Fan Favorite: Robert Greene on Breaking Free From Mediocrity in a Chaotic World

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What's up guys, today I am bringing you the man known for his unflinching look at the darker side of humanity around the laws of strategy, power, and even seduction. In his fourth round here on Impact Theory, Robert Greene is exposing the traps who may be falling for that makes life feel boring and how it can leave you alienated from your true self.

He also explains why overlooking your flaws and limitations is a big mistake. I hope you guys love listening to this episode. As much as I enjoyed recording it, I love my time with Robert. And if you do, please leave a review on our podcast. It really is the best way to support us so that we can get the show out there to more people like you that really want to get more out of their lives. I am Tom Billieux and welcome to Impact Theory.

Robert Green, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me, Tom. I think this is my fourth time. I think you're right. So 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're 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 the 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 intricacies 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. Right?

You're getting 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. It'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 got to go find a new 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 into anything lasting and then you, 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 supply. 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. I know. How could you?

True. And in fact, I want the viewers to hear that I am desperate for your next book to come out. I really do think of you as a legendman, rereading the daily laws and 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. So right now, and I should hardly talk, but people are extremely interested in drugs, in like psychoactive drugs. Trust me, I did a lot of that in my 20s. I have nothing against it. 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, et cetera, et cetera. You could be continually tripping. You don't need drugs. Your brain is wired for this kind of interaction with life. It doesn't feel true to me, so how do we tap into that? Well, because 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,

God, Robert, you've got a lot of problems, man. Why these thoughts keep popping up? You think you're so great, but you're not so great. 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. You've got to let go. And I just kept repeating myself, let go, let go. Every time a thought came in, I was like, all right, let go of it. But it's painful because you realize 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.

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, mmm, that may have a dark underbelly.

My wife and I were arguing and she said something that just makes me so pissed off. And I'm like, what the fuck? 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 any time I had that impulse, she had tripped an insecurity of mine. But if I didn't know that I was insecure about it, I would get the surface level of motion. It felt so real. It just felt like she had said something she shouldn't say. 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 did 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 T. So you're at the surface level going back to your early point. You stop at 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 as an insecurity. So when I see somebody get angry at me, I'm like, oh, shit, 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, you know, you don't have to read books about human nature 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. 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 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 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 absurd. 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 it's pleasurable or easy. 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. 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. The other way is, you don't necessarily have to hit rock bottom, but you are really motivated to change your life.

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. And so it's not working for me right now. I'm getting in my own way. 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 an intellectual level that people have to be 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, when we're having a problem, our first, because what I'm giving a talk about is how to deal with change in the world.

Whenever we think that 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 no 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. Let's take a break from the show. To talk about something I'm all too familiar with.

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I've got a personal invite for you guys to join me, Tom Billu, live on my Twitch stream where I play the video game that I'm building, Project Kaizen, and Talk Mindset. So when you join the stream, you are getting more than just gameplay. You're getting practical insights into how to shape your mind if you want to achieve something extraordinary in life.

This is more than entertainment. It is systematic growth through gaming. You'll be joining a community focused on having fun playing games together as a community and talking about mindset and the strategies for real success. Each stream is high energy gameplay mixed with real conversations around mindset and success. You can ask me about business mindset. The game itself, we are here to talk about all of the entertainment focused things that we're doing here at Impact Theory.

I am live almost every day from 6.30 a.m. to 8.30 a.m. Pacific time. So make sure you turn on that notification bell. You can find me at twitch.tv forward slash Tom Diliu. That's T-O-M-B-I-L-Y-E-U. All right, guys, I will see you live in stream in the mornings, bright, nearly 6.30 a.m. Pacific time.

Now we're turning away from the emotion? 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, it's stalling people out. It's the kind of emotions 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 all of this, the human condition or the fear of change or the inability to change.

Well, 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, et cetera. But these things are subtle.

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 because I don't know enough about the world, or other people are blocking me, or I didn't get 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 when I'm talking about how you deal with change, which is an incredibly important issue, particularly in the 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

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 to say, I don't know.

I don't know tombillia. 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 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 weird moment as the Chinese proverb, I'm not 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 when I think about it, I think that a lot of what's playing out is some change is bad.

