"These LAWS OF POWER Will Change Your Future!" | Robert Greene

I've learned a lot and if I could boil down what I think makes a person successful in one sentence or one word, I would say it's your-.

What should we know about the Daily Laws, a new book, 366 Meditations on Power, Seduction, Mastery, Strategy, and Human Nature? Why is this going to be helpful for people to chunk on a daily basis something that they can take action on for yourself? What do you think?

Well, okay, so I've been at this Lewis for 25, 26 years now, which is a very good chunk of time. And, I've learned a lot. And if I could boil down what I think makes a person successful in one sense or one word, I would say it's your attitude in life is, is the cutting edge, right? It isn't your skill. It isn't all these other things. It's how you look at the world. Right? If you look at the world through the lens that's negative, like nobody likes me, the world is against me, I'm not really good enough, I don't deserve things, that's what you're gonna get in life, right? If you look at the world like this opportunity for me, I'm good, I'm aggressive, I know how to get there, I'm gonna get it, that's what you're gonna get. So how you look at the world is what you're going to get. And the attitude to me, that is the most powerful and the most forceful, particularly nowadays, is a realistic attitude, right? You're able to look at the world. First of all, you're able to look at yourself and assess who you are and not be filled with all these illusions or these insecurities. This is who I am realistically. This is my problems, my weaknesses, my strengths. This is what I'm good at. This is what I'm destined to create. your ability to look at other people realistically and see through their appearances, see through their masks. They pretend to be this but they're actually that and I'm not gonna be fooled. I'm not gonna be naive and I'm not gonna be fooled. I'm gonna see into that. This is what the world is like right now. These are the trends. I'm not deceived by all the things in social media. I know what's going on and where the world is headed in three years. You've got this laser focus you're seeing through yourself. you're seeing through other people, you're seeing through all the bull in the world, you understand what's happening. You can't fail when you have an attitude like that, right? And you also understand the power of being fearless and taking risks, which is also a part of a realistic attitude. All right, how do you get there, right? Well, it's not easy because we're born with a certain attitude, we're born with things, with burdens and baggage from our childhood, etc. It's like a daily process. Yes. Right? You have to see first your negative attitude where it comes from, the problems with it, what is holding you back. And now you have the power to begin to fashion it to a degree that's going to actually be something strong and powerful. Well, this is what the book is designed for. So I've been covering this for 25 years. It's scattered across six books. Right? In Mastery, I talk to you how to be realistic about your career. In Power, I tell you how to be realistic about the power games going on. In War, how to be strategic, human nature, how to see into people. But it's all scattered and it's hard to find the cohesive thread through all these different books. This book is going to bring it all together. It's going to help you, it's very laser focused, and I talk about it in the introduction, on crafting that hardcore realistic attitude about you, where you're headed in your career, the mistakes you're making about people and their weaknesses and the power games they play, about what it takes to influence and persuade people on and on and on. And you're going to be doing it every day. Now, I know because I meditate every morning. I've been doing it for 11 years now. It saved my life, I can honestly say. Every morning I sit on the pillows for 40 minutes now. I just focus on getting outside of myself and I learn through this process that day by day by day by day change occurs. It doesn't occur in a dramatic way. It doesn't occur like, wow, I'm different now. It almost occurs unconsciously. Things seep into you that you're not even aware of. This book is designed to get under your skin day by day by day by day. You're going to read it. It's going to make you think. You're going to go on to the next day. It's going to kind of strengthen that idea, come at it from another angle, and slowly it's going to get under your skin and it's going to alter how you look at the world and alter your attitude. And then maybe you'll reread it in a year. That's what it's designed for.

For me, this is the exact type of book that is perfect for me because it's hard for me to get through a full book, any type of book. But when I can go to one page every day and read something that's going to be powerful to help me improve and give me a tip, a strategy, an idea to improve something in my life, it's the perfect type of book. So make sure you guys get a few copies, the Daily Laws, because your friends are going to enjoy this, especially in a world where for most people it's hard to stay focused long periods of time and keep their attention on something for a week or weeks through an entire book sometimes. I don't want to generalize, but the Millennials of the world, this might be a good book for them to get as a gift. So get this, and every day you'll get a page that'll give you some meditations on power, seduction, mastery, strategy, and human nature. It's going to help you improve your life. So make sure you guys check this out. Where are you spending the most time on social media right now?

I probably have become... I have somebody managing my TikTok account.

Yes. That's a good TikToks on there. Yeah.

I don't really spend a lot of time on it, but I have looked at it and that's kind of a new frontier and it's kind of exciting.

It's very exciting.

Yeah. And it's not natural to me, but I'm learning it.

Yes.

Because, you know, I'm at that age where it's like TikTok. Well, I don't know, but I'm enthusiastic. I probably spend more time on Instagram, I have to admit.

And you're Robert Green official on Instagram, is that right?

Yeah. Okay. I've kind of gone off Facebook like a lot of people. And I've never really been a big Twitterer.

Although I do have a Twitter account. Robert Green there, but Robert Green official.

You'Re posting more on Instagram. Yeah. Okay.

But I have posts on Twitter as well. Then I have the TikTok stuff that's going on. Is that just Robert Green? When they search your name, we'll find it there. We'll link it up on the show notes as well, so people can see it there. I want to ask you a question that I've asked you before a few times. This is your fourth or fifth time on now. It's called the Three Truths. And I have your previous ones here. So I'm curious if it's evolved or changed as you have maybe a different perspective on life now. So the question goes like this, imagine it's your last day on earth, many years away from now. and you continue to accomplish all of your goals and dreams. But for whatever reason, you've got to take all of your work with you and it's your last day and you have three final things you get to share with the world. These three lessons you would leave behind or three truths you would share with people. And they wouldn't have access to your books, your work or this interview or any of your content. What would be those three truths that you would leave behind?

Whoa. Well, you know, so recently I suffered a stroke like three years ago, came out of the blue. I was totally healthy, swimming, biking, doing everything, you know, and now it's all taken away from me. So the truth is, the first truth is don't take anything for granted. Don't assume that what you have now is going to go on forever. It could be taken away from you tomorrow. And appreciate and love deeply what you have right now. It is an insane gift to be young. I wish I could go back to being young again because that was the most fun time in my life, right? You're in your 20s, you're healthy, you're exciting, you're seducing, you're just having lots of fun. Well, it doesn't last. Well, appreciate it and suck, soak up every second of it because something like this could happen to you tomorrow, particularly with this COVID that we're all living through. So do not take the smallest thing for granted because it could be taken away from you.

That's one.

Well, do not be afraid to face your own kind of weaknesses. And I'm speaking from experience because you're asking me what's happened recently. And I've had to come to terms with my own limitations because I thought that I could do anything. And it's not just the physical limitation, it's the mental limitations. It's the frustrations that I have. It's the anger with myself. It's like, why can't I... Is there something wrong with me that in my physical therapy I'm not able to strengthen my left arm, etc. And I've been afraid, I think, to confront that and to see that I am my own enemy. I've probably gotten in the way of my own recovery by my attitude, by being impatient. by being in too much of a hurry, right? So I've had to step back and I've had to see, I've had to have some humility. So that's sort of the lesson.

Okay. Yes.

I'm not as great as I thought I was, but I can work on that. Now that I know that my impatience is getting in my way, I'm going to work on that every day. So if at night, I stumble or I drop something, I'm going to calm down. And I'm going through this kind of physical therapy now, which is actually trying to alter my attitude towards my own body. But I'm confronting my own limitations, and it can be at any age, and it's actually helping me get through this kind of ordeal that I'm going through.

Wow. Okay.

Three.

Three.

I guess it's, I hope it doesn't sound too soft, like Robert Greene is not like the 48 Laws of Power anymore, because I am still that hardcore person. Don't worry about me. Or I haven't lost my edge, maybe a little bit. Is the ability to kind of forgive people, you know? So, and I'm not the most forgiving person. So I had a thing in mastery that's called Suffer Fools Gladly. It's an expression from the Bible. and it means the world is always filled with foolish people, fools, who are stupid, who don't know what they're doing, etc. And your tendency is to get angry and irritated and upset, and instead you need to suffer them, you need to be tolerant towards them, because there are too many of them in this world, right?

Sure.

And I've never been good at that, you know? I've learned like when I'm judging people, etc. to sort of it kind of goes to that other one they're all interrelated. But you know, maybe I'm too quick to judge. Maybe I can understand their problem. Maybe if I've hired this researcher and they're not working out, maybe it's because I'm not explaining myself very well or they've got other issues and I'm not going to maybe try and repair the relationship or keep them on as a researcher, but I'm going to forgive them. I'm not going to carry the weight. I'm not going to carry them around with me. There's this old Buddhist kind of paraphable where these two monks come up to a river and there's this old woman who can't cross the river and one of the monks, because they can kind of walk across, she's too old, One of the monks puts her on his shoulders and carries her across and lets her go, and she's so grateful. As they walk on, the other monk says, you, know, we're never supposed to do that. As Buddhists, you're not supposed to touch people. You're not supposed to handle them. You violated one of the most important laws of Buddhism. On and on and on, he went criticizing him about it. Finally the guy said, well look, I left that woman on the other side of the river. You're still carrying her right now. Right? You're still carrying her mentally with you. Let go. Right? So that's the, I've created for myself a mantra in my daily meditation. It's called let go. Just let go of the rank or let go of the hurts, let go of the past and kind of forgive and kind of be in the moment.

How important is expressing emotions and feelings of the greats that you've studied or the people you've been around? Do they express their emotions and feelings? publicly? Do they do it privately? Do they journal? Do they suppress their emotions and just have a positive attitude all the time? What do you think is the importance or lack of importance of that?

Well, I think everybody's different, but in general, if my knowledge of psychology and all the books I've read, is that you pay a price for repressing your emotions. That repressing something eventually comes out. And the great psychologist Carl Jung he was the one who kind of studied that in great depth. When you repress, for instance, your dark side or your dark emotions, they come out in other ways. Right? So trying to always, like, present yourself as this very stoic person when, in fact, you're not, you're going to pay a price for it. It's going to come out in ways you can't control. Right. There's going to be a negative consequences to that. And so On the other hand, you don't want to be this person who's constantly emoting and telling everybody what you feel like. It's very irritating. You have no self-control and people are judging you. You look like this weak person who can't control your own tongue. You can't control it. Okay? So I compare it in my books and talks to the metaphor of the rider and the horse. Right? So the rider of the horse is your rational brain. And the horse is your emotion. It's the animal part of you. It's what makes you angry or excited or fearful. The rider is what makes you kind of, you know, get things done. If the rider on that horse, I don't know if people have ridden a horse, I used to ride a lot when I was a kid. If you hold the reins too tightly, if you're trying to control the horse and repress it, the horse feels it. It feels it in the way your thighs are constricting it. Horses are very sensitive animals, right? And it won't do anything. It won't follow any of your instructions. It won't go anywhere. Or it will freak out and it will run far away and it'll throw you off the horse. But if you just let the horse go anywhere, the horse also feels that. The horse has been tamed to some extent because this guy has no respect for it. He's not trying to do anything. And the horse will go wherever it wants. You have no control. People who know how to ride horses, they know they have to have a balance. You have to hold the reins not too tightly, but you have to be able to guide the horse. You have to squeeze with the thighs, but not too tightly. You have to feel relaxed and one with the horse, the horse that gives in, and you can go anywhere. So you want a balance in life. You want to be able to understand your emotions, right? You want to be able to understand why you're angry. why you're fearful, why you're frustrated, and not just give into the emotion, like let the horse go anywhere, so that maybe next time you understand, well, maybe I don't need to feel anger or fear because it's not really related to anything. So you have a balance. You understand the horse, the emotion, and you can control it to some degree, but not over control it or repress it. Because, like, I know if I get angry a lot, I could have anger issues. Right? The moments where I give in to it, I regret. I sent that angry email to my agent. Oh man, the next day, you feel bad. For worse, you feel bad. Yeah.

Do you apologize a lot after you're angry or do you just kind of say, I'm just a grumpy old man now, just like.

Well, I am a grumpy old man, but yeah, I do apologize. Oh, that's nice. Apologies are good. It's a good thing to do. Yeah. But yeah, I feel terrible, right? And so you have to go through a process like, Before you send that email, why am I angry? Do your hindsight thing. Will I be feeling angry in three weeks? No. Is it really important? Is it possibly my own fault? When you go through that process, you're not repressing the anger. You're not pushing it down so then it explodes three days later when you yell at somebody who inadvertently crosses your path. That's what happens when you repress it. But you understand it and you let it work for you. You know, okay, I won't write that angry email. But then you can use your anger for other things like writing a book, right? Etc. Or believing in some social cause that's important, etc. So it's a balance.

I'm curious about 48 Laws of Power and Laws of Human Nature. This is probably gonna be a hard question, but I'm gonna throw it out there anyways. What was your favorite Law from the 48 Laws of Power, pre-stroke. And what would you say is your favorite one now? And same for human nature. Favorite kind of law of human nature, pre-stroke that you're like, this is the thing that I'm going to see in my life that I really am connected to and now something that you lean on or connect to in a different way.

Wow, that's a tough question.

It's hard, I get it. I mean, there's so many.

Yeah.

Well, first thing that comes to mind, maybe.

Well, for me, for the 48 Laws of Power, this will be kind of symmetrical. But law number one was always, like, the most important one to me. Never outshine the master. Because it was the first law, it was the first successful book I ever had. When I first pitched it to the man who produced the book, I told him the story that initiated the map, Never Outshine the Master. And I had personally violated that law on several occasions, and it caused me a lot of misery and pain in my life.

Why?

Why what?

Why did they cause you a lot of misery and pain by violating that law?

Well, this is before I wrote the book. So, I had a job in the film business and television show with a very famous person whose name I will not mention. And I was a researcher on it. And I was the best researcher there by far. You know, you would count success by how many stories you found and what got actually filmed.

And yours got filmed the most.

I had like a 60% rate or something like that. I knew I was the best. And then I got fired.

Why?

Right?

'Cause you were outshining the master.

Well, at the time, I thought she hated my guts. I pissed somebody off. I said the wrong thing. And I was capable of sometimes doing that because I could have an attitude. And I was blaming other people, et cetera. But then it sort of dawning on me. And then later when I wrote the book, it was very clear to me that I had inadvertently made her think that I felt greater than she was, that I was after her job. Other people were really praising me and not praising her so much. I was getting too much attention. And it happened another time, a second time, right? I wasn't controlling myself. And so that law meant a lot to me because it was very painful. Being fired is a very painful experience. I don't know if you've ever been through that.

No, I haven't.

Really?

No, I mean, I'm not a job. Oh, I mean, I got, I mean, actually, I did get fired. I got fired once. by getting in a fist fight on a golf course. I was a grounds crew kid when I was like 14, 13. And we were playing around, this is a long story, we were playing around throwing leaves at each other and someone punched me in the back of the neck as I'm throwing leaves at him. So we're raking up leaves and grass on the golf course and he punched me in the back of the neck and I just went crazy and got in a fist fight. We got in two fights, real fights in my life, that was one of them. And we walked back, I walked back to the grounds crew shed and washed my knuckles off because they're bleeding. And I was just high on adrenaline and the kid who I got in a fight with walks back a couple minutes after me and I couldn't recognize his face.

You punched him in that path.

I mean it was just like, it was an animalistic reaction when someone punched me. It was just like, you know, I mean, it only lasted for maybe 10 seconds and then someone took us off. There was other people around and kind of broke it up. But it just kind of hit him in the right spot, I guess, and it kind of swelled over his eye. It looked like a softball in his eye. And I was just like, wow. And it was really the first time I felt like I had any power as a 13 year old. And the grounds crew leader or the boss saw him walk up, kind of yelling at me, and he just goes, you,'re fired. And he writes a check and gives it to him. He's like, get out of here, never come back. And I was like, So that was.

My only, that was law number one B, never punch a colleague.

Exactly. Never punch anyone. But for you, it was stressful and emotional getting fired.

Yeah. I mean, you take it personally, et cetera.

And you were like, I was the best.

I was. I mean, I haven't had many jobs. I didn't stay at a job more than a year my whole life. But whenever I had a job, I worked very hard at it. And, you know, I was very conscientious, so that was very painful.

