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Robert Greene: Do You Think You’re In Control? Think Again.

Lace Gilger
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How did one of the greatest geniuses of all time lose his life savings overnight? Despite our illusions of rationality, even the most brilliant humans are not rational at all. We tell ourselves that it’s always the other person who is irrational, envious, and aggressive, and that it’s never us. But science shows that all of our brains are remarkably similar, sculpted by evolution to have baked in biases and bad habits. No one is exempted from the laws of human nature. In this episode we explore the path that all the world’s greatest strategists have used to master their own irrationality and achieve mastery with our legendary guest Robert Greene.

Robert Greene is an author known for his books on strategy, power, and seduction. He has written six international bestsellers: The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law, Mastery, and The Laws of Human Nature. In addition to having a strong following within the business world and a deep following in Washington, DC, Greene’s books are hailed by everyone from war historians to the biggest musicians in the industry (including Jay-Z, Drake, and 50 Cent).

  • How one of the greatest geniuses of all time lost his life savings overnight. Could it happen to you?

  • Even the most brilliant people on the planet struggle to understand human nature.

  • Despite our illusions of rationality, humans are not rational at all - we are governed by our emotions.

  • We are born irrational, we are governed by our emotions.

  • You think you are in control. You’re not.

  • To be rational requires deep work and training.

  • All the most important neuroscientist make the same point - that the most primitive parts of our brain - the limbic system - gives off hormonal and electrical signals that are much more powerful than anything coming from the neocortex or cerebral cortex.

  • Fear is a viral emotion that leads to a lot of irrationality.

  • You really are a stranger to yourself. There’s a stranger inside of you.

  • The journey is not just about understanding others, but it really begins with self awareness and understanding yourself.

  • If you learn how to alter your attitude and approach people with a more open spirit it could transform your life.

  • Many forces from evolution that are wired into our brains used to be adaptive, now they can be dangerous and even counter productive

  • These primitive elemental forces form the cornerstones of human nature

  • Are the emotions that you’re feeling actually from your life? Did they come from you or did they come from other people?

  • We need to be independent, we need to think for ourselves, we need to gain control of our emotional responses.

  • You need to be able to form a reasonable, rational plan for yourself , your life, your business

  • You can’t begin to be a rational strategist in life until you are aware of your own emotions

  • Our brains are remarkably similar. No one is excepted from these laws.

  • The systems and ways your brain function are predictable.

  • It begins with humility. Turn your internal self absorption around.

  • Rationality is being aware of your irrationality. Being aware of the emotions that govern your decisions.

  • Step back. Cultivating the ability to step away, to pull out of tunnel vision, to see a bigger picture, is a cornerstone of rational thinking and strategic thinking.

  • You will never become a rational strategist until you come to terms with the fact that you are governed by emotions.

  • The brain operates by simplifying information - we often don’t have access to the SOURCE of our feelings and emotions.

  • You’re not aware of how other people perceive you. You’re stuck in your own tunnel vision of your own thoughts and preoccupations.

  • Stop reacting and have a more detached view towards life. What makes you react all the time is that you’re locked inside of yourself - you’re not paying attention to others. You’re not paying attention to your own emotions.

  • You can’t succeed in this world if you’re bad with people.

  • Understanding other people makes your life “1000x easier"

  • One of the most important decisions in your life is who you choose to partner with - who you choose to keep very close to you. And we often make the worst decisions in these areas because our decision making is clouded with emotion.

  • Absorb your mind in the thoughts, experiences, and world's of other people.

  • You need other people to do anything in life. Investing in the skill of influencing them is one fo the most powerful things you can invest in.

  • Focus on and be deeply interested in other people. Want to understand their perspective and where they are coming from.

  • The ability to understand people deeply actually makes it easier to deal with toxic people.

  • How you can soften people’s resistance by confirming their self opinion

  • How LBJ was a master influencer and could melt away anyone’s defensiveness

  • Respond to people as they ARE not as you want them to be

  • We often mistake the appearance of people for their reality. If someone seems extremely convinced and confident, we think they must be correct. The truth is, the more convicted someone is about an idea, the more you need to be suspicious - because they are likely covering up their own weaknesses and insecurities.

  • Your natural tendency as you get older is for your mind to close up.

  • Open, curious, having a mindset of discovery and openness is much more powerful than a deeply convicted rigid mindset. Having a rigid perspective is destroying your mind.

  • A creative mind is incredibly flexible. That’s the quality of any truly great artist, entrepreneur, or political figure.

  • Accept and realize that you don’t understand the world, you often don’t even truly understand yourself. What you think you know will probably be considered ridiculous in several centuries. Have humility and curiosity and open. Don’t be so sure of what you think you know.

  • Assume formlessness - be like water. It’s one of the oldest ideas in strategies.

  • It’s the path that ALL of the great strategists in life have followed. Do you want power, creativity, success, and influence? OPEN UP YOUR MIND.

  • Homework: Use a journal or simply do a thought experiment in your own head - in the course of a day you will feel many different emotions - dig into those emotions and understand what is going on with yourself and your own emotions. Try to find one moment, one emotion, and think about the root cause, think about where that emotion comes from. Where does it REALLY come from? Question. Dig. Think before your act. Try to come up with one little nugget about yourself and why you feel that way and analyze it instead of giving into it.

  • When meditating - ask yourself “Why are you thinking that, you don’t have to worry about that right now?” when a random thought comes up.

Thank you so much for listening!

