What's up, guys? Today I'm bringing you the man known for his unflinching look at the darker side of humanity around the laws of strategy, power, and human seduction. In his fourth round here on Impact Theory, Robert Greene is exposing the traps you may be falling for that makes life feel boring and how it can leave you alienated from your true self. He also explains why overlooking your flaws and limitations is a big mistake.
I hope you guys love listening to this episode. As much as I enjoyed recording it, I love my time with Robert. And if you do, please leave a review on our podcast. It really is the best way to support us so that we can give the show out there to more people like you that really want to get more out of their lives.
I am Tom Dillieu, and welcome to Impact Theory. Robert Greene, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me, Tom. I think this is my fourth time.
I think you're right. So for the people out there who believe that their life is boring and that they're wasting it, what trap have they fallen into and what advice do you have for them to get out of that sense? Well, you were talking to me about, you were talking earlier about diet and problems with your health, and you said get at the root cause. So you have to get at the root cause of your boredom.
And most often you're looking at it superficially. You're thinking, I just don't have enough stimulation in my life. I need to travel more. I need to get rid of my girlfriend or boyfriend and find a new relationship.
My career is bothering me. I need to change jobs. That's the superficial way of dealing with the problems deeper. You have to look at yourself and you have to see the possible root causes of what is making you bored.
A lot of it is the fact that you are looking for external stimulation, whereas looking inward and seeing who you are and what drives you and what your motivations are, what makes you different? You were talking about diet and how all the intricacies and how each person responds to foods differently and it's very inexact science. Well, you are an individual and you have your own little weirdness and everything about you is different. You have all these little grains inside of you that react differently to things.
You don't know who you are. You're alienated from yourself. You're alienated from your nature. You're finding career paths that don't suit you, just like I might be eating things that don't suit me.
I'm sorry to keep going back to that. You're involved with people that don't suit you. You don't know who you are. You don't know your core or your essence.
You don't know what really excites you, what Abraham Maslow calls impulse voices. You have these little voices inside of you that are saying, I like this. I love this. This is what excites me.
You're not listening to me. It's drowned out by social media, by your parents, by everybody else. So you don't know who you are. And because of that, you choose things that aren't right for you.
And when you choose things that aren't right for you, you're not engaged emotionally. And when you're not engaged emotionally, you get bored and you get restless and you reach for, I've got to travel to Bali. I've got to start playing the guitar. I've got to quit my job.
I've got to go find a new model to start dating or whatever. It ends up like you do it and for a week or two, it's exciting. And then it doesn't lead to anything lasting. And then you're bored and you're restless and you go on to the next thing.
It's exactly what I'm writing about right now in my book on The Sublime. I'm just quoting the chapter I just wrote. I love that. I actually didn't.
I mean, I know that you're writing about The Sublime. I had no idea that it was about that specifically. How could you? True.
In fact, I want the viewers to hear that I am desperate for your next book to come out. I really do think of you as a legend, man, rereading The Daily Laws and Prepper this. I am freaked out by how accurately you get a certain aspect of the human condition. So with that in mind, is it that people don't have the balls to look at who they really are?
Is it just that things are getting drowned out and they don't know how to create the silence? Like, why is it so hard for people to understand themselves? Well, it's hard. And our default position is to take the path of least resistance about what is easy, you know?
So right now, and I should hardly talk, but people are extremely interested in drugs, right? In, like, psychoactive drugs, mushrooms. Trust me, I did a lot of that in my 20s. I have nothing against it, right?
But you have the capacity in you to be continually high on life, to almost have a drug-like effect. We have these remarkable senses, our ability to pick up colors, et cetera, et cetera. You can be continually tripping. You don't need drugs.
Your brain is wired for this kind of interaction with life. It doesn't feel good to me, so how do we tap into that? Well, because it takes effort, whereas popping a pill, whereas just doing the easy thing, whereas looking at yourself and introspecting requires effort and it requires pain, right? Because when I look at myself, as I do with my meditation every morning, God, Robert, you've got a lot of problems, man.
Why do these thoughts keep popping up? You think you're so great, but you're not so great. Your mind is veering towards these petty issues. Let's work on this, right?
So my meditation this morning, this very morning, I was thinking, my problem, Robert, is you don't let go. You've got to let go. And I just kept repeating myself, let go, let go, let go. Every time the thought came in, I was like, all right, let go of it, okay?
But it's painful because you realize what your blocks are, what your limitations are, what you're doing wrong. We don't want to face ourselves. It's so much easier to look externally, to look out in the world, to find a guru or a coach who will help you, to find a book that will help you, to find a drug that will help you, to find some kind of, to go on online porn, you know, anything, as opposed to looking inward and seeing who you really are. Yeah, so looking inward and seeing who you are is definitely heavy.
It's definitely hard. It is also, I would say, the thing that leads most assuredly to success. Now, the reason that I say that is I have found that by acknowledging my own pettinesses, my insecurities, all that, I can better understand other people. When I can better understand other people, I can better navigate the world.
So the method that I use to figure that out is when I feel something uncomfortable, I, one, I distrust my emotions, so I don't just think, oh, I have an emotion, I should enact it. I'm like, hmm, that may have a dark underbelly on my hand. My wife and I were arguing, and she says something that just makes me so pissed off. And I'm like, what the fuck?
How dare you? I cannot believe that you would say whatever it is that she said. And what I learned early in our marriage was anytime I had that impulse, she had tripped and insecurity of mine. But if I didn't know that I was insecure about it, I would get the surface level emotion.
It felt so real. It just felt like she had said something she shouldn't say. And I would never take the time to figure out why shouldn't she say that. And so the emotion gave me righteous indignation.
I would push back on, hey, why'd you say that? And never get into, oh, I see, I'm super insecure about this thing, which is what's triggering the emotion. So it's what she and I call arguing about the tea. So you're at the surface level, going back to your early point, you stop at the part that's easy to identify, I am angry.
Because I am angry, then I just do what the anger tells me to do, which is push back, shut her down, get her to take it back, whatever, rather than go, whoa, like, why does that bother me so much? But in understanding why it bothers me, then I'm like, okay, now I see this as an insecurity. So when I see somebody get angry at me, I'm like, oh, shit, they're insecure about this. That's interesting.
