Robert Greene || The Laws of Human Nature

today we have Robert Green on the podcast. Robert is the number one New York Times bestselling author of The forty eight Laws of Power, The thirty three Strategies of War, The Art of Seduction and Mastery, and as an internationally renowned expert on power strategies. His latest book is The Laws of Human Nature. Robert, really great to chat with you again on the podcast. Thanks for having me again, Scott, My pleasure. Yeah, So there's lots of talkt with this book.

It's quite an insightful book that spans a wide range of territory. I thought we could start off with the question of your own definition of human nature that you present your book, because it was a I thought it was quite a unique definition. Well, my definition is that there are forces within us, we're not aware of it. In other words, there's kind of a stranger within each

of us. There are patterns of behavior that are ingrained in us going back hundreds of thousands of years based on how we evolved as a species, and we're not aware of these forces as they operate within us. They kind of move us around like pawns on a chessboard. They sort of control a lot of our behavior if we don't make an effort to become aware of them. They just give you one simple example. We're extremely susceptible

to the emotions of other people. If we're in a group or a crowd and people are suddenly getting excited or angry, we find ourselves getting swept up in those emotions. If we're in an office and somebody is kind of depressed that we're talking to a lot that we have a lot of, you know that we're around a lot, we kind of absorb their emotion and we're not aware of this. We're not aware that we're not as autonomous and independent as we think that something like that is

actually altering our emotions. And this goes back to how we evolved, in which the contagiousness of emotions served a very important evolutionary process. But now as we're evolved and we no longer live in small bands of thirty or forty people, that kind of viral contagion of emotions can become very dangerous. And so we see that very much playing out in our politics today. So consider that one kind of elemental primal force that moves us around and

that we're not aware of, and that I call human nature. Sure, and I have several other forces. I have eighteen of them, if you will, that I believe we need to become aware of to be conscious rational human beings. So our consciousness is part of our human nature, right, yes, very much. So our awareness is also part of our human nature. So it could also, but you don't include that as in your definition. Oh of course, you know what I'm saying.

Oh okay, well, part of our nature. The point of my book is to become aware of our nature so that we can use it for productive purposes. And I include in each of the laws a way that we can do that. So the awareness part, like I say, there's a lower and a higher self within all of us. The lower self is this animal self that's very much wanting immediate pleasures, that takes the path of least resistance,

that wants everything easy and simple and fast. But within all of us, part of our nature is a higher self, a self that is disciplined, that gets things done, that is able to work in a group with other people, that feels empathy for others. This is a potential within all of us. It is part of our nature. It is deeply wired within us. But that higher self takes effort.

It doesn't come naturally or easy to us. So, for instance, one of the forces that we're talking about that I think is very powerful, that I talk about in the book is empathy. I know it's a word that gets used a lot, and I try and define it in a more kind of practical way, bring it down to earth,

and sort of show you where empathy originated. But as we evolved as a species, the ability to take the perspective of other people, to get inside their mindset, to understand how they are feeling their moods was very critical survival skill, and I maintain that before the invention of language, our ancestors have almost telepathic ability to understand the moods

and emotions of other people. Around them. Empathy is a very powerful force within us that is a potential, and the problem is that it's something that is like a muscle that atrophies, that we don't use very much, and that needs to be brought out. So sort of the easy animal parts of our nature, like the fact that we feel envy or that we react emotionally, that doesn't

take any effort, that just comes to us naturally. But the ability to be rational, which is part of our nature, which is a potential, or the ability to feel empathy, requires effort and awareness and consciousness. Thank you for that. So what do you make of the distinction in psychology between effective and cognitive empathy. It seems like you're focusing on the cognitive empathy part, right, No, I very much

want to mix the two. Okay, cool, I'm kind of following Jung's sort of definition where there's visceral Well, I call it visceral empathy, which is maybe what you call effective empathy, which is very easy. We can pick up the moods of people much more easily than we can pick up their thoughts. And then I combine it with analytic empathy. If you simply have this visceral kind of empathic energy where you just pick up people's moods, it can be a bit dangerous. You need to be able

to analyze the information that you're receiving from people. There are many errors you can make in your interpretation of the moods that you pick up. You need to be able to get inside the mindset of other people and to analyze where that's coming from. So I like to try and mix the cognitive and the visceral, and I make a very big point about how you need to

do that. Okay, great, So when we jump into some of I mean, obviously don't have time to talk about all these different aspects of human nature, but I'd like to pick out some themes that I thought would be neat for us to discuss. Sure, let's start with transforming self love into empathy, because since we would to rip off of the fact that we're just talking about empathy a little bit, can you talk about what the deep

narcissist is? Well, the point I'm trying to make that I think is not usually popular in our culture today is that all of us are narcissists. All of us are on the scale of narcissism. For yourself, talking about I am speaking for myself. I know, I know, I'm joking very much the degree of my own narcissism. I try and say that it's in our nature to be self absorbed, and part of that is the need that we have at a very early age to develop some kind of self love, some kind of self esteem that

protects us from a harsh, very competitive world. So we are all on the scale of narcissism. We are all to some degree self absorbed. And I like to make it almost like a water mark, where at sort of the halfway point is kind of the difference between our self absorption and becoming aware of other people and being able to be empathetic. And at the high point, let's say, at the point one hundred would be complete empathy with other people, the complete ability to get inside their mindset,

and at zero would be total self absorption. And most of us are sort of above that fifty percent mark. We are able to get outside of ourselves at moments and get inside other people and understand them to some degree. But then in some moments we sink below that fifty percent mark when we feel depressed or there's some kind of trauma in our life, and we tend to become self absorbed, so we fluctuate. But a deep narcissist is someone who is always below that level, who can never

rise above. They have probably suffered some kind of deep wounds in early childhood. They never were able to develop that kind of self love that protects people. So I maintain we humans need validation and recognition and attention from other people. I believe that would be one of Maslow's needs in the hierarchy esteem esteem, And if we're not able to get that from our parents or from other

people when we're very young, it's very wounding. And so what we do is we develop a self that we can love and that we can feel can be appreciated. And so in moments of doubt, when we're not getting attention from people, we withdraw. We retreat into that self where we can tell ourselves we are still good, we are still worthy, We're still somebody that can be loved. Deep narcissists never develop that anchor, that sense of self that will control them. They are always in need of

