Your Dark Side and Control Over Your Life | Robert Greene | EP 237

I've try to remove the kind of taboo or the negative associations we have with a word like power or with the word ambition you know I try and say ambition is a good thing it means that you have you believe in yourself you you you have some self-love and you believe you're worth something and you want to go out and Achieve and and create something worthwhile for other people so ambition is a is a positive thing but so many people are just kind of embarrassed about being a human being embarrassed about our Prim nature embarrassed

about our own aggressive impulses this is partly why boys are failing in our schools now at a disproportionate rate you know the the and I see this there's an assault of the sort that you're describing on the better part of striving masculinity and you know I had a friend who killed himself because he identified his ambition with you know the the the patriarchal Force that's devouring the environment let's say and that's a con that's you know the cause of of hisor IAL horror and you might say well no one takes that on to themselves to

that degree and that's well you can say that but that you just don't know what the hell you're talking about people take that on to themselves all the [Music] [Music] time hi everyone I'm pleased today to to have with me Mr Robert Green Mr Green is the number one New York Times bestselling author of number of books the 48 Laws of Power 1998 The Art of Seduction 2001 the 33 Strategies of War 2007 the 50th law which he wrote with 50 Cent the rapper 2008 Mastery 2012 the laws of human nature 2018 and the daily

laws this book right here so he's an he's an internationally renowned expert on power strategies living in Los Angeles Mr Green worked at an estimated 80 jobs including magazine editor construction worker Hollywood movie writer before becoming an author the Sunday Times referred to his first book the 48 Laws of Power as the Hollywood backstabbers Bible and it can be difficult to find people who acknowledge its influence because of its controversial nature I was reading the daily laws before setting up this interview and I'm going to read one uh it's a it's a set of meditations

366 meditations on power seduction Mastery strategy and human nature and so here's the one for June 7th and I think it's relatively representative of the book June 7th never impune people's intelligence then there's a subtitle uh or an introdu Rory idea the best way to be well received by all is to clothe yourself in the skin of the dumbest of brutes balasar graian the feeling that someone else is more intelligent than we are is almost always intolerable we usually try to justify it in different ways quote he only has book knowledge whereas I have real

knowledge quote her parents paid for her to get a good education if my parents had had as much money if I had been as privileged he's not as smart as he thinks last but not least quote she may know her narrow little field better than I do but beyond that she's really not smart at all even Einstein was a boob outside physics given how important the idea of intelligence is to most people's vanity it is critical never inadvertently to insult or impune a person's brain power this is an unforgivable sin but if you can make

this iron rule work for you it opens up all sorts of avenues of decep ction the feeling of intellectual superiority you give them will disarm their suspicion muscles and then daily law subliminally reassure people that they are more intelligent than you are or even that you are a bit of a [ __ ] and you can run rings around them and this is the 48 Laws of Power from the 48 Laws of Power law 21 play a sucker to catch a sucker seem dumber than your mark So when I Was preparing for this I was

reading these daily um these daily meditations and I was actually shocked I was really quite shocked by them I was shocked by that one and I was very unclear as a consequence as to your motivations and so I was thinking do I want do I want to I don't get this I don't understand this exactly it's like this is very deceptive and then I talked to my team who like your books a lot and and my daughter who really liked interviewing you and I thought well there's something going on here that I don't quite understand

understand which is certainly possible and then I thought well this is maybe a shadow exploration something like that and and then I thought like I was kind of a dimwit for not catching that earlier but so but you know it is shocking these are very manipulative uh laws let's say and so can you guide me through the rationale for producing material like that what what were you trying what are you trying to do with your books and they've obviously been misunderstood it says in the in Wikipedia Green's books are sometimes described as manipulative and amoral

and so clear this up for me well you know that it's a it's a bit manipulative when people write that because a great deal of the 48 Laws of Power I'd say you know maybe two-thirds of them are not manipulative have nothing to do with deception they have things to do with kind of Common Sense ideas about power such as such as being generous with people such as creating compelling spectacles such as entering action with boldness and kind of how you present yourself sort of things about your image and your appearance but there are definitely

some laws that are quite manipulative and then my other books don't really go into things like that so it is a bit of a distortion to write that but where this comes from is basically um I have a particular idea of power so maybe I should explain that a little bit my idea of power it's not about this kind of grand thing of political or War something it's on a very individual level and the idea for me comes from from n and his idea of the will to power which he explains as all every organism

has a desire to expand itself as a desire for expansion and so I think that for human beings the desire that we we have this innate um propensity for wanting to expand beyond our limits we want to feel like we have some degree of ability to influence other people that we can control our own career and learn more and develop greater skills and have more kind of power and influence in our life the feeling that I cannot have any power or influence over my children my spouse my colleagues my boss my career in general is

deeply deeply unsettling for the human animal and causes all kinds of attempts at but I call negative power passive aggression Etc setting yourself up as a victim kind of L leverage power in a negative way and so the problem is um and this a lot of this comes from makel who inspired a lot of the 48 Laws the problem is that we live in a world where this desire for some kind of power buts up against kind of codes of behavior that have gotten stricter and stricter and stricter in in particularly in the 21st century

about what is acceptable about what is politically correct so we're supposed to appear to be these Paragons of virtue these Paragons of fairness and democracy Etc at the same time we're all trying to angle for different degrees of power in our work in our relationships Etc and so because of that Dynamic we have to be extremely careful in this world and I compare it to the courts of like Louis the 14th where all of the courtiers if they're too overt in their power moves the King will disapprove of them and will not banish them but

they'll be kind of excluded to the corner of the palace and so the game was to be sort of indirect to be polite and ingratiating and if you had an enemy to know how to kind of very quietly get rid of them and so this is kind of what I what what where the 48 Laws of Power came out from so you quoted me I had like 80 different JS probably more like 60 65 but I saw all kinds of very deceptive games being played continually in the various different jobs I had and I I

worked in every conceivable field and I didn't see any kind of honesty about this dynamic in the human world and it really kind of irritated me all the self-help books were sort of um describing a world that I never saw existed you know I saw people being very political having Egos and having problems with their egos and I didn't see any but any books like they're kind of describing what I had encountered every day so law number one is never outshine the master and the idea is that if you try too hard to impress your

boss or the person above you you're liable to make them feel insecure you're going to trip on their ego and something bad will happen to you right and so this seemed like the fact that people have egos and operate with Egos and you have to be careful with them seems very clear to me but I didn't find books out there that were describing it so I hope this kind of gives you an idea a little bit of the context where the book came out yeah well the okay so I just I I can't remember who

sent me this U I think it was Clay routage yeah I think that's right he just sent me a survey that this organization he works with has completed stating that something like 40% of Millennials don't feel they have any control over their life right so that is related to the first issue that you brought up and and you you obviously consider that uh problematic and you said that well we need to it's good for us to have some control over our Destinies and also to feel that that's a possibility to see it at least as

a goal and and then and that if if we feel consciously thwarted in that goal or believe that it's impossible that doesn't mean we're going to give up our striving it means it's going to go underground and then it's going to manifest itself in all sorts of deceptive ways exactly and then you you said that you were interested in n's idea of Will To Power as in some sense the central motivating uh the central motivation of of the organism yeah across species to some degree um and and then you talked about the jobs that you've

had so why why did so I got that right I hope I I hope I've got that very well thank you okay okay and so and so to some degree and then you said well you had all these jobs and you found that people were engaged in manipulative and deceptive strategies a fair number of a fair amount of the time and that no one was really warning people about this are delineating out the strategies yeah okay so that you know that seems to me to be reasonable that I mean I'm a big admirer of the

work of Carl Yung which everyone listening to this knows more than they even want to know um and he was certainly sensitive to the idea that people had a terrible Shadow yes that they would clothe themselves in the GU garments of moral virtue right and act out a virtuous persona but because of the thwarted will to strive in some sense that they have all sorts of motivations sexual power related dominance um aggression anger resentment that aren't admitted thoroughly and that are snakes under the carpet or elephants under the rug or skeletons in the closet and

they pollute human relationships and I certainly believe that's true I believe that that that's the corruption of Human Relationships by a form of of severe deceit and I also think it's reasonable to warn people against that and also to alert them to the fact that such things operate in their own Souls I guess what I wonder is so then the last thing I'm confused about to some degree is you had 65 jobs how come so many jobs I was a very restless young man um it doesn't speak very well of me and the fact that