And so now let's drill into, and why are you insecure? I mean, look, there are certain conversations where you're never going to ask that, but it gives a lot more clarity, which is why I ask, like, I think it's that the reason people don't identify what's really going on inside of them is twofold. One, it takes a certain level of understanding about the human animal, just generically, about the way emotions come about, et cetera, and then testicular fortitude to look at something and say, oh, man, I'm not as cool as I wish I were. Yeah, right.
So how do we get beyond that? Well, you know, you don't have to read books about human nature or make it a study. Just look at yourself and you'll find out all that you need to know, right? You'll know that you have the flaws that you naturally think you see in other people.
So I always find when people are particularly angry about some character trait in me or others, they're actually more often than not projecting. Unconsciously, they have the same trait. So, goddammit, that person's a narcissist. Well, you're not, that's your way of kind of hiding from yourself your own narcissism.
So by looking at yourself, you're inevitably going to see your flaws and your limitations, which was the whole subject of the laws of human nature. We have these negative qualities built into the way we evolved as human beings, right? But we evolved a million years ago under circumstances that are completely different now, that don't have any relationship that aren't functional for the high-tech worlds that we live in. And so we have a lot of qualities that constantly create problems for ourselves, okay?
You think it's other people that have these problems. You think other people are aggressive. Other people are passive-aggressive. Other people are self-aggressive.
No, you have all of these traits as well, okay? So it's painful, right? And if you know one thing about human beings, if there could be one law about human behavior, and it's true, I suppose, of every animal, we avoid anything painful, and we veer toward what is pleasurable or easy, okay? So how do you overcome that?
That's your million-dollar question that you're asking. Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom. Sometimes you have to go, nothing is working in my life. I'm miserable.
I'm depressed. My career isn't going in the right way, okay? Maybe I'm the source of it. And when you hit rock bottom, you're willing to take anything.
The pain of looking at yourself isn't maybe as bad as the hole that you dug yourself into, okay? The other way is, you don't necessarily have to hit rock bottom, but you are really motivated to change your life, right? You're ambitious. You want to be successful.
You want to have some degree of power. We're a social animal. You want to get along with people. You want to know how to navigate these complicated social environments that we inhabit, right?
And so it's not working for me right now. I'm getting in my own way, okay? So I have to step back, and I have to look at myself, and I have to study who I am, and I have to do some heavy work on myself. Now, nobody says that's easy.
If it were easy, everybody would be doing it, and we'd be living in paradise. But we obviously don't, right? Do you think it's an intellectual level that people have to be at in order to do that, or is there a process that people can run to figure out that? I'm a big believer that intellect is vastly overrated, that we are emotional animals.
The problem is emotional. I hate to keep saying it, but I'm about to be giving a talk in a few weeks, and this is exactly what I'm giving my talk about, which is you have to change your orientation, right? Your problem is emotional, not intellectual. Our first, when we're having a problem, our first, because what I'm going to talk about is how to deal with change in the world.
Whenever we think that we don't understand something or having a problem, we think that knowledge is the answer. We have to accumulate more knowledge. It's intellectual. We have to know more data.
We have to read studies. We have to understand these things better. The problem is emotional. The reason you can't deal with change or you're not looking at yourself is you have emotional blocks.
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Is it that we're turning away from the emotion that causes the problem? Like why is being emotional stalling people out? It's not being emotional stalling people out. It's the kind of emotions that are kind of blocking you.
So there are emotions that are very positive, like confidence, like boldness, like fearlessness, like openness to experience, adventurousness. These are all brilliant, expansive emotions. I contrast expansive emotions with constricting emotions. Ego, pettiness, fear, impatience that close you down and narrow the scope of what you're willing to try out.
Okay? So fear, I compare it to a tree. Fear is the root of all of this. And at the branches, we find impatience.
We find ego. Is all of this the human condition or the fear of change or the inability to change? Well, you know, we are anxious creatures by nature. It's kind of built into our system as well.
And so we're kind of primed to feel fear, et cetera. But these things are subtle. So you're not aware that fear is the source of your problems, right? Because you're not attuned to who you are.
You think that it's because I don't know enough about the world or other people are blocking me or I didn't get a good enough education, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? It's hard to see the effects of fear because it's very subtle. It's going to block you in ways that you're never really aware. It's like this kind of poisonous gas that you can't see and seeping into you.
So getting back to when I'm talking about how you deal with change, there's an incredibly important issue, particularly in the world now that's changing so quickly, right? You have to be able to be open to what's happening in the present moment, people, with events, et cetera, et cetera. But because of fear, you're slipping further and further behind. You're locked in the past.
You think that ideas that you had are exactly what's happening. You're not paying attention to the things that are around you because attention is hard and it's difficult. And it means letting go of some of your most cherished ideas about the world and just being open to experience. So with people, for instance, let's say I'm working with you, Tom, right?
And we've been working together for a year or so. I have a certain impression of you, right? Probably from our first interactions. And that impression kind of freezes in my mind.
And as I'm dealing with you, I'm always sort of seeing this kind of image that I have of you. And I'm not paying attention to who you are in the moment, how you are changing, how things are adapting. Maybe my first impression was wrong. Maybe you're actually quite different.
But that takes some courage. That takes some effort to be alive in the moment to say, I don't know. I don't know Tom Villier. I don't really know who he is.
I don't know what motivates his behavior. I need to pay attention. But the idea that I know the answer actually stems from fear. So in this moment of radical change, so I think there's two things at play.
