Learn the Secret Power of Seduction, with Motivation Expert Robert Greene!

[Music] I wanted people to be less stupid and less incompetent in dealing with power so their lives would be easier so they wouldn't have the pain that I had I just wanted to reveal it so everybody knows about so everybody can share in it power is this word or Book of Knowledge that basically was limited to white males for so many centuries Millennia only certain people knew these laws if you say I don't I'm not interested in power that is a maneuver in the power game you are implicated in it you were trying to pretend

that you're moral that you're above it all that is a power move powerlessness feeling that we have no control over the world is very built into our nervous system and we cannot stand the feeling of being powerless of feeling helpless it's very Primal emotion and so we're all scrambling for some degree of control over the world so the idea that I cannot influence at all my children I cannot influence my spouse I have no influence or persuasive Powers over my boss over my colleagues is deeply deeply painful we can't stand it when I wanted to

reveal what goes on behind closed doors I just wanted to reveal the truth of it and level the playing field it's my breakdown she's going to break it down for you because you know she knows a thing or two and now she's going to break down break's break it down hi I'm my Ami alic I'm Jonathan Cohen and Welcome to our breakdown this is the place where we break things down so you don't have to this is the place where we gain power this is the place where we find out how power can work to

our advantage in work in dating in life in life this is the place where we learn how to seduce anyone and what things you are doing that you don't realize are anti- seduction techniques here's a little hint I've done them all today's guest is really an unbelievable author his books have changed culture Robert Green has written the 48 Laws of Power which is a book that attracted the attention of Jay-Z of Drake um he ended up writing a book with 50 Cent he is a very unlikely author of this kind of book he essentially was

tired of being mistreated by people in power and at 38 after having upwards of 50 different jobs that didn't suit him decided to study the history of what is governing power and he wrote this book which is now banned in prisons because it is very very powerful for lack of a better word he's also written a book on seduction on Mastery he's a a really really interesting person who to by his own admission is an unlikely person to be mingling with all of these Mega Superstars 25 years in this book that m is holding is

selling more than when it was published he's taken information that used to be siloed that only a certain Elite group of people had and he has disseminated to the mass to the masses anyone can follow and learn how to increase their influence over their life also how to understand the forces of power that are often working against us and we end up talking about everything from polyamory to hating your job and finding your passion spirituality near-death experiences how anxiety can actually be a teacher to help you find the thing that you're meant to do in

this world and that each one of us is imbued with a unique set of DNA that has never existed any time in the in the in the past and will not exist anytime in the future and that each one of us has a life's purpose that we should be looking for and finding to help us along our way he also has a way to figure out what your true like Destiny and passion are that is based on something that you probably haven't even thought about in decades and I was really really impressed when he gave

us this tool and at the end of the episode we have included a little SN little snippet that was recorded before we sat down to officially begin the episode where he describes his first meeting with 50 Cent so stick around right till the end and Robert Green welcome to the breakdown break it down it's very exciting to have you here um I'm scared of you I'm scared of you because I'm scared of her so we're all even the reason I'm scared of you SC both of you never heard that before um I'm scared of you

in a friendly way I'm scared of you in a way that I'm open to learning ways to not be scared of you but you know for lack of a better word I'm scared of the power that you have as a writer and um you know we're we're um looking at this beautiful 25th um aniversary edition of the 48 Laws of Power which is really gorgeous and it um if you tilt the side binding one way it's your lovely face and if you Tilt The Binding the other way it's Mackie Elli's face and so lovely too

yeah also lovely and you know when you're um leafing through all the different Laws of Power you get to choose you know am I thinking about um Robert or am I thinking about makavelli um the reason that um I have a certain amount of you know trepidation is you know I'm a person who was raised to really fear power I was raised to um you know to to distrust people in power and my my parents were um you know liberal activists and so I was raised with this very um you know this I think somewhat

healthy notion of be afraid of the people who wield power um that the the underdog will not be spoken for unless someone speaks for them that the disenfranchised need a voice and for me I was really raised with this notion of like nobody really knows what I need except me I shouldn't trust the government to tell me that or even rabbis or you know like have to find it for myself what this book is and what sort of you know I mean you've written several books uh you know after this one you're really you know

distilling down a tremendous amount of of information largely from a historical basis um why should I not be afraid of you well um I'm not necessarily the person I don't exemp I don't operate by All 48 Laws then you should be afraid of me if I did I basically uh prior to publishing that book I was somebody with not very much power I did work for a while in Hollywood I was a low-level positions and I was an observer I'm an observer of power like mlli himself self he was a mid-level diplomat during the Renaissance

he was not a powerful figure at all right but through the prince and his books he became powerful so you shouldn't be afraid of me as a person because I'm actually more like The Underdogs that you think about and where the book comes from which I think I'm now in many podcasts have broadcast this but some people don't understand is um I was sort of angry and pissed off by the people I saw Hollywood how hypocritical they were how they would pretend to be these nice liberal people but they were incredibly manipulative they were incredibly

power hungry and I didn't like that quality in them and I wanted to reveal what goes on behind closed doors people have these you know like this law in there of crush your enemy totally how evil is that well I mean in business that's a law that people operate by Google Microsoft Facebook they don't they can't abide having any kind of competition they crushed their enemies totally I just wanted to reveal the truth of it and level the playing field because power is this word or is this kind of book of knowledge that basically was

limited to white males for so many centuries Millennia right and um certain only certain people knew these laws and um I just wanted to like reveal it so everybody knows about so everybody can share in it you know know so like people like 50 who who who read the book and said it helped him a lot because he said that I he doesn't really he didn't really need help but he claims that it did um that the music industry is by far the sharkiest environment of all the businesses you could possibly enter into and you

know laws like always say less than necessary that's not something you necessarily learn on the streets because he had Street knowledge it's the kind of thing that a king would use or a powerful person in the past or the head of a Hollywood studio back in the 30s or 40s and so it kind of opens up the door to everyone to understand how these laws operate so are you still afraid of me I'm less afraid less afraid less afraid well I mean I think okay yeah I and I I don't well you should be a

little bit afraid of me I don't want you to like we don't want to get too comfortable here yeah um well I guess then I think what I'm more afraid of if I'm you know being more accurate I guess I'm more afraid of um of the people who would you know live by all of these and some of these make a lot of sense to me yeah they're not all evil at all no they're not all evil and actually I um I I hope you don't mind I reviewed them with my 18-year-old who's about to

enter College um he's um I think a very thoughtful uh very I'm sure he's very smart he's a very smart guy he's um he's intellectually oriented he's a thinker um and we went through them and um surprisingly a lot of them made a lot of sense to him meaning he was thinking about them sort of in the in the framework of um of the society that he's been raised in the culture that he's been you know raised in try as I might to you know not have him see lots of these things um one of

the questions that he had which I also had is um where where does ethics come into this or morals for you um and obviously when you wrote it you weren't writing a guide book for living this is a really an historical and kind of philosophical Treatise I mean it's phenomenal um but where where do you see kind of a notion of Ethics or morality here well I I say the realm of power is an amoral realm um and I thought I'm not saying that that's good or bad I'm just saying that's the reality okay so

um I'm generally when I entered the work world I was a naive person and I got hurt a lot it hurt me a lot cuz I'm very sensitive so things like never outshine the master I would outshine the master I would get fired and I wouldn't understand why I got fired right so being naive is very painful in this world and so I wanted to kind of help people a lot with the book but if I'm preaching and if I'm going if I'm going in the preface you know only use this if you're good and

and behave I don't think that's that's the right tone to have I like to see my readers as adult not as children I don't like preaching to people I like them to make their own decisions their own mind up ethics is up to you as an individual so if you try telling an 18-year-old you know very well this is how you should behave this is what's ethically correct he'll he'll say the equivalent of you know go buzz off right right I want to do things my way I don't like preaching it's something very innate in

me I want people to find their own way to it so I'm I'm showing you what the laws of Power are you know and I and you know to pick out one that is I'd say particularly nasty and I I I own it you know I wrote the damn book um get others to do the work but always take the credit law number seven okay I mean that's Hollywood that's literally that is how I that was the story of my life I worked for a screenwriter you know he was a good man I don't I'm

not going to say anything bad about him but he would I would write whole parts of dialogue for his screen for his movies that he would direct never got any credit for it nobody ever acknowledged that you know I did all the research for his stuff I never got any credit for it basically I wasn't saying I was the brains behind the operation no way but I did a lot and nobody ever put my name on it and at first it kind of hurt me you know like I I want to have people acknowledge that

I did all this work that I was that some of this witty dialogue they were laughing at was actually mine but you know that's just the way the world is is and you have to accept it if I had accepted it at that time and understood this is how the world operates I would have been able to deal with it better instead of getting defensive and neurotic and upset about it I would have just said all right Robert this is how people operate in Hollywood someday you're going to turn the tables on them you're going

to deal with it calmly and rationally you're not going to get all emotional about it so I tell you my view of ethics is it's not my complete I have my view of ethics is more complicated than that but um I I I'm studied ancient Greek that was my I was a Classics major right and the Greeks had this notion that more harms caused In This World by people who are stupid and incompetent than by those who are truly evil because often the stupid and the competent think they're good and they do all these horrible

they launch Wars that are awful you know the people who launch the Iraq War in 2001 they thought they were good or whatever year that was they were doing the good thing they were moral people but it was stupid and it had terrible consequences you know so I wanted people to be less stupid and less incompetent dealing with power so their lives would be easier so they wouldn't outshine the master so they wouldn't have the pain that I had they'd understand it better I'm not saying I'm a paragon of virtue and I'm not at all

but that's ethics is complicated it can't be reduced to something simple so I hope I'm in my own way I'm kind of answering your question oh for [Music] sure my Alex breakdown is supported by Wild Grain Wild Grain is the first ever baked from Frozen subscription box for sour dough breads fresh pastas and artisanal pastries every item bakes from Frozen in 25 minutes or less no thawing required which is super awesome the team at Wild Grain just sent me a new box there's so much delicious stuff inside I'm going to tell you about it one