I couldn't hold a job for more than 11 months I I came out of college and I wanted to be a writer and I had all kinds of romantic Notions of what that meant and then I entered journalism and I worked in New York and I didn't find that that was a very good fit so I moved to Europe and I wandered around for four or five years writing trying to write novels and working in hotels doing construction kind of the writer's life where the the the variety of experiences were kind of giving me material

and I couldn't I never was really happy in in overtly political environments to be honest with you I'm kind of a a born entrepreneur I like working for myself I didn't like a lot of the games that were being played and I'm not very good at them I mean I've gotten better at it but a lot of the things that I write about in the 48 Laws of Power such as never outshine the master are things that I did poorly I did wrong and I suffered for them so I understand the kind of the pain

that a lot of people have in the Work World which is sort of hard for a lot of other people who don't have that kind of experience to understand how deeply frustrating it can be when you have a job that you're not satisfied with and so I was someone who's very restless and I never felt comfortable in any of the different jobs I had and I was also trying to broaden my experience okay so so I had a lot of jobs when I was a kid I worked as a oh God I worked as a

uh in a garage pumping gas I worked as a dishwasher for years I was a short order cook I re tip drill bits I worked as a beekeeper um I had a lot of oh I worked in a plywood Mill uh running plywood pieces through a huge dryer we used to try to light the thing on fire it was like a block long this dryer fired by natural gas if you worked really hard you could stuff it so full it would get crammed up in the middle then it would light on fire and all the

the fire uh um sprinklers would kick in and then the whole building which was like a block Square would fill up with steam really oh God so anyways I I worked in a lot of jobs and and so but I didn't so this is something that that's worth getting clear I like the jobs a lot almost all of them not all of them but almost all of them I got along with the people that I was working with I didn't have the same exactly the same experience that you're describing and yeah you said that you

said that you had a harder time I don't know exactly was it fitting in you didn't like overt the overt political elements too and like when I worked in restaurants I didn't really experience that you know like I got along with the guys that I was working with there was a lot of joking around I I and it's not like I like political maneuvering when I got in the university and saw people in bureaucracies particular maneuvering politically to attain dominance just I found it I I find it absolutely appalling that underground power struggle but it

sounds like it sounds like you had a harder time maybe than I did adapting and that maybe is and that became a conscious puzzle for you is that a reasonable way of thinking about it I think so it made me explore think about myself like maybe I'm doing something wrong the natural reac action in these situations where things you know it wasn't that I hated all of my jobs some of them were fun so I don't want to give the wrong impression but when mistakes were made and I it maybe inadvertently made my boss or

someone feel insecure it caused me like months later to kind of question what had happened and maybe something I did that was wrong in that environment and so um you know I I I felt it wasn't that I felt uncomfortable but I felt sometimes that trying so hard or being good at my job which was often the case was often a detriment which was a very strange realization well that's that's a really good sign that you need to go get a different job I mean I worked with clinical clients a a lot you know in

career counseling and my sense one of the things we'd analyzed right away was well can you actually do your job well and be recognized for it and have a pathway to something approximating success or are you around truly toxic people who will punish you for your virtues in which case well let's get your CV together you know let's get you prepared to get the hell out of there and find a place where you can actually Thrive I mean I had clients who were trapped in jobs I remember one client in particular she uh she had

been a refugee from Albania Eastern Europe that was a rough damn country man and then she came yeah yeah like the worst of the Eastern European block countries in terms of poverty and and general oppressiveness and then she came over to North America and got educated and she ended up working in a bank in Canada and like she was good at her job and she was smart and the her managers just hated her and like she sent me an email string one day it was about 30 emails long that her manager had put together where

the bureaucrats in the bank were discussing whether or not they were allowed anymore to use the word flip chart I think they replaced it with easel board or some damn thing well the reason for that was flip had been used at some point hypothetically as an epithet for Filipino people and so it was it was Politically Incorrect and it was just I mean she was just being driven mad by this this kind of what would you call it pointless moral posturing she was a sensible person and questioned a lot of the bureaucratic stupidity so right

my goal in situations like that was to help people figure out how to move laterally and find a place where you know their virtues would be rewarded instead of punished right it's very wise you know if it can be managed my experience is um and what I I wanted to help people with 48 law of power when these things kind of happen you get very confused and they create a kind of trauma in your life where you sometimes blame yourself or you wonder maybe you did something wrong and you become a little bit skittish and

you you you get a little bit afraid in your next job and these things things kind of Linger on in your mind so having some clarity I don't want to make people paranoid in reading these books I make it very clear that that's not the point I want you to be very realistic but the idea that you could have some clarity that maybe what really happened is that I inadvertently triggered the insecurities of this boss or maybe there are these strict kind of moral puritanical codes in place and I somehow violated them it's not my

fault that kind of clarity can be very very ow ing I find in that that's another kind of motivating device behind the 48 Laws well you also make me very curious about your personality I mean when I'm talking I'm sorry I'm gonna yeah well you know I'm a that's okay I'm a clinician and I snap into that mode sometimes and I'm very curious about this conversation I mean you have a very gentle demeanor and a very uh soft and kind voice and yeah you you don't look like a harsh person and so one of the

one of the dimensions one of the Cardinal personality Dimensions there's of them you may know this extroversion which is a positive emotion and it's associated with assertiveness and enthusiasm yeah and Trump is extroverted definitely negative emotion that's neuroticism and that's the whole panoply of negative emotions they all Clump together and people differ in their sensitivity to them agreeableness that's compassion and politeness on the high end and more like bluntness and competitiveness on the other end and conscientiousness and openness which is creativity you're obviously high in openness you're entrepreneur you're a writer you're interested in ideas

you're obviously creative but you strike me as someone who's very high in agreeableness compassion that's compassion and politeness is that a reasonable is that a reasonable I think that's fair I think that's fairly spot on I would I couldn't have fought fun yeah I agree with you on that certainly okay okay so I mean I mean people are a little more complex than that I do have other sides to myself I do have a shadow side that is can be very aggressive and very I'm very competitive so it's I think on the surface I have

that kind of agreeable personality for various reasons but yes would you describe yourself as compassionate empathetic very much so yeah okay so here's what I'm okay okay okay so that's I'm very curious about that because one of the disadvantages of being high in agreeableness is that you're more likely to be a target for disagreeable types certainly and this is a really important notion so I was talking yesterday who was it with I can't remember but we were talking about oh yes it was Andy no we were talking about the establishment of this you know Utopian

community in the middle of Seattle the the mayor described it and said well maybe it'll be the summer of love which is extremely naive thing to think especially because the Summer of Love blew up and so and you know that's sort of a celebration of agreeable virtues and so agreeable people are very generous and kind and they're not backstabbing and they're empathetic and they're self-sacrificing and and but there have been computer simulations very sophisticated computer simulations by evolutionary biologists of what happens if you get agreeable people together so imagine you have a population of people

and all of them are agreeable and so they're cooperating away it's all very kind and nice but if you put one person in there who has psychopathic traits yes he just takes over everything yeah and so the agreeable people always have the problem of how do you handle Free Riders cheaters and Psychopaths and you know you might be utopian and say well those people just don't exist and they shouldn't exist and we shouldn't structure our societies that way but that ain't going to cut it because psychopaths are always 3% of the population they veryy begin

five and so if you're so so is it possible I don't want to push this interpret Beyond its reasonable limits but I'm I'm wondering you're you're open and creative and entrepreneurial and so that's not going to suit you for managerial or bureaucratic jobs you don't have the temperament for that and then you're agreeable and so is it possible that you encountered more of that bullying Behavior or like a disproportionate amount of that bullying behavior and so forth in the jobs that you had is that I think that's very possible and yes and I'm also very

sensitive so I'm kind of you know react a little bit more than most most other people might react but the odd thing is is that the book came out in 1998 and it has resonated with lots and lots of readers I've sold millions of copies of the book and so there's I think a lot of people share the trait that I have oh there's no doubt about it that that's it's not uncommon what I'm talking about at all I mean the the great manipulators in the world the three% that you talk about and I think

that's about the right number they don't need this kind of book because they're born that way or they're not born that way but they learned at the age of three or four or five how to begin to manipulate and their whole personality was kind of formed over these sort of tactics they don't need a book like that what seems to happen there we studied that you know so if you take two-year-olds and you group them together two-year-olds by the way grouped together are the most violent of human beings in age matched groups okay so among

two years two-year-olds there's a proportion of them who will spontaneously kick fight hit by and steel they're almost all males and it's about 5% of the males now most of them this goes to nature versus nurtur say most of them get socialized out of that by the time they're four now they would be more disagreeable boys so they're not empathic and compassionate polite by temperament but they can still be socialized but a proportion of them don't get socialized and they tend to be life course antisocial types yeah I think um Melanie Klein she looked at

infants like that of that age and she said that there was something called the greedy baby and the greedy baby was like sucking the mother's breast so hard it could never get enough milk it was just so greedy for more and more and she saw that as the child got older that kind of greediness and that kind of selfish behavior only got worse and worse and worse and she would like try and see if you could track that to someone who got who became older was a type and she ended up thinking that there was

maybe a genetic component to oh yeah well there is a genetic component too because that sort of proclivity runs in families but and also there's a genetic underpinning to variation and agreeableness now you know if you have a tough kid like that and you're very agreeable the kid can run rough shot over you it's very difficult for you to do the socialization and so like one of the one of the problems that women face with men so men are reliably less agreeable than women that's cross culturally and it's true it's even more true in egalitarian

