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

[0] Welcome to episode 237 of the JVP podcast.

[1] I'm Michaela Peterson.

[2] In this episode, Dad had a conversation with Robert Green, the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The 48 Laws of Power, the Art of Seduction, and the 33 Strategies of War and Mastery.

[3] Their conversation was centered around human nature and principles surrounding strategy, power, and seduction, as well as psychopathy, manipulation, agreeableness, ambition, channeling your shadow and many other topics.

[4] Robert's been on my podcast before and he is extremely interesting.

[5] I'm definitely going to enjoy listening to this podcast.

[6] Hi everyone.

[7] I'm pleased today to have with me, Mr. Robert Green.

[8] 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.

[9] So, he's an internationally renowned expert on power strategies, living in Los Angeles.

[10] Mr. Green worked at an estimated of 80 jobs, including magazine editor, construction worker, Hollywood movie writer, before becoming an author.

[11] 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.

[12] I was reading The Daily Laws before setting up this interview, and I'm going to read, one, it's a set of meditating.

[13] 366 meditations on power, seduction, mastery, strategy, and human nature.

[14] And so here's the one for June 7th.

[15] And I think it's relatively representative of the book.

[16] June 7th, never impugn people's intelligence.

[17] Then there's a subtitle or an introductory idea.

[18] The best way to be well received by all is to clothe yourself in the skin of the dumbest of brutes, Baltasar Grassian.

[19] The feeling that someone else is more intelligent than we are is almost always intolerable.

[20] We usually try to justify it in different ways.

[21] Quote, he only has book knowledge, whereas I have real knowledge.

[22] Quote, her parents paid for her to get a good education.

[23] If my parents had had as much money, if I had been as privileged, he's not as smart as he thinks.

[24] 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.

[25] Even Einstein was a boob outside physics.

[26] Given how important the idea of intelligence is to most people's vanity, it is critical never inadvertently to insult or impugn a person's brainpower.

[27] This is an unforgivable sin.

[28] But if you can make this iron rule work for you, it opens up all sorts of avenues of deception.

[29] The feeling of intellectual superiority you give them will disarm their suspicion muscles.

[30] and then daily law, subliminally reassure people that they are more intelligent than you are, or even that you are a bit of a moron, and you can run rings around them.

[31] 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.

[32] So when I was preparing for this, I was reading these daily meditations, and I was actually shocked.

[33] was really quite shocked by them.

[34] I was shocked by that one.

[35] And I was very unclear as a consequence as to your motivations.

[36] And so I was thinking, do I want to do I want to, I don't get this.

[37] I don't understand this exactly.

[38] It's like, this is very deceptive.

[39] And then I talk to my team who like your books a lot and my daughter who really liked interviewing you.

[40] And I thought, well, there's something going on here that I don't quite understand, which is certainly possible.

[41] And then I thought, well, this is maybe a shadow exploration, something like that.

[42] And I thought, well, this is maybe a shadow And then I thought like I was kind of a dim wit for not catching that earlier.

[43] But so, but you know, it is shocking.

[44] These are very manipulative laws, let's say.

[45] And so can you guide me through the rationale for producing material like that?

[46] What were you trying, what are you trying to do with your books?

[47] And they've obviously been misunderstood.

[48] It says in the, in Wikipedia, Green's books are sometimes described as manipulative and amoral.

[49] And so clear this up for me. Well, you know, 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.

[50] They have things to do with kind of common sense ideas about power, 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.

[51] But there are definitely some laws that are quite manipulative.

[52] And then my other books don't really go into things like that.

[53] So it is a bit of a distortion to write that.

[54] But where this comes from is basically, I have a particular idea of power.

[55] So maybe I should explain that a little bit.

[56] My idea of power, it's not about this kind of grand thing of political or war or something.

[57] It's on a very individual level.

[58] And the idea for me comes from Nietzsche.

[59] and his idea of the will to power, which he explains as every organism has the desire to expand itself, as a desire for expansion.

[60] And so I think that for human beings, the desire that we have this innate propensity for wanting to expand beyond our limits.

[61] 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.

[62] 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 what I call negative power, passive aggression, et cetera, setting yourself up as a victim's kind of leverage power in a negative way.

[63] And so the problem is, and a lot of this comes from Machiavelli, who inspired a lot of the 48 laws.

[64] The problem is that we live in a world where this desire for some kind of power butts up against kind of codes of behavior that have gotten stricter and stricter and stricter, particularly in the 21st century, about what is acceptable, about what is politically correct.

[65] So we're supposed to appear to be these paragons of virtue, these paragons of fairness and democracy, et cetera.

[66] At the same time, we're all trying to angle for different degrees of power in our work, in our relationships, et cetera.

[67] And so because of that dynamic, we have to be extremely careful in this world.

[68] And I compare it to the courts of like Louis XIV, where all of the courtiers, if they're too old, 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.

[69] And so the game was to be sort of indirect, to be polite and ingratiating.

[70] And if you had an enemy, to know how to kind of very quietly get rid of them.

[71] And so this is kind of what I, what the 48 laws of power came out from.

[72] So you quoted me, I had like 80 different jobs, probably more like 60, 65.

[73] But I saw all kinds of very deceptive games being played continually in the various different jobs I had.

[74] And I worked in every conceivable field.

[75] And I didn't see any kind of honesty about this dynamic in the human world.

[76] And it really kind of irritated me. All the self -help books were sort of describing a world that I never saw existed.

[77] You know, I saw people being very political, having egos and having problems with their, egos.

[78] And I didn't see any books like they're kind of describing what I had encountered every day.

[79] So law number one is never outshine the master.

[80] 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.

[81] You're going to trip on their ego and something bad will happen to you, right?

[82] And so this seemed like the fact that people have egos and operate with egos and you have to be careful.

[83] with them seems very clear to me, but I didn't find books out there that were describing it.

[84] So I hope this kind of gives you an idea a little bit of the context where the book came out from.

[85] Okay, so I just, I can't remember who sent me this.

[86] I think it was Clay Routledge.

[87] Yeah, I think that's right.

[88] 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.

[89] Right.

[90] So that is related to the first issue that you brought up.

[91] And you obviously consider that problematic.

[92] 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.

[93] Yes.

[94] And then, and that if we feel consciously thwarted in that goal or believe that that it's impossible, that doesn't mean we're going to give up our striving.

[95] It means it's going to go underground, and then it's going to manifest itself in all sorts of deceptive ways.

[96] Exactly.

[97] And then you said that you were interested in Nietzsche's idea of will to power, as in some sense, the central motivation of the organism across species to some degree.

[98] And then you talked about the jobs that you've had.

[99] So why, why did, so I got that right, I hope.

[100] I hope I've got that.

[101] You did.

[102] That was very well put.

[103] Thank you.

[104] Okay.

[105] Okay.

[106] 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 or delineating out the strategies.

[107] Yeah.

[108] Okay.

[109] So that, you know, that seems to me to be reasonable that, I mean, I'm a big admirer of the work of Carl Jung, which everyone listening to this knows more than they even want to know.

[110] and he was certainly sensitive to the idea that people had a terrible shadow that they would clothe themselves in the garments of moral virtue 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, 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.

[111] And I certainly believe that's true.

[112] I believe that that's the corruption of human relationships by a form of severe deceit.

[113] 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.

[114] I guess what I wonder is, so then the last thing.

[115] I'm confused about, to some degree, is you had 65 jobs.

[116] How come so many jobs?

[117] I was a very restless young man. It doesn't speak very well of me and the fact that I couldn't hold a job for more than 11 months.

[118] I came out of college and I wanted to be a writer and I had all kinds of romantic notions of what that meant.

[119] And then I entered journalism and I worked in New York and I didn't find that that was a very good fit.

[120] So I moved to Europe and I wandered around for four or five years, trying to write novels and working in hotels, doing construction, kind of the writer's life where the variety of experiences were kind of giving me material.

[121] And I never was really happy in overtly political environments, to be honest with you.

[122] I'm kind of a born entrepreneur.

[123] I like working for myself.

[124] I didn't like a lot of the games that were being played.

[125] And I'm not very good at them.

[126] I mean, I've gotten better at it.

[127] 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.

[128] I did wrong and I suffered for them.

[129] 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.

[130] And so I was someone who was very restless and I never felt comfortable in any of the different jobs I had.

[131] And I was also trying to broaden my experience.

[132] Okay.

[133] So, so I had a lot of jobs when I was a kid.

[134] I worked as a, oh God, I worked as a, in a garage, pumping gas.

[135] I worked as a dishwasher for years.

[136] I was a short -order cook.

[137] I re -tip drill bits.

[138] I worked as a beekeeper.

[139] I had a lot of, oh, I worked in a plywood mill running plywood people.

[140] pieces through a huge dryer.

[141] We used to try to light the thing on fire.

[142] It was like a block longness dryer, fired by natural gas.

[143] If you worked really hard, you could stuff it so full, it would get crammed up in the middle, and then it would light on fire.

[144] And all the fire sprinklers would kick in, and then the whole building, which was like a block square, would fill up with steam.

[145] So anyways, I worked in a lot of jobs.

[146] And so, but I didn't, so this is something that's worth getting clear.

[147] I like the jobs a lot, almost all of them, not all of them, but almost all of them.

[148] I got along with the people that I was working with.

