Full transcript: Robert Greene on London Real
2:52 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Robert Greene, the American best-selling author on strategy, power and seduction. You have written six international bestsellers, including The 48 Laws of Power, The 50th Law, co-authored with rapper 50 Cent, and Mastery. The 48 Laws of Power has been widely referenced in pop culture, including songs by Jay-Z and Kanye West, and is currently being adapted into a documentary series by the rapper Drake.
3:18 The book is known worldwide and is also one of the most requested titles in American prison libraries. Your work has also been featured in The New York Times, USA Today and Forbes, and your latest book, The Laws of Human Nature, explores the principles that govern our behavior and how to use this knowledge for continuous self-improvement. Robert, welcome back to London Real. Thank you for having me, Brian. My pleasure, it’s great to have you.
3:41 It’s been almost eight years since we had you on the first time. It was the old studio, I think. We kind of split the screens, it was really old school, but I still remember that conversation, Robert. It was epic and you know, it was fun. It was fun, it was a lot of fun.
3:55 Yeah. I wish I was there in London now, and you know, but what can we do? It’s the circumstances we’re all facing. But yeah, well, hopefully in time either I’ll get to LA or we’ll get you to London to do that again. But we went, remember last time we were way off topic and it was just really good.
4:11 I just checked it, it’s got like 100,000 views, so it did pretty well. And yeah, I mean, I’d love to jump into the book, but first I’m wondering, what did you learn about human nature watching the world for the last three months and the whole, you know, COVID-19 pandemic, the lockdown, everything? What have you seen? Well, a lot of things that I wrote about in the book have been confirmed. You know, the first chapter in the Laws of Human Nature, Law Number One, is about irrationality, and the idea is that we like to think of us human beings as being supremely rational, that our behavior is governed by our minds, by our intelligence, that we think before we act.
4:56 And I try to make the point in the book, I try to hit you over the head with this idea, that that’s not true at all, that we’re basically governed by emotions. And I explain the neuroscience behind that, how emotions have much more powerful physically than anything that our neocortex can supply to counter that. So basically we think that our decisions are based on thinking, but they’re based on our emotional responses to events. And the coronavirus is kind of a laboratory of that kind of phenomenon, because facing something so large and so immediate and so drastic, it naturally feeds our irrational tendencies.
5:38 You know, we see that in obvious behavior, which at least in the United States, with the hoarding of toilet paper, of hand sanitizers and things like that, that kind of behavior was completely irrational. What was that based on? But also, you know, people have, at least here, they have a hard time figuring out what the future is going to be, and so there the fear response is very real. We have to, you know, realize that the threat is dangerous and that the coronavirus is something very real, but what are the long-term consequences on our thinking patterns?
6:17 How is this fear going to become like a habit? How is this going to infiltrate our career decisions moving forward, you know? So that’s one sort of thing that is definitely brought out. And you know, it’s asking, we’re an intensely social animal. Our survival, I make this point in the book, depends on our ability to get along with other people and to understand their point of view, etc.
6:44 And a virus like this is putting a big kind of strain on that, because what it means is by following certain guidelines that have been put out by people who study this, scientists who actually have a more rational take on what’s actually going on, like epidemiologists, the socially, the pro-social thing is to protect other people as well. So it’s not just about you taking, you know, certain steps to protect yourself, but it’s also helping other people. So in some sense there’s been some positive elements, at least in parts of the states where I live, where most people are following these rules and they’re thinking about other people, but there’s a lot of very selfish behavior and people kind of going crazy and getting very restless about the lockdown.
7:34 You know, in, I often think about World War II and in the States and certainly in Britain, of the incredible sacrifices that we were asked to make for those events, you know, economically, personally, with our freedoms, etc., and that how people back then, there were maybe even some government, but people back then were more than willing to make those sacrifices. And I’m wondering if it’s the same situation now, because you’re seeing people are so restless, they have to get out, they have to have their life as it was before. And if we see a second wave of this again, as might be happening right now in the United States, that means that, you know, we’re not willing to make those kind of sac-, we can’t even take three or four months to stay alone in our apartments or our houses to sort of let this pass over.
8:26 This is another element of human nature that I sort of discuss in the book, just that thought of sacrifice. You’re saying or being alone, which one you mean, sacrifice or just being alone with your thoughts? Well, both. I mean, in theory this could be a moment of great opportunity for people, because most of the time in our day-to-day lives we’re so rushed, we don’t have any time to think about ourselves, to think about our careers, to think about ourselves, about who we are.
8:57 We don’t really have time to read books, you know, life just comes at us so rapidly, and here now we have the ability to finally look at ourselves and introspect a little bit and think about who we are, think about our career, the point we are in life, to read books, to strengthen ourselves from within, because some of these life skills, the ability, for instance, to delay instant gratification. So you can’t go out to a pub, you can’t get drunk, etc., but you can find pleasures and distractions in other ways, and in doing that you build a kind of inner strength that will last long after this coronavirus is gone. You’ll be able to be more patient, you’ll be able to withstand moments where you do have to be alone, where you do have to think, but you have to think about yourself and what you want and what your likes and dislikes are.
9:50 So the ability to be alone and to kind of reflect is a very important life skill, you know, and not just be constantly on social media, etc., and sort of have some sense of who you are as differentiating yourself from the crowd. So these are moments where you can develop true life skills, and that is a bit of a sacrifice, because you know, you’re not used to having to do that in your day-to-day life. This is sort of forcing you on it, but I want people to think of that as an actual opportunity to kind of build internal strength.
10:26 Yeah, I kept thinking, because you know, we’re in London, we’re in East London, and I kept thinking of 1940, Battle of Britain. I mean, this place was being bombed, you know, on a nightly basis, people were having to sacrifice and be rationed, and they thought maybe the Germans were going to come to the shores and they were preparing for that. So for me, I’m always, when the lockdown hit and the pandemic, I just tried to compare it with something this city went through, you know, 80 years ago, and it never seemed that bad, even though it was different because it was this invisible thing.
10:59 But I always try to use that to ground me while I’ve been here, if that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, and the public spirit, I mean, you know, it is a little bit of a cliche in all the movies that they have about this, particularly at certain holidays in England, but there was definitely an incredible spirit that came up, a sort of a social spirit of we’re in this together, we’re united and we’re going to defeat this enemy. It’s a lot harder with something that’s not, that’s not, we can’t personify.
11:28 It’s not a living thing, it’s not something that we can say this is the enemy and we’re going to destroy it. It’s much more diabolical than that in a way, and so in that sense it’s a little more difficult than if we were facing an actual invasion, but to think of it as something that can test our ability to unify, to think of other people, to be pro-social, to think in terms of what is the greater good for our country, for the whole country, not just the wealthy but everybody, I mean all classes, etc. You know, these kinds of crises, you know, when you build something like a bridge or a skyscraper, in order to test its strength you simulate like a terrible earthquake or a hurricane, because only by something so drastic can you see the faults and the cracks in the structure that you’ve designed, and these kind of crisis, crises reveal the faults in the structures and the gaps in the, and the potential problems in our political structures, in our individual lives, and how strong we are.
