcome that? You have to first be aware that you're feeling envy, that it is motivating you, that you feel this. And that means what we bring you back to looking at yourself. So, we can't fight these negative changes in a global context. We have to hit individual people. We have to awaken their own their consciousness. We have to make them look inward. And the best thing I can do is for me personally is to write books about this. I don't know any other way. So, we're making them look inward and we're we want them to understand that they're having an emotional problem, not a logic problem, which I think is a really interesting insight. I think so. In business, I realized pretty early on in my career that the thing that separated me from other people was I could self-soothe. So, I was stung by whatever happened, whether it was somebody chastising me or embarrassing myself or being embarrassed on purpose by a narcissist or whatever the situation may be. And it broke most people. Like it would derange them. It would push them underground. The Either they're embarrassing themselves, being chastised, somebody going out of their way to embarrass them. All the power games that you talked about. And and you and you are able to not to soothe yourself and I could soothe myself. It still hurt. I still went through the same emotion, but I was so obsessed with my goals that I would just ask myself, "What is going to move me forward?" Well, that's an That's an amazing example of a process that we're talking about and the power behind it. I couldn't have chose anything better. In fact, I don't think I could do anything better than what you do because I try and do what you're talking about and I don't even know if I've quite reached that level. But that's exactly what the point I'm trying to make and that you are illustrating here. That when you look at yourself, when you look at what really is driving your behavior, and let's first admit that we really don't know who we are and that there's a core that we will never understand. Right. We can't really see completely into ourselves. We can't really totally understand what motivates our behavior. There's an element I'm a big believer in humility. May not believe it because I write these books that don't seem humble at all. But the humility to say there are parts of me that I'm never going to understand. Okay? That's good. That's all right. That's a powerful thing. Cuz the idea that you know yourself so completely and I've gone through this process and I know who I am and I've got these problems. It's [ __ ] You don't know who you are. There's always a core that you'll never ever understand. That's a beautiful thing in life because it means mysteries are great. They're fantastic. It means you have more work to do. But all we're talking about is increasing that margin of knowledge. So let's say in the end, just to pick another number out of my you know what, 70% of ourselves we're never going to know. Right? For most people it's 95% or 98 or 99. If you can lower that number a little bit. If you can have a deeper understanding, if you can understand that what you're doing is that it's all about your ego, that you really want to be right and not about getting ahead or having success or power. If you can learn these little things, the world opens up for you. Because what power is really about in life, people always ask me for definitions, is it's about having more options. Okay? So, when you're so narrow down inside yourself about you know you have the right answer, you know that, you know, you're going to argue with people and everyone else is wrong, etc., etc., you're you're limiting what you can do in life. You can only take path A or B because that's what you're geared for. That's what's going to soothe your ego. That's what's going to make you feel better as you thought when you're trying to shout to get the right echo, okay? But when you let go, when you're open to the fact that you don't know who you are, that there are other things that could be going on, and then you figure out that ego is tripping me up, suddenly doors open. I can do C, I can do D, I can do E. I can do what you just said, or I can stop I can learn more, I can shut my own head, the voice in my head, and I can pay attention, I can learn. The world starts opening up. You start having options. You have maneuverability. You can do different things in life. Things open up for you. That's all I'm ever asking for people is to get out of these kind of narrow corners that they backed themselves into. A lot of people are feeling hopeless right now, and they are gravitating towards alcohol, porn, Netflix, etc., but nobody is coming to save them. If they want to get out of that hole, they are going to have to do it themselves. So, what is it that people can do, and quite honestly avoid doing, if they want to stop being aimless and make their dreams a reality? Well, um sometimes you have to get deep enough in that hole that you really, really want to get out. So, the key factor in life is motivation, is desire, is the energy that you bring to it. So, if you don't believe in yourself, if you only half-heartedly are reading my books or listening to Tom or listening to me and you go, "Yeah, I kind of want to change." It won't matter. It won't change anything. You'll just go back to your old habits. Right? Because habits are very powerful. You're a product of the cultural moment. It's very hard to resist it. It's very hard to swim against the tide of the times that we live in. So, if you don't have the motivation, if you don't have the energy, if you don't have the idea that damn it, I'm going down fast. If I don't turn this around, I'm you know you're only alive once. It's you know, YOLO. And um it goes past really fast. I can tell you that as now as I get older, faster than you think. So, you've got to be desperate. You've got to tell yourself, "I've got to get out of this. I've got to change my life. I've got to swim against the tide of the times that I live in. I have to change my ways." Because if not, when I'm 32, when I'm 35, all of my hopes, all of my horizons will narrow so much that it it's going to look very, very bleak. Right? So, the younger you are, the better. And you have to have that desire. You have to look yourself square in the eye. And the number one thing to think of is you have much less time than you imagine. Right? It goes past past really quickly. Your 20s will go past faster than you could imagine. Suddenly, you're 30. You go, "Whoa, what am I going to do?" Then you're 40. "Shit, it's too late." You know, okay. So, just realize you don't have as much time as you think you have. Now, the other thing you have to realize is um what builds strength, what builds character, is resistance, right? So, if you're trying to make your body physically stronger, you need resistance. You need weights, because weights are our natural resistance. You need to swim, water is resistant. You need to run, you know, gravity is resistance, etc. That resistance builds muscle, builds strength, builds aerobic power, etc., etc. Life, mentally, it's the same thing. The times that you live in are providing incredible amounts of resistance towards success, towards power, towards a sense of fulfillment. They are flooding your face with all kinds of qualities that you have to resist. And to the degree that you're aware of these qualities, and to the degree that you resist them, you will build inner strength, you will build the kind of life skills that are necessary to survive and and thrive in a very, very tough world. So, one of these resistance factors is social media, is the level of distractions that we're all facing, right? It's never, ever, ever been so intense. And you have to realize, you don't let everything into your body. You don't eat all this sugar, I hope at least. You don't eat all the pizza that you think is great for you. You understand that you have to limit your diet to be healthy, particularly as you get older. You have to limit your sugar intake, among other things, etc. Okay? You have to limit the amount of stuff that's coming into your head. You have to put your head on a diet. You have to go, "I can't be distracted. I can't absorb all of this information." The human brain, we can only retain so much in our short-term memory, let alone our long-term memory. You're flooding it with too much, and what happens is you're losing the ability to focus on simple things, right? So, to be successful, you have to have primarily the quality to focus, to concentrate. And that begins on small banal tasks like I mean, this is this is, you know, a simple example, but if you're playing the piano or you're learn want to be a chess master, you have to learn the basics. You have to learn the moves, the different games you can play. You have to learn how to do scales, etc., etc. You have to be very focused and attentive to it. So, if you're trying to learn scales and learn how to play the piano, and your mind is in 20 different places, you'll never master it. You have to develop the ability to concentrate, to focus, and the times that you are living in are making it increasingly so difficult for you that it's splintering your brain and your attention into a thousand different pieces to the point where you can't even focus on your body, on yourself, on who you are, on what makes you strong. So, you got to put your brain on a diet. And that means you got to limit how much social media you let into your life. You have to limit how many different sources you're listening to. You can't be listening to a hundred different podcasts every week. Although, you should be listening to Tom's podcast, right? So, put yourself on a diet and say, "What is it that matters? What is important?" And then that brings you to the second question, which is tied to the first one, which is by far the most important step in your life with all of these things coming at you that are creating resistance, that are going to make it hard for you, which is who are you? What makes you unique? What makes What were you born to achieve in this world? You have to be aware of that, and to be aware of that, you have to be able to focus. You have to have introspect. Introspection is a is a skill. It's not given to you. The ability to tune out things and to look at yourself and go inward and go, "This is what matters to me. This is what I hate." I realized early on I've said this before. I hate politicking. I hate office politics. I hate working for other people. They annoy me. I feel like I can do a better job than they can. So, I hate that. Therefore, Robert, you need to be an entrepreneur. You're not meant in this life to be working for other people. So, you have to be attuned to yourself. You have to look in and go this is what I hate. This is what I love. And you have to be honest because you can fool yourself. You can think that you love rock music and that you're meant to be a rock star, but it's only that's because of the culture that you're living in what your friends think is cool. That isn't necessarily who you are. You have to look at yourself. You have to focus deeply. You have to go through a process being honest and going, "What excites me? What do I feel like makes me unique?" And what does the the power that you have in life is mining that uniqueness, mining that individual quality in whatever field you go into, even in business of being an entrepreneur. And so you can't have that self-awareness if you can't focus. If you can't concentrate, if you can't be bored and take a notebook and start writing things out about your childhood, about who you are, about what you love and what you hate. If you can't do that, I'm sorry, but there's there's no hope for you. There's really no hope for you. So, you have to be able to put yourself on that information diet and go into that introspective process. That that's really heavy and I think a lot of people are going to they're going to hear that there is no hope for them. That's going to feel right and before you and I start rolling, you said um things really are bad for them. And if I grew up in their generation, I would probably be in the same boat. Why? Why is it bad right now? What What is it that's creating the sense of hopelessness? Well, we live in in a very nihilistic culture. And I find it in our entertainment, you