Robert Greene || Strategy, Seduction, and the Sublime

our relationships, and daily life. We also touch on the topics of empathy, imagination, charisma, power, and his upcoming book on Transcendence and the Sublime. Chatting with Robert is always such a delight as we have many mutual areas of interest. I have been a longtime admirer of his books and I remember reading them in college and thinking that he seems to just get it. I hope you enjoyed this high level discussion as much as I did. So, without

further ado, I bring you Robert Green. Robert, it's so great to talk to you today on the Psychology Podcast. Well, thank you so much for having me again on your show. I really appreciate it. Yeah, you've been on three times now, one of the records and really yeah, yeah, I think it's your third appearance. Well, no, I'm honored. Yeah, a veteran, that's right, that's right. Well, first of all, I want to just start off by saying my sincerest condolences on

the passing of Brutus. Oh my god. Well when I heard about that, it made me really sad. That was exactly two years ago, so yeah, I mean you never met him, but he was the most amazing cat, and he had been with me. He was nineteen years old when he passed away, so he had been my constant companion through the writing of five books. You know, seeing him day in and day out in the backyard and everything. It just kind of keeping me company. I don't know

the attachment that you get to an animal. It is just hard to explain to people who don't understand end of it. But I had such a deep, deep attachment to him, so it was very painful, I know, I know, so missin serious condolences And how are you doing. How's your health? Well, my health is good. I mean I can't really complain. It's just since I had my stroke three years ago and I'm not where I thought I

would be. I thought it'd be much further along. So I've had to deal with some of my own impatience and some of my own limitations because I still can't like take a walk anywhere. You know, I'm kind of limited in that, and it's very very difficult to deal with things that you can't really change your control. I do a lot of therapy and there's hope, but I'm just dying to be like having my old life again

where I swam and heked and stuff. And actually, honest I don't know if I will get it back, or if I'll get enough back that I Yeah, that's what the doctors have said, have a full recovery, so you know, that's what But it might take like four more years or something, so instead went instead, But you can fill out of that time writing really influential books that change the world. So that's good, that's right us. The one compensation it didn't affect my brain as far as I know,

so I can keep writing books. That is one good thing, because some people have strokes and it mostly affects the brain and your cognitive abilities. So I'm very grateful that it affected the other side. So yeah, Well, congratulations on your new book, The Daily Laws. That's a bit of a what is it a schmorgispor like like your Greatest Hits in a way, well, trying to think of the best metaphor here and to describe it, How would you

describe it? People? Some people say that it is kind of a choice of some of what I consider the most salient parts of the book. But it does have a logic and a structure unlike kind of a Greatest Hits album, you know, it has a linear plot that goes through it where I'm sort of instructing you on various phases of my philosophy, you know. And each month has a kind of a theme to it, and then there's some original material in it. Each month is introduced by an essay of dealing with my own life and

how that inform my books. And then the last month there's some passages from my new book. So there is some original material in there. Yeah, and I can't wait to get to the topic of your new book. And that's so well aligned with so many things I'm obsessed with these days. But let's go in order in a way, not like there's a necessary an order, but let's cover

some other topics first. And I want to start this very kind of general level of this thread that runs through all of your writings, which is this connection to reality, this idea. What is a radical realist which is a term that you use. Well, you know, there's a degree of connection to what's really going on in the world, and we're never going to completely connect to it. I mean in a kind of a Zen Buddhist way. That's sort of the goal of enlightenment, where you have a

complete grasp of what the world actually is. Right, But for those of us who haven't reached that state of enlightenment, it's a matter of degree. And I'd like to think of it in three parts. The first part is about yourself knowing who you are, and we live with a lot of illusions and delusions about who we are. You know, we're not really connected to what really motivates our desires,

our behavior. We kind of exist in this fog, and if you think about it, it's actually quite startling and frightening at the same time when you realize that so many of your thoughts and your emotions and your behavior you're not really conscious of, right, you don't really know where it comes from, keep down inside the roots of why you react certain ways. So much of our behavior is kind of on an automatic level, and so we have this sort of robotic double that does most of

our actions during our life. Right, So a radical realist applies that light, that illumination on oneself, on one's early childhood, on one's attachments early on in life, on what one loves, on what one hates. You're a big follower of Maslow, and I always got very excited by an expression he had,

which was called impulse voices. Impulse voices are what an infant of one year old or younger has that kind of directs him or her to certain objects and food that he or she likes that are so powerful that it can only be something perhaps genetic, that comes from deep, deep inside. So we do. As we get older, we lose connection to those impulse voices, to what really is who we are as opposed to the social persona that

we assume. So a radical realist has an ability to look deep inside and become more aware of who one is. Of course, you can never really know. Maybe we can only know ten percent of who we are, but that ten percent is greater than most people have, and it's powerful. The other side is understanding people, which is extremely important because we're such a deep social animal and once again

we're operating in this deep, deep fogs. We're constantly listening to this kind of tape rolling around in our heads. We're not really getting inside people. We don't really know what motivates them, what their world is, what their experiences. We project onto them our own emotions, our own fantasies, etc. So we don't really have a clue as to this extremely critical part of our lives, even our intimate partners, we don't truly understand. And it's getting worse and worse

and worse. I think as people, as studies have shown that we're all becoming more narcissistic, more self absorbed. You know, I read novels from the nineteenth century like Jane Austen or I'm reading a lot now by Virginia Woolf, and I'm shocked at the level of understanding of people and people's psychology, like they're constantly having parties, interactions. Their life was so much more social than ours, was right, because they had no other form of entertainment. They had internet,

no television, radio may have just been beginning. Their only form of entertainment was interacting with people, So they had a much deeper grasp and connection to the people around them, the kind of high level empathy that I think is getting degraded so that a radical realist will never truly understand.

