So I'm going to send you the sirens in Park Slow. This is going to be a fucking problem all episode isn't it? Welcome to New York. The Big Apple. Keep in something about you being in New York for this episode that way we get weirdos in our mentions being like, but you're still doing it on Zoom? This is what is so fucking fascinating to me is like I started... God there's like a starter is pissed all going on outside.
So no that is a there's construction near you. I'm like two blocks from the harming building going up. That is some sort of construction site, Flintstones, horn. Within limits of course. Wait, there's a siren outside. There's sirens a lot in New York. Has anyone talked about this? No one has. There's noises in New York. This is why every Brooklyn based podcast just has sirens and sometimes you're like, oh they should have waited for the fire truck to pass. No you can't.
There's no way to do it. And so, I love my gobs of here in New York in real time. I can't. I'm never coming back. So I have noticed that most of our episodes only get good when we start talking about the book. So I'm going to dive pretty quickly into this book. Peter, do you know anything about the 48 laws of power?
I've heard of the book, but I don't really know anything about it. My high level memory of this is that this is like lessons that this author learned from like observing powerful people about how to acquire power or something like that. I think you're basing that on the title. I think you know the title and you're extrapolating that is possible. You're like, I think there's 48. How many are there early in this podcast? I used to at least look up the Wikipedia of the books you were doing.
And then there's like, no, you have to be fresh. This is my whole thing. I know you do nothing. And now I do nothing. And now I do nothing. And this is what you get. So the 48 laws of power is by a guy named Robert Green, who we will talk about later. It is published in 1998. As usual, it's basically impossible to get decent numbers on how many copies this book actually sold. But the number you usually hear is between one and two million copies.
It seems to have spread mostly through word of mouth among like CEO types, but then it made its way to hip hop. So there are lyrics in J.Z. and Kanye West songs referring specifically to this book. Oh, hell yeah. And you are going to wrap them for us right now. Yeah, that's the rest of the episode. It's just a series of couplets. It also says on the Wikipedia entry that Drake is developing a series called the 48 laws of power, but it also says that he's developing it for quibi.
So I don't know what that Wikipedia just has an updated while. And then according to the author, it's now been read by Fidel Castro among other like heads of state. And this book doesn't really show up on the sort of best business books ever like most influential self-help books. It doesn't really show up on those lists, but it does show up on a lot of lists about the best self-help advice for men. Oh, okay.
So this really bounces around the sort of polite version of the men's rights activist world. This is seen as a kind of Bible for like how to be a man in the world. That's an interesting framing because now I'm picturing like 70 year old Fidel Castro being like, how do I be a man in this world? Swayering a Fedora doing magic tricks at the other end of the world, LA. Okay, so this is the first paragraph of the book.
The feeling of having no power over people and events is generally unbearable to us. When we feel helpless, we feel miserable. No one wants the last power. Everyone wants more. In the world today, however, it is dangerous to seem too power hungry to be overt with your power moves. We have to seem fair and decent, so we need to be subtle, congenial yet cunning, democratic yet devious. It's a real problem.
Yeah. We all want power, but we can't just be like telling people, hello, I would like more power. I immediately don't relate. I have to say there are many situations where I want less power. I also am a little concerned that he seems to be portraying power as he defines it as somehow conflicting with fairness and decency. He says we have to seem fair and decent, right off the bat. He's like, you know how we're all big pieces of shit?
Yeah, I think one of the tensions that showed up for me literally within words of starting this book was where in modern life are people engaged in power struggles like this. Yes, there's office politics. We all exist within hierarchies that on some level, you have to do a little bit of strategy. Yeah, yeah. You know, there's various other things of maybe you want to be the president of the PTA or you want to coach your kids little league team and somebody else wants to as well.
And you got to lobby a little bit. But he makes explicit reference throughout the book, and especially in the intro to the French court. How there were all these people around the king. And you had to suck up to the king, but you couldn't make it obvious that you were sucking up. And you had to beat the other like courtiers and kind of scheme and backstab and do all this kind of stuff like this, the sort of game of thrones conception of, you know, human societies. And I just don't see it.
This was immediately conjuring up game of thrones to me. Somebody said it because there's something weird about a framing where our everyday lives are a struggle for power. If you read that paragraph and it resonates with you, you're probably conceptualizing your life as like this elaborate real politics. Yeah, and you're actually living out a fantasy just by reading this. Right. This reminds me of a lot of like the watch marketing and things that are pitched at men.
Okay. So we're going straight into personal attacks. Chosen deliberately, Peter. It's like, you know, you're hiking mountains and you're out in the elements and you're like on a sailboat in the middle of the night, trying to survive and whatever. And you need this watch because you're such an extreme person. Right. Maybe I should have said Patagonia or something. But it's like, it's selling you this fantasy of your life is like much more exciting than it is. Right.
Most of the people who drive SUVs are not like busting sand dunes in the middle of nowhere and going over streams. Man, you're, you keep preempting me. I was like, as soon as you were talking about this, I was thinking about those commercials of SUVs out in the desert. Yeah, yeah, yeah. An authentic SUV commercial is like you pulling into a Texaco. This book could have been called Think Like A Straight Man.
And now I do. So you're picking up on when you see when he said Think Like A Straight Man. Now I have a maybe think of that Steve Harvey book and now I have like, like act like a gay boy. Think like a straight man. That's going to be the title of our book and we finally do one, Peter. Because our power is combined. Okay. So here is the end of the intro. He is laying out what the book offers and kind of how it is going to work. What this book is going to contain.
Consider the 48 laws of power a kind of handbook on the arts of indirection. The laws are based on the writings of men and women who have studied and mastered the game of power. These writings span a period of more than 3,000 years and were created in civilizations as disparate as ancient China and Renaissance Italy. Yet they share common threads and themes together hinting at an essence of power that has yet to be fully articulated.
3,000 years. The 48 laws of power are the distillation of this accumulated wisdom gathered from the writings of the most illustrious strategist statesman, courtiers, seducers and con artists in history. Who would you listen to? If you were trying to figure out how to coach the little league team. Oh my god. The con artist thing is right right away. He's like, I've learned these things from con artists and now I'm teaching them to you.
I should also mention this as a spoiler, but when he says statesman, he exclusively means dictators. He never refers to like Winston Churchill or anybody in this. It's like Mal. Like over and over again. And like Julius Caesar and shit. Right. We're not talking about the secretary of the treasury here. No, exactly. But then I think this is an important thing to know about this book. Is that this book, the copy that I have is 478 pages long. Oh my god.
