Transcript for:
Power, Human Nature, and Personal Growth

People that really kind of reach the apex of power, like an Elon Musk or a Steve Jobs or a rock star, people in politics, they're weird. They're strange, right? And it's because they're not afraid of what makes them different. So what happens when you're younger, when you're four or five, you know something strange about you.

You're kind of connected. You're in a dream world. And then you enter school and people start saying, oh, that's weird. And they add.

The idea of being different kind of gets a negative connotation, which is the degree that you know what makes you different and you lean into it and you exploit it. That's where the realm of power lies. So I did, we did a show about two years ago and I went through a lot of the laws of human nature. And your newest book is kind of. I don't want to say a calendar, but it's daily.

It's meant to be consumed day by day. And of course, like any kind of weirdo interviewer, I plowed through the whole thing in about two days in audio form. You're supposed to do it day by day. You're supposed to have taken 365 days.

I guess we didn't have that much time, though. No. I was going to say, I could have taken a year to prep it, but it would have been a really, really slow and grueling process. This.

And I'll mention this in the intro to the show. This is going to be a little bit of an all over the place conversation. Well, that's what the book is.

That's what the book is, right. And there's pieces where I'm like, that had nothing to do with the previous day, but oh well. So that's why the show is going to be a little weird. It's a PSA for the audience. I do want to start with why you write these books.

Because I think, and I've looked at some of your negative reviews on Amazon and elsewhere. There are negative reviews? Believe it or not, there's at least one or two.

And people will say... This guy is a sociopath and he's creating more sociopaths. This guy is truly, has evil on his mind because otherwise, why would he create this monstrosity that people are reading to learn how to hurt other people? And I know that that's not why you wrote these books. Well, they're not evil, obviously, according in my opinion.

You know, when I first came up with the 48 Laws of Power way back in 95, I wasn't writing from a position of power, right? I never had any power up until that point. I had been kind of a failure in life, to be honest with you. I had 60-some different jobs. I tried journalism.

Yeah, Anna and I counted one day. We got up to like 64. And then I said, I know I'm forgetting some things. There's probably more like 80. But we counted 64. She commented because she knew me back then. She said, God, you've had so many different jobs in the three years I've known you. I said, well, you should just...

go back further. So anyway, I never had any positions of power, right? But I had observed, I was a very keen observer. I had some of the worst bosses you can imagine.

You know, what we might classify today as psychotic bosses. I had every variety of it. And I'd seen all of these power moves going on.

And it struck me that this world is intensely hypocritical. It really, really pissed me off that this is what goes on in almost every single office. People, or you put three people together, politics takes over. Egos take over.

The person who has the power and the leverage tends to go as far as they can with it, right? They use their power. They intimidate. They manipulate.

They do all these things. Not every boss. Right. Don't get me wrong. I don't do that with my team.

Right, guys? Okay. Well, I'll talk to them later.

Yeah. But, you know, my experience had been this, right? And so... But the books don't describe it. The books describe power as if it's all about being compassionate, empathetic, being a team player, you know, cooperating.

These are what management and self-help books were all about. And I go, this isn't my reality. This isn't the reality of the work world.

It's bullshit. It really pissed me off that no one was writing about the truth about the kind of power games that go on, particularly in Hollywood where I was working. Oh, yeah.

But I worked in a detective agency. I worked, you know. in a hotel in Paris. I worked for newspapers, magazines, you name it.

I did all sorts of different kinds of jobs. And this was what I had seen. This was the truth.

And nobody really wanted to write a book about that. So I wanted to rip away the curtain, show people this is what really goes on in the world of power. Because I had been on the wrong end of it.

I had suffered because of my naivete. My natural naivete after graduating university and thinking everybody was just so interested in ideas and getting things done. And then I had this rude awakening that no, people are interested in their egos and kind of promoting themselves. So I wanted to sort of show the reality of what goes on in this world, right?

And sort of help people like myself, who are naive, right, deal with these kind of power games that are going on. And so I wrote from that perspective, but there is a level of irony involved, which tricks people and makes people make those kind of comments. So when I say, play on people's need to believe to create a cult-like following, you know, people are going, Robert is teaching people how to create a cult?

Well, Nobody's going to use that chapter to actually literally create a cult. What I'm telling you is the world we live in now, there are cults everywhere. Political groups are cults.

All kinds of organizations are formed like a cult. It's part of our 21st century. And so I'm showing you, I'm opening your eyes up to the nature of the world right now, right?

When I say always get other people to do the work but take the credit for it. Right. You know.

And realistically, people who do that, which is the nature of a lot of jobs in Hollywood. I've done great with that. Just look at this podcast. Yeah.

Yeah. So far, so good. Yeah, exactly.

So when I, in Hollywood, I would do all the writing for a screenplay, you know, bits of dialogue. My name was never put on it. Never, right?

So that's kind of the nature of things. When politicians give a speech, they never write the speech. You never know who wrote the speech, right?

This is the nature of the world. I'm just revealing it to you. And in the chapter, I describe how you deal with that when somebody does it to you.

And I know from the emails I've gotten since that book came out 23 years ago. You're talking about 48 Laws of Power? Because that's the most evil.

Is that how old the book is? Yeah. Wow. I know. It's older than a lot of my readers.

Yes, it is. So since 1998 when it came out, I've received... thousands of emails from readers, right?

And occasionally there'll be someone who'll say, I'm certain that my boss read your book and did this bad maneuver to me and I feel kind of bad. But 98% of them are saying, you know, I didn't realize that I was outshining the master, law number one. Your book opened me up to that reality and saved me.

So most of the readers coming to my book, the real sharks out there don't need to read a book like that. This is their nature already. It's their nature already. The people who need it are people who, like myself, who kind of came out of the universe, were kind of naive by nature, and needed some awakening, needed to kind of learn the rules, the laws of power, so that they could play the game.

So, you know, a lot of the power game traditionally was kind of older white men, at least in my experience in Hollywood, right? And so, you know, I wanted to, like, open the doors up and show everybody how the power game worked. And which shows kind of...

affirms what I'm saying here today or right now is that among the first readers of the book, the ones who loved it the most, who gave it its kind of popularity were hip hop artists and people in the African-American community, because they had traditionally been locked out of the game of power. And people like 50 would tell me, I wrote a book with 50 Cent, would tell me later that-You don't call them 50, you call them 50. That's-I don't want to sound like a fake-It's pretty, that's pretty whitey, Robert. Robert Greene.

I don't even call him Curse. I just say 50, 5-0, whatever you want. I'm a nerd. He knows that I know it.

Yeah, I think as long as all the cards are on the table, it's fine. Okay. Anyway, he said he dealt crack on the streets of Southside Queens. He said, nothing prepared me for the music business. That was the most hardcore power games he'd ever seen.

And the book, The 48 Laws of Power, really, really helped him navigate that world. So I think that kind of shows that... That's really kind of the essence of the book. It's sort of a handbook for those who've never had power how to deal with this kind of environment. Yeah, rappers like Rick Ross do use your material and love it.

I interviewed him a few weeks ago. He's pretty amazing. He's really smarter than I would have kind of expected just based on the music. I mean, not that you can really assess someone's intelligence, but I figured anybody focused on this is not really going to be thinking about it. No, he's...

Looking for chicken places to buy and looking for cars that are going to go up in value. He's an entrepreneur of the highest order. Really?

I'm going to be doing an event with him in December, I think. Oh, really? Ted, a live talk here in LA.

Yeah, he mentioned your stuff in his newest book and or on my show. I can't remember which one it was, but yeah. I heard your books are banned in prisons, and I remember writing you an email about this a long time ago. Are they banned or is it just popular? Both.

Both. It depends on the state and the particular prison. Okay.

So like the state of Utah, if I believe correct, has banned it. The state of Pennsylvania, I believe, has banned it. Okay.

Certain states. I don't think like the art of seduction is banned because nobody in prison is going to be, I hope. Well, you never know. You never know.

Yeah. I hope not. But I believe the war book and the power book are banned, right? Yeah. And I've gotten a lot of emails from people in prison who said, you know, Robert, thank you.

This book has helped me. Because if you think about it, I mean, I'm saying Hollywood is bad. I'm saying the music business is bad. But imagine being in prison. Yeah.

That makes Hollywood look like kindergarten, to be honest with you, right? I would imagine it does. I don't have that much experience in prison. That we know of. Hollywood is, yeah, that I'm willing to talk about in public.

Hollywood is bad. I'm not a movie star or anything like that. Well, I guess it's worse for people who aren't, right? I suppose if you have power and leverage, maybe it's great. Yeah, but in prison, all gloves are off.

And it's not just violence. It's all kinds of... Weird mind games going on to kind of create a hierarchy I'm the dominant person in this block etc And so people would write me saying, you know I was so confused and people were you know I just didn't know what to do or what who was where and the wardens were which side who people were on and your book Really helped give me some clarity and sometimes somebody would rate right and say I didn't quite feel comfortable with this I used your book to take over cell block a Then, okay, I don't know about that. Well, maybe, maybe you did do something good.

Who knows? The fact that they're writing you emails from prison, though, should tell you that they're not following all the rules because I'm not sure how allowed that is. Yeah.

I think a lot of these people wrote to me after they got out of prison. That makes sense. You know? Yeah.

But, you know, a lot of people in prison, so like the 50 had a, 50, 5-0, had an assistant. His name will come to me in a minute because I want to give him a shout out. He's a great guy.

Anyway, he'd been in prison for like 20 years. He was caught up in that New York law where if you had three drug offenses, you were put in prison. It was just ridiculous because he was like not a dealer or anything.

It was so unfair. And anyway, it was before my book came out, right? So he can't say, but he told me, you know, what kind of the life was like in prison.

And he said that your book really described it. And he could understand why people would find it. extremely helpful because he was not the powerful person.

He was kind of like this, this kind of small guy who was just sort of not used to that kind of environment. And it was extremely frightening. Oh man.

I can't even imagine. So stay out of prison. Stay out of prison is the moral of the story.

Yeah. That's a third time's the charm. Uh, the book is designed to make you a radical realist or many of your books are designed to make you a radical realist. And That for me is, well, tell me what that means and why it's important.