I can't understand what Scott Barry Kaufman is thinking right now, but I can get a little bit in tuned with your moods and your emotions and how you're feeling, and to that degree that I can get that kind of inside out perspective on you, you know, getting the theory of mind, get inside your mind and how it operates. You know, I have a greater connection to the reality

of what makes you tick. And then finally, the radical realist is connected to the zeitgeist, to what's going on in the world, to an understanding of the historical social moment that we're going through to a degree that's possible. You know, we can never have perfect clarity there, but you add those three realms. If you're able to increase the sense of clarity you have about those those various aspects,

that's sort of what makes to me a radical realist. Thanks. Yeah, I really love that, and I completely agree with you about increasing problem a lot of what you describe. I know that you put the label empathy on it, and your idea of empathy is it's very clear that it's about perspective taking and getting really inside someone else's mind and being able to see what makes them tick. Like

you say, I know we've discussed this before. Some other people in the psychological dature view empathy more is like mirror neuron mere emotional sharing of emotions and feelings. But it does sound like you have a bit of a different conceptuization of empathy. Is that right? No, I agree that it's mostly on the level of emotions. I consider

it a kind of a visceral thing. Some people have criticized empathy as a more kind of abstract process where you're sort of trying to figure out mine read the other person and the limitations of that, right, But I'm trying to say that we have like a kind of a visceral connection to other people. I mean the books that I've read and people who speculate about our earliest ancestors.

I think we were had almost a telepathic feel for what people were for their moods, their emotions thousands, hundreds of thousands of years ago, even before the invention of language, that we have this capacity that is kind of like an instrument that we don't really use very much because

we don't practice with it. But that's my sense of empathy because sometimes I have this feeling that I really I'm almost can bete inside the skin of another person, right And I can't put it into words, something I talk about in my Sublime book. You can't really put it into words. You can't create a formula for it.

And a lot of people in psychology are all into formulas and you know, kind of ways of describing things that are precise because you're so obsessed with science right now to a degree that I find kind of nausea and to be honest with you, whereas this kind of visceral sort of feeling that you have this connection that can't be quantified, I'm sorry to say, is to me the essence of our social nature. And you know that's sort of my concept of empathy. Yeah, I hear you.

I mean, I think a useful distinction in my field is between affective empathy and cognitive empathy, because they do split apart. I mean, you do have some people of deficits and afflective empathy who have great cognitive empathy they use to manipulate people solely as their purpose, and of those that have the reverse, A lot of people with autism on the automate spectrum have the affect of empathy, but they have very difficult with cognitive empathy. So sometimes

those distinctions that nauseate you are actually useful. Well, I don't find the distinctions nauseating. I just find trying to debunk I've read articles where people try to debunk the concept of empathy itself, saying that there's no evident like yeah, like paulblems the argument against empathy. Yeah, yeah, he argues for rational compassion. Yeah, the idea of congrational Actually, his episode on my podcast will be coming out right by yours.

Oh well, a good contrast. Fun to have that exhibision. Yeah. I think we live in times that are over intellectualized. It's sort of a lot of the theme of my new book, right, that we've become so abstract that we're losing a lot of what makes us deeply human. Right.

So the kind of computer metaphor that the mind now people now associate with the mind, you know, as if it's this data processing instrument, as opposed to how you know, I would look at the mind a lot differently and that there are things about consciousness that will never be able to know, that will never be able to scientifically describe, you know, things that are kind of a realm that's I hate to say, it will always remain mysterious that

we can't really figure out empirically and empathy. When you think of it only in this kind of intellectual, abstract realm, it can seem like something that has limitations. You don't understand it. But I know from my own experience, from a lot of things that I've read, and from what my connection other people and what I read a lot of history, etc. That there is something else to it that a lot of people by a hard time actually describing. Yeah, yeah, no,

I hear you. Another major theme, you know, because I want to start I want to actually try to ask you some high level questions because I'm sure that you have been saying the same thing over and over and over again in an interview after an interview, after interviews. Yeah, hopefully I can we can have a little more of a you know, and I really respect this, so I want to have a little bit of a higher level discussion.

So another area of commonality that I notice in your writing is especially when it comes to things like seduction and strategy, is actually using imagination as a tool for manipulation, you know, keeping people unpredictable, playing to their senses, looking fantastical, these sorts of things. So I wanted to discuss. Someone might think, well, that seems at odds with your idea

of the reality principle. I don't see it as odds, but I'm saying I thought we could have discussion about how we can kind of integrate these two themes that do run through. On the one hand, it's really important for you to be connected to reality as cully as possible, But another hand, a lot of people have used imagination as a tool for strategy, as a tool for seduction, etc. Well, that is a high level question you're getting at here.

That's where I wanted to do with you today. Okay, a person, there's psychology and their desire for fantasy, which we all have. We all want to be taken outside of our world, our narrow little world, and we want to be engaged with something larger than life. Mythic, however you want to describe it, is something that's deeply rooted in human psychology, right understanding that is part of being a radical realist, I understand that I myself have a

tremendous need for things that aren't necessarily hardcore realism. I need like theater. I'm obsessed with theater. I love drama, like films. I like reading fiction. Okay, a work of fiction. To use this as a prototype is complete work of imagination. Right, to actually get through seven volumes of Proost, which is an exhausting thing, which I did years ago. You know your del You're absorbed into this insane microcosm that he actually this world that he creates of all these characters.

But there is no greater psychologist than Marcel Proused, in my opinion, on an incredible level, or someone like a Virginia Wolf, and they're getting at the reality of people through the device of fiction. Okay. But the other thing is understanding human nature is to me part of that

aspect of understanding yourself and other people. Right, And we all have the desire, I believe to be seduced in some way, and that can go back from to our early relationships with our parents, to our siblings or et cetera, whatever the roots of that might be. We want to feel deep down inside that there is a vulnerability to us and that somebody else almost kind of inhabits our being in a way. It goes back to I think

something in a relationship with one's mother, et cetera. So I think we want to all of us have a drive to be taken out of our little interior prisons and be drawn out into the world of someone else. To falling in love with another person. It makes us vulnerable to a piece of fiction that takes us on a journey. It can be negatively. It makes us vulnerable to a demagogue politician, for instance, to just getting outside

of ourselves in some way, to transcending our limits. To look at the title of your book there a little bit and so you know, some of that involves use of fantasy, et cetera. But the other side of it that interests me is that, you know, people like to contrast what I write in my books with being authentic, and they say, Robert, you're kind of advocating a kind of inauthenticity about people where it's a lot it's you're talking about deception and manipulation, etc. And I'm kind of

come from a different angle or a different perspective. I'm very much influenced by the writer Irving Goffman. I don't know if you're familiar with his work, and Goffin's approach is that we humans are continually acting in our daily lives. We are never really completely truly authentic. It's part of being a social animal. So when we assume a certain role, a certain position in a job or whatever, we have

to assume that role where we become an actor. And then when we go home and we're dealing with our spouse or our children, we wear a different mask, we act in a different way. But this idea of our being an actor and play acting is suffused through out our daily life. And if you look at children, children learn at a very early age how to be highly manipulative. They know how to manipulate their parents, to use their smiles, to use their tears to get to get what they want.