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:11.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than four million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

How did one of the greatest geniuses of all time lose his life savings overnight? Despite our illusions of rationality, even the most brilliant humans are not rational at all. We tell ourselves that it's always the other person who's irrational, envious and aggressive and that it's never us. Science shows that all of our brains are remarkably similar, sculpted by evolution to have baked in biases and bad habits. No one is exempted from the laws of human nature.

In this episode, we explore the path that all of the world's greatest strategists have used to master their own irrationality and achieve mastery with our legendary guest, Robert Greene.

I was recently closing a big software deal and I was thinking about how the lessons and themes from the Science of Success have been so valuable to me as an investor and business owner. I realized that I'm leaving a lot of value that I could be creating for you, the listeners on the table. I believe that many of the things that we teach on the Science of Success are some of the biggest and most important business success factors today.

To that end, we're launching a new Science of Success segment focused on business. These episodes will air every other Tuesday and will not interrupt your regularly scheduled Science of Success programming. Everything we teach on the show can be applied to achieving success in your business life. Now, we're going to show you how to do that, along with some interviews of the world's top business experts. With that, I hope you enjoy this business-focused episode of the Science of Success.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word smarter, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we discussed crazy research that can predict 94% of the time whether or not your relationship will be successful. We revealed why you should never give someone unsolicited advice. We shared the communication Swiss Army knife that you can use to build rapport, influence anyone and deepen the most important relationships in your life, all that and much more in our previous interview with Michael S. Sorensen. If you want to level up the most important relationships in your life, listen to our previous episode.

Now, for our interview with Robert. Please note, this episode contains profanity.

[0:03:27.8] MB: Today, we have another legendary guest on the show, Robert Greene. Robert is an author known for his books on strategy, power and seduction. He's written six international bestsellers, The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 strategies of War, The 50th Law, Mastery and The laws of Human Nature. In addition to having a strong following within the business world and a deep following in Washington, his books have been hailed by everyone from war historians to the biggest musicians in the world, people like Jay-Z, Drake and 50 Cent. Robert, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:04:00.7] RG: Thanks for having me, Matt. I really appreciate being on your great podcast here.

[0:04:04.4] MB: Well, we're so excited to have you on the show. As I was telling you in the pre-show, the research for this episode was so hard, because there's so many incredible topics that we could dig in to. I had to just throw out 48 Laws of Power, can't even get into that. Most of the stuff in Mastery, we probably won't get into, but there's a rich treasure trove of lessons and ideas from Laws of Human Nature that I think we can start with and really dig into.

To open things up, you had a great quote in the book from Isaac Newton and I'll paraphrase it a little bit; one of the most legendary physicists of all time and the quote was basically, “I can understand the laws of the heavenly bodies, but I can't understand the madness of men.” In many ways, that quote inspired the creation of this podcast as well. Our whole quest is how do we understand ourselves and other people and how do we think about it as logically and rationally as possible, because it's so challenging. Tell me a little bit about that quote and how that inspired you to write the book.

[0:04:59.1] RG: Well, that quote is really emblematic for the book as a whole. Basically, the story comes from we think of Isaac Newton as one of the great geniuses of all time, an incredible mathematician and discovered the laws of gravity, he’s set it at that point. What was going on in England in the early 18th century when he was an older man was there was this stock market frenzy of all around this company called the South Sea Company, that was selling shares in the government. Still, I'm not going to go into the nitty-gritty and it's boring. It was a classic story of a bubble, one of the most incredible stories in the history of bubbles that have recurred throughout history.

It swept up everybody, including the King of England, all aristocracy. Coachmen were investing their life savings and suddenly buying mansions. Isaac Newton himself invested 7,000 pounds, almost his whole fortune and he tripled it within a couple months. He sold it, because he thought well, you know, what goes up can go down and I could lose it all and he sold it. Then six months later, people were getting – the frenzy was increasing and he thought, “My God. I got to get back in. Everyone's making more money.” He poured all 21,000 pounds in. Then a few weeks later, the whole thing collapsed like a house of card, like Bernie Madoff’s thing. He lost everything. That's where that quote originated from.

What I found so interesting is here is somebody who is as I said earlier, incredibly brilliant, can figure out the laws of the planets that move far, far away from earth, things that we can't see that are completely invisible. He wrote incredible books about color, etc. He could theorize about the most arcane phenomena in the universe. When it comes to the thing that's most important, that's closest to us all, human nature, people, what makes them tick, what motivates their behavior, he had no clue. He was just as stupid and ignorant as anybody and he fell for this very irrational scheme.

My idea is that we humans have this opinion of ourselves as being very rational, sophisticated, we all have our smartphones and we've evolved so far from our earlier animal origins and we're basically good people and we think before we act. The truth of the matter that I try and make a point in this book, I try to beat this over your head, is that we are not rational at all. We are largely governed by our emotions.

The emotions that seized Isaac Newton was, “Everybody else is making a fortune. I've got to get in on it.” The fear of missing out. We see that all the time in Internet behavior and social media, where you're constantly aware of what other people are doing and you don't want to miss out. You want to be in on what others are doing. Your first consideration isn't, “Is this rational? Is this a good use of my time? Should I really be investing so much money in Bitcoins, or in real estate at this point, or whatever the bubble is?” Or can you step back and actually think rationally?

I make the point that you, you the listener out there, you are not born rational. You are essentially irrational. I include myself in that. I'm not excluding myself. You are born irrational. You are governed by your emotions, largely. You think you're not, you think you're in control, but you are not in control. Your decisions are largely based on emotions, on what pleases you, on what excites you, on what you like.

