MASTER Your Dark Side To TAKE CONTROL Of Your Life TODAY | Robert Greene | Transcription

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Introduction

Intro (00:00)

I don't write books to please my ego, to make people laugh or to entertain. I want to influence them. I want to get inside your skin, inside your brain and alter how you look at the world. I think this change in your perspective and how you look and socialize and deal with people will radically alter so many aspects in your life. Everybody, welcome to Impact Theory.

Discussion With Robert Greene

Welcome Robert Greene (00:29)

Our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams. All right, today's guest is the legendary number one New York Times bestselling author of a string of books on the nature of power itself. His writings have become an intellectual buffet for those seeking power and influence, as evidenced by the fact that his work has become an integral part of the very fabric of hip-hop culture. He's been referenced in songs by Jay-Z, Kanye West and Drake to name but a few, and Busta Rhymes used his lessons to resolve a tricky issue with problematic movie producers. Fidel Castro has even been reported to have read his book, and his most famous tone, The 48 Laws of Power, is both one of the most requested books in the American prison system and one of the most frequently banned, along with one of his other books, The 33 Strategies for War. This may seem an overreaction to what are ultimately just books, but in truth, every one of his six books are razor sharp and dripping with usable insights. They are dark and powerfully revealing works that look at some of the most often ignored and harder to look at parts of human nature. And that's exactly why they have transcended the status of mere books that you read and become among the rare pantheon of books that you study. For that very reason, his book, Mastery, is on my ultra short list of books that you must read. So please, help me in welcoming the best-selling author of The Laws of Human Nature, the Godfather of Power Dynamics himself, Robert Green. So, dude, writing your intro is about the easiest thing I'm ever going to do in my life. What you've written is so extraordinary and as somebody who I had to toughen up, so that was my journey as an entrepreneur. So some people, I think, start too hard, don't have enough empathy and they really have to find that and find their love for other humans. I led with that but had to develop the resilience and the internal fortitude to see things through. So I love hip-hop culture and the lack of anxiety that they talk about. And I like that similar thing in your books where it really just delves into this sort of an objective look at human nature or power and it's really pretty fascinating. So the fact that you wrote a book about The Laws of Human Nature is very intriguing.

The negative bias (02:58)

I could not wait to dive into this. And I want to start with, you take a default sort of negative view about our aggressions and things like that. What is your default stance on human nature? I admit that I have a negative bias but I try to make my books as objective as possible. But I think that we consider ourselves human. Obviously we're human beings but I don't buy that definition. I think that we're actually animals, that we have an animal nature and that we have to become human. And we become human by overcoming some of these deep-rooted animal forces within us. These forces within us that we can't control such as the fact that we can't control our own emotions, our own anger, our own frustration or we feel envy or we're caught up in the emotions of other people. I call those forces primal forces human nature and I have 18 of them. They can create sort of negative patterns of behavior, the dark side of what we see in the news, etc. And we all have them ingrained in us because the way we evolved millions of years ago served a very definite purpose for our survival as a species. But the savannas of East Africa is not the offices in Silicon Valley or 21st century America. The world isn't the same, we are not built to adapt to this new technological environment we're in. We still have that lizard brain, those animal parts of our nature. So my book is designed to confront you with human nature so you can begin to overcome it. So for instance law number one is about how we're basically irrational creatures. We think that we're rational but really our emotions govern us. We feel something before we ever have an idea or think it. We have to become rational through this process that I lay out in my book. So I don't mean to say that we're negative because humans are obviously incredible. Look at what we've created. It's a rage if you think about who we were millions of years ago and where we are now. We're obviously capable of incredible achievements. We're also the most brilliant social animal on the planet. We're capable of cooperating and working on teams to a level that no other animal has ever reached. So there's obviously another side to the story. But to become greater, to become truly human we have to overcome these forces that I lay out in the book. What are some of the other primitive forces that are driving us, especially ones that people might not be aware of?