And the psychologist that I admire a lot, Milton Erickson, he was very attuned to this kind of manipulative side that comes out in humans at a very very early age. And we are deeply, deeply uncomfortable with that side of our nature. We want to deny it to as much

as we can. We want to act as if this is not part of our reality, right, And I think that this play acting, this acting, part of our nature is deeply ingrained, but we're not comfortable with it, so we want to assume that there's some other ideal for us. And all I'm trying to say is, let's be a little more comfort with human nature, with the fact that etiquette, which we all believe in, is a form of continual

daily deception. It's a continual stream of white lives that we tell people when we complement them, when we say we love their screenplay, when we think they're looking great. You know, if we weren't using etiquette in this way, you know, we wouldn't be able to get along. And it is a form of deception. It's not high level manipulation, don't get me wrong at any point, but this aspect of our daily lives that make us be somewhat a

little bit false in our interactions. We want to imagine that this is not part of our reality, that we're in fact these kind of gandhiesque figures that are you know, truly noble and have this ideal of being authentic. And I just want to say that let's be a little more comfortable with this darker side of human nature. I'm not really sure I'm answering your questions, Scott, because it

was so long ago. Well, thank you, thank you. Well, I'm still I appreciate your point, and I just want to, for the sake of conversation, just keep pushing this so we get really, really deep into this. There's such a thing as surely lying, and there's such a thing as surely telling the truth about yourself. Yes, it seems like on the one hand you stole the merits of reality and truth telling and really seeing things for what they are. But on the other hand, you give a lot of

advice for how we need to deceive. You do lots of things to put up smoke and mirrors in order to get what we want. Don't fully tell people how great you are, don't. I mean, there's a million things you talk about. So there's a one hand in another hand here, And how can a deep integration of those two what does that look like? Well, I don't really know what you mean about me believing in truth telling.

So a lot of the forty eight laws of power which people misinterpret, is I come more from the side of the victim of the innocent side in the equation, which was who I was when I entered the work world at the age of twenty two after graduating university, and suddenly I became exposed to all these high level political games, the kind of manipulative things that go on

in the work world. It's not the complete picture, don't get me wrong, but there's definitely that aspect that were all kind of shocked by, you know, when we enter the work world after being somewhat naiven, innocent. So I wanted to expose the reader to the kinds of things that go on in this environment that are not discussed. They're not discussed in self help books. There's not things that your parents talk about. It's not something you learned

in university. The political aspect of human nature where people's egos are involved. Right, So if you're learning to never outshine the master, that you don't want to get fired for trying too hard and making the person above you feel insecure about their position in life. That is the reality of human nature. That is the reality that people above you have egos, that they're insecure, and you have to acknowledge that. And that's the truth about that situation,

and that relationship. I'm not saying that you may have a boss where it's fine not to outshine him or her. It's you know, I'm not saying it's always the case, right, But I know so many people, including myself, who have suffered deeply from being fired and not understanding why I was fired. And if you examine the roots of it, it was this very kind of dynamic of outshining the

master that was at the root of it. So, you know, get others to do the work, but always take the credit, which is a pretty nasty manipulative law in the forty eight Laws of Power. I quite honestly, I have many different markers in that chapter that make it clear that I'm talking about you, the person who's going to be the victim of that, like I was the victim of that.

And to be aware that other people are going to get you to do the work, are going to put their name on it, and to not get defensive or upset that it's just part of it, and how to handle those kinds of situations, right. So, and then I talk about how in our culture there are a lot of con artists in our midst in politics, in business. You know, one thing that's very rarely covered is how much deception and manipulation go on in a very micro,

day to day level in the business world. In advertising, in marketing, is a constant game of creating smoke screens, of creating this image that you want other people to believe in. Right, So I want you to be aware of these dynamics and how they occur. And that's part of being a radical realism. I don't know how else to explain it. That is the reality that we have to deal with. Now, is there a role? Is there

important to tell people the truth? Obviously, yes, particularly in your intimate relationships, which I'm not covering in my books on that level, right, I mean, I know, seduction different, so I am contradicting myself a little bit here, but you know, dealing with your spouse or dealing with your intimate partner or your children, yes, truth telling is extremely valuable, right, And even in the work world there's a role for it, Okay, And you know, I've discussed that a little bit in

my books, but mostly a lot of the times we do have to wear a mask when we enter that world, right, and we can't be completely honest. We have to kind of be continually aware of people's egos, their insecurities, and how we have to mold our actions, our behavior, our words to who that person is. So once again, I'm not quite sure if I'm answering your question, but I'm trying to No, Well, you're this is good. I mean, this is good. I really like to hear further qualification

from you. You know, there is there are two sides of the story. There's you can learn about the reality of the matter so that you don't get duped or taken in, and then you can also look at the reality of the matter and use that tactically as a way to get what you want out of life. Now, that's not always necessarily a bad thing, as you point out, to do that, to do the latter. Sometimes it is a bad thing, but it's not always a bad thing. But I think you flip back and forth between the two.