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for someone who may not be you know pursuing a CEO role or an executive role but what strikes me about your work is that it applies to everyone no matter what situation you're in so being more aware of it but let's start like sort of The Beginner's Guide the introduction what do we mean by power well uh the first thing is when you enter the realm of power which when you're a child you're not really in that unless you've got abusive parents in some cases but it's more or less either when you enter college or

more realistically when you enter the Work World now you're in the realm of power okay and so I'm saying that you cannot you cannot get out of it once you're in it that's it right and so if you're trying not to play the power game if you say I don't I'm not interested in power I don't want that is a maneuver in the power game you are implicated in it you were trying to pretend that you're moral that you're above it all that is a power move so the idea behind it answer your question more

directly is um the feeling the human being is basically we come into the world somewhat weak right as a baby we're crying uh you know we unlike any other animal we spend an incredibly long period being dependent right so powerlessness feeling that we have no control over the world is very built into our nervous system right and we cannot stand the feeling of being powerless of feeling helpless it's very Primal emotion built in and so we're all scrambling for some degree of control over the world so the idea that I cannot influence at all my

children I cannot influence infuence my spouse I have no influence or persuasive Powers over my boss over my colleagues is deeply deeply painful right we can't stand it so we're going to try in some way to get power over it so there's so much in life you can control if I were to pick out a number I would say 95% of life is circumstances that are completely beyond your control namely death itself but a lot of other things okay so power is the ability to maybe on the margins to have a little bit more influence

than you would have had if you're completely ignorant if you're completely helpless if you don't understand anything about power right so it's the degree to which you can kind of influence and move people and and not feel that that helpless feeling like you know when an animal is on its belly it feels completely vulnerable and it freaks out right well we get that feeling too sometimes and it and it and it's it's not a good feeling so to the degree that you have confidence that you can direct the course of your life that you're not

just simply um open to any circumstances aren't pushing you around that is the feeling of power it's also the degree of power over yourself self-mastery mastering your own emotions Etc so it's that slight margin of control that that kind of knowledge can bring you and I think is is how I would define it I like the idea of direct control or influence over your life so I like I think tangential words that I hear is influence agency being able to Direct Control and I've heard you speak about uh our emotions we're talk we're taught a

lot these days to feel our emotions and process our emotions but you know can you talk about sort of the risk there in terms of the relationship to self-control and Mastery in in the pursuit of power well it's it's a conception that people may have about me or about power that you want to suppress your emotions emotions are extremely important to the human being it's you can't be creative you can't think you can't write a book you can't make a movie you can't be successful without some kind of emotional background something powerful motivating you your

desire to have power is what's going to make you kind of try and get it right things like ambition or whatever for me it's a desire to write a really good book something that's very true or real so if I didn't have any emotions I wouldn't be able to write my books and actually a lot of anger is what impels me to write a book but the thing about emotions is that when you feel an emotion you know so many things are much more complex than we imagine they are we use language and language is

just kind of this screen that doesn't really describe reality emotions are very very complex they're not simple um they're a mix of things they're just basically these these hormones churning up inside of these chemicals that we ascribe anger or love Etc but they're more complex than that and so you operate on an emotion but you don't understand it you're not thinking about it you're not analyzing you don't know where it comes from and actually your anger might be mixed with Envy it might be mixed with even love it might be mixed with things you're not

even thinking about so you need to apply intelligence to your emotions not suppress them but try to understand them so in the moment if you're feeling a powerful emotion you want to be able to have the ability to step back not react not send that angry mean email or whatever it is you were contemplating and go what am I really feeling you know not just the word that I ascribe to it but maybe there's something deeper maybe there's something about my partner that's irritating me or maybe there's something from my childhood that's being triggered I

don't know you're probably never going to solve the mystery but analyzing your own emotions is just a really really powerful tool for people to start developing I think and it's not something anybody teaches which shocks me you know it's not this kind of emotional intelligence where you where even a psychoanalyst would tell you here's what the process that you go through to try and understand nobody talks about this and so sometimes I wonder if I'm answering a question if I've gone off the deep endd I think you are 100% answering it I mean Mam and

I talk a lot about the need for understanding what is driving us yeah and to unpack it I mean my I've learned a lot mayam is talks openly about her therapeutic Journey using that as a space to better understand emotions and to try and um both hold space for them to process them because as you mentioned if you suppress them then they causes all sorts of other problems and then if you act only on them without an analysis then you're going to cause a whole other realm of problems that are uh equally de devastating as

if you were to suppress them ju just to give you a quick example um take for instance somebody who was very young let's just describe a gen say it's a male uh whose parent or mother or father wasn't very bonding with them right they were kind of neglected they felt abandoned as a child right and um all sorts of issues kind of evolved our whole personality kind of formed around this sense of feeling abandoned and later in life they've completely kind of gotten over they don't really think about this at all they're in relationships with

girlfriends Etc and they're always they have a pattern which is I could guess go ahead as things are starting to maybe get good or intimate they break it off yeah their pattern is they have to be the one abandoning the other that's the way of reversing that feeling of helplessness of powerlessness that I'm talking about this over and over and over again always blaming the woman they'll always find her she did something she was being too intr she wasn't giving me my space whatever they don't have any selfawareness of how a pattern is emerged from

their two three-year-old childhood that is ruining their life right so imagine all the people in this world wandering around doing things without any kind of basic awareness most humans yeah I mean it really is uh the the the psychologist your parents probably knew about him because he was a Marxist Reich filel Reich he called it the emotional plague and he was thinking that just people are walking around with this emotional plague spreading it around to everyone else else how do you know all this how do I know all this yeah where did you learn it

like were you a person that was raised in an emotionally intelligent home is this something you learned for yourself did you go to therapy and like it no um well you know my mom watches this show my mom is 97 years old wow but um so am I you're not 97 little bit inside you're half that exactly um are you 48 I'm 48 that's a good number um anyway uh so you know I was kind of neglected a lot as a child I was and not in a necessarily negative way a lot of it's a

generational thing I was just left alone right so um I didn't have a lot of support and my sister now my sister who's I'm extremely close to she's older four years old she was the person I was actually very close to and kind of saved me that way but when you're like that what happens to a lot of people like that and I've seen this pattern is you become very observant of others right because it's your protection it's the shield hyper vigilance yeah yeah so in other in order not to feel that kind of sense

of neglect and and being powerless and people can hurt you you want to observe and you want to see through and you want to understand them so since I was very young I've always been aware that people are pretending to be something that they're not you know that and a lot of adolescents it's not that shocking a lot of adolescence have that because they look at their parents and they say God you're wearing a mask all the time be real man be some you know and particularly my generation because your generation isn't quite so conventional

like my parents were you know I just saw that they were that they're wearing a mask they're playing a role what is the truth what is really going on behind them so to answer your question it comes from years and years and suffering and pain making mistakes observing people very deeply and you build up a kind of a muscle so in my last book I talk about non-verbal communication I I I can sense things right away about people that are inevitably accurate because I've been doing it for so long it's not not like I'm superior

or anything just I've been doing this for so long so therapy books no it's like observing people being in the moment and observing them because if you're filled with theories of Freud and all these other people you're not observing you're you're using preconceived notions and people are weird they're different they're individuals I look at each one and I'm in the moment and I'm observing it so that's sort of where it comes from I wonder if you can speak a little bit more about um this I don't even want to call it a perception you know

I think in many cases it's not a perception it's a it's just a an an accurate understanding um the notion of this is something Jonathan talks about a lot you know um feeling as a child that everyone's working an angle of some sort you know um I was often accused and still I'm often accused of well you know what I'm just gonna I'm I'm I'm going to pull it up yep I believe it is uh I'll tell you I think it's 10 infection yeah infection that's I mean I'm sure you know them all by heart

do um so so la law 10 I took very personally which is not your fault um avoid the unhappy and unlucky you can die from someone else's misery emotional states are as infectious as diseases you may feel you are helping the drowning man but you are only precipitating your own disaster the unfortunate sometimes draws Mis draw Misfortune on themselves they will also draw it on you associate with the happy and fortunate instead so I took this personally um because I I actually I mean I don't want to say that I let's just go with happiness

and a state of unhappiness for me I feel like a lot of my unhappiness is based on what I see as a very accurate reflection of the world around me which I believe is quite depressing and you know I was raised with a very strong you know a a keen set of attention to Injustice um and you know not to say that that's all that I was raised with but my DNA you know created a person very very sensitive and I think that that um has made for a very specific profile and I think it's

a lot of other things you know like add trauma add ingenerate add the Holocaust like add whatever you want but this made me anxious because it kind of feels like that's a reaction to what you're talking about like if you have a perception that people are not well-intentioned or people are abusing power it it's made for a lot of unhappiness for me and then I got nervous that like now I'm an infection now I'm law 10 I'm the person that you're warning people about well you mean you're the infecting person yes well I'm unhappy if

unhappy um and I can be a real Downer you want to attest to this it's true well um yeah wow you get what I'm saying like I'm taking I'm taking that sort of like that sensitivity that [Music] vigilance mind BS breakdown is supported by ritual I wish someone had told me at the start of pregnancy that it was going to get a lot harder being a parent was going to get a lot harder than even I thought pregnancy was but also it gets a lot more amazing so many women experience anxiety around conceiving and pregnancy

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a brief questionnaire they'll match you with a licensed therapist you can switch at any time for no additional charge never skip therapy day with betterhelp visit betterhelp.com breakday to get 10% off your first month that's betterhelp hp.com [Music] break something struck me while you're talking that I haven't realized about you before uhoh and whenever something says something like that now I should hold hands with Robert because I don't know what's going to happen next well I want to actually bring this to the group and get Robert's perception while you were talking about that seeing the

things that are troubling you about the world what I heard was that you have an enormous amount of anger at the system and if that anger isn't CH channeled some way and expressed towards a purpose and you know that we can tie this into finding one's purpose in life then you're going to be depressed like depression as a signal as a messenger versus as a genetic State there's a difference there and I'm wondering if you know you are highly sensitive highly attuned to the things that are troubling in the world and maybe it is a

practice of seeing the positive things and we know that the brain can adjust and you know re reorient to be more focused on positive but also maybe there's a repressed anger do do you feel like you're infecting the people around you sometimes like your son um I have two boys so I've infected both of them um I will say that yeah I think that I mean I think for a lot of our you know a lot of our listeners or viewers like for people who experience some level of you know Mental Health Challenge um you

know depression is a really really sticky one um you know but aspects of of anxiety or trauma like when those things stay with with you like you know it's impacted the whole house you know and now that I have one going off to college it's kind of like hey I didn't drink or do drugs but I bet at times it felt like something was going on that you couldn't understand and for people who grow up in alcoholism it's like oh when you realize it it's like oh that's what was going on our house was driven