To be rational in this world requires effort, requires practice, requires training. That's the first law of the law of human nature. That idea that we are largely governed by our emotions and we need to be aware of it is what permeates the entire book.

[0:09:00.8] MB: Such a powerful point. I think it bears underscoring that to do a lot of the research for this book, which is a massive tone and very well-researched, you really dug into a lot of the science and looked at neuroscience and research and all kinds of different work.

[0:09:17.1] RG: Yes. I'm glad you brought that up, because I'm not saying that I'm not just pulling that out of my proverbial you know what, when I say that we're irrational. The neuroscience backs that up. All the most important neuroscientists, including Damasio and Ramachandran and many others make the same point, that the most primitive parts of our brain, the limbic system typically where our emotions are largely based, give off signals, hormonal and electrical signals that are much more powerful than anything that comes from the neocortex, from the cerebral cortex, from the cerebellum.

Emotions are much stronger, give much stronger signals and we pay much greater attention to them than we do to thinking and to ideas. We're essentially, we’re captive of that lizard part of our brain. The evolution of the fear emotion, etcetera. Our species evolved 500,000 years ago, or a million years ago to deal with situations that are not adaptive at all to the 21st century world. Things like the propensity to feel fear and to be caught up in the fear of other people and have it become a viral emotion is extremely wired into our system and leads to a lot of irrationality.

I'm saying in the book that we have to come to terms with who we are, both as a species and both as individuals out there listening to this, that you really are a stranger to yourself. Sometimes you catch this in strange moments in your life, where you suddenly say something, you get angry and then the next day you regret it and you go, “Where did that come from? I don't even know who that was.” Or you invest in something that's foolish and you regret it.

You do actions that seem to you unusual and that surprised you, as if there were another person inside of you. I'm trying to make the point that that is actually who you are, that a lot of the behavior that you don't understand is a signal for things that you're not aware of. This book he's not only geared towards helping you understand people in your world, because we are social animals. Primarily, it's also designed to help you understand yourself, so you can break out some of the negative patterns that are keep holding you back.

[0:11:46.3] MB: You make a great point, which is that this journey is not just about understanding others, but it really begins in many ways with self-awareness and understanding yourself.

[0:11:56.0] RG: Yeah. I mean, take a simple example. I have a chapter in there about attitude. The idea is we all have a particular lens through which we look at the world. Some people, that lens is optimistic, some people it's pessimistic, some people are introverted, some people are extroverted, etc. That energy that you have, that way you have a looking at the world, let's say perhaps it might be defensive, or it might be paranoid, just to put a negative light on it.

When you are interacting with people in your world, you're not aware of the fact that they're picking up your attitude. They're picking up signals from you, non-verbal communication, so much how we communicate to others is non-verbally through the tone of our voice, through the look of our eyes, to how we smile, our body posture.

We're not aware of it and even people who are picking this up are not doing it consciously, but they sense perhaps that you're a defensive, slightly closed person and that makes them in turn defensive and a bit paranoid in dealing with you. As they do that you're going, “Wow, these people don't like me. Maybe my idea that the world is against me is actually correct.” You're not aware of how it starts from you, how so much of what you give out into the world changes how people respond to you. I can go on and on about other areas that you're not aware of.

Simply, I'm trying to show you that there are things that you can control very easily by learning how to alter your attitude, by learning how to approach people with a more open, less defensive spirit and get that reaction in return. These are things that are very simple to control, but you're not aware of how many of the problems in your life, or how many the negative reactions you get actually come from you. Not completely, not always, but a large percentage more than you think.

[0:13:52.4] MB: Such a great point. It's funny, we have tens of thousands of e-mail subscribers and I've sent this one e-mail to tens of thousands of people and the reactions that I get from it are so polarized. Sometimes people are saying, “Wow, I love this. It’s amazing. I love your energy. Thank you so much for sharing this.” Literally, people have sent me all caps, “FU. I hate you. Why are you doing this?” It's such an amazing mirror, because it teaches you that lesson, that a lot of times the reaction of other people is really a reflection of themselves and not you.

[0:14:21.2] RG: Yeah, I have the example in the book of two people – have seen this example happen to me personally. Two people who traveled to Paris when they're young, one person has a negative, slightly defensive attitude. The other person is very open and excited and has an open spirit. The negative person only sees the gloomy weather, the unfriendly people, the dirty streets and the noise, etc. They think, “God, Paris is really overrated. I really hate it.”

The same person who's adventurous and fun-loving thinks, “Well, the language is incredible. Once you get to know the people, they're really interesting. There's so much history.” It's the same stones, it's the same buildings, it's the same river, it's the same bridges, but one person sees it in a very negative light, another person sees it in a positive light. It's all because it's how we look at the world determines what happens to us and what we see.

[0:15:20.6] MB: A moment ago, you touched on this idea that our brains have not evolved, or adapted to exist with the modern world and the stressors and the fears and the things that we deal with in modern society. Tell me a little bit more about that.

[0:15:34.9] RG: We live basically in very small groups of 50 to a 100. Our survival depended on how well we bonded with the group. We developed the capacity to bond with people in a visceral non-verbal way and be extremely susceptible to their emotions, so that if one person in the group, or the tribe felt fear at the sight, perhaps of a leopard in the distance, other members of the group would sense that fear from their co-member and the emotion would pass through them. Then the group could react as a whole very quickly and respond and flee, or whatever it was, or fight.

