Robert Greene ON: The Daily Laws of Mastery, Power, and Human Nature & How to Harness Your Dark Side For Good

Try it because you're going to rise to the occasion. Hey, everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every single one of you who come back every week to listen, learn and grow. Now you know that the podcast is just an excuse for me to reach out to amazing people, incredible minds, and the people that I want to sit down with the most and pick their brain. And today's guest is someone that I've wanted to do that with

for long time. I remember reading his books years ago. We've been in touch for quite some time to try and get this scheduled, and today I'm so grateful because he's made the effort to be here physically present with us in the studio. He's none other than Robert Green, the author of some of my favorite books. We have The Laws of Human Nature, his new book that's out

right now called The Daily Laws. I highly recommend that you go and grab your copy, and of course the greatest one of all time, in my opinion, the forty eight Laws of Power. So we're going to be diving into these three books today and Robert himself and I hope that you'll all be making notes. This is one that you want your notebook out for. It's one that you want to get your pen and pencil out for. And I'm so grateful, Robert, thank you so much for

being here. Thank you so much for having me. Jane, my pleasure. No, it's an honor to have you here. Honestly, I've been looking forward to it me too, me too,

So I mean, I'll tell everyone the story. Me and Robert were about to record three or four months back, and we both had a friendly conversation and I think you were asking me where I live, and I was saying I live in LA and I live in Hollywood, and you were saying you live in Lost Feelers, and we were like, well, we were like fifteen minutes away, and so we said, let's do it in person and I'm so happy that we made that possible and all the effort you took to be here, So thank you. Yeah,

my pleasure. I love getting out of the house, so it's actually fun for me. Amazing. Well, you know, your work is legendary. It's you know, to say it's a best selling book or anything as an understatement. Your work has impacted the way people think and live and make decisions. And people look to your books as law books and textbooks. They don't see them as just story books or a quick read. Their reference books almost And I guess my biggest question to start off is where did your obsession

with power come from? You know, I guess is you'd have to go back to my early childhood. Maybe. You know, I felt as a child a little bit helpless around my parents. In some ways, I was a very sensitive boy. I still have that issue. They were great parents, but they weren't the most overtly affectionate, and so I was always kind of wondering and observing them and trying to

be careful around them. They didn't do anything to upset them, so I became kind of an observer of people, and my main thing was as sort of a protective device to not be heard and to be able to have a degree of control over the people around me. So I didn't feel like I was going to get yelled at or something like that. And then as I entered the work world, you know, I kind of it was sort of a rude awakening for me because I had studied,

you know, literature and languages. My major was Ancient Greek, and you know, things that are completely impractical in this world. And then I entered the work world with all of my dreams, my illusions, my fancies, and it's like slapped in the face. This is not what I expected. I had many different jobs. I lived in New York. I did journalism. Then I lived in Europe. I traveled around because I couldn't really find out what I wanted to do. I origin a hotel in Paris. I taught English in Barcelona.

I did construction work increase on an island in Greece. I worked in a television company in London. You name it, I did it. And I had all kinds of bosses. I saw all kinds of power games and manipulations going on, and so taking that knowledge from my childhood observing people, seeing how they operate, seeing what's really going on behind their minds. Because people wear masks, they don't tell you

what they're thinking. They don't want to admit that they want power, that they want to control you or manipulate you in some way. And so I was always kind of a decipherer of people and what their real thoughts were. And to me, figuring people out is a form of power. And then I worked in Hollywood, which is kind of the ultimate at power environment, you know, because nobody in

Hollywood wants to admit that their goal is power. They want to make it a worry about art, were about creativity, liberal causes, blah blah blah, but really they wanted power. It's the most power hungry environment I had ever witnessed. I observed a kind of a double face think quality going on. On the one hand, they would present this front to their employees, to everyone else, but really they were practicing all of these games, these kind of power

games going on. And so that's what sort of inspired my first book, The forty eight Laws of Power, because my sympathies are more on the side of the underdog. I don't have a sympathy for a Hollywood executive, for

a Michael Ovid's for a CEO of a company. I have sympathy for the poor guy like myself who is thrown into these environments doesn't understand it is a bit naive, right, doesn't know the rules of power that these generally white men, at least back in that era, seemed to know instinctively. And so I wanted to reveal to everyone what goes on behind closed doors, the real games of power that people play. So it's not that I'm obsessed with it, but I feel like people like myself are often too naive.

They don't understand what they're about to get into, they don't understand how rough and brutal the world can be, and I actually wanted to kind of help them and reveal the kinds of things that I learned the hard way. I love that learning journey because so much of what we seek at the gifts and gaps from our parents. You know, whether they give us a gift and we chase that gift, or they have a gap in their parenting. We try and fill that gap. And it's amazing how

everything seems to really really stem from that. Where how do you define a power in the way you guide people in this book Towards Power, because I think power has changed, power has shifted, it meaning has evolved, and I wanted to know what you define as power. Well, people have this misconception of power. They think it has to do with you know, CEOs and presidents, and it's kind of ugly and dirty. I have a much different conception of it. It's something that has to do with

your daily life. Now. I have the idea that much in our lives we cannot control. You can throw a number out ninety five percent. You can't control disease. You control the people that you meet. It's by chance that you met your wife and you fell in love and you ended up marrying her. You kind of fall into jobs. There's much in life that is way beyond your control, but there is a margin that you can control, right,

And it's mostly about your relationships. It has to do with your children, your spouse, your partners, your colleagues at work, your bosses, and the feeling that you have no control over them, that they can do whatever they want, that you have an idea and you want to sell it to them, or you want somebody to stop their annoying behavior, and you can't control them they're completely oblivious, they won't listen to anything you say. Is to me, the worst

feeling for a human being to have. Right where animals that need that sense of eye can influence my environment, I can influence the people around me, and the sense of helplessness is a very, very primal feeling. It's like when you take an animal outor if you have dogs or cats and you put them on their belly, they feel exposed, they feel terrified, and that's when they attack you. Well, that position is like being on our belly. I can't

control my teenage son he's into drugs. My husband or my wife isn't listening to me, ah, my boss is doing You know, you want the ability to be able to at least defend yourself or to have some influence or power over them. It's a small margin because there's much you can control, but to the degree that you

can have some of that power and you can. And then there's one other aspect, probably the most important aspect that I'm forgetting here, is power over yourself self mastery, right, because a lot of the problems that you have in life, you can't really control yourself. You're subject to all these emotions these moods, these things that grab you, that obsess you, that possess you. Your mind has these recurrent thoughts. You have no self control and it drives you crazy. You

have a habit you want to get rid of. You take some program, some class, and three months later you're back at it. Ah, you know what is it? So the sense that you can control yourself to a degree and the sense that you can have some influence over people is power. And the more you have it, the greater the feeling you have because you can avoid that helplessness that makes all of us kind of crazy. Yeah.

I really love how you grounded that definition of power and self mastery because that seems to be where everything else loses control. You know, It's like, if we're out of control, then everything seems out of control, and so so much avow lust or envy or greed or anger has the ability to distract and derail us completely when there's no self power. Right, And why do you think it is? You mentioned that, Why do you think it

is that we all haven't? And I can relate to this, and I think you know when you refer to yourself as as someone who struggled, and you know, couldn't figure it out and was surprised by what happened. And you know, I would say the same that you know, I grew up being bullied for being overweight, and I was one of a a few Indian people in my entire area that I grew up in London. I was in North London, so a majority area of Tottenham and would Green, Yeah,

which are not considered South Asian areas generally. And when I look back at that time in my life, I also feel like I, at one point in my life was an underdog. And why do you think it is that so many underdogs have such a negative view of power? I feel like so many people today, whether they consider themselves underdogs or not, when we think of words like power or influence, we think of them as negative things. We think of them as being as you said, like

dirty or toxic or plagued. Why is that? And how do you healthily transform your belief round power? Well, that was sort of what I wrote the book about, but a lot of it comes from our culture, which I think plays a very often a very negative role in our lives. It teaches us the wrong kinds of lessons. And so back in the days when it was television. Now it's whatever you watch and whatever medium. You know.