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. I find it very easy to let go of anything, everything, my identity, all of it, like to a point where 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 away that I want. They don't understand that their fear is coming from weakness and 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, and 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 twin heads of this dragon right now.

What are the twin heads again? Some changes bad. So some things that are happening are actually we're going in the wrong direction. And then some of the 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, some changes are not good, but 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 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 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 lasts 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 fucking tired, pardon my language, of all of the 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 like where we're heading, like 100 years from now, we're all going to be like these grand inquisitors that the social justice movement will reach this insane end point. 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 it, although 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 in their

No, I mean, like, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be, be

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 who does a lot of time talking on camera,

I think a lot about, okay, 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 no 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 burned 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 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 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 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 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 loud, but yeah.

You know, it's engineered for that, right? You know, just to give an example of something that really gets under most, to show my own outrage. You know, on my feed, I get these notices from next door. You know what next door is, right? And everything is about crime and about. And I know in my neighborhood, there's some crime, but if you read next door, it's like you should 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. They're going to get you emotional. That's just next door. Facebook is a master of it. You know, Instagram. They all just use these algorithms to hit 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 around thinking, oh, I'm not manipulative. I'm in control of my thoughts. I know what my feelings are. I behave according to what I want to do. Bullshit. You are continually being manipulated by these various platforms. OK?

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. We might hate it, but I hit that

again and again about how we're 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 did I choose that? No, why is it so powerful? Because it is wired inside of us.

Our brains work by comparing 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 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 gifts and these rewards, and I don't have any of them? It was a problem that existed in hunter-gathering 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 give it to someone else. It's like a ritual because you're definitely afraid that if you keep that gift, people are going to have envy and they will murder you, right? So 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, the other one has a cucumber. He's like, whoa, what the hell, what's going on here? That study is hilarious, which you can find on YouTube for anybody watching. It's insane. Yeah. 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, et cetera, et cetera. Look at my poor pitiful life. Well, that person who's, they're only posting the most positive things. They're not showing 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, 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 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. Either they're embarrassing themselves, being chastised, somebody going out of their way to embarrass them, all the power games that you talk about. And you're able to soothe yourself. I could soothe myself, it's 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 amazing example of the process that we're talking about and the power behind it. I couldn't have chosen 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. You 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. Because the idea that you know yourself so completely and have gone through this process, and I know who I am and I've got these problems, it's bullshit. You don't know who you are. There's always a core that you'll never, ever understand. And 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 were 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. 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. So when you're so narrowed down inside yourself about you know you have the right answer, you know that you can argue with people and everyone else is wrong, etc.

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, where I can stop, I can learn more. I can shut my own head, the voice in my head, and I can pay attention, and 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 back themselves into. Yeah, the fact that people don't know themselves, I didn't really think of it. I didn't think almost at all about it until I got into business. And then it was like, okay, why do some people succeed and other people don't?

and started thinking about, okay, so the people that stop at the level of emotion, they're unable to walk a path of usefulness. And so that's a big thing for me. I'm always hungry for myself for sure, because I'm not above this at all, but I'm constantly trying to optimize for how do I get my ego and my emotion out of the way so I can figure out what's truly useful and move forward.

but certainly wanting people on my team as well that are doing that, that are looking at the, not to make it clinical, but they're looking at the data. Like, did this work? Whether it's, you know, the 48 Laws of Power, and it's like, oh, the story that you opened with about where you were thriving in your job.

But your boss hated you. And you're like, what the hell am I doing wrong? And then you realize, ah, never outshine the master. It's like you ran an experiment in that environment. Did killing it at your job allow you to move forward in the company? Yes or no? No. Oh, shit. Then there's something I'm not understanding. And so getting people to take that feedback, assess, go inward and go OK.

What didn't work? Going back to the idea of root cause medicine. Why didn't it work? Oh, I see people are insecure. I triggered her insecurities. Okay, now I get it. Rule number one, never outshine the master. It's interesting. Reading your books is like

It's a marker in your life depending on what stories jump out to me, what I remember, what laws and like, oh shit, I've been dealing with that recently. It's really interesting. So getting people to do that, so effectiveness. Did I get the result that I was looking for? And that was the big thing going back to that story of in work where I was arguing for my ideas because I wanted to feel a certain way.