[149] I didn't have exactly the same experience that you're describing.

[150] You said that you had a harder time.

[151] I don't know exactly.

[152] Was it fitting in?

[153] You didn't like overt political elements too.

[154] And like when I worked in restaurants, I didn't really experience that.

[155] You know, like I got along with the guys that I was working with.

[156] There was a lot of joking around.

[157] 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.

[158] It's just, I found it, 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, and that became a conscious puzzle for you?

[159] Is that a reasonable way thinking about it?

[160] I think so.

[161] It made me explore, think about myself, like maybe I'm doing something wrong.

[162] The natural reaction in these situations where things, you know, it wasn't that I hated all of my jobs.

[163] Some of them were fun, so I don't want to give the wrong impression.

[164] But when mistakes were made and I, it may be 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.

[165] And so, you know, 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.

[166] Well, that's a really good sign that you need to go get a different job.

[167] I mean, I worked with clinical clients a lot, you know, in career counseling.

[168] And my sense, one of the things we'd end, 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?

[169] Or are you around truly toxic people who will punish you for your virtues?

[170] In which case, let's get your CV together.

[171] You know, let's get you prepared to get the hell out of there and find a place where you can actually thrive.

[172] I mean, I had clients who were trapped in jobs.

[173] I remember one client in particular, she had been a refugee.

[174] She had been a refugee.

[175] from Albania, Eastern Europe.

[176] That was a rough damn country, man. And then she came, yeah, yeah, like the worst of the Eastern European bloc countries in terms of poverty and general oppressiveness.

[177] And then she came over to North America and got educated.

[178] And she ended up working in a bank in Canada.

[179] And like, she was good at her job and she was smart.

[180] And her managers just hated her.

[181] And like she sent me an email string one day.

[182] 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.

[183] I think they replaced it with easel board or some damn thing.

[184] Well, the reason for that was flip had been used at some point, hypothetically, as an epithet for Filipino people.

[185] And so it was politically incorrect.

[186] I mean, she was just being driven mad by this kind of, what would you call it, pointless moral posturing.

[187] She was a sensible person and questioned a lot of the bureaucratic stupidity.

[188] So my goal in situations like that was to help people figure out how to move laterally and find a place where their virtues would be rewarded instead of punished.

[189] Right.

[190] It's very wise.

[191] Yeah, if it can be managed.

[192] My experience is, and what I wanted to help people with 48 laws of power, when these things kind of happen, you get very confused.

[193] And they create a kind of trauma in your life where you sometimes blame.

[194] yourself or you wonder maybe you did something wrong and you become a little bit skittish and you get a little bit afraid in your next job and these 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 they're these strict kind of moral puritanical codes in place, and I somehow violated them.

[195] It's not my fault.

[196] That kind of clarity can be very, very empowering, I find in that.

[197] That's another kind of motivating device behind the 48 laws.

[198] Well, you also make me very curious about your personality.

[199] I mean, when I'm talking, I'm sorry, I'm going to, yeah, well, you know, I'm a clinic.

[200] That's okay.

[201] I'm a clinician, and I snap into that mode sometimes, and I'm very curious about this conversation.

[202] I mean, you have a very gentle demeanor and a very soft and kind voice.

[203] And you don't look like a harsh person.

[204] And so one of the dimensions, one of the cardinal personality dimensions, there's five of them, you may know this extroversion, which is a positive emotion, and it's associated with assertiveness and enthusiasm.

[205] And Trump is extroverted.

[206] Definitely.

[207] Negative emotion, that's neuroticism, and that's the whole panoply of negative emotions.

[208] They all clumped together.

[209] and people differ in their sensitivity to them.

[210] 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.

[211] You're obviously high in openness.

[212] 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, that's compassion and politeness.

[213] Is that a reasonable observation?

[214] I think that's fairly spot on.

[215] and I couldn't have any fought fun.

[216] Yeah, I agree with you on that, certainly.

[217] Okay, okay.

[218] I mean, people are a little more complex than that.

[219] I do have other sides to myself.

[220] I do have a shadow side that can be very aggressive and very, I'm very competitive.

[221] So it's, I think on the surface, I have that kind of agreeable personality for various reasons, but yes.

[222] Would you describe yourself as compassionate?

[223] Empathetic, very much so.

[224] Yeah, okay.

[225] So here's what I'm wondering.

[226] To a fall probably.

[227] Okay, okay, okay.

[228] 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.

[229] Certainly.

[230] And this is a really important notion.

[231] So I was talking yesterday, who was it with?

[232] 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, leading.

[233] 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.

[234] And so, and, you know, that's sort of a celebration of agreeable virtues.

[235] And so agreeable people are very generous and kind, and they're not backstabbing, and they're empathetic, and they're self -sacrificing.

[236] 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.

[237] They vary between 1 .5.

[238] And so if you're in a, so is it possible, I don't want to push this interpretation beyond its reasonable limits, but I'm, I'm wondering, you're open and creative and entrepreneurial.

[239] And so that's not going to suit you for managerial or bureaucratic jobs.

[240] No. You don't have the temperament for that.

[241] And then you're agreeable.

[242] 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?

[243] Is that?

[244] I think that's very possible.

[245] And yes, and I'm also very sensitive.

[246] So I'm kind of, you know, react a little bit more than most other people might react.

[247] But the odd thing is, is that the book came out in 1998.

[248] And it has resonated with lots and lots of readers.

[249] I've sold millions of copies of the book.

[250] And so I think a lot of people share the trait that I have.

[251] Oh, there's no doubt about it.

[252] That's, it's not uncommon what I'm talking about at all.

[253] I mean, the great manipulators in the world, the 3 % 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.

[254] They don't need a book like that.

[255] What seems to happen there, we studied that, you know.

[256] So if you take, two -year -olds and you group them together.

[257] Two -year -olds, by the way, grouped together are the most violent of human beings in age -matched groups.

[258] Okay, so among two -year -olds, there's a proportion of them who will spontaneously kick, fight, hit, bite, and steal.

[259] They're almost all males.

[260] And it's about 5 % of the males.

[261] Now, most of them, this goes to Nature v. Nurture say, most of them get socialized out of that by the time they're four.

[262] Now, they would be more disagreeable.

[263] boys.

[264] So they're not empathic and compassionate, polite by temperament.

[265] But they can still be socialized.

[266] But a proportion of them don't get socialized.

[267] And they tend to be life course antisocial types.

[268] Yeah.

[269] I think Melanie Klein, she looked at infants like that at that age and she said that there was something called the greedy baby.

[270] And the greedy baby was like sucking the mother's breast so hard.

[271] It could never get enough milk.

[272] It was just so greedy for more and more.

[273] And she saw that this, the child got older, that kind of greediness and that kind of selfish behavior only got worse and worse and worse.

[274] 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 this.

[275] Oh yeah.

[276] Well, there is a genetic component too because that sort of proclivity runs in families.

[277] And also there's a genetic underpinning to variation in agreeableness.

[278] Now, you know, if you have a tough kid like that and you're very agreeable, the kid can run roughshod over you.

[279] It's very difficult for you to do the socialization.

[280] And so, like, one of the problems that women face with men, so men are reliably less agreeable than women.

[281] That's cross -culturally.

[282] And it's true, it's even more true in egalitarian societies.

[283] And so women have to be agreeable because, I think primarily because they have to take care of infants.

[284] And that's an extremely self -sacrificing occupation, especially when they're under nine months.

[285] But with men, they have to select men who are agreeable enough to be generous and kind and share, but they have to be disagreeable enough to keep the real psychopaths and the manipulators at bay.

[286] And so it's a chronic problem for the human race.

[287] Okay, so you're doing all these jobs, and you're seeing the politicking, and it's not going well for you, and you decide to analyze the behavior of the people that are acting in these underground oppressive ways.

[288] You're definitely going to see that if you're being pushed around, a lot, you know?

[289] And so you decided to make that an object of study.

[290] Yeah.

[291] You know, I wasn't, it's not so much that I was pushed around.

[292] Some of it was also just observing how other people were being treated.

[293] I have this idea that I talk about in the book that, you know, people will always wear the mask of being agreeable and friendly, even the most psychotic boss will always know how to be somewhat charming and present themselves.

[294] But you look at how they treat other people when you're not observing them behind closed doors.

[295] And that's when some of their ugly behavior will come out.

[296] They kind of hide it very well from the public.

[297] So a lot of it was observing how other people were mistreated.

[298] And so when I worked in Hollywood, you know, in some industries, I have to say some industries are a lot worse than others.

[299] So when you're working at that factory job that you're mentioning, people will tend to be kind of united and around a single purpose.

[300] There won't be much politic and going on.

[301] An environment where Hollywood, so much of it is money and ego, et cetera, the level is...

[302] And the desire for fame, you know, and that's going to attract a disproportionate number.

[303] So it's the people that are more likely to be the way that you describe are high in extroversion, especially assertiveness, and low in agreeableness.

[304] That's kind of the personality disorder axis, high in extroverted assertiveness and low in agreeableness, especially compassion.

[305] And then if you add unconscientiousness to that, you got someone who's bordering on psychopathic.

[306] And they could still be high in openness.

[307] They could still be creative and intelligent, but they'd be manipulative as hell and callous.

[308] And I would say, another thing I was going to ask you is because you worked in Hollywood, and that is a place that invites people who want to be to make a display of themselves, let's say.

