Hey this is ryan holiday obviously one of the perks of my life is that i get to have conversations with the great robert greene i think one of the the best living writers on the planet author of as you can see here mastery laws of human nature the 48 laws of power the 33 strategies of war 50th law and the art of seduction you know we have these com these phone Conversations every couple weeks and and so what he and i thought we would do is we said why are we just doing this privately what
if we just got on zoom and recorded and people could listen because maybe some of the things that we're going through that we're thinking about some of the stuff that's you know influencing his writing could be could be beneficial to everyone we we talk about the the rampant Irrationality of our time we talk about political polarization we talk about falling for scams and cons which i think is a its own pandemic these days we talk about conspiracy theories i love talking to robert i feel like you know i've been i've been having these conversations with
him since i was 18 or 19 years old and it has transformed how i see the world it's Helped make me into the writer that i've been lucky enough to to become so i'm so excited to share this with you here is my interview with the great robert greene there's this line from churchill that i like where he talks about as world war ii is breaking out he says uh it felt good today to put a thousand years between me and the 20th century meaning he was Reading and writing about history as a way of
calming himself down and getting perspective and i feel like your books are a great opportunity for people to understand the present by looking at the past yeah i agree with that i agree with the fact that it's kind of calming it gives you perspective it makes you realize that the bad days will end that we're in a particular cycle of history and that nothing lasts forever In my last kind of podcast i was talking about irrationality and i brought up the story of pericles and of the plague that hit athens kind of drawing a comparison
a little bit with coven although obviously i recognize the plague is not the same thing as as as the coronavirus but it's sort of as a metaphor for what we're going through and the kind of irrationality That erupted in athens kind of triggered by this very powerful plague to give people a sense of 2 000 years essentially of perspective on this or more than 2000 years of how these cycles occur and how outbreaks of irrationality occur even in the richest times in history which is 5th century bc athens the the height of what we would
call rationality and then it led to a whole century the Fourth century bc in athens of incredible irrationality of superstitious beliefs it's also the period of plato and aristotle so it was very contradictory but these things happen in waves people go crazy they go insane collectively it's not just a pandemic of a virus it's a pandemic of emotions of irrationality That people can't handle so very much i agree with you history gives you a deep sense of perspective and can help you lift some of the depression that comes from being mired in in a moment
that seems so chaotic what's interesting yeah you read your books and it's filled with stories of irrational people and con men and it's filled with stories from history and i think maybe we look at those and we go oh That was a long time ago it's different now and then we're surprised when we see those traits or those tendencies re-emerge in our modern world it's hard for a human being to have perspective particularly on its own period of time and you said this time it's different that's the classic phrase that people used when there was
Like some kind of bubble like the south sea bubble or the crash in 2008 some new scheme comes from making money which is clearly like an allow cryptocurrencies and yeah right it's obviously a an elaborate type of ponzi scheme and everybody kind of points to well look at the past there were all these other kind of You know schemes going on and look how they ended up no this time it's different one thing i talk about in the 48 laws i think is very relevant i talk a lot about how to form a cult yeah
arlatins and con artists and the thing about a cult is when you're in a cult you have no idea that you're in it so you might be in one right now you Ryan holiday or me robert greene but i wouldn't realize it because the nature of a cult is it envelops you in a narrative a narrative of this is what the world is these are enemies out there this is our cause this is what unites us and it creates this kind of fake and very simple and vague narrative of what the world is like and
when you're in that bubble you don't realize That you're in it because by the nature if you did realize you were in a cult you wouldn't be in a cult any longer so that's the kind of danger that people are living in right now you know there this is a time where conmen and charlatans are proliferating no as i said in the book when you go through a period of transition where great big grand belief systems such as christianity or organized religion particularly in the West or communism or something like that falls apart people need
to believe in something it's a deep human need and when that disappears we're going to start believing in these little microcosms little mushrooms that emerge after the rain with all these sort of little kind of belief systems that kind of combine technology and religion etc i'm not sure i've ever been in a cult but But certainly and i know you saw some of it american apparel dove charney was able to create kind of a cult-like atmosphere inside the company and one of the things i found to be most strange about it and i kind of
had one foot in one foot out especially towards the end because i i always was doing my other own things it would be When there would be obvious flaws or faults so you know you're being criticized or it's being sued or there's the front page of the new york times is arguing this or that what i noticed is that instead of that waking people up it drove them deeper into the narrative and obviously the scientific term for this is cognitive dissonance i'm curious how you see cognitive dissonance playing out these days well Cognitive dissonance is
like the the golden principle right now and essentially what it means is you believe in something you you come to believe in something for whatever reason and when evidence comes in that what you believe in is patently false it confronts you with a dilemma either you were kind of stupid in the beginning To believe in this in the first place and as the philosopher schopenhauer says people will admit to anything but they will never admit to being stupid or having less intelligence than another sure so it's very difficult to admit that you were stupid you
know it's like the last thing someone will confess to so the alternative is instead of believing the evidence you double down on your initial belief And you say it's the other person who's wrong and you see this all the time like there's this scare that antifa is coming to idaho and he's coming to your small town and it's just like facebook hoax it's a complete hoax somebody was pulling their leg and so hundreds of people come out with their ak-47s to defend their little town in idaho Against the antifa that are coming and of course
they never come and then they say later on it's clear that it was a hoax but they say no we scared them from coming you were there or or that that congressman in texas go merit you know he's ranting against masks helping in the coronavirus and then he catches the coronavirus the ultimate irony Right and then he says it was the mask that are happening at left right and center if you and everyone's gonna see through this but if you voted for a president for instance or a leader and it ends up that that person
