What could your mind do with just a few moments of silence? This week Robert Greene explores the liberation that comes from practicing enlightenment through silence, and how recognition of death tragedy help him manage adversity in his daily life. Listen in as we discuss why manipulation is part of our makeup, why recognizing our failings makes us better people, and how a near-encounter with death changed his perception of adversity.
Robert Greene is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, and The 50th Law. His highly anticipated fifth book, Mastery, examines the lives of great historical figures such as Charles Darwin, Mozart, Paul Graham and Henry Ford and distills the traits and universal ingredients that made them masters. In addition to having a strong following within the business world and a deep following in Washington, DC, Greene’s books are hailed by everyone from war historians to the biggest musicians in the industry (including Jay-Z and 50 Cent).
Greene attended U.C. Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he received a degree in classical studies. He currently lives in Los Angeles.
You can see a full collection of Greene’s work here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001IGV3IS/allbooks?ingress=0&visitId=33a4f706-a8ef-4d25-8162-c1f038681070
Episode Transcript
I’m Marcus Aurelius Anderson and my guest today truly embodies that phrase. Robert Greene is one of the most influential and prolific authors of our time. He’s written New York Times bestsellers, The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law, Mastery, and The Laws of Human Nature. The Daily Laws is his most current book and he’s working on a new one right now when I’m sure that we’ll talk about it. This man’s work has been a significant impact in my life for my recovery and my rediscovery of purpose. Robert Greene, thank you for having
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time to be on today. You’re an incredible author and thank you for listening to what we have to say and being present with us today. Well thank you for inviting me Marcus. It’s my pleasure. I’m looking forward to it. This is going to be tremendous. We were talking about your meditation that you have in the mornings. This is Zazen, correct? This is from Zen Buddhism? Yes it is. Zazen, that’s correct. Yeah. I’ve done meditation for a while as well. When you were talking to, it was on one of the impact theories, you were talking to Tom Bilyeu about this idea of Zazen
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Do you just kind of give yourself that peacefulness or are you asking yourself specific questions to sort of uncover? What is kind of the methodology for you? Well, I’ve been doing it now for it’ll be 13 years in a few months, like every day. I’m up to doing 45 minutes. I do it when I wake up in the morning. It’s been kind of a journey. I’ve taken there’s a Zen center here in Los Angeles. I’ve been to it a few times. I don’t have a master that I can work with, which would be a great help. If anybody out there.
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point indicates somebody here in Los Angeles, I’d be very excited. So I’m mostly self-directed and I read a lot about Buddhism and Zen. Although you have to be careful. It’s a kind of practice and religion where reading and words really don’t have any use. You’re trying to get away from words, from logic, from analytical thinking. You’re trying to access a deeper level of your consciousness. Though in the last
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five or six years, I took on a koan. You’re familiar with koans? Yes. It’s the most classic koan of them all, the most famous one, which is the Zen master, Josh Xu. A student asks him, does a dog have Buddha nature? And the word Buddha nature is extremely important in Buddhism. It means the capacity to become like Buddha, to get rid of discriminatory thinking, et cetera, et cetera, and to return to
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your kind of natural self to your original mind that you had as a child. So the person is asking, does even a dog have Buddha nature? And the Zen master, Joshu answers, Muh, this is one word, Muh. And so all I do every morning is I meditate for 45 minutes on that one damn word, Muh. And supposedly it’s like, they call it a barrier. There’s like a barrier to enlightenment.
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And this is the gate to enlightenment and muh is like the barrier that you need to pass through. And the word literally means does not have, but it’s essentially meaning it means nothing. It means really silence, nothing. You can’t say it has, you can’t say a dog has or doesn’t have Buddha nature. I know I’m boring the hell out of your listeners right now, but basically you’re trying to transcend this dependence that we have on words.
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analytical thinking and kind of enter this other level where you’re getting rid of the self, the ego, you’re transcending all of that through the portal of this one word, muh. You know, like this morning in my meditation, every day is different and that’s what’s so exciting about it. Some people do meditations that are kind of programmed and I like this free reform where you never know what you’re going to get. Every day is different. There’s no essential direction you’re heading in. It’s just whatever the morning brings you.
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This morning, I’m trying to go really, really deep into cutting off every kind of possible thought in my head. And for 40, you try doing that for 45 minutes and you know that it’s not easy. And I’m going so far deep into it. I’m like feeling my brain as it’s developing brain waves. And I’m sensing the brain waves as they’re zigzagging through my head. And I’m trying to still them and stop them.
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and create this complete silence and stillness in my brain. And if you can do that for five minutes, my God, it’s the most insanely liberating feeling of all. And I can think, if I could keep that for 45 minutes, I would pass through that barrier that they talk about. But I can’t, I can only do it for like a couple of minutes here and there. So that’s the kind of meditation that I do. Wow, that’s powerful. I’m sure you’re familiar with some of Dogen’s writings on Zen and his idea. Oh yeah.
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I love that idea because we always talk about enlightenment or this desire to sort of transcend, but he was like, how about we just do what you’re saying, which is sit down, shut up. The very act, the intention of sitting down and trying Zod’s in, in and of itself is enlightenment. So it’s sort of liberty in that capacity as well. You know your Zen very well. Zen is not given enough credit in the West as a philosophy. It’s one of the most profound philosophies ever created.