societies and so women have to agreeable because I think primarily because they have to take care of infants and that's an extremely self-sacrificing occupation especially when they're under 9 months but with men they have to select men who are agreeable enough to be generous and kind and share but they have to be disagreable enough to keep the real psychopaths and the and the manipulators at Bay and so it's a chronic problem for the human race okay so you're you're doing all these jobs and you're seeing the politicking and politicking and it's not going well for

you you decide to analyze the behavior of the people that are acting in these underground oppressive ways you're definitely going to see that if if you're if you're being pushed around a lot you know and so you decided to make that an object of study yeah um you know I wasn't it's not so much that I was pushed around some of it was also just observing how other people were being treated I have this idea that I talk about in the book that you know people will always wear the the mask of being agreeable and

friendly even the most psychotic boss will always know how to be somewhat charming and present themselves but you look at how they treat other people when you're not observing them behind closed doors and that's when some of their ugly Behavior will come out they kind of hide it very well from from from the public so a lot of it was observing how other people were mistreated and so when I worked in Hollywood you know in some Industries I have to say some Industries are a lot worse than others so when you're working at that factory

job that you're mentioning people will tend to be kind of United around a single purpose there won't be me much politic and going on an environment an environment where Hollywood so much of it is money and ego Etc the level and the desire for fame you know and that's going to attract a disproportionate number so it's the people that are are more likely to be the way that you describe are high in extroversion yes especially assertiveness and they're low in agreeableness that's kind of the personality disorder axis high in extroverted assertiveness and low in agreeableness

especially compassion and then if you add unconscientious to that you got you got someone who's bordering on Psychopathic right and they could still be high in openness they could still be creative and intelligent but they'd be manipulative as hell and kous and and and I would say another thing I was going to ask you is because you worked in Hollywood and that is a a place that that invites people who want to be to make a display of themselves let's say and and there's some utility in that right we want to people to be actors

we want them to be enthusiastic and entertaining yes but but it's so do you is it possible that a lot of this you saw was a consequence of the form of Industry that you were involved in especially in Hollywood well definitely but um after the book came out U my first book the 48 Laws it became hugely popular popular in the hip-hop world among musicians which is why I ended up doing a book with 50 Cent and I found out that the music industry was even worse than Hollywood and then I was in Washington for

a book tour for the 48 Laws and this woman came running up to me who worked in voice of Americans she was saying you have no idea how the the 48 Laws of Power exactly describe the environment I'm in and then I was in a conference with people who were in um nonprofits in San Diego and this woman was saying boy you describe the nonprofit work politically it is so so perfectly it is so political it's so much about ego so it's horrible but that's true of the nonprofit world you know I mean that might

have to do with that moral posturing e well I the way I look at it is you had a place like the Soviet Union where your degree of power wasn't based on any kind of Statistics it wasn't that you perform better than others it wasn't that your brand your economic Branch was was outperforming others and therefore you were elevated to a higher position it was pure politicking it was pure manipulation how close could you get to the hierarchy maneuvering yeah so when you have like a nonprofit world where it's not based on money or or

or or um you know results it's more on it's you get very political environments like that where there's no kind of quantification of what what one is doing Superior work than others yeah you know I talked to um um Woodridge wridge Adrien wridge and he wrote some books on the history of meritocracy and they're very very interesting he writes for The Economist and he so you know that the idea of meritocracy is under assault now I think the idea of Merit per se is under assault and what wridge has done was look at how societies

were structured in the absence of the meritocratic ethos and so that's in the absence of a belief that there is such a thing as productive competence and he talked about nepotism which by the way Psychopaths practice nepotism they're not only selfish they they do differentially benefit their immediate kin and and hereditary aristocracy so if you don't have meritocracy and if your hierarchies aren't predicated on competence you don't get a UT a non-competitive Utopia not NEP yeah exactly you get nepotism and and this political infighting and that is like it's no wonder that affect you cuz

that's that's absolutely toxic it it's just sickening and it does produce a situation where the worst people can the worst people torture the people who are competent for their competence it's really ugly yeah and and uh you know when I came out of University I went to University of Wisconsin and I had you know my degree in Classics and literature Etc you know I wasn't expecting this I expected that the harder you tried the more the better your the work that you produced the more you tried to you know get results That's What mattered right

and then to suddenly be blindsided this because nobody in our culture in tells young people that this is what the world is going to be like and that's s sort of a lot of where this book came out of I wrote it when I was 38 39 so I was already a bit older but your parents don't prepare you for this schools don't prepare you for this University certainly doesn't prepare you for in fact it lead you to believe the opposite and so you enter the world Work World and if you're entering a place more

like what we're describing here not like what you were describing some of the jobs you had you're you're blindsided you had no preparation for it nothing prepared you for it and you don't know how to react well you know if if you're naive in that manner two things happen and I was naive yeah one is that you're much more likely to be exploited that definitely happens the other thing is you're much more likely to be traumatized because you trauma sort of occurs in proportion to how much of your belief it it demolishes and so if

you have a a too positive and too naive view of the world and you especially if you encounter someone malevolent they can really do you in psychologically yeah and and they often will too because well they have their their reasons and so yeah yeah I can remember um I I had a job in journalism and I wrote this article um about Italy and I thought it was a great article and then the editor um brought me in for lunch and he was he was like having his second or third martini and he started to tell

me that Robert you're never going to be a writer you don't have the discipline for it you're just too wild you don't communicate to the reader Etc you need to get out of this business it's not for you it was very painful and then in looking back in it I think he had set me up for this I think that he was had kind of commissioned this article knowing that it was going to have some problems with it Etc and he was deliberately setting me up in this situation so that he and I think a

lot of it came from Envy you know en is a bad one and envy and resentment man those are corrosive it they're they're they're soul and culture destroying emotions you know when I worked with my clients we talked a lot about resentment a lot and I I I had kind of an axom which is well if you're resentful there's only one two things going on one is you're whiny and neurotic and it's time to grow the hell up and take some responsibility and so you got to ask yourself that and the second is someone is

taking advantage of you and you have something to say or do that you're not saying or doing and so we try to sort out which of those it was and then if it was that they had something to say or do to stand up for themselves for example then we' just strategize like mt so I had one client for example I really liked her she was smart man uh very very very competent honest hardworking conscientious diligent attractive lawyer and uh she'd moved firms and those firms can be pretty Cutthroat you know they're full of prosecutors

what do you expect right right right and and and one guy when she went into the firm basically swiped her biggest client through a series of manipulative actions right and you know kind of lulled her into a false sense of security sort of started to cooperate with her and then shunted her out and then when Sheed started to complain about it he started Distributing R rumors that she had mental health issues and and oh it was absolutely awful so we spent about six months strategizing how to deal with him and so it was successful you

know and then I love doing that sort of thing it was such fun helping people who are I yeah I do the same thing as well yeah I'm sorry so why do you think this was so popular oh you said the music industry was particularly pathological at least this is the reports you got so why do you why do you think that is do you have any theories about that and then why do you think your books got to be so popular among well rappers say uh why do you think it it the music industry

is the way it is or yeah I mean I mean do you think there's something specific about that industry that lends itself to that kind of cor yes and and and I've had a lot of um people give me the same kind of feedback there's a lot of money around right huge amounts of money around and um and people are producers of Music are very M they have a very exploitative kind of model of business which is they they seduce a firsttime artist with a with a lot of money but the contract is and eventually

they own all of the work etc so it was a very exploitive business model particularly for africanamerican musicians who were historically very exploited and so it's it's like Hollywood where so much of it is about pleasing people and having the right demeanor so so 50 c who I wrote the book with he said you know he he dealt crack on the streets of Southside Queens you know he's was a hustler at the age of nine he saw everything but nothing prepared him for the kind of mellan games that music industry people would play you want

to take take a straightforward criminal over a psychopathic manipulator any day yeah yeah exactly well and you talked about money like I'd rather deal with someone greedy like honestly greedy than someone manipulative underground politic or because at least with the greed well you can negotiate with someone like that you know what they want they're kind of dimensional and you might have your moral qualms about it but I still I think that's partly why I'm an admirer of capitalism it's like greed is not the worst of the vices by any stretch of the imagination no no