But don't you want to, I would think if someone's excelling on my team, I'd be like, celebrate them and keep going. Wouldn't you want that? Or do you not want people to.

Well, Louis, come on.

What'd you want people to accelerate?

I didn't read chapter, law number one.

Remind me. I understand, but yeah, in a perfect.

World where angels were everywhere and we all just had wings and We were all just all out for other people and for the greater good.

Right.

But we happen to live in this planet that's not like that.

I know.

We're descended from primates. We're much different from that. So how do you- How do you.

Grow with like, how do you improve in a career but not outshine too much so you stay in the career, I guess?

Well, you have to read law number one. But you have to first understand a very basic principle of human psychology. Yeah. Everybody has an ego and everybody you meet is insecure. They have insecurities. But your boss, the person above you, has even more insecurities and a larger ego than other people. And you don't think so. You're probably aware that they have an ego, but you don't think that they have insecurities because they're the boss. But actually, they're always worried about whether people like them, whether people respect them, whether the people think they're doing a good job or not. They're riddled with doubts and they're constantly looking out for people to see their body language, etc. Does that guy really respect me? Does he have an attitude, etc.? You don't think that. You think, if I just try hard to please the boss, it will work out wonderfully. But you might be doing something else. You might be stirring up their insecurities. So you have to always be aware in life of people's insecurities. You know, it's like lesson number one. It's going to save you a lot of painful moments. The people you deal with are riddled with doubts. They're riddled with fears. They have things hanging over them from childhood. They're wondering about themselves. And you inadvertently are feeding their insecurities and you never intended to. And then you find, wow, look what happened. And you don't even understand why it happened that way. So when you're fired for outshining the master, you don't know why you were fired. It's very hard to learn a lesson when you don't know why it happened. That's what's so complicated and tricky about people. Because when people do something that's kind of harsh and negative, they never tell you why they're doing it. They always have a cover story, a narrative, right? They have a way of deflecting it as if they aren't to blame. And so you're confused. That's why I wrote the Laws of Human Nature, because you're continually confused, 'cause people never tell you what they're really doing, why they're motivated, why they behave such a way, and you take their words and their appearance for reality, and it's not reality. So, that's the source of so much of your painful experiences in life.

Okay, so law number one, never outshine the master, was the law that you were really leaning into pre-stroke. Is there one post-stroke that you think about that that sticks to you more, that connects to you in a different way now?

Yeah, I would say assume formlessness, which is law number 48. So that's why I said the symmetry.

Ooh, look at you. I like this.

And that's all about kind of being fluid and adapting to circumstances and never having like a concrete form. It's a very military law. Comes from Sun Tzu, And like the perfect army doesn't have a form, you can't figure out where they are, what their strategy is, their strategy has no form. Or the great swordsman Miyamoto Musashi said that nobody ever knew what my strategy would be. I was completely formless. So it's a way of being very fluid in life and very open and never doing the same thing twice and adapting your circumstances. what you do to the circumstances around you. And when you have a stroke, it's not easy to do that, right? Because your body certainly isn't capable of being fluid, so your mind has to be fluid. I have to retrain myself from not getting stuck in certain ideas and certain patterns of thinking, certain negative things and certain frustrations and certain ways of looking at the world. I have to be fluid and take each day as it comes and adapt myself to this new body that I have. So, I think about that a lot.

How does someone, you know, you have a book on mastery. How does someone master the art of something if they're always trying something new every day or if they're always formless and reinventing themselves every day or, you know what I mean? From these, the swordsmen, you're saying it's like he was always in a new strategy, but If you want to master something, you typically have to do something over and over to master it, correct?

Yeah, well, that's the thing about my books and about the laws. They're about the circumstances. So I'm not saying assume formlessness for all you people out there who are 18 years old who are about to enter the work world or 21, just be formless, no.

Master something and then when you've mastered multiple things, you can adapt.

Miyamoto Musashi was fighting for 20 years as a swordsman. in life and death battles and he eventually developed this power of his, right? But if he were formless without ever having any experience, he would have been killed in his first sword fight. So, you know, you have to have discipline, you have to assume like this is what I'm doing and this is my career path, as you talked about, as you mentioned in Mastery. And you have to put in the hours, the 10,000, the 20,000 hours. And then when you get to the level of a master, Like a Bobby Fischer in chess, then you can do anything you want. You're on another level. You can be as formless as possible. Right? So yeah, you're right. I'm not advocating that for just anybody out there. But for me in my situation, after I've had the success, it's also for people who've suffered a major blow like that, like an illness or something. where your habits of thinking can get very set and very rigid, where every day you wake up and go, wow, why do I have to be like this? Why couldn't it happen this differently? As opposed to being open to what life brings me every single day and not developing a kind of a defensive, rigid attitude.

One of the things that I love about your journey and story is that you mastered so many different types of writing over 20, 30 years. I think you were like, first in a newspaper and then a magazine and then screenwriting and then certain types of books and then weird, you know, you did all these different styles of writing that you tried a lot of things, mastered them to a certain point, which gave you the range to kind of write in the way you do now. It gave you the ability to write the way you do now, which I think is interesting. So I like that you say that when you're in your 20s, like, find something to, to hang on to, to master. for a few years, then you can go to the next thing and that'll give you more range.

Well, there's a... I don't know if I can remember my metaphor, but it's like you want a path in life when you're 20, 21, 22. But you don't want it to be so rigid because you're going to burn out, you're going to get bored and you're going to give up. You want that path to be like that instead of like this. So, you can go this way, you can go this way, you go this way, you go this way. But if your path is like that, you'll never find anything because you'll try everything. So I knew I was to be a writer and I tried eight different forms of writing. You know you want to be a musician, you try writing music, you try learning an instrument, you try performing, producing, you go into entertainment as a lawyer, as a music lawyer, whatever. You try different things. But you know this is what I love in life. if you have no idea what you're going to love, and I deal with that because I help consult with people who come to me with that very issue. Robert, I don't know what my life's task is. I never had an indication when I was a kid. That's the worst situation to be in. There are ways to solve that, but that's really painful because you have no idea where to go. But you want to have a sense, but you want to be fluid and open so that eventually what happens is you hit upon the right thing, right?

And most of us are never gonna hit the right thing in 25.

No, I was 36, 37, your age when it happened.

So maybe I'll start to feel like I'm hitting the right thing soon.

Yeah, you found it out a little earlier. You found it out like eight years ago.

Yeah, I think so. But I think it's always evolving and growing and, you know, you gotta be fluid with it. So it's funny because I'm, I've been consistent with the main thing. which I started the podcast almost eight years ago and I said I'm going to do it once a week for a year and see how it goes, see if I like it, learn, but I got to be consistent enough for a year. Then I did twice a week for the second year. Now we've done three a week for the last five, six years, I guess now. And I've been consistent in one thing, trying to improve. You see me from the first episode to now in the different stages, the leveling out the production, the set, this, you know, everything, audio quality, video, all these different things, my skills. But also, I wrote a book. I'd never done that before. We did live events. It's like I'm trying new things as well that I'm not that good at the start, but we start to master them over time to create more range and diversity. But I'm still sticking to the main thing as the main thing and evolving as I go.

That's the perfect way to do it because you need challenges in life. You do. I always look at it this way. If you're here, this is your skill level. A challenge like here is going to really improve you. If the challenge is here, it's too much, you'll fail and it'll have bad consequences. If you're here and you're below your level, you're going to get bored. So the optimum thing is to always choose your next project that's a little bit above you so you can learn and feel excited and challenged and have that adrenaline rush from trying to meet the challenge and get there and all your energies involved. So that's the proper way to do things in life for me.

So what about the laws of human nature? What was one that you were like, oh, this is my law. This is the one that I love the most right now, for whatever reason, pre-stroke to the one now that you think about more as important for your life?

Well, my favorite chapter was kind of about the dark side of human nature, the shadow. Confront your dark side and make it work for you, as opposed to repressing it. So everybody has a dark side. I don't care if you're Mahatma Gandhi or whomever, you have a dark side, right? It comes out in ways that you're not even aware of. And I explain in the book where our dark side originates from. You know, as a child, we had a lot of powerful emotions that we couldn't control. We would hit our sister. We would play terrible practical jokes on her. I'm talking personally.

You went to terrible- I did the same thing.

Terrible practical jokes. We'd be kind of mean and aggressive. but also we'd be very loving, which is true as well, would be a full range of things. And then you learn as you get older, Robert, you can't hit people in school. Stop that. Don't be like that. Don't play those practical jokes. It's bad. People don't like it. And you get older and older and you start repressing that, those kind of feelings that are very natural to you. Right? Because we all have aggressive impulses. We all, we, we love our parents, but there's also a side of us that that doesn't like them. We resent them. It's natural. But we have to repress all that because we have to be good social animals. We have to be good little kids. We have to be little angels at school. We have to be angels at work. All this pressure, like, I've got to repress all that. I've got to be this perfect person. I have to be someone who pleases, who's very nice, blah, blah, blah. And then when you're 28, you start becoming addicted to alcohol and you don't know why. you start getting really angry, you have anger issues, you yell at people, you don't know why, you're like a 45-year-old person with a very steady profession, you leave your wife and you run off with a 19-year-old, destroying everything that you've built. The dark side has come out because you've repressed it instead of dealing with it. So the idea was you need to understand your dark side. confront it and make it work for you. And I have a dark side. I have, you know, every chapter in the book, you know, sometimes now I think that my answer wasn't the right answer, but I'll go with it anyway.

It's all good.

In writing the book, I kept having to say, I wrote a chapter on narcissism. Robert, you're a narcissist, you know? I wrote a chapter on the dark side. I go, robert, you have a dark side. same thing with the chapter on aggression. And like, what is my dark side? And you know, I had to analyze it and deal with it and think about it and think about how I, my, any success I've had in life is because I managed to use those dark emotions in my work and channeled them because they have tremendous energy to them. They power you forward. So I had anger coming out of working in Hollywood. I kind of hated the environment. I hated people's hypocrisy. I hated all the sycophancy and all that. I was really angry, but I didn't let the anger turn inward. I channeled it into the 48 Laws of Power. So I used my dark side. And I really liked that law because it showed me that I'm a victim of this, but I also unconsciously learned how to use what I'm writing about. So I kind of drew on my own experience.

What about when you're in a relationship and you want the relationship to work long term? You wanted to have, whether you're getting married and you want to, you know, you want to last and you don't want to just hang on to the marriage and be miserable, but you want it to be a happy, thriving existence, healthy, conscious, loving, to the best of your ability. Should we continue to seduce our partners in committed long-term relationships or is that not something you do once you're in a relationship?

Well, I have a chapter in the Art of Seduction that deals with, I think it's the last chapter. And basically, I think a lot of people complain. It used to be women complained about it, but I think it transcends that, where we've been in a relationship for a year and all the things that I'm going and hearing the woman talk, because I've heard this before, everything that he used to do, he doesn't do anymore. Right. He doesn't take me special places. He doesn't make that extra effort. He doesn't buy me special gifts anymore. All the things that he did when he wanted to have sex, he was like going crazy and doing all these things. He was dressing really well. Now he kind of dresses like a slob. He kind of doesn't want to go out anymore. I hear that more than I hear the opposite. Like, he keeps trying to seduce me and I'm getting tired of it. I don't hear that too much. But I hear that he's taking me for granted. Right? So it's not like you're practicing the same things that you did when you were trying to get that other person to fall in love with you. That would be exhausting, right? And I don't think it would really work. But it's that you still do some of the effort, right? You still try to surprise the other person. You still have sides of your character that they don't know about. You do things that they've never seen before. You still take them to places. you still put effort into buying gifts, right? You buy that special gift. You still take effort to take them one night to a special restaurant or to a movie that they something that they had. You know, like if you understand, if you listen deeply to that other person and they reveal their secret desires and what they're not getting from the world, just take that in and go, if I give her a gift or take her to a place that fills that very thing that she said she's not getting, man, that'll have such a powerful effect on that person. Even if you've been in a relationship for two or three years. And I've been in a relationship for decades, I'm afraid, I have to admit. And you still have to go through that process.

Really?

Yeah.

What is the questions you can ask to find out someone's secret desires without saying, what are your secret desires?

You just have to listen. Okay, so the main thing is get them to talk about their childhood.

Really?

Yeah. I mean, obviously, don't go, Tell me about your father. What was he nice to you?

What question can you ask in an organic, relaxed way that would open that up?

Well, in the context of a context, you can say, I don't know. Are you close to your parents? Do you see them? And then, just without being too inquisitive, without making it clear that that's what you're doing, just get them to talk about their early life.

Why is that important to figuring out people's secret desires as adults asking about their childhood?

Because it's the key to everything.

Really?

In the Laws of Human Nature, I have a chapter about, I call it about gender, about the mix of the masculine and feminine. and there's a concept from the great psychologist Jung called the anima and animus. And he basically says that from a man, from his mother, if you're straight, because things change, the man from his mother internalizes an image of women that it will haunt him for his entire life.

Wow.

Right. Because the relationship between a mother and son is very intense. It's not the same as between a mother and a daughter, right? Because she's the opposite gender. You're cycling on her breasts, she's the only person you know for the first couple of years. It's very powerful power and unconsciously her image slips inside of you, internalize a part of it. And you're going to have this, you're going to carry with this. Even if you don't like your mother and you come to not like her later on, that image is still inside of you and you're still going to choose women that have some of those qualities that you would like, you wish your mother had or that she did have. So those early relationships, the woman with her father will tell you so much about her and about her weaknesses and her vulnerability. Really? And what she's missing, yeah.

So what if the person is one.

You know, anything where the person gets excited Right.

Then just take note of that and start.

If you touch upon a subject and you see that they get nervous or they laugh a lot, they're very excited, just put that in your little index there and go and return to it. You've hit upon a chord, a subject that either excites them or gives them fear or whatever. There's something very powerful going on there. Right?

Right.

And childhood is a very powerful one. So.

What should people be aware of when they're getting into a relationship? What do you think are a few questions they should ask and get answers to to see if it's a potential for a good relationship or it's going to be completely off or they're just wasting their time trying to get into this? Are there any questions you can think of?

Well, no, I can't think of questions. It's more like... Or should it be.

Asking how is your parents relationship and this and that?

It's not that direct, it's not that verbal, it's not that intellectual. It's more of a kind of a spirit meshing between two people, right? So, there are plenty of examples of couples that have done extremely well where they kind of disagree on political issues, although that can be a problem as well. But there's a little bit of tension on that, but they connect on some deeper level. I refer people to that chapter I was just talking about in the Laws of Human Nature, where there's a level where we connect to people that is not on the surface, that is kind of non-verbal, that has to do with our unconscious, that has to do with things that we've never been able to get from our parents or whatever. and we kind of have these ideals that have been unmet. And connecting on that level, connecting on the level of spirit, where your emotions, it's more like your emotions mesh together well than your ideas. Like there's, you know?

Yes.

And because if that other person is is incredibly dramatic and out there. And, you know, that's something you can, even though they have the similar ideas to you, it's going to grate on your nerves.

You know, I saw a post recently, excuse me, about something like, I'm going to mess this up, but something like you don't, you don't marry the person. You marry the person's, like, trauma. You marry their. you know, in-laws trauma, you marry like what they haven't healed yet, you marry their emotional, you know, the relationship to certain things, you're marrying the emotions of the person really.

Yes, exactly.

And being aware like just because they look great and just because you have fun together certain times, you're really marrying all the other stuff along with it.

Right, and you won't find that out right away.

Because they're good at hiding it. Yeah, right, they're good at like reserving that until six months a year, two years later, right? So it's making sure that your emotions mesh well over your ideals. Is that what I'm hearing?

Over the intellectual part, over just the superficial fact that you both vote Democratic or Republican or that you both like this movie director. I mean, certain tastes that mesh are important, but I don't think there has to be kind of a charge between you, a kind of something that goes on underneath the surface. that has nothing to do with just words or kind of superficial things, you know? Something deep spiritual. Yeah.