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And Dogen is as great as a Schopenhauer, a Nietzsche, a Hegel. He is absolutely insane. And it’s so complicated. I understand maybe a third of what he says. It’s so deep and weird and interesting. And what he writes about the concept of time to me, that’s what I love the most. And I found that incredibly profound. In my meditations, I’m always going back to that idea of the experience of time is you’re in a boat in a river and.
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You’re living inside that moment. It’s not like you’re looking at it from the perspective of the bank of the river, watching time go by your inside time itself. I know that sounds like a weird concept, but if you meditate on it, it’s really exciting. So I’m glad you mentioned Dogen. I have to go back to that. I love Dogen. And I agree with you that in the West that philosophical ideal is underutilized, is overlooked, even with the idea of Taoism, where they very much as in, in Taoism kind of take.
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this assumption that we have and they turn it inside out or upside down or they’ll use a colon to almost make fun of it, to take away the seriousness of it so that we’re not trying to achieve this thing so difficultly and maybe gives us that perspective to see it an alternate or lateral angle which often is enlightening in and of itself. Yeah, well the idea is you already are enlightened. You’re just returning to a state that you already have, which is something I was writing about recently in this book I’m writing right now.
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I have a chapter in there about childhood and the consciousness that we had as children and how we kind of looked down on children and childhood unconsciously as if it’s a less sophisticated level than what we are at now. But I’m saying it’s the opposite actually. We were at a level that in many ways was superior as the way we directly experience life and we didn’t have all these distractions and thoughts clouding us. And so Zen Buddhism is a way of getting back.
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to that childhood brain that you have, your original nature, your original mind. I talked to a lot of people who were like masters in their field. In mastery, I interviewed Paul Graham, who’s a great tech master, created Y Combinator, and he always said, the more you know, the further you move away from the truth. The more knowledge you get, the less creative you become. You become kind of entrenched.
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in various ways of doing things, various heuristics that you keep repeating. And you have to be able to get rid of it. And so the greatest inventions in tech or anywhere are people who come from outside or who are very young, who aren’t weighed down by all this. The same thing as the beginner’s mind, the original mind that you had. I love it. And you were talking about kind of that crossover between the Eastern idea and then into the West and Daoism and Zen and sort of the dovetail of
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how all these things, I love that that was what you were using to really direct you because in Zen the idea is to see through illusion, see through self-delusion and try to see reality for what it is. And oftentimes, even with it, whether it be with tech or social media or whatever, it’s easy for us to sort of either sugarcoat or use self-terfuge to keep us from seeing those things but all of your writing has been so deep trying to get to those realities which
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Sometimes reality is not always pretty, whether it be the first book that everybody’s familiar with, The 48 Laws of Power, people looking at things and they use this pejorative Machiavellian. But in my opinion, reading those books and reading your message shows us not that we have to act in that manner, but that we have to be aware of those that will act in that manner so we are not victimized by those tactics. Yes, very much so. But also a big strain in my writing is coming to terms with who you are.
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and not being in denial. And so the human animal has Machiavellian manipulative streak to it. They call chimpanzees the Machiavellian primate. And a very great writer, Franz de Waal, he’s a primatologist, he’s written some amazing books sort of cataloguing the Machiavellian behavior in primates. It’s something so deeply embedded in our genes, we’re not even aware of it. But children can be very manipulative and can be very Machiavellian.
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It’s not that I am promoting this as a way to be in the world, because if everybody was constantly being manipulated, it would be pure hell out there. But it’s part of your nature listening to me out there. You do it, you’re not even aware of it. A lot of it is passive aggressive behavior. You make people feel a little bit guilty for not texting you or calling you. You don’t think that you’re being manipulated, but you are being manipulated. You’re just not conscious of it. So a lot of my books are.
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denying it. Turn around and face the reality of who you are, that you have this nature, that this is what the human animal is about. Let’s not be so ashamed about it, because when you’re ashamed about it, it creates hypocrisy and it creates behavior that you’re trying to disguise it and it comes out in uglier ways, those kind of passive aggressive behaviors that I’m talking about. It’s better to look at it full in the face and say, yes.
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There is a manipulative side to my character. Now, how can I make it something that’s maybe a little more conscious and a little less negative and a little more productive? How can I channel it into my work? How can I maybe not be so manipulative now that I realize it? That’s a big part of why I wrote the 48 laws and it’s a theme in all of my books. I love that consistency is the foundation of all of it. Another foundation of all these things is this understanding of, because any philosophy is great, but it’s only as good as the person that’s
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women to use it. So that fundamental idea of to know thyself, to strip away all the bullshit to get down to what’s really going on, because we can try to put anything on top of those things, whether it be a process or a philosophy or a religious ideology, to justify behaviors yet at the end of the day, if we don’t get down to who we are, and what really either drives us or what we really want or motivates us or what the fear is that we’re not willing to look at, then it’s impossible to actually know what we’re going to do.
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especially when we face any kind of adversity in our lives. Yeah, I call it radical realism. And realism almost has sort of an ugly tint to it. Like, well, if we saw the way things really are in this world, it’s kind of boring and dull and drab, just clouds out there, the sun shining. I see it every single day. What’s much more exciting is video games, porn, online porn, or wild fantasy rides. I’m trying to say no, that’s the opposite.
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Reality is the most exciting, beautiful thing around you. Immerse yourself in it. It’s infinitely more exciting, infinitely more intense than anything a video game or virtual reality can give you. That’s an important part of Zen philosophy is reality is by far the most beautiful thing that there is. So being into your own nature, seeing who you are, understanding the dark side of your character as well as the good side of your character is part of that realism.