[309] And there's some utility in that, right?

[310] We want people to be actors.

[311] We want them to be enthusiastic and entertaining.

[312] Yes.

[313] 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?

[314] Well, definitely.

[315] But after the book came out, my first book, The 48 Laws, it became hugely popular in the hip -hop world among musicians, which is why I ended up doing a book with 50 cent.

[316] And I found out that the music industry was even worse than Hollywood.

[317] And then I was in Washington for a book tour for the 48 laws.

[318] And this woman came running up to me who worked in Voice of Americans.

[319] She was saying, you have no idea how the 48 laws of power exactly describe the environment I'm in.

[320] And then I was in a conference with people who were in non -profits in San Diego.

[321] And this woman was saying, boy, you describe the nonprofit work politically.

[322] it is so perfect, it is so political, it's so much about ego.

[323] It's horrible, but that's true of the non -profit world, you know?

[324] I mean, that might have to do with that moral posturing, eh?

[325] Well, 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.

[326] It wasn't that you perform better than others.

[327] It wasn't that your branch, your economic branch was outperforming others, and therefore you were elevated to a higher position.

[328] It was pure politicking.

[329] It was pure manipulation.

[330] How close could you get to the rule?

[331] Dominance hierarchy maneuvering.

[332] Yeah.

[333] So when you have like a nonprofit world where it's not based on money or results, it's more on, you get very political environments like that where there's no kind of quantification of what one is doing superior work than others.

[334] Yeah, you know, I talk to, Woodridge, Wildridge, Adrian Woldridge, and he wrote some books on the history of meritocracy.

[335] They're very, very interesting.

[336] He writes for the economist.

[337] And he, so, you know, that the idea of meritocracy is under assault.

[338] Now, I think the idea of merit per se is under assault.

[339] And what Wilderidge has done was look at how societies were structured in the absence of the meritocratic ethos.

[340] And so that's in the absence of a belief that there is such a thing as productive competence.

[341] And he talked about nepotism, which, by the way, psychopaths practice nepotism.

[342] They're not only selfish.

[343] They do differentially benefit their immediate kin.

[344] And hereditary aristocracy.

[345] So if you don't have meritocracy, and if your hierarchies aren't predicated on competence, you don't get a non -competitive utopia.

[346] No, not at all.

[347] Yeah, exactly.

[348] You get nepotism and this political infighting.

[349] And that is, like, it's no wonder that affected you, because that's absolutely toxic.

[350] It's just sickening.

[351] And it does produce a situation where the worst people can, the worst people torture the people who are competent for their competence.

[352] It's really ugly.

[353] Yeah.

[354] And, you know, when I came at university, I went to University of Wisconsin and I had, you know, my degree in classics and literature, et cetera.

[355] You know, I wasn't expecting this.

[356] I expected that the harder you tried, the better the work that you predict, the more you tried to, you know, get results, that's what mattered, right?

[357] And then to suddenly be blindsided this because nobody in our culture tells young people that this is what the world is going to be like.

[358] And that's sort of a lot of where this book came out of.

[359] I wrote it when I was 38, 39, so I was already a bit older.

[360] But your parents don't prepare you for this.

[361] Schools don't prepare you for this.

[362] The university certainly doesn't prepare you for.

[363] In fact, it leads you to believe the opposite.

[364] And so you enter the 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 your 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 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 trauma sort of occurs in proportion to how much of your belief it demolishes.

[365] And so if you have a too positive and too naive view of the world, and especially if you encounter someone malevolent, they can really do you in psychologically.

[366] And they often will too because, well, they have their reasons.

[367] And so.

[368] Yeah.

[369] Yeah, I can remember I had a job in journalism and I wrote this article about Italy.

[370] I thought it was a great article.

[371] And then the editor brought me in for lunch.

[372] And he was like having his second or third martini.

[373] And he started to tell me that, Robert, you're never going to be a writer.

[374] You don't have the discipline for it.

[375] You're just too wild.

[376] You don't communicate to the reader, et cetera.

[377] You need to get out of this business.

[378] It's not for you.

[379] It was very painful.

[380] And then in looking back in it, I think he had set me up for this.

[381] I think that he had kind of commissioned.

[382] this article knowing that it was going to have some problems with it, etc. And that he was deliberately setting me up in this situation so that he, and I think a lot of it came from envy.

[383] You know, envy is a bad one.

[384] Envy and resentment, man, those are corrosive.

[385] They're soul and culture destroying emotions.

[386] You know, when I worked with my clients, we talked a lot about resentment, a lot.

[387] And I had kind of an axiom, which is, well, if you're resentful, there's only one of two things going on.

[388] One is you're whiny and neurotic and it's time to grow the hell up and take some responsibility.

[389] And so you've got to ask yourself that.

[390] 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.

[391] And so we'd try to sort out which of those it was.

[392] And then if it was that they had something to say or do, to stand up for themselves, for example, then we'd just strategize like Matt.

[393] So I had one client, for example.

[394] I really liked her.

[395] She was smart, man. Very, very, very, very, very competent, honest, hardworking, conscientious, diligent, attractive lawyer.

[396] And she'd moved firms.

[397] And those firms can be pretty cutthroat.

[398] You know, they're full of prosecutors.

[399] What do you expect, right?

[400] Right, right.

[401] And one guy, when she went into the firm, basically swiped her biggest client through a series of manipulative actions.

[402] Right.

[403] 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.

[404] And then when she started to complain about it, he started distributing rumors that she had mental health issues and, oh, it was absolutely awful.

[405] So we spent about six months strategizing how to deal with him.

[406] And so it was successful, you know, and I love doing that sort of thing.

[407] It was such fun helping people who are being killed by.

[408] Yeah, I do.

[409] Yeah, I do the same thing as well.

[410] Yeah, I'm sorry.

[411] So why do you think this was so popular?

[412] You said the music industry was particularly pathological.

[413] at least this is the reports you got.

[414] So why do you think that is?

[415] Do you have any theories about that?

[416] And then why do you think your books got to be so popular among all rappers say?

[417] Why do you think the music industry is the way it is?

[418] Yeah.

[419] I mean, do you think there's something specific about that industry that lends itself to that kind of corruption?

[420] And I've had a lot of people give me the same kind of feedback.

[421] There's a lot of money around, right?

[422] Huge amounts of money around.

[423] And people are, producers of music are very, they have a very exploitative kind of model of business, which is they, they seduce a first -time artist with a lot of money, but the contract is, and eventually they own all of the work, et cetera.

[424] So it was a very exploitive business model, particularly for African -American musicians who were historically very exploited.

[425] And so it's like Hollywood where so much of it is about pleasing people and having the right demeanor.

[426] So 50 Cent, who I wrote the book with, he dealt crack on the streets of Southside Queens, you know, he was a hustler at the age of nine.

[427] He saw everything, but nothing prepared him for the kind of Machiavellian games that music industry people would play.

[428] Right, you want to take a straightforward criminal over a psychopathic manipulator any day.

[429] Exactly.

[430] Well, and you talked about money.

[431] 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.

[432] You know what they want.

[433] They're kind of young dimensional.

[434] And you might have your moral qualms about it, but I'd still, I think that's partly why I'm an admirer of capitalism.

[435] It's like greed is not the worst of the vices by any stretch of the imagination.

[436] No, no, I agree with you on that.

[437] And so, you know, why are my books popular?

[438] I think there's a combination of things.

[439] First of all, I'm giving people something that's not out there, a kind of a realism.

[440] And I think a lot of people are inwardly very tired and very sick of all the kind of coddling that goes on with readers in our culture, where the people are tried to perpetuate this myth that'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.

[441] etc. And they kind of have the same kind of illusions that I had.

[442] And so the kind of the harshness of the book that first kind of shocked you sort of excites people.

[443] It appeals to their shadow side, if you will, you know.

[444] And that shadow side is very much repressed in our culture.

[445] 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.

[446] It has a very attracting pull on them.

[447] So I think that's part of the reason, because there's a kind of a notoriety around the book, and people almost feel like it's something naughty when they have it.

[448] And so I think that's part of the appeal of it.

[449] So I have a friend, he's a really good friend of mine, and I've known him since I was in college.

[450] And he's a tough guy.

[451] I mean, he grew up under rather poverty -stricken circumstances in northern Alberta, really on a frontier piece of land.

[452] Like it had only been broken 50 years before by his father, who was a longshoreman and an ex -military guy, good guy his father.

[453] But this guy grew up and he is tough.

[454] He worked in lead smelters and he wandered around Western Canada.

[455] He was my roommate when I went to college and it's still a good friend of mine and he ended up working with like delinquents.

[456] He went into social work oddly enough and he ended up working with some of the worst delinquents in Canada.

[457] And he's a really good guy.

[458] And he likes to help people get better, but he isn't naive at all.

[459] And then part of the reason that he was good at working with the delinquents was because there were no tricks they could get up to that he couldn't see right through.

[460] And that was partly because he had a real integrated shadow.

[461] I mean, I'll give you an example of him.

[462] So one day, I was living in this town called Grand Prairie and it was at the height of the oil boom.

[463] And so there was a rough town, and there were lots of rough bars in it, and lots of young men.

[464] in there with plenty of money and plenty of, they come in for, you know, three days after being out minus 40 weather working on the oil rigs.

