Robert Greene | The Laws of Human Nature | Talks at Google

[Music] [Applause] thank you so much for coming I've been a big fan of Google since way back since the late 90s I even wrote a blog post many years ago comparing Google to the warfare of Napoleon Bonaparte and Sun Tzu so I've been a big fan for years and it's always been a great honor for me to talk gu --gel this is my third Google Talk so thank you very much for this opportunity I really appreciate it now today I'm going to be taking all of you inside my latest book the laws of human nature

because I believe it has the potential to change your life to actually change how you look at the world but I want to begin by telling you a story that I relate in this book and the story concerns a man named John Blount a prominent English businessman in the early 18th century now mr. blunt was a leading director of an enterprise called the South Sea company and basically at this time the English government had massive debts more than any other country in history from financing all the wars they had been fighting it's basically valued at

around 31 million pounds which was enormous and the South Sea company basically managed this debt in exchange for having a monopoly on all trade in South America but John blunt he came from the lower classes and he was an extremely ambitious man his motto in life was think big and so in 1719 he came up with an idea for a business idea that was worthy of this motto and that would earn him everlasting Fame the idea was that the South Sea company would completely take over the thirty-one million dollars they would pay the government with

some money for that right and what they would do is they would take this money and they would privatize it and they would turn it in to a commodity and they would share cells of the debt shares of this debt to the public one hundred pounds equally one share in the South Sea company and the idea was that if they turned a nice profit they would be able to pay down the English enormous debts they would be able to make a nice profit for themselves and they would take some of that money and pay very

nice dividends to people who invested in it so it seemed like a win-win how could this lose and so they initiated this in about May of 1719 and it took off people didn't really understand it but they thought it was an amazing idea it was their patriotic duty to to invest in this and quickly the share prices rose within a month to two hundred pounds a share within two months to three hundred pounds a share the King of England King George the 1st plopped down a hundred thousand pounds of his own money into the scheme

people were going crazy but servants and maids were taking their life savings and investing it and cashing out and making a fortune one day this woman who was aristocrat very wealthy was in the theatre and she looked up and she saw her former maid occupying a seat a balcony a box in the theatre that was much more lavish and expensive than her own it was like things were going upside down people were going crazy but about 6 months into the scheme or 7 months into the scheme mr. blunt started getting an uneasy feeling basically what

he was running was a glorified Ponzi scheme the money that people were investing in the South Sea company he was actually sending back to them in the form of dividends to entice more and more investors but at some point people panicked and stopped buying shares the whole thing would collapse so he had to keep trying stoking interest in it giving people even better and better better terms of investing in it but finally the panic that he worried about occurred in September of 1720 and the whole thing collapsed in the most spectacular fashion thousands of English

people lost their their lives savings hundreds of people committed suicide including mr. blunts nephew it's estimated that it took the English government over a century to recover from this debacle and this was the everlasting Fame that ironically John blunt earned as the initiator of the infamous infamous South Sea Bubble now many famous Englishmen had invested in this including writers architects politicians etc but none more famous than the great Sir Isaac Newton the greatest scientist of his age and one of the most brilliant men that ever lived when the scheme started he took his own life

saving 7,000 pounds and he put it in to the South Sea company and he watched as it quickly doubled and then troubled too nearly 20,000 pounds mr. Newton realized that what mud goes up could easily go down so he cashed out and he collected his 20,000 pounds but in August of 1720 as Blunt was giving out these incredibly favourable terms and Isaac Newton saw that other people had made much more money than his 20,000 pounds he decided he was going to take that money and reinvest all of it in the South Sea company and he

lost aw he lost his entire savings on month later in the crash and here was a man in his 70s at this point who was reduced to near poverty and in the aftermath of this horrible event in his life he had a quote that I am particularly attracted to he said quote I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies but I cannot understand the madness of men end quote here was his great genius who could understand the laws of gravity what the motions of planets and all sorts of other things but when it came to

him the closest thing to him he could not understand himself he couldn't understand that laws that govern human behavior so now come like some 300 years later more to the present time and I'm me Robert Greene I'm working as a consultant to many powerful people in all sorts of enterprises athletes hip-hop artists politicians businesspeople and they're coming to me particularly after they wrote the 48 laws of power with their own problems and these problems basically revolved around the fact that it couldn't control the people that they were dealing with they didn't know how to handle

them there was one man who had partnered with some guy who he thought was rather mild mannered and this man was in the process of stealing the company from him there were other people who had made really disastrous hires of lieutenants and other people that were literally destroying their company destroying their lives there was one gentleman who had had a board of directors that he lost complete control over there was another person who had started this product line that he was certain was going to succeed and then it failed miserably and he blamed all of

his associates for not knowing how to execute these plans I had one famous musician who had took all his investment all of his savings had put it in the Bitcoin craze about four years ago and he lost everything in that quite similar to Sir Isaac Newton and so what all of these people had in common was they were all like mr. Newton very brilliant in their fields they could calculate the movements of global markets very complicated economic things but when it came to the basics of just dealing with people with me you would think the

most important skill you would have and in understanding themselves they were actually quite helpless and in the aftermath of all of these experiences that I was having rather powerful experiences I also thought of myself I thought of myself in the sense that I'm I too had had many failures I to it had problems dealing with people particularly before I wrote the 48 laws of power problems that inspired that book I too had made many mistakes I had violated law number one never outshine the master and I had been fired for that so I was thinking

about my own problems as well and about seven years ago I decided to set out on a quest I was going to try to get at the root of all of these problems that these people had in that I had to sort of and and what I thought that the root of this problem was the basic ignorant or misunderstanding of human nature of the laws that govern human behavior much like Sir Isaac Newton was looking at the laws that governed the movement of stars I was going to write a book about this subject because startingly

startlingly enough this is a subject that we all need we all need to know because as a social animal we spend all of our time dealing with people you can't succeed in this world I don't care how technically brilliant you are in your field how well you are at coding or or whatever it is if you don't understand people you're gonna neutralize all of your powers and yet nobody was writing a book about this subject so I determined I was going to be the one to do it and so I started devouring literature on the