Primal instincts (05:36)

Well I think we're kind of aware of it but we don't see it in the same light. So for instance, we are built to constantly compare ourselves to other people. We're always thinking of what the other person has and how we are in relation to them. Are we getting as much attention as that other person? It started off when we were children. Are we getting more attention than our siblings from our parents? So we're continually comparing ourselves in rank, in power, in status to the people around us. And this is deep force within us and it's constant every day, every moment. You don't realize it but you're going through that. And social media completely exacerbates this tendency in human nature. And it's the source of envy which I have a whole chapter on in my book. So that's one force that I talk about and I try and show the roots of that in our evolution. Here is the contagiousness of emotions which is extremely powerful. We tend to think of ourselves as autonomous human beings that were independent, that I feel affection or anger or frustration on my own. We don't realize how deeply we are affected by the emotions of the people in a group. This is the viral effects. Emotions are extremely contagious. And I explain in the book there was an evolutionary reason for that. For the invention of language we humans had to be able to communicate to one another through just picking up the moods of other people. And if there was a threat to our group or our tribe, the ability to feel fear and anger together bonded us and helped us survive. But that doesn't serve much function in the world today where viral emotions could be very dangerous and very, we see a lot of that on social media. So there's are two of forces I could mention, there are several others.

Writing in Anger (07:40)

So you said that you often write from a place of anger. I do. What was the anger that was driving this book? Well I tell you, I just think I'm really worried about people nowadays. So in mastery my worry was people no longer knew how to build things. No longer understood the process for becoming great in excelling at some craft or field. But now my worry is that people are so immersed in their smartphones and their technology that they don't understand people, they're not observing people. And this has been documented in studies that young people for instance levels of self absorption and narcissism have been growing steadily since the 1970s. We are the preeminent social animal on the planet. Our survival depends on how we relate to other people, whether we understand them on some level. And I find a lot of people are increasingly in the world are really bad at observing just basic elements in human psychology. The position I'm in now, I'm a consultant to a lot of very powerful famous people. I'm not going to mention any names. People fly me out to consult with CEOs, political people who are very powerful and even in other countries. And the number one problem I find that they have is an inability to understand the people they're dealing with. They hire the wrong partners. They hire the worst assistants when they're ruining their lives. These are people who are technically brilliant, they understand their field, they understand marketing, et cetera. But they don't understand basics about people around them. And they make terrible hires or they marry absolutely the wrong person for them in their lives. Their emotions, their personal relationship bring them down. So this is like our Achilles heel and I think it's gotten worse in the world today. So my anger was that people are so focused on technology, but that we need to focus much more on human nature, on understanding people. That's the primary skill that you need in life. I found it really interesting. So I'm sort of the, I get a little mischaracterized as the blank slate guy and admittedly I do want to believe that we're blank slates, but I don't believe that. I don't think that we are blank slates. And I think that there is a certain amount of human nature that's really baked into things. One thing that I thought was pretty funny in your book was like the biggest part of human nature is that we deny that there is human nature. I thought that was wonderfully ironic and terrifyingly true. And I want to know like how much of this is stuff where we tease out, because you said the purpose of the book is to give you a sense of who you are so that you can change who you are. But without that self-awareness, without going through the process of learning this stuff, you're just never going to be able to make that change. So okay, operating from the thesis that your book is designed to give me that level of self-awareness as I go through the process of trying to tease out who I really am, which is a fascinating journey that your book takes people on if they're willing to acknowledge when they see themselves. How much of this is truly like just a, you were born that way and how much of this is early childhood development? Well, I have a chapter on character, which is an extremely important chapter.

