The Manipulation Expert: You're Being Manipulated! Use Jealousy To Manipulate People! Robert Greene

you need this skill if there's somebody in your life and you don't know whether they're a snake or they're genuinely your friend. Approach them from an angle and surprise them, and for a second, you detect what we call awareness.

Robert Greene is one of the bestselling authors in history. He's an internationally renowned expert on power strategies. He's been referenced in songs by Jay-Z, Kanye West, and is known as the Godfather of Power, Seduction, and Mastery.

We have this idea that if I apply myself really hard, I should be successful. But I kept noticing this blind spot that people had; they were terrible at dealing with people. If you're not careful and constantly misreading people, they could manipulate you, they can wound you. But if you follow the process that I lay out, it will be the best defense you could ever have in your life.

You know all the tricks people are playing on you. We have to learn to look behind people's masks. Being a human being means we lie, but you know what doesn't lie? Body language. Eyes are hard to lie. The smile tells you a hundred different things if you know how to read it.

But the problem that you have is you think it's a natural skill. "I'm a human being; I know how to read people." You don't. You're operating in darkness. But I do believe everybody has that potential.

So the first thing you do is recognize Frenemies. Do we all have Frenemies? Yes, they sabotage you, hurt you, and you don't want them in your life. One common sign of a Frenemy is there.

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Let's get on with the episode. Robert, you wrote a book about human nature in 2018 called The Laws of Human Nature. Why did you write that book?

Well, it's the fruit of a lot of experiences that I've had. I wrote The 48 Laws of Power, and prior to that book, I was somebody who never had any power in life. I was sort of a failure. You know, I had gone through so many different jobs, and then all of a sudden, I write this one book, and people are coming to me for advice. It's kind of shocking, right?

I started noticing a trend. The trend is we live in this intense technological age where we have so much power at our fingertips, right? It's so easy to get attention and on and on and on. We have this idea that everything in life should be easy. It's all about just, "Well, if I apply myself really hard, I should be successful."

But I kept noticing this blind spot that people had; they were terrible at dealing with people. They were making all of these mistakes. Everybody wears a mask. You wear a mask; I wear a mask when we're out in the public realm. We don't exactly say what we think, right? We're all a bit strategic.

If you're not careful, you're constantly saying the wrong things. You're constantly misreading people. You're doing things at your job that you think are going to impress, but they have the opposite effect. Then something bad happens, and you're confused and emotional.

It was like this circle atmosphere of pain around the globe of people suffering because they don't know how to handle the people in their lives. Because we're so virtual and we're so locked in our phones, we're becoming worse and worse at reading other people, at understanding them.

You know, when I'm sitting across from you, I can see your body language. I can see your nonverbals. I can see all sorts of things. I can deal with you as a human. But when I spend 95% of my time behind a screen, you know, and that's even how I date, basic human skills of understanding, of connecting, of empathy, of reading, they're getting hopelessly degraded.

That's my long-winded answer for why I wrote that book. If there's someone listening out there and they can relate to certain parts of what you've just said, maybe it's a lack of their own self-awareness or maybe they have poor awareness of others. Is there a starting place to reversing that? Is there maybe a most important skill that we need to master as the foundation of that transformation?

Yeah, it's very simple. It's to get down on your hands and knees and realize you're bad at dealing with people. The problem that you have is you think that it's a natural skill. "Yeah, I'm okay at it; I just kind of wing it. I understand what I'm doing. I'm a human being; I know how to read people," etc. You don't. You're operating in darkness.

Just realize, first of all, that you need this skill. Once you realize that, the first thing you do is look inward. You look at your own nature. You look at the things that I write about in the book about narcissism, about irrationality. Instead of searching for the people around you that fit those categories, look at yourself.

So it all begins with self-awareness. You are the best subject of human nature. When I was writing this book, it was actually quite painful. I'm writing a chapter on narcissism, one of the longest chapters in the book because it's a very important subject.

I'm telling myself, "Robert, you're quite a narcissist." You didn't think of yourself that way, but you have all of these classic tendencies that you're writing about in the book. It was painful, but in order to come to understand narcissism in other people, I had to sort of understand it in myself.

So step number one is I need this knowledge. I'm actually not very good at dealing with people. It's caused me problems. Go back and review the problems and the mistakes you've made. Mistakes I've made as well, many, many times.

When you realize that you want this knowledge, then you begin by looking inward. But if you think that it's not needed, that you're not, it's just, "Oh, it's kind of interesting," or "Maybe I'll sort of dabble in it," it won't mean anything to you.

You have to feel that pain that you've been through in life, and it's kind of an ongoing pain. It's one that I still have, even though I wrote the book, where I misread people, where I inadvertently hurt them when I didn't mean to hurt them. You know, and I feel that, and I suffer from it.

The pain that you feel, the emotions that this turns up, motivate you then to become better at understanding other people. What if you find things in yourself, like you said, that you don't like? You find narcissism in yourself; you find darkness in yourself. What are we meant to do with that? Are we meant to heal it, resolve it?

You're meant to look at it. You're meant to confront it. I have in the book a quote from the great writer Anton Chekhov that people can't begin to change themselves until they know who they are, until they understand themselves, right?

So we all want to change; we all want to be better at ourselves. But until we know who we are, until we realize our flaws and our weaknesses, the main law of human nature, if I could summarize it, is we don't like to look at ourselves.

It's always the other person. They're the ones with the problem. They're the ones who are aggressive or passive-aggressive. They're the ones who feel envy. They're the ones who are irrational. But me? No, no, I'm a paragon of virtue. I'm always moral. I'm always good. I'm always smart, etc.

So the point isn't to beat yourself up and go, "Damn it, I'm an awful human being." We're all humans. We come from the same source. We all have the same ancestors. We all have the same flaws in our brain. It's not like you're exceptional. It's not like you're the one person that doesn't have narcissism, that doesn't have self-absorption.

So realizing that you're connected to all these people, that we all have these flaws and weaknesses, is actually not a bad thing. It's a good thing. By examining yourself deeply, you can begin to change some of these things.

You know, it's just like you. I don't go like, "Oh, damn it, I'm a narcissist. I'm self-absorbed. I think a lot about myself. I love talking about myself," which is something I'm afraid I do like to do, right?

The point isn't, "Oh, well, I'm just depressed; there's nothing I can do." Once I'm aware of it, I can begin to change it. But if I'm always repressing, if I'm always thinking, "No, I'm good; I don't have those problems," then if you can't see them, how can you change them?

How can you deal with them? How can you become a better person? How can you change those qualities that you don't want? One of the most important things in The Laws of Human Nature is that you have patterns, that you are compulsive. It comes from your character.

These patterns that you see in your intimate relationships, you always fall for the wrong person, or you sometimes fall for the wrong person. You see it in your work world. "I make these mistakes; I get fired for this reason," etc., etc.

And they're good patterns, but we tend to repeat over and over and over again. Being aware of these patterns, being aware of these things, you can now begin to change them.

A lot of people climb the mountain of awareness, and they get... I was thinking about people in my life that have climbed the mountain of awareness and in my own life, things that I'm aware of, darkness within me that I'm aware of, or challenges or patterns I'm aware of.

Taking the next step from... So I think becoming aware is painful, and then doing something about it is difficult. It's painful because there's a lot of cognitive dissonance associated with figuring out that you're not who you want to be.

Doing something about it requires breaking what feels like old neurological pathways in my brain. You know, trigger... You think about the habit cycle, how breaking that is difficult.

I look at it very differently, I'm afraid. I think actually it's worse when you're not aware of who you are. When you walk around in this world with all of these false ideas about who you are, you don't even know who you are. You're wearing this mask; you're not authentic.

You're behaving in the world as if you're somebody else, and you're not aware of that. But it's causing you pain; it's making you suffer because you're not aware of the real person that you are. You're not authentic.

Coming to terms with some of these dark qualities is actually a very enlightening experience. It can actually be euphoric. You go, "I am an animal. I'm not this saint. I'm not this paragon that I thought I was. I'm an animal with flaws. I can embrace that. We're all like that, and it's a good thing."

Feeling like you have this and you're coming to terms with it... I have a chapter on the dark side of human nature. Everybody has a shadow side. I have it; you have it, right?

Seeing that shadow side, which is something you've been repressing since childhood, and dealing with it and confronting it is actually one of the most wonderful experiences you can have in life. Because repressing all of these things is what is making you miserable in life.

But coming to terms with who you are and being aware of it is actually what liberates you. You know, where does it come from, our dark side? What you talk about in chapter nine of the book?

Well, I think it comes from childhood. So when you're a child, when you're three or four years old, you're like this complete person. I compare it to like this round ball. You have good qualities; you have loving qualities. You love your parents, perhaps. You love your siblings, perhaps.

But you also have these other darker qualities, these kind of aggressive impulses. Sometimes you hit people; sometimes you say nasty things, right? But you're a complete person. It's natural; it's who you are. It's how you were born. It's like a round ball, and it's complete.

Then slowly, year by year, month by month, you have to cut off that dark side, that backside of yours. In school, you're told, "Don't ever show that part of you." Your parents are, "Come on, you've got to be nice. You've got to get along. We want to be proud of you."

All of those aggressive impulses that you have, all of those feelings where you felt envy about somebody, whatever, you wish you had what your brother or sister had, they all go underground, right? You force them down; you don't want to deal with them.

But they're still there because you're a human being. Those emotions don't leave you; they just get pushed down, and they go into the backside of your head. That round ball now becomes cut off. It's like the moon with a dark side and a front side.

When you're out in public and you're in work or in social situations, you're only showing people that bright, happy side, the good side, and you're doing the damnedest to conceal all that dark energy inside of you.

Then suddenly, because you're not aware of it, it comes out in explosions. A very typical thing is you suddenly get angry and you burst out with an angry email, or you yell at somebody, you say something kind of nasty, and then you look back and you go, "Where did that come from? That's not really me. I'm not really like that. I feel ashamed about that."