Yeah. Well, it's really the kind of the goal of the daily laws in a weird way. But the idea for me is we have to deal with so much illusion and bullshit and crap in our world. When we leave university, we're filled with all of these misconceptions about people from our parents, from our peers.

from just the atmosphere of being in school, what professors teach us. So we don't have a real grip on reality. And then when we enter the work world, we're usually kind of bitch slapped by it. And sorry for the expression. No, all good.

You're the one who's going to get canceled, not me. That word is cancelable? Everything is.

Yes, that one for sure. Yeah, of course. Oh, okay. I don't know. I'm not the arbiter.

If I knew what could get canceled. So you got female dog slapped. Yeah, it's even worse somehow, but go ahead. So suddenly reality is right in your face, and you don't know how to deal with it, and you make a wrong step here and there.

You know, you get involved in some kind of emotional drama. It kind of creates a wound that lasts forever. You end up going down this rabbit hole that you can't escape.

on into your late 20s, etc. And you started off on the wrong foot. So I tell people, imagine the following scenario. You have all these illusions about yourself, right? You think you're probably greater than you are.

You have a bit of grandiosity. You don't really know what you're good at, what you're bad at, what you were meant to do in life, what I call your life's task. So imagine that you could have this radical realism where you understood who you were. what you're really good at, what your strengths are, what you're not good at, what you were meant to accomplish in life.

You had real deep clarity about what you were destined to create in this world. That would be incredibly powerful and liberating for you. Then imagine dealing with people in your life, your bosses, your peers, your children, etc. You're walking around and you have no idea what's going on in their minds.

People wear masks. They pretend to love you. They smile. I love your screenplay, Jordan.

It's fantastic. While they're actually thinking, God, that guy's the worst writer I've ever met, right? I'm not saying this personally.

No, I mean, it's true. I would never, if I had a screenplay, it would be terrible. Okay. So you have no idea what's going on in the minds of people, right? It's our nature.

We're born actors. So imagine also you have this radical realism where you could see into them. You could actually see through the opaqueness of people and understand what's going on, not completely.

We have a better idea if they really do like you, if they really are interested in your ideas, if they are planning to help you or planning to sabotage you. Think of all the mistakes you would avoid and all the powerful forms of connection you could create with people. It would be awesome.

And then finally, think about the world at large. So the world has what we call a zeitgeist, since you speak German. I'm going to use some German. Spirit of the times. Yeah.

Okay. So we have a spirit of the times, right? And this thing is always changing.

It's never static, right? So you walk through life, you don't really know where the world is headed. You don't realize that in two or three years, your career is going to be hitting a wall.

You're going to be downsized. You're going to be out of work. You don't know, you know, what's the next step, what's the next move to make.

And then also you start a business not realizing that that business is not, you know, going to be viable in six months. Imagine finally that you have that ability to see what's going on in the world, to see realistically the trends happening. So radical realism is the most powerful form of thinking that you can have in my world.

And it's not something that's depressing. It's not people think of realism as kind of ugly and drab. They think fantasy is wonderful and beautiful and reality is kind of meh. But actually, radical realism is very inspiring. It's a very beautiful way of looking at the world to sort of accept this is the world as it is, as opposed to how I want it to be or wish it to be.

It's actually a profoundly moving and almost, I hate to use the word poetic, but, you know, to see the world, to see things as they are, is very, very powerful and very inspiring, I find. It's like a superpower, the way that you phrase it, though, as well, right? Because if we, no one can see the future, but if I have a conversation with my boss and I say, I think that went really well, he's going to support my ideas.

But really, it's become so clear to somebody who's trained or read your work, for example. that what he's going to do is use this conversation against me the first chance he gets, it would pay if I knew that, right? I should already be looking for another job based on what I know and how that conversation went. But a lot of us, we get blindsided.

And every Friday, we give advice on our Feedback Friday episodes, people write in with problems. And there's a lot that can't be foreseen or foretold, so to speak. But there's a lot where I think I've read this letter, and it's really clear from the details that this person sees the writing on the wall. Maybe they read your book, not quite sure, but they just go, I can't put my finger on it, but this happened before and that happened before.

And now with this happening, I'm pretty sure that I'm on the outs. And I say, look, you don't know if that's true, but you should plan almost as if that were true. And we give them a strategy for that.

And it sure pays to be ready, especially if you're going to get let go from a job or you're going to be forced to move or you're dealing with something in a relationship. So yeah, it's almost like a superpower. There's so many notes that I have about allaying people's insecurities and the so-called dark side stuff that we kind of talked about in the beginning of the conversation, but maybe we actually flip the script a little bit or change gears and start with some positive career advice because it is tempting to stay with the dark side of the force when we have conversations about power and influence, I think. And not a lot of people probably go with the positive stuff when you're sitting in front of them, right? I don't know.

I could be wrong. Uh, you do mention in, in some of the daily laws, there's a, there are chapters about reconnecting with your childhood passions. I would love to talk about this because a lot of people think the majority of people, like you said, go even go to school and through school, having no idea what they should do. Uh, and reconnecting with your childhood passion seems like a really good way to, to at least get started on the path of figuring that out.

Well, the first chapter in Mastery was called Discover Your Life's Task, and so the first month of the Daily Laws is about that, the month of January, because it's really, if I had to say it, Jordan, it's the most important thing in your life right now, particularly if you're younger. You know, if you're in your 50s or 60s, it's getting a little bit late, I'm sorry to say, but it's never really too late. But if you're younger, man, that is the most important thing you can learn. I can't emphasize it enough because I have studied throughout my years and the thousands of books I've read for my research, biographies of the most successful, famous, creative people, and I've done consulting with people on the highest level. So I've seen this firsthand and I've done it in my research.

And inevitably, these are people who understood at some point in life that this is what I was destined to follow. This is a path for me. Now, that might have path might have been most people is like a zigzag.

You don't have a straight line. This is what I was meant to do. It's never like that. It wasn't for me. But you kind of have an idea and it becomes clearer and clearer and you find that path and it leads to so much power, becomes so creative and so energized.

Because you enjoy your work, you learn faster, you're engaged emotionally with what you're doing. It is so important. And a lot of people who are successful had a clear idea when they were five or six. Some people discovered it at the age of 12 or 18. Me, I really didn't discover it until I was about 35. Is this 60 jobs later or 80 jobs later?

Probably 80 jobs later when I got to write The 48 Laws of Power. But anyway, so it's not easy. And a lot of people get confused. And why do you get confused? Well, the psychologist Abraham Maslow, who studied a lot of children, for instance, he said that children, and you'll maybe know this with your two-year-old, they have what he calls impulse voices.

And these are voices that say, I like this. I don't like that. I like this kind of food. I hate this. I'm going to spit it out.

I like this person. I don't like that person. They're very clear. They know what they like and what they don't like. It's so obvious to them in an almost pre-verbal sense.

It's like binary. Yeah. It's just, yeah, there's almost no lukewarm, with my kid anyway. He's either open-minded or it's not happening. Yeah, exactly.

It's really kind of on and off and that's it. That's exactly. So you, everyone had that because it's the nature of being an infant in this world, right? Because it's natural.

It's a voice that's naturally inside all of us. And then as you get older, you start listening to. Mr. Harbinger and Mrs. Harbinger telling you, don't do this, Jaden, do this. You know, this is what you should behave like this. Don't behave like that.

And the kid starts getting a little confused. So I say, well, my voice tells me to do this, but I'm told not to do that. And slowly you go through a process where you're not hearing it anymore. You're hearing what teachers tell you. You're hearing what parents tell you.

You're hearing what peers are telling you about what's cool, what's not cool. You're hearing what social media nowadays is telling you. I'm talking about like your career, what you were meant to do. And then you arrive, you're 18, 19 years old, and you haven't a clue because you can't hear that voice anymore.

And you're going to try this, that, that, the other, not based on things that are deep inside of you, but based on what other people have told you you should do or what they think is cool. And you're going to end up trapped. You're going to end up choosing a career path that seems seductive and interesting and lucrative.

And five years down the line, you realize it doesn't really interest me. And you hit a wall and you go, fuck, man, what's going on with my life? You start maybe drinking.

I know I'm giving a little exaggerated scenario here, but you start drinking. I thought you were just narrating my exact life story. But continue. So far, it's spot on.

Well, you get addicted to online porn, you know, on and on and on and on and on, right? That's funny. Okay. So, and then you're 30 and then it's starting to get a little late. Yeah.

Right? Okay. So, the problem is, how do you clear away all of that? noise, that white noise that's drowning out your impulse voices and actually hear what was your voice when you were two years old, right? And so it's a process.

I've done it in consulting with people, trying to help them figure it out. People will say, Robert, I have no idea. So, you know, I haven't a clue what I was meant to do in this world, right?

You talk about my early childhood. I can't remember anything. Okay, so it's not...

For a lot of people, it's not obvious or easy, and I understand that. But we go through a process, if I'm able to do that with them, you know, online or in person sometimes, where we reconstruct some of the early memories of things that really excited them when they were a kid and things that they hated. And a book that I always recommend to people, it's on the shelf somewhere right behind you, I don't see it right now, called The Five Frames of Intelligence by Howard Gardner. A really good book. We'll link to that in the show notes.

Okay. The idea is... We normally associate intelligence with kind of book learning and intellectual learning, but he says there are five different kinds of intelligence and each is equally valid and important.

One of them will be obviously words and language. It was something that I was attracted to. Some of it will be with figuring out patterns.

It leads to like a mathematician or somebody interested in statistics. Another one's a little more abstract. I can't remember which one that leads to like music. Then there's kinetic intelligence.

Like athletes. Yeah. It's all about your body.

And that's a very high form of intelligence. We don't think of it that way. But it is a form of intelligence. There's a social intelligence where it's all about people, right? And he makes the point that a child has one of those forms of intelligence that dominates inevitably.

Some people might have another one that's kind of in the background. But one of them inevitably dominates in them. And if you choose a career that's not really in alignment with what you're naturally gifted for, your brain was wired in a particular way. It's genetic. And if you're not following that, forget it.