getting attention from other people. They can't get it from themselves. They can't get that love or that sense of a self from within. They must get it from without, so they're constantly playing to other people and it can make them kind of praised. There are introverts who are deep narcissists, who tend to go into their own shell, into their

own fantasy world and reality. And they're extroverts sort of like the classic sort of Donald Trump paradigm, who must get that attention constantly from other people and stir up all kinds of drama. But the main thing that I want to emphasize here is that we always like to point fingers and say, oh, that person's a narcissist or they are, and we never like to think of ourselves

in that category. And I want to make I want to get you away from this idea that there's somehow people, some people are different, some people aren't subject to these laws of human nature. We all have various degrees of self absorption, and we're all capable of becoming deep narcissists if we suffer some kind of trauma. Yeah. I like that. And you know that was the conceptulation of like the earlier psychoanalysts like Cohut. You know, it is so very

much influenced by COVID. It was sort of the main influence there. Yeah, but it seems like we may have lost that perspective a little bit. I mean, that was much more in the consciousness of the psychoanalytic perspective, but

it's not maybe so much anymore. So I'm really glad that you made that point, and and I'm so glad that you talk about it as you know, the spectrum, the narsic spectrum, and we have a deep narciss and then we have something kind of in the middle, which you call functional narcissist, and then you have on the kind of the far right of the spectrum, you have the healthy narcissis. Could you maybe talk about the difference between the functional and the healthy. Well, I've maintained that

most of us are sort of functional narcissists. We fluctuate between moments of self absorption and then the ability to feel empathy for other people, for our children, for our loved ones, et cetera. So we're able to get outside of ourselves. That's what empathy is. It's the ability to get outside of ourselves. At the highest end of that spectrum would be what I call a healthy narcissist. That is, somebody who has a much higher level, much deeper ability

to get inside the perspective of other people. They are not so quick to judge others. Their first instinct is to understand where people are coming from, as opposed to judging them. If you measure by the ability to get outside of ourselves, it's not just the ability to get inside other people, but it's also the ability to get inside your work. So work is a main area in which you can kind of heal some of the narcissistic

wounds that you might have. And I have in the book an example that I actually took out because the book is so long. One of them is the scientist, the great scientist Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist, he who was what we would definitely categorize as a deep narcissist. He had tremendous wounds from his childhood. He continually felt like he was a victim, and he was actually sometimes on the verge of sort of psychotic behavior. He once tried

to murder one of his professors. And he was later in life able to heal himself by completely absorbing his mind in his work. And it all kind of came together on the Manhattan Project, where he was the head. I know it was for the purpose of creating an Adam bomb. So we think that's the whole other issue over that, Yeah, we gloss over. But in that project, in working with other people and absorbing his mind in his work, he was aware that he was actually healing

his own narcissistic wounds. So work is another area where we can get outside of ourselves and feel like we're contributing and producing something positive. So that's what a healthy narcissist is nice. He or she is able to put their energy into other people, into taking their perspective and into their work. I love that. Just to circle back to Heinz Cohaed again, it sounds a lot like in his language it would be like wholesome transformation or something

like that. You know, Like this is actually a quote from presentation he gave nineteen sixty five that I think

really highlights that really well. In many instances, the reshaping of the narcissis structures and their integration into the personality, the strengthening of ideals, and the achievement, even to a modest degree of such wholesome transformation of narcissism as humor, creativity, empathy, and wisdom must be rated as a more genuine and valid result of a therapy than that patient's precarious compliance with demands for a change of his narcissism into object love.

And you know, object love was, you know, the drive to form close relationships with others and things. You know. So we're not saying like we're trying to change you into a completely different person. We're trying to have a healthy whole I like that phrase wholesome. What do you think that phrase wholesome transformation? I kind of like it. I like it very much. And what's interesting, I'm so glad that you're familiar with Koho because I'm a big fan.

I'm a big fani. He's very difficult to read. Yeah, nobody is, especially in German. Oh god. But the interesting thing about Coohu is he knows what he's talking about because he was a deep narcissist. He is like Robert Oppenheimer. He was very much aware of how profound he was on that narcissistic spectrum. He had a troubled childhood. He was alienated. We had a sort of a suffocating mother, and he was constantly trying to transform himself. It was a struggle for him, so he was very it was

not just some intellectual idea. It was something very very close to him. But yeah, I love the expression wholesome transformation. Yeah, and that part of that is, you know, whole the word hole in there, and it just really dealt us so nicely with some core themes. We're meant were meant as humans to be. We're a social animal. Yeah, We're not meant to be so atimistic, to be kind of balkanized like the way we are now. We were designed to be completely social and to the sense that we

can heal ourselves. It isn't the ability. This is an idea from Adler more than anything. That's what he called social interest, and he a person as healthy by their degree of social interest, by their ability to have their interests applied to other people, to society, to the group. That is. I believe our ideal, but it doesn't come easier naturally, particularly in this world. It is a struggle.

But by the fact that you're aware. I want to make the reader aware that you're a narcissist, so you don't get to escape this and think that you can just be who you are and that you're naturally healthy. I want you to be aware that it's a struggle that you must work at this, that you must overcome your own tendencies towards being self absorbed. Yeah, it's that's an important point. By the way, do you know how to pronounce odd Or's notion of socialisms like full something

like that. Do you know how to pronounce it? The German word force would be gazelle shots for society. Yeah, I don't know, gazelle shops. I don't know what it would be. I've seen it spelled out before, and I always have to. I learned German diction when I studied opera and undergraduate, and I've always had trouble pronouncing that whole.