All of the villains in the world, where these power hungry people in black coats with cars with the windows kind of blacked out, you know, and doing all sorts of evil, ugly things. That's what we think of as power. It's like a cultural trope that we've all digested, you know, this kind of machiavellian character who's out kind of destroy people. Nobody thinks of power in a positive sense, and it's maddening.

It drives me crazy. It's incredibly hypocritical when self help books are written and they're trying to say that power or ambition or influence are ugly things, when the writer himself or herself is actually a very powerful person who has influence, who has control, is awful. It drove me crazy. It's why I wrote the book, you know, so I try and tell people, Look, who's one of the great saints that we hold up in our culture, Mahatma Gandhi. Right,

I certainly venerate him as an amazing person. And I read very deeply about Gandhi and I wrote about him in my third book, The Strategies of War, and his goal was to throw the English out of India so they could finally experience independence, because the people had been subjugated for so long that they had forgotten what it meant to be human in a way right, a very noble goal, but he realized us quickly on how difficult

it would be. So he had to be strategic, and so he had things like the Salt March, where he very much plotted in advance that he knew using his method of civil disobedience, where once the police came out, you were not to fight, you were to accept them. If they beat you, you accepted it. You never fought,

no violence. But he knew that back in the day before television, that the media, the newspapers would cover their English bobbies or whomever they were beating these people up, and it would play horribly in England because people in England thought that they were very liberal and open minded, that they weren't these horrifying imperialists. He was strategic. He knew that he had to get maximum publicity for very

ugly confrontations. Years later, Martin Luther King, another icon who also practice civil disobedience, utilize the same tactics in his campaigns in Selma and Montgomery. At one point if very controversial. He had children of the age fourteen involved in this march, that they would get beaten up. People were in his group castigading. But how could you be like that? He knew that that would play on television now to the

white audiences around America, they'd be horrified. If you want power in this way, if you are fighting for a cause, if you want some kind of justice, you have to be strategic. You have to think like that. You have to think in terms of power. People just don't give themselves up. You know, if we have the Me Too movement now, men are not going to give up all their control in a place like Hollywood. You have to hit them. You have to be strong, you have to

be forceful. It's a power game. And I can't stand people who are naive, who think that just being themselves, just being virtuous, is going to get what they want. And like, if you're going to fight for something, you have to be able to meet the enemy on their terms of power. So that's sort of how I like to explain to him. There's nothing unhealthy about Gandhi or MLK as far as I know. Yeah, no, thank you, so much for sharing that perspective. I definitely feel very

aligned with that. I've often said to people when people have asked me, like Jay, how have you created what you've created? Or how are you building your work and businesses? And I've always said that to me, sincerity and strategy have to go together. Sure that data and intuition have to go together, Like it's you can't have one or the other. And so to only be sincere and loving and compassion and kind, actually a lot may not happen.

And to only be strategic and influential and powerful, you may end up your exactly well beautifully said, like you lose your soul. But when you have two together, and it is a fine balance, and it is you're always juggling both, and you don't get the perfect amount. You're always in percentages and proportions. But the idea that you

can't ignore this side. There's a beautiful quote you reminded me of from Martin Luther King where he said those who love peace need to learn to organize themselves as well as those who love war. And I think that's what yeah, and I think that's what we're saying that and that's what I saw when I first started to share the messages I'd learned from living as a monk

and the vaders, and that tradition. For me, it was if I'm not strategic about this, or if I'm not focused or organized about this, then i might as well give up now because it's not going to spread itself. And so I'm really happy to hear your perspective on that. How do the laws become things that you use versus getting lost in what we just sort of losing your

soul in power now driving you? Because I almost feel like when you start using the rule the laws, you end up feeling a sense of power, and then that power can consume you. Often it can become toxic. Some people start that way. They start with an agenda and they utilize the powers wrongly. But what to speak of someone who starts in a more noble cause. But then now the laws are using them versus them using the law.

You have to understand there's an offensive and defensive side to the laws, Okay, And I always tell people who have these kind of compunctions about crush your enemy totally. I don't want to do that, neither do I. Okay, So if you're reading a law and it kind of triggers this, Ah, I can't do that. Then it's not something you should do anyway. It's it's not gonna fit your way of doing it. You have a certain style, a certain belief system, certain values. I'm not telling you

to go outside your values. But look at that law, which is probably the ugliest in the whole book. Crush your enemy totally, and understand that in the business world that law prevails ninety five percent of the time. When a company like Google or any tech company has an enemy, their goal is to get rid of them completely, to buy them out so they have no competitors. Right look at Amazon, but even small our business is dealing with rivals. It's a dynamic in the business world. So you need

to be aware of it and not be naive. You don't have to practice it, but you need to be aware of it. Other laws are just simply trying to show you what you know. We're animals that kind of base our opinions a lot on what we see and perceive. We don't often think too deeply. We kind of take people based on their appearances. So there's a law of power, and they're called always say less than necessary, very kind

of common sense law. And the idea is that if you're in a meeting with people, that man or woman who talks less generally has an aura of power, particularly a boss. They seem enigmatic, mysterious, and when they do something, say something, everybody's hanging on their words. What does that mean? But whereas people who talk a lot give the impression that they're weak, they signal weakness. They can't control themselves. So they can't control themselves. How can they control anything

in the business world? Right, So we sense that in people, So be aware of that. You're probably talking too much in a lot of circumstances, and maybe you can control that. And so this is kind of a way of defending yourself in an environment where people will tend to see you as weak if you can't have any self control. Right, So, if you see that a law that's ugly that makes you skin crawl, you don't want to do it. I

have no problem with that. There are law of laws I don't practice in there, but you need to be aware of them. You need to be aware that other people are practicing them so that you don't become their victim. Then there are other laws that, yes, you should practice right like appealing to people's self interest when you're trying to influence them or despise the free lunch. We learn to pay for things and be generous with your time and your money for people. So it depends on the law.

But I hate it when people say, oh, what an evil book. Those are people who haven't read it because half the laws are more than half have nothing el about them, and the other half are about opening your eyes. I'll never say you have to practice this. I'm just making you aware of reality of what goes on in the world. Is it possible to And I agree with you phully. I think if you read the book, you can't see as an evil book or controlling or manipulative

book at all. You know that's and you can tell clearly it's not your intention, it's not who you are. And that's what I want to ask you. How much of a role does intention play in some of this work? Because I wonder if you thought about that when you were writing it. Do you think about it now in terms of how your intention fits in with a law or your reason why you're doing it, the cause behind the law that you're using. Does that impact or affect

the quality of the effectiveness of the law. Does it make a law work better? Does it doesn't have any power? Does intention have any power? You mean, if your intention is for something good or for something correct correct, Well, it depends. Unfortunately, in the world today, and you know, I've had this experience, and we read about it in the news, a lot of people who have a dark side, whom we might consider rather immoral in their behavior, get pretty damn far right, and they use these laws and

they don't pay any consequences. So there's no kind of ultimate justice in this world. Although there might be in a religious sense. I don't deny that at all, But in a secular world, there's no consequences to pay for it. So people, if they have a lot to crush your enemy totally and that's their goal, they might end up being even better at it than somebody who doesn't really want to go there. But then it kind of tries it halfheartedly. Right, So I'm not here to say that

justice and goodness always prevails. But the people who have those kind of intentions, the true sharks in the world, they don't need my book, right, they know it. It's in their DNA. They grew up at the age of five or six seven, it's already been implanted in them, and I write about that in my last book, The Laws of Human Nature. You can see that in certain

people at a very early age. The great therapist psychoanalyst Melanie Kleine identified the greedy baby at the age of six months that was already sucking so hard on the mother's breast, and she saw that this type of baby turned into the type that was actually very aggressive in life. So it's in bread very early on. People like that

have patterns of behavior they cannot control. But those people with those kind of intentions who are very manipulative, I believe very firmly, they don't get Ultimately they hit a wall. They piss so many people off. They don't know the soft side of power. They have no self control because all they know is grab, grab, grab, push, push push. They don't know when to yield, they don't know when