Character (10:56)

And what I'm trying to get at in there is that there is something deeply ingrained in each individual person, a particular individual nature that we all have, and that causes us to go into compulsive patterns of behavior. I have this problem myself. I notice each time I write a book, I'm telling myself I'm going to make this book short "I'm not going to ruin my health. I'm not going to do so much research." And every goddamn time I still go through the same process, I can't break this pattern. Okay? And everybody has them. Where does it come from? Some of it comes from our DNA, from our genetics, things we can't control, that we've inherited from our parents. Some of it comes from our early attachments. And some of it comes as we get older and we interact with teachers and mentors and various people who create a certain way we view ourselves. If people keep telling us that we're not really worthy, that we're not good students, we internalize that and we end up becoming like that. So it's a mix of things. Each person has a mix of these qualities and you have to untangle the various strands. And you're right. What I'm saying is you're a mystery to yourself. You don't know who you are. You have patterns of behavior and you're not even understanding that. You don't know why you're angry. You think you're angry because that person said something mean to you or did something wrong. But in fact, your anger probably stems from things from deep, deep within from your childhood. And you're not reacting to that person, but to actually your parents and what they didn't give you. The origin of wisdom according to the Greeks was know thyself. And I believe that very firmly that knowledge about who you are is an end in itself and will help you in so many ways become that human being that I think we all have the potential to become. So talk to me about self-awareness and how it impacts biases.

How self-awareness impacts biases. (13:00)

Well, you have to see this is my book. So I try to be as practical as possible. I don't want to get academic. I want you to be able to actually use this knowledge. So I'm a great believer in baby steps in learning how to do things on a daily basis. So normally when we feel an emotion or we have an idea, we don't examine it. We just assume that's natural. We came up with that on our own. I want you every single day to be examining yourself and to look at yourself. Why do I have that idea? Why am I feeling this sudden emotion? And it's not easy. It can take time and it can take degree of introspection that you're not comfortable with. But if you begin to look at yourself and question, why do I feel this way and examine it and look at perhaps other sources of it, then you can begin this process of understanding instead of just simply accepting that you feel or have this certain idea. So when I write the book on human nature, I admit that I have a negative bias towards human nature. I tend to see the dark side in people. I tend to see their manipulative side, what they're trying to hide. That was the source for the 48 Laws of Power. That was the anger I felt then that people weren't being honest about how manipulative they can be. So I recognize that I have this bias. I recognize that that's who I am. Instead of thinking that, "Well, I'm just brilliant and my ideas are always correct," I question it and I question, "Is my negative bias towards human nature? Is that reality or is it just me? And maybe it's just me because of the way my parents are. My parents were kind of anxious and are worried about a lot of things." And I internalize that and maybe that gave me my negative view on people. So I question it and I say, "Maybe it's not real. Maybe I need to read books that tell me the other side of the story." And there are plenty of books that say that humans are great. So question yourself. Stop assuming that everything you do is so brilliant and smart and right. And imagine that maybe your ideas don't come from yourself. Maybe you're feeling some political anger or whatever comes from the fact that you're just assuming it from other people. You're following things on Facebook and you're getting swept up in some viral emotion. You want to think that you're completely independent and autonomous, but maybe you're not as independent as you think. So how do you want people to use your book as a tool as they go through what exercises do you want them to do? Because I think some of a lack of self-awareness is not just a, "I don't want to do the work, the introspection." It's a not understanding the process of what introspection is. Well some of it also is denial. Some of it also is a block that people have to look at themselves because it is a little bit, a confrontation with reality. But as far as the process is concerned, it's a daily thing. So first of all, the first and most important thing that you have to do is to come to admit it's almost like an AA thing that you have a problem. If you go through a life thinking you don't have a problem that you know who you are, your relationships with people are fine, that everything is hunky-dory, then you're never going to be able to even begin to go into the process. So admit you have a problem. Admit you don't understand the people you deal with. Even your spouse or your children, their mysteries to you. You don't really know what they're thinking, so admit that first. When you admit that, now you're motivated to try and learn. They're little steps you can take. I won't go through all of them. But the first thing is, if you take your wife or your husband, if you say to yourself, "I don't really understand them. I think I do." But a lot of the times when you think you understand them, you're just simply projecting your onto them, your own emotions. Step back and say, "Today, I'm going to observe her," let's just say from my point of view, "in a different way than I normally do her." And I'm going to look at her nonverbal communication because I'm a big believer in non-verbals. And today, I'm going to glean one truth about my wife or spouse or partner that I had never noticed before. And I'm going to try and see, perhaps get to the point where I can begin to understand her perspective. So if, for instance, there's an argument or a disagreement, here's another instance where you step back and you go, "Stop being self-self-righteous and maybe try and take the step of understanding her point of view." So these are sort of baby steps that you take in life. You can use this in your office where you think you know your colleagues, but you don't know them and they might be having thoughts about you that aren't very pleasant, that you don't want to confront. Step back and start observing them. And I have many, many examples in the book about how lessons on how you can start observing people, observing their body language, seeing the subtext behind their words.