I'd be very interested to see what you think of this. So I think we're going through a very weird moment as the Chinese proverb, I'm not sure what to call it, but it may have been interesting. times supposedly meant as a curse i think we're living in interesting times and i mean that as a curse and uh when i think about it i think that a lot of what's playing out is some change is bad and and i consider myself hyper malleable it's one of either my greatest strengths or my greatest weakness i'm not entirely sure in fact when you started off by saying you have a hard time letting go i have the exact opposite problem i find it very easy to let go of anything everything my identity all of it like to a point where it may border on not useful but anyway so you've got we're living in a time where i don't think all change is good and then on top of that i think that when people feel weak no when people are weak they have a feeling that ah like things are not going the way that i want they don't understand that their fear is coming from weakness and actual inability to be effective in the world and because they have the will to power in the nicho way they begin grabbing onto whatever tool they have at their disposal and right now the thing people are using is shame and shouting people down effectively and so mix and this is super complicated with social media and all that but those two things i'm just beginning to like think through this i think for letting me think out loud but those feel like the the twin heads of this dragon right now what are the twin heads again some change is bad so some things that are happening are actually we're going in the wrong direction and then some of the um lashing out that people are doing is because they are weak and they don't know a positive way to navigate the world to manifest the will to power in a way that has to do with personal responsibility getting better at moving through the world and so instead they use the easier tools which are shouting people down which makes them feel powerful but in reality is fear of their ideas but they don't know how to get stronger in their own convictions they don't know how to be open-minded to learn and so new ideas scare them some ideas actually are bad but they feel weak and so now they're just lashing out somewhat blindly yeah of course um some changes are not good but in the larger picture of it change i believe has an inherently positive quality to it because the worst thing that can happen to a culture to a civilization is to be in these static moments so let's say we're going to a moment where the political correctness where the social justice warrior is in the ascendant and i agree with you it's a negative it's a kind of a negative change in a way right well first of all you have to understand these changes so even if they're negative it's not that you embrace everything that's going on that you understand them on a deep level well let's say that this is a negative change that is occurring in the world but it's occurring for a purpose it's a reaction against something that occurred earlier on it's not going to last have a larger picture of history and of the world nothing that we humans do last very long and particularly now in this accelerated moment of change in 10 years from now the generation z and the new generation coming up they're going to be so fucking tired pardon my language of all of the truth virtue signaling and everything they're going to go in the opposite direction it's going to swing back and forth and back and forth back and forth right so don't get so caught up in the moment i think this is this is like where we're heading like 100 years from now we're all going to be like these grand inquisitors that the social justice movement will reach this insane end point we've had these moments before in history where people get extremely tight and constricted and upset and uptight and worried about things and angry and taking it out on everybody else we've been through it so many times before so have some perspective that it won't last okay do you worry at all though that with the historical lens on it also has killed a lot of people this is the first time in my life i'm like i have a feeling that there are going to be consequences to the way that society is going now i couldn't be more open to realizing that i'm wrong so if you have an insight that i'm people being canceled and their careers being executed being beheaded for it uh yes i do mean i don't i'm not thinking literally of guillotines though that has been one of the historical ways this way out but like i am i am very aware of the truth of the statement all that evil needs is for good men to do nothing and so it is right now it feels like division is running just in opposite directions and as somebody that has uh who does a lot of time talking on camera i think a lot about okay how do i how do i grapple with some of the issues and then what is the way to sort of present ideas to people that will hopefully gently nudge them in a more useful direction so i think all about usability it's why i love your book so much because you're like if i was going to boil you down really simplistically i would say your core message is deal with the world the way that it is not the way that you wish it were and that idea is very powerful to me so looking through the lens of okay what is useful what is the way that i can behave is useful so you start by saying no thyself i think that's incredibly useful one it helps you navigate your own emotions two it helps you understand other people okay so that advice is good because it's incredibly useful then i look at the world running in opposite directions algorithms social media exacerbating that problem the rapidity with which ideas burn through society is really fascinating and historically humans tend to go so wrong before they swing back in the other direction that millions of people do die with a high and distressing degree of frequency now do i think that we're right on the precipice no i think that we have plenty of time and space to calm everybody down but i do think for the first time in my life anyway here in the u.s it's worth going hey this can wrap up to the point of being actually dangerous yeah well i don't disagree with you but then the question is what do you do about it i mean you can't change like whole groups of people in mass like people like i used to think in communist countries where you can change human nature by creating a different system you know that doesn't work unless you happen to believe be a communist and you believe that's possible so it has to occur on an individual level right and how do you change that in a culture where it is where we're engineered to be angry and emotional where all of the social media that people spend 85 percent of their lives on i don't know i'm just taking that number out of my you know what it's way too long but yeah okay all right um you know it's engineered for that right you know just to give an example something that really gets to show my own outrage um you know on my on my feed i get these these notices from next door you know next door is right and everything is about crime and about and i know in my neighborhood there's some crime but if you read next door it's like there's a sense that there's everywhere like there's murderers next door to you like rapists they're all around you right it freaks you out the algorithms are there they choose those posts to put in your feed they're going to get you emotional that's just next door facebook is a master of it you know instagram they all just use these algorithms to hit your most basic emotions right how do you fight that well you have to fight that on an individual level you have to tell people you are being manipulated right and in order to say that you're being manipulated you're hitting their ego you're telling them you're not as in control of yourself as you think you are i know this for myself i know that i am manipulated by these different algorithms but it means i have to have that kind of humility to say i'm a person who can be manipulated but most people go around thinking oh i'm not manipulated i'm in control of my thoughts i know what my feelings are i behave according to what i want to do bullshit you're continually being manipulated by these various these various platforms okay you can't change as an individual i can't go and get mark zuckerberg to suddenly stop doing all these dastardly things it's impossible right so what do you do you have to try and awaken people one by one by one that's sort of why i write books like the laws of human nature to awaken you up and it's an incredible theme in that book you might hate it but i've hit that again and again about how we're being manipulated by social media how it's playing to our most basic instincts how envy which is a most powerful human emotion it defines us in so many ways why envy why envy was just one of the 18 chapters but why did i choose that no why is it so powerful because it is wired inside of us our brains work by comparing um different pieces of information on the most basic level that's how our brains our neocortex operate a piece of information comes up we compare it to something else our brains operate through continual comparisons when you create a social animal whose survival depends on getting along with other people that comparison device is continually in operation with other people what do they have that i don't have why are they getting that attention that i don't have why are they getting these these gifts and these rewards and i don't have any of them it was a problem that existed in hunter-gathering societies you've ever studied primitive