to step back right. They've only learned one way, and so that becomes their down For what I'm hearing from you is that the intention, it's in one sense, could could weaken it if it wasn't used effectively. But you know, you're also saying that if someone does have a positive intention or a good intention, then it is likely that they may be happier with that power to some degree. And I think that's what I find so fascinating. Yeah, right,

there's like, yeah, it's the relationship. I guess we both know a lot of powerful people who would consider themselves to be not happy. Yeah, And I ask myself, then, what is the role of power in the world, Because I feel like a lot of people in your situation when they didn't feel any power at home, or they didn't feel a sense of significance at home, often power or significance become pursuits for pleasure and for happiness. But

power doesn't lead to happiness. What does power lead to? Well, I'm not sure I completely agree with them, because under the way I've defined power where you feel like Okay, So let's say you have a spouse who has a very annoying pattern of behavior. All right, and in my books, I train you being direct and yelling at them never works. Never works. You have to learn the art of insinuation of persuasion, which often is stepping back, which often involves

teaching them a lesson mirroring their behavior. Right, And so your intention is not ugly or bad. It's that you you can't live with this personalist. They alter their behavior, right, And so you think about it, you strategize a little bit, you take some steps, and it works. Yes, right, I understand. So in a relationship, often that you know can spell

into some degree of power. Or let's say you're in a nasty divorce case and there's a child involved, and your emotions are to screw that man or woman who is so mean to you, and you're going to have this nasty fight, and then you realize, oh my god, this child that I love is really going to suffer from it. And then you step back and you go, no, I have to not just react. It's going to lead to some an uglier cycle of battles. I need to

be a little bit more strategic about this. I need to pursue this in a softer way, right, And so you end up feeling better about yourself. So I'm not saying all of the laws are going to make you feel better about yourself, but the degree that you can control your environment where you're not helpless at work or in a relationship or with your children, will give you a degree of happiness. It won't fulfill you the way Maybe that's the difference here. It will give you a

sense of satisfaction, It will relieve that anxiety. It won't make you fulfill the way your career will if it's done properly, but it will help you lose that continual gnawing anxiety that you can't change people, that you can't change yourself. So I do think there is an element of happiness. However you wanted to do do. Yeah, no involved with power? No, And I think I think that's why going back to your definition of power, and that's why

I asked I ask you that earlier on. That's that's exactly it that when I was referring to my point, I was saying that when people have a negative intention and their definition of power is warped, then power can end up feeling dissatisfying when you get there because it didn't really get you what you want to, right, because you couldn't force someone to love you, or you couldn't

force this person. But actually when it was done in a in the way you're saying, like, when you realize that actually, if I don't exert this power, I'm actually using this power to save this situation to enable this situation to improve. I think that's if. Yeah, I think that's what I was pointing to. And so yeah, we're on the same page. There's one a couple of laws that I love that I wanted to pick out for you, so to just mention a bit, because I think these

are really really interesting. So this one law twenty nine plan all the way to the end, right, And I wanted to ask you how one actually does that? And I know you talk about in the book, which I want to say for people, but for today's conversation, i'd love to do, how do you plan to the end when sometimes it's really hard to know what's next and what the end is? And I think so many people today are you know, in jobs for less time, they're

moving quicker, there's so many more opportunities, new technologies. How do we What does it mean to plan to the end? Well, it's a thought process. So as as you point out well enough that things come up that you can foresee circumstances, things change and the ending that you plan for doesn't happen the way you wanted to, that's fine. But to the degree that you go through a mental process and you think about the ending, and you have a goal in mind, You're going to be much more effective in life.

So when something comes up you're planning to go here and forces you that way, you're are prepared to take that circumstance and maybe veer a little closer to the point that you want. Right. So, people, the main point of that law is that we are all go around with these dreams and these thoughts and these plants that are so vague. I'm going to write a book, I'm going to direct a movie, I'm going to start a tech startup. It's going to make billions of dollars, blah

blah blah. And then we maybe go through a kind of half hearted process. Yeah, my book's going to be about this. Yeah, my business people like that. Right, And then you don't really plan deeply enough, you don't think

because your plans are infected with wishes. Right. And to me, the kind of the model of that is the invasion of Iraq by all of these extremely prudent strategic men like Dick Cheney, etc. They thought that we would be greeted as liberators with people with flowers in their hand, and then lo and behole, whoa this nasty nasty war in which hundreds of thousands of people have killed ensued. They didn't realize that their plans were infected with their dreams,

with what I call the rosy scenario. So when you're going to go sell this movie that you want to, you're imagining that people already love it. You've already convinced yourself. But you don't realize that people are cold, they're indifferent. So if you plan to the end, you think about the goal, you think about the other people, you think about steps ABCDE to get there, you're more concrete. And then when things come up, as Mike Tyson said, everyone

has a plan until you get hit in the face. Right, Okay, you get hit in the face. Yeah, all right, I got to change my plan a little bit. You're able to adapt. But if you're not thinking clearly about the end, you're in deep deep doodoo. That book will never get written, or if you start it, no one's going to be interested in it, etc. You have to plan more deeply, and the closer you can visualize the ending and be realistic,

the greater your chances of success. That's sort of the meaning behind Yeah no, that's I that makes complete sense and I think we've we've almost lost that ability today. I mean, yeah, I rarely hear that, And that's why I wanted to pict that one because I feel like today and I guess I could see you noding for anyone who's not watching the podcast right now, I'm seeing wrong. Yeah,

it's the idea we've lost that today. There's so much of like, oh, well, just try this for a second, and try this for a moment, and give this a go. And it's almost like when you don't, you're so right. Not only do you not get it done, I feel like the hurdles seem much bigger because you just didn't comprehend them. Right. But today when people people would argue, and that's what I'm in through, I would love to

hear your opinion. A lot of people would say, but Robert, if I comprehend them, then I just get disinfused or I get I feel limited, and I just feel like it's overwhelming. Courage. Discourage, that's the word I was looking for, Yes, discourage. I feel so discourage and overwhelmed and it's too much for me. So how do you think about the end but avoid that feeling? Well, I guess you don't you can't avoid that feeling, but you walk through it. Well,

I mean, do you want just the dream? Do you just want the the vision of that of the great thing you're going to achieve, or do you want the reality? Right? And so you know, if you're going to let's say you're you want to write a book, I know that's very lazy. That's what I do. I'm writing my second book right now, so this will be very helpful. Okay, all right. It's a pretty enormous thing usually, I mean, if you're if you're somewhat ambitious, right, and it's going

to involve a lot of work and thinking and planning. Right. But if you overdo the thinking, if you think about it, every little thing is planned ahead of time, then the process kind of loses its joy and its excitement. It seems overplanned. Right, But you want to have a vision. Whenever I start a book, I have an overall vision of what I want the reader to feel from it, what I want them to learn from right, Okay, and so then I plot very carefully the ways to get there.

But yeah, it's going to be take three or four years. Yeah, it's overwhelming. Yeah, it's daunting. So what you do is you back off and you create little micro goals. So I have planning all the way the end means to the end of July. Right, Yes, I'm going to plan to the end of July, and by July thirty first, I am going to have written ten pages. I'm going

to have done this chapter. I've done this research. Then maybe if it's then it doesn't seem quite so daunting, and then you can maybe extend it out a few more months and low and behold the little baby steps you take, you're suddenly halfway there. Wow, it's really not as difficult as I thought. So you break it down, people, it just drives me. Created can only think in terms of black and white. Oh, plan all the way the end? Oh think about that. No, it's planning all the steps

along the way. There's a balance involved, right, So if you do these little baby steps and you give yourself goals, you know, if you have to work on your own you're starting your own boss. It's maddening because nobody's pushing you. You have to create continual deadlines. I do this to myself. By this date, I have to have this much written, right, and it kind of engages your spirit to get your emotions going. It ricks you realize you have a deadline

you have to get there, and it energizes you. Whereas that vague feeling of oh, I want to write a book, okay, blah blah blah, it's actually more daunting, is less energy involved, because you never feel like that. I call it in my war book death ground strategy. When an army's back is against a mountain or the ocean, they fight like hell to get out of it because there's desperate and it's either win or die. You have to have that approach with your book or something. If I don't get

this done by July thirty, first, I'm in trouble. I better hurry up and do it. So break it down and don't don't always every single day think of, oh my god, it's going to take so many years, etc. That's in the back of your head. You have a vision,

but you have other little ends that you're continually planning towards. Yes, yes, absolutely, yeah, And I think like that's the challenge, right, Like, when you're writing the page, you're thinking about the book, and when you're writing about a chapter, you're thinking about the book launch. And it's like you're thinking about something way bigger than what you actually have to do right now. But it's the way you do right now that's going

to get that bigger thing. And I think if all you did was wake up, I just have to write a page today, which is that microstep you're speaking of, then I don't think I have to write a book.

