The Art of Power, Seduction, and Mastery — with Robert Greene

26:07They know how to make it seem like they love you and they draw you into their world. And when they get what they want, then that's the power that they have. Whereas a hot seducer is somebody who is genuinely, absolutely seduced first by the other person that they're seducing. And those are kind of the best seductions. So you fall in love with somebody, you're so interested in them, but they're not maybe interested in you. Now, in order to get them to like you or to love you, you have to seduce them. You have to draw them into your world. You have to go through some of the things that I talk about in the book.

26:42But you're emotionally engaged. You're hot. You're after them. You want that. And once you get them involved, then that kind of back and forth of both of you being kind of emotionally engaged creates a really beautiful dynamic and things can proceed. But it all comes down to what you're after and the level of emotional engagement that you have with the other person. I love that. We talk a lot about that sexual desire, while it's been pathologized, can be a wonderful thing that can turn you into a better man. Make you want to be kinder, make you want to be more successful, make you want to groom, make you want to dress better, make you willing to take risks, make you a better man.

27:22And we're pivoting around, you had a lot of books we want to touch on here. You said in your book, Mastery, where you said it was a way of showing there's more to success than just power and seduction, that real fulfillment takes time and depth. What were you seeing in society that made you want to deliver this message? Well, I was seeing the fact that we live in a culture that's so technologically proficient that people weren't paying attention to what actually made success in life, which is your brain. you know and the brain is this insane instrument it's incredibly powerful incredibly complex incredibly beautiful and it has a certain kind of inclination what i call a grain to it and when you work with the grain of the brain i'm sorry for the priming there but when you work with it amazing things can happen you can flourish you can become very creative you can you can reach that level of mastery.

28:17And my worry and my concern was that with technology, people are relying so much on other things that they're not, they think everything is easy. Everything can be fast. That if I want power or success, I can hack my way to it. I can get into cryptocurrency and in a month I can make a million dollars and then I can do this, I can do that, I can do that. All these illusions. Whereas the truth of it is, true mastery, which is a beautiful thing to attain in any field, is something that lasts for 10, 20, 30 years. And it takes time and it takes effort. It takes years of work. It takes a point of an apprenticeship of maybe the proverbial 10 ,000 hours, although some of that has been debunked.

29:03But it takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of effort. And people don't want to hear that. They want to hear that I could do it in four hours a week. I could master something. I want a hack. I want a drug. I want something to give it to me quickly. So my concern was people don't understand how the human brain works. It's so simple that when you spend time learning something, something that you love and that interests you, amazing power start emerging from that. What do you think separates, in addition to the 10 ,000 hours, someone who's a real master versus just average? And how do you think young people can try to sort through a lot of the, sort the signal from the noise and find something that they have the potential to be a master at?

29:50I think mastery creates reward. I've always found, don't follow your passion, follow your talent, where you can develop mastery. Help young people. A lot of people would say, how do I find my mastery? Well, the first part of your question, I mean, some people will spend 20 ,000 hours, I don't know, just put a number on it, and they don't end up becoming a master. So this man wrote to me, said, I've been a painter for my whole life. I've been painting for 40 years. I'm in my 50s now, and I'm not a master. So, Robert, that debunks your idea. And what I tell them, my answer to that is, it's not a question of hours.

30:31It's a question of intensity. What makes a master is somebody who by the time they're 25, have put in the amount of work that you put in by the time you're in your 50s. Because the human brain is most creative and most fluid when you are younger. So you want to build those hours and that intense practice and discipline when you are younger, because that's when you are most creative. so that by the time you have put in a lot of hours and things start clicking in your brain, you're 29, you're 30, the brain is fluid, things are happening, you've got energy, amazing things will happen. It won't happen.

31:08It can't happen, but it won't be as likely to happen when you're in your 50s and 60s. You're more set in your ways, you're more rigid, your brain is slowing down. So it has to be a function of intensity. But when it comes to finding your life's task, which is the first chapter of mastery. And quite frankly, to me, it's the most important thing in life, even in power of all the books that I've written. It's the most important thing for anyone to find in life. Because when you find out what you were meant to create, what your task is, what you say your talent lies in, there has to be, of course, an element of loving it, the whole world just opens up, right?

31:49You will gain power. You will find, you will be good in the seduction game. Men or women will ever will come to you because you have, you're moving in the direction that your brain wants you to move in. You're learning quickly. You're becoming creative and you fulfill, you know, your dreams from when you were younger. I think the The worst feeling for people that I found, the most tragic thing, is to get into your 50s and tell yourself, God, I could have been something else. I went down a wrong path. I could have found what I wanted to find, and I didn't do it because I listened to other people, because I was more interested in money than I was interested in mastery.