But what you must realize is that's part of your shadow that's speaking. It's coming out; you're just not aware of it. You're trying to control it too much. I say the best thing in life to do is not to take out this dark side and just throw it around the world and be nasty and aggressive. That won't work.

But you have to find ways to take that energy because that dark side contains a lot of energy, a lot of power, and use it and channel it into ways that are productive. So I happen to be someone who has a fair amount of aggression. I have to admit I'm extremely competitive, right?

Even in card games, I don't like losing. So I've channeled it into my books. I take all of that energy and I put it into making the best books that I can, into ambition. So if you're ambitious, channeling that energy into becoming the best and beating the competition is a productive way of using that dark energy.

If you feel angry about a cause or something that pisses you off about the world, some injustices, instead of whining about it, you go out and you do something. You get involved in a movement or whatever; you channel that energy into something productive.

That's the way to deal with the dark side. You can't go throughout life imagining that you're the saint because you're not. You have these qualities.

In your book about the strategies of war, the second strategy of war that you write about is "Do not fight the last war." When I read that, what I understood it to mean was about not being rigid.

How does one dismantle the prison of convention that they live in? So for that lawyer or for that person that's working in the financial district who is, you know, 47, and they're a lawyer, they're a stockbroker, and they're miserable, they have somewhat been imprisoned by their own identity, which is like a set of ideas from the past.

I'm really obsessed with how we get out of the way of our own identity so that we can live our most fulfilling lives. Even me, you know, there's probably even you. I've created this perception of who I am, and I'm like following the instructions every day.

Yeah, it's a trap. You can't fall into that. So one of the laws of power that I have, one I think is very important, I think it's Law 25 or 26, I don't remember the number, is "Recreate yourself."

The moment people start to know who you are, they identify and create your identity. "Oh, Robert Greene is this person who writes these dark, Machiavellian, manipulative books." Then I'm trapped. I'm trapped by their perception of me, and I always have to be like a little dog performing for them, right?

And I don't want to fall into that trap. You have to recreate yourself. You have to use your personality and who you are as clay that you are molding. You're like an artist.

You change yourself for each person that's different. For me, it means I don't write The 48 Laws of Power Part Two. I write now a book that's not like The 48 Laws of Power at all. For you, it's doing your podcast but changing it up, or maybe you do a different podcast, or maybe you go into a different career set.

Maybe you become a CEO or an entrepreneur in a different direction. I was recently on Andrew Huberman's podcast, right? One of the most successful podcasts besides yours in the world.

I don't want that to sound like bragging, but the book Mastery helped him a lot because he was a professor, I believe, at Stanford. I hope I have it right. Everything was going well; he was on a fast track in neuroscience, but he was miserable. He hated the politicking; he hated all the [ __ ] that you have to go through in academia.

Then he read the book, and he goes, "I don't know how old he was; he must have been in his early 30s. He goes, 'I don't want to do this. I want to change. I want to recreate myself.'" He decided to go into podcasting to take all of his knowledge about science and neuroscience and bring it into a different medium.

That's extremely powerful because if he had stayed in academia, he would have gone down the path that we're talking about. It sounds a little sexier than being in finance at 47, but being stuck in academia when it doesn't fit you, with all the nasty politics that go on in universities, etc., that is a path for misery if it doesn't fit.

So you have to kind of go through this process all the time and not let other people tell you who you are. In the case of Andrew Huberman, who transitioned from an academic to a podcaster, it's quite a feat because there are lots of forces that try and hold our existing identity in place.

A lot of people, to sort of cross the chasm, get past all of that force that says, "No, we want you to stay with us, Andrew. We want you to be an academic. Who do you think you are being a podcaster?"

You know, that force... I'm so intrigued by it because everyone, regardless of where they are now, if they're going to try and venture to somewhere else, a better place, they're going to encounter that.

How does one work through that? What is that? How do we understand that force that's trying to keep us down?

It usually happens when you're successful that people start giving you these identities that kind of define who you are. If you're okay with it, that's fine. You know, if it doesn't... But I'm a big believer in listening to your own pain and listening to your own frustration.

So when you feel frustrated in life, you have to go through a process. You have to look at it, and you have to go, "What is the source of it?" Normally, the first thing you'll do is you'll blame other people. You'll blame the world; you'll blame your spouse, your children, whatever, right?

And you won't really look at what it is, why you're frustrated. If you look at it deeply enough and you go, "I'm really frustrated because I'm not enjoying my work. I'm making money; I'm going there every day, and I'm going through the motions, and I'm successful, and people admire me, but I'm not happy. I'm frustrated; I'm upset."

You've got to lean into that pain. You've got to lean into what frustrates you and go, "I can't go on another five years like this." Because the mind and the body are tied in; there's no difference. We're all one; we're all a unity.

When you start having these frustrations, these desires that you're not acting upon, it creates physical problems. You're not aware of why suddenly your blood pressure is rising, why suddenly your back is having pain, like I'm having right now. It's all interconnected.

When you're not doing something that you're engaged with, your whole being goes out of whack. Everything doesn't work. You've got to listen to it; you've got to understand it, and you've got to go, "I want some joy and some excitement in my life. I want a challenge."

It takes some fearlessness because leaving a prestigious job at Stanford, where you've got money, I don't know if you had tenure or not, or perhaps he did, you know, it takes some guts because you're leaving something that you know, that's stable, etc., etc.

But you've got to go, "It's not worth the price. It's not who I am. I'm going to suffer for it down the road." Let's say he decided to go into podcasting and it failed. All right, so be it. Then he learns that, and he's somebody who's very smart. He would have figured out another way, another direction to go in.

If my book, The 48 Laws of Power, hadn't been a success, I don't know what would have happened to me, but hopefully, I would have figured out another way to go. You know, I also had to drop a career direction that I was going in.

But you've got to try. You've got to be able to try, and you've got to go say to yourself, "It's actually a great thing in your 30s, let's say, to go, 'I need something new. I need something completely different. I need a new challenge. I'm going to drop this. I'm going to start something.'"

You won't believe the energy that will suddenly rise up in you, right? You'll suddenly feel invigorated; you'll suddenly feel youthful again. "I'm not stuck in this thing; I can try something else."

I'm so intrigued by two things within that. One of them was going back to the case of Andrew, who left Stanford and became a podcaster. My brain... You said, "He's an intelligent guy; he would have figured it out if he'd failed."

My brain also was saying, "He could have always gone back." There's a real illusion sometimes, I think, in most of our lives where we don't realize that if we mess up in this thing, as I think Jeff Bezos calls it, this is probably a type two decision where we can walk back through the door.

But it's this sort of illusion that we're going to really lose something great if we fail that stops us from taking that first step. The other thing I was curious about is this idea that pain is a catalyst for change.

Do people need to get to that point in their lives where they go, "I'm just so sick of this," to change? Can someone change before they get there?

Unfortunately not. Sometimes the bottom has to drop out before you realize what you really want and what you really need to get in life. I wish it weren't that way, but feeling like you're suffering and that you need a change and that if you go on this way, bad things are going to happen is the greatest motivator of all.

Because if you're moderately discontented with your job, you're going to constantly be justifying to yourself, going, "It's all right; it'll get better. There'll be a new boss, or I can always move from this job to another company similar." You'll justify; you'll never get out of it, and the trap will just close in on you, and you'll never get out of it.

It's those moments where, "Damn it, I hate this. I can't go on. I'm heading to suicide; I'm heading to depression; I'm heading to drinking. I'm hitting bottom. I don't like where I'm going."

It doesn't have to be quite so drastic; I know I'm exaggerating. But you have to feel a degree of pain and frustration to say, "I need to make a major change in my life."

The other thing I say is, in the same book you were quoting about warfare, I have what's called the death ground strategy, where you feel like... So he's going into podcasting, and if you go in with the attitude, "Well, if I fail, I'll just go scurrying back to Stanford," that's a recipe for failure in itself already.

Your attitude is already half-fast; you're already half into it. You go to yourself, "I've got to cut my ties at Stanford. If this podcast doesn't work, I'm not going back." It gives you the energy, the motivation, the desire to actually make it successful.

But if you're always going through life kind of with half measures, going, "Well, if I start this business and it fails, I'll go back to living with my parents, and I'll do this other job," you're not going to put your full energy into it. You're not going to give all of yourself into it, and it's probably going to fail.

It's really... It's so true. It reminded me of something I was reading in one of the psychology journals about a study they did with participants where they asked them to do a puzzle and offered them a delicious snack as the reward.

In one group, they said, "This is the only way to get the snack if you do this puzzle." In the other group, they said, "By the way, the same snack is also available in the vending machine down the hall."

Then the people in the second group, where they had a plan B, were less committed to doing the puzzle, spent less time trying to solve it, and did worse in the puzzle. It's this idea that a plan B actually psychologically distracts you from your plan A.

Yeah, we're animals, right? We have a certain nature, which is what I talk about in human nature. Our earliest ancestors, to go back to something I was talking about, our brilliance, the power of our species is we are actually very physically weak compared to like chimpanzees and cheetahs and lions, etc., etc.

But we use our brain, and feeling the necessity, feeling that we're going to die unless we don't solve these problems, right? If we don't use our brains, if we don't create tools, if we don't work together as a team, we're going to die; we won't survive.

It's what makes us inventive; it's what makes us creative. It's almost like a barometric pressure. I like that; that's the metaphor I like to use. When you feel that pressure inside of you, and it's very heavy, like in weather that's very, you know, heavy and thick, you're motivated.

You feel it. "I've got to get up in the morning. I've got to do this. I've got to accomplish this." When that pressure goes away and you don't feel any pressure in your life, you can do anything, and there's no consequences for it, you'll just waste time.

You'll waste years; you'll waste months; you'll never accomplish anything. You give somebody a deadline, right? They'll accomplish in two months what it would take somebody two years to do without a deadline.