Writing a book is daunting and overwhelming, but writing a page or writing a paragraph, if that's where you're at, like wherever you're at a line, you know, like that's if that's the case, that baby step is what you want to wake up and fix sat And I think it's the same with yeah, with anything, whether you're launching a podcast, whether you again I'm being lazy, whether whether you're launching ay, like you said, launching a company, whether

you're you know, whether you're starting a new brand or whatever. It may be the problem is we're thinking that I need to do this, I need to do that thing on the front cover of Forbes magazine, and it's like that's not what you're doing, Like this is what you're doing right, Yeah, I mean people who are great craftsman and I have a book called Mastery Yes, which I discussed the process of creating something. If you look at crafts people, somebody's building a house or an architect. They

can't sit there and just suddenly have it happened. They have to go brick by brick by brick. They have to lay a foundation, they have to focus on the foundation, et cetera, et cetera. But at the same time they have an overall vision of what the house will look like. So if you're only focused on the day to day, it loses a little bit of spirit. So you need to allow yourself a little bit of dreaming. I dream all the time. I'm being interviewed by Jay Shetty while

I'm writing the book. You know I'm having I'm on the cover of some other mac great magazine whatever, you know, right livesoft to have it because it gives you kind of so you need both. Again, you need both. You need to balance, yes, but a little bit more towards the micro ends and then occasionally, ah, yeah, when it's finished, I'm gonna have this. It'll be wonderful because that'll keep your energy up. Got it. Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. The other one I wanted to pick out.

I mean, there's obviously as everyone knows there's there's forty eight to pick out, So I'm only picking two, and we've spoken about a few of them, but you have to get the book to read about the rest of them. We have master the art of timing. I find that one fascinating too, because I think today we're living at a time when people either think it's too late, it's

too early. I'm not sure, it's not my time. These are the you know, these are the things I see on social media, These are the things I see people express. How do you master the art of timing? What does that mean? Well, in an abstract philosophical sense, let's pull back a sai and time is a human construct. Time does not exist in the universe. It's eternal. There's no clocks, there's no beginning or end. It's just one massive thing of time that goes on forever. Right, We humans have

created time. So it's a subjective. It's psychological. So you know the experience that when you were a child, a year seemed like a million years. Oh my god, Now a year goes like that. It's subjective, right, So you have to understand that first. Okay, So when you're excited about a project, when you feel alive and energized, then the time is a much different experience than when you're bored. So you can create your relationship to time. Right, so

I'm not ready, Well, there's a strategy for that. You should always take action a little bit before you were ready, as the advice I give. So if you're not ready and it's really a huge task, okay, maybe wait a little bit, take steps to get closer to being ready, but several months before you're ready, go ahead and do it. Try it because you're going to rise to the occasion. If you feel like you're almost ready and then you start,

you go. But I better work harder because I know that I can do this, Whereas if you think I can never do it, you'll just give up. You don't want to give up. Right, So I have in the book many examples of people who forced time. I call it forcing time. So I talk about Julius Caesar and the famous crossing the Rubicon. Right, he had an army of only like five thousand and facing Pompey, his arch enemy, who had an army of hundreds of thousands, and to

cross the river means he's starting a war. And everyone say it's insane. Don't do it, You'll never make it. And he goes, the die is cast, and he crossed the rubicon. The war was on, and he knew that doing that he would have to think every moment, give it every all of its intense thinking, and you have to reach the conclusion. And he ended up pulling off one of the greatest military victories in history. Look at Barack Obama, a senator who had only been in office

for one term. It's two thousand and seven or so, and he decides to run for president. Everyone thinks you're insane, you're not ready for it. No one's going to believe it. You're not. You have enough weight behind you. He goes, doing this step will force me to work harder to gain that energy. Yes, if he was a state representative, it wouldn't have been time to force it and try and make it happen. But he'd already had enough preparation, just enough that he knew if he took that step,

something would happen. The energy, the excitement, people would catch it. He would be infectious and it would work. And look what it did for him. So you can be overready. You should always take action, just a little bit before you think that you're you're ready for it, right. So, and then the the thing is to realize that with time is that you want to feel like you're in control of the time that you have, yes, right, So

I call it a live time versus dead time. Dead time is where you work for other people, you have no control of it. Your time is not your own, it's their time. They possess you. You're almost literally their slave, right, And a live time is that your own. You're your master of it. You control it. So when you work for yourself, which I think is the best position in the world to be, and although it's not for everybody, you kind of control your own time. Every moment is alive,

it's precious, right. So for me, I practice this in my meditation, in my daily life, particularly since I almost lost my life a couple of years ago. Is every moment is so valuable to me that time I maybe I could be dead tomorrow. And you have to think that way. And if you think that your time is limited, that you have things to accomplish, businesses, to start books, to write pot casts, to start right, you're going to

force yourself. You're gonna find the energy if you realize your time is short and you have to kind of force it in a way and not be sitting back on your heels and continuing waiting. So I tell people, if you have a dream, maybe stop waiting so much. Maybe throw yourself across that river and go and take the action. And if you fail, you will have learned eighty thousand times more than you would have learned in business school. You start the tech startup, it fails, don't

worry about your reputation. You learned the incredible things in it, so don't be afraid of failure and be willing to always kind of force the time. That's for one of the art of it. Yeah, No, that's really well articulated

and explained. What changed you? You mentioned that what changed for you between knowing time was limited and then experiencing it and actually feeling with it, Like, because I think that's there's I guess there's very few people who have that experience because for some people it literally ends up being the end from a physical standpoint. But to almost have Yeah, what does that feel like? Because I think you're someone who already knew that, you knew that you

lived like that. You wrote this book like you already lived like time is limited. I have to write books. You write phenomenal books and lots of them. Yeah, what changed? What changed in that? Knowing that theoretical about my stroke? Yes? Yes, yes, yes, sorry, I wasn't trying to be cryptic. So you see the shirt that I'm wearing? Yeah? Do you see it? Kind of a weird little jagged line. I see it. Okay, Well, this is the shirt that I was wearing when I

had my stroke. And I was with my wife who were driving home, and she saw, whoa, Robert, your face is all weird. You're slurring. She was freaking out. She said, pull over. That's the last thing I remember. I went unconscious, and the ambulance came and they took scissors and they cut the shirt right around there. They ripped it off me. They threw it in a bag. Then they put something into help give oxygen to my brain because it had stopped going flowing to my brain. So months later, I

asked my wife whatever happened to that shirt? I loved it because she had given it to me like two months before for my birthday. I love that shirt. She told me the store and say, oh man. And then finally I said, can you like sew it together again? Because she's a good sewer. She said, yeah, okay, and so she did. And so I wear it and it reminds me because when I was this close to dying, there was a feeling inside that I had, right, It

was a feeling that I, it's weird. There was almost a taste in my mouth, and there was a feeling in my bones, a kind of a softness, like I was melting from the inside out. And I could literally feel myself moving away from life in that moment just before I went unconscious, right, So reminding of it with things like so now when I wear the shirt, it's like a memento mori. I can re experience that feeling.