How to use Roberts book as a practical tool to improve. (18:19)

You know, seeing their patterns of behavior. You know, for instance, you'll notice sometimes we all go through this, that when we see our boss, we get a kind of body language and a nervousness that's unusual. But when we see somebody else like a friend, suddenly our face lights up and we're much more relaxed and happy, all people are like that. So you want to see how somebody reacts to you when you meet them, when you come up to them and how they react to other people. And notice that there's a great difference when they see you and suddenly they're very nervous around you, where they're very excited. That will tell you a lot about yourself and about them. You're not being observant.

Milton Erickson (19:08)

You mentioned Milton Erickson before we were talking about how incredibly observant he was. What he was fascinated with was how incredibly unobservant people are. Let's go deeper into Milton Erickson who is a shared fascination for you and I in seeing him in your book was very excited and you give like this blow by blow account of how he comes to what is really almost a superpower. His ability to read nonverbal communication is beyond powerful. But the way that you tell the story, it makes it sort of self-evident how he develops that. Walk us through what happened when you got struck with polio, how he leveraged that, what some of those realizations were, and then how we can all train ourselves. And if you can touch on like what he learned about the word no, like I found that really interesting. Yeah, yeah. Well Milton Erickson is an amazing figure. He's the person who created basically hypnotherapy and was the main inspiration behind NLP. And when he was about 18 years old, he suddenly got polio. And as his polio spread, his entire body was paralyzed. The only thing that wasn't was his eyeballs. He could move, he could look at people, he had some ability to see move his eyes a little bit. And so imagine, I can imagine myself, I have a very active mind. Imagine you're paralyzed in bed, you can't read, you can't watch anything, no television, no entertainment. People can read you stories basically. But how incredibly bored you'll become and how frustrating and you can't do anything for yourself. You know, you'd go crazy. So what Milton Erickson did as he was in that state and he was living in his house and people were visiting as him, is he decided he would observe people on a much higher level. Now he couldn't say anything, he couldn't communicate because his mouth was paralyzed as well. So all he could do was observe and observe people closer and closer.

The second language (21:15)