cultures you come upon a very strange custom of theirs which is the moment anyone sees a gift of food or anything what's the first thing they do they give it to someone else it's like a ritual because you're definitely afraid that if you keep that gift people have envy and they will murder you right so it's a continual ritual so it's bred into us even chimpanzees are known to feel envy like if another chimp gets a delicious piece of grape and the other one has a cucumber he's like wow what the hell is going on here that's hilarious you can find on youtube for anybody watching it's insane yeah so it's who we are but what do you think social media is it's an engine of envy it's making you continually aware of what other people have and what you don't have oh he's vacationing in bali oh he's dating a supermodel etc etc look at my poor pitiful life well that person who's they're only posting the most positive things they're not showing their kind of unhappy their misery their daily life but you're feeling envy so how do you overcome that you have to first be aware that you're feeling envy that it is motivating that you feel this and that means what would bring you back to looking at yourself so we can't fight these negative changes in a global context we have to hit the individual people we have to awaken their consciousness we have to make them look inward and the best thing i can do is for me personally is to write books about this i don't know any other way so we're making them look inward and we're we want them to understand that they're having an emotional problem not a logic problem which i think is a really interesting insight i think so in business i realized pretty early on in my career that the thing that separated me from other people is i could self-soothe so i was stung by whatever happened whether it was somebody chastising me or embarrassing myself or being embarrassed on purpose by a narcissist or whatever the situation may be and it broke most people like it would derange them it would push them underground what the either they're embarrassing themselves being chastised somebody going out of their way to embarrass all the power games that you talked about and you and you're able to not to soothe yourself i could soothe myself it still hurt i still went through the same emotion but i was so obsessed with my goals that i would just ask myself what is going to move me forward well that's an amazing example of the process that we're talking about and the power behind it i couldn't choose anything better in fact i don't think i could do anything better than what you do because i try and do what you're talking about and i don't even know if i've quite reached that level but that's exactly what the point i'm trying to make and that you are illustrating here that when you look at yourself when you look at what really is driving your behavior and let's first admit that we really don't know who we are and that there's a core that we will never understand right we can't really see completely into ourselves we can't really totally understand what motivates our behavior there's an element i'm a believer in humility may not believe it because i write these books that don't seem humble at all but the humility to say there are parts of me that i'm never going to understand okay that's good that's all right that's a powerful thing because the idea that you know yourself so completely i've gone through this process and i know who i am and i've got these problems it's bullshit you don't know who you are there's always a core that you'll never ever understand that's a beautiful thing in life because it means mysteries are great they're fantastic it means you have more work to do but all we're talking about is increasing that margin of knowledge so let's say in the end just picking up a number out of my you know what 70 of ourselves we're never going to know right for most people it's 95 or 98 or 99 if you can lower that number a little bit you can have a deeper understanding if you can understand that what you're doing is it's all about your ego that you really want to be right and not about getting ahead or having success or power you can learn these little things the world opens up for you because what power is really about in life people always ask me for definitions is it's about having more options okay so when you're so narrowed down inside yourself about you know you have the right answer you know that you know you can argue with people and everyone else is wrong etc etc you're you're limiting what you can do in life you can only take path a or b because that's what you're geared for that's what's going to soothe your ego that's going to make you feel better as you thought when you're trying to shout to get the right echo okay but when you let go when you're open to the fact that you don't know what are there other things that could be going on and then you figure out that ego is tripping me up suddenly doors open i can do c i can do d i can do e i can do what you just said where i can stop i can learn more i can shut my own head the voice in my head and i can pay attention i can learn the world starts opening up you start having options you have maneuverability you can do different things in life things open up that's all i'm ever asking for people is to get out of these kind of narrow corners that they back themselves into yeah the fact that people don't know themselves uh i didn't really think i didn't think almost at all about it until i got into business and then it was like okay why do some people succeed and other people don't and started thinking about okay so the people that stop at the level of emotion they're unable to walk a path of usefulness and so that's a big thing for me i'm always hungry for myself for sure because i'm not above this at all but i'm constantly trying to optimize for how do i get my ego and my emotion out of the way so i can figure out what's truly useful moving forward but certainly wanting people on my team as well that are doing that that are looking at the let's make it clinical they're looking at the data like did this work whether it's you know the 48 laws of power and it's like oh the story that you opened with um about where you were thriving in your job your boss hated you and you're like what the hell am i doing wrong and then you realize ah never outshine the master it's like you ran an experiment in that environment did killing it at your job allow you to move forward in the company yes or no no oh shit then there's something i'm not understanding so getting people to take that feedback assess go inward and go okay what didn't work going back to the idea of root cause medicine why didn't it work oh i see people are insecure i triggered her insecurities okay now i get it rule number one never outshine the master it's interesting reading your books is like uh it's a marker in your life depending on what stories jump out to me what i remember what laws i'm like oh shit i've been dealing with that recently uh it's really interesting but so getting people to do that so effectiveness did i get the result that i was looking for and that was the big thing going back to that story of in work where i was arguing for my ideas because i wanted to feel a certain way it was like oh wow i didn't even understand what my real goal was i had the goal that i would say because it was what i was supposed to want right some part of me did want it but i was totally blind to i actually steer my life towards what makes me feel smart and i was like wow that was like being slapped in the face right and so once i understood that then i could really begin to navigate well but i first had to grapple with effectiveness right and coming back to the the thing that i'm obsessed with right now and i've been dying to talk to you like the first person i thought so i managed to make it 46 without ever being um ever encountering knowingly nietzsche and so i'm taking uh the great courses on each i don't know what it was the idea of the will to power and i think something in me had an intuitive understanding that the moment we're living through right now is this will to power so i've never understood the woke movement because it doesn't align with the natural thing that i do which is um it is people that have found a very useful tool to gain control of the situation that i was blind to and once i started learning about nietzsche it was like a puzzle piece clicked into place that we have this innate drive for what i'll say power or control because i think power is gonna it's a word with a lot of baggage so but people have this innate drive to control the environment themselves whatever they want to to be in control and they're if you aren't able to in full view of everybody out compete you still have this drive for control and then people go underground it's the whole theme of the 48 laws of power correct what i wrote about in the preface to it yeah um the thing about me Nietzsche because, you know, he's my idol. Really?
Why do people have such a dark view of him? I don't know him well enough to understand why. He's in all of my books. I was reading him when I was 16, 17 years old.
And oftentimes what happens in your life, people that you read when you were that age, and you're now in my 60s, I'm sorry to say. Wow, congratulations about that. Thank you. 46 seems like a kid.
You know, things that I read when I was 18, I don't know, I don't like anymore. Nietzsche is like a through line. I'll never get bored with him. I'll never tire with him.
He's just absolutely the greatest. But his will to power is something that got misunderstood. It's like, it's not necessarily what you think it is. It's developed macht.