There was a very important reason for why we are so susceptible to the emotions of other people. That's just one aspect of the ancient wiring of our system. Now, there are not very many leopards roaming the offices in downtown Manhattan. We're not on the savannahs of Africa anymore. The dangers aren't the same. To feel to get so easily caught up in the emotions of other people has a lot of problems. First of all, it leads to irrational behavior, as we see in the crash of 2008, where all of these extremely sophisticated investors like an Isaac Newton, got caught up in this incredible real-estate bubble that finally crashed in 08.

That group mentality, that conformity where the emotional and impact of, “I don't want to miss out. Other people are making money. I'm so excited, etc.” It causes all kinds of problems where the tribe that you belong to on the Internet or wherever, it's a little niche, the people that you listen to, if somebody is outraged or angry about a topic, you get caught up in that anger and it fills you as well. You're not sitting they’re stepping back and going, “Are these emotions that I'm feeling? Are they actually relevant to my life? Do they actually come from me, or do they come from other people?”

In the case of all the investment frenzy in a bubble, it's not coming from you, it's coming from what's happening to other people. A lot of times, your anger has nothing to do with yourself, but you're being caught up in the outrage that other people are feeling. That one aspect, and I could point out others, is not very adapted to a world where we need to be able to be independent, where we need to think for ourselves, where we need to gain control of our emotional responses, but we're not simply reacting to everything that's happening in the world. I want people out there to be good strategists in life. I want them to form a reasonable, rational plan for their future, for their career, or their business for whatever it is.

You cannot begin to be a rational strategist in light, until you're aware of how deeply you're governed by the behavior and emotions of other people. I could go on and list five other kinds of things that were wired into our brains early on, such as our propensity to compare ourselves to other people, what makes us prone to feelings of envy, which has been discerned in chimpanzees. It's a very primate type thing. That's certainly what we see a lot of in social media, where we're so hyper aware of all the great things other people are doing and what we're missing out on.

I can go on and on about other elements as well, but that's just to give you a flavor of the lack of awareness that we have of our true nature, how so much of what determines our behavior are the forces that we are not aware of and can't control. These forces that I'm talking about, the contagiousness of emotions, the propensity to compare, on and on, these are what I call human nature.

[0:19:13.1] MB: I want to dig in to how we start to become rational strategists and cultivate rationality. Before we dig into that, I want to just underscore this point a little bit more and this notion that the primitive primal human nature that underscores our behavior, one of the other themes or ideas from the book is this notion that our brains are remarkably similar and that this applies to everybody. Extrapolate on that a little bit.

[0:19:38.2] RG: Yeah. Glad you brought that up. It's a very important point. Probably, one of the most prevalent things in human nature is that we like to distinguish ourselves. We like to think that we are special. It's always the other person who's a narcissist. “Oh, I'm not a narcissist.” It's always the other person who might feel envy. “Oh, I never feel envy.” It's the other person who's aggressive. “Oh, I'm never aggressive. I'm an angel. I always have the best intentions at heart.” On and on and on.

I'm trying to as I said, beat you over the head with this idea that all of us are cut from the same cloth, all of our brains are remarkably similar in size and in configuration. Of course, there are differences and those differences are very important. For the most part, our brains are wired and are basically of the same size and we're all have systems, ways that the brain function, that transcend us as individuals.

This idea, this propensity that we have to be self-absorbed, which is the source of narcissism, if it's something that's wired into our nature of the reasons that we can't control and have to do with how we're reared in the long years that we spend being reared by our parents unlike any other animal, and that's what makes us self-absorbed for reasons I discuss in the book. If that's part of our nature, then you're not exempt from that, you listening to this right now.

You have definite narcissistic tendencies. The person out there who says, “Oh, no. I'm not a narcissist.” You can be a sure sign that that is a narcissist, because narcissists like to think of themselves as being very special and different. Well, you're not special and different. We all have the same brain, the same propensity, the same tendencies. Yes, some people are more aggressive than others. Yes, some people have more tendencies towards envy. Yes, some people are toxic out there. I talk a lot about the toxic types out there.

There's simply more extreme examples of propensity that exists in all of us humans. I want a bit of humility in you. I'm saying, you need to transform, you need to turn that self-absorption that all of us have, particularly in the day of smartphones, etc. You need to turn that around and turn it into empathy. You need to take that energy and that love that you feel towards yourself and direct it outward at other people and get interested in their lives. You can't do that until you come to terms with the fact that you are basically self-absorbed. It is a very important theme in the book that you are not exempt from the qualities that I'm discussing in this book. I include myself very much in all of those things.

[0:22:17.0] MB: A really powerful point. Even that last bit is critical and obviously, this applies to me, this applies to you, this applies to everybody. To begin the steps towards as you called it earlier, becoming a rational strategist to cultivating humility, you really have to turn the gaze inward and look at yourself and figure out where are these tendencies happening in my life.

[0:22:39.6] RG: Yeah. I mean, rationality the way I describe it, I defined in the book is simply being aware of your irrationality, of the emotions that are governing your decisions. With that awareness, you can then begin to discard your emotions, to not discard them, but to step back from them and to reassess them and to not let them govern you. Let's say you have an important decision, or plan to make. You're going to battle in your business, or you're dealing with an incredibly intense rival, or competitor, the stakes are high. You come up with a strategy and a plan and other people get onboard and they go, “Wow, this looks great.”

You're not aware of the fact that you're probably being governed by wishes and desires and things. You're being optimistic about how your opponent will react to this, not realizing that at the same time that you're coming up with a plan, your opponent is coming up with a plan, which could be even more brilliant than yours. You get caught up in the excitement that other people, “Oh, this is great. This will work.” You're imagining all the success that will happen, all the money that will be flowing in, but you're not being rational.