And so he noticed that as he progressed in that, there's the second language that people speak and this language is non-verbal. It is in gestures, it is in tone of voice, it is in just your body posture. And slowly over months and years of being paralyzed in this position, he literally mastered this second language. He could tell from the way his sister moved her hair like that or moved her head that she was feeling some resentment towards her other sister. He noticed as you said that there were like five different forms of no that someone could say no, I don't want that apple when they were offered to it, but they really meant yeah, I really do want that apple. And so he noticed that there were all these different variations of no depending on the tone of voice. He could hear people in another room talking about him and through that the tone of their voice he could understand what they were really trying to say about him and the subtext behind the words that people have. And so as people talk and they use words to conceal what they're thinking, their bodies reveal what they're actually thinking behind the words through their nervousness, their tone of voice, their eyes, the eyes and the mouth tell you incredible amounts of information. Milton Erickson mastered this language and as he got older he used this in his therapy where he would have patients enter his room, he became a psychoanalyst. And he deliberately placed his desk at one end of the corner so they would have to walk into the room and he could understand from the way they walked and their gate whether they were nervous, whether they were excited, whether they wanted to change their lives or not. He was so brilliant at it that people later in life, people thought he was psychic, he could literally read your thoughts. It was unbelievable. So the point of the story was that humans have this ability to master this second language. Put yourself in the position of our earliest ancestors, I mentioned this earlier. They don't have language yet their survival depends on getting along with the group and knowing like you're hunting and where is that leopard, what's going on. But you can't say anything, you don't have language yet. So your ability to pick up fear in the eyes of a fellow group member or to pick up excitement, your survival depended on it. So I maintain that our ancestors were virtually psychic and their ability to attune themselves to the nonverbal communication that people are constantly emitting. So the idea in this book is we humans are constantly emitting information about our real emotions. It comes out nonverbally and you're not picking up these signals. You're so focused on people's words that you're missing this other reality which is so incredibly eloquent and I try to instruct you in the book about how you can become a superior observer of this. For me the Milton Erickson ability really does border on a superpower that came from obviously something very disruptive in his life. And I know recently you had a stroke and the way that you're approaching it has the sort of Milton Erickson written all over it with rebuilding yourself but with a writer's mind and so you're paying attention to what it takes and what you're going through. Walk us through that. What are you learning about that? What principles of the book are you applying to it?

Confronting your fears (24:58)

Well, I hate to say it but it was kind of a near death experience because I was with my wife at the time and she called the ambulance right away. I was driving and if she hadn't called right away I would have permanent brain damage right now and I probably would have gotten in a very bad car accident. I might not be alive. So the last chapter is a chapter about death confronting your greatest fear in life as just your mortality. I literally had to confront that. So the abstract words that I have about, "Oh, confront your death, overcome your fear" suddenly became very real to me and so that was one aspect of it. But literally you lose control of your body. I'm a very independent person, very willful. I like to imagine myself like I can do anything I want and suddenly I'm put in the position of being a baby dependent on people to clothe me, to feed me. I can't walk very well. I have no control over my left side of my body. I wasn't an athlete but I loved exercise, endurance exercise, not all that wiped away. So what am I going to do? Am I going to start feeling sorry for myself? And so I applied one of the things in my book which has to do with the last chapter about death. What also permeates through the book is just sort of accept things as they are. Stop judging. I had to accept that this is a fact of life and how can I make it into something strong? How can I turn this into a positive? I have a chapter on your attitude in life. How you can change your circumstances by changing your attitude. Your attitude towards life will determine what you get if you're avoidant and hostile towards people. A hostile person will tend to create hostility around him. So how can I alter my attitude? And it's a struggle every single day. I have to be incredibly patient and I'm not a patient person. It takes me ten minutes to put on a t-shirt to be able to get my left arm through that hole that sleeve. Damn it, I'm not somebody who's patient and I've had to develop patience. I've had to overcome all of these sort of negative qualities in myself. So if I talk in the book about overcoming your own nature, this damn, and that was fucking slammed into my face. I had to overcome my frustration, my lack of patience, my willfulness, the fact that I always have to do things myself. Then I had to confront the fact that I could easily have died, but I didn't.

Rebuilding your body (27:38)

I'm alive. So I can learn from this. I'm learning a lot. I'm going to rebuild my body. I'm going to rebuild it. I've come a long way. So like a month ago, I was pretty bad. I'm able to walk now fairly well. In four months from now, I'm going to be swimming again. In six months, I'm going to be jogging. I'm going to be back to where I was. Nothing will stop me, but I have to overcome all of my deficiencies and all of these weaknesses that I have built up over the years. Yeah, that is needless to say, that's a long, difficult road. How do you, or what tools do you use to reset your mind every day as you're going through this in parallowing that maybe to the check-off story in the book and how what he overcame and was really extraordinary being beaten by his father all the time, and that he goes on to be the guy that isn't bitter, was pretty extraordinary.