And the concept of macht or power in Nietzsche is, it's control, it's more like expansion. That's what the word really means. And he takes it down to a biological level, that every organism wants to expand its circle, wants to expand its environment, wants to have more mobility in the world that it's in, right? So it's a native biological need that all creatures have for expanding themselves, for having more influence.
So what it means for a human is to have more power and more influence and able to move in greater circles. To have more control, yes, control is part of it, okay? But people, when they have this sort of negative view of power, damn it, that makes me so angry. It triggers all of my buttons.
I'm sorry to say, because I am an emotional creature, I have to admit. Because everything is about power, right? The idea that you don't want power, that you say, oh, I'm not interested in that. I'm all about truth and justice and what's good for humanity.
That's a form of power, I'm sorry to say. You are seeking power. You are seeking power over other people, you know? Some of the most heinous crimes have been committed by people who think they're doing good for others, right?
Okay? But you want power, right? And I look at academics who have these very lengthy, very powerful arguments about the world, et cetera, et cetera. It's all about power.
They don't want to admit it. They want to admit it. It's just about ideas. It's just about intellectuals.
It's about, you know, the realm of exchanging ideas. Bullshit. It's about power. You want the sense of expansion.
You want people to love you. You love that feeling that what you're doing is influencing others, that you've hit the right answer. Everything you do, everything you breathe in is a desire for power. It's a desire for expansion.
Look in the mirror and admit it, and let's get away from the negative connotations that we have with it. Yes, power can be used for bad purposes, but as Malcolm X said, you know, absolute power corrupts, but powerlessness corrupts even more. So the feeling that you don't have any power is even more corrupting because it makes you passive aggressive. It turns you into these warriors who think they're doing something and you're not even aware of what you're really after.
So that was the whole point of the 48 Laws of Power. It was an inflection moment in our culture and our history where I was getting really upset with all of the political correctness and all of the squishy self-help books out there, right, and trying to appeal to our good side, et cetera, et cetera, and things like ambition or power were ugly words. Man, I hated that. I thought it was so hypocritical because my experience in Hollywood, for instance, where I dealt with a lot of film directors and powerful people is they would project this image of being extremely liberal and for all the good causes, but they wanted power.
They really wanted power, and they would often treat people in a poor fashion despite being for all the great causes. And hypocrisy just really wrangled me, and that's sort of why I wrote the 48 Laws of Power, to expose that. You were saying, look at yourself, that you have this desire for power. It can twist you.
You can look for it in wrong ways, most definitely. But at least come to Jesus, come to Muhammad, and admit that that's who you are, that that's what's motivating you in your behavior. And from there, we can start seeing, well, maybe there are more constructive forms of power that I can go after. It's so interesting because when I was maybe 25, something like that, 26 maybe, I bought the domain Seeking Power.
Oh, that's 20 years ago. Yeah, very long time ago. So it was a couple years after my book came out, but I'm not saying they were saying it. Unfortunately, I had not read it yet.
If I had, you would have saved me a lot of suffering. But that felt true to who I was. Third power is taking on these dark, evil connotations. But I was like, I want to get better.
I want to get more powerful. And my whole youth, I had felt so weak. And getting into business, I finally encountered the idea that you could get better than other people. You could outperform them.
And in outperforming them, you could transform your life and you could do things that other people couldn't do. I wish, unfortunately, Kobe Bryant didn't exist back then in any way that I was aware of anyway. And he has this whole idea of booze don't block dunks. And that you can get so good at something that no matter how much people hate you, want to stop you, whatever, you can outplay them.
And you can still dunk over them. And I was like, oh my God, this is so amazing. So all I have to do is get good at things. Now, to your point, if you're using that for evil, I've got no time for that.
But in your own life, if it's, you know, whether in business, if you don't acknowledge that it's a competition, you're going to get eaten alive. So recognizing, okay, like this is a competition. I'm not out to hurt other people, but I'm absolutely out to outperform them. And life became way more fun when I realized, oh, I can come seeking power.
I can sit at somebody's feet and learn from them and want to grow more powerful. And that's why like this whole moment that we're living through now feels like the wrong way to go about the change that people want to see in the world. Because it's like, if you own, okay, I want this outcome. And to get that outcome, I need to garner a set of skills.
I need to get better at my performance and then I can do it. When it's out in the open and you're taking personal responsibility, in fact, here's the easiest way to sum it up. As Gary Vee says, there are two ways to build the tallest building in town. You can knock everybody else's building down or you can build a building that's taller than theirs.
And if you're spending time knocking people's buildings down, which is the energy I feel coming off of a lot of people, that's not interesting to me. And people do it in the name of, oh, no, no, no. Like they were just, their building violated some invisible code. You know where that comes from?
It comes from envy. Envy is a huge motivator of people's behavior now. So the drive to bring other people down is really truly motivated by feelings of envy, inferiority, that other people are better than you are. So it's a leveling process that's going on where we want to bring everybody down to the same level.
Nobody's excellent. Nobody's accomplished anything. Oh, they just accomplished great things because they had money or because their parents sent them to Yale or Dartmouth or because they had all this privilege. So it's like bringing everyone down.
But I think that envy is the root cause of it. So going back to where we started, that people are bored, they feel like they're wasting their life, but you were saying, wherever you go, there you are, that this is an internal problem. You have to master your emotions. How do you begin to tile that together for somebody that wants out of that?
They want to love their life and feel like they're making the most of it. You talked about like, we actually have the ability to get a drug-like effect by looking inward and what is it? And improving ourselves and just falling in love, being honest about what we actually like and pursuing it. Like, is that an act of the will to expansion?
What's driving that? Well, you know, there are many ways to look at that. But in mastery, my way of describing it is a very high form of fulfillment because I like to think of fulfillment over happiness. Happiness seems like a kind of an immediate thing where getting some kind of stimulation or drinking whiskey will make you happy, but it won't make you fulfilled.
Fulfillment is a longer lasting emotion. It comes from, wow, I spent two years doing that. I made what I set out to create. I feel fulfilled.
It's a wonderful feeling. It's the greatest high in the world, I think. Okay, so my one avenue to get to what you're saying is through your work. I'm not saying it's everything because I understand relationships and people and children, all these things are very important, okay?
But I'm looking at through your work to reach a level of feeling, of that sense of power and expansion and fulfilled. And when you have that feeling, you don't want to hurt other people. There's no need for it. There's no need to push people around for no reason.