Rational means stepping back and saying, “What part of my decision-making process here could possibly be infected with emotions? How am I possibly overestimating our powers? How am I possibly underestimating my enemy? Have I really thought this through? Are there maybe two or three or four other options I could look into?” No, because you tend to go – like a tunnel, you tend to be geared towards that one thing that pleases you, that makes you excited.

If you're aware that you have this emotional tendency and that you're not rational, you will step back and you will reassess your decisions in life. That is the first step towards becoming rational. Now there are other steps and I include them in the book, but none of that will ever matter. You will never become a strategist in life, until you come to terms with the fact, you are basically governed by emotions and that your emotions are infecting all of your decisions in planning in life.

[0:24:47.7] MB: An underpinning of that is this notion that our brains operate by simplifying information, and even the notion that we often can't access the true source of our feelings and emotions. Tell me how that impacts all of us.

[0:25:03.5] RG: Well, that's another part of the neuroscience. I touched upon that earlier. Basically, the emotional part of the brain – I mean, I'm simplifying here. I'm not a neuroscientist, so please excuse me. I've read a lot about neuroscience, but I'm not an expert. Essentially, that emotional part of our brain, you can call it the limbic system, or it could begin in the thalamus or whatever part of the brain, is very ancient and primitive. It dates back to reptiles, to the year of the dinosaurs and the first fear reactions.

The higher up in the brain you go, you reach the neocortex, the source of our ability to rationalize, the executive part of the brain where we’re able to make decisions and think about the future. These two parts of the brain are very different. They don't operate on the same system. They're not coded in the same way. When you feel an emotion, which is largely hormonal, or electrical, or chemical, let me say, it's not connected to the language part in the left hemisphere of the brain. It's very hard to understand the roots of your emotions, or to put them in words and we've all felt that happened to us.

One day we wake up and we're depressed and we don't know why. Nothing happened. There's no reason for it. Or one day we feel angry. Perhaps we think it has to do with what somebody said, but if we step back we realize, there's no real reason why we're angry. If you just thought about it many times, you don't really know why you're feeling the way you're feeling. That's because the part where we have emotions and the part where we think in words are not connected, are not on the same system.

It was very hard to understand and verbalize and get at the root of your emotional responses. I talk in the book, I have an example that I like to use of a young man as a scenario, who grew up 3 or 4-years-old with a mother who was not very attentive, who is let's say a narcissist herself. He experienced this mothering as almost a form of abandonment. She was never there for him. It was very intense and it was very painful.

Throughout his life, later in life in his relationships with other women, he's constantly unconsciously mostly afraid of being abandoned. He experienced the abandonment of his mother. What does he do? He gets in a relationship. After six months or so, he's the one to break it off. This pattern goes on and on throughout his life. The breakups occur for different reasons. He always has a rationale for, “Oh, this woman wasn't right for me. We're not on the same plane. Oh, she's a gold digger, or whatever, etc.”

He's not aware of the fact that when he was a child, this pattern were set, where his emotions, his emotional response to the potential of being abandoned by a person was so powerful. He had to do anything to foreclose it, to not let that happen. Here he is going through life, making himself miserable by always breaking up relationships. Hnd he hasn't a clue as to the source of the actual emotions that he's feeling.

Now that's a rather dramatic example. It's pulled from one of the case studies of a famous psychologist, but I'm sure there are similar examples happening in the lives of all those people out there listening to this.

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[0:29:39.8] MB: I want to start to unpack some of the lessons and strategies we can start to use to be more rational. You talked about the idea of the first step is really stepping back, cultivating an awareness of your own irrationality and your own biases. What do we do after that?

[0:29:56.1] RG: Really, probably the most critical step, you're not really aware of how other people are perceiving you. You are locked into your own world, you're in your own little tunnel vision of your own thoughts and preoccupations and you're not really aware of how other people perceive you. Now it's not easy to do that. It's hard to get out of yourself.

To the extent that you can begin to loosen up and not always react to situations. Part of this book is to get you to stop reacting and to have a more detached view towards life, which will make you a better strategist. What's making you react all the time is that you're locked inside of yourself, you're not paying attention to other people, you're not aware of how they're responding to you, of how they're looking at you. This is a book about altering your perspective on life. Turning that lens that is not 95% turned inward. You don't think that. You probably think, “Oh, that's not me.”

If you watched yourself in a conversation, you would realize that most of the time, you're not listening to the other person, you're listening to that little monologue in your head. You're going over what the boss said, what your girlfriend said, you're worried about tomorrow, etc. You're not really listening, or paying attention. I'm trying to get you to turn that lens that is so much focused inward, to focus it outward on other people, to find other people interesting and fascinating and to absorb your mental energy, a lot of your creative energy to getting inside the minds of perspective of other people.

That is what will make you a superior social being in this, with social agent. You can't succeed in this world. No matter how technically brilliant you are at coding, or whatever field you're in, you will never get far if you're bad with people, if you misjudge them, if you're naïve, if you're rude and not aware of it. Okay, so you've got to develop the skill. It will make your life a thousand times easier, but you need to be able to focus your energy, your creativity, your thinking, your mind on other people and follow them.

I have chapter after chapter about how to do that, on how to learn how to become attuned to the non-verbal communication that people have, to be attuned to the patterns that they give off. Probably the most important thing in your life when it comes to decisions is who to partner with. You have a business and you want to partner with someone. Or you need to hire an executive to help you. Or you’re choosing an intimate partner in life.