You know, it's not always so clear to me when you're in one mode or the other. You know, of like be wary of this, and then sometimes it does come across as advice on what to do. So do you see what I'm saying? Yeah, But you know, Scott, I'm a believer in specificity. So it's very hard to argue this in the abstract. So you point to me a chapter of passage that you find is ambiguous, and I'll clarify for you. I'd be happy to, but to discuss this abstractly about all seven of my books, it's

very difficult for me. I hope you can understand that fair enough. So let's go through some specific ones. So poeticize your presence, never be ordinary or limited in poetry as opposed to reality, anything as possible. Can you tell us a little bit about that one? Well, that's in the art of seduction, right, So it's specific about the seduction process, okay, And you know in seduction, I think that there's an element of theater and drama. There is

what excites us about it. It's like a mating ritual in a way, right, in which we go through these kind of prescribed forms of behavior, et cetera. And one of the things about us humans and about love and even our sexual desires is it's deeply embedded in our psychology. Right. It's not just this animal drive where we want sex,

et cetera. There's a lot of psychology involved. And one of the things is in a seduction in that kind of area of our life, we want to be taken out of the banality of our day to day world. That is sort of the essence of seduction, where you create almost a kind of theater in daily life, right, and you're making the other person enter this realm of that quite frankly, a bit of illusion, like as on a stage, as in theater, or as in a film. Right.

So you're giving people this sense that when they're around you, that there's something more than just what they see. There's something exciting, there's something larger than life. You're kind of poeticizing your presence. This could mean in the kind of objects that surround you, in the way that you dress, in the way that you talk, and you know, in a seduction setting, when you're trying to make that other person be interested in you or fall in love with you, right,

you normally naturally kind of go through this process. You don't normally wear the clothes that you normally would wear. You don't, you know, wear your sloppy jeans or your T shirt, although that might be changing now, I don't know. You tend to dress a little differently to kind of impress the other person. You don't just take them to the local pizza hut, you know, to have your meal. You take them to a restaurant that you think. So you try and create this aspect of theater in your

daily life. And we don't get enough of that in our world, because you know, it's sort of an aspect that used to be in our social interactions, where we used to being at a party or being with people, there was a kind of this heightened aspect of it, the sense of being drawn out of yourself, this kind of Durkheim's sense of being in a crowd and being involved and this kind of large, this sort of collective consciousness of and you know, our daily life used to

involve a lot of these kind of theatrical moments, and they don't anymore. So I'm trying to signal to put a little bit of poetry into who you are, into how you act to the thing, into the gifts that you give, into the words that you say. You know, I mean, that's sort of what I'm talking about. Yeah, you know, I'm also thinking that one to a very interesting point you make about charisma and how the most charismatic individuals are not those who inhibit their emotions. I

thought that was really interesting. You said, those who actually harness their emotions in a very directed, focused way. Can you elaborate a little more on that. Well, I'm thinking of someone. I mean, I'm thinking that the metaphor for charisma, this is kind of this inner light. It's like this lamp that's inside it's illuminating or whatever metaphor you want, a lantern or whatever. And you can't literally see through a person and see that light, but it's inside that

person and it animates them. It animates their eyes, it animates their mouth, their gestures, their words, their tone of voice, their body language right, and it becomes apparent you can feel it, and that comes from something deep inside that person. So the kind of the person that I used as an great example of it was Malcolm X. Now, Malcolm X obviously had a great deal of anger inside of himself for all that he had suffered, you know, and for all the injustice that he saw in his daily life.

You know, he was a kind of a hustler in Boston who then got put into prison for drug dealing, etc. And he spent you know, several years in prison, and that's kind of when he turned his life around. But his form of charisma comes from this tremendous sense of injustice that he couldn't control. But he learned in public speaking that if you just ranted and got angry and just spewed all of your emotions out there, it wouldn't

be effective. What was effective for him, I don't know whether he came upon this naturally or whether it was conscious. I don't have knowledge of that. But his idea was that by channeling this emotion, by kind of giving it a form and giving it a degree of restraint, not very much, but just a little bit of restraint, it

created this very powerful effect. The audience could sense, could sense the anger, but they knew that he was struggling to control it in some way, and it kind of lit up his face and it made everything about him deeply, deeply appealing. The original origin of charisma goes back to Moses. Moses goes up to the top of Mount Sinai, he sees God. God gives him the tame commandments, and when he comes down from the mountain people are looking at him. His face is like glowing. The presence of God gave

him this glowing sense. It wasn't literally glowing. It wasn't

literally a flame, but they could see it. That's the words that they use, And that's kind of the sense that a charismatic person has, so another to give a different side of it, like a Marilyn Monroe, whose charisma came from a great deal of hurt, because a lot of charismatics, in my belief, come from broken childhoods, come from a lot of deep pain somewhere deep in side, and they have a tremendous need to connect to people, to find the love they didn't get at home through

their connection to other people. Marilyn Monroe was an orphan who you know, had a lot of abuse in her early childhood, and when she was in front of the camera, you could sense that she was literally kind of making love with the camera. She so deeply wanted your attention, your affection, your approval of her, that just animated everything about her and gave her this kind of sense of charisma. So that's sort of, you know how, my view of it.

So you learn, you learned to channel that, you don't just she just just went like, you know, doing whatever in front of the camera. She knew in a professional, in a craft way, how to use that energy and kind of channel it. So it's like you can see a river that's really wide and flowing with a lot of power. You're able to kind of take that river and make it more ordered and restrained, so instead of being all over the place that kind of goes like this.

It has a lot of power and energy and force, and by your ability to kind of restrain it to some degree. Yeah, No, I find your description of chrisma really powerful and it just got me thinking about this other one that seems related to me, and that's the one where you say, any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good. Now this you say this multiple times throughout in different ways that

you know, being trying to be nice. You have another one called like don't be so nice or something like that. Can you elaborate a little more and what you mean by that, Well, it's a quote from from Machiavelli directly, that particular thing about you know, if you're nice all the time, if you're too good all the time, you

get in a lot of trouble, et cetera. The idea is that there are moments in life where you have to learn to let go of your kind of perpetual, pleasant demeanor and you have to learn how to be a little bit tough and a little bit resilient and be able to play some of that hardball game that goes on in life now. I had to chat recently

with people. We were talking politics. We were talking about what's going on with the Democrats and the Republicans, and a lot of the frustration that a lot of us feel, who happen to be more on the side of the Democrats, with how little anything is happening, how slow things are.