12:38 So we’re being tested in a way, and that’s sort of how I like to look at it. In some ways there’s good news and in some ways there’s bad news, at least here in the United States. Yeah, that’s a fascinating way to look at it, and I’ll be honest, a lot has been revealed to us here in the last three months when it comes to what really happens, what the structures are like. Some has been good, some has been bad, but it’s all been a great opportunity for us to learn and grow and get better, to say the least.
13:04 Robert, I just had a question that I just just thought of. You know, you talk in the book a lot about empathy and trying to understand the other, and you know, as also as an antidote potentially to narcissism. I’m wondering, you know, we’re seeing a lot of division in America and at the same time we can’t interact socially, so we miss the cues and the get-togethers and times where we maybe would hang out socially, even with people with different points of view, and now we kind of, we watch our own news networks, we follow our own social people, we sometimes interact digitally, which means we lose the nuance, we lose the empathy, we lose the humanity of it.
13:43 Do you see this extended lockdown period being difficult or hard for that empathy factor? Very much so. But in moments like this, what really is important is leadership, is somebody on the top sort of setting the tone for the entire country. And we’ve noticed that, you know, at least here in the United States, we faced moments like this before, probably the most extreme was during the Civil War, and when leadership, when the person or the people on top are basically trying to spread a message of we have to unify this country, we’re all in this together, we’re all Americans, at least for this, for the United States here, and we’re either gonna, you know, a house divided cannot stand, which were Lincoln’s very famous words, you know, it’s either, so that kind of people from the top can set the tone.
14:36 But when you have leadership actually trying to divide us, actually pushing all of our buttons, it becomes increasingly difficult. And so I’ve noticed on social media, I’m not going to disguise the fact that I am not a Trump supporter. I do not like Donald Trump. I think he’s the worst president we’ve ever had and he’s extremely dangerous. I’m not going to hide that, so people can take that however they want.
15:02 But I’ve noticed on social media that I try and discuss rationally on Facebook or wherever, you know, certain elements of certain of his policies, particularly now since the coronavirus has exploded on us, and I don’t get, like, you know, I’m open to other people, I’m trying to hear their point of view, I’m trying to hear them defend his response to a crisis that has killed over 120,000 Americans, you know, the equivalent of over 50 of 9/11s, if you will, kind of thing, or 6911s, you know, an incredible number of private citizens being killed. I want to hear their defense. I’m open to hearing something rational, and all I get are these slogans and this very kind of defensive posture.
15:49 And it sort of starts from the top. He’s kind of created this tone. Of course, he’s exploiting something that’s already there. He’s already exploiting the divisions that exist within our country and he’s making them worse, and he’s using social media as a way to do this. But it doesn’t mean that social media in itself is simply a means of dividing people.
16:09 It could be used for other things, it could be used as a form of dialogue, it could be used as a way of rational discourse. I know I’m sounding like incredibly idealistic here, but you know, I want to hear people defend his policy, I want to hear a rational argument, and all you get are these heated emotional responses, a lot of it to me stems from cognitive dissonance, which is something I talk about in the chapter on irrationality, and the idea here is you form an opinion about somebody, let’s say you support a certain politician like Donald Trump, and then evidence comes in that maybe contradicts your original decision, but you, instead of listening to that evidence, because if you listen to that you have to admit that you were wrong in your original choice, and people never liked to admit they were wrong, it would rather hold on to something that’s irrational to believe that their original choice was the right one than to have to admit that their original choice was wrong, because it causes doubts about who you are, about yourself as a person, in your own intelligence.
17:16 So instead of rethinking your original position, you then latch on even more emotionally to what drove you in the first place, and I see a lot of that kind of behavior going on. And so one of the things I talk about in rationality, it’s not that you’re not born rationally, you are born irrational, but to become irrational, to become rational, you have to be able at times to admit you were wrong, to admit that sometimes you made a mistake, that you made choices that didn’t come from the right information. That is the first step towards becoming a rational human being.
17:49 And you know, I’ve done it through myself, I’m constantly admitting the predictions I made eight or ten years ago were wrong, people I voted for ended up not being the right people, and it was my fault. I recognize my own limitations, that I can make emotional, wrong-headed decisions. That is the first step towards being rational, and in this climate it’s extremely hard to find people who are willing to do that. And what else can we do, Robert? I mean, I think most people would probably agree with you that we’re irrational, even though we all like to think we make just logical decisions, but is there any other way of, like, checking your emotion on a regular basis or when it comes to big decisions?
18:28 I mean, we’ve all heard about the exercise where you, you know, write down the pros and cons of a decision and when you see the two lists, then you make the decision. I mean, that’s a way, I think, of trying to engineer out your emotions, but like, what are some other things that people can do either to recognize it or to be more rational? Well, the first step is actually quite simple, and if you don’t make this first step, none of the other things, writing that stuff on a piece of paper, will be meaningless.
18:54 The first step is to understand that you are not rational, that emotions are infecting your decisions. So if you have a strategy, a plan for your company to make more money or for yourself in your career, the first thing you have to do is you have to realize that 90% of what has gone into your decision is emotional, that you’re basing it on wishes and what you hope will be the truth, and that you’re finding evidence to confirm that, confirmation bias. Okay, so if you can’t make that first step, forget all the other that people throw at you in self-help books, it’s meaningless.
19:29 And I do a lot of consulting with business leaders and I go through this time and time again. I try and say, look, you’re not, your decision that you’ve just come upon is basically based on what you want, not on what’s actually going to necessarily happen. So you have to take a step back and realize that, and when you realize that, now you reassess your decision. Okay, now you can begin to have what’s called emotional intelligence, and emotional intelligence basically means the ability to assess your own emotions.
20:00 So if you feel angry or if you feel excited, instead of acting on it, instead of going out and buying 10,000 shares of that stock that other people are buying, or instead of, like, writing some really angry email to your boss about something he or she said, you then think about why am I angry, why am I excited, is it reasonable, is it based on what’s actually happening to me right here in the present? Maybe it’s not reasonable, maybe I’m responding to something that happened in my childhood or to something that happened a few days ago and it’s not about what’s going on in the present. So the ability to step back and analyze your own emotional responses is actually a critical life skill.
20:42 And then when you’re looking at your decision, you’re making it a choice about your life, let’s say, a lot of people now are facing a very big decision, which is what is my future, what is my career going to mean? I may not have a job when this is over, or it might be a very different job, right? Okay, so you want to have the ability to step back and consider other options, because the real, the greatest limitation that the human mind has is that we tend to consider what we’ve done in the past.
21:14 We tend to follow a straight line. If we’re considering, you know, we’re going to go here, here or here, we only think of three possible paths in life. We have a very narrow perspective. We try and keep this narrow because otherwise the human brain gets overloaded. You want to be able to expand your choices.
21:32 You want to be able, instead of just thinking of A, B and C, you want to think of D, E and F and G. You want to think, are there other things I could be doing? Are there other possibilities out there? I’m tending to always repeat the same strategies, the same conventional, boring ideas from the past, these sort of patterns of life. And I talk about in The Laws of Human Nature, 90% of our behavior is compulsive.