subject neuroscience evolutionary biology psychology psychoanalysis and in the course of this research I came upon three kind of discoveries that were very fundamental that sort of grounded the book that came out of that the first one was I read that in neuroscience people estimate that 95% of human behavior is unconscious in other words 95% of what we do never reaches the level of consciousness we're not aware of what actually motivates our behavior I thought this was rather startling it's as if we possess a stranger inside of ourselves who's governing our behavior the second fact I

uncovered was that there are many kind of forces that came from our evolution hundreds of thousands and millions of years ago that are wired into our brains and how we operate and a lot of these things came about evolutionarily for very adaptive purposes for when we where we were five hundred thousand years ago but that don't have much purpose for where we are right now in the 21st century these elemental forces that are very primitive I call human nature these are the forces that basically determine a lot of what we do and so much of

this very primitive stuff is actually intersecting us in the 21st century and determining a lot of the problems that we're encountering now I'll go into that a little more later the third thing I discovered is that basically the human brain that all of us possess is remarkably similar each of us in other words there's very little difference between the brain you possess and somebody in some other country who's had a different cultural background and the reason is is that we all evolved from the same origins the same source hundreds of thousands of years ago well

before the spreading out of humans all around the globe so the qualities these forces that I'm talking about here now about human nature they are within all of us they are governing all of our behavior nobody is excepted from this from these laws and so I started as I started writing the book I got kind of excited and I kind of had a weird sensation it was making me understand myself in a way that was making me a little bit uncomfortable I was realizing some of the dark irrational qualities in myself some of my the

sources of my own bad habits and patterns it was also making me very aware of the things that I was observing in the people around me and I start to sense that there's incredible power in this knowledge that it can help me break these habits it can help me get along with people I'm gonna like much higher level but also more importantly at the time that I was writing this book a lot of strange things were going on there was the Bitcoin craze there was a whole transformation of social media into this giant feeding ground

for trolls etc and all the stuff that we've seen happening in social media a new president was elected and that was a very strange experience and all the things that were going on around that and the kind of tribalism in our politics in the heated nature of it and I thought what I was uncovering in this stuff about human nature is explaining in many ways all of the stuff that I was witnessing and I had this metaphor that I included in the introduction of the book that came to me and the metaphor was that human

nature the stuff that I'm talking about that evolved very deep in her past it's like a puppet master and we are the puppets and it's kind of moving us around and making us do things we're not aware the human nature is making us do these things but the puppet master is there and we die a new generation comes and this puppet master is going to move them around in the same way and the only way to escape that is to understand these laws to understand what is really going on so I want to take you

now through some of these I told you about these kind of powerful primitive forces that intersect the modern I want to take you inside four of these forces that kind of inspire ground many of the chapters in the book and the first one has to do with chapter 1 which is basically the law of irrationality and the point of this chapter is that we like to think of ourselves as these rational thinking very strategic creatures when in point of fact we humans are deeply irrational and what I mean by that is that we are governed

by our emotions more than anything else this explains the kind of madness that overcame even the great genius Isaac Newton and I referred to neuroscience once again to explain this kind of madness that exists inside all of us and basically when neuroscience shows is that the human brain evolved it's kind of like a ladder the brain has different layers literally going from the top to the bottom to the top the bottom part of the brain is the oldest part it is where the autonomic functions the governor or hormones etc you move up and then there's

the limbic system that governs our emotions and at the very top is the frontal neocortex that developed very recently it's where our language and our reasoning powers came from and what this means is that these two parts of the brain emotions and and reasoning are not in the same area they're separated by other layers and they don't communicate with each other now this is a very powerful idea that I think we all need to understand so emotions are a very very ancient system reptiles have a fear response so this is something that goes back millions

and millions hundreds of millions of years and basically emotions originate as a kind of hormonal a nerve signal they're sent to the brain and these signals are much stronger than any of the signals that the frontal cortex sends and what that means is emotions consume so much more of our attention than any kind of thought they grab our attention more because they're involving these very powerful physical forces the other thing that comes from this is that because they're in two different parts of the brain we don't really have access to our emotions so it's very

hard for us to put our feelings into words I don't know if you've ever experienced that but the word depression doesn't really describe exactly sometimes the feeling of depression or the same with anger they're more complicated there's something more going on it's hard to verbalize these emotions the other thing is we have no access to the source of our emotions so we could be angry and depressed but not really know consciously why we're angry or depressed and finally because these are separated functions we don't really realize to what extent emotions are infecting our strategies our

plans our ideas we don't realize how much the ideas that we have are being infiltrated by right by our emotions and to make all of this more complicated and worse I don't mean to overload you with all this information excuse me our brains operate by simplifying information the human brain takes in so much stimuli in the course of a day that if we had to sit there and look at it all of that we would go crazy so the brain operates by simplifying the material that we receive and tells us a story so that for

instance when you're feeling angry your brain tells you you're angry because of this person or that you're depressed because of this event or that but it's not necessarily the truth there's it's often a disconnect between the two so excuse me so so so for instance when Sir Isaac Newton is having this this issue with the South Sea Bubble and he decided this Houston company decides to pour all 20,000 pounds back into the investment his brain is telling him Isaac this is a great idea look at how much money you're going to make the King invested

in it people are making fortunes it's a rational decision whereas in fact what was really motivating him was she agreed but the brain wasn't telling him that I tell the story in in the book of something that always a story that I fascinated me by a famous psychoanalyst named Heinz ko hoot who had a patient and this patient was a young man who had this pattern in life he was get involved with young women young women in different relationships they were like four or five of them and he broke each one of them off several

months or even several years into the relationship he would say well this woman I didn't trust her I don't think she was gonna be faithful this other woman she wasn't smart enough she wasn't up to my level this other woman you know I think she was just out for my money on money he would break the relationship off first and in discussing with this patient ko who discovered that this young man had a mother who was very kind of a narcissistic she never quite paid very much attention to him and so this was a very

painful experience for him that he didn't really remember but basically he experienced her narcissism as a form of abandonment as if she had left him and so his pattern in life was to always be the one abandoning other people abandoning women before they could abandon him because he could not relive that experience again but his brain wasn't telling him that his brain was telling him this woman was not good she wasn't smart she wasn't worthy etcetera he had no access to the actual source of the patterns of behavior in his life and I ask you

to think of the possibility this could be happening to you there could be things in your life things that are getting you angry or frustrated or depressed and there could be something very much rooted in the first three or four years of your life that you have no idea about what is actually motivating your behavior in the present in economics writers like Daniel Kahneman I don't know if you're familiar with him he talks about they talk about the affective heuristic affective meaning emotional and what that means is what determines people's decisions in economics to buy