It's like it's spelled g E M E I N s c h A f T s g E f u h l. Anyway, let's just say social interest good, mind shoft dude, mind shoftful, something like that, Yeah, mind shocked, yeah, f u h l. Yeah. I feel that's feeling, Yeah, I feel yeah, the feeling. Yes, So yeah, yeah, there

you go. You know, reading your book, it just occurs to me, like how many areas of mutual I guess nerdiness and we have we share I don't know, lack of a better word for it, but that is the right way because and you know, we both are appreciated Abraham Maslow's work and he was deeply, deep influenced by Adler. I mean, his whole thesis was a way of trying to kind of prove AdWords theory of power. It was right, but among monkeys, you know, like he looked at it

among monkeys. And I don't know if you heard this story, but he met Adler in New York when he moved to New York and was so excited to tell him about all his research, and they became friends until one day, I think you'll appreciate the story, until they were having lunch in the grammar Sy or something in New York, and and he hit a very sore spot, you know, about his rift with Freud, and he said something like about that rift with Freud or whatever, and he said,

this was not the rift and it was just, you know, he hit a very sore spuand they never were the same ever since. And at the end of Maslow's life, I saw a note he wrote in something where he said, I have always had this regret that I never patched things up with that or before he died, because we were never good after that. Yeah. Well, I guess as I was a bit hypersensitive, that sort of doesn't show

in the best line. Yeah. And apparently like Maswell was disagreeing with him at one of these intellectual soires that Adam had in his apartment, and Award threw Maswell up against the wall and said, do you agree with me or don't you? Wow? Yeah, isn't this amazing? So it it's exciting to live in a world where people took these ideas so seriously, these kind of rifts and battles. It feels so old fashioned. But Maslow talking about this

health wholesome transformation. Maslow talks about this a lot as well. Yeah. The book that I used was The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, which is an excellent book, and he to himself talks a lot about well in the hierarchy of needs, that that highest need is to feel whole, and a lot of that does come through your work etca. So he's definitely mirroring what we're talking about here, definitely, And he was influenced by these other people that we're talking about,

so it's not coincidence. So I think I'm trying to like in real time, like segue into the ones that naturally fits. So I think the one confront your dark Side feels right to talk about as right. This seems to naturally fit with what we're talking about. So you talk about confront your dark side, and you say, quote I'm quoting Robert Green, by integrating the dark side into your personality, you'll become a more complete human and will radiate and authenticity that will draw people to you. Wow,

I mean talk about truth. You have this way of like having piercing statements of reality. It's like interesting, Yeah, well the idea is, you know, I'm very much one of the main influences on this book was young, but there were of course other people like Cohut et cetera, and Fairburn and beyond. But his concept of the shadow I was extremely interested in, and I try and based on him and others, I try and trace it in the following source in that when we were born, we

were very young, we were like complete individuals. We felt a wide range of emotions that were naturally to us, natural to us. I can remember when I was a child, I could be quite angry and destructive and mean, but at the same time I could also be very loving and empathetic. But children are like that. They're just complete. They don't know how to regulate their emotions, so they simply vent them. And then as we get older, we're socialized and we have to learn to repress a lot

of these qualities that are very natural to us. Perhaps these are aggressive impulses. A lot of them are aggressive impulses, and they go into what Jung called the shadow, and they cause as we get older and we repress them more, they cause all kinds of weird behavior. And I try and go into that weird behavior. I call it like looking for signs of the shadow. So, for instance, you

see people to sudden very contradictory behavior. Some very stodgy professor will suddenly run leave his wife and run away with an actress or something, or a politician will get caught out doing some behavior that completely contradicts the image they've presented. So we notice, or someone who's so quiet and timid suddenly lashes out in an outburst of anger that seems very violent, and we see in those moments another side to a person, and our tendency is to think, well,

that was just sort of some weird behavior. Some eccentricity. That's not who they are. They'll usually excuse themselves saying, you know, I don't know what came over me. But in fact, what is happening is the shadow part of the personality is speaking, it's coming out, it's leaking. And the fact that we're always trying to hide it and contain it and repress us, I believe has a very long term deleterious effect on us. I think it tamps down a lot of our creative energies, among other things.

And so I want to try and bring you back in some way to that child, to the more authentic self, and which you could express the full range of your emotions. Of course, some of it is destructive, and some of it you naturally had to kind of you had to become socialized, and you had to sort of adapt and mold, and you can't just be or say whatever you want.

But I think there is a way to take the shadow side, the repressed part of your personality, and bring it out in your work, for instance, or express it in your relationships, but in a healthy way, in a productive way. And I think that there are people out there who we see as more authentic because they express more of their shadow, and they're admired for that. And as you say, they're more you know, there are people just seem like you know, people like me and you

seem very comfortable with ourselves. Well yeah no, but you say people who seem comfortable in their own skin sort of thing is a good thing. You know, you made me think of roll May the daimonic. His notion of the dimonic, you know, it was is different than the demon, as he was very clear to say, it could be demon, but if it's integrated healthily, it's creative power prowess. So that was nice. I also really like this. Do you say here the emphatic trait generally rest on top of

the opposite trait, distracting, concealing it from public view. Now this is very interesting me because you know, on the one hand, I don't want to become too cynical about people. I don't want to suddenly think that every single person who has some And you aren't saying this at all.

I'm not saying that, but I'm saying I want you to help me kind of find this healthy awareness of this without automatically assuming that everyone who is And I'll give you a specific example I mean, what do you make of people who I know some people who are just hyper hyper spiritual, and it just seems every time you talk to them, like everything is just like they're just these they radiate light and sun and it's like

this person doesn't have any darkness at all. Right, but there's got to be right Like this is where young comes in, Yeah, and he nice to say that there is something else going on here that the complete person can't possibly be. He calls that one sidedness. And people who are one sided are definitely concealing the opposite trait because that's not natural. It's not natural to be completely

spiritual like that. Because we are bodily creatures. We all feel deep physical needs, we all feel frustration, we all have moments of anger and depression. And so the person who is continually trying to project an aura of being saintly and calm is more than likely disguising something. And I don't think that's being cynical. I just think that's looking at the human animal as we are without judging it,

you know. And I made the point in another chapter that a generation can have a shadow, and I talked about the people in the sixties with everything being so spiritual and about a cause, and the whole New Age movement that's just sort of came out of that, and how the hippies would seem to be people who were

not materialistic. But underneath that was a shadow, which is the need to be always the best hippie, to have always the best pot, to have to know the best guru, and that kind of morph later on into yuppies having the best pasta machine. So there's this shadow side to that incredibly spiritual person who's revealed through their obsessive need to have something be the best, and then maybe they'll have the best yoga mat or they'll find the best

retreat to go to. So there's a physical element that's sneaking through that isn't so high brow and spiritual. But this principle doesn't seem to work in reverse. And now that's maybe like a cheeky question, but I'm just trying to think of illogically. It's not like people who are emphatically assholes are actually secretly nice, great people, do you know what I'm saying. So it seems that there doesn't

seem to be a bi directionality of this. There is a bidirection, so you have to look at it differently. The person who is an asshole or who is extremely manipulated is probably covering up deep insecurities and vulnerability. There is a soft side to them that they hate, they hate interesting. They have to repress that down and they have to be tough and verea island masculine and macho and aggressive. But deep inside their wound is they know

that they have a soft spot. They know there's a feminine part of their personality that they just don't want others to see. They're covering it up, and it's very much there. And we often see that where the gangster I mean in old movies suddenly has an incredible soft spot.