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And I talk in my book, Human Nature, about the shadow. I have a chapter about the dark side, the shadow side of human personality, which is a big theme in the psychologist, Carl Jung, kind of popularized the idea. He almost invented it in a way. And the idea is if you look at your dark side, if you look at what usually try and deny the fact that you can be not the nicest person in the world, that you can be irrational, that you can do stupid things and believe me, I’ve done
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plenty of stupid things in my life. We could take up the whole show going through that. But recognizing that and looking at square in the face, he says makes you a more complete individual, makes you a more complete self, and you can incorporate this dark side into you. And in doing so, that kind of realism is a profoundly transformative thing as opposed to only living in this kind of fake ideal world that every, I’m just the.
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most just, righteous, wonderful person around, you know? Everything I say and do is just wonderful. You’re just living a lie, you know? Well, and that protects us from being ambushed by cognitive bias or our own dissonances that try to reaffirm what we already believe, and now we get into this vacuum where this loop of patting ourselves on the back for being sparring. Yeah, confirmation bias is a huge motivating factor in human behavior, and I notice it in myself. I mean, the thing is,
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When I write a book, I’m not just talking about the world. I’m also looking at myself as well. And I’m aware of these qualities in myself as I’m writing about them, which helps me sort of understand what the reader is going through. So when I was writing a book like The Laws of Human Nature, I know that I have cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. And I have to work to overcome that constantly. So I’m not trying to like,
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scorn or denigrate people out there because I’m including myself in this. I have these problems as well. And when I talk about rationality and the laws of human nature as an ideal, in order to become truly rational, which is, I think, would hold up as an ideal for all of us, you have to understand how you are irrational first and not assume that you know exactly what you’re doing. You have to understand first that emotions are governing your behavior.
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not your rational thinking. People in marketing, economists, they know this very well, that you’re not behaving and buying things out of rationality. You’re buying and purchasing things because of emotions. And that’s what gives Mark Zuckerberg so much power and what gives these tech people so they understand human nature and human psychology very well. You have to come to terms with the fact that emotions are governing your behavior and they’re giving you cognitive biases.
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And I include myself in that scenario as well. And I think that that morning Zazen every day kind of gives you that clean slate. It gives you that ability to at least have an idea of being objective in the process. Because in the heat of it, it’s difficult to have that kind of detachment. Well, I tell you, one thing that happens in Zazen is as you’re sitting there trying to empty your mind, all of these stupid, inane, silly, dumb, irrational thoughts start flooding your head.
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Why can’t I control that? Where is this coming from? Am I really that banal and I’m really that stupid that I’m stressing over something somebody said three days ago that’s totally irrelevant? I should be like meditating. It really humbles you when you see how your thoughts are not your own, you don’t own them. They kind of come up from some sort of automatic system. It’s a very humbling experience to realize you’re not really in control of yourself and to kind of confront
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your own limitations. So in your face every morning like that, I think is a very, very profound experience, at least for me it is. I think it’s one of the most courageous decisions that we can make. Yeah. It’s very vulnerable. It forces us to be very vulnerable. And you started off going to UC Berkeley, and then you finished your degree in Madison, Wisconsin, which the winners are a little different than California. What was the motivation behind that? Well,
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I’m a California boy. I was born and raised in Los Angeles. I’m an old guy. I have to admit it. This is in the 70s and I’m in Berkeley. So I’m revealing what a dinosaur I am. I’m in Berkeley. It’s exciting to be outside of Los Angeles. But at the same time, there was lots of drugs. It was sort of the hippie culture, the dregs of it were still kind of dragging their corpse around Berkeley. And I got into it. I started to get really depressed. I really found it kind of like alienating.
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We’re living in the 60s and it’s not, it’s like the mid 70s. And it was starting to like wear on me. You know, I did a lot of drugs. I have nothing against drugs. It’s a huge part of who I am and how my mind and my brain developed. But I was starting to sink and I was starting to feel like something was missing from my life, that I was becoming something that I didn’t like. And so it was a summer and I was so goddamn tired of the counterculture stuff.
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I wanted to do the opposite, but studying ancient Greek. You know, what could be more opposite of that mentality than ancient Greek? And I took a, you learn one year of ancient Greek in six weeks. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life. It was so exciting. You know, like 12 hours a day of ancient Greek. I was dreaming in ancient Greek and my professor at the time.
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They brought in a visiting professor, Barry Powell, from University of Wisconsin. I thought he was really exciting because he was an Egyptologist. He studied hieroglyphics. Oh, how exciting, what a mind. And he said, Robert, if I can lure you over to Wisconsin, we’ll give you a full scholarship. We only have like five students in our classics department. We’re dying, we’re going extinct, we need you. We’ll give you the Gertrude Slaughter Scholarship.
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And I’m there and I packed my bags and I went to Madison, never visiting it, just sight unseen. And I loved it. It was a great experience. Yeah. Cold, like you have no idea as a California boy. I remember there’d be days in January where the whole streets were all be frozen. It’d be like walking on an ice skating rink, you know, and I’d be falling and falling and falling and falling and cross country skiing to class. I loved it. I thought it was, it was a great experience. I love.