21:54 We repeat the same patterns of behavior, the same strategies over and over and over again. It’s the animal part of our nature, and to be truly intelligent, to be truly rational, to be able to break out of those patterns, but you can’t do that unless your mind is willing to consider a wider range of possibilities for yourself or for your decision. So when you write down those pros and cons, you’re probably not writing down all of them, you’re probably keeping them narrowed down to a certain thing, and even if you do write those pros and cons, your emotions are going to infect what you write down as a pro and a con unless you are aware of all these things that I’m talking about.
22:34 So being irrational is very dangerous. It’s like a vapor that’s hidden, you don’t realize it’s infecting your decisions, but it is, and just being aware of how subtly it’s infecting everything that you do can give you the ability to be more rational in life. Are there any ways to just to disrupt your patterns of thinking? I mean, I think when you were here eight years ago, I vaguely remember us talking about psychedelics. Two years ago I went and had some pretty heavy, I think we did, I had some big ayahuasca ceremonies in Costa Rica a couple years ago.
23:05 We made a movie about it called Reconnect, and I mean, talk about getting a reset for your brain and just opening up my brain to lots of possibilities, it definitely did. Of course the integration process took a couple years, some people say it’s still happening, but like, are there other ways to just kind of detach from those patterns? Because, Robert, otherwise we’ll repeat them for the rest of our lives, and then you know, that’s why a lot of people have these regrets, because they look back at their life and they see they were stuck in these patterns.
23:34 Right, well, you know, everything that we talked about here so far this evening is all about awareness. That’s the key thing here that I’m trying to pound into people in my book. You have the short version there, which is fine, I don’t want to say don’t read it, but the book, the actual book, is long, I’m afraid, it’s like over 500 pages, and I’m pounding into your little head that you are not aware of yourself, you don’t know yourself, you don’t know other people.
24:02 Okay, so the key here in going about your patterns is to be aware of those patterns. Okay, if you’re not aware of those patterns, you will repeat them your entire life, because you don’t even know that they exist. So what are your patterns? So to do that you have to take a step back and you have to introspect, which we were talking about earlier. You have to look at yourself and the patterns that you’ll see will be very evident in certain things.
24:28 They’ll be evident in certain career choices that you’ve made. You’ve noticed that you tend to go either for a job that gives you a lot of money, because that’s something that’s important to you, and then you’re unhappy and frustrated because it’s not fulfilling, and you go for another job for a lot of money and then you’re unhappy, you start drinking, you start taking drugs, and you go for, you know, on and on and on and on. Or so, look at your patterns and your decisions, important decisions, they reveal something about you.
24:54 Look into your choices of intimate partners. A lot of people will make a wrong choice, I know I have in my life. Luckily I’ve been with somebody now for several decades and I’ve made the right choice, but in the past you’ll notice that you often choose the wrong kind of person, the wrong man or woman for you, and then three years later you repeat it. You don’t realize it, but you’re going for the same type of person, you’re attracted to a narcissistic man or woman, you break up, then you go after the same person again, over and over and over again.
25:26 These are patterns that are trying to tell you something, about something deep within you, about your character, about something that goes back to your childhood. So I tell in the story in the book, the story, the famous kind of case study of psychiatrists, where there’s this young man who keeps having these patterns of these relationships with women, he keeps breaking them off after a couple of years, and then he tells the therapist, well, she wasn’t right, she wasn’t my type, or bubble, he keeps coming up with reasons, and finally the analyst discovers that essentially his relationship with his mother, his mother wasn’t very loving to him when he was three, two, three years old, you know, she was kind of a narcissistic mother and he always had this feeling of being abandoned by her, and it was very painful for him but he doesn’t remember it because it was when he was three or four years old, and so his pattern in life is to always be the one abandoning other people before they can abandon him, so he doesn’t repeat that feeling of pain, but look at the incredible painful pattern it sets.
26:32 He can never have a relationship and he can never be aware of why he’s doing that. Well, you can better believe that you out there listening to this have patterns like that. They may not be so extreme, but then you have patterns that stem from relationships with your father, your mother, your siblings, your earliest teachers, that are causing you to do things that you’re not aware of, and you can see, only see evidence in this, in certain very important decisions that you make that reveal something about your character, about your emotional resilience or your lack of it, as I said, in relationships or career decisions, and there might be other areas as well.
27:09 So seeing those patterns, you now have the ability to perhaps bring, it’s not easy, it’s not going to be a simple step, because the brain is designed as this kind of machine for repeating behaviors over and over again, we’re neurologically wired to repeat things, it’s not easy to break that, but the only way is to apply light to it, to throw a light on it and to bring some intelligence and to say, ah, this is why I always get angry when an authority figure asks me to do something, this is why I’m so rebellious and I always say the wrong thing in meetings and why it’s constantly hurt me in my career. Ah, this is why I’ve made terrible choices in a spouse or an intimate partner over and over again. Now you, that’s like incredibly empowering.
27:58 Now you have a little bit of space the next time you’re about to make a decision to go, whoa, wait a minute, no, maybe I shouldn’t do that, maybe I need a different type of person to be my partner in life, or no, maybe I shouldn’t say that thing to my boss, this has gotten me in trouble before. Now you have a little bit of power and you can start to build on that. So everything sort of revolves around your awareness of yourself and of these patterns. Well, it sounded like you were talking about my life for a second there, Robert, because up until I was 40, I mean, I made a series of career choices based on money because I thought in my head that money would make me happy, and it took me literally, you know, 20-some years to realize it didn’t, which is why I started doing London, London, Rio, London Real was a run as a 180-degree turn from that style of me as a greedy banker for nine years and other jobs, and it was me finally realizing, after alcoholism, drug addiction, loneliness, depression and just general I’m not happy, to realize that the only way to get happy was, I mean, ultimately really to be of service.
29:06 I mean, that’s ultimately what I discovered, but I had to break that pattern. Actually a meditation practice helped, some, you know, drug addiction and overdose helped, being alone helped, so a few things snapped and got me that realization. So, and maybe hitting bottom too. Yeah, that definitely helps. And it was interesting, earlier you were talking about business leaders, I thought of that movie Moneyball with Brad Pitt, where this baseball team decides that if they want to win, if they really just wanted to win, they should take the emotions out of it and say, stop going for the, you know, the super cool base hits and all these other things and just play by the numbers.
29:48 You can win this game of baseball if you just play it rationally and logically, as opposed to most teams that were doing things the old way and the old patterns, because the old-timers did it that way and ultimately they were successful. I think because they took their emotion out of it. So yeah. Well, the only thing I’d say about that is I don’t believe that emotions are bad. It’s a misconception that people might derive from my book, and actually the science on this confirms what I’m trying to say, that emotions are very important.
30:20 That they’ve done studies of people who’ve had brain damage to the extent where the emotional part of the brain, which is generally centered on the right hemisphere, has been damaged, so people don’t have access to the usual emotions and they are the ones who make the most irrational decisions of all, because they can’t, for instance, tell if someone who should be, they should mistrust their, they don’t have the emotional intelligence to see that that person is not somebody they can trust, and then they do something very naive. So emotions are actually very important and you’re not going to be able to write a book, to start a business, to create a popular podcast, to win an election, unless you have a great deal of energy and emotional power and enthusiasm for it.