I agree with you on that and so you know why are my books popular I think there's a it's a combination of things first of all I'm giving people something that's not out there kind of realism and I think a lot of people are inwardly very tired and very sick of all the kind of codling that goes on with readers and in our culture where the people are try to you know perpetuate this myth that it's all about cooperation and getting along and that business is kind of this world where people are all on the

same page trying to create the best product possible Etc and they kind of have the same kind of illusions that I had and so the kind of the harshness of the book that you that first kind of shocked you sort of excites people it appeals to their Shadow side if you will you know and that shadow side is very much repressed in our culture and I think artists and writers and people who produce work that kind of vents some of that shadow some of those darker emotions that people have it has a very attracting pull

on them so I think that's part of the reason because there's there's a kind of a notoriety around the book people almost feel like it's something naughty when they have it and so I think that's part of the appeal of it so I have a friend he's a really good friend of mine and I've known him since I was in college and he's a tough guy I mean he grew up in a a under rather poverty-stricken circumstances in Northern Alberta really on a frontier piece of land like it had only been broken 50 years before

by his father who was a long shoreman and an ex-military guy good guy his father but this guy grew up and he is tough he worked in lead smelters and he wandered around western Canada he was my roommate when I went to college and is still a good friend of mine and he ended up working with like delinquents he went into Social Work oddly enough and and he ended up working with some of the worst delinquents in in Canada and he's a really good guy and he likes to help people get better but he isn't

naive at all and then part of the reason that he was good at working with the delinquent was because there were no tricks they could get up to that he couldn't see right through and that was part because he had a real integrated Shadow I mean I'll give you an example of him so one day in I was living in this town called Grand Prairie and was at the height of the oil boom and so it was a rough town and there were lots of rough bars in it and lots of young men in there

with plenty of money and plenty they come in for you know three days after being out minus 40 weather working on the oil rigs and they were ready to party man and we had a party one night and this kind of frat house that I went to college in and about oh way too many people showed up and some of them were real troublemakers and one we had a table that was pretty full of beer bottles and vodka bottles and so forth and one guy just went over like tore the leg off and knocked the

table over and then a bunch of us got together and chased them all out and this friend of mine he said Oh They'll be back and so he went upstairs and he put on some steel to cowboy boots it was just like a bloody Western he come marching down the stairs and just as he entered the living room there was a big knock on the front door it was these Hooligans coming back to cause grief and he he just didn't break stride he opened the door he pulled open the door and there was a guy

standing there ready to fight and he kicked them underneath the chin with his steel tool cowboy boot knocked him right over the the front porch and you know and the battle was on but that was exactly what he was like you know I mean and he had his shadow was integrated you could he was a great roommate he he reciprocated everything I always knew if I bought groceries one week he'd buy it the next like he was a straight shooter you could trust him but he was not naive man and that made him able to

deal with delinquents and to help them so that's part of that integration of that shadow yeah um I I go very deeply into the shadow in in a chapter in my last book the laws of human nature and I try and talk about how one integrates the shadow because it's not it's not an easy answer for that you know people are kind of perplexed well I have this dark side and I explain a lot of where it comes from and how a lot of your aggressive impulses like the room of two-year-olds that you were talking

about you have that as well I'm talking to the people that my readers you have that aggressiveness when you were young and it got socialized out of you and then it got kind of got repressed and it's like a lost self that lives inside of you and it's screaming to come out how do you integrate it and so the main thing is you have to be aware that you have this Shadow side you have you can't run away from it you have to acknowledge that it exists you almost have to embrace it in way a

good parent too does everything he or she can not to repress that like what you want to do with children is you want to like you want them to be forceful you want them to have some power you want them to integrate that that capacity for aggression into let's say Lucid conversation you want them to be able to stand up for themselves in family discussions if you just punish them for being aggressive let's say for talking back or something like that you don't gu that into more sophisticated development you see this in schools too now

you know when my kids went to school this was so dumb I we had a rule in our house which was you don't have to follow stupid rules that's a good rule but if you get caught you have to put up with consequences but right so one rule was the school had not only could you not throw snowballs you couldn't make them and so they were trying to yeah exactly you should shake your head that's for sure and like because their answer and this was all politically correct nonsense you know non-competitive games we're only going

to play non-competitive games it's like first of all you know I studied psj yeah a hockey game is not competitive exactly because in a hockey game well everybody no one brings a basketball everybody plays hockey so that's cooperation and then on the team you have to cooperate and like if you're the star but you never pass you're just a dumb son of a [ __ ] you're not the star and so there's tremendous amount of cooperation in all those competitive games they're integrated and this idea that you know you children better by not allowing them

to be competitive it's so it's disgusting it is it's that well that's the Freudian devouring mother right that's oh well everyone's safe and no one's going to ever hurt anyone and that's kind of where a lot of young people you know they enter the world where they've been coddled where they think that there are no winners that everyone is you know it's just win-win situations and that's where they get really shocked by the realities of the world so all this codling and this idea that there doesn't have to be a winner we don't have to

get prizes for first place everybody should get a prize you know all you're doing is setting your your children up for for massive uh you know shocks when they enter the world and they see that it's not like that yeah and then they get disillusioned and depressed you know or traumatized by I mean when my my son's hockey team in his school they won the the city Championship which was a big deal you know and the school was pretty happy about that to to his credit so was the coach but the principal who was this

authoritarian empath she was an awful person I thought authoritarian empath empath Yeah well yeah she used virtue as a club oh it was yeah well there's plenty of those people around she said well really today we're all winners and and the coach had the yeah exactly no it is sickening cuz it and you know my son was just a but but the coach had enough guts he said no no the the hockey team won and it's not like the kids in the school were jealous some of them were obviously but most of them are really

happy like you are when your sports team wins that you know and most people are generous enough so that they're able to celebrate someone else's Victory without and that's the same I saw this with birthday parties I just bloody well hated this it's like well every child gets a gift bag it's like no you know they have their damn birthday every child doesn't need a damn gift bag and this is this same this same naive trly and it's authoritarian too because it imposes this kind of view of the world it's like no it's this kid's

day to be special that's why we're celebrating this kid the rest of them if they can't take that it's like it there's something wrong with the way that they've been treated and attended to well a lot of my books I try to remove the kind of taboo or the negative associations we have with the word like power or with the word ambition you know I try and say ambition is a good thing it means that you have you believe in yourself you you you have some self-love and you believe you're worth something and you want

to go out and Achieve and and create something worthwhile for other people so ambition is a is a positive thing but so many people are just kind of embarrassed about being a human being embarrassed about our primate nature embarrassed about our own aggressive impulses this is partly why boys are failing in our schools now at a disproportionate rate you know the the and I see this there's an assault of the sort that you're describing on the better part of striving masculinity and you know I had a friend who killed himself because he identified his ambition

with you know the the the patriarchal Force that's devouring the environment let's say and that's a con that's you know the cause of of historical horror and you might say well no one takes that onto themselves to that degree and that's well you can say that but that you just don't know what the hell you're talking about people take that on to themselves all the time and then they they start to identify the best part of them that strives forward with the destructive impulses of humanity and they're so ashamed because they can't do anything good

then but in principle yeah you know he tried to be as inoffensive and harmless in every possible way as he possibly could and it just sucked all the life out of well you end up turning that aggressive energy on yourself is what ends up happening and that's maybe leads to Suicide the ultimate kind of self-aggression I know that I personally have as I said I definitely have a shadow side I'm very aggressive and extremely competitive and I have a lot of anger so a lot of that those experiences in my youth made me very angry

but the way I kind of integrated my shot I'm not saying this is a model but the way I integrated it was through my books yeah so I kind of that anger kind of seeps through the material that I write and I find I can only write when I have that of anger but I don't rant I don't yell and kind of put people down I kind of Channel it into something productive and something creative and so I definitely do that when I'm lecturing you know and people have commented you know some of the people

who've criticized me that I'm an angry person and which isn't true but it's definitely that anger that capacity for anger definitely is something that gives you force and it push and anger definitely so psychophys logically so imagine that this is obviously a thought experiment but imagine you're chasing a cat with a broom well the cat's going to run from the broom but if you Corner the cat with the broom it will attack you even though it's just a cat well and the reason for that is that fear will facilitate either freezing or Escape right but

sometimes fear isn't the right response and anger will suppress fear and so one of the tools that we have at our disposal psychologically is anger as a antidote to the terror that would otherwise freeze you and you can integrate that you know that's you know if you if you have some justifiable moral outrage let's say something really annoys you or or or or I shouldn't say that deeply violates your sense of moral propriety I don't mean trivial things then the fact of that forceful response can motivate you to do things well it does for lecture

but certainly to write a l energy to write man you need all those sources of energy if you're going to be able to do it just even to turn it on yourself to discipline yourself you know it's like I had to grab myself by the Scruff of the neck when I was a young guy to sit down sit down godamn it and right you know and and there's a force that's necessary to especially if you're open because you're all over the place if you're creative to to get yourself to sit down and focus yes that's

right yeah and um you know some of that anger you know I think Young talks about this is that that dark side contains a lot of energy it contains a lot of power those two-year-olds are kicking and screaming that's all this kind of force behind it and when you sort of are ashamed of it and you push that down you're kind of getting rid of an incredible well of energy that you can use for your creativity for your work etc you can take that energy like you say and create discipline out of it do something

creative out of it support some cause that you really believe in you know so that shadow side when you when you deny it only negative things will happen and and it is extremely important for people to First recognize it in themselves you know and it's it's very hard for a lot of people to do that well I found like I said earlier the one of the best ways in there is resentment you watch yourself like well because if you're if you're resentful you know you're feeling like you're being victimized and mistreated it's like okay well

you might maybe you are okay and you think there's no anger in that resentments you're not looking hard enough you watch your fantasies for example if you're resentful and you watch the fantasies that flip through your imagination like you might not want to attend to them because they can be so brutal right but but that the F because if someone is is oppressing you genuinely and you're not standing up for yourself then there'll be these compensatory fantasies yeah so one day I'll tell you a story about that so one day I was I'd been renovating