Because sometimes people will think, oh, we have all these things in common, we have this connection, this is a great match, but then they don't experience the emotional or spiritual level. Right. And then that comes out later and you're like, well, we are from the same city and we went to the same school and we voted whatever. and we have similar friends and we like to go to baseball games, but if there's not that spiritual or emotional meshing.

Ruben, your idea is very apt. You are marrying the other person's emotions, right? And so that's not something that you see right away. And you could love the same movies, you can have all these other things, but if that part isn't connecting on the right way, if they're revealing something that's gonna really drive you crazy after several months or years, it doesn't matter about how well your ideas are similar.

What if your ideas are amazing together, the sexual connection is incredible, but the emotional level is not in sync?

Well, you know, it's hard to generalize. You know, have a relationship, it'll probably last just a few weeks or a couple months. You know, it'll be hard to build a relationship where you don't connect on this kind of deeper level. but that's not to say that it doesn't happen. And it isn't to say that people can't change, right? So, you know, you might discover after five years that this person has qualities that kind of get on your nerves a little bit. You wish you had seen them earlier, but by then you've fallen in love with them. Right. And you go, you know, I can appreciate their weaknesses. I can love their weaknesses. I can get over it. It still kind of irritates me. It still irritates me, but there's something deeper. I actually really love this person, and even their flaws are lovable. And that happens, right? So it's hard to generalize about everything, and you can't change. You can, like, see that maybe I'm overreacting, maybe I'm too cold and rational, and they're too dramatic, and maybe I can learn from her or him and become more like them. People change and that's the great thing about a great relationship, is the ability for the other person to change you as well.

To influence you. How long have you been in your relationship now?

It's over 20 years.

Over 20 years. What do you wish you knew about being in a long-term relationship like this 20 years ago? Is there anything you would have done differently on your end or anything that you wish you would have known? to, I don't know, it seems like it's been a happy, healthy relationship to last that long. But is there anything you wish you would have knew earlier, Robert, you know, at that point before getting into the relationship?

You mean and not have the relationship or what?

No, and being in the relationship, like things that you could have, I don't know, it's things you could have eliminated or things that you could have done differently yourself to make it even greater or wish you would have like solved things before challenges came up for you if they did come up?

Well, it's.

Or have you just been, like, the king of relationships?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. As I. As i've made very clear, I have got my own problems, my own flaws, you know? No, I mean, being more forgiving would have probably helped. You know, i'm. I can be kind of rigid. and kind of stubborn thinking I know the right way all the time. And I felt like, you know, she had certain flaws that were really too strong. And if I could just like, you know, go with them and say that I have flaws as well and be a little more humble and being more forgiving of her, I think that would have helped. Yeah. You know, and that's not easy all the time.

How important is it, do you think, being in a healing process before entering a new relationship, as opposed to just jumping into a relationship without the process of reflection, self-awareness, looking at what pain has caused you in your past that you haven't forgiven or healed?

It's very, very important. Because oftentimes your choices with a partner occur for reasons that you're not aware of.

Really?

I talked about an example in the Laws of Human Nature that's sort of a classic case in therapy where this man had come to a therapist and he had a series of like 10 very powerful emotional relationships. And each time he broke it off. And he would say, you know, she betrayed me here. I found out that this was happening and I no longer loved her. on and on and on. The therapist started to go into his early childhood. And he discovered that he had a mother, this man who was very cold, wasn't very loving to him. And he had a sense, and this is what happens to children, it happens to boys, when the mother is like that, you feel abandoned. You don't feel like it's your fault. I'm sorry, you don't feel like it's their fault. You feel like something's wrong with you. and they have chosen to abandon you. It scars you. It scars that three-year-old in a way that he'll never get over. And so what his pattern was, each time he got into a relationship, before the woman could begin to maybe hurt him and abandon him, he was the one doing the abandoning. It gave him a sense of power and control. It was like he was redoing the mother relationship where he was the one abandoning and not being abandoned. he was not aware of this at all. He had gone through 35 years of his life and all of these relationships, probably choosing women that would kind of mirror that early relationship as well, but that he could then abandon them so he could have this feeling of power. Now, you might not be having something so dramatic going on in your life, but you will have patterns like that. And I know I've had patterns like that, and I've analyzed them and I've become aware of them. And so, if you've been in a very bruising, kind of damaging relationship, which we've all have, if you've been alive for enough years, right? It is absolutely essential that you step back and analyze it, because kind of negative relationships and traumas like that will reveal a lot of truths about yourself. You will tend to blame the other person. for everything, but you need to look at yourself and see the patterns that are making you fall for people like that. Right?

And you're getting into those relationships over and over again.

Yeah.

So what would it look like when you start the healing process or the awareness process of, okay, I'm the one who's responsible for this pattern. I'm the common denominator of all these relationships. So there's partially me to be responsible for. what would it feel like to start the healing process and what would that next relationship look like when you make a commitment? Would it just feel different? Would it feel like, oh, this is very healthy. How would that look, do you think?

Well, there's a lot of problems. It's not easy. Yeah. And the main problem, Louis, is believe it or not, some of those early dysfunctional relationships with your parents are charged with this kind of sexual energy.

Really? Yeah.

And so you'll find yourself attracted to the very man or woman who's going to hurt you. Whereas the man or woman who is good for you, there's no kind of sexual charge. Because this isn't everybody. This is maybe a third, I don't know what the percentage is. Don't quote me.

Sure, sure.

But you are actually more attracted to the person that has these damaged qualities. Why is that? Because you get to relive some of those early traumas. And so the problem that will happen, and I can see this in my own life as well, that the person who is good for you, that's actually caring that will mesh with you, that physical charge maybe isn't as strong. And that's a problem because you want to have that element. But you need to be aware of this. You need to be aware of the fact that some of the people that you're most attracted to, you're not attracted to just because of their sexy body or whatever it is. There's also some kind of issues you haven't worked out from your early childhood that are at play in that relationship and that are going to cause you a lot of pain.

Why does that turn us on sexually, do you think? Why is the human brain turned on by drama and, you know, unhealthy relationships? Like, why does that Well.

I would be a multi-billionaire by now if I could answer those questions. I would be the ultimate doctor of love. But I can say this, that when you are a child, you are two or three years old, we are talking about entering the spirit, try and enter the spirit of the three-year-old Lewis Howes. You are very vulnerable, you are very weak, right? You are at the mercy of this person who is very powerful. your mother and also your father, it depends on what, you know, you're at their mercy, right? And you're open to them, you depend on them for so much. So the emotional energy that you are putting onto them is extremely powerful, more powerful than any other relationship you will have in your life, and you're not aware of it. And so it meshes with all these other kind of physical impulses and desires that you have. because a child who's two or three years old is actually still having sexual impulses very early on. It's kind of creating a pattern of attraction that you are very rarely aware of. It's not to say everybody is like that, but it's a pretty common denominator that if you have, for instance, a very narcissistic mother who was more interested in herself than in you, you're going to be attracted to narcissistic women.

If you're a man, yeah, don't you? Wow.

Yeah. And you're not aware of it and, you know, it creates this a lot of pain for you, right? So you've got to go through a process. It's kind of like there's the ancient Greek play of Oedipus. Right? I don't know if you were. He married his, he killed his father and then he ended up marrying his mother.

Crazy. Yeah.

You know, go get the Oedipus complex from. Right. And he never realizes it until he's like in his late 30s and he's gone through this, his whole career as the king of this Thebes, and then suddenly. he's made aware of it through various things that happen, right? And it's like, oh my God, really? I've done all that? This is what my life is? And he's so overwhelmed that he cuts his eyes out and he blinds himself as proof of how blind he was in life. And so the Greeks are saying in that play that we're all kind of blind. Fate kind of pushes us around and we're not even aware of it. and the moment of feeling enlightened about becoming aware of some of these patterns in your childhood is actually a great moment. It's very painful, but it's very powerful. Sorry, I didn't mean to take it to such a dark place. I didn't mean to take it to such a dark place.

No, I love this. Let's say someone has been through a tough breakup. and maybe this is their first breakup they've gone through that was tough and tough relationship or this is a pattern. This is their third or fifth relationship in 10 years that's been like, you know, what's wrong with me? What would you say would be the next three things they should focus on after the breakup? On how to find that awareness and open their eyes on how to start, you know, observing men or women in a different way before they get so committed and go all in and start fantasizing about how amazing they are. What would just say are three things they could do before entering another relationship?

Well, first of all, to become acquainted with yourself and to see, know who you are and know the source of your own desires. So, if it's your very first relationship, it's a little hard to see patterns. But you can begin to see patterns of the kind of person that you're attracted to after the third or fourth time. And to analyze that, and to be aware of it. Now, you know, some people will say, well, won't that kind of ruin the whole relationship game that I'm analyzing myself that seems so unseductive, etc. And, you know, if you're in your 20s and you're healthy and you're young, maybe it doesn't matter so much. Right. You know, you're going to have some painful moments, but you're having a lot of fun. Okay, I'm not going to, I'm not going to, you know, rein on that parade. But eventually, you're not going to be so you're going to be in your late 20s, you're going to be in your early 30s. And a series of bad relationships, they're going to start wearing on you. They're going to start creating trauma. And they'll start infecting you with this kind of negat, this kind of defensiveness, where every time you meet someone, you're worried that they're going to hurt you, and you can't, like, you know, open yourself up to them, right? So you've got to, as early as possible, understand your own patterns. Why am I attracted to this person? Just simply ask that question, right? It's, you know, like, what was it about him or her that attracted me to that person? You know? Is there something I'm not thinking about? Could I have foreseen some of the darker side of this person earlier on? Yes, obviously. Could I have seen the fact that he could be someone who could be kind of cold and abusive? Yes. You know, oftentimes a man who is like that will love bomb the woman. He'll overwhelm them with emotion so they get confused and they're not aware of it. That also is a sign when a man overwhelms you in the first two days with so much attention that he's hiding something dark. But don't look at it as if it's always the other person. See your own temptation, why you give in to someone like that, why you are attracted to people like that. Go through that process and then say, all right, what are the qualities that I really, really want? What is important for me that I'm not getting from this person? The sex is great, but there are other things that are more important. validation, like the other person cares about my work and about my career. They're not just interested in me as a physical presence, but they actually show interest in my future, right?

Yes.

What are these things that I need that are very important to me that I didn't get in that last relationship, right? Who am I, right? That's just the question. Who am I? What are my deepest needs? and what are my dark patterns, right?

-Yes.

-And then to go through a process of, if I, we talked about this earlier, if I now become all defensive and closed, and if I'm like always judging the person, you know, oh, he's not right for me, she's not, you know, da-da-da-da-da, because you're afraid of being hurt again. -That last person has power over you still. -Yeah, they defeated you. They conquered your spirit. -Wow. So you can't be afraid to have some more of that pain again, right? You have to open yourself up a little bit here. And if you do that and you're hurt again, at least you can say that that person who hurt me earlier on has no more power over me. You know, I'm still able to fall in love. I'm still able to let myself open myself up to another person.

Yes.

It's incredibly important to be able to feel vulnerable to another person. It's a deep human need. It goes back to our childhood. It's part of our human nature. And if you close yourself off, it's not only gonna affect your romantic relationships, it's gonna affect you in work and everything.

Yeah, so don't jump into another relationship if you're closed off, is what I'm hearing you say. Be willing to heal that part or process it.

And then one last thing. You asked for three. Those were two. The third is learn to judge people by their character.

So true.

All right. So not the superficial charm and smiles and all the great stuff that they're able to fake, but who they are deep inside, right? You know? Do they have some of these strong character traits? Can they take criticism? Matt, you have no idea that that is such an important quality in a relationship.

Taking criticism?

Yeah. If that other person cannot take any kind of criticism, how can you be in a relationship with them? And they'll make you, they find ways to make you pay for criticizing them. They get passive aggressive, they get cold, oh, I'm never going to do that again. You can't be in a relationship. So judge someone like that. Can they take criticism? Can they deal with moments of stress? Can they get outside of themselves? and think about me. You know, think about how they are in a conversation. Do they hear what you're saying? Do they come back with things that reveal the fact that they've been listening to you, that they picked up signals from you? Get inside them. Get inside their character and be able to judge them on that basis as opposed to their sexy veneer that they have. So those would be the three things. It all starts with something very simple. which is the power over yourself. If you have no power over yourself, then you're at the whim of everything else in this world, right? So what does that mean to have power over yourself? Well, we can, and this is a lot of what I talk about in the Daily Laws. It begins with something very simple, which is you have to know who you are, right? So you're walking around in this world, you don't know really who you are, you don't know what your needs are, what you really desire in your life because you're a product of social media, you're a product of what other people are telling you you should like, what your parents tell you, what your friends tell you. You don't know who you are, what drives you, what really motivates you deep down. And so you're kind of wandering in life. And when you're unmoved from yourself, Everything else will affect you in a way that you cannot control, right?

When you're on what from yourself?

Unmoored.

What does that mean?

When you don't have an anchor, like a moor is like an anchor.

Okay. You gotta speak in simple terms to me over here. I'm sorry.

Maybe is my pronunciation.

No, it's again, no, no. I don't know what the word is.

That's what I'm saying. Unmoored, gotcha. Okay, so it's like a boating term. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, if If you don't know what you were intended to do in life, what your career was that meshes with you well, you're going to be making all of these wrong decisions. And you're going to, people will do things to you that you won't be able to understand why you're reacting the way you're reacting. You'll get lost. You'll end up in blind alleys with your career and you'll go, Man, I'm so helpless. I have no power. I have no control. The world is against me. It's 2021. It's the pandemic. It's well, no, it's you. It starts inside of you. The real problem is in you, not in the world, right? You don't know who you are. And it's not easy. I have sympathy for people because we're so distracted. We're so much in our phones. We're so much listening to what other people are telling us is cool on Instagram, on TikTok, on Facebook, etc. We're like creatures of media. We've been programmed. We don't know really what drives us anymore. We're so tuned to what other people are telling us is what we should be interested in. So it's not easy. It takes some time. It takes some reflection. That means that you have to have the ability to step back, be alone, be alone with your thoughts, and as this book is talking about, meditate and reflect on your childhood, on who you are, on the mistakes you've made, on the wrong career paths you've taken, on the wrong relationships you've taken, and begin to construct an image of that real secret inner, the true Lewis Howes that lies buried deep within all the bull that people have added on to it. If you can't control yourself, If you don't know yourself, you can't control your own emotions. You're going to be reacting to everything that comes your way without having an understanding why you're doing that. So when you know yourself, you know, I don't need to get angry about this because it's not something that touches me personally. It doesn't matter in the end. Whereas if you don't know who you are, everything affects you personally and you're getting grumpy and insecure and bitter and resentful. You have to start with yourself. It goes back to the ancient Greeks and the Oracle of Delphi, Know thyself.

What is the source of our inner power that we maybe aren't even aware of?

Very simple. What makes you an individual, what makes you different, your uniqueness. That's what the first month in the Daily Loss is about, the month of January. if you look at people who are successful, you know, you look at a Lewis Howes or you look at a Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or whomever, you say to yourself, There's nobody else like them on the planet. You may hate Elon Musk. You think he's an egocentric maniac. But you can't tell me there's another person with that kind of guts, right? With that kind of confidence. and with that kind of vision, because he's one of a kind. And you're going around trying to imitate other people, trying to do what you think other people are doing. You're running away from your source of power. What makes you unique, what makes you even weird, what you may even be afraid of because it's so different from other people, is your source of power. It's what makes you a Superman. or woman or whatever, yes. So I don't want to talk about myself too much because who's interested in that, but I write books that nobody else has the same kind of structure or the same kind of approach. That is my source of power. And very early on it was threatened. I wrote the 48 Laws of Power. We finished it in 1998. The publisher had already purchased it, but they came back and they go, Robert, this book's a little weird.

Yes.

You know, the structure, the things on the side. We want you to change it. We want you to make it more like other books out there. And me and my partner, the pack guy who packaged it, he backed me up and we said, no, we'll walk away from the deal. We'll find someone else. Because we knew that being different was the key to making this book a success. It could very easily fail. It could have bombed. But it would have failed in the right way, which is being yourself, doing something different, standing out and not being afraid of what makes you unique.

And how old were you then when you launched that book?

98. I was 39 when it came out.

39. Did you have a lot of success prior that would have shown this would have been a success?

Nope.

