Robert Greene - Ego Traps, The Art of Control, & How to Stay Irreplaceable

27:13That you did something wrong and you show genuine contrition. And then, you know, a lot of people who were canceled six years ago, that's when they were contacting me or eight years ago. And I said, you know show that you're contrition understand why people reacted against you give it a little bit of time and then come back with more or less the same image but you know understanding there are there kind of guardrails here you know I thought for instance watching Jimmy Kimmel last night and his monologue that's not quite the same thing because it was just like four days or so that he was canceled.

27:57And it was a scandal, but it wasn't like a huge scandal. But I thought how he handled it was really, really good. He was apologetic. He understood why it was taken the wrong way. But he wasn't this craven coward who was just saying, oh, I'm so sorry for everything I did. I'm not going to behave like that anymore. Because that doesn't seem authentic. That doesn't seem genuine. And he positions himself with strength that he apologized, but at the same time, this is who I am. I'm not going to change. But he also acknowledged the wife of Charlie Kirk, and he said that she did it very gracefully. He said, you know, it's terrible that this young man was murdered.

28:39And his wife, his own wife, forgave the assassin. Incredible thing. He acknowledged that. And yet at the same time, he then was being more or less himself. He wasn't going to change who he was. That was a very powerful way of handling that kind of scandal. In relation to reputation, in 2025, do you think reputation is more important than capital? Reputation is capital. So to give you an example, I look at Elon Musk, for instance, okay? And I look at the early years of Tesla. Now, anybody who studies the manufacture of automobile business knows that to start a new automobile company is extremely precarious.

29:25The amount of capital that you need to start up with the factories, with the overhead, with the materials, from getting parts from all over the world is enormous. It's why nobody starts from scratch an automobile company, which he did. Now, his cars were well built. They were interesting. But what he did was, was his reputation, his boldness. He was on Twitter at the time saying all of these different things. He was always in the news with very bold pronouncements. People loved him. This is before his more recent iteration. They were excited about him. His reputation meant people would now, when he went public, people were investing in it based on his reputation, not based on Tesla, not based on the actual cars that he was producing, not based on knowledge of the business, of the finance of Tesla, which was actually in the hole, which is actually deeply in debt.

30:24Based on his reputation as a maverick, as somebody inventive, as somebody who was interesting and innovative, a true pioneer spirit, money poured in, investment money poured in to the publicly traded company, which then turned into capital that he could now use to build this company and build the cars. His reputation in that case was capital. I think in his case too, it was reputation combined with attention. His ability to garner the attention in conjunction with his reputation is what did it for him. Guys, quick 60 second break. I am so excited to announce our first partnership. It is the perfect fit for me and what I believe in.

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31:38You can target by viewership, behavior, income, geography, custom audiences, and more. Just like you guys are used to seeing on social. I'm giving out$500 in ad credits with my referral code to the first 50 people who fill out the form below. First come, first serve, it's going to go fast. And if you're spending over$300K a month on paid, I have something special for you. Everything's in the description below. Go diversify now and appreciate the support. What is the right way to package wins so that people above you feel ownership instead of feeling threatened? You mean never outshine the master?

32:09Yes, sir. So it says never outshine the master. You know, maybe it should be usually don't outshine the master, but that wouldn't have sounded so good. So you have to understand that the person above you has an ego and has probably a bigger ego than you do, obviously, because they're powerful. But with an ego comes insecurities, okay? So you must be aware that the person above you has insecurities and probably has more than you do because they're constantly worried. Do people still like me? Am I still doing as well? Am I as popular as I was a year ago? Am I getting as much attention as I deserve?

32:53Am I doing a good job? He or she is very insecure. They're thinking about these things all the time. So what happens is if you try to eagerly to impress them and you do such a good job on some project or something, and then all the attention accrues to you for doing that, then you're going to trigger their insecurities. Wow, this person's getting the attention and not me. Maybe they're after my job. Maybe they're more popular than I am. They're not going to consciously think this because they don't want to admit that they're insecure. but unconsciously they're worried about you. They're thinking things that maybe you're a threat, right?

33:35And slowly they're going to build up kind of resentment towards you. And what will happen is you'll probably be fired or you'll be demoted. So if you work hard on a project for somebody else from somebody higher up in your group and you do a great job, you need to tone it down a little bit. Don't take so much credit. Let them bask a little bit in the glory. Let them have the attention. Yes, they're the genius behind the project. I was just executing their desires. That makes them suddenly go, wow, this person, you understand that they did a great job, but they're being a little bit humble. They're giving you the attention, which you deserve anyway, because you think you do, okay?

34:17But if you're too weak about it, if you're too humble, if you're going, oh, you don't take credit at all, you weren't involved in it at all, that makes you look weak, right? So you have to be kind of nuanced. You have to do a good job. You have to try really hard. You have to do the best that you can, but you got to let the person above you take some of the credit, take some of the glory. Otherwise, they're going to be wondering about you. They're going to be thinking that you think that you're better than them and you're going to trigger their insecurities. This is the most important law and power that I want you to engrave in your brain right now as you listen to me.