my house and it took a long time and the neighbors this house was a complete derel and it was a semi detached like really a derel it hadn't been touched since like 1927 had gas fittings in the Upper Floor needed to be completely gutted and so we gutted it and my daughter got sick at exactly the same time really sick and so it was it was stressful and difficult and the neighbors just they called the city on us they they did everything they could to make difficult even though they were attached to us and wanted

to sell their house so we probably added like $25,000 to the value of their house because it was no longer attached to a der and then just as we were finishing my sister and her husband came to visit and I was making tea for them and I closed the cupboard so it click and the neighbors banged on the wall and then that night I couldn't sleep and I had this I had really been pushed to my limit by these people and I had these Visions in my mind of burning the damn place down and I

thought oh man if you're starting to think about burning the place down you you should probably go say something so I took put on my Park and I went outside about 6:00 in the morning and I just waited for them to come out they never did but I went knocked over on the door and I said uh I was making tea for my sister last night and I closed the cupboard you didn't happened to bang on the wall because you heard my cupboard closing did you and they said yeah and I said okay look if

you bug me anymore I'm going to cause you so much trouble you cannot possibly imagine it yeah and I meant it it was like because I knew it was brewing in the back of my mind because I was done it was like you want a war you have no idea what you're getting into and so they backed into the kitchen and like two hours later they came over and said oh you know we're sorry and we won't do it again and but like I what we did was the mistake you talk about we backtracked continually

trying to pleased them you know and every time they complained we did what they wanted because we assumed we were dealing with reasonable people but we weren't and the only way to stop them was with a show of force it was like you want to be malevolent you want to play that game it's like okay no problem but right you know and things went more smoothly after that and and that's a good example of well paying attention to those fantasies cuz I thought I better like deal with this straightforwardly otherwise I'm likely to do something

stupid right that's the other thing you got to watch if that builds up inside you exactly yeah and a lot of times I look at people in in the public eye who get caught doing something really stupid like you say and their first thing will be well that wasn't me that did it I don't know what came over me that's not that's not who I am but that is exactly who you are that is a person who has been carrying this resentment and this kind of inner anger but not acting upon and then suddenly they

do something really stupid like having an affair with a 21y old or or you know they just caught doing something yeah so I I I watch people with their their children a lot hey yeah and so when my son was a pretty assertive kid and tough like he had a real will and uh you know when he was 9 months old and starting to crawl around I taught him what no meant and no what no means is stop doing that or something you don't like will happen to you that's what no means right and so

when he was 9 months he was starting to take books off shelves and get into the plants and so on and because he was starting to crawl around and so to teach him what no meant I just grab his leg when he wasn't doing something that he I didn't want him to do and you know he would squawk and [ __ ] and complain and I'd say no no no and I just hold him until he gave up and sometimes he would cry and the reason he was cried is cuz he was frustrated and angry

that I was mucking about with him it's like fair enough he wanted to go explore and you know fair enough kid you want to explore but you can't tear out the plant and get dirt all over the rug and you can't go into the electrical cords you know like no and no and so I had done a lot of Behavioral training by that time and by the time I did that for say six or seven days and soon as if I just said no he would just stop and sometimes he would cry and then the

week later if I said no he'd just stop so it took like two weeks e and then then I knew that if I said no he would stop and so then I could let him explore I could give him a lot of freedom and then I'd have people come over to my house with their 2-year-old or three-year-old and because they had never taught the child what no meant they never gave because they didn't want to impose on their freedom let's say they couldn't give the child any freedom at all they had to wander around behind

them all the time because they never knew what the child was going to get into and so then you start to hate your child right because instead of having a bit of free time and just being able to say no to this kid while he's playing around on his own and giving him some Freedom you're just non-stop monitoring this child and you're mad cuz you don't have a life and we had another couple come over and they had two kids that were like four and five and they were just horrible we sat down to eat

we wanted to have a conversation and we put a basket of bread out and the kids just grabbed the bread and they ate all the centers out of the bread and the parents were all embarrassed about it and but they didn't do anything to stop it and you know in their minds they thought well aren't we permissive and nice and we never say no to our CH children but they didn't notice that they actually hated their children because how could you go to someone's house and you want to have a conversation you just met them

and your children embarrass you to death and you think you're not going to get resentful about that right and you think you're not going to take and so here's how people would take it out on their kids so imagine that happens now you go home and you're pissed right off but you're not going to let yourself know that because you're such a nice person then your child goes off and draws a picture maybe they put a lot of work into it e then they come running up to show you and that's a real good time

to give them a pad on the head and say look isn't that great but you're pissed off because you were embarrassed and so you look at it and you think uh and that's all you have to do it's like that's not really worthy of my attention you don't have to say anything mean you just have to not attend in this manner and then you got your revenge and you think you won't do that man you know nothing about yourself and you know you read in the paper sometimes these mothers or fathers they do something brutal

to a child and I know what that I know how that happens it's like no disciplinary strategies in the house the kid is driving the mother or father crazy you know and then maybe the mother or father they're hung over one day and maybe they just broke up with their boyfriend or girlfriend maybe they got you know hell at from their boss who's a tyrant and they haven't stood up to them and the kid does the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time and maybe he's actually pretty good at that by then and it's like

out comes Satan himself yeah and all hell breaks loose it's like I wouldn't do that it's like yeah there's almost nothing you wouldn't do you just don't know yourself very well yeah yeah well the abil the ability to set limits and to say no and to tell people that you know it's not right for you to bang on my house at this hour and etc etc etc that takes a little bit of toughness on your part A you have to be kind of willing to put yourself on the line maybe that person will get angry

and hit you or something or maybe the war will escalate but you have to be willing to take that risk because if you don't then they then you set No Limits and who knows what they'll end up doing but a lot of this permissiveness is people are just basically afraid they're afraid of any kind of Confrontation yeah they're afraid of any kind of conflict and through conflict and confrontation is how you actually grow it's actually how you develop as a person hey so here's a cool stat this is really interesting man so there's been some

great work on what predicts what behavioral markers predict divorce in couples's counseling really solid work okay so here's one predictor if when the couple is talking in front of a therapist and one of them or the other or both roll their eyes there's like a 95% chance they're going to be divorced within six months and that's contempt okay they've got so they've become so discom connected because they don't communicate because the resentment has built up that they now have contempt for each other but here's here's another cool fact from that research so if you have

people track the number of positive and negative interactions with their partner you can calculate ratios and then you can see what the ratio is that that lends itself to the successful maintenance of a relationship and so you might think well the more positive interactions the better and that's kind of true so if it falls below five positive to one negative the relationship is in danger but if it rises you have five to one and you can kind of see that CU you know negative events are more memorable and and and more powerful than positive ones

and so you know that if you read YouTube comments you know but if it rises above 11 to one the relationship is also in danger and you could imagine that what you want in a relationship is well you want support and love and you want most of your interactions to be positive but you want your partner to slap you down then when you're being stupid right because and then if they don't outcomes your or Tyrant right you're just going to dominate them if they don't push back and so if you have any sense too if

you have a partner you want to encourage them to put limits on you you know especially if they're a little more timid than you temperamentally it's like you don't want to run rough shot over them because they know some things you don't right so cool that it's above 11 to1 so that means to Too Much positivity is also is the death no for a relationship and you know you want someone with some spark right it's like well what if I push you a little bit even teasing yeah you want the P per person to be

able to push back a bit and you have to be able to accept it as well because some people probably in those situations can't stand any kind of criticism they're they're so fragile that if the other person pushes back it kind of escalates into a battle so so real strength comes from the ability in a relationship or any kind of Rel intimate or otherwise is the ability to take that kind of criticism to actually welcome it when people set Li limits for you and tell you that this kind of behavior is wrong and then you

can evaluate and assess yourself yeah unless you want to repeat it stupidly forever right I mean that that's the alternative in a relationship is I don't like conflict I've been in plenty of conflicts like plenty way more than is reasonable but I don't like them like I I well I meet people now and then I went to talk to Douglas Murray in in New York City about a week ago and we were talking about conflict and he said you know he he doesn't mind to fight and I've met lots of people like that that you

know they like that combativeness and I don't really but what I really hate is deferred conflict that escalates it's like it's better to get it over with now and you're a fool if you think that running away from it is going to you know like if if someone cuts you off in traffic and they're obviously really angry it's probably better just to get the hell out of there because you're never going to see that person again you know and you don't want a situation like that to escalate because they might have a gun or whatever

well yeah you don't just don't know what's up with them they're really strangers yeah but you know if you're dealing with someone day in and day out and they're pushing on the top of your head to stop you from growing which I think Lucy used to do to lus in the peanuts cartoons they had a dark side those cartoons man they Comics they sure did yeah yeah they would be canceled now probably yeah could now I don't think yeah I think that's right yeah because a lot of characters Lucy was actually not a likable character