It was like, oh wow, I didn't even understand what my real goal was. I had the goal that I would say, because it was what I was supposed to want, or some part of me did want it.

But I was totally blind to, but I actually steer my life towards what makes me feel smart. And I was like, wow, that was like being slapped in the face. And so once I understood that, then I could really begin to navigate well, but I first had to grapple with effectiveness. Right.

coming back to the thing that I'm obsessed with right now, and I've been dying to talk to you like the first person I thought of when I started reading this. So I've managed to make it to 46 without ever being, ever encountering knowingly Nietzsche.

And so I'm taking the great courses on Nietzsche. I don't know what it was the idea of the will to power. And I think something in me had an intuitive understanding that the moment we're living through right now is this will to power. So I've never understood the woke movement because it doesn't align with the natural thing that I do, which is

It is people that have found a very useful tool to gain control of a situation that I was blind to.

And once I started learning about Nietzsche, it was like a puzzle piece clicked into place that we have this innate drive for what I'll say power, because I think, or control, because I think power is going to, it's a word with a lot of baggage. So, but people have this innate drive to control the environment themselves, whatever, but they want to be in control. And there, if you aren't able to

In full view of everybody out-compete, you still have this drive for control, and then people go underground. It's the whole theme of the 48 Laws of Power. Correct. What I wrote about it in the preface to it. Yeah, the thing about Nietzsche, because, you know, he's my idol. Really?

Oh, why do people have such a dark view of him? I don't know him well enough to understand why. In all of my books, I was reading him when I was 16, 17 years old. And oftentimes, what happens in your life, people that you read when you were that age, and you're now in my 60s, I'm sorry to say. Congratulations, by the way. Thank you. 46 seems like a kid.

you know, things that I read when I was 18. I don't know, I don't like anymore. Nietzsche is like a through line. I'll never get bored with him. I'll never tire with him. He's just absolutely the greatest. But his will to power is something that got misunderstood. It's like, it's not necessarily what you think it is. It's deviled to mocked. And the concept of mocked or power in Nietzsche is, it's controlled, it's more like expansion.

That's what the word really means. And it takes it down to a biological level that every organism wants to expand its circle, wants to expand its environment, wants to have more mobility in the world that it's in, right? So it's a native biological need that all creatures have for expanding themselves.

for having more influence. So what it means for a human is to have more power and more influence and able to move in greater circles, to have more control. Yes, control is part of it, okay? But 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 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 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, et cetera, et cetera. It's all about power. They don't want to admit it. They want to admit it. It's just about ideas. It's just about intellectuals' public. You know, the realm of exchanging ideas. Bullshit. It's about power. You want the sense of expansion. You want people to love you. You love that feeling that what you're doing is influencing others, that you have hit the right answer.

Everything you do, everything you breathe in is a desire for power, is 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, you know, absolute power corrupts, but powerlessness corrupts even more.

So the feeling that you don't have any power is even more corrupt 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 and 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, etc., etc., 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 wrinkled 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 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 seeing, well, maybe there are more constructive forms of power that I can go after. It's so interesting because when I was

Maybe 25, something like that, 26 maybe. I bought the domain seeking power. Oh. And I... It was 20 years ago. Yeah. Very long time ago. So it was a couple years after my book came out, but unfortunately I had not read it yet. If I had, you would have saved me a lot of suffering. But 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 is 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. 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, 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 whether in business, if you don't acknowledge that it's a competition, you're going to get eaten alive.

So recognizing, okay, this is a competition. I'm not out to hurt other people, but I'm absolutely out to outperform 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 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, because it's like, if you own, okay, 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 easiest way to sum it up.

As Gary V 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. They're building violated some invisible code.

You know where that comes from? It comes from envy. Envy is a huge motivator of people's behavior now. So the drive to bring other people down is really truly motivated by feelings of envy and the inferiority that other people are better than you are.

So 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. Well, they just accomplished great things because they had money or because their parents sent them to Yale or Dartmouth or because they had all of this privilege. So it's like bringing everyone down. But I think that it's envy 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 that an act of the will to expansion? What's driving that? Well, you know, there are many ways to look at that. But in mastery, 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 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 two years doing that. I made what I went out to sit 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 and all these things are very important. 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. There's no need for it. There's no need to push people around.

comfortable with yourself. 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. 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, 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 isn't road to 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 settle for what they have, right? Because a lot of people aren't happy.