is not what you thought he was or she it's obviously a charlatan a con artist that's the ultimate thing you have to admit that you were conned and nobody wants to admit that so you'll double Down on your belief that this person is right then you'll be even fiercer in your defense against these enemies that that he or she is facing i feel like that's kind of the ultimate message through all your books whether we're talking about planning uh strategy and in 33 strategies or whether we're trying to build some power dynamic or we're trying
to achieve mastery in a Field i feel like the thread through all your books is this sort of an unflinching commitment to reality even when it's inconvenient even when it means you have to go oh man that was so dumb why did i do that or whether it's taking responsibility for a failure or a mistake that it seems like i think you you say like we have to take to reality like a spider to its web Right i mean you probably know this i mean you have to understand people it's not like i'm accused like
i'm somehow exempt from human nature so i understand the process but i'm actually not as secure and certain of myself as people think i am whenever i hold a belief or i'm writing a book i always start with the premise that i'm probably wrong that i'm actually quite ignorant that my Idea is pretty stupid and i look at the evidence on the other side and i examine it and i try and convince myself that my initial idea was right and if it isn't then i change it but it's very painful because you want desperately to
hold on to those beliefs that you had initially so the the number one thing about reality is confronting yourself The fact that you are a limited human being with a limited cognitive abilities your are emotion based and so your relationship to the world is usually through thick layers of illusions that come from the media that come from your childhood that come from your culture that you live in and that it you have to cut through those layers but you have to confront yourself and see yourself as the source of them i Mean have you ever
realized that you made a terrible mistake about something and had to reassess you ryan holiday and your own intelligence isn't it quite painful yeah it's like we'll do just about anything to avoid having to do that right so i mean the thing you want to do in life i'm a great believer in looking at the evidence and looking at facts and things that are Happening information historical context etc and it's the evidence and the facts that's how i write my books it's probably how you write your books it's the evidence and the facts that tell
me what reality is they don't begin with my own preconceptions i let the stories tell me what's going on and don't you think from an individual in terms of like who you're married to Who your friends are and then from a leadership perspective who is on your board of advisors who works for you how information bubbles up through the hierarchy i think the other thing if our mind is inherently sort of not our friend in that respect and tries to deceive itself it seems like we have to build systems and relationships That counter balance those
forces so we we have access to reality through somebody else's perspective they can be like robert you're being an idiot what are you doing well that's why you read books i mean it's great if you could have intelligent people around you to have discussions and tell you ryan that idea is but first of all people will never do that because they're everyone is so Political everyone is so sycophantic they'll say ryan i love your idea your book is fantastic it's very hard to get objective criticism sure when you read nietzsche when you read mark marcus
aurelius when you read through kiddies or any of these writers you're getting a perspective on reality that has nothing to do with you personally Right they don't know you so you don't have to get upset if they're bringing up facts and ideas that kind of challenge you it's kind of an exciting process and i often love the fact of reading great books from hundreds of years ago that literally challenge how i think you know i'm reading now for my new book things of descartes who's somebody i don't like His philosophy is very strange to me
but i'm forcing myself to read i'm entering his world and it's really having a profound effect on me so entering someone's different reality that's what books do to you they enrich you and they show you that your own look on the world is limited you can look through it through the lens of another culture another gender another period in time And if you're not reading books then you're going to probably be in those layers of illusion are going to be so damn thick you're never even going to realize it yeah there's a quote i've liked
from uh general mattis he says if you haven't read hundreds of books you're functionally illiterate you know we think like oh i can read but the reality is if you're not reading what good is that skill Right and i think we should talk about conspiratorial thinking um but that's so loaded that maybe i thought i'd start with something else that i think is equally prevalent and i was just writing about i think we're also seeing a lot of magical thinking so conspiratorial thinking is you know like these people are out to get us this is
how things are operating behind the scenes Magical thinking is oh the coronavirus will just disappear or oh a vaccine will will happen and all of this will go back to normal or you know my ex is going to come rushing back through the door any day now she's going to realize what a mistake she made it feels like people are living in a fantasy world of their own kind of magical thinking that's very true and You know it's obviously the source of falling for a con game or falling into a cult or believing in a
conspiracy like i'm seeing it a lot where like parents seem to think like oh i'm gonna send my kid to school when it's like school is important of course but it's also the middle of a pandemic so just because you like something or just because you need something if i would have wanted to visit my relatives in europe during the second World war my need for doing so does not change the fact that there are german u-boats patrolling the atlantic and i'm gonna get sunk if i try to go see them yeah but if you
say that ryan like i tried to say on my last video about the playground people were gonna be coming or are you comparing the coronavirus the world war ii you know people don't know how to think in metaphors anymore sure you know What i was gonna say was i don't know if this is accurate it's a thought that came to me and maybe i need to think it through more deeply but i think a lot of it has to come 60 70 years of an entertainment industry that envelops us in these stories that have like
drama and then a happy ending and a consequence and a conclusion and it creates this kind of way of Thinking that the world is just like this and ideas have to be entertaining i noticed this one time when i gave a talk in toronto and i was one of the top speakers there was like 12 of self-help gurus including um anthony what's his name and they were like yelling and ended stomping around the stage and yelling and Had videos and it was just like a clown show right right and then and then i i got