We make most often the worst decisions, because they're based on emotions. We don't look at the character of the other people, because we're thinking about how they flatter us, whether we like them. We're thinking about ourselves. If you focus outward and you look at them squarely, objectively and coldly and look at their patterns and look at what they've done in the past and assess the strength of their character, not just how charming they are, you will make better decisions.

You talk about what the next step is, it's turning that inward absorption and focusing it outward and absorbing yourself in the minds of perspective of other people. Not only will that make you a better social agent in this world, but it's also great therapy. Because you probably, by being so self-absorbed, you're making yourself miserable. It's actually great to absorb your mind and the thoughts and experiences in the world of other people. It's like taking in drugs. You get outside of yourself finally. That would be the second most important skill.

[0:33:42.3] MB: How do we start to do that and see through other people's masks?

[0:33:46.8] RG: Well, the most critical thing, I mean, I've already mentioned it, but I'll say it in a different way, is people say what? You should be better listener. Well, that's very simplistic answer. It really won't help you be a better listener. Well, okay, I'll try, but it won't lead to anything. That's not the crux of the problem. The crux of the problem is that when you're sitting down with someone in a conversation, you might pretend otherwise, but really you're more interested in yourself.

I'm not being critical there. I'm not criticizing you. I have that same problem. It's natural. It's human nature. You're more interested in your own ideas, in your own world, in your own emotions, in your own experiences. What makes us a narcissist, you'll notice is that you'll also tend to be attracted to people who have the same opinions and the same ideas as you, which is another form of narcissism.

Anyway, you only will be able to do what I'm saying to the extent that you find other people more fascinating than your own world, than your own internal monologue. I want you to do – I give people simple exercises. I want you tomorrow in your office or wherever you work, there's somebody that you deal with all of the time that you talk to and you probably take them for granted, you don't really pay attention. I want you in the course of a conversation, to look at them and to observe one thing that you would never notice before about them.

Perhaps it's a way they smile, perhaps it's something non-verbal, perhaps it's something that they say that indicates an emotion, an aversion, or an excitement that you would never realized before. I want you to glean one nugget of truth you would never really observed in them until this moment. I want you to see that wow, this really does work, this is powerful. If I actually try and think inside them, if I truly listen, if I try and say what is their motivation? What's going on in their mind? I see something that I never saw before.

Then if you do that two or three times the next day, on and on it becomes a muscle that you're training and you'll be able to interact with people better and you'll be able to think inside of them. You can't get through life without the ability to influence and persuade people. You want them to invest in your company. You want them to go along with your idea. You want them to help you in some way. You're always in that position. I'm always in that position as well.

Nine times out of ten, you're thinking about your own interests, you're thinking about well, I have a great idea. They can't help but love me. Well, I've done a favor for them before. They need to do this for me now. You're thinking of yourself and that makes it very hard to persuade people, because they sense the fact that you're thinking about yourself. You're not thinking about them and it makes them defensive. It makes them think that some person wants something out of me. “I'm a busy person. I don't want to have to give to them.”

If you turn that around and instead of thinking of yourself, you think of them, you think of their self-interest, you think of their world, you think of their problems, you think of what could save them time, what could make their life easier and you somehow introduce that into the conversation, suddenly all that defensiveness is gone and you have much more room to persuade them, or to influence them than you ever had before.

This ability to find other people fascinating, you go to movies and you're interested in that murderer, or in that other interesting character, whomever that superhero and you want to know what makes them tick, why are they acting like that way? You're fascinated. Well, people in the real-life are like characters in a movie. They're more interesting than you think. If you could get to the point where you can want – you want to understand them, you want to see their perspective, you want to understand where they're coming from.

Don't get me wrong, some people are toxic out there. You don't want to be so soft that you'd like this with everyone and then you let talk to people run all over you. This ability to understand people will actually make it easier for you to deal with toxic people. A lot of times, we don't see that flaming narcissist who enters our life and wreaks all kinds of havoc, because we're so spelled down by their charm, by their words.

This ability to get outside of yourself and look at them squarely and see their perspective will make it easier for you to identify that toxic narcissist before you let them into your life. This will not only help you deal with the people who could be potential allies, it will also help improve your ability to combat those definitely malevolent figures that exist in the world.

[0:38:31.1] MB: Great advice and really, really important point. The idea of focusing on other people is so critical and such a powerful influence strategy. I'll throw some episodes in the show notes for listeners, because there's some really, really good episodes we have that go even deeper in that topic. For some reason, that made me think of another chapter in the book and it's only tangentially related, but really interesting is the chapter about the law of defensiveness and how we can soften other people's resistance by framing things, or confirming their own self-opinion. Tell me a little bit more about that.

[0:39:03.4] RG: Well, the idea is simple. I say that people have an opinion about themselves. They look at themselves in a certain light. They have a certain image of who they are. There are three universals to that self-opinion. What I mean is that almost all of us share in these three factors. One of them is that we basically think we're rational and autonomous. In other words, we make decisions based on thinking, rather than emotions.

The other one is that we're basically good people. Yeah, sometimes we mess up, but basically we have the best intentions at heart. We're a team player. We like other people. The third is that we're autonomous. In other words, when we do something in this world, it's not because other people told us or made us, or we're imitating what other people are doing. We've basically decided on our own through our own willpower what we want to do.