[465] And they were ready to party, man. We had a party one night in this kind of frat house that I went to college in and about way too many people showed up.

[466] And some of them were real troublemakers.

[467] And one, we had a table that was pretty full of beer bottles and vodka bottles and so forth.

[468] And one guy just went over, like, tore the leg off and knocked the table over.

[469] And then a bunch of us got together and chased them all out.

[470] And this friend of mine, he said, oh, they'll be back.

[471] And so he went upstairs and he put on some steel -told cowboy boots.

[472] It was just like a bloody western.

[473] He came marching down the stairs.

[474] And just as he entered the living room, there was a big knock on the front door.

[475] It was these hooligans coming back to cause grief.

[476] And he just didn't break stride.

[477] He opened the door.

[478] He pulled open the door.

[479] And there was a guy standing there were ready to fight.

[480] And he kicked them underneath the chin with his steel -told cowboy boot, knocked him right over the front porch.

[481] And the, you know, and the battle was on, but that was exactly what he was like, you know, and he had, his shadow was integrated.

[482] You could, he was a great roommate.

[483] He, he reciprocated everything.

[484] I always knew if I bought groceries one week, he'd buy it the next.

[485] Like he was a straight shooter, you could trust him.

[486] But he was not naive, man. And that made him able to deal with delinquents and to help them.

[487] So that's part of that integration of that shadow.

[488] Yeah, I go very deeply into the shadow in a chapter in my last book, the laws of human nature.

[489] and I try and talk about how one integrates the shadow because it's not an easy answer for that.

[490] You know, people are kind of perplexed.

[491] 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.

[492] You have that as well.

[493] I'm talking to the people that my readers.

[494] You have that aggressiveness when you were young and it got socialized out of you.

[495] And then it kind of got repressed.

[496] and it's like a lost self that lives inside of you and it's screaming to come out.

[497] How do you integrate it?

[498] And so the main thing is you have to be aware that you have this shadow side.

[499] You can't run away from it.

[500] You have to acknowledge that it exists.

[501] You almost have to embrace it in a way.

[502] A good parent too does everything he or she can not to repress that.

[503] Like what you want to do with children is you want to, like you want them to be forceful.

[504] You want them to have some power.

[505] Exactly.

[506] You want them to integrate 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 guide that into more sophisticated development you see this in schools too now you know when my kids went to school this was so dumb 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 have to put up with consequences.

[507] But so one rule was the school had, not only could you not throw snowballs, you couldn't make them.

[508] And so they were trying to, yeah, exactly, you should shake your head, that's for sure.

[509] It's 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.

[510] It's like, first of all, you know, I studied PSJ.

[511] Yeah.

[512] A hockey game is not competitive exactly because, in a hockey game, well, everybody, no one brings a basketball, everybody plays hockey.

[513] So that's cooperation.

[514] And then on the team, you have to cooperate.

[515] And like if you're the star, but you never pass, you're just a dumb son of a bitch, you're not the star.

[516] And so there's tremendous amount of cooperation in all those competitive games.

[517] They're integrated.

[518] And this idea that, you know, make children better by not allowing them to be competitive.

[519] It's so.

[520] It's disgusting.

[521] It is.

[522] Well, that's the Freudian devouring mother, right?

[523] that's, oh, well, everyone's safe and no one's going to ever hurt anyone.

[524] That's kind of where a lot of young people are, 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.

[525] And that's where they get really shocked by the realities of the world.

[526] So all this coddling and this idea that there doesn't have to be a winner.

[527] We don't have to get prizes for first place.

[528] Everybody should get a prize.

[529] You know, all you're doing is setting your children up for.

[530] for massive, you know, shocks when they enter the world and they see that it's not like that.

[531] Yeah, and then they get disillusioned and depressed, you know, or traumatized by, I mean, when my son's hockey team in his school, they won the city championship, which was a big deal, you know, and the school was pretty happy about that, to his credit, so was the coach, but the principal, who was this authoritarian empath, she was an awful person, I thought.

[532] Authoritarian empath, that's interesting.

[533] Yeah, well, yeah.

[534] She used more virtue as a club.

[535] Oh, no, there's plenty of those people around.

[536] She said, well, really, today we're all winners.

[537] And the coach had the, yeah, exactly.

[538] No, it is sickening because it's, you know, my son was just appalled by it.

[539] But the coach had enough guts.

[540] He said, no, no, the hockey team won.

[541] And it's not like the kids in the school were jealous.

[542] Some of them were obviously, but most of them were really happy, like you are when your sports team wins.

[543] Yeah.

[544] And most people are generous enough so that.

[545] they're able to celebrate someone else's victory without, and that's the same.

[546] I saw this with birthday parties.

[547] I just bloody well hated this.

[548] It's like, well, every child gets a gift bag.

[549] It's like, no, you know, they have their damn birthday.

[550] Every child doesn't need a damn gift bag.

[551] And this is this same, this same naive, treakly, and it's authoritarian too, because it imposes this kind of view of the world.

[552] It's like, no, it's this kid's day to be special.

[553] That's why we're celebrating this kid.

[554] The rest of them, if they can't take that, it's like there's something wrong with the way that they've been treated and attended to.

[555] Well, a lot of my books, I've tried to remove the kind of taboo or the negative associations we have with the word like power or with the word ambition.

[556] You know, I try and say ambition is a good thing.

[557] It means that you have, you believe in yourself, you have some self -love, and you believe you're worth something, and you want to go out.

[558] and achieve and create something worthwhile for other people.

[559] So ambition 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.

[560] This is partly why boys are failing in our schools now at a disproportionate rate, you know.

[561] And I see this, there's an assault of the sort that you're describing on the better part of striving masculinity.

[562] And, you know, I had a friend who killed himself.

[563] because he identified his ambition with, you know, the patriarchal force that's devouring the environment, let's say, and that's, you know, the cause of historical horror.

[564] And you might say, well, no one takes that on to themselves to that degree.

[565] And that's, well, you can say that, but you just don't know what the hell you're talking about.

[566] People take that on to themselves all the time.

[567] And then 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 it 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.

[568] But the way I kind of integrated in my shot, I'm not saying this is a model, but the way I integrated it was through my books.

[569] 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 kind of anger.

[570] But I don't rant.

[571] I don't yell and kind of put people down.

[572] I kind of channel it into something productive and something creative.

[573] And so to me that's - Yeah, I definitely do that when I'm lecturing.

[574] You know, when people have called.

[575] commented some of the people who've criticized me that I'm an angry person, which isn't true, but it's definitely that anger, that capacity for anger definitely is something that gives you force and it can push, and anger definitely.

[576] So psychophysiologically, so imagine that this is obviously a thought experiment, imagine you're chasing a cat with a broom.

[577] 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 just a cat.

[578] Well, and the reason for that is that fear will facilitate either freezing or escape.

[579] But sometimes fear isn't the right response, and anger will suppress fear.

[580] And so one of the tools that we have at our disposal psychologically is anger as an antidote to the terror that would otherwise freeze you.

[581] And you can integrate that, you know, that's, you know, if you have some justifiable moral outrage, let's say, something really annoys you or, or, or, or, you or I shouldn't say that deeply violates your sense of moral propriety.

[582] I don't mean trivial things.

[583] Then the fact of that forceful response can motivate you to do things.

[584] Well, it does for lecture, but certainly to write.

[585] It takes a lot of energy to write, man. You need all those sources of energy if you're going to be able to do it.

[586] Just even to turn it on yourself to discipline yourself, you know?

[587] It's like I had to grab myself by the scruff of the neck when I was a young guy to sit down.

[588] Sit down, God damn it, and write.

[589] And there's a force that's necessary, especially if you're open, because you're all over the place, if you're creative, to get yourself to sit down and focus.

[590] Yes, that's right.

[591] Yeah.

[592] And, you know, some of that anger, you know, I think Young talks about this is that that dark side contains a lot of energy.

[593] It contains a lot of power.

[594] or those two -year -olds that are kicking and screaming, that's all this kind of force behind it.

[595] 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, et cetera.

[596] 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.

[597] So that shadow side, when you deny it, only negative things will have.

[598] happen and it is extremely important for people to first recognize it in themselves you know and it's very hard for a lot of people to do that well i found like i said earlier that 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 resentment so you're not looking hard enough If 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.

[599] Right.

[600] But that, the fan, because if someone is oppressing you genuinely and you're not standing up for yourself, then there'll be these compensatory fantasies.

[601] Yeah.

[602] Yeah.

[603] So one day I'll tell you a story about that.

[604] So one day I was, I'd been renovating my house and it took a long time.

[605] And the neighbors, this house was a complete.

[606] derelict and it was a semi -detached like really a derelict 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 a city on us they they did everything they could to make it difficult even though they were attached to us and wanted to sell their house so we probably added like twenty five thousand dollars to the value of their house because it was no longer attached to a derelict.

[607] 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.

[608] So it clicked, and the neighbors banged on the wall.

[609] And then that night I couldn't sleep.

[610] And I had this, I would really be pushed to my limit by these people.

[611] And I had these visions in my mind of burning the damn place down.

[612] And I thought, oh, man, if you're starting to think about burning the place down, you should you should probably go say something.

[613] So I took, put on my park, and I went outside about six in the morning.

[614] I just waited for them to come out.

[615] They never did, but I went and knocked over on the door.