It is the opposite of filler. I've never seen this. The actual chapters are like very dense like historical anecdotes. Like that's most of the book. Is he's like long historical anecdotes. But then also the margins are also filled with like Swahili Fable quotes from philosophers and shits with just like this black brick of words shining in your face for like a month on end. Like this was the experience of reading the book for me.
God, that is hellish. I mean, I will say the one thing that's great about the books that we do is that they have so much filler that you can sort of mentally skip over. I know. I know. And how many times have we said this that like these books so often present themselves as the sort of like inheritors of this ancient wisdom. Yeah. How Alexander the greats conquest can teach you how to get that promotion instead of Josh. Before we get into like the sort of patterns that the book is doing,
I want to talk about how this book works. So one thing that I will say for him is that he's a very structured thinker. These aren't just like a series of kind of random rants. Every law is broken up into like very clear sections. For example, law one is never outshine the master. And after each law, he gives a sort of basic premise of this law. So he calls it the judgment. Right. And so he says always make those above you feel comfortably superior in your desire to
please and impress them. Do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite. Inspire fear and insecurity. Make your masters look more brilliant than they are and you will attain the heights of power. So that's what he's like about to lay out, right? And then he has these historical sections which he calls observance of the law or transgression of the law. So for this one, he uses Galileo who didn't quite invent but like massively modified and
improved the telescope. And when he looks up at the sky, he finds four moons of Jupiter. And no one had ever seen these before. And it was like a whole big fucking deal because people thought that everything rotated around the earth. But here are these things rotating around Jupiter. It's it's like a massive deal. And his patrons are the Medici. I didn't even know Patreon was around back then. They're at the $10 tier. So they get the bonus moons. And so he decides to name the
four moons after his like four Medici backers. He kind of goes out of his way to basically imply that like the very heavens are like recognizing the brilliance of the Medici. It's like well there's four of you and there's four of them. And it's a much longer anecdote. So you've done this show before Peter, you know, you know how these books work. I've just told you a historical example. What am I going to tell you now, Peter? Presumably that some of the facts contained within that
example are incorrect in important ways. That's that's what I'm anticipating. Perhaps I'm going to say the funniest outcome is that that's not who the moons are named after. I feel like you're there's a clever Hans thing going on right? I feel like you're picking up on the fact that the by far the biggest twist of the episode is that this story about Galileo is like roughly true.
And basically all of the anecdotes in this book are true. Like I fact check them. I was like, okay, here's the part where I like go Google it around about Galileo and then I find out there's bullshit. No, they're real. I mean, as a researcher, as a researcher for this podcast, that is the worst. Yeah, I know. Like now what do I do? You're like one of these has to be fucking made up. That's just my whole career. You're destroying. Now we just have to talk about
the content of the book. I just don't learn things about historical figures. Jesus Christ. I love that this is the only author we've done so far that has integrity. Yeah, clearly associopath, but he has integrity. After all of the historical examples, he then gets to something called the keys to power where he lays out like the little lesson. Like what are the themes we're pulling out of this? And I'm not going to read it, but in this one, it's basically like
Galileo was good at sucking up to people who were essentially his bosses. And so like be good at sucking up to your bosses, which ultimately is like fairly good advice. I think if you're going to do like office politics and shit, like figuring out, okay, what does my boss want? Right? What does he want from his boss? And like, how can I help give that to him? It's like that's kind of reasonable. No, it's totally reasonable. It's just that the like the framing of it is like, here's
what Galileo did. Yeah, yeah. What he's really talking about is like the head of regional sales, yeah, get him coffee sometimes or whatever. Like that's how it translates to like a normal human being's life. So then he also does a weird thing. So at the end of every chapter, after he's laid out the lesson, he then has a section called reversal where it's like, well, sometimes this law doesn't apply. So in this one, he says, you can't worry about upsetting every person you come
across, but you must be selectively cruel. If your superior is a falling star, there is nothing to fear from outshining them. Do not be merciful. Your master has no such scruples in his own cold blitted climb to the top. Okay. So I mean, I guess you could say that there's like a kernel of decent advice in here, right? If like your boss is unfavered within the organization that you work
for, like, yeah, maybe don't be like, oh, I'm Jeff's guy. Like when you think of Jeff, think of me, like it seems so far, like you could rewrite this book with all of the same lessons toned down, like the language and framing. And it would just be called like, how to get a 15% raise at your job. But then also, I mean, one of our kind of central critiques of these self-help books is that they give these overall rules of like you should do this. But then obviously there's there's numerous
situations where they don't apply, right? You can't actually give people meaningful advice unless you know the specifics of their situation. Yeah. Should I break up with my boyfriend? Sometimes you should. Sometimes you shouldn't. Kind of depends on what your boyfriend is like. There's no, there's no like generalized advice about this kind of stuff. But it's so amazing to me that he just seems to realize that, right? He's like, always suck up to your boss. But sometimes,
you shouldn't suck up to your boss. Yeah. I'm still kind of impressed though that he's so rigorous. Like all the anecdotes appear to be like more or less correct. Yeah. He's hedging so that he doesn't get like too aggressive in his prescriptions. Yeah. I can't wait for this to get weirdly sexist or whatever's about to happen. Oh, Peter, I set you up so perfectly. I was like, I'm going to make Peter think that this is chill. We're going to cover the next 46 laws of
power in parts two through twenty four, the next two years of books. Good. So we're not obviously going to read all of the fucking 48 laws to like this extent. I just wanted to get like the structure of the book down. Yeah. From now on, what we're just going to talk about is like the patterns of the book. Okay. Like all of these books, it's unbelievably repetitive. So at a certain point, you're like, ah, okay, that goes in this bucket. Like I was just basically doy decimaling the rest of
the book, shocking that he did not identify 48 distinct non overlacking powers of power. They're either repetitive or contradictory. The first pattern that we are going to dive into is utterly sociopathic advice backed by irrelevant anecdotes. Hell yeah. So I'm going to send you the first couple paragraphs of law to never put too much trust in friends. Learn how to use enemies. You often do not know your friends as well as you imagine. Friends often agree on things in order
to avoid an argument. They cover up their unpleasant qualities so as not to offend each other. They laugh extra hard at each other's jokes. Don't trust it. Since honesty rarely strengthens friendship, you may never know how a friend truly feels. No honesty. He's never had a friend. This man lives in John Gray's cave with him. He's just never come out. I'm very upset by this. Like sir, you need therapy so bad dude. We're already at uni therapy. We're not too, Peter. So fast. Not too. Oh god.