34:57And it's the following. Everybody has insecurities and has an ego. And the worst thing you can do for your boss, for your colleagues, for the people underneath you, is to violate their ego, to make them feel insecure. You will pay a price for it. They will resent you. They will work against you. They will betray you in the end. So never lose sight that everybody around you has an ego and has insecurities. If you're thinking about going upstream, you're an employee with your boss, in short, kind of do good, do your work, selectively compliment them. But then on the flip side, the boss, you recommend have everybody do the work for you, but then take credit.

35:40I'd love for you to expand on that. What's your thoughts with that? So the law came from, I worked in Hollywood for, unfortunately, for like 10 years. It kind of inspired the 48 Laws. I say unfortunately because I hated Hollywood. But I would work for a film director who would be doing a screenplay. And I would write large portions of the dialogue and I would contribute to it. Nobody ever knew that. It was always his name on it, right? He got all the fame, all the glory, all the attention. And at the time, it kind of bothered me. I was kind of resentful. And then when I wrote the 48 Laws of Power, I had this idea that, Robert, you did the wrong thing.

36:22You were stupid. The game of power should have been, that's how things are, right? When you look at a politician who gives a great speech and everybody's going, wow, Barack Obama, that was an amazing speech. Someone wrote that speech. Somebody wrote it. He never wrote it. And you never know that name who wrote it. You might, but no one ever gets that attention. When you see some journalist, giving some really interesting monologue on television. Somebody else wrote that, did all the research and gave them all the notes for that. Comedians, Bill Maher doesn't write his material. He's got a team of people writing all the jokes, right?

36:58You never see them. You never know them. Maybe the credits rolled by really quickly, right? So that's how powerful people operate, okay? And I should have just accepted it. I should have been more humble. I should have said, that's how the jungle is. There are people who take the credit for it. and if I didn't resent it, I wouldn't have lost energy. If you get too worked up about things, if everything is so dramatic, if you're emotional, if you're reacting against everything, it drains you of energy. It clouds your mind. You're not a good strategist. You're not a good warrior in life. You're not a good power player because your brain is just sinking into this mud of reactions and emotions.

37:39So I should have just been more zen about it. This is how the game is. eventually, if I keep writing this good dialogue and stuff, he's going to let me take credit or I will get credit for it eventually. If I'm humble, if I'm serious, if I learn the game, if I play it right. If you play the game of power right, you read the book, you understand it, you will be rewarded down the end of the game, right? You will be rewarded. So I wrote that chapter because people in power use that and know about it, But also for you, the person starting out or was younger, to understand that that's what's going to be happening to you.

38:20People are going to be taking your work and taking credit for it. But just accept that. How much of avoiding outshining the master is really just about knowing who you're dealing with? It seems like it's very contextual to who the actual master or boss is. Yes, it is. And it's nuanced. And some people, if you work really hard, you do a great job and you get attention for it, they won't mind. Your boss will be fine. They'll be happy for you. There'll be no resentment. There'll be no pettiness. There'll be no envy. Great. If you have a boss like that. But do you want me to tell you the percentage of bosses who will be like that?

38:56It's probably about 5%. Okay. I'm just throwing that number up. That's what I think. Right. But if that's who your boss is, fantastic. Wunderbar. Love it. Go for it. but the chances are that they're probably not. So law number one is understand that probably they're insecure. Probably you're going to trigger their egos and be a little bit careful, but understand as well, what are their insecurities? What is going to trigger that? So to give you an example from my own life, because I violated this law once, I worked for an awful, awful television show back in the 90s, whose name I won't even mention.

39:34I was a researcher for it, okay? And I was the best researcher on this crap show. And best researcher meant that the stories I found were the ones that were most used. I had a higher percentage, right? Kind of went to my head. Wow, I'm hot shit, you know? I'm by far the best researcher on this crew. And I had a boss, a woman, and she ended up thinking I had an attitude. Like, Robert just thinks he's so great, okay? and one day we had a meeting and I hated these meetings because they were such bullshit. Nothing is accomplished, just people talking. It's just political crap. That's how I felt. So I was kind of like doodling in my notebook.

40:17I wasn't listening. She goes, Robert, something wrong here. Do you think you're better than everybody else? Ended up, she started really harassing me after that. Not sexually. She started harassing me, my job, right? And eventually I just quit because I couldn't handle it anymore. I was sick of it. I hated the job. I hated her. And I hated all the politicking that was involved. Shouldn't life be about doing the best job, getting the best stories? Isn't that what matters? No, that's not what matters in business or politics. What matters is pleasing people, stroking their egos. I triggered her insecurity, which was she didn't feel like she was in authority.