And I brought up that chapter that you mentioned, that passage you mentioned the daily laws about stop being so nice, And what I said was, you're dealing with an opponent the Republicans who have that kind of idea where they're going to obstruct no matter what right and they're going to bend the rules however they can to. Their obsession is with power. It's not with getting anything done, it's

with maintaining their power. Right. Look at the tact that they have used in the last twelve years or so, going back to Obama, where they obstructed every single thing that he did with a very conscious purpose that Mitch McConnell said, this is what I'm going to do. And then look at the thing with happen with Merritt Garland where they wouldn't nominate him when you know, put him up for nomination for the Supreme Court. They're constantly bending

the rules. They're playing a very machiavellian game. And the Democrats they're as if they're playing in the nineteenth century. You know, Obama said, when they go low, we go high, kind of thing. They believe in, let's follow the norms, let's not you know, let's let's be nice. Let's not

play the game like they do. And look where they're at, the position they're in, you know, they're getting It's like a chess game where they're they're you know what, they're getting what's called forget the word in chess where you're pushed, where no matter where you move, you're in trouble, nothing will work. I think it's called strategic crush. Any move that you make is going to end up. Something bad will happen, rolling everything from voting rights on and on

down the line. They're creating permanent minority power. My point is the Democrats need to learn how to not be so nice they need, how to place some of that game back. It's not that you give completely your morals away. It's not that you go completely down to their level. But when it comes to simple things like strain to get rid of the filibuster, when it comes down to maybe gerrymandering yourself in a state like New York to kind of neutralize what they're doing in the state of Texas.

Do it for God's sake, you know. So to me, that's an example, a real life example where sometimes you have to let go of your ideals and you have to be willing to play and understand what the other side is doing. Yeah, and that's when that one seems to dovetail with your mixed harshness and kindness. Keep them in suspense. So how would the suspense part apply to the Democrats? Well, I don't think it really empty books

more suspense. Okay, that doesn't have to I'm just wondering. Well, I'm not sure that was more of a seduction tactic than anything else. I mean, you know, I'm talking about how like in Napoleon Bonaparte, he as a leader and a motivator, he would learn to sometimes with the same lieutenant.

He would criticize them harshly, they'd even go a little too far and blaming them for something, and then the next day or a week later, he'd be incredibly kind to them and say, you know, compliment them for something that they didn't give them a reward. And that mix of criticizing and then being very kind has a very

powerful effect on human psychology. Kind of makes you confused, and it makes you want to please that person on a higher level, and it's kind of something that people use to kind of motivate the troops, if you will. I don't think it really applies. I'm not sure. I'd have to think about it more deeply to this scenario. I was just painting between the Democrats and Republicans. Yeah, people are always expecting to me, you know, being my normal,

agreeable self. That when the second that I'm not like it shocks people, you know, and then I feel a bit like an asshole, you know, just even if I'm just not being completely agreeable. So that's something I think a lot of agreeable people need to kind of deal with to realize some of your laws here, I have

that kind of issue. I don't know, if you say it's a problem not where I want to please people a little too much and be agreeable, but what it's a matter of When it's as a public person who you are very friendly and very agreeable and very open on your podcast, you don't want to change that. That's

who you are. It's going to look weird. But in actions, in behavior, where you learn to set boundaries with people who are doing things that you find either offensive or not productive or not working with the team, you learn to create boundaries. If there's someone on your team who's not performing the way you want, you have to sometimes be a little bit harsh with them. You have to, you know, tell them what you're really thinking and maybe even take action to make it clear to them that

their job is in jeopardy. But your public persona, you shouldn't be mixing that up because that would be too confusing him. It's not who you are. But I know a lot of people. I'm consulting right now with a gentleman who runs a very large company, and his problem is he doesn't know how to be hard with people. He doesn't know how to be tough and sometimes necessary, and I have to help him. He has to channel me kind of telling him in a sort of Cirno

di Berger act way. You know, how you have to behave with some people, how you have to set limits to them, how you have you can't be so nice and run a very large company. You know, you can't always be so nice. So I think there are a lot of people who do have that problem, and I myself in that group. Yeah, you know, we're just seeing reality of ourselves as clearly as possible there and being honest about it. So yeah, well, coming to terms with our dark side. This is a huge, huge theme of

your work, and I think it's so important. So what is the primary wall of human nature? Well, the primary law of human nature is that we want to deny that we have human nature. So I discuss in the book sort of sixteen eighteen facets of human nature that can have a negative aspect to it, but that can be turned around and have a very positive aspect. So if you look at how we evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago, certain forms of behavior are ingrained in

our nature as a primate. But some things emerged in our years spent as one hundred gatherers, et cetera, and they're not really applicable to the world that we live in. So there are aspects of our nature that can get us in trouble, that not very social, that don't really work very well. And you know, I talk about our irrationality. I talk about our narcissism, our self absorption. I talk about our propensity to envy, which is something that chimpanzees have.

I talk about our grandiosity. Give us just a taste of success and we start becoming grandiose. I talk about our aggressive impulses, our passive aggressive impulses, our conformity, on and on and on, And what is it that you ask me? The primary law of human nature? The primary law of human nature is to deny that I have anything, as if I Robert Green could be the exception in that rule. Oh it's he that's narcissistic. Oh, she's the

one that's aggressive or passive aggressive. Oh they're feeling envy. We never want to admit that we have these qualities, that we have aggressive impulses, that we can be passive aggressive, that we can be extremely self absorbed. And when I was writing the book, it was kind of a shock for me as I wrote the chapters, the ones I've just elucidated to you. Go, wow, Robert, you're actually more self absorbed than I thought, and I generally think of myself.