And it's so ironic because two months before I wrote the last chapter of Human Nature about confronting your mortality. It's not the same it's abstract. This is visceral. This is real. And people who have had much more powerful near death experiences than I am know that you don't emerge from that ever the same. It changes you. Right, So now it was an intellectual concept. So now when I hear the birds chirping, I look out my window.

The sun is shining. I almost want to cry. I'm here to see it, and I came that close to never seeing it again, you know. Or people are irritating me. No, I could be dead and they don't. I love them, and I can overlook them because they're also mortal. They're also going to die. They also have fears. It's just changes you emotionally from the inside out. So how can people do that who haven't experienced death. It's not easy, but you have to make the leap from an intellectual,

abstract concept to something visceral and emotional. Right, So, even before my stroke, I meditate every morning. I would always have a practice of meditating on that moment when I'm going to die. I imagine myself it's an afternoon, the sun is shining, and this is my last day on earth, you know. And I could even make myself kind of cry as I do that, and I would make myself it's something real. Because we go around and we live

in a culture where death has no meaning. We don't see the food that we're eating, the animals being killed. People die in hospitals, cloistered away. Whereas our ancestors, they sought on the street, they saw the animals being killed. It had a presence. You live in this abstract world where nothing is real, where your mortality is just like something you don't even process. Get over that, Jump over that and make that leap. Make it something emotional and visceral.

It's not gloomy, it's not more, but it's ober rating because when you think about your death and it becomes real, you realize, I don't have this much time. I better work harder, I better appreciate the people in my life, a better love the more, I better appreciate every moment that I'm alive. And it just opens you up in so many ways. So it's one thing to have an intellectual so it's another thing to make it more visceral. And that's what I'm kind of advocating. That's why I love.

That's a beautiful transition into you know, the new new book that's how called the Daily Laws because that's a daily habit, right, Like that's the only to make that law feel real. You need to practice it daily, especially if you've not had a near death experience. And I know that I've practiced that death meditation often in my life. When I don't do every day, I do it more when I'm making a big decision. It really helps me

make big decisions. I remember when I was working in the corporate world, but I really wanted to be doing what I do today and sitting there asking myself, like, how will I feel about this in you know, on my deathbed? That's very interesting. I never thought that's very Yeah. I was like, if I stay in the corporate world, how will I feel about this when I'm eighty or ninety? N Yeah, And then how would I feel about this if I tried and failed? And how will I feel

about it if I tried and it works? Yea? And every part of me was just like, you have to try this, Like even if it failed, you'll you'll be so upset at yourself for being ninety and about to die and you didn't try. And so I love that and and that's why I love the fact that you've taken up the daily laws. Would have been some of your daily life changes since that moment you told us about that beautiful meditation? Have there been other things? Obviously

looking at the birds with the sun. What else has changed daily for you? I wonder, well, Um, a bit of humility? Wow? So um. First of all, Um, you know, I look at people now who are old or who have a disability, and I understand them on a much deeper level. I have much greater empathy for people not just with a disability, but people who have lost their job, who are poor, who have no control over their lives. I have greater empathy for them because in the months afterwards,

I had no control over my body. I couldn't walk. I still walk in a very kind of wonky way. Right. I was dependent on other people's, dependent on my wife. I was dependent on health care caregivers, on therapists, etc. And that feeling of depends is on something I like, because I like somebody really values independence. So I had to deal with myself. I had to get over my kind of radical individualism, my radical sense of being totally independent,

because I was dependent on other people. And I really could empathize with others who have that feeling of dependency. It's not a good feeling. You have to you have to learn to accept it in some way, and it's not easy. And so I learn that there were some negative qualities that I had that I had to confront, like my impatience. Yeah, whenever I had a problem or a health issue. I would push past it. Man, Okay, I broke my leg. Well, I'm going to do therapy, so in two months I'm going to be out and

I did it right. It doesn't work for this. You can't push past what my brain was damaged. I can't push past it. I have to accept it, and that's not easy for someone who's used to just pushing past things like that. So I had to deal with qualities that aren't really to me very good. Like I think patience is a good thing. I think it's a virtue and I think it's positive. And being able to accept certain things as you can't control. So I had to

learn certain things about myself. I had to learn that some of the ideas I had were intellectual, where I do have empathy for people, but it wasn't as visceral as it is now, you know. And then on a day to day basis, I've had to like control my impatience. My wife can attest I often lose it. So I'm no saint and I don't pretend to be. There'll be days where I'm like, God, damn it, I can't pick

up my tooth, preshious driving me crazy. Other days it's like, come on, you can do It's okay, calm yourself down. Things are okay, right, Everything's going to be all right. So I've had to deal with my own issues on a very visceral, real level and deal with them in a way I've never had to do before. So it's it's an ongoing process. Yeah, that's such a special answer.

Thank you for sharing that. Like, to get into your head with what it feels like in humility is such a incredible quality and the hardest to learn and the most painful to go through. And I remember when we were talk about sickness and health and as young monks, one of our duties or roles would be to take elderly monks to the hospital when they had to get checked.

And it was part of that routine to make you see that because we were like twenty one years old and thought we were super human, because because we were like, oh, sleep, who needs to sleep? You know? Like food? Who needs food? Like? And you thought so highly of yourself, only to realize that you were just lucky because of your age. It was just the age of the body that you were

winning on. It wasn't anything else. It wasn't that you were more self mastered or disciplined, and being humbled in that way was such a you know, to witness what you're saying, Like all of these things have been hidden in society. They're invisible yea. And when pain becomes invisible, we become worse at dealing with it because it's become immune to We never see it. So how do we

know how to deal with it? And so I'm I'm grateful that you're sharing so authentically your pain and what you're going through, because you know, be very easy for you to say, oh, yeah, I'm just living all my messages and you know, all of us failed to live our own like as in it's not fail, it's just it's just hard, like you know, I think about it. So with the daily laws, you've got three hundred and sixty six meditations, you said you meditate daily. What's been

your daily meditation practice and does it change? Does it stayed the same? Oh? I have a very boring daily me. I want to hear it. I do Zen Buddhism. Yes, okay, I've been doing it now for eleven years. Every single morning I can remember the day I started. And it's basically actually sit on it. It's called za Zen. You sit on these pillows and you're trying to empty your mind, right, and you know you have a process. You learn things from masters. I've gone to a Zen center here in

Los Angeles. I read a lot of books. But it's a completely non intellectual process. Right. You can't think your way to enlightenment. It will never happen. And that's the problem I haven't. Everybody has. Oh this is what I need to do. Blah blah blah blah blah. You can't do it. It's like this paradox. They describe it zen as this red hot ball that you've swallowed and you can't get rid of it. You can't throw it up.

It's there, It's stuck inside of you. The paradox is thinking, won't get it there, so how do I get there? So I'm not going to reveal the whole thing, but I have things called a cohan, which is like it's like a little parable and it's a very famous cohan in Buddhism. It basically it says this one monk asks a zen master does a dog have Buddha nature? And the monk and the master applies muh and muh in Japanese means nothing or no, but it really means nothing.