If you approach people and of course, everybody, then there are specific elements to a person's self-opinion that depend on them as individual, such as some people have a self-opinion, that they're incredibly self-reliant and independent, that they're very tough-minded. Other people have the self-opinion that they're incredibly generous towards other people with their time, etc.

There are individual aspects to that opinion. If you go and you approach someone, a stranger or even a friend and you're in the position where you want their help, or you want to get them on your side, or have some degree of influence on them and you inadvertently offend that opinion, you inadvertently trip on it, you inadvertently make them feel that they're irrational, that they're stupid, they're not thinking.

If you make them feel that they're actually not so autonomous, that they're behaving because other people are doing this, if you make them feel that they're not really good or whatever it is, then doors will close. It will never open up again. Because we all want to feel, we all have this image of ourselves. To have that violated, to have somebody confront that, to challenge it is very, very disturbing to the human animal. I go into that more depth in the book why that is.

You may not realize that you're doing that. It's very subtle. You may not think that what you say could have that effect. People are very sensitive. Everyone has an ego and maybe you inadvertently are saying something that is tripping that wire and then they’ll listen to your idea, they’ll listen to what you have to say to your plea for help and they'll politely say, “No, I'm sorry. I can't. Very interesting, but whatever.”

You're not aware of the ill-will you inadvertently stirred. The fact that you unconsciously made them not want to help you, not want to be on your side. Your task in life, before you ever approach people and ask them for anything is to make them feel comfortable about themselves, is to validate their self-opinion, is to make them feel that they are smart, they are good, that they are basically acting as rational, autonomous people, etc. You want to make them feel comfortable and validated as a human being.

That doesn't mean it has to be a 100% bullshit, because a lot of people are basically good. We all have good elements in them. If you focus on what is actually positive about that person and you say things that make it clear that you like them, that you accept them and that you acknowledge these positive qualities in them, suddenly that whole dynamic alters. Before you even – you might not ask them for help until the next day or a week later, but you've softened them up. You've softened that natural defensiveness up and it's an incredibly important skill. In the book, all my chapters are illustrated with stories.

I talk about Lyndon Johnson, our president, but who was also a senator. He was the absolute master of this. In discussing his story, I reveal all his techniques, how he was such an incredible listener and how he always got into the world of the other person and made them feel validated and comfortable. Then when he got them, they didn't even realize that they were serving him in the end, that they were doing him the favors and doing things that he wanted. He was so good at it. This is an incredibly important skill to have in life.

[0:43:26.6] MB: Another great strategy and really interesting example. I want to change gears slightly, because there's so many topics I want to touch on. One of the most interesting things for me from the book was the notion of – we touched on this broader principle earlier, but the specific idea of how people often in their uncertainty and confusion, fear about the world, about themselves, about their place and that they end up as you put in the book, replacing their curiosity with conviction. Tell me about how we can do the opposite of that and why it's important to cultivate an expansive and positive and curious world perspective.

[0:44:03.1] RG: We have a tendency, because we mistake the appearances of people for the reality. If somebody like a politician seems extremely competent and full of conviction about some idea, we assume that they must be correct, that there must be some validity to it. Why else would that person be so emotional if they didn't feel that they weren't correct. It seems unnatural as to think that it's an act.

Whereas, the truth is the more that people express themselves with conviction about something, the more excited they are about their idea, the more they try and yell at you what needs to be done in the world, etc., and seems so supremely confident, the more you need to be suspicious, because they're probably trying to deceive you. They're probably trying to cover up all kinds of weaknesses and insecurities.

The same thing is happening to you. Your natural tendency as you get older is for your mind to close up. When you were a child, you were like a sponge. You were just so open. You're absorbing all this information from your parents, from your teachers, from your friends, you were curious about the world, you wanted to read books, you wanted to understand, because you were in a position of weakness and you needed to.

Then as we get older and life gets harsh and we develop an ego, those qualities start dropping off from us. We don't want to feel so open, because openness means vulnerability. If we are not so sure about our ideas, if we think that well, maybe there is a God, maybe there isn’t. I'm not sure. I don't have any evidence yet. I could be – I'm agnostic, etc. It seems weak in the world. People who have convictions seem like they're strong. “Oh, no. There is a God. Oh, no. There is no God,” etc., etc., right?

The idea that you're more nuanced, that you're not making a decision, that you're open and you're curious and you wanted to see perhaps what is really going on, seems like a child, seems like something that's weak. Your tendency is to close your mind off, so that also it's comforting to have certain ideas in your head that just keep repeating, that you learn when you're in your early 20s and it becomes solidified.

Then you don't have to challenge yourself. You don't have to think anymore. You don't have to assess the world as it is. Your mind gets harder and harder and harder and more rigid. You're not even aware of it. Just like your body is growing rigid and you have to do yoga for it, your mind is growing hard with each day as you take on ideas and they become rock solid in your brain and you don't question them anymore.

This limits your creative potential in life. It's destroying your mind. It's making it so that you're not able to learn anymore, because you think you know everything. I talk a lot about this in Mastery. It's a major theme in Mastery, when I go into creativity and developing true mastery of your field. A creative mind is incredibly flexible. That's the quality of an Einstein, of a Steve Jobs, of any really great entrepreneur, of any great artist out there in the world, even of a political figure.

You want that flexibility, just as you want to be flexible with your body, you want that of your mind. You want to go back to that childhood curiosity that you feel. You want to realize that you don't understand the world. You think you know everything about physics, or about laws, or this, that, or the other in science, etc. In 300 years, all of those ideas will be laughable as people have learned so much more than we know now. What you think you know is probably going to be ridiculous in several centuries.