It's that necessity; it's that sense of, "There's a sword at my back. I've got to get it done." It makes you get things done; it gives you the energy. It's "Get rich or die trying," to quote somebody.

Yeah, you talk about that in the book about the strategies of war. Chapter four, or strategy number four, is about creating a sense of urgency and desperation. When I was reading that, I was thinking, to be fair, I don't know any great leader that isn't a little bit urgent and a little bit desperate.

Even if they feign that desperation to galvanize people, there's something about creating urgency and desperation in your life that is an incredible tailwind. Is there any practical way that you think the average person can create the required sense of urgency in their life so they can get things done?

Well, it's kind of like a level here. You need challenges in your life; that's what the death ground is about. You're challenged; you better rise up to it. If the challenge is too great, if you're like, "I'm 24 and I've never written a book, but I'm going to write the best book ever," you're going to fail because it's too far above you.

You're never going to reach it. If it's too low, you're never going to have the energy. If it's too easy, it's not going to motivate you. But there's a sweet spot. I don't know; I'm just drawing it here.

It should be like here, where it's a challenge. It's above what you can do right now. It's not so far above that you can't possibly do it, but it's enough of a challenge to mean, "God, I better get my act together. I better get the energy together. I better change my habits."

I've got to get up earlier; I've got to work harder. It's not like I have to get up at 4 and force myself and work out, etc. I can get up at 6, 6:30, an hour earlier, and I'm going to meet this challenge that's a little bit above my level.

That's a powerful way of motivating yourself. You need challenges; you need constant challenges in life, or you're going to stagnate. It's just the law of nature.

You talk about false purpose as well. What is false purpose, and how do we know the difference?

Your purpose in life is something that you're born with. It's like your destiny. This is what you were meant to accomplish; this is what you were meant to be, what you were meant to do.

We were going through... We were talking about that in terms of your childhood, etc. Right? But we humans are not born with that purpose engraved in our heads. We don't wake up when we're seven and go, "That's my purpose."

If it were that easy, it would be that simple, right? Because we don't have any direction, you know, animals don't wake up in the morning, if they're not nocturnal, and go, "What am I going to do today? I can go here; I can hunt for this animal; I can hunt for that animal; I could eat this."

No, they don't. They operate by instinct. They have a purpose; it's automatic, almost. Okay, we don't have that. We have to find our purpose.

Because it's so deep and so important that if we don't find it through this authentic process I'm talking about, we'll find it somewhere else. Because we need a purpose in life; we need something to live for.

What will that be? It will be drugs; it will be some kind of cult that I have to join; it will be some kind of political movement where I can get out all of my anger and vent all of my frustrations. You know, it'll be on and on and on.

It's something that has nothing to do with who you are personally, but it's something that you can believe in and can give you a sense of purpose, but it's not really who you are. It's like a drug; it's drugging you into believing that you have a purpose, but it's not the real purpose that you were born for.

That's what I mean by false purpose. When we find our purpose, if we are able to and lucky enough to discover it, what's the variance in what someone's capable of that's found their purpose versus someone that hasn't?

Do you think, like, what's the difference in how they show up, how they deliver the results, the impact they have?

When you find your purpose, it's like everything falls into place, right? You don't need to... You don't need to almost do anything. You'll find whatever you need to find; good things will come to you.

I know that sounds woo-woo; I know that sounds mystical, but I definitely believe it, right? So it's not like you have to try so hard. Yes, you have to learn skills; yes, you have to apply yourself; yes, you have to work hard, etc., etc., etc.

But things just go so much more smoothly when you have it. For instance, one thing that happens when you have a sense of purpose, and I hate... It's something that I feel, um, so I know my narcissism is coming out again.

I know what I don't want. You don't know the power of that. You can't imagine how powerful that is. So people come to me all the time with, "Robert, we can make a lot of money doing this. We could try this. Let's make a TV show out of The 48 Laws of Power. Let's do this, let's do that. Let's make a game."

I'm not interested; it's not my purpose. No, I don't want it. If I didn't have that radar, I'd be spreading myself out into eight different venues, and all of my energy would be scattered.

I wouldn't have that focus, and I'd probably end up being pretty miserable because I would have lost my purpose. But when you have a sense of purpose, it's like, "No, I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that. I don't want to... I want to do this."

Yeah, it can be rigid; you have to be a little bit flexible. So if somebody comes to me and goes, "Robert, what about this?" I'm open to it. That sounds moderately interesting. All right, maybe I'll try it.

You know, and I do open things. Things like that I'm going to be doing in a month. I'm going to be recording a French version of, you know, the master class. There's a French version of that.

So, you know, I'm not so rigid where I can only write books. I can try other things because I can see value in it, and it interests me. It's a challenge.

Being able to say no is so important, and it's so empowering. That's what a sense of purpose will give you, too, among other things.

There's a quote that says something like distractions come dressed up as opportunities. To even know what a distraction is, you first must understand what your goal and what your purpose is, or else it's impossible to distinguish between a distraction, Robert, "Let's go start a game," or an opportunity, which sounds much more like that Mastermind thing.

I think about this all the time. You know, the more clear I am on the goal and what my purpose is, the much easier it is to understand what a distraction is. For they do look the same when they...

Yes, well, the other thing I do is I kind of game it out. So somebody comes to me, they go, "Let's do a television show, The 48 Laws of Power." Believe me, I've been through that about 85 times. People coming to me that, and we have even attempted it.

But I go, "I've worked in Hollywood; I've worked in television before I had my books. I know the process; I know how miserable it can be. I know you have no power."

I'm a writer now, where I write books, and I have all the power; I have all the control. You go into Hollywood; you go into television or film, 85, you know, 800 other people join in, and they all have their ideas, and they change this, that, you have no power.

And it's meetings and meetings and meetings and talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. I game it out, and I go, "No, I don't want to get into that trap. I don't want to be spending a year having meeting after meeting after meeting, hearing about this possibility, having it changed by this producer."

I game it out, and I go, "No, I don't want to do it." Can you do that when you're younger, kind of 21 years old? No, no. It takes a lot of... It takes a fair amount of experience in life because when you're 21, everything looks great and exciting.

"Man, yeah, I'll do that; why not? Yeah, it'll be fun; I'll meet some hot girls; I'll do this and the other great," you know, etc., etc. You know, you don't have that radar. Everything looks exciting and enticing.

It takes the pain, I keep going back to that, of things that you wasted your time in and things that failed, things that you didn't like to teach you the ability to say no and to save your energy for what you really love.

Should a young person just be saying yes to everything? You know, the problem that we have is everything has to be this way or that way; it has to be black or white, and it's not like that. It's kind of in between. You can learn to dance in life.

You don't have to go this way or that way; you can kind of do both. So the best advice I give people is your 20s, the best years of your life. Actually, I think the 30s are, but let's just say for argument's sake your 20s, you're young; you probably look pretty good; you're healthy.

You know, you've got all these things going on for you. I want you to have some fun, and I want you to have adventures. I don't want you to be 22 and go and get a job at Goldman Sachs for the rest of your life, etc.

You need fun; you need adventure; you need some looseness. You want some experiences, but it has to have some direction to it. It can't just be, "I'm going to write poetry; I'm going to do rock and roll; I'm going to go learn chemistry; I'm going to become this, that, the other."

No connection at all between all of these things, just trying everything for the sake of novelty. That's a recipe for not being successful because what you want to happen is you're 30 years old now. You've let your 20s are behind you.

It's usually a time of reckoning where you go, "Damn, I'm not so young anymore. Okay, you know, I'm getting older. All right, I've had my fun; I've had adventure. I'm ready for something serious, and I've learned some real skills in life."

For me personally, I learned how to write, or whatever it is. You didn't just go try 80 different things; you kind of had four or five that you did. You experimented with, "All right, now I know what I love. Now I can go down that path."

In Mastery, I often tell the story to people of one of the masters I interviewed was Paul Graham, who was the man who started Y Combinator. You probably heard of Y Combinator.

He was somebody who got into AI when he was like 18, 19 years old. He was like at MIT, I believe, right back in the late 70s when nobody was even thinking about it. Okay, he was a hacker because his father was a scientist who had computers back in the 70s, and he learned how to hack early on.

Okay, so he went down the process of going into academia, of going into programs of computer programming, etc., etc. He was on a track just like Huberman at MIT to become a professor, to become proficient in it, and he hated it.

It was soul-sucking; he didn't like the politics; he didn't like dealing with the people; he didn't like academia. So he quit, and he became a painter because that's... He loved design, and he loved visuals.

He comes back to New York; he's living in a loft; he's painting; he's happy, and he's not making any money. Then he hears an advertisement on the radio for, I think it was maybe Netscape, one of the earliest, you know, internet whatever you call it.

They're saying the future in computers is being able to buy and sell products on the internet. He ends up creating the first, I think, one of the prototypes for all the things that we have now. Yahoo ended up buying it for like $5 million, and then the rest is history.

He spent his 20s trying something out, learning real skills. He went somewhere else, learning something that he loved, and then he's 30, and he combines the two together. He's a classic example because he gets very bored easily.

So Y Combinator is worth billions of dollars, extremely successful. He sells it, gets into something else because he likes writing, etc. He's always... He's kind of a prototype for a lot of what we're talking about.

We've spoken a lot about self-awareness and self and all those kinds of things. What about other people? You know, the only thing that seems to stand in the way of all of our goals in life are other people.

So if I want to become exceptional, understanding the human nature of other people and using it in my favor, where do I start there? What are the sort of foundations of being great at using other people's human nature to my advantage?

That sounds very narcissistic and very awful, but it is what it is. Partly, it is what it is. Exactly. People, as I said, the main mistake we make in dealing with other people, and it's a common mistake that I make as well, is we take the appearances for reality.

We take their masks, for how they appear to us, for their politeness, for their smiles, for their saying, "Oh, I loved you," etc., for the reality. We have to learn to look behind people's masks.