You feel comfortable with yourself, all right? So the number one thing, the most important thing is to figure out the path towards that kind of fulfillment through your work or through your career, right? Now, some people don't like that. I've been criticized before.
I went once and gave a talk at Stanford and they were thinking that that was just so elitist, like fulfillment. Well, through your work, like this one woman said, my father was a truck driver his whole life. Are you saying that he wasn't fulfilled? You know, that kind of criticism.
What'd you say to that? I said, well, that's actually very elitist on your part. You're saying that that's all your father was ever capable of achieving. Maybe, you know, if he was happy being a truck driver, if that excited him, if that's what he was destined to create, if he felt comfortable with that, fine, I have no problem.
But a lot of people in very working class jobs aren't necessarily so happy. Their lives are full of routine. There's no kind of intellectual challenge to it. And if you know anything about the human animal and the human brain, our brains are voracious.
We need constant stimulation. So if you're driving a truck all day, that's all you have. If that's fulfilling for you, maybe, yes, being a good driver and getting there on time and delivering goods, maybe that isn't road to fulfillment. But maybe your father was frustrated.
Maybe he was drinking or something. Maybe it didn't really fulfill him. So how can you say that people should just settle for what they have, right? Because a lot of people aren't happy.
And they may think they're happy. They may kind of deceive themselves. But deep down inside, they're frustrated. And that's why they turn to having affairs.
That's why they turn to alcohol. That's why they turn to drugs. That's why they turn to addictions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There are all kinds of signs of that.
So I'm not necessarily assuming that your father was fulfilled by his truck driving. I could be. That's how I answered her. She wasn't happy with that.
Okay, anyway. So some people criticize this notion of work. But no, we are animals that love to make things. Somebody wants to find us as homo faber, the animal that likes to build things, to make things.
That's our hands. We became powerful for making tools, et cetera. Also by being social animals, don't get me wrong. But we are creatures that are designed to make things, to build things, to create, right?
And I'm not an elitist. I think every human being on the planet has that desire, right? They want that fulfillment. I don't care if they're born poor and they're impoverished or they're homeless.
They still have that need and they have that capacity to become a master in what they do. So the most important thing in life is to figure out what is your path, what is the kind of work that will bring you that sense of fulfillment, okay? So some people, it's being an entrepreneur, it's being in business. Other people, it's the arts or it's entertainment of some sort.
Other people, it's writing, it's words, it's literature. Other people, it's the body, it's sports, it's dance, it's whatever. I don't care. I don't have a hierarchy.
I don't say writing books is better than building wood things with your hands. It's all the same to me, right? It's all a form of a skill. It all can lead to mastery.
But you have to find out what that is and then you have to build towards it. And when you reach that point, let's just look at the end point. So in your 20s, which is the most important part of your life, I think. Really?
Yeah. I won't derail. Okay, we should come back to that. It's when you're discovering yourself.
It's where all the seeds are planted for what's going to happen to you. Of course, they're planted in your earliest years. Don't get me wrong. But I do think that's the most critical phase, right?
You're exploring. You're trying things out. You're experimenting with different careers, et cetera. You're gaining skills because you're learning.
Like you said, you wanted to learn, right? And then you're 32, 33, and you start a podcast, a website, your own business, et cetera. And maybe it fails, but you're excited to your own. And then you learn from it and then you create something even better.
Man, it's like the greatest feeling in the world. You don't need anything else. You know, you've accomplished something. You set a goal and you reached it.
It is, to me, a feeling of high. So when I write a book, it's painful. There's a lot of pain involved, stress, et cetera, et cetera. But man, there's nothing in the world I would give up.
I even had a stroke probably because of that. I wouldn't give up any of that for that sense of, I can look back, I wrote that book. I can die tomorrow and I'm happy. I did what I thought I needed to do.
I reached not all my potential, but a good portion of my potential. To me, that is, if everybody had that open to them, then I think we would live in a much better world if people knew that as a value and went towards it. And I think the greatest periods in history, the kind of the golden eras, we can look at Athens, we can look at Renaissance Italy, we can look at the 1920s in America, the jazz era, all the great cultural movements. Pick whatever period you like.
Some people like the 60s, some people hate the 60s. I don't care. Whatever you think is a golden era. The era of richness, of diversity, of all kinds of creative people doing all kinds of interesting things.
It's an openness and everyone's experimenting. And this kind of change that's brewing and experimentation, that to me, is a high point of human culture. And it comes from more and more individuals taking this path that I'm talking about. Do you have a math equation, for lack of a better word, for fulfillment?
How would that be? A plus B? Yeah, kind of. So here, I think that, so I agree with you so violently, I want to bite through the table.
Go ahead. So I have the best use of my teeth. So I have a rough formula of what I think leads to fulfillment. I think about this a lot.
I'm always looking for somebody that can help me refine. But I think it goes like this. It has to be hard. And there's reasons for this from an evolutionary standpoint.
But it has to be hard. It has to be something that you get more energy from than it takes. So it's something that you inherently enjoy. And it has to be something that allows you to transform your potential into skill set.
And that skill set has to be something that serves you and the group. If you do all of that, you will be fulfilled. If any one of those pieces are missing, it's really hard, it's something you love, you're improving your skill set, but it only serves you, you won't be fulfilled. If all of it, but it only serves the group and not you, you won't be fulfilled.
It seems to me that it has to have all of those elements. Yeah, I mean, I think there are people, unfortunately, who get that fulfillment without the group part. Do you think they're actually fulfilled? Yeah, I mean, if you like artists who write to do some kind of great art, but they're not necessarily the best people in the world, you might be a total dick.
But if their art, which I think is its own punishment, P.S., but they may find fulfillment in their art if they get feedback from the group, the group has moved, it's sublime. And so their art creates the desired feeling in that person. They have contributed to the group, in my estimation. But if that same artist made art and nobody gave a shit about it, I don't think they would feel fulfilled.
Well, you know, I don't want to split hairs with you because you're largely correct, but I can't think of examples of people who were ignored in their lifetime and it was painful, but they knew they were right. They knew they had created something brilliant. They knew they had created some invention and it was ignored and nobody cared, nobody liked them. Think about Tesla, Nikola Tesla.