31:12 I talk in Mastery how Albert Einstein, the person we consider the most rational person ever, was extremely emotional, and he talked about how it took an incredible amount of excitement to spend ten years studying the same one formula day after day after day after day. You need your emotions, and I compare it to the old ancient Greek metaphor of the rider on a horse. So the horse represents your animal nature, your emotions, right, and the rider is your intelligence, the neocortex, the part of our thinking process that evolved much later on.
31:50 Okay, so if you just let the horse go wherever and you don’t try and guide it, you’re gonna end up in all kinds of dangerous things. The horse might just, like, jump off a cliff or will end up going anywhere, right? But if you hold on to the horse too tightly, if you’re so worried about controlling it, it won’t go anywhere or it’ll be very rebellious and upset. So you have to learn how to ride a horse, which means you find a middle path. You hold the reins, you guide it, but you use that energy of the horse, the power that it contains, to take you somewhere, but you guide it, you give it some intelligence.
32:26 That is what rationality is about. So you have to have that energy, you can’t repress your emotions, you can’t repress anger. To try and repress anger, it will only cause other problems, physical and emotional. You have to learn how to use your anger, you have to be able to be like that rider on the horse and guide it in an intelligent, productive way, right? So it’s not about just getting rid of emotions, which is impossible for a human being, it’s about learning how to recognize their power, how much they intend to infect your decisions and to be able to guide them in some way, instead of being there, instead of letting the emotions ride you, you’re riding them.
33:07 You know, you mentioned getting in touch with your anger, you got a great chapter in the book about your dark side and the shadow, and again, a few years ago we made a movie here at London Real about one of my mentors, and my mentor is, I mean, he’s like a Bond villain, he’s like 75 years old, he’s got a castle in Scotland, ex-oil man, climate denier, cusses like a sailor, he’s a high performance coach that’s created a trillion dollars worth of net wealth, net worth, it’s his way or the highway, and he’s had a big effect on me and we were trying to think of a way to present him to the world. He’s also one of my most popular guests ever, Robert, but nobody admits it, but they watch him on the sly because he reminds them of their grandfather that doesn’t accept their BS, right?
33:48 And so in the beginning of the movie we present him by saying, we just open up and we got all these, like, Faustian images and we talk about how everyone has a dark side, because it’s easy to point at him and say, well, I’m not like him, but I’m trying to get everyone to kind of admit they have a dark side. It’s a big part of your book here and maybe you can talk about how we have to accept, because most people won’t accept that they do evil things, they do angry things, that they’re, you know, potentially savage, violent, nasty, mean, envious creatures. How do we get in touch with this, Robert?
34:24 Well, you know, there are 18 chapters in the book, 18 laws, but the most, the Law Number One, which is implied in the book, is the fact that we deny our own nature, we don’t want to admit it. So it’s always the other person that’s a narcissist, it’s always the other person who’s violent and aggressive, but me, no, no, I’m not, I’m a saint. It’s always the other person who’s the conformist, no, I always get my ideas for myself, I don’t listen to other people.
34:52 It’s always the other people who are envious, no, I never compare my, it’s the person who denies it the most, the person who says most vehemently that I am not a narcissist is the most narcissistic person of all, because they have to prove how different they are from other people, it’s all about themselves, right? So denial, as Freud said, is merely a way of disguising the actual, the opposite, what you’re trying to disguise from yourself. Okay, so we have a dark side, we, I try to make the point in the book, we are all narcissistic and self-absorbed by nature, we all have aggressive impulses by nature, we are designed as animals to feel envy, so stop trying to play the saint and admit that you have these same tendencies.
35:35 And the dark side is a chapter, the shadow, which I try and explain where the dark side comes from, and I explained that in childhood, if you’ve ever had children or been around children, you know, or you remember your own childhood, children are kind of these complete individuals, they feel a very wide range of emotions. Some of the emotions are positive, like love and affection and empathy, but a lot of the emotions are negative: anger, destructiveness, hatred, you know, violence, etc. And children haven’t yet been socialized.
36:08 They have this complete range of emotions, right? They’re like a total, like a round ball of energy that just exists, and they can’t control it, they just are who they are, good and bad, angel and demon, you know, all in one. But then as you get older, as you become six or seven years old, you just have to listen to your parents and your teachers tell you, you can’t be like that, little Bobby or Susie or whatever, I’m sorry about my bad names here. You have to learn to get along with other people, you can’t be so angry, you can’t be so violent, you can’t be so aggressive, you need to control it, and you on and on, year after year after year after year, after hearing this, you push it down, you push it down, that round ball of energy just becoming the squashed little thing like that, and all the dark energy gets pushed down into somewhere else, but it doesn’t disappear, because nothing that’s natural human energy, you can’t get rid of it, it’s there, it’s just repressed and pushed down into what’s called your shadow, what Carl Jung called the shadow side of the personality.
37:14 And the shadow will come out later in life when you’re in your 20s, for instance, when you suddenly have a burst of anger and you tell somebody something that you regret the next day. What the hell came over me? Was that somebody else? That wasn’t me, I don’t understand it. Or you buy something that was totally wrong, that was not the right purchase for you, and the next day you go, why did I buy that thing?
37:36 Why did I spend forty thousand dollars on a new car when I don’t even have that, blah, blah, blah. When suddenly you have some sort of behavior that surprises you as if you came out of nowhere, you know, you leave your very good wife you’ve been married to for 20 years for some sexy model who’s 20 years old and she ruins your life and you’re such an arrest, why did I do that? Who was that person that came out? Well, that is your shadow side that you’ve repressed, that’s coming out in moments that you can’t control.
38:09 So oftentimes you see that with celebrities who get caught in the act of doing something kind of naughty or bad, and they’ll always come out in public and say, that wasn’t me, that isn’t who I am. No, that is exactly who you are. That is exactly who you are. That is more you than the kind of saintly person you try and present. It’s that dark side that is really a part of you that came out, that you’ve been trying to conceal from other people.
38:36 Okay, so the thing is you have to admit that you have a dark side, that you have aggressive impulses, that you have some anti-social impulses, that you have a rebellious streak, which is natural for all of us, we all went through a rebellious phase in our teens, etc., that you have these qualities that you kind of don’t like in other people but you have them as well, right? And the point is not to just suddenly become this devilish person in life and just give full rein to all that stuff, but to be aware, back to awareness, and to be able to channel it in a productive manner. So for instance, I talk, I do a lot of consulting with athletes, for instance, who have problems with power, etc., and they’re the type of people who have a lot of them, like basketball players, and I’m sure it’s the same in football in the UK, they have a lot of aggressive, competitive, ambitious energy, right, and this is one area where you can now channel that dark energy into something productive by putting it into your team, by becoming a better player, by winning in competitions.