I talked in the forty eight Laws of Power how al Capone, the most violent, kind of macho, trump like man around, would sometimes be a conned by a con artist because who would give a story about his grandmother who was ill or something, and al Capone would kind of melt and give you give him the five thousand dollars for this cause. So a con artist knows this is always a part of someone's personality, that the tough guy is concealing deep vulnerabilities and insecurities and that you

can play on those. So I think the asshole definitely does have a shadow side. It's just there is a soft part of them that they're trying to cover up and run from. Yeah, no, you're right. I'm now recalling this paper from nineteen thirty seven. Masow wrote on dominance, feeling, behavior, and status, where he distinguishes between the feeling of dominance

and dominance behavior. So there are those who are projecting this dominance behavior, but they're not actually authentically these people, right, So he actually made this clever distinction between the behavior and the feeling. Well, you know, in a different chapter on aggression, I look at like the hyper aggressive person, someone like a Trump or a Putin, And when you look at these people, you realize that they cannot tolerate any kind of criticism. They need to be surrounded by sycophants,

people who are always adulating them. Any kind of criticism makes some fears. They go into a narcissistic rage. And so we like to think of them as being incredibly strong. Look how strong that Putin guy is, But in fact they're riddled with deep, deep insecurities. Because a person who was really strong from within would be able to take some criticism from other people and absorb it and not be so hyper sensitive. So these very aggressive people are

always concealing some kind of wound or insecurity. That's definitely a Union perspective, and I think there's a lot of truth there for sure. I'm trying to think, you know, we all have insecurities, so it's not like you ever meet someone who doesn't have in security. I find personally, I don't know what you find, but I find it really helpful that when I have these insecurities, Like I really enjoyed telling people, like just saying it out loud. Like even sometimes in some of my talks, I'll just

like have stream of consciousness. I'll be like, look, I'm really nervous right now, Like try to like project something different. I just like try to just state what is in the moment, and I find that really helps calm me down. Yeah, I think that's a good strategy for you. Everybody is different. I mean, I do have the idea in the book that we are actors, that in the social realm, we're never just who we are. That's kind of an absurd notion that a human being is always performing. We naturally

conceal our flaws. We don't want people to see everything that's going on inside of us. We don't want them to know about our dark moods or our moments of deepest doubt about ourselves. So we project something that's more consistent than we really are. One of the main points in my book, and something that kind of overwhelmed me as I wrote it, is that human beings are incredibly complex,

much more complicated than we think. In the course of a day, we're feeling does of emotions that are constantly conflicting. We are very ambivalent. We never feel pure love or pure hatred. It's always mixed with something else. We're much more complicated and interesting than we think we are. But we're trying to present a persona to the world that's

more consistent. So we are wearing masks, and so I think at some point your strategy is very effective to sometimes let the mask down and to kind of reveal what's going on. But in the sense of irving Goffman to rehabilitate him, I would have to say Scott that he would say that you're doing that is a kind of a performance in its own right. Well Mark Cleary would say that, yeah, modern psychologist Mark Cleary does study

self presentational strategies. You know, I think that we can run amok with this idea though, and see everything as a self presentation strategy and kind of lose a humanity there of. Like, No, I think there's a lot of truth to that. You know. It's like I am try trying to kind of put a stop to I want to be run in control of what people think, right, you know, like by expressing it. But I am genuinely feeling that way though, So I'm not making that up. Yeah,

I don't deny that. But as part of the complexity of humans, people can have two things going on at the same time. They can be genuinely wanting to share something. I know this happens with myself because I am like you in many ways, I do the same strategy. You can genuinely feel the need to open up and show your vulnerability, and at the same time you are aware that you are performing on a kind of subconscious level. Yeah, two things can go on at the same time in

the human We're more complicated than we think. Yeah, so true, And you know I try not to take another thing. I think it's just important. It's just don't take yourself too seriously, Like no one should take themselves too seriously. That's extremely important. Like I try not. I try to kind of just walk around this world. It's very absurdist sort of like attitude about everything. So could you maybe give some strategies to people and how you can see

through people's masks? And I'd like to combine these two. If you don't mind seeing through people's masks and determining the strength of their character, I'd combine two of yours well. Seeing through people's masks is a chapter that I wrote on nonverbal communication. Now I know people write entire books on it, and it's the subject that people go over

a lot. So I try to navigate to explore some new territory and nonverbal communication and make it very clear on how you can practice and become better at it. But the idea is that there's a human beings have two languages. One is the verbal language in which we're conscious and we say things. But then there's a second language. It's just nonverbal, which comes from our tone of voice, where how our eyes move, from our smile, from our energy, from the moods that we have, from our body posture, etc.

And this second language is extremely eloquent. It is revealing all kinds of information about people. And you must understand we existed for hundreds of thousands of years before the invention of language, so nonverbal communication was an extremely important part of human survival, an important part of communication. But we don't pay attention to this. And I use as my icon for this Milton Erickson, who is a therapist. He sort of invented hypnotherapy. Some people don't take him

so seriously. I'm sure known Erickson right the lesson. I think it's absolutely brilliant. I think he was very practical, and some people don't like that about him, but I think the man was incredibly brilliant, and he was a master at picking up this second language, and so you could say he was fluent in it in a way that no human that I know of was, at least

by the way it was recorded. Mostly because he was had polio and he was paralyzed as a young man, and he couldn't move his mouth, he couldn't move a single muscle on his body. So he spent years just absorbing and looking at people and learning that language of their nonverbal communication. And his point was that we go around sleepwalking, we're so taken in by people's words that we're not paying attention to all of the signs they're

revealing of what's really going on behind the mask. So, for instance, one of the main signals of what's going on behind the mask that people wear is mixed signals, which is very common. A person will say something to you that seems very nice and polite, but their body language expresses something else. It's not natural, it's not comfortable.