by someone's you know um disease you know and they were trying to fix it and make it better so like even though my kids didn't grow up with that they grew up with you know someone carrying this like this weight and I mean I don't know I think you know in infect is a strong term and with all of these I was like I see where he's like I knew enough about history to be like oh I get where this law comes from or I knew enough about Jay-Z and 50 Cent to be like I

get it um I understand why this is banned in prisons U but yeah I think that that for me like law 10 was gosh can can I be among people or am I going to bring them down to the point that I'm like taking their power away because I'm infecting them with my sadness okay well a lot of the problem people have with the 48 Laws of Power is they they read that initial paragraph but they don't actually dive in deeply into the chapter itself and what I'm really describing in that chapter is mostly people

who are deeply narcissistic right and um they they're addicted to drama right for whatever reason that's their form of getting attention that's their form of getting power and we see this in political people whose names I will not mention right now right who use that very much to continually continually stir up drama on a national stage right okay and um they're they're going to infect you with that but they don't appear to be that so I don't think this fits you really okay I feel better so they appear to be Charming people who were very

charismatic they're they they've learned confident confident yes they've learned to to um and it's attractive to people and then you get in a relationship and you realize that you're continually caught up in their emot emotional maelstroms right and um they they pick on people who they know are caring and um you know giving and sensitive because they're easy prey and so you get involved with them not realizing that they have this infecting quality and they draw you down down deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper until you you know you're feeling all all sorts of

emotions because their whole thing is to create drama to make you emotional and to react so sorry no go so you're not doing that to your to your boys right no and U that's you're not like a deep narcissist so this is what what you're describing and we've talked a lot about narcissism here and it really is this sort of like you know for lack of a better way it's a little bit of a pop psych like everybody he's a narcissist or she's a narcissist but when we when we talk about classical and clinical narcissism

what you're describing is in in many ways what a lot of people who have a a truly narcissistic parent experience for sure like that's really interesting to me I mean that is it's it's um it's a tool of power right narcissism is a tool of power or is power a tool of narcissism well um some people who are deeply narcissistic um don't get very much power right they're or they find ways to get power however they can like from their family or home if they can't have it the deeply introverted uh narcissist who is very

very low self-esteem right they're they're not going to be uh but the ones like the Elon musks who are out there and he's a what I call a deep narcissist I I make the comparison human nature that we are all self absor absorbed we all have a touch of narcissism so get off this idea that there just some people out there in all humans so you know don't be so judgmental okay but there are deep narcissists who can't control it their level of narcissism is at a is at a different level so people like this

um have learned early on they're like seven or eight years old and deep narcissists generally have one of two parental patterns I know I'm simplifying and I'm venturing into the realm of pop psychology here so excuse me but they either have the incredibly neglectful parent that has abandoned them right and is often their own world right like a narcissist them themselves or the suffocating parent that was on top of them so often in and helicoptering them Etc so they had no space to kind of create a self inside of them that they could love that

they could appreciate so they learn when they're six or seven years old that by acting out by being dramatic by getting it attention they have power attention is power for them and they use that continually throughout their life and because they learned when they were seven to do this they become great actors they become they know how to put it on they actually become actors a lot of them in life right so it can become a form of power it depends on I mean I know some narcissists who are are very deeply troubled and they're

there that introspective variety so I think I think it just depends on on the type of bonding and some of the genetics because like Yung thought the introvert extrovert thing is a genetic thing which we still don't know to this day but anyway you've spoken about narcissism and that we all have narcissism yes and that we should embrace that to some degree obviously not to the depth of an absolute narcissist who is using it as a power tactic but can you talk a little bit about the Embrace of our dark side and why that's helpful

for people well um so the the most important thing for a human being is self-awareness if you're aware of yourself if you're aware of what motivates you if you're aware of what you truly love of what you truly hate you're going to be a much more fulfilled human being but so many people have lacked complete self-awareness right and so they become they like to more they like to judge other people well he's the narcissist she's passive aggressive they're full of Envy they have the dark they never look at themselves right you are all full of

this dark energy it is built into the human being when you were three or four years old you acted out on all of these raw emotions you weren't socialized yet you were a complete natural creature I like comparing it to like a round ball and then slowly you become half of that and and you have a mask and you repress all of those those other things that are going on when you were a child right and you become this person that is socialized has learned to get along with other people but it's not really who

you are and so to become aware for instance when I wrote that chapter on narcissism I was going wow Robert you actually are quite a narcissist you never thought of yourself as a narcissist but man you've got these qualities here and it was kind of painful it was kind of weird and I still I'm still thinking about it it still kind of hurts me a little bit you know but it's better that I'm aware of it because now I can see it in operation I can see how I'm doing this how that narcissist Within Me

is coming out and how it can hurt other people what was what was the voice what was the the thoughts that you were having like when you realize that about yourself like what emerged that you were like oh wait a second that's coming from a place that you didn't realize you had I can't remember exactly what it was that I was writing about in that chapter um but I was recognizing some of the patterns so I had some key figures that I was analyzing like Joseph Stalin is to me the greatest narcissist who ever lived

but there was also Robert Oppenheimer and um the actual figure of Robert Oppenheimer is much more interesting than that movie portrayed but he was a deeply flawed individual and I know I recognize when I was in my 20s my narcissism probably was kind of hurtful and I'm I'm much more in control of it now then but I think a lot of it was recognizing it when I was young and I would do things like I remember I was staying with this family in France they let me have their apartment for a month in in the

south of France and uh then they I come back to California and they were so angry with me they left this message with they visited my parents I had rung up a phone bill of like thousands of dollars and I never realized it you know just kind of using people for things using them and not thinking about it kind of seeing what what in Psychology they call Self objects that people are kind of objects that you can use for your own benefit I had some of those traits you know things reviewing things where I hurt

people in the past inevitably stemmed from my lack of empathy and my lack of self-awareness but the place that the place where sort of that pivot point is like where you're not a sociopath is that you can learn well I don't know but I'm guessing that we the the idea is for us to learn from those sit right to to learn to have a sense I mean what we try to teach in children is a sense of remorse right or teaching sort of consequences like oh when you do this that person is crying right but

I have a lot of issues with you know kind of of this notion um you know of like forcing children to say they're sorry forcing oh yeah right and it's like to me I was always about I'm trying to teach an understanding of an association that elicits what if you don't have a sociopathic child is a human response of that person is crying because of an action what's the dynamic here and you teach that in an age appropriate way you know teaching these things I I haven't had children so I I'm just bloviating here I'm

able to say whatever I haven't gone through that trauma but um you know it's very complicated to like teach that kind of remorse sort of thing because if you impose people on them you say this is how you're supposed to feel right it's not real and they'll apologize but they're not feeling the emotion right that's not registering deep within them you maybe you should have had kids I don't know you have to be tricky you have to lead them to things without them knowing that that you're leading them you really have to be cut out

for it I don't know that I was here we are too late now I wonder if we can move into um how we get children which is seduction children which is seduction um um so besides the 48 Laws of Power you've written books on you know many other kind of equally significant and you know important ideas and one of them is seduction and seduction is I mean this is just my sort of paraphrasing it's part of power right yeah it me any any system that has power typically is going to involve some element of of

Seduction to me like when I hear seduction like and maybe this is just because I you know was raised as a female person like all I hear is manipulation and I feel badly to say that what it's a thing you just deflated robt folded in half no and I I think balloon all the air left out you know and and and looking at sort of the you know some of the examples that you that you draw on you know for understanding seduction um you know a lot of a lot of these are are are difficult

and complicated personalities or you know entities what do you mean some of them some of them are very positive John F Kennedy his his campaign in 1960 was a mass political seduction I I am um so I don't mean to cut you off and I I I he also publicly had you know a very specific you know affair with Marilyn Monroe that like it you know at the time obviously was like it's like a funny little thing but there's complexity here I think in light of the generation that you know we're in now of like

you know it's it's power right those are those are anyway okay help help me through this you know things things are more complicated so can we say that maybe Marilyn Monroe seduced John F Kennedy also possible but you know well why not I don't need to tell you about a feminist perspective but a feminist perspective would also say that when women are raised in the structure of a you know a patriarchal power system you know we taught to use certain tools because in many cases and in many times those are the only tools that we've

been given and I'm not I'm a second W feminist I'm like a Hillary Clinton pants suit or die kind of person so you know I understand that third and fourth wave is turning that on its head I'm just 97 years old like your mom wow boy am I being put on the defensive here no I'm asking you to help me I have a way to help you if you want a map here well um I'll I'll try and then you help me out you bail me out when I get trouble um you know I I

I think of it in in kind of primitive ways so seduction is kind of like a mating ritual it's sort of a ritual that we go through where we're kind of having this sort of back and forth Dynamic with the other person and we're playing on their psychology and they're playing on our psychology and I come from a different background than you obviously a different generation I've been always been fascinated by like the 18th century and particularly in France sort of subject I studied a lot and um although kasanov is Italian it was this kind

of culture of Seduction heavily involved with the theater okay it's a patriarchal culture right but I can still understand it without going back using those kind of labels here right and so for women yes seduction was the only game that they had right for seducing the king mhm Etc you know for Madame to pomidor Etc but I loved Esther yeah eser and yeah um so I love the theatrical playfulness of it right the element of play where I'm not so involved with my ego and and who I am but I'm in I'm entering this kind

of theatrical realm where I'm playing with appearances and men are doing this to women and women are doing this to men and it's kind of like this elegant dance that are PE people are doing so seduction involves vulnerability to another person and to me it's a kind of mental disease that I see a lot in the world today where people are totally invulnerable they don't want to open thems to the they don't want to open themselves to any kind of hurt and so what does that look like to me it looks like somebody that can't

fall in love so the ability to let go and to let somebody else into your psychology into your psyche and to let them kind of uh become a part of you to the point where you could become pain where they could hurt you they could abandon you but you learn from it and you grow from it and you develop from it and the ability to be vulnerable is what makes a great artist in any kind of Realm it makes a person creative and I think there are a lot of people now who are desperately afraid

to let go desperately afraid to be vulnerable and I think seduction you know it's it's a book that has all those evil connotations that you're referring to but people are so fascinated with it because I think they recognize that it's actually something that they want they want that kind of power who has more power The Seducer or the seduce well they both have power so in the classic example that I use in The Art of Seduction comes from dangerous leaon one of my favorite books I do not speak French okay okay but you got the

very pronunciation C and some French movies well your pronunciation was very good thank you um an actor so the main character is valmon who's this evil Seducer of women he s he ruins all of their reputations right Daniel J Lewis in the American version yes that's right and Michelle Fifer Michelle Fifer that's right and so he decides he's going to to seduce La pres which I think is the Michelle fer character because she's a prude she's the most prudish woman of all to seduce her would be the greatest feather in his cap right because she's

impossible to seduce and then what ends up happening he tries she she's completely not into him at all she knows his horrible reputation and as he tries further and F harder and harder he suddenly finds that he's falling in love with her he's never fallen in love with any woman before perhaps because she won't yield to him whatever the reason is he's falling in love and as he falls in love with her she begins to open up to him and the seduction happens and to me the lesson is if you're completely a cold Seducer it

doesn't really work there's no pleasure involved and if it's a man being that that to a woman the woman kind of sees through it and is put off but if you're the kind of Seducer that is falling in love with the seduced if the seduced is seducing you you will be a better Seducer right in that way are you going to rescue me now you did a great job that was very very lovely you didn't need me at all oh right but it sounds it removes the level of manipulation if two people are exchanging an

experience both of them opening up and being vulnerable it removes that element of being done to or something wrong happening let me not make myself out to be the angel that I might appear to be there is manipulation involved in that book for sure I don't deny I own it but that's certainly not all there is to it you know and um I'm fascinated by the psychology that involved in there and what ties it all together so what ties a great corisan seducing uh uh some French businessman the 19th century and draining his bank accounts