40:55She didn't feel like I respected her. That was her weakness. If I understood that, maybe I would have played it differently, but I wouldn't have played it differently because I wanted to quit that job anyway. That's discovering that thumbscrew, what the weaknesses and the motives and the things that make people tick and act differently. Yeah. Yeah, you got to know that initially. I think for outshine the master, it's very upstream. It's bosses to investors, employees to bosses. A really, really interesting, let's call it the 49th law of power here, actually. There is no 49th. This is a good one.

41:26I think you're going to agree with it. It's new and I've heard it. But my buddy, Simon Molnar, he's actually next on the podcast. He was a part of Afterpay. His brother was the founder. Afterpay? Afterpay. Afterpay. So if you buy something for$100 online, I'll say, spend$25,$25,$25 installments. And I go, he was a billionaire in his late 20s. And I asked him, what was his superpower? What was his moat? And he said he had the ability, we're talking downstream now, that as the boss, even if it was his ideas, if his employees repackaged it or came to them with the ideas, he would make those employees feel as though it was their idea.

42:04And he said that empowered them in a whole different way. And ultimately, he had his own motive. He was planning to the end himself. And he felt that psychologically put them in a place where the work they did was valuable. I had never heard anything like that. I thought it was absolutely brilliant. And it's kind of a riff on Alshine the Master upstream. This is kind of downstream. Well, I'm all fine for people who do it differently from my laws because as I said, no law is set in stone and sometimes you need to do the opposite. But I would like to see the actual results from this. So a danger in that kind of approach is that people get complacent.

42:44They think, God, this boss is kind of weak. He's giving me credit for all these things. I actually, you know, I did some of the work on it, but really it was his idea. And now you kind of, your respect for him is just a little bit less. You're not admitting it. And so you're not emboldened to work as hard. You might think that it's the opposite and he might think it's the opposite and it might be the opposite. And I could be very wrong, but it could also be that people think I don't have to do very much to get his approval. Whereas if it's the opposite and he takes most of the credit, you get a little bit of it.

43:23You get a little, that little bit of it makes you feel good and it makes you want to try harder the next time. I feel like you almost have to be nice, but not too nice. That's kind of where you're at. That's what I believe. Now, you're this man for Afterpay. I'm sure he's brilliant and I'm sure he knows more than I do about his company and I'm sure he played it right. So I'm not contradicting him. But I don't know if it's a model for other people out there because I think there's a slight danger to it. We'll make sure we ask him on the next podcast. I want to go off to Loft 40, despise the free lunch.

43:54That's one of my favorites. My friends call me Barter Simpson. I've talked about it before. I barter a lot of things and do free both ways. It's something I need to stop. So I guess let's just start with why is free so often the most expensive mistake in business? Well, I tell you, a lot of times, So people often want to work for me. They offer their services. They say, Robert, you don't need to pay me. Okay, I'll work for free. All right. And the idea is nothing, nothing ever comes free in this world. Nobody ever, ever gives you something free. Now, there is an exception to that. Your mother probably loved you.

44:32Not always probably loved you, not expecting anything in return. But usually, you know, even mothers do expect something in return. So even their love is not often totally free. But nobody gives you anything for free. They're wanting something in return. And it's a trick where they're thinking that if they offer their services for free, you're going to go, okay, that's great. And you're not going to pay attention to the fact that they're after something else from you, right? And so it's always better to pay people and pay them well for their services. So if you're generous with your money, if you show that you're not niggly, you're not a powerful person, feels confident in their wealth, feels confident in their resources, feel confident in the time that they have.

45:19And so they give that generously to other people. Being tight with your money, not wanting to pay your employees well is a terrible, terrible quality and it will bite you in the end. So I always tell you, maybe you don't give them credit for everything. Maybe you keep them a little bit on their toes, but you pay them well, right? You treat them well. They feel comfortable. They have food. They have an apartment. They have living expenses, okay? And you don't want to make them feel insecure about that. So being cheap with your money is very, very dangerous. It's a signal of weakness, okay? But on the other hand, when people are offering their services, they come to you saying, I want it for free.

46:04I say forget about that there's a ploy there they're after something but if somebody comes to you and says Robert I really want to work for you I think I could be a really great researcher and this is what I'm worth and then you see that they have some experience and you try them out and you pay them that's going to be a good relationship moving forward right in short you You need skin in the game for team building, for partnerships, for anything. Yeah. That's a good way of putting it. I'm going to remember that. Does it ever make sense to give away something free strategically or never? Give me an example.

46:43You're a brand owner and you believe in your products so much. And let's just say you're a mass market product. You say, hey, I'm going to give you this t-shirt for free. Oh, well, people are doing that all the time. That's a brilliant marketing tool. Yeah. So is this more from a human perspective? Because humans ultimately at the core have a dark side per what you said versus a business strategy or a product, which obviously the product does know. Well, if you're the buyer of the product, you should be a little bit wary that they're giving it to you for free because they're going to come after you now.

