How To Master Seduction, Understand Desire & Influence People | Robert Greene | FO565 Raj Shamani

32:16We can feel it, but a lot of times it feels desperate. It feels like they want you to like them so that you won't hurt them. And we smell that kind of weakness. Now, I'll tell you something, Raj. I'm normally, I think, a pretty nice person, right? I came from the side that's more naive. I have a bit of weakness to myself. I've learned over the years that playing up the niceness and, you know, going along with people being interested in them can work if I demonstrate there are limits and there are boundaries and you do something to me. And I'm going to mess with you. You can't go that far with me.

33:04I'm nice. I'm gentle. I like what you say. I'm interested. Then you start taking advantage of me. I'm going to put the hammer on your head in an instant. I'm going to show you the limits and the boundaries. And then my genuinely nice nature, which I do have, works for me. Right? But I have limits. And there are people out there who will attest to how I can be when you test those limits. In middle, you said we all are unconsciously attracted towards dark traits, attracted towards evil traits. What are these dark traits that people are attracted towards? Well, first of all, you have to understand the dark side of everybody, right?

33:56So, when you were a child, you were just a complete individual. You weren't yet socialized. You would maybe beat up your sister, you would hit your sister, you would steal from her, you would do things, but you would also be sweet and nice. And then slowly you become socialized. Your parents tell you, don't do that, Raj. Don't hit yourself. Be nice to her. Your teachers are doing that on and on. And that kind of human quality that we all possess, that kind of animal energy that's just explosive, it gets pressed down further and further and further and repressed. Okay. And we suffer from that because we're not complete human beings anymore.

34:40A big part of ourselves has been cut off from us. Something that was in our childlike nature. Okay. So when we see people who give out some of that energy from childhood, it seems very authentic to us. It seems very real. And we're attracted to people like that. If you look at entertainment in movies and television shows, it's the dark characters. It's the evil ones. It's the Machiavellians that were interested, that were excited in it, that make us want to watch that movie. We just want to know what's going to happen. The villains. If there were no villains in this world, there'd be no drama.

35:22There'd be no entertainment. We are drawn to that secretly. we're drawn to those types of people because it's a part of ourselves that we've had to cut off and repress. Now, I'm not telling you to go out there and be evil and be dark and steal and rob and cheat and kill. I want you to take that dark energy that you have that we all have and channel it into something productive and make it work. So I took all of my dark, evil Machiavellian energy which I've had since I was a child and I put it into the 48 laws of power which has had some success and has helped a lot of people. Tell me top three dark traits which people are really attracted to.

36:12Well I know for instance there's an athlete that I admired very much Kobe Bryant basketball ball player love him okay he was my idol he's he's the greatest kobe had a lot of dark energy to him and he talked about it a lot and when he was young it could get him in trouble and i remember when he first got on the lakers there was something about him that wasn't mixing well with the team he was so competitive so ambitious he was just gonna he would do anything to get an edge on you Right. And Michael Jordan was a bit like that as well. OK, so that sense of somebody who has that kind of ambition, but is controlling it and putting it into a basketball game is incredibly powerful.

37:08And we're attracted to it right on the court, particularly. Another thing was. So willingness to do anything for your ambition. in a professional setting, that's an attractive trait. Yes. I mean, Elon Musk is not somebody that I admire, but his quality of he'll do anything to promote himself, anything to promote his business is what attracts a lot of energy towards him. Hatred and love as well, right? Another quality is, I talked in the art of seduction about charisma, right? And I equate charisma, a charismatic person is like they have a light inside of them that animates them. They're so excited.

37:58You see it in their eyes and their voice. One of the people I talked about in there was Malcolm X, a very important figure here in America. He had a lot of anger and righteous anger because he was a black person in America who suffered very deeply. He was a hustler who was put in prison for many, several years he was in prison, right? And then he came out and he saw all the racism in America and it made him so angry. But he, when he spoke, he was one of the most elegant speakers and you can look at it on YouTube and watch one of his talks. He doesn't seem angry. He doesn't come across yelling and bitter.

38:41He controls it. It's in his word. It's in his tone. It's in what he says. It's in his gestures. It's in his body language. It's very, very powerful. Anger can be very, we're drawn to it if it's in that channeled, controlled way. Somebody who yells and screams like a Hitler, like a Mussolini. Yeah, that could be, some people are drawn to that. But the person who channels that energy that anger into something that's kind of controlled right that's in the background is very very we're attracted to that so i took my own anger and i put it in the 48 laws of power and when you read it you're not aware of an author who's angry who's been screwed in Hollywood, but it's in the background.

39:32And the kind of darkness in the 48 Laws of Power is what has made it, I'm afraid, so successful because people are secretly drawn to that. There's so many icky, gooey, sweet, sentimental, self-help books out there that say, just be kind, just be good, just be a team player, just be cooperative. Yuck, that's all we've read. We know that the world isn't like that. But here's a book that kind of talks about, you know, act like a friend, be like a spy, crush your enemy totally, you know, play a sucker to catch a sucker. Yeah, man. Yeah, I'm interested in that. So I kind of accomplished that in my book itself.

40:13So first was willingness to do anything for ambition. Second was anger. What's the third one?

40:24geez i don't know i have to think about i have to think about think about people who have that quality the other thing is you're giving me a hard time that's all right i deserve it the other thing is that you have a past what do you mean by that that there's something dark in your past that makes people nice uh more attracted towards you yeah i think so too yeah when you show people that you're broken in a way which and you accept that in a way that most people will never accept and you show up out there it makes you instantly attractive yeah all right i got one yeah yes because in fact i've seen this is to me personally people who appear to be having a great past and they have no darkness and it feels like they're too good to be true I find it very difficult to trust them yeah yeah like I I want to be careful of them yeah and if somebody comes and tells me about some broken bad thing which probably is negative I still trust them more than the people who appear to have no past at all.