know? So, the idea of having a set of principles that guide you in life, man, it seems so old-fashioned, it seems so fussy. It's so No, man, I'm just going to be who I am, you know? And And the the values that are implanted in in in entertainment are completely nihilistic. They give you no focus, they give you no direction, they don't tell you what actually matters in life, right? They give you all of these fault these illusions about what life is about. And so, some of it stems from the kind of fractured society that we live in. So, Fractured in what way? Well, most cultures up until the 21st century had a kind of cohesiveness to it. There were certain myths that people ascribed to that that set the boundaries. This is what unites us all. These are the things that are good, these are the things that we hate, these are the values that are good, these are the values that are bad. Now, sometimes those cultures, those conventions, those myths were not good. But then you had something to rebel against. So, me as a product of the '60s and then in the '70s when I came of age, you know, and I'm in in college, I didn't like the culture that was there, that kind of monolith myths and things. I wanted to rebel, but I had something to rebel against. What are you going to rebel against now? You don't even know what to rebel against now because there's nothing. It's just pure chaos. I can't point my finger finger to what are the guiding myths of our particular cultural moment. Maybe in a hundred years they'll be clear, but I think a lot of our myths come from technology. You know, so my study of history is every cultural moment has a kind of guiding metaphor for it. Something I'm writing about right now. And so like in the 18th century, the guiding metaphor was theater. Life is like theater. We're all actors. We're all playing roles. Early in the 20th century, it was the unconscious and Freud and discovering the unconscious and exploring that, which had a huge impact on culture. There were other myths, but I'd point to those. Today, it's technology. It's AI. It's It's all those other things, right? And so But that is like that kind of devalues the human element. So, I recently um gave a a a couple of talks with a conversation with Ryan Holiday. And uh you can look at these on YouTube. It was like an hour and a half here in LA and then in Seattle. And Ryan asked me my thoughts about AI. And I went on a kind of a rant. I'm not a Luddite. I understand and I use technology, etc. But my point was instead of fetishizing AI and ChatGPT, which I admit I've seen it, it's powerful how it goes like that. Whoa, it's like magic. Fetishize the human brain. Fetishize human powers. Fetishize our sociabilities, our theory of mind. Theory of mind is what makes humans human. And what that means is we have the ability to put ourselves in the minds of other people, to imagine what they're thinking, what they're doing. That's what makes us a preeminent social animal, which is the source of our power. What is your power? Your power is your ability to be social. Is your ability to navigate difficult social environments. Your second power is your brain and all the incredible things it has. One of them is the ability to focus. One is the ability to learn. Is the plasticity of the brain. So, the guiding metaphor, if it's all technology, it kind of makes us think that you know, with your smartphone, you have all of these powers, and you can't believe it. It makes you so impatient. Everything should be like my phone. Everything should be instant. Everything should be at my fingertip. If my internet service goes down for a few hours, I get so cranky. Well, you're like a little baby, whining and crying, right? No. What really should matter is not You don't have those powers. You can't press a button. Your brain isn't designed that way. It takes years to develop true skill, to be a master at something. You need to go back to these elemental primal human qualities. Our sociability, so get out of the virtual realm, learn social skills, which is what my book, The Laws of Human Nature, will kind of help you and grind you ground you in, as well as The 48 Laws of Power. And you need brain skills. You need to develop skills, actual skills that you can use in this world. Man, that's really interesting. So, the idea of the guiding myths, um that's something that's sort of been in the back of my mind, but I hadn't pulled forward. So, thank you for that, because now that you say that, I think one of the biggest issues that I see people struggling with, I would have used different words, but it's the same idea. Um people look at the world, they look at the here in the West, they look at the game that we're playing, they see capitalism, ew, this is gross, like it's predatory, whatever. And because they have such a negative view of the system, because the system right now isn't working for their generation, they just want to opt out, but it creates this incredibly cynical, incredibly aimless, incredibly hopeless vibe. And uh I think you and I agree, that's dangerous. Now, I I I will say for my own sake, I think it's dangerous for them. I think the punchline of life is all about fulfillment. I think that's what people should be pursuing. I think fulfillment has an evolutionarily imbued formula and that recipe, maybe is a better word, is you're going to have to work really hard to gain a set of skills that you care about for your own intrinsic reasons that allow you to serve yourself and others. If you do that, you're going to be fine. If you don't, you're going to have a profound sense of disease. Because people want to check out of the system, they are, to your point, acts they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So, they're trying to check out of a system, which by the way, I think is a phenomenal system and I advise people not to check out of it. But anyway, even if you want to check out of that system, if you then just dive into a any setup that isolates you, you're going to be in for a bad time. Because we the brain works in a certain way. And so, I've said many times on the show, on my tombstone I want it to read, "You're having a biological experience." And the reason I want people to understand that is because your brain works a certain way, there are certain things you can do that will align yourself to feeling good, feeling engaged, feeling fulfilled, loving communication, connection, meaning and purpose, all that. And there are things that you can do that will lead you exactly away from this. And so, uh rejecting the system but without a cause, so rebel without a cause style, is not going to move you towards anything. That's a pure move away from play. And if you're just moving away from something, you're going to find yourself accelerating that sense of aimlessness. And so, there's a a compounding variable here, which is people there's a rising sentiment, "Burn it all down and then we'll build utopia, for lack of a better word, in its place." And that is people that don't understand the absolute hellfire of chaos that will reign if your meaning and purpose becomes destroying instead of building. Because if if they really do succeed in tearing down a system, uh you don't have scaffolding left to build upon and that bad things happen in that vacuum. Well, first of all, also it's not possible to tear things down because the world is larger than just individuals. It's larger than a movement. It's larger than your generation, I'm afraid to say. So, you don't even have the power to tear things down because the world will go into its own kind of system. It's on The human unconscious has moved us throughout history. Human nature has. It's going to continue. It's beyond it transcends you as an individual. So, you don't have as much power to burn things down as you imagine. So, just get over that that childish fantasy. But the second thing I would say is I began by saying what matters is your level of energy, your level of motivation in life, right? And when you're cynical and when you're nihilistic it just drains you of energy. Why do anything, man? It doesn't matter, you know? 10 years down the road with climate change, we're all going to be dying anyway. What matters, okay? But I'm writing a book right now on the sublime, in which I'm trying to say the world that you live in is not ugly. It's not horrible. It's not destructive. It's insanely beautiful. The fact of being alive is one of the most weirdest things. I even have a chapter called Awaken to the Strangeness of Being Alive. It's chapter number two. And so just the fact that you are alive now as a human being is an incredibly unlikely set of circumstances that occurred. So the world that we live in is utterly sublime and utterly weird. And a lot of that interesting stuff comes from science. So, at the same time that technology is kind of making our brains into mush, scientists are uncovering things that just are so fantastic, they're extraordinary. What we're learning about the cosmos, what we're learning about the origins of life, what we're learning about evolution, what we're learning about the brain. I mean, if you just think about it, it's staggering. And so, being part of that wave of knowledge that's overwhelming us right now should be incredibly exciting. But if you have no excitement in life, if you think it's all just crap, and it's better just to not care, and you know what that comes from? It's a common adolescent pose, and I probably had it when I was 16 years old. Man, I don't care. Yeah, let's screw everything, you know. It comes from insecurity. It doesn't It's not strength. Being that kind of rebel without any reason for against nothing is actually a sign of incredible weakness. And you know where it comes from? Comes from the fear of failure. So, if I don't try to do anything, if I just say, "Oh, it's all going to hell. I'm just going to go in my van. I'm just going to tour around the United States. I'm just going to take videos and things. I You know, what the hell? Let Let You know, as as King Louis the 14th said, 'Après moi, le déluge.' After me, the deluge. I don't care." If that's your attitude towards life, you know, then that's what that's what you're going to get. So, um you have So, it comes from a fear of failure. It doesn't come from strength because to try something to try to build a business, to try and write a book, to try and make a film, puts you You're putting yourself out on the line, and you could fail. And with failure comes criticism. And with failure, you're exposing yourself. You're exposing your ambition. You're exposing that you weren't up to the task. Better to not even try and to just say, "Oh, I don't care." Because then you're not exposing yourself. So, that kind of pose is is actually a form of childish insecurity that you need to get over. But you need to have a sense of excitement. And if you don't, if you think everything is just gray and equal and bad and we're all heading to hell in a handbasket, then that's that's what you becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, I'm writing a book to just make you get that energy, that excitement again. And you know what? When you were a child, you had it. I don't care if you grew up in this culture now that is kind of, I think, deadening things. What You're a child, children have this energy that nothing can can suppress. It You actually live in a world of enchantment. Things are like amazing to you. You want to learn, you want to read books, you want to explore, you want to explore, you want to adventure. You had it when you were a child and you've lost it. You've lost it in adolescence. You lost it when you were 12. You lost it cuz the culture sucked it out of you. But it's there. It's still waiting to come back to you. But if you don't have that enchantment about life, if you don't see something really amazing about the one life that you have that can go back back go by very quickly, then nothing will ever change. You'll You're just going to end up as As I said, it'll be a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom. Okay, I agree with all that. It's easy though to step into their shoes and look back at you and say, "Hey, listen, old man who remembers the late '60s, uh that worked because of the time you were in and demographics are destiny and the time that I'm born, it's just an absolute [ __ ] show. Uh baby boomers are hoarding all of the wealth. They refuse to leave the workforce. I can't buy a property. You And when you were first getting on the property ladder, it was like a $1.50 to buy a house in Beverly Hills. And so, yeah, it seems great for you. And OPS, uh I've taken on $180,000 in college debt. It's non-dischargeable even in bankruptcy. Uh so you found a way to put me in indentured servitude and I can't expect my Oh, I'm not done. I can't expect my social security to be there when I get there because you [ __ ] won't die. Uh so that's how they're going to look back at you. What do you say to somebody with that frame of reference? Well, you know, there's obviously some truth to that and I said I understand why people are the way they are, you know. But not every time is this sort of golden period in history. You know, I lived through the 1980s, which I thought was a really, really ugly period in history. I found it very bleak and very horrifying. And I didn't have this kind of golden thing that you might imagine. I did not have success until I was 39 years old. I struggled. I I was more like how people are nowadays and that I wandered from job to job. I had 60 different jobs. I never held a job for more than 11 months in my entire life, okay? So I know and I got very depressed. I even had moments of being suicidal. I lived in a crappy one-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica. I know Santa Monica is very nice, but back then it wasn't so nice. And so I know what it means to struggle. I didn't have debt, but I didn't have any money. I was very poor living in many Most of my life I was very poor. So it's not as golden as you think for me individually, but I understand the baby boomer scenario and everything that you're facing. But so what? Stop whining. Stop whining about the circumstances. My parents grew up in the depression. Isn't That's nowhere near This isn't times are nowhere near what they had to deal with. My grandparents really more, but even my parents to some extent. So stop your goddamn whining. It was pretty awful back then. They had faced the stock market crash in 1929. They had to live through the depression of the 1930s. Then they had World War II. You think you have it bad? Try having to deal with the Nazis and the Japanese attacking you both at the same time. The 1960s, we had the Vietnam War. I was of the age where I had a draft number. My draft number was so low that I was certain to be drafted. But fortunately, the draft ended like 6 months before my age came of whatever. So, you know, you think it's the worst ever. It's not the worst ever. I can point to 100 other periods in history that were equally incredibly bleak. The generation that came out of World War I, do you know the massacre that young people faced in World War I? That's why we had the 1920s with the flappers, because people didn't want They wanted to drink themselves into oblivion. Millions of young men died for a senseless, stupid war. Okay? You have no historic sense. You have no proper sense of proportion. Just because you live in the 2020s, you think that this is the worst time? You don't read history. You don't understand that it's not the worst ever. So, stop your whining. There are plenty of humans that have dealt with things far worse than you've ever dealt with. Our ancestors who were pioneers in the 19th century, they felt faced privations and poverty that you would have no conception over. You have it much better than a lot of other people in the past. So, stop your goddamn whining. People had it worse in the past a lot of times. You don't have it so bad. Okay, you have a lot of debt. All right, you have to make a plan. You have to be strategic. But if you give up, if you just say, "Oh, it's the baby boomers. Oh, I can't own a home." If that's your energy, then that's going to be the fate that you have. There are always circumstances that are going to be resistant to you. I understand the resistance factors now are very powerful. But are you going to meet them or are you just going to give in and surrender? You can make that choice and that's fine. If you want to live on a organic farm in Oregon, I have nothing against it and I'm not making fun of it cuz that is a good life. That could be fine if that's your ambition. But maybe you can't make it that way because it's not that's not an easy life either, right? So you have to make a choice. Do I want something else for myself? Or do I just want to wallow in self-pity and blame other people? And you can blame other people and there's a lot of things to blame just as when I was growing up I had a lot of things I could blame. But you have to look at it differently and you have to say that kind of energy is self-destructive. How can I get out of that energy? I can only get out of I have to control what I can control. I have bad student debt. I have $100,000 in debt. All right, I got to make a plan for the next 5 years. First of all, you didn't have to get that $100,000 in debt. So you take a little bit of responsibility for that, you know? I mean I know they had little things that you signed that you you weren't aware of, but for a long time we've been aware of some of those predatory practices in lending. So it's partially your responsibility a little there. But okay, you have your $100,000 in debt. You make a plan. I'm going to I'm going to have to work it off this way. I'm going to have to get a job that pays well, but at the same time I'm going to be building other kind of life skills, etc. I'm going to get myself out of this hole. I'm going to have hope. I'm going to have energy. Fine, that's it. That's the alternate path, but if you don't have that, if you don't think that that's possible, then there's nothing really that I can say. I could just waste a lot of words that won't mean anything. But don't think that you have it worse than other people because you have no sense of history. You're living in this bubble, this illusion of the present. You don't know what people like were living in the Middle Ages, in the 18th century in America, in the 19th century, World War I, the Depression, the Vietnam War, the Watergate era, the the recession we had then. Stop it. You don't understand. You're not reading history. And I I agree with that very much. The way that I think about it because one uh I have a feeling that even with the like intense energy, you say that from a place of you want to see them do well. Uh you don't want to see them be stuck. And that's certainly where when I get riled up on this topic, it's from that perspective. And what I used to ask people that would, you know, come to me and say, "Look, I've got it really hard for whatever reason." And I've worked in the inner city, so I've seen poverty just absolutely demolish people. It It's really brutal to see up close. And the only question that I can think of is, "Okay, you've got $180,000 in student debt. Uh boomers are sucking up all the oxygen in the room. Whatever, whatever, all the bad things, terrible economy, nobody can get on the property market, all that. Climate change." The The question that remains is, "And now what?" And if your answer to "And now what?" is, "I give up." I will say that that is not a life frame of reference that I'll I'll refer to it as that that is going to lead you anywhere neurochemically advantageous. Now, okay, going back to you're having a biological experience. So, when I say a neurochemically advantageous uh experience, what I mean is you're not going to feel good. It's just going to feel terrible. And so, it's an incredibly self-destructive frame of reference to adopt. Now, we all see the world through a distorted lens. That's what I mean when I say frame of reference. So, your frame of reference is a pair of glasses that you wear. And these glasses are distorted, and they do not show you reality. They show you a distortion of reality. The great news is uh even though it doesn't seem like it, you get to shape those lenses. And the thing that worries me is that people have shaped the lens to show them a world that is uh against them. It is a hostile universe. Well, and let's say that these all these things are real like about the with they're very real. I don't deny them, and I don't deny the reality of people living in inner cities, and I have a huge readership among people from inner cities who've used my books and have helped them a lot. And I did a book with 50 Cent who's I agree understands an exception, but he came from the worst part of America, and he managed to pull himself up in an incredible story. So, I I understand that, but let's say that these are the circumstances that you have, and you're young, and when you're young, you're idealistic, which is part of Cynicism is just the flip side of idealism. So, your idealism, you can't really hold on to, so it just flips into cynicism, but the two are very much related. And so, if you believe that these things that there are so unjust in this world, then there's your energy. There's where you put yourself. There's your cause. Your cause isn't to to destroy, it's to say, "Wow, there's a lot of injustice in this world. There's a lot of poor people that are suffering because there's no opportunities out there. Boomers have created this awful world. All right, how do I construct a better world? How can I create a movement? How can I How can I create um more opportunity for other people? How can I start a business that will employ thousands of people instead of just wasting away and not and not contributing at all? How can I contribute to helping climate change? You know, it kind of ticks me off that there's so much technology in Silicon Valley that goes to entertaining us, to masturbating our minds, so to speak, with all kinds of trivial [ __ ] things that don't matter in life. Take all of that brilliant energy and do it to solving some real problems that we're facing. Problems that we've just outlined here about the lack of opportunities, about home ownership, about climate change. But pour your energy into something productive if you feel that way. And then contribute a sense of contri- contribution. You know, it will fulfill you in a way as a social animal, the sense of I just didn't whine and give up. I actually did something to help change this world. And if you think that's impossible, if it's just like Don Quixote tilting at windmills, then fine, and that's that's what end up happening. But even Don Quixote had this illusion that he was actually going to change it. So you need to have those illusions, even if it's not true that you can change this world. You at least need to believe that you can kill those windmills with your sword. You need to at least believe in the illusion. And then then your energy will change. So if there's so much against you, there's so much injustice in the world, there's your cause, there's your energy, there's your hope. So if it really is an illusion, uh why would they be better off believing in an illusion than trying to contact ground truth, figure out what is real, and how to operate moving forward so that they can make whatever change it is that they want to change? Well, I'm not sure quite I understand. I mean, what I meant by illusion is maybe you as an individual can't really stop climate change. Obviously, you can't. And it's bigger problem that you have than than than what any of us can really tackle. But believing that you can make a difference will give you the energy to create something, to do something. As I said in human nature, change your attitude to change your circumstances. So, if you believe in it, then you will you will do something towards that and maybe it won't be enough. But if enough people believe that and then it will be enough, you know? But what was the second part of your question? Yeah, that was it. I wanted to know so my thing is it's what I call the only belief that matters. So, the only belief that matters is that if you put time and energy into getting better at something, you'll actually get better at it. So, if like my advice would be very different if I actually thought there was nothing they could do. The reason that my advice is to ask and now what and to come up with a positive vision for their future is that they really can make a change. I mean, there's just the litany I mean, you've already gone through the