So they're kind of praising you, were saying something good, but there's a slight coldness about it, and unconsciously you register this and it makes you a little bit anxious get about it, but it kind of gets under your skin. Well, you need to pay more attention to that negative signal that's coming through in that mixed signal, because most often the mixed signal involved the negative is with real And

this is a language that you can develop. It could be used for very cynical, manipulative purposes, and a lot of psychopaths are actually very very good at picking up these signals in this language. But I think it's something that can be extremely positive because it can give you insights into people that you can't get in any other way. If people are telling you about their childhood or about their insecurities, they're not probably giving you the unvarnished truth.

And unless you're jung Rollo may or Heinz Coh, you're not going to be able to decipher what there's really the subtext behind what they're saying. But their body language is revealing so much, so much information, and you're just not paying attention. So I want to ground you in skins and how you and make it like like you learn how to play basketball, you learn how to play the piano. I want you to learn how to pick up these nonverbal signs from people because it's a fascinating subject.

It's like a masterclass in human nature apprenticeship. Yeah, and so throughout my book, I'm talking about the signs, Like I have a chapter on envy, and envy is probably the hardest emotion to detect in other people because it's the one that people disguise the most. But even with envy, there are nonverbal signs of it. I'm kind of very excited by Paul Ekman's notion of micro expressions. I don't know if he invented it. I know maybe he just

picked it up. You know, that flicker, that instance of kind of displeasure when you first encounter someone where they're trying to show that that they like you, but in fact there's a flicker of kind of oh why are you here? So yeah, Robert, I kind of got that from you a little bit at the beginning of this. No, I'm jokayjok I was like, so, I'd not have ignored that flicker. I'm just joking. I could have been I'm

just really is that true? I remember in high school, know, in college, I was staying with my girlfriend at her house in Chicago or Evanston, and I was like being very friendly and vivacious and trying to please her family. In the middle of the night, she woke me up and said, Robert, you have to get out of the house. You have to leave, Like why my mother just was picking up such aggressive, angry energy from you, and you know, she couldn't believe it. It It was so strong, and you

have to get out of the house. I left, and I thought about it later, and it probably was very much true because I didn't like her. I knew I didn't like I felt her really false and phony and and all that, and so she was picking up something that was sort of leaking out from me. So I'm capable. Wait, do you feel that way about me? It wasn't a subtle way to say that. Oh okay, I feel quite

the opposite of you, Scott, thanks much, a nerdy jewish bomb. Oh, I mean it's like, yeah, so let me ask you something because, like in the when you determine the strength of people's character, you talked about the importance of assessing

their character over their actions over time. Yeah, And I just want to stress that point because I feel like, you know, we can be wrong sometimes in what we're picking up, and some people that I've thought, you know, I'm like, oh, this person really doesn't like me or whatever. You know, I realized that like they had a bad day. It was like totally impersonal. It had nothing to do

with me at all. Right, And so I just want you to riff on that point a little more because you do emphasize that in your book that we need to think of this as an overtime issue, right, Yeah, Well, you need to be humble in your assessments of people.

There is the idea of a fellow's arrow. I don't know if your error or sorry not errow error in which he assumes that Desdemona is guilty of adultery because she's so insecure and defensive when he confronts her, but in fact she's just simply really worried about his aggressive energy. So they call this Othellow's error, because often when you see someone's overt behavior, like particularly anger, your first assumption is that it's personal, that it's about you, and you

interpret it while that's an asshole. Why is he so angry when in fact maybe that isn't really anger. Maybe it's some sort of frustration that's boiling over from some other issue that's nothing to do with you. So I'm trying to teach you to not rush to judgment, to be a bit humble, that your assessments of people are quite often wrong, and that you need to take a step back and develop the skill. And one of the

key things is viewing people over time. So the idea is that people tend to reveal who they are, They reveal their character through patterns of behavior. I've always, for some reason, going back to my day's college, interested in this idea of character, coming from the Greek word chiros, which literally means an engravement, something engraved like in stone or whatever the engraving is. And so your character is something that's carved deep deep within you, your core of

your being. It's qualities that you really aren't even conscious or control. They come from your DNA. They come from your early attachments to your parents or not attachment to them. They come from your experiences in childhood, and it causes you to behave in compulsive ways, to repeat certain patterns of behavior. And people will repeat patterns of behavior, and particularly I want you to be looking for the toxic types among us. Can we talk about some of them?

I wrote down some of my favorite ones. Do you mind if we talk about some of them? No? And it's funny because, okay, if you could see my notes in your book, By the way, I have notes on every page, but if you could see my notes in that section in particular, you would see every page it says Trump at the top. Trump. It's very interesting stuff. Because I was writing the book it kind of you know,

overlapped his rise to power. So I started, you know, in twenty fifteen, and then as I'm writing it, like I'm writing a chapter on grandiosity, just at the moment where his grandiosity is so evident, the chapter on aggression, or the chapter on the shadow, or the chapter on gender and toxic masculine. He's all the toxic types, like the integration, the unhealthy integration of all the toxic types.

And yet, and yet the shocking thing is that has tremendous appeal to one third of the population country or less, probably one quarter. Because I feel like we're just stating some facts that like he conforms to some of these archetypes that throughout history that you've identified. It's obvious, it's obvious, right, Yeah, But you know, on the other hand, you have to

recognize the attraction that it has to people. So I try and talk in the book, how very toxic types have people who are grandiose or aggressive have this peculiar kind of charm. Why do they have this charm? You know, it's fascinating because we should never undervaluate them or underestimate them, like a lot of people on the left have underestimated the power of a Donald Trump. Yeah, okay, so I identify people. I know I can think of people like

that moment of names in this podcast. But for each one of these, so we all know, the relentless rebel right. I know people you know that seem to have this psychopathological need to say the opposite, like to non conform to anything, even when like the conforming would actually be the healthy choice for them, or would be the obvious like normal. Like it's like, you know, you could say the world is round, you know, the earth is round

there and be like it's flat. You know, like they have to say that, you know, they think that that's a sign of the intelligence, the intelligence that they're able to think for themselves as opposed to you who are just accepting the conventional wisdom. Well, you know what I try to say about these people, the toxic types that I'm pointing out, going back to what I said earlier, is I have a quote in there from Schopenhauer that evil people don't go around with horns on their head,

and fools don't go around wearing caps and bells. In other words, people learn who are toxic from an early age to disguise it and to present a persona that will get them some kind of social power. They know that if they are truly showing their toxicity to everyone, they'll be alienated, and they will you know, they won't get very far, so they learn to disguise it. And the relentless rebel is someone who's probably dealing, in this particular instance, with a lot of deep rooted issues from

childhood with perhaps a father figure. I don't want to get too Freudian here, but you know, a deep level of resentment towards the father figure, perhaps the mother figure, if the mother figure was the dominant one in the relationship. And so they present this an extremely positive light. Oh, I'm so cool. I'm such an anti authoritarian. I'm James Dean, I'm really him. I'm against this, I'm against that. You know,

I don't want to vote for Hillary Clinton. I'm going to go for Jill Stein because you know, man, you know, that's just kind of thing, that's just the rebel post. Yeah, that's a really rebel vote for Jill Stein. Yeah. Well, I know people like that cool someone in particular, okay, you know, and they present themselves as like it's a really strong thing, that they're not so stodgy as you are.