41:41And also if you've been hurt really badly and you had a bad childhood or something, there's something very, we're drawn to people like that. We're drawn towards broken people. Yes. That is, it's true. That is so true. Yeah. I know personally in the realm of seduction, I'm the woman that has had a wonderful childhood. Everybody treated her well, who's so happy. Doesn't interest me. So I'm particularly vulnerable to that problem. So being broken, being ambition and anger. Okay. You know, one thing which helped me a lot. Not, yeah, like I started purposely following that rule. in my life at in the beginning of my professional career in last now i've i don't think about these things at all it was law of absence what does that mean that don't be present everywhere what what don't be present everywhere like be absent oh yeah yeah of course like that well you know i talk about that a lot that's what that's what like you talked about it and that's how i got to know and i started putting that in my life and I've seen changes.

43:03I never used to believe in that. I used to feel, and this is strictly professional, that if I go to every networking event, every place, every conference, I'm there, I'm being seen everywhere, you know, it's going to help my career. It's usually the opposite. If I'm seen at very few places, that has helped me way more than being seen everywhere. So the law of absence became a primary rule in my life. I'm so glad to hear that. And now everybody in my team follows it. I'm so glad. I'm glad you realized that. Well, I said before that the art of seduction is maybe people think about you when you're not there.

43:43So if you're there at every event, every networking thing, they take you for granted. True. Right? But if you're not there, why isn't Raj here? What's going on with him? Does he have better things to do? Better than being here? You're making them think about you. You're creating a little bit of mystery so that when you do show up, it has meaning. It has import. Yeah. It's an incredibly important law because in the age of social media, it almost seems counterintuitive. I've got to be seen everywhere. I've got to have attention. I've got to have as many followers as possible. If a day goes by and I haven't posted something, people aren't thinking about me.

44:21They're not talking about me. But what you don't realize is that in playing the game that way, you're just like everybody else. And other people are going to come along and they're going to attract attention and people will forget about you because they take you for granted. You're just like everybody else. And the game is to be different, is to be not like anybody else, to be who you are. So it's not like Raj shows up every other time at an event. We don't know. We can't figure it out. He's got his own weird pattern. He's got his own weird things. And so it's you, it makes you unique. And as you get older, as you're only 29, you'll see more and more of possibilities to be different and be yourself and have power in that.

45:08Because it's hard when you're in your 20s to think that way because you think, I've got to be like everybody else. I've got to fit in because that's what it means like to be young, to be hip, to be right. But as you get older and you're confident and you know yourself, you know the game is actually to not be like anybody else out there. That's what really draws attention. And so not showing up is part of that game. Yeah. True. There's nothing wrong with that kind of manipulation. I mean, you're going out on a date with a woman that you're very interested in, right? So you dress nicely, right? You dress nicer than you normally would.

45:50You think more deeply about what I have to wear. And you think, I want to take her to a good restaurant. These are things you wouldn't normally do. You're playing a game. You're manipulating her. She thinks you dress nicely. You don't normally dress that way. So that's part of being a human being. It's part of being a social animal. I get a little bit angry sometimes with people who are so worried about always having to be like an angel. because the people who have to pretend that they're always an angel are actually hiding something very deep inside, you know. We all play games. That is so true.

46:29Thanks for saying out loud. Because I do sometimes have certain guilt about certain things. So thanks for pointing out that one thing. Okay, tell me when you, you know, when you practice all of these things, right, and you become this one person who is who is this you become this person who everybody is attracted towards right then a lot of people get addicted to you and people get obsessed with you so when someone is obsessed with someone what are they really addicted towards why like what quality is there that that is making this one person so addictive that you can't leave that person. You know that this person is not right.

47:21You know that this person shows 50 % interest, 50 % doesn't show interest. You get addicted to it. Why? Well, the most powerful, you know, in the art of seduction, I have the nine types of seducers. The most powerful of them all is the coquette. often traditionally associated with a woman but men equally can play the game and a coquette is someone who blows hot and cold right so if this let's just say it's a woman but it could be a man if this woman were always cold and indifferent nobody would be interested in her if she was always hot and exciting and sexy and coming on ah but she's exciting and sexy and alluring.

48:07You go after her and then she pulls back and she's a little bit cold and you go, she was interested. What's going on? What's my problem? She's not interested in you. I've got to try even harder. It's a very addictive type of person. It makes you chase them. So people who withdraw, who step back and make you chase them and make you go after them, it becomes a form of addiction. It becomes a kind of a hunt. You want to conquer them. You You want to get them. You want to be the person that has them as well. So that sense of mystery, of retreat, of a little bit of absence is what can make you very addicted to them.

48:48True. True. You know, I was reading. I mean, like, I'm sorry, when you're addicted, what makes you addicted is withdrawal. You don't have that drug and now you've got to get it. That's what this person is doing. True. True. I was reading a little bit of neuroscience around this and I found out that your dopamine neurons, they fire up not because of the reward. It's because of the anticipation. Ah, very interesting. And they fire up to the maximum, not at 100%, but at 50%. so whenever you're chasing something and there's an anticipation that you're going to get 50 % and 50 % you might not get that is when your dopamine neurons are fired up to the maximum and that's why you get addicted to it that she might say yes she might say no that like neuro but like neurologically it's more addictive and it's proven by science so this whole anticipation game works way better a lot of people think that the reward makes them addictive but it's actually the anticipation insight that maybe i'll get it and maybe i'm not yeah yeah i mean um i talked in in the in the war book um about leaders who are very good at motivating people and one of the greatest motivators was Napoleon Bonaparte.

50:20And Napoleon Bonaparte's strategy was mixing harshness with kindness. So he was very interested in his soldiers. He was very thinking about them and trying to protect them and making them comfortable. But when he was harsh, man, he would make a show of it. And he was the meanest person of all. And there was no leader who people were more addicted to who were more in love with than napoleon bonaparte even though he led millions of young men to death literally in the wars in europe by mixing that harshness and kindness they were constantly thinking about him they were so enraptured by him because those moments of harshness whoa it's like a slap in the face that's not who napoleon is but yeah he is and it made it It made them, the respect levels go way up.