litany of of people that have had it way worse and they've still managed to do something productive with their time. Anybody that doesn't know Winston Churchill's story, it is truly incredible. This is a guy that was watching his city be bombed nightly. He was constantly in danger. He was on the front lines of World War I being shot at. Like this was not somebody who was tucked away And he had severe bouts of depression. Indeed. And he was he just always said, you know, one, I'm grateful that I live at such a pivotal moment in history so that we can do something about this. So, to your point, it's like if you really see a lot of things you want to make change on, then it's like, okay, what do I need to do in order to make that change? So, going back to frame of reference, if your frame of reference is cynical and there's nothing I can do, it it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because only behaviors matter, but your behaviors are downstream of your beliefs. So, if you don't get your beliefs right that, hey, if I engage in this, if I go do something, uh if I want to pay off my student loans, there is a path to getting this done. And that doesn't mean that the deck isn't stacked against people. It doesn't mean that there are aren't worse times in human history, but at the same time, if you the only way to make a bad time worse is to have a negative attitude about it. And I mean, look, there's two books written about Auschwitz, where that's the punch line. Man's Search for Meaning, and then it The book is called The Choice. I forget the woman's name. She's still alive, as far as I know. She was doing podcasts very recently, and her whole family is killed in the Holocaust. She was in the Holocaust, and she was a dancer, and the Nazis used to make her dance while they were like selecting people to be killed. It was crazy, just like unimaginable amounts of psychological torture. And she realized, I have a choice to make now that I've survived. Is that going to be my life? Or am I going to find a way to find meaning and purpose and and go after something? Yeah. And so, it's I I don't want to adjudicate whether worse time, not worse time. I just want to say, such is the human condition, Yeah. that everyone is going to encounter difficult things. Your frame of reference is going to control what you do, and what you do will control the quality of your life. I mean, Auschwitz, I mean, who had it worse than that? Can you imagine? And I've read many, many accounts of it as somebody who lost a lot of my ancestry in in the Holocaust. Um And I I highly I can't recommend enough reading Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl. It's an amazing book that accounts what he lived through, but also a philosophy of life that will serve you very well in exactly the struggles that we're talking about. People, when they have this sort of negative view of power, damn it, that makes me so angry. It triggers all of my buttons. I'm sorry to say, because I can I am an emotional creature, I have to admit. Because everything is about power, right? The idea that you don't want power, that you say, "Oh, I'm not interested in that. I'm I'm I'm up all about truth and justice and what's good for humanity." That's a form of power, I'm sorry to say. You are seeking power. You are seeking power over other people, you know? Some of the most heinous crimes have been committed by people who think they're doing good for others, right? Okay? But you want power, right? And I look at academics who have these very lengthy, very powerful arguments about the world, etc., etc. It's all about power. They don't want to admit it. They won't admit it's just about ideas. It's just about intellect. It's about, you know, the realm of of of exchanging ideas. [ __ ] it's about power. You want the sense of expansion. You want people to love you. You want You love that feeling that what you're doing is influencing others, that you have hit the right answer. Everything you do, the everything you breathe in is a desire for power. It's a desire for expansion. Look in the mirror and admit it. And let's get away from the negative connotations that we have with it. Yes, power can be used for bad purposes, but as Malcolm X said, um you know, absolute power corrupts, but powerlessness corrupts even more. So, the feeling that you don't have any That's so important. So, the feeling that you don't have any power is even more corrupting because it makes you passive-aggressive. It turns you into these warriors who think they're doing something and you're not even aware of what you're really after. So, that was the whole point of the 48 Laws of Power. It was an inflection moment in our culture, in our history, where I was getting really upset with all of the political correctness and all of the squishy self-help books out there, right? And trying to appeal to our good side and etc., etc. And things like ambition or power were ugly words. Man, I hated that. I thought it was so hypocritical, because my experience in Hollywood, for instance, where I dealt with a lot of film directors and powerful people, is they would project this image of being extremely liberal and for all the good causes, but they were wanted power. They really wanted power, and they would often treat people in a poor fashion despite being for all the great causes. And the hypocrisy just really rankled me, and that's sort of why I wrote the 48 Laws of Power to expose that. But I want people to admit if you were saying, "Look at yourself." that you have this desire for power. It can twist you. You can You can look for it in wrong ways, most definitely. But at least come to Jesus, come to Muhammad, and admit that that's who you are, that that's what's motivating you in your behavior. And from there, we can start saying, "Well, maybe there are more constructive forms of power that I can go after." Mhm. It's so interesting because when I was maybe 25, something like that, 26 maybe, I bought the domain seeking power. Oh. And I That's 20 years ago. Yeah, very long time ago. So, it's a couple years after that my book came out, but I'm not saying there was any connection. Unfortunately, I had not read it yet. I wish I had. You would have saved me a lot of suffering. But um I That felt true to who I was. I was like, "I come seeking power." And it was It felt so light and so expansive and so positive. So, it's weird to me that the word power has taken on like these dark evil connotations. But I was like, "I want to get better. I want to get more powerful." And my whole youth I had felt so weak. And getting into business, I had finally encountered the idea that you could get better than other people. You could outperform them. And in outperforming them, you could transform your life, and you could do things that other people couldn't do. I wish, unfortunately, Kobe Bryant didn't exist back then in any way that I was aware of, anyway. Uh and he has this whole idea of booze don't block dunks. And that you can get so good at something that no matter how much people hate you, want to stop you, whatever, you can outplay them, and you can still dunk over them. And I was like, "Oh my god, like this is so amazing." So, all I have to do is get good at things. Now, to your point, if you're using that for evil, I've got no time for that. But, in your own life, if it's, you know, whether in business, if you don't acknowledge that it's a competition, you're going to get eaten alive. So, recognizing, "Okay, like this is a competition. I'm not out to hurt other people, but I'm absolutely out to outshine perform them." And life became way more fun when I realized, "Oh, I can come seeking power. I can sit at somebody's feet and learn from them and want to grow more powerful." And that's why like this whole moment that we're living through now feels like the wrong way to go about the change that people want to see in the world cuz it's like if you own, "Okay, I I want this outcome, and to get that outcome, I need to garner a set of skills, I need to get better at my performance, and then I can do it." When it's out in the open and you're taking personal responsibility, in fact, here's the the easiest way to sum it up. As Gary Vee says, there are two ways to build the tallest building in town. You can knock everybody else's building down, or you can build a building that's taller than theirs. Great. And if you're spending time knocking people's buildings down, which is the energy I feel coming off of a lot of people, that's not interesting to me. And people do it in the name of, "Oh, no, no, no, like they were just their building violated some invisible code." You know where that comes from? It comes from envy. Envy is a huge mo- uh motive motivator of people's behavior now. So, the drive to bring other people down is is really truly motivated by feelings of envy, inferiority, that other people are better than you are. So, it's it's a leveling process that's going down where we want to bring everybody down to the same level. Nobody's excellent. Nobody's accomplished anything. Oh, they just accomplished some great things because they had money or because their parents sent them to Yale or Dartmouth or because, you know, they had all of this privilege. You know, we're all you know, so it's like bringing everyone down. But, I think that it's envy is is is the root cause of it. So, going back to the where we started, that people are bored, they feel like they're wasting their life, but you were saying you know, wherever you go, there you are, that this is an internal problem, you have to master your emotions. How do you begin to tile that together for somebody that wants out of that? They want to love their life and feel like they're making the most of it. You talked about like we actually have the ability to get a drug-like effect by looking inward. And and what is it and improving ourselves and just falling in love, being honest about what we actually like and pursuing it? Like is is that an act of the will to expansion? What what's driving that? Well, um you know, there are many ways to look at that. It's um but in mastery, I I my way of describing it is a very high form of fulfillment because I like to think of fulfillment over happiness. Happiness seems like a kind of an immediate thing where, you know, getting some kind of stimulation or drinking whiskey will make you happy. But, it won't make you fulfilled. Fulfilling Fulfillment is a longer-lasting emotion. It comes from Wow, I spent 2 years doing that. I made what I went out to set out to create. I feel fulfilled. It's a wonderful feeling. It's the greatest high in the world, I think. Okay, so my one avenue to get towards what you're saying is through your work. I'm not saying it's everything because I understand relationships and people and children all these things are very important. Okay? But I'm looking at through your work to reach a level of feeling of that sense of power and expansion and fulfilled. And when you have that feeling, you don't want to hurt other people. You don't There's no need for it. There's no need to push people around for no reason. You feel comfortable with yourself. All right? So, the number one thing, the most important thing is to figure out the path towards that kind of fulfillment through your work or through your career. Right? Now, some people don't like that. I've been criticized before. I went once and gave a talk at Stanford and they were thinking that that was just so elitist. Like, fulfillment? Well, through your work. Like this one woman said, "My father was a truck driver his whole life. Are you saying that he wasn't fulfilled?" You know, that kind of criticism. What did you say to that? I said, "Well, that's actually very elitist on your part. You're saying that that's all your father was ever capable of achieving? Maybe, you know, if he was happy being a truck driver, if that excited him, if that's what he was destined to create, if he felt comfortable with that, fine. I have no problem. But a lot of people in very working class jobs aren't necessarily so happy. Their lives are full of routine. There's no kind of intellectual challenge to it. And if you know anything about the human animal and the human brain, we're voracious Our brains are voracious. We need constant stimulation. So, if you're driving a truck all day, that's