Transcription
Knowledge and skills are like gold, a currency you will transform into something more valuable than you can imagine. It's similar to one of your tweets which is eventually the time that was not spent on learning skills will catch up to you and the fall will be painful.
Well, um, you know, uh, life can be kind of difficult, right? Um, you don't really know sometimes where you're headed. Nobody kind of gives you any kind of guidance in this world, right? And they don't tell you when you graduate college, go ahead, go Robert, you go study this, this is what you know and you know, this is what your brain is suited for, etc., etc. You have to find your own path.
And so for me personally, I spent years in the wilderness. Um, so I'm going to give this a personal spin because I think that helps a little bit because what I can answer it inside my own body here. So, I I know I want to be a writer, but I can't figure out what the hell I'm going to write. So, I leave college and I try journalism because I have to make a living. I have to support myself and I don't really like it. It doesn't suit me. He writes an article and then a week later it's forgotten. Nobody reads about it. And as somebody who studied ancient Greek and Latin in college, I think in terms of thousands of years and not in 3 days or a week, you know, I want something that I write to be read in 3020 for, you know, sorry. Um, so it wasn't a good fit. So I quit.
I wander around Europe trying to write a novel with my backpack. I live in London. I live in Paris. I lived in Ireland. I lived in Greece. You name it. I taught English in Spain trying to write a novel. I had no discipline. I couldn't do it. It didn't work. And I get started to get depressed. I had spent 18 years or so acquiring in high levels of skill in writing. Okay? I could I learned in journalism how to write under a deadline, under pressure, how to make it dramatic, how to make the opening sentence exciting enough to make you read on further. Trying to write novels taught me about creating stories, which is a huge part of my writing. Working in Hollywood, I learned how to research, which is a huge element. And then the theatrical element, making things dramatic, also story. Okay. All of that time, slowly by slowly, brick by brick, I had developed real level skill. So when it came time to write the 48 laws of power, I could do it. I had learned all this discipline. I had learned how to write under a deadline. I learned how to make things entertaining. The whole the whole bag. Okay.
And so the world opened up for me. Prior to that time, I was miserable. Really, really was. I mean, I had good moments, too. You're young. You're always happy when you're young. But a lot of times, I was miserable. And I didn't know why. But I was acquiring skills, not even aware of it. And so the reason I write that is when you develop that skill, when you're serious about it, because I was very serious about writing, you change your brain. You rewire your brain. It's like uh and this is an a remarkable power of the human brain that people don't realize. Something I'm also writing in my new book. Um, this this one writer, uh, his name is Schwarz. I believe he's a UCLA neuroscientist. He wanted to help people who had OCD, right? Obsessive comp, you know, compulsive disorder. And usually it's drugs and it's talking therapy. He wanted to find out something more effective. And he found that through certain strategies that he developed, um, that they could use in their life that they would get over their disorder. And he, the point isn't what the strategies were. The point was he did brain scans and through the strategies that he gave them to do, which I can't remember right now, the brain scans show that they change the brain. And his point was through thinking through developing skills, you literally change matter, you change your brain. So something non-material like thoughts can literally change material things like the wiring of your brain. You learn skills, you're changing your brain, you're changing the matter of your brain. Things are connecting that weren't connected before. And slowly, if you do it, if you're serious enough, a point will be reached like it was reached in my life, where either you will start a business or someone will ask you to do something like write a book or make a film. And the world will open up for you and you'll be able to do it because you have that, you've laid the ground. You, you've laid the soil. Everything is there. It's rich and now something great, amazing will sprout up out of it.
When you have no talents and you have no skill, life is a series of endless confusion. You, you hit this road, you go here, then something else, you go here, then you go here, you end up in a circle, and you don't know where the hell you are. When you've got skills, zoom, you know where to go. It's not It's not zoom. It's more like, but your head somewhere. Yeah. It's not >> Yeah. >> I don't know if we're being filmed, but So, yeah. So, that's that's my answer to your question.
If you believe as if you were confident, as if you are powerful, it will tend to be read that way, right? And so like he had the analogy, if you smile, even though you don't feel like smiling, you'll end up kind of maybe feeling kind of happy. So the physical action will create the psychological action was his belief because he was very much believer in the body things starting from the body. So if you believe physically and bodily embodied that you were great, that you deserve this, it will kind of become part of your psychology and it will radiate outward.
>> But for those that don't, they just don't have that belief. Can you lie to yourself? Can you tell yourself I am strong and I am powerful?
>> Well, everybody has some good qualities, right? Everybody, I think almost everybody has something that they can can go back to in the past and go, I was actually very good at that. That was actually a good moment. I actually was, you know, scored in that particular moment. And you can think about that. I mean, actors do that all the time in movies. When they want to express an emotion, they go back into their past like they have to express sadness. They go back and they think about their father or mother who died and they call that emotion up. You can call that emotion up of when you did something actually really great. You might have only been in high school when you were on the sports team and you threw the touchdown or something. Okay, think about that and and it'll come back to you. Everybody has something that they can be confident about. I hope.
>> If there was one law that the powerless amongst us who who feel powerless or lost in the current world, one law or or one fact of human nature that people who are feeling lost and purposeless in a drift right now should be thinking the most about. Which one springs to mind?