Be wary of friends. But hire a former enemy and he will be more loyal than a friend because he has more to prove. In fact, you have more to fear from friends than from enemies. If you have no enemies, find a way to make them go make enemies Peter. You can just write that first paragraph about your friends and then show them that. Then they'll be enemies. I'm sorry. I don't mean to circle back to the friend stuff, but I'm just so upset that he doesn't seem to understand that
these are all like nice elements of a friendship. People who know you. People who like you. Right. Friends often agree on things in order to avoid an argument. First of all, I don't even know that that's true. But like your friends being like, well, I don't really agree with what Michael just said. But like, I know Michael. We don't need to fight about this. That's like a normal and good quality of a friendship. And also to say that honesty. Rarely strengthens friendship.
Don't tell people stuff. It's not just like, oh, does this guy have friends? It's also like, has he read a book where there are friends? Just as a sociological phenomenon. Have you seen a movie where two people have a friendship? If you watch Goodwill Hunting, it's actually a speech that Ben Affleck gives. What's funny about this chapter is that like the actual advice that he gives is just like, if you need to do business stuff, don't hire your friends. That's good advice.
Not because your friends are like evil and scheming. I know. But it's like he expresses it in like the most sociopathic way possible. But what we're diving into, Peter, you're seeing this like this kind of general rule of like friends are bad, right? And you're like, okay, what example is he going to give? Right? Because every law has these fucking anecdotes in it, right? And they have these like fables and shit on like the margins. It's just going to be like Caesar. No, this is so he
he illustrates this with a fable. Okay. It's a little bit long. But to me, it's important to like really revel in this story and like get the full picture. Actually, why don't I send it to you? So this is like, he says like African proverb or something. I don't know where he's pulling this from. Africa. A snake chased by hunters asked a farmer to save its life. To hide it from its pursuers, the farmer squatted and let the snake crawl into his belly. But when the danger had passed and the
farmer asked the snake to come out, the snake refused. It was warm and safe inside. On his way home, the man saw a heron and whispered what had happened. The heron told them to squat and strain to eject the snake. When the snake stuck its head out, the heron caught it, pulled it out and killed it. The farmer was worried that the snake's poison might still be inside him. And the heron told them that the cure for snake poison was to cook and eat six white fowl.
You're a white fowl, said the farmer. He grabbed the heron, put it in a bag and carried it home where he hung it up while he told his wife what had happened. I'm surprised at you, said the wife. The bird does you a kindness, rids you of the evil in your belly, saves your life, yet you catch it and talk of killing it. She immediately released the heron and it flew away. But on its way, it gouged out her eyes.
What is the lesson here? I don't even understand the ostensible, theoretical reason for the bird gouging out the wife's eyes. Exactly. She's the good one in the story. It's literally like if you try to be nice, it will backfire because the person you were nice to will take advantage of you possibly attack and try to kill you. What the fuck is this? Also, what was this snake's plan for the next several days? We're then going to do one more of these, Peter. In law three, can seal your
intentions. He says, most people are open books. They say what they feel, blurred out their opinions at every opportunity and constantly reveal their plans and intentions. Many believe that by being honest and open, they are winning people's hearts and showing their good nature. They are greatly deluded. Honesty is actually a blunt instrument, which bloodies
more than it cuts. Your honesty is likely to offend people. It is much more prudent to tailor your words, telling people what they want to hear rather than the course and ugly truth of what you feel or think. During the War of the Spanish Succession in 1711, the Duke of Marlboro, head of the English Army, wanted to destroy a key French fort because it protected a vital thoroughfare. Yet he knew that if he destroyed it, the French would realize what he wanted.
Instead, he merely captured the fort and garrisoned it with some of his troops, making it appear as if he wanted it for some purpose of his own. The French attacked the fort and the Duke let them recapture it. Once they had it back, they destroyed it, figuring that the Duke had wanted it for some important reason. Now that the fort was gone, the road was unprotected and Marlboro could easily march into France.
What the fuck is this? That's not like it, conceal your intentions is really, really good advice if you are in the midst of medieval warfare. The ability of that to translate to my everyday life where most of my interactions are with the kabob guy. I just don't see it. What does this even get me in the workplace context? This is what is so fascinating to me is after a while. The anecdotes get very repetitive. It's
like ancient China, the Roman Empire, ancient Greece. He has a bunch of stories of Nicola Tesla. The ton of stories about Nicola Tesla. He has a bunch of Louis XIV French court pre-revolution France things. He does not have, I'm not exaggerating, a single anecdote in this entire book from an office. He's just like little aphorism of like, conceal your intentions or something.
And then the next paragraph will be like, in 252, the emperor, so-and-so of China, wanted to conquer the general something something and you're like, why am I hearing this? I'm just picturing Jay-Z reading this. That's why he has so many lyrics about the Duke Amaril bro. A huge percentage of this book is basically just like unbelievably sociopathic advice. Right. Law seven. Let others do the work for you, but always take the credit. No doubt.