They're just full of this rebellious energy. But in fact it comes from kind of an ugly place where this is their only way of asserting themselves and feeling like it's a form of superiority, right, Yeah, a flight in that is you are kind of stodgy and conventional, and I'm sort of the bearer of truth. And you know, you'll get attracted to this person because you kind of were all attracted to the maverick, to the underdog. But then in a relationship, we'll find that that rebelliousness turns

against us. That it's very hard to get along with someone who who's always seen the contrary sign to things. For sure. You know, there's a statistical technique called factor analysis in psychology where you take a bunch of things

and you simplified into their main dimensions. I feel like I want to run this empirical analysis of all your toxic types because I intuitively it's I can see some clusters, like it seems to me like and I'm sure you'd agree so like I found personal experience that the following tend to cluster together drama, magnet, sexualized, and princess, but it could be princes as well. You know, do you see what I'm saying? I see those three tend to

go together. Yeah, I would agree with you there, although I imagine there are drama magnets who don't sexualize everything. But I believe every sexualizer is a drama. It seems so, it seems so right age they're drawing you into the drama through their sexual lore, right and then you know, you talk about the pleaser. I worry sometimes that's perhaps

my biggest problem is people pleaser. Yeah, I have a people pleasing ten I have a real people pleasing tendency, and I don't like it, like I don't want it, you know, but I can't help it. Sometimes there's the kind of benign form of all of these types, which we all are, and then there's the toxic types. And so you're not the toxic type of pleaser because the toxic type of pleaser is basically disguising a desire to wound others. Oh so they don't actually want to reach

out genuinely. Well, they do, but they want to protect themselves from any kind of conflict. But a lot of them are very passive aggressive. So their way of pleasing you is to get you sort of entangled into their drama, sort of become their friend, and then they're going to find some way to wound you or hurt you in some way. The toxic pleaser type is not benign. So for instance, you meet somebody and instantly they're like, Wow, you're amazing, You're one be friends, I mean friends you

want on Facebook, really really connect. You're very wary of that. Yeah, I'm very aware of that. That is not natural. That's not natural, because what's natural is for us to be wary of strangers, to have a little bit of distance. But it's very seductive when people do that. You're not the toxic type. That's glad to hear that. I do sometimes want to just somehow like a false turn off my you know, like I've got to answer all my email that, you know what I mean, that kind of

people pleaser. It's like I gotta gotta answer all the emails, gotta like, you know, check this box in this box, and and sometimes I just want to just like give myself permission to just like I'm taking a day off from pleasing anyone. You know. Yeah, well that maybe should be part of your shadow side that you're labeled to get out. I like that. Oh gosh, I'm going to embrace that shadow side. Once a week, how about one like Sunday's or something. I've been starting to do that

like Sundays be like that's my dark side day. So yeah, let me get to some of my last couple that I think take us into more of a higher nature, because some of the people listening to this podcast might feel like we're kind of maybe stuck in the look in a way. But that's not all of your book, and so I want to make that very very clear by focusing on some of these others. So you say,

advance with a sense of purpose. So we do have as part of our human nature of the capacity for a sense of mission or a pro social drive to get out out of ourselves. Is that right? Yes, that chapter is sort of an elaboration or a continuation of Mastery of a chapter in Mastery, And essentially I'm saying as part of our nature, the problem that we humans face is that we don't seem to be born with

a purpose. Like today, I wake up and I could play golf, although I don't play golf, or I could get drunk, or I could try and start writing my novel, or I could just go watch a movie, or I could read a book. Nothing tells me what I have to do. You know, there's no direction in life, and I feel that that is what causes a deep degrees of pain in people, the sense that they have no natural direction in life, what guides me towards this career, what guides me towards having this partner in my life?

Why am I doing this instead of that? And that sense of swimming in the sea of possibility of being able to do anything can create deep wells of depression and pain in people. And you know, an animal has a built in sense of purpose. They know who they are. A tiger as a tiger, a dog is a dog. We don't know what we were intended to do, but I maintain that we do have a sense of purpose actually,

but it's hidden. We have to discover it. It doesn't come immediately apparent to us when we're suddenly twenty one years old, when we enter the work world. It actually involves a process. But if you can discover this sense of purpose, I call it a form of internal radar. It now gives you a sense of direction and a sense of channeling your energies. This is where I should go,

not wasting my time over there. It gives you concentrated energy and force, and it's an extremely liberating and beautiful thing. To discover that sense of purpose. Once you have it, everything kind of falls into you're able to prioritize your life.

And a lot of young people, particularly nowadays, are really really suffering in this way because in some ways, like with the Internet, you believe that this whole feast is opened up in front of you, that you can learn anything that you want, that you could become this or that, or you know, tomorrow, I could study online and become, you know, a great psychologist or something whatever it is. But you know it's not true. It's not true that

you can become anything. You only have a limited amount of time and a limited amount of energy, and that sense of purpose comes from the fact that you have to be aware of what makes you different. I was very much taken by a phrase that Maslow used in that book that I mentioned. He calls it impulse voices, and what he meant by impulse voices is an infant knows that it likes this particular food, and it eats it and it enjoys it. It's an impulse voice saying

this is what I like, what I love. And when we're young, we feel these voices, they say this is I love, you know, playing sports, I love music, et cetera. And what happens is most people, as they get older, lose that impulse voice. They don't longer know what they like or what they dislike. They only know what other people like and dislike, and they're conforming to that. Oh that kind of movie or entertainment is cool, I better like it, whereas in fact it may not be natural

or authentic to you. You have impulse voices. They were telling you when you were three or four, what you naturally love, what you gravitate towards. What is an intellectual area that you should be moving towards. And I don't mean just intellectual. It could be working with your hands, or working with other people, etc. Or sports or physical activity. You know, I'm very much taken in by Gardner's book The Five Frames of Mind that there are five forms

of intelligence. That every person has a natural bent towards one of these forms of intelligence. You need to connect to that. That voice is deep within you. It's an impulse voice. It's telling you, you know, what makes you different, what makes you special, what makes your energy different from other people's energy, And that is your internal radar system. You know, the oracle of Delphi, the main font of

wisdom was know thyself. So the ability to know who you are, what makes you different, what makes you unique, is to me the key towards fulfillment in life. And so, you know, I kind of describe a way to discover that path, to discover those impulse voices later on when they're drowned out by other things and get closer to it. But it's also a matter of not listening so much to your parents, to other people, and getting in tune with what makes you different and unique and following that path.