[616] And I said, I was making tea for my sister last night.

[617] And I closed the cupboard.

[618] You didn't happen to bang on the wall because you heard my cupboard closing, did you?

[619] And they said, yeah.

[620] And I said, okay, look, if you bugged me anymore, I'm going to cause you so much trouble.

[621] possibly imagine it.

[622] Yeah.

[623] And I meant it.

[624] It was like, because I knew it was bruin in the back of my mind.

[625] I said, because I was done.

[626] It was like, you want a war, you have no idea what you're getting into.

[627] And so they backed into the kitchen.

[628] And like two hours later, they came over and said, oh, you know, we're sorry and we won't do it again.

[629] But like I, what we did was the mistake you talk about.

[630] We backtrack continually trying to please them, you know, and every time they complained, we did what they wanted because we assumed we were dealing with reasonable people.

[631] 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 you know and things went more smoothly after that and and that's a good example of well paying attention to those fantasies because 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 you exactly yeah and a lot of times i look at people 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 yeah that's not that's not who i am but that is exactly who you are that is the 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 the 21 year old or, you know, they're just caught doing something.

[632] Yeah, so I watched people with their children a lot, hey?

[633] Yeah.

[634] And so when my son was a pretty assertive kid and tough, like he had a real will.

[635] And, you know, when he was nine months old and starting to crawl around, I taught him what no meant.

[636] And what no means is stop doing that or something you don't like will happen to you.

[637] That's what no means.

[638] Right.

[639] And so when he was nine months, he was starting to take books off shelves and get into the plants and so on because he was starting to crawl around.

[640] And so to teach him what no meant, I'd just grab his leg when he wasn't doing something that I didn't want him to do.

[641] And, you know, he would squawk and bitch and complain.

[642] And I'd say no, no, no. And I'd just hold him until he gave up and sometimes he would cry.

[643] And the reason he was cry is because he was frustrated and angry that I was mucking about with him.

[644] It's like, fair enough.

[645] He wanted to go explore.

[646] And, you know, fair enough, kid, you want to explore.

[647] But, You can't tear out the plant and get dirt all of the rug.

[648] 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.

[649] And by the time I did that for, say, six or seven days.

[650] And soon as if I just said, no, he would just stop.

[651] And sometimes he would cry.

[652] And then the week later, if I said, no, he'd just stop.

[653] So it took like two weeks, say.

[654] And then I knew that if I said no, he would stop.

[655] And so then I could let him explore.

[656] I could give them a lot of freedom.

[657] And then I'd have people come over to my house with their two -year -old or three -year -old.

[658] 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.

[659] They couldn't give the child any freedom at all.

[660] They had to wander around behind them all the time because they never knew what the child was going to get into.

[661] And so then you start to hate your child, right?

[662] 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 because you don't have a life.

[663] And we had another couple come over and they had two kids that were like four and five and they were just horrible.

[664] We sat down to eat.

[665] 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 but they didn't do anything to stop it.

[666] And, you know, in their minds they thought, well, aren't we permissive and nice and we never say no to our children?

[667] 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?

[668] You just met them.

[669] And your children embarrass you to death.

[670] And you think you're not going to get resentful about that?

[671] Right.

[672] And you think you're not going to take.

[673] And so here's how people would take it out on their kids.

[674] So imagine that happens.

[675] 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.

[676] Then your child goes off and draws a picture.

[677] Maybe they put a lot of work into it, eh?

[678] then they come running up to show you and that's a real good time to give them a pat on the head and say, look, isn't that great?

[679] But you're pissed off because you were embarrassed and so you look at it and you think, and that's all you have to do.

[680] It's like, that's not really worthy of my attention.

[681] You don't have to say anything mean.

[682] You just have to not attend in this manner.

[683] And then you got your revenge.

[684] And you think you won't do that, man. You know nothing about yourself.

[685] And you know, you read you in the paper sometimes, these mothers or fathers, they do something brutal to a child.

[686] And I know what that happened.

[687] I know how that happened.

[688] This is like no disciplinary strategies in the house.

[689] Yeah.

[690] The kid is driving the mother or father crazy.

[691] You know, and then maybe the mother or father, they're hungover one day.

[692] And maybe they just broke up with their boyfriend or girlfriend.

[693] Maybe they got, you know, hail it from their boss who's a tyrant and they haven't stood up to them.

[694] And the kid does the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time.

[695] And maybe he's actually pretty good at that by then.

[696] And it's like, out comes Satan himself.

[697] And all hell breaks.

[698] loose.

[699] It's like, I wouldn't do that.

[700] It's like, yeah, there's almost nothing you wouldn't do.

[701] You just don't know yourself very well.

[702] Yeah.

[703] Well, 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 et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[704] That takes a little bit of toughness on your part.

[705] You have to be kind of willing to put yourself on the line.

[706] 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.

[707] Because if you don't, then you set no limits and who knows what they'll end up doing.

[708] But a lot of this permissiveness is people are just basically afraid.

[709] They're afraid of any kind of confrontation.

[710] They're afraid of any kind of conflict.

[711] And through conflict and confrontation is how you actually grow.

[712] It's actually how you develop as a person.

[713] Hey, so here's a cool stout.

[714] This is really interesting, man. So there's been some great work on what predicts, what behavioral markers predict divorce in couples counseling.

[715] Really solid work.

[716] Okay, so here's one predictor.

[717] 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.

[718] And that's contempt, hey.

[719] They've got so, they've become so disconnected because they don't communicate because the resentment has built up that they now have contempt for each other.

[720] But here's, here's another.

[721] cool fact from that research.

[722] So if you have people track the number of positive and negative interactions with their partner, you can calculate ratios.

[723] And then you can see what the ratio is that that lends itself to the successful maintenance of a relationship.

[724] And so you might think, well, the more positive interactions, the better.

[725] And that's kind of true.

[726] So if it falls below five positive to one negative, the relationship is in danger.

[727] But if it's right, rises a you have five to one and you can kind of see that because 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 yeah but if it rises above 11 to one the relationship is also in danger and you can 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 inner 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 roughshod over them because they know some things you don't right it's so cool that it's above 11 to 1 so that means too much positivity is also is the death knoll for a relationship and you know you want someone with spark, right?

[728] It's like, well, what if I push you a little bit?

[729] Even teasing.

[730] You want the person to be able to push back a bit.

[731] 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.

[732] They're so fragile that if the other person pushes back, it kind of escalates into a battle.

[733] So real strength comes from the ability in a relationship or any kind of intimate or otherwise is the ability to take that kind of criticism to actually welcome it when people set limits for you and tell you that this kind of behavior is wrong.

[734] And then you can evaluate and assess yourself.

[735] Yeah, unless you want to repeat it stupidly forever, right?

[736] I mean, that's the alternative in a relationship is I don't like conflict.

[737] I've been in plenty of conflicts, like plenty, way more than is reasonable.

[738] But I don't like them.

[739] Well, a few people do.

[740] Well, I meet people now and then.

[741] I went to talk to Douglas Murray in New York City about a week ago, and we were talking about conflict, and he said, you know, he doesn't mind to fight.

[742] And I've met lots of people like that that, you know, they like that combativeness.

[743] And I don't really, but what I really hate is deferred conflict that escalates.

[744] It's like, it's better to get it over with now.

[745] And you're a fool if you think that running away from it is going to, you know, like if someone cuts you off in traffic and they're obviously really angry, it's probably better just to get the hell out of 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.

[746] Well, yeah, you know, just don't know what's up with them.

[747] They're really strangers.

[748] 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 Linus in the Peanuts cartoons.

[749] They had a dark side, those cartoons, man. They did.

[750] They sure did.

[751] Yeah, yeah.

[752] They would be canceled now probably.

[753] Yeah, they couldn't exist now, I don't think.

[754] Yeah, I think that's right.

[755] Yeah, because a lot of Schultz's characters, Lucy was actually not a likable character at all.

[756] Right, right.

[757] And she was really oppressive to Linus, who was a good character.

[758] Yeah, yeah.

[759] Yeah, good humor always has an edge.

[760] But yeah, that, you don't get rid of the negative part of yourself, especially that aggressive part by pretending it doesn't exist.

[761] That quite the contrary.

[762] That just doesn't work at all.

[763] Right.

[764] Yeah.

[765] I'm sorry, you're going to say anything?

[766] I was just going to ask you about your new.

[767] I wanted to ask you about working with 50 cent and the rappers.

[768] And I wanted to ask you about your new book, too.

[769] So let's start with.

[770] So how did this partnership with 50 cent come about?

[771] Well, the book was very popular with rappers.

[772] As I said, because of the nature of the music industry.

[773] And he reached out to me. He wanted to meet me because the 48 laws of power was sort of his Bible as he.

[774] he expressed it.

[775] So I met him in New York, kind of in the back room of the steakhouse.

[776] It was sort of like something straight out of the godfather.

[777] I was kind of the one white guy amongst his whole group there.

[778] I was a little bit intimidated, to be honest.

[779] I didn't know what to expect because he has his reputation.

[780] Ended up, he was really nice and really interesting, actually a very kind of sweet guy, not what you expect.

[781] And I just finished writing my book on warfare and strategy, which is kind of my version of Sun Tzu's art. of war, how to strategize some conflicts, sort of like what you're talking about.