We have to learn what's really, really going on behind them, and we have to learn some basics about human nature. People like to believe that they're essentially good, you know, saintly, virtuous, however you want to do it.

People want to believe that they're intelligent. They never want to feel like, "I'm not stupid; I'm intelligent." And the other third thing is that they willpower, that they're in control of their lives.

They do things because they decided to do it. To tell people, "Feel insecure about their intelligence," right? To make them feel like they're not moral or they're not good, to make them feel like they do things not because they choose to, but because they were forced to or because they're not aware of themselves.

They hate that. They're going to hate you; they're going to resent you; they're going to resist you. Knowing some basics about people like that gives you the power to use that for influence, for persuasion.

Okay, understanding envy in the human world. On social media, envy is just a nuclear bomb. It's just exploded. Our tendency to feel envy, to compare ourselves to other people, you've got to use that for power.

There's great power in that in a marketing, publicity sense, virality. Getting other people to be interested in what other people are doing, that's how things sell themselves.

If you try and tell people what they should buy as opposed to look at what other people are doing, "I want to join in on that," right? Knowing about these basic qualities in human nature, about how we like to compare ourselves, how we have these certain opinions about ourselves, etc., etc., gives you all of this power to take that human nature and use it for whatever purposes you want, for good or, unfortunately, some people use it for bad.

Do we have to lie to be successful? I say this because through reading some of your work, I heard sentences such as, "You should keep your true intentions hidden in social situations."

You say a lot about kind of cloaking yourself in various ways. You talk about showing up as an actor, that sometimes we do need to show up as an actor in our lives. So in order to be truly successful, I know it's a little bit of a difficult question, but do we have to lie?

Look, being a human being means we lie, right? The moment you open your mouth and you speak, you are essentially not telling the truth. You know what doesn't lie? Body language, non-verbal communication.

The way you smile, the look in your eyes, you can't lie about that. But children, three or four years old, are already learning to craft what they say to mommy or daddy to get what they want. They're very clever; they're very strategic, right?

They know that if they say what they exactly want, they won't get it. They learn to kind of whine and complain and put a certain tone in their voice. To be an actor, a social animal like we are, we are actors in life.

Get over this idea about guilting about it. I'm so sick of that. We are actors. We are descended from chimpanzees. Chimpanzees are concept subit actors. Read the literature on that; they know how to deceive incredibly well, and they don't even have language to deceive, right?

So we are actors. The moment you go out in public, you're not telling people, "Oh, you're fat; you're ugly; your writing sucks; I don't like what you're wearing." You never do that. You're an actor.

When you see your father, you act a certain way. When you see a little kid, you act a certain way. When you see a little kitty cat, you have a certain tone in your voice. When you deal with your boss, the person who pays for your podcast, I don't know if there is such a person, you act a different way.

You're constantly changing how you are. Act one moment you're Robert De Niro; the next moment you're, I don't know what other actor you are, but you're changing your roles depending on who you're dealing with.

I'm so tired of people not recognizing this fact that we are all actors, that we are constantly deceiving. Yes, there are differences; there are qualities of lying. I understand that there's Donald Trump lying, and there's the lying of the everyday white lies in which we have to say certain things to get ahead, etc.

There are degrees; I understand that, and some lying could be very harmful and very counterproductive in the end. But the moment you enter the world and the moment you open your mouth, you are in some ways already an actor, and you are already using forms of deception.

Why can't we be our true selves? Because it would irritate people. Because it would... You know, I don't know about you, but I appreciate politeness, right? I go somewhere, and I know someone's being polite. I know that they're not necessarily meaning it, but it's nice, right?

It's kind of smooth; it kind of makes everything sort of smooth. If people weren't polite, it would be grating, like two pieces of metal constantly hitting each other. It'd be so annoying; you'd want to kill yourself, or you'd want to kill people.

You'd become a murderer. You know, social life depends on that kind of smoothness, those interactions. So we need that to some degree. If we were just always telling people what we really thought, our world would collapse tomorrow.

What about showing our weakness? I've got this quote from you that says, "If you are weak and ask for little, little is what you will get. But if you act strong, making firm, even outrageous demands, you will create the opposite impression. People will think that you are confident, and that it must be based on something real. You will earn their respect, which in turn will translate to real leverage."

Well, it's about certain situations. So I don't want you to apply that idea to everything in life. Some people make the mistake when they read The 48 Laws of Power; they think, "Well, I'm going to use that everywhere."

No, it applies to certain situations. So let's say you're negotiating, and I know I dealt with this myself. I'm actually a fairly timid person by nature, but I've learned to cultivate the opposite.

So if you're negotiating a price for what you want for your time, for your services, and you're not very confident, and you kind of ask for a little, that's what you're going to get. Because people aren't going to... They're assuming that you're not really up to the task.

You say, "All right, $20,000 is enough." That's what they'll give you. But if you raise your price high and you say it with the right voice and you believe in it, they're going to go, "Wow, that person is confident."

If they turn you down, that's fine because somebody else will give you that price. You set your own value by what you believe about yourself. If you think that you're worthless, if you're not very good at it, other people pick that up.

As you were talking, I was thinking about Adam Neumann from WeWork and this conversation I heard with him and the founder of SoftBank in the back of a taxi, where Adam Neumann's asking for a billion.

Then the owner of SoftBank, this very eccentric, very rich Asian man, goes, "Do you know what, Adam? The only problem with you is that you're not ambitious enough." He writes him a check, I believe, for like five or ten billion dollars in the back of this taxi after something like 12 minutes of being with him.

I always thought about that and thought, "Jesus, what if I just started asking life for way more? If I just multiplied all of these emails that I send and requests I make by 10, what would happen to my life over the course of 10 years?"

Well, yeah, you probably would have gotten a lot more than you got without asking for that. Yeah, because we creatures, as I said before, we look at the appearances of things.

Look, it's a very, very easy metaphor here. You go into a social situation like a party, and you go up to somebody who's kind of nervous and insecure and anxious. I'm not criticizing that because we all have insecurities; I have many of them myself.

But you go up to somebody like that, and it makes you feel kind of nervous and insecure, right? You're kind of fumbling for words, and a bit of awkwardness happens. Reverse that; you go up to somebody else, and they're kind of confident.

They look you in the eye; you know their voice is strong; their body language is strong; they connect to you. Whoa! You think it brings out that part of you who's like that. You might be intimidated, but it also might bring out your own kind of confident self.

I remember being around 50 Cent, who's a very charismatic, confident, to the point of ridiculousness, and it was very infectious. I felt that way after being around him for a couple of hours. I was with him for several months; it rubbed off on me, right?

We have these kind of viral, contagious effects by people. So if you project strength and confidence, you know, and I understand it's a little different for women, which is an interesting subject because sometimes projecting that for a woman will rub the wrong way because people will think that...

And it's a terrible quality about us that women are judged by a different standard, where that'll seem like they're a [ __ ] or something like that. So I understand that there are nuances here and that the game is different for women as it is for people of other ethnicities as well.

You know, so it's not just one way or the other. But to the degree that even for the woman that you have this air of confidence, that you believe in what you're doing, that you believe you're worth it, it projects itself to other people.

You don't have to scream and shout; you don't have to demand ten billion dollars. But if you feel confident, if you feel you're worth this amount of money, it will project outward to other people.

Body language... Yeah, I want to talk about that. You know, you said earlier it's one of the things we can't lie about. Is there anything that you still look for today when you're trying to read someone?

Are there certain cues? Is there posture?

Well, you know, you've got to... In reading non-verbal communication, it's a different form of intelligence. It's not algorithms; it's not formulaic; it's human; it's emotional; it's empathetic. It's a reading without words.

It's attuning yourself to other people. So I attune myself to people's emotions, to the vibe that they give off in an overall sense. A gut is one thing that I like to do.

So if I had to give it a word, I would say anxious, or I would have to say outgoing and extroverted, or I would have to say impatient, or whatever. There's an energy that kind of defines them; it's a word.

That word is not precise, but there is an overall feel that I get from a person. Then I'm always looking at specifics. It's not like I'm sitting there consciously in my head going through a checklist.

I'm just feeling certain things, and I'm feeling that the eyes are kind of dead; they're not engaging with me. You can't put that into words, but you know the feeling.

When someone's looking at you, but they're not really looking at you, you know what that feels like, don't you? A lot of psychopathic people, a lot of narcissists do that.

So part of their face pretends to be interested in you; they are looking at you in the eye, but they're not really looking at you. They're thinking of something else; they're seeing in you what they can get out of you; they're seeing you as an object, right?

Eyes are hard to lie; they tell you something. Now, actors, very skilled actors can kind of create some of these impressions, but one thing that they can't fake is the tone in their voice.

Actors will tell you that it's the hardest thing to actually consciously control. So the voice of a person tells you a lot about their confidence levels, tells you a lot about, you know, just about their general emotional tone, about their character, about who they are.

It's very difficult to fake, and when it's hesitant, when it's like stammering, when it's not... You can kind of sense something from people's voice, and it's very hard to fake.

Then the smile; the smile tells you a hundred different things if you know how to read it. There's the authentic smile, which I'm not going to fake right now, but it lights up the whole face.

You know, like you really feel joy; you can't... You don't... You can't fake it. Your eyes go up; your cheeks go up; everything kind of connects together, right?

The fake smiles, you know, we've all seen the fake. Just when the mouth goes up and the rest of the face doesn't bother. "Stephen, I really like you; you're really wonderful."

You know, most of the time, most smiles are fake, but you can kind of... When you see the genuine smile, you go, "That's what caused the genuine smile." You should become aware of that.

Then body language tells you a lot. Like, is somebody, when they're talking to you and you're standing up at a party, is their body kind of facing another direction while they're talking to you? Or are they kind of looking out their way while they're talking to you?

That means they're not really interested in you; they're not really engaged in you, right? Also, when you catch people by surprise and they don't have the time to put on a fake smile, I often tell people to do this.