32:31And it's a regret, and it's too late at that point. So it's a function of emotional—and we talked about this in seduction— it's almost the key for everything, is your emotional engagement. So you're not going to learn, you're not going to put in those 10 ,000 hours or whatever it is that's required if you don't actually love or have some degree of interest that's very deep and profound. So if you're told to become a lawyer because that's what your parents told you to do, but it doesn't connect to you emotionally, you could spend 100 ,000 hours as a lawyer, but you're never going to reach a point of mastery because it doesn't connect to you.

33:13The brain learns fastest when you're in love with what you're learning, you know? So you've got to figure out what that is. And it's a process. It's not easy. It's not like I could give you a formula to tell you how to do that tomorrow. It's you have to go through a process of introspection. You have to look at things that really, really, truly excite you. The great psychologist Abraham Maslow talked about impulse voices in infants. Infants have these voices inside them say, I like this food. I don't like that food. I like this activity. I hate that activity. It's not something that they can verbalize.

33:53It's something very deep inside of them. And all of us have these impulse voices when we're very young. but we stop listening to them as we get older and we start we lose touch with what we really like and what we really don't like we're listening too much to other people particularly in the era of social media so a lot of figuring out your life's task is getting rid of all that noise of getting rid of what everybody is telling you it's getting rid of what the culture is telling it's getting rid of what people in social media are telling you and it's listening to yourself and listening to what you love i mean i could go on for hours and hours and i wrote a book on it about your life's test because there are other things I could talk about, but I don't want to take up all our time.

34:34But the main thing is going into yourself and not listening to other people that will help you get there. One of the things we talk a lot about here is storytelling, and you're such a great communicator and storyteller. What advice do you have for someone who wants to develop their skills as a storyteller? Well, I'm glad you brought that up because I take that very seriously. It's what I work the hardest at because it is my belief that a book or any kind of idea, people are resistant to. There's so much pain involved. I've got to read 30 pages. I have to listen to somebody on a podcast. It's too painful.

35:18But when you tell a story, all of those resistances go down and people want to enter into it. They want to hear it. They want to hear what the ending is. They want to hear what the moral of the story is. It's a brilliant way to seduce people into your idea, to trick them into it in a way. And so this kind of storytelling that I do is you don't want to be overwhelming people with fancy words, right? I hate people who overwrite. I hate people who think that they're so clever that they can be all into like the language itself. You must think that the story is a form of communication. You are communicating something through your story, the idea, the premise, the thesis, whatever it is that you're trying to communicate.

36:04Get rid of all that extra verbiage and be direct and tell the story in a plain, pared-down fashion. To me, it's much more powerful. Then keep aware that in each paragraph of your story, people are either engaging or they're disengaging. You want to keep them moving inside that story, almost like a landscape that you're leading them through so that they don't like deviate and go off and are bored. So each moment you have to think, am I engaging the reader? Am I making them want to go on? How do I do that? How do I create suspense? How do I make them feel that there's something coming up that they want to keep finding out, but that in the end isn't what they expected because the surprise or the unexpected is the most powerful form of storytelling.

36:52telling.

36:56We'll be right back.

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38:59We're back with more from Robert Greene. On the Diary of a CEO, you said you've come to terms with your own narcissism, irrationality, grandiosity, and aggression, all under the auspices of talking about masculinity. What did that process teach you about what it means to be a man in today's world? Well, I grew up in a different era. Now, you know, my father, because our fathers have a big influence on our concepts of masculinity, And my father, he was a very quiet man. He wasn't boisterous. He wasn't out there. He wasn't like performative masculinity, which is what we see a lot of nowadays. He was very quiet.

39:42He was a salesman. He worked at a job for 40 years of his life. He was very solid. But he was really good with people. And so my idea came from him, which is a kind of a quiet strength, a kind of calmness. but kind of the ability to not get freaked out about everything, to not be so emotional and yelling, and to just be calm and centered and kind of infect other people with that calmness. So my idea of masculinity had very much to do with him. And then, of course, from that, there were icons in the culture at the time, like a person like John F. Kennedy, who had this kind of quality, that charisma, very calm, but very confident, kind of projected it.

40:26And it was very, very, to me, that was kind of my icon of masculinity growing up, even though I was like five or six years old at that time. But he had a huge impact on the 60s. So these icons, these role players play a huge part in forming your idea of what it means to be a man. And today, the role players, the people, the icons that we look up to don't have those qualities at all. They're very performative. formative. They're very emotional. They're very aggressive. They're about being in your face. It's kind of this idea of the more I show how aggressive and masculine I am, that is how masculine I am.