You'll never get anywhere. So we go through a process of trying to figure out what is just in the most general way. Let's not get so specific about your actual career choice.

What is that form of intelligence that you're inclined towards? You know, it's not. difficult.

Were you really attracted to sports and movement? Do you find you're most joyous when you're like dancing or running and that's what gets you excited and you think about that? Okay, well, that's probably in some ways where your brain is wired.

You know, is it words and some, just the sound of words that kind of obsess you and fascinate you like it did when I was a kid? You should probably be involved in some form of writing, right? Okay, so we go through that process. What is your frame of intelligence?

We kind of determine that. And then we kind of reconstruct certain key moments in your childhood where you did something and it felt right. Now, a lot of people don't have that.

I maintain that everybody has it. You just have to kind of dig. But you did something, and in the process of doing it, it felt like there was kind of an ease to it, as opposed to learning math when you don't like math. There's no ease involved, right?

For some people, that ease is in math. Okay, let's talk about that. Let's kind of put our finger on that for a little bit.

On and on and on. And then as we get older, I like to look at what people hate. So when I was 23, I discovered that I hated working for other people. Well.

That's why I had 60-some different jobs. That makes sense. You know, I don't like the political games. I don't like all the bullshit.

I don't like all the stuff, all the things you have to play and pretend. I'm an entrepreneur. It took me a long time to figure it out because I never had a job more than 11 months in my entire life.

It took me a time. Okay, I should be working for myself because I don't like working for other people. So if we detect in this person that they don't like that, and that's a lot of people in the world today, you should be an entrepreneur.

You should be working for yourself eventually. So that's part of the process that we go through. It's more complex than that, but that gives you an idea of what it's like. I love this because when I was a kid, I learned how to build out of little parts from RadioShack an FM radio transmitter. And it was kind of interesting because I would solder these little things in.

And my dad was a mechanical engineer. And he goes, wow, I wonder if my kid's going to be an electrical engineer. And then when I built it.

And it didn't work. It was frustrating, but someone helped me fix it. And then I could transmit my voice to the radio, probably like, you know, 50 feet away.

And that was the part that was the most interesting. And I realized I didn't really care about making the thing as much as I cared about somehow being able to talk to my friends and things like that. So I wanted to, to turn the power up on this thing. And I learned that you could do that by elite, like breaking federal law and attaching a high gain antenna. And then, and then.

communicating with the Russians. Yes. Yeah. Accidentally communicating with the Russians.

Yeah. This is like an eighties Disney movie or something like that, like a cloak and dagger. But I wanted to be, I said, I want to be able to talk to everyone in the neighborhood on their radios. And they were like, that's super illegal. You can't do that.

And my mom sort of put the kibosh on that project. Then I go through this whole path and I'm good at studying and I go through college and I get good grades and I decide, I guess I should go to law school because more school is better. So then I become a lawyer, but I already knew I didn't want to become a lawyer. And then I start the podcast in my second year of law school, and I end up on Sirius XM Satellite Radio. And then I quit law and I come back to this.

And I didn't remember that when I was a kid, I wanted to be on the radio. Wow. I only remembered it probably eight years plus after doing this. That's a perfect example.

Yeah. Yeah. If I'd freaking listened to myself, I could have gone to broadcasting school.

No, no, no. Or whatever. Everything's for a reason.

It was better that way. First of all, your law career taught you some interesting things that you're never going to forget. That's true.

There's some skill sets that were created then. And then if you had found your way to podcasting too early, it wouldn't have the same meaning to you. Now you're so excited that you found the right thing because you kind of hated law and law school that it means much more. And you actually are more motivated to follow it through.

Like if I had been offered to write a book when I was 24 as opposed to 35, 36, it would have never worked. I didn't have the experience. I didn't have the desperation, et cetera.

That makes sense. I mean, I didn't even get into podcasting because I thought it would be fun to do a show. I got into podcasting because I was recording a lecture of a course that I was teaching and I needed to put it online.

Wow. And podcasting was the only way to put it in. You've had like 80 different jobs.

Yeah. I mean, this was during law school. I was teaching a networking class and I kept giving the same damn talk every week.

I need to record it on my Sony minidisc player, take it and then get it to my computer. make an mp3 file and put it on the internet but there was no soundcloud there was no youtube you know so my friend said hey there's podcasting you can put these files online and that was the what year are we talking about 2006 that was just the beginning of podcasting i think we're one of the first 800 or first thousand i cannot i can only remember my first podcast was like an 08 and i was like whoa what is this yeah it's like a downloadable radio show yeah yeah yeah anyway yeah and here we and here we are so you're right it's sort of Makes sense. Because if someone said, hey, you should start a podcast, I'd probably go, well, I'm not going to be some guy who records stuff in his basement.

That's dumb. And then I did that for a long time. And here we are.

What do we do when we realize we've chosen the wrong career? Like if we just get up and we realize, look, I'm not just burned out. I'm not for years.

I'm finally going to do something about it. What is that thing that we do? Well, one thing just to backtrack a minute here.

One thing I left out, the reason why you want to follow this path isn't just because it's some kind of mystical destiny sort of idea. The human brain works best. We learn fastest when we're emotionally engaged, when we're interested and excited by something.

The brain opens up. We become like a sponge because we want to learn and our attention is much deeper. And so we learn faster. So if you choose the wrong career for whatever reason.

You know, like you go to law school and you're kind of half listening as the professor is droning on. You're kind of half reading the books. You're not involved in it.

And so you're not learning fast enough, right? And if you don't learn fast enough, creativity, which is what we all want, is a function of the intensity of your knowledge, of the information you've absorbed. The faster you absorb information, the more thoughts and associations you create in the brain.

It starts going all the time and ideas are coming to you. If you take five years to learn something, that stuff going on in the brain won't happen. So that's why we want to do it, okay? So you're going to find out in your career that you are not emotionally engaged. That isn't happening.

The gears aren't connecting. You're tuning out. You're not paying attention, right? And you kind of realize that.

Okay, so you have to be able to realize that. And not a lot of people are going through their 20s, for instance, because they're going after a big paycheck. They're unaware that they're actually not really attuned to what they're supposed to be learning. But once you have that moment, it kind of depends on how old you are. So there's not like a single formula for what you should do.

So if you're 24 and you realize you made the wrong choice, that's great. Now we can go through a process and you can make a fairly radical shift in your career decision because you haven't wasted. I'm not saying wasted, that's too harsh a word, but you haven't spent 15 years in something not relevant to you. It's only been a couple of years, all right? Let's go through the process of figuring out what you should do and let's kind of change your skill set, right?

Let's start heading in that towards that direction of what you were intended to do. You can make a more radical shift. But if you're in your 30s, I wouldn't recommend that because you need to make a living, right?

You have learned things, you have learned certain skills. So what I recommend is not a radical shift, but a more subtle shift, heading more in that direction. And that might include keeping the job that you have. But at night, going to school or online, learning some new skills that you now can quit.

Your plan is to quit this job in two or three years. But you will have learned things that will allow you to quit and go on to this other path. Or you figure out a way to kind of shift it. So I know a woman, Alison Hope Weiner. I don't know if you know her.

She has a podcast. Many people have thought. There are 2 point whatever million.

I thought everyone knew each other. Yeah, we all hang out. It's a really, really big cafe.

Anyway, like you, she studied law and then she realized that she wanted to be a writer. And so what she did is she went into legal journalism. That was how she made a shift.

Because she could still make a living. She could become a writer. And then she learned true writing skills.

And then she could maybe write a novel if she wanted to at that point. So that's the kind of more gradual shift. If you're in your 40s, it's even more gradual that you have to do.

But the thing is, all your life, you've been accumulating experiences. You have to keep that in mind. So even when I was working in Greece, because I landed on the island of Crete one summer, and I got very sick, and I ran out of money, and I was in a hospital. Oh, my gosh. And then I came out, and I had no money to get back to.

Paris, wherever I was living. I had to go work in construction. You were literally stranded in Crete? Crete.

Is that where the Minotaur lives? Is that the... Yes, Knossos, yes. Wow. Well, he doesn't live there anymore, but he was from there.

Right, yeah, that's where he was from. That's a... And this is like not... There's no internet at this point. You can't just be like, hey, I'm...

Somebody wire me some money. If I told you what year it was, you'd be shocked. Yeah, I don't want to make you feel...

We're talking prehistoric period. No internet, nothing. I mean, I could have made a phone call and had money wired, sure.

But I was embarrassed. I didn't want to have to involve my parents. I didn't even tell them I was in a hospital.

Oh, wow. So I'm working in construction, and it was a really weird world where the boss was Greek. And all of the people working for him, doing the construction work, were like Australians and Americans and English, all blonde, blue-haired, blue-eyed, not blue-haired, blue eyes.

You know, it was like the reverse of here because we were all people who had been stranded. Yeah, everyone just got out of the hospital. Yeah. So I was like ripping nails off of boards, et cetera.

Man, I hated it. It was the worst job. I know that I'm not destined for doing construction.

So. The long-winded point of this anecdote is that I learned everything taught me what I'm good at, what I hate. I know I'm not good with my hands.

That only made it clearer to me, etc. Yeah, you went through a long process of elimination to get there. So the point is, you're learning. Don't just say, oh, I did this job. I got nothing out of it.

You get something out of everything. And if you're in your 30s, for instance, combining your skill sets, so combining writing with law, is very powerful. Because we live in a world where you have such access to information that the best entrepreneurs are combining things that nobody ever thought of. And starting a kind of business that involves kind of very strange skill sets, but is so unique that it takes off. So.

Never give up. Never say that this was wasted time. Nothing is wasted.

I love the tip, for lack of a better word, of the instruction that you can compare the moments that you did what others wanted you to do versus what you felt in the moments when you did what you wanted to do, especially if you can remember those as a kid, to bring out the ideas or at least an idea of what might be right for you. Because if I look back and my parents go, oh my gosh, you... bugged us and you rode your bike to Radio Shack 500 times and you bugged us for money to buy these extra pieces and you wanted to take the antenna off the house that we used to get cable and connect it to your device.