on the stage and i had no video i'm just sort of talking about mastery and then i realized you've got to entertain people you've got to put your ideas inside these little sugar pills you've got to make them titillate them and excite them going on through television to radio Through television through the internet through social media and now people think that the only ideas that are legitimate are these ones that fill into these little capsules like a log line for a screenplay right this is what reality is you know the the pandem it's pandemic it's
it's right it must be true 5g yeah you know it's whatever it is these little tiny tidbits of information That people glom onto it's very entertaining it's sexy it's nice to believe it and as you say it's complete magical thinking i don't know if my theory is totally whack but it came to me the other day that that was sort of no i i think i think that makes sense it's funny musonius rufus one of the stokes he was saying if the audience is responding it's a sign the philosopher Is not delivering hard truths he
was like they should be sitting there in complete silence because their mind has been blown but no i i think you make a good point like we've lost the ability or maybe we've never had it but we're struggling with the idea that a lot of truths are uncomfortable a lot of truths are complicated and a lot of times the difference between the path we should take And the path we shouldn't take there might only be three or four percentage points of difference between the two like you're you're also seeing this in the pending there's got
to be some magical drug that just treats it or there's got to be you know even mass like oh so i'm wearing a mask now i can just go about my normal life as if everything is fine It's like no actually we're trying to chip away at this thing from all these different angles there is no one silver bullet solution but a lot of bullets that you eventually kill this thing with and we we don't seem to be able to do that we want to glom onto the one thing and then that's the only thing
yeah i mean the a virus is a very boring thing right it's not a living Organism first of all you can't anthropomorphize it right you know we're going to kill this thing it's not a living organism okay and it's very boring it simply lives by this rigorous math right no they have the number one 1.1 it infects more than one person at a time it can expand exponentially right and exponential increases are very hard for us to understand and are very Powerful right so and then the solution is also really kind of boring it's so
simple and you know like wearing a mask and being socially distant and putting up with that kind of sacrifice for four months how unmanly how unmasculine wears a silly little mask i mean you know oh my god no it's much better to believe in Something much a vast conspiracy that this was some nefarious chinese person planted it so that it would destroy america that some kabul of people somewhere in in eastern europe are doing this to destroy donald trump or that you know on and on and on and that maybe yeah as you say you
know one thing will solve it it's as if people can't think of two Things at the same time it's such it's magical thing if it's also black and white thinking right so if if some reason it comes out that masks aren't the only solution that you know there are limits to mask well then that was totally false fauchi was wrong trump is right masks are silly no there's nuance science is full of nuances Masks help they don't do the whole thing you have to do this other thing it's not very sexy or exciting it's not
like csi miami it doesn't have an exciting ending it's not all masking it's not people shooting with guns it's very simple people don't want to believe in something so simple and boring as that you know i i think this goes to the the point of your book mastery too which is like People want to think that to become great at something it's a hundred percent genetics or they want to think it's a hundred percent hard work or they want to think that it's you know it's oh it's 10 000 hours so if i put in
10 000 hours i automatically become this you know and and the reality is it's complicated that i think a lot of these things are Art more than they are a science what i like about your book is you're like no no it's really really hard but if you follow these basic principles more often than not you will get close to where you want to end up and i think that's also with the 48 laws of power i hear people do this all the time they go but some of the laws contradict each other so therefore
the whole book must be false like It's uh yes life is complicated sometimes you have to do this and sometimes you have to do that how is that hard for you to understand well even taking it a step further i said in the intro and i use the last law to say i am contradicting myself be formless right don't listen to a writer think sometimes that maybe he's wrong and every chapter ends with a reversal saying that this law sucks that you have To look at it from the opposite angle and still people go into
that black and white thinking that you know he's contradicting himself but the thing with mastery was i was actually worried that this book would not sell at all because the message is so kind of not what people want to hear right particularly in an age where you've got your phone in front of you It has such power and you can do whatever you want to a degree that nobody in history has ever experienced and so it creates this belief that you can have the same kind of effect with anything in life that things should become
easily that you should be able to hack your way quickly through you know some some app that comes that you get or whatever and get power really quickly and easily And so i thought god i am swimming against the tide because i'm telling you i'm delivering some bad news the human brain evolved millions of years ago and you know over the course of of you know let's say hundreds of thousands of years and in one generation you're not going to change the human brain because of technology so you have to understand that our Brains are
designed to practice things to learn to be patient develop discipline what a bleak message oh i've got to put in that many hours oh i have to be disciplined oh i have to learn how to fail oh my god i don't want to hear that but the good news is the book has sold well and it's really resonated with a lot of people so i think in this culture of so much of so many sugar pills of feeding people so much crap that i think a lot of people their human nature revolts against something inside
says i don't want that anymore i want a dose of reality i want somebody to splash some cold water on my face i know you're fascinated with eastern philosophy i think western philosophy tends to be so logical and and attempts to be so Rational do you think there's maybe some additional merit then in the eastern stuff where it seems like these sort of zen koans and and these riddles and and and and some of these questions they ask it almost seems like they're embracing the paradoxical nature of reality and the contradictions and the the unknowableness
of it all yeah very Much so where i found that the most interesting was when i did my war book and i got into strategy and asian strategy and um you know you would think strategy is a very kind of heavy western concept you know you do this and this results it's very cause and effect consequential step a will lead to b would lead to c And you plan out and you map it you know val clouds of it so whatever and then you go into sun tzu and it's like whoa what is he saying