And they may think they're happy. 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, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 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, that's how I answered her. She wasn't happy with that. OK, anyway. So somebody will criticize this notion of work.

But no, we are animals that love to make things. Somebody wants to find us as homophabor, the animal that likes to build things, to make things. That's our hands. We became powerful through making tools, et cetera, also by being social animals. Don't get me wrong. But we are creatures that are designed to make things, to build things, to create. And 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 is 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 wooden things with your hands.

It's all the same to me, right? It's all a form of a skill that 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. I don't want to derail, but okay, we should come back to that.

It's what 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 the most critical phase, right? You're exploring, you're trying things out. You're experimenting with different careers, et cetera.

You're gaining skills, because you're learning, like you said, you wanted to learn, right? And then you're 32, 33, and you start a podcast, a website, your own business, et cetera. And maybe it fails, but you're excited to 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've accomplished something. You 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, et cetera, et cetera. 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 could 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 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 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 can 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 era 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 this kind of change its brewing and experimentation, that's to me is a high point of human culture and it comes from more and more individuals 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. Yeah, kind of. So here I think that, so I agree with you so violently. I want to bite through the table. Go ahead. So I might not be the best use of my teeth. So I have a rough formula of what I think leads to fulfillment. And 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 a group and not you, you won't be fulfilled. 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 think they're actually fulfilled?

Yeah, I mean, if you like artists who write, you do some kind of great art, but they're not necessarily the best people in the world. It might be a total dick, but if there are, 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 shit about it, I don't think they would feel fulfilled.

Well, you know, I don't want to split hairs with you because you're largely correct, but 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. Think about Tesla, Nikola Tesla. Yeah, he was pretty miserable. Yeah, so despite all this incredible shit, 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 nickel a 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'm definitely cycle analyzing 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. I can't think of it because my mind is slowing down, but I've been talking recently with my wife about artists and composers, et cetera, who had no success in life. She's going, really? Yeah. Never sold any books. Their music was ignored.

But my research of them, 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 because I said, oh, you might be right. I mean, I'm not really fast-flitting hairs, but the thing is, is the sense of flow. Because what happens is, what makes you miserable is your self-absorption 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? Yeah.

Yeah, well, I mean, maybe it'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 accentuating your self-absorption, right? Whereas what you need is to get outside of yourself, not into all of your problems. Now, of course, I'm contradicting myself as I talked about introspection.

That's a different thing. We're not introspecting about my problems, what my parents did to me, more and 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 if something feels intuitively right about this. Yeah, well, I just wrote, sorry, I keep doing that, about this man. People won't have heard of him. He's a Russian.

mystic, whatever you want to call him, Guru Jeff, who had these exercises. One thing he taught his students was to not vent your unpleasant emotions. So we had this exercise called self observation.

or you 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 instead I'm pulling it out of you know what again.

Okay, so most of it is dealing with frustration, resentment, anger, bitterness, cetera, cetera, cetera, cetera, 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 started to go away. I didn't really feel them because 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? And I don't mean people. I include myself in them, because I'm a human being as well, as far as I know. I've heard. It's that we're self-absorbed.

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, et cetera, et cetera, 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 as the environment, which I believe a lot where 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 force that's drawing us further and further and further in. My problems, my parents, my education, my brother and sister,

My wife, my wife, my wife. More and more inward, more problems. It gets deeper, deeper, more irascinated 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 us. I kind of wished I had been art. 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. Yeah, but I wanted to be 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 to 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, that's not very interesting. What is it that you wanted to be?

That list is very long. If I could snap my fingers, I would be Elon Musk. That is like my fantasy of fantasy. You have plenty of time. You're young. Yeah, we'll see. A on 46. What's he like? 47, 48? He's barely older than me.

51, 52, I mean he's like, certainly within striking distance. And look, I am honest enough with myself, know thyself as Robert Green 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 on. I think it's interesting. But I would pay that price. So before we started rolling you and I, we're talking, I'm, I am very enamored with what you've created and put into the world and you've

You still feel a niche that so few people are able to fill. I think it's utterly fascinating. 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 fucking 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 thinks absolutely incredible.