You know, that was the stuff that was really lighting me up and getting later on getting in trouble, messing with the phone system and things like that. You know, people thought you're going to become an engineer, but really I liked the communication element. It just didn't really occur to me because I was too busy.

stealing long distance calls from my bell. You could have been a criminal too. I was, I was, I was just juvenile and didn't get caught. Right. I didn't get caught once, but that's a different story that we'll, uh, I'll have to bring that out on another show.

Um, but the advice I think that you wrote about in the daily laws, I think you phrased it always stick to what makes you strange and weird. And that's. surprisingly really good advice, right?

Well, yeah. I mean, the people that really kind of reach the apex of power, like an Elon Musk or a Steve Jobs or a rock star, people in politics, who we kind of hold as like icons, you can honestly say that there's nobody else like them, right? They're one of a kind. They're weird. They're strange, right?

And it's because they're not afraid of what makes themselves. it makes them different. So what happens when you're younger, when you're four or five, you know something strange about you.

You're kind of connected. You're in a dream world. And then you enter school and people start saying, oh, that's weird.

And the idea of being different kind of gets a negative connotation, right? And you want to conform. You want to be part of the group.

You want to, you know, there's peer pressure. And so the idea of being different and strange kind of has a negative tint. Although we might... ostensibly say, oh, it's good to be different and weird. We actually are afraid of it deep down inside because it comes with criticism.

It comes with people kind of making fun of us, et cetera. So your source of power in life is actually what makes you weird and strange, right? It makes you different.

So I make the point in mastering in the daily laws that there's never going to be another Jordan Harbinger in this world. Your DNA may has never occurred before and will never occur again. And your parents and how their DNA and their genetic component and how they raised you will never be replicated.

So you are one of a kind by nature. It's irrefutable, right? Okay, so there's something so very different about you.

And it's hard to put into words because some of it's genetic, some of it's early education. And that what makes you different is the source of what you want to lean into. Because if we can say that, you know, there are 20 Jordan Harbingers out there.

They all have the same idea. There's no power behind it, right? You can be replaced by 19 other Jordan Harbingers who are doing the same thing.

But if you're the only one thinking of this thing, if you're the only one creating it, that is the ultimate in power. Now, that's the ideal. It's hard to reach, right? But to the degree that you know what makes you different and you lean into it and you exploit it, that's where the realm of power lies.

Now, I don't want to seem egocentric here, so I have to be a little bit careful. It's okay. Look, it's a podcast.

You can blow as much hot air as you want. I'm not the greatest. Anyway, no, I'm just kidding.

But to talk about myself here for a second. Go for it. You know, as I said, my arc was I kind of had a failure. I was a bit of a loser by the time I was 35, 36. I tried all sorts of different things.

And then I was asked if I had any ideas for books. And I kind of described this process in The Daily Laws. And it was this very interesting man, Joost Elfers, who was a book packager.

We were in Italy at the time. And I kind of improvised this idea that turned into The 48 Laws of Power. It was sort of a nice chance encounter.

It was a beautiful day in Venice, Italy, and I gave a really great pitch, right? And so when I created the book, because he got so excited, he said, Robert, I'll pay you to live while you write half the book and then we'll sell it. And so when I started the process, naturally my mind gravitated towards other books out there, right? And then I just wasn't comfortable with that.

And I just sort of thought, I want to... tell stories. I love telling stories. When I first pitched the idea to this man, I told him a story.

That's how I naturally am. I'm actually more of a novelist in some ways. I like creating drama and stories. And so I started writing stories like little parables for the 48 Laws of Power. And then I thought, I want to be able to tell the meaning of this story and not just leave it out there.

So I wrote this as what's known as the interpretation of the story. Is this like the director's cut on a DVD where they're narrating how they made the movie? A little bit.

A little bit. You mean what I'm doing right now? No, just, no, no, the meaning of the story.

Because, you know, as a non-writer, I'm not super familiar with that. Well, I didn't know what I was doing. Oh, okay. I was just groping in the dark.

And basically, the short end of it is I was kind of creating my own thing, right? Kind of in a haphazard way, I was following in this path that was me, that was weird, creating stories, kind of interpreting them, then giving you some theory, then having quotes that were in kind of shapes, and then having things on the side, side material with passages from fairy tales and fables. You know how, right? Yeah, those little like boxes, sidebar, whatever they're called. Yeah, we call those, I call it side material.

Anyway, I ended up creating this book. that you could hate it for very many reasons, but you can say there's nothing else out there like it. It doesn't look like another book, page by page. It doesn't read like another book, because the structure is something that no one has ever done before. You know, it's my own idea, right?

And so it's like one of a kind. And then the publisher, when they first got the book, they loved it, they gave us an advance. And somewhere in the process, they said, you know, Robert, I think this... book is just a little too weird.

Let's kind of soften it a little bit. Let's make it more like other books. So that business with the story and the interpretation, get rid of that.

Just write a story and kind of talk about it. And then fortunately, the man who I mentioned here, Joost, the Dutchman who paid me, he stood by me because I said, I don't want to change it. This will either sink or swim the way it is.

It's a weird book, but weird sells. That's what makes it a powerful thing. So we stuck by it and we said, no, we're going to do it our way. So the moral of the story is, if I had tried to make it like other books, I wouldn't be here talking to you right now.

My book would not have succeeded. So by sticking to what makes me different, to what makes, opened me up to ridicule, in fact, is what made the book so successful. So anyway.

This point really is well taken because. there's another guest on the show, Ramit Sethi, he talks about financial things. One of the points he made on an earlier podcast was, I'm going to butcher the quote here, but it was something along the lines of, the market and people out there want to make you vanilla, but as soon as you become vanilla, they dump you because they already have vanilla.

So you really want to be tutti frutti. Yeah, or like Neapolitan at the very least. Well, that's the same thing. Yeah, is that what that is?

Yeah. So like... I think. Yeah.

I could be wrong. I'm going to have to deal with that later. Maybe not.

Maybe not. I feel like Tutti Frutti would be fruitier than just one stripe. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Wouldn't have the chocolate. Yeah.

There'd be less chocolate. Yeah. You're right.

Okay. Well, I don't know if I'm right. I'm just speculating. But the idea is, hey, you got to take those unique angles because if somebody, and I've gotten lessons for interviewing and coaching and things like that, I do sometimes discard the advice because they'll say, you know, if you just do it this way, this is how most journalists do it.

And I'm thinking, oh, that's good. And then I'll do it and I'll go, this is really boring. And my show now sounds like every other interviewer. And there's a reason for that because it's formulaic.

Yeah. And I'll get a lot of feedback. Hey, just ask questions. Don't add any stories. Don't add any color.

Just ask the questions. And it used to make me feel bad, but I realized this is just people trying to make me vanilla who will immediately stop listening to the show once I become vanilla. Those same people will write in and go, show's just lost something that you had. I can't quite put my finger on it. I'm going, I took your advice.

That's the problem. I took your advice. I should have ignored you like I do everybody else.

The book is supposed to be read chapter a day. Did you think about what you were going to put for February 29? Did you agonize over what's going to go on that day?

I thought about it. I don't remember what was on that day. It's adopt the hacker mindset. Yeah. It's only going to be read once every four years.

So I figured you'd put something. Yeah. To be honest with you, Jordan, I'd be lying if I said there was some incredible ulterior motive behind it.

But I did think about it at the time. Like, I don't want to put a really common, powerful idea that everybody needs to read on February 29. Right. Yeah.

Not to say that you don't want to read that, but maybe read it only every four years. Yeah. That's funny.

I thought about that. I thought, oh, I bet this is something he thought, this isn't that important. I'll just put it in there. I'll put it on.

Everything's important, but it's not as important. Right. Yeah.

It's the 365th most important concept. Oh yeah. 366, the most important concept. Retain the craftsman mindset.

This is another concept from mastery slash the daily laws. The work is the only thing that matters is what you wrote. And the idea that you give is cultivate profound dissatisfaction with your work. I both love and hate that because of course we're always dissatisfied with our work and we want it to be better.

But doesn't that kind of make you miserable in the process if you're never happy with what you create? Or are those two different things? Well, you know, people who are craftsmen or craftspeople, if we have to say that. Yeah, you're going to get canceled. I'm telling you.

So you're like building something, a table or anything, you know, something out of wood. And you don't have like a perfectionist attitude. The table will fall apart, right?

Or it will be lopsided. So you learn. to kind of make things symmetrical. You see the faults and the defects in what you created. You work with the wood itself and you try and create something that's as perfect as possible.

The mistake that most people make in building something. So first of all, I want you to think of yourself as a builder. You're literally building a house or a table or whatever it is.

So that's starting your own business. That's writing a book. That's working on some project in your office.

So think of it like you're literally building something with your hands. It has to have a foundation. It has to be on something solid. It has to stand up.

It has to look. you know, reasonably symmetrical, et cetera. So you're actually like a craftsman, okay?

So use that kind of mindset because it's a very powerful, very human mindset because we are natural builders. That's what makes us kind of human and powerful, okay? So the problem that most people have, believe me, I know it, when you're writing something or working on a project is you have no distance. You have no ability to analyze your own work. You think that everything you do is just golden and beautiful, or you think everything you do is awful or terrible, right?

Yeah. So you need, you can have other people look at it and who can kind of bring you back to reality and say, this is what's working, this isn't, what isn't working. But oftentimes you can't trust other people, right?

First of all, maybe they don't really know, maybe they're not as knowledgeable on the subject. And also they might have a political ax to grind or whatever. So you have to become your own critic.

You have to be able to see the flaws and what isn't working in your own creation, right? And sometimes, you know, it's very hard to do that. You tend to kind of gloss over the things that aren't working.

I know when I write a chapter, I lose perspective after time because I've spent so long on it that everything seems natural and good to me. And then when I come back to it a month later, it goes, no, that's not working, Robert. That's not working at all.

And so that critical voice inside of me that says that isn't working is what pushes me to make something better and better and better and better. Now you can go crazy with that. You can reach a point where you never end up finishing whatever you're making because you're always criticizing it.

At some point you have to say it's done. It's 95% there. I'm never going to get to 100%.