Law 12. Use selective honesty and generosity to disarm your victim. He uses the word victim throughout, which I think is weird. In that law, victim is like your friend, right? Or like the my co-worker who didn't get the promotion, and I did. In law 14, pose as a friend, work as a spy. He has this whole thing about like, crush your enemies completely. And again, you're just like, Robert, I work at Quiznos. I don't have like enemies. I'm trying to think of where this would
apply the most. And maybe it's like, if you're like a cabinet member or something. He actually uses a ton of examples from Henry Kissinger. Yeah. And like, yeah, if you're the secretary of state and you're dealing with like weird, conniving other heads of state, and like you kind of are in some way engaged in some of these like power battles. Right. Then like, yeah, some of the stuff is useful. Conceal your intentions. Right. Like you're, you're sort of like literally dedicated
your life to the pursuit of power. Right. You're not coming into contact day to day with people who you're just trying to like build fulfilling relationships with. Right. If you're living Henry Kissinger's life, you are a sociopath and you have chosen the life of a sociopath, you know. So I, before we get to the other categories of information that this book contains, I just want
to talk a little bit about like the specific kind of sociopathy that he's promoting here. So in the intro, he says, genuinely innocent people may still be playing for power and are often horribly effective at the game since they are not hindered by reflection. Once again, those who make a show or display of innocence are the least innocent of all. You can recognize these supposed non-players by the way they flaunt their moral qualities, their piety, their exquisite sense of
justice. But since all of us hunger for power and almost all of our actions are aimed at acquiring it, the non-players are merely throwing dust in our eyes, distracting us from their power plays with their air of moral superiority. This is just what Republicans believe. You see it all the time in the language they use when they talk about virtue signaling, for example, which you know, I think you can say is a real thing, but they are obsessed with the idea that progressives who
talk about morality and, you know, doing the right thing, etc., are faking it. And in fact, they have these devious plans. And that's because they accept this framing of the world where everyone is scheming out for power, out for themselves. You read a paragraph like this and the conclusion might as well be like, and this is why we need more police on the street. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's like either play the Game of Thrones or get Little Finger blasted. This is what he's lying
out. I like how you did your own spin on an already perfectly sufficient line from Game of Thrones. When you play the Game of Thrones, you live where you die. Okay, you could have just said that, but no. You said Finger blasted on Sky the other day. And I was like, I don't know when I have heard that term other than like eighth grade and like right now. This is what I get for doing a podcast with a straight man. It is because the last time the last time I heard it was like a month ago.
Okay, me and the boy is talking. I did actually look this up because I was silly. I was really struck by this too of like, this is a world view that I do not recognize at all. Everything is this battle for power and even people who are acting kind. That's evidence that they're trying to manipulate me. Right. I started looking around and there is an actual concept in psychology called zero sum ideology. And this is basically the idea that every single interaction between two people
has to have a winner and a loser. Okay. Which is actually relatively widespread in the population. You can read people these scenarios of like Dave put his car on Craigslist and then like Jessica bought the car and then you ask people like, okay, who won the interaction? I would be like, oh, Dave won the interaction. There's no reason to think of this as like one person won and the other person got cucked in that exchange is just like two people engaging in mutually beneficial activity.
But there's obviously a spectrum. And so on the sort of extreme cuck end where I am of this, there are people who have what's called zero sum aversion where people will actively avoid situations that are just objectively zero sum. Right. If I win a tennis game, you lose a tennis game. And so people like me who are super conflict diverse just like don't really like playing tennis
or like doing those kinds of competitive activities with friends. But then on the other end of the spectrum, there's people who have what's called social dominance orientation that physically like cannot see situations as win win. Yeah. You can explain to them like in very clear terms like both people benefited from this interaction and they'll be like, no, he won. So it's like this idea
that like you can't look for win-win scenarios because you don't think that they exist. Well, you know, little peek behind the curtain for listeners, but you were recently at my wedding. And I just want to ask you, who do you think won? The world because there's one fewer single straight man in the world walking around. Everybody won. No, I look, I told my wife right afterwards. I was like, I think I won this one.
This entire episode is a sub-tweet of you here. This is an intervention. This is why I do any of the books. I think that everyone knows people like this to some degree or like they have some version of this, right? Yeah. I don't mind competitive stuff with my friends, but there are people who in the workplace in personal relationships, et cetera, just cannot tolerate the idea of someone else doing well. And just to get, and just to give an example of where the stuff might lead,
I think that a lot of these mindsets sort of feed into things like in-sale culture. Yeah, okay. These guys create an adversarial relationship with women in their minds, right? They can't help, but you women as their enemies, even though they are fundamentally trying to connect with them. This is actually kind of where I was going with this because they've measured this in various countries and across time periods, et cetera. And typically what you find in societies at zero
some thinking is more common among majority groups. So like white people, men, depending on the country, Christians are more likely to engage in zero some thinking. Basically, this is one of the major things that prevents policies that would increase equality because people like physically cannot process the idea of more equality as not taking something away from them. So there's actual studies on this where they give people like scenarios. They're like, okay, Latinos are less likely to get
home loans than white people. So like the mayor is going to pass a policy that promotes home loans for Latinos. This will not affect white people. And then like the survey question is like, will this affect white people and survey respondents are like, oh yeah. Big time. Like even like in black and white, you're like, this will like, this is a fake scenario. I have defied. Right. This will not affect the indroom. Be like, oh yeah, I'm going to get fucked by this.
So much kind of political debate takes place on the sort of implementation of policies or these specifics. But it's like when you're understanding of society at this most basic level is just that no one can get anything without me losing something. It's very difficult to argue with somebody like that because it's like such a base belief and something that I think people are relatively
reluctant to like articulate or even kind of know that that's their belief. Right. I don't think I don't think that there are a lot of people that would frame their politics as being driven by that. It's just something that is sort of, you know, behind the scenes in their brain, which is why I always sort of circle back to a lot of conservative thinking being like brain chemistry as much as it is like a coherent ideology. And this is part of that. You know, they won't let you
say it on TV. But what Republicans have is a case of the bad brain. Their brains work no good. And the PC police won't let me say it on the radio, but that's true. But your podcast can host well. This is the importance of independent media. You can't hear this anywhere else. So we're now going to go back into the book. So we've talked about how most of it is sociopathic advice and these weird irrelevant anecdotes. The other main pattern, like we're now down to like
the remaining like 25% of the book. Most of it is just sociopathy and weird anecdotes. The rest of it is just like straight up bad advice. So I mean, send you the opening anecdote of law six court attention at all cost. Oh my god. Thank you. It is a story of PT Barnum opening like his first museum where people could come. And he was he was basically trying to get them to
attend his new museum through like marketing efforts. So here's this. Barnum would put a band of musicians on a balcony overlooking the street beneath a huge banner proclaiming free music for the millions. What generosity New Yorkers thought and they flocked to hear the free concerts. But Barnum took pains to hire the worst musicians you could find. And soon after the band struck up, people would hurry to buy tickets to the museum where they would be out of earshot of the band's