So you weren't some big shot writer that was getting awards and other things.

I was the very opposite of that.

You were the opposite?

Yeah. Well, I mean, very simply, quickly. You know, I graduated college. I wandered around Europe kind of trying to write the great American novel. I lived in Paris. I lived in Spain. I lived in London. Had all kinds of seductions. I had a great life, a lot of fun. Then I come back to New York, it's time to get serious, get into journalism. I kind of started off successfully. I worked at Esquire. But then I didn't really like journalism and it kind of wasn't working. And then after four years I go, this isn't right for me. Go back to Europe, I wander around, I try to write another novel, fail again. I come back to LA to try and make it in the film business. And it doesn't work well and I'm a failed screenwriter. I work for various film directors, but I can't sell a single one of my screenplays. And here I am, 35-36. You know, I have a lot of skill. I've learned writing for film, I've learned writing for journalism, I've been writing novels. I have skill, I have discipline, I have research ability, but I have nothing to show for it. Absolutely nothing. I was a nobody. and this man whom I met who, you know, I've told the story many times, I pitched the idea of the 48 Laws of Power. He thought it was great. But, you know, there's a big difference between pitching something and making it happen. But because I had been so disciplined and I'd been writing all this time, I couldn't. I could actually, you know, meet his expectations and write a proposal that would get him excited. But I had nothing to back up my, to answer your question, nothing to back up my confidence. that this book would be good. Just simply having a sense it's a book about power, and I understood instinctively that power is about kind of going your own way, interaction with boldness. That's going to be one of my chapters, and then I'm going to be all weak and timid about my book and how it has to be like other books, that I'm a hypocrite. So I was bold, we were bold, and it turned out well.

So you were 39 when the book came out. I'm pretty much 40 years old with nothing to show for your life, except for lots of experience, but not a bunch of success or accomplishments?

No, no success, no accomplishments. My parents were starting to give up on me.

So you turned 40 and the book really didn't take off right away, right? Didn't it take some time for it to kind of...

It did well. I mean, it got attention, it got a lot of press for it. It kind of stirred because it's a weird book, kind of stirred up some interest. And it was selling, but it's selling much more now than it did back then.

Really?

Yeah.

20 something years later.

Oh man, we've been, yeah, like during the pandemic, the sales have skyrocketed.

No way.

Yeah.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

So how did you have confidence to claim your inner power after years and years of trying things and not working out the way you wanted, kind of trying something else? How did you stay consistent with your inner power and not lose sight of at least trying new things? Well.

It'S a great question and it's not an easy answer, but it might even sound a little bit insane, to be honest with you. But deep down inside I always had kind of a weird faith in myself. I always had a sense that there was a destiny that my life was following a certain path, that there was something fated to happen. Maybe it was a little bit grandiose. Maybe it was kind of overconfidence because it would swing up and down. I would go from confidence to the deepest depression. But deep down inside, I never gave up because I knew I had something in me. Now, if the 48 Laws of Power hadn't worked, I don't know if I would have gotten my act together. I might have been crushed by it, to be honest with you. Or maybe I would have picked myself up. I picked myself up 30, 40 other times in the past when people told me, like this one editor, Robert, you're never going to be a good writer. You should go into business or law school. I've been crushed several times and I picked myself up. But I don't know if that might have been the nail in my coffin, literally, at that point. But I had a voice inside of me saying, you can write. I know you can write. I've seen you write, Robert. I've seen you write great things. You've never put it together. You've never made it consistent. But you have a voice. And that inner voice of mine might have gotten smaller and smaller and smaller. So I could barely hear it, but it never left me.

How does someone give themselves more power when they feel defeated?

Well, we're circling back to the original thing. So if you know that you were destined for something, that you were fated for something, that you have a sense that your life had a meaning, a purpose, then you can withstand the traumas, the setbacks, the difficulties, the bullsh*t criticism and all the other things. So in mastery, I talk about a very simple fact. When you were born, you have this DNA that will never be replicated in the history of the universe. There will never be another person with your exact makeup, Lewis Howes. And on top of that, no one will ever have your exact parents and your upbringing and your early life. So there's only one of you that's ever existed, right? And There's a reason for that. There's a purpose behind it. And the purpose behind it is our culture, the same thing as in nature, thrives by the diversity, the people coming into it with different angles, different perceptions, different ideas. That's what makes a culture creative, etc. It's why the Renaissance was so great. So it's a purpose for you being who you are. Right?

Yes.

And it may not be that you were destined to be Napoleon or a president or whatever, but there is some kind of greatness in you waiting to come out. And it could be just on the level of working with your hands. Working with your hands is a great skill to be a master carpenter, to be a master builder with wood or whatever. That is a form of greatness.

Absolutely.

You were destined to do something like that and it was in, like a seed was planted at your birth But if you don't know what that is, then you can't find your way back to it. And if you're 24 and you're in my position and that man who's having his third martini says, Robert, you're never going to be a great writer. Go to business school. I would have gone to business school. I wouldn't be here talking to you. But I kind of sensed deep down inside that I was destined for something else. Right? I talked to a lot of people, particularly in the podcast world, people who began other careers. They went into law, they went into something else. They weren't happy, right? And then they found their way to like creating a podcast and it's taken off, right? It's made their lives. They found their way slowly to something else. It wasn't just any old podcast. It was something that reflected their own strangeness, their own weirdness, but they have discovered something that they were destined to do that makes them different, right?

Yes.

Because there are a million other people who can do the same thing out there in this world, but there's only one person like you born with your own strangeness, your own inclinations, you know?

Absolutely.

There's the Jimi Hendrix song. I don't quote him off him, but he says, I'm going to wave my freak flag high, right? You want to wave your freak flag high. You're a freak, you're weird, you're different, but embrace it. That's your source of power. And when people criticize you and you have setbacks, you'll land back on your feet if you know that. You'll have moments of doubt and depression like I did, but you'll eventually land back on your feet.

Do you think it's possible to accomplish your goals and achieve great things and be a success in whatever the definition is for you without going through multiple failures? Do you think it's possible to just be, just finished school and now the first thing I do, it's just gonna work out and everything just works? Is that possible?

I'd say no. No.

Yeah?

Because it's just not how life goes, you know? I mean, I could, I mean think of like the greatest athletes in the world, people who are at the the top 0.00001% of the top of their profession. They're failing all the time. They're not winning championships every year. Their careers go up and down. Everybody who's successful, you will see ups and downs. We venerate Steve Jobs as perhaps the greatest tech entrepreneur. He went through an incredibly dark period after he founded the company. He got fired from Macintosh. He founded Next, which was a failure. He was as depressed as I was in the mid 90s. He didn't know what was going on. Then he got his career resurrected with Apple on a second go. He had a career that went like that, you know? I mean, you can take any name and you can find the same kind of trajectory. And it's because through failure, you develop some toughness, some inner toughness. Right? You develop a thick skin. You're able to take it.

Right?

Life involves adversity. And if you've only had everything good, the first time something happens that you don't expect, you're just gonna wilt. So I don't care who you are, there's always somebody, you've always, people who were successful have always had some kind of failure of adversity. Otherwise they wouldn't be able to stay on, to rebound.

A lot of people are afraid to create something because they don't want to fail. They're afraid to start, launch, create, whatever it might be, post, because they don't want to fail. What do you think is worse than failure? If failure is actually a good thing for a lot of people to help them learn and grow, what is worse than failing?

Not trying. So, you know, if you fail, and, you know, people are laughing at you, Etc. And you feel kind of, you know, vulnerable to criticism, Etc. You take that moment and you learn from it. You learn what you did wrong, right? You learn what didn't work, and then you grow from that. And then the second thing that you create is going to be powerful and it's going to be successful. I'm sorry.

I forgot your question. What is worse than not than failing?

If you never try, you're never going to learn, right? And a lot of people don't try because they're afraid of that very thing of actually failing. They'll disguise it as, I'm not ready. I didn't go to the right school. I don't have funding. My daddy isn't rich. You know, people aren't helping me. There's a pandemic. it's bad out there, etc. No. So you're just blaming the fact that you're afraid of failure, right? You're finding excuses. Actually, the pandemic is a terrible, terrible thing. Don't get me wrong. It's 650,000 people who have died. It's insane. But business-wise, it's an incredible opportunity for you. There is so much change going on that if you're young and you're you're smart, you've got some skill, you will create something incredibly brilliant and find your own niche. So stop whining and stop blaming other forces and try even before you're ready. Start that business, try something and learn from it. I tried many things and I failed many, many, many, many times before I wrote the 48 Laws of Power. And it taught me a lot about myself. And then I did the 50th Law with 50 Cent. And the first version of the book that we turned in, the publishers didn't really like it. It was my first real failure as a successful writer. And maybe Robert, maybe you're losing a little bit. And then I kind of heard why they didn't like it. It hurt, but I understood. It was a failure, but no one ever will see it. And then I go, okay. I need to make this book more kind of a certain style that I've done before. Alright, I'm going to not complain and I'm going to produce this book in the eight months that they gave me to redo the whole thing. And I learned from it something that I will never forget about why that book failed and I've never repeated that mistake again. So you have to learn from your mistakes and you have to be willing to fail. otherwise you're never going to develop that kind of thick skin that the world requires.

What's the conversations we should be having with ourself more to set ourselves up on the path of accomplishing, achieving and feeling better about who we are and our uniqueness in the world?

Well, one conversation you should be having is very simple. Life is shorter than you think. okay, you're 25 and you're thinking, Wow, I've got 10 years to figure it all out. I've got all these vistas of time. I'm young, I'm healthy, etc. You don't have nearly as much time as you think you do. It goes very fast.

Really?

So, you need a sense of urgency and energy. Like, by the time I'm 30, I'm going to have to try and start that business. I'm going to have to do something. I don't have as much time as I think I have. Right? And you have to develop some fire inside of you. You have to say, you know, a lot of times people don't give you deadlines in this world, right? So you could, you could spend your whole 20s and 30s never producing the thing that you dreamed of because no one's pushed you. No one said, you better do this by the time you're 35 or we're throwing you out of the house or. or whatever. There are no consequences for procrastinating. You have to create those consequences. You have to live on what I call death ground. Death ground means your back is up against the wall, the enemy is coming at you, and it's either defeat them or die. And you have to tell yourself, I'd only have so much time. The peak creative years for anybody is in their early 30s. Really? I think so. I believe so. And people have borne that out in various studies. Yeah, there's a different kind of creativity that one can have when you reach my advanced age. There are really fluid, creative times, and I know it personally, are in your 30s. And they creep up really quickly. And if by the time you're in your mid-30s and you haven't started creating something, man, you're going to be in your 40s and it's almost going to be too late. so you don't have as much time as you think you have. That should be the number one conversation that you have with yourself.

Any other conversations besides sense of urgency?

Well, the worst thing in life is to be 55 or 60 and to go, I had potential. I had dreams. When I was a kid, I was going to think I was going to do this. and you've realized none of that, right? So you want to have accomplished something in life, something that you're proud of. It doesn't have to be a book or anything. It could be something that lasts that you're proud of. It gives you a sense of accomplishment, right? Because that carries off into every aspect of your life. It carries off into your relationships. It carries off into how well you sleep at night, et cetera. So you don't, you want to have that in life, you want to accomplish something. What is it? What is it I want to accomplish? What was I meant to accomplish? And how can I start on the process tomorrow? Not next week or next year, tomorrow. Maybe you can't start because you don't have the money, but you can start planning. You can start maybe taking classes or learning skills that you can do that tomorrow, et cetera.

You've had a pretty positive attitude, I think, in the last couple of years. I'm curious, what has been the biggest lesson for you with going through a massive stroke, where it's hindered your relationships, where it's hindered your physical activity, your ability to work on the things you're passionate about, what's been the big lessons?

Well, I'm a very driven person, so I wasn't going to let this defeat me because the alternative was losing hope and becoming suicidal and I wasn't going to let that happen. Also, I knew I had another book that I really, really wanted to write. so I had to keep living, you know, and I was in a coma for a while and things were a little bit touch and go during that. And I feel like there was something willed inside of me unconsciously that kept me alive. The other weird thing is I spent a lot of my time alone, swimming, hiking, riding. It just so happened just by coincidence that I was driving when my wife was there. and so I have a feeling that I kind of almost was ready to have my stroke once she was there. I can't say that for sure. These are, you know, weird kind of psychic almost kind of thoughts, but I felt like there was some will power in me that was keeping me alive so I could keep going. But the main lesson was it's been a struggle. I can't say it's been easy. I can't like lie and say I've just figured it all out and I'm this incredible superhuman being. I've had moments where I've cried, I've had moments where I felt like giving up. It's like a daily struggle and I other people, you know, I know a lot of people in this world suffer. They have it a lot worse than I do. I have a comfortable life, I have a lot of money, I have my books, etc. But on the level of like my body, just every day has been a struggle. you know, I wake up, can I walk? Will I fall? Can I hold this in my hand? So dependent on other people and a very independent person. So I've had to really, really work on myself and really develop a lot of patience which I don't have. And the thing is, when you get an illness like this or something happens like that, the natural thing is just sort of wait it out. and wait until your body recovers. And people said I would have a full recovery two years down the line or so. So the tendency would be just to let it go and let time take its healing process. But I wouldn't let that. I don't know why, but I was like, no, I'm gonna work out every single day. I'm gonna do therapy two or three hours a day. I bought a special bicycle because I can't do a normal bicycle. It's a recumbent bike where you sit down. Man, it's like the hardest thing. You have to get up these incredible hills and 80-year-old grandmothers are whizzing by.

Me on their bicycle.

This is outdoors. Outdoors in Griffith Park, yeah. Wow. But I'm just determined to beat the thing. And sometimes it beats me. So every day it's like a battle. It's like a boxing match. Who's gonna win? But I'm not gonna give up. I just keep trying and trying. I'm going to see a new therapist. I'm working on new exercises. I'm working on different parts of my body. I'm trying to build strength in certain muscles so I can start walking normally. Because as you know, working out, swimming and hiking and bicycling, that was like my main way of de-stressing. I loved it. I love being out in nature. I love being alone with my thoughts. And to have that ripped away, it was like having part of your whole body taken away from you. So, but I'm pretty relentless. That's my lesson. I didn't give up.

Which book of yours that you've written and the lesson in that book have you had to lean back on more than any other lesson or principle from all the books? How is it, which one is like really, oh, that's interesting that I wrote about this five years ago and now I really need to apply it.

Well, the last three books would be more applicable. So there's the book with 50 Cent, 50th law, which is about fear and overcoming your fear. And in fact, the last chapter was about the fear of death in that book. And, you know, I've had to deal with a lot of fear. And you don't know what it's like every day you're walking and you don't know the next moment you're going to fall. I've had several falls, and falls are literally what will do you in. So it's a constant fear, and I just won't let it affect me. I push past my limits. I do things that I'm not supposed to do. I take hikes, even though I have to hold on to somebody to do it. People think I'm crazy. So I had to deal with my fear. Mastery taught me that repetition, doing something over and over and over again, like any kind of skill, learning a skill like basketball, whatever, leads to something. So every day, just using my left hand instead of my right hand, forcing myself and slowly, getting used to it. That taught me a lot. And then the laws of human nature, you know, I have a one thing that when you have a stroke, it affected the right side of my brain, which destroyed the left side of my body. And supposedly when the right side of your brain is damaged, it tends to make you more emotional. And I've definitely become more emotional. So I've had to learn to control some of my anger, some of my impatience. some of my frustration, and obviously the laws of human nature a lot about that. And the last chapter is about having to deal with death. And so with all of the things I'm dealing with and all the kind of, God damn it, why can't I do that? I have to keep reminding myself, I'm alive. I'm gonna write another book. The birds are out there chirping. It could have been a much different story. Last month, six weeks ago, was the second year anniversary of the stroke. and I had this thought, this could have been the second anniversary of my death. And people would be gathering together, or maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't. But it would be like the anniversary of my death, but it's not. I've been given a second lease, and I have to think about that every single day.

Isn't that crazy to think that when you die, hopefully people will think nice things about you, and every year they'll get together and say, hey, let's tell a nice story. story about our friend or that we lost, hopefully. But isn't that crazy to think that someday we're gonna die?