You're actually quite narcissistic in some ways. You have these qualities that you're describing, right, And so we have this Robert, I know, I know you said, you said right, and that's right. I led myself over into a thing. So we're deeply invested in this kind of ideal image that we have of ourselves. Right. So it's always the and I'm trying to say, the key to being a human being is to be self aware and to be aware that you have these problems. Yes, there are other people

who are more narcissistic than you are. Yes there are people who are more envious and grandiose, always, of course, but we all come from the same origins, the same fabric that created every human around the planet. We share, So it would be impossible, it'd be a contradiction to say somehow we're exempted from something so deeply ingrained in

our nature, something that's wired into our brains. Envy is deeply deeply wired into how our brains operate by comparing bits of information, So naturally we compare ourselves to other people as a social animal. Right, and we all continually, in the course of a day, feel envy towards others. We're just not honest about it. So that's the primary law of human nature. Yeah, and relatedly, I thought this one was really interesting where you're talking about an importance

of confronting your dark side. You said depression and anxiety come from not being your complete self, from always playing a role. It requires great energy to keep this dark side at bay, but at times unpleasant behavior leaks out as a way to release the intertention. Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit. Yeah. The idea is that you know, when you're a child. The metaphor I use is kind of like a round ball, right in three dimensions, And when you were a child, you

were a complete person. That round ball was very clear. You had a sweet, angelic sigh, and you were very nice and lovable to your parents. But you also had a side where you could be very aggressive, where you could pull your sister's hair, or you could scream nasty thoughts. You didn't have as much self control as you gain later on in life. Right, you were a complete human being. Right, you expressed every aspect of who you were, like this

round ball. And then what happens is you get older, people start telling you you can't behave like that, Robert. You have to be nicer. You can't say those kinds of things to people. You can't pull your sister's hair, you can't throw things at people. You have to be nicer. You have to be a comedy, you have to fit

in with the group. And slowly those parts of ourself that are deeply, deeply embedded in our nature, some of which are naturally don't function on the social role, they get cut off, and so you become this kind of moon where there's only the bright side that people see.

Then the dark side is kind of hidden, and it gets repressed and repressed and pushed down right, and you're in complete denial that you have these feelings, that you have these aggressive impulses, that you have these dark desires, And if you examine any of your dreams, you will see leaking out continually, these kind of dark desires that none of us want to really discuss. Right a point can be reached later on in life, and we see that in public characters, we can see it in ourselves

or that dark side that's been repressed. It's almost like the child, the dark child in you that you don't want to admit exists, and sometimes later in life that comes screaming out of you and you're not even aware of it, and it causes behavior that you might even see, Well, that wasn't really me. I don't know where that came from. Where suddenly you say something a little bit mean, or you take an action, you hurt your partner by having an affair with someone, or you do something that you

don't know where it came from. It's almost like you feel afterwards as says, somebody else inhabited your body. Right. I mean that's an extreme example, but it comes out in day to day affairs on a more banal level, right into sort of dark emotions that you sense in you. It leaks out and it causes sometimes very weird behavior. And so what I'm telling you is not to become that child, because you can't be completely always expressing how

you feel. Right, That's part of being a social human is that we learn to kind of mold our behavior, but to recognize that unwanted child in you, that person that you've repressed, to say hello to it, to kind of welcome it, to even kind of embrace it in a way and say, it's a part of me. Now, how can I use that part of me instead of

denying it? Can I channel it into something productive? Can I use my anger and aggressive impulses towards writing books, which is something I use, or to creating some kind of just cause you know, I feel angry and upset and I'm yelling at people. Maybe I can channel that into something productive. And I give plenty of examples in that chapter of how you can do that and very famous successful people who manage to channel that dark energy

their competitive instincts or whatever it is. But the first step is to acknowledge that kind of ugly child that you don't want to see in yourself, not ugly but unwanted, and to accept it and to find a way to maybe use it in a productive way. That energy. Yeah, yeah, well I kind of agree with that more. And I really love this phrase you said mitt Freuda, you know, as a contrast to shot in the Freuda can you I've never heard that before, and that's really cool, So

tell tell our listen. This comes from Fredrich Nietzsche kind of coined the expression. So sean freude. Freude means joy or pleasure in German, and shaan means kind of pain, So it literally means finding joy in other people's pain, not in your own pain, but in other people's pain. And that's sort of what schadenfreude is. To some degree.

You hear news of your friend who got fired or something bad happened to them, and deep down inside you feel a little bit of gloating, you know, like, ha haha, right, they're human, after all, Maybe I'm not so bad, maybe

they're not so great. That's sean freude. And Nietzsche found that kind of aspect of human nature deeply petty and deeply kind of base, and he had this ideal of something more kind of noble, and the nobility part of it would be mitfreude and mitt means in German with so it means with the joy, And how he defined it is when other people have news that is good, instead of feeling envious or upset, you feel joy with them. You experience their good news, their good fortune with joy.

The flip side would be I don't know what expression I could come up with in German, but if I thought about it, I could where if something bad happens to someone, you don't gloat. You feel their pain. You know, I have to figure out what that word would be midshot, and maybe you feel their pain with them. Don't gloat, right, Okay, you feel their pain with them, right. But he wanted this kind of sense where empathy. If somebody has something great happen to them, you're normal and it's all human.

It's I go through it myself is to feel why did it happen to them? Why couldn't it have been me? Maybe they don't deserve that good thing that happened to them, Maybe they're not as great as people think they are.

To go the opposite direction and to literally force yourself and to make get a habit of that's wonderful, and not to just to not just to fool yourself, but to literally feel inside of yourself joy at their good fortune, to experience it with them, right, And in the process of doing that, they will sense it and they will feel incredibly grateful because it's not it's rare to have someone truly participate in your your good in your good fortune, et cetera. But also it'll make you feel a lot

better about yourself. You know, you'll feel because those kind of petty instincts that we have, which are natural, we don't like indulging in them. They make they don't make us feel very good. But you can practice these other habits, which I think Midfreud is part of Yeah, for sure. I mean, I just love like seeing the potential in

someone they don't see themselves, you know. I think that that might be related to that emotion, you know, especially if it's like a student, a student or something and I'm like, you know what, you really could do this. Yeah, that's an amazing thing. And I'm sure you know all

about that more than I do. But like the Pygmalion effect that they've studied in students where great studies done back in the sixties and seventies, where a teacher if they simply felt, without ever expressing it, that their students were good students deep down and they were all deserving to go to college or university, the grades of those students would suddenly rise. Right. It was never spoken, but the feeling that the teacher felt that they were worthwhile