47:19I gave you my book for free. Maybe I'm after something. Maybe I'm after you being kind of gentle with me and having a good interview. So you have to be a little bit wary of that free gift. Guys, Robert gave me a beautiful limited edition 48 Laws of Power where you flick the pages. It's his face on one. What was the other face? Machiavelli, was it? Machiavelli. Machiavelli is beautiful. I'm going to post that on the internet and give some distribution and hopefully sell you some books. Well, it's already - You don't need to sell any books, but I'm just saying. Okay, okay. I want to go into another law in conjunction with Despise the Free Lunch.

47:52when asking for help, appealing to self-interest, never to mercy. What is kind of the biggest lesson for power behind that? Well, if you want something from somebody who's powerful, let's say you want them to fund your movie or whatever, you go to them and you go, you know, I kind of helped you out a little bit in the past once before. When my brother worked for you and did a really great job, can I get some help now for my project? almost saying you deserve it because you did something for them in the past. Terrible, terrible approach. Terrible, the worst approach. Nobody wants to feel like they owe you anything, all right?

48:33And nobody really feels much gratitude. But the smart approach is you want funding for that movie or for a project. You do some research. And I tell you, research in any business before you approach somebody for a job or anything is absolutely essential. I find out this is something that he needs. He's always been trying to break into the movie business. He hasn't been successful, okay? All right, I'm going to package this as a way where I'm going to give you credit as a producer on this picture. I'm going to let you have this perk or that perk, or you'll get to meet Sidney Sweeney or whoever it is, right?

49:15Whatever their self-interest is, whatever they need, whatever they don't have, if you think of what they need, what their interests are, what they lack, then you've got a good proposal. I'll tell you, when you're in a position of weakness, you're starting out and you're approaching powerful people, okay, what is the self-interest that kind of ties most powerful people together? They don't have enough time. They are too busy. We all know that. You know that. I know what that's like. Too many things going on. Too many people asking for favors. Too many projects. Too many things going on. Never have enough time.

49:53If you, in your proposal, and you're asking for them to do something for you, if what you're offering is to save them time, to make it so it's not so exhausting, you can organize something for them, that'll have a lot of power. That'll have a lot of impact. That's in everybody's self-interest today. I would say save time and attention. Those are the two kind of biggest things that people want. And what's really interesting about what you just said, when you are going and appealing to somebody's self-interest as the asker, you have the ability to control the unit economics where your ask could be pennies on a dollar for what I actually want.

50:30Case in point, an example is, you mentioned that I'd want to be on a movie. You want$2 million from me? I could say, I've always wanted to be an author. Robert, I'm a huge fan. Why don't you let me write the forward? What's the reality? How much does the forward cost? It costs you nothing. It's obviously real estate in your book. I have no economic participation, but I'm making no money. You're getting your$2 million. So you can really arbitrage making money through being super strategic in the favor. Tap into, I always say all the time that you have to understand and know like your bullets in the chamber.

51:01You're a basketball fan. Who do I know that's a basketball player that I can introduce you to? Stuff like that. That's my weakness. If you wanted me to give it, you had some ask from me and you said, Robert, I can introduce you to Kobe Bryant when he was still alive or whomever. I'd be eating out of your hand. I'd be like a little puppy. I just have to stop you guys right now. Guys, the first 20 minutes we were off camera just geeking out about basketball. We need to get you on camera another time just talking about that. You need to go on like Colin Coward or something. You're very, very deep in basketball.

51:34Yeah, I don't have a detailed knowledge of basketball, but I have a very strategic knowledge of basketball. but I have a feel for it. You understand macro strategy and you knew the standings. I mean, you know what's going on. Yeah, I do. Very much so. I don't waste a lot of my time because I have so much work. But the one thing I waste time on is reading about the NBA and all various websites, particularly all the rumors about the Lakers and everything. I'm just a total junkie for that kind of stuff. We have to get it on camera. Prediction for the Lakers next year. They'll probably end up like in the fourth or fifth slot in the Western Conference.

52:14They may win the first round. I don't think they'll get out of the second round. If they do, that would be, I think, quite an achievement for them. But what will be interesting is to see is what happens to the Clippers because I hate the Clippers. And you know what's going on right now. I know exactly what's going on. The Clippers are the Cowboys, Robert. They don't even, we don't even, it doesn't even deserve for us to talk about them. They are at the bottom of the barrel. They are. Although if you watch the Jerry Jones documentary of the Cowboys, it's very, very, you want to talk about interaction with boldness?

52:45Jerry Jones is interaction with boldness. That guy took massive risks. I know, but that's an example of reputation as capital because the Cowboys are worth one of the most wealthiest, you know, what their worth would be if he sold it right now. It's one of the highest of any sports team in the world. But what's it based on? And they've not won anything for 30 years or so. I don't know, almost 30 years, right? So it's all his reputation. It's all the glory from the past when he had - Irving, Emmett, Aikman, Jimmy Johnson. Jimmy Johnson, yeah. He should have read 48 Laws of Power when he let Jimmy Johnson go.