Okay, that's fine. I understand that. But to the degree that you're able to look at your own work with some distance. and say, this isn't working for me.

It could be better, is what's going to end up making it better, right? And so a lot of people have a hard time with that. You know, I get that a lot when I read other people's books or manuscripts, etc.

It kind of works, but God, this could be so much better. You didn't take the time. You didn't go through the process I'm just describing. You didn't think of how somebody else would read it.

how an outside eyes would read it. You didn't think of where it might be boring. You didn't, you assume that everyone's going to be interested in something that they're not going to be interested in. So take the time and learn how to criticize your own work and make it better and better and better. It's extremely important.

It seems like there's a point of diminishing returns when it comes to this. For example, I'll listen to an episode that's three years older, two years older, and I'll go, okay, there's a couple of missed opportunities. I used to listen and go, ah, cringe.

This is awful. Why did I release this? Now I listen and I go, okay, there's a couple of things I could have changed or added or man, our audio quality has improved a lot since then.

Something along those lines. I remember hearing about, I think it was David Letterman who used to watch tape of every show he did until three or 4am just beating himself up and treating himself like crap after every, was his show five days a week? That's a lot of time to spend telling yourself that you suck at your job and beating yourself up over every little. opportunity or missed opportunity?

Well, that's not at all what I'm talking about. Okay. Yeah. It's different.

So after I finish a book, I never read it again. I never look at it again. Really? I have no idea. I have no desire to look at it again.

In fact, it kind of repulses me. That's funny. It's like, you know, I created it. Get out of me. I don't want to look at it.

I'm on to the next thing. So there's no point in the post-mortem. There is a point in things that you've done in life and your interactions with people. to go through that kind of post-mortem process, to go, what could I have done differently that didn't create this particular problem? Okay?

I highly advise that. So if you had a podcast that got you in trouble, then go through that post-mortem process to see what you might have done that caused it, and so you can learn the lesson. It's extremely important. But that's different from going back and criticizing a podcast that's already been created. and it's out there, what value are you going to get?

You're just going to be beating up on yourself as you say. I mean, you could look at it constructively and say, you know, I could be doing it a little bit better, right? It's all in the spirit that you do things in. So you could improve yourself. But my thing with my work is once the book is published, there's nothing I can do about it, right?

It's true. It's out there. And in the process of writing, I've kind of learned already what it was that I didn't do quite right and what I could improve on.

So the idea is to get, I think the essence of what we're talking here is the point is to beat up on yourself. The point isn't to make you feel bad about your own work, because that'll work against you. You have to kind of love and have a sense of excitement about the work itself. The idea is that you're able to kind of have some detachment from it.

At certain key moments, you're able to look at it from a distance and to look at Jordan Harbinger on the screen and say, he needs to be doing this a little differently, as if you're looking at it from the outside, is very, very powerful skill. So the goal isn't... to become so critical of yourself that you can't ever do anything in life. You need to have a degree of innocence about it. But if you have no voice inside of your head telling you that some things aren't really working, a voice that's somewhat like an outsider, then you're never going to be able to improve your work from the inside.

Yeah, this is something that I think a lot of creators struggle with because also as much as you want to have external critics or cultivate your own critical eye, it is for many of us hard to do without beating ourselves up or without attaching some sort of meaning to it. But it doesn't, that's not productive to do. I guess I don't understand that. Maybe it's because of the way I, maybe I am because I'm Jewish.

I'm always kind of criticizing myself. Yeah. How can you not do it?

Yeah. You know, kind of sort of beaten into me. But when I'm writing something, I never get too attached to what I'm writing, right?

Because I know that's really dangerous. Maybe it's because I've been, this is my eighth book that I'm working on right now. Maybe I've learned that. But I never get too attached to it because I know that that's going to be very problematic down the road. And I always know.

So in the moment after I've written something that's very arduous and I go back to it and I go, this isn't working. Yeah, it's painful, undoubtedly, because we're all kind of lazy by nature. We tied the ribbon.

We finished the screenplay. We did the project. It's over.

I want to move on. Right? That's natural.

Yeah, it's Johnny Depp not watching his own movies, right? Right. But... I think that's who that is.

But I don't know. I had no idea. Yeah, I think he like refuses to watch his own movie. There's a few actors that just say, I'm never watching my own movies.

Well, that's the same thing. I don't want to read my own books. Yeah.

It's like very similar. Yeah. But you don't want to rush to the end.

because, you know, things can always get better. And your natural tendency is to be in a hurry because you want the product out there, you want all the accolades, etc, etc, etc. But if you develop this voice, if you're able to look at it with some detachment, it ends up becoming kind of an interesting game where you feel like I can always make something better, better, better, better. It's kind of a very satisfying feeling to improve something and to be able to say, that my first iteration was kind of weak and I've really strengthened it right now, as opposed to sending it out there early and then you have a little bit of doubt and then it isn't quite clicking together and people start criticizing it. So, you know.

Self-sabotage. This dovetails nicely with our section here on self-sabotage that I'd love to go into. This is from, I think, The Laws of Human Nature.

The attitude is, if we are fearful, we see... negative in every circumstance. We don't take chances. We blame others for mistakes.

If we are suspicious or negative, we make others feel those same emotions. Then we create those outcomes for ourselves at home and at work. There's a lot in here.

That's not your exact wording, I don't think, but the idea that we can almost project our own insecurities onto other people and then have it come back at us. It looks to us like they're causing the problem. This is an eye-opening moment for, I think, a lot of people when they realize this is the case. Well, I can illustrate it with a very simple example.

You're at a party and somebody comes up to you you haven't met before or you go up to them. And they're kind of nervous and insecure and they're kind of sweating a lot and their eyes are kind of blinking a lot. You find yourself getting very nervous in their presence, right? Yeah. You get sort of, you start feeling a bit insecure.

Maybe I'm causing that reaction. And that as I get insecure in their presence and my talking gets a little halting, the insecure person gets even more insecure. Like this person isn't really interacting with me.

Weird around me. Yeah. And then it gets back and forth, back and forth.

It gets worse and worse and worse. Or the opposite happens. You go up to that person.

They're very confident. They're very secure in themselves. They're very calm.

They have a calm energy. It just calms you down. And the conversation that ensues flows in this very natural, easy way.

And then that person feels that you're kind of engaging. They engage more on and on and on and on. So the idea is that we humans operate on a level that we're not aware of, which is on a nonverbal level, right? So we pick up. the attitude, the vibrations, to use a 70s term.

Yeah, man. Groovy. You're on my wavelength.

You hear me? Yeah, I'm on your wavelength. Okay.

We pick those up from the other person in ways we're not even aware of, and it influences how we are. So your attitude towards life, you have an attitude, right? And I call it the way you look at the world. It's a lens. That attitude can be complex, but it usually has a single dominant component.

It could be anxious. You're anxious about everything, worried. It could be insecure.

People are looking at me strange. Do people like me, etc. I think I have all of those so far. Okay. I hope not.

Or your attitude can be very adventurous. Everything seems exciting to me. I want to explore there.

I want to go there. You're very open to things, right? Okay. So when you have that attitude, it goes out in the world.

People sense it. in a pre-verbal, non-verbal way, in that animal way, they feel it off of you, right? And that it makes them respond in a certain way.

And so if you have that anxious attitude, you're going to create all kinds of situations that are going to feed your anxiety. It becomes what I talked about in that chapter, a self-fulfilling prophecy. You're going to find anxiety at every corner that you come upon, right?

Because you're nervous, you're making other people nervous, you're supposed to take an action. You hesitate, and then it doesn't go very well because you hesitated. That makes you more nervous, et cetera.

So you have to get the idea that you are sabotaging yourself with your attitude, right? And there have been some amazing books written on this aspect of human psychology that actually were kind of mind-blowing to me, to use another 70s expression. Sorry, Matt. We still use that one.

Okay, all right. Things like the Pygmalion effect. which I hope in the next 20, 30, 40 years, people study more seriously in sciences and explain. But the idea is in studies like teachers and schools, if a teacher thinks that the students are good and smart and deserving to go to Yale and Harvard and they're all brilliant, but never says anything about that.

It's just, they think it. It has an effect where the students work better. They get better grades.

They're more excited. The attitude... speaks to them. They feel it, right? So if you go up to somebody and you already anticipate that they're not very good, that they're not, you know, that they're not going to succeed in life, it's going to create that feeling in them.

So you have the power to make people feel a certain way by the attitude that you have, right? And think of that attitude. So the bad news is you are born with an attitude.

There's a genetic component to it. My kid is really careful, way more careful than me. Yeah, and that's something wired into him or her, him. Him. Soon to be a her in the picture, but that's, yeah, we're talking about Jaden.

He's the most careful baby at the park. He's very, like, is this stable? And I know that's not exactly what you're talking about, but it's, I mean, the hard wiring is there. Well, the classic example is an introvert or an extrovert. And the man who came up with that was Carl Jung, the great psychologist.

He believed that there was definitely a genetic component in that, that people are born with a tendency to being introvert or born as an extrovert. Now, naturally, the parent will have an influence on that. But that is very deeply ingrained into you, that attitude.

So that's the bad news, right, that you're born a certain way. If you're anxious, you're born with an anxious attitude. The good news is that you can change it. It's plastic.

You can work around the edges, you can soften it, you can make it better. If you're anxious, you're not going to suddenly become this open adventure exploring type person. Okay, but you can become less anxious.

You can realize that it's causing you problems and you can work to kind of alter this attitude, right? And so the first thing is you have to be aware of what your attitude is in life and the problem that it's causing and how it's infecting your relationships. And the second thing... is to be aware of how you can take small steps to slowly begin to alter this attitude. So I tell people, for instance, who are born very anxious, and I understand that because I have a bit of that myself.

It doesn't paralyze me, but for some people it paralyzes them. What I suggest is tomorrow you do something that you're not quite comfortable with. Not too radical.

You're not suddenly going to go out naked in the streets running, etc. You're going to do something that's a little bit outside your comfort zone. It's a little bit different from what you would normally do.