Yeah.

And someday no one's gonna remember us.

It's a weird thought. And it's also like, I wrote about this, I can't remember, I think it was in the 50th law, where enough time passes, nobody remembers you.

No one.

200 years from now, no one will even know who Lewis Howes was or Robert Greene, you know? And so all traces of you are gone. Yeah, it's a weird thought.

You might be in a history book or something. Maybe.

Maybe. If the planet is still here.

It's here, yeah.

Yeah, that's true. But this is sort of what my next book is about. You have to be able to take every kind of negative experience or emotion in life and find a way to transmute it into something healthy and positive. so how do you take that thought and turn it into something life affirming and productive? And so my way is, okay, that very well may be. I better make the most of what the time that I have, because in 200 years, I'm nothing, right? Also, through my books, I will have a life that will go on. I will have a legacy. Work on that. Think about people reading you in the future. So I use it. any kind of negative thing, this is sort of the idea of Amor fati that I talked about in my books, any bad thing that fate brings you, you have to find a way, it's like alchemy, using the philosopher's stone, you transform that into gold through a mental process.

How do you think we can transform ourselves into the person or the people we want to become? When there only seems to be negative experiences in our life. I'm hearing you talk about transmuting negative into a positive. How can we truly transform ourselves into this desired dream life when it seems like everything is out to get me, the government isn't the way I want it to be, my friends are not the right friends. What do you think we can start to do to transform ourselves?

Well, I would tell people to read chapter 8 of the Laws of Human Nature. because I go deeply into that, which is the law about your attitude. And the idea is you have a viewpoint, a perspective. It's like the lens on a camera. And it's through that lens that you view the world and you view people and you view events. And no two people see the same event in the same way. Right? And so your attitude, how you look at the world, will determine what you get in life. So if you're focusing on all the obstacles, if you're focusing on the government, if you're focusing on COVID, if you're focusing on this person didn't give me that thing, my parents didn't give me that thing, that's you creating your attitude. You're building it. It's something, it's like a crystallization process. This crystal starts getting bigger and bigger and bigger as each new crystal is added and you crystallize this negative defensive attitude towards life and that's what you're going to get. and there's simple examples of that. So if I'm kind of come to this interview and I'm sort of defensive and I don't really feel good about Lewis, I'm not sure what's going to happen, you've picked that up on me because you're a very astute person, you're very sensitive. You pick it up and so you're not going to be very friendly to me. So my initial attitude creates a reaction in you which is negative. It starts from me but because Most people are kind of paranoid and don't have that self-awareness. They'll think, God, Louis is such an asshole. I don't know if I can say that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not on television. He's such an asshole. He's so cold. Why is he? But it's coming from me. You're not realizing it. So you create how people react to you. You create how negative circumstances affect you. So, you know, we have COVID and jobs are being wiped out left, right, and center. you're having to spend a lot of time alone at home. Your life has been massively disrupted, most people. And you can see this as like, God damn it, why did this have to happen? My life is ruined. I'm not gonna go anywhere, blah, blah, blah. You know, and you start maybe drink a little bit. You start putting on some pounds, that COVID, whatever they call it. COVID-15 or whatever.

COVID-15. I think it's the freshman 15.

Right. Well, it's understandable. It is a very devastating kind of bomb that exploded here. But on the other hand, you could say, this is an opportunity. And I'm not trying to be Pollyannish about it because I'm not a Pollyannish person, as you know. I wrote the 48 Laws of Power. And I don't never have, no one ever has to say that I'm Pollyannish after I wrote that book. But it's an opportunity, and the opportunity is on many levels. to rethink your life, to rethink your values, to rethink where you're going, to rethink what your career should be, what your relationship to other people should be. It's a time to reorient yourself to who you are and what you like and what your goals are and what makes you unique. It's a time to read books and enlighten yourself and enrich your mind. So if you take that attitude Then, I mean, Ryan Holiday wrote the best book on this subject. I encourage people to read it. The obstacle is the way. If you have that attitude where obstacles are actually the path forward, nothing's going to stop you. But it's all how you look at things. It's kind of a mental process that you switch to seeing the positive side. So a stroke is like the worst thing that happened to me. It ruined so much, but it's also been a blessing. some ways because it's really made me appreciate my life, appreciate the people around me. And I'm now writing my seventh book. And I, you know, I keep having this thought that I could die tomorrow because I, you know, I'm in a very vulnerable state for catching the coronavirus once you've had a stroke. It could happen, you know, I gotta get this book done, man. I am so motivated. I'm working so hard on it because You know, I see that this is like my great opportunity to express something before I am dead. Yeah. So it's really just that switch inside of that lens, how you look at the world that will change what you're just talking about.

What are the greats in history? What have they done when they lose a war? They, you know, they're a family member dies, they go through a life threatening condition. What are the great presidents, rulers, leaders of the past? What do they do in those moments of tragedy that allow them to bounce back and then rebound into something more powerful or greater than before? Is there common themes from the past that you've seen?

Well, Abraham Lincoln faced a lot of that stuff. He dealt with a lot of death early on in his life with his parents and people around him. and he suffered some major setbacks. And then you can think of like Winston Churchill who also dealt with, like he led a campaign, a war campaign, and during World War I that was a major disaster. He was in disgrace and he was a very manic depressive person and he became very, very depressed and he bounced back. A lot of it is Getting back to your attitude and towards thinking a particular way. So defeat and failure is the greatest thing that could ever happen to you.

To say it again.

Defeat or failure is the greatest thing that could ever happen to you.

Why?

Because when you're successful, you tend to not learn anything. You think, wow, My book, my business got so much, did so well. I've got the Midas touch. Anything I do is going to be great. And look, I've got all these people around me, these sycophants saying, Robert, you're wonderful, you're great. I love what you did, your book's fantastic, etc. etc. And slowly, slowly, I don't learn anything. And then my next project is a disaster because I've become grandiose, because I'm not really moored in reality. Failure teaches you your limits. It makes you realize what you did wrong. It shows you what you could do differently. So making a personal example, because it's always easier for me to do that, I did a book with 50 Cent called the 50th Law. And the first iteration of that book I wrote, and I've never had this happen before, people weren't really liking it. And then the editor, the publisher dropped the whole project. And I was facing a major disgrace. 50 was going to lose faith in me. I lost a project. And it was a big blow to my ego. And I haven't, we all have egos. And so we found a new publisher and he said, Robert, we'll do the book, but you've got to rethink it. And I need this book in eight months. And I go, you, want me to start all over after a year working on this book? and you want it in eight months? No way. But then I realized, okay, what is it that I did wrong? And he said, you didn't make the book a Robert Green book. You made it too much about 50 Cent. People want to read you. They want to read about your ideas. They don't want it to be so much about him. They wanted a combination of the two. But you were being too humble here. And I go, okay. And I listened to him. and I wrote the next book and it took me, I worked like a fiend and I got it done in eight months and I took every lesson to heart about how I can fail and it taught me very valuable lessons about the books that I write and how I need to have faith in my style and my ideas and not worry that if I'm working with a celebrity that I have to give him all the attention. Failure taught me this. and success didn't teach me anything. So failure or defeat, you know, great generals in battle, that's what they would learn. But the greatest general in history, I believe, was Napoleon Bonaparte. And Napoleon Bonaparte had 10 years of the greatest success anyone's ever had in military history from 1796 to 1806. He was on the top of the world. He crowned himself emperor, and then he had eight years or ten years of most abysmal failures. It's because it all went to his head. He lost touch with who he was. He lost touch with his own military strategies that were grounded in success. He became too conservative. That's the other thing that success will do. It'll make you conservative. It will make you think you have to hold on to what you've done and keep repeating it. And the world success and great things happen by being not conservative, by being open with your ideas and challenging yourself and always trying something new and being willing to change. So that's, I think, the lessons there.

What would you say are three questions we should ask ourselves when we face some type of tragedy, some type of big loss, failure, near-death experience, breakup, what do you think? You said you started becoming introspective and asking yourself and changing your attitude. What three questions should we ask yourself?

Well, I don't know if I can get to three, but I'll start with one. The first one is, could it have been worse?

Could it have been worse? It could have been worse or could.

It have been worse? You're asking me for questions.

Yeah, yeah. Could it have been worse?

Yeah. Let's say, you know, I broke up with the girlfriend and she had very embarrassing pictures of me and she posted them all over the internet. Well, thank God that didn't happen, you know, or I could have died. That's always the last one you always say. Could have been worse. I could be dead. Right. As long as you have your body and your mind together, you can recover. I tell people, and you can recover from the worst. possible disaster, even public humiliation you can recover from. Because fortunately nowadays people have short memories and they'll always remember your last success. So things are never as dire as they appear to be. So it's could it have been worse? What is the worst scenario that could have happened? Well, luckily that didn't happen. Yeah. The next question is like I would say, what is the lesson I can learn from this? So if it's a breakup with someone, and I've been through them, we all have, it's like instead of thinking that it was just putting blame on her or yourself, it's thinking of, was this the right person for me? There's going to be someone else, right? First of all, maybe I wasn't actually the right person for her, and maybe I was partially to blame for this. So what can I learn about relationships going forward? And what can I learn about what I want from a relationship? Maybe I want something a little more stable, or maybe I need something a little more exciting to sort of see to be future oriented. And that's really critical because I talk a lot of people who are going through hard times with COVID is always being future oriented. So we tend when we're in the moment of a bad thing like a breakup or a failure or you know, like something like a disaster. We're so enmeshed in the moment and when enmeshed in the moment things seem much larger than they are.

It seems so big.

Right. But with time and distance, if you look back two years ago, it doesn't seem so big anymore, right? So you need some perspective and you need to understand that two years from now, you'll be onto another business or you'll be onto another relationship and things will be much better. So be future oriented. That's one of the key things, key elements about people who are very successful in life. They're always sort of oriented towards the future. What's the next project? What am I going to be doing in five or ten years? As opposed to obsessed with the past, I think people who have the hardest time in life are so obsessed with the past. That scumbag, he destroyed me. He ruined my last project. They hold on to all this crap. They're so weighed down by the past, their parents, they whine, they complain. People who are future-oriented, I'm on to the next thing. It's like they say in basketball, next man up. our star player was injured. All right, next player, come on, let's just go, we got to win this game, right?

Yeah.

So that sort of thing is being future oriented and thinking like that.

I started, it's really hard when you're in the moment of stress or breakup or chaos or you get fired from your job. You feel like it's such a big deal. It's so messy, it's so painful. It's hard to think outside of that moment when you're in it. I went to a breakup almost two years ago and I remember feeling like, ah, this is like, this kind of sucks. It's in the moment, you know, people are judging you. And I just kept saying to myself over and over again, I'm gonna have hindsight now. I think this is exactly. I was like, this is around January time. I was like, this might be like six to eight weeks of some like drama or whatever, just gossip. Let me think it's gonna be New Year's Eve one year from today. Exactly. Like, what's the lesson I'm gonna learn from this experience? Exactly. how much stronger am I gonna be? How much more humility will I have? You know, maybe I'll connect with someone new that'll be a better relation. You know, all these things. I just kept saying, anytime I felt like the moment was bigger than me, let me have hindsight now. In a year, six months, two years, I wanna be on to something else. And people either move on with me or move out of my life.

That's the perfect example. That's exactly what I'm saying. Yeah. I mean, honestly, it's hard, as you said, in the moment. Right.

It's very hard.

And so you can't beat yourself up. You can't like, God damn it, why am I like this? Why can't I just be like Robert or Lewis said? I'm not like that. So when things first happen and they're bad, I beat myself up for several weeks, but it only lasts for several weeks and then I pick myself back up. So be patient and understand that right after something bad, you're going to be depressed. It's okay to be depressed. It's okay to feel bad about yourself, to even blame yourself, but you're going to pick yourself up and be patient about it, you know? It's a process.

How do we develop seduction with money involved in a relationship? And how do we stay in a healthy relationship and not allow money to ruin the relationship?

Well, money isn't just money. Money is a sign. Money is something that has psychology, has other things attached to it. So let's just say it's a woman who is finding herself losing her attraction to a man because he's not making any money. That could be because it's a sign that he doesn't have enough ambition, he doesn't have enough drive, or it could be a sign that he's just finding himself and eventually he'll discover it. but you kind of turned off a lot of women. And I think, yeah, it's mostly women, by the fact that this person doesn't have any drive, has no ambition. They're not trying to make something of their life. And so it's not about the money that they're in. It's the fact that there's something missing in them. That kind of masculine energy, such as masculine women have great drive to make money as well. I don't mean to put it that way. But that kind of drive, that energy that makes them want to get ahead can be very seductive and very powerful.

That's powerful for women to see that in men. Yeah.

And to sense that he's just kind of a slacker. Okay, maybe he's got good qualities. Maybe he's a wonderful person and that's fine. And then the money isn't a problem. You don't care. And maybe if you do care, it's because it reveals something about their character. Right. The other thing is generosity in a relationship is very important, right? It's not just giving money, but it's also giving your energy, giving your time to the other person. So a lot of a classic turn off that men will do is that they're not so generous with money, time, attention, etc. And it's a sign of something closed inside of them. So, you know, they don't want to pay for a meal. They don't want to pay for something. They don't want to spend money on a nice gift or whatever. It's not the money. It's the sign that someone isn't generous in their spirit, in their heart. They're not willing to take risks. Right? That'll be another thing that the lack of money will say. You know, to start a business and fail, would not be such a bad, I don't think would be such a turn off, as opposed to never starting a business, as to always talking about, oh, I could have been great, I could have done this, but never tried. Because it reveals a lack of security about yourself, confidence. Because confidence is a key quality. So I think money is often a sign of something else, another problem. It's revealing something about their character. You know, I mean, it could be he or she isn't pulling in their weight and that's an issue. And I kind of resent that. But that's not about the money, that's about the other person not caring enough to pull their weight or not thinking about the other person's needs.

It's what's underneath the money.

Yeah, I think so.

You mentioned confidence for a second. How much does someone lacking confidence affect their ability to seduce and maintain a level of seduction in a long-term relationship?

Well, confidence is extremely important. I mean, it can border, it can go off into grandiosity and arrogance and hubris, and that can be a turn off. But in general, most people, men and women, make the mistake by not having enough confidence. Really? But I'm not enough secure.

Yeah. It's better to rein someone's confidence down a little bit than to have none at all. It's better to have more of it and be like, okay, your ego is getting out of control. Let's take it down a little bit. Then I have no confidence at all.

Well, the fact that you feel confident about yourself is very seductive in itself. It has an attractive power. I talk in the Art of Seduction of charisma. I have a whole chapter on the charismatic and the origin of charisma. And what I define charisma is there's a person who has a kind of inner light inside of them. They're so confident that they kind of glow with that confidence, that their words are kind of revealing it. Their eyes are glowing, their gestures are glowing, and they're very charismatic. It could be a Malcolm X, it could be a Marilyn Monroe, it could be a John F. Kennedy, it could be a Mick Jagger, whomever. We sense this incredible confidence in this power and it's like an inner lantern that just makes everything glow and we are so attracted to that. That's what charisma is. Why are we attracted to it? Because we envy people who have that kind of confidence. We wish we could have that and we find it very compelling. We want to know them. We think that some of it and perhaps will rub off on us. I know in working with 50 Cent, I wrote a book with him, this guy is very charismatic. He's extremely seductive. He's one of those men that I mentioned earlier who's in that pantheon of great seducers. And I've seen him up front doing his seduction. So I know I speak from experience. And he has this incredible charisma, this insane confidence. It's not in what he says. It's not in his eloquence, it's just in how he carries himself. And it could be a little bit cocky sometimes if he's all seen from him. But man, it is so seductive and women go crazy over things like that. And men will go crazy over that in women as well. So confidence is extremely important in the realm of seduction. You can almost not go wrong with it. Yes, you can border on being insane and grandiose. But the feeling of that person is comfortable and confident and has that kind of inner force energy that's coming up from somewhere they don't know is very powerful and very compelling. And the lack of confidence is extremely anti seductive.

It is very, it'll probably hurt the relationship. If your partner is always lacking confidence in themselves, it doesn't make you feel attracted to them.