39:47 So you can channel your aggressive impulses into making the best business ever and putting that competitive energy into something that benefits society by creating a killer product of some sort, right? So you can channel it into pro-social ways. In fact, if you learn, and I often tell artists, people who are filmmakers or writers, your anger is your best weapon of all. I know, I, when I wrote The 48 Laws of Power, which has been my sixth most successful book, we’ve sold well over two million in the United States, I don’t mean to brag, but I’m just saying, yeah, I’m bragging, that’s my dark side, I’m gonna stop that, is I had a lot of anger, right?
40:33 I had worked in Hollywood and I hated the falseness in Hollywood, I hated all the phony, yeah, I love your screenplay, love all the, and I channeled my anger into that book and people feel it, they like the anger. So if you’re an artist, don’t be afraid of your own anger or your own dislikes or even your violent energy, put it into your work, because people are so repressed out there and so politically correct, they’re gonna love it, they’re gonna love that you expressed some of those emotions that everyone else is afraid to express, and you put it in a work of art. So find ways to use that dark energy that are actually productive.
41:14 Yeah, that’s super good advice. Did you watch the Michael Jordan documentary on Netflix? Because you really see his competitiveness, and then you’re talking to him what, 25 years later and he’s still mad at some of the guys he competed against, but he did channel that into, you know, the team winning, but it feels like he keeps the energy with him. I don’t know, what did you see in Michael Jordan? Yeah, he’s a classic example of that, and you know, he was like in high school and somebody told him, like a coach, you’re never going to be a successful basketball player, you know, you’re too on discipline, I don’t remember what it was.
41:52 He never forgot what that guy said, he remembered it every single day of his life, still does. He used that to channel himself, you know, I’m gonna show you that you’re wrong, you know, etc. Anytime somebody doubted him or wanted to show him up on a court, he never forgot it, he used it to get back at them, and in some ways, you know, he wasn’t often the best teammate, he can be really hard on players. Fortunately he had a coach, one of the great geniuses, strategic geniuses, Phil Jackson, and I talked earlier about leadership and how it’s important that somebody can set the right tone, and Jackson set the tone as team first, and he made it very clear to Michael Jordan, look, what you want to do is win championships, that’s the ultimate.
42:38 In order to win championships you need a team, in order to have a team you need to be a team player, and you need to not just be a team player, you need to be the team leader, you need to set the tone. And without Phil Jackson I don’t know how many championships he would have won, but he is a classic example of what we say. The other person is Kobe Bryant, who is my particular idol because I’m from Los Angeles and I’m a die-hard Laker fan, and God bless his soul that he unfortunately was taken from us, but Kobe was the most intense.
43:07 He was Michael Jordan, I can’t say more than Michael Jordan because nobody ever has been that way, and even Tiger Woods to some extent. So it can be a little bit destructive, you can go a little bit too far in that if you don’t have some degree of control of that energy, and it can spill out into your private life, but athletes like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant are the prime exemplars of this. The thing is, we don’t have, you and I or people in business, we don’t have the same outlet where we can physically impose ourselves on other people and be a little bit violent and push them, get the ball and score points, etcetera.
43:44 We have to be a little more polite and social and civilized out in our offices, we have to pretend, you know, we have to wear these kind of courtier masks, etc. But you can channel it in some ways, you know, like for me, for instance, I’m a very ambitious person, I’m very competitive, anyone who’s ever played a game with me knows there’s a Michael Jordan in me. I’m not as bad as Michael Jordan, but I’m definitely of that type. I don’t like to lose, right?
44:12 So when I’m writing my next book, I’m always worried that it’s going to fail, that no one’s going to read it, it’s going to be terrible, and I put so much energy and so much time into making sure that it’s going to be a bestseller by trying to think of my audience and thinking how I can make this the best book. I pour all of my ambition and my aggression into that book, into making it something I can be proud of. So it’s not as immediate gratification as destroying my opponent on a court, but I get some of that satisfaction when my book sells really well or is successful, right?
44:48 And you’re channeling that into something that will help other people, which is a good thing, I hope you hope. Yeah. Talk to me about this paralysis by comparison, and then it kind of links into narcissism and also with social media these days. I mean, unlike say 20, 30 years ago, now literally we can pop on Instagram and you can always find someone that’s better looking than you, has more money than you, has a better relationship with, you know, a better girlfriend, a boyfriend.
45:14 You know, it’s so easy now to find someone who’s better than you and then that also gets you back into your own head. Talk to me about how we can maybe break the cycle or even recognize that this cycle is happening. Well, you know, I talk a lot about the book in the book, The Laws of Human Nature, that our nature was set by how our brains were wired 200,300,000 years ago, well before the invention of language. The human brain basically reached its present size somewhere around 200,000 years ago or maybe a little bit less, okay, before we had language and reasoning powers.
45:53 So our brains are wired for a much different environment than what we’re living in right now, but some of those qualities, those very primitive qualities in us were, for instance, our need to compare ourselves to other people, which is the source of what we would call envy. So for instance, the human brain naturally operates by comparing information. That’s how we receive something visually, we compare it to other things that we’ve seen and we decide this is good or this is dangerous, etcetera.
46:26 So the brain is a comparing machine for comparing information, but we’re also a social animal, so it means that we’re constantly comparing ourselves to other people. So they’ve noticed that chimpanzees, for instance, who are our ancestors, have, they demonstrated that there’s definitely signs of envy among chimpanzees. So if a researcher gives a couple of bananas to one chimp and the others are excluded, all of a sudden the other chimps are looking at what we would call the evil eye, and it gets very dangerous, they might end up like stealing it from or attacking them.
47:04 Primitive societies, hunter-gatherer cultures, noticed that envy was their most dangerous thing in a tribe. If some one person received more meat from a kill than others or received a gift, the other members of the tribe were so envious that they were going to kill that person, so they developed all kinds of rituals to make sure that nobody had more than others. So the moment you received a gift, you felt worried and afraid and you immediately gave it to other people, right?
47:30 So they recognize the dangers of envy. So here we are two hundred thousand years later in the most sophisticated, modern, computerized, technologically savvy world, and what are we seeing? The most primitive parts of our nature are actually coming out and flourishing. So that need to compare ourselves, that chimpanzee, that hunter-gatherer quality, on Instagram, on Facebook is now just given a medium for exploding, because as you say, we can see what everybody else is doing.
48:04 In the past we could maybe be envious of a few people around us who we heard got a great job and we didn’t get it, etc., but now we have to see the whole world doing all these fantastic, wonderful things, and of course these fantastic, wonderful things are highly edited. People never put on Instagram their kind of boring moments or their pain or the days where they don’t look so good or the holidays that didn’t quite turn out or the career decisions that didn’t work out, all the pain and suffering that we all deal with every day, we don’t post that on Instagram, we edit it and we show our grit, our best selves, right? So it’s a machine for exacerbating this very powerful, horrible tendency in humans to compare ourselves to others.