Let's say that's going up to a stranger in the office or at a social affair and engaging them in conversation. Whoa, I can't do that. Do it. All right? And you'll find, so explore those margins of what you wouldn't normally do that aren't dangerous.

That person isn't going to kill you, hopefully, for going up to them. But try these things out. They're going to be able to, you'll see though, I don't need to be so anxious. And that by being open and wanting to talk to this stranger, they started talking to me on a level I've never experienced before.

It's exciting, right? So that's sort of, you know, your attitude is like your work of art. It's something you create.

You're born with it, but you can change it is the power that you have. Yeah. You mentioned that it's, and I think you said this earlier in the show, that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It's almost like if you expect someone to disappoint you, there's a higher chance of that happening. It's not metaphysical or something like that. No, not at all. It's some sort of magic, but it's simply how you create the, I'm trying so hard not to use the word energy because it sounds metaphysical, but you're creating that environment around you. You're creating the vibes.

The vibes. That's very scientific, yes. The one example I thought that was really weird in the book that I thought was so interesting is this woman, it's the story of a woman who had a boss who was kind of abusive and was always criticizing her.

And it just, she didn't know how to react. No matter how she reacted, he only got worse and worse and worse. And a psychologist told her to, when you go into work, think of him as this great guy. She said, I can't do that.

No, don't listen to me. Just go in there and think in your head. He's actually a wonderful person. He's got some problems, some issues, but he's actually a really interesting person. He's very complex.

She said, what do you mean? Just do it. She did it, and suddenly he reacted in a way she had never expected before.

He was kind of put off by it because he noticed she was acting different. He acted different in there. And so I thought this was really interesting.

She never said anything. She only thought it. And this wasn't to 14-year-old students.

This was to like a 40-year-old boss. He suddenly went on a different track because he detected something. You have a look of disbelief on.

I just feel like it's, this is, it's not disbelief. It's actually, I know that this would work on me if that's, if we're using it as a technique. I know if somebody came with a totally different.

type of, to use your scientific lingo, vibe with me that it would completely change the way that I react to them. As much as I like to think I'm, and a lot of us like to think, oh, I just am the way that I am, I know 100% that this would have an effect on me. Yeah. Okay. So I think it's a look of complete agreement.

Oh, well, I read you wrong. Yes. Yeah.

Maybe you need to read more of your own books. Maybe I do. But then you would never want to do that. No, I don't. I don't.

You do mention becoming aware of our own attitude and observing it, and this seems useful. I think one of the reasons you give, the rationale you give for this is, do we instinctively blame others for things? How do we react when challenged?

How do we judge and think of people when they're not around? This seems like a great way to reprogram a lot of negative behavior. If I'm the person that says, man, Ryan came over to film and he was late, that guy, his whole life is a mess, right?

We all know people that do that kind of thing. We don't want to be around them. They're annoying to work with.

It pays for us, if we are that person, to nix that stuff as soon as possible. How do we observe our own attitude? That seems easier said than done.

Well, first of all, you kind of notice you have an overall tenor or an overall mood to you, right? So if you are an anxious person, It's pretty obvious. You don't need like Sherlock Holmes to kind of, you know, decipher that for you, right? Whenever a situation, when something new or novel comes up, your first reaction isn't, wow, I'm excited.

It's, oh no, I'm nervous. This makes me uncomfortable. You know, how you react to things in a general way, in a kind of a neutral circumstance, right?

So you're thrown into some novel situation. You find yourself in a foreign city. Is your first instinct to open, to take all your clothes out and go exploring and finding everything there and getting away from Americans and seeing what the culture is? Or is it to kind of stay in your hotel room and kind of watch, you know, American television or things like that?

You know, in certain patterns in your life, how you react to things that are different or new will be extremely telling to whether you're an introvert, whether you're an extrovert. whether you're anxious, whether you're adventurous, on and on and on, right? So observe yourself in kind of these key moments. I don't think it's rocket science.

I think it's pretty clear. I know, for instance, that I am an introvert, you know, that my tendency is to, I'm more on the shy side, although I've learned to kind of overcome that, right? And I see that in my social interactions. So you in your room, where you're kind of quarantining, you can think that you're Napoleon Bonaparte.

that you're wonderful, that you're amazing, that you're so bold. But then the moment you go out in the world, it's extremely different. You realize your weaknesses, your limitations. So being out interacting with people is going to reveal 100% your attitude towards life because you can't control it. In your room, you could be Walter Mitty.

You could be imagining yourself as anything out there, right? But when you're with people, it becomes very clear that you're shy. or that you're extroverted, that you're out there wanting to engage with people. So the key to discovering your attitude is to see how you are with people, right? How you interact.

So, you know, somebody new approaches you, like the scenario I said earlier, is your first reaction, oh no, get away from me. Or, hmm, an interesting person, somebody new to meet, right? Those are very clear signs of what your attitude is. I mean, there are other things as well, how you respond to criticism, right, from other people.

So get defensive, tear them down privately in my own mind. Right. That's your reaction. Yes. Is that healthy?

No. So the other reaction... Didn't mince words at all.

Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. The other reaction is, they're right. I'm a worthless worm.

God, how awful I am. Okay, that's another kind of reaction. Or the third reaction is, there's something interesting there. I could learn from that.

Maybe there's something in truth to it. You know, maybe I have to take it seriously. You have to look at the person making the criticism and see and judge whether they have a valid point that whether they have no political acts to grind. I can remember when I was about 24 years old. I was in New York working as a journalist.

I thought I was a hotshot journalist. Sure. New York journalist, 24. It all adds up. I wrote this article about, it was kind of for a travel magazine that I was working for. I wrote this travel article about Italy, about the Amalfi Coast.

I thought it was the greatest thing since Gore Vidal. I was, wow. And then the editor invited me for lunch.

Okay. I'm getting promoted. Yeah, right. And then after his third martini or whatever he was drinking, he goes, Robert, you are not a writer. You are not writer material.

That article was all over the place. You have no discipline. Your language is going in all directions.

You're not connecting to the audience, to the reader. If I were you, and I don't mean this. this harshly, I would go to law school or business school and I would get out of writing. Oh my God.

I'm cringing for you. And this is like years, decades later. It's hard to hear.

So I was trying to remember the name of this guy the other day, but I can't remember his name. I can see him very clearly. And I had this image in my mind that's very vivid.

I mean, look, if he has three martinis at lunch, he's dead already. So it doesn't matter. So the image that played in my mind was like a house that on the outside kind of looks good. But if you looked at the attic and the interior of it, you'd see that the wood is all rotten and termites have kind of eaten it away and things are about to fall. That was the image that came into my mind of what was going on in the inside of this man.

But afterwards, I was very obviously pained by it. I thought, what an asshole. He's wrong. But then as time went by, I processed it and I go, no, there's truth to what he was saying.

I don't really like journalism. And because I don't really like and I don't really fit, my language is a little bit odd for the genre. It was a little too literary what I had written, right? Maybe I was meant to be a novelist or a screenwriter or to write something else.

So there was validity in what he said. And I got out of journalism and I decided I'm going to go to Europe and I'm going to wander around and I'm going to write a novel kind of thing. And then that ended up failing.

Well, yeah, you ended up working construction. in the home of the mid-john. Nearly dying in a hospital, yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, if the guy needed, and I made a dark joke earlier, but it sounds like he was, he needed three martinis to break bad news to you, he actually was probably a really nice person for doing that.

He didn't want to do that. He did it for your sake. Probably, yeah.

Yeah. But I didn't take his advice to heart because... Now you're a writer, so I guess he failed. Because I knew that I had something there. It's just I was in the wrong, you know...

Genre. Genre, yeah. Writing insufferable articles about the Amalfi Coast. Oh, man. Let's talk demagogues.

I mean, I told people the show is going to be all over the place, demagogues. This is, unfortunately, according to my Feedback Friday inbox, is half the... nation is working for a demagogue. There's demagogues in every level of politics from the police all the way up to the White House, depending on who you ask, right? So I think this might be useful, whether we have one in the office or whether we're electing them to office.

When in the presence of a demagogue, focus on the rational even more to avoid their emotional pull, is what you say in the beginning of this particular section. Uh, this is very profound, but it also sort of implies, well, it does imply that demagogues use emotional pull to, would you say influence us or control us? Well, yeah, I think that's, that's, that's fairly obvious there.

I mean, um, you don't have to call that thing out. That makes me sound less intelligent. Okay, Captain Obvious. I'm just kidding.

I'm just kidding. Yeah, but it's true. It's true. All I did was rephrase something and I'm supposed to people go, wow, Jordan really, he understands the things that he looks at. Wow, Jordan, that was really, you really understand me.

Yeah, I really do read carefully. So yes, the obvious that demagogues thrive on the emotional pull that they have over us. Well, I mean, the obvious element is they're not appealing to us through reason.

Right. Right. So, in the Laws of Human Nature, I have a chapter on irrationality.

It's chapter one. And I talk that we humans have certain irrational biases built into our brains. And one of them, obviously, is the confirmation bias that everyone knows about. But I talk about the conviction bias, which is if somebody talks with so much conviction, so much anger, so much emotion, so much righteousness, we tend to think that there's something real about it. They wouldn't be faking these emotions.

Therefore, there must be something true to what they say. And this is what makes people on television multimillionaires. The angrier they appear, the more truthful they must be and the more audience people will reach because we have a propensity to want to have our emotions stirred, to want somebody who appeals to them, and we want to believe someone who kind of speaks.

spews the anger that we're not necessarily comfortable with expressing, right? That's a good point. Yeah, we see this on the extreme left and extreme right on television because then those shows where they're yelling at each other and that's all they're doing. Or someone says, can you believe these idiots are doing this and this and this? And it's just a bunch of people at home going, yeah, I hate that.

They're the worst. Yeah. I mean, the person I think who really does that is like Tucker Carlson. Yeah.

I'm not going to go political here on you. because there are people on the left who do it as well. There are, yeah, to be fair. You know, Chris Cuomo can be a little bit like that. But Tucker Carlson, yeah, it's like his snark, his disdain, his anger, his vitriol is what people love.