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Wisconsin, I love Madison. Anybody out there like that? I’m saluting you. I have never been back since I graduated, but it’s something I definitely want to visit again. It was very wholesome. Even though Madison is the Berkeley of the Midwest, it was a very kind of grounding, earthy experience compared to Berkeley. Wow. That’s beautiful. That’s very much why we go away to college, to have these adventures, to have this, I don’t want to say trial by fire, but it really does give us like this completely different architecture for us to see.
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I remember they put me in a dorm and they assign you a roommate. And my roommate was this guy who was fresh off a farm in Wisconsin. He had never been outside of the farm. It was like the Beverly Hillbillies. You couldn’t have put two of the odd couple, two more opposite people together in a room. He would wake up every morning at like five o’clock, five thirty. He had like three alarms because he normally would wake up to the farm animals.
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He was driving me crazy. We ended up, we ended up getting in like a fistfight. I had to get a new roommate. It was a total culture shock, you know, but if he’s out there, I apologized for my behavior back then. I think we could all apologize to people that we knew when we were in college at some point in time. We’re all just trying to learn. Exactly. We have no idea who we are at that point. And as an author, I know that you’ve gone through a lot of different experiences and different jobs, but to want to write.
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to want to create something that is as powerful as the way that you write is, can you give us, because you always remember your first love or you remember like your first experience in these different ideas, can you tell us the book where the author or maybe even the quote that just hits you so hard that made you say, God damn, I want to write something like that, or I just want to absorb this and try to process it in a way that’s going to have some sort of meaningful impact? I didn’t really have any kind of epiphanic moment like that. I wanted to become a writer when I was a kid.
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I read a lot of books. I wanted to be basically a novelist and reading great novels, which kind of was the video games that I played when I was 11, 12 years old, that determined the course of my life. I just thought, I have a weird relationship to sounds. I’m a very oral person and words just fascinate me, just the sounds of words, the look of words, just words in general. So I had to do something eventually with language.
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and it was naturally writing. It was just a matter of what kind of writing that I needed to go through. So the only kind of epiphanic moment that I had where I go, wow, this is what I should be doing, was when the 48 Laws of Power came up and I met that man who basically, Yost Delfers, who basically changed the course of my life, gave me a chance to write the 48 Laws. And as I began writing it, delving into Machiavelli and all these other things, I go.
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This is it. This is the right thing. I found it. I hit my level. This is what I was meant to do. So that would be the closest to that kind of light bulb going on in my head. I find it beautiful because again, Steven Pressfield, I’ve interviewed him a few times and it was that same kind of idea where we have this kind of idea, we have this thing that we enjoy so much. But then we’re sort of going through these phases to learn whether it be like you said, different jobs, different experiences, different places. And then finally,
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eventually there is this, I don’t want to say clarity, but then things sort of just line up and now it’s saying, here’s the opportunity because you were writing a little bit leading up to that obviously, correct? It’s not as if you just weren’t writing at all. Oh, no, no, that’s all I was doing. That was all my whole life. I mean, I’ve been writing in college and my first job is in New York working for various magazines as a journalist. And then I left that and wandered around Europe trying to write the great American novel.
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which I basically failed at. And then I came back to Los Angeles to make it as a screenwriter, which I basically failed at. I tried to write theater and plays, which I didn’t fail at, but it wasn’t a great success. So by the time it came to the 48 miles an hour, I had gone through my apprenticeship. I had done more than my seven years or more than my 10,000 hours. I was ready, I had the skillset, so it all kind of fell into place. I was thinking the other day,
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I’ve always had this idea that there’s some kind of fate that I’m involved with, that things were meant to happen this way. And it’s almost kind of creepy, as if I’m imagining some other alien life force that’s looking down on me and is directing my life and is going, this is where you should be, blah, blah, blah. The other day I was thinking, that is so irrational. You’ve been keeping that idea with you since you were a kid. It’s so ridiculous. It’s probably not true.
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You know, I mean, this is almost sure it’s not true. You’re just alone. You’re just a human being. You’re imagining these things. And then I go dialoguing with myself. Like, yes, Robert, that’s true, but it’s better to have the illusion. It’s better to believe in fate and better to think that that’s the case. Cause it protected me. It helped me throughout my whole life. Don’t go looking so deeply into everything in your nooks and crannies. Just accept that fact. No, I love that. And again, we’re talking about confirmation bias.
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If we have one, we might as well have one that serves us. We might as well have one that pushes us, that gives us that thickness of skin to say, you know what, this is gonna be hard. Or when people, again, the publishers are saying no, no, you’re being said no to with all these things. You have to have that, the ability to say, you know what, fuck you, this is what I’m doing irrespective of what else is going on. Do you have that own sense in your own life, in the course of your life? I absolutely do. As I told you before, when I was 38, I got divorced. My great uncle, who was my biggest male role model, passed away.
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He was in the military. I wanted to join the military to kind of follow in his footsteps. And that’s when I was like, okay, this is it. This gives me direction. And then being injured and paralyzed and dying on the table. And then looking at my life at 40 and looking at all the regrets and where everybody else is in their life, get married, get a job, pick a fence, two cars. And here I am with nothing. And everything I’d given myself to is just ripped up underneath me. So that’s when you have to start saying, okay, I have to find my mind a purpose.
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behind this. And to me it was like adversity was that thing that forced me. I look at adversity the way Presto looks at resistance, but I look at it as a much more aggressive and adversarial form of it because to me it literally potentially could have taken my life had I not actually gone towards it the way that I did. And in that very Zen idea, I want happiness. Well, I take myself out of it because that’s ego, one is desire. So what am I forced with here? I have to look at this thing.
