Robert Greene - Optimizing Your Reality - [Invest Like the Best, EP.379]

24:30So saying less than necessary is a signal that I have reached a position and I have control. I can control my time. I control what I say, which is not an easy thing to do as a human being, but it signals power very much so. Court attention at all costs is more depending on where you are in life, but particularly in our media era, it's extremely relevant for no matter where you are. And the icon for that was P.T. Barnett, the greatest person in history who caught attention at all costs. Although there's somebody in our world right now who's even better at that, and I won't even mention names, but you know who I'm talking about.

25:06But P.T. Barnett was the 19th century master of it. And his idea was that no attention is bad attention. It's like oxygen. People pay attention to me, and I'm getting that oxygen. To be ignored is the worst thing. So he would deliberately do things that would upset people because he knew that would bring an attention. One of his tricks that I loved is he had a museum in New York with all of his oddities, all those weird misshapen fetuses and things. It's like a museum of oddities that people loved. And sometimes people on the streets wouldn't come into his museum. It didn't irritate him. So what he did is he hired the worst band of musicians he could find.

25:43And he had them sit on the balcony and perform horrible music that, I don't know, maybe in front on the street. The music was so bad, so irritating that people had to rush into his museum to escape it. But he knew that doing things that were ridiculous, people would talk about him and being talked about his power. So sometimes being talked about is not what you want in life and you want to hide and you need to retreat a little bit and have laws about that. But the game today on social media with followers and attracting followers and being a quote unquote influencer is all about courting attention.

26:20And you notice, to me, when I look on social media, when I look on Instagram or whatever, I think people, they're like clowns. They're like going a little further than people used to go to get attention. Sometimes it seems a little bit ridiculous. I watch, I'm not going to name names, certain people, and the way they shout, the way they have to say absurd, ridiculous, extreme things to get attention. They might as well be wearing a red rubber nose as far as I'm concerned. They look like clowns to me. But that's the game on social media is core attention at all costs. It depends on the period you live in and the world that you actually are performing.

26:55So what do you think are the laws of power that have trended up and or down the most since you wrote the book, given the conditions of the modern world, given the social media and the connectedness and all the stuff we're all familiar with? Are there certain aspects of the laws that you think have become more relevant than when you wrote them and or less? I don't know about that. There's always an aspect of each law that's relevant. So crush your enemy totally. I love that one. People like to point out it's the most evil law of all. Yeah. And maybe in our hyper-correct world, you don't want to do that.

27:29But I didn't write it about individual behavior. I wrote it about business. And if you look at a company like Google or Microsoft or Facebook, crush your enemy totally. I'm sorry, but that's their philosophy. That's how they operate. The second any kind of competition pops up, their game is to buy it out, to crush it or put it out of existence. They cannot endure any competition. The monopolistic dynamic in business across even tech and other businesses is all about crushing your enemy totally. So it's very much relevant. Play a perfect courtier. Maybe that seems like a false thing and people nowadays want to seem so genuine and real.

28:08But my thing is being genuine and real is playing a role. is a certain mask that you're wearing. You want people to take you as genuine and real. And in the social realm, nothing is genuine and nothing is where you're always performing. So trying to make people out as if you're not according to, you're just being yourself is a way of performing. I recently heard a story from a prominent tech entrepreneur who made the mistake of not crushing their enemy totally and gave the story in response to the question, what's the biggest mistake you've ever made? And the mistake was not crushing the enemy totally.

28:42So it's very true. And when you heard the story, it wasn't malice or mean. It was just business strategy in its basic form. I wrote the book really before social media even existed. Internet was in its nascent phase. But to me, it demonstrates. So I take a law like never isolate yourself. Fortresses are dangerous. I forget the exact word. And the idea was it's a military term that a fortress is the worst place to retreat to because the enemy knows exactly where you are. You have no room to maneuver. They can lay siege to it. You will starve to death and diseases will happen. It looks great. It looks like you can protect yourself, but it's the worst place to be in.

29:19The idea was it's a social game. Being isolated is the most dangerous thing that can happen to you. You have to circulate. You have to understand what's going on in the streets everywhere. That's a timeless law that goes back. I have a story from ancient China that demonstrates the dangers of this. And yet here we live. I wrote that came out in 1998. Here we are where that law is more relevant now than it's ever been because social media and the modern world doesn't alter human nature. It emphasizes it. It brings it out even more. Things like envy and narcissism and all that stuff. Can you give your favorite examples of entering action with boldness or creating compelling spectacles?