Resetting Yourself Daily (28:23)

What mechanisms do you use to reset every day? I meditate every morning. I've been doing that for several years, for eight years now religiously. And in those meditations, I confront myself. So I'm sitting there meditating, and my meditation is all about emptying the mind, but it's impossible to empty the mind. So as your meditating thoughts come to you, anxieties, worries, resentments, I've trained myself to question where they are. Each time I feel anger at my sibling or my mother or friend, for saying something that I misinterpreted, I go, that's your ego speaking. These people weren't saying something that was personal. You just have your ego, which is always getting in your way. Question it. So question my impatience, my frustrations, et cetera. The meditation has really helped me. Then a friend of mine wrote saying about the stroke, well, look at it this way, that it's kind of an adventure that you're having to experience things you've never experienced before. They go, wow, I think I'm so brilliant, but I'm not. Sometimes other people have the best ideas. I'm always stealing their ideas. That was a great idea. This is an adventure. This is something new. I'm having to learn it. It can be exciting. Although really I'm feeling kind of bitter and angry. I have to confront that and move past it. The Chekhov story is great because Chekhov was born in Russia in the most miserable village in Russia, poverty, stricken, et cetera. Really cold and the streets weren't paved and wild dogs ran through the streets and you could fall into a pothole and drown. His father beat him every morning practically and his siblings were a mess. Then suddenly the two of the brothers ran off to Moscow and then the father decided to follow them. The rest of the family basically abandoned Anton Chekhov at the age of 18 or 16 in this miserable little town and he had to fend for himself. He started becoming really bitter. Why me? Why do I have this awful family, this horrible abusive father, this mother who won't stand for her up for herself, this drunken brother, why me? Then he suddenly got sick of the story in his mind and he goes, "Maybe I need to look at this totally differently. I don't want to be like this the rest of my life." He decided that what he would do is he would try and understand his father instead of judging him and he went through a process where my father was born a serf. We got freed later on but he was basically a slave. His father beat him. He was never allowed to go into the kind of work that he wanted to. So no wonder he became an alcoholic who beat me. He can't help it. Instead of hating him, I'm going to love my father. I'm going to try and love him for this human being, for this fact of nature that can't help himself but is my father for who he is. And in that moment he had a total epiphany in transformation that by getting rid of his negative emotions towards people, he was like free. He was liberated. And I've experienced this myself, my meditation, to go through just an hour or half an hour of freeing yourself from all your negative emotions about people. This is almost as if you're going to fly in the air, you feel so light and suddenly you've gotten rid of all of your burns, all the things that are weighing you down. Accepting people and loving them for who they are is an incredibly liberating thing. Now you can't do that for everyone. Some people are so toxic and ugly that you're never going to reach a point where you're going to love them but you can understand them and in understanding them you don't have to internalize that the pain they inflict on you. He changed his attitude towards people and towards life and it changed everything that came to him later on. He became a successful doctor and later a great writer. The two brothers of the same reality, the same world that they were looking at, the same family, one looked at it through this prism of empathy and love, the other looked at it through resentment and bitterness. The one person check off, got famous and successful and fulfilled life. The other is just descended into suicide and alcoholism.

Understanding Of Mortality And Influence

Memento Mori (33:23)