What ties That to John F Kennedy seducing the American public what ties That to Pamela Herman seducing all these different men as this incredible charmer what ties That to Josephine Baker and Marina Dietrich etc etc what is the psychology involved fascinated me and I couldn't find a book written on that subject so I wanted to tie them all together and show that there's some very Elemental form of psychology involved which is essentially creating the lure of pleasure right because we're all kind of of repressed we don't have enough pleasure in our lives right particularly nowadays

and to give somebody the sense that through you they can have some kind of Adventure they can have some sort of weird pleasurable experience is incredibly powerful and it ties John F Kennedy's seduction of the American public in 1960 I'm going to return you to the uh it's called the New Frontier we're going back to the 19th centur we're going back to America the way it is the frontier will be outer space we're going to create this that and the other thing it's incredibly seductive incredibly pleasurable because was built on all of the myths that

America is built on I mean you could argue that the the movement of Obama enthusiasm I mean that was also it was a total seduction I think we should established that when we're talking about seduction we're not only talking about sexual seduction yeah that we're talking about I I like this notion of the infiltration of IDE the notion that you have to be vulnerable enough to have be able to to consider something else well I just very quickly um you know one of my favorite philosophers is friederick n and in one of his earliest books

he talks about empathy and he says when he reads a book he tries to understand and get inside the spirit of the person who wrote it not trying to judge it at all but trying to genuinely feel the voice behind it and who wrote it in why so he drops all of his his uh critical skills and he just kind of lets himself immerse in the book he lets it seduce him he uses the word seduction all the time and I feel like people often come to a book or an idea with their own preconceptions

they're clothed that's what I talk about V invulnerable this is what the world is like these are the labels I prescribe to it and they don't understand what someone else is trying to say right so You can disagree with it and I try to read books that way like I have people whose books I absolutely loathe and I disagree 100% with and I will name a name Stephen Pinker I never like his books I just I just I'm I'm the opposite of him whatever that would be in in in you know science fiction terms um

but I try and read his books and I try and say well maybe there's some wisdom there maybe I'm missing it and I let him seduce me initially a very old school perspective though like meaning I I agree I was raised to read things that I don't agree with and find the reasons why and I went to graduate school and for like seven years that's what you do but what I've noticed is very unpopular is people really are resistant to being seded that's what I'm talking about the invulnerability yeah so let an idea they want

to read things that they agree with yeah and and follow the people that they agree with right do we think it's an increase in camps and Vision or do we think it's also a part of people don't know how to come back to themselves so they're so con so concerned about being having their mind changed or having their identity changed because they think that their identity is associated with I believe this set of narratives that only exist over here on the left or over here on the right that I have my answer but I'm curious

what Robert says well I mean it's it's a million-dollar question I could go hours for but there's um I I believe there's a great book that I often refer to called the fall of public public Man by oh God I'm sorry I'm just blanking out Senate Richard Senate Richard Senate that's right and he traces the the narcissism in our culture back to the 8 19th century and it's a book that heavily influenced me when we talk about theater and seduction because he talks about Cafe culture in the 18th century and then how in the 19

century it all became about your identity and your politics and who you belong to in the group that you were with you became very defensive very close-minded and his model is kind of the urban environment like a New York City where you're mingling with people from all different ethnicities all different races you're getting in all these different ideas all these different perspectives are flooding through you and it kind of makes you a rich Urban person an intelligent person so a lot of it is that but I think a lot of young people um have grown

up in in a very very chaotic environment um a lot of it from technology however and then there was there was two 911 there was the crash of' 08 there was the pandemic Etc and when you're dealing with chaos and crisis the tendency is is to become very defensive and very insecure and you're not you don't want that openness to other people's ideas you want to get into your camp where everyone thing is certain and secure and you know all the answers and to me knowledge and wisdom is something you know I go back to

Socrates is admitting that you're ignorant that you don't know you don't know anything that's the beginning of knowledge and that's so alien to our culture to people how people are today I mean I think we're seeing it play out politically also not just here but you know some might say in France um you know you're you're seeing a a really strong desire for someone to fix it for someone to tell you Absolut abolutely what's wrong and how to fix it and what this leads to is you know this kind of extreme tribalism uh and it

leads to scapegoating um and um yeah so a kind of adjacent to this sort of Cafe society which I admit I don't know as much about as I would like to um you know a lot of um kind of going back to the sort of Seduction uh oh playground well you know um many people are are using um you know online dating sites for example as a way to meet people or people are meeting you know in ways that uh don't involve let's say the oldfashioned ways we used to do it um and you know

I always lament like once I left grad school I kind of didn't know how to socialize because that was where I socialized and well like you know like you'd go to talks or you'd go to lectures or you had students that you like once I kind of left that it's like bars like what is this clubs like that's not for me but um I wonder if you can talk a little bit it sort of combines the a question about seduction right and I'm really taken with this notion and it kind of is threw out but

definitely in a few laws in particular you know about this Persona that that we create right the masks that we wear which as you sort of pointed out for those of us who grew up in any state of sort of hypervigilance you see that everyone's wearing a mask um even the people who are supposed to you know protect you and care for you um how is that how do you see that sort of playing out in in this sort of field of trying to find connection and love when we literally have a system that is

designed for people to create a Persona that in many cases is really not even close to them yeah um well the online world because I'm I'm I'm so old that I I have no experience with it at all for me back in the day it was it was bars it was clubs it was meeting people through friends and having to literally put your whole self-esteem on the line by asking a girl on a date or something like that right so I don't really have much understanding but I think it's very destructive because we're humans we

have we have um mirror neurons we have things where we relate to people on a physiological level that cannot be replicated through any kind of technological or algorithm right and so people are losing social skills they're losing the ability to enter into the spirit of another person they're losing the empathic muscle that happens when you're constantly socializing so when I read like a Jane Austin novel from like 1820 it's astounding how she that she is so insanely observant about people because that's all they had they were continually socializing they had no internet they had no

television it was just parties salons people playing the piano Etc social social social you you you developed this muscle where you understood people that's all atrophying with this new generation right yeah so um seduction is the ability to enter into the spirit of the other person and understand them on a deeper level and get into what makes them tick so it's actually it can be on my scale a very healthy thing yes that can be used for manipulation so a lot of sociopaths actually are good at figuring out what you like and then using it

to manipulate so I don't deny that but if you are not a sociopath you're using this to actually understand what other people are like and what is making them tick and so um I forget what your original question because I wanted to get back to yeah I was talking about just online dating and the wearing of masks sort of like that is literally the the tool of Seduction is to sort of create this Persona like here's the here's me holding a beer on a boat but then with my cat right right but then you're going

to meet the person and they're not at all like the the Persona they created online you know well I think I mean I I meet I mean I live in Los Angeles you do too I meet plenty of people who are just about what just about the mask that they create meaning there's not a lot there right because there's been so much emphasis placed on what I look like and what my body looks like and you know where I'm eating and what designer yoga bra I'm wearing uhhuh well to me that's not what seduction is

about right uh seduction is is is a psychological game it's not about the the lipstick you wear and the low cut dress and the beefed up body that you have is completely antithetical and what I like to use in the book were examples of men and women who were not very attractive but who were masters of the game of Seduction of Psych playing on people's psychology this is the title of the episode can unattractive people be good seducers well the the one of the greatest seducers of male seducers of all time was an Italian poet

named Gabrielle dunio you can look him up he was was hideously ugly he was short unfortunately musolini was very much inspired by him but um he uh he was not attractive and women would say that but he had a gift of language ah he was you know he could he could entrance any woman off her feet by how he talked and uh I say in in seduction based on all the research that is generally a weakness that a lot of women have some a really good talker right women and men are seduced by different things

right women it's words and Men it's visuals it's it's unfortunately it's the obvious physical appearances of things that's not have to say that they can't be seduced by other qualities sure well and attractiveness is different than seduction because usually for attractiveness historically speaking like I you know need to put all the caveats like every caveat that's politically correct please place in here but typically women list um you know money property and Prestige as things that are important because it indicates you know evolutionarily it indicates an ability to be supported and attractiveness indicates an ability to

make children who will also make children like I'm just again I'm a scientist I can't help it that's true yeah Scott Galloway talks about no I think Jonathan sent me something that I think is really very misogynistic Jonathan s sent me talking is foreplay for women and what I think is lying is how men get women to bed talking doesn't necessarily mean lying yeah really if your lips are moving there's that song your lips are moving your lips are moving no but that's one of the earliest lessons I was ever taught by my parents was

that women will will use sex to get love and men will use love to get sex men will say anything they will say anything for the purpose of h i deflated him again it's going to be a sh of his former sell I'm just shriveling up just just hearing all of this no I hate I I don't know I don't know if my parents were right but you know what I'm 48 I could say that like 9.9 times out of 10 at least in those formative years we're talking about in the in the years when

you're learning to navigate Junior High High School even your 20s and I'd say this day and age well into your 30s I feel like it's still true ladies I'm going to throw my hat in and put a vote for that there is authentic connection that is possible that there are many people who are good who are trying to form connection and who can use these skills yeah or and these tools I should say to increase their ability to make connection because they're doing things that they may not understand or offputting and if I frame it

from that perspective I might pass it back to you Robert and say from a good place from a I'm trying to make connections and I may not be sure what I'm doing for example I may be showing my anxiousness which I don't realize I'm doing give us the bit of an overiew view how does one become a great Seducer from from a good place yeah well to me the word doesn't have negative connotations I know it does for a lot of people but I don't see it that way so the word doesn't make put a

chill up my spine it actually Thrills me and excites me because I was raised on not raised but reading the great literature on seduction the libertin fiction of the 19th century Etc so to me it's extremely exciting one of the most most important qualities is to have a lack of defensiveness and a lack of insecurity I'm taking notes so the typical rake is a man who is very who loves women who's addicted to women has a lot of femininity in his Spirit actually was probably raised by a mother that was kind of dominant and so

he's extremely into feminine psych female psychology but one woman can never satisfy him right as Mom issues see you you you like to turn these turn these things around but may maybe it's a bad thing yes you are you you have a binary like good or bad you like something that's either good or bad you don't like a gray area no that's true okay sorry go ahead that's called a rake I didn't know that term it's one of I have my list of rake is a man who's obsessed with women who really and I and