29:56Those seem like extremely applicable modern laws. And I'm curious, what examples stand out to you through history of those two or one of them? Well, I wrote that book thinking of con artists. So in my idea of the social being a game and people playing wearing masks, deception enters into that because you're never letting people know exactly what's going on with you, conceal your attention, et cetera, et cetera. And con artists are like magicians. They're great and their stories are so interesting. How they deceive people with the big cons, the large cons always fascinated me because I see politicians as con artists.

30:31I see business people as con artists. But these are the real thingies of the pure masters of the art. So one of the great con artists, there were several in the book, but one of them is a man named Count Victor Lustig. And that is not at all his real name, trust me. It was George Zimmerman, I don't know. It was Count Victor Lustig. And he went to Paris and his con game was one of the most brilliant that ever was. He decided that he was going to sell the Eiffel Tower. And the Eiffel Tower was clearly not for sale. Who would ever sell? Who owned the Eiffel Tower, who could sell it? He created this.

31:02He did all the paperwork with all of the seals of the government. And then he invited these industrialists room where he was going to offer them that he could give bids on purchasing the Eiffel Tower. I'm not totally correct yet. There was a need for repairs of the Eiffel Tower at the time. So it was slightly believable, but it was really ridiculous at heart. And these industrialists were going, okay, all right. And they put their bids in, that he collected the money, and then he disappeared. We made a million dollars off the sale of the Eiffel Tower. Somebody finally won the bid, paid him, and then the account disappeared.

31:35Then he returned to Paris, and he did the same con a second time. Now, if that isn't boldness, I don't know what is. And the idea is, if you're going to lie about something, a small lie people can see through because it doesn't seem, they can sense the distortion that's going on. But a big lie like that, someone who's so bold as to sell the Eiffel Tower, who would be crazy enough to make that a con game? Who would be crazy enough to deceive on that level? So it has to be true. It has to be real. So being bolder with your deceptions, which is often a game that unfortunately politicians play, works better than being meager with your lie and your deceptions.

32:15So those are the best example of entering action with boldness. As far as spectacles and stuff. go. What did all of your investigation of power lead you to believe about good and evil, the concepts of good and evil versus reality? What do you think of those concepts and where do they belong in all this? Well, they definitely belong. I would never say that there's no such thing as ethics. I believe personally in treating people as well as I can. You won't find, I hope, too many people out there who talk about Robert Greene as being a mean bastard. manipulative bastard? There might be, who knows, as far as I know.

32:52So personally, I like to not engage in a lot of those things. I'm revealing what other people do. But on the other hand, it's something that I wrote about in my book on human nature. We all have a dark side. We all have a shadow, what Jung would call the shadow. And a lot of us, the game that we play is we try and repress it. We try not to show any of it in public. It can be our ugliest desires, our competitive instincts, our ambition, even our desires to hurt people, our ambivalence. People have this notion that when we feel an emotion, or it's even somebody we love, it's like this pure thing.

33:27But emotions are never pure. We're always ambivalent. So even with our parents or our loved ones, we have little elements of hostility. We still have moments of that. So we have a dark side, and yet we don't want to admit it. So what annoys me are people trying to pretend that they're these saints, that they're these virtuous people. The dark side, people who pretend the most, the dark side leaks out in all kinds of their behavior. So to me, to be a truly, quote unquote, ethical human being, if there is such a thing, is to recognize, to be self-aware that you're not as good as you think you are.

34:00You're not as virtuous. You're not as saintly. That you have a dark, maybe even an evil side to you, because that is human nature. That is how we're born that is who we are. So I'm not going to wrestle with what exactly is good or what exactly is evil. But I do think true virtue, if you will, comes from awareness of your complete self, your good side and your dark side as well. To take one of your ideas from earlier that the zeitgeist today is so much about algorithms and obviously with artificial intelligence, which I'm super curious for your read on just watching this get built and unfold up against all the research you've done, how you would program an algorithm to be seductive.

34:39Lots of talk now about the new open AI voice sounding like the movie Her. If you were programming the voice to be as seductive as possible, maybe even to trick people into doing your bidding through artificial intelligence, how would you think about the variables in the seduction equation? Well, I mean, it's a very interesting question, but it's also a bit of an oxymoron or a paradox because seduction depends on being a human being, depends on mirror neurons, depends on picking up all the nonverbal cues in a human being. And there's no AI on the planet that will ever be able to do that, maybe in 500 years if there's some insane breakthrough.