Right? Right.

So what would you say if someone's been through a breakup after breakup or even just one bad breakup and they feel heartbroken or closed off? How can they reclaim that confidence? What would you say to that person if they've lost confidence on how to reclaim it themselves? And also, if your partner has lost confidence and you're in a long-term relationship, how can you help someone gain confidence in a relationship. So, individually, how do you reclaim it and then your partner is lacking it?

Well, there are several ways to answer that. I mean, you know, seduction is almost like a skill. It's almost like being able to hit a baseball and bat 300.

Yes.

So, the best thing you can do after a bad relationship is go back in the game and try and meet other women and go back in and and if you fail, to have a kind of a light attitude and not care. But closing yourself off will make it harder, each time harder to get outside of yourself, right? I can remember one time I was in New York, I was young, I was maybe 24, I was on the subway, and I just received some great news about my career, about this thing that I had written. Right?

24. Yeah. Yeah.

And I was on the subway going in somewhere in Manhattan. And all of a sudden, like these women were looking at me. And, you know, I'm not saying that that never usually happens.

Right, right.

I'm not bragging.

Yes.

What's going on here? Wow. This is one really attractive woman. What's going on here? And I can never, I can't forget that moment. It stuck out of my mind so strongly. like there's this energy that I had that they were picking up and they were sensing it and they were attracted to it. I didn't say anything. It wasn't on the, we didn't have a phone then. I just had heard it and I was really happy in a great mood. But I'm certain that that energy was kind of projecting itself onto other people. So seduction is a skill in getting out there and trying your hand at meeting other women and going through the process. you'll learn about yourself. You won't take things, don't try and take things so personally. Get back in the game by being defensive and going into your shell and saying, oh, I don't want to get hurt again. You're going to make it harder each time to get out of that shell.

Yes.

So, that other gender is kind of mysterious to us. We don't really know them. Right. They have a different world, a different personality, right? But the more you interact with women or men, the more you can kind of get a sense of what drives them and what motivates you. You can't ever totally understand them. A man can never ever understand a woman. There is always a big mystery there eventually, thank God there is. But to the degree that you interact with women or men in any situation, you're kind of learning about them, you're getting more comfortable with them, right?

Yes.

So, a lot of great male seducers had sisters. A lot of great female seductresses had brothers.

Interesting.

They grew very comfortable with that male or female presence.

And they might have been around the sisters friends or the woman might have been around their brothers, guy friends and been around that energy more.

Right. So if you had just brothers, you know, women seem kind of scary or weird. What do they want? And the opposite is true. So interacting, getting outside yourself, interacting with women, you'll get to feel more confident, you'll learn more, and you'll be more comfortable in their presence. So don't go into a shell. That's the main thing.

That's the key. And what about, did you have something else?

No, you had a second partner.

What about if your partner, you're in a relationship for 10 years and whatever reason your partner and a woman is lacking confidence, they're insecure, they're doubting themselves over and over, what could the other partner do to help them reclaim their confidence? Or is that not something you can do?

No, you can do that. You can find what it is that they need validation about. and you can give them pep talks and make it clear to them, this is the most important thing, Louis. Make it clear to them that you still have confidence in them. You haven't lost it. Because the sense that that other person is losing faith in you and your abilities is deadly.

That's big.

So, if you care about that person and you don't want to see them go down the drain, with their insecurities, make it clear that you haven't lost faith in them and show it to them in certain ways. Whatever it is that they're worried about, show them that you still believe that they can accomplish something. The relationship I've been in, it predates the 48 Laws of Power just barely. And before the 48 Laws of Power, I was a nobody. I had no money. I had no success. I was very frustrated. I was depressed.

Really?

Very depressed. Even bordering on suicidal.

-Wow.

-I was 37. I hadn't gone where... It didn't bother her. She had faith in me. She had confidence in me, right? She saw that something probably would happen. And then it did with the 48 Laws. But, you know, I could sense that... She could sense that there was something I could do.

Right?

So she kept boosting me about my writing and about my career. So what is it that that person is insecure about? Boost them up, make them feel like you haven't lost faith in them. And that will be almost enough in itself.

What are a couple skills you wish you would have mastered earlier in life that maybe you've mastered now, or maybe you haven't yet that you wish you would have?

I wish I had mastered a three-point jump shot.

Okay. Three-point jump shot.

Yeah.

Two hand shooter. Yeah. No.

I don't know. Because when it came time to write that book, I had learned a lot about researching, you know, maybe about, like, marketing, because I'm not very good at that, to be honest with you. That's why I rely on people like Ryan Holiday, who know their. That's opposed to me who knows nothing. So, I wish I had been a little smarter about things like that. Because I was so much in my head into my books and my research writing that I never really paid attention. Yeah. I had been a little more hard-edged that way.

Learning about promotion and marketing. It's true because my brother who's one of the best jazz violinists in the world.

Really?

Yeah, he's arguably number one in the world of jazz violin. And he said, there's so many talented artists that think they're gonna be discovered, like in their basement or something. But you have to learn how to master your art and then how to master the art of selling yourself. Definitely. Because if no one knows who you are, then you're not gonna have opportunities. You're not gonna be able to monetize your craft, your art, or have, you know, provide a lifestyle for yourself. So, and if no one is aware of your art, then you're doing a disservice to the world by just hiding it for yourself or for a couple friends.

A lot of artists have that problem because they think that that kind of sullies the, you know, what they're producing. And, you know, they're afraid of that part of the game. But that's why a lot of artists fail. The ones who are successful know how to play that game of power to some degree. They're not so naive.

The game of power. What do you mean by that?

Well, take the art world, for instance. Something I know fairly well from people who I've known personally. It's a cutthroat industry. The number of kids who go to art school is like hundreds of thousands in the United States. The number of artists who can make a living, you can count them on two hands, right? Okay, so what's going on here? Well, it's that it's really, really difficult to make it. And who are these people who make it? They've learned, they've gotten tough, and they've learned how to market themselves. They learned how to promote. They learned what sells right now, and they've mastered that aspect of the game. Here in Los Angeles, every other person is an actor or a screenwriter wannabe, right? And they think they've got all the talent in the world. but they're not disciplined. They don't take a day-to-day approach and they don't know how to sell themselves. I mean, I deal with that all the time. I've dealt consulting with actors who, who don't know, like in, in just the audition aspect, they don't know how to present themselves and sell their skills. They think just their natural ability is enough, but it's not.

So what other, what a skill is that? The art of selling yourself, marketing, is that just communication skills? Is that understanding human nature on how people think and building them up, like what would you say that would be?

It's the whole sandwich there.

It's all of your books combined.

Yes, it is.

Seduction, power, mastery, all these things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you have to understand the power game to some degree. You have to understand that there are people who control your business, your industries. They have more power than others. They have egos. They're insecure. If you don't know how to appeal to them, if you don't know how to appeal to their self-interest, they're not going to finance you. They're not going to help you. You have to understand the political game. You have to be able to play to what's going to please them. You have to be able to get rid of your ego sometimes and do things that maybe aren't exactly what you want to do. but is the right career move. You also have to know how to package things. And I talk a lot about that in my books, in the 48 Laws of Power. You have to understand human psychology. People want drama. They want something that stands out. They want something that's strong, that's forceful, that's impactful. And you're sitting here writing something that kind of meanders, it sells it kind of in this half-baked way, etc. No, you've got to hit directly. You have to hit people's emotions. We're emotional animals. And that's sort of the key to marketing, is hitting people's emotions, not their intellect, not their ideas. Right? I mean, it's the whole thing. You have to understand human nature, you have to understand psychology, you have to understand politics and egos.

You've got to learn a lot in life just to get anything that's inside of you out. and being semi-successful yeah. It's not the craft itself, it's everything else around the craft.

Unfortunately, because, you know, Steve Jobs and, and wozniak, forget his first name.

Yeah, Steve wozniak.

Wozniak was by far the more brilliant person. He was the most brilliant person with computers of his time in the late 70s, early 80s. Steve Jobs was really very weak when it came to computing and things. like that. But look who made it. The person who understood marketing, right? He understood.

Human psychology, marketing, persuasion, the political game, the theatrics of communication.

Theatrics, definitely. Right? So talent is important, but it will only get you so far. You know, there are so many in talented basketball players just in the United States, but the ones who make it are not always the most talented, but they're the most disciplined of all.

Absolutely. I played with so many athletes better than me on teams that weren't disciplined enough or committed enough just to do the extra effort and work to get to the next level. To be on the field, to stay on the field, to get thrown the ball to, to get the tryouts or whatever it was the next level. And I would just say that I had more commitment than a lot of people that were better than me. And I remember being like, man, there's guys in the pickup games in basketball who were freaks that could have played, but they just didn't lack the discipline and the consistency or the attitude. And so they get kicked off the team because they just had a bad attitude.

Right.

So we gotta learn all these other things for sure. What do you think is the skill that a lot of people master that's actually wasting their time?

I never really thought of that. I mean, you can try too many things in life. You can try to learn too many things, right, and never master one of them, right? So the temptation in our culture is with all the access to information, all the things going on in the media, to think that I'm going to start picking up the guitar now, and then I'm also going to learn this and I'm going to learn that. So, people are kind of trying too many different things, and they're not like learning one thing really, really, really well.

Yes.

And so, that's kind of like the main fault I see in a lot of people, particularly when they're young. Because it's very difficult when there's so many things out there and there's so many temptations.

And I think it's a balance of it because there's a book. I think his name's David Epstein. Do you know David Epstein? He wrote a book called Sports Gene, I think it was called. But he also wrote a book called range, which talks about all these successful people who actually were. Had a range of skills that later in life, I think I mentioned this before with you, that you had a range of all these skills that maybe you did okay at, but. didn't really optimize fully and succeed at, but the range of skills you had created these weird books. I mean, these weird powerful books that were different at the time, that were unique. And if you didn't have that range of trying all these things, maybe you wouldn't have created this unique product at the end.

I agree with it, but there's a little element that I would twist there. So, for instance, I had learned researching skills when I worked in Hollywood and in journalism. And that's actually a skill.

Yes.

You know, I learned how to work libraries like you had no idea how to work a library, right? And I had done it for years.

Oh, man, that's a lot of time and energy.

Yeah. Well, that wasn't like just kind of a semi skill that I possess. That was a real skill.

Yes. Right?

And the journalism that I had learned was four or five years of writing under a deadline, making things concise and dramatic. I wasn't wildly successful, but I could say it was a skill. So when I combined everything and then my knowledge of history, etc., there was definitely a range. And that range, I totally agree with that writer. But if they were kind of mediocre skills, I don't know how it would have all fallen into place, you know?

So it was all within the ability of writing and researching. It wasn't like, I'm going to do all these other things that aren't associated with.

Exactly.

Gotcha.

Yeah. And for mastery, I interviewed Paul Graham because I agree with that idea, and I advocated learning four or five skills and then combining them in a unique way. But he was like the man. He's one of the most successful tech entrepreneurs of our time. He started, he went to college and learned computer skills. He was going to go into AI early on. Didn't like it, didn't like the politics. He dropped out and he went to Italy to study painting, right? And he studied painting for several years and became really good at it and very much really good at design, etc. Then he came back to New York and he heard an ad on the radio for Netscape and how the future of the internet was selling products on the internet which no one had ever done before. He goes, maybe I could take my design skills and my knowledge of computers and create something that would be very aesthetically pleasing and very easy to navigate. It would be like me and it ended up being the first kind of online store that Yahoo bought. and on and on. But he was really good at those two things. Steve Jobs was really great at the design element of technology and so forth. So, I'd be a little wary of telling people that you can kind of learn four or five things kind of middling.

-Right.

-'Cause the main thing you want, the main thing that'll get you ahead in life is your level of enthusiasm and excitement.

-Over anything else?

-Yeah, your love of something. so you have to kind of learn and be energized and really excited by it. And if you're just kind of piddling around trying different things, you won't bring that kind of.

A friend of mine years ago, probably 18 years ago, told me that the world makes room for passionate people. And there's a quote by the coach of the Green Bay Packers.

What's in slumped?

Yes, that if you're not, if you're not fired up with enthusiasm, you'll be fired with enthusiasm. Something like that, right? I'm paraphrasing, but if you're not fired up with enthusiasm, then you'll be kicked off the team. Because we need people here who are excited and passionate about what they're doing, otherwise, what are we doing here? And we're gonna lose if you're not fired up with enthusiasm. So I think that's probably one of the greatest skills, is having the energy to have enthusiasm about what you're doing, right. To get yourself the opportunities over than the mastery of itself with a negative attitude.

Right.

I would say.

Yeah.

It's no fun having someone on your team who's really good at something, but just mean and nasty and dragging and not on time. And what are you just like?

Yeah.

Doesn't matter how talented you are.

Right.

It's the other skills that come along with it.

Right.

What if someone's struggling to accomplish their goals. We've talked about fear a little bit. You know, it's been holding people back from trying and getting out there. But what if they've got their, their goals, they've got the stuff, they're willing to go after it, but they're struggling accomplishing goals. Did you have any strategies or tactics to setting up your life in a way to accomplish goals more?

Yeah, I mean, so I call it kind of a ladder of descending goals. I think that's one of the entries in that book. Okay. So what you want is a mix of things. There's a lot of success in life is creating this kind of balance. So you want an overall goal for yourself. Let's say you want to accomplish this business that you want to start, right? But you're not able to get there. You're not able to make the bridge to it. Okay, so you. You say, this is my long-term goal, and then you build a ladder of descending goals of small things to get there. And within it, so let's say your goal is five years, you're going to start the business. Then within that, you've got months and you've got weeks and you've got days and you're building small goals that you can reach and are reachable. So I want to start my business. It's really hard out there. There's one thing that I don't think I'm good at. All right, well, tomorrow, I'm going to start learning this new skill. I'm going to go to school. I'm going to read this book. Right? Give yourself a goal that you can reach in a week, right? Or in two weeks.

Yes.

Not in so that was killing you is you're thinking too long term and you can't get there. And it's kind of making it seem like it's impossible. It's killing your spirit, right? You're too ambitious. You're thinking too far ahead. You need smaller, reachable goals. Right? So your great business, your great book, your great podcast has other little steps you have to take to get there. Create a step you can reach in a month, a week, or whatever and reach it. Don't make it too difficult but don't make it too easy. I always tell people to make it a little bit above what you think you can do and you'll get there. But if you give yourself a goal in a month that is a step towards creating this larger thing and you reach it, you'll have a sense of pride and accomplishment. You did something, right?

Yes.

You got part of the way there and now you know with determination, you're on your way and you can do that again and you can make another smaller goal. And you're not paying attention to five years from now, you're paying attention to tomorrow's goal. Your eyes are focused on these small steps. You don't lose sight of the larger goal because then you'll get mired in details. It's driving you but your main focus is on reaching what you've set yourself up for a month by month by week by week by week baby steps.

Yes.

If you do something every day and you reach these things, the sense of you've never done anything is what's killing you. You need to have a sense that you actually have something to show for it. you actually have reached part of the way there. And believe me, when I start a book, it's like, oh my God, I can't do that. How am I going to make it? Well, I start off simply and I go from simple goals and I have a process I go through and I don't worry about three years down the road. I worry about what I'm going to do tomorrow.

Do you think anger, resentment, frustration is a greater power to create over love? Or if we came from a place of love, could it be that much more powerful our creation?

Well, that's a great question and it really depends on who you are. You know, sometimes those dark energies have more kind of power behind them. They impel you. They do. And love? It just kind of melt, you know, love doesn't necessarily make you want to write a book. Although it can. But for me personally, I'm speaking from personal experience, it wasn't love that made me want to write a book. It was anger and bitterness, right?

I'll show you.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'll show you mentalities.

Whereas, you know, I love this. I love that. Yeah, it's not gonna... And the reason why that happens, is people in our day-to-day life are so repressed, we have to be so politically correct, we have to be so pleasant and smiling, etc. That when your work expresses anger or expresses pain, people love it. They're drawn to it because finally someone's expressing what I'm feeling but no one else is talking about, you know? Right?

That's powerful, yeah.