it's like this this reality that we're dealing with is very nuanced it's it's it's very hard to see it's like an artist you say and you you take action a and it won't lead to b it could lead to c it could lead to d so where do you go And i was confronted with this i decided i would read a version of the art of war that went through all of the chinese characters obviously don't read chinese but it explained literally what each character meant so you were reading a much more direct translation and
then it made me realize that this is not how we think right so to give you an example He talks about potentiality of power so you want to put the art of war is to put yourself in a position this could be in business or any strategy where you have the potential of great momentum of great power right it's not about a will lead to b it's about a position can be somewhat nebulous and what are these positions of power he compares it to a stringing of a bow that beau has potential force behind it
Or a boulder on top of a mountain and then he talks about how you can do that in warfare and i thought this is a whole other way of thinking it's much more holistic it's much more nuanced it's much more artful and it's more closer to reality so to get back to your point people think of zen as a kind of religion and it is theoretically a religion Something that i'm delved into very deeply but more than anything zen is the philosophy of reality it's trying to connect you to what the world really is like
and it starts from the premise which buddhism does that your mind is inherently living in illusion because you're separating yourself from the world and the world isn't like that you actually are a part of the world That you're in so that way of thinking deeply deeply excites me because it contains you know possibilities of things being the opposite so something that's so extreme turns into its opposite which is something very kind of a very powerful part of chinese philosophy and in the laws of human nature i talk about how people who appear to be so
One quality are actually disguised in the opposite quality and they continually turn into each other you know the shadow side of human nature these are things that i've you know absorbed from years of reading asian philosophy i wanted to go back to this idea of sort of people have some of these irrational beliefs they've picked up these stories this entertainment Sort of bias that we have uh nasim talib he's like stories are powerful and he says the only way to to beat a story is to replace it with another story given your writing on seduction
which to me i sort of expand seduction out from just you know sort of sexual or relationship seduction but it seems like what you're really talking about is if you want to combat some of this Propensity for entertainment or this magical thinking we have to combat it with a better story or something you know you know what i mean so how how do you suggest leaders and people think about like if you let's say you knew someone who is starting to believe in pandemic you can't just go that's stupid you're an idiot how do you
walk them back from that it's Not easy if i had the magical answer to that there's no magical pill for that either right but you have to kind of enter their world first a little bit to understand you know where where these things come from so you know part of that is you say is understanding their story and you you would have to maybe watch pandemic which i'm afraid i did gave me a headache you weren't convinced No i wasn't convinced what i did see through was all the tricks the music the narrator's voice i
totally deconstructed in my mind all the little tricks that it used to create this illusion of some kind of menace etc but i watched it and i could see its seductive power in the sense of what we were talking about where people want to believe in stories They want a villain they want something simple and easy to digest they want a kind of vague conspiracy in which they can project their own little neuroses and problems i saw its seductive appeal and so maybe in that sense what you're talking about is i would have to create
a kind of counter narrative that also was seductive but i don't know how you do that sometimes people need to Be confronted with reality sure but they need to be confronted with reality in a way that doesn't offend that doesn't say you're stupid you know i talk about that in human nature and i see that every day in the world you know there's somebody you disagree with you think they're wrong in fact you're sure of it and you'd call them on it all you're doing is making them more Certain that they're right because nobody wants
to admit that they're stupid so you have to be able to understand people's insecurities and what led them to believe in plandemic in order to create a possible alternative scenario you know so i don't know what that would be i've had moments where elusive moments where i thought of a way to maybe Appeal to people in this in the sense of creating a kind of narrative of the science of it and the virus and kind of the excitement that comes from you know actually you know because one thing that that irritates the hell out of
me is people generally love and trust science they do it tacitly they do it because they Drive a car and they assume that the technology is there in a plane they go to a doctor when they have a disease and they they tacitly believe that there's an expert in their signs and it will solve problems for them but science isn't sometimes very sexy you know it doesn't it doesn't necessarily please you it's an inconvenient truth what would be Your counter narrative well i i don't know exactly but like let's say we're thinking and someone's uh
someone lives in some rust belt town in a in a mobile home you know they're they're not in good shape because they you know they don't eat well because they live in a food desert maybe their community has been decimated by opioids and you know the the the job market is Not robust for someone who isn't educated when you hear this idea like let's make america great again that is that taps into exactly how you're feeling and i think i think the rational community if you will and and i think that can include a whole
swath of the political spectrum has seems like has not done a particularly good job You know i forget who said it but leaders are dispensers of hope you know we there's not really a narrative that dispenses hope that dispenses agency that dispenses anything worth believing in yeah i misunderstood your question yeah i completely believe it i completely agree with you and so like a mistake that the people in the democratic party are on the left will make Is not having a counter slogan to make america great again right slogans people love slogans his build back
better is so awkward right it's not the same doesn't have the same ring so it's they're very democrats have always been so weak in that because they believe they're technocrats they believe that if they just tell people the truth about the economy but it's not seductive and i always go back to the only Democrat in my memory who did this was john f kennedy he was a genius at marketing on the level of of trump because that is the one element that trump is good at you know kennedy had the new frontier you know he
realized that we're emerging out of the boring eisenhower years which really weren't so boring right you know he created this idea and now we're returning to our pioneer myths our frontier is now outer space we're Going to go to the moon we're going to be the first people to go to the moon we're going to be so technologically advanced that we're like the pioneers in the 19th century it was really powerful and seductive and it worked brilliantly i agree with you completely you need us you need to seduce people and you can't be afraid of