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and I examined everything from the hardship of my own parents’ divorce to the reality of what I was facing then. And if that’s what I had, if this is the reality, and it is, how do I move forward? Because I was suicidal, but I couldn’t even act on it. So I felt like a victim for months. This is in your early 40s or at the age of 40? So I was 38 when I joined the military, and then I was 40 when I actually got injured. That’s interesting that you joined the military that late in your life. That’s very interesting. Yeah, I did very much with you in…
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sort of press what we’re doing where I was going through to be an occupational therapist and I was going into criminal justice and then I was in chiropractic school in Atlanta and I was two years from my doctorate. So when I talked to the school they said if you go full time, if you’re active, we’ll pause your degree, you’ll get your GI ability, come back, pay for all your school. I would go serve my country for four years, come back, get my doctorate, serve my community with my hands and live happily ever after. But there’s what we hope will happen, there’s what we fear will happen and then there’s what actually happened.
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Well, I think fate in your case is also in the fact that your very name is kind of spelling out what’s going to happen to you, oddly enough. It forces you to be in that place. It’s weird because I thought this is probably another silly thing that we’re, I don’t know if it’s going to be interesting to people, but people’s names often have like, have you ever noticed how they kind of follow the same kind of, there’s something about Richards and there’s something about certain female names, etc.
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They all kind of follow a pattern. So the name that you’re given as a child, in some weird way, has some kind of strange connection to what ends up happening to you. I don’t know, it’s not really worth going into, but having a name like Marcus Aurelius is certainly a very explicit example of that. Well, having that name at a young age, I didn’t understand who he was. In my mind, I thought they were saying he was a king. So as a little boy, I’m not a king. I’m eight years old. I’m introduced to people, and there’s recognition on this adult space that I’ve never seen.
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What is the big deal about that? So I just went by Mark for a long time, because Marcus was too much gravity in my opinion, because I didn’t feel like I was worthy of that. Started doing martial arts when I was 12. Tried to pick up meditations at 12. Goes over my head, and I’m 50, so I had to order the book. It’s not like I could just get it on Amazon and have it delivered the next day. Waited for it, had no context about what meditations was. Opened it up, he says, for my father I learned this, my grandfather I learned this, for my mom I learned this.
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I don’t know who any of these people are, so it was sort of a dry read. I sort of set it down. I’m like, I’m named after this guy. I don’t even like his book. But that’s when I found the Dao De Jing, because as I was leaving in defeat, I saw the Dao De Jing sitting out, picked it up. And for me, the prolific statement was, if you continue to sharpen your knife, it will go blunt. If you overfill your cup. And so even at that age, that made an impact on me. And that became my gateway to understand Stoicism later. Oh, very interesting. That’s very exciting. Wow.
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You need to write a book about all this. The first book that I wrote is called The Gifts of Adversity. Oh, I’m sorry. No, no, don’t be sorry. It’s it’s nothing to the degree that you have. And then my TEDx talk is called The Gifts of Adversity. So that was what got me sort of in this area. But now I’m trying to figure out sort of what you’re doing, where you’re on this path and you’re following this truth. And we don’t always see where it goes, but we know it’s a general direction that we need to be pushing towards. And that’s very much that artistic.
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authorial journey in many ways. Yeah, yeah, very exciting. Well, you have to send me a copy, yeah. I would be honored to send you a copy. And speaking of that, your second book on seduction. Well, you have the early version of it. Oh, yeah, I followed you for a little while. I’m not an overnight fan of yours. Okay. Can I ask you, were you already seeing Anna? Were you already partners with her at that point? Yeah, uh-huh. How did that sort of inform the way you wrote or how did that kind of influence?
30:47
I had a wild period in my 20s, like a lot of young men might have. I was definitely a rake. I was 21, living in Paris, France, working in a hotel where all the top fashion models were staying. Oh, wow. That’s a high target environment right there, Robert. Very high target. I sewed my wild oats for a good 10, 12, 14 years until I met Ana. And she kind of…
31:15
turned me into what we would call now a reformed rake. And you can read about that in the book. I talk about the rake and the reformed rake and what happens to him. And then the funny thing is, although she has a different take on the story, mind you, because she was the victim of it. Several years before I wrote the Art of Seduction, I essentially, in my version, deduced her. Her version, as I said, is different. And I used a tactic.
31:43
It is a strategy that’s very much part of the art of seduction about creating triangles and appearing to be an object of desire. I invited her to a birthday party in which I was going to be surrounded by these eight beautiful women who were my friends at the time, knowing that that would kind of spark her competitive juices, which women definitely have. She knows that. She saw through it. She laughs about it. It’s not like this is some evil thing that I did.
32:12
So yeah, prior to that book, we’d been going out together. So yeah. So did she try to counter that with a coquettish kind of strategy? Definitely. I’d say her type is more like a siren or a dandy. But she definitely played a little bit hard to get, yeah, which is fine. That’s my great weakness. I think it’s every man’s weakness, essentially. So yeah, it’s never a one way thing. It’s never like one person seduces another. It’s always like.
32:41
kind of a game that goes back and forth and back and forth in the best scenarios where it’s not just one person imposing their will. It’s kind of a courtship, a dance sort of thing. So she had her strategies and tactics, whether they were conscious or not, I don’t know. We could invite her in and she could tell you her side story. We could hear the he said, she said version of it. It would sound a lot different than mine, I can tell you that.