all you have. If that's fulfilling for you, maybe, yes, being a good driver and getting there on time and delivering goods, maybe that is a fulfillment, but maybe your father was frustrated. Maybe he was drinking or something. Maybe it didn't really fulfill him. So, how can you say that people just should just settle for what they have, right? Cuz a lot of people aren't happy. And they may think they're happy. They may kind of They may kind of deceive themselves, but deep down inside they're frustrated. And that's why they turn to having affairs. That's why they turn to alcohol. That's why they turn to drugs. That's why they turn to addictions, etc., etc., etc. There are all kinds of signs of that. So, I'm not necessarily assuming that your father was fulfilled by his truck driving. I could be wrong. That's how I answered her. She wasn't happy with that. Okay, anyway. Um so, some people criticize this notion of work. But no. We are animals that love to make things. Somebody wants to find us as homo faber, the animal that likes to build things, to make things. That's our hands. We became powerful through making tools, etc. Also by being social animals, don't get me wrong. But we're creatures that are designed to make things, to build things, to create, right? And I don't I'm not an elitist. I think every human being on the planet has that desire. Right? They wanted that fulfillment. And I don't care if they're born poor, and they're impoverished, or they're homeless, they still have that need, and they have that capacity to become a master in what they do. So, the most important thing in life is to figure out what is your path? What is the kind of work that will bring you that sense of fulfillment? Okay? So, some people it's being an entrepreneur, it's being in business. Other people, it's the arts, or it's entertainment of some sort. Other people, it's writing, it's words, it's literature. Other people, it's the body, it's sports, it's dance, it's whatever. I don't care. I don't have a hierarchy. I don't say writing books is better than building wood things wood things with your hands. It's all the same to me, right? It's all a form of a skill. It all can lead to mastery. But you have to find out what that is, and then you have to build towards it. And when you reach that point, let's just look at the end point. So, in your 20s, which is the most important part of your life, I think. Really? Yeah. want to derail, but okay, we should come back to that. It's where you're discovering yourself. It's where all the seeds are planted for what's going to happen to you. Of course, they're planted in your earliest years, don't get me wrong. But I do think that's most critical phase. Right? You're exploring, you're trying things out. You're experimenting with different um careers, etc. You're gaining skills cuz you're learning, you like you said you wanted to learn. Right? And then you're 32, 33, and you start a podcast, a website, your own business, etc. And maybe it fails, but you're excited, it's your own, and then you learn from it, and then you create something even better. Man, it's like the greatest feeling in the world. You don't need anything else. You know? You've accomplished something. You've set a goal and you reached it. It is to me a feeling of high. So, when I write a book, it's painful. There's a lot of pain involved, stress, etc. etc. But man, there's nothing in the world I would give up. I even had a stroke probably because of that. I wouldn't give up any of that for that sense of I can look back, I wrote that book. I can die tomorrow, and I'm happy. I did what I thought I needed to do. I reached not all of my potential, but a good portion of my potential. To me, that is if everybody had that open to them, then I think we would live in a much better world if we live if people knew that as a value and went towards it. And I think the greatest periods in history the kind of the golden eras, we can look at Athens, we can look at Renaissance Italy, we could look at the 1920s in America, the jazz era and all the great cultural movements. Pick your whatever period you like. Some people like the '60s, some people hate the '60s. I don't care. Whatever you think is a golden era, they're eras of richness, of diversity, of all kinds of creative people doing all kinds of interesting things. It's an openness and everyone is experimenting. And that this kind of change that's brewing and experimentation, that's to me is a high point of human culture and it comes from more and more individuals doing taking this path that I'm talking about. Do you have a math equation, for lack of a better word, for fulfillment? How would that be? A plus B equals Y. So, here I think that So, I agree with you so violently I want to bite through the table. Uh and so, I am might not be the the best use of my teeth. Uh so, I have a rough formula of what I think leads to fulfillment. I think about this a lot, so I'm always looking for somebody that can help me refine. But, I think it goes like this. It has to be hard. And there's reasons for this from an evolutionary standpoint, but it has to be hard. It has to be something that you get more energy from than it takes. So, it's something that you inherently enjoy. And it has to be something that allows you to transform your potential into skill set and that skill set has to be something that serves you and the group. If you do all of that, you will be fulfilled. If any one of those pieces are missing, it's really hard. It's something you love, you're improving your skill set, but it only serves you, you won't be fulfilled. If all of it, but it only serves the group and not you, you won't be fulfilled. It It seems to me that it has to have all of those elements. Yeah, I mean, I think there are people, unfortunately, who get that fulfillment without the group part. Do you Do you think they're actually fulfilled? Yeah, I mean, um if you like artists who write who do some kind of great art, but they're not necessarily the best people in the world, You know, they might be a total dick, but if their art, which I think is its own punishment, PS, but they may find fulfillment in their art if they get feedback from the group, the group is moved, it's sublime, you know, and so their art creates the desired feeling in that person. They have contributed to the group, in my estimation. But if that same artist made art and nobody gave a [ __ ] about it, I don't think they would feel fulfilled. Well, you know, I don't want to split hairs with you cuz you're largely correct, but I do I can't think of examples of people who were ignored in their lifetime, and it was painful, but they knew they were right, they knew they had created something brilliant, they knew they had created some invention, and it was ignored and nobody cared and nobody liked them, and it was painful. Nikola Tesla. Yeah, he was pretty miserable. Yeah. So, despite doing all this incredible [ __ ] being out of step with your time is rough. You are the shout and the echo. So, even though when Einstein was asked, "What's it like to be the most brilliant man alive?" he said, "I don't know, you'll have to ask Nikola Tesla." Despite that, Tesla died very unhappy, by all accounts. I obviously did not know him, certainly alone and broke. And so, there was something was missing. He could never get I'm I am definitely psychoanalyzing somebody I have no right to, but I have a gut instinct that because he could not figure out the echo part of doing something in a way where people reflected back that, "Yes, this is amazingly valuable." that even though now we all reap the benefits was very little consolation to him. I I I can't think of it cuz my mind is slowing down, but I've been talking recently uh with my wife about artists and composers, etc., who had no success in life. She goes, "Really?" I said, "Yeah. Never sold any books. Their music was ignored." But my research of them they they had just in the work itself, in the absorption of the mind in composing this brilliant thing, or in writing this thing, they had that flow. Yes, so the pain is definitely there. I'm not arguing against you cuz as I said it's Oh, you might be right. I mean, I'm utterly fascinated. splitting hairs, but the the thing is is the sense of flow because what happens is what makes you miserable is your self-absorption in in in many ways. Right? The worst form of therapy is to sit there and talk about your problems. The best form of therapy is to get outside of yourself. But the people are going to be like the record just skipped for a lot of people. Go back. The worst form of therapy is talk therapy? What what like Yeah. Yeah. I Well, I mean, it maybe's not the worst, but it's not to me the most productive therapy to just talk about your problems. Really? Why? Because it's like it's like accentuating your self-absorption. Right? Whereas what you need is to get outside of yourself, not into all of your your problems. Now, of course, I I'm contradicting myself cuz I talked about the introspection. That's a different thing. We're not introspecting about my problems, what my parents did to me, more more oh, I'm so miserable, blah blah blah. I'm sure there are forms of talking therapy that are good, so I shouldn't generalize that. But what I think I don't know, something feels intuitively right about this. Yeah. Well, I just wrote Sorry, I keep doing that. About um this man, people won't have heard of him. He's he's a a Russian mystic, whatever you want to call him, Gurdjieff, who had these exercises. I don't know Um One thing he taught his students was to not vent your unpleasant emotions. So, he had this exercise called self-observation, where you're to go observe yourself like you did in the most deepest way, not just your thoughts, but about your body and how your body and your mind interact in this insane continual blend. There's no separation. So, one kind of thought will affect your body, but a feeling in your gut will affect your thinking. You're all this Observe yourself. Observe yourself. Observe yourself. And he said, "You will discover in observing yourself that most of your thoughts revolve around unpleasant emotions." It's a very bad thing to realize, but it's true. I use the number 95%, but I I As I said, I'm pulling it out of you know what again. Um okay. So, most of it is dealing with frustration, resentment, anger, bitterness, etc., etc., etc. Okay? And he said, "Look at those emotions. See them. Do not judge them. Do not say they're bad or good or whatever. And don't ever talk about them. Don't vent them to people. You can look at them, but don't talk about them." And the people who experience it go, "Whoa. I'm not talking about them. They start What? They start to go away. I didn't really feel them cuz I never expressed them. So, expressing them was kind of what makes them stronger and more embedded inside of you." I feel like we're doing that culturally right now. Yes, most definitely. I mean, look. What is the crux of the problem in people today, if I had to summarize it? Oh, and I don't mean people. I include myself in them, us, cuz I'm a human being as well, as far as I know. I've heard. We're self-absorbed. Right? I think that's the root cause of so many of our issues. Right? Because we are creatures that are actually built for empathy, for actually putting our minds into other things, into people, into animals, into solving problems, into our work. That's who we are. And we've turned that around where all of that voracious brain energy that we have As I said, I just wrote a chapter on the brain and it's this insanely powerful instrument that is so complex. People say it's the most complex piece of matter in the universe, right? It's so powerful. And when you turn inward, it just eats us alive inside. It's like a bacteria eating us from within as opposed to exteriorizing it into work, into creating things, into building things, into empathy, into working with other people. And if we're getting all ranty and outraged about justice, etc., etc. What you really need to do is to get outside of that and out and helping other people, genuinely helping them. Right? If your cause is and it's my cause as well, it's the environment, which I believe a lot and it's where all my charity goes to. Then ranting and complaining online and making people feel bad is useless. Go out and start a movement, create something, do something. You'll feel so much better about yourself and you'll be contributing it. But what we don't need is more of that self-absorption. It's like a centripetal centripetal force that's drawing us further and further and further in. My problems, my parents, my education, my brother and sister, my wife. More and more inward, more problems. It gets deeper and deeper, more and erasinating inside of ourselves. Right? You want to get out of yourself, right? And put it into your work. So you know, let's say you're an artist, right? I have great respect for artists. I kind of wished I had been an artist. I'm a failed artist. This is the guy who's written incredible best-selling books. I've walked through bookstores and watched them bring in stacks of books that you wrote decades ago. but I wanted to be a a novelist, you know. So fascinating. It is so weird to me that you can sell at your level and still be like, "Oh, but I wanted to be this." I'm the same, which is why I have such a response So that because I am not good at the things that I wanted to be good at, and the things that I am good at that other people envy me for, I'm like, "Eh, like that's not very interesting." it that you wanted to be? That list is very long. I My if I could snap my fingers, I would be Elon Musk. That is like my fantasy of fantasies. You still plenty of time. You're young. Yeah, we'll see. A, I'm 46. What's he, like, 47, 48? Like he's barely older than me. He's over 50 now. 51? 