It's like, well, it's nothing. In other words, you can't answer the question yes and no have no meaning, right because in Buddhism there is no discrimination. The discriminating mind is the ultimate form of some sara. So you need to like get rid of that and meditate on muh. So for five years now, I've been meditating on muh only muh what does it mean? And you have no idea the richness that will flow from one little syllable like that, and meditating it on every day. So my

meditation is not exciting, it's not variety. It's the same thing every day, right, And there are steps I involved in it. It's a physical, emotional process less than an intellectual one. But that's to give you an idea about it. Yeah, no, it's it's beautiful to hear about it, And yeah, I love the idea of I remember the monks that I

used to live. It would always say that you know this, whatever you call it, enlightenment or revelation, whatever whatever word you want to give it, it's something that's received, not achieved. It would always repeat that to us, it's received, not achieved and and you know, as we're all trying to achieve it, like I want to have it and I want to find it. What do I have do? Whatever? To think? And just knowing that it was received gave

me so much liberation in and of itself. Right, knowing that it would be received you as I continue the path, and it would be revealed as well as I continue. So well, thank you for John. I love it. I love hearing about people's daily meditation practices. I wanted to pick out a couple of the daily laws because what this book beautifully does for everyone is it literally goes through every day of the year so you can open it out on that day. Why do you think it

was important to do that? Why was it important to have something for July first, or you know, why was it important to have August twentieth or whatever it may be. Well, we've talked about a little bit earlier about having micro goals. So we all have ambitions, we all have dreams and goals and desires that we want, and our culture fills us with these kind of vague hopes and dreams. I'm going to be this, I'm going to be that, But really,

what gets you to where you want our habits. Our daily habits are negative habits that you can't get rid of, smoking, drinking, you know, online porn. Whatever your daily habit is, you can't get rid of it. But there are other habits that, like discipline, like working every day, like taking steps to get reach your goals, that are immensely liberating. And you can get rid of your bad habits through developing positive habits. Right.

So the goal here is to focus less on the giant dreams and on the everyday process of changing your thinking. You know, I spend a lot of time thinking about how does change occur within a person? Right? Yeah? I mean too yeah, because we all experience from ourselves. The change rarely happens quickly as we like, we step back, we revert to our old habits, etc. What involves what kind of consciousness do we have to go through the steps to literally change our way of thinking? It requires

hitting at the roots of things. It requires how you think every single day about simple, basic things in your life. Right. It's not grand dreams. It's the day to day thoughts that consume you, that obsess you. Right, So that's what

the book is about. Every day is a meditation, and it's kind of structured in the beginning to help you go through your career, mostly things from mastery about finding your life's purpose you're what I call your life's task, and how to achieve a level of mastery and whatever you do. Then I kind of take you through the forty eight laws of power and dealing with toxic people, which we inevitably have. No, you're never going to go through life without facing toxic, negative people and how you

deal with them. And it takes you through how to have influence and be able to persuade people. And finally it ends with learning about human nature, etc. And the last month December is so inspired by the book that I'm currently writing about The Sublime, about opening your eyes to the insanity of just being alive right now in this world that we live in. So that's kind of the process. It goes every day, focusing your mind on a thought that hopefully we'll plant little seeds inside of you.

Let's talk about the heart of the middle of that, which was like dealing with toxic people. That's actually a question I get us so often, so I'm glad I get to defer to you in this scenario and put you to the task. But the idea of like people, I hear this all the time, Jay, I'm stuck in a toxic family, My workplace is toxic. I you know, and some people are honest enough to say, Jay, I'm my mind is just toxic, Like it's not even other people. Right,

where do you start? Where? Where do you guide people in that journey? Yeah, it's obviously something I've been thinking about and dealing with my whole life, particularly in all my different jobs. I've had a lot of bosses that we would qualify as the psychotic boss or no matter what you do, that never pleases them kind of thing and the best lesson of all. So we can say the different kind of toxic type of people. Most often

they're of the narcissistic variety. They're people who are grandiose, are people who are aggressive, passive, aggressive, who feel a lot of envy. There's like debridged insecurities on and on their many types. But the main thing that you want and a lot to develop in life is the ability to detect them before you get involved with them. Because the way toxic people have learned, they've learned strategies since they were six or seven years old how to get power,

and they embroil you in dramas. They get into your emotions, right, They entangle themselves in your life. They don't come at you saying I'm toxic, I'm a narcissist, Get away from me. They know how to appear charming, they know how to be interested in you, they know how to be moderately pleasing, etc. They can they can even be charismatic. You get involved with them and then it starts to come out, and

it's too late because you're emotionally entangled with them. They've got their roots inside of you, and you're sucked into their dramas, and it's really hard to get out, particularly in an intimate relationship. That's the worst of all. The best thing you want to develop in life is the radar to detect them before you get involved with them. And it requires a change in how you perceive people. So it doesn't mean I don't want people to become paranoid.

Everybody out there that I'm dealing with could be talking because it's only like five percent of the population or whatever. It is, truly like that. But you want to be able to see the signs beforehand, right, and you don't want to judge people based on their words, based on their charming personality, based on their glittering resume. You want to be able to judge their character what's deep, deep inside of them, right, the things that they are not

so visible at glance. Right. So you have to train how you think about people. You have to observe their patterns in life before you met them. If this person you're about to get involved in a relationship tells you all my wives and girlfriends in the past, they were just such blah blah blah blah blah, and then you hear that they only last a year or so and it was always their fault, your antenna should go up. Something is wrong here. This person isn't revealing the truth.

That's probably coming from something within. In my forty eight Laws of Power, I talk about infection, where there are people who have an infecting power on you. They've surrounded by all kinds of drama. They continually present themselves as the victim of other people, whereas in fact they're the ones that constantly draw this drama to them because that's how they survive. And you're going to find yourself involved with them, and it's going to be horrible. To get

out of the relationship, you're going to feel guilty. So develop the power to recognize them before or you get involved. And I have in the Laws of human nature tons of advice about that, paying attention to people's nonverbal cues. To a narcissist tends to have a very animated face, but a kind of a deadness in their eyes. They're kind of listening to you, but you can hear that they're actually thinking about themselves, or they're they're not really

connecting to you through the eyes. The face is alive, but the eyes are dead. Right. There are signs, nonverbal cues that will show you that you're dealing with someone who's not I hate the words like sociopathic, psychopathic, but who is you know, generally very in itself directed. Right. The other thing I have to say is it's easy to judge and say, oh, the narcissist that talks to people, but we all have these qualities. We all have narcissistic qualities.

We all can be passive aggressive, right, So some of it you can recognize in yourself, and there are ways the ways to get out of it, but the main thing is to not get involved. With these people. If you're involved, let's say you have a spouse or whatever. The best power you can get is the ability to withdraw your emotions from the moment. And God knows that

is not easy. It's a day to day thing. It's a daily process where you have to tell yourself these little kind of scripts that you tell yourself, it's not me, it has nothing to do with me. It's not personal. They have issues from early childhood that have given them these toxic patterns in life. They're trying to make me feel guilty. But it's nothing to do with me. It's not personal. Over and over and over and over again, every single time. So you have the ability to detach

yourself emotionally from them on a daily basis. If you're in a job and you have a toxic colleague or a toxic boss, if you can get away from them, if you can quit your job, if you can move to another part of the office, do it because it's worth it. Not worth collecting ten thousand extra dollars a year because with this boss, because it's going to damage you emotionally. It's going to take you years to recover. Three years with a toxic boss. You may never recover.

So if you can quit the job, nothing, no job is worth that kind of abuse. It's going to hurt you. It's going to damage you right and the same in a relationship as well. If you can't get out, you have to develop a habit of detachment and not taking things personally. And oddly enough, when people sense that in you, like a toxic persons senses that they can't push your buttons, it has a powerful effect on them. I'm not saying it's going to cure them, but they thrive on the

ability to push your buttons. To see you getting upset and angry just makes them so excited in a perverted way. The fact that you're not that you're not taking it personally, that you're calm, that you're centered, that you're thinking to yourself, it's not personal, it's not personal. It's going to have a powerful effect on them. You may not end the dynamic, but it will have more of an effect that you want than constantly falling for their ploys and their games

are getting emotionally sucked in to their dramas. Yeah, it's almost like you see the you see the magic trick right like or you're seeing like the puppet strings. Yeah, and you go, I'm going to cut these strings off now, like you know, And that's like you're saying, it doesn't necessarily solve it, but that person is well aware now that that's not going to work on you, right, right, And you're so right that that reactivity we have with

people that it's like they want that drama. They seek that drama because that's what gives them their sense of significance. And so you're right that it may not stop that, but it definitely makes them think, and it definitely makes them check themselves in question. They're used to getting away with things, they're used to people not seeing through them. And just repeat to yourself, talks to people do not announce themselves. They do not wear little horns on their

head saying I'm devilish or whatever they disguise it. So a person who is overly charming on that first encounter, who's so nice, who's listening to you, who wants to help you and please you, that's not natural because we've all developed the habit of being slightly wary of strangers. And I've learned through my consulting work and my own experience that that person who's trying too hard on the first encounter. They're generally hiding something, they're generally conceding intentions

that they don't want to give out right. Their method of throwing dust in your eyes is to appear the opposite of what they are, and you're going to fall for that. So when people try too hard with one quality or reveal too much of a single quality, they're often concealing the opposite. To be aware of that as well. Yeah, and that's and that's what you're saying, Like, it's so hard to know whether someone is a got an agenda or someone who's just truly nice, Like it becomes hard,

it becomes hard to suggest. I remember when there was someone I was building a relationship with and I said to them, I was like, you know, I've just really got along with them, and they talk about this all the time now, and I said something like, you know, I think I think would be really good friends. And they said that they'd never heard anyone say that to them, because it just seems so like lame to somebody agree to say that to someone. But I've always lived that way.