[782] And he has a very strategic mind.

[783] And he got, we got very, we kind of had a really nice connection.

[784] And I thought, you know, so much in our culture is creating these stupid kind of divisions and walls.

[785] Like you're in academia, you only write academic books.

[786] You're a popular person.

[787] You only write popular books.

[788] You know, you come from this community.

[789] You come from that community.

[790] And they should, you never communicate.

[791] And I thought it would be very interesting to write a book coming from two opposite backgrounds.

[792] You know, me, middle class Jewish boy from Los Angeles and him from Southside Queens.

[793] Something interesting could happen from a collaboration.

[794] There's not enough of that in our culture, I believe, because even though our circumstances were very different, our minds were very similar.

[795] We were thinking at a similar plane that kind of transcended these sort of superficial differences.

[796] 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 to ending up in prison.

[797] What saved him.

[798] And I determined that the quality he had was this kind of fearlessness.

[799] And it isn't the kind of fearlessness where you go beating people up or something.

[800] It's kind of an inner strength.

[801] He had been shot when he was like 20 years old like nine bullets right there through a car window kind of one of the 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 die bring it on I don't really care and so 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.

[802] 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 actually of death itself, not being afraid of the reality of your situation on and on.

[803] So the book that we formed together was kind of a meditation on 10 forms of fearlessness.

[804] And I found, you know, I thought that I was a relatively fearless person, which in some ways I am.

[805] I seem agreeable, but I'm actually in some ways a little bit bold and adventurous.

[806] And but compared to him, I realized, no, I'm actually riddled with fears.

[807] 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.

[808] So that's where that book came out.

[809] Yeah, it's nice to have a model like that really close by.

[810] right, to contrast yourself with.

[811] Yeah, you can learn a lot from.

[812] So do you think, you think that fearlessness that you saw on him, you think part of that was a consequence of that brush with death?

[813] How much of that do you think was temperamental, too, in him?

[814] Well, well, there's a, 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?

[815] He has a very kind of strategic under control, fearlessness.

[816] Hey, I got something cool to tell you about that.

[817] So I was talking to David Buss.

[818] Yes, I believe it.

[819] And he's an evolutionary psychologist, a good one.

[820] We're talking about this Machiavellian personality triad, the dark triad, the Del Pallos, UBC, yeah, okay.

[821] So here's something really interesting.

[822] It's the bad boy paradox, they call it, that young naive women are attracted to those Machiavellian types.

[823] but when they get older and more experienced, they start to be able to see through that.

[824] The reason they're attracted to it, as far as I can tell, and I talked about this with Bust 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.

[825] And so they get sucked in by the sort of psychopathic recklessness because they think it's fearless competence.

[826] And then, of course, the guys who are doing that, they'll pray on that because they're trying to ape competence.

[827] 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.

[828] But they want that fearlessness that does go along with true generosity and competence and also the ability to keep real darkness away.

[829] Well, a lot of those people who display that kind of what you call mimicking, fearlessness.

[830] Yes, macho.

[831] That's the macho thing.

[832] They're actually hiding the opposite.

[833] They're actually very, very riddled with insecurities.

[834] They're not, you know, and they're, they're kind of create this sort of bravado and 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.

[835] But someone like 50 -scent, he was very, he's very comfortable with himself.

[836] He knows who he is.

[837] He knows where he came from.

[838] His mother was a hustler on the street.

[839] So he knew the limits of the game.

[840] And I don't know, I think there is maybe a slight genetic component to it.

[841] I can't really put my finger on it.

[842] Why he was able to have this kind of self -control where other people did.

[843] Yeah, well, that dimension, neuroticism, you know, if you're in a rough environment and you're low in neuroticism, that's pretty damn helpful.

[844] Because imagine that what neuroticism is unit of psychophysiological upset caused per unit of stress.

[845] Yeah.

[846] And some, or unit of danger.

[847] And some people overreact and some people underact.

[848] Sometimes the overreaction saves your life.

[849] Sometimes the underreaction gets you killed.

[850] So it's not like there's a clear answer.

[851] So there's variability there.

[852] Some people are much more calm, not volatile.

[853] They don't withdraw temperamentally.

[854] And that's a more masculine temperament, by the way.

[855] Yeah, I agree.

[856] But 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.

[857] And that can be a real blessing.

[858] 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.

[859] Did you see the same thing happening with 50 cent?

[860] Oh, my God.

[861] His music is incredibly aggressive.

[862] And that's, and to an extent it's kind of violent.

[863] And I must admit, it really appeals to me. So when I was writing.

[864] Why, why, why?

[865] That's cool because it's so interesting that so many rap fans are young white guys.

[866] I know, I know.

[867] Yeah, yeah, but that's really psychologically interesting, right?

[868] Because if they've been coddled and their ambition has been squelched and everything about them that's aggressive has been shamed out of existence, that's part of that attraction of that dark fantasy, right?

[869] And 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.

[870] It's part of that desire to bring that shadow out of the shadows and into the light.

[871] Well, I wasn't really, I was a little bit different in that.

[872] I kind of understand, you know, my own anger.

[873] I wasn't so much coddled.

[874] But what I really enjoyed about his music is it just seemed very real.

[875] And kind of the beat kind of catches you up in a primal sense and kind of the aggressive.

[876] just seems very direct and very refreshing, by the way.

[877] And you could tell, you know, I say in my book mastery that by a person's style, by how they write a book, by how they put language together or the music they create, reveal something very, very deep about their character, about who they are.

[878] And so a lot of rap kind of comes across as sort of false, like someone is trying really hard to have that kind of thug persona.

[879] It's not real.

[880] But it really smelled authentic with him.

[881] And the fact that he'd been shot and nearly died, you know, just kind of added to that aura.

[882] But there was something very real about and very authentic in a culture where so much isn't real.

[883] I think that was the deep, deep appeal in a primal sense of 50s music.

[884] And when I was writing the war book, I was trying to get myself in a martial mood to write it.

[885] I would actually listen to his music to kind of put me in the mood to write some of the chapters.

[886] that in Beethoven.

[887] What do you like from, what Beethoven do you like?

[888] What pumped you up?

[889] Well, when I was a kid, one of the first albums, I was first kind of raised on classical music.

[890] Then I got into jazz and rock and everything.

[891] But I got a collection of his ninth symphonies.

[892] And God, there's a kind of an aggression and violence, like to the fifth symphony and the ninth symphony.

[893] It's just kind of, you know, like they used to clockwork orange.

[894] there's something so overwhelmingly powerful about it, right?

[895] It just, you can't.

[896] The choral section in the ninth is like that.

[897] It's so powerful.

[898] Yeah.

[899] And isn't that so interesting that the ode to joy has that primal aggressive force?

[900] And it makes joy, it makes joy is, you know, in the naive sense, it's, well, you're happy.

[901] It's like, no, this joy is that integrated, terrible power that you definitely hear in superb music.

[902] yeah yeah and so when it 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 ones work as well it's like it's like encountering the terrible force of good you know you think about moses in the burning bush it's or or jacob wrestling with God.

[903] It's like, well, why is it a burning bush?

[904] Why is it terrifying?

[905] Why do you wrestle with God?

[906] Why do you get hurt?

[907] It's like, well, because good in its full force has this unbelievable, what has this integration of power.

[908] And it's no wonder it terrifies people because it just burns everything away in comparison.

[909] Right, right.

[910] Yeah, I mean, a lot of the new books that I'm writing about, which is the sublime is, as I'm talking about, it's a combination of two emotions of both kind of pain and pleasure of excitement and fear at the same time.

[911] So you're confronting something that kind of intimidates you, but is so awesome that you can, you know, you're just overwhelmed.

[912] And the confluence of two emotions, opposing emotions at the same time, is very, very powerful for a human being.

[913] Yeah, I've just written a book that I'm going to publish next year that's called an ABC of Childhood Tragedy, and it's a combination of dark humor and beauty.

[914] It's the same.

[915] We're trying to, we're experimenting with exactly the same thing, those, that paradoxical juxtaposition of dark and light emotions.

[916] There is something sublime about that, that's, and something awe -inspiring about that.

[917] It's, I guess it's, it's part of bringing what's dark into the light or subsuming it under the light, maybe.

[918] So why do you, why the sublime, what are you pursuing there?

[919] Well, what's the reason, um, you know, the ultimate in sublime is to me, So the way I look at it is being a human being socialized is a kind of a world.

[920] There's a limit, a circle that we have to live inside, certain codes and conventions that we have to abide by.

[921] And we all do that.

[922] And the codes and conventions for 5th century, BC, China are not the same as what we have now, but there's still that limit.

[923] And what humans are attracted to what lies beyond that limit.

[924] It's just part of our nature.

[925] It's a first part of it.

[926] And when we explore beyond the social limits and codes and things we're supposed to, to do in ways we're supposed to act.

[927] It's deeply exciting and thrilling.

[928] There's also that element of fear involved, right?

[929] See, I think that's a better, that's a better, what would you call it, formulation than Nietzsche's idea of will to power is the desire to exist on that sublime edge.

[930] And that is the border between order and chaos that you're describing, right?

[931] And the thing, and that is the source of meaning itself.

[932] 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 or something discordant.

[933] Yes, exactly.

[934] And then integrated within sort of a higher, what a higher unity.

[935] And it's deeply meaningful.