Have some humility and have some curiosity and open yourself up to the ideas of other people who are different from yourself. Don't be so sure of what you think you know. You have only your own rigidity to lose and your own creativity to develop.

[0:48:00.9] MB: I think that's one of the most important ideas that spreads across a lot of your work. Whether it's from Mastery, from Laws of Human Nature, this notion of being flexible, being humble, not getting rigidly stuck in your perspectives and your mental patterns is such a core component of performance, of happiness, of influencing other people. Yet, it feels like our world every day is marching more towards more fixed and polarized perspectives.

[0:48:31.6] RG: Yeah. I mean, Law of 48, or The 48 Laws of Power is assumed formlessness. Be like water, it's the old Bruce Lee idea. It comes from martial arts. It comes from Sun Tzu, it's one of the oldest ideas and strategy. In Seduction, I talk about how you need to adapt yourself to each person and be fluid and be like Proteus. The 33 strategies of War, I talk about how you don't want to fight the last battle. Each battle is different and you have to approach each decision and strategy in life and start fresh and think anew. As I talk in Mastery, I talk about it in this book.

Yeah, it's a continual theme in my book, because it contains so much power. If you want power in life, if you're not just mouthing and saying, “Yeah, I'm interested and I want to be a powerful person.” If you are truly interested in it, you have to start with your own mind. You have to start with your own spirit and how you approach things, under the degree that you think the degree that you think you know, to the degree that you repeat the same patterns and strategies, you are going to fail in life. It's just that simple.

If you want success, if you want power, you've got to follow this. It's the path that all of the great strategists in life have followed. I make it very in all my books, with tons of historical examples and backed by neuroscience. It's said particularly in Mastery where I talk about it, but it's do you want this power? Do you want success? Do you want to be creative in your field? Well, then you better get off your ass and you better follow this advice. You better start opening your mind up to other possibilities.

[0:50:01.7] MB: Incredible. I love it. For somebody who's been listening to this conversation who wants to start somewhere, who wants to concretely implement one thing or idea as a piece of homework to begin down this journey, what would be one action step that you would give them to start right away?

[0:50:19.3] RG: Well, I've already hinted at several. You can use a journal, if you want. Journals are very helpful in this. Or you can just simply do this thought experiment in your own head. You keep it there. In the course of a day, you're going to feel many different emotions and our emotions are blended. We never simply feel love, or excitement, or hate. They're always blended with something else.

We can actually feel love and hate at the same time. We can feel envy and admiration at the same time. Our emotions are very fluid. They're always crossing and blending into each other. In the course of the day, it's like this continual wave of moods and emotions that are overcoming you. You're not thinking about them, you're just letting them take over and you're not aware of them. I want you one day, perhaps tomorrow or whenever as a fun experiment, this should be fun, to look at yourself and capture one of those moods, capture one of those emotions that come in the form of a thought.

For instance, “Damn, I hate that person. They really screwed me. They don't like me, etc.” Okay, because our emotions would generally come to us associated with an idea or a thought. I want you to step back and not just give in to that emotion and not just think, “Oh, I'm so justified to feel that way.” Go and say, “Where did that come from? Why am I feeling this way? Is there some rational objective reason why I have this emotion?” Is it as simple as I think, maybe my hatred is actually mixed with envy. Maybe secretly, the person that I'm wanting to diss is actually somebody that I envy and wish I have what they have. Maybe my emotions aren't what I they think they are.

I want you to take that exercise and just catch yourself once and go and backtrack and try and think about the root of where it comes from and don't just simply react. Maybe write it down. Maybe what you'll discover is, “I woke up with this mood and I don't even know why.” Maybe it was something I ate the night before, or maybe this emotion has something to do with a pattern in my life, where these situations always seem to elicit this emotion and I'm not even aware of it. Maybe my anger stems from something in my childhood, or whatever.”

Question and dig. Think before you act. Try and come up with one little idea or noggin as I said earlier about another exercise about yourself and about why you're feeling a particular way in the course of the day and analyze it, instead of giving in to it. It's a very powerful exercise. As someone who meditates – I meditate every morning, I'm continually going through that process. As I'm saying, they're trying to empty my mind, suddenly this emotion comes to me. “Damn, my agent didn't call me back. Damn, why is this person bothering me?” I detach myself and I go, “Why are you thinking that? Why are you giving into that? You don't have to worry about that now. There's no reason to have that emotion. Now where is it coming from?”

It's coming from your ego, or some dark part of your personality. Why, where? Question. I want you out there, the listener out there to go through that process at least once in the course of the next day or so and sense whether that's an interesting thing and whether that you'll have something to learn from it.

[0:53:48.4] MB: Robert, where can listeners find you and all of your work online?

[0:53:52.8] RG: Well, I have an old website. Sometimes old is good. It's power, seduction and war. The and is spelled out. Powerseductionandwar.com. There you'll find links to the book that I did with 50 Cent, The 50th Law, to Mastery and to The Laws of Human Nature, to some of my blog posts and to my Twitter and other social media. An e-mail address where you can send me ideas or whatever you want, to communicate. It's all there, powerseductionandwar.com.

[0:54:26.9] MB: Well Robert, thank you so much for coming on the show. As I said before, your books have inspired me, some my favorite books of all time. Mastery is one of my all-time personal favorites, but all of your work is so incredible, so detailed, so rich with examples and insights. It's been an honor to have you on the show today.

[0:54:44.2] RG: Thank you so much for having me, Matt. My pleasure.

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