48:48 Okay, so once again you have to be aware that you yourself are doing this, and I tell people, if you actually spent part of the day thinking about your own thoughts, you would realize that well over half of your thinking revolves around other people and what they have, comparing yourself to them, comparing yourself to them career-wise, money-wise, you know, relationship-wise, etc., and so you have to be aware that’s going on, and that’s a process that’s happening now. One thing that’s important that I tell people in this time of coronavirus, etc., where you’re in your lockdown, although that’s sort of easing up, is to be able to get off social media for a while, to be able to recognize its dangers. Now I’m somebody who uses it and I enjoy it and it has a purpose and I sometimes abuse it because I can’t, it’s hard to control, but you have to control it.
49:44 You have to give yourself time, in days where you don’t check the Instagram, you don’t check Facebook, where you leave it alone, when you’re not on it you’re not unaware of what other people are doing and you’re thinking about yourself and where you are, because your career, your power, your success in life, and I made this point in my book Mastery, depends on your ability to bring out your uniqueness, to bring out your originality, to be different from the crowd, to show what’s different about you. That’s your source of power. I call that in my book your Life’s Task, because all the people who are successful in the world, if you look at them, the Elon Musks on down, they’re unique, they’re one of a kind, you can’t say there’s anybody like them.
50:29 They are not afraid of what makes them weird or different, they bring it out. So if you’re so locked into social media, you’re going to find those conformist tendencies in human nature, there’s another chapter in the book, getting stronger and stronger and stronger, and you’re going to find your thinking becoming more and more conventional, where you’re always thinking about what other people are doing and how you can fit in and how you can impress them, and you’re going to lose a sense of who you are, I lose a sense of your soul in a way. So number one, you have to be able to detach yourself from social media from time to time, take a break from it, but step two is to recognize the dangers that are involved.
51:06 And so if you’re constantly thinking about what other people have, I have it at the end of each chapter, I describe how you can take these qualities and turn them around. So envy means that you’re comparing yourself to people who have more than you. You can also try and compare yourself to people who have less than you and feel grateful for who you are So for instance, two years ago I suffered a stroke that has completely altered my life. I can’t hike, I can’t swim, I can’t bicycle, all the things I loved were taken away from me, right?
51:41 And so I feel envy every single day as I see some people running up the street. Damn it, man, I can’t do that. I’m so upset, I can’t tell you the pain and envy that I feel. But then I have to train myself and say, well, look, first of all, I came this close to dying, I came this close to having permanent brain damage. Okay, I didn’t have that, I’m alive, the birds are chirping, I can look at the world, I can talk to Brian Rose, I can read the newspaper, I can write another book.
52:10 I have much to be grateful for. And on top of that, I tell myself the other thing, those people who were running, who are doing all the things I used to do, they’re unaware, they’re kind of spoiled, they’ve never had to suffer. I mean, maybe they have, a lot of people have suffered, I really suffered, and suffering has made me stronger. So maybe I won’t feel envy, I’ll feel grateful for this experience because it’s made me tougher and more patient and more grateful for what I have.
52:38 So compare yourself to people who are poorer than you, compare yourself to people who caught the coronavirus and who are dying in the most miserable circumstances. Also realize people who seem to have great lives don’t have great lives. I talk in the book about Aristotle Onassis in the 60s, the wealthiest man in the world, he could seduce and sleep with any woman, married to Jacqueline, Onassis, a dream life, he was the most miserable, unhappy son of a that ever lived.
53:07 Money didn’t bring him happiness. So that person you think that has a great family, was a wonderful, loving husband or wife, etc., if you were actually there at the breakfast table you would realize it’s just all illusion, that their life isn’t nearly as happy as you imagined. These are processes you can go to break that kind of envy cycle. Okay, so that gives you some idea. Oh, that’s super helpful, and maybe we could just finish on this idea of confronting the fear of death.
53:33 I mean, you know, you mentioned your stroke, you spent a lot of time with 50 Cent, who, you know, took nine shots at point-blank range. You know, since you came here originally first on London Real, I opened up in a movie we did called Iron Mind about my heroin overdose in 2001 in New York City. Yeah, so I, you know, after that, you know, every day was almost a gift, and then every day sober was a gift. And so I mean, talk to me, because we don’t really talk about death.
54:02 You’ve said before that, you know, we don’t see death, we don’t kill our animals, people die in hospitals. Is this kind of underlying a lot of our behaviors and is this something we can maybe try to get in touch with more to understand ourselves better? Yeah, I mean, the irony was that I wrote that chapter about confronting our mortality, the last law, in like May of 2018, I finished it, and literally two and a half months later I had my stroke and I nearly died.
54:31 So everything that I wrote about I suddenly had to confront in real life. And what you say there is something that I write about in the book. If you read a lot of history like I do, you know that in centuries before, let’s say the 19th century and beyond, death was a continual presence in people’s lives. Even in the 20th century with World War I and World War II, for instance, you were seeing dead bodies in the street, people were dying in your home, okay, there were plagues, etc.
55:01 There was something like the coronavirus with millions of people dying on the street, cadavers piled up, you saw it all the time, and then animals that were killed for your food, you literally saw the chicken being killed or whatever it was, right? So death was this presence in your life, it was very palpable, and people were obsessed with it. It was why a lot of religion took off and became so popular and so necessary because confronting your mortality is a terrible thing when you see it day in and day out, and we have managed to create this antiseptic kind of lifeless world where we banish death to this little corner in these sanitized hospitals where people die alone under machines, etc., where we could go our whole lives and never once see an actual dead person, which is an insane thing because life means death.
55:55 The moment you were born you’re going to die, every cell in your body is in the process of dying, right? So there is no such thing as life without death, it’s part of its, two sides of the same thing, so to repress it, to hide it from our view, is to hide life from our view, right? And what makes it even worse is in our entertainment, in our video games, in our movies, we have this sort of cartoonish version of death where, you know, hundreds of people are shot with one gun and they all fall down and there’s no life, there’s no empathy, there’s no psychology into what is it like to be killed like that, what does it feel like?
56:33 We have no feelings anymore about what death means, so we live in a very dangerous world and to repress death, which is, as I said, the flip side of life, is to repress something very important and it’s to create fear inside of you. People in the 21st century, 20th and 21st century, we have a lot of anxiety, much more than our ancestors did, right? We feel a lot more stress and anxiety about our careers, about our lives, and that anxiety stems from this one thing that we’re not confronting, which is our own mortality.
57:10 When you don’t confront your death, you’re not dealing with something, it’s the most real thing in your future and it’s causing you to have this kind of continual anxiety that sits inside of you and that you channel towards other things. So your anxiety about where you will be in two years with your career is actually a disguised anxiety about your death, about your own mortality. Okay, so you need to turn this around, so instead of hiding from death, which is, you know, in, I don’t know if you ever read, when I was sort of a hippie in the early 70s, and I loved the books of Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan, I love, I read every single one, he said that death is a hunter, it’s stalking you, it’s behind you every second, it’s hunting you every moment of life, and you don’t realize that it’s on your heels.