I've said it before I I was a rake in my 20s oh so you you can go ahead and hate me I mean that should be the title of your next book I was a rake in my 20s yeah well they call them a reformed rake so I'm a reformed rake um but you're you're you're kind of obsessed with women you're very interested in them a lot of men have no understanding of women they they're not interested in them they're not interested in their psychology in their world how they think how they think differently than

a man but Rees are they're fasc by it they're fascinated by their Psychology by by just the clothes they wear by everything they do their activity their energy Etc but they can never be satisfied by one woman they have to have have more and more and more they need different ones constantly but for that one month where they're interested in you or two months they are so keyed into you they're so completely absorbed in you they love you so much they give you so much attention that is very hard for a woman to resist it

this is the kind of the Lord Byron or the Duke Ellington or the arol Flyn of this world but getting back to your question the lack of of insecurity so a lot of men for instance they think that um they're they're in they're interacting with a woman let's say in a bar it could be a woman but I'm just think I'm a man so it's easier for me to go from that perspective thinking a heterosexual man yeah yeah just trying to be yeah that's true that's true um is am I saying the right thing am

I doing the right thing does she like me what am I doing that's not connecting her what am I doing that's right they're absorbed in their thinking they're absorbed in themselves and the other person the woman or the man can pick that up can sense it and it's kind of offputting they can sense that they're thinking about themselves in that moment if you flip that around and you're not thinking about yourself but you're absorbed in the other person not to use them or manipulate them but you're genuinely interested in them you don't have that defensiveness

that insecurity it's massively seductive because think of it how rarely that happens to you in life how rarely does somebody talk to you and actually appears interested in what you have to say is actually interested in your spirit it's actually interested in your ideas and where you come from in your childhood that's classical courtship it's just just it doesn't really exist anymore it doesn't exist anymore right it's I don't yeah it is it is courtship but it's a skill it's it's an ability that you have to let go of yourself well not to argue for

social conservativism but when there used to be a lead up to sexual intimacy there was an extended period of time sometimes sometimes just sometimes not always where there was a process of getting to know the other person and learning about them but when when sex is expected or when both parties expect it as a first night of getting to know someone there there's really not a a need in that sense meaning it becomes more transactional and you know not to be you know Marxist about it it becomes a commodity like it really is like sex

just becomes a commodity and this component of intimacy uh really you know is kind of gets sidelined well seduction depends on tension it depends on Resistance from the other person so if the other person doesn't resist you there's no there's no kind of you don't have to do anything there's no effort you're going to sleep with them tomorrow or they're going to leave you but the fact that they're resisting you makes you go like what can I do to change that how isn't that a manipulation so what's wrong with manipulation if men didn't manipulate women

and women didn't manipulate men there would be no children in this world it doesn't feel so good your parents wouldn't have had you Mom I don't know why they had me they don't know why they had me is the line of the podcast there has to be some kind of manipulation involved so if you don't manipulate all that happens is I just wear the clothes that I wear I say whatever I want to say and the other person falls in love with me we have sex we have beyond that there's an app that tells me

how close someone is who'd like to have sex with anyone and all I have to do is open that I'm not saying me but people all I have to do is open that app and I mean like that we've we've Lily like we've Lily paded this whole thing we have lack of defensiveness we have in we have lack of insecurities confidence what other qualities are are essential the ability to um get involved in the other person's Spirit which I've already talked about is very important and then seduction is a language basically without words and so

you have to master this language it's a ma it's it's a language of gestures of you take someone to a certain place there's no words involved but by taking to this particular place which may have romantic connotations or whatever you're gesturing something to them when you give a gift there are seductive gifts and they're non- seductive gifts a non- seductive gift is just spending a lot of money of $10,000 on a ring whereas if you spent $10 and you gave them something that reflected something they had said something from their childhood something that they some

story that they were relating to you it reveals that you were listening to them which is very seductive right so I tell people if you're con talking to someone for several hours which nobody does anymore anyway but let's say that's involved in your seduction you're talking to them if later in the conversation you come back to something they said hours ago and and you kind of Bring It Up again in a different context it's going to register that you were listening to them and you remembered it and it got it's under your skin and it's

deeply seductive because you're listening to someone people don't listen anymore they don't reflect they don't mirror you anymore it's something we're all missing we're that's why I don't find the word seduction evil at all we're missing this so much in our pleasureless completely political world where people aren't open to the spirits of other people just so closed off so you're listening so this that's a gesture it's not the words that you say but the fact that you remember that what they said right it's it's how you smell it's how you look I mean don't get

me too literal there but it's it's a physical communication as well it's the theater that you create so you don't don't show up every night wearing your shorts and your T-shirt you wear something that shows that you're actually you know not depressed huh not depressed yeah she's teasing me because I wear the same type of t-shirt all the time I have a gray t-shirt teing myself oh you're teasing yourself yeah but that's cuz you're here you're not you're not seducing here I hope um so so um what they say foreplay is everything from the last

orgasm to the next one sorry so I mean those those are the main things lack of insecurity you know confidence in yourself um entering the other person's spirit and kind of understanding this nonverbal language you don't have to say I love you but you show that you love the other person you don't have to say a word but you show it to them or the things that you do for them well especially this last part about the language without words and the listening and the mirroring someone that's why I don't think it falls under manipulation

it falls under are showing up being present and you are going to find a match yeah if again coming from a good intention it's people have a natural instinct to be to be on guard to say is this person going to cause me harm yeah right and if the manipulation as we're calling it which again I don't think it is manipulation but I'm addressing the words you're using M if if the manipulation is to put you at ease to say I not going to harm you because I actually am listening well the listening isn't isn't

a foil it's actually the person is showing up and doing the work of what it takes to bond and be in connection with one another and so what you're saying is hey you've forgotten Society how to connect because of these digital tools because we are no longer required to do so because there are alternatives because um for all the reasons we know yeah and you should remember society that these are the things that are required and and yes they can be used for nefarious they can be tactics yeah and I and I think I think

a clarification might be helpful here which I think you absolutely you know can make um and I think there's a little bit you know of an obligation here that we should make uh the notion that if someone let's say doesn't want to go to bed with you right that that needs to be respected right if someone does not want to right I mean like I think that's pretty clear but what you're talking about if I'm understanding is we're talking about threading the needle in terms of the way that human primates interact and there's verbal and

a nonverbal interplay that is largely missing because of a lot of interesting you know features in our culture um and and honestly I it it is it's in our lifetime yeah uh one of the one of the skills that I was taught was most attractive to females when my parents were growing up was if a guy was a good dancer and I think it's interesting because what it what it communicated was um you know a a physical kind of interplay in some cases a playfulness in some cases a romance it was artistic right it was

an understanding of like music and movement right there's an element of sort of like peacocking but but when I think about you know what dances were like when I was in junior high which was totally you know like I think the last phase of when people would actually like Sway and things like that but I'm thinking about you know sort of the the romance of courtship is where I think some of this lies but I just want to be really careful that we're not talking about seduction being you know a tool for convincing someone to

do something that they don't want to do right like no means no well a lot of men I'm not into you is I'm not into you a lot of men have a really hard time now dealing with rejection right and so what I tell them because they've they've come to me for advice and I've talked to groups of men for this very purpose is rejection is a good thing it's fine you just move on to the next person if somebody says no sometimes people say no and it doesn't necessarily mean they're completely not into you're

not going to force them to have sex but you can still try still try and charm them in some way but if it's very clear that they don't want anything to do with you that that you're even frightening them fine right don't take it personally move on to the next person and keep but I think the a lot of men can't handle that kind of rejection they wanted everything to be easy easy they want every woman to sleep with them well and my fear is that then you're dealing with with you know we well and

I'm not saying you're doing this but I'm saying what we see a lot is men then adopting a Persona that is false that they are sensitive caring or interested so that they you know don't have to deal with rejection because they're getting you know in theory what well do I sound like a horrible person like I'm so cynical about it but but women can see through that they should be able to sometimes yeah well back in the day they could see through it so yes and I think that um this is where when we talk

about power I'm interested in power differentials and I'm interested in sort of places where women are not conditioned you know to to be able to um you know have a lot of agency which can breed situations where it is hard to distinguish like if you're taught to always smile and say you're okay when you're not that obviously translates into much larger issues of what happens in the dating Arena right right you're taught to never I mean don't make him feel bad like if he went through all that trouble if he bought you that expensive dinner

like that's I think still a factor for a lot of women really yeah that's sad it is sad I mean a lot of women have written to me um from The Art of Seduction some complaining and I feel bad mostly they say your book really helped me see through this really evil guy who was trying to manipulate me I saw that he was using some of your tactics I saw through him wow you know and it helped me I'm fine with that because a lot of it is just opening up the game and showing you

how people operate in this world and I think there are some there obviously malevolent seducers out there probably more men than women but there are women who use it for nefarious purposes as well yeah so um we've been taught by men huh nothing Quick List Robert what are the anti- Seducer qualities that quickly make people uninterested well um I call it the moralizer so seduction is not a realm of morality right okay it's a an an arena of playfulness it's theater okay and you're enjoying yourself it's a realm of pure pleasure and if you're always