Yeah. You know the person that I think a lot about in the dark side is Kobe Bryant. I was going to talk to him about it if I could have. Because he confessed this. He had a lot of dark energy. He had a lot of anger, and he was so competitive. He wanted to crush you on the basketball court. And he spoke of it in those terms. It wasn't like a friendly little basketball game. This was war. But like Michael Jordan, he transmuted, he channeled this energy into being a good teammate and to just defeating the other team, working as a good player, a colleague with his other teammates. But he learned to channel it. Early on, it kind of destroyed him a little bit. It kind of ruined his relationship with Shaq in a way. But then he learned that that dark anger, et cetera, was the source of his power. It's kind of like Star Wars and Jedi type thing, you know? And how you use that dark energy and transform it into something positive.

Do you think there's a basketball player or an athlete or someone who could not have dark energy and anger?

Could have love.

Who could be just like, I'm just grateful for my family, my wife, my kids, my health, and I'm just gonna go out and channel my gifts to serve, to inspire because I love the sport. Do you think there's... No. No, you think anger is the way. It's like learning to channel anger.

Anger and competitiveness and ambition and the desire to win, you know, is a very powerful motivating factor.

Very powerful.

You know, maybe if you're an ice skater or in a sport like that where you're working in pairs, something.

Dancing or yeah.

Yeah, you don't maybe want to have that kind of issue. I can get that. But like football or basketball or even baseball, you know? I don't think so. And all the greats that I've studied all have pretty much a very similar profile. And there have been examples of players who don't have that drive, who are more kind of into being friendly and nice and loving and they don't go nearly as far. I'm afraid to say it. The greatest player is LeBron James. He's probably the greatest player now.

You're from Cleveland, right? I'm from Columbus, but Ohio.

Ohio, it's all the same.

We're Ohio, yeah. Are you a Laker fan?

I'm a Laker fan now because of LeBron. I'm a LeBron fan. Okay, well, me too now. But that guy is driven. Driven.

Right?

You can see it in his face. He doesn't want to lose. He's not going out there with love in his heart. I mean, he's a very generous person. He's a very loving person outside basketball. But on the court, no, I don't think so.

He's an animal. Yeah, he's an animal in the court. It's interesting because I was very anger driven from my teens to my 20s. Maybe a little bit in my early 30s, I was driven by anger to compete, to be the best, to win. But it always left me achieving and accomplishing and kind of proving people wrong, but it always left me feeling like still unfulfilled inside. How can someone be driven by anger or frustration, bitterness and achieve and feel peace at the same time? Is that possible?

Yeah, because that's not the goal in it is not like beating other people and humiliating them. That's the dark side and that's giving into the dark side. The goal is to be the best at your sport to win a championship and then to give back to the community, to make a lot of money and then donate a lot of it or become, you know, like LeBron has done with the schools in Ohio, Etc. To be a good role model. But when you reach the top, you have that luxury. And so it's more like, what are you doing this for? So when I had my 48 laws, I'm sorry to talk always about myself. It's kind of the narcissist in me.

It's all good.

I admit it. You know, it wasn't about making fun of all those Hollywood executives who I disliked. Then it wouldn't have been the book that it was. It was, I want to help people. I want to use my energy, my frustrations, to show people that they don't have to suffer the way I suffer, other people suffer in the work world. These are the laws of power. You don't have to be so naive. You can understand that you don't need to ever outshine Master. So I was able to put my energy in there and get some of my yayas out in doing it, but for a higher purpose to help people. I think that's the difference, right?

Yeah.

And so I tell people you feel anger, but there's a lot of injustice in this world, particularly nowadays, right? A lot of things are just wrong in this world today. And if I were young, I would. My anger would be exploding because there's so much that's wrong. channel it into a worthy cause, into justice, into leading some kind of movement. That's a brilliant way to take your dark energy and metamorphize it into something really positive. Believe it or not, because in my last book, Martin Luther King was one of my heroes that I wrote about, he had some of those frustrations and some of that anger. He grew up in Atlanta where there wasn't as much racism because he was in a relatively good neighborhood. His father was a preacher. He saw racism, but he was a little bit shielded from it. And then he had his first encounters, particularly when he went up north to Boston. Believe it or not, it was in the north that he had his first real encounters. He had a few before that. And then he's like, God, he was really angry about it. It really was an eye-opener. And he learned that he couldn't give into that kind of emotion. what he was going to do with his life is he was going to use it to help blacks in the South, he was going to return to the South. His path he thought was to stay in Boston, New England, because it was like cushy, etc. But then he realized, no, I've got to take all this bitterness that I feel and I've got to go back to the South at the risk of my own life and help my people, you know? So working for a cause is probably the best way you can channel some of that dark energy.

So how do we be angry about a cause but not being a prisoner to that unjust thing that's happening in the world? Is there a way we can still be angry and movement and creation mode but not be a prisoner to that situation?

Well, what would being a prisoner mean?

I think like allowing it to affect you emotionally, to consume you, to control you, to make you focused on that thing all the time as opposed to.

Just where your energy is. Is it about you? Is it about you and your emotions and your anger? Or is it about helping people and about the cause? So is it for something greater than yourself? And if it's for something greater than yourself, then you're not a prisoner of it. because you're getting outside your own ego and you're actually working to help people. But I can tell you a lot of social movements and revolutions, if you want to call it, or reform movements, they peter out because they lose energy, they lose a drive, the initial impetus sort of isn't quite there and you've got to be able to keep it alive.

How do you keep it alive?

Because you feel nothing has changed, the injustice is there. I mean look at someone like Martin Luther King, what he had to put up with constantly, constant failures, constant rejection, everybody he dealt with so much envy, it was insane. Even people within the movement were constantly belittling and criticizing him, but he kept his eyes focused on the greater prize, the ultimate goal, which is what you want to focus on. on, but you have to use that energy or it's going to peter out because life will wear you away. You'll get older, you relax, you don't want to, you know, you don't want to have to spend so much time doing this, you know, and you, you get soft and the energy dries up and you need that energy. Every time I write a book, I'm starting from ground zero and I'm going, okay, Robert, What's gonna motivate you? What's like something that really irritates you and it makes you angry and pissed off, right? Okay? Because now feeling that you're gonna get over that mountain of writing the book and you're gonna feel every time you write a chapter you're gonna feel that emotional kind of thing in your gut and you're gonna express it. But I'm not doing it for me. It's because I know it's going to help people, you know?

Yeah.

So for my new book, I'm really frustrated and irritated by how limited people are about their thinking. And I'm not blaming people because I have the same problem. It's like the world is this insanely awesome thing to be alive. Do you know what it means to be alive? Do you know what everything had to fall into? Go back to the Big Bang, which is what I'm writing about now. And all the little pieces that had to fall into place for life to happen again on Earth. and then for animals and then for a giant asteroid to hit Earth, you know, some 70 million years ago, so the dinosaurs are wiped out. None of this had you wouldn't be here, Louis wouldn't be here if your parents hadn't met. So your life is like this insanely unlikely thing that ever happened. Do you know how awesome it is? Do you how awesome it is to look out and see stars in the sky or things around you? And people are not there, locked in their little banal worlds of social media, etc. they're not opening their minds up to what it means to really be alive. And it makes me angry.

That's good.

So I'm gonna, that's why I'm gonna write the book.

What's the title of this book? Are you sharing that yet or no?

Yeah, the Law of the Sublime.

So it's about how we can think differently or how we can open our minds to possibilities?

Yeah, it's to reanimate your soul. So you feel excited about things. So you feel like, you know, when you were a child, you were curious about so many things, you were open to so many experiences, things were constantly wowing you, and then you become blasé and kind of cynical, and you don't want new experiences because they kind of mess with your familiar patterns. And then your life kind of closes and closes and closes. And the sublime is opening your mind up as far as possible, as wide as possible. And Opening your mind and your spirit like that makes you more creative, makes you more energized, makes you a better human being, etc. And so I have to write a book with a sense of purpose. I don't write books for money. I swear on the Bible. I do not write books for money. The money comes in and I'm very happy. It's comfortable. But I don't write going, what's the most marketable book I can do next? It's like, what do I need to express in this moment.

What does sublime mean? What is the definition?

Well, you really want to get into the weeds there. It comes from the Latin word sublimen, and there are several meanings of it, but the one that I like is the limen is what's called a threshold. It's like a door that leads from one place to another, right? And sub means right up so sublime is right up to the limit. And the way I interpret it is, is that that door is death itself. On the other side is death. And so I draw a kind of, I have a metaphor, it'll be through in the book and on the COVID of a kind of a circle, right? And just, we tend to, our brains tend to work in these kind of conventional patterns, our minds, our thoughts, etc. Right. And that circle is the limits that we will not go past. We will not think thoughts beyond that.

We'll stay in the circle. We won't go beyond it.

Right. Just beyond it is this region of the sublime. And it goes in very different arrows. And each arrow is a chapter. But the main arrow is death itself. And when you go up to that door and you peer on the other side, you see something that's going to shake you up, that's going to transform you like it transformed me, right? You're going to realize how short your life is, how weird it is to be alive, the possibilities of what it means to actually die. Near-death experiences are pretty awesome, amazing things. People have had near-death experiences and they've been completely enlightened by them, right? And so that's the ultimate sublime experiences going up to that threshold of death itself. But there are other experiences that I'm going to be talking about as well.

I'm excited about that. That'll be fun. What about the, I think you mentioned in the laws of human nature, the first one, confront your dark side. What about the one you're thinking about more now that connects to you?

Well, obviously, the chapter on death. Not so much now, but right after my stroke, because that was the last chapter, chapter 18. I finished it pretty much in May of 2018, and I poured a lot of energy into it because I kind of think a lot about mortality, etc. And I really thought, and I did research, and I put a lot into it. And then two and a half months later, it happens.

After the book came out.

After I finished writing the book.

After you finished writing the book, it came out, yeah, gotcha.

Like, what is the irony there? The gods are somehow messing with me, right? Yeah. Because the fact that the stroke happened was like a series of chains of events that were pretty unlikely. So it was almost like fated to happen. Right? And so I had to reassess. All right, Robert, you wrote that. Is that really true? Is it really true that it alters how we look at other people? Yeah, it does. You were true. But what happened was the chapter was written from an intellectual position and the experience was not intellectual. It was very real. So when I had my stroke and I was in the hospital and the first days, I had this feeling in my stomach of almost like my bones melting, that they were soft, that the inside of my body was soft. And so I later thought that that is the feeling of death that's still in me, this feeling of softness. So death was no longer an idea. It was in my gut, it was in my viscera, it was a feeling. And so, you know, I had to think about that. And I actually did write that, that death is a feeling, it's not an idea. But here it was brought to me in an experiential way.

Wow. I think that experience you had is going to be very powerful for the next book.

I hope so.

To be able to share your experience of being on the brink of death.

Yeah, I'll tell you what. I'm going to mention this in the book is I had planned on writing this book on the Sublime 14 years ago. It was to be the book I wrote after the war book. And then I got sidelined into different projects. And I had always had the idea when I did this that I was going to go have these incredible, sublime experiences. I was going to go travel to Antarctica to experience it. I was going to go paragliding. I was going to take boats in this area. I was going to... Of all these adventures, I was going to live my book and now I can't do anything. I can't do one fuck, I can barely even go outside the house. So what do I have to do? I have to live in my head. I have to imagine all of it. And I think it's a very good thing because if I had been able to just go around and have all these adventures, I'd look like this kind of privileged kid who could just use his money. But the readers are going to say, I can't go to Antarctica, you know? But everyone who's reading the book is going to be in my position, more or less. You don't have the money or the power to do all these things, but it's in your head, it's how you think about it. So it's altered how I'm going to write the book and how I think about the reader.

I think imagination has got to be one of the most powerful things we can have, the power of our imagination. What did Einstein say about imagination? Something that's more powerful than knowledge or something like that. It's what you were talking about earlier about being able to alchemize something, having an idea that then we can transmute into real life and creation. And I think it's hard to create something meaningful without having a meaningful imagination, which brings you back to being a curious mind from childhood and being able to express yourself and be curious.

Well, I mean, I look at it this way. You know, we're all going through a very difficult time now. A lot of people out there are really suffering. circumstances are very harsh, they'll work, etc. And the tendency is that you don't imagine what else it could be, what the future could be, what you could be doing with your life. So the lack of imagination is really holding you back. So the idea that I want to plant in people's brain with my next book and in general is things don't have to be the way they are. because you're in this situation in the present doesn't mean it has to be that way in two months or a year from now. There are other possibilities. Try and imagine a different path for your life in a year or what that could be like. Try and imagine a different relationship you can be in if you're stuck in something. But don't keep in this little small little circle of thought. So imagination is extremely powerful and extremely important. Yeah.

You mentioned Martin Luther King as someone you're really inspired by from the past. Who are the top two people that you've researched or written about in any of your books that you really connect with the most as an inspirational leader from the past or a human being?

Well, this person is a little bit more on the devilish side because I have to not act like I'm this, Mother Teresa here. And that would be Machiavelli. Machiavelli was the inspiration for the 48 Laws, somebody I've always loved because he's such a realist. He explains this is not how life should be. This is how life is. This is how people are. This is what the world is like. And when I was 17, I was 16 when I first read the Prince, I was like, wow, I didn't really understand the book. I go, wow, this is powerful. this is really talking to me. This is really saying what it's like with my friends in high school, etc. I could relate to his honesty because so many people are so dishonest. And I love him because he's a man of the Renaissance. People don't understand this about him. He wrote a hardcore book like the Prince, but he also wrote much more intellectual book like the Discourses. He also wrote one of the wickedest plays, comedies ever written in the history of theater, a play so sacrilegious that it shocked everyone at the time. And it's a very funny play called Mandragola. He was like a poet. He was a great seducer of women, even though he was physically ugly. He was like a really weird guy. He was interesting. And I loved his stories, right? So he'd be one. And the other one would be from master was Leonardo da Vinci. I mean, these are from the same period. In fact, they probably crossed each other's path. But da Vinci, you know, he was like not human. He thought on a level that was so superior, that was so almost God-like that it fascinated me, you know? there's a theme that I have in my new book, people who are so far ahead of their time that it's uncanny. And I have examples in history of this. People who are a thousand, 500 years ahead of their time. How can that be? You know, is it just coincidence or what is it? And I'm fascinated by it. Well, he was doing drawings of military tanks, of flying planes, of, you know, all kinds of of elaborate technological devices that some have never even been invented, you know? And where did this come from? He was also like one of the first people in history who observed nature just for itself. He loved like plants and flowers and animals without thinking about God or religion. He was one of the first animal lovers in history. I'm an animal lover, right? I love any kind of animal.

Yeah, cats, right?

I have cats, but I love dogs.

Two cats, right?

I have two cats. Yeah. But I love horses, I love dogs, I love them all. He, people were so cruel to animals back then. Nobody had pets like that.

Yeah, just stray animals.

Cats were just there to kill rats, you know, etc. He would go in the marketplace in Florence where birds were being sold. He would buy them and open the cage and let them fly away. He had great empathy for other animals, creatures, who the church said didn't have a soul, but he believed that animals had souls, and he was the first person really. So, I'm obsessed with people like that who were so far ahead of their time. He'd be the second guy.

Is there a woman from the past that you raised?

Cleopatra.

Cleopatra, why?

Well, because I wrote a book about seduction.

Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, obviously have a side to me that's very into seduction. I wouldn't have written the book, you know, and in my 20s, I was kind of a player. You know, I know it's hard to believe now, but I was. Yeah, I was a bit of a rake. And so. And Cleopatra was kind of like almost my ideal in a way. When I read about, I haven't met her, obviously, but she was very smart. She was quite an intellectual. I've always been very attracted to very smart women, right? She was very well read. She had the Library of Alexandria there. She'd read all the great classics. She was a lot smarter than the men around her. She was a lot smarter than Marc Antony. I wouldn't say she was smarter than Julius Caesar, but she was his equal. And she was insanely good seductress. She was very theatrical. She knew how to create these insane spectacles. and what man wouldn't be impressed by that? You know, she knew that Mark Antony was like this kind of raging sensualist, so she seduces him by creating this insanely decadent barge that floats down the Nile River with all these weird animals on it and people fanning you with giant things and all gold and everything. You know, Mark Antony goes on a tour of all the cities on the Nile with the, on this barge, and he was totally seduced. produced. She was like constantly putting on this theater and believe it or not, she supposedly wasn't that beautiful. We don't have any images from her, but descriptions said that she had a bit of a nose, etc. But she had, her energy was really interesting, so that would probably be the woman of my choice.