52? I mean, he's like was certainly within striking distance. And look, I am honest enough with myself, know thyself as Robert Greene would say, that I don't My brain doesn't process data the way that his does. Now, he warns people like me not to want to be like him because he says having the intrusive thoughts that he has around engineering and problem-solving, he said it's, you know, it's like having this thing turned on that you can't turn off and you wish you could. But I I would pay that price. So before we started rolling, you and I were talking. I'm I am very enamored with what you've created and put into the world, and you've you still fill a niche that so few people are able to fill. I think it's utterly fascinating. You I said once in our earlier interview that when I read your books, I can hear wolves howling in the background, but in real life, you're so lovely and kind and considerate. So most people that write dark books are [ __ ] dark, and they don't even realize they're writing a dark book, but like your stuff really deals with an underbelly of the human condition, but yet you're this lovely person. Anyway, what you've put in the world I think is absolutely incredible. And so I totally understand the the impetus to be good at one thing, to wish you were good at something else, but it is a very fascinating part of the human psyche. Well, probably if I had been a novelist, I would and then I was at this age and I was successful, I'd say, "You know, I really wanted to write non-fiction." Correct. The grass is always greener, so who am I to say? Yeah, it's such a weird [ __ ] thing. But so the what I find interesting about what you were saying is that this idea, and I've been thought a lot about this, so um I'm thinking out loud here, but the idea that if you're repeating something over and over and and I have said many many times, whatever you become what you repeat. So if you're saying to yourself like, "Hey, I can figure this out. I can learn. I can grow." then you will act in accordance. And I find that there's something about this moment where we are obsessing over things. I'm not even saying they're not real, but we're obsessing over them to the point where it's becoming counterproductive. Like we're seeing things where they aren't necessarily or we're exaggerating things that are there, but like now we're making them seem just absolutely terrifying. And I think that there's something that people have to be careful about there, that you can you can make your own life worse by obsessing over the things that are wrong, rather than like you said, making it somehow external or creating a piece of art around it or something. I don't know, creating something. Like I said, I'm thinking out loud. I don't have my finger fully on Right. why I can sense that there's a problem with it, but there's a problem. Oh, I think most definitely. We can feel it in the zeitgeist. Mhm. It's kind of ugly. It's an ugly energy. It's an ugly energy. I normally hate that kind of loose talk, but because I don't I don't yet know how to articulate it, that feels really right. So, you talked about this earlier and I I can't remember where I first heard this, but the idea that some things make you feel expansive and some make you constrict. This moment feels like a mass constriction. And that's why I worry. Yeah, and the feeling of openness, which I say occurs historically cuz we're social animals and things occur in these kind of cultural globs, these generational moments, is because of like memes and and being infected by the people around us. And in moments of expansion, your I your minds are open. You're adventurous, you're exploring. It often comes in in these kind of revolutionary periods where people are just so sick of the past 20 years and all the accumulated baggage and all the ways of doing things. They're just tired of it. They want something new. And so, they're exploring and they're hungry and they're adventurous for new ideas and people come up with wild things, but who cares? It's wild, but it's interesting. It's new. There's discussion, there's argument, but the people aren't killing each other over it, right? These are great moments in history and it's an feeling of expansion and adventurousness. So, if you have an adventurous spirit, which I think is an incredibly positive um quality to have, that means you're continually open to life. You're continually open to what happens with it brings to you and you're seeking it out. You want new things. You're learning. You're not closed off. You never have a moment where I know what is I know what is happening, etc. You have what the poet Keats called negative capability. I don't know if you're familiar with that concept. but because of you. Oh, yeah. So, I talked about it in Mastery. It's basically the fact that you can carry in your mind two contradictory ideas and not be upset about that. Because quite honestly, sometimes things are contradictory and they're true. Mhm. Right? It's weird, but it's true. Right? It could be A, it could be black, it could be white, and they're both correct. The fact that you can hold two things that seem opposing in your mind at the same time, he considered the foundation of creativity. He thought that was Shakespeare's greatest quality. It's what makes a great scientist, a great inventor, great entrepreneur, a great inventor, etc., etc. Right? any examples? I I agree most wholeheartedly, but I'd be hard-pressed to give an example off the top of my head. Well, I'm going to I'm going to mess it up horrifically because I don't remember it so well, but there's the story of Louis Pasteur. We're talking about invention, um, and of sort of the whole science of immunology, right? And here I'm having to strain my my neurons here to fit to remember it, but um, basically he had these chickens that had been injected with smallpox or whatever the disease is, right? And then they all died. Okay? And then he brought in a new batch of chickens. He's trying to figure out out of solve smallpox or whatever it was. Brought a new batch of chickens in. He injected them. And then they survived. Some of them survived. And he couldn't figure out why. And then, um, he injected them again. And I I know I'm messing it up, so please out there scientists don't don't don't flame me for this. You know, he's trying to figure out why they survived. And basically, it was because the smallpox that he that he had injected them with the second batch was weaker. It'd been left outside. And so, they had developed immunity from it by having this smaller, less intense version of smallpox injected into them. So, the next time they got injected, they had the antibodies. Now, we think we we take this for granted now, but nobody had a concept for antibodies back there back then. It was totally novel concept. And so, when he saw these chickens that survived, he was like, "Why?" You know, why what happened?" And he submitted this to other scientists, and they came up with all kinds of ideas that were basically the same ideas rehashed. You know, it was an accident. You have to redo the experiment, or they survived because of this, that, or the other. And he asked himself, "Well, no. Maybe it's something that nobody ever considered. Maybe what had happened was by having the weaker batch, they were able to somehow survive." So, he asked a question that was counterintuitive, right? Which is injecting someone with something will give them a better chance of surviving it. Which is like, "Whoa, that's like a contradiction in terms. How can that happen?" He was able to entertain this very bizarre idea that contradicted everything in medicine. At the same time, he had negative capability, and he displayed it in other aspects of his life as well. And he invented one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of medicine. There are other examples I could give of artists cuz it's most common with artists, but I you know, people like Einstein had it as well, etc. So, that that you asked for example. I'll give you a bad one. No, that's actually really that's a great one. I have one in business I was just thinking about and cuz I talk about this in Impact Theory University a lot. You have to be able to hold two competing ideas in your head at the same time and the the one that I encountered the most is as a leader you have to understand that people are intoxicated by certainty in a way that is almost distressing. And in fact we just Impact Theory just had our sixth birthday and one of the founding members thank you very much. One of the founding members recorded a video of an early memory and she was like I remember Tom had so much conviction about what we were going to build cuz I had to convince all these people like to you know do the startup starting literally from scratch and she was like Tom had so much conviction that we were going to be able to pull this off. And so one of the things I teach is you have to be able to create a narrative. You have to be able to say this is what's going to happen. This is exactly how we're going to do it and if you can like show people that you just really believe to the core that this is going to work then they'll follow you. The problem is that if you're blinded by your own narrative you're going to get blindsided and so you have to have this narrative you have to present it with conviction you have to believe it but then you have to question the [ __ ] out of it. And make sure that like is this really working? Like am I getting the data that I should be getting because any conviction like that should make a prediction. If your predictions aren't coming true then you're in trouble. So it's like you have to be convicted and at the same time be hyper skeptical of your own vision. That's perfect example. I couldn't have said it better. Thank you. People can't like that's hard. It's hard. It's hard but it's very high level of creativity. You know and if you can reach it it's it's like gold. You said something earlier that I want to go back to. I've been holding it in my head cuz it was so intriguing to me. Yes, at the Stanford talk the one who was annoyed that you said that you could find fulfillment in your work. Why do you think it made her mad? I understand your rebuttal to her, but why did it make her mad? Well, I think there's a context. First of all, this was like the a group of psychologists very heavy academia, right? High level. And here was this self-help writer from Los Angeles coming to the Stanford Behavioral School telling us about what is fulfilling. There was an imme- immediate snobbery going on. I could sense it. And I think that was a large part of it. It was like when I went to France. Although this was not nearly as bad an example of this American's going to teach us about seduction. Come on. We're French, right? We taught the world how to seduce. I