noise and of the booing of the crowd. So like you should be obnoxious to people so they go to your museum, I guess. What? Who would flee into a museum? By the same guy who's providing the music. Right. By the guy who just proved to you that he cannot entertain you. That's why our main food episodes are just two hours of the sound of a baby crying. So the people seek refuge in our
bonus episodes. What I often do is go to the hip parts of Brooklyn and just blast an air horn thus driving people to podcasts and they will eventually find if books could kill. So then after this deranged like kind of funny but like not clearly relevant anecdote, he then says this is the advice that we're pulling from this. He says at the beginning of your rise to the top, spend all your energy on attracting attention. Most importantly, the quality of the
attention is irrelevant. What? No, I don't. I think if you're like an intern at a company and you want to get a promotion, you do need positive attention running into like the board of directors meeting and like doing a heery, heery. I don't even understand what quality of attention means actually, but all right, never mind. This is stupid. I can't. This is making me mad. We're already spinning our
wheels. This is making me mad. It's making me mad. So that was law six in law 14, pose as a friend, work as a spy. He's talking about how like sort of elder statesmen, he loves this political advisor
to Napoleon named Talleyrand. He has 29 anecdotes featuring this Talleyrand guy and apparently in these sort of cocktail party diplomatic conversations, he would constantly be like spying on people to try to get intel on them, which honestly is like a thing that people do in like the diplomatic world. So like yeah, sure. Whatever, but also not what you should be doing at like work happy hours. Yeah. He says, a trick to try in spying comes from La Roche Foucault who wrote,
sincerity is found in very few men and is often the cleverest of roses. One is sincere in order to draw out the confidence and secrets of the other. By pretending to bear your heart to another person, you make them more likely to reveal their own secrets. Give them a false confession and they will give you a real one. Another trick was identified by the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who suggested vehemently contradicting people you're in conversation with as a way of irritating
them, stirring them up so they lose some of the control over their words. In their emotional reaction, they will reveal all kinds of truths about themselves. Truths, you can later use against them. What? So make up shit to confess to people like I'm addicted to coke. Oh, you're also addicted to coke. Ha ha. Now I know you're addicted to coke. Yeah. Well, that one at least makes like has like an internal coherence. But the other one is just like get someone mad and they will start confessing
things somehow. Be super fucking irritating to the point where someone blows up at you and they're like, ha ha. Now I know what makes you blow up. In the course of blowing up there like, you piece of shit. I'm addicted to cocaine. Oh, no. Oh God, I can't I can't keep doing this Peter, but there's one more. This is the perfect like triptych of anecdotes. This is from law 20. Do not commit to anyone. Oh, he has a bunch of like weird sort of quasi dating advice just after I got married.
He says when Picasso, after early years of poverty, had become the most successful artist in the world, he did not commit himself to this dealer or that dealer. Instead, he appeared to have no interest in their services. This technique drove them wild. And as they fought over him, his prices only rose. So Picasso, when Henry Kissinger, a US Secretary of State, wanted to reach detente with the Soviet
Union, he made no concessions or conciliatory gestures, but courted China instead. So use the rules on the Soviet Union. He then refers to the author of this tally-rand biography that he uses a million episodes from. He says this tactic has a parallel introduction. When you want to seduce a woman's then fell advises, court her sister first. Rule number 46, bring a black light. This goes to your one book theory, Peter. It's all one book, baby. Because it's ultimately
fucking dating advice. There's no, you can't get like a straight guy writing 500 pages about the laws of power without him doing like, here's some, here's some tips for getting pussy too, FYI. Don't text back. I don't know, fucking someone's sister is not a great way to fuck them. Even if you don't think it's morally repugnant, it's just like, this is bad advice. If it works, you have successfully seduced a very unwelter person who needs therapy so badly.
If someone is like that vulnerable to insecurity, then they're definitely the kind of person where you can just do the lint trick too. You don't have to go through the whole sister route. So this, after all this shit, I'm sort of halfway through the book now. And I'm like, okay, who is this fucking guy? Like, who's this author, right? His name is Robert Green. He hasn't really done anything else. If you Google him, it's like he's one of these people that sort
of rode this book to like a bunch of other books. That's weird. I thought he would have risen to the top of the global order by now, using these sick laws of power. I do want to say there are two very interesting things about the author of this book. The first, and this is, I think, unique on this show, is that he's an actual subject matter expert. Okay. He grows up in LA. He grows up in like a seemingly middle class family. And then he goes to the University of Wisconsin
Madison and graduates with like a class X degree. And he speaks five languages. What the fuck? He like actually knows all this like Greek mythology and shit. And when he speaks about like the Roman Empire and stuff, he does actually seem to be drawing on some like legitimate expertise. I'm sorry, but like what a waste of a life. You learn five languages and you're like, I'm going to write a book about power for the boys. There's also something really funny about how
this book comes about. Like no one ever talks about these books as basically like as artifacts of marketing, right? You're coming up with a title and a cover. And that's why like 95% of people buy it. It's not really the text of the book. So he basically graduates with this class X degree in 1980. And then he like bounces around. He says he has 80 jobs over the course of the next like 10 or 12 years. He eventually moves to Hollywood and tries to make it as a screenwriter. And like he
has zero IMDB credits other than the quibi series. So it doesn't seem that that like hit for him. This is the Ben Shapiro arc. He somehow gets his fellowship in Italy. I think Italian is one of the languages that he speaks. And he basically meets a book marketer, this guy that like does coffee table books named juiced Elfers, who is actually listed in some printings as a co-author of this book. And then he says that like the genesis of this book was that he's like telling this book marketer guy.
He's like, I've been trying to write a biography of Julius Caesar for the last like five years. But like I just can't really, I don't know if it's like a motivation thing or he can't really get the framing or whatever. But like that just isn't working this Julius Caesar biography. And then my theory is like between the lines. This guy who's like a book marketer is like, why don't you just put together all your Greek and Roman shit into like a fake ass self-help book? Your Julius Caesar
biography isn't coming together. What if I proposed to you doing something much, Domer? Would you like that? So the second interesting thing about Robert Green, I cannot fucking believe this is that he actually has good politics. So I'm going to send you an excerpt from an interview that he gave to the Guardian in 2012. He is now working with labor organizers in Latin America and his liberal politics disappoints some of his fans in the business world who expect him to be
a champion of the ruthless go getter. I'm a huge Obama supporter. He says, Romney is Satan to me. The great thing about America is that you can come from the worst circumstances and become something remarkable. It's Jay-Z and 50 cent and Obama and my Jewish ancestors. That's the America we want to celebrate, not the Vulture capitalist. These morons like Mitt Romney, they produce nothing. Republicans are feeding off fairy tales and that's what did them in this year
and hopefully we'll keep doing them in forever because there are a lot of scoundrels. I forgive him. You know what? It's basically impossible to square this with the book. It's fascinating. Is it the same guy? I would like to... Like I googled like I forgot to put in his birth date and is the wrong Robert Green. No, but you know it's the right one because he's talking about Jay-Z and 50 cent who presumably he knows of their existence because they talked about his book, right? No,
he wrote, he co-wrote a book with 50 cent called The 50th Law. You're really making me wonder what the 49th Law is. But then what is interesting to me is he also has the same blind spot that we see in so many of the authors where he doesn't seem to think that he's doing anything to promote this worldview. So in the Guardian interview, it says, Green states that he doesn't try to follow all of his advice. Anybody who did, he says, would be a horrible ugly person to be around.