What do you think is the greatest skill or a couple skills that any 20 to 30 year old kind of in their 20s should be to learning how to master today from the skills of psychology, the skills of human nature, the skills of understanding people. Which skill should that be?

The best thing is to be able to get inside the minds of other people. If you develop that skill, the sky's the limit. Nothing will ever stop you because people are like a mystery. They wear a mask. and you don't have any idea what they're thinking. And I have this metaphor in human nature which I never wrote, but imagine a device was created in which some app that you could unknow the thoughts and feelings of the other person. Do you know the power you would have?

Wow.

Be insane. Okay, you're not, I can't give you such an app. I can't invent that. But you can develop half of that power by becoming someone of insane empathy. And it's not easy and not everybody's born the same way, but it begins with one very simple step and that is normally you go around more interested in your own thoughts and ideas. You're thinking about your boss, you're thinking about your girlfriend or boyfriend, you're thinking about this person who said this, that or the other and you're locked in your head and it's like a record like in the old vinyl days going around and around and around the same grooves, right? And even when you're sitting there talking with someone on a date or something, you're thinking about yourself, you're still in there, right? Because you find yourself more interesting than the other person and it's very human, I'm not judging it, but inevitably you think your own dramas, your own ideas, your own problems are essentially more interesting the other person. So if that's your starting position, you're naturally going to be more absorbed in yourself. You can just switch it around and you tell yourself, the other person is more interesting than me. Their life, their thoughts, their ideas, it's like an undiscovered world. It's like going to Tahiti or something and visiting another culture. They have experiences you've never had. They have a world that's not your world. It's fascinating. Why do people love movies? They love movies because they get to go inside other people's characters and they get to vicariously live in them. It's voyeurism. You can have that in everyday life if you switch that thing where you're more interested in other people. And so when you listen to them, you're not listening with the idea of, do they like me? Are they thinking about me? What does it have to do with me? I'm sorry, using that voice, please. You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Kind of a windy voice. What's it about? Me, me, me, me. Thinking just in a Zen way, absorb yourself in their words and their energy and think about what. What they're saying. What's the subtext behind them? What's the body language revealing? What is it that motivates them? What is their inner life like? I can't get inside Lewis how's thoughts. It's impossible. But I can get inside your moods and emotions. because we humans are very susceptible to the moods of other people. We can feel them. So I can start to, if I'm open enough, I can understand the tone in your voice. I can understand the subtext of what you're saying and I could pick up the emotion behind it and what you're intending. And once I do that, well, then if someone says something, I don't have to take it personally because now I understand that it probably comes from other things that have nothing to do with me. Or I want to persuade them to help me on a project. Well, now I know what their world is like, what their spirit is, what their problems are. I'm going to mold what I'm saying to get them interested in my idea. Doors open up to you left, right, and center. The whole universe opens up to you once you're able to put yourself in the mindset and the point of view of other people. enter their spirit. That's the single greatest step you can have. So you're about to start your first job and you're all insecure and you're all worried about you and what people think about you. Try and make it's not easy, it's not natural. Try and make that switch and don't think about yourself and try and figure out what is your boss like? What is he or she? What is motivating them? What are their insecurities? What are their doubts? What is this person feeling? And suddenly you're going to navigate this social environment in a much different level.

I love this. This is powerful, I think. So to get in the minds of other people would be the greatest skill.

By far.

And the way to do that, I'm hearing you say, is through empathy, through asking interesting questions, through listening.

No, it's taking this one step, which is other people are more interesting than me. I love going to see movies. That other person is like Hannibal Lecter. I'm sorry, that's not a good choice. Sure. Could be, but, or they're like this other character in some other movie. I don't know, choose whichever one you want, right? Beetlejuice.

Beetlejuice.

Beetlejuice, there you go.

Okay.

Wow, that was a long time ago.

Yeah. Yeah, I remember that.

Just thinking of a fascinating character. They're like that. They have stories, they have drama. Right? Their childhood was probably weird. They come from a culture from a city, from a background that's not your city or background. And to try and understand it. Now, some people are harder to do that with than others. There are people out there who are like just total assholes. And you don't really want to have to get into that world. You feel like you're getting yourself taking a shower of mud or something or excrement or whatever. You don't want to get into that world. But even then, It pays, if you've got a psychotic boss, it pays to get inside their mind so that you don't take things personally, so you can understand where they come from. So even with horrible people, being able to understand who they are will prevent you from taking everything personally.

So having the understanding that other people are more interesting than me, having that framework in your mind allows you to look at them differently.

Or as interesting. They have stories to tell. They have a life that's fascinating. They're like a character in a movie. I want to understand it.

And asking questions allows you to understand it.

You have to be careful with questions because if you're so obvious, if you're going, Tell me about this.

Yeah.

So did you love your mother? Did your father be... Yeah.

So how do we get to know them without being intrusive?

Well, it's an art. So, you know, people love to talk about their childhood, right?

And their successes and yeah.

Yeah, but I found like childhood is the main thing. Everyone has this kind of emotional attachment to their experiences as a child, to where they grew up, to their parents, to their family, to their earliest friends. It's got all sorts of emotions surrounding it that are very potent. and uncontrollable. So a very kind of slip in question about someone's childhood and then asking a few leading questions and letting them do the talking. So if you're at peppering them with questions, you look like a lawyer or.

Someone who's, or someone like me who just interviews people for a living.

Right. So you want them to do 90% of the time. You can't 90% that it's obvious what what you're doing. 80% or so, people love to talk, right? If they do 70% of the talking, they're not even aware that they're doing that, but you're letting them talk, you're letting them be the star. But you find a foothold into their what excites them, and you get them to talk and open up about their childhood, and then occasionally a question, and then occasionally you go into your own life to sort of show, oh yeah, you had that I had something very kind of similar. Mirroring people is a slightly manipulative trick. I don't doubt that and I talk about that in seduction, but it's very powerful. They're starting telling you things about their childhood that are powerful. You go, yeah, I had something very similar. And you probably have had something similar. That's a really potent way of connecting to people. But you've got to be subtle. It's an art to getting people to talk and open up, to finding that thing that lights their face up that gets them excited, you know?

Yeah, I think the book Influenced by Cialdini, I don't know if you've studied that book, but just likeability allows you to, is one of his main, I think it's seven or eight keys of influence, but he talks about likeability and the more someone can see that they like you through mirroring or through, we have one thing in common, makes them like you more. So finding that commonality, social proof, like a bunch of other things. I can't remember all seven of them, but yeah, likability is one of the biggest things. It's one of the reasons why I'm just always trying to have fun and just be playful and kind of ease the moment for people so they can feel like, oh, this is relaxing and fun and playful.

Well, I must admit, that's why you're a good interviewer. And I know that because I've had, I've been with many bad interviewers who are kind of tense and nervous and defensive. and they're insecure, right? And then they make you feel that way, but you have an energy that kind of brings out that part of, at least for me, that likes to yammer.

How does someone not be insecure? An interviewer, someone trying to get a job when they're doing an interview with their potential boss, when you're with someone who's you're inspired by or higher status or on a influenced position, how do you not be insecure or nervous?

Okay, one simple answer. I mean, there may be exceptions, but it's pretty simple. Do your homework. Be prepared. So, if you go into an interview, you're naturally nervous. But if you've prepared the out of it, you've researched that person, you know who they are, you know what the company is like, you know what the position is, why the other person was fired, what they're going to need from you. You're going to feel a lot less insecure than if you just kind of go in and wing it, right? Okay? So if you're on any kind of project, I talked in the war book about Alfred Hitchcock, the film director. And my wife is a film director. It's a nerve-wracking task. You've got an army of 80 people who are all and insecure and ego ridden, etc. They're all. Secretly hoping you fail.

So they can be the director, yeah.

It's a nightmare, right? And Hitchcock, people were astonished. She'd be on the set, she'd be falling asleep. Oh, really? Okay, yeah, yeah, go ahead. He was like Buddha, he didn't care. He was never upset or anything. People, how could that be? Directors are the most nervous and bitter people. They're so control freaks. It's because he prepared. every detail he knew beforehand. He knew every shot that he wanted, what the clothes looked like, what the colors, how the framing would be. He storyboarded it in exact detail. And he said that by the time the film was being shot, I was bored because I knew everything, how it was supposed to be. So he could be calm because he was so well prepared. So if you do your homework, it's maybe not going to get rid of all your insecurities and all your nervousness. Because the degree of nervousness is okay because you have to understand the physiology. Adrenaline is a very powerful emotion and feeling a little bit of doubt and a little bit of fear will drive you and keep you awake and alert. So you don't want to be so confident that you'll just do anything. You want a little bit of tenseness. But if you prepare and you've anticipated the situation it will get rid of 80% of those doubts that you have.

We were talking about before and I have a couple final questions for you. We were talking about before self-doubt before we started recording. And I'm curious your thoughts on doubt, doubting ourselves and how do we train our minds or our bodies or our life so that doubt doesn't keep us from accomplishing with what we want or keep us from trying something we want. I think a lot of people don't do something because they doubt themselves so much from the fear of failure or the fear of success or people judging them. What's your thoughts on this?

Well, the main thing is, is you have to try something, you have to do something, right? And of course, if you're full of doubt and insecurities, it's going to be very hard. And so what separates the person who is going to learn is on the way to success from somebody who won't? will be that person who's 22, 23, they tries it, they do it. They take that job and they write that thing or they do that whatever it is that the other person maybe wouldn't try because they're not afraid of failing. So a certain level of you can't control that because some people are born that way. I don't know if they're born that way, but something about them in their DNA has given them that drive. But if you don't have that drive, if you have your insecurities, understand pain is a very powerful motivating factor. But if you're 22 and you don't try something, you don't feel the pain. So why not? And then you're 23, then you're 24, you're not feeling pain. Then you're 28, you're still not feeling pain. Then you're 32, you're starting to feel a little depressed. And 35, man. And you're 40, you're picking up the bottle, you know, it's sad. Okay, so understand. you're 22, that life is very difficult and that you're down a path towards something really, really bad unless you get your act together and try that first thing. Because what happens, people have studied fear and it's very important. And I know back in 2001, I was in Vienna, Austria, and I was watching, I was in a theater. I was in the middle of this very packed audience and there was a fire. And people were panicking and running around. And I got such a sense of claustrophobia. It killed, I was like, aha. And from then on, I couldn't get on an airplane. I couldn't get in an elevator. I was like developing major claustrophobia, right? And then I went, I saw a therapist and she said, you, got to expose yourself. You got to go back in that elevator.

So true.

You got to go back into that airplane. and then you realize it's not so bad and you'll get over it. But avoiding it, you'll never get over the fear. So take that first step, do whatever it is that you thought you couldn't do and don't be afraid because that is the most important moment in your life. And then you realize it's not so bad. Okay, people are making fun of me, I failed, but they never tried anything. I at least tried it and I have an idea for my next one. It wasn't so bad.

Right.

You know? But if you never make that first step, I don't care the wisdom of Solomon won't be able to help you, right? You'll always be stopping before you can. So you've got to have the guts to make that first step and then the doors will open for you. It's what I'm hearing you say is.

It'S an experiential event. It's not a theory of, okay, let me think my way out of the fear or the insecurity or the doubt. It's like, no, I have to practice this in the feeling of, I failed or someone laughed at me or I tripped and fell, whatever it is, you've got to experience it.

You have a good way of summarizing what I'm saying because you said it better than I did.

Well, this is something I've been fascinated by because I think so many people are doubt themselves and their doubt is what keeps them from going after what they want. Getting into the relationship they want, getting out of the relationship they want, you know, getting the job, all these things. And they're afraid of failure, they're afraid of success, and they're afraid of people's opinions or judgment when they take this action. And I tell people that the simplest thing you can do is write a list of your biggest fears and insecurities, circle the top one, the one that scares you the most, and then do that until you feel at peace with it, or at least so you can brace it. Essentially become Batman of that fear and live with the bats of of that fear, that insecurity.

That's a good way to do it.

Where then it becomes a powerful thing for you. And this is what I did in my teens and 20s from being terrified of public speaking. And I went to public speaking class every single week until I felt like, wow, I feel powerful up here, not powerless. And I did it with so many different things that I was insecure about until they became skills as opposed to fears and insecurities. And so I love that you said you've got to expose yourself to the fear. You've got to re-go into the elevator, go back to that theater that had the fire and breathe and feel comfortable so you can live your life.

Then we go back to the thought about that question, could it have been worse? Well, think of it this way. If you don't try that thing, it's going to be a lot worse for you down the road. You're going to never get anywhere. and the pain will be intense in 15 years. You're not feeling it now, but have that hindsight to realize that the worst thing in life, the worst feeling of all, is the feeling you wasted your potential. That you had dreams and you never even tried them and then you're in your 50s, your 60s, you're facing death. Why was I alive? I didn't do it. I could have done this, that, or that. Never even tried. Remind yourself of that. You know, they used to have emperors in ancient Rome would have a slave walking by them and whispering into their ear, you,'re going to die, you're mortal. You might die tomorrow. You might die tomorrow. Right? And that was like a reminder of their mortality and that they had to.

Not get so... Wasn't that a story from Marcus Aurelius where he had someone talk to him and say, you,'re just a man or something?

That might be.

Was that who it was? I can't remember, but someone had someone just say, every day you're just a man.

Right.

The more powerful he became, to kind of keep him more grounded.

Right.

You're just a man, or you're going to die.

Or just have that whisper, you,'re gonna fail. You're gonna be, you're not gonna realize your dreams, you're gonna waste your life.

You'Re wasting your life, you're wasting your.

Life, you're wasting your life. You don't wanna feel that way. I know, like, it's hard to, I'm coming from a position of privilege and I don't deny that. But I was not, I didn't have anybody help me. All my success was pretty much on my own. I worked really hard. But I can tell you this, that prior to my success, I was really unhappy. I was really unhappy. I was very depressed. I even had moments I was suicidal. I felt like I could do something but I wasn't able to do it. And then The ability to write my books now, I don't have that feeling anymore. And it's the greatest thing in the world to not ever feel like that doubt and that depression. It's like a constant exhilaration.

It's amazing.

I finished it. I wrote that book. I did it. I can feel good about myself. And I want other people to understand that. It doesn't have to be a grand project. but it has to be something that makes you feel like, you know, because when you're a child, you have these dreams. Everybody had these dreams. You're going to be the best basketball player in history, like me, like I thought I was. Right?

You know, the Jewish kid's going to.

Be a great basketball player. Okay. You know, or I'm going to be the best this. I'm going to be a great writer. I'm going to be that, blah, blah. And then you get older and you lose those dreams, and it's very depressing. It's very dilating. And you want to keep some of that child within you alive and some of that ambition, some of that desire to achieve something great. And having ambition is not a bad thing. It's a dirty word today because people think it means you're selfish. But your ambition is going to be towards achieving things that help people as well.

What's the greatest fear for you now that you haven't yet conquered or overcome or insecurity that you're still Dealing with?

I don't know, Lois. You know, I have, believe it or not, a tremendous fear of failure.

Still, after all these massive hits and millions of book souls, and every time.

You get a-- I'm neurotic and I don't deny it.

Every book is a hit and just changes lives.

Well, it's because, I don't know if it's from my background, I come home with straight A's and my parents would go, Eh, okay, so what? What's next? Okay, so it's instilled in me some way. I don't know why, but so I'm writing my new book, my first chapter, and I'm going, this isn't working. It's too intellectual. It's not going to hit people. It's not relevant to their lives. I have to change it. I have to change it. If I write the book like this, people are going to laugh at me. And I go through that every single time in every single book. Now, I'm able, it's kind of a split personality because in the back of my mind I know I'm kind of playing a game. But I still play the game and it keeps me motivated and it keeps me working. What have I found that you do about terrible things? Generally, you don't run from them, especially if they're not avoidable in the future. Generally, you stand, confront, decompose, understand, adapt.