something good would happen to them. The students would feel that from the teacher in a nonverbal way. It would come you know, it would pass through them and they would try harder, and they would feel better about themselves. There's a whole realm of human psychology that involves these kind of nonverbal interactions where how you feel about another person it translates to them in a way that they're not even aware of and alters their behavior, which in

turn alters your behavior. I wish somebody would go into that in a deep level and kind of expose it, because to me, it's fascinating. To me, it's the new frontier of human psychology, you know, and I, you know, keeping notes about these things in different phenomenon that I think could go into it. But for instance, one psychologist had this example where a woman was dealing with a very kind of angry, abusive boss and she didn't know

what the hell anything she did. He just got angry at She went to a therapist and the therapist said, next time, just go in there and think good thoughts about him. Maybe he's like this because of something going on in his life that he can't control. Have a little bit of empathy and go in there and go into in the interaction and go I don't feel resentful or angry. I sympathize. I feel a little bit sorry for you, and I actually like you, but don't say it,

just feel it. She went in there and suddenly he was so put you didn't know how to react because it was so different just her body language, and he kind of melted and kind of changed his behavior. So these are things that are similar to the Pygmalion effect, to the mid Freud. If you will, I'm doing it right now towards you. I want to see if it affects you at all. I'm very proud of you. I'm proud of you. Okay, good God good. So I really

like the integration of the shadow. That's that's you know, we're you know, we're we're reaching the end of our interview today, and there's no better place than the very high level of integration. Right It takes makes so much work to do that. Oh no, we'll get there, we'll get there. But we're as we're, as we're approaching the mountain, extending the mountain. Integration at a high level seems to

be up there. And you know, you talk about absorb yourself and your work, not your ego, and that requires a really high level of integration, you know, because the ego is constantly screaming at us, right, So, do you have some tips or ideas on how how we can work on that. Well, it's a feeling of whether you're turning inward or whether you're turning outward. I mean, obviously there's going to be gradations of that. We're not always

completely turning out or inward. But the degree to which you can get outside of yourself and make that inward pull towards your ego, towards your insecurities, towards your own continual recurring thoughts, and get outside of yourself and put yourself into your work fully and engage with it as if it's something outside of you, to the degree that you're able to get outside of yourself and engage completely with other people as a reality that has nothing to

do with you. They have their own reality, their own experience, you know, as you're able to do that with people in all sorts of situations. To me, that's the highest form of therapy that you can have right where you're And so much of the dynamic that's taking over us in the twenty first century is that inward turning is getting deeper and deeper and stronger and stronger that pull, right, And I talk about in my new book, which we

may get to or not. I talk about how in the ancient world, in the pagan world, if you will, the sense the greatest feeling that a person have was to be possessed by something outside of them. That was what was kind of ecstasy. That was what religion was, that was what the divine was. It was being possessed by some force beyond you, whether that was love and aphrodity, whether that was clear thinking and the theena, just to use the Greek examples, et cetera. So back in those

in our earlier years, people were much more vulnerable. And are you familiar with the work The Secular Age by Charles Taylor. I'm actually not now. No. Oh, it's a fascinating book. It's really interesting. He kind of is trying to show the roots of where how are we evolved into a completely secular society? And his the word he uses his permeability. So in the past people were much

more permeable to outside influences. It was also kind of a frightening thing as well, right, where you were much more open to what other people said, to their world, to the natural forces around you. And as we've evolved, we've become more and more closed. We want to control that, we want to retreat to our inner citadel. So you know what, Scott, I've kind of forgotten the original question. Maybe it's because that title anxious is staring me in

the face. What was your original question? It's so probably and as somebody somebody who suffers from anxiety, and it's like, whoa anxious? I don't know if I want to read that book. It's making me anxious. Maybe that's part of the markets. It's right under our books. I really should remove that. I'm going to this one of the original questions.

Did I ever have that? Okay? My original question was how Tenny tips for integrating the two, but integrating the dark side with our really healthy motivations for work, not our egoistic motivations, but our I say, the kind that

we really really should have. Yeah. Well, you know, so if you're feeling like you have a lot of aggressive impulses, that you're a very ambitious person, you could channel that into hurting other people, into pushing them around, to getting a position of power in which you control them and you intimidate them, and you feed your own ego, and I'm saying, take that that energy, because the dark side contains more energy, I'm afraid than the light side, because

it's so repressed, because it has this kind of primal animal aspect of it. It contains a lot of energy and a lot of creative energy. You know, all of some of our best artists that we appreciate know how to channel that dark side and know how to express it to some degree. You know, Like I was talking earlier about Malcolm X, his ability to express the dark side of how African Americans were feeling was a great part of his care charisma that he could express what

other people were feeling but would never dare to say. Right, that's one way of channeling your dark side, right and instead of instead of like pushing people around, just kind of creating something in your work, in your business or whatever that's superior, you know, to put all that ambition and drive and energy into creating something very productive and beautiful and getting outside of yourself and channeling that energy instead of inward into something outward a project or other people.

I think that's what I meant. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So tell me about your new book, Their upcoming book, The Law of the Sublime is that still the working title of it. It is the working title, and it's I think there's a lot of similarity to your book, which very excited to get a copy of. But you know, what I'm trying to explain in The Sublime is I'm trying to resurrect a concept that was

very popular in the late eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, the sublime has become a word that doesn't have much meaning anymore, or is used you know, that was a sublime meal that we had, or it's used by people in the art world in a very kind of cloistered way that doesn't have much relevance to our day to day life. And I'm trying to bring it back down

to earth. And the kind of the metaphor that I use is that to be a human means to live inside of a kind of a circle, and that circle is these are the behaviors, these are the codes and conventions that being a sociable human being we have to abide by. And every culture has that limiting circle, so they had it in ancient Egypt. It isn't the same