Why do these authors keep doing this shit? I do genuinely find this fascinating. I listen to a bunch of podcast interviews with him where he talks about like he believes in climate change. After 2016, he started going on TV to talk about Trump and be like, this guy is not applying my rules. I'm sorry, but is there anyone who's doing this better? Is there... Is there anyone who's more tightly adhering to the 48 laws of power than Donald Trump? Come on. But then to me, the core of
his blind spot is this thing where he says, oh, I'm not telling you to do anything. I'm just telling you how the world works, right? If you look back at what he said in the intro of like, oh, the lessons from 3000 years of history, it's like he mentions like great statesmen and also seducers and con artists. What he means by power is manipulation, right? He doesn't think that there's any
power in being honest or in being right, right? And he never uses anecdotes from... I mean, these are cliché examples, but like Martin Luther King, Gandhi, I don't know, Florence Nightingale, he does have a couple of anecdotes about FDR, but only the anecdotes where FDR had to lie and scheme to get his way. Like, he's not interested in the kind of power that comes from just like
honesty and charisma. I don't get this. I assume that the reason we see this from these authors is basically their inability to admit to themselves that like their sort of primary output into this world, the thing that they're known the most for is sort of evil. Yeah. And so instead, they have to imagine that it wasn't quite as bad as people are saying that it was. I also think
another very important element of his blind spot is he's never actually had power. Okay. One of the interesting things that he says in various interviews is that one of the inspirations for the book was trying to be a Hollywood screenwriter. And some of the laws that he's coming up with are like the way that he was treated by Hollywood executives. This thing of like blaming people when something goes wrong, never letting people know your intentions. What he's doing is he's looking
at the ways that he was treated when he didn't have any power. And he is projecting this necessity onto them. You must behave like this. But that's not actually true. What he's basically doing is playing out his bitterness and resentment and hurt at the way that he was treated when he was at the bottom of the ladder. I really like how this his sort of arc is just like a great hymboification. He's like this this brilliant, you know, historian knows multiple languages.
And then he's like, no, I'm gonna, I'm gonna write a self-help book and get rich in dumb. Yeah. He just he wanted to like be on a beach trying to get laid or something and he had never done that. He was, you know, he was too much of a nerd. So I'm proud of him. His next book is called the Art of Seduction. Oh, fuck yes. Dude, okay, why does this keep happening? Because remember the Tim Ferris book, his next book also had like long digressions about seduction. It's so fucking weird.
These guys are like just getting like book tour pussy after their first book hits. And then they're like, oh, you know what? You know what? I'm gonna write a whole book about this. Yeah, it's like they go on these book tours and every journalist like, but have you had sex? And they're like actually. Actually, yes. So to get back to the book, the third pattern in the 48 laws that I want to talk about is these weird flashes of insight that are immediately used
for evil. So law 27 is play on people's need to believe to create a cult like following. Okay. And he gives all these steps of like how to create a cult. So here's the open A. To create a cult, you must first attract attention. This you should do not through actions, which are too clear and readable, but through words, which are hazy and deceptive. Your initial speeches, conversations and interviews must include two elements. On the one hand, the promise of
something great and transformative and on the other, a total vagueness. To make your vagueness attractive, use words of great resonance, but cloudy meaning words full of heat and enthusiasm. Fancy titles for simple things are helpful. As are the use of numbers and the creation of new words for vague concepts, all of these create the impression of specialized knowledge giving you
a veneer of profundity. He's telling you how to write an airport book. Yeah. This is like the new trend that in our in our latest books where they just explain how to do the scam that they're doing to you right now. Fancy titles for simple things. Right. The use of numbers. It's like he's doing 10,000 hours. He's doing victimology. He's doing he's doing our show. I do feel like reading him and Tim Ferris has made me realize that a lot of these guys are in fact doing this hyper consciously.
And I think that they don't perceive it like that entirely. I think that when he's giving this advice, he's like, yeah, here's cool tips on building a cult like following. He doesn't really realize that what he's doing is confessing. I also want to talk about the way that this book is specifically pitched to men. I did some interesting reading on sort of like the self-help marketplace and how most self-help advice for women is about interpersonal relationships. And a lot of it is
about like health and wellness type stuff. Whereas self-help advice to men is almost exclusively along these lines. It's like how do a mass power or how to make money basically? It's like they're both kind of doing the thing of like, here's how to attain status in the society that we have, but men and women are judged differently on what status is. So there's a super fascinating law in this book that is law 33 discover each man's thumbscrew. The basic idea is that you should
always be looking around yourself at like the weaknesses people have. Like what are their deepest desires? What are their impulses they can't control? Okay. So they have little titles. He says, find the helpless child. Most weaknesses begin in childhood before the self builds up compensatory defenses. Perhaps the child was pampered or indulged in a particular area or perhaps a certain emotional need went unfulfilled. As he or she grows older, the indulgence or the deficiency may be
buried but never disappears. He then says, fill the void. The two main emotional voids to fill are insecurity and unhappiness. The insecure are suckers for any kind of social validation. As for the chronically unhappy, look for the roots of their unhappiness. So Jeff, the head of sales in the Northeast returns home for Thanksgiving, but there I am having coffee with his mother asking about his childhood. What were his weaknesses as a child? There is a point in like all of these books
where like I start to become sad. And I think this was the point for me because a lot of what he's describing are like the skills of friendship. You ask somebody about their childhood. You know, what challenges they face throughout their life? What are the relationships that are important to them? What are their impulses and their habits? What are the things that make them laugh and make them sad? Which kinds of desires do they struggle to control? I keep thinking of how straight men need advice
like this? Really bad? Of just the importance of intimate relationships? And a lot of it is this kind of stuff. Ask people about their values. Spend time with people. And he's giving you all these skills, but he's giving them to you in this sociopathic fucking way of you should like form like a little file folder on everybody. Learn about your friend's childhood so that you can leverage it
against him. Exactly. You're just like be interested in people. The one of the only other like laws in this book that is like actually useful is like number law five, I think is like your reputation matters, guard it with your life. And it's like the easiest way to have a good reputation is just to be like nice to people and work hard. Yeah. What does that even mean? Like sue people who say mean shit?