35:14So people are so bad at seduction, or the people who are bad at seduction, they're not paying attention. They're not living with the human being, the flesh person in front of them. They've been in their phone so long, they've lost the ability to interact and to look at another person and to pick up all of the cues that they're emitting. So I say seduction is a language, but it's not really a language with words, although it can be. But the words and seduction are actually very demonic, and I have a chapter on them. But mostly it's the language of gesture, the language of scent, the language of the gifts that you give.

35:48It's the language of your behavior, of how you show up, of how you dress, where you take people to has nothing to do with words. Do you say, I love you? Well, I say, I love you can have its effect, but demonstrating that I love you is infinitely more powerful through gestures. So all of this nonverbal language that is involved in seduction is what people are not good at because they're so immersed in words. They're so immersed in the virtual aspect that they're not attuned with their bodies enough. Now, an AI doesn't have a body, And you have to know. So the game in seduction is if you appear to be a seducer, you're going to turn people off because they can see through it.

36:25That's what would happen with an AI generated seducer. It'd be so obvious. The game is to not appear that you're seducing. But you can't fake that. That's very hard to fake. So what you have to do is you also have to fall in love to a degree with the person you're seducing. You have to be vulnerable to them. Now, can the computer be vulnerable? I don't think so. I don't even know if that can even entertain that notion. But if there's a woman out there that I'm trying to seduce, and I am not under her spell, it's going to be obvious what I'm trying to do. So in Dangerous Liaisons, probably the greatest novel about seduction, there's this, the Ficot Valmont, who's the great seducer in it.

37:04He wants to seduce the most prudish woman that he can find because it's the ultimate challenge to him. And everybody knows his reputation. Every woman in France knows how dastardly he is. And the president de Tourville knows how dastardly he is. And his seduction attempts, he uses all the tricks. They're not working because she sees through. And he's getting so frustrated. Finally, he reaches a point where he finds himself actually falling in love with her because he's tried so hard. It's never happened to him before. He's never let his emotions run. And the moment he falls in love with her, she starts falling for him.

37:37So the lesson I gleaned from that is you have to have some of the emotions that you're trying to inject in the other person and yourself as well. And people are not good at that. They're too in their heads. And seduction is a game where you're getting out of your head and into your body and playing this mating ritual that I don't think AI could ever achieve. I think that your very first law of power is to not outshine the master, which makes me think of just mastery in general. And I'd love you to define mastery. You wrote a whole book about it. It's one of my favorite things you've written. I think you define it as finding your life's task.

38:12It's one of the steps. We talk a lot about life's work and what we do, which I think are very similar concepts. What is mastery to you? What is it and why is it worth pursuing? Well, I have six chapters that are like this steps upward to this ultimate state, which I call mastery. And the level before that is creativity. And creativity is gold. It's like the philosopher's stone. If you're a creative person, you'll be successful in whatever event you do because you'll always be coming up with new ideas, novel associations. But mastery is one step above that. And it's where you have this feel for your subject, for your field, for whatever it is.

38:48You don't have to think ideas come to you. You've internalized the whole world that you're doing. So you're thinking faster. You're on another level. And I give examples of people who play the piano, who've been practicing for so long that they don't have to think anymore and they're interacting with the keyboard. They become the keyboard. So it's almost, I say it's mixing the rational with the intuitive. It's mixing the outside with the inside. You're a master at chess. That chessboard lives inside of you. It's outside and it's inside of you. You're a great soccer player like Pele or Neymar or whomever.

39:21The field is out there, but it's inside your head. You've internalized it. So I call it this inside-out phenomenon, where the external world is now living inside of you. And when you reach that level, it's almost woo-woo. It's hard to even verbalize, but I tried in that chapter to explain it, that you don't have to think anymore. Things come to you, and it's the most exciting sensation that you can have. So I wanted to give people the idea that this is a power. We're so interested in superpowers and Marvel comics and things that don't exist at all that are pure fantasy. But the human brain has a superpower.

39:55This is it. It's an incredible instrument that we all have. And I wanted to interest people in attaining that level because they don't think about it. They think of hacking their way to something, to just finding tricks, to how to fake being good at something or whatever. It's all just a game or whatever. But no, the brain has these insane powers. If you follow the process that I lay out, you will reach them. There's a seduction. The book is a seduction. I want to seduce particularly young people because that was my audience for that. I want to seduce that 18 to 20-year-old to think, this is something I want.