judging the other person oh you said that you believe that oh I can't believe it you're wearing those clothes that's incredible turnoff right so the moralizer drop all of that drop all your judgments and be completely open to the other person there's no there's there's none of that in involved in here there's no good or bad okay the second thing is generosity not being generous so not paying when when you know it could be man or woman but but being very niggly and cheap with your money with your gifts Etc and be being ungenerous with

your attention and your time but being generous with your time and your attention your money is very very seductive okay um I call this the bumbler is somebody who's always thinking about themselves and did I say the right thing did I do the right thing you know um self-centered Neurosis yeah that's that's very anti- seductive um this might not be true anymore when I wrote the book but I had the character of the vulgarian who's very vulgar and has everyone's vulgar now Robert I know how you pick how you choose yeah also people who talk

too much this is something that men will have more than women the mansplaining kind of thing where they're always they know so much about everything they know about cars stereos wines you know they they can tell you exactly what you're doing wrong Etc talking too much and thinking that you know everything is very very anti- seductive these are a few of the qualities I know they're like five more but I don't want to bore the hell out of you but you get the general idea very interesting that's very helpful how did you how did you

reform yourself from your 20s as as as a rake well it gets tiring and it also gets a little bit pathetic you know I mean like you know Warren batty maybe be able to get away with it but when you're like in your 40s and your 50s and you're still like a rake and you still have that mentality I think it feels kind of pathetic it feels kind of like you know and it's also sad because you're going to be lonely you know when you're in your 20s you're having a lot of fun you're not

worried about loneliness because there's so many different women you're involved with but eventually you you maybe either want a family or you want to settle down and you don't want to have this kind of Chaos in your life and and you're facing a life where you're going to be alone a lot so um facing those kind of factors you know thinking this is kind of pathetic a little bit and it's tiring and I had I had my moment I you know I uh I I whatever the expression is I made hay when the Sun was

shining um pardon the expression it's over all right I'm getting older it's not such a bad thing to get older and I found a woman that I've been with now for a while and she basically reformed me she put the call around my neck she tamed and domesticated me was it an easy transition I've heard you know some people who have lived a certain way and then transitioning to that other way you know when you start to become more close with someone when there's an increase in vulnerability it's it becomes challenging and it could be

it could be easy to be oh wait a second that other life was maybe a little bit lonely but a lot of fun and exciting and I didn't have all all these emotional challenges that I'm having now yeah for sure definitely and you're always lured back into being a rake again unfortunately because you do have very pleasant memories Etc so it is a challenge you have to work on yourself and you have to grow and you have to mature a little bit and understand that if you're fooling around that you're not going to have that

relationship that you want that you think is very important you need very much so so the woman I'm with you know we have a very deep connection intellectually and emotionally and you know we we we kind of help each other very deeply in each other's work etc so we're invested very deeply into it so you know you weigh that factor and you go that's that's much more important than than those momentary Pleasures I had in my 20s and not all for Not all men are going to feel that way but that's that's my particular Journey

yeah that's beautiful and the involvement in each other's work and helping each other in that way and the intellectual connection I think is something to look for and partnership I have a question and I know it's not necessarily fair to make you sort of comment on current you know dating practices cuz I mean none of us are really in that current pool but I do think in the you know in the framework of what we're talking about of Seduction and and and power and you know sort of that interplay um um many many people are

having um you know non- monogamous relationships they're polyamor right and um you know I I I'm fascinated by this just because I think it's very interesting and you know what I what I hear you know from a lot of women is like two can play at that game and if he wants to have lots of Partners like I should too and I'm a sexual person and so is he and you know all these things um but I wonder if you could speak a little bit to where that kind of comes into this notion of you

know is that a reaction to men being rakes um is it you know a resp is is this something that that women experience in the same way and you know at what point is there a a neurotic or compulsive feature to the need to have multiple partners does that come into any sort of understanding of power or seduction that you can understand well everybody is different um some people I think it maybe it is a healthy thing where they they just have an incredibly powerful sexual drive and they want different partners and they found somebody

so I I don't like to judge with broad Strokes like that and sometimes it's not just the sexual connection it's like it's like having committed you know intimate relationships with more than one person so yeah but then there's sex addiction part of it that becomes compulsive where you're dealing with issues probably stemming from your childhood probably stemming from your connection to your mother I know um You probably heard of Neil Strauss wrote the game he wrote this book where he tried to get out of the game where he called the truth have you heard of

this yeah where he um tried to reform him his ways as a pickup artist and he went to these retreats in Arizona and they taught him all these things about who he was and why he has this compulsive need Etc and and he essentially reformed himself so I think he did I can't say for sure but it came from an unhealthy place but you have to have self-awareness also to be able to access this kind of information right well he I think he in his case he was in general not yeah he sounds like he

went through a rigorous process he did he wanted to have children he wanted to have a family and he thought this you know I don't want to be someone you know constantly sleeping around and and and trying to also have a family I mean I don't know I don't know I'm not going to go into how he thought but as far as you know I do believe that men and women are different I'm sorry to say that it's very radical notion I know it is and I think women think differently about sex than men do

they generally speaking generally speaking they have more at stake obviously well one egg a month you know yeah so the women that are involved in polyamorous relationships I don't think it's the same as it is for a man um now I'm not saying that there aren't women that are naturally drawn to that kind of lifestyle and I'm sure there are but I don't think it's the same drive and the same uh I don't think it's as prevalent as it is for for men excuse me for saying that I know I'm being a quote unquote gender

essentialist here but um I do believe that that it is different between men and women biologically speaking let's talk about Mastery yes Mastery of Seduction and power well they do interrelate they do interrelate because um you talk about people finding their life's purpose or finding their life's task and in order to do that you are able to have more agency and influence on your life potentially but can you start us off you know explain a little bit about the notion of finding a life's task to someone who may be like well I don't know if

I have one well everybody has one and of all of the chapters in all of my books it's the most important one of all for re for fulfilling your life for for having what you want in this world it's extremely important and um I believe I'm I'm a complete egalitarian in that sense I believe everybody is born with this capacity everybody is born with a life's task and in the book I kind of reduce it to uh genetics the DNA that you possess will never be has never been H replicated in the past nor in

the future it is one of a kind is a mix of of hormones of chemicals that are completely unique you are are a unique phenomenon in the history of the universe and it's something that may sound like a cliche but if you think about it it's very very powerful there has never been anybody like you and you can add on top of that your parents who are also have their own uniqueness they're raising you in a unique way with a chemistry that has never existed before and you can also say that about your earliest experiences

in life the people that you interacted with so you are a unique phenomenon in this world and that uniqueness What Makes You Different is your life's task understanding what makes you different from everybody else clearly indic will indicate to you the career path that you should be following should indicate what it is you should be studying in in high school in college and and when you enter the work world and it's um for a lot of people I believe for every child it's very clear but you don't remember it right um so when you're like

two or three years old you're you're attracted to things I call them Primal inclinations Abraham maslo the great psychologist he called them um impulse voices you have these impulse voices that say I like this fruit I don't like that I like this person I don't like that person you have these definitive tastes early on in your life and a a man named Howard Gardner wrote a book called The Five frames of intelligence that I tell people that is very essential that we associate intelligence with just intellectual power but that's not true there's intelligence in the

body kinetic intelligence there's a connect there's intelligence social intelligence to deal with dealing with people there's an intelligence that was with words and language there's intelligence with patterns which is has to do with like math and music there's kind of visual intelligence and you have one of these right just like from doing nothing just from being like you're just you got one of them right genetically well usually it's one but there's there can be there can be a second one that you could combine that with so we could look at a great person like Da

Vinci and he has like he's like visually oriented very much so but he also had that mathematical kind of brain and he also had that visual intelligence of being able to design mechanical things mechanical intelligence was the other one I was thinking um so you have that you have that that it's and it's it's almost we put too many words and labels on it it's something that's deeply ingrained in you it's actually a chapter I'm writing about in my new book and I'm going back to the ancient Greek concept of the dayon that you're born

with a kind of a guardian spirit and a fate um that that you are trying to follow and you have to key into what it is that separated you at Birth all right so you have this but what happens is you get five years old your parents are saying oh you should be studying this you don't want to go into dance you wanted to start playing a musical instrument your teacher starts saying you shouldn't be you need to be studying you need to get better at geometry even though you can't figure out anything about math

your friends start telling you things those impulse voices that you were hearing when you were three or four get drowned out by your parents by your teachers by your peers you don't hear it anymore you're 18 years old 19 you're confused you enter the Work World you hav a clue anymore what it is that you actually love your parents say go to law school so that you make some money you go to law school you're like 29 you're 30 you go God I don't really love this I'm burning out you know and you start start

taking drugs you start getting into some bad habits because you're not connected to it you don't love it right so it's something that everybody has and I used in Mastery the example of Temple grandon a woman born with deep deep autism nonfunctional autism at the age of two her parents were to committed to a hospital where she'd spend the rest of her life right but she met a woman a teacher who thought she could teach this deeply autistic child language and slowly she brought her out of Temple out of her shell and she realized she

had a Fascination like a lot of autistic people do with animals right she had this deep connection almost she could understand their language I mean she revolutionized the way we think think of Slaughter and you know and animals um I'm a vegan person so we know about her okay um yeah she revolutionized the way that we understand I mean essentially food production uh because of her understanding of animal you know um psychology well she had a connection to cows that was just insane she she just understood them deeply very early age so I say if

someone born with high high level autism can find their way to a life's task I'm not saying it's easier that's for everyone but it shows that everybody has this potential so I'm com 100% egalitarian in the belief that everybody even from the worst background has this potential but it's a lot harder for some people to realize I understand but you have it and I counsel a lot of people who say I don't have any idea what that is help me Robert I'm completely lost you have to go through a process that I try and leave

them through so I don't have as much time as I used to have to do this kind of thing but it is the process it's a process of connecting to who you were in your earliest years to those impulse voices to what excites you to what doesn't excite you and uh I believe if I had the time I could do that for everybody that came that came to me for this I've had a lot of success in doing it but um I understand why it's not easy I always felt attracted to words and language in

an obsessive way almost an unhealthy way I just loved word games right and I loved history and prehistory was my obsession so you know I knew it from an early age so it's it's easier for me to say that but I understand a lot of people don't have that for various reasons and there might be a component to people who understand it deeply and don't lose that connection there might be a reason why some people have that like an Einstein like a Steve Jobs like um a Martha Graham people that I highlight in the book

there might be a reason why some people hold on to it better than others that uh that is genetic or whatever I don't know but I believe everybody can find their way back to it if we go through this process M what did you like as a kid telling other people what to do I remember being 3 years old and the girls wouldn't play with me cuz I was too bossy and you know when I think about sort of like you know I mean I wanted to be a psychiatrist I wanted to be a doctor