33:09
Well, the beautiful thing is you both won and you still dance really well together, obviously, because you have to be able to. I think people forget that there’s always that initial spark and the initial chase and the hunt. But being able to continue to cultivate that and feed that fire and work at those relationships, that’s almost the most difficult thing you can really have in the process. I think it’s the second most difficult thing. I think the most difficult thing, which I’ve never done. I only know by secondhand is raising a child.
33:39
That to me is like the hardest skill of all, as far as dealing with another psychology. You know, it’s bad enough for a man dealing with a woman’s psychology. But a child, I know I have a lot of friends and they come to me for advice and I’m like, I can’t even begin, it’s too complicated for me, sorry. I have a 20 year old stepdaughter that I’ve been in her life since she was about 15. And kind of like you said, I’m trying to understand the dynamic and we got along really well, but then she’s.
34:07
getting older, discovers boys, is driving. And now there’s this whirlwind of other things that I’m trying to take into consideration. And for me, it was about finding the right battles to fight, where to draw the line, where to allow, because that’s always difficult. And then the dynamics always change. Yeah, you have to both let go, but not let go too much. It’s like an art. If you’re too controlling, then you destroy them. If you don’t give them any direction, you destroy them in a different way. So how you balance that.
34:37
Hell, if I could write five volumes on that, I don’t have the answer. I agree. And speaking of writing, you’re writing your newest book and I’m not sure if we even have an idea the release date as of yet, but can you tell us a little bit about that? It’s the law of this of wine, correct? The release date is before I die, hopefully. It will be. Anyway, it’s going very slowly. It’s not an easy concept to describe, not like the 48 laws of power or something, but I’ve been meaning to write the book for 16 years.
35:06
And the last chapter of the 50th law, the book I did with 50 cent, I talk about it where I discussed, wow, you’ve got it all in front of your mortality. And I talked about the sublime there. And then the 18th chapter of the laws of human nature. But I meant to write it in 2006 and I got sidetracked by the 50 cent project. And then I had my stroke, like literally three months after I finished the laws of human nature.
35:36
and the last chapter which was about confronting your mortality. If somebody up there was trying to send me a signal, this is the time I have to write the book because the sublime basically, if I can kind of give you an analogy of it, is that we sort of as human beings, we tend to live in this circle and that circle is the codes and the conventions of our culture, of our civilization, certain patterns of thinking, certain patterns of behavior.
36:03
that are considered correct and acceptable. What that circle was in ancient Egypt isn’t the same circle as it is now. They had different values, et cetera, but there was still the existence of a circle. The circle is timeless, and what it means is we humans tend to think in certain patterns and certain conventions, and this is what other people are thinking, kind of in a viral sense. Though the sublime is what lies outside of that circle.
36:29
What are thoughts that you don’t really think of? Emotions that you don’t normally have. Experiences that you don’t normally have. Behavior, and you’re peering into something that’s a little bit forbidden, that’s very different and strange. And it’s like a door opening up to another world. Well, the strangest of them all is death itself, because you can’t really know what it is while you’re alive. But to taste it, to sense it, to go up to that door,
36:59
and open the door and peer in and see what it feels like, what it might be like, because each of us has to face that, is a very, very, very sublime moment. And I had written about it intellectually in the 50th law, and I had written about it intellectually in the laws of human nature, and then the door was slammed in my face as I was in a coma and I survived by razor-thin margin, thanks to Anna, who was in the car that I was driving when it happened.
37:29
So I had an encounter, not as strong as a lot of near-death experiences are, I can’t say, but it was an encounter where I felt life draining out of me. I felt my bones dissolving. I felt like I was approaching some threshold. Okay. Well, when you have that moment, it changes you forever, though you can’t shake it. So normally in our day-to-day human consciousness, we’re very good at repressing the thought of death.
37:55
We turn it into, even if we think we’re being realistic, we turn it into an abstraction. Well, yeah, someday I’ll die. It’s not a good thing. Yeah, I’ve confronted, I’m dealing with it, man. You know, come on. Et cetera, et cetera, but you’re not. It’s an idea, and death is a feeling. It’s an emotion, it’s a visceral thing. You feel the blood inside you. You feel your blood moving. Death is also inside of you right now. Your cells are dying. Your brain cells are dying. Your body is decaying.
38:24
When you fall asleep at night and you have that moment where you kind of lose consciousness for a second, that’s a presentment of death itself. When you say goodbye to somebody and you don’t think you’re going to see them for a while or they die, you’re getting a little feeling of that ultimate separation. It affects you in here. It’s not an idea. It’s a visceral connection. When you have that, you can’t get rid of it and it changes you.
38:50
It makes you look at the world differently. It makes you appreciate life. It makes you appreciate the people that you know and that you love. It makes you feel like a sense of urgency. I better, Robert Greene, I better finish the law of the sublime before I die kind of thing. It’s the ultimate sublime experience. So I don’t know how many chapters there are. I’m on the sixth chapter. There are gonna be about 12 or 13, but each chapter is like a facet. If it’s a circle.
39:17
There are 13 facets around that, or doors around that circle. One is appearing into cosmos and what it means to just be living in the universe. The other is biology and evolution. Another is the ancient world and how people thought back then in our ancestry. Another is childhood. The other is the brain itself. I’m working on a chapter now about animals and other organisms and their consciousness.