And so I totally understand 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.

But probably, if I had been a novelist, and I was at this age and I was successful at saying, you know, I really wanted to write non-fiction books. The grass is always greener, so who am I to say? That's such a weird fucking thing. But so what I find interesting about what you're saying is that this idea, and I haven't thought a lot about this, so I'm thinking out loud here, but the idea that

if you're repeating something over and over. 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 were 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

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. 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 yet know how to articulate it, that feels really right. So you talked about this earlier, and 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 because we're social animals and things occur in these kind of cultural globs, these generational moments, is because of like memes and being infected by the people around us. And in moments of expansion,

Your minds are open, you're adventurous, you're exploring. It often comes 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 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 quality to have,

That means you're continually open to life. You continually open to what happens, what it brings to you, and you're seeing it out. You want new things. You're learning. You're not closed off. You never have a moment where I know what is happening, etc. You have what the poet keeps called negative capability.

I don't know if you're familiar with that concept. I am, but because of you. Oh, yeah. 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, 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, a great entrepreneur, a great inventor, et cetera, et cetera. I have any examples. 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 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 and sort of the whole science of immunology, right?

And here I'm having to strain my neurons here to remember it, but 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 trying to figure out how to solve smallpox or whatever it was. He 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 he injected them again

And I know I'm missing it. So please out there, scientists, 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 had injected them with the second batch was weaker and had been left outside. And so they had developed immunity from it by having this smaller, thus intense version of smallpox injected into them. So the next time they got injected, they had the antibodies.

Now, we take this for granted now, but nobody had a concept for antibodies back then. It was a totally novel concept. And so when he saw these chickens that survived, he was like, 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. 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, 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 because it's most common with artists, but people like Einstein had it as well, et cetera.

So that's the US, for example. I 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 because 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 one that I encounter 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- Congratulations. 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. Because 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 shit 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 a perfect example. I couldn't have said it better. People can't. Like, that's hard. It's hard.

It's hard, but it's very high level of creativity. And if you can reach it, it's like gold. You said something earlier that I want to go back to. I've been holding in my head because it was so intriguing to be a tired woman. 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 you rebuttal to her, but why did it make her mad? Well, I think there's a context. First of all, this was like 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 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 is going to teach us about seduction. Come on, we're French, right? We taught the world how to seduce. I could laugh then, I thought that we're right, you know, and I felt kind of humbled about that. But this woman, a kind of sense of

It wasn't necessarily what I was saying. It just did rankle them 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 brought up the example, because 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.

how he had overcome incredible adversity in his life, and had written this book, and then basically 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, et cetera. And I was detailing the process of him as a writer, as an example of what I was describing about through your work you reached this level.

So there were two things. There was the snobbery element of this Los Angeles because you know from LA people are are appreciably dumber.

further South Eagle 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. That's about as bad as I 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 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, I'm not one of those arch libertarians I believe in the necessity of government. I'm somebody who's educated through public schools through my whole life 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 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, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, 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 deconstruction, et cetera. 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, 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 health 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 element of anger underneath her tongue. It's interesting, you just opened up a whole new can of worms. So 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 when you were talking about it, I was like, okay, why would she get mad about that? Well, not crazy, but that everybody should do that way. Because I was saying that everyone should have that opportunity to be 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 some other capacity interesting what about the idea of doing the driving so well that it becomes an artistry I said that that could have that was what fulfilled him I have no problem with that

And if what fulfills you as 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 a good 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? Craftsmanship is a high form of intellect to 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. Craftsman masons, et cetera. People who can make stained glass, they were masters of it. These are things you 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. And maybe you should consider that about your father. Maybe, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I think the vast majority of humans never spill into that. And so this brings us back to the very first thing that we were talking about is how people can get lost in their own life. And they think that it's the thing I'm doing versus the way I'm doing the thing. And

I don't want people to feel like, oh, I just need to change the way that I do the thing and never aspire to something else, aspire to whatever you want, but just understand that no matter what you do, if you're not looking at it, how do I get unbelievably good at this thing? And I don't know if Tony was the one that thought of it, but Tony Robbins certainly introduced the idea to me that progress is a foundational pillar of human happiness, that if you're not making progress, just there is something innate to the human animal that you will be unable

to find profound, would he say fulfillment? I don't know. But to me, that's how that became when I really thought about what makes for fulfillment, you do have to be translating your potential into skillset. There's something so inherently pleasurable about, I couldn't do it and now I can.