something or invest in something is not rational it is actually based on emotions this is a recent discovery in economics and most of us are not aware of it we think when we buy a product we've done our research we know what we're doing we bought it for this the other reason and because we're not aware of how emotions are governing our purchases our economic behavior this gives marketing people incredible room to manipulate us so they've done all the research on human nature and they know that putting a little ping sound in your smartphone at

a certain frequency has a very hypnotic effect and so you're you're drawn to constantly check your smartphone's you think is because of your own desire but it's actually you're in some ways being hypnotized they know that the color red will grab your attention in a way that no other color will so they put things that will they know how to you know manipulate your attention by using colors there's the exposure factor that they discuss so they know through through lots of research that if someone is exposed to something first they're much more likely to buy

it the same thing goes with Presidents that we elect or candidates if we're exposed to them if we know them just by the name just by the recognition were prone to vote for them back in the day when people who still used to buy things in shops and stores these people knew that if a shop assistant lightly touched you on the arm in a very non-threatening way the chances of you buying the product went up like 50 60 % and so they would teach their employees to do this on and on and on so the

lesson here is that we're not aware of all of these things that are going on of how much our emotions are actually governing and determining so much of our behavior and the solution that I give in my book the solution for us humans to actually become rational like we imagine ourselves to be is to become aware of this phenomenon first to not think that you're rational to see the process so it's not easy but when you're feeling anger or you're feeling depressed don't just act on it and mope or lash out but why ask yourself

why what is going on here could there be something else going on that I'm not really thinking of is there something deeper going on and just in the you may not get to the answer you may not uncover that thing that in your early childhood but just in asking that question you're gonna create a little bit of space between the signal you're getting from your brain and your reaction and that space that time that 10 minutes that one hour that you don't react is actually what's going to make you a more rational person in the

long run you'll be able to question well why am I really interested in buying this product is it because I'm being manipulated or is it something that I really need I talk a lot in my consulting with people who have to make important decisions I can bet you that 95% of your decision the strategy you're coming up with is infected with emotions I call it the rosy scenario you're always imagining the best case that will emerge from this but you're not seeing all the potential pitfalls so you want to subtract all of these emotional elements

before you make your decision going through this process is what will in the end finally make you rational talking about how emotions govern us there's obviously something that emerged in our deep past that's not really adapted to where we're living now but there is a power that it that we evolved from in our deep past there's actually extremely it well adapted to where we are now and will be very valuable for us and that quality is empathy which is a major theme in my new book and empathy is basically the ability the incredible human ability

to get inside the perspective and the point of view of other people to literally see inside how other people are seeing the world and this is equality a power that our ancient ancestors well before the invention of language invented as a way to increase their ability to understand that and the people in the group or the tribe and to work more closely together and I asked I say in my book mastering in this new book that I imagine these early ancestors were nearly telepathic and their ability to sense what other people were feeling and thinking

I call this visceral empathy but we humans have another quality that kind of counters this and renders this power that we all possess kind of neutralizes that and this quality is our self absorption our latent narcissism and this quality isn't something that's necessarily wired into our brains but comes about because of how we're raised how we're socialized I'm trying to make the point that we are all somewhat narcissistic that we're all on that spectrum the origins of narcissism quite simply are that we humans spend an inordinate amount of time being raised by our parents much

longer than any other animal so we form a much deeper attachment to our mother and our Father but a point is inevitably ray reached in this process where that attention slackens and the parent distance distances themselves from us and it's very emotionally disturbing we feel like we're not getting a much anymore love or attention from our parents and the solution that most people create in this is to create a self a self image that they can retreat to that they can love and esteem and so that in these moments when parents aren't giving us love

and attention and recognition we can withdraw into ourselves and feel that we are worthy that we are okay that we can love ourselves and this self love operates as a kind of thermostat so when we're feeling depressed we're not recognized it kind of raises us our moods up so we don't fall too deeply down into this depression and what's part of this this self-love is that we pour a lot of libidinal love energy desire into the self that we create we become fascinated with our own tastes our own desires of who we are and then

we go searching for other people who are similar to us and you know and people have noticed in studies that we tend to fall in love with people who either look like us or have very similar ideas or values to us so that we're attracted and drawn to people who reflect who we are which is an L another aspect of our narcissism and we see that on social media where people glom on to those who are about creating kind of like a narcissistic tribe now obviously there are people who fall deeper into this types that

I call deep or toxic narcissists and what this what happens with them is they never develop that inner thermostat because something was broken in the relationship with their parents they were never able to develop enough self-love and so the only way they can get that feeling that sense of self-worth and recognition when they started getting lower things aren't going well is to act out and get attention from other people instead of from themselves so they become dramatic and they kind of know how to get attention when they're children etc and so that's their only way

of solving this kind of emptiness inside of themselves and such people such deep narcissus can actually go pretty far in life because as children they developed a lot of flair and charisma and if they're talented they can become leaders they can become CEOs of business of businesses because of this kind of charisma that they have but then they read hit a wall because they're always need more and more and more attention they're not really paying they really don't know under understand that people they're dealing with because they're using them as objects for their own benefit

and they can't learn from their mistakes because for a deep narcissist to admit that they had made a mistake it's too painful so even though they can become the CEO of an enormous tech company and they're not going to name names here they're inevitably gonna hit a wall because of this so the point I'm trying to make is that we are all on that spectrum we all have that potential and in moments when we feel too pressed where circumstances aren't going our way we noticed that we could become more and more self-absorbed and that we

have this potential to fall even deeper into ourselves so I want us to get over this notion that the narcissist is always the other person and not me we are all on the spectrum the solution here is simple first we have to admit this that we are narcissists the person says oh my god I'm not a narcissist no not me that's exactly a sign of narcissism right there they are the exception no not me look at me I'm not a narcissist the second thing you have to realize is that you're basically a functional narcissist and

that energy that goes into yourself can literally be turned outward and can be transformed into empathy which is one of the chapters in my book and what I mean by that is we turned all of that libidinal desire into ourselves we became fascinated with ourselves our thoughts our ideas we need to turn that outward into people that were looking at so when you're in a conversation with a friend or whatever chances are you're not really listening to they're not paying attention you're in your phony or somewhere else because you're more interested in your own ideas

and your own problems that's where your energy and fascination goes but you must realize that the people you're dealing with are weirder and more interesting than you could ever imagine I like to tell people think of the people you deal with us if they were characters in a movie I had a job once where I was really depressed people I thought were really awful and I imagined that they were actually figures in Greek mythology and I had to figure out which one each one of them was it helped me a lot because now I mean