40:28Our whole world is based on immediate gratification. But delaying gratification and trying to reach something greater is a feeling of fulfillment and it's the best feeling you can have. And I wanted readers to think on that level. This is a value that I could maybe attain because I tried to debunk the notion of genius. I have people in there who reach mastery, who had the worst childhoods, came from the poorest backgrounds and reached that level. I have a woman who was autistic at birth, a non-functional autistic child who reached mastery, one to entice the reader to think of this as a value in our culture, that, hey, I want this.

41:05And then from there, I tried to lay out how you can get there. But the whole book is a form of seduction. Do you think that this term, you use your life's task, the thing, it sounds very predestiny or something that each person is wired with something that they're there to do. How predestined do you think that thing is for each person? And how do you encourage people to start searching for it? So if they're 18 or 20 and listening, how would you even know where to begin to look to figure out what your task might be? Well, the way I try to look and the way I explain it in mastery is your DNA, your genetic component.

41:39I'm not a biologist, so I'm just doing my amateur way of describing it, is unique. The code that is you has not existed since all life forms, as far as we know, in the cosmos, and will never be repeated again in the future. You are one of a kind. That code is in you. It's one of a kind. And you can think of that as happening for a reason. You know, in nature, there are mutations, And mutations drive a lot of the force of evolution. A mutated gene suddenly turns into a new species and turns into the human being. Our brain is a mutation, if you want to think about it that way. So you're being different from everybody else.

42:19You're having a unique code. It's a form of a mutation. It exists for a purpose. You are one of a kind. You have to recognize that. Even in your most depressed feelings, in your most suicidal moments, you have to tell yourself, I am one of a kind. there's never been anybody like that. And on top of that, your parents are one of a kind. Your earliest years of formation, there's nothing else like that. Your formative years are a unique experience. All that goes up to create an individual, okay? So connecting to what makes you different from everybody else is your life's task. And if you look at people who are successful and are powerful in business and arts and sports, wherever, they are one of a kind.

43:02They're not imitations. You can't say for better or for worse that we know of another Elon Musk. There's nobody else out there. He's so weird and strange. And you can say that about other people. And artists, particularly in music or whatever, they're strange. They're not afraid to be different. That is your power. They have understood that they're unique. They recognized it when they were very young, usually when they were six or seven years old, often sometimes in their adolescence, and they mined that difference and they made it into something very powerful. So you have that, you outside in the world have that power.

43:36You have that life's task, which is to realize your uniqueness, which is your source of power. The problem is, as we were talking about earlier, so the social intervenes and you start hearing from your parents, this is who you are, little Patrick. This is who you need to become. You need to become a doctor or a lawyer because that'll make you a lot of money, blah, blah, blah. You don't want to become a podcast. You don't want to be doing that. This is where you need to be. Teachers are starting to tell that. Your friends and your peers are starting to tell that. And as that happens, you lose contact with what is you, what is uniquely you, your life's task.

44:11So you come to the age of 18 or whenever, you have no idea. And that is a very, very sad thing because it's a known thing that adolescence is the most critical moment in some ways in your life. but it's going to form you in some way. And when you're an adolescent, you finally awaken to how you're different from your parents and you want to be different from your parents. You don't want to be like them. Some people it's different, but most people it's like, damn, I don't want to be like my parents. I want to be myself. I want something different. And that makes you explore and that makes you figure out something that's you and you rebel and you dress in a funny way.

44:48You dye your hair, you put nose rings, tattoos, whatever it is, superficial stuff, but you're struggling to be different. And to lose that and to just submerge yourself in what other people want and desire is very, very, very sad. So the reason why it's so important in that 18 to 22 year reign is you're about to enter the work world and you're about to make choices and decisions that are critical for your happiness and your success. And you have to have a sense of what makes you different from other people. It's a process. And people have lost sense of that word process. They want things needed.

45:21That's just like they can get on the phone. So I have no hack to finding your last purpose. I can't give you a pill that will make you aware of it. It's a process. It will take writing in a journal. It will take introspection. It may mean talking to people, et cetera. And I have talked to people through that process. But it means looking back at your childhood, looking about what you hate and what you love. I always knew I wanted to be a writer, but I couldn't figure out what to write. But when I was 23, 24, going through the work where I started off in journalism, I realized I hate working for other people.