at all right and she she was really oppressive to lonus who was a good character yeah yeah yeah good humor always has an edge but yeah that that you don't get rid of your the negative part of yourself especially that aggressive part by pretending it doesn't exist that that quite the contrary that just doesn't work at all right yeah I'm sorry you gonna say something I was just going to ask you about your new I wanted to ask you about working with 50 Cent and the rappers and I wanted to ask you about your new

book too so let's start with so how did this partnership with 50 Cent come about well um the book was very popular with rappers um as I said because of the nature of the music industry and um he reached out to me he wanted to meet me because the 48 Laws power was sort of his Bible as he expressed it so I met him in New York um kind of in the back room of the steakhous it was sort of like a something straight out of The Godfather I was kind of the one white guy

amongst his whole group there I was a little bit intimidated to be honest I didn't know what to expect because he has his reputation ended up he was really nice and really interesting actually very kind of sweet guy not what you expect and we we I just finished writing my book on warfare and strategy which is kind of my version of ssu's Art of War how to strategize and conflict sort of like what you're talking about and he has a very strategic mind and he got we got very we kind of had a really nice

connection and I thought you know so much in our culture is creating these stupid kind of Divisions and walls like you're in Academia you only write academic books you're a popular person you only write popular books you know you come from this community you come from that community and they you never communicate and I thought it would be very interesting to write a book coming from two opposite um backgrounds you know me middle class Jewish boy from Los Angeles and him from Southside Queens something interesting could happen from a collaboration there's not enough of that

in our culture I believe because even though our our circumstances were very different our minds were very similar we were thinking on a similar plane that kind of transcended these sort of superficial differences so I spent time with him and I was trying to figure out what is the essence of his power what makes him such a compelling figure and made him not one of those people in Southside Queens who ended up kind of spiraling downward ending up in prison what saved him and I determined that the quality he had was this kind of fearlessness

and it isn't the kind of fearlessness where you go beating people up or something it's kind of an inner strength he had been shot when he was like 20 years old like nine bullets right there through a car window um kind of L one of them bullets lodged in his mouth and he survived miraculously and it gave him this kind of calmness like I have nothing to fear I almost died Bring it on I don't really care and so I I observed him in meetings I observed that kind of calmness and how he could take

over a meeting not by being super aggressive but just by having this kind of dominant Persona and I thought that there's tremendous power in this fearlessness not being afraid to be different not being afraid to have conflict and confrontation not being afraid of of actually um of death itself not being afraid of the reality of your situation on and on so the book that we formed together was kind of a meditation on 10 forms of fearlessness and I found you know I I thought that I was a relatively Fearless person which in some ways I

am I seem agreeable but I'm actually in some ways a little bit bold and adventurous and but compared to him I realized no I'm actually riddled with fear and just being around him and kind of writing the book helped me a lot in my you know kind of overcome some of my own limits and some of my own fears so that's where that book came yeah it's nice to have a model like that really close by right to contrast yourself with yeah you can learn a lot from so do you think you think that fearlessness

that you saw in him you think part of that was a consequence of that brush with death how much of that do you think was temperamental too in him well well there's there's there's a kind of a reckless fearlessness that a lot of people from the hood have which doesn't really serve them very well and it gets them in a lot of trouble right he has a very kind of strategic in in under control fearlessness hey I got something cool to tell you about that so I was talking to um David bus yes I believe

it and he's an evolutionary psychologist a good one we're talking about this uh maavalan personality tribe the dark Triad the Del poos UBC yeah okay so here's something really interesting um it's the bad boy Paradox they call it that young naive women are attracted to those maavalan types but when they get older and more experience they start to be able to see through that the reason they're attracted to it as far as I can tell and I talked about this with bus to see if I was way off on the wrong track is that those

Reckless Fearless people mimic real Fearless competence and young women aren't good at distinguishing between the two and so they get sucked in by the sort of Psychopathic recklessness because they think it's Fearless competence and then of course the guys who are doing that they'll they'll prey on that because they're trying to ape competence but what the women are really after in their heart of hearts they might be out for an adventure too because there's that element of it but they want that fearlessness that does go along with true generosity and competence and also the ability

to keep you know real darkness away so well a lot of those people who display that kind of U what you call mimicking fearlessness or whatever Macho that's the Macho they're actually hiding the opposite they're actually very very riddled with insecurities they're not you know and they're they're they kind of create this sort of bravado in this false front and they go to an extreme to kind of project this machismo when in fact they're riddled with insecurities and that's their way of dealing with it but someone like 57 he was very he's very comfortable with

himself he knows who he is he knows where he came from his mother was a hustler on the streets so he knew the limits of the game and I don't know I think there is maybe a slight genetic component to it I can't really put my finger on it why he was able to have this kind of self- control where other people yeah well that that to mention neuroticism you know if if you're in a rough environment and you're low in neuroticism that's pretty damn helpful because imagine that what neuroticism is unit of psychophysiological uh

upset caused per unit of stress yeah and some or unit of danger and some people overreact and some people underreact sometimes the overreaction saves your life sometimes the underreaction gets you killed so it's not like there's a clear answer so there's variability there some people are much more calm not volatile they don't withdraw temperament that's a more masculine temperament by the way I agree but if you if you're raised in a really rough environment and you happen to be emotionally stable that's the opposite of neurotic let's say then you're just not going to be as

affected by it and that can be a real blessing so and then I'm also interested in that you know you said that you channeled a lot of your Shadow let's say into creativity did you see the same thing happening with 50 Cent Oh my God his music is incredibly aggressive and that's and and and to an extent that's kind of violent and I must admit it really appeals to me so um when I was why why why that's cool because it's so interesting that so many rap fans are young white guys I know I know

yeah yeah but that's that's really psychologically interesting right because if if they've been coddled and their ambition has been squatched and everything about them that's aggressive has been shamed out of existence it's that's part of that attraction of that Dark Fantasy right then they see that aggression manifesting itself and in a creative form in rap it's not surprising that they're going to try to imitate that it's part of that AB that desire to bring that shadow out of the shadows and into the light well I I I wasn't really um I was a little bit

different in that um I kind of understand you know my own anger I wasn't so much coddled but but what I really enjoyed about the his music is it just seemed very real and and kind of the the beat kind of catches you up in a primal sense and kind of the aggressiveness just seems very direct and very refreshing by the way and you could tell you know I say in in my book Mastery that by a person's Style by how they write a book by by how they put language together or the music they

create reveals something very very deep about their character about who they are and so a lot of rap kind of comes across this sort of faults like someone is trying really hard to have that kind of Thug Persona and it's not real but it it really smelled authentic with him and the fact that he'd been shot and nearly died you know just kind of added to that aura but there was something very real about it and very authentic in a culture where so much isn't real I think that was the deep deep appeal in a

primal sense of 50s music and when I was writing the war book I was trying to get myself into Marshall mood to write it I would actually listen to his music to kind of put me in the mood to write some of the chapters that in B that in bethoven what what what do you like from what what bethoven do you like what what pumped you up well when I was a kid one of the first albums I was first kind of raised on classical music then I got into jazz and rock and everything but

I got a collection of his nine Symphonies and God there's there's a kind of a an aggression and violence like to the Fifth Symphony in the n Symphony it just kind of you know like they used Clockwork Orange there's something so overwhelmingly powerful about it right it just you the coral section in the ninth is like that it's so Joy yeah and it's so isn't that so interesting that the Ode to Joy has that Primal aggressive force and it it makes Joy it makes joy is you know in in the naive sense it's well you're

happy it's like no This Joy is that integrated terrible power that you definitely hear in uh superb music yeah yeah so when when that when that Coral bit kicks in it's just overwhelming it's like a blow and makes you tingle it's it's so exciting and I've heard it maybe thousand times since then it still affects me the same way and now when I'm driving somewhere and I have to get myself in the mood I'll still put the night Symphony on and some of the other yeah it's like it's like encountering the terrible force of good

you know you think about Moses and the bird Bush it's or or or Jacob wrestling with God it's like well why is it a burning bush why is it terrifying why do you wrestle with God why do you get hurt it's like well because good in its full force has this unbelievable what has this integration of power and it's no wonder it terrifies people because it just burns everything away in comparison right right yeah I mean um a lot of the the new book that I'm writing about which is the sublime is is I'm talking

about it's a combin comination of two emotions of of both kind of pain and pleasure of excitement and fear at the same time um so you're confronting something that kind of intimidates you but is so awesome that you can't you know you're just overwhelmed and the Confluence of two emotions opposing emotions at the same time is very very powerful for a human being yeah I've just written a book that I'm going to publish next year that's called an ABC of Hood tragedy and it's a combination of dark humor and Beauty it's the same we're trying

to we're experimenting with exactly the same thing those that paradoxical justos of dark and light emotions there is something Sublime about that that's and something a inspiring about that it's I guess it's it's part of bringing what's dark into the light or subsuming it under the light maybe so why do you get why the sublime what are you pursuing there and well the reason um you know the the ultimate in Sublime is is to me so the way I look at it is being a human being and being socialized is a kind of a world