The anecdote that he uses there is about how PT Barnum like destroyed somebody else's reputation. So he's like if if you don't have a good reputation like destroy somebody else's because they'll have to defend themselves so vociferously that people will be like why is he defending himself so much? This book is so sociopathic it feels that like I don't think it could turn anyone into a sociopath path so much as only a sociopath could benefit from it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And those people aren't reading it anyway. So it's this weird like it exists in this weird like never place. Those are the CEOs that like were upset that he's a Democrat. I feel like you can tell that I've been reading this book by how I've manipulated you into saying exactly what I need you to transition into my next little sections. Peter to be fair. It's not the hardest thing to do. Feeding you little crumbs around the Peter to make it political and I can talk about political stuff.
The the final thing that I want to talk about in this book because the whole time I was reading it I was just like look this advice is so deranged that like I don't think anybody can do this. Maybe this is my own inherent optimism about the world but like I don't think people have the wherewithal to run their lives like this. Never showing their emotions constantly like scheming
gathering intel on the people around them. I think people like to think that they're doing this especially men like like to be told that they're playing this like complicated chess game all the time but underneath it all people want to be loved people want to love other people people want to form community. I don't actually think that the advice here is all that corrosive because like people aren't capable of doing it. But I do think what is corrosive about this is the world
of you underneath it. Right. So the example that I want to talk about the this is one of the most interesting examples in the book. Have you ever heard Peter of Joe Orton and Kenneth Hallowell? No. So this is a story that he tells in law 46 never appeared who perfect. These are two men who meet in a London acting school in the early 1950s. They eventually start dating. They become lovers. They move in with each other. They're both in acting school but they decide relatively early
that like we're not that good at acting. So they start writing plays together and they get a couple things in like London West and things but they're sort of like the equivalent of like off off off off Broadway like nothing is really happening. And for a while they're living on Kenneth's trust fund but eventually that dries up. They start doing this weird thing where they start defacing library books as a kind of like performance art thing. Eventually they get caught and they're
sent away to prison for six months. As they're imprisoned apart, Joe starts writing plays by himself and once they get out of jail they move back in together. Joe's plays start becoming really popular. As this is happening, Kenneth starts to feel envious and sad. Like he feels like most people at parties are kind of going up to Joe and wanting to hear what Joe thinks about things. He just sort of feels like an also ran and Joe also starts cheating on him. He's like going to like parks sort of
cottaging Kevin's Bay City type stuff. And so this is the final paragraph of this anecdote in Robert Green's book. He says Kenneth outwardly seemed as happy as Joe inwardly though he was seething. Two months later in the early morning of August 10th 1967, Kenneth Hallowell bludgeoned Joe Orton to death with repeated blows of a hammer to the head. He then took 21 sleeping pills and died himself leaving behind a note that said, if you read Orton's diary,
all will be explained. This is a really fucking sad story. There's so many lessons that you could take out of this. Robert Green's lesson is only a minority can succeed at the game of life. And that minority inevitably arouses the envy of those around them. Once success happens your way, however, the people to fear the most are those in your own circle. The friends and acquaintances, you have left behind. Feelings have been very already not at them. The thought of your success only
heightens their feelings of stagnation. Envy, which is the philosopher Kierkegaard called unhappy admiration, takes hold. I'm miserable. I like I wanted to fucking cry reading this. It's like a really sad story that is true. I mean, he blaze out the facts accurately. And then he pulls the most fucking psychopathic lesson from it. Don't be successful. Well, like, you can be successful, but don't be in love with someone at the same time. Yeah. One of the obvious truths of being a
human being is that like you end up being hurt the most by the people closest to you. Yeah. Some people think that the lesson of that is not to trust the people closest to you. Yeah. As opposed to like, you know, when you bring someone into your life, those are sort of the wages, right? You get the highs and the lows. And it's very weird to look at a situation like that, which is basically like an extreme version of that lesson. Yeah. And think that the real problem
there is that like they were too close like he let him get too close. Yeah. He's he's specifically says like people will give you words of affirmation as like a way of twisting the knife like as a way of declaring their envy for you. It's just so stupid. I do. I mean, pardon an episode of like some earnestness on our like shit posting little podcast, but like we've spoken on most of the episodes about like the experience of reading these books. Reading this book sucked. Like it sucked.
I've had a rough couple months. I have like my hand stuff. I've had some like personal stuff going on and like reading this worldview like this just cancerous way of looking at the world just like made me feel bad like spending time with this guy felt bad. Yeah. It was very weird to be reading this at the same time that I was reading this really lovely collection of Kelly Link short stories, which are these sort of modern day fables. And they're all about like kind of like love transcending
time. They're all very like childlike and lovely. And she has this really beautiful story in there about like a guy going to hell to rescue his lover from like the queen of the dam. It's really good. And one of the phrases that he keeps coming back to is our love will build a paradise. It's just such a lovely way to think about the world. The way that emotional states can create societies and can create communities. Yeah. Love can build a paradise. And like this stuff can just build a
fucking trash can. And this is why the sort of like criticism of more like hippy-dippy progressive types as naive always rings hollow to me. Yeah. Because like what kind of life are you trying to live? Are you trying to live one that is built around love and trust? And sometimes you don't quite succeed. Are you trying to build one that is based around mistrust, hatred, and adversarial stance towards everyone and everything in your life? If you try to do that, you will succeed.