51:1350, 50 % true. And they were anticipating that moments of harshness, as you say. Exactly. So it's like, then the obsession with the leader or with a woman or a man is not about the person at all. It's, you're not addicted to that person. You're actually addicted to the unanswered question, which you feel like only this person can answer. And that's why you get more addicted. I mean, the flip side of it is I'm wondering like algorithms are designed to be incredibly addictive, right? They figured out how to kind of capture our attention and to return over and over and over and over again to the same kinds of posts on social media.

51:57It is the same rule, right? You don't know if the next reel is going to be good or bad. Yeah. So in your head, you're anticipating next one's a little better. or this little bit and that's very interesting you've just hit something yeah right like you've just gamified the whole anticipation mechanism in your head well you know um all that stuff like neuroscience that you mentioned they're all reading all about that they know about all these studies and they're very clever in getting us hooked and addicted true that they all they do is this let me is is it's seduction ultimately the art of discovering an unmet emotional need of someone else?

52:37So in ancient Greek, the God of love was Cupid or Eros, and he had a bow and an arrow. And what that meant was he would wound you with the bone and arrow. And in that wound, you would fall in love now. Because if we feel completely secure and happy in our lives, we can't be seduced right there's nothing there's nothing to seduce we're already so perfect and happy yeah but if we're missing something if we have a wound from our childhood most often something that would hurt us something that we never got before then we're extremely vulnerable to being seduced, right? So, if somebody as a child never got enough attention, right?

53:30Their mother was a narcissist, wasn't really attending to them very much. They're going to spend their entire life with that emptiness, that wound in them that they never got enough attention, that they never got enough recognition. When a person comes along who senses that weakness in them and gives them that attention, they're just going to melt, right? Yeah. Everybody has a wound from their childhood, something missing, right? And you realize what that is and you're giving it to them in some form or another. It could be wicked and manipulative, or it can be very caring and helpful to the other person.

54:12But if someone is completely happy and has no wounds, you cannot seduce them. True. It's always like that, that your childhood voids end up becoming your adulthood things that you value the most in life. Right. And then if you can figure out that void and become a person who provides that, you usually end up making other person fall in love with you. Well, you see, the thing is, as I mentioned before, you're not going to figure out what people are missing in life if you're thinking about yourself and your own wound. True. So the problem that people have is when you're somebody who is wounded from childhood, like you weren't given something, it tends to make you very self-absorbed and it makes you a bad seducer.

55:02So the problem is you have to overcome that and you have to be outer directed and very much looking at the other person so that you can figure out what they are missing. Sometimes you can sense that intuitively the moment you meet somebody and don't have to put it into words. But most often people aren't realizing it. They're not conscious. They're not aware because they're not paying deep attention to the signs that people give. I tell that if you get people to talk about their childhood, right? But you're not obvious about it. You don't make it look like you're questioning them for information.

55:41But in the course of a conversation, you get them to talk about their child, about their parents, their early years. You're going to figure out very quickly what that wound is. They're going to reveal it. Things that excite them, things that they tell. and then little dark secrets, little shadows and corners that they don't really want to talk about, but kind of come out. Get people to talk about their childhood and you pretty quickly figure out what it is that they're missing. True, true. It's, and when you figure out something about other person's childhood and that you're interested and you're trying to know that, But it somehow, I don't know why, it somehow gets you closer as well as two people.

56:26Like when the moment you start talking about childhood, the good, bad and ugly things all together, it just brings you so much closer to the other person. Yeah, yeah. Right. When people talk about their childhood, they become like a child. Yeah. Yeah. They're reliving experiences and they have their facially, their smiles, their laughter, uncontrollable things light up. You can see the four or five year old in them coming out. It's very interesting. And people love to talk about their childhood. Even if you had a bad childhood, people love to talk about it. you could think you get them to open up because they're dying to share their little secrets and their and everything that they suffered and all their pleasures that they had it would work wonders on me as well i i have that weakness too yeah you know that's one of the questions one of my most go-to questions when i meet someone for the second or the third time is this that what do you used to do the most as a kid and then it just starts a new segue into a conversation which can either go very deep or into so much fun or can lead to a different adventure that hey i used to do this and i missed it okay let's go do that right and then and then brings it out in you and you want to share your own experiences and then you can kind of bond on some level yeah so and then people end up telling you what they missed today yeah what they used to get yeah and what is something they continue to do.

57:57And then it's a great way to realize what other person likes or dislikes. And when people talk about their mother or their father, that's particularly powerful. So for a boy, the relationship with his mother is extremely potent. All sorts of things are constellated around that relationship. All the things they never got, all the things that they love, what they're attracted to. I don't mean to get Freudian on you, but your relationship to your mother is incredibly powerful. And for women, it's also the mother, but it's also the father. And their relationship to the male figure, to that dark, shadowy father that was looming in the background, carries all sorts of power in it and reveals all sorts of weaknesses and things that they're afraid of and things that they're attracted to.

58:46Yeah, I absolutely agree. that makes me question do you fall in love with another person or do you fall in love with the fantasy of who you become with that person well it depends depends on on most often we fall in love with the fantasy right but sometimes it can happen also what often happens is when you first fall in love, it's the fantasy. And then if a relationship develops and it's several years down the road, you start falling in love with the person as they are the real person with all their weaknesses and all their foibles. And even the things you don't like about them and the imperfections in them become something that you cherish and you love when you think about them, what you would miss if they were gone.