could laugh then and I thought they were right, you know, and I felt kind of humbled about that. But this woman, I got a sense of wasn't necessarily what I was saying. It just didn't rankle them that um that I was saying The other thing that rankled her was that I was saying that as an individual you could change yourself. And I had brought up the example uh cuz it was recently I was writing about this with the 50 Cent book about the great African-American writer Richard Wright who wrote this fabulous novel called Native Son. Is that the name? There is a book called Native Son. I don't know if you wrote it, but And um how he had overcome incredible adversity in his life and had written this book and then basically kind of what kind of went downhill from then, but he had resurrected himself through his work and he had overcome this horrific poverty that he grew up in the South, etc. And I was detailing the process of him as a writer as an example of what I was describing about through your work you reach this level. So, there were two things that was the snobbery element of this Los Angeles because you know from LA people are are appreciably dumber further south you go in California, right? If you're in the Bay Area, you're from Los Angeles, you already have a mark against you. Interesting. I know. A self-help writer from Los Angeles. Okay. All right. As bad as a guess. Yeah. All right. And then the other element of it's not about culture. It's not about the superstructure of society. It's not about some Marxist theory about, you know, your level of income and your and all of the other things. I was saying this person, this individual, overcame the worst kind of adversity not through a government program, although I have nothing against government programs. Arch libertarians, I believe in necessity of government. I'm somebody who's educated through public schools for my whole life and I and I love that. But, he did it on his own in a process that was very arduous and beautiful. It's like well, this goes against everything we believe in that you can't do things on your own, that you need an organization, you need a structure, you need politics, you need this group, you need you need a you need academics at Stanford to teach you how to get to that point, right? So, I was nailed as the self-help writer from Los Angeles who was preaching about individualism and it fit all the clichés about the American etc. etc. etc., right? And that's not the trend in academia. The trend is trying to move away. This goes back to the whole structuralist movement and deconstruct struction etc. It's not the individual that creates a work of art, it's the culture, right? Getting away from the idea that there's a writer, there's a narrator narrator. It's all about the culture, it's impersonal. So, what I was saying went against all of the trends in academia, and it really upset them because maybe I'm wrong, but I was challenging some of their deepest held principles, at least for this one woman. She was very she wasn't rude or anything, but I could sense that I had rubbed her the wrong way. And she was very kind of There was an There was an element of anger underneath her tone. It's interesting you just opened up a whole new can of worms. So, the when you brought her up the first time, you were talking about she was incensed that her father wasn't fulfilled as a truck driver. And that the whole idea that somebody would find their fulfillment through work to her seemed crazy. And I was when you were talking about it, I was like, okay, why would she get mad about that? not crazy, but that everybody should do that way. Because I was saying that everyone should have that opportunity. Mhm. To me, the ultimate anti-elitist belief, that even her father who drove a truck could have done could have been an artist, could have created something. Through driving or in some other capacity? Interesting. What about the idea of doing the driving so well that it becomes artistry? I said that that could if that was what fulfilled him, I have no problem with that. And if what fulfills you is being a great parent, then that is a form of mastery. When Mastery came out, I had some carpenters who were doing the tile work on my patio, and I was interviewed by the New York Times about my book, and I said, he's just as good an example of mastery as Albert Einstein. He was so careful and so precise, he did a brilliant job. He got a great sense of satisfaction of seeing a beautifully done you know, bit of craftsmanship. Right? We craftsmanship is a high form of intellect in my my viewpoint. It's actually a great thing. And it's something that people used to value, you know, I mean look at the cathedrals in Europe, you know, some of the most beautiful things ever created by human beings. Craftsmen, masons, etc. People who can make stained glass, they were masters of it. These are things we need to celebrate. So, I have no problem with your form of mastery. Whatever it is, if it is driving a truck. But maybe driving a truck isn't something that's fulfilling. Mhm. And maybe you should consider that about your father. Maybe. I don't know. Ambition is seductive. Why? Why do women find ambition seductive? I think you'd have to go to evolutionary reasons. I think it goes back to something biological almost. It shows that a man can provide. He's he's going to be someone who's going to make a good living. He can provide for me. He can take care of me. You know, um I don't know how much of that is still alive in in human psychology, but I believe that is the root of it. That a man who doesn't have ambition how you know, I can't lean on him for support phys- materially and psychologically. But an ambitious man he you know, the he may be uncontrollable. He may be a little bit dangerous, but damn it, he's going to be able to to survive in a very tough world. And women know it's a tough world. And you know, so they need sometimes they need that kind of powerful figure as a support in their life, even though they're they're often the breadwinners now and they're they still have that desire for a man that shows that he can take care of himself. He can take care of his world. He can provide for them if they need it, etc. What's the difference between the way that a man would seduce a woman and the way that a woman would seduce a man? Well, it's it's it's very elemental. I mean, as of course it depends on the circumstances. But as I outlined in The Art of Seduction, women will use the visual sense of factors, the senses that men are so vulnerable to. You know, how they dress, how their body looks, their perfume, the uh the sound of their voice. I say in The Art of Seduction that a woman's voice is perhaps one of the greatest under undervalued tools that a woman possesses. Men don't realize it, they don't think about it because they so think that they only are looking at like the physical component. But a woman's voice is very, very powerful and I relate it to the voice of the mother in a kind of a sing-songy quality. And I have known women in my life who's go, "Wow, that woman has an incredibly seductive voice." It's a very powerful tool. So, men are drawn to those sense cues and and and they're very they're almost like you can't control them. And women have learned over centuries how to appeal to that. They also know that men have a desire to pursue, to hunt, to to to go after something if it that's the kind of man it's uh some men are not like that. And so, they know how to play the coquette. The coquette was a feminine invention. There are now men who are coquettes for sure, but the original coquettishness is a female quality of I'm I I'm I make the man interested and then I pull back. He has to chase me because they know men love to chase and if I show that I'm not interested in him, that excites his interest. So, those are the ways that women will seduce a man a A will seduce a woman by things we've already talked about. The quintessential male seducer is the rake. Doesn't seem like he'd be very very attractive because he he can only have as many women as he can find in his life, right? He's not willing to settle down. But when a rake is is interested in a woman, he's 100% attend attuned to them. He's in their world. He's listening to them for the one month or two month that he's with that woman. She is his whole life, right? And not in a scary sense, but in a very interesting poetic sense. He knows how to give the right kind of gifts. He knows to take her to the right places. He's very attentive. His energy is focused on her. And um and he knows how to lead. So leading is not just forcing someone. It's like I'm leading you into the story that I'm creating. I'm taking you to certain places, even literally to certain places, but I'm leading you down a path and you're excited by the adventure and the mystery of where this is going. And so, you know, those are those are two different kind of stereotypical strategies that men versus women will will utilize. Mhm. I want to go back to what you were saying about the female voice. So, this twice now at least twice where you've made reference to they do something that is modeled after the mom or like the mom. Obviously, there's the old phrase that men marry their mothers and women marry their fathers. I've never really liked that. Um it I've always thought it might be closer to something like men marry women who make them feel the way their mom made them feel. I can see that. Uh but what is it about the mom? Why would that be a positive seductive trigger? Well, it's not necessarily positive, um but it's uncontrollable. So, a lot of our erotic desires, what we're interested in, are things we cannot control. They go back to our first years in life, right? And we're not even aware of it. We're not even conscious of it. And so, the mother figure for a boy, for the for a male, is extremely powerful. It's extremely because if you think about it, unlike a girl, our first years of our lives are completely involved, dependent on a woman, the opposite sex, right? And so, that has an extremely powerful impact on our personality. And we internalize her image in our head, and that turns into what we what Jung called the Anima and Animus. You might believe that it's just nonsense, but I happen to believe it's very, very real. It's a very amazing theory, okay? So, that female figure from your mother gets under your skin. And sometimes mothers are not good necessarily good figures. Maybe they're narcissists. Maybe they were so much involved in their own looks that they didn't pay you much attention. So, it's not always that they're a positive it's a positive thing. But because it got under your skin in a way you're not even aware of, you're attracted to women who have that narcissistic quality. Because you want to replay a lot of that drama that occurred in those earliest years. Um and I know people are going to go, "Oh, that's such [ __ ] I can't" You're not even aware that's happening. I'm I'm sorry to say, because it's occurring in your unconscious. But if you look at it, if you see the patterns in your love life, and you see the kinds of women that you are attracted to, you will inevitably see an element of what I'm talking about, right? Sometimes it's a woman that has a physical resemblance to your mother and that's an extremely common pattern, believe me. But sometimes it's more of psychological quality. The fact that she was very solicitous with attention and showered you and made you feel special. Man, I've never gotten that feeling again since I had with my mother. You're not aware of that, but you're looking for them for the woman that will give you that feeling again. Or as I said, your mother was a narcissist. She was just completely involved in herself and her clothes and her look. I want to find a woman who's like that because maybe this time I can get that woman to really love me and give me the attention I never really got from my mother. So, these early early years have such a powerful impact on you, you're not even aware. And the flip side is the same for women with the father figure. And um I think a lot of women will admit that the father figure had a very very powerful impact on what they're attracted to. They're usually more honest about it because men um find the the whole issue of the mother kind of creepy. The sense of being so dependent