>> Well, there's there's no one-shop answer to this kind of thing, but one law that I would highlight is interaction with boldness. And what I mean by that is you, if you feeling timid, if you're feeling that you're not confident in something, you will start a project and it will fail because you feel that way. Because you don't enter into it with the right energy. So if you feel, if you take something and you do something boldly, everybody loves the bold. Everybody admires it. Even if it's stupid, even if it fails, it will gain you that kind of attention. And so let's say you're thinking about starting a business. Well, just go ahead and do it and be bold about it and start it and be as dramatic as you can and be as confident as you can. And it creates a self-fulfilling dynamic. People admire it. They don't admire the timid and the insecure and the guy who spends two years talking about that podcast he's going to start. They admire it. That bloke who just decided, "All right, I'm going to start it. I don't care if nobody likes it. Fine." You know, uh, I remember this guy who interviewed me once. He had a magazine called Bad Ideas, and it was a really successful magazine in like the early 2000s. And I said, "Where'd you get that idea?" and he said, "My mother told me that to start that magazine was a really bad idea, right? So, I thought I'd put the title there, you know, and that would be the title of it." And I just went ahead and started it. And it was very successful because it was a great like marketing gimmick and it also worked and it was auction full of bad ideas of the thing, but very in a very interesting way. Um, so being bold, being different. Everybody nowadays, I'm getting on my goddamn soap box again and I'm so I apologize to everyone about this, but everyone is so similar. Everybody is so afraid. Everyone's trying to be like everybody else. You go out there and you start something that's different, that's you, that's unique, that's loud, that proclaims I'm a different voice on it, you're going to get attention. So I want more bold people in this world. We got too much fear. You know, that's I'm not maybe a big admirer of in some ways of Elon Musk, but damn it, he's always bold and it always works for him. He doesn't start just a a minimal business about maybe sending rockets out there. He starts think it's going to take you to Mars. He's bold and people love it.
One of the uh groups I suppose I think that's looking for a lot of advice at the moment is young men uh feeling a little lost like their place in the world is just uncertain. They don't they don't really know or have the direction. What advice would you have for young men that are feeling a little lost in the modern world?
Well, you have to um you have to be comfortable with with who you are and with your masculinity. So the word masculine has now got like this negative connotation around it which is terrible because your young man, it's not every young man, some men don't feel this way, but a lot of young men, I remember myself, you got this testosterone that's roaring through you. You're competitive. You're ambitious. You have goals. You have this energy. You want to assert yourself, but it's bad. It's bad. It's bad. You're not supposed to be like that, you know. And so and the culture isn't about there's no virtue in masculinity. Okay, there is such a thing as toxic masculinity most definitely. But there are virtues in in being masculine and have to be redefined and we have to have icons and role models for that. And so when I was growing up, oh god, I sound like I hated that when people said that when I was a kid. So I know you're going to hate me, but I'll say that anyway. I can't help it cuz it's true. When I was growing up, you know, I watched like a lot of westerns, you know, it was the the the silent hero kind of thing, the Gary Cooper thing. But my idea of masculinity growing up was a man who was in control of himself, who wasn't mean, wasn't pushing people around, who was decent, who treated women well. So treating women well is a masculine virtue is a good thing. It comes from a position of strength. You're not insecure about your masculinity. You don't have to prove that you're a man by demeaning women, by pushing them around, by calling them and etc. You don't have to take the Andrew Tate path in life. You can respect women and respecting them is a sign of your strength, is a sign of being secure in your masculinity. You don't need to put other people down to make yourself feel better. Okay. So, we have to redefine these qualities, but there are no icons like out out there. You either have the Andrew Tates out there or you have these wimpy men who are just so afraid of being masculine. Okay? Your aggression, your assertiveness, your testosterone, it's a good thing. It's how things get done. It's what energizes you, what puts you in the world. It makes what makes you ambitious. What makes you assert yourself and and motivate yourself. It has to be channeled. It has to be disciplined. But you have to see, you know, we were talking about our people pleasing things and how you reframe it. You have to see who you are and see the virtue in it and see the power in that. And it, it's a cultural problem because men are very confused. I didn't have that confusion when I was growing up. um, you know, so now it's very difficult because you're being told that all these things that you feel naturally are negative. They're only negative if you can't control them. So self-control is a very masculine quality. You're able to control yourself. You're able to control your passions. You're able to not talk too much if you don't need to talk too much. I'm not saying that women don't have that the opposite is wrong. These are things that men naturally have because of their biology. And I'm sorry. I do believe in these things. Um, but they're good. They're just how you use them that can be bad. And so I just wish there were more positive role models out there. I know I could be a real bastard. I could be a real I'm very competitive. When I play games, I like to win. And I can be a little bit mean about it. Okay? I mean, I'm a pleaser, but I like winning. I channeled it all of my aggression, all of that testosterone. I'm not saying I have more than anyone. I just have normal amounts. I poured into my books. I poured that edge, that aggression, that like, damn you, I don't really like you. I don't like the world. Into the 48 laws of power into here's how these manipulative these how people manipulate. These are how people can be bad and cruel and damn it, I'm going to get out all my aggression by exposing it and showing it and being as real and direct. I channel it into something as opposed to hurting other people kind of thing. So finding ways to channel your aggressive tendencies is a positive way of being a man. You have to find whatever that is. Sports is a great example but there are other things as well.
>> It feels a lot like alchemy in a way. Uh or actually it's even it's alchemy is taking something which is bad or useless and turning it into something which is valuable. This is taking uh something which is uncertain. It could go either way. you know, this desire for mastery, for conquer, for achievement. [Music]