59:36But originally in the first moments, we're almost always attracted to the fantasy that that they're somehow fulfilling for us definitely true because i often believe that

59:51You usually don't fall in with the person, right? You fall in love with the idea of you around them, how they make you feel, who you become, how enlarged you get or how empowered you feel when they are around you. Because that is a different personality of you, which you really get addicted to. So you always keep asking yourself a question, who am I without you and who am I with you? and that usually is the answer to why did you fall in love with someone because even if you look at when they when people break up they usually don't tend to miss the person they miss the version of themselves which they were with that person yeah and that's what they moan the most because they almost feel like they've lost something a part of personality which they had did themselves when they were with this partner who they absolutely love.

1:00:49Then they go in search of someone else who will give that to them. And it's very difficult to find that. Yeah. Yeah. So in my new book, I have a chapter on, it's a book about the sublime and I have a chapter on love sublime. And I talk about this story from the middle ages in Europe of Abelard and Eloise, one of the greatest love stories in Western culture. and essentially abelard was this professor in paris who was very logical very could figure things out but he had never had a relationship with a woman and there was this one young woman named eloise who was the most educated philosophical and desired woman in all of france it was very unusual for a woman to be a scholar but she knew hebrew and latin and greek and she was beautiful and he sees her one day walking by the river Sen and he tells himself I'm going to I'm going to be the one that conquers Eloise I'm going to seduce her I've had no experience with women but I'm going to I'm going to seduce her somehow because it was for his ego he wanted to show everyone that he was the greatest person of the time and so he becomes her tutor and as he starts instructing her they start becoming physical because he was a very handsome man and quickly they're having sex and they're doing all sorts of very naughty things for the time and he starts falling in love with her and he starts realizing that what he thought he was the fantasy that he had imagined isn't the reality she seems so sweet and innocent but actually she's got a very dark and devilish side.

1:02:36He's always afraid that they're going to be caught and will ruin his reputation. She doesn't care. She wants to be caught. They sneak into churches and they have sex inside the church. She's transgressive. I didn't understand who she was. So he gets to ignore her more and more and more. And finally, the fantasy that drew her into her turns into the reality that this is a person who is incredibly interesting, incredibly dimensional, and he's completely hooked and he falls deeply, deeply in love. And their story and their connection is one of the most fascinating stories because we have the letters between them and the connection that they developed between each other was just insane.

1:03:18And I'm trying to say, so we say that love is like, we say falling in love, right? So it's a brilliant metaphor because it is like falling. You're falling because you're letting go. you're letting go of all of your defenses you're letting go of all your vulnerabilities you're letting go of all that keeps you a separate from other people you're letting go of your ego you fall and you fall and you fall and you fall you let go of all that you reach a point where there's nothing left and you become like the other person and you have this incredible bond it's an ideal that is very rarely realized but to get to your point what happens is for most people they start falling and they get afraid oh no I'm gonna get hurt you know I don't want to give up so much of myself because what if this person suddenly doesn't desire me anymore I've fallen this far if I fall any further the pain will be that much greater I'm gonna stop right and then you start you start hearing from friends about oh there's somebody you start thinking oh there's must be somebody else out there because you're addicted to that sensation of falling and letting go but you wouldn't let go far enough to fall really in love so you become addicted to the sensation of falling but you won't let yourself fall far enough for anything meaningful to happen so you go search for other people and you never quite you never quite let go enough to ever have that sort of sensation that is the deepest it's almost a religious feeling that a human can have because it's combining the physical and the spiritual.

1:04:57It's the physical powerful connection to a woman or a man. And it's the spiritual side of getting to understand what makes them a unique individual. They become something that lives inside of you. It is a religious experience. It could be very powerful, but people are too afraid to let go to have that happen because they're so defensive and worried about the pain that might occur. and then do you feel that a lot of people they get this kind of really aggressive love deeply love feeling and even after that then they then they leave like they get really into the relationship they are in love they're addicted to it they're enjoying and then they leave like immediately something goes on and they try to look for that kind of feeling or maybe a deeper feeling with someone else it's like almost they feel like there's something which is better better and not full not completed here well the thing is um humans are flawed individuals they have imperfections.

1:06:13They have weaknesses. And the longer you're involved with someone, the more you're going to see their flaws and their weaknesses and what makes them a human being. So you fell in love with the fantasy, the image, which has idealized and kind of perfect. And then you start seeing that they're not really what you thought of. Some of what you now discover is interesting, but some of what you discover is kind of off-putting. You didn't realize they were so needy and so insecure. You didn't realize they needed all these things that you weren't, aren't necessarily prepared to give them. All right, I'm going to cut off that falling process and I'm going to find somebody else who's better, who's more perfect.

1:06:53And we live in a time where the prevailing metaphor is the marketplace. So it's Tinder, swipe, ah, somebody better. They're going to be better. They're a little, they look a little better. They look a little bit younger. they're not going to have all of these flaws. But of course, inevitably they do because they're a human being. So you have to get rid of your fantasies and think of, I mean, having, if you value having a relationship over time, and I can tell you personally, as someone who was a rake in my twenties, who had many different women that I was involved in, having a relationship over time is incredibly satisfying, incredibly enriching.

1:07:34It's a beautiful, wonderful thing, right? But it's not going to happen unless you accept the very glaring imperfection in the other person and even come to love them and appreciate them and realize that the imperfections is what makes them a human being and what makes them in some ways very attractive to you. But, you know, you're always listening. Your friends are always telling, oh, there's somebody else out there. There's something wrong with that person. She's like this. She's like that. You can find somebody better. Right. And then you have the swiping thing going on. So you're never going to let yourself ever have that sensation of falling in love with the complete human being that they are and the imperfections and all.

1:08:20this gets me to a larger point which you also mentioned in the beginning of the conversation was something missing why do young people today feel that there's something missing this has almost become like a constant emotion or a constant state of living I feel there's something missing you know when you're young it's it's like I had that feeling as well, like something was missing. You have all of this energy, all of this excitement inside you physically, you're so charged. You look good usually, you know, and you want things to happen. And the world isn't providing it for you because everything nowadays is so virtual that to have a real experience, to have a real adventure, to be taken outside of yourself, To be taken into something so different and exciting, it just never happens anymore.