53:23I'm going to leave it at that. Okay, okay. He should have done that. But yeah, the Cowboys star is the Yankees pinstripe. And at this point, I mean, they're on the same level as the Giants at this point. They're terrible. What's up, guys? Guys, it's Mark. Quick 15-second break. We're building a private community for operators, marketers, and creators. And in order to join that wait list, you have to sign up for the newsletter. The newsletter is going to give you alerts on all of our new content and my personal takeaways from each and every guest. Make sure you click the link at the top of the description to sign up.

53:52Thanks for watching. All right, we're going to go into the lightning round. I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions and fire off. What is the single most important skill to master? Well, the single most important skill to master is to be more focused outwardly. So a problem that you have is you're always inside yourself. You're always thinking about your needs, your emotions, your problems, things that have happened to you. Do people like me? Am I getting enough attention? That's a deadly, deadly attitude to have in business or in any venture in life. We're a social animal. So you might think that analytics and algorithms and data is what's going to drive your company.

54:38That's certainly a part of it. But the social aspect is equally, if not more important. What I mean by that is your employees, the culture of your group, the world at large, your clients, the global situation right now. These are social phenomena, right? You have to understand, you have to be so close to what people are thinking in the world today, what your employees are thinking to what your colleagues are thinking, what your rivals are thinking. So you need to be continually laser focused outwardly on the world, on the trends, on what other people are thinking. You have to become a master observer of the social game, being able to read other people's psychology, being able to read and understand the trends that are going on in the world, where the world is going in five years.

55:24So get outside of all your emotions and your feelings. Oh, I'm not getting this. Oh, I'm such a victim. Oh, people don't like me. And be laser focused on other people, what they need, what they're thinking, what they're feeling. That's like a killer skill that you need to develop. It's all about just tailoring your strategies to what's going on on the outside. It has nothing to do with the inside. You have to be emotionalist, no ego. Whatever's going on the outside, you got to adjust to that. What should the real goal of your life be in your 20s? And what do most people get wrong? For that answer, I would really recommend reading my book, Mastery, because I go into that quite deeply.

55:57So you need to think of your 20s, which is by far the best years of your life. Let's get that straight first. Well, it was the best years of my life, right? It's the most exciting. You know, you're young, you look good, you've got energy, you know, you dress well, probably, I hope. The thing that you want from your 20s is you want an apprenticeship, right? You want to learn. You want learning skills. You want to learn skills, solid skills, so that by the time you turn 30, which is the critical turning point in your life, I said the 20s are your most fun. The 30s are the key part of your life, which is my key part, the late 30s.

56:36When you're 30, you want to go, I had fun. I had adventures. I traveled. I dated. I did everything I wanted, but I also learned things. I learned A, B, and C skills. You don't have to learn just one skill. You can learn three skills, three things that you master, that you spent seven years going into deeply. But if you wasted your 20s, if you just had fun, you just did whatever you wanted to, by the time you hit 30, nothing will stick together. Nothing will cohere. You've been stretched too thin. But if you're linear, laser focused, I'm just going to go to Goldman Sachs. I'm going to get a job.

57:16I'm going to get paid$150 ,000 a year. You're not spreading yourself out. You're not learning enough skills. You're not developing yourself inwardly. Learning a skill is a skill, but learning is a skill. And in order to learn, you have to be able to put up with boredom, frustration, and tedium. So if you're able to put up, because right now, young people have it really, really bad because things are so easy for them. that they don't have the patience to learn something. They just want to get on to chat, GBT. Everything is fed to them. You need to be able to put up with the tedium, the boredom that learning a skill involves.

57:59I talk in Mastery about a guy named Paul Graham, Y Combinator, et cetera. Paul was one of the earliest people to get into AI back in the late 70s. He was a coder. He was really into computing and hacking. He went to MIT, I believe, and studied computer programming, got his master's, his PhD, whatever. But then he got bored with it. He got tired of it. It just became monotonous to him. He always was interested in painting and design. So he left New York and he went to Italy and he enrolled in an art school and he learned painting in Florence for like a year. He came back to New York. He was a painter in a loft.

58:40And he heard on the radio that Netscape, which was the newest hot thing, was going to try and maybe use the internet to sell things. Now, you might laugh at that, but at the early days of the internet, people didn't sell things on the internet, right? It wasn't a marketplace. And Lightbulb goes on, he said, goes, I like painting, but I'm poor. I'm living in this loft. I have no money, but I know computer programming. I have a great feel for it, but I also know about painting. I know about design and about what looks good. I have the skill set to make an incredible website, which will be the first website where you can actually build something and sell products for other businesses to build off of.

59:24Right? He went and did that. And then I think it was Yahoo or somebody like that that bought his company out for like$10 million. And that was the start of things. From that, he built Always Upward. but he developed two incredible unrelated skills, computing programming, design and painting. And then he combined them into creating this new company. Yeah, I think one thing that you touched on with Paul Graham that I found super, super interesting was the combination of kind of art and programming. For people out there listening who are on the back end of my 30s, I think it's very important to understand and know you must pick the right skills because there's compounding effects where there comes a certain age, which I'm very curious what age you think, where if you've invested 10, 15 years of your life to learn X skill, it is not smart to put that skill and just throw it away.