So I've always been someone who, like, I will tell you exactly what I'm thinking right now, and I will in that sense, not exactly what I'm thinking right now, but exactly what I'm feeling in a relationship. I've always enjoyed communicating because I saw people communicate so badly about who they wanted to be friends with and spend time with.

I was just like, I want to tell this person I want to spend time with them, and if they don't want to spend time with me, I want to hear it now too, because I don't want to go home thinking about And that's how I was when I started dating. It was like, if I was attracted to someone, I would always tell them because I actually preferred the failure then the idea of them not knowing and us

missing out on an opportunity to have a relationship. So I guess my question is is there a way of knowing if there's some sincerity or or is that just an energetic, intuitive thing that comes with time. You know this is I have a chapter on non virual communication or lots of human nature. We have an animal part of us right where we feel certain things about people on that first encounter or second encounter. That's not rational,

that's intuitive, and then we don't trust it. Yes, right, And often it happens in a microsecond, in a flash, you meet somebody and you sense a chemistry or something a little bit wrong. Right, okay, But with you, if I met somebody like you who seems very genuine and sincere, and I can read it in your face and I feel it, I don't need to be wary, but particularly with women dealing with men, because quite frankly, the more

dangerous toxic type will be man. Women will often have an intuition, a sense of something isn't quite right, but they don't trust it. They go on. But we all have that feeling. Trust it, and you could be wrong. But it doesn't hurt to be a little bit wary of someone. It doesn't mean if someone is being like you friendly, I want to be your friend, that you have to go running away immediately. It just means maybe the ulterior motive here, Yes, I'm reading body language that

tells me know that they're sincere. I can let down my guard, but there'll be a tiny percentage of me which in the days to come wants to see which is fat because there are people like it's a It's a common classic case of envy where a person who is envious of you becomes your friend. That's where most envy relationships occur is between friends, right, and they make a point of being your friend. They're very friendly, they love you, they want to help you, they want to

assist you. Wow, this is great because we never get enough of that in life. And then six months down the road, they start turning against you, start doing things that completely confuse you. Now, probably in your first encounters you could have detected something about them already, but people can be tricky. So you know, with you, I would kind of sense a complete sincerity and I would let down my guard. But there are other people that you

have to be a little bit wary of. It doesn't mean that you've cut off contact, but you have a little bit of distance and the moment you see behavior that kind of contradicts that initial impression, WHOA all right, And maybe you don't become for it. You don't get involved with them because getting involved with the person like that is it's going to cost you a lot in the end. Yeah, I can't agree more in that place to business love relationships and I've I've made mistakes because

you fall in love too fast. In each scenario, you just you're moving so fast and so quick, and you're involved with someone before you even know it, and you never get a chance to say, oh, do I notice something you know toward about this person? And so no, I'm with you. What are the things that Robert we talked about, like people not having power, not understanding power, developing a power. I guess one of the things that you believe destroy someone's power by themselves, So I don't

mean things like reputation and envious people. And what are the ways we destroy our own power? Generally by not having the ability to adapt to circumstances. Okay, So you go through life and if you're successful or have some success, you kind of depend on certain skills, certain strategies that get you where you want to be. And then you find yourself in a position that's new and circumstances that are new, and you keep doing the same thing over again and it doesn't work, and you get angry and

you get frustrated and you blame other people. This guy's not listening to me, This isn't working. It's because you're not adapting, right, So you need to have this it's a kind of a zen or it's Asian strategy mindset of every circumstance is different. You have to have a sense of flow every thing that you encounter, every problem is new. What worked in the past won't work again. I need to adapt. I need to be able to flow and be fluid and adaptable. That's the main thing

that trips people up. It's the wall they continually hit. And I've seen it time and again in business with CEOs. I was on the board of directors of a publicly traded company, and people who are very powerful get to a position by being very aggressive, by being very charming, by being blah blah blah, and then they reach a manageria level where they have a huge company and those skills don't apply anymore, and they keep trying to push those same buttons and it gets them in trouble and

they hit a wall. So your ability to adapt and alter your thinking dependent on your circumstances will make you not hit those walls. I think that's the main thing. And then the other thing that happens is grandiosity kicks in. I have a chapter in Human Nature about grandiosity, and basically what happens is success is very very dangerous. Success is much more dangerous than failure. Failure makes you look

at yourself. When I failed with my body and after my stroke, I had to look at my own limitations. Whereas success is like a drug. It's like a continual hit of coke or whatever. Wow, I'm a god. People love me. Everything I say is wonderful. Everyone's going around thinking, God, you're so great, Robert One Yet da da dah. And slowly your feet reason low, higher and higher off the ground. You lose contact with reality and boom, you fall down. Because you don't realize that success often has a great

degree of luck. You're discounting the luck involved. You're discounting the role of other people that helped you to get there. You think it's all about you, right, So you take actions that aren't calibrated to reality because you think you have the Midas touch and you don't. So those are

some of the main barriers to power. I think, God, Yeah, there's a great answers, there's a there's a absolutely brilliant I loved what you said earlier about thinking everything every situation is new, having fresh eyes and fresh ears to to look at a problem, to hear a problem, and you're reminded me of a beautiful zen story. I'm sure you know it. Of the i'll, i'll, I'll do the quick version, but the idea of the person who wants to cross a river, so they the raft. The raft

helps them across the river. Now they carry the raft wherever they go. And now they come up to a wooded forest and they're trying to get through and the raft won't let them get through. And they realize they have to let go of the raft if they want to go through the forest. Yeah. I never thought of that. That's great. Yeah, the idea that you get so attached to this raft saved my life. I have to keep it on me forever, right, Yeah, And you know I can relate to so much of that in my life.

Like you know, I often feel that I allow myself to go through a renewal and almost and I don't like the word rebranding because it seems so external. It's almost like what is the word for an internal rebrand?

But it's like the idea of I allow myself to just be like who do I want to be at this stage in my life and what do I truly want to dedicate my life too, and this time in my life too, And I feel like I'm at that stage right now in my life and because I've I've far superseded things that I thought I would have done, and now I need and want to create the next challenge in the next you know, I'm looking forward to

something that's big and that's very healthy, that's good. Yeah, I look at what's that next big thing that's going to make me learn new skills? And what is the thing that I want to learn in order to you know. And so I'm there right now. And when you were saying that, I was nodding along and laughing because I can just so relate to that, and and thankfully because of good mentors and coaches. You know, it's I'm always I'm using success to look inward too, as opposed to

only failure. And of course there's plenty of failure in success too, so you're you're always doing both, but the idea is to always look inward. And so yeah, I'm just I'm actually just sharing that with you because I could relate to it so strongly. Well, you know, the temptation I had after the success of my first book, The forty eight Laws, was to kind of keep repeating it to do a forty eight lass of power number two, which is what a lot of writers ended doing because

they're worried about taking on something different. They've kind of created their audience. They better just sort of keep to it. With success, you become conservative. I better just do what's working right and then but times change. There's a zeitgeist, there's a spirit of the times. People have moved on, but you haven't, and your forty eight laws of power number two won't work, you know, So you need to change. And I do that with every book that I write.