doing that you know even you know like bernie sanders he created A cult like following let's say what it is it's a cult but he was actually pretty good at creating these kind of slogans and these kind of quick ideas that people could digest about the one percent etc you might hate him but he was good at it but so many democrats particularly the ones that we nominate suck at it and they suck at it royally because they think they just need to Deliver bullet poi a list of things that we must do we must
do this for education this for health and you can just see people falling asleep as they do it i completely agree with you i misunderstood your question no no i i think it applies to the pandemic too like i'll talk about that in a second but yeah i remember in the campaign uh in 2016 Hillary's response to make america great which is actually you know as nationalistic and stupid as it is in a lot of ways it makes sense there's a sort of an immediacy that makes sense and her response to that instead of a
better story was america is great because it is good you know and it's like good is not as good as good as great that's what words mean and second You're telling people who are unhappy that actually they're wrong to be unhappy because america is already great you know what i mean like you're not you you have to tell a better story and it seems like we struggle to do that well the thing is you know to be a leader today to win an election is extremely complicated because we're very divided Yeah right we have niche
groups these little beliefs you know identity politics wherever you want to determine and and and even on the right they have their little niche groups so to unite the country to win an election you have to create a narrative you have to tell people this is what it means to be american right nobody ever does that i can't recall In my lifetime you know you could say trump somehow some does ronald reagan perhaps did is an example but what does it mean to be an american in 2020 it's a very strange time we're going through
we're a very diverse country with all of these you know it's not the same in wisconsin as in california and new york and we have these different isolated pockets what will unite us what will create a Grand sense of we are a country we don't need to hate each other i can actually appreciate that trump voter in michigan he's an american as i am he has the same you know frustrations with the health care system that i do what unites us how do you create a narrative that makes people emotional that makes people actually want
to think that this is what the future of America damn it if i could just get inside of a politician's head to create that narrative that's like the one thing that's so missing and there's so much potential power behind that well no i was very power it's not like a nazi type power but but but it it is very volatile power like i mean uh we're recording this the day after The 19th anniversary of 9 11 and to think you know there was the there was all that energy you know those planes crash into those
towers and government the united states government has an opportunity what story are we going to tell ourselves about this event and then how are we going to direct that energy you know the war on terror is a story it's just probably the wrong story and we ended up Telling a story that you know cost america trillions of dollars thousands of lives and and almost certainly made us less safe than we were uh you know before and and you know why is why is china ascendant and america somewhat stagnant it's you know china didn't spend several
trillions of dollars you know uh for for very little gain in the Middle east over the last 20 years yeah i mean um the the narrative that you create has has to be reality based to some extent and it has to be pro-social you know so the reality the narrative of of this is our enemy we must destroy them the war on terror was kind of the false way of uniting people so i agree with you there is a kind of cult-like nazi way of Uniting people behind a cause that is very evil that can
take the energy in a crowd and make it very very dangerous so yeah i agree with you but you know if i'm talking about a narrative nowadays that you unite people it's look we're the most powerful country we used to be i don't know how long we'll watch longer we can say that but in quotes we're the most Technologically powerful country in in the in the world look look what we've done look at the science look we've created look at our business look at our our culture etc and why can't we see this this is
this is our new forefront the new frontier to do kennedy to bring back to kennedy we're going to solve all the incredible problems in the world through being a magnet for the greatest thinkers in the world We're going to we're going to solve global warming and we're going to make it economic economically profitable you can make that narrative pro-social it doesn't have to be evil and cult-like and i think kennedy's was like that or even reagan's to some extent you know no i i totally agree when you see all this happening And it's it's aggravating
and it's frustrating and it's disappointing how does one prevent themselves from giving in to despair i mean that that's something i think about like how how do you not just go this is crazy i'm gonna be like montagna and i'm just gonna retire to my tower and uh read my books for the rest of my life well that is kind of what i'm doing i'm kind of being like montagna i am kind of retired To my tower and working on my next book i mean i'm an exception so it's not really easy fair for me
to say because you know thank god i have books to write and i can absorb myself in 3 000 over 3 000 years of history and get outside of this time but you know some perspective will help i had a chapter in my laws of human nature about the generation phenomenon there's a great book called generations By these two writers that came out of the 90s that show these incredible patterns through history that that happened in sequences of four and so there's there's a kind of a crisis generation which i believe is what is millennials
people who live through 20 this crash of 08 and now this and then there's the revolutionary generation where something new is Created where people are so tired of what's going on in the world particularly young people because it's only young people that ever really create change and change is very necessary in this world and so the only hopeful thing is that i think young people are so sick of the narrative they've been fed about the world Particularly from boomers about this is what america is this is what prosperity is this is what our future is
that they're so sick of it they're so tuned out of it that if they could ever get the energy together they could create something very powerful and new my only hope is that people are going to get tired of this and that this is what has has saved us in the past That we've gone through these deep moments and sometimes these moments can last well over a hundred years there can be the dark ages in our history that lasts four centuries or something like that you know but at a point is reached where the human
spirit rebels and returns to its origin and returns to something powerful and healthy because we know we don't like you know if you eat a lot of junk food You feel sick your body feels sick sure you consume a lot of information and things that are just entertainment on the internet you kind of also feel sick like you're disconnected from from who you are from your own body from the world you rebel you're sick of it and so we need in some ways i i don't want to people are going to kill me for saying