I had to think about their lives and their childhood and what made them the way they were so the people you're dealing with are much more interesting than you imagined and so if you can turn that energy around and you can start placing yourself in their shoes it will go a long way to taking that self-absorption and turning it outward we're all working in much more dive verse workplaces fifty years ago my father had his job it was all basically white men in his office we don't have that anymore people come from all different men

and women all different cultural backgrounds and in this diverse workplace it's actually fascinating to try and get into the backgrounds and the mindsets of this diverse world and get outside yourself and get inside what other people are experiencing and try to figure out their culture that they came from it's like therapy so this is an incredible power empathy that lies latent in all of you but that must be cultivated and developed and I give you many lessons in the book on how to do that now another law of human nature is that we humans have

what I call a self opinion an opinion about ourselves and people have done studies have shown that that opinion is generally at more elevated than the reality so we tend to think of ourselves as intelligent at least in our field were intelligent we like to think of ourselves as autonomous we just make our own decisions like people don't tell us what to do I'm an independent person and we tell ourselves that were basically good moral people that were nice and polite that were team players that we get along with other people but an equal law

of human nature is that this sunny kind of positive portrait is actually covering up and masking a dark side with psychologist Carl Jung called the shadow and that every human being has a dark side has a shadow and this shadow is not something that's wired into our brains it comes about how we are raised as children basically as children we come into this world as a kind of complete natural being we have all kinds of emotions and feelings we are mischievious we could be we can love our parents one moment and then hate them the

next we can be that sweet little angel one mom and the next moment we're burning with desires for revenge and we steal something from our her sister we were a complete being we had a full range of emotions but slowly over time we have to sort of soften all of that our parents are all stressed out and they're trying to get us not act out so much they want us to be more angelic and teachers have this pressure as well so slowly we feel this pressure to kind of tamp down and disguise these sort of

natural emotions that are inside all of us and this energy that was both could be positive and negative could be loving and mischievous or vengeful at the same time all of that the dark stuff goes into what it's called the shadow it doesn't disappear it stays with us as adults and this shadow that you carry with you you're feeling tremendous amount of pressure to keep it conceal it because you want to present to everybody here at Google an image of yourself as this sweet angelic child this person that's that's wonderful and it's pressure how do

I keep this dark side from coming out well it comes out in certain moments particularly when we're feeling stress we're feeling moments where we're not getting enough attention and recognition from other people and it leaks out in some comment that we give or some abrasive comment that hurts people's feelings or it comes out in some act that surprises us or surprises that people around us you know and we often see that with celebrities people in the news who get caught out doing some kind of weird sexual escapades or something like that yeah I don't know

who that person was that isn't me something came over me right the guy who invested all his money in bitcoins he he would tell me I don't know who that was that wasn't me that had popped all that money down something came over me and we generally accept these explanations because it makes sense because it only maybe happens once or twice but I'm telling you in my book that this kind of behavior is not an exception it's actually more of their real self the real self that people have that is leaking out the shadow side

the shadow likes to disguise itself from you and one of the great shadow of disguises that I talk about in the book is over idealization and this is what we see with the social justice warrior now if you're a social justice warrior you believe so deeply you've identified so deeply with your cause that it justifies any kind of manipulative nasty intolerant bigoted behavior because it's all for the great cause that I mean that I'm promoting right you can censor people you can tell people to shut up you can do whatever you want because it's all

for your great cause and you think it's because it's for the cause but actually a lot of its coming because the shadow is trying to find some way to get itself out and it uses you in this fashion the social media has become this intense magnet for the dark shadow side lurking inside of us which is why we find all the Neela's controls etc on social media it's become an infested ground for the shadow so the point I try to make the solution here is to be aware of it your going around and you've so

identified with the sweet angelic persona that you have created for yourself and that you show the world that you don't even imagine that you have a shadow and it operates by the fact that you're unaware of it the fact that Isaac Newton wasn't aware that he had a greedy little person inside of him that was dying to get out made it so that he could lose all of his money in this investment so you want to see the shadow inside yourself recognize that child within you that was tamp down see the patterns of behavior in

which it leaks out and then in my book I described many ways for how you can incorporate your shadow in a productive way you can take your ambition aggressive energy and channel it into some great cause you can be a social warrior there's not a social justice where is nothing wrong with it but you don't have to be nasty and intolerant and bigoted you could be about getting results about actually promoting your cause instead of hurting putting down other people on and on but the key is you have to first see this shadow within you

well I'm going a lot slower than I thought maybe I'll skip over some of the things I have here so in in in my talks and my experience has always been a phenomenon that has struck me and it first struck me about twelve years ago when I gave a talk at Microsoft I've been in the Seattle area it was a group of twenty thirty thousand people some in this one area and I was struck about by how similar everybody was people kind of dressed alike they all kind of acted like they were all sort of

this sort of button-down serious kind of personality they weren't all the same but there was something weird about the kind of behavior patterns that I had never seen in any other office before then some seven years ago I was at Google up in Mountain View and I noticed a similar thing but much different it was a much more playful and open a much more pleasant to be honest with you environment but there was definitely kind of a spirit that these that that group had some talk about in Mountain View I worked on the board of

directors for a company called American Apparel and CEO is this kind of insane madman kind of like he had sort of this hippie free-love tarted mentality and here you had a company of ten thousand people and they were all having nose rings and tattoos and cross-dressing excuse me it was like thank you it was like you know what was going on here and so I thought you know what I'm seeing here in Microsoft at Google and American Apparel that there's a culture these places have a culture that's a weird phenomenon if you think about it