That's what makes them tune in. And they assume that he must be telling the truth because there's so much conviction behind it. So as opposed to a professor who gets up there in a very calm demeanor. and sort of explains what's really going on in the world. We're going, what an egghead, you know?

You know, he's got some ax to grind because he went to Harvard or something. Yeah, he's an elitist. He's an elitist. Exactly.

Thank you. Okay. So we are wired to have our emotions appeal to us. It's part of our nature because we're at heart emotional animals, right? Emotions, to give you a very brief physiological lesson.

When you feel an emotion like anger or frustration or excitement, hormones or chemicals are released into your bloodstream that are very powerful. Whereas the cortex, the frontal cortex where your thinking goes on, those are like little electrical impulses that are not nearly as strong as those hormones that are charging through you, making your adrenaline pump, right? Yeah, I rarely get fired up about...

like logical math problems or something like that it would never get me sort of charged up having to do my math homework instead of watching a movie or a show that i wanted to right that triggers that cortisol or whatever it is adrenaline reaction so by nature we're wired to pay attention to our emotions whereas our thoughts Yeah, we kind of listen to them. But when we feel something, it engages so much of our body physically that we have to pay attention to it. So we are emotional creatures by nature. We are not these rational thinking animals that we like to believe that we are.

And people who do marketing and PR, they know that we are emotional creatures. They know how to appeal to the animal in us. It's an art that they have developed, that they have honed, right? They call it the affective heuristic.

People buy things based on emotions, not based on rational decisions. Are you saying I didn't need the upgraded camera in the iPhone 13 Pro Max? Are you sure about that?

Well, there was probably some ad that you saw or something. Yeah, it probably wasn't a rational decision is what I'm trying to say. No, it wasn't a rational decision.

No. Okay. Completely irrational.

Yeah. So get over the idea that you're a rational being. You're very emotional based. And a- political figure or in any walk of life or your boss or whatever, if they're like always emoting and they're like out there expressing something with so much conviction and anger and righteousness, you can believe that they're hiding something, right? They're trying to convince themselves of the truth of what they're saying.

They're trying to lie to themselves that what they're saying is true, but by putting on that act, that extra bit of anger, et cetera. right? So con artists have always known since the beginning of con artistry that the more you feel sincere, the more you tell people, believe in what you're selling is like gold. You know, you have a gold mine instead of that you're selling or the Eiffel Tower, the more people are likely to believe you, right? So I just want people to be more skeptical in this world.

When someone is spewing all kinds of emotions, and I've noticed in our age, now the social media age, that you see a lot of righteousness, that people are saying, I am so right about the cause I believe in. Outrage, yeah. Outrage. It gives me license to say whatever I want, to be as angry and violent as I want to because I'm on the side of truth.

You see it a lot nowadays. I want you to be super skeptical of people like that. They're probably hiding something. They're feeling very insecure about the subject.

they may very well be lying about it. You want to have some distance and be able to analyze what they're saying with some degree of rationality and some degree of detachment. Yeah, you say the emotional self thrives on ignorance. So what these people require is for us to not stop and think about, not have any sort of skeptical bone in our body, but to go, yeah, and then blindly follow with whatever they're asserting.

Exactly. You say once we become aware of this, it loses its pull. So awareness being like group bias, insecurity, ego is the greatest danger here, I think, is something that either you or I noted.

And not the ego of the person telling you what to do, but the ego that might say, maybe I just got worked up and I'm wrong about this. Well, that's the confirmation bias. And it's something sociologists have said determines like 95% of human behavior.

Really? That much? Well, I just pulled that out of my you-know-what.

Yeah, we got it. I was like, that's a huge, that's a large majority. But it's higher than you think, let's just say that. So what happens is, if you believed something once, if you voted for this particular person once, right, and then evidence comes in that they're not who they said they were, that they're a hypocrite, they're deceptive, etc. Your propensity is not to believe what other people are telling you, but to double down on your original attitude and say, the person telling me this has an ax to grind.

They're being political. It's their fault. I was right in my choice.

The reason for confirmation bias is you never want to believe that you were stupid. You never want to believe that you were conned, that somebody pulled the wool over your eyes, that you are not rational. that you do not come to your decision based on proper analysis. So you're wired, you have the bias already to believe what you already believe in, to believe in what you want to believe in. So you're going to look for the evidence that confirms what you've already believed.

And trust me, it does motivate a huge percentage of people's behavior. It means it makes you why you don't want to change what you're already doing. Because to change what you're doing means to change your way of thinking.

and to admit that you were wrong. that you did something kind of stupid or that you were going in the wrong direction. It's very, very hard for humans to do that. I think you're right. I mean, we see this happening all the time.

And when it comes to the news or politics or anything like that, nobody wants to turn around and go, yeah, I did that and that was wrong and there were profound consequences, especially if there were profound consequences for themselves or others. How do we balance the need to be rational, cautious, skeptical? with the benefits of being curious and open-minded to new ideas? Well, so you can be too rational.

You can be too cautious. You can be too logical in your attitude towards life. The metaphor I use is of a horse and the person riding the horse.

So I'm saying that the horse is your emotional self. It's all that animal energy. It's those hormones coursing through you and making you excited or angry, etc. And the rider of that horse is your rational self, is your frontal cortex, or your executive decisions, where you go through a rational process of coming to a decision about what needs to be done. Okay?

So if you've ever ridden a horse, I did when I was younger. It's very much more, it's so much harder than it looks. Yeah.

If you remember that. Yeah. Well, horses are very sensitive creatures. They pick up your energy very quickly, right?

They can tell by the way your legs are kind of hugging it whether you're nervous or not. And they're very, very sensitive, okay? So if they sense that you are not controlling them, that you're worried, that you're fearful, that you're kind of like, you know, you don't know how to control this horse, they're going to take control.

They're going to be the alpha in the situation. They're going to go wherever they want to go. They're not going to listen to you because they don't think you have the stuff in you. You're not stern enough, right? And so you'll find they'll be riding all over the place.

They'll be going a lot faster than you want, and it can be very dangerous. But if you hold the reins too tightly, if you're the opposite type, where you're too much trying to control them, you're holding the bit in their mouth really tightly, you're trying to make sure that they only do exactly what you want, the horse... isn't comfortable, right? It doesn't like that because horses have been broken, but they have a wild streak to them, right? So they're either going to rebel, they're not going to go necessarily do what you want, or they're going to go very slowly, etc.

And you won't really be able to ride them with any kind of ease. They'll be very halting. They'll suddenly stop and chew the leaves on a plant when you want them to move ahead, etc. So the perfect balance to make this metaphor come to life is...

You want to have some hold on the reins, but you also want to let the animal have some of its own power. Because that horse is very powerful. Horses are amazingly powerful creatures.

You want to be able to use their energy, to channel their energy for your own purposes, right? So think of your emotions as that horse. They contain incredible amounts of energy and power. You can't write a book.

You can't start a business. You can't do anything in life if you don't have a degree of emotional energy behind it. You have to feel excited. You have to feel motivated.

You have to want something very, very badly. If you're holding on the reins too tightly and trying to be too controlled and everything like that, you're never going to be able to get anything off the ground because you're not going to have any energy behind it. But if you let that go everywhere you want to, then nothing will get made because you won't be able to structure.

You won't be able to organize. You won't be able to discipline yourself. You won't be able to make executive decisions, say, we've got to do this instead of that. So you want to balance, right?

So you don't want to be too rational, too controlling. You want to be able to let go at some times and let your emotions lead you and be inspired, but be able to have some distance from them to know that you can pull it back, you can control it. Now, I forgot what your original question was.

It was how do we balance the need to be rational, cautious, and skeptical with the benefits of being curious and open-minded? Well, so the curious and open-mindedness is that horse kind of exploring things and wanting to try new things out, right? So the idea of being curious and open is an emotional quality, right?

You're not curious, you know, because of some... something going on in your frontal cortex, there's an excitement level that makes you curious about something. You're interested. There's an emotional component, right? You have to let go of that sometimes, of the need to be so rational and so controlling.

So in life, you have to know when to let go. You have to know when to let go of control. and let things happen to you and let things come to you.

If you try and control everything too much, then, you know, things won't happen. You won't have the space for surprises, for the unexpected. If you're a scientist, some of the best discoveries are things you never expected or planned for.

They just happen upon you. And if you've already assessed what you think is going on, you're not going to be open to the new information that comes in. So... The balance is in what I'm talking about.

You know that being too rational will cause you problems. You won't be able to get anything done and you won't be able to explore with your ideas. From a practical level, you mentioned that we should observe how people behave around others, how they interact, their emotions, etc. And compare that to how they behave towards you.

Is there frustration, micro-expressions, anger, contempt? And then ask what reason there could be for this. So there's a lot of practicals in dealing with, all right, if I'm looking at how other people are acting, are they acting the same way around me?

Are we looking for, I'm trying not to be sort of hyperbolic here, are we looking for hidden enemies here? Are we looking for people to show their true colors because we know they'll have a facade up when they're talking to us, but maybe not with others? Well, that could... Possibly, but that's not really the point of this here.

The point is to have access to information about what's really going on behind the facade, the mask people are wearing. And that might be totally benign. It might be that they do like you.

It might be that they're not as interested in you as you think they are. But that doesn't mean they're going to go out and harm you in some way. It just means you think they're excited by your idea, but they're not really so excited. So we all have this experience where...

In the presence of one person, like our wife or a colleague or husband, we act a certain way. And then we're in the presence of someone else. We act totally differently, right?

Because they have a different energy. So the way we talk and move and our body language in front of our boss is not the same as it is when we're talking with our child, with a two-year-old, etc. Or with a younger, an older person like that.

So we're continually changing. who we are when we're in the presence of different people, right? So when you go up to someone, they're responding to your energy, right? And there's some of it's coming from you, and you can't really disentangle what is you and what is actually coming from them. But if you observe them with another person, right, you get better information, you get more dispassionate information.

So you judge them with you. They're this way and that way, etc. But with this other person, they act totally differently, which is the real self.

Well, you don't really know, but at least now you realize that what they were responding to you is only like a quarter of the picture, right? So you want to see how people interact in situations, in a variety of situations. It'll give you more clues as to what's really going on in their heads.