Yeah, he was pretty miserable. Yeah, so despite all this incredible shit, being out of step with your time is rough. You are the shout and the echo. So even though when Einstein was asked what's it like to be the most brilliant man alive, he said, I don't know, you'll have to ask Nikola Tesla.
Despite that, that because he could not figure out the echo part of doing something in a way where people reflected back that yes, this is amazingly valuable, that even though now we all reap the benefits, was very little consolation. I can't think of it because my mind is slowing down, but I've been talking recently with my wife about artists and composers, et cetera, who had no success in life. She said, really? Yeah, never sold any books, their music was ignored, but my research of them, they had just in the work itself and the absorption of the mind in composing this brilliant thing or writing this thing, they had that flow.
Yes, so the pain is definitely there. I'm not arguing against you because I said, oh, you might be right at me. The thing is, it's the sense of flow because what happens is what makes you miserable is your self-absorption in many ways, right? The worst form of therapy is to sit there and talk about your problems.
The best form of therapy is to get outside of yourself. Well, the people are going to be, like, the record just hit for a lot of people. Go back. The worst form of therapy is talk therapy?
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, it's not the worst, but it's not, to me, the most productive therapy to just talk about your problems. Really? Why?
Because it's like accentuating your self-absorption, right? Whereas what you need is to get outside of yourself, not into all of your problems. Now, of course, I'm contradicting myself because I talk about introspection. That's a different thing.
We're not introspecting about my problems, what my parents did to me, more and more, oh, I'm so miserable, blah, blah, blah. I'm sure there are forms of talking therapy that are good, so I shouldn't generalize that. But what I think... I don't know if something feels intuitively right about this.
Yeah, well, I just wrote... Sorry, I keep doing that. About this man. People won't have heard of him.
He's a Russian mystic, whatever you want to call him, Gurdjieff, who had these exercises. I don't know. And one thing he taught his students was to not vent your unpleasant emotions. So he had this exercise called self-observation, where you could go observe yourself like you did in the most deepest way, not just your thoughts, but about your body and how your body and your mind interact in this insane, continual blend.
There's no separation. So one kind of thought will affect your body, but a feeling in your gut will affect your thinking. You're all this, observe yourself, observe yourself, observe yourself. And he said, you will discover in observing yourself that most of your thoughts revolve around unpleasant emotions.
It's a very bad thing to realize, but it's true. I use the number 95%, but I'm pulling it out of you-know-what again. Okay, so most of it is dealing with frustration, resentment, anger, bitterness, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, and he said, look at those emotions, see them.
Do not judge them. Do not say they're bad or good or whatever, and don't ever talk about them. Don't vent them to people. You can look at them, but don't talk about them.
And the people who experience them, whoa, by not talking about them, they start to go away. I didn't really feel them because I never expressed them. So expressing them is kind of what makes them stronger and more embedded inside of you. I feel like we're doing that culturally right now.
Yes, most definitely. I mean, look, what is the crux of the problem in people today, if I had to summarize it? And I don't mean people, include myself in them, us, because I'm a human being as well, as far as I know. I've heard him.
It's that we're self-absorbed, right? I think that's the root cause of so many of our issues, right? Because we're creatures that are actually built for empathy, for actually putting our minds into other things, into people, into animals, into solving problems, into our work. That's who we are.
And we've turned that around. All of that voracious brain energy that we have, as I said, I just wrote a chapter on the brain, and it's this insanely powerful instrument that is so complex, people say it's the most complex piece of matter in the universe, right? It's so powerful. And when you turn it inward, it just eats us alive inside.
It's like a bacteria eating us from within, as opposed to exteriorizing it into work, into creating things, into building things, into empathy, into working with other people. And if we're getting all ranty and outraged about justice, et cetera, et cetera, what you really need to do is to get outside of that and out and helping other people, genuinely helping them, right? If your cause is, and it's my cause as well, as the environment, which I believe a lot, where my charity goes to, then ranting and complaining online and making people feel bad is useless. Go ahead and start a movement, create something, do something.
You'll feel so much better about yourself, and you'll be contributing it. But what we don't need is more of that self-absorption. It's like a centripetal force that's drawing us further and further and further in. My problems, my parents, my education, my brother and sister, my wife, more and more inward, more problems, it gets deeper and deeper, more erasinated inside of ourselves, right?
You want to get out of yourself, right, and put it into your work. So, you know, let's say you're an artist, right? I have great respect for us. I kind of wish I had been.
I'm a failed artist. This is a guy who's written incredible best-selling books. I've walked through bookstores and watched them bringing stacks of books that you wrote decades ago. Yeah, but I wanted to be a novelist, you know.
So fascinating. It is so weird to me that you can sell at your level and still be like, oh, but I wanted to do this. I'm the same, which is why I have such a response to that, because I am not good at the things that I wanted to be good at, and the things that I am good at that other people envy me for, I'm like, uh, like, that's not very interesting. What is it that you wanted to be?
That list is very long. If I could snap my fingers, I would be Elon Musk. That is, like, my fantasy of fancies. You're still plenty of time.
You're young. Yeah, we'll see. Hey, I'm 46. What's he like?
47, 48? Like, he's barely older than me. He's 50 or 50 now. 51?
52? He said, you know, it's like having this thing turned on that you can't turn on. Oh, I didn't know. That's interesting.
But I would pay that price. So before we started rolling, you and I were talking, I am very enamored with what you've created and put into the world, and you still fill a niche that so few people are able to fill. I think it's utterly fascinating. I said once in our earlier interview that when I read your books, I can hear wolves howling in the background, but in real life, you're so lovely and kind and considerate.
So most people that write dark books are fucking dark, and they don't even realize they're writing a dark book, but, like, your stuff really deals with an underbelly of the human condition, but yet you're the lovely person. Anyway, what you've put in the world, I think, is absolutely incredible, and so I totally understand the impetus to be good at one thing, to wish you were good at something else, but it is a very fascinating part of the human psyche. Well, probably, if I had been a novelist, I would end up at this age, and I was successful at saying, you know, I really wanted to write nonfiction books. The grass is always greener, so who am I to say?
That's such a weird fucking thing. So what I find interesting about what you're saying is that this idea, and I haven't thought a lot about this, so I'm thinking out loud here, but the idea that if you're repeating something over and over, and I have said many, many times, whatever, you become what you repeat. So if you're saying to yourself, like, hey, I can figure this out, I can learn, I can grow, then you will act in accordance, and I find that there's something about this moment where we are obsessing over things. I'm not even saying they're not real, but we're obsessing over them to the point where it's becoming counterproductive.