1:00:15You should probably utilize some sort of element in that and make a new concoction of using that skill in something new. When is that age? When do you think someone, you know, it's kind of counterintuitive to the Gary V where you could start your life at 60, 70, 80 years old. When do you think you need to understand and know this is what I'm going to do with my life? Well, everyone's different. And it's good to have an idea of what you want and what you love when you're 18 or when you're in your college years, if you go to college, it's good to have a sense of what you love and what connects to you.

1:00:50But to be a specific project, a specific business, if you're too single-minded and you're 23 and you know exactly what you want, you won't have adventures. You won't have that freedom, that fluidity to learn different things. Okay. So I would say generally around the age of 30, in your 30s is when everything should start coming together. Now things can go up and down. They can have a trajectory. I often think of Steve Jobs. So he's like Paul Graham. He had a background in design because really what Steve Jobs was a great designer. He had computing skills, but not on the level of Wozniak or people like that.

1:01:33Calligraphy classes he took as well, too. Huh? He took calligraphy classes as well. He was an artist. He was an artist. His real interest was in the look of technology and the design of things, how things felt, how they felt in your hand, how they looked. Okay? And so the reason I pick him out is your career can go like this, like this, like this, and it goes up. but there are going to be downturns. And how you handle those downturns are going to be extremely important. So nobody has a straight line up. So he has this design background. He starts the first iteration with Wozniak. He has Apple.

1:02:11They have success, but he's not good with people. He knows that, he admits that. And he burnt himself out and the company brought in other people and he was eventually fired, right? So he's going like this, and now his career is going like that. But he didn't sink down, right? He kept at it. He started another company called Next, which was actually a very interesting company if you look at the computers he was making. But it failed. It was a failure. Okay? So it's like this. It's going down. It's going a little bit up now. It's going down again. And then he's brought back to Apple because Apple isn't doing so well back in, I believe, the late 90s.

1:02:54He learned all of these lessons in the meantime. He's in his 30s then? Probably late 30s. Late 30s, okay. He's learned all these lessons. He's learned that he can't be an asshole anymore like he was early on. He learned what failed at Apple, why Next failed. He was set up for a brilliant, brilliant comeback, okay? So I guess the point I'm saying is your career is never going to be straight up. If it's straight up, you're in trouble. Your failures, if you're bold and you try things and it fails. You've learned lessons. Don't let it sink you. Let it be a lesson for your next project and have another iteration and go in a slightly different direction.

1:03:34As he did, he realized he couldn't start his own company. So he went back to Apple, but he completely revolutionized it and made it according to his own image. I want to fire a couple more questions. You said money isn't just money. What do you mean by that? Well, I mean, what is money? I mean, think of it. It's a human invention that we have created. Now, why do I say that? Because money is pure psychology, right? Look at, I talked about Elon Musk and how he turned like alchemy. He turned a company that was nothing into powerful. He attracted all this money because of attention, because he understood the attention gain.

1:04:13He understood the psychology, the psychological element that translated into money. You look at the crash of 2008 and all of these people going into these derivatives and these real estate investments, right? Completely irrational. As looking back, it was like, what were people thinking? It wasn't based on anything real. It was based on a mob mentality, on lemmings going over the hill, all believing that this would, because other people were signing off on it, I'm going to sign off of it. Which is how bubbles always happen. Bubbles are classic examples of money as pure psychology. Some people now are speculating that AI is going to turn into a bit of a bubble because so many companies are throwing billions of dollars into AI right now.

1:05:04And it's not really paying off. It's not translating into productivity. It's not translating into profits. It could be a bubble. But I'm saying people follow trends. They put their money according to what they think is going to be good. Look at the stock market right now. The stock market is pure psychology. People believe something has happened. They believe in the future. They're optimistic. They're bullish. Well, let's invest. At a slight turn in psychology, they become bearish. It's pure psychology. You have to understand that. I don't know why that seems so strange. It seems so obvious to me.

1:05:45Seems like psychology, persuasion, reputation, and attention kind of concoction of all of those things. All of that that you just mentioned is all about human psychology. How do you get attention? How do you market things? You have to understand the psychology of people. You could have the best product in the world. You put all the money into it. You don't know how to market it? What good does it do? Marketing is pure psychology. Love that. Last question before we get into the final round. Which strategy of seduction is most effective in business and what are the risks of misusing it? What I wanted to do in the art of seduction was to show that seduction is a bit of psychology.

1:06:26It's a strategy. What ties all seductions together is people are resistant to you. Nobody is naturally open to another stranger, right? Seduction is getting those walls down. getting them to crumble, getting them to lower down to a point where they are going to maybe do what you want, where they're interested in your project, where they're interested in following, where they want to be involved with you in some way. It's the art of bringing all of their defenses down. And if you do it too directly, if you hit them with the hard sell, the walls just go back up because we're all wary of people who give us the hard sell.