France obviously has a culture but that culture took a thousand years to evolve and it's very pronounced but in the course of 10 20 years Microsoft Google American Apparel they've evolved their own culture their own way of being where people are kind of similar what is this phenomenon and basically I explained it in my book as one of those very ancient processes that's kind of determining who we are see our ancestors in order to succeed and thrive as a social animal they developed complex emotions like joy like surprise like anxiety and these emotions would show

up on the face this is before the invention of language so you could look at the person next to you and see that they were feeling anxious and then you could feel it as well and then together you could respond quickly without ever having to say a word then maybe there was some predator in the area so these emotional responses that people had were very much communicated without words viscerally infected we became infected we were susceptible to the emotions of people around us and we humans have inherited that incredible power the other thing that happened

is that we developed what's known as mirror neurons which I talked a lot about in mastery I don't know if you're familiar with mirror neurons and basically that means is if you're watching somebody playing tennis the person playing tennis is they're hitting the ball certain neurons are firing in their brain to make them hit it as you're watching them the same neurons are firing in your brain that are firing and there's so that you this is what gives us the power to imitate and to learn so you'll notice sometimes you'll be watching a basketball game

and you'll almost like be shooting a free-throw along with this with the player because you're trying to will that ball into the net those are your mirror neurons that are operating so we have this built-in power to take on the emotions and feelings and moods of the people around us and if you put enough people together for enough time through sheer osmosis you will create some kind of culture and people will start acting and behaving in a similar way these cultures can be tight like in Microsoft or looser as I imagine here they could be

more kind of traditional or they can be more kind of populist they can be sort of top-down or more egalitarian on and on and on often the culture of a group reflects the person on top so you know Bill Gates obviously for Microsoft in Dov Charney for American Apparel I don't know I can't begin to speculate where that might be from Google I have no idea so what happens with this culture is that also certain unwritten codes of behavior evolved and these sort of determine what is acceptable or not acceptable within this culture and if

you don't pay attention to these codes here at Google or wherever office you're working you are likely to be fired or ostracized and never really understand why so you need to pay attention to this so the idea that I'm trying to promote in this chapter is you like to think of yourself as this independent person or your thoughts and beliefs are your own but in fact so many of the things that you think so many of your values and ideas come from the group we are more conformist than we imagine and I include myself in

that if we belong to a certain political tribe we tend to absorb all of the ideas the same ideas as other people have the same political beliefs so we're much more conformist than we like to believe and the other thing is that if we're not careful the kind of group mentality could turn in easily into a mob mentality and it can become quite dangerous as happens in like bubbles like the South Sea Bubble etc so the solution that I'm promoting here is you need to be aware of how deeply the group has infected your own

behavior and infected your belief system so that you can create a bit of space for some independent thinking so you can begin to realize that maybe you don't want to have some of these ideas they're not coming from within and the second thing is if you're a leader of any kind of group in any way you must be very aware prevailing culture you must be able to read it and understand it and work with it so if you're starting a group you're starting a business if you have a startup of some sort you have the

chance to create a culture and it's extremely important because once a culture is created like in Microsoft or American Apparel it's very hard to change it so I talk in the book about how to create a healthy functional what I call a reality group as opposed to a dysfunctional group so that's sort of the lesson there the last sort of force that I wanted to talk about is related to this group force and basically all of us belong to one enormous group that is millions hundreds of millions that includes hundreds of millions of people and

that group is the generation that we belong to a generation basically comprises 22 years it's called a cohort so you belong to a particular generation as I do and obviously in that 22 year span the people born near the beginning of that generation that people born near the end there's going to be some differences but sighs social scientists have discovered remarkable similarities between people within a generation even those that are separated by that by those years they'll have similar tastes similar sense of humor similar values similar ideas where does this come from well in my

book I make a very kind of intricate description of the origin of the generation and why it had evolved that way but very simply put when you're young you're very vulnerable to the emotions and moods and ideas of the people around you and those of your own age you're all watching back in the day when people did that you're all watching the same television shows you're all listening to more or less the same music you're all dealing with parents who came from their own generation who have their on different special parenting styles on and on

you're absorbing this kind of group osmosis this group personality the kind of determines who you are and this will be the same for Millennials for baby boomers for Gen Xers it's kind of like a secret Club that you belong to so people who are Millennials you have a kind of a tacit understanding I could never enter this club I could never really completely understand your mentality because it's something that you only from within the generation but you understand and there are two things that you have to see about the generation phenomenon first is every generation

things that it's vastly superior to the one that came before it and vastly superior to the one that comes after one of the most ancient forms of writing that we have is a Sumerian tablet in which it's quoted quote today's this is from a thousand BC mind you today's youth is rotten evil godless and lazy it will never be what youth used to be and it will never be able to preserve our culture end quote now that sounds pretty familiar right so you know people say Millennials oh you're so soft you're so pampered you know

what's wrong with you but people were saying the same thing about baby boomers and saying about the same thing about Gen Xers it's human nature so the next time you hear somebody sort of parade this sign of superiority which I just basically considered generational narcissism just tell yourself it's human nature people are gonna be saying that a thousand years from now the second thing you must understand is that the generational phenomena creates what is called a zeitgeist a spirit of the times that's critical absolutely critical for you to understand if you want to be successful

in business or whatever the zeitgeist basically at any one time there are four generations that are alive the twenty-two years there might be a fifth generation but they're getting pretty old and they're dying off so the the two youngest generations are the ones that are under kind of unsettled they don't like the way the world is they want to change they want to create new values new fashions new styles they're generating all of this energy for change the two older generations want to stop that they want to hold on to the past they want to

conserve and preserve the traditions that they inherit and these two seismic forces are continually clashing creating a spirit of the time as I'd Geist the other thing is with generations is they follow this incredible pattern that people have discovered have written about for many years so there will be a generation that will be known as the revolutionary generation which it overturns all of the previous ideas and values and creates a true revolution this will be followed by a generation that tries to preserve that revolution and kind of turn it into something a little more rash

on the Seine this will be followed by a very conservative generation that has lost touch with the revolution but it's just basically all about safety and keeping what happened in the past this will be followed by a crisis generation which gets so sick of the stagnant situation and of the values they've inherited that they're very unhappy and dissatisfied and this leads to the revolutionary generation on on on on and on and we can see this cycle continually happening and people estimate that the generation that is now like the millennial generation is a true crisis generation