Like, there's somebody in your office, and you don't know whether they're a snake or they're actually genuinely your friend. You suspect it could go either way. You kind of approach them from an angle, right?

And you surprise them. You come up to them, and they look at you, and for a second, you detect what we call a micro-expression of disdain. Then they put on the smile.

That micro-expression, which scientists and psychologists have studied, lasts for like less than a second, much less than a second. You have to be able to read it, but it reveals whether they actually like you or they're totally false.

They can't fake it. So if you come to straight on, they'll go, "Oh, hi, Stephen! I love you! Great to see you!" They come, "Oh," they kind of pretend, then they try and act, and you can get clues like that.

There are so many ways to read body language; it's such a fascinating subject. I could go on for hours about it.

How important is it? You know, you're talking about colleagues and team members there, and earlier you said that people are contagious. How important do you think it is to the success of our lives?

And I paused there because success means it's a personal thing; it's a professional thing to surround ourselves with the right group of people and to be intentional about that.

It's very important. I have a chapter in The 48 Laws of Power about infection, and I think it's an experience many of us have had where you're around somebody who seems at first glance to be very interesting.

They become your friend; maybe they're very dramatic, and they have all these stories to tell, and they seem almost slightly larger than life. You engage with them, and then you become friends.

Then slowly, slowly, slowly, it becomes clear that they're a little bit nuts, right? They're always talking about how this person screwed them, how that person screwed them, how this boyfriend or girlfriend was so awful and so nasty.

You begin to realize, "Is this true, or is it maybe that the problem?" But now they're your friend, and now you're emotionally attached to them, and now they have room to play all these kind of games on you.

All of their drama starts infecting you, and it's like, "God damn it, I want to get away from this person, but I can't." They've infected you with their negative energy, and it gets under your skin.

You have to avoid people like that. You have to read before you get involved with them that they are a drama queen or a drama king because there are just as many men out there who have this quality.

You have to see that they play the victim of everybody else, but actually, they kind of bring it onto themselves. Some people are genuinely unfortunate; bad things have happened to them, and it's not their fault.

I'm never saying it's a misconception about that chapter that you should avoid everybody who's unfortunate. There are people, and a lot of people out there whose circumstances have put them in their situation; it's not their fault, right?

But there are other people you have to recognize that the bad things that happened to them are things that they have brought on because they have this infecting power. It comes from deep insecurity.

You don't want them in your life. Being around insecure people will make you insecure. Being around confident people who kind of know what they're doing, who've got their act together, who are trying to make things and accomplish things, because there are so many people out there who talk and talk and talk but never do anything.

Being around people who do things, who get things done, who've made a business, who've made this, that, or the other, their goal to be around because they'll infect you with their positive energy.

Frenemies... Yeah, do we all have Frenemies, and how do we spot Frenemies?

Well, hopefully, we all don't have them, but in The Laws of Human Nature and in several of my books, I talk about the phenomenon of envy, which is a very, very powerful human trait. It has roots, very ancient roots.

We know that in hunter-gatherer societies from thousands of years ago, envy was a real problem, and so they created all kinds of rituals to avoid envy. The moment somebody in a tribe received a gift, they had to give it to other members so they wouldn't face envy.

Facing envy, you could be murdered for it. So you learned all of these rituals, and we've noticed that chimpanzees feel envy. You give one of the higher-up chimps a grape, and all the other chimps are very wanting that grape as well, and they feel envy, etc., etc.

So it's an extremely human emotion. The thing that we don't realize, though, is that the people most likely to feel envy... First of all, we all feel envy; we're all comparing ourselves to other people. I feel it all the time, right now.

I envy Ryan Holiday because he's, you know, so 30 years younger; he's sold so many books; you know, he's got all this great stuff. I know what envy is like; I feel it. We all feel small degrees of envy, but there are people I call it passive envy.

But active envy means people act on it; they do something to hurt you; they sabotage you in some way. Frenemies are the classic scenario.

So somebody who feels envious of you ends up befriending you, and consciously they may not even be aware of that. They think, "Well, I do want to like them," but unconsciously they feel envy.

They think that you have success that you don't necessarily deserve, that you have what they want, right? They become your friend, and they charm you, etc., etc. Then, lo and behold, you start noticing all kinds of behavior that's very ugly that you weren't expecting because they're your friend.

They start saying [ __ ] comments that get under your skin, that make you feel insecure. They take things from you; they act in ways that are hurtful. But because they're your friend, your first instinct is to blame yourself.

"Well, maybe it's my fault that they've done this. Maybe I'm actually to blame for what they're saying," etc., etc. I believe behind the Frenemy phenomenon is this phenomenon of envy, where the person secretly wants what you have, and they're becoming your friends so that they can wound you.

What's best to do is to recognize that. One common sign of a Frenemy, of somebody who's befriending you out of envy, is they're in a rush to be your friend.

Normally, we like to take it a little bit slow. We just don't let anybody into our lives; we like to vet them a little bit beforehand, right? We don't trust everybody.

But the person who feels envy is like, "I love you; you're fantastic; I want to be your friend. We got to hang out; let's go out for dinner the next night." They're in a hurry; that's a sign that something else is going on because that's not natural.

What about when friends become Frenemies? Because sometimes through the process of us changing, yes, you might inspire that envy. Yes, like your status changes.

We've all had to deal with that. I've had to deal with that as well. You have success, and you came from a background where you weren't so successful, and your friends are still there, and they envy you, and they're not very nice to you.

It's not a good quality, and I understand the quality. I understand where it comes from, and I wrote about it in Human Nature, where we're all aware of what we call schadenfreude.

Schadenfreude means you take pleasure in other people's pain. So you hear a friend didn't get the job that they wanted to get, and you go, "Oh, I'm sorry," but deep down inside, you're kind of happy, you know?

We all go through that, right? The opposite is mitfreude; it's an expression that means you feel joy for other people. I like to try and cultivate some of the higher qualities in life.

So if something good happens to somebody, my first thing is I might feel a twinge of envy, but then I go, "It's great for them. I'm actually very happy. I'm excited. I share their joy in what has happened," right?

But it's not natural, so when somebody that you know and you've known for a long time has success in life, your first thing is to be, "They didn't deserve it; they kind of cheaped their way to it."

Okay, as we talked about in the very beginning, you confront that ugly emotion yourself, and you go, "That's not who I want to be." You go, "I'm going to make myself feel the opposite. I'm going to make myself feel happy for their success."

It's not natural, and most people don't go through that. I know personally from people I knew before I had any success in life, they're the ones that give me the fewest amount of compliments for my books.

They never read my books in the first place; they're very spare with what they say. They've got a pinched look on their face, whereas people I've never met before in my life give me all kinds of compliments.

Why is that? Because they're envious; they're upset. Are you threatening them because they see themselves like you? Because they knew you and you're where you're from, where they were from, so you're even more threatening.

You're holding up a mirror to them in a way that makes them feel even more uncomfortable. Well, they're not going to feel that way.

So what people will go through in that sense is... And this is how I think through, "Oh, Robert sold himself out. He wrote a book that's evil, that's nasty, that manipulative. I didn't think he was like that. I thought he was this nice person. Oh, I don't like this book; it's ugly."

They'll go through that process; they'll stay my friend because we've had years and years together. It's very, very common. At least I know that they go... They do that with my books, even though my later books aren't like The 48 Laws of Power; they still have it in the grain that this guy who used to be so sweet and nice with these nasty, evil, manipulative books, he sold out.

What is it at the heart of The 48 Laws of Power that some people are triggered by? What was the single most triggering concept or the most controversial or the concept that people just had a surface-level allergic reaction to, onsite, without even really reading it?

They just... No, no. Yeah, they read the back of the book; they read the names of the laws, and they go, "Oh, that's ugly." A lot of times, they've had to deal with ugly people in their lives, and so that's when I see the authentic disgust reaction.

I understand it; they had to deal with someone who's very manipulative, and they find it disgusting. Of course, when I get to have a rational discussion with them and I calm down their emotional reaction, I said, "Look, if you had The 48 Laws of Power before this person manipulated you, they would have never been able to manipulate you."

That book is the best defense you could ever have in your life; it's like a shield. Once you've read it, you know all the tricks people are playing on you, right? They know they're posing as a friend and acting like a spy, right? They're concealing their intentions, you know, etc., etc., etc.

It's showing you all of these tricks, okay? But that's when they calm down and are able to say that. But the idea that we're not angels, that we don't all have the best intentions in life, that I'm writing a manual that they think for how to manipulate, how to deceive, how to con people triggers people very much.

A lot of people who've suffered in life, who've had a lot of pain, understand that there's irony in the book. They don't read it the same way they read it, knowing, "Yeah, I've had this happen; this is what people are like. I'm okay with it; I'm cool with it."

I must say, I don't know if this will come off wrong, but a lot of the readers who responded most positively to The 48 Laws of Power early on were African Americans, people like 50, people in the hip-hop business, etc.

They didn't have any illusions about human nature, about how good we are because they've seen the side all throughout their lives, right? 50 said when he got into the record business, he was shocked at how political people were, how manipulative they were.

So they weren't having that same reaction; they weren't having the guilty reaction like, "Oh, I don't want to read about that. Why do we even have to discuss that? That's not positive; that's not helpful."

That's, I think, a lot of what triggered people. It's funny because I was speaking to a CIA agent recently, and he said something at the end of our conversation to me. He said, "You know, one of the things I've come to learn from being in the CIA is that I no longer believe that equality is possible."

He said, "Equality?"

Yeah, because that's just not the way that the human world works. We all pretend we want equality; we all pretend we want everyone to be equal. But if you look at every game we play, whether we're politicians or we're business people or whatever, it's all about hierarchies and power and getting ahead.

Even the sheer nature of being a politician is campaigning to get into a position of, you know, objective power. I wanted to know what you thought about that.