57:58 I always took that image, okay, instead of, like, having it there and running away from it, turn around and face it and look at it, and look at it for yourself. And how do you do that? Well, it can’t just be an intellectual exercise, it has to be real, it’s what I have to call visceral. So samurai warriors who are facing death on a weekly basis in a sword fight, a sword fight wasn’t just like a boxing match, you would die if you lost, right? So they would face, they would have meditate on death, and they would meditate in in their viscera, in what’s called the tandem or the hara in Japanese, where we get the word harakiri.
58:36 They would think about death right there and they would meditate on it so they would lose the fear of it. You have to make death a visceral, horror presence in your life. I meditate every morning and I would sometimes go through an exercise where I would literally imagine my own death, like it’s happening here on this day, it’s in the afternoon, my senses are kind of falling away, I’m looking out a window, I try and imagine, I try and make it real. It’s not morbid, it’s not gloomy, it’s actually very affirming because it means you can get rid of the fear, the anxiety, by confronting it.
59:15 You can’t completely get rid of it. If you got completely rid of it you would run in front of a car on the street. You have, you know, you want to survive, but you also want to be aware of your own mortality and carry that with you because it has numerous benefits. First of all, it makes you aware that your days are numbered. You know, when you’re in your 20s or 30s you think, I’ve got these vast horizons of time in front of me, I’ve got 40, 60, 70 years, I can waste it, I can do all this stuff.
59:45 No, you could die tomorrow, even when you’re young, you could die tomorrow, it can be taken away from you. Believe me, I know how much was taken away from me in one split second. It can happen, you have no control over it, right? That awareness makes you suck every second of life with more intensity, more vitality, more awareness, more gratitude, because it can be taken away at any moment. So it actually, the awareness and closeness with death opens your eyes and opens your whole body and makes you more aware and vital and aware of life.
1:00:17 It also makes you more empathetic. I remember one day I was in New York City, it’s actually just before my stroke, I just finished the book, I was walking through the city of where my publishers are, it was like before the book came out, and I was looking at all the people walking by me, I forget, it was on the west side, some busy street, I think Sixth Avenue, and I was imagining, you know, in a hundred years all these people will be dead, none of them will be alive, right? Every single one of them will be dead, and I started looking at them and I started to seeing them, and it was kind of a real poignant moment where people who I might have, like, initially been a bit repelled by because they were obese or they could, you know, or they, I don’t know, they didn’t wear a Trump hat but there was something that rubbed me the wrong way, I go, they’re going to die, they’re mortal, they’re afraid, they have the same insecurities as I do, the same vulnerabilities as I do.
1:01:16 It made me feel a great wave of empathy towards them and connection. So understanding, I talk, I quote in the book Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, which is like the coronavirus. He was five years old when the plague hit London in the 1660s, and then later in life he wrote a journal, it was kind of a fictional account of the plague, and his idea was that at a certain point in the plague, people were so aware of death that when they came upon an incredible connection to each other.
1:01:49 It didn’t matter if you were wealthy or what class you were in, you were gonna die as well, the plague could hit you, and so it made everybody feel like this kind of incredible, insane connection between you. And he said that the plague just sort of wiped away, like this kind of hot, nice scalpel, it wiped away all the divisions in our society and it made everybody feel connected. And that’s what an awareness of death can do. It can also make you aware of what I call the sublime, which is the subject of my next book, by the way, of all that kind of transcends human existence, that your little pitiful 80 years on this planet are going to be dwarfed by billions of years of the universe, cosmic history, that you’re this tiny little ant on a planet in this vast universe, that you’re not important, but feeling that you’re a part of that incredible scheme is actually kind of a mind-blower.
1:02:49 It’s like having ayahuasca. I’m trying to write a book that’s going to have the same effect as taking ayahuasca, to make you aware of how insanely mind-blowing it means to actually be alive, to be actually talking to Brian Rose on Zoom in 2020 when a hundred thousand years ago our ancestors were hitting bones on the ground and couldn’t even talk. It was actually an insane idea, right? Wow, you can’t even conceive of it. Okay, so you’re aware of mortality, it opens your mind up to these other sublime thoughts.
1:03:23 These are kind of the benefits that can come from that. You know, I could go on and on, better to read the book, but that’s sort of the gist of it. Robert, I could listen to you for hours. I think we found a new medium for you, I think books are played out. I want 20 hours of Robert Greene in audio and video.
1:03:39 What do you think? All right, well, we’ve been toying with the idea of me doing a podcast, but sometimes I listen to my own voice and I go, God, I get tired of hearing myself, you know, I want to hear other people talk. I just feel like, you know, it’s better to write books than to be constantly talking, but maybe I’ll do it at some point. I don’t know. You’re really good at it, I think you’ve gotten better over the years as well.
1:04:06 Oh well, thank you, I have a lot of practice. That means, but you know, it’s true, you don’t always meet writers that can articulate the stuff and go kind of off topic and, you know, pull in all sorts of different ideas all the time. I mean, sometimes you do, but you know, that’s why you have guests on your show as well, so you don’t have to talk the whole time, Robert. Yeah, that’s sort of the idea, I’ll have guests like you on, etc., and then I’ll get them to be the bloviators and not me.
1:04:32 All right, well, I’m suggesting you do that, and one of the first rules in LA as an actor is that you got to get over the sound of your own voice. It only takes a couple months and then it’s normal again. It took me a little while, I can’t stand the sound of my own voice, to be honest with you. I can’t watch my own podcast, I can’t, I don’t like seeing myself, I’ve been that way since a kid. You know, if you do it, I don’t think I’ll ever.
1:04:55 You don’t think so? A few hundred hours, you might get over it. I don’t know, I got this kind of lazy Los Angeles surfer accent, I just, I know everybody feels the same way about their sound of their own voice, so I’m the only one. And you are uniquely you, Robert, I mean you really are. It’s true.
1:05:12 That’s true, I have to get over this. Yeah, and like, you know, I remember when you came to London and I think you said this a lot, people expect you to be sometimes this, you know, Machiavellian 48 Laws of Power guy, and you’re like, I’m actually not that guy, I’m this other guy, but then you’re also competitive, so you know, I think you have a very unique personality you bring to the table too. So well, the Machiavellian is my dark side, I do have that, you know, but it’s not my, that’s not my primary quality, but there is a very, an element of me obviously that has that.
1:05:45 Yeah, well, I mean, you said two million books in America, I mean, this thing is part of the cultural zeitgeist around the world. I bump into the strangest people and I see your book on their bookshelf or in their bag and I’m always like, you reading that? I mean, so many people do, so you know, you should be really proud of all the work. When’s the next book coming out, and then also how, also can we get in touch with you, is our website the best, is Instagram your thing, or how can we stay in touch?
1:06:10 Well, my new book, which is going to be called The Law of the Sublime, excuse me, The Law of the Sublime, I’m just starting the writing now, I think realistically about three years, I’m afraid, but you know, if you’re gonna wait, you’re gonna wait. People will wait for me, it takes that. The Laws of Human Nature took me five years, over five years to write. The best way to reach me, I have an old website that we still have called powerseductionandwar.com, the end is spelled out, those are my first three books: Power, Seduction, War.