and then when I got to college I wanted to be a psychiatrist and I didn't have the grades for med school but yeah I've always been interested in like therapy talking to people helping people you know and I'm thinking like gosh was that related you know as a three-year-old that's sort of managing and directing and being like I want to play This Way um yeah I don't know it was two years ago I think mime directed her first movie that she wrote really mhm and I wasn't there on set but when I was talking with

her she expressed feeling more at home and in herself yeah on a set which requires telling people what to do but being a director meaning being in charge of every aspect of meaning like the visual the I wrote it you know so the words like it was it was the best it was the best way of being bossy without it being an authoritarian I I see this what is the movie called it's called as they made us as they made us as they made us it's with um Dustin Hoffman and Candace Bergen really oh to

look it up had some big hitters there and uh Simon hellberg from The Big Bang Theory and Diana Agron and it's um you know it's like a character kind of study but a very very small film but it absolutely felt like this is why my brain was made the way it was because I could see in angles and like I you know loved the cinematographer and being able to work with him and that was my favorite thing was designing all these things and I was like is this what my brain you know was kind of

designed to do also therapist as well as telling people what to do as well as Artist as well as visual kind of put all the pieces together I think for a you know a lot of women I think of my mom's generation I think of women probably for most of his history you know the the the prum was pretty limited you know and you were raised you know to have a certain set of skills that serve you know I'm watching 1883 and I'm like that was what women's lives were you know like cooking cleaning making

sure no one died and having enough children so that when some died you still had left over right and so I think like gosh what a you know what a blessed time for me to get to live in where I did I got to go to college it wasn't this novel thing it wasn't crazy that I wanted to get an education or that I didn't feel the need to get married at 16 or 17 yeah and for people trying to find their life's task now or their life's purpose now you've described connecting with what they

used to like as children reidentifying and reconnecting with that you also talk about sort of viscerally in the body understanding what those signals are well the the signals are things that you love and things that you hate so um I you know going on my own life um as I said I've had this visceral attraction to this day whenever I see something in the New York Times that has to do with earliest ancestors with things about the Neanderthals I get this thrill that I just I just got to read it because I'm so fascinated with

this notion of of who we were 50,000 years ago compared to now right something from when I was four years old but also things I hated I hated working for other people I hated office politics I hated the [ __ ] going on I hated all the game play I had all the brown noosing I hated it hated it hated it I realized I never held a job in my entire life for more than 11 months right that's why I had 50 60 different jobs so now I don't work for anybody else and I'm in

heaven I've di in heaven is it that simple like what are the things that you viscerally like what are the things that you viscerally hate no but but I'm saying is that a starting place because you know I was just talking with my 18-year-old and I was like isn't it interesting that you're entering a phase of your life where you could and he is a person who has really you know both sides of his brain you know running on a lot of cylinders like he could say I'm going to study science and I'm going to

go to medical school and like that could be your life or you could study philosophy and say I'm going to write and I'm going to think and like we we're at these points a lot of times in our life where you know options are open like is it that kind of simple I mean mostly I went to school with people who thought they had to go to med school because it's all that they were kind and and in a culture that worships money and power you know that that is what drives a lot of people

but I really love this idea and I think for those of us who are artists like you you play we live in a play world like as an actor I literally like pretend for a living which is a bizarre thing you know to do but that's sort of some of what you know artists are able to tap into right like I get to keep playing and seeing what moves me exactly exactly so um it's you have to make a living you have to be somewhat practical well Scott Galloway who we had on says don't pursue

your passion that's not going to be you know what actually makes you successful and able to support yourself find the thing that you're best at uh that you can do even if it doesn't move you and like that felt very Loveless to me I I I'm I'm of the opposite perspective know so that's why you're here for longer than he okay cuz he made me cry okay well so you do have to make a living you have to be practical I understand that but um what you want to do is you want to think of

your 20s as a period of Adventure as a period of trying things out you don't want to have this kind of monoral linear perspective I've got to go to law school I've got to make $100,000 by this blah blah blah you're not going to have any fun you're going to burn yourself out and you're going to end up miserable but that used to be when women had to have your babies yeah now they're extending it but many of us are geared towards like I got to have a baby when I'm most fertile that's now in

your 30s well I mean I was just more conservative I was you know I a lot of women waiting until their 30s these days I know but you know then you're geriatric after 35 like they flag you it's like you can't do a home birth yeah after 35 is considered a geriatric pregnancy eggs eggs have been in there a long time that's changing that's changing well you I have a lot of female friends who've had children in their late 30s for sure Whitney Cummings she's in her 40s but also like she talked about it like

the journey is not necessarily linear or smooth it often involves you know a lot of so she had her career she had a great time you're right but she also but people and Whitney talked about this she also was in a place where she had the you know financial and cultural support to do that you know for a lot of women like I mean look you can't even have access to birth control abortions but we don't need to talk about that but go ahead 20s Adventure good well I mean even even for a woman like

you you're in your early 20s you can you can you know yes and then when by the time that you've kind of got skills and you're ready to do something you can have a child when you're 29 they penalize you for leaving to have the baby this is what she was talking about ear LA 10 I had my kids in that's right law 10 Is Coming Robert like I changed my mind you are toxic you have infected the whole room and your entire field of ner I haven't quite gotten there yet maybe eventually another 10

minutes another 10 minutes um well you know like quiet like my wife she's a film director yes right so she knows about what you're talking about about the kind of yeah the chaos and all the people you know she she knew that early on she wanted a career right she wasn't a baby oriented woman right and so we opted not to have children right which is a choice for some people and a lot of people do and in this world with climate change and with everything you know there's there's a good logic behind that sometime

so women can always make that choice unless they feel very deprived by that because they are a baby oriented the pressure to be part of the baby making you know machine it's enormous pressure yeah but trying to tell you have you seen those commercials they look you're not supposed you're not supposed to be giving into pressure 100% you're supposed to be figuring out what you want and if you are a social person if that's if babies are a deep need for you and it can be an incredibly wonderful experience then do it but to be

someone who wants to have a career that feels depression has a kid and is not very good mother or father it's terrible it's very terrible so women should have that choice and there should be no pressure right all right right um anyway 20's excitement adventure exploring you but you have a reasonable idea of what excites you and so you try different things but there's there's a there's a kind of a logic to it there's sort of a parameter it's not like you're studying philosophy and you're studying you know uh carpentry or shoe make I don't

know I can't think of what the other thing would be but there's a there's a logic to it there's a connection to it but you're having fun you're trying things out you're not so worried about making money right I'm I'm not being Scott Galloway here the money will come if you figure out what you love and so the human brain doesn't learn very well if it's not emotionally involved you tune out you burn out you're not listening you're not studying you're not absorbing right and you can [ __ ] your way through that when you're

in your 20s and your mind is flexible and open you go to law school you can learn it by the time you're 30 it starts boring the hell out of you and you're not learning and you're not developing you're not evolving you're heading towards a disaster so you want to feed your mind you want to have Adventures within a certain framework and then when you're 29 you're 30 you've got skills things start to fit you start to say this is where I can go I can mix acting with Neuroscience I can become a film director

and a podcaster I can combine these different things that I love and you start finding it out and you've got these skills and you know you're you're you become creative instead of just instead of just absorbing information and so nothing will happen positive in your life if you don't have that I really honestly believe it and a lot of people are disoriented and lost in their lives because they don't have a clue they don't have any idea about this and it's tragic and they enter their 30s and 40s by the time you're in your 40s

it starts to get a little too late in some way I think in your 30s you can kind of I mean I wasn't in I was in 38 until I wrote the 48 LW unbelievable so um there's something really interesting about your trajectory being 38 when you wrote the book yeah you'd call yourself maybe a late bloomer in terms of finding that a very light blo I which I appreciate because it also relates to something that you speak about which is the notion of anxiety as a motivator and you know your relationship with anxiety when

things were not working for you yeah can you talk a little bit about what you were going through when it wasn't working and actually how that helped you you know realize what where you should go next and and was somewhat um divined that you found a path towards a book well it's weird uh you know life is strange um in the moment that you're doing things you're not really aware of a pattern you're not really aware of a fate or a Destiny or any larger thing and then in retrospect you start seeing this so who's

to say that it's it's all illusion it's all in your mind but I don't believe so I believe that I can discern a pattern looking back that actually was there and so a lot of it was I try these different jobs out and it doesn't fit me the fit isn't right so I was I started off in New York as a journalist I lived in New York for several years and uh because I thought I could make a living and write and I I didn't like it I didn't like the fact that I wrote something

and it only was seen for a couple weeks whereas I'm have somebody who loves history and I like things that last for hundreds of years not a week not two weeks I thought it was dep depressed me the world of Journalism and the people in it depressed me and this one editor took me aside uh when I was maybe about 24 or so 25 and he he was on his third martini and he said Robert you're never going to be a writer you don't have the discipline you don't have the skill you're all over the

place you're you know you just go to law school go to business school you're not going to make it that's terrible yeah and I was you know I was seeing that he was kind drinking martinis and I understood that he was not not necessarily the most reliable source of wisdom there it hurt me but then I realized this is not the right world for me so then I I I was young and adventurous I just packed up and went to Europe I wandered around Europe are these your raish years my rakish years I I uh

I tried all these different jobs I was going to be a novelist I was going to be the next Hemingway or whatever I was going to try all these different jobs and I did and I had a great time but I never wrote a novel because I was I didn't have the I didn't have the discipline and I wasn't probably very good at it and so I realized I'm getting 30 years old I'm living in Spain and I'm teaching English but it's not my path I'm worried I have that anxiety that you mentioned so I

decided my dad had just come down with cancer I was going to come back to LA I was going to get into the film business and with I can write screenplays that's what I'm meant to do and you know I can make a living you know make a good living hell you know I do that and I come back and I'm in it for like seven eight years and I get this icky feeling it's not me it doesn't fit so I kept having this recurring feeling it's not me it doesn't fit but then the point

might be you reach a point where you go maybe Nothing fits maybe you're just a Restless person that can't figure it out you know so you start worry a little bit okay but then um so this you know we're complicated creatures so part of me that my brain is going maybe you're never going to figure out you know the depressing part the part that does get depressed and I was very deeply depressed but there's also another voice saying don't give up don't give up there's still something there there you still you know something you have

great knowledge of languages of literature of philosophy of History there's still some there still un niched for you even in this weird world then I'm in Italy and I meet a man they're on one of my 60 different jobs um we're we're trying to launch a New Media School in Italy and it's a disaster and it's just all this mackelli and politicking and he's a Dutchman and he's a book packager and he asked me do I have any ideas for a book and I imper we were in Venice Italy we're walking along near the Patza