there's a limit a circle that we have to live inside certain codes and conventions that we have to abide by and we all do that and the codes and conventions for fifth century BC China are not the same as what we have now but there's still that limit and what humans are attracted to what lies beyond that limit it's just part of our nature it's aers part of it and when we explore beyond the social limits and codes and things we're supposed to do and ways we're supposed to act it's deeply exciting and thrilling there's

also that element of fear involved right see I think that's a better that's a better what would you call it formulation than n's idea of Will To Power is the desire to exist on that Sublime Edge and that is the the the the border between Order and Chaos that you're describing right you want you want and the thing and that is the source of meaning itself I mean that's why I think music is so powerful is because it plays with predictable forms but continually adds that level of unpredictability a beautiful you know how in any

kind of music the simplest music someone who's good at it country music you know there'll be a key shift or a twang on the string or something that or something discordant yes exactly and and then and integrated within a sort of a higher uh what a higher unity and it's deeply meaningful it puts you on that edge of the sublime and and and we are we do Find the meaning that helps sustain us in life exactly at that place that's that's something more deeply real than anything else well so and and so the ultimate thing

beyond that limit is is death itself and the word sublime means up to the threshold of a door or sublemon lemon being the limit right like Su and so um I I've been meaning to write this book for 15 years and I got distracted but then about three years ago I nearly died myself I had a stroke and um I came you know just an inch away from dying myself I was driving my car and so some of the experience the near-death experience and what it kind of taught me and how it sort of remained

with me three years later and how I kind of feel it in my bones and how it's altered how I look at the world and everything around me is to me the kind of the ultimate Sublime experience so now unfortunately I'm able to write about this in a way that's actually very personal and experiential instead of just purely intellectual and why unfortunately because of the price you had to pay for it yeah the price is I can't take a walk I can't do the swim I can't do the things that I used to love so

you know I'm kind of I can I can you know I'm functional I can walk around the house but I can't take a hike and I can't do my longdistance swimming or my mountain biking or anything like that so I I pay a price but I'm alive well and then but so interesting that that was it was in the aftermath of that devastating experience that you decided to turn particularly to the sublime yeah well it's because I've been wanting to write the book for a long time and I knew that it has to do a

little bit with the feeling of death you know um and I don't understand that so why that why make that as I'm not disputing it I don't I just don't understand like I mean you talked also about 50 cents brush with death but yeah why does the sublime in your estimation why is it tangled up with the with the idea of death well because there's there's a li that that limit and experiencing the limit gives you that sense of excitement and fear at the same time well death is the ultimate limit and to have gone

up to that door and glimpsed to the other side and literally felt it in your bones and literally feel your bones melting away as you kind of go into a coma you know is like I went up to that door I actually peered inside of it now other people have had much stronger near-death experiences mine was more of the milder sort but still I peed as far as as far as near-death experiences go relatively minor well you know my my coma my coma lasted an hour or something some people been up there Ah that's nothing

man experts have Comas for like three years well okay all right um I could have had a you know a more intense near-death experience but it was pretty intense it sounds like it was sufficient it is but so the sense of life is almost too much it's overpowering in its immediacy and we humans try and kind of dull the the the the razor edge so much so that we can live but if you think about you know your mortality on a day-to-day basis and if you try and actually experience the immediacy of life and how

dangerous it actually is and how it's fraught with all of these these you know these these things that you don't want to confront is is very very very powerful and I'm sorry Seri just keeps hearing me so so annoying so um you know it creates so when you have that it's it's like the ultimate it's a mix of you know they they call in French the orgasm right right so an orgasm is almost like a little death you know so that sense of it's almost too much it's almost like death itself like something so pleasurable

can actually kind of morph into something a little bit frightening as well something a little bit like you're like you're exploring something that you're not supposed to oh you see that in the ease in which laughter and tears can be interchanged right you see that with children they can switch from laughter to tears and no time and you know you can laugh so hard that you cry and it's often too when you're crying about something sorrowful that someone can say something funny and it'll switch to laughter that's all way down at the level of instinct

right where these right it's so interesting to see the Opposites touch at that level yeah so so the reason why I doing the elini Mysteries just to bring that back is uh I have a chapter on Pagan religions on what I call the Pagan Sublime and I'm trying to tell the reader that it we don't have a right conception of ancient religions they're actually very different from what we think we have these kind of cliche Notions of kind of mischievous gods cavorting in clouds and doing all kinds of naughty things that are very human and

just kind of almost a silliness to it like whoa we're so beyond that but actually Pagan religions were extremely serious and they were based on creating go away Sy and they were they and they were based on um creating very powerful emotional responses and people and that was what Primal religion was about or ancient religion was about it wasn't based on texts on Dogma on the written word so the elini Mysteries because there are Mysteries because nobody ever wrote about it there's no text there's nothing written that we can go to yes there's the hymn

to Demeter that kind of maybe describes a little bit of what it's based on but we don't know really what happened because nothing was ever written down it was simply about creating this overwhelming emotional reaction in which you took the the initiates to the edge of death you made them experience death in life which is the story of demer and pany you were like making them feel as if they had gone into the underworld itself and that created a whole new relationship to life but I wanted to this idea that religion isn't this kind of

milk toasty thing that people think about nowadays it was initially extremely powerful reaction to human vulnerability to our weakness in this immense Cosmos with all of these very powerful forces and the religious rituals were to actually mirror that and give you a kind of compensatory sense that you could control it you could contain it within these kind of powerful experiences oh it's really interesting to me that you know you've you've come through your analysis of the darkness and then a consequence of that was to be motivated to pursue the sublime you know it's in the

little stamp that I'm using for these kids book which I'm doing with this illustrator named Juliet fogra who's a real genius in my estimation we made a stamp and the motto on the stamp is through the darkness into the light and W you know and there's this old idea that if you look into the darkness enough you'll find something that compensates for it right that emerges out of the darkness that's greater and more powerful than the darkness and that part part of the looking into the dark side of you yourself is you find the power

that enables you to deal with mortality and there is something Sublime about that it's so cool but you know all your work investigating and trying to integrate the shadow has led you to this to this what what what that your intuition has been gripped by the idea of the sublime is necessarily where you'd think you'd end up well yeah a lot of the um impetus for the book is another little bit of anger as well because I always have to have some anger in order to feel the you know the impulse to write and dis

discipline myself and my anger now is about about how people's worlds have become so tight and so banal and so limited where they're just kind of Disappearing into their phones and their world is is just sort of programmed for them by by Facebook or social media and they're sort of told what they're supposed to think and they're kind of programmed and at the same time you know what science is discovering about the universe and about where we live and about who we are is just so insanely mindblowing just absolutely almost Inc it's Sublime in my

opinion and yet so many people are just living like as if they're sleepwalking is if that you know I talk in in one chapter about the unlikeliness of any of us being alive any of us actually being here right now on Earth and how just to just to be who we are the odds against it are like8 trillion to one I mean even more than that and but people aren't thinking about this they're they're not aware of the awesomeness of just the fact of being alive of the cosmos as it evolved as as things on

earth evolve the way they are and so I'm kind of I'm kind of angry uh a little bit about how about how people are just not aware of this not well that anger again that's you know one of the things I did as a clinician is to help people find their purpose was to to help them find out what they're angry about it's like well what's your problem you know you say that someone what's your problem but actually you want to know it's like cuz if you have a problem then because there's lots of things

you could be bothered about but you're not bothered about by all of them right there's something that stands out for you as you know something that violates your sense of moral propriety let's say that's your problem you think well I don't want to have a problem it's yes you do you want to have your problem and then you want to go try to solve it and if you're looking for meaning in your life it's like well what bugs you well I'm annoyed at this and that and and you know it's pretty naive and low resolution

and formulaic to begin with but you could zero right in on that and then you find the purpose of your life and that's that's in that anger it's in that anger at least to some degree yeah and as I said I can't write without it I don't know why every day I have to feel a little bit a little bit of pinch of it or like a little bit of edge of that knife in me and and sometimes yeah well you have to be that's right I mean I find what I'm sitting down to write

a chapter cuz it's hard to sit down and and write a chapter it's a lot of work man and you know writers always whine about that but it is hard to it's hard to do it's as hard as clinical work which is the hardest work I ever did and so but I have to be it's like there has to be a reason for this you know to get me going to do it it has to be important and that means it has to be dealing with something weighty and if it's weighty it's going to it's

going to act it's going to what what it's going to call out of you all your emotions responses including the well certainly including anger certainly that's a tremendous form of energy well I don't know if you have the same experience but I read so many books uh from my research and that's the main thing that I fault them with there there's no kind of energy behind it there's no human behind it there's no voice that's kind of screaming out why do they have to say this screaming out is exactly right that's a great book screams