1:09:16So the feeling that something is missing, a lot of it has to come from our technology and how we're being programmed and we're not experiencing things for ourselves. And so the book that I've just written is about how to get out of that trap and how to live your own life more intensely, more connected to the world and to have real concrete physical experiences and get outside of your goddamn phone. You know, that's why I think a lot of people are feeling like they're missing. They won't admit it because they're addicted to their phones and to their screens. But what they're missing is real life, life intense, life physical, life exciting, direct, immediate, not mediated by this thing.

1:10:00Tell me how someone who's socially anxious is always feeling that something is missing, is trapped in this feeling, can get out of it. Tell me one interesting framework from the book that people can implement today to get out of this whole trap of feeling something missing. So first of all, give yourself moments where you put the phone away. Give yourself some moments of silence. Take a walk and not hear anything. Just look around and be observant and get rid of this addiction, right? I mean, I remember I used to swim all of the time. And there would be people who had airphones in their head while they were swimming.

1:10:41I mean, what's wrong with you? Don't you want to be directly related to what's going on to your environment? That's the first thing. It's the most important thing of all is putting your stupid phone away, putting it in a drawer, taking a hike, taking a walk, going on a date and putting your phone away and talking to the other person. You'll see couples at restaurants and both of them are like this, right? So you're not living your life. You're living the life that other people are giving to you, that are programming you, that are conditioning you. You're not even aware of it. When I meditate, I become aware of how programmed I am, right?

1:11:20I become aware of these thoughts that I can't get rid of, but that were literally on my phone half hour before when I looked at them. And I'm aware, God damn it, I am being programmed. I am being conditioned. So the first thing you can do is experience life around you directly. You're young. Your senses are alive and awake and aware. When you get older, your senses become dulled and you're not so active. Okay. But you're not attuned to your body. You're not attuned to yourself. You're not attuned to your own rhythms. Put the phone away and start opening yourself to your environment, to the things around you, to the sounds.

1:11:59I do this exercise when I'm riding my bike up in the hills. I do two things. I absorb my mind completely in the environment, in the strange trees, in the rock formation, and to the sounds. I'm not hearing in my head thoughts. I'm hearing the traffic in the distance. I'm hearing the bird calls. I'm hearing the wind. I can't tell you how wonderful it is, what a wonderful sensation it is. But I won't have it if I'm like this, you know. But do you think that will help people feel better? because what I'm talking about is this constant anxiety that people feel like there's something missing in my life.

1:12:46I'm doing everything right and yet I'm not fulfilled. Do you think just by getting close to nature and leaving technology is going to help them that much? Yes, it's not going to solve all of your problems. There are other things I can talk about from my book. Tell me one of the other things. Well, I have a chapter in there about your childhood and how when you were a child, the world was so much more intense, right? I mean, nowadays, I don't know, children with their iPads, it's changing. But for me, at least, my childhood was the most intense period of my life, okay? And I'm telling people, what you're nostalgic about isn't being young.

1:13:29What you're nostalgic about is the intensity of your experience, right? So I try to analyze what made the experience so intense back then. A lot of it was you were curious about the world. So the problem that you have when you get in your 30s and 40s and 50s is you think you know everything. Yeah. I've read all of these books. I know what the world is. I know what reality is. I know what politically is great and right. And your mind just closes and gets narrower and narrower and narrower on these certain small little set of ideas. You think you know them, right? When you were a child, you had none of that.

1:14:12You're interested in everything because you're so small and the world is so weird and mysterious you want to understand. Well, you can go back to that. Go back to that feeling of curiosity. Start playing the exercise. and I do this exercise on myself as I go around and I look at things. I don't know anything. I have no ideas. I don't know what the world is like. I don't know why there's a sun out there. I don't know where birds come from. I don't know where my body is. I don't know who I am. Return to a sense of mystery and wonder about the world like you had when you were three or four or five years old.

1:14:51You can do that by doing. So each chapter in my book ends with literally exercises that you can practice for putting this into your daily life. Because I don't want this to be some boring academic book about the sublime. It's about how you can have these experiences. So I literally give you exercises to enact each of these things. Right? So interesting. There's something similar which I do in my life, but it's accidental. Now I can just draw a parallel. I do this to stay Purposely and intentionally To stay more curious If I have to go to one place Let's say every day I usually try to take different routes And if I'm going to any new place New city or just a new area I try to just look around and look at houses Look at trees Look at the shapes of leaves Look at all of these things And make theories in my head Why is this leaf round?

1:15:52Why is this one pointed? And then I make makeup theories in my head to just amuse myself. And then when I come home, then I like whichever thing I'm most curious about, then I start Googling it and try to find out that, OK, oh, this theory. No, no, this was completely wrong. This is completely right. And it just keeps me so much more curious about the world. Yeah. It helps me. Well, I would give you one wrinkle to your exercise. So you take a different route. Yeah. Try taking the same route, but making yourself observe things you had never seen before on that same route. So my bike rides there, I have only like five different versions I can go on, but I take the same one and I'm always looking for something I had never noticed before.

1:16:37Some strange tree growing out of the ground. So one thing in the book I say is everything you do is language oriented, right? So you don't look at a tree. You just think of the word tree. Yeah. The general category of tree. But look at that strange thing emerging out of the ground that doesn't have a brain but is alive. It has its own strange consciousness because trees do have a consciousness. if you came from another planet where there there might be life but there are no trees what a fascinating weird thing and each one is different there may be the same tree but no two trees are the same right so i mean that's part of the exercise that i go through i'll try to do that okay tell me the most interesting chapter from your book which you feel is interesting well the chapter i i'm personally um most drawn to is one about animals i call it the interspecies sublime and it's so a lot of the book i tell you that your brain is wired a certain way and it makes you think a certain way and you take that for reality so when i'm meditating i try to make myself aware of consciousness itself and how it feels, right?