San Marco and I improvise what turns into the 48 Laws of Power and his eyes light up and it's like a revelatory moment for me I could write books non-fiction books that combined philosophy History Literature psychology I never intended to write self-help books or books for business people or books that would be banned in prisons because they're too powerful yeah exactly I I was a literary person a philosophy person right those were my references but you know he believed in me it was like a fortune it but sometimes people say that you kind of draw

that kind of thing to you if he had come to me when I was 25 I wouldn't have been able to write the book I was at the right moment fate intervened and it feels like it was meant to happen I know that's ridiculous I know that's woo woo but I still really really believe it and I was so desperate and even slightly suicidal at that point that this was my chance and I grabbed it and I gave it everything I had had all the experiences all the bad times all the manipulations people have played

on me I thank them in the acknowledgements of the 48 Laws of Power all the people who've done these nasty things to me you inspired this book thank you very much I had all this information to draw upon and so you know at 38 I you know it turned my life around I could have I don't think I I don't know what would have happened to me if that if I had had that occurrence I want to touch on the woooo part because I'm yeah I was going to this is like the most spiritual experience

without you mentioning sort of like a spiritual experience yeah I'm listening to The Alchemist the book The Alchemist with my son uh he's 16 and he really loves sci-fi and and magic and uh i' I've been trying trying to get him to have a little bit more exposure to literary books or sort of books that you know are on the lists of books you should read in high school so uh and he loves audio so we've been listening to it in the car and it talks a lot about you know the world is going to

conspire on your behalf to help you find the thing that you're meant to do in the world you're a unique gift um and so as you're talking it's like you hit the crisis of of Faith there being depressed but that little voice where do you think that little voice came from do you think it was divine intervention that or a spiritual World realm I know you've talked about meditating like do do you have a connection to things greater than ourselves that are do and it's a subject of my next book I'm writing a book on

the sublime and um ex I had a near-death experience you know with my stroke I came this close to dying I wouldn't be here I almost had irreparable brain damage I still have moments and I'm I'm writing right now a story I have a chapter on the what I call the dayong that I'm writing right now and I talk in this book each chapter has a kind of a main figure and the main figure for this chapter believe it or not is Harriet Tubman and she um as I analyzed it as a young girl had

a definite really strong strange unusual Spirit Born Into Slavery but she was a rebellious Restless a fighting spirit in her right and but with slavery you can't imagine the limitations are are insane right um but she kept finding her way she kept struggling struggling struggling struggling and she did all these things that eventually led to her getting to work in the fields which was a great Liberation where she learned about the railro network where she learned all about Black Culture underground culture it opened her eyes up she was kind of maneuvering her life in unconscious

ways and then she had that brain injury where someone threw a lead weight at at somebody else that hit her here in the head and from then on she was hearing voices she had Visions yeah and she hear the voice of the God saying harod I want you to escape to the north harod I want you to do this that take people out of slavery I mean that was the and so um the way I'm trying to analyze it because the information we have from her life is very scanty and we don't some of it's

pure Legend some of it we don't know but I'm saying that she had that voice when she was 2 years old it was there it was very strong and it was kind of like underneath everything underneath so she has to go work in these house for these white Mistresses you know fluffing up their pillows and and looking after the newborns but that spirit is still there underneath and and saying I've got to rebel I hate these people I hate this world she figures a way to trick them deceive them gets her sent out to work

in the fields that spirit is there it's constantly moving and then that accident happens and I'm trying to say that the voice that she's hearing of the Lord I'm not just say that there's it could have been the Lord who knows but I'm saying it's that uniqueness that she had when she was 2 or three years old now raised to the 10th level she's hearing it right so there's an element where that voice is in you right it's always there it is always there inside of you was it planted by the Creator I'm not a

I'm not a religious person by Nature okay so I don't necessarily that but I have nothing against it I'm extremely agnostic if I die and there's heaven I'm a Believer you know I I'm open to anything okay but um I believe that it's something in you is planted at your birth a seed is planted and that is what your voice is and that voice communicates not just with words it communicates with your heartbeat with your skin with how you feel about it how how you react to certain things what repulses you what what excites you

what Thrills you right it's visceral and you feel that voice and it communicates to you so in even in my darkest moments it wasn't like I was hearing a voice saying Robert you're really good I was just not giving up but part of me just wouldn't give up so you can almost say that it was a voice telling me not to give up that I felt like I was destined for something I always felt since a very early age I was destined for something strange and unusual I thought I'd be a novelist that didn't happen

but it turned out in a different direction you know so um it was always there thank God it was always there because I was on the point of of giving up it's very powerful you mentioned your agnostic you know a lot of people have spiritual experiences we actually had a woman on who had a near-death experience who explain meeting God going to the other side having a download of universal information that exists in many literary texts that she had never read and came back with um Supernatural ability yeah did you have what was what was

your near-death experience like well uh nothing like that I mean uh you know um I had uh I had like a slight kind of weird Vision something I you know I had a stroke where I I was driving and my my wife girlfriend at the time was sitting next to me and she forced me to pull over and then strange things are going on in my mind and you know uh it's starting to close down but I'm not aware of it I'm talking Etc as if everything is normal and then I completely blank out right

and then I wake up and I'm in a hospital and I don't know what happened but I have as I'm waking up I have this kind of vision of my mother and my wife talking to me at my funeral and I'm kind of seeing them and they're saying you know and and I'm getting a feeling I don't I can't hear what they're saying but I'm getting a feeling that everything is all right life has gone on right now I don't believe that this is something uh from heaven or God because as I said I'm agnostic

there's a really great book that I love called dying to live it's Susan Blackmore I think she's a neuroscience scientist it's a great book and you'll you you find it fascinating because she explains everything in very clear sight but she's not she's not um uh condescending about it she's she's not saying you you woooo people are ridiculous she's understanding on a very deep level and she relates it a lot because she like myself practices Zen Buddhism so she relates it to certain things going on in the brain when you're when everything kind of shuts down

and you're actually connection to reality whereas we're not normally in connection to it also um Dr Jill Bolly Taylor MH you know about her oh she'd be good for your show for your podcast this is like kind of wrote a book um stroke of insight yeah she had a horrific stroke oh yes yes yeah yeah my mom loved that one um and she explains it she's a neuroscientist and she explains it of what happens to the brain right yeah we actually we gave a talk at South by Southwest about the intersection of Science and spirituality

and trying to explain some of the neurological substrates of Prayer of meditation and a lot of these studies are done you know with practicing uh meditators um such as yourself uh but also the notion of you know what what are the commonalities and you know there's this overlap between DMT and between near-death experiences it's kind of a window into you know what is this thing that you know I think in our culture we associate with like it must be God but um anyway um it's very exciting to to have you here for the 25th anniversary

of um The Laws of Power I really appreciate my very special copy okay um and um it's just really been I mean it's been a thrill to talk to you I feel like we could talk to you forever thank you so much it's really been so much fun talking to you I'm not scared of you anymore you sure yes you're just a little bit now you're scared of me a little bit yeah she has that effect on people from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have we'll see you next time it's bre's

going break it down for you she's got a neuroscience PhD or two and now she's going to break down a break down she's going break it down has it been wildly surreal to start to meet people like Drake and 50 Cent and go from writing into that world well it's it's even more than that I I compare it to there was a ride at Disneyland I don't know if it's still there called Mr Toad's Mr Toad's Wild Ride yes sort of like that um because before I wrote the 48 Laws I was kind of this

guy in his late 30 sort of a loser at least my parents were getting worried about me I had like my my girlfriend now my wife we counted I had like 50 60 different jobs up until then doing writing but just everything every I worked at a detective agency I you can't imagine the different jobs I had but I I had no success and although I'm still the same person that I was back then nobody was giving caring about my advice nobody listened to me who's this loser trying to tell me how to get my

life together suddenly the 48 Laws of Power come and people are like starting to consult me and stuff so but the really weirdest part was like six months after it came out it got translated into Italian and they brought me over for this like book my first book tour and it was like in the Island of Capri and was all these celebrities and paparazi were following me around and taking pictures of me and I met the ex-president of Italy and I was you was like what the hell's going on this isn't right I feel like

an impostor basically and then you know then the rap rapper stuff started happen but by then I was getting a little used to you know some of the attention you got used to all the rappers being in love with you yeah but you know as you as I as you can tell I'm like this nerdy white guy middle class from Los Jewish kid from Los Angeles so meeting 50 Cent for the first time was an experience but I love uh kind of crossing boundaries you know people don't usually do that in America usually a writer

who does this you're a rapper who does that and I like to just be extremely fluid and mixed with all different kinds of people and just see them I see him as This brilliant strategist kind of I call him the Napoleon Bona part of Hip Hop and just seeing on a higher level his intelligence his Spirit as opposed to all the kind of identity things that keep us separated really pisses me off to be honest with you pardon my language I've heard you talk about the role that he plays and the role that we all

play yeah did you feel like you had to play a role when you walked into that Arena okay so I I'll give you a little story here so uh I first meet him in New York and you know I'm a little bit intimidated right how did you choose what to wear I can't remember back that far it's 2005 20 yeah 2006 I don't remember what I chose to wear I wasn't like blinged out or anything because I never do that that looks so fake it's ridiculous you know I'm not like Ali G or something right

I know my limits um anyway so um but I'm just one white guy and he's like nine of his Entourage there right and I sort of feeling a little bit a little bit intimidated and he you know he's like just a very impressive looking person got all this this incredible jewelry I was like f transfixed by his bracelet all diamonds on it must have been like worth million dollars I don't know what anyway the the irony of the story to get to your question was um I was intimidated but he was also told me later

he was intimidated by me he thought he was going to be meeting someone who looked like Henry Kissinger this kind of very impressive maybe had a little bit of a German accent who knows who was kind of you know just so powerful and then he meets this kind of nerdy guy and I me meet this man who's really soft and gentle and sweet he's very sweet so we were both kind of surprised by the Persona that the public knows but isn't really like who we are it's my be breakdown she's going to break it down

for you she's got a neuroscience PhD or two and now she's going to break down a break down she's going to break it down