This is the big reason why I think that people should exercise and lift weights very specifically. There is something your mind will be changed when you realize you walk in the gym one day and you can't lift the weight. And then after several months of putting in the work and trying to get started, you can now lift something you couldn't lift before. That is one of the freakiest things that you can go through.

And when you get that same realization in real life that and this goes back to my whole thing that I can feel there's something going on in culture right now where people have lost and maybe because of what you're talking about with the woman at Stanford where it's like no it's not the individual it's all culture and people have lost the understanding it is in culture it is the individual and that's the only place at which you can actually get

better at something where you can then influence the world in some way, but understanding that you can translate that potential into skill and now you can actually move the needle, make change, but if you don't believe that's possible and you have Nietzsche's will to power or expansion, however you're going to think about it, you have this internal compulsion. I have to gain control. I have to expand my sphere of influence, but I don't think I can get better.

And so the only thing left is you start knocking other things down. I that feel like as I'm saying it now, that cocktail of things feels like it pretty accurately predicts what we're going through right now, that you will have an impulse that you need to satisfy where I have to get control of the situation. But I don't think I can do it by

falling in love with something and getting better at it and offering my art to the world and whatever form and getting the echo back because they are so moved by what I've created that it inspires them to create in their own way again expansive versus constricting but because you still have this need to expand to gain control that you start doing things that are

coming from a place of envy, coming from a place of silencing, coming from a place of destruction instead of building up and thinking, oh, I don't want to feel like I don't want to feel that other people can outperform me or that other people have more control or recognizing that they do. And because I don't want to feel that way, I'm going to get better.

And that to me, if I really think about why do I put myself in front of camera, why do I go through it? My life is fucking stressful. I'm already rich. What the fuck am I doing? When I think about why I reengage with the world as intensely as I do, it's because I understand how transformational that moment is when you realize, oh, wait, I'm not powerless. I can get better. That's it. That's the juice for me.

Yeah, yeah. And it's an ongoing process. There's an expression in Spanish that was like the artist Goya's motto, which is, I'm still learning. It means I'm learning my whole life. So you might be 46 and you're fabulously wealthy. I mean, look where you live, et cetera.

But just living off your money and playing golf and going to the beach, you'll get depressed. What good does it have? You need constant challenges. You have an act of voracious mind. You need new things to be applying it to. So of course you're going to want to keep challenging yourself, no matter, and even in the stress. And as we said before, when we were talking,

Stress is good for you. I know it goes against everything that our culture wants us to believe. It wants us to believe that you need to relax, not stress yourself, not work too hard. Yoga, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I think, no, stress is great. Stress is a wonderful drug if you know how to use it. And I just wrote about in ancient cultures where you had shamans and initiation rituals. They would put people through the worst forms of stress, right? They would suspend them hanging from things in their skin. Books in their fucking flesh. I've seen that live and in person, by the way.

Okay, but why do they do this? Okay, the other things, the extremes of hot and cold, et cetera, et cetera. And then after that, they would then go dance incredibly fast or run up a mountain, and they would create what this one writer called the omnipotence feeling, the omnipotence effect.

Basically, what they had done is they had mastered the neuroendocrine system. They had found a way to engineer our body chemistry to create feelings of ecstasy and euphoria. And I think a sense of euphoria is a very positive experience. I think it's an end in itself. It's a great thing.

Humans are wanting that kind of peak experience and it's very valuable and healthy. They had mastered, they had created the science of how to get there by creating stress. And then centuries later, neuroscience has realized how they had done it.

Basically, by suspending them like you saw, they create the fear effect, which floods the body with adrenaline. And adrenaline is an incredibly powerful chemical. If you've ever experienced it in yourself, you know it. If you faced a danger, or there's some accident, or your life's at stake, that adrenaline floods your body.

It gives you incredible amounts of energy. It makes your eyes pop open, you alert, you're seeing everything around you.