this but we also somewhat need a kind of second Revolution in america of you know bringing all of the great things of our country and updating them to where the world is right now and my only hope is that young people are so sick of the way things are that they're going to be the catalysts of change i could be wrong and it may never happen but that's what makes me not want to kill myself right now So so let's say that that some of this energy does come together and maybe there have been moments
right there have been marches in the streets whether it's about george floyd or whether it's about the parkland shooting or whether it's about climate change or the you know the women's march whatever it is it seems like we get these moments of energy but the wave crests before it has a Chance to do anything and and i think part of the reason that that seems to happen is that the entrenched interests are so good and so used to sort of parrying these blows that that that that they don't end up landing and so i'm curious
like what's your advice to you know an incipient active activist movement that is fighting an enemy that is not playing by the rules Like if you're belarus right now and you are up against the full power of the state um what do you do you do what you're doing and those are brilliant beautiful examples and i'm following with great interest i mean look what happened in ukraine i was recently in ukraine ukraine's an amazing beautiful country people are very smart there there's there's a lot of great tech things of Technology that are coming from ukraine
they overthrew one of the most corrupt oligarchies in modern times now things aren't perfect there there's still levels of corruption they're still fighting it but you know i was reading the paper this morning in the washington post about somebody i think you really need to include in your book on courage okay i think he's the most courageous Person in the world today and that's a lexi navalny right the guy who was poisoned by the russians sure unbelievably brave read the washington post article today okay unbelievably brave what he's put up with completely incorruptible and his
strategy providing the most in trend you think it's bad maybe in the united states try fighting against putin and russia And you'll see that you're hitting a block of cement more than anything but it's not impossible and the the solution is because i've researched this a lot and thought a lot about it is visibility you need to be out there in the streets and you need to not let your energy dissolve and you need to be constantly publicizing the corruption and you can't be naive so What you're talking about is entrenched powers co-opting the the
anger on the streets and so citibank will have an ad saying we're all with you you know george floyd blah blah blah they're co-opting it they're calling your energy and they're turning it into their own thing you must call them out on that you must not be seduced by these little crumbs that they try and Throw at you you need to keep your narrative together which is there is rampant corruption in this country there are oligarchs whatever country you're talking about you need to be revealing that for what it is and if you look at
alexia navalny and why he's so brilliant you talk about seduction he creates these youtube videos i don't know if you Ever watched any of them no they have them they have them with subtitles they're fantastic he has managed to create these these i don't know 20 minute i don't know how long they i don't remember videos detailing the corruption in russia he gets these drones to pass over oligarch's mansions and he films their pawns filled with ducks and swans and their tennis courts in their Swimming pools and he puts it together in a really powerful
video and says look russians this is what they're stealing they're stealing your money this is how our president uh medvedev has 1.4 billion dollars put into his estate well meanwhile you are starving and you're dying from the pandemic etc etc they're powerful so you have to be entertaining And you have to be constantly visible if you're marching in the streets you can't let the energy dissolve and you have to create a narrative that's strong and you can't be naive you can't let yourself be seduced by these people who are trying to co-opt you and i've
been i've been fascinated about the civil rights movement uh lately and reading a lot about it i think maybe one of the things we get Wrong about it too is that you know we think it's like oh you know martin luther king just took people to the streets and so we think like oh what we need to you know to get change is just to have a lot of protesters or demonstrators like when you really think about what like the montgomery bus boycott was or some of his garbage boycotts he was he wasn't just demonstrating
But he was exerting real pressure that had that the leaders had to alleviate and and the only way to alleviate it was to get into his demands and so i think that's what like you know we do this remember after 2016 there was a march for science in america or something like that that's not exerting any pressure on anyone and there's no goals of that move you know what i mean we just think that organization is key But there has to be another component well i mean but martin luther king definitely had what i'm talking
about he definitely wanted to keep these things visible constantly in the presence his but what you're saying is true you have to be strategic that's the difference right and martin luther king was a brilliant strategist so he understood that the goal of his Campaigns were the white liberals sitting in front of their television sets in janesville wisconsin or in illinois right they're going to see images of children 12 years old being beaten by brutal black cops and their dogs etc and they're going to be awakened to the reality of america and to do that he
had to make things extremely visible he had to be Constantly out on the streets and he had to even provoke the other side so one of the things that you know we tend to create these saints and martin luther king was not a saint but she was very human but he had a decision in one of his rallies whether somebody proposed letting school children 11 12 years old participate in the demonstration which would probably End up violent and people said oh martin you can't do that that's terrible it's gonna that's not ethical and this very
religious man this preacher this priest you know said no it's the right idea and he did it and it was very very powerful it was one of the key moments in the movement so yeah there are times when you can't exert pressure Like on you want police departments to change and you're out on the streets or let's say the election is you know there's fraud and and there's like the 2000 movement where the brooks brothers revolution occurred and they all you know tried to change the results in florida you know what i'm referring to yeah
um so The leverage in that particular case is only going to be by demonstration in mass numbers i mean that's so the both components are important in belarus it's the fact that 100 000 people in a small country are in the streets of minsk basically running the risk of being beaten or killed and that is incredibly powerful it has a snowball Effect where everybody wakes up so visibility and being on the streets is one component very important but you have to also be strategic and do what you're saying yeah no no i think i think