Each book has to be different as to reflect the spirit of the times, has to be a challenge. I have to learn new skills, I have to go outside of my comfort zone. So I think that's sort of a similar thing. Yeah, definitely. And I think I saw that because I look again what we were talking about earlier. When you study the people you admire in any field, or the companies or whatever it may be, you see that, you see that constant renewal. And initially it's very uncomfortable

for the audience as well. It's uncomfortable for the community because they're not used to changing and they're not used to seeing people grow in that way, and and I think that discomfort is both on the behalf of the individual who's trying to grow and be more of themselves, and it's there for the community too. And but but it gives birth to something phenomenal, Like you're saying, the conservative approach would have never got you there, and so

I love that idea. And yeah, just it's it's been a fun time for me trying to figure out like I'm almost enjoying feeling like I'm at the beginning of my journey again. Wow. And there's some there's some joy in that. Yeah, there's some sachredness and specialness of like, oh I forgot how this felt. You know, read a book on that. That's your book. That's your next book. I'm right, my next one already. So this one may have to be later down because I read that book tomorrow.

That's great idea. Wow. Well well yeah, well we'll have to we have to, yeah, share notes and collaborate on that, because I was saying offline, I want to share this with we with me and Robert were talking about this offline, but I want to share it with you. Is the idea of you know, I'm really enjoying this conversation with Robert, because we're almost toggling between the binary and finding the gray, and Robert's fantastic at getting and that's what I enjoyed

talking to you about so much. You're so fantastic at getting into these subtle nuances because we, you know, all of us try and be like, should we do this or should we do this? Like is this the answer? Is this the answer? What's the number one thing? And it's you know, all of that stuff just sounds good, but it doesn't mean anything. And I feel like today we've really, you know, dove into some of those in betweens and nuances. So I wanted to share thank you

for doing that. Is you've been guiding us that way, Robert, I want to ask you, is there anything that you feel you haven't shared or something else on your mind or intuitively in your heart they're like, Jay, I have to share this on your podcast or anything right now that's calling you. Well. The book that I'm working on, the Law of the Sublime, which is taking a long time, is probably gonna be three years away or so, maybe more so. It's almost a little bit too much to

tease people with now, but it's something. It's very important to me because back in two thousand and five, two thousand and six, I had meant to write a book on the Sublime. It's a concept that fascinates me, and I got derailed by other projects. I did a book with fifty cent I did Mastery Human Nature, and then

I had my stroke. And the last chapter of the Human Nature is about the Sublime, about confronting mortality, and so I go, this is the time to write this book because it means so much to me, and it's been brewing in me for sixteen years, so there's something very personal about it. And the idea is I think a problem that a lot of people face today is that their minds are locked. They have only one way of thinking about things. They've become so conventional, and I

know it's something. I'm not being judgment because I have the same problem, so rigid about this is the way the world, this is how things have to be, this is how my life has to be. This is what meaning is, This is where value is in life. And I compare it to like a circle, and being a social animal, our thoughts have to sort of stay within this circle of what ideas are accepted of what behavior is accepted, what conventions and codes there are, And the

sublime is what lies just outside that circle. What isn't really something you're supposed to think, something's supposed to do, isn't a behavior or a value necessarily or encouraged to have. But when your mind touches it, tickles it a little bit, you're like, whoa, it jolts you alive. There's another way of thinking, there's another way of being in this world. How exciting, right, And that's what makes people search for

transcendental experiences what Maslow called peak experiences. That's why they climb mountains and almost get close to death and falling because it gives them that joel of being alive. It shakes them up. And so the ultimate thing outside that circle is death itself. It's the ultimate unknown, right. And the word sublime means up to the threshold of a door, and that door is the door to death itself. And so when you peek at it and you look at it,

that's the ultimate in a sublime thought. Right. Okay, so that's thought of the model. But I have these different categories and I want to make you the reader aware that you take so much for granted, and I don't want this to be in a Polyanish way, because the Sublime has an element of terror and darkness and fear involved, because death is the paradigm here. But you don't realize

in your day to day life. I've just written these first two chapters and they're in the Daily Laws, so you'll see about them, giving you some excerpts from the new book. But it's insane that you live in a world that the way it is right now. If you study the history of the cosmos, and how unlikely it is that the Earth ended up being the way it is, and how rare it is that they may not be

life on other planets. If there is the rarity of the life that we know of the prog the animals, the evolution, the technology that we have, and then if you look the course of evolution, and how improbable it is that humans ever evolved even existed. If an asteroid hadn't hit the planet sixty some million years ago, dinosaurs would still be around, on and on, multiplied by the

seventy thousand generations of Homo sapiens that preceded you. If one of so let's say your parents had never met, you would not be here, Jay, you'd maybe you'd be combined in something else. Okay, and think of the narrow possibly that your parents hadn't met. Multiply that by seventy thousand other generations trailing all the way to the first

Homo sapiens. It's astronomical. The odds that you exist, that you're breathing, that you're looking at a world with plants and animals, etc. Is staggering, and you never think about it. So I'm trying to make you think about things that you never think about in this book, and I want you to completely alter and make that going beyond the circle sort of more of a daily occurrence for you. So that's what's on my mind a lot, right, Yeah,

I love that and I look forward to that. I purposely didn't dive into it too much because I know we need to wait for it, and I hope we get to have another conversation when that comes out. But now we look forward to that and I can agree

with you more. The inconceivable is is such a beautiful meditation and of itself, to meditate on the inconceivable nature of where we are and what's possible and what's around us, and it needs to be part of our daily life for that entrance into the splendor and how sublime it can be. So yeah, I love that and we look forward to that. Robert. We end every on Purpose interview with the final five. These are the fast five rapid five rounds, so answers have to be one word to

one sentence maximum. I may go off on a tangent, but let's see. So, Robert Green, these are your final five. The first question is what is the best advice you've ever received? I remember years ago my brother in law said something about learning to watch the grass grow, basically the idea of things only happen over time. And I was twenty one at the time and I wasn't listening. And I've learned since then that the most beautiful things occur slowly and with patience. And if you can sit

there and watch the grass grows, that's pretty great. That's beautiful. What's the worst advice you've received? You need to capitalize on the forty eight laws of power and make a lot of money, which I ignored. That's brilliant. That's a great answer. That's a great answer. Third question, what's your current purpose? I have certain books I want to write that are very mean a lot to me, and I want to create them before I die because I know

that my life is short. I may not have as much time as I want, So that's to realize all the books that I wanted to write. Question number four is what's something that other people value that you don't. It's going to sound not right, but I'll say it anyway. It's money. I mean I have. It's easy for music because I have enough of it and I'm comfortable, but it's never been my goal. It's never ruled my life doing what I want to do. All that money means to me is freedom to do what I want to do.

I never focus on what I can do to increase my bank account, so I don't really value it, and it drives my mother crazy. For instance, Thank you for sure, I love that. And question number five, If you could create one law in the world that everyone had to follow, what would it be? Be yourself. Be as weird as you want to be. Stop listening to other people and doing what they tell you. Just follow what your soul

tells you what makes you different, and be weird. We need more weird people, who are more individuals, who are unique who create art and businesses that reflect themselves. So just be you, be weird. Let a thousand flowers bloom. As they used to say in China. That's beautiful, Robert Green, everyone on on Purpose. Make sure you go and follow Robert across social media and we'll have the links to

all of Robert's books in all the descriptions. The Daily Laws is out as you're listening to this episode, and of course the forty eight Laws of Power and the Laws of Human Nature, Mastery and Robert's other books are available to Robert. I want to thank you for just being such a wonderful guest on the show, for making

the effort. Just for those of you who don't know, Robert has traveled here to be here with us in the studio despite you know, all the physical challenges that he faces on a daily basis, and I really want to honor you for that and thank you for that. It's it's a real show of your your effort and love for what you do and I don't take you for granted. I really value it, so thank thank you so much for inviting me here, Jay, I was definitely worth the trip out of my house, So I really,

really enjoyed it amazing. Thank you,