Another practical is... train yourself to see past the front people put on. So this is sort of very similar. Train yourself to see their mythology. Look for signs of their true character or true signs of their character.

How do we do this? The example you give in the book is Howard Hughes. He was actually a terrible businessman, but yet most people think of him as this like brilliant creator.

And meanwhile, he was, according to the Leonardo DiCaprio movie, peeing in bottles in a room and made a plane that didn't fly, or at least didn't fly well. Right. Well, the idea is that people have patterns in life, right? And the patterns reveal what I call their character. And character is something very deeply ingrained in a person.

It's that genetic component we talked about earlier. It's the early education part of them. It's something so deep inside that they can't control it.

And you have a character and I have a character. And what it does over time is it creates patterns. We end up falling into patterns in life, in our work world, in our personal relationships, etc. And you can see this over time.

And that reveals that essence, that core that we are, often in a more negative light. And so Howard Hughes had this pattern of enticing people into this kind of business venture because he was very ambitious, very grandiose. And then he wouldn't deliver.

And he wouldn't deliver for various reasons. One thing is he was an insane micromanager. He had to oversee every single detail of that plane. But he couldn't because he's only one person.

And he'd get overwhelmed with information. And he'd become paralyzed. And the project would never happen.

He would be asked to build 200... enormous transport jets for the Defense Department, and he'd build only one. You know, the Goose, whatever that thing is.

Spruce Goose, I think was his name? Yeah. Okay, because he was so paralyzed with he had to control everything, etc.

And it spilled over into when he produced films, and he directed films, and he had the same mentality. And each time it failed. And yet people would not pay attention to those failures because they got sucked in.

to the aura of Howard Hughes, this adventurer, this pilot who would risk his life doing things, which was true. He was very almost reckless in his flying planes, etc. So they bought the legend of Howard Hughes, and they weren't seeing the reality was that this man was an awful businessman.

He was just a terrible businessman, right? And the clues were all there. And yet they were falling for the appearance of this really smooth, charismatic man.

And it became comic by the end because he had four or five or six failures in his past. And still he managed to convince people up until like the 50s or 60s to fund his wild projects. So the idea is, to sum it all up, is stop paying attention to people's charm, their presence, their facade, to how excited they are when you first meet them, to their resume. to the fact that they went to Harvard or Yale, etc., and look at their character, what lies underneath.

So if you looked at Howard Hughes'character, you would have seen someone deeply insecure and deeply controlling to the point where he could never finish anything. And if you saw that, you would have never signed on to one of his projects and lost millions of dollars, right? So people give signs of this. They give signs of their behavior.

They give signs of the fact that they're not a team player. Character... I like to decide to judge as either strong or weak.

You want a strong character for a partner in an intimate relationship, for a business partner, for a colleague at work. A strong character can take criticism. That's the number one thing.

A person who is strong inside can take criticism and can use it constructively. They don't become defensive. A strong person, when there's stress, they don't crumble.

They suddenly become this whiny little baby. They can handle it. They have presence of mind. A strong person can work with other people. They're not dominated by their ego.

They don't have to have everything on their own terms. A weak character is all the opposite of those traits. So you hire somebody based on their charm.

Then you discover when there's stress that they crumble into pieces. You discover that when you criticize them, they get all whiny and defensive and they can't learn. You discover that they can't work together as a team. They only want to advance their own agenda. You learn that too late because they're already working for you.

So judge them before you get involved with people. And I should talk in my books about how there are always signs of what the underlying character is. And if people want more practicals about this, obviously in the books, which we'll link all of them in the show notes, we did an episode probably going on two, maybe even three years ago now, hard to say, which I'll also link in the show notes.

And that one is full of... envy and jealousy and human nature and control and defense against it. All the dark side stuff.

Exactly. I will wrap on one final thing here. And this is now that we have cryptocurrency going crazy and people, the stock market is super high. Many times, this is your idea here.

Many times we run on a reactive program. We get caught up in the moment. Perfect example, the crypto run the economy.

Even wise people fall prey to this. oh, Bitcoin's at an all-time high. Look at how high the Dow is going. We need to funnel more money into these things. We have to zoom out and take a longer view of time.

But how do we do this? How do we zoom out? Even when we don't feel like it, which is really what's going on here, I feel like buying more of that stock that's going up. I feel like I need to get on the Bitcoin rocket ship.

We have our FOMO, our fear of missing out is in full swing. How do I short circuit that? Because it's easy for me to say when Bitcoin is zero and the Dow is losing money that I need to not invest. It's really hard when I feel like I'm the only one who's missing out.

Well, I wrote a whole chapter in there about that. It's called Our Short-Sighted Nature. And I describe the phenomenon of bubbles, economic bubbles. And the original bubble...

was aptly named the South Sea Bubble, and I narrate the story in The Laws of Human Nature. This took place in the 1710s in England, and the idea behind it is, is that when other people are buying things, you're not, or doing things, we're a viral creature. We look at, we're social animals.

We're very much wrapped into what other people are doing and we get caught up in the kind of herd mentality. If other people are buying something excited, there must be a reason. I don't want to miss out on it, right? And so this is what's behind a lot of Ponzi schemes, etc. The more people that get involved, the more it seems like it's real and substantial.

And so the South Sea Bubble was this kind of comic event where the man, it was like the original Ponzi scheme. And Sir Isaac Newton was investing his life savings in the South Sea Bubble. And he ended up losing like all of his savings in there. The king of England was putting his name behind it, the brother of the king. I can't remember which one it was.

Yeah, it's hard to say. I vaguely remember this from your work. So everyone got caught up in it, the smartest people around. and the stupidest people. So when you find yourself in a dynamic like that, this is part of human nature.

There was the tulipomania. I was going to say it's like the tulip mania, where people are buying tulips for the price of gold or something like that. Yeah. 17th century. You had the railroad mania in the 19th century.

You had the tech bubble in the 1990s. You had the real estate bubble in the early 2000s. Who knows what the bubble is now?

Maybe it's cryptocurrency. I don't know. But when you find yourself and what motivates you is that other people are doing something, I have to get involved. Little red flags go up in your brain and go, uh-oh, I'm probably, probably this weak part of human nature is getting involved here. I'm getting sucked into this dynamic where the social aspect of my nature is telling me that other people are doing something.

It must be great. It must be interesting. I have to get involved. No. The moment you feel that's happening, step.

back. This is one situation where in the rudder and the horse, you want to be holding the reins a bit tighter because, you know, your money, a lot of money could be at stake. So it's a delicate thing.

I mean, who knows in the beginning whether cryptocurrency is real or not. Maybe it is like the new thing it's going to. But when you hear people say that this time it's different, there's something new about cryptocurrency. Your bullshit meter must go rise right up because that's language that every swindler has ever used.

This is different. This is not like anything in the past. The rules of finance are being rewritten.

You don't have to worry about it because this is totally new and different. That is 100% bullshit, right? The rules of finance have not been rewritten. Bubbles exist and they've been existing for hundreds of years because of human nature, because of psychology, and that's what's getting sucked in.

sucking you into it. And so you want to look at the classic bubble in our time was the one that led to the crash of 08, where all these people were involved in these complicated real estate derivatives, all these names that I can't even remember. That's what I was doing on Wall Street, mortgage-backed securities. And I remember thinking, what happens if people can't pay their mortgage? And the partner said, real estate always goes up.

There's so many people in these pools. They're not all going to default. Well, real estate does tend to go up, but this isn't real estate. This isn't bound to property. This is bound to things that were completely like financial chicanery.

They only existed on paper, right? And the smartest minds in the world got caught up in that bubble. You can't believe the names of people who went to Harvard, Yale Business School, CEOs. They all got caught up in the idea that this time it's different, right?

We've created... A new kind of financial mechanism. The old rules, you can throw them out. The moment you hear that, you know something is wrong, right? So all the signs, the classic signs, we've all lived through them if you're old enough.

I don't know if the people that young, if you're 12, maybe know, but if you're older than 12, you live through that crash, and you know what really happened. And that's the kind of herd mentality and kind of stupidity, to put the right word on it, that we all are prone to. And when you find yourself getting emotionally attached to Bitcoin to the point where if someone so much as breathes, whispers something skeptical. You get all emotional.

You act, oh, come on, you old fuddy, you dinosaur. You don't understand the hipness. This is the new thing. You know that you're drinking the wine, that you're drunk on this thing and you're in trouble.

So it's not necessarily that there's not anything to go on the Bitcoin metaphor. There's still innovation. There's still new things that result from this. It could change the world, but the idea that it is completely new and different and not subject to the laws that everything else has been subject to. We're not going to invent any machine on Earth or in the universe as we know it that's not subject to gravity forces.

Well, the metaphor I've given in human nature is human nature is so strong that it changes everything that we create. It's like this impersonal force. So just to finish this metaphor here, the internet comes out in the 90s and then it starts to explode in the late 90s and we're all using it and we're so excited.

There's this forum for all this free communication. It's like the wild, wild west. It's so exciting. It could lead to anything.

And slowly, slowly. Yeah, well, slowly, slowly, that's what it becomes. Slowly and slowly, it becomes this place to sell the worst kind of products.

It becomes the place for online porn. It becomes the place for venting your outrage and being a troll. It brings human nature, changes this thing.

that we all thought was this liberating device that was going to open up the world into something kind of ugly and political, a tool for China to spy on people, to spy on its own citizens, to gather, and in this country too, to gather information on private citizens, right? So human nature, the dark side of it will take over. So Bitcoin might have started out as this incredibly liberating thing, but you better damn well believe that the forces that are out there are going to take it over. And that's going to be somehow misshapen and malformed into what other things have been misshapen for in the past, like the internet. Well, fortunately, Bitcoin is decentralized.

And I'm going to get a lot of emails from people that are like, he's wrong. And here's why. And I'm looking forward to those. And this is a great conversation.

Thank you so much. Well, I'm just saying you might be right. But the fact that you think you're so right is the problem.

Just be able to look at yourself and just entertain the possibility. entertain it in the tiniest little corner of your brain that it could be a bubble. That's all.

That's all.