[936] It puts you on that edge of the sublime.

[937] And, and, and, And we do find the meaning that helps sustain us in life exactly at that place.

[938] That's something more deeply real than anything else.

[939] Well, and sort of the ultimate thing beyond that limit is death itself.

[940] And the word sublime means up to the threshold of a door or sublimin, lemon being the limit.

[941] Right, like subliminal.

[942] And so 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.

[943] I had a stroke and I came, you know, just an inch away from dying myself.

[944] I was driving my car.

[945] 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 kind of the ultimate sublime experience.

[946] 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.

[947] And why unfortunately?

[948] Because of the price you had to pay for it.

[949] Yeah, the price is I can't take a walk.

[950] I can't do the swim.

[951] I can do the things that I used to love.

[952] So, you know, I'm kind of, I can, you know, I'm functional.

[953] I can walk around the house, but I can't take a hike.

[954] And I can't do my long distance swimming or my mountain biking or anything like that.

[955] so I paid a price, but I'm alive.

[956] Yeah, well, and it was so interesting that that was, it was in the aftermath of that devastating experience that you decided to turn particularly to the sublime.

[957] 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, and kind of that's...

[958] I don't understand that, so why that, why make that as, I'm not disputing, it.

[959] I just don't understand.

[960] Like, I mean, you talked also about 50 cents brush with death.

[961] But why does the sublime in your estimation, why is it tangled up with the idea of death?

[962] Well, because there's a limit, that limit and experiencing the limit gives you that sense of excitement and fear at the same time.

[963] Well, death is the ultimate limit.

[964] 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.

[965] I actually peered inside of it.

[966] No, other people have had much stronger near -death experiences.

[967] Mine was more of the milder sort, but still, I peered as far as near -death experiences go, well, relatively mine.

[968] Well, you know, my coma lasted an hour or something.

[969] Some people, you know, there.

[970] That's nothing, man. Experts, they have comas for like three years.

[971] Well, okay, all right.

[972] I could have had a, you know, a more intense near -death experience, but it was pretty intense.

[973] That sounds like it was sufficient.

[974] It is.

[975] But so the sense of life is almost too much.

[976] It's overpowering and it's immediacy.

[977] And we humans try and kind of dull the razor edge so much so that we can live.

[978] 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 things that you don't want to confront is very, very, very powerful.

[979] And I'm sorry, Siri just keeps up hearing me. And so, so annoying.

[980] So, you know, it creates.

[981] So when you have that, it's like the ultimate, it's a mix of, you know, they call in French the orgasm, le petit morgue 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 be exploring now you see that in the ease in which laughter and tears can be interchange right you see that with children they can switch from laughter to tears in no time.

[982] And you know, you can laugh so hard that you cry.

[983] And it's often, too, when you're crying about something sorrowful that someone can say something funny and it'll switch to laughter.

[984] And that's all a way down at the level of instinct, right?

[985] Where these, it's so interesting to see the opposites touch at that level.

[986] Yeah.

[987] So the reason why I'm doing the Elysinian Mysteries, just to bring that back, is I have a chapter on pagan religions, on what I call the pagan sublime.

[988] And I'm trying to tell the reader that we don't have the right conception of ancient religions.

[989] They're actually very different from what we think.

[990] We have these kind of cliched 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.

[991] Like, whoa, we're so beyond that.

[992] But actually, pagan religions were extremely serious and they were based on creating go away serious.

[993] And they were based on creating very powerful emotional responses in people.

[994] And that was what primal religion was about or ancient religion was about.

[995] It wasn't based on texts, on dogma, on the written word.

[996] So the Ellicinian mysteries, because there are mysteries, because nobody ever wrote about it.

[997] There's no text.

[998] There's nothing written that we can go to.

[999] Yes, there's the hymn to Demeter that kind of maybe describes a little bit of what it's based on.

[1000] But we don't know really what happened because nothing was ever written down.

[1001] It was simply about creating this overwhelming emotional reaction in which you took the initiates to the edge of death.

[1002] You made them experience death in life, which is the story of Demeter and Persephone.

[1003] They were like making them feel as if they had gone into the underworld itself.

[1004] And that created a whole new relationship to life.

[1005] But I wanted this idea that religion isn't this kind of milk -toasty thing that people think about.

[1006] nowadays.

[1007] It was initially extremely powerful reaction to human vulnerability to our weakness in this immense cosmos with all of these very powerful forces.

[1008] And the religious rituals were to actually mirror that and give you a kind of compensatory sense that you could control it.

[1009] You could contain it within these kind of powerful experiences.

[1010] Oh, it's really interesting to me that you've come through your analysis of the darkness and then a consequence of that was to be motivated to pursue.

[1011] the sublime.

[1012] 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.

[1013] Wow.

[1014] 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?

[1015] And that emerges out of the darkness that's greater and more powerful than the darkness.

[1016] And part of the looking into the dark side of you yourself is you find the power that enables you to deal with mortality.

[1017] And there is something sublime about that.

[1018] It's so cool that, you know, all your work investigating and trying to integrate the shadow has led you to this, to this, what, what, what, what, that your intuition has been gripped by the idea of the sublime.

[1019] Yeah, I never, where you think you'd end up.

[1020] Well, yeah, a lot of the, um, impetus for the book is another little bit of ang.

[1021] as well.

[1022] So I always have to have some anger in order to feel the impulse to write and just discipline myself.

[1023] And my angered now is 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 just sort of programmed for them by Facebook or social media.

[1024] And they're sort of told what they're supposed to think and they're kind of programmed.

[1025] 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 mind -blowing.

[1026] It's just absolutely almost sublime, in my opinion.

[1027] And yet so many people are just living, like as if they're sleepwalking, is it that, you know, I talk 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 be who we are.

[1028] the odds against it are like $8 trillion to one.

[1029] I mean, even more than that.

[1030] But people aren't thinking about this.

[1031] They're not aware of the awesomeness of just the fact of being alive, of the cosmos as it evolved, as things on Earth evolve the way they are.

[1032] And so I'm kind of angry a little bit about how people are just not aware of this.

[1033] 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 help them find out what they're angry about.

[1034] It's like, well, what's your problem?

[1035] You know, you say that's, what's your problem?

[1036] But actually, you want to know.

[1037] It's like, because 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.

[1038] Right.

[1039] There's something that stands out for you as, you know, something that violates your sense of moral propriety, let's say.

[1040] 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 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 it that's in that anger it's in that anger at least to some degree.

[1041] Yeah, and as I said, I can't write without it.

[1042] I don't know why.

[1043] 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 sometimes, you know, you have to be, that's right.

[1044] I mean, I find when I'm sitting down to write a chapter, because it's hard to sit down and write a chapter.

[1045] 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.

[1046] It's as hard as clinical work, which is the hardest work I ever did.

[1047] 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.

[1048] It has to be important, and that means it has to be dealing with something weighty.

[1049] And if it's weighty, it's going to act, it's going to, what's going to call out of you, all your emotional responses, including the, well, certainly including anger, certainly that's a tremendous form of energy.

[1050] Well, I don't know if you have the same experience, but I read so many books for my research and that's the main thing that I fault them with.

[1051] There's no kind of energy behind it.

[1052] There's no human behind it.

[1053] There's no voice that's kind of screaming out.

[1054] Why does they have to say this?

[1055] Screaming out is exactly right.

[1056] That's a great book, Screams.

[1057] Like Solje Nitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, that's like 3 ,000 pages of screaming anger.

[1058] It's like you sustained screaming anger for 3 ,000 pages.

[1059] It's unbelievable.

[1060] It's unbelievable.

[1061] It's like being caught in a windstorm reading that book.

[1062] Yeah.

[1063] And that's no wonder that greatness is terrifying.

[1064] Yeah, yeah.

[1065] And that's kind of channeling the dark side in some ways.

[1066] Yeah, well, I mean, that man brought down a totalitarian state, at least in part.

[1067] It's like you have to have a lot of force.

[1068] And you think that there's not going to be anger in part to push back against, that's all that kind of petty tyranny that you were talking about in its most, what would you say, most rigidified and universal form.

[1069] And one man, you know, who decided he was going to tell the truth and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, I don't know if I'll have that kind of effect.

[1070] I'm sure I won't, but, um, that's sort of, 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, um, we have changed a lot in thousand, 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.

[1071] It's the definition of crave.

[1072] I don't think nothing.

[1073] Music does.

[1074] Music does, man. Music does.

[1075] And music was such a mystery for me when I was a young psychologist.

[1076] Like, music is meaningful and you can't argue the meaning away.

[1077] Like, it's invulnerable to criticism.

[1078] Isn't that so cool that there's a source of meaning that's invulnerable to?

[1079] criticism.

[1080] And then it's this harmonious interplay of beautiful patterns, predictability and unpredictability and an integration of passion and movement, right?

[1081] Because it compels movement.

[1082] You see, think of people dancing to a Strauss waltz, right?

[1083] They're harmonizing themselves with the sublime patterns of the world.

[1084] That's music.

[1085] 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.

[1086] that's where they go to things like raves or astral world and concerts like that.

[1087] They want that kind of collective experience, you know, that you used to get from like initiation rituals or kind of things in pagan times.

[1088] I remember once I was in Nicaragua.

[1089] I was a journalist.

[1090] I was covering the civil, the revolution, the civil war going on.