Like, we're seeing things where they aren't necessarily, or we're exaggerating things that are there, but now we're making them seem just absolutely terrifying, and I think that there's something that people have to be careful about there, that you can make your own life worse by obsessing over the things that are wrong, rather than, like you said, making it somehow external or creating a piece of art around it or something. I don't know, creating something, except I'm thinking out loud, I don't have my finger fully on why I can sense that there's a problem with it, but there's a problem. Oh, I think most definitely. We can feel it in the zeitgeist.
It's kind of ugly. It's an ugly energy. It's an ugly energy. I normally hate that kind of loose talk, but because I don't yet know how to articulate it, that feels really right.
So you talked about this earlier, and I can't remember where I first heard this, but the idea that some things make you feel expansive and some make you constrict, this moment feels like a mass constriction, and that's why I worry. Yeah, and the feeling of openness, which I say occurs historically because we're social animals and things occur in these kind of cultural globs, these generational moments, is because of memes and being affected by the people around us. And in moments of expansion, your minds are open. You're adventurous.
You're exploring. It often comes in these kind of revolutionary periods where people are just so sick of the past 20 years and all the accumulated baggage and all the ways of doing things. They're just tired, but they want something new. And so they're exploring, and they're hungry, and they're adventurous for new ideas, and people come up with wild things.
But who cares? It's wild, but it's interesting. It's new. There's discussion.
There's argument, but people aren't killing each other over it, right? These are great moments in history, and it's a feeling of expansion and adventurousness. So if you have an adventurous spirit, which I think is an incredibly positive quality to have, that means you're continually open to life. You're continually open to what happens, what it brings to you, and you're seeking it out.
You want new things. You have what the poet Keats called negative capability. I don't know if you're familiar with that. I am, but because of you.
Oh, yeah. I talked about it in mastery. It's basically the fact that you can carry in your mind two contradictory ideas and not be upset about that. Because quite honestly, sometimes things are contradictory, and they're true, right?
It's weird, but it's true, right? It could be A, it could be black, it could be white, and they're both correct. The fact that you can hold two things that seem opposing in your mind at the same time, he considered the foundation of creativity. He thought that was Shakespeare's greatest quality.
It's what makes a great scientist, a great inventor, a great entrepreneur, a great inventor, et cetera, et cetera. Do you have any examples? I agree most wholeheartedly, but I'd be hard-pressed to give an example off the top of my head. Well, I'm going to mess it up horrifically because I don't remember it so well, but there's the story of Louis Pasteur.
We're talking about invention and sort of the whole science of immunology, right? And here I'm having to strain my neurons here to remember it, but basically he had these chickens that had been injected with smallpox or whatever the disease is, right? And then they all died, okay? And then he brought in a new batch of chickens.
He's trying to figure out how to solve smallpox or whatever it was. He brought a new batch of chickens in. He injected them, and then they survived. Some of them survived, and he couldn't figure out why.
And then he injected them again. And I know I'm missing out, so please, out there, scientists, don't blame me for this. He's trying to figure out why they survived. And basically, it was because the smallpox that he had injected them with the second batch was weaker, had been left outside.
And so they had developed immunity from it by having this smaller, less intense version of smallpox injected into them. So the next time they got injected, they had the antibodies. Now, we take this for granted now, but nobody had a concept for antibodies back then. It was a totally novel concept.
And so when he saw these chickens that survived, he was like, why? You know, what happened? And he submitted this to other scientists, and they came up with all kinds of ideas that were basically the same ideas rehashed. You know, it was an accident.
You have to redo the experiment, or they survived because of this, that, or the other. And he asked himself, well, no, maybe it's something that nobody ever considered. Maybe what had happened was, by having the weaker batch, they were able to somehow survive. So he asked a question that was counterintuitive, right?
Which is, injecting someone with something will give them a better chance of surviving it. Which is like, whoa, that's like a contradiction in terms. How can that happen? He was able to entertain this very bizarre idea that contradicted everything in medicine at the same time.
He had negative capability, and he displayed it in other aspects of his life as well. And he invented one of the most important breakthroughs in the history of medicine. There are other examples I can give of artists, because it's the most common with artists. But, you know, people like Einstein had it as well, et cetera.
So that's the US, for example. I can give you a bad one. No, that's actually really, that's a great one. I have one in business I was just thinking about.
And because I talk about this in Impact Theory University a lot, you have to be able to hold two competing ideas in your head at the same time. And the one that I encounter the most is, as a leader, you have to understand that people are intoxicated by certainty in a way that is almost distressing. And in fact, Impact Theory just had our sixth birthday. And one of the founding members, thank you very much, one of the founding members recorded a video of an early memory.
There's so much conviction that we were going to be able to pull this off. And so one of the things I teach is, you have to be able to create a narrative. You have to be able to say, this is what's going to happen. This is exactly how we're going to do it.
And if you can, like, show people that you just really believe to the core that this is going to work, then they'll follow you. The problem is that if you're blinded by your own narrative, you're going to get blindsided. And so you have to have this narrative, you have to present it with conviction, you have to believe it, but then you have to question the shit out of it and make sure that, like, is this really working? Like, am I getting the data that I should be getting?
Because any conviction like that should make a prediction. If your predictions aren't coming true, then you're trouble. It's like gold. You said something earlier that I want to go back to.
I've been holding it in my head because it was so intriguing. Yes, at the Stanford talk, the one who was annoyed that you said that you could find fulfillment in your work. Why do you think it made her mad? I understand your rebuttal to her, but why did it make her mad?
Well, I think there's a context. First of all, this was like a group of psychologists, very heavy academia, right, high level. And here was this self-help writer from Los Angeles coming to the Stanford Behavioral School telling us about what is fulfilling. There was an immediate snobbery going on.
I could sense it. And I think that was a large part of it. It was like when I went to France, although this was not nearly as bad an example of, this American is going to teach us about seduction. Come on, we're French, right?
We taught the world how to seduce. I could laugh at that and I thought that we're right, you know, and I felt kind of humbled about that. But this woman, I got a sense of, it wasn't necessarily what I was saying. It just didn't rankle them that I was saying.
The other thing that rankled her was that I