39:42
on and on and on. So that’s basically the book. And the last chapter will obviously, well, we know what the last chapter will be about. And I absolutely agree. For me, when I flatlined, it was just very cold and very dark. It was very peaceful. But again, I did feel myself moving towards a certain direction. But it felt like it was eternity and then it felt like it was heartbeat. I was back in the ICU recovering. But again, having that urgency really makes us understand what’s truly a priority, what is not.
40:11
where we’ve been bullshitting ourselves, where we’ve been wasting time. And it gives us just that extra notch because obviously with you, it’s not like you’re slacking. You’ve been writing prolifically for years, yet it gave you an even more greater sense of this urgency and gravity. Can you describe what that feels like? I mean, obviously you’re dual planet with that, but in other areas of your life, how is it affecting them? Well, it’s in a day-to-day sense. You look at things and you see how short-lived they are.
40:38
how evanescent everything is, how every experience is going to pass. It makes you more kind of empathetic towards other people with limits. You know, there are people in my life who I try and draw the limit. I’m not gonna feel empathy for them because they’re bad. But it makes me feel much more connected to people because everybody is facing their mortality. And when I see people who are disabled, because I mean, I’m still am, you know, if you saw me walk down the street and say this guy is basically disabled.
41:07
makes me feel much more emotional about them, makes me care about them much more deeply. It makes me understand them emotionally what they’re going through. It also, when the pandemic occurred, which was occurred like a year and a half into my stroke afterwards, I understand the feeling of not having power over yourself. Oddly enough, I wrote the book, but I had no power over my own body. I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t move. My right hand is still a bit of a claw.
41:37
though it’s getting better. I understood people who suddenly had no job and no future. And it’s like that sense of vulnerability and helplessness. I could understand now on a very much more profound level, not on an intellectual level, but on an emotional level. So it had many, many changes in that sense. And it is so important to be able to give that pragmatic empathy to other people. Again, we can be empathetic without being a doormat, but yet.
42:03
But empty and empathy are spelled similarly for a reason. We have to empty ourselves of desire, trying to fix this person, trying to put our two cents in and just be there. I just be that vessel for them. And that’s a very powerful experience. Yeah, I mean, one of the things I would say about this sublime book that I left out is another impetus for writing this. I think people now are too mired in banality. Their worlds are shrinking, they’re getting smaller and smaller, which is a paradox because
42:31
The opposite should be happening through science, through the internet. We should be having our minds should be expanding every moment with all the insane discoveries about the universe around us, about life on earth, about other organisms, about our own bodies. We should all be wandering around and go, wow, whoa, man, I can’t believe it. Oh my God. Instead we’re like, what food did this person eat yesterday? Look at her clothes. Oh, look at that hairstyle. It makes me really angry. That we’re.
43:01
dropped into this world and 20,000 years ago, we were wearing pelts and carrying clubs. And here we are talking on Zoom. We should be all like, it’s like a drug trip, man. We should all be like going, I can’t believe it. Instead, we’re so petty. We’re so fucking banal and petty and boring that it drives me crazy. Open your eyes. This world is insane.
43:29
Your life is absolutely insane. You’re even breathing right now. I know we all have hard things. We all have crosses to bear. I agree, I understand. But at the same time, just getting out of that small world and expanding your horizons, that’s really what I wanna write the book about. And we used to have it centuries ago. That’s why religions existed and why spirituality existed. Maybe we’ve outgrown some of that and I understand it.
43:57
because we’re so technological and scientific. But it doesn’t change the fact that it’s this weird journey that we’re on that life is so bizarre and strange. You don’t have to be religious to feel these emotions. So that is a major impetus behind writing this book. I can’t wait to read it. Having the skill set of the mastery that you have of the craft and then to have an experience that you had, this gives you incredible voltage to create something that’s.
44:23
Your work already changes people all over the world, but this is going to be something that’s going to be, in my opinion, obviously tremendous. Oh, good. I hope so. I hope I’m a, I hope all my talk, I can back up my talk with something that’s, that’s worth it. But yeah. Yeah. You’re an octanon, but you’re not the guy that just talks about it and doesn’t do it. So of the people that you’ve gone through and research, there’s been a lot. Is there anybody that you researched that you were just surprised that other people were not as familiar with?
44:51
historical bigotry. Like, my God, why is this person not been more widely read or aware of or the significance of their impact in historical things? Wow, that’s a good question. And I wasn’t really ready for it. I don’t have a snap answer. Good. That’s what I want. I want to give you. Obviously, in the ancient world, but I’ve written about him and I think people have an awareness of him, is this character named Alcabietes, who was an ancient Greek.
45:19
He was a really strange, interesting person, very larger than life. And I kind of really got fascinated by him because we think of the ancient Greeks as so different from us, totally different animal, you know, like they were all hanging around in their, whatever they, they wore in academies and thinking these great Socratic thoughts, et cetera, but Akabaitis was just like somebody that you would see in New York right now. He was weird.
45:48
He dressed weird, he was very outrageous. He was probably quite a bit of a narcissist, but he was also brilliant. He was a great strategist. There’s the famous Peloponnesian War, probably the most classic paradigm of warfare in history between Greece and Sparta. He was sort of the leader of the military at that time, and he had a brilliant strategy for how to finally get rid of the Spartans.