I believe that's true and that what it's following is that we're on the verge of another kind of revolution the kind that happens they estimate every 80 or so here's our values are going to be completely overturned and something new is gestating something very exciting and something very different and so your task whatever you're creating or whatever you're doing you have an audience that you must reach and that audience has the zeitgeist as a spirit and this spirit is never stagnant it's always changing and you tend to be remain locked in the past I think

like to tend the spirit of the times as a kind of a wave if you're just behind that wave if you're not quite up to it the product the book that you write the startup that you create will fail if it's with that wave if it's riding with it you will have some success if you anticipate that wave if you're a little bit ahead of it you will have tremendous success that is where true power lies so you must be incredibly sensitive to this phenomenon and not be your generation will tend to lock you into

the past lock you into certain values and belief systems you want to let go of them you want to develop some flow and you want to be able to develop this kind of very sensitive antenna to what's going on with the younger generations where true change is foaming now I've gone way over my talk when I thought this would take but I want to conclude with a story that I have in my book that sort of illustrates to me the tremendous power that you can have by putting these ideas into action and it's a story

about another Englishman don't worry these book isn't just about English people a man named Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton he was one of the great English explorers he lived in the beginning of the 20th century Shackleton had led several expeditions across Antarctica and it was his idea that he would lead the first expedition the first group of men to cross this enormous continent on foot so in 1914 he set out with a crew of 27 million to accomplish this but as they got nearer to the point where they were to embark and crossed the continent they

got trapped in an ice floe and they were trapped in there for months and their ship started catching water and began to sink so he had to order all of his men off the ship and onto this ice floe and they managed to keep a couple of the life life preserved ship little lifeboats that were on the boat but basically Shackleton was now facing what seemed to be an impossible dire situation um they were about to enter the winter in which there would be no no daylight and the weather would be awful the radio was

too weak to send signals distress signal to be picked up so they were trapped on their own supplies from the ship we're gonna quickly run out and so they would have nothing to eat they would have to live off the land and so to be able to survive against all those odds seemed nearly impossible but Shackleton had been on many expeditions he was this brilliant man who was not just brilliant at adventuring but he had a deep understanding of people and himself so the first thing he realizes in order to get out of this horrible

situation he would have to be making series of decisions decisions the most important would be when to abandon the ice floe and try and go somewhere else and if he listened to his emotions if he panicked where he got doubtful he wouldn't be he wouldn't time this right he would leave too early or too late he had to calm himself down he had to make sure that his decisions weren't being influenced by the men he was leading and their and what they were feeling he had to step back and assess rationally what was the best

time to leave what was the best decision for that moment the second thing was he had to deal with a very diverse group of men that came from all different backgrounds social economic backgrounds and he was an incredibly empathetic person he made a point of getting in time inside the spirit of each one of his men he talked their language to the photographer on the ship he talked like a photographer he got inside his more artistic point of view to the carpenter who was from a lower class he suddenly talked more of his language he

got into the spirit of each of these men so that he could figure out their moods and anticipate when they might start getting kind of negative and in fact the group with doubts and he was very sensitive to each person he understood that the group had a dark side and this could ruin any chances of of success that the great enemy wasn't the weather or anything but it was from within the human spirit so he organized all of these things that could channel this dark energy he organized big soccer games on the ice so that

you get out their competitive spirit he organized all these kind of festivals where they get drunk and rowdy and raunchy he didn't stop it basically he tried constantly to keep elevate the group spirits that they would not start doubting themselves on and on and on and through this process he figured out the moment when they left the ice floe they got on their life their little life preservers their lifeboats and they traveled some 300 miles to an island the Elephant Island where they now we're on solid ground but on a tiny beach where they wouldn't

survive and then he took one of these little boats but I'm a six men who had carefully Tros chosen he crossed the most treacherous waters on the planet 800 miles with waves 30 40 feet high to South Georgia island I was able to get a rescue ship and all 27 men survived is considered one of the most remarkable survival and rescue stories in the history of mankind and Sir Henry Shackleford has gone down in history any books on leadership are always quoting the story of Shackleton and what he accomplished on that journey sorry I'm losing

my voice now through you know and basically he did this through his his knowledge of himself there was incredible empathetic connection to his men and through his deep grasp of human nature now I don't think here at Google you're ever gonna be facing a city circle census as dire is what Shackleton faced I'm not sure but I don't think so but in but as a social animal we're always facing environments that are full of dangers disappointments toxic people etc and it's my belief my hope that was a genuine understanding human nature which I've hope to

have sparked in you today you can navigate even the most treacherous dysfunctional environment you'll ever encounter and handle those toxic people that will never bleak Ross your path that you'll be able to develop that empathy that I think is the most powerful tool that any human could possibly possess thank you so much for this I'm sorry about how long it went I thought it was much shorter talk than it was anyway thank you [Applause] so you mentioned that like 95% of our decision of action I come from subconscious so it's that on average I always

say is there a like Grinch for that well the range would be coming through the understanding that I'm trying to develop and help you with by understanding yourself more deep just by understanding the fact that so much of your behavior is unconscious your are rarely going to increase the range of that of that 95 and lower it because you're going to be aware of these things going on and you're going to be able to see for instance if emotions are governing your action and you're not aware of it how you buy something or the plans

and strategies you're making or how you respond to people if you simply know that fact then you're able to carve out carve out more consciousness so so how do you have a more empathetic relationship with your shadow and do you have any examples of how an individual use their shadow to be more productive in what they wanted to accomplish yeah you do have to be more empathetic it's like a child inside of yourself that you have to finally accept and come to terms with and kind of love in a way so I noticed my own

shadow for instance I like to think of myself as this rigorously independent person but basically what it's just disguising because the shadow also I didn't completely go into everything the shadow is not just your dark emotions it's also your insecurities and your vulnerabilities that you're hiding from the world and I'm hiding from the world from from the public a kind of scared child I want to be independent and assert that because I had parents that basically never gave me enough attention so it said I hope my mom's not watching this I shall not want to

rewind that but anyway uh so I tend to kind of go too far with this sort of behavior I talk in the book about Abraham Lincoln who had a very pronounced shadow and the shadow had two sides to it first he was kind of morbid and a very sensitive person almost kind of poetic in a way he was obsessed with death and he knew that if he let out this kind of obsessive morbid overly sensitive personality would get him in trouble people wouldn't like it he also was a very aggressive and belligerent people these two