Well, I mean, there's some truth to it in the sense of there's something in our nature that is hierarchical, that has deep roots in us. But I do believe in one form of equality, and that is everybody at their birth has the possibility for following the path that I talk about in Mastery, for being great, for fulfilling their destiny, for being the unique individual that they are at birth.

So everybody is born with a DNA that will never be replicated in the past or in the future, right? There is a uniqueness about every person, and there's a uniqueness about your parents, about your background, about your early years, right?

That uniqueness is a seed that if you cultivate it and you use it and you know your purpose and you mine it for power... In Mastery, I interviewed one of the masters I interviewed was a woman named Temple Grandin, who was born with severe autism.

At the age of two, she was about to be committed to a hospital for the rest of her life. She was almost like in a walking coma. For some reason, they got her a teacher to teach her language, and she started emerging a little bit.

Then slowly, she blossomed, and she realized it was something common to a lot of autistic people that she had an incredible connection to animals. A lot of autistic people have that.

She couldn't connect to people; they were so tricky and deceptive. She didn't know how to deal with them, but animals? Give her a horse, a dog, a cow; she felt like she was one of them.

She ended up following that path and becoming a high-level animal behavioral scientist who was born with autism, about to be committed to a hospital, and she achieved incredible success in life as a scientist.

I do honestly, and I'm not faking, I do honestly believe that everyone has that potential. But it's not equal in the outcomes of that. There are a lot of people; the majority of people don't follow that path.

But I do believe everybody has that potential. Is that potential like objective greatness, or is it our own subjective greatness? I can become the greatest version of Steven, or do you believe that everyone could become great in the context of, you know, the very best in the world, like Steve Jobs?

No, you don't have to be the very best in the world. I mean, when Mastery came out, the New York Times wanted to do a story about my house in the home section. Okay, well, why? But all right, right?

I never get any publicity from mainstream media, so okay, fine. So I had to quickly upgrade my house because they were going to come over with photographers, and we got a man over to do the tile work on my patio, which looked like hell.

I told people this guy was a true master. He wasn't like making six figures; nobody would ever write an article about him. He will die, and no one will ever know that.

But I could see in the quiet quality and how well he understood it and the care that he took in it and how much he enjoyed creating a beautiful effect with tile work that he was a master.

It doesn't have to be the best ever; you don't have to be famous and successful. There are grades of this; there are degrees of it. Some people, it's just being a great parent.

They are very social; they're very empathetic, and they're not maybe going to become an extremely successful finance person, but they're really good at raising their children, and they put a lot of effort and care into it.

That's fantastic. You don't have to be famous; you don't have to be Steve Jobs. There are levels of it, right? But the sense of, "This was what I was meant to accomplish, and I'm following it, and I'm happy with what I do. I feel fulfilled by my work, and I can go on doing it. I take it seriously; I care about it."

I do believe that anybody can have that level of power in their life. I think I struggle with that, if I'm being honest.

On a personal level, I struggle with enough being enough. Also, I think I've grown up in the generation where there's so much comparison everywhere we look. When we open up our phones and Instagram, you kind of always are led to believe that you're not quite there yet.

Now, I've contended with the idea that maybe that's a good thing because it drives you forward. It's that pressure you described; it's that creates that urgency, that desperation.

So maybe I should never believe I'm there yet, but then also I wonder, am I going to defer happiness off into the future because I think it's behind some kind of accomplishment or job title or, you know, success in my life?

When I hear about that tile guy, I go, "That person that was tiling your patio, I'm really jealous because they sound content with much less than would make me content."

What is the correct answer? Is it to be the happy tile guy who's tiling the patio, or is it to be the impatient Steve Jobs that's striving for the personal computer?

Well, it depends on who you are. We're all individuals; we all have our unique energies. It's the fact that you engage, you love, that you're emotionally connected to it, that it gives you a sense of fulfillment, that you're not looking over your shoulder.

"Oh, I could be doing this instead." I'm fine with that. It doesn't have to be the Steve Jobs who's continually dissatisfied, who's foul, and who always has to have more.

I'm not against that either. I don't know why we have to be so judgmental if people are following the path and they are in love with what they do and they have a genuine connection to it.

I'm not going to judge it because they're not famous or because they're not trying to be the greatest, the Michael Jordan of tiling or whatever, etc. I think it's fine.

You're not happy; you want to crush it; you want to have the number one podcast. That's fine as well. Why can't we have that kind of diversity in our world?

The most important thing for both those types of people, the people that have that sort of insatiable sense of ambition, but also the people that are content with whatever they're doing in their lives, from what I had there, is they both love what they're doing.

They both have those core components that you described earlier, like they both feel the challenge in their work still. And that challenge might be, "Okay, I'm going to do a bigger patio today," or it might be, "I'm going to launch a billion-dollar business tomorrow for someone else."

It's really about those core components of challenge, meaning, purpose.

Yeah, because what you don't want is you don't want to be in your 50s, in your 60s, facing death, you know, because your days are numbered. Who knows how long you're going to live?

You're going to go, "Damn it, I could have done something with my life. When I was a child, I had these dreams. I thought I was going to be really great at it, and I

Life makes me aware of how valuable each moment is and how things that everybody does, I look out my window and see people doing things that I can't do anymore. I go, they take it all for granted. They walk around unaware of their mortality, of how their body could break down any day. Now I'm aware of it, so I'm not going to feel envy because my mind is at a different level. I'm aware of the ephemeral nature of life, and it makes everything kind of beautiful to me.

I don't mean to be too saccharine about this because it could come off that way. There is a dark side to it, and I definitely have a lot of that darkness in my dreams and thoughts. But I believe the awareness of death is a beautiful, beautiful thing. It makes everything intense and makes everything glow with that awareness.

If you were my age—I've just turned 31—wow, you're a kid! Jesus Christ, man, I hate you! When I was 31, I was the biggest loser. That's amazing! If I could transplant that awareness from your head to my head, the awareness you've got from the life you've lived, but also from that stroke incident and the perspective of your mortality that it gave you, how do you think I would live my life differently?

How would you have lived your life differently when you were 31? You know, I make a point of never going through that exercise because I believe in something called amor fati, which means love of your fate. Everything happened for a purpose. I wouldn't have done anything differently if I had to go back because it all led to the right things.

If I'd been in a hurry when I was 22 to be successful as a writer, I would have never been able to write the books that I wrote. It would have all gone askew. Who knows where I would have ended up? I'm very, very happy with where I am. I don't regret anything. But if you're young, what often happens is because the pattern of your life, if you think of it as a weaving, is only like a third woven. For me, it's like two-thirds woven, so I can see all of these patterns that you can't see in your life.

At your stage, you tend to think, I've got all of this time ahead of me. I'm so young! I can do this, I can travel here, I can do this business and that business, etc. You don't feel that sense of urgency. You don't realize that tomorrow you could be hit by a car, or tomorrow you could suddenly be diagnosed with cancer. People are dying now in their 30s and 40s.

Unfortunately, when you get older, a bad habit is you start reading the obituary pages. I don't know why, but you start reading about people. A lot of people in their 40s and 50s are dying left, right, and center today for various reasons. It can happen, and what it does to you is it says, I only have so much time. I wanted to accomplish this one thing that I've been putting off.

Okay, you wrote your book. Maybe there's something else that you've always wanted to do but have never done, and you're kind of putting it off. A sense of urgency, a sense that your time is relatively short, is a good thing. The other thing is, as I said, it makes everything a little more intense, a little more... "glow" is the word I like to use.

I used to swim like three days a week, and I would swim long distances. I loved it; it was my greatest therapy. I just loved getting out of my head and being in the water. But I never appreciated it until now when I can't do it. So I want you to appreciate going to the gym, having your health, being able to do these things. Don't take it for granted.

It pisses me off that young people take all this stuff for granted. They think that I'm privileged because I have this success. When you're young, you have all those privileges. You have your health and other things that could be taken away from you. Don't take for granted these things in your life that are not going to last forever.

Think in those terms and think of how much more intense everything around you becomes when you have that mindset. One of the things I think I worry that I take for granted is my romantic relationship with my partner. Hearing your story of being in that car that day, it's literally evident that your romantic partner can save your life. She did.

You know, we've been together for a while. I'm not going to say how many years because she doesn't like hearing that. We have a deep, rich past, and it's a wonderful thing. She saved my life. Saving someone's life, man, it really is important. It really means a lot.

In my book that I'm writing now, I wrote a chapter on love, which is something I've never written about. Obviously, I've written about seduction, etc., but I've never written about love. I wrote about the incredible, sublime quality that you can have when you allow yourself to go deeper and deeper into that falling process, where you get rid of your ego, your defenses, and all the resistance. You just let yourself fall, fall, fall, fall, fall, and you connect to someone on that deeper level.

It's a chapter on the sublime because it is a very sublime experience. The reason I wrote it is I feel like people are missing that now because they don't want to be vulnerable. They don't want any pain. Falling for another person and letting go of your defenses opens you up to pain, right? We just want to avoid that.

We don't want to experience that; we want to be invulnerable. It's like cutting off all the richest experiences in life. So I wrote that chapter addressing that and saying, let go of your defenses, let go of your resistance, let yourself go into that process of falling. Feel what it feels like to have your ego dissolved in the presence of another person and care more about them than you care about yourself.

You mentioned a second ago dark thoughts and dark dreams. We all have dark thoughts; our dark thoughts are our own. How do you go about dealing with dark thoughts, and what are those dark thoughts that you're able to share?

Well, you know, in my dreams, I'll be doing all kinds of weird things. A lot of times, there'll be guilt, like, did I actually murder that person? Are the police actually after me? Damn it, what's going to happen? What's going to happen to my reputation? Then I wake up. So all that kind of stuff happens.

But also doubts about myself and depression. I've dealt my whole life with feelings of not being very worthy, like even doubting my success, doubting that my work is any good, doubting that I deserve it. I had a lot of periods in my life where I wasn't successful, and I kind of had it ingrained in me that I could do better. I could do better. I could do better.