46:14
And like several nights before the whole thing was to launch, he was involved in this weird scandal where they profaned the gods, you know, like phalluses were cut off statues and he was involved. He was so disgraced that they threw him out of the military and everything went downhill from there. I mean, I don’t mean to put it all on one person, but he and Pericles are the two figures in ancient Greece that kind of fascinate me and people don’t study enough of.
46:43
I’m sure there’s some ancient Romans that I’ve come upon that I go, wow, nobody really reads about them, but nobody is flashing in my head right now. Give me a moment and I’ll come up with something incredible. That was incredible. Don’t worry about it. I mean, I read so much history that I know you do. I know you do. So it’s not even my head is swimming in this great snow and I can’t pick out the little pieces of meat in there. You know,
47:09
getting old. No, please, our listeners want to hear this. They want to hear all this stuff and that gives them an insight even more into who you are as an author and as a person more importantly. I mean, when it comes to strategists, is it John Boyd? He wrote about the 33 strategies of war. He created the OODA loop. These are kind of these oddballs. I like oddballs. Let’s just say it as it is. I like people who don’t fit into a category. You can’t pitch holes this side or the other. And yet they’re absolutely brilliant.
47:38
John Boyd, who I highly recommend to read his ideas about strategy is one of those figures. I love that. And sort of on that vein, and I want to be respectful of your time. This will be our last question, unless you have more time, but is there an event in history that you wish that you could have been witness to? There would be several things. I would really like to have been around somewhere on the planet around 10,000 years ago when the Paleolithic period.
48:07
kind of melted into the Neolithic period. And what that is is, and basically the transition from us being hunter gatherers to living in settled villages and raising farm animals and cultivating our own food, basically creating who we are today. I was fascinated by that. I’m fascinated by Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals and that transitional moment in our history.
48:35
I would love to be around that and kind of be what people were like because their consciousness was so different from ours. And you can see that in the cave art, etc. So reading an amazing book right now called Inside the Neolithic Mind, where these writers try and recreate how Neolithic’s probably thought and they’re going into the neuroscience, they’re going into the DNA, they’re going to… It’s very scientific, very well researched.
49:04
I would love to be around the Battle of Salamis between the Athenians and the Persians. And that moment that probably changed history forever with a brilliant strategy where they lure the Persians into the narrow channels off of Athens and they defeat an army 20, 30 times their size. Whoa! You know, because if not, Persia overtakes Greece.
49:31
And you and I would, who knows what language we would be talking right now or what would have happened in the world, you know? That kind of stuff. I’m sure there are others, but I’d probably go somewhere around there. No, I love what just is coming off the top of your head. I think that’s perfect. And then I live one more question. If there’s one person throughout history you could have had a conversation with, if language was not a barrier. You already speak five languages, so that probably wouldn’t be a barrier. Well, probably it would be like…
49:59
Buddha would be somebody very interesting because he was a living figure. There’s so much mythologizing around these characters, Socrates, Plato, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, etc. But they were also human beings. Well, I’m not going to profane anybody, but they’re flesh and blood, they’re human like us. I was reading the Laws of Human Nature biography of Martin Luther King. I realized really great definitive biography of him.
50:29
This isn’t what the myth is. This is somebody else. This is somebody actually better than the myth. This is the flesh and blood human being who has foibles, who has flaws, but who overcame his flaws. We did something incredibly powerful. To know them in their minutiae, in their day-to-day life, and to humanize them is incredible. Well, Buddha was actually a living person. He’s surrounded in this myth that’s hard to pierce through.
50:58
We know that he grew up in a very wealthy family, aristocratic family. And the legend is that his father heard a story that the son was going to deny all the pleasures of his life, go off and become a monk. So he wanted to make him addicted. Nothing bad could ever happen to him in the palace so that he could never try and do that on his own. He would be too weak and soft. You know, so go there in that palace and be with them and see that. And then
51:26
Maybe leave that moment when he’s 29 years old. I think it was 29. He decides to leave the palace and go off into his seven year, eight year journey to find himself. That’d be an incredible moment. And then to be with him when he has his moment of enlightenment. Then, you know, of course I would love to meet Machiavelli, somebody I feel very close to in a way. When I read him, I feel like an affinity, like I know him. And.
51:55
When he was exiled by the Medici’s after they came back to power in like 1511, 1512, I don’t get me, dates are off a year or two here. He’s living out in a farm outside Florence. He’s trying to get himself ingratiated back with the Medici’s back into power. And he’s depressed and he’s miserable. He decides to write the prints to re-ingratiate himself. I always picture him in this farm.
52:21
outside on like a bench and a table and writing the prints and like an orchard. And there was this woman that was serving him and he writes about her. I’d like to be that moment there hanging out with him as he’s writing the prints and talking with him. That would be like, I know Buddha and Machiavelli, you can’t go to like two more extremes there, but that’s me. You know? No, I love that. I would love to see you and Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia and Michelangelo having dinner.
52:49
as their paths crossed and to see what they were thinking, where they were going, the different intentions, the different desires, the different fears, the different ambitions, and see how they all cultivated into the history that we know of today. Yeah, I’d invite you along. You’re invited to that dinner. I would love to. Let me know. I’ll have to work on my Italian. Okay. I think it’d be fantastic. Listen, Robert, I cannot thank you enough for your time, for your wisdom, for your generosity, and for your honesty and everything that you do. Thank you so much for being here. I look forward to shaking your hand.