But what are you going to find at the end of it? Exactly. And I it's very important to me in all of the books that we cover, but especially in this one that even like as a philosophical matter, I don't like to think like this. But also as an empirical matter, it's not fucking true that the world is like this. Right. So for this, I read a really good book by Rebecca Solnet called a
Paradise Built in Hell, which is all about disaster sociology. People study large scale disasters and like the kinds of human networks that form when basically all of the structures of society fall away, right? There's no power. There's no water. What happens? The vision of the world that this book lays out is that we live in this like Hobzian world where without all of the structures of society, we're all just immediately going to start like clawing at each other and like trampling
and murdering each other. And it's like there's this this wave of cruelty. I don't like to word Hobzian because that's my dad. So I was thinking about like a hungry, hungry hippo's world, right? Where there's just like a finite number of little marbles and we're all banging at our little hippo. I mean, Lord of the Flies is right there, but hungry, hungry hippos. Okay. Mine is better. And so what you find in actual disasters in in the world when something terrible
happens is like a lot of kindness, right? We've all seen this in blackouts. Yeah. Even in like the dreaded like New York City where crime runs rampant or whatever. As soon as there's a blackout, people are checking on their neighbors. They're going to older folks. They're checking on their disabled neighbors. People are checking in on each other. We just saw this in COVID. I mean, it's all been totally wiped away now. But the early days of COVID, it's like we knew that the fatality rate
of COVID is not super duper high, but it attacks the old and the vulnerable. And our entire society was totally willing to like shut down to save those people. And you know, you remember after 9-11, like the whole fucking country was donating blood, right? Not the not the best example to use within a Iranian American, but I hear you. Okay, fair. In the disaster sociology work, there is this kind of trajectory where early in disasters, when you let humans form networks, they mostly create
networks of kindness. Yeah. Like they're bringing things to people. They're checking on each other. But then what happens after a couple days, a couple weeks is something that the sociologist called elite panic, where basically the fear among elites and people in power that there is going to be unrest ends up causing unrest. The most obvious example of this is Katrina, where you know, in the early days after Katrina, everybody was watching on the news, you know, hundreds of people drove down
to like try to get water and supplies to people. People brought their boats, right? There's this huge display of solidarity. And then after a couple days go by, you start getting these reports of like the super dome shit of like, there was this rumor that like babies were being raped in the super dome, which is just obvious bullshit. And you know, the all this footage of like looters and stuff. And then what you had is elites like losing their fucking minds. And after a couple days, the
national guard was pulled off of search and rescue and on to like looting prevention. Like they were protecting stores. Right. When people were still like stranded in their houses. And I'm going to
send you a little excerpt from the book about Katrina specifically. On September 3rd, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd summed up the popular viewpoint that New Orleans was, quote, a snake pit of anarchy death looting, raping, moroting thugs, suffering innocence, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels, and criminally negligent government
planning. By that time, there were supposed to be hundreds of murder victims corpses in the super dome, stories of child rape or rampant and armed gangs were allegedly moroting through the streets of the city. There were even rumors of cannibalism. The rumors were right about one thing.
There were gangs in the super dome. If gang is the right word for inner city men who grew up together and hang out together, Denise Moore, who's home literally collapsed around her and ended up at the super dome, said that the gang members, quote, got together, figured out who had guns and decided that they were going to make sure that no women were getting raped and that nobody was hurting babies.
They started looting on St. Charles and Napoleon. There was a right aid there. And you would think they would be stealing stuff, fun stuff, or whatever because it's a free city according to them, right? But they were taking juice for the babies, water and beer for the older people, food, raincoats, so they could all be seen by each other. She compared them to Robin Hood. We were trapped like animals, but I saw the greatest humanity I'd ever seen from the most unlikely places.
And like you don't want to be naive, right? Yeah. People take advantage of chaos, like humans or humans, right? But empirically, those kinds of actions are really isolated. And we've seen this over and over again. And yet these myths persist. To this day, there's never been a confirmed murder or rape in the super dome. So those rumors were just fully rumors. What's amazing now, looking back is that those rumors were spread by FEMA officials. Right. FEMA officials were the
ones saying there's 200 bodies. Turns out they were only six bodies and all of them died of natural causes. We also had, there were 11 police shootings during the aftermath of Katrina. There were cities outside of New Orleans where people essentially formed militias and they were so afraid of this like loosed hoard of rioters coming that they murdered a bunch of people. There's this town where 11 black people were killed by like mostly white residents, like just carrying around their
own guns. The thing to sort of realize about like this world of you and these myths is that they're self-fulfilling prophecies, right? If people in power start to be worried about these like animalistic hordes, they're going to treat people like animalistic hordes and you're going to get these kinds of clashes. The kinds of myths that he is promoting in this book also create a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think everybody is a fucking skimmer, you're going to treat
them all like skimmers. It's the opposite of our love will build a paradise, right? You're creating this ugly world by thinking it's already ugly. Yeah, I think that this mindset fosters this almost like uniquely American phenomenon, which is that a lot of people view the world so adversarially that they are willing to forego helping people as long as that ensures that they can't be taken advantage of in some way. You see this with stuff as simple as like student loan forgiveness,
right? Like sure. It'll help a lot of people who have student loan debt and need the help. But what about the people who don't need the help? Do you want to financially doing fine and could pay it off, right? People talk about it in the welfare context. Yes, of course, there are a lot of people who need financial assistance, but there are also a lot of people who might take advantage of that system who don't need it, right? And so let's hold off. Let's we allow those people to take advantage
of us. If you imagine that those people are a large chunk of the population, that there are tons of people who are out there with this sort of kill or be killed mindset, then you might think that that's a good argument against welfare payments, right? It's just a bleak way to view the world. And the only upside that I can see is that if Jay-Z never read this book, we might not have ever gotten lemonade. The domino meme with this fucking with Robert Green going to Italy in 1996.
And then we could lemonade. And was it worth it? I do want to end with these aren't quite the last three paragraphs of the book, but like they're close. This is from law 48, assume formlessness, which by the end of the book, he's just like saying stuff. This is something about like never let people know what you think, whatever, whatever. So he says, learning to adapt to each new circumstance means seeing events through your own eyes and often ignoring the advice that people constantly
peddle your way. It means that ultimately you must throw out the laws that others preach and the books they write to tell you what to do. Do I too much on other people's ideas? And you end up taking a form not of your own making. Be brutal with the past, especially your own, and have no respect for the philosophies that are foisted on you from outside. This is within a book that's giving me fucking 48 little tips for how to be powerful at Quiznos. So ultimately don't read
this fucking book and don't listen to me. Yeah, I'm glad he ends on a strong note. I can't disagree. If you criticize the book, it's just proof you didn't read the video.