But you know, you talk about that in Mastery, right, that's a very big, big component of mastery as getting in touch with that. But you say you discover your the life life's task. That seems similar, right, Yes, it is. That's exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah. And then I noticed also, like you talk about in a way, this current book is like a grand integration, right of lots of prior laws, because you also talk about the you know, how to create an air of mystery, and that was

in your Walls of Seduction. Yeah, so it's sort of coming together of all the things that I've written into this is sort of what grounds all of them is

what's lying the laws underneath all of them. But just to say one more thing about the sense of purpose, I don't mind wax sort of poetic here, but for a moment I will, which is I believe that this kind of diversity in nature, which is embedded in you as you're listening to this podcast, in your DNA and what makes you different is actually has a purpose to it. That we know in ecosystems, when there's a diversity in that ecosystem, that things thrive and it becomes a self

fulfilling process. We're more and different forms of life can evolve. And we know that when a culture has a variety of people and a variety of voices, that culture is much richer. That's what made Athens in the fifth century BC, or Renaissance Italy, or France during the Enlightenment, or perhaps Paris in the nineteen twenties, these moments of tremendous cultural ferment. But there's incredible diversity of people and ideas in there. And so diversity is a positive thing for humans in

our culture. It's a necessity, I would say. And you bringing out your uniqueness, you being Scott very Kaufman and finding a way to blend psychology with your podcast, with your books and put it a unique quirky personality. Your quirky personality is fulfilling that sense of purpose, that diversity. It's like you're contributing to something that's extremely necessary. You know, it's like, well, thank you, I hope. So sometimes you know,

you don't know. I guess you have to really trust that we got lots of voices, right, Like, we've got voices that are trying to take us away from that purpose, you know, that are trying to steer us in a self destructive way. So I mean holding that intuition to tell the difference between all these competing impulses is part of the task itself, right, Yes, it is, I know.

So for instance, for my life, I didn't start writing The forty eight Laws of Power, my first book, until I was thirty eight, and up until that moment, I was kind of a lost cause, and even my parents were on the verge of giving up on me. And you know, I knew that I wanted to write from very early age, that I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do, what kind of writing, and I messed around. I tried journalism. I tried Hollywood, I tried writing plays novels,

and I was really depressed. But I had a sense of overall frame. This is what I was headed towards. It was writing, but I couldn't channel it the right way and it was causing a lot of pain. And then I discovered, through writing a book, this is what I was meant to do, and it completely eased got rid of all of that pain in my life because now I know I don't waste my time. I don't start thinking, oh I should start writing a screenplay, Oh I should start writing for the New York Times magazine

or whatever. No, my energy is focused on this. This is what I was meant to do. This is what it feels right, and it cuts out a lot of you know, tangents that I could take and wasted time, and it makes me feel very guided. And it is a powerful force. You say, I'm going to quote Robert Green again quote operating with a higher sense of purpose is a force multiplier. All of your decisions and actions have greater power behind them because they're guided by a

central idea and purpose. So you're getting more bang for your buck by choosing wisely. Yeah, because you only have so much energy in life, and when you focus it on something that you want or that you love, you're able to accomplish something in one year that would have taken you ten years if your energies are diffused. You know, we only learn when we really learn something deeply, when we're excited by the subject. So if we're forced to study physics in high school, it goes in one ear

or out the other. But if we love it like an Einstein, you know, by the time you're fourteen or fifteen, you're already on your way to becoming a genius because you love it so much. You want to devote all of your energy, and you learn really quickly because you're motivated. And so it's a force multiplier in that it concentrates your energy on something that you love and it makes you learn more quickly. This doesn't mean that you have

to focus your whole life on one thing. The beauty of this purpose is that it can mean combining three or four some central interests in your life. You know, I talk in Mastery about Da vinci Is interest in architecture, engineering, in science, and painting, et cetera, all kind of an anatomy he was able to combine all of these things into something very unique. So you could combine several interests,

but there's an overall framework and overall purpose to that. Yes, and we can also be wored by false purposes, which we just touched on that for a second and use the phrase love this phrase transcendence on the cheap, and it made me think of Maslow's phrase that I saw a footnote of one of his books. He called it pseudo growth. I think we can have pseudo transcendence as well, because he defines pseudo growth as you know, growth built

on a shaky foundation right of needs. Well, what I'm trying to say in the false purpose section is the need for a purpose is so deep in humans that if we don't find it through what I'm talking about, finding your career path to your life's task, we will find it in other ways. We will find it in the pursuit of pleasure, will become a hedonist and that will give us a sense of pleasure a sense of purpose, or will go in money and becoming successful will become

our sense of purpose. But that money is not really a sense of purpose because it's soul as it's not connected to who you are, and a lot of people who have a one track mind about obsessed about making money end up burning themselves out in their mid thirties, becoming alcoholics, porn addicts, whatever. And you know, that kind of shadow side comes creeping out. Other kinds of things would be some sort of cause or cult that you can join that will give you a sense of purpose.