I wasn't a good parent to myself; I was very tough on myself. A lot of my dark thoughts are that I'm still very tough on myself. The other dark thoughts I have are, I can't do the things that I used to be able to do. Is life even worth living when you can't hike, when you can't swim, when you can't go out on your bicycle, when you can't travel normally?

Do I really want to live? Maybe death wouldn't be so bad compared to that. I go through that, and then I talk myself out of it again and again and again. But my dark thoughts are about myself, my doubts, and the state of my body as it is right now.

If I said to you that I had those same doubts, about, you know, if we were identical in every way, and I said, "Robert, I'm having a lot of doubts about not being able to go out on my bicycle, I can't do the things I used to do, I'm wondering if life is worth living," and I asked you for advice, what would you say to me?

Well, I would say there's a lot of people we talk a lot in life who bullshit their way through and say they've accomplished this and that, and they've never done anything. You have a book out there that you can be very proud of. You could die tomorrow, and it's like a memento that will live on forever.

You've accomplished that. You've accomplished this stuff with your podcast. You've actually made things. So focus on that. Focus on the fact that so many people never get out of bed and amount to anything. You've built things; you've accomplished things. Focus on that.

Then about your body, well, you know, when you're dead, it's all gone. Who knows what there is on the other side? But just think of the insanity of what it means to be alive. That's another chapter in my new book. The odds against you, Stephen, of ever being born are absolutely insane. I describe those odds in the book and go through from the very first cells that ever formed life on planet Earth to the evolution leading to us sitting here. It's unbelievable.

So that you are alive is an incredible, astounding thing. You have to think about that. Just seeing the sky, just being aware is an amazing thing. I often think about people who are suicidal. There are a lot of people like that in life, particularly nowadays. I know because I went through that period most strongly in my early to mid-30s as I was contemplating the lack of success in my life.

What kept me going was I still believed that I could accomplish something. Even in my darkest moments, I managed to pull myself out. But then I think of people who maybe don't have that energy, who are kind of going down that hole. I know from my own experience that hearing somebody tell them that life is an incredibly amazing fact won't have any effect on them, right?

Because it doesn't connect to them emotionally. I often think, how could I connect to them emotionally? How could I make it clear to them that there's something worth preserving? I don't have the answer here today, but I think about that all the time. How would I deal with somebody who is suicidal? I get people writing to me like that, and I've had relatives in those situations before.

So that's something I think a lot about. It's a difficult question to answer. What do you have to say to that person in that situation to get them to believe in the sublime, to get them to believe that life is worth living?

I ponder whether what maybe you need to do is to get them to take the first step to create evidence for themselves, somehow, whatever that small first step is.

I think that's great. I think that's spot on. That's exactly what you have to do. They have to come to the realization themselves, and through some action that you get them to do, which gives them a little bit of belief in themselves, then the spiral can turn around.

So I think you're right; it has to come from them, and it has to come through something that they actually do. All the talk in the world won't really help them. What that is, is something that I would like to think about, and it depends on the individual. But I think that is the way to do it.

You're writing this book at the moment called "The Sublime." Are you writing that book because of the situation you found yourself in after having the stroke and going through that journey of saying, "Why is life worth living?" and going in search of the sublime that we all have inherently?

To be honest with you, about 20 years ago, I had the idea for the book. I read a book on the subject and got excited about it because they were explaining it as a kind of experience that's very hard to verbalize, that goes outside of what we normally experience. I got very excited by the idea and planned to write that book.

Then, after that, it was going to be my fourth book, and my agent was getting all prepared to sell it. Then I got hooked on 50 Cent and did that book instead. I put it on the back burner, and then "Mastery" came up, and I got hooked on that. Suddenly, it kind of got pushed aside.

In "Human Nature," the last chapter in the 50 Cent book is on the sublime; it's about death and facing it. Then the last chapter in "Human Nature" is about the sublime; it's about death and mortality. The irony is that two and a half months after finishing that chapter in the book, I nearly died.

What I had planned originally was to go to the Gobi Desert and walk across the Gobi Desert. I was going to swim with whales, you know, literally whales in New Zealand. I was going to go to Tierra del Fuego. I was going to have all of these sublime experiences and write about them. Now I can't do any of that.

All I can do is sit in my little room in my house at my desk and write the book. It's all in my head. The book is so much better because of that. So it's changed. I can't go to the Gobi Desert; I can't swim with whales, or I would drown. I can't go to Tierra del Fuego. I can only sit in my office, look at the birds, go through the books that I'm reading, and write the book, keeping in mind other people and what's going on in the world in their life and my limitations.

Ironically, the book has become better because I had to go through this experience. But nearly dying was like little bells going off in my head, saying, "All right, it's time to write that book. You're not putting it off any longer."

Has it forced you to find the sublime in everyday life?

Well, obviously. I'm writing right now a chapter on what I call the "daimon," which is an ancient Greek concept that all of us are born with, like a guardian spirit. I know it sounds very mystical, but a lot of contemporary psychologists have written about the daimon phenomenon, the idea that you have a second self, a kind of higher self that, in some way, is guiding you.

It has a lot to do with some of the things we've talked about—purpose, etc. I have to think about it in terms of my own life. I have to think, is there something else inside of me that's communicating to me? What does that mean? How does that connect with other ideas about the universe? I get to read books about it. It's a very, very exciting process. It's keeping me alive right now.

Then, you know, I write a chapter about animals and what's sublime about interspecies communication. Now I get to look at my cat. I don't look at my cat or the birds the same way as I did before I wrote that chapter. So it's changing me, and it's lifting me out of the kind of depression that people who have strokes go through.

We all have to go through terrible diseases, all of us, unfortunately, unless we die by an accident, cancer, etc. Strokes—the number one thing that happens is terrible depression, to suddenly lose your body and what you could do. This has kept me out of that depression, I have to say.

You said that all of your books have been kind of focused on different subjects, and that's very much the case. There are sometimes thin lines between the different books, but they're all very much focused on a variety of different subjects. If there was a message that kind of brings all of your work together, if this was your last day on Earth, what would the message be that you would want to leave the world with?

Wow, that's a really good question. A lot of my books have to do with the reality of our life—not what we want to believe, not our fake ideas about it, not our illusions, etc., but what life is really, really like. This is the human animal; this is how they behave. This is what will seduce them; this is what will turn them off.

This is how strategies will get us what we want in life. This is how you can master your subject—not the bullshit thing that people tell you about mastering, where you can take a drug or hack your way to mastery. This is the truth; this is the reality.

So all of my books, the through line is, this is what the world is really like. It's not ugly; it's not beautiful; it just is. It's great to relate to the world as it is, to see things as they are. It kind of is liberating, and in a way, it is kind of beautiful to just connect to the reality and not be inside of your wishes about why can't people be more like this? Why can't somebody tell me this? Why can't they give me this? Why can't I be successful? Blah, blah, blah, blah.

Getting rid of your illusions and just looking at the way that life is is sort of, I guess, the through line of all of my books.

Do you see life as a bit of a game, and is that a healthier way to view life? A game where we need to learn the rules and then play the game versus fighting against the injustice of the rules of the game?

Yeah, it's all a game, definitely. There was a great man on the left named Saul Alinsky who wrote a book called "Rules for Radicals." He was a strategist for union organizing, and he would hate the world today with all of their virtue signaling and everything.

He said if you want to change life, if you believe that there's injustice, you have to be a strategist. It's warfare; you have to organize. You have to understand the rules that will lead to actual change in this world. Whenever you enter the realm of rules and strategy, it is like a game.

So yeah, I believe that. I believe people with all their moralistic ideas, who think just because they believe something is right that it will get what they want, are just living in a fool's paradise. You have to strategize. If you don't, you're just bullshitting; you're just pretending. You're just virtue signaling. You want people to see you as a saint if you're not willing to get your hands dirty and to organize and to say, "I've got to take this A, B, C, D. I have to figure out the process of getting there."

Then all you're doing is just playing a game of appearances as opposed to the real game of getting things done in life.

What is the opposite of that strategy you're talking about?

I'm trying to figure out the average person that is currently not strategizing in their life. What are they doing?

Well, you know, everybody, I guess you could say, has a strategy, but their strategies are extremely ineffective. Their strategies are full of illusions. Human beings have to strategize because to wake up in the morning and go, "I've got to make breakfast," you have to strategize how you're going to cook and what you're going to make and what you're going to do that day and what you're going to wear.

It's human nature; it's just that people do it very, very badly. They do it badly because they're so emotional. Now, I'm not against emotions, and emotions play a huge role. I'm writing a lot about it in my new book. But the ability to get things done requires you to be in control of your emotions.

You have to take a step back, and you have to go, "I'm not going to react." This person is pressuring me; they're saying these things. My natural tendency is to react, get my back up, and bite back. No, I'm going to step back and go, "What's going to make them shut the fuck up? What's going to make them get out of my life? What's going to defeat them if they're an adversary?"

I made that decision not to react, not to get emotional. Now I have to think, if I do this, they're going to react this way. But if I surprise them with this angle, they won't know what to do, and then they'll react in a different way, and I'll be in control of the situation. I strategize; I go through a process of gaming out the possibilities here.

To not be strategic is to be stupid. Stupid people create more damage in this life than anybody else with their bad strategies, their bad wars, the bad things they lead people into, their bad politics, etc. So that's the opposite of strategy: stupidity.

I also heard within there that being emotionally driven very much doesn't allow you to have effective strategies because you'll get caught up in personal things.

Yeah, and things that probably don't matter. That ability to rise above, though, I think we all want to master that. I would love to master the ability to rise above in all situations at all times.

Well, you can. When you're younger, it's harder because you've got your hormones, you've got all that energy, all that adrenaline. It's harder. As you get older, it gets a little bit easier.