1:07:07But if you come from the side and you do the soft sell and you're gentle and you do like a viral approach like people everybody else is buying my product I don't need to go out there and market it and have advertising and most often creating those kind of viral effects is by far the strongest marketing tool that you can have and I go I have a chapter in that in the art of seduction so you have to understand that people don't naturally want to buy your product. They don't want to listen to your music. They don't want to read your books. They're not interested in you. How do you seduce them into doing that is the name of the game.

1:07:48The book on marketing. All right. Last three questions we got here. I've had an amazing time. Favorite book or podcast and why? Oh, God. All right. Machiavelli's The Prince. And my favorite podcast? Well, you know, I can tell you the most fun I've had on a podcast that I've been on. I don't watch a lot of podcasts because I'm way too busy. But I had the best time on Theo Vaughn's podcast. And he's so much fun to watch. That was a loose one? You guys got loose? Very much so. We'll pop that up here. I can always watch him because he's really interesting. He's somebody who's very unpredictable. You never know exactly where he's going to come from.

1:08:32And that's what makes him such a great interviewer. And so if you're out there, Theo, I really enjoyed your podcast. Well, that entrepreneur or brand that you want to give flowers to and why? Oh, boy, that's a tough one. I mean, I'm really into health and fitness. Obviously, I had a stroke, so it's even a little bit more urgent from me. So there's some companies out there, some startups that have done really well, not just so I'm thinking of a company called Momentus. Great supplement company. Great supplement company. And I'll tell you what the most important skill is in the business world. We talked about it earlier, but there's something else, which is everything now is so inhuman.

1:09:18You can never talk to anybody over the phone or wherever, say you're dissatisfied with their product or something went wrong, right? They put you through this maze like a rat so that you hang up so that you never get to have to talk to a human being. Everything has to be online. There's no feedback. There's no relationship between the client and the product, people selling the product. And we all feel so frustrated with it. Everybody's dealt with that. Everybody hates it. Sometimes you just want to talk to somebody, want to hear them. Companies that give you feedback that are open to interacting with you.

1:09:53Yeah, it costs money. Yeah, instead of having farming it out to some people in Pakistan or on a phone bank answering you. It's actually somebody in Texas on a phone who you can understand, who's telling you how they can write it. Well, Momentus is that kind of company. Great products, really well managed, really well put together. Some of the best supplements that you can find and they're friendly. They're open to you. They interact with you. I'd send some flowers to them. From an FX perspective too, for people listening, I forgot what the stack was. It was the booster testosterone. It was Tongat Ali and something else.

1:10:34They were doing three, four, five million dollars on one of these products. Their customers loved it. Who's this? Momentus. And they took the product off the shelf because they couldn't get behind the science on it. So they had a product that was absolutely booming. Their customers loved it and they took it off the shelf. That's an excellent sign. Yeah. They've got a conscience. They're smart. They're strategic. they understand and I think they've got a great future. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your next book, Sublime. We're hoping that you finish by the end of the year. It's fourth quarter for Robert, guys.

1:11:02He's got one more chapter left to go. He's staying with us for a couple hours now. I appreciate this. Tell everybody about your next book, Sublime. I'd say that means it's the fourth quarter with about seven and a half minutes to go and I'm driving towards the end zone and hopefully I don't fumble. This is a non-business book. Let's be honest with it. But there is the chapter I just wrote has something to do with the business world. The chapter I just wrote is about willpower and resilience and how important that is to be able to deal with pain, suffering, and adversity and challenges and how that makes you stronger and a better person and how that is a sublime power in the human animal to be so resilient where nothing could beat you down, where you let You allow yourself to feel the pain and you grow from it.

1:11:53Because people nowadays are so avoidant of any kind of conflict, of any kind of difficulty. So that chapter, I think, will have a lot of relevance to entrepreneurs. But in general, I hate to use the word, but it's a little bit more of a spiritual book. In that seven years ago now, I came this close to dying. I had a stroke. I was driving my car in Los Angeles. My wife had me pull over. I didn't want to pull over. I was going to keep driving. She forced it and she called an ambulance. She saw my face. The right side of my face was just like falling. Something was really wrong with me. I didn't know.

1:12:31I was like, everything's fine. In that split second where she didn't panic and she called 911, she saved my life. She basically saved my life. And they came quickly. And so I came this close to dying or this close to being brain dead. Now, that can have a deep effect on a person. And I had always been meaning to write a book on the sublime. And what I mean by the sublime is I like to compare it to a circle. And that circle is what we're all supposed to think and do. It's kind of a limiting factor where in our particular culture, these are the thoughts that you have. These are the behaviors that you do.