1:18:04And I tell myself, if I came from another planet, my brain would be wired so differently, I wouldn't have this consciousness. So, this consciousness has a feeling towards it. It's like, it's not inside of my brain. It's not in the world. It's nowhere. It's like the sky. It's empty. What is the feeling of it? But animals have a different kind of consciousness. Their brains are wired differently. Each one has, their senses are different. A dog lives in a world of smells. They can tell more things about the world through smells than we can ever do through our intelligence. They're brilliant. They're philosophers, right?

1:18:48Cats live in their own world. Bats live in a world of sound as do dolphins. Spiders are blind, but they live in a world of vibrations. They can feel the world. They understand the world through vibrations. The point of this chapter is you think that you understand the world, but you're just seeing a version of what your brain is telling you because your brain is wired a certain way. Animals are like alien beings on our planet. We're so interested in science fiction and things that don't exist, that are not real, but we're surrounded by aliens, by space aliens, by spiders, by bats, by butterflies, by dogs and cats.

1:19:31They're insane. They're amazing. They evolved over millions and millions of years with their own consciousness. And I give you exercises about how to get outside of your consciousness and enter into their world. And I have examples of people who've done this with octopuses, with whales, with wolves and with birds. The second chapter that I'm most excited about is one about history. And I'm trying to tell you that history is not about like dead facts and things that you read about in a book. People 500 ,000, 10 ,000 years ago were alive just like you. They had emotions. They had feelings. They had sensations.

1:20:14They had dreams. They were alive. Enter their world. Enter into the past as if it's something present. And I give you exercises on that. And I recreate the past for you. So for instance, I take you on a journey through ancient cities. Ancient Babylonia kind of fascinated me. And I literally take you on a walk through the city of ancient Babylonia. And I make you aware that you think New York is beautiful or San Francisco, Los Angeles. These places were unbelievably beautiful. in a way we can't even begin to comprehend. These 40 foot statues, these ziggurats going up into the sky, these buildings that were all reflecting the sunlight in the same way, these gods, the hanging gardens of Babylon.

1:21:05If you were to transport yourself there now and look and look how strange it was, my God, my world is so ugly and drab, but these cities were unbelievable. They were so beautiful, right? And then at six o 'clock at night, as the sun goes down in ancient Babylonia, suddenly there's this wild sexual energy where prostitutes, male and female, are filling the streets and everyone's having sex. And there are these orgies going on, even in temples. I just want you to make the past come to life and not see it as something dead. And so those are the two chapters that I love the most from the book. And there are 12 of them, 12 chapters.

1:21:44Nice. Give me an exercise. Give me one exercise which helps me become better with the world of history specifically, which you just told me. Okay. Well, one of the exercises I have is if you can remember the apartment or the house that you grew up in originally, right? And the objects that were there, right? Okay. So the exercise is to think about the house and the furniture and the objects that were there. some of them were there before you were born right yeah okay and they come from a world that you never lived in true the early 90s the 80s the 70s your parents probably even have things from the 60s things that they inherited from the 50s and 40s okay there are objects in your house that were there before you were born and they have a style to them that's alien to you because it's not the world that you lived in, right?

1:22:43They inherited, they lived before you were born. Do you understand what that means? You were literally not existing. You were dead. You were not a creature, but these objects were there before you. They carry a weird energy and a weird life to them because they're signs of the past and it's sort of a twilight zone. So, they're things that you can remember that you lived with, but they come from a period before you were born. And so, they have an energy to them. And so I'm trying to show you that the past is like lives in these objects and they have a life of their own and the life of their own is the past.

1:23:22And they're full of this weird energy. You can do that with movies. You can look at movies from the 1980s and you could go, this is when my parents were young and exciting and happening. And they first met and they were like in their twenties, right? And they had these weird fashions and these weird hairstyles and these clothes. You can look at the movie and go, this is the world before I was born. It's strange, yet it's familiar because there was something still like that when I was living, right? So, I'm trying to give you a sense of what the past was like as something alive, not dead, and it's carried in these objects.

1:24:01And so, then when you go to a museum or you see photographs in the past, you can go through the same exercise and see them as something that was once very much alive. So that's one of my exercises. And what happens if I do that?

1:24:20Well, first of all, you become aware of another world. So the world now is something that you take for granted that it's like, this is how things are, right? But the world was different 50 years ago. It was very different, had a different energy, a different cultural moment, a different zeitgeist. And so by connecting to the past, you become more of a human. The problem I think that a lot of people have nowadays, I read a lot of history, okay? I'm not good at many things Raj I have many weaknesses and flaws but I read a lot of history I understand history on a very deep level and it gives me a perspective on life and the world that is very different if you don't understand history if you don't understand it it expands my mind it makes me aware that there are other ways of thinking other ways of behaving in the world different customs different cultures going in through this exercise takes you out of your narrow little moment in the present and makes you aware of the world before you are alive, but that still has some spirit to it, still has some liveness to it.

1:25:34So it's opening your mind up to a different world, to a different reality, the world of your parents. It's not a world that's dead. It's a world they're alive. They raised you. And so you're entering into their world and you're entering into the world of your grandparents. I don't know if you don't find that exciting. There's nothing I can do that's going to make it for it. To me, I find it exciting. And eating into the past is one of the most immense experiences. I love both of these things because it gives me a perspective of what my parents or grandparents must be going through or living through.

1:26:11And the second, I think that's even more fascinating exercise that I live in some civilization, which was thousands of years ago. and then I try to understand what happens when the sun rises and when the sun sets. And I'm trying to experience it by just expanding my imagination. And that helps me a lot and helps me see things today from a different perspective and not just in one perspective. Well, that's what my book is about. But look at the sun someday, just stare up at the sun and realize that 20 ,000 years ago, our ancestors back in the Paleolithic era were looking at the same thing and having strange sensations from it because the sun is a very strange thing you take for granted.