like Soulja niton gag archipelago that's like 3,000 p of screaming anger it's like you sustained screaming anger for 3,000 Pages it's unbelievable it's unbelievable it's like being caught in a windstorm reading that book yeah and that's no wonder that greatness is terrifying yeah yeah and that's that's kind of channeling the dark side in some ways yeah definitely yeah well I mean that man brought down a totalitarian state at least in part it's like you have to have a lot of force and you think it's not going to be anger in part to to push back

against that's all that kind of petty tyranny that you were talking about in in its in its most what would you say most rigidified and Universal form and one man you know who decided he was going to tell the truth and and and and harnessed that passion to his words changed the world yeah yeah so I don't know if I'll have that kind of effect I'm sure I won't but um that sort of I I want people to I kind of want to spark a sense of almost the religious awe without an organized religion behind

it because I think um we have changed a lot in thousands of years but there's something in our nature that kind of craves those kinds of experiences and nothing in our culture is providing it's the definition of crave I don't think nothing music does yeah music does man music does and music was such a mystery for me when I was a young psychologist like music is Meaningful and you can't argue the meaning away like it's invulnerable to criticism isn't that so cool that there's a source of meaning that's invulnerable to criticism and then it's this

harmonious interplay of beautiful patterns predictability and unpredictability and and an integration of passion and movement right cuz because it compels movement you see think of people dancing to estos Walts right they're harmonizing in themselves with the sublime patterns of the world that's music it's something man and it's no wonder young people are so desperate for music because that's where we have the sublime in our culture well that's where they go to things like Raves or astral world and concerts like that they want that kind of collective experience you know that you used to get from

like initiation rituals or kind of things in in Pagan times I remember once I was in um Nicaragua I was a journalist I was covering the the Civil the revolution the civil war going on and the pope was visiting Nicaragua at the time it's 1984 I believe and there was like 100,000 people crammed in this one square and you know I'm not by any means a sand denista I had no sympathy for particularly as it is now but the feeling was that I experienced I've never experienced anything else like it of that crowd and that

group emotion it can be frightening too like well well that's it that's the thing that Nazis were unbelievably good at at pulling bringing that up right and so you might say too that if we can't figure out how to harness that force in a positive way in our culture we pretend it doesn't exist it's going to come up in these underground ways because the craving for it is so deep and the Nazis were masters of spectacle and fire they were really good at that sort of thing and Orwell was courageous enough to point that out

he said well we don't have anything with that power to combat that terrible dramatic evil but you do see it in a concert you do see it in that in that Collective well you said you saw it in relationship to the pope and that's well hopefully that's something good or at least it's certainly a lot better than nberg yeah and to think that we don't need that or that that's just Superstition that's extra yeah I know I know I agree yeah yeah well look it was really good talking with you man very nice talking to

you I really enjoyed it these are things I never get to cover in all of my eight you know hundreds of interviews so I'm very very grateful for I've explored territory that I've never explored before so thank you isn't that fun yeah yeah usual experience for me yeah I I enjoyed it a lot man yeah sorry your maps of meaning was a very important book for me I read it actually to help me with my War Book Believe It or Not Your notion of conflict and integrating internal conflict and external conflict so I just want

to thank you and let you know nobody knows about that because I haven't really spoken about it but that book was very important for me thank you I'm amazed you read it it's a hell of a slog that book six 700 pages and I can't honestly say I don't think I understood everything in it at least at the time but it was very amazing book well thank you very much I'm glad to hear that and yeah it took me I wrote that book it took a lot of anger man I wrote that book every day

three hours a day every day for 15 years Jesus yeah wow I I had to put my hands around my neck and say you sit God damn it you sit down write this goddamn book I had to quit drinking I had to quit having fun I know believe me I know all about that it took me five years to write my last book I can't imagine what 13 years would be like but yeah I know all about that well good luck with your book on the sublime I'm looking forward to it let's talk again let's

talk again when it when well but maybe when it comes out that would be good I really like to and I'm really curious about how you integrate your investigation at eluc ucan mysteries I talked to some interesting people about that recently and I know I had already written the piece when I heard them speak and then I I changed some things because I realized some things I written were inaccurate but what I try to do in that is I try and I I create a character a woman who's going to the Mysteries and what it

was like from her first person account it's fictional but I'm trying to actually you know give her a history during the the plague in the 1420s and then going to the Mysteries and what it would feel like subjectively to be in there yeah I had a vision once that the the shamanic experience was an antidote to icy Northern totalitarianism you know so many people are going to the Jungle now to the Amazon to use iasa and that sort of thing and there's I mean and that certainly that drug use that hallucinogenic drug use was up

with those primordial religions in some way we don't understand any of that even a little bit no and of course the El Mysteries probably had that drug element as well because the drink they had was either mushrooms or aot or or or Opium poppy seeds poppy so yeah uh it's been demonstrated that all kind of pagan cultures had some kind of drug thing going on and yeah so all right well good luck to you writing this book and it was pleas talking to you and I certainly am much more clear about you everything that you've

been doing I'm so glad I decided to talk to you and yeah me too me too yeah I hope I brought a little bit of clarity there oh absolutely it was a really good discussion thanks thanks again thanks again thank you so much again say hello to your daughter for me I will I will do that definitely okay yeah she's a big fan and so as my producer Eric oh Eric this Eric yes this Eric I had no idea hey Eric you can come in if you want yeah big fan big big yeah well I

was all shorted out when I was reading uh the daily laws I thought I I don't know what to do with this it's like it's this what the hell's going on here and Eric he said well he really liked your books and my daughter really liked your interview and I thought well I'm obviously missing missing something you know and I did I didn't spend as much time when I was deciding about this conversation reading it to but I had some sense that maybe you were doing a shadow investigation but I clear about so but they

were big Defenders of you it's like that's you got to talk to him thank you Eric thank you I appreciate that of course yeah of course anything I can do for you thank you no AB Eric why were why were why were these books helpful to you oh man [ __ ] good question uh that's tough um there's been a few points in my life where so I I I was a fighter that was my first career choice I was a mixed martial arts fighter um and and so to me knowing like from reading the

48 Laws of Power it's very similar to Jiu-Jitsu so when I got into business it was like oh I've seen this behavior before because I've read this book and I understand this so it started as like a a very interesting it started just as an interest like oh this seems cool I think I saw you on Tim faris's show or something like that um and and and when I started to see those things come into play it then like completely hooked me and I got all the rest of the books um and so it prepared

you yes yeah and and and one of the things Robert that I like so much about what you're doing is you're taking these principles you're showing it throughout history and you're giving examples of how this plays out today and so it's like across the entire spectrum of what type of thinker is reading it yeah you have to be the type of thinker that's going to read which isn't everybody but across that Spectrum everybody gets a little exactly what they need to hear in it so it makes it very practical you can then go off and

be very practical with it the same thing that prct yeah yeah well it's really important like one of the things you learn as a cognitive behavioral psychologist is that you have to nail this down to changeable Behavior you know one of the things I was always doing with my clients was and I I've recommended this to people many times in my lectures is find find the largest unit of change that you're actually willing to do like maybe you won't clean up your room I I stress that it's like well will you move one thing off

your desk today one thing just one or if you can't do that because sometimes clients would come back and say I couldn't even move one thing said well why don't you look at one thing and think about moving it and and they're embarrassed because you know they're so unable to perform this task which is a simple task in some sense that they're ashamed to admit where they are to themselves but they can't move forward I had one client this is so funny he lived at home with his mother and he shouldn't he was too old

for that and his room was a complete bloody catastrophe and he knew it and he was probably mad at his mother for like coddling him and and so he was needed to vacuum the carpet so the deal for the week was you go vacuum that carpet and he brought the vacuum cleaner into his room but he left it in the doorway like on a slant and every day for a week he had to walk over that vacuum cleaner he wouldn't Mo put it back and he wouldn't bring it in his room and and vacuum and

that's a good example of that underground resentment just think how angry you have to be at your situation to put a vacuum cleaner you know was probably a middle finger to me too it's like I'm not doing what that goddamn therapist says you know that kind of resentment but he he literally walked over that damn vacuum cleaner for a week you know and we talked a bunch about that it's like well what are you doing it's like obviously you're angry like why can't you do this what are you angry about well man he he was

angry about plan of things let's put it that way so yeah there that practicality that's real necessary to nail the highest to the lowest and to get all that organized all the way down to practical implementable with the work of Milton Ericson yes what you refer to specifically I just all of his work I just I'm just enamored with his work because his ability to create change in his patience and the strategies he would employ I just think are so brilliant you know I don't know I don't know if he's respected in the field or

not anymore but I just thought his story well all those my experience with all those great clinicians was you're a fool if you don't take what they knew seriously I mean those people had a reputation for a reason and there's you know I I really learned a lot from the great behaviorists I learned a lot from the psychoanalysts from the rogerian types like they all had their they all had something to say the behaviorists were great at decomposing something complex into implementable units man and the psychoanalysts were great at high level conceptualization archetypal analysis you

know the big story big picture yeah so hey Eric maybe we'll keep that discussion with you in the video okay yeah I like that yeah yeah sorry for cursing right away good that was perfect [Music]