You know, you could feel alienated in your town in Illinois and becoming a white supremacist or not trying to gloss this over, does literally give you a sense of purpose. You're part of a group, you have a cause, you believe in, getting a sense of belonging, a belonging, and that here is a narrative about what's wrong with the world and how we can fix it and everything will be great and right. So that can give you a

sense of purpose as well. But these are faults and they lead into rabbit holes, and they don't lead to anything deeply fulfilling in the sense that I try and say that, you know, or attention can become a false sense of purpose that a lot of people have now on social media getting the most amount of attention, but you're feeling very empty. The thing is when you have a real sense of purpose. You know, when you've reached something like I wrote this book, I feel good about it,

and now I go on to the next book. How do you know when you have enough money? How do you know when you have enough attention from other people? How do you know? It's never enough? Well, it's never enough. Yeah, it never leads to anything, to an endpoint, to something that fulfills you or that you can you know, it's a good point. It's a very good point. They describe in the literature the psychology or the difference between authentic

pride and he bristoled pride. And it seems like you're saying we should really foster our authentic pride and earned accomplishments. That's another chapter. I talk about grandiosity, which is influenced another chapter influenced by Cohu, and I try and make the distinction that we all have grandiose tendencies to get out of this notion that only some people are grandiose. Grandiosity is built into human nature in a very deep level,

and I don't think it's necessarily a negative. I have what I call practical grandiosity, the sense that you can actually feel great and greater than yourself through your work, through making something that contributes to society is a practical

and realistic form of grandiosity that is healthy. Combining these, it seems like having a sense of purpose, and combining that with understanding the historical moment and having awareness is going to be even a more potent force because your purpose will really resonate with the most amount of people within your generation. Yeah. I have a chapter on the zeitgeist Dan, becoming aware of your generation. Yeah, and the spirit of the generation and your sense of purpose should

fit in with that in some ways. Yeah, yeah, Okay, So I'm going to end with edroid one of your mindful of the time. I want to end with this notion of open the mind to the sublime. I thought that would be I can't think of a better way of ending this conversation with opening your mind to the sublime? Any tips for doing that in thirty seconds? I've always intended to write a book on the sublime, and it's still on my list. I will do it before I die, hopefully.

Oh you should. You should totally do that though. And when you call it the sublime or something like that, yeah, I call it towards the Sublime. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, it's a subject in a word that fascinates me, and I can't really give it the thirty second treatment, so

I'll do my best here. I have it in the chapter about confronting your Mortalit about you know, as far as when it comes to human nature, we're the only animal that's aware of our mortality, and how deeply deeply that has wounded us and created all kinds of reactions that we're still paying for that we're deeply afraid of our mortality and we're fleeing from it, and it creates continual,

latent anxiety in people. And in the past, people fled this sense of mortality through creating it the afterlife, in a sense that death is not the end. And now we flee it by never confronting the reality of death, by never seeing a dead person in hospital, by never seeing an animal that we eat being killed, by having movies filled with kind of cartoonish violence, as if death is just like a cartoon thing. So we're in deep,

deep denial about death in the year twenty eighteen. And the sublime is a word that literally means up to the threshold from Latin. I'm a threshold okay, to the threshold, and it literally. The ancient conception of it from the Latin writers was that death is the ultimate threshold. When you cross that, you don't know what it is. We have no idea what death means. The sublime is moving up to that threshold. So death is something so awesome and so vast that our puny little minds can't wrap

ourselves around it. Nobody on Scott Berry Kaufman's podcast find it. It's too great, it's too vast to think that you can is rather grandiose, and a lot of scientists can be rather grandiose in that sense. It's too vast. But a sublime moment is creating that sense of confronting anything in life that is almost too vast to comprehend, that you can't put it in words. And a lot of

religions have this notion. The sublime is a notion. It's very important in Buddhis and I recently discovered it in Christianity, in what is known as the via negativa, which is you cannot know God through words. It is nonverbal. It is something so vast, so superior to you, that only in moments of meditation can you begin to experience that shiver of the sublime, of something too big for even

words to encapsulate. And so I believe there are sublime moments that we can create in life by opening our minds intellectually to experiences that are just blow you away. So I have a simple banal example of think of yourself that you're alive right now, and think of the fact that three billion years ago life on planet Earth began, and it was extremely unlikely that life ever began. It had a particular combination of chemicals that occurred and life started,

and so many other planets are lifeless. It was like this freak occurrence that occurred. And then in this freak occurrence was a vast chain of evolution in which animals were appearing and disappearing in very rapid rates, and near the end of that comes this weird animal to primate, and then comes these early hominids and these early humans, of which there were maybe ten different varieties of and nine of them disappeared, never to reappear again Australopithecus et cetera.

But one survived, Homo sapiens, And at some point Homo sapiens was probably on the verge of extinction because we were so small in number, yet we survived. And if we hadn't, I wouldn't be on a podcast with Scott Barry Hoffmann right now, and so on and on. You go down this chain, and each person meeting another person, having children, your parents meeting and begetting you to use a biblical word, depended on all sorts of freak occurrences

of other people meeting other people meeting other people. You wouldn't have been you if your parents hadn't met who. I don't know. I don't have the philosophical answer. Maybe you would, your atoms would have been in something else.

But the fact that that you're you right here stands at the end of this insane chain of causation that is so unlikely, and if you thought about it, it it would blow your mind away and you would never commit think of committing suicide because you would realize that to be alive, it's this remarkable, incredible thing that you're conscious, that you're aware that is a very sublime thought. And I have others that I can talk about, you know, like, what is it that you know? I'm very fascinated by

the idea of how animals think. What is the reality for a bat or for a bee, it's completely different from our reality. To sort of submerge yourself in what their intelligence and what their reality would be is kind of you can't intellectually understand it, but you can have a moment of Wow, that's that's amazing. It's beyond anything I can begin to put into words. And these things take you out of our banality. We're bathed in banality

right now in the world. Right now, we're bathed in cheap entertainment, in all sorts of trivial gossip about celebrities. We're obsessed with Donald Trump. We're kind of lost in these kind of obsessive thoughts. And the sublime opens your mind up to something vaster, and it's very liberating and it's very therapeutic. And I want to eventually write a book that sort of bathes you in the sublime, but in this chapter I sort of show you some ways

to kind of start to approach that threshold. Thank you so much that I can't wait for that book, and I have to end on that note. I mean, there's nothing I could possibly ask after that that would be any more transcendent or higher reach of our human nature. So thank you so much for all the work you've done through all your books and really I've learned so much from them in literally half of my existence. And thanks for being on the chat today. Well, thank you, Scott.

I must say your interviews are one of the most enjoyable for me because I bring out my nerd. Yay, I don't have to repress it. No, no, none of my guests should ever have to feel like they have to repress their nerd. I can talk about coho. Do not feel like I'm being proposed story? Yeah, you sure can. Thanks Robert, Thanks Scott. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com. Also, please add a rating and review of the Psychology Podcast on iTunes. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the podcast, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.