sides lived in these two aspects were both there at the same time he was a belligerent person you don't realize this but he loved boxing and he loved beating the hell out of people and he was a boxer as young man and at one point in his life he insulted of another politician with very rude language and he told him so I'm never gonna do this again he saw his shadow operating and so he learned to channel these two sides of himself in a way that would be productive he turned that kind of morbid sensitivity

into empathy did a feeling that he didn't want to lose lives during the Civil War they wanted end lives of even Confederate soldiers was valuable to him and he channeled that aggressive energy into winning the war and to strategizing into being the most brilliant rational strategists that ever lived I tell people who are artists use your anger use your frustration in your anger and your hurts and put them into your work because and and films and books that do that grab an audience because we all have these emotions and these sides that were tamping down

but if you express your anger it'll attract people like a magnet and I did that I've done them in all of my books the 48 laws of power I had a lot of anger in there and I put it in the book and I think it's what attracted a lot of readers to it and I talk in art of seduction about Malcolm X and the tremendous anger that was welling inside him from all the hurts that he had as a young man and the years in prison and he tapped that down and he controlled he

didn't he didn't explode if you ever watched Malcolm X speak there was this incredible incandescence that I call charisma he was controlling that anger but he was channeling it in these very rational powerful speeches so I want you to take it and channel that energy into something positive and productive taking don't be afraid your very ambition don't be afraid that you're aggressive but put it into something that's actually productive and you'll accomplish something as opposed to hurting people I mean I have more in the book about that but that's sort of does that answer your

question yeah thanks okay you mentioned that the laws of human nature are based in neuroscience and that we all experience it but how is it also related to mental disease do you believe that like for sociopaths for example do you believe that they also are guided by these laws of human nature or do you believe that they are an edge case to this they're one that they're an edge case that they don't I think they're an outlier well by the logic I've determined nobody is exempt from it okay so they are more like an edge

case so I talked about narcissism we all have narcissism tended narcissistic tendencies but there are people who fall deeply into toxic narcissism deve narcissist they're only a more extreme example of a tendency that we all have so even the worst criminal is only displaying potentiality and tendencies that it exists within each and every one of us so criminals have a dark side obviously and they act on that dark side more readily than we do they didn't necessarily tamp down all of that energy that they had as a child they're acting out on it more in

their 20s and 30s they're holding up liquor stores they're robbing they're doing what they want because they don't they never developed that kind of positive angelic image that we have but critten criminals have I've studied a lot 95% of the time they're actually polite people getting along though they're not being aggressive and violent and angry all of the time they've learned also as well in order to get along with people in order to survive even among other criminals that they have to present a certain kind of image so the laws that I'm talking about affect

each and every one of us so the criminal mentality is simply an extension of tendencies we all have the number one thing that defines a true criminal is the fact that they don't have the normal patience that we have to get what we want they don't are not able to delay the gratification needs so if we want money and recognition we're willing to put in ten years of hard work to get it knowing that at the end there will be something like that they don't have it they want instant gratification they don't Lee they can't

wait that long they need the money now they need the attention excitement now but we all have that tendency all of us are impatient we all are prone to taking the line of least resistance if someone gave us a shortcut instead of ten years it only took two years each and every one of us would take that so there is that tendency within all of us the book I really want to be making sure in a kind of humane way just stop separating us and them as if we are these great superior creatures they are

these these scum these human rejects we are all in this together we all have the same propensity you take any one of you and put you in some horrible neglected poverty-stricken environment you'll find survival skills that you never realize you have you'll become a different person you might even review discover criminal tendencies in yourself you never realize so I want to get people off their high horse off their moral superiority off their feeling that there's so much better than others we're all in this together we all have the same flaws and the same strengths thank

you hi Robert hi hey um I was I really enjoyed your cut your talk along it was great I really enjoyed it um I think I cut out a bunch of stuff oh you can believe it I'm sort of disappointed you know I'm used to listening to really long podcast oh okay but I was taken with the sort of like the storytelling aspect of your talk and I'm wondering if you could talk about a what you think is there's a little off topic for your book but a what do you think makes for good storytelling

the way you've delivered it and maybe some of the people that you look up to as good storytellers well you know since the 48 laws of power I and my method by Travis I always decided that I would tell stories because I feel I want to draw the reader into my subject and so many books that I read are really boring and they don't connect with me because I'm always at a distance from what they're talking about and I want to seduce the reader I want to draw you into my world to my way of

looking at things and a story does that and the power of a story which I talk a lot in two of my books the art of seduction and then in my third book on strategies for my kind of version of sunsoo I have a chapter about how to communicate to people and I just I reveal all of my secrets in that channel but basically when you tell a story people don't know what's happening next and I always make it a point then you don't know the lesson that I'm getting at where I begin you have

no idea that the people I'm describing are actually the con artists who are calling the other person you think they're the ones being caught but they're the connors I try and surprise you I try to have some mystery and I lead you along and lead you along and then BOOM I tell you the ending and the moral and then I interpret it and I liken this the power of this psychologically to when we were children we liked that feeling of our father picking us up and throwing us around carrying us someplace we didn't know where

he was carrying us we liked the idea of some ride in an amusement park what's around the corner what's happening next what's behind the curtain that moment were you we were wondering what's happening next you have caught the reader you've hooked them they're gonna want to know what's next so I'm always in the process of hooking the reader I'm very aware of my audience I'm very aware of when they're going to get bored and whether their attention is gonna weaken so I want to create stories I mean any great novelist any great playwright any great

screenwriter it's going to be a master at creating that level of suspense in mystery but I think it's it's deeply ingrained in us and if I could tell people that I teach people to write books and I'm often helping them with their books I'm telling you you're being too obvious too familiar you're not surprising people by the third chapter we've read everything that you have to say you've left no surprises so I always structured my books to have continual little pops make them think oh so you're never quite bored I hope I've succeeded but I

mean I'm excited to read your back oh thank you hey Robert yeah hey um so you talked a lot about the power of empathy I'm curious what your thoughts are on let's say as a leader and having to make decisions sort of for the overall you know like the best possible decision for the overall good right even when sometimes it has to be kind of hard on certain groups of people right and then maybe like work harder to sort of get ahead in a certain environment like what are your thoughts on maybe show it like

do you do you ever feel like too much empathy could lead to a little bit more of an irrational and emotional decision making it's a very good question yeah there's a there's a level there where as a leader in particular you have to cut that off but the empathy that you're having is as a leader you're there for the greater good the group is coming together to create something positive what I call a reality group a reality group is a group that is together to make something to create a product to create a book or

a film it's not there for emotional purpose it's not there for people to be friends or to get out there Yaya's it's to make something so you're grounded in reality you're practical and if you have 10 members and one of them is some kind of raging narcissistic or whatever you can't be empathetic to that person you have to find a way to isolate them so your empathy is geared towards the greater good of the group I have a chapter on this of a chapter on authority and I talk about the icon of that is Queen