1:27:00It's a star that at some point will disappear. And in one of my chapters, I described the birth of our sun, but they were having the same sensation 20 ,000 years ago that you can have. I don't know for me that's that's a very powerful thought how do you become the most powerful person in the room okay well um in the laws of human nature I have a chapter on non-verbal communication and I talk about the qualities that emanate power in people so if you read that chapter and you study that, you will understand the qualities that you should have. So first of all, a powerful person is not like looking everywhere.

1:27:51It's not like, because that's a sign of nervousness. Like, oh, are people looking at me? Are people noticing me? Okay. So you're controlling your facial expressions. You're not looking everywhere. You have a focus on something in particular, a particular person, a point in the room. Okay. You have a posture that you're not like you feel confident. You have a particular pose. And so I say that a powerful person is relaxed, right? So when you enter that room, you are relaxed. You're not nervous. You're not looking for attention. You're not wondering what people think about you. You're inside your body.

1:28:33You're calm and you're confident and you're relaxed. That relaxed quality is incredibly powerful, incredibly attractive. Because if you enter a room and you're a stranger or people don't know you, everyone's nervous. Everyone naturally is nervous, but you're not. You're calm. You're not looking everywhere. You're not touching yourself. You're not talking a lot. You're relaxed. You're going to draw a lot of attention, a lot of power. Okay? And don't talk a lot. Control your words. have a sense of mystery. So when we talked about withdraw and absence, you can be in a room, but also slightly absent.

1:29:16How? Well, you're not trying so hard to get attention. You're almost stepping back and letting people come to you instead of you having to go out and get them. So you're inwardly stepping back and people are drawn to you in that way. If you're always like in their face trying to get them to talk to you, but you're stepping back and you're the one kind of inside your own body and commanding, they're going to come to you and they're going to want to talk to you. So that sense of withdrawal of retreating is very, very powerful. I told you in that room with 50 cent of course it's a little bit skewed because he's 50 exactly so i'm sorry but the fact that he wasn't talking at all that he was so quiet and had that kind of enigmatic smile on his face being sort of mysterious and enigmatic is very powerful made everybody like what's he thinking what's he doing what's he up to so a little sense of mystery you're not obvious and you're relaxed and in control, I think that will command attention when you enter that room.

1:30:24Let's say you're not someone who's popular and famous. You're an average person. You are on your journey to become someone exceptional. You enter a room, you enter a social gathering, and you're confident, you're relaxed. And what do you do? You just stand in the corner and do nothing and just look at people? That's going to make it very feared, right? You're just standing alone. well i mean you can go up to somebody if you recognize that there's a person that's like um maybe they're kind of powerful or interesting you can go up to them but i mean you're asking kind of a slightly impossible question because you can't command a room without a reputation of some sort you have a past people know you if there's just strangers what I'm telling you will have some power, will have some effect.

1:31:20But yeah, if you just walk into the room and you're just relaxed and you don't do anything, okay, I agree with you, right? But normally, in normal life, people have reputations. So when 50 Cent enters the room, wow. When Robert Greene, when he was 20 years old into the room, who cares about him, right? Right. So your reputation carries a lot of power behind it. How do you not feel powerless and insecure in front of a very powerful person? I tell you, and I know this because I have to interact sometimes with powerful people by being calm and relaxed and not asking them a million questions and not acting like I think they're a god.

1:32:06I feel like they're a human being. So when I met 50, I was very normal and natural around him. And I talked to him like I talked to anybody. And boy, was that kind of powerful for him because he was expecting me to be all weird and Henry Kissinger-like with him or Machiavellian. And instead, I was talking to him about strategy and how he was strategizing with his record albums. So just, just being a normal human being, because they're so used to people, famous celebrities, they're so used to people being weird around them and being intimidated and being insecure and not knowing when someone's natural around them and relaxed.

1:32:50Wow. That's, that's really interesting because it almost makes it seem like you're equals. I know that could be a little bit insulting if you're not careful. So it's not like you're equals because I'm as powerful as 50, but it's equal as human beings. And I'm not really intimidated by you. I actually want to talk to you about regular things. If you do that in the right way, it can be very powerful. It could also be taken the wrong way too. So you have to be careful. When did you feel the most powerless in your life?

1:33:28Well, prior to writing the 48 Laws of Power, I had been working in many different jobs. Like my girlfriend, my wife and I counted, it must have been 60 different jobs. I couldn't hold any job down because I wasn't happy. I wanted to be a writer and I had no success. I tried journalism. I tried writing novels. I tried working in Hollywood. And so in the nineties, in the mid nineties, I fell into a very deep depression because my life wasn't going anywhere. And that's when I felt very, very helpless. Not this time? This time I feel physically helpless. That time I felt mentally kind of helpless.

1:34:17And what was worse? It's a good question. I think the depression in the nineties was worse because I now have all of this success that I never had before. So having my body kind of destroyed, at least I have accomplished something. I could die and I could die happy because I did what I wanted to do. But back in the 90s, it was a very bad time for me. It's very fascinating that you ranked psychological helplessness above than physical helplessness. Yeah, because physically, you know, you can do things. You can do therapy. You can try like the hyperbaric chamber. You can practice walking. You can deal with it.

1:35:16But I got a, because I was very physical, I did a lot of exercise. I got a special kind of bicycle. It's called a recumbent bike. And I live near this giant park. And I'm able to go right up. Yesterday, I took a two-hour bike ride way up into these hills. Physically, I can deal with it. I can deal with it. It's not fun. It was a big loss for me, but I can handle it. But the psychological, you don't know what to do. You don't know where to turn. You feel, I knew that I had something important to express to the world. I have a strange way of thinking. I had lots of experiences. And I knew that there was something inside of me.

1:36:05But I couldn't connect it to anything. I couldn't get it out into the world. And that was worse, I think. Because there was nothing I could do, you know. And I was very fortunate to meet a man in 1995 who packages books. And he's basically the one who kind of saved my life because he gave me the opportunity to write the 48 Laws of Power. So I think that was worse than what I'm going through now in a strange way. You know, there was a time in my life where this was five and a half years ago. where I was feeling completely helpless and powerless and psychologically. How old are you Raj? I'm just curious.