that's right and and it that does seem like something people who have kind of turned up their noses at your books right now especially millennials i think need to be reading because They're when the other side is not playing by the rules you have to you although you do have to maintain the moral high ground which you talk about it's like on the one hand you got to be kind of a lyndon johnson you have to take the moral high ground here but then in the smoke-filled rooms or in secret you got to know how
to grab somebody by the balls and twist You know and and i think we're we're lacking that yeah i mean i was thinking about it today i was reading the paper i don't remember what the story is where i'm seeing republicans can play very dirty yeah you know they play this kind of asymmetric warfare where they're willing to do anything when it comes to limiting voting rights or Working with the post office they'll do anything to keep on power and the democrats i don't want to get involved in that kind of nasty stuff you know
it's too dirty we're pure man i've been hating that for my whole life it makes me sick you know read about franklin delano roosevelt one of our greatest presidents and one of our most liberal that guy the person who wrote the best Biography called the lion and the fox he was machiavelli incarnate he was incredibly strategic nobody played more hardball than franklin delano roosevelt and he knew how to do it and he was successful at it and so you know that's what the world is like and if you're going to organize a movement you have
to realize that you can your hands are going to have to get a little Bit dirty and then even martin luther king was willing to get his hands dirty in a demonstration and even gandhi i talked about in my war book gandhi was incredibly strategic he knew that if he was did passive resistance and they were being beaten up by white british people policemen those in england be seeing this and they'd be revolted by it Disgusted by he was willing to have that happen he was very strategic if gandhi and martin luther king were strategic
people who knew how to play tough and hardball why can't you get off your high horse and and be more strategic and be willing to get your fingers a little bit dirty and play a little bit dirty and con you're not going to lose yourself you're going to win but no it's like uh Bill belichick talks about the patriot way and no ego and all and then you know he's also looking for every you know every possible thing he can do up to the line and sometimes he's willing to to see if he can get
away with crossing the line you know what i mean and and that's what it takes to be dominant at that level i think Or or look at churchill in in world war ii you know read the book i recommended to you the body lives uh great book you know the levels of deception and this things that kind of cross an ethical boundary that you would normally never do in wartime he was willing to do because the stakes were so high well the stakes are pretty high right Now and sometimes you have to be willing to
go a little bit past that boundary so when you i thought maybe we'd close with with some of the maybe to bring it full circle it strikes me that there there are some people who are just sort of being manipulated because they're uneducated they're being manipulated because they don't have the training that we're talking about they're being manipulated Because they're vulnerable whatever and then it it but it also seems like there's a part of this that it's people it like there's this that quota you can't con an honest man it seems like some of the
the the people that are falling for this they should know better and in fact why they don't know better is because they think they're the ones that are getting the better deal out of it do you know what i mean it's like i think Machiavelli says like he who deceives his most easily deceived well i mean uh look at trump and bob woodward trump is the one who's who's incredibly deceptive who likes to let's just call a spade a spade he's he lies a lot you know i don't anybody even a trump supporter would deny
that and here comes bob woodward who kind of says you know i'm going to write a book and bob woodward has 18 books behind him revealing what he does he like take rips you to pieces he shows your innards he makes you look as ugly as you can and he agrees to it the deceiver was deceived con artists are often conned i have the story in the 48 laws of the greatest comment that ever lived in america yellowkid vile and how he was conned by these two very Beautiful women on on on a boat once
you know and he realized that you know i'm very much open to it the idea is you know when we look at the world we like to think of evil people and victims it's part of our black and white magical thinking there are evil people out there and there's poor oppressed victims and the thing about con the reason i try to show in con artists Or with cults is i'm fascinated by the psychology of people who fall for it and it's not so much that they are victims in this particular instance they want to believe
in the khan there's an old latin expression i wrote it down here mundus de quipeks ergo the world wants to be deceived therefore deceive them is the expression people want to be fed Some convenient beautiful truth you can have easy money we're gonna do this little thing here and you're gonna get thousands of dollars without ever doing anything right wow okay i'll do it you know or whatever the story is whatever the con is you want to believe in it you're a sucker you're a dupe because of human nature and we all have that part
of us You want to believe in this easy route to power and money right so the end thing is you have to be responsible for yourself you can't be whining that you were the victim that you were conned or that you were deceived of course you'll very rarely ever admit that you have to build rational defenses in your mind you have to be willing and this comes From a lot of reading to question everything to question your own beliefs to say am i actually in a cult maybe i am have i actually been conned maybe
i albert green have been gone and i have been con myself personally you have to look at yourself that is the last line of defense for any kind of world we live in with so much deceiving and conning going on yeah i remember you tell a story i think It's in 40 laws of power about this con they do where they approach someone and they say hey do you want to fix a boxing match with me yeah and then you're you're you're in the you think you're tricking other people and then and then they stage
this elaborate ruse where one of the one of the the boxers gets killed and then they flee with the money but you don't ever tell anyone about it because you would Have to admit that you were fixing a boxing match yeah it's the old russian trick of compramont so if your compromise couldn't uncompromised in the actual con you're never going to come out and go to the authorities because a it shows how stupid you were and b you're admitting guilt on your own part so that's one of the oldest cons in the book yeah yeah
no compromi is a fascinating and Very relevant thing these days and i think i was reading an interview with an fbi agent and they were saying you know it's not people think that to be compromised means that you're a trader like you're somehow some double agent and he's saying being compromised just means there's a reason that you can't be fully honest It's like you have a secret or you have some shame or you have something you don't want to admit and that's what it is and i think you know when people talk about this election