1:13:11These are the values that you have. This is the things that you conform to, right? And outside that circle is everything that you're not supposed to do, everything you're not supposed to think, everything that's different, that's strange, that's weird, that's not normal. That is the sublime. And I'm trying to lure you outside of the circle in these 12 different directions to experience something beyond your normal limits, beyond your normal boundaries, that's going to shake your brain up and make you realize that the world you thought was this way is actually this way. You don't know what reality is.

1:13:45You have this image, but things are much stranger, much weirder, much more sublime and awesome than you imagine. It's a book to shake you out of your complacency, to shake you out of this idea that you know what the world is like and to make you realize you're ignorant, that the world is mysterious and beautiful for being mysterious. So each chapter is outside that. And the ultimate chapter, the 12th chapter, the one I'm writing now, is about death. It's about, death is sort of the ultimate limit that we all face. But to be able to experience it, to understand what may lie on the other side, what it is, is the ultimate sublime experience, right?

1:14:25Because we don't know. Nobody knows what happens to us after we die. Yeah, we think we just decay, we just dry in the ground. But people have these called near-death experiences. They're very strange. They're very weird. What happens to our consciousness as we die? And so because I lived through that, it's not like an intellectual thing to me. I lived with death being inside my body, with me feeling a creeping sensation of everything decaying and softening inside. I have a different relationship to death than most people do. So I want to communicate that in the last chapter. So that's sort of what my new book is about.

1:15:05That was an amazing trailer for your next book. The Sublime, is that your last dance? Is it the last book? Well, if I don't have a heart attack or something, there might be other books. But I can tell you this. I'm in my 60s. I'm actually in the latter half of my 60s, if you can believe it. I don't have the energy that I used to have. I'm slowing down. And the other thing is I can't type. My left hand is pretty useless. So I have to handwrite everything. Wow. I used to take long walks or go for these long swims or go mountain biking to get my mind off my work and stir up new ideas. Can't do any of that.

1:15:47I'm just trapped in my room. It's been so exhausting to write this book like that. I can't do it anymore. So my next book is going to be quicker and smaller and slimmer and easier. I know I keep saying that every time, but I have to this. I just can't handle it anymore. The stress. I have one more question for you that is kind of a cliche question. I've never asked it. I've never wanted to ask it. But with you specifically, I'm just deeply curious. What would Robert Greene tell his younger self? What's the advice that you would give yourself? I feel like you have a lot of wisdom and you've lived multiple lives and recreated yourself.

1:16:22Well, I would say, Robert, don't worry. Everything is going to work out for the best. You're doing the right thing. So my philosophy in life, If I had to say I have one philosophy, it's called amor fati, which is Latin for love of fate. And what that means is everything happens for a reason. Even the bad things that happen to you have a purpose to them. If you know how to handle it, if you embrace the bad stuff that happens to you, nothing, nothing can ever hurt you or harm you. You learn from every bad experience. So getting fired or losing my job from that woman that was kind of bothering me, I learned great lessons for it.

1:17:04It made me stronger. Having people tell me when I was 25, Robert, you're not a good writer. You're not going to end up being a writer. You should go to business school. It made me stronger. It made me tougher. It made me more resilient. It made me learn. Everything is a learning experience. Nothing is wasted if you have this philosophy. It's something that the Stoics and Ryan Holiday talks a lot about his book. The Obstacle is the Way, brilliant book. Great book. But nothing is just meaningless. Everything has a purpose behind it. And so all the bad stuff that happened to me when I was in my 20s, all the feelings I had of being lost, they ended up having a purpose because I used it that way.

1:17:46So I would have told myself, don't worry, Robert. Don't be despondent. Don't despair. Or despair. It's fine to feel despair because everything in the end will work out. It's all, as I tell other people, my motto in life besides Amor Fate is, it's all material. Everything that happens is material for me to use in my books, for my mind to feed off of. So I wouldn't have told myself, actually, I wouldn't tell myself anything. I would have shut up and said, just go on, do your life. Don't listen to me, Robert, you're fine. That just took a hard turn there. I appreciate you, man. You're a living legend.

1:18:23As I mentioned off camera in the beginning, this is one of the first books that I recommend people to read. Good to Great by Jim Collins and 48 Laws of Power are the two. Thank you so much for coming and taking time out of the day. Where can everybody find you? Where's the best place for them to find you online? Well, I keep quoting my, I think my website is still powerseductionandwar.com. The and spelled out, powerseductionandwar.com. and there you'll find links to X, to Instagram, to TikTok and to YouTube. We just went over 2 million subscribers on YouTube. Thanks to Stanley. So you can find me on all of those platforms or you can visit that website.

1:19:08I also have a newsletter that you can get, but you'll find all the information there. Amazing. Guys, I'm going to link that in the description below. Robert, I appreciate you, my man. Thank you so much, Mark. Had a great time. What's up, guys? Guys, if you guys got this far in the episode, I would assume that you enjoyed it. If you got any value, it would mean the world if you hit the subscribe button, give it a like, post a comment, tell a friend. We could keep going bigger, bigger guests, bigger locations, more value. See you in the next episode.