on a woman, being so weak, that I'm after my mother. Oh, it's like a Freudian Oedipal thing. Oh my god, that's disgusting. I don't want to even admit it. But it's very true, it's very real. Yeah, that one's uh that one's tricky. All right, you I didn't convince you. Um no, that one I'm really just trying to sponge. I've never quite understood it. So, you've given me another brick of information to lay down in my desperate attempts to map how this stuff all really works. Okay. Um like you and you said this at the beginning, really the thing you want to get to is what really works. Like where does the rubber meet the road on all this stuff? Not not in fantasy land, but like for real for real. Um somebody's going on a date. They met them online, never met them before. There's like a screen check process. You guys have had to do this sort of dumb Some of the guys here will show me the way that they have to flirt on the apps in order to get to the first date. So, how one, how do you set it up in the flirtation to get to the date, and then how do we be maximally seductive on that date? Well, you know, I didn't grow up in the era of Tinder, so it's um you know, it's hard I don't really know. I've never had to deal with it. Right? Do you think it's going to be a different set of rules? I have a feeling it's going to be the same set of rules, but it's a different playing field. I'll give you that. But, Well, the the main thing is that I would say in in a in a kind of macro sense of is pay attention to the non-verbals. So, seduction is a language that does not involve words. It involves what is not spoken. It involves your body language, your eyes, your smile, your face, how you compose your face, how you walk, how you present yourself. The um the places you take the woman to reveal who you are. If you take her to a a pizza and beer joint, that probably that says something as opposed to a an elegant restaurant. How you dress is part of that language. Are you just wearing your shorts and t-shirt, or do you present yourself in a nice Maybe those shorts and t-shirt for someone would work, but for a lot of women it shows you don't really care. So, pay attention to all the non-verbal things, to the little signs that the woman is very, very attentive to, and be able to control that to some degree. So, you want to present yourself as they say, the most anti-seductive quality is insecurity. So, it's hard to fake the non-verbal secure cues that are in the world. And a lot of it it centers around the eyes and the face and the mouth and how you smile, etc. And there are weak ways of looking kind of and there are aggressive ways and confident ways that are directed through the eyes. But if you don't feel it, it's very hard to fake it. So, you have to put yourself in a mindset a kind of an as if strategy as William James said, where you feel confident, where you feel strong. You talk yourself into that mood, etc., etc. And you let the non-verbals kind of communicate themselves. So, you're strong, you're taking them to a place, but you're also attentive, sensitive, you're able you're willing to reveal that slight feminine streak in you, but you're in control. You know what you're going to do, you know the exactly where you want to take them. And you of course you're you're going to let see how things play out. You don't have everything planned, that would be very anti-seductive as well. But you have a sense of this is who I am and this is how I'm going to present myself. The flirtation is not in the words that you say, but it's in the looks that you give. In the energy that you that you radiate, right? In the strength that you show, in and the fact that you're looking them in the eye, but not in a scary way kind of thing. And then mirroring behavior is is extremely a sign of of the other person is follow falling under your spell. So, you you smile in a certain way and you see if she responds in the same way, right? And you kind of learn how to kind of go with her energy in the moment as well. But one thing you have to be careful of is you have to use who you are. So, what's flirtatious for one guy isn't going to work for the other guy, you know? So, if you happen to be good with words, you know, I I have to admit I'm I'm weak at a lot of things, you know, I wasn't that quarterback in high school, etc., all that stuff, but I had a way with words, you know? And I had a way of kind of leaving of a world with the words that I said, with the metaphors, with the things that I said. And so, I would kind of use My flirtatious style was to kind of envelop them in these kind of images that I would create. And that worked for me. Sometimes it didn't work because some women weren't interested in that. They wanted the quarterback. But, for a lot of women, that that was my style. What is your style? I don't know what it is, but it has to fit who you are. I think that is very good advice. Um, the thing that I would put out there is there the big click for me was when I realized that I needed to have absolutely no fear of loss. And so, going into uh a situation, you met them online, you guys have had some flirt flirtatious exchanges. There, one of the things that's really anti-seductive, to use your phrase, is if you feel needy. Uh, if they're you're thirsty at all. Like, you really have to be what I call aggressively yourself. Go ahead. One thing you have to keep in mind, though, is if the woman seems to be resistant, and then you just wilt at that moment, and you you you cut it off, and you go, "Oh, this isn't going to work." Man, they are so stupid. You are such a bad seducer. Women are testing you often. And by their showing you that they maybe they're not interested, they might actually be interested, but they want to see are you willing to pursue them? Are you willing to deal with some obstacles in the way? You know, are you willing to like you know, move past their resistance, not physically forcing them. But if they don't seem so receptive to you on that first date, that doesn't mean you have to give up. It just means give it a second date and and show that you're you're still interested in them is a very powerful message. It means I can deal with maybe your kind of somewhat pissy side or your sort of negative side or your kind of pickiness. You know, I'm still there. I'm still interested. Okay, that shows that you're willing to jump over this one hoop that I've set for you. So, just immediately wilting is a bad sign. Mhm. Now, agreed. My advice would be if somebody is in that situation, somebody's displaying something they don't like. I mean, look, I'm not going to say it at everything that comes up, but for the most part, I would try to be playful with that. Yeah. And if you if you can really stay centered, if you can be somewhat unflappable, and what I always uh have said about the way that I was with Lisa was I was aggressively myself. Yeah. And so, I wasn't afraid of losing her. Now, I was still strategic about the way that I packaged myself. Like I said, that this is a game of marketing. You are going to be who you really are, but you need to bundle that in a way that's going to communicate who you are well. And if I know that one of the things that people are going to be most attracted to is somebody that is confident, cool, then I'm I need to be confident in who I am. And also, if you really want to get people's attention, be counterintuitive. Be be interesting. Like say things that they couldn't have predicted that are real. They're true to who you are. But if you can find those things where it's like, oh, wow, I never thought about that. That's you're coming at something from an oblique angle. Then it's like, okay, you're not exchangeable. I can't This isn't just I'm trying on somebody that looks different but is exactly the same as everybody else. It's like you're you one have the confidence to say something like, I don't know how this is going to land, but it is true and therefore I'm going to say it. And the way that I see dating is you're throwing the bat signal up in the sky. You're not trying to win the person over. I mean, you you're trying to seduce, don't get me wrong. There's there's an agenda there, but you want to make sure you're seducing the right person. And so in the beginning of this, I'm just going to be this is who I am packaged in a way that is meant to uh elicit a response from the right person. So I'm not going to make it hard to be interested in who I am and all of that, but I'm going to be myself. I'm going to say things that are unexpected. This was the same discovery I had with interviewing was uh in the early early days, I did it was like my maybe fifth interview and I did the whole interview and at the end of the interview I said, uh hey, do you mind if we start over? I want to film this again because I'm either going to quit doing this because I was bored out of my mind because I wasn't asking the questions I really wanted to ask. I was asking the questions I thought I was supposed to ask. And now I want to ask what I really care about. And she was game and so we refilmed it and that was the beginning of me actually having a career as an interviewer was when I was like, I don't care if this is the question people want me to ask, I'm going to ask the question I'm actually interested in. And bringing out that kind of intrigue, especially if you can focus it on them. So if I'm asking you questions maybe other people haven't asked from an angle people haven't asked it or have a follow-up question that is surprising and shows I'm really paying attention. I actually care, it'll get pretty interesting pretty fast. Yeah, I mean, um a couple things that I would add to that. First of all, as I say in the art of seduction, any kind of moralizing, judging quality is very anti-seductive. So you're very tolerant, you're very open, you're not You're not there to judge the other person. And if they make a comment, you don't want to go touch up on politics, etc. But just the sense that you're It's a non-judgmental environment is is very sick cuz we live in a world that's so partisan. But the other thing is, so when we talk about interviews, I've done hundreds of these over the years podcasters, including yourself, you're one of my favorites. Thank you, sir. And I can notice a difference between interviewers. The ones that come with a preset agenda of questions, not just an opening question, but a whole set of questions, and they're not really paying attention to you and your answers, and they're they're kind of in their heads and they're thinking about their next question, etc. They make me uncomfortable and I don't do as well. Mhm. But if the person is interviewing me is in the moment, they're kind of responding, they're alive, they're giving me, you know, body language, verbal cues of their eyes, and we're interacting, then I open up to them and then then there's a nice flow. It's a similar thing between a man and a woman. Mhm. You're in the moment. I can't say that enough. You're in the moment. You're not in your head going, "Does she like me? Am I going to have sex with her tonight?" You know, do I find her that attractive? You're in the god damn moment. You're alive, you're attuned, you're listening. And I can tell you um my wife has said this and I've known it from other women before I met her is I would listen very deeply and then I would hear something that kind of signaled to me a sign of something that they were interested in or something that said something about who they are. And then 4 hours later or the next day, I would bring it up again wrapped in my own little way of wrapping things up and they go, "Whoa." You don't have no idea how much that impresses a woman because it says, "I was paying attention. I was listening to them and I and I brought back what they said later is very powerful. So, be in the moment. Don't be thinking about your next question, your next step, how you're going to you know, what you're going to be doing next, but be alive and be attentive and be in the flow. Check out my intense conversation with Patrick Bet David about masculinity. To truly be free, you have to be strong enough to control your own life and many men today simply do not qualify. Many of you have been told the pursuit of power is disgusting. You shouldn't do it. Many of you don't even have a clear definition of what it means