Animals have it. It's an animal type thing. It's there to make you survive. And then by creating, by running and doing all these other things, they then had released all these endorphins in the body. Because this is a neuroscience. I'm not going to bore your audience with it. But nerve endings in the limbs and in the feet is where the endorphins are triggered most.

And that's why long distance runners have this endorphin addiction. Because endorphin is a pain killer. It's the most powerful pain killer ever invented. Your body creates a pain killer, right? And so when runners, they go running 50 miles, they feel an incredible amount of pain. The endorphins kick in.

The pain goes away and they're ecstatic, they're euphoric, and they're addicted. They go one day without running, they're 20, 30 miles, they're depressed. They're addicted to that endorphin rush. These shamans had created through mastering stress.

Through making acclimating the body to stress and pressure, they had mastered it. So when you entered a situation like that, you felt confident and bold, and you knew that you weren't going to die, and it created this endorphin release that you had the energy from the adrenaline, you had the calmness and pain-killing effect from the endorphin.

You were high. You were euphoric. It was great, great. Stress, if you learn how to use it, if you build yourself up to it, can be a great thing. And so for me and my writing, I'm continually creating stress for myself. Sometimes it's unhealthy, but often it's for a purpose, right? Because it makes me reach these levels that I hadn't reached before. And when I get there and I've created something that I know is right when I hit it right,

It's a high. I feel high. I use that energy that comes from pressure to actually excite me. And I say, like, creating a deadline. So Thomas Edison did this himself, right? He was going to create the first city lit by electricity for that it was all oil and gas lamps, et cetera, right?

People laughed at it on a ridiculous idea. How can you do that? And it was a ridiculous idea because it required so much thinking, so much inventing, so much logistical stuff that it was almost impossible to do. And what did he do?

Soon after he had the idea that he was going to light a city through electricity New York in this case, he publicized it. He gave interviews knowing full well that once he gave the interview, the pressure was on him. If he never invented this, if he didn't live up to it, he'd be humiliated. He deliberately created stress for himself so that he would have the adrenaline and the energy to stay up

you know, 18 hours a day and create this thing that was one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind. So learning how to use stress is a very positive thing. I don't know how we got into this.

How we originally started talking about stress. We were talking about you and your need for challenges, etc. And I said, yep, that is exactly right. And then you said, but that's a good thing. Stress is good for you.

There's another angle to this, which is maybe more basic than where you came at it from. I actually hadn't thought about it the way you were talking about it. That makes a lot of sense to me. The more basic way that I've always thought about it, because this is my journey, is some people just need to toughen the fuck up. I just needed to toughen the fuck up. And the way that you toughen up is by realizing as going back to Nietzsche, what doesn't kill me makes me stronger.

and not just in like the, oh, I learned from this way, but in the like, oh damn, like, I actually realize how much I can endure. Oh, there's a great quote. I need to memorize this. I used to remember who said it and I forget, but the paraphrase is, to those that I love, I wish suffering, pain, failure, embarrassment, because that will show the only thing that matters. That one can endure.

And I was like, damn, that feels so true to me. That people need to go through some hard-ass shit so that they can see, can you endure or not? And most people can, but they have to go through something before they realize it. That was a very important part of this ancient ritual, the shamans, that I was talking about. Where this guy who was studying it in the 1990s, trying to figure out why this happened, he was saying

The missing ingredient was that sort of confidence and boldness and toughness so that they went through these rituals over and over and over again so that they knew that they could survive, they could withstand it, so it toughened them up. And without that element of confidence, the fear element that came from the adrenaline would just overwhelm them and crush them.

Right, so that was what you're talking about is a necessary component in this kind of chemical response that I'm talking about in this equation. Yes, dude, I could talk to you forever. Where can people find you? Well, I'm right here. Sorry. Rewash the episode. They can find me. I have an ancient website. It goes back thousands of years. It's called

Power, seduction, and war, the end is spelled out.com. Power seduction and war.com. And there you'll see all of my social media crap, the Twitter, the Instagram, the TikTok. Yes, I'm on TikTok. And an email address that if you want to write to me and tell me that I'm full of shit, you can write to me and do that. So that's the best place. Power seduction and war.com. And my YouTube channel.

I love it. Awesome. Guys, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.

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