as what we have now. The codes have changed. What behavior is allowed has changed, but the circle remains the same, right, And it's like, it's not just how we're supposed to behave, but it's certain thoughts that we have. This is how our culture ingrains in us, certain ways of thinking, certain values, certain opinions. And what lies beyond that circle, just on the other side to me is what I define as the realm of the sublime, because by our nature we

humans don't like limits. We want to explore things. We're fascinated by what is taboo or what is not is not where we're supposed to go. And so that realm of thoughts and feelings and emotions and experiences that go beyond that limited circle, they fascinate us because they represent a realm of thinking and acting that is freer, that isn't so limited, and it's something deep down inside. It's kind of a way of transcending that circle, you know, to use the word on your title there and so

the ultimate. So the word sublime from the Latin means up to the threshold. Limit meaning is the Latin word for a threshold, up to the limit. Up to the threshold, it's like a door that you're coming up to its threshold and you're looking at the other side. And the ultimate form of looking on the other side, in which the word sublime was originally associated with, is death itself. Death is the ultimate limit, right, So to peer through that door and to experience death in some way while

you're still alive is the ultimate sublime experience. So if you've ever read the literature on people who've had near death experiences, it totally transforms. They're never the same. I had, on a minor scale, my own near death experience three years ago when I came very close to dying and I was in a coma, you know. So I understand that now in a very real, visceral level, right. So I describing in the book like fifteen different facets of

that sublime experience. I talk about the cosmos and understanding the insanity of how this universe even evolved and what science reveals to us, and how just knowing that should explode your everyday experience. I talk about evolution of life and how the fact that Scott Barry Kaufman and Robert Green are now communicating through this form as two human beings in twenty twenty one is the most outrageous, outlandish the odds against this happening are so astronomical, But how

often do I think of that? And do we think of that? And I go through the link, the causal link, going back to the first moment that life sparked, which was against the odds and all the bottlenecks and evolution, which could have made things go completely differently so that human beings would have never evolved, such as the extinction of the dinosaurs by a freak meteor that hit our planet.

Such as how humans nearly went extinct eighty thousand years ago, on and on and on, your parents' meeting, how unlikely that was. Multiply that by seventy thousand generations of other seventy thousand unlikely meetings. So you, being Scott Barry Kaufman, is almost too, is almost incomprehensible that you even exist as you are. Right. So that's a sublime thought to go into, just really the reality of our existing in this world as it is as we look at it today.

And then I go into, as I said, pagan religions, I go into childhood and how to recreate childhood feelings because children are very susceptible to the sublime, how the human brain is a sublime instrument on around these different facets that are like little doors around that circle that open up into worlds that we don't really think about, but that are incredibly off inspiring and give us a

taste of what Maslow called peak experiences. And the final thing I'll say about the book is, I'm trying not to make it just an academic discourse on the sublime point of it is, I want this to be a part of your daily reality, so the optimal world is experienced. I want this to be a part of your experience, not an intellectual way, but in an emotional way. And so a lot of the book is about almost exercises and ways you can can access this sublimity in your

daily consciousness. And now I'll shut up, no cracking me out. That's beautiful. I actually I can't. I can't wait to read it. I can't wait to read the book. I'll know, I know I'll learn a lot from it as you'll read and transcend Maslow. Towards the end of his life, he had a heart attack a couple of years before he eventually had his fatal heart attack, and he called it those last couple years of his life, the post

mortem life. And he said, if everyone could have a post mortem life where they they have a near death, the kind of death kind of experience, and then continue to live, that would that then they could access higher levels of transcendence than they ever known imaginable. And another thing that I think, yeah, is that expressed in a book, in a particular book that I should read. It's in my book because it's transcribed from lectures he gave towards

the end of his life. So this is unpublished, unpublished stuff. I went through all of his oh, his personal diaries, his personal diaries, his and and also another idea a lot of people are not aware of that. I think you'll really deeply resonate with his idea of he's the Plateau experience, he said, and he realized during this post mortem life that the peak experience is not where it's at.

He said, it's the plateaux experience. It's like lounging in heaven but not getting so excited about it, seeing the miraculous in the every day. He said, you know what, that's better than the peak I've been talking about before. Well,

he describes that in his book Peak Experiences. In that book itself where he contrasts the plateau with the peak experience, and he kind of, I think, if I remember correctly, he kind of compares it to like a meditative state that Zen Buddhists would have where they kind of are able to live that kind of peak experience is on the sort of level plane throughout their life and they experience it day by day to day. Yeah. I mean, I've been writing about how the sublime is in our

everyday life. You don't have to. The weird thing is Scott. When I originally decided to write the book, which was fifteen years ago, I had wanted to write this book. I had this image in my mind that I would be jetting all parts of the around the planet, having these sublime experiences. I would go to Tierra del Fuego and Antarctica. I would swim with dolphins in the Caribbean. I would have and then I had my you know,

then finally I got dive sidetracked by other projects. And now after my own near death experience, I decided going to write the book on Sublime. But now because of my physical limitations, I can't fly anywhere. I can barely even take a walk outside my front door, so I can't do what I originally did, So I personally have to find the sublime in order to write about it in just looking out my window and just going, you know, in my car and seeing certain things, just interacting with

my girlfriend or my cat. You know, I have to suck it out of every flower that comes in my way, get that nectar in the smallest thing, because it's the only avenue I have. And so in writing the book, I'm going to make it clear to the reader that you don't have to go climb out Everest literally to have a peak experience. It's there around you and everything that surrounds you. Love that, and you know, just to conclude, your writings really do instill this sense of wonder and

peak experience in the reader. So I hope you writing the books can can help give you that experience as well from time to time. It does. Thank you so much, Robert for Oh good, no, no no, that's it, good good. Thanks Robert for being on the podcast today. It is so great to chat with you again, and good luck on your new book. Yeah, and please send me the link to send me the book and send me the link to Anxious, because I'm going to have to read that book. At least I'm going to put it on

my book. I got it for my podcast, and I'm going to have everybody to have to look at that. I love it. I love it. Okay, I'll send you both book books Anxious. No, thanks, Robert, It's been a pleasure. Oh, thank you very much, Scott. I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed it too. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thusycology podcast dot com. We're on

our YouTube page, The Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.