Elizabeth the first that I discussed who was an immensely empathetic person but was an in terrible position as a female ruler at a time that women weren't supposed to rule and so she created a style of authority that I think is incredibly powerful and from her story I kind of deduced certain laws and so for instance if you need the group to work harder and their slagging off etc you need to lead from the front you need to set the example you can't be sitting there back in your office yelling at people saying what are

you going home right now it's four o'clock no you got to stay long you can't be berating people and pushing them like a donkey up a hill if you set the example if you set the tone and the spirit people will follow you and that's the mistake 95% of these I keep using that number 95% saw so many mistakes that people make leader wise is they think that that it comes from other people that their employees are to blame they're lazy they don't know what they're doing it comes from you you're not setting the tone

you have the power to set the right tone you're in the office working till 9:00 10:00 o'clock and everybody sees that they're gonna follow your lead they're gonna see that you take responsibility for mistakes you blame scapegoats they're gonna say oh I better take responsibility for myself you're not favoring this person over that person they're treating everybody more or less equally oh okay I'm motivated to work hard and earn his or her trust through the tone that you said that's the power that you have as a leader it's much better than yelling at people and

berating them so i agreen empathy can go too far in that case and you have to set limits and boundaries but more than anything you have to set the proper tone for the group so I have a question about leadership you mentioned that people in actually about culture people in certain environment become very similar to each other and we have a tendency to be like other people around us the culture I was wondering yes if you don't like something about the culture and you are not in the leadership position to set an example how do

you go about changing the culture it's extremely difficult particularly if you know large company because the culture is stronger than any individual right so if you're in a dysfunctional environment and believe me I've consulted with companies that I would call dysfunctional you as an individual have very limited choices and I've talked to people like that and I say in this case these situations you have to be a little bit selfish you have to see the skills that you can get you have to learn from this if you have to learn the negative examples you have

to get out as quickly as you can because these kind of environments will drag you down I say people can go crazy can literally develop a mental illness by working in a dysfunctional group it can infect you you'll never get over the rest of your life as opposed to working for a reality group or a positive place can actually improve your mental health so first of all don't be hubristic don't be grandiose and think that you one-person mid-level employee is going to suddenly be you know shiny Knight and armed we're going to change this culture

you can't it's stronger than you are and I talk in the book the United States Pentagon it's very powerful rooted military culture and all these people came in thinking that they were gonna be the ones that were gonna alter the culture John F Kennedy was one Lyndon Johnson was one they didn't want to get deeper involved in the Vietnam War that we're gonna they were going to change their culture and the culture ended up changing them and ended up making them go further and further into the into the war the culture will change you the

longer you're in it you won't change it so have some humility think about yourself and as soon as you can't get out of it I mean if you can give me more specifics I can go more deeply into it that's generally the advice I get may not be necessarily a dysfunctional culture you don't mind there may be aspects like you went to Microsoft everybody was a certain way yeah what if you you have some different idea of what culture should be not necessarily it's it's I'm not talking about this function I'm sorry I misunderstood well

you know in a culture like Microsoft and I'm generalizing a bit but there is there wasn't much room for expressing something weird or individual from showing your own flair but you always could if you learned to first abide by the conventions of the culture that you're in so when you enter a new environment a new group let's say you enter Google for the first time and there's a pronounced culture you must be very attuned but you must understand the spirit you must understand the mood that prevails and certain codes of behavior what is acceptable and

what is not acceptable even though you may not like it you have to learn those codes and from within those codes perhaps you have room to express a little bit more of your individuality and it's a game because sometimes bending those rules a little bit and being more of yourself will actually be very powerful if you're simply the company man or woman maybe you won't get very far because you're too much of a conformist so sometimes operating within the conventions and the codes of behavior we have room to bend them a little and show some

of your own flair I know I'm generalizing in that sense but that's one way where you can kind of operate within that kind of strict environment thank you I'm gonna see this through all right hey thanks for your talk I really enjoyed it I am so my question was I'm a little curious about what you were discussing about the power of empathic ability and how I see it I like empathic ability yeah how I see it that someone with a greater empathic ability would in an interaction have essentially a like a greater level of power

maybe to the point of like I'm in manipulative capacity and how is it possible to recognize this type of power dynamic and like what's the best way to address that very good question so it's a known thing in in in the socio in psychology that a lot of Psychopaths or sociopaths whichever term you prefer it can be very attuned to other people they have actually empathy and that's what makes them such great manipulators they're able to get in side the moods and ideas of people and they know who you are and that gives them the

room to manipulate manipulate you so it's a very good point and I discussed this in the book that there are different kinds of empathy there's what I call analytic empathy in which you were looking at the other person in a very analytic way what's their weakness what's their strained through who are they and I talked about visceral empathy visceral empathy it comes from here from the gut it's a feeling and I talked about we have this power I can't read your thoughts but through a great knowledge of nonverbal behavior which is part of my talk

I didn't get to get to I can feel what your mood is what your emotions are what your spirit is and that creates a kind of visceral connection a communication that is that predates words that we humans possess and that kind of visceral empathy is more human it's more elemental it's more on the level of two fellow people communicated to each other and the psychopath doesn't have that visceral empathy is what enables them to be so evil and nasty manipulative because they can go inside your world and figure out how to mess with you and

they won't feel any compunction because they lack that quality that links to people from here not from the heart but from the visit the viscera and so to have true empathy you have to develop this other skill and I say in there having just this real empathy is not enough either because sometimes that gut feeling that communication can be inaccurate you can miss read people so you want to have that analytic ability you want to have the ability to go what was your childhood like what was your mother like who are you and analyze it

but you want it with this as well because one without the other we'll make you a kind of inhuman beast so that's the difference between the two all right thank you so much everyone for coming thank you Robert Farah talking [Applause] you