[1091] And the Pope was visiting Nicaragua at the time.

[1092] It's 1984, I believe.

[1093] and there was like 100 ,000 people crammed in this one square.

[1094] And, you know, I'm not by any means of Sandinista.

[1095] I had no sympathy for it, particularly as it is now.

[1096] But the feeling was that I experienced, I've never experienced anything else like it, of that crowd and that group emotion.

[1097] It can be frightening, too.

[1098] Well, yeah, we can think about.

[1099] Well, that's it.

[1100] Well, that's it.

[1101] That's the thing, that Nazis were unbelievably good at pulling, bringing that up, right?

[1102] 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.

[1103] It's going to come up in these underground ways because the craving for it is so deep.

[1104] And the Nazis were masters of spectacle and fire.

[1105] They were really good at that sort of thing.

[1106] And Orwell was courageous enough to point that out.

[1107] He said, well, we don't have anything with that power to combat that terrible, dramatic evil.

[1108] But you do see it in a concert.

[1109] You do see it in that in that close.

[1110] 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 Nuremberg.

[1111] Yeah.

[1112] And to think that we don't need that or that that's just superstition, that's extraordinarily naive.

[1113] Yeah.

[1114] I know.

[1115] I know.

[1116] I agree.

[1117] Yeah.

[1118] Well, look, it was really good talking with you, Ben.

[1119] Very nice talking to you.

[1120] I really enjoyed it.

[1121] These are things I never get to cover in all of my, you know, hundreds of interviews.

[1122] So I'm very, very grateful for it.

[1123] I've explored territory that I've never explored.

[1124] before, so thank you.

[1125] Yeah, isn't that fun?

[1126] Yeah, yeah.

[1127] The usual experience for me. Yeah, I enjoyed it a lot, man. Sorry, you're going to say some.

[1128] 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.

[1129] So I just want to thank you and let you know.

[1130] Nobody knows about that because I haven't really spoken about it, but that book was very important for me. Well, thank you.

[1131] I'm amazed you.

[1132] You read it.

[1133] It's a hell of a slog that book.

[1134] Six, 700 pages.

[1135] And I can't honestly say, I don't think I understood everything in it at least at the time.

[1136] But it was a very amazing book.

[1137] Well, thank you very much.

[1138] I'm glad to hear that.

[1139] And yeah, it took me. I wrote that book.

[1140] It took a lot of anger, man. I wrote that book every day, three hours a day, every day for 15 years.

[1141] Jesus.

[1142] Wow.

[1143] I had to put my hands around my neck and say, you sit, God damn it.

[1144] You sit down and write this goddamn book.

[1145] I had to quit drinking, had to quit having fun.

[1146] I know, believe me, I know all about that.

[1147] It took me five years to write my last book.

[1148] I can't imagine what 13 years would be like.

[1149] But yeah, I know all about that.

[1150] Well, good luck with your book on The Sublime.

[1151] I'm looking forward to it.

[1152] Oh, thank you very much.

[1153] Let's talk again when it, well, when you want to, but maybe when it comes out, that would be good.

[1154] I really like the, and I'm really curious about how you integrate your investigation of the Lusinian Mysteries.

[1155] I talked to some interesting people.

[1156] about that recently?

[1157] I know.

[1158] I had already written the piece when I heard them speak.

[1159] And then I changed some things because I realized some things I'd written were inaccurate.

[1160] But what I try to do in that is I try and I create a character, a woman who's going to the mysteries and what it was like from her first person account.

[1161] It's fictional.

[1162] But I'm trying to actually, you know, give her a history during the plague in the 1420s and then going to the mysteries and what it would feel like subjectively to be in there.

[1163] Yeah, I had a vision once that the shamanic experience was an antidote to icy northern totalitarianism.

[1164] You know, so many people are going to the jungle now, to the Amazon, to use ayahuasca and that sort of thing.

[1165] And there's, I mean, and that certainly that drug use, that hallucinogenic drug use was tied up with those primordial religions in some profound way.

[1166] We don't understand any of that even a little bit.

[1167] no and of course the elysini mysteries probably had that drug element as well because the drink they had was either mushrooms or ergot or or opium poppy seeds poppy so yeah 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 a pleasure talking to you and I certainly am much more clear about everything that you'd be doing.

[1168] I'm so glad I decided to talk to you.

[1169] Yeah, me too.

[1170] Me too.

[1171] Yeah.

[1172] I hope I brought a little bit of clarity there.

[1173] Oh, absolutely.

[1174] It was a really good discussion.

[1175] Yeah, yeah.

[1176] Thanks again.

[1177] Thanks again.

[1178] Thank you so much again.

[1179] Say hello to your daughter for me. I will.

[1180] I will do that, definitely.

[1181] Okay.

[1182] Yeah, she's a big fan.

[1183] And so is my producer, Eric.

[1184] Oh, Eric?

[1185] Is this Eric?

[1186] Yes, this Eric.

[1187] Oh, I had no idea.

[1188] Hey, Eric.

[1189] Yeah, big fan.

[1190] Yeah, big fan.

[1191] yeah well i was all shorted out when i was reading uh the daily laws i thought i don't know what to do with this it's like it's this what the hell's going on here and 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 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 wasn't clear about so but they were big defenders of you it's like oh that's good You've got to talk to him.

[1192] Thank you, Eric.

[1193] Thank you.

[1194] I appreciate that.

[1195] Yeah, of course.

[1196] Anything I can do for you.

[1197] Thank you.

[1198] Eric, why were these books helpful to you?

[1199] Oh, man. Fuck.

[1200] Good question.

[1201] That's tough.

[1202] There's been a few points in my life where, so I was a fighter.

[1203] That was my first career choice.

[1204] I was a mixed martial arts fighter.

[1205] And so to me, knowing, like from reading the four, laws of power.

[1206] It's very similar to Jiu -Jitsu.

[1207] 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.

[1208] So it started as like a very interesting, it started just as an interest.

[1209] Like, oh, it seems cool.

[1210] I think I saw you on Tim Ferriss's show or something like that.

[1211] 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.

[1212] And it prepared you.

[1213] Yes.

[1214] Yeah.

[1215] 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.

[1216] And so it's like across the entire spectrum of what type of thinker is reading it.

[1217] Yeah.

[1218] You have to be the type of thinker that's going to read, which isn't everybody.

[1219] But across that spectrum, everybody gets a little exactly what they need to hear in it.

[1220] So it makes it very practical.

[1221] You can then go off and be very practical with it.

[1222] The same thing that you do.

[1223] Yeah, yeah.

[1224] Well, it's really important.

[1225] One of the things you learn as a cognitive behavioral psychologist is that you have to nail this down to changeable behavior.

[1226] You know, one of the things I was always doing with my clients was, and I've recommended this to people many times in my lectures, is find the largest unit of change that you're actually willing to do.

[1227] Like maybe you won't clean up your room.

[1228] I stress that.

[1229] It's like, well, will you you move one thing off your desk today?

[1230] One thing.

[1231] Just one.

[1232] Or if you can't do that, because sometimes clients would come back and say, I couldn't even move one thing.

[1233] I said, well, why don't you look at one thing and think about moving it?

[1234] 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.

[1235] I had one client, this is so funny.

[1236] He lived at home with his mother, and he shouldn't.

[1237] He was too old for that.

[1238] And his room was a complete bloody catastrophe, and he knew it.

[1239] And he was probably mad at his mother for, like, coddling him.

[1240] And so he needed to vacuum the carpet.

[1241] So the deal for the week was, you go vacuum that carpet.

[1242] And he brought the vacuum cleaner into his room, but he left it in the doorway, like, on a slant.

[1243] And every day for a week, he had to walk over that vacuum cleaner.

[1244] He wouldn't put it back, and he wouldn't bring it in his room and vacuum.

[1245] And that's a good example of that underground resett.

[1246] You just think how angry you have to be at your situation to put a vacuum cleaner.

[1247] You know, it's probably a middle finger to me, too.

[1248] It's like, I'm not doing what that goddamn therapist says, you know, that kind of resentment.

[1249] But he literally walked over that damn vacuum cleaner for a week, you know, and we talked a bunch about that's like, well, what are you doing?

[1250] It's like, obviously you're angry.

[1251] Like, why can't you do this?

[1252] What are you angry about?

[1253] Well, man, he was angry about plenty of things.

[1254] Let's put it that way.

[1255] So, yeah, so 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 behavior.

[1256] I can you familiar with the work of Milton Erickson?

[1257] Yes.

[1258] What are you referring to specifically?

[1259] All of his work, I've just enamored with his work because his ability to create change and his patience and the strategies he would employ, I just think, are so brilliant.

[1260] 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.

[1261] Well, all those, my experience with all those great clinicians was, you're a fool if you don't take what they knew seriously.

[1262] I mean, those people had a reputation for a reason.

[1263] And there's, you know, I really learned a lot from the great behaviorists.

[1264] I learned a lot from the psychoanalysts, from the Rogerian types.

[1265] Like, they all had their, they all had something to say.

[1266] The behaviors 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, the big picture.

[1267] Yeah, so, hey, Eric, maybe we'll keep that discussion with you in the video.

[1268] Okay.

[1269] Yeah, I like that, yeah.

[1270] Sorry for cursing right away.

[1271] No, that's all right.

[1272] That was perfect.