1:36:52I'm 29 now. Wow, you're so young. Okay, go on, I'm sorry. So there was a point where I was, I was leaving my home and in India, where you live with your parents, you don't move out. It's not a very normal thing to do, right? And it's like almost seen as a bad thing if you leave your parents and live somewhere. Something I wanted to leave and start something of my own. and that was a point where i felt really helpless in my head because i didn't know what to do the idea of podcast or anything was not in my head at all and i have to thank you because i used to read like a lot of small snippets which was just roaming around on internet by you i'm sorry what was that like small snippets like tweets or like small quotes of you which were roaming around on the internet all around that helped me a lot really like and i'm so grateful because i i think in my head when i look back and when i think about those days one of the big reasons i got the courage to do certain things was uh your quotes really so thank you so much for doing that did you get the book yeah so i read i read the seduction I read Art of War.

1:38:12I read Bits of Mastery. I read 48 Laws of Power. I was like a Robert Green junkie.

1:38:21Even right now, a couple of months ago, there was a big decision in my life that I wanted to take. And I've been dabbling around that decision since last one year or so. And I was going through this frustration. I'm like, I really don't know what to do. And I read a tweet by you, paraphrasing it, but it was something around death ground. Like if you are not on the death ground, you can't actually go out and win. And that was the day we took a decision to just do something we were scared of. Do you think every young person at some point to become someone really big should put themselves in a death ground, should leave everything and just start somewhere new?

1:39:05Well, it depends. Some people can't handle it. You know, some people are so much anxiety and they've had issues from early childhood and they can't handle it. If they, if you put them on death ground, they would just destroy themselves. It would be too powerful, right? So you need to have a certain degree of inner strength, which you probably had even when you were 24 and you were feeling helpless. So just to backtrack, even when I felt helpless and desperate in the 90s, I never gave up on myself because I knew that there was something I could express to the world. You had something like that in yourself.

1:39:46So if you have a foundation, a degree of inner strength and the death ground is fantastic for you. But if inside you're sort of weak or you're soft and I'm not criticizing because this world is a hard place then death ground could just absolutely destroy you so it just depends on the individual but I would advocate for a lot of young people who don't know any don't have any direction who feel lost in this world to try that if they can because I think it could if you feel like tomorrow I could die I'm 25 years old. I've gone to college. I have these ideas, these businesses I want to start, but it could all end tomorrow.

1:40:31I could have a terrible illness. I could die. I better get going. I better get moving. Yeah, it could be huge motivational factor. But how to build inner strength? That's the most difficult part. How to build inner strength?

1:40:48well it's one thing you cannot fake right yeah and you can't take a drug for it there's no hack there's no app there's nothing on the internet that's going to give it for you it can only come from you but it has to be built up slowly it has to come from doing things in the world from trying things from trying to start a podcast from trying to go to the university and getting a degree you fail but then you realize well i can pick myself back up i can i can get back up and i can try again i could do something else it builds you build some confidence in yourself slowly slowly day by day by day if you're patient and you don't give up you have down moments but then you get up then you have down moments and you get up you're going to build that inner strength it's resilience That is the word.

1:41:41You can bounce back from adverse situations, right? And so I can say for writing this book, you know, for seven years, in the beginning, I just couldn't imagine accomplishing it because it was so, there was so much difficulty. But as I started going the second year, the third year, the fourth year, and I was making progress, I started developing a kind of inner strength and confidence in myself. So you have to build confidence in yourself, but it can't come from talking or thinking or hanging out with your friends. It can only come from doing things in the world and failing and having tough times and things going bad and doubting yourself, but getting back up, it has to be through your actions, not through a lot of talk.

1:42:34True. Here's the last question that I ask all my guests. What is the cost of becoming Robert Greene?

1:42:49Well, that people think I have an answer to everything and I don't. Sometimes I'm just stupid and sometimes I don't have an answer. And you asked me a question and I kind of blather and I give this thing, but I'm actually kind of just covering up my ignorance. I don't know everything. I have gaps, right? And so sometimes if I think about it, I come up with a good answer, but on the moment I don't have any answers. So the cost of it is that people think I know a lot more than I actually do know. So that's the problem. But do you sacrifice personally anything in life to become who you are today or the kind of successful person you've become well i write these books that are like i'm not bragging but they're like marathons this last book took seven years the laws of human nature took six years and it led to my stroke because it was so intense mastery took me five they keep getting longer and longer they've worn my body down they've just made me age they've just really sucked a lot of energy out of them, out of me.

1:43:59So the cost has been physical, right? And, um, you know, when I wrote the 48 laws of power, I was 38, 37. I was young, relatively young. I was bursting with energy. I wrote that book in two years. I could never do that now. So the cost has been slowing down, slowing down, taking more and more time and physically draining myself. So, but on the other hand, I have a very rich life, so I cannot complain. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Thank you for spending time with me. It was an honor to have you. Oh yeah. Well, we'll have to do it again. Absolutely. It'd be my honor again. Whenever you just tell me you're free I'll come down.

1:44:49Hello. Hi you're Rod. Yes. Very nice. Pleasure meeting you sir. Is there any feedback for me? How can I do this better? You have a very good style. You have a very good style. I can't think of any and first of all it's a very good question. Instead of asking like a general question if you could make me make it a little more specific with a particular scenario so it's easier to answer. But, I'm sorry, but I have really no other comments because you're a great interviewer. I'll do that. Next time, every question is going to be specific. Not every question. It's a great feedback. Thank you so much.

1:45:32No, no, no. You're very welcome. Thank you for watching this episode till the end. We would love to know what you liked or disliked about this episode and which guests you would like to see on the show. Let us know in comments. Your feedback help us improve and make every episode a little better. I'll see you next time. Until then, keep figuring out.