Your attitude will mean what you get in life. You will sabotage yourself with your attitude. I got all bitter and railed against fate for making me who I am, for the stroke that ruined my life, that took away everything that I value. I can't travel, I can't drive. I would become a different person. I would become somebody who limited my scope of activity but by accepting it, by saying I'm not going to let this happen, I'm going to accept it, I widen my scope of activity. I do things that I normally wouldn't do if I became angry and avoid and anxious. Amur Fatih. Yes, exactly. Tell people what that means. It's a Latin expression that literally means love of fate and it was created by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who is one of my great icons in life, one of my favorite writers. And basically his idea was that we humans normally go through the life kind of not accepting things. We want things to be different from the way they are. We want to have a better wife or husband. We want our children to be better. We don't like the political system. We want this sort of utopia to suddenly come about. We want people to be different. We want this, we want that. And to Nietzsche that meant you are anti-life. You are against life because life isn't like that. Life is a series of facts. Life is what it is. We've evolved a certain way. Your reality is a certain way. It is what it is. And by pushing against, you hate life. You want love life. You want love fate. And what fate means, things happen to you can't control. You didn't control who your parents are. You didn't control what city you were born into, what school you went into. You didn't control whether you were born rich or poor. There's much you can't control that's fate. You can't control it for what it is. Stop whining and stop going, I want something else. Embrace your world, your life. Our fear of death is probably the greatest influence on our behavior throughout history. We're the only animal that's conscious of our mortality. And it's caused an incredible reaction. We're avoidant. We're anxious. We invent an afterlife, a heaven where we'll all go. We see death. We never see people die in hospitals. We never see the animals that we eat being killed. We have no confrontation with death personally in our life. Completely disconnected from it. It makes us anxious and fearful. And that controls everything about our behavior. We become anxious and fearful about everything. So the ability to accept death and look at square in the eye and accept this is your reality that you're not going to live forever is very liberating. So a more fati is a step from turning your back that's faced this way going, "He's alive and I hate it. I don't want him to turn around and facing it." Going, "I accept it. I love it. I embrace it." And it has a very powerful effect. Let's go a little deeper on that.

Facing Death (36:46)

So with your recent, essentially moment where you couldn't help but look at death, what have you learned? What have you taken away from that? Knowing as a writer you have shown time and time again that you see things that are offered counterintuitive. So what was it in that maybe that even surprised you? Well, the experience itself on a physical level was very weird because I didn't experience the stroke as it was happening. It was almost an outer body thing. So my wife noticed I was acting very strangely. My whole body was weird and everything. And then I blanked out and I was basically kind of in a coma or not conscious for about 10, 15 minutes. And then I was taken out of it at the hospital and I kind of freaked out like what's happening to me. Where am I? What happened to my body? So it was a kind of a weird out of body experience that I think I'm still kind of recovering from. The other thing was I did a book with 50 Cent called The 50th Law and I hung out with 50 for several months. He's a great guy. We're still friends. 50 had an even worse near death experience than I was. He was shot nine times, very close range. Well, it went through his jaw. He came this close to dying and he said, "And I've noticed it in him since then, that nothing can face him after that. How can he be afraid of anything in life once he came that close to death?" So he has this kind of Zen calmness that I've witnessed. You don't think of 50 as being Zen in calm. You think of it as this angry kind of thug like rapper. But in real life, he's an incredibly calm person who never seems to get riled by things. Well, I've had a little bit of that effect myself. So I've noticed the people around me, like my mother or other people, they're all freaking out about what's happened to me. "Oh my God, you've got a kid. You might fall. You might do this." And I don't care, really. I feel calm. I feel more calm than I felt in a long time. So that was kind of a counterintuitive thing that I wasn't expecting. Now, is that because you feel like there's nothing left to take away? Now, every day is a gift or what is the calmness born of? It's definitely that. And then it helps the fact that I've written, this is my sixth book, "The Laws of Human Nature" was sort of like my ultimate. I vomited out of me everything that I had built over the last 20 years. I did this one book, "All the Things I've Learned, All My Anger." I got it out of this one book. So if I die, I don't have to, I don't have any regrets. You know, I, yeah, I'd like to write a seventh and an eighth book. I have other ideas, but I could die and I'm okay. I lived a great life. And I talk a lot about that in mastery and in this book. That the worst feeling in the world is to be facing death and to think, "Damn it, I've wasted my life." And I want people out there to realize that if you're 20s and you're 30s, you don't want to reach that point. You don't want to waste your time and become 55, 58, have a stroke, face death. And what have you done nothing? You've moved from job to job. You tried this, you tried that with half the energy. You really have nothing to look back on. That's the worst feeling. So, you know, I don't have that problem, I don't think. So that's part of how I'm able to stay calm. But the other thing is you say, bring it on. What worst can happen? I've already experienced it. You know? I'm somebody who has a great deal of fear of death. And now I had to deal with it. So, eh, it's all right. It's not that bad. I can handle it. That is amazing. Thank you for sharing that. All right. Before I ask my last question, tell these guys where they can find you online. Well, I have my old website, which I've kept together, which is www.powerseductionandwar.com.