Do you have a system that you use just to detach yourself from the emotion sometimes?

Well, I'm not always good at it. I've learned to not react emotionally when people say something that I think is going to be triggering. I just don't do anything. I go into my zen mode. Oh, it's just life; it's just words; it's just verbiage. It doesn't matter; it doesn't mean anything to me. I'm neutral; I'm unaffected. I'm in my citadel.

If I get angry and write that email, which I still do, I don't send it. I put it in my draft box, look at it a week later, and go, "What the fuck was I thinking about?" I'm glad I didn't send that. You delay your reactions.

But mostly, I've trained myself, and I must say my meditation practice has helped me to not react when people say things that are so annoying that get under my skin. I just go, "That's them; it's not me. They're another human being; they have a bad idea. I don't care; it's not my bad idea; it's their life."

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Earlier, you mentioned the opposite of strategy with stupidity. So let's talk about politics. It's a really interesting time in politics at the moment. I'm really obsessed with U.S. politics in particular because it's more like a reality show over here than in the UK. It's quite boring.

I must admit this year, Trump is running for re-election against Biden. The country seems to be very divided for a number of different reasons. It feels, I don't know, I just feel like it's more divided than ever. I do feel like the left has moved further left than ever before to the point that I struggle to resonate with that side, and I still don't resonate with the right. So I kind of feel a bit trapped.

What do you think of everything that's going on, and how does your work inform what's happening and everything in between?

Well, we all have biases, and I've come from more of the liberal side, the left side. I was actually rather extreme when I was younger, so I have that bias. So I'm not really going to be objective; let's get that out of the way. I have my emotional reactions, my triggers by what I see.

But I'm very concerned about the overall spirit, the overall zeitgeist. I worked as, I know this will sound like I'm going on a tangent, but bear with me. I was on the board of directors of a publicly traded company, American Apparel. I was brought on there because I was friends with the CEO, but he thought of me as a strategist because he loved "The 48 Laws of Power."

I started seeing that things were kind of going downhill, and I sort of had my finger on what the problem was. The problem was our demographic was basically young women ages 18 to 24. It's a very difficult demographic to deal with because their tastes change very quickly; they're very viral, etc.

What worked early on with American Apparel was slowly becoming a cliché, and it wasn't going to translate well to a new generation coming up, which ended up being Gen Z. I had the idea that we need to have these retreats, these yearly things where we step back from the day-to-day business and think about the brand, where we're going, how we're going to adapt.

We're not going to change it, but we're going to adapt, etc. I presented it to the CEO, and he said, "No, we don't need any of that." What I came away with was that the reason businesses are so awful, large businesses, why they suck, why they're never successful, why they're so damn annoying, is because they're always dealing with the quarterly report, at least for publicly traded businesses.

They can't have a long-term vision because they can't afford it. They have to deal with what Wall Street will say to that quarterly report and how the investors are going to react. To sit there and step back and think about where you're going to be in a year or two, we might not even exist in a year or two, so forget it.

Well, politics is the same thing. You've got to win elections. You're facing every couple of years, every four years. You don't have the luxury of thinking of the larger picture, and that's what we're suffering from right now.

If you look at the political situation in America, nobody has any loyalty to anything. In my age, when I grew up, you were a Democrat, you were a Republican, and you had kind of roots. You believed in that because the Democratic Party was for the working class. We were for the unions; we were for the common guy, the little guy—the FDR mentality, even to some extent Kennedy and Johnson.

The Republicans were for big business, for lower taxes, blah, blah, blah. You had a sense of connection to it. Now, people have no connection at all to any particular party, which is fine. I don't care, but what that means is it's so volatile.

Somebody will vote for Obama, then they'll vote for Trump, then they'll vote for Biden, and then they'll vote for Trump again. There are plenty of people in that situation. They have no roots; they're not connected to anything. It's not people's fault; it's our politics' fault. They're not creating a sense of what it means to be an American.

What is it? Can you give us a story, a myth about what it means to be an American in 2024 that will connect us, that will kind of give us a sense of what is beautiful about our country? Because there are beautiful things about it. It's possible. It's very possible to create that kind of a vision if you can step back and think in the longer term.

All right, maybe it's hard to do that for America, but what is it for the goddamn Democratic Party? What does it mean to be a Democrat? What does it mean to be a Republican? Now it just means to be a lapdog for Donald Trump, to believe everything he does.

But the Democrats have their own problems, their own issues. You can't have a party that's just against everything. What are you for? I often tell people I'm sick of hearing what you hate. I'm sick of hearing what you're against. I'm sick of hearing what you're complaining about. Tell me what you want. Tell me what you're for. Tell me your vision of what a great country would be like.

But they can't do that because they're only in this bubble of what I hate, what I'm against, what I'm trying to protect, etc. There has to be a politician that rises up at some point that has a vision that's not just a demagogue, that's not just a charismatic person looking out for themselves.

They can connect the dots and say, "This is what it means to be in this party. This is our vision. This is what connects. This is the glue." Yeah, there are going to be little separate parts of it, okay? But we're the party of the working class, right? We're the party that's going to protect people, make life easier for them, or we're the party of business, etc.

I don't care what it is, but create a vision, a sense of who you are, of what it connects to. Hit people in their heart. You see, Trump succeeds because he has an emotional, visceral effect on people, and he's very good at it. The Democrats can't learn that.

It's always about a laundry list of, "We're going to do A, B, C, D, and E. We're going to hit the numbers. We're going to reduce inflation. We're going to create this amount of jobs," etc. It's all in the head; it's not in the heart.

You've got to create, you've got to connect to people viscerally, emotionally. You have to create a myth that will connect people, even within their disparate little niches. It's possible because to believe it's impossible goes against the grain of history. Somebody will emerge. I might be dead when it happens, but someone will go through that process.

Otherwise, everything will fall apart. Robert, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest.

Oh, I remember now! I didn't prepare.

It's okay; I'm sure you can come up with one about the sublime. Maybe I don't know; we'll see. The question for you is, and you're not allowed to say nothing: If you could change one thing from your last 10 years, what would it be and why?

Well, I would have prevented my stroke. I would have realized that I was burning myself out writing "The Law of Human Nature." I would have taken it slower. I would have realized that my body has limits, and I would have been easier on myself and not put myself through that.

That book was very stressful and very difficult. I would have taken it slower; I would have gone at a different pace, and I wouldn't have had my stroke. I'd be so much happier.

Do you think you could have prevented your stroke?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, it was a weird set of circumstances. The stress of writing "Human Nature" kind of ground me down, and I had high blood pressure already. Then I took a trip to New York where I forgot my blood pressure medication, and I was hiking in a park, and a wasp stung me.

Five days later, this whole area got inflamed, turned red, I was itching, I couldn't stand it. I went to the doctor; they prescribed me basically a steroid, which raised my blood pressure to the roof. When I had the stroke, my blood clot was exactly where that wasp sting was in my neck.

If I hadn't worn myself into the ground, if I hadn't forgotten my blood pressure medication, if that doctor hadn't prescribed me that nasty prednisone, if I had just been more careful, I probably wouldn't have had a stroke.

Are you able to forgive that sequence of events and the people involved?

Yeah, I have to. I've forgiven the wasp. You know, that wasp maybe died because of me because I don't know if wasps die when they sting you; bees do. But I've forgiven the wasp. I've walked past that spot where the wasp stung me and given my little prayer to it and said, "I'm sorry about your little life," etc.

Yeah, I've forgiven. I've gotten over that, and I've made my peace with it. You know, it was meant to happen—amor fati; it was my fate. Probably it happened for a good reason. I mean, I'm right now contradicting my answer to that person's question, but so is life.

Because the way I think about it is I was kind of reckless with what I thought I could do. Probably if I hadn't had my stroke, something else bad would have happened because I didn't realize my physical limits. I probably would have.

So I'm alive; I have my brain, and I'm writing this next book. It happened for a reason.

If that bee wasn't there that day—wasp, sorry, correction—if that wasp wasn't there that day, and I say this because I've been reading a few books recently about how throughout human history, these tiny little events, like the Nagasaki where they dropped the bombs, and all of these tiny little events with a cloud that flew over—a butterfly effect—all of the little butterfly effect things.

Is there anything from how these tiny, seemingly insignificant chance events can have massive consequences?

You're going to make me cry because what if there was like a little bit of wind, and the wasp didn't come directly in my path?

Yeah, I know; it's horrifying. But is there anything you can do about it?

No, there's nothing you can do about it. You know, it's Ryan Holiday; we'll talk to you about it. What you can do is the stoic philosophy is how you react to it mentally. You can't change the physical circumstance, but you can change how you think about it and how you react.

Robert, thank you so much for your time and your wisdom. I'm so very, very excited for your upcoming book because if it's anything like your past books, it's really something worth waiting for.

That's nice to hear; thank you.

Before we started recording, you told me about the process you've been going through. You spent four years writing this upcoming book, "Sublime."

So far, it's been four and a half, and it'll be another year and a half, so that'll be six total years.

Yes, pouring. It's so incredibly inspiring to me.

Well, keep this in mind, Stephen: I can't type. My—I used to be a fast typist, and I can't go out and take a hike to clear my head. So everything takes one and a half times more.

I have to write things out by hand; I have to edit by hand; I have to dictate into the computer; I have to edit with one hand. I have to clear my mind without hiking, so everything takes one and a half times more.

That's probably so. It probably would have been like a four or five-year book. But as you said about your cycle, when you slow things down, sometimes you enjoy them more, and you make better things.

Yes, I think you're right. Probably the slower cooking will make a better book.

Exactly right. I can't wait. I hope everyone has your existing books because, as everyone's witnessed today, they're all based on challenging but important enduring wisdom—every single one of them.

I think we need more challenging wisdom in our society these days.

Well, thank you.

Thank you so much, Robert. You're a real hero to many.

Thank you so much.

Okay, thank you, Steve. Thank you for inviting me back.