45:52I can't stand the politicking, the bullshit, the games that are being played. I don't like working for other people. It's not my nature. So that's a very important realization. So it's not always what you love. It's also what you hate, what you don't want to do. Parents want you to go to law school. You start your first year of law school. Oh, it doesn't interest me at all. No, I think it's law school. It's going to be great. It can be perfect for you. But you have to have awareness, but it's not something that suits you. That's not something that you love or like. So what repulses you is a sign.

46:23What attracts you is an even greater sign. Do you think that the best compass in this search is just energy? The things that give you energy and the things that drain energy, that's north and south, if you had to be reductionist about it. Is that the compass? That's a very interesting way of putting it. I think there's some truth to that. Our level of willpower, going back a little bit here to Schopenhauer, but that's also William James. Our willpower is actually more a definition of who we are than all his other qualities of our shy, gregarious, et cetera, et cetera. Our energy levels define us in some way.

46:59So I describe it as a current in a river or a stream. And when you're engaged, some activity that doesn't suit you, like I was in Hollywood, you're swimming upstream or sideways and water's entering and you can't breathe and you almost feel like you're going to drown. And because of that, you will become listless. You will become depressed. Your energy levels will dissipate because our minds are connected to our willpower. And when you're excited, your energy levels rise. And then you're moving with that current. And you have to find that activity where you have that feeling of moving with that current.

47:34So for me, writing nonfiction books was moving with that current. And it felt right. And it felt good. And it could be many other things as well. But your energy levels are tied to your love of something. There's the modern day philosopher that maybe he's not trying to be one, but he seems to be one, which is Jerry Seinfeld. And he's been talking a lot about the role, really mastery, I guess, is what he's talking about, that really all of us have one job, which is to get really good at something. And you have this idea of submitting to reality in the book, which I think is very much like submitting to the reality of your DNA and your circumstances and your form of experiences.

48:10And then after that submission, I'm curious what comes next. What has defined Seinfeld, he's talked a lot about it, is just the insane work ethic, never missing a day of perfecting his craft, just going forward and trying to be as good as he possibly could be in everything else's bullshit, as he would put it. I'm curious what percent of people you think ever do submit to reality and pursue their life's task. But let's say you do it. What do you do then? Well, you submit to it. That's about the apprenticeship phase. And how do you become a good apprentice. And your level of engagement, your level of love for it will depend how far you can go.

48:45So Seinfeld probably had an insane love for comedy, which is great. It is your life's task. And you could go back to his childhood and find the roots of that. But to become really good at something, to master it, it's going to require a lot of tedious work. It's going to require hours and hours of boring tasks that you have to learn, that you have to repeat. For a comedian, it might be going through all of those small town comedy stores and taking it on the road and the humiliations and the rejections and all of that. But whatever it is, it's going to be painful. So if you don't love it, if you're not deeply engaged with it, you'll give up.

49:21Why keep going on? People are not laughing at my jokes. They're not showing up. I'm getting terrible. Why go on? But if you love it so much, you can't not go on. You're going to push past that and you're going to learn. You're going to learn, you're going to learn, you're going to reach a very powerful moment in your life. So they have the 10 ,000 hour rule, which some people have thought is now debunked. I laugh at that. 10 ,000 hours is just a number. So yeah, it's probably inaccurate. It could be 8 ,000, it could be 12 ,000. But the idea that it's debunked, that the more hours you put in, that you're not going to reach mastery is just ludicrous to me.

49:58But you put in so many hours that the 10 ,000 hours to show that your brain literally changes. You reach a point where you don't have to think so much. So when you're a comedian, great comic routines come to you. You're standing in front of a live audience. You're not nervous anymore because you've gone through it so many times. Somebody says something and you can just improvise in the moment. Somebody in the crowd makes a joke. You can improvise because you've been through it so many times. The repetitions take over. So you reach this incredible level where you are beyond the learning phase and you can go out there and become a journeyman or a master because you've had so many hours of repetitions.

50:37So you've learned the skills so well, you've pushed past those obstacles that most people give up on. You asked me the percentage. Most people give up because they can't endure rejection. They can't endure failure. They can't endure that first, particularly nowadays. And I'm not criticizing young people, but young people have a harder time dealing with rejection and failure, probably because of all the horrible things they've had to go through in the past 20 years and all the stresses and pressures. But you have to be able to deal with rejection and failure and people criticizing you. And if you do that, after those seven, eight years, something has changed in your brain.