Robert's Work (41:07)

The and is spelled out. So, powerseductionandwar.com. And on there you'll find links to mastery, my pages on mastery, and to my new book, The Laws of Human Nature. For some reason I've just kept the old address. So that's where you can find everything. All right. Perfect.

Impact on the World (41:26)

My last question, what's the impact that you want to have on the world? Well, I want to have the largest impact possible. So I'm grandiose, you know, which is one of the chapters in the book. You know, I'm an ambitious person. I don't write books to please my ego, to make people laugh or to entertain. I want to influence them. I want to get inside your skin, inside your brain, and alter how you look at the world. And so I believe, from the emails I've gotten from lots of readers and people I've talked to, that my books have had that effect. That you don't don't read my books. They get under your skin, and you're thinking about them years later. And I consciously design that for that reason. I seduce you into following me. I tell you stories. I don't preach or tell you this is what it is. I tell you a story. Each chapter is, I begin with a story to gently bring you into my world and into my ideas. I want to get under your skin. I want to change how you look at the world. Because I don't think, I'm not doing that for evil purposes. I think my way of looking at the world will help you. I know because I get a lot of email from people from mastery. Mastery has helped a lot of people find their way in life, find their path to a career that is fulfilling, and to know how to discipline themselves. So I think that my perspective will have a beneficial effect on you. Maybe I'm just deluding myself. But I think that. And so I want the biggest impact possible. I want to change how you look at the world. And so with the laws of human nature, I want to change how you look at people. Normally, everything is personal. Oh, they said that. Oh, they don't like me. Oh, he likes me. I'm not getting attention. Cut that off. I want you to look at people as facts of nature, as things like a rock or a stone or a plant. This is who they are. And I want you to observe them and accept them for who they are and deal with them as individuals. You will be free of all that emotional baggage that you carry when you take everything so personally. I think altering your perspective, how you look at people, will have a radical influence on all aspects of your life. So I want to have the biggest impact that I possibly can. And that's how I try and design my books for.

Conclusion

Final Remarks (44:11)

I love that. Awesome, Robert. Thank you so much. Thank you. Alright, guys. Read this book. In fact, read everything this man has ever written. I'm telling you he is absolutely right. These are books that get under your skin. They will change the way that you look at the world. They will change the way that you look at human nature. And most importantly, if you let it, they will change the way you look at yourself. And we didn't even get into some of the extraordinary stuff that he talked about in the book about how you develop self-esteem, the story that you tell yourself, how you construct your sense of self, how it's used both as a mask, and as a way to reflect back on yourself, it is incredibly extraordinary. And as you go on the journey of reading the book, if you're open to it, you will see yourself in many of the darker elements of human nature. I am sad to say that I think all of us will see bits and pieces of ourselves through all of the 18 laws of human nature. Not all of them are flattering. But if you're willing to really get that level of understanding like he said, from there you can change yourself. But if you don't first understand yourself, then that is absolutely hopeless. And that has really been the extraordinary journey that he's taken us on as readers thus far through all six of his books is to just understand, as he called other people, facts of nature. I think that's so interesting. And to see yourself in that pantheon as well, to understand that there are parts of you that are just facts of nature. And to really come to understand those is to come to understand yourself is to be a master of yourself. And that journey is something that I'm extraordinarily grateful to him for laying out in this book so eloquently. I think it is worth every second that you will spend on it. I cannot highly recommend it enough. Alright guys, if you haven't already be sure to subscribe. And until next time my friends, be legendary. Take care. Robert, as amazing as yours. Everybody, thank you so much for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. You're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential. All right.