1:06:47 There you’ll find links to my Instagram, which I’m trying to build now, I finally surpassed 100,000 followers, which took a while because I just started it, to my Twitter and to my Facebook, and there is an address where you can write to me and tell me how I’m full of, you know, an email address, etc. Send me all of your criticism or whatever, and it also has links to all my books, etc. Are you still writing books with the index cards and doing everything like you traditionally do, like you taught Ryan Holiday and all that stuff?
1:07:22 You want to see my index cards? Yeah, can we? My new, for my new book, this is this, perfect, this is epic. I don’t know if I can hold it up that high because it’s kind of heavy, but is it even a few, and so you write down thoughts on these cards and then you kind of move them around and collate them and then, oh wow, okay, and the colors are different. That’s only part of it, I have like more, really, these are over a thousand cards in here.
1:07:55 Wow. And that’ll be part of the book, not all of it. No, it’s like the whole book is basically, you know, this is what I kind of write on each card. Oh wow, and these are kind of ideas. No, like, what I do is, I mean, I don’t know if your readers, your listeners want to get into the weeds here, but I read books, I read, like, over for this book so far I’ve read about 150 books for research, and then I go back like a month later and I put on a note card, so when I’m reading it I make little notes on the side about this is interesting, and then I go back and I condense the entire book onto about 10 cards, or I note down the major ideas, the points that I would, that interest me, and then when I, and then I organize these cards into chapters, which is my next step, which I’m going to be starting in actually two days now, and I organize into chapters, and then when I start to write the book I take the 50 cards for a chapter and that’s all the material that I need and I can organize it very quickly.
1:08:57 Wow, where did you come up with this concept? Was it just natural or the obvious way for you to do things? Well, it’s kind of an organic process, I think. My mom said she came in my room, she noticed that I had these cards from when I was in like junior high school for some class, so somewhere deep inside I had that kind of idea, but when I did The 48 Laws of Power, you know, I had read so many books and it was like, how do I organize all this? Putting it on pieces of paper and notebooks, I realized very quickly it was going to overwhelm me, because if you’ve read the book you know how many different stories and ideas are in there.
1:09:38 So I just naturally kind of navigated towards putting it on note cards, and as I did that I kind of created a system where I put, like, the theme of the card on the top and then I wrote it down with the page numbers and then it kind of just organized itself, and over the years I’ve kind of kept a system, I’ve refined it a little bit but it’s pretty much the same. And yeah, I taught it to Ryan Holiday and I help a lot of other people who write books, and I tell them, look, you’re either a prisoner of your material or you’re the master of your material if you’re a prisoner of your, a lot of books fail because the writer doesn’t really in control of all the research, and it shows up in the book being kind of badly organized and ideas being repeated over and over again.
1:10:28 By the time you reach the last 20, 30 pages it’s totally petered out because they haven’t organized their material. And so you need to be on top of it, and the only way to be on top of it, to master it, is to put it into a system that you can control. If you can create another system with your computer, I’m all for it, you know. This might not be the best system ever created, but it works for me and it makes me, I can read 300 books, like I did for Laws of Human Nature, and not feel like I’m overwhelmed, that I’m in control of the process.
1:10:59 Wow, and with the index card you can move them around so you can change chapter composition, and then almost by definition you don’t repeat, because they’re kind of only used once in the book. Well, sometimes an idea on a card will actually be relevant to several chapters and I have to note that down, and then when I finish the chapter I can move them to the other chapter that they’re relevant to, so it’s kind of this mobile system that, you know, you can’t really do on a computer, I’m afraid, because here it’s very tactile, I can take the cards in a matter of seconds. I mean, I’m sure you could on a computer, but my mind doesn’t work that way, I need to see things at the same time, I need to be able to access them in real time and move them around really quickly and see the whole thing in one kind of gestalt like that.
1:11:50 So, you know, it’s like, I don’t know, there must be some equivalent in the world of, like, a like a chameleon that’s constantly changing colors or something, it’s able to change its shape at will. This, the soul system, can change its shape as I direct it, like God with my material. I bet there’s something to the tactileness, to the fact that it’s right there with you, that this can’t be replicated on a computer. And I mean, just to show my age, I just turned 49, but I remember index cards when I was a kid, I remember, you know, that was a thing for a while but it hasn’t been a thing in a while.
1:12:30 Well, I supposedly, when I wrote my war book, Napoleon Bonaparte, I try to make the point in The 33 Strategies of War that Napoleon Bonaparte was kind of the absolute genius of strategy for at least 10 years, and then he kind of declined, but in those 10 years he was the most brilliant man, and his power was how well his mind was organized. He could have incredible amounts of information in his brain at the same time so that he could make strategic decisions that no one else could, and he had a note card system. Back in 1800 he created note cards for all the information that came into him from his lieutenants, from all the things that he had, information he heard about the opposing general, about how many soldiers were in the field, about the topography of the land they were fighting over, he had the system too.
1:13:20 So there you go, and look at the word got him. Am I going to see you on MasterClass, Robert Greene teaches writing, something like that? I don’t know, I haven’t been approached yet. I’m kind of, I’m kind of an outsider type person, you know, I look at things like that and I go, do I want to be, you know, I feel like I want to be different from other people, I don’t want to, if I do the MasterClass it’s going to be on my own. You know, I have a definite rebellious streak, which is my dark side as well.
1:13:50 So, this is great stuff, Robert, and again, like, I like that you’re saying you got to wait three years for the book, and I think most oft, you know, I think most authors at the end of their life would rather say, I’d rather have, you know, six, seven, eight, nine, ten great books than 30 that I did in a year to make a publisher happy. So you know, again, that’s mentorship right there to future writers, I guess. Take your time and make it great, right? Write a bestseller is what you try to do.
1:14:17 Yeah, some people don’t have the luxury because they need money, etc., and I understand that. I had, I’m very lucky and that my first book was successful, so I don’t have publishers telling me, you better write this in one year. I’m very lucky, a lot of people don’t have that luxury. So yeah, get writing, that’s what they should do. Well, the book, the book is The Laws of Human Nature.
1:14:38 Get the big one, but get the concise one if you’re, if you’re on the move. All your stuff is incredible, Robert. I remember I did the audio version of Mastery after I met you and listened to that whole piece, and I’ve read many of your books many times, The 50th Law as well, I love that, always been a huge 50 Cent fan. So thank you, great talking to you. You’ve got to do the podcast, Robert, you’re amazing on video and audio, so if you want some, if you want any training on that, let me know, I’ve taught a few thousand.
1:15:07 All right, I very well might take you up on that. I might, that sounds good. Please do, and next time let’s do this in person. I’ll try to get out to LA. I hope so, and meet you, or I want to come to London, I have been in London, I was supposed to be there for this book tour, I haven’t been there in like five years, I miss it very much.
1:15:23 I’d love to have you here, we’ll show you the new studio as well. Okay, very good, all right, Robert, great speaking to you, thank you so much, I appreciate the ideas, always mind-blowing as usual. Stay safe and I’ll see you soon. Thanks a lot, Brian, my pleasure, we’ll do it again. Thank you.
1:15:38 Take care. All right, good stuff, and thank you everybody for watching, we’ll see you next time on London Real. Take care.