41:07But it's a farce. It's a total con game. This is what my father told me. The more you're out there aggressive, pushing, the more you're revealing your deep, deep insecurities. You're actually a little baby, a little child inside of there. You're not strong. You're not calm, you're not centered, you're not masculine. You're performing what you think it is, but you're not feeling it. And when it's the Andrew Tates of the world and the others, whose names I won't mention for reasons, I don't want to get in trouble. You know, if those are all of your icons, then you're lost because you think that that's what matters.

41:43And the problem is, is it's going to cause you so many issues in life because it's a quality that in the end puts people off. It might work here and there in some environments, but you're going to be offending more people than you're getting allies on your side. So I don't know if I'm answering the question or not, but the problem for us today is these icons that we have. We don't have anymore that kind of calm, quiet, centered, kind of rational sort of icon of masculinity anymore. kind of to me, if I think of a movie, because I love watching old movies, I think of Gary Cooper in High Noon, one of my favorite movies.

42:28And, you know, he has to face all of these stressful situations, these people trying to kill him. He's got really good values. He's there to protect other people. He's going to get rid of these horrible people who are invading this town. but he's not hysterical. He's not violent. He's just doing what he needs to do to get the job done. We don't have those anymore in our culture. It's really, really sad. It's really depressing. I don't know what I could do personally to bring that back, but I think that's the source of the problem. Did I answer your question? You did your best, but this is a difficult question to answer.

43:06I'm writing a book on masculinity and trying to outline an aspirational vision of masculinity without it digressing into something that feels sexist or misogynist that tries to take the best of what the gary cooper masculinity but also evolve it recognizing the world has changed and that there's some wonderful things about the progress women have made that we we don't want to diminish and we also don't want to don't want in any way not acknowledge the immense challenges women still face but but there is a notion that the way i see it the far right wants masculinity to be cruel and coarse, the far less wants masculinity to act more like a woman.

43:44And there's got to be something different than both of those things. Definitely. I completely agree with you. But one thing that you mentioned there is part of that masculinity is being very respectful of women and not feeling like they're this inferior species that you need to protect them and control them. That certainly doesn't work in our era, but that's never was, to me, that kind of icon. I'm speaking of masculinity But to create something that's not on the right or the left, it has to be, things like your books will help a lot. I find, though, that preaching about things, which, of course, I'm going to be slightly guilty of here, doesn't really work so well.

44:28So you have to find ways to kind of seduce people into other roles and to other ways of being, which is why I say, if we had people in our culture that would kind of embody this new 21st century form of masculinity, it would really help if we saw those kind of figures in our films, our television shows, and the books that we read or whatever our culture is. It would really help. But we have the opposite. We have the rap stars. We have the politicians. We have the movie actors. It seems all about just being cruel, if you say. So I'm a bit pessimistic about this in the present. and maybe you can help me.

45:10Maybe your book will help. It seems like a lot of young men are really struggling and lost. What advice would you have for kind of younger men or parents or single mothers of younger men who are struggling? Do you have any sort of best practices around coaching young men? Well, I have mentored a few, and there are a couple that I'm dealing with right now. And it's very difficult because the culture is against them. And I try to, first of all, I think the example that you set, as I said with my father, the kind of calmness, the energy that you have is very, very powerful. It communicates in a very direct way.

45:54So if you're saying that, you know, truly being masculine is having a degree of self-control, but you don't demonstrate that self-control, then they get the opposite lesson from it. So you have to display these values. But in one particular instance, to deal with kind of like a cultural issue, this is a young man who's incredibly bright, incredibly ambitious. And I, first of all, tell him that ambition is really good because a lot of young men don't have enough ambition, and ambition is a very much testosterone-driven masculine trait that's actually extremely positive, as long as it's channeled in the right way.

46:36He has a lot of ambition, and I completely, completely enforce that and confirm it, so that's a very positive value. But some of the issues are he's trying to do so many different things. He's got so many different games going on at the same time. And I see a lot of young men who do have this kind of quality, this kind of ambition. They think that they can do like seven different kind of, of hacks where they're going to get power and money, et cetera. Tied hustles. Yeah, hustles. And I say, no, you know, I'm trying to tell them, no, that's, that's a, that's a recipe for disaster because you're not going to develop enough skill in one of them.

47:15And what is the common thread of all all these things, I keep trying to come back to it, and I can't really find that common thread. The other thing that happens a lot is they're in such a hurry to make a lot of money. And it's kind of, I don't know if it has to do with Andrew Tate, but it's kind of that cultural thing that making a lot of money shows that you're masculine, because now you've got that fancy car that you can impress women with, and you've got the clothes, etc. But that's not, that's going to lead you down the wrong path. So it's not money that matters. It's not making a lot of money.