51:13Now you can be creative with it. Now you can enter the world and be that journeyman or journeywoman. And your mind has reached a new level. What other investigators of human nature through history have most drawn you? That's what you've done. You're investigating all aspects of human nature. Humans as a social animal, all your books are aspects of that nature and that reality. What other people that have gone on a similar path have impressed you the most with the way that they frame their understanding of human nature? Well, I must say one of the most brilliant people dissecting human nature and social codes was the writer Jane Austen.

51:50And a lot of the reason is, and a lot of 19th century novelists were some of the most brilliant people dissecting human nature. A Dostoevsky, a Jane Austen, a George Eliot, a Flaubert, etc. Marcel Proust was one of the greatest ever. It's because these worlds, as opposed to our modern world, people were incredibly social. So imagine, put yourself in their shoes. You don't have the internet. You don't have television. You don't have film. You have theater and you have live musical performances, but they're very rare. If you were a modern person, God, you'd be bored stiff. Yeah, you had books. That's true.

52:29The main form was socialize. You were continually socializing. You were playing cards. You were going to parties. You were dancing. You were listening to music, but you were never stuck in your home with your phone or whatever. You were out there socializing. People, people, people, people. And when you have a young woman who's very sensitive, as women can be, who are very empathetic to other people's energy, and they're socializing since the day they were a young girl to when they're in their 20s and 30s, they're going to have a grasp of human nature, of human psychology that's on another level because they've been practicing, they've been observing.

53:02So writers, I know this for myself, although I don't write fiction, to be a writer, you have to be a master observer of people's character. And we've lost that now. We're novelists now. They're not really so into the social. They don't understand it nearly as well as we did because they're not doing it. So some of the people like Chekhov. Chekhov was absolutely brilliant at understanding human nature, mostly because this is the other quality in writers. They're nonjudgmental. Not all writers are like that, but the best writers are depicting humans as they are, not as they wish them to be, Balzac, et cetera, et cetera.

53:35So you're nonjudgmental. You're looking at people as they are. You're observing them intensely on and on and on for years and years and years. Those, to me, are the master players that understand the human nature. Of course, psychiatrists, psychologists who deal with patients day in and day out and individuals, they also, like a Jung or a Freud or an Alfred Adler or a Kohut, they can also reach that high level as well. Or Milton Erickson, one of my icons. What about Erickson? Why is he an icon for you? What did you learn from him? So he's a standard who's been through all of my books. The reason I love Milton Erickson, he's supposedly the inspiration behind NLP, but that's a bit dubious.

54:13But really, he's the founder of hypnotherapy. But Erickson, as I described in The Loss of Human Nature, came down with polio at the age of 17 or so, and he was completely paralyzed, except for his eyeballs. So during the two years that he had to try and recover, he became a master observer of people's nonverbal communication, because that's all he had. It's the only entertainment he couldn't read, he couldn't watch anything, he couldn't go outside. So his sisters mostly were coming in this room and entertaining. He observed every little aspect of their behavior. And he could decode it like he had learned French.

54:47He spoke it fluently. And then he became a psychologist. And unlike the talking therapist, he wasn't interested in hearing about your childhood. He was interested in how you moved your body when you talked about your childhood, how your eyes reflect. He watched how people walked into the room. He watched how tight their body was. was one woman sitting in his chair undergoing therapy. She was going on and on about her problems. And he goes, you know what? I know what your real problem is. She goes, what? He goes, you're having an affair? Wow. How did you know that? He goes, the way your body is, the way you're in this locked position, I could just tell the way you're crossing your feet.

55:21That's a power that he had uniquely, but it's a power that humans can have when you understand non-verbal communication. He was also just a really great thinker about human behavior. And he was also one of those non-judgmental people. And he had amazing stories of how he cured people, not just talking, but through actions, et cetera. He had one person who was insane, who was in a mental institution. He had been a successful person, but he went crazy. And the only thing he could do was moving his hand back and forth, back and forth, and back and forth. And Aaritson's solution was to give him a piece of wood, some sandpaper, to go up and down and up and down and to sand it.

55:59And he got so entranced with the smell of wood in the motion, he decided to study carpentry and he became a carpenter and he got cured of his mental illness. Not bastardizing the story, but that was his process of curing people. I'm fascinated by people like that. If you could take everything you've studied and learned and applied yourself and turn it into a challenge to be issued to people listening, how would you do that? What would you challenge people to do? I would challenge people to get outside of themselves and to be more observant. We're all too locked inside of our own worlds, inside of our own obsessions, our own problems.