interference and all this stuff like no it's not just politics i mean there's college professors who've been taking research money from china we have like this is why i think ethical lines And holding yourself to a high standard is so important you don't want to be compromised because once you're compromised you're not yourself anymore well it's it's the chapter in 48 laws of power about your reputation and there is an element that isn't maybe so ethical in that it's a power thing but it it it is ethical in the sense that your reputation is your
most important thing that you have And if you sully it in the least sense particularly in this era with so much visibility and social media will run one one wrong step will resonate you know those ways will go in a matter of minutes across social media you have to be very careful and you have to see that there are all kinds of compromising factors out there so yeah i myself have been in a position Where people have been offering me money from somewhat dubious sources and i say no no way because i know it'll come
out at some point and people will go oh look robert green how can we trust his books he's actually receiving money from this somewhat corrupt group or that somewhat corrupt group you know i'm not saying that i'm pure but i'm i'm very much aware That i myself have been the target of compromised campaigns before and i take a step back and i go no my reputation is the most important thing that i have well no and that's why you know controlling your ego is so important i i not the same level but everyone saw you
know you get a television request to be on rt or something and on the one hand you're like oh that Would be good and then you're like ah i know why this is happening right and or or you know we can also corrupt ourselves like how many people get themselves in trouble because three years ago they said something dumb on twitter because they couldn't control their emotions and now you know uh now they can't be president or whatever it is You know we tend to separate ourselves from other people and point fingers and i know
how easy it is to fall for these things i know like if you're in a group situation you're working in an office like we have when we were in american apparel we recently discussed this the pressures that you're feeling to conform and to maybe do things that you normally wouldn't do because you're being asked To do it and the group pressure is very powerful and then you'll let slip some of those ethical principles that you have i know i've felt that pull myself and i maybe even at some points have have slipped a little bit
i'll admit that you know i understand how difficult it can be but as you as you say at some point you you look at yourself And you go this is who i am this is what i stand for it's more important than any kind of momentary friction i'm going to get from the boss or from ever and i'm not going to go past that particular limit no i love it anything else we should cover that we haven't covered i don't know i don't know i think we covered you the world as it is how about
you yeah i don't know I think it's so hard to know where we are in the sort of levels of emergency do you know what i mean like you know when is when is when is this the early sign and there's still something that can be done about it to take it out of the complicated political context let's say you're convinced that that we're entering an economic bubble So you could sell right at the beginning of the bubble and be totally safe but as they say the remark the market can remain irrational longer than you
can remain solvent and so there's this tricky balance of like do you ride it up you know and risk maybe taking it too far do you or do you risk taking your chips off the table too early and so i think in a political and in a social context we're In this weird environment where you know where are we on the spectrum from you know america the the dream and you know russia or germany and how do you know well if i had that answer i would be the most powerful man in the universe you
know we don't have perspective to be even to be someone who writes books more if you have to have humility and realize there Are limits to what you know so i read a lot of history and i see a lot of patterns and a part of me says that things are pretty damn dire that certain guardrails in our democracy are furthering away but to be honest with you what scares me more than anything is the levels of irrationality and magical thinking and people not able to kind of look at Themselves and be somewhat self-aware and
that disconnect from reality and as i say i kind of think it's from decades of being entertained and being kind of brainwashed is what frightens me the most because even if let's say trump is gone let's say people are coming in they're fixing things etc that's not going to change this consciousness that people have that is is you know kind of like the Equivalent of eating junk food so that thing that part of it makes me a little bit depressed because you need to change people's consciousness more than anything on a deep level you know
and the other thing that's very frightening now that we've seen before in history it's not the first time is the extremity of the partisanship of the tribalism that we're going through And you know i could point through other moments in history that have been equally tribal of course before social media which has only exacerbated it but it's kind of like this hall of mirrors that you enter you can't argue with people anymore right because the moment you say this is what i i think and you're challenging them oh you're you're just this you're just a
A liberal you're just a trump supporter you know you've drunk the kool-aid i get that all the way oh robert you've drunk the kool-aid whereas in fact you were the one that's trying but the people who drink the think everybody else are the ones that have drunk it that's the nature of it even in jonestown where the expression comes you drank the coulee they thought everybody outside of jonestown Had drunk their own kool-aid that's the kind of world we live in it's like alice in wonderland which jared kushner was saying ironically enough kind of is
the book that encapsulates the trump presidency but that's kind of the world we're living in no gas lighting is the uh operative term too not just because of what it means like it it's rooted in the in the story of a man Who's sort of flicking off the gas lights and and slowly tricking i think his spouse about it but but you know if you if you expand that out it's like some gas is leaked into the room and it's made us all irrational and uh we we can't think straight and the worst part is
we can't think straight but we think that we are thinking straight and that about sums up the nightmare that We're in i think that sums it up you're right i can't think of a better way of putting it well it was amazing to talk to you and uh let's do this again for sure yeah and you have a book coming out don't you i do yeah lives of the of the stoics uh september 29th i encourage all of my followers and readers if you don't i mean i'm sure all of you Read ronald holiday but
you really should go out this is going to be a great book when is it come out september 29th okay thank you i appreciate it welcome for the stoics wisdom was an ongoing process it was a journey zeno said that well-being is realized by small steps but it's no small thing so how do we do that well i suggest the daily stoic email you can sign up at dailystoke.com Email one email every single day totally free the best wisdom and insights from the stoics from zeno to marcus aurelius epictetus and seneca sign up start your
journey let me know what you think