47:48It's developing yourself. It's developing your skill and getting a lot of knowledge and being patient. Just be patient. That's another trait that I think could be one of these. You know, the part of the problem here is when you say that they're masculine, you're saying that women aren't that way. And I please, that's a real false form of reasoning about what I'm saying. I'm not implying that women are impatient or that women don't have self-control. We're just talking about qualities that I think are masculine virtues. But being patient, being willing to take your 20s and not make a million dollars, but actually develop yourself and develop skills and develop your character and develop discipline is much more important than six or seven figures.

48:37So a lot of it for me in dealing with young men is calming them down, making them patient, and making them grounded in certain values that have kind of been lost in the 21st century. Values of doing things a bit slowly, values of taking your time, values about, you know, being considerate of other people and not pushing them around, being empathetic, things that are kind of lost. So I do mentor young men, and I recognize very deeply the problems that they're dealing with. And I probably would have shared these problems if I had been growing up now. You've been very generous with your time. So I'm going to wrap up here with just a quick lightning round.

49:17Oh, dear. I hate this. There you go. Sorry, boss. Best piece of advice you've received? Well, best piece of advice was I was in the 90s. I was in a very depressed part of my life and I was trying to have it both ways. I was trying to have my cake and eat it too. I was trying to be creative and in the movie business, and I was trying to make a lot of money. And my girlfriend at the time, who I'm still with, she said, Robert, you have to choose. You can't have both. You have to choose doing what you love and being creative, and then maybe money will come, or you have to give that all up and just make money.

49:56She was right, and I erred on the side of doing what I love and being creative, which was writing the book that I wrote, and then all the money came in. So that was the best advice I was giving. The last piece of media you streamed or read that kind of moved you or resonated? Oh, wow. I've been reading a lot of articles about kind of what's happening in the world right now. Things in the Atlantic Monthly, which I subscribe to, which has a lot of very interesting, not all of them, us very interesting, thoughtful articles. And I was reading one by, I forget her name, Anne Applebaum, maybe it is.

50:40She writes some very brilliant stuff and she's kind of diagnosing the authoritarian turn that America is taking, but that is part of a global trend. And I love people who kind of connect what we're living through now with kind of history, because I think history tells us more than we think about what's happening in the present. So I was very impressed with that article. This should have been a longer conversation. We're going to try and sum it up into a quick, crisp answer. Current state of power, autocracy in the world right now and in the U.S., do you think it gets better or it gets worse? Well, it's certainly in a very bad state right now.

51:27But if you read a lot of history, like I do, things turn. And it's hard for us to see in the moment. And there have been other moments like this. They're very chaotic and people freak out. We're going through a freak out right now. So things could very well turn in five or six years. And particularly if this economy crashes and we go through very hard times, there could be a turn towards something else. And I'm not giving you a short answer, but I'm reading right now about the French Revolution. and the French Revolution, nobody expected it. Nobody thought it was coming. It was a complete shock.

52:04In a matter of two months, the whole thing fell apart. These things can happen very quickly. And I think they will something like that, not the French Revolution, something similar could happen in five or six years to throw that out. If you could go back and speak to someone you've lost, who would it be and what would you say to them? Oh, God.

52:31the two people I've lost the most was my father. And I would tell him that, you know, he was alive for my first book. So we saw that success because he was getting kind of worried about me. And I would tell him, Dad, you didn't believe in me all of these years. I mean, you were very loving and all that, but I could sense that you were doubting. And as it comes out, I've made more money than you've ever made in your life. I'm not bragging, but because I stuck to my goals and my desires and what I love, I ended up being very, very successful. And I have you to thank for that, for the patience that you disciplined, that you instilled in me.

53:14I think we should leave it there. Robert Green is an author who writes about strategy, power, and seduction. He has written seven international bestsellers, including The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, Mastery, and The Daily Laws. He joins us from his home in Los Angeles. Is that correct, Robert? Yes, I am. Los Feliz. So, I can't tell you just how impressed I am with you. And I just think you're doing such good work. And I love how measured you are. I don't know if you are. You strike me as kind. You strike me as trying to help people. You strike me as fearless.

53:53I really do. You're a real inspiration for those of us out there trying to be fearless, have an impact, have a footprint, trying to help people. I think you're just fantastic at what you do and you're doing great work. It was really a pleasure. Like I said, you have been, I can check off the top of the list of who I wanted on this podcast. Really appreciate your time. Wow, I'm really honored to hear that. Thank you so much. That That means a lot to me, and I really look forward to seeing this book that you're writing. Thanks, Robert.

54:25This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prof G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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