56:34Particularly, it's a real problem now. It's been documented how levels of self-absorption are increasing. The best therapy of all is to get outside of your own brain and to get inside the world of other people and to observe them. It could be observing animals. It could be observing protozoa. It could be observing plants. I don't care. Get outside of yourself and get into the external world and immerse your spirit and your mind and your body and your brain into something else and to try and enter into it. I said before, mastery is making the outside into the inside. I call it inside out. So you want to feel it, but first you have to get outside of your brain and into that world and other people and other animals.

57:15That to me is the best advice. It's what all my books are about, is observing people is not being self-absorbed to the point where you do talk more than necessary, where you do have these faults that I mentioned, that you are an anti-seducer, that you're a bad strategist, that you are fearful because there's the 50 Cent book, that you think that mastery is only for certain people. It's just about getting outside of yourself and observing the world. What did you most learn from 50? Well, 50 is a great person. So the thing is, up to then, I read three books and they were all lots of research and they were all dealing with dead people.

57:49So I was living in a room full of ghosts and skeletons from books. The spirit of Napoleon, the spirit of Machiavelli, they're in my room. It's a little bit weird and depressing sometimes. So here I was in the presence of somebody, a real power figure, Napoleon of hip-hop, as I called him. And I got outside of my book world and I could see somebody in action, somebody who really was a powerful figure in the world, not like me writing about. He had overcome the worst circumstances, being shot nine times, nearly dying. And he had turned himself into this powerful figure. So I never got to be around Napoleon Bonaparte, unfortunately.

58:29I wish I had. But I did get to be around 57. I could soak up his energy. I could watch him in action. I could see how he operated. I could see his body language and how confident and how powerful he was with how he saw himself. So I determined that it was his fearlessness that was the source of his power. So not many people who were dealing crack cocaine at the age of nine on the streets of Southside, Queens, rise to power. In fact, I think you'd find that group very, very, very small. How he did is an amazing story. And it should be a positive example for us all. Speaking of recreating yourself, most hip-hop artists are one-hit wonders.

59:05He went well past that. But he branched out into business. He branched out into film. He was constantly recreating himself. So it was a great experience for me because I had been doing consulting, but I was just starting to actually observe a real-life person of power. It taught me a lot about charisma and confidence. I ask the same traditional closing question for everyone I speak with. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? I take you back to, I'm 36 years old, somewhere around there, I can't remember exactly. And I was in Venice, Italy, and I've been working in Hollywood, and I was very depressed, very depressed.

59:38I had this job in Italy that seemed, well, Italy, how fantastic. And Italy is a wonderful country. The job was turning into yet another power game, another depressing environment. And there was a man there, his name is Joost Offers, a Dutchman, who is a packager of books. And we were both there to help try and launch the book for this new school that was being created in Italy. And it was a stupid, stupid job. We were both really couldn't believe how stupid it was. We were walking in Venice, Italy, and Joost asked me if I had any ideas of books. And I improvised what had turned into the 48 Laws of Power, even giving a suggestion of what it could be like.

1:00:16He was so excited that he said, you go and write a treatment, and I will pay for you to live while you write the book. Now, mind you, it was in his self-interest because he thought the idea was good. But he had no idea. I could have been one of those people who would talk a good topic, don't deliver. but he saw something in me and he encouraged me and he gave me a line out of the life that I was living in. And it was an act of kindness. It was an element of, he had no idea that we would both be making all this money from the book and that it would be such a huge success. We had no idea at that moment we were walking in Italy, but he believed in me.

1:00:53He believed in my idea. He trusted me and he turned my life around. So that was the kindest thing that anyone has ever done for me. Well, Robert, your canon of books is one of the most unique. And if you like history, I think it's about the most chock full of interesting episodes in history of any collection I've encountered. I've really enjoyed talking to you today. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Patrick. I really enjoyed it. It was a lot of fun. If you enjoyed this episode, check out joincolossus.com. There you'll find every episode of this podcast complete with transcripts, show notes, and resources to keep learning.

1:01:25You can also sign up for our newsletter, Colossus Weekly, where we condense episodes to the big ideas, quotations, and more, as well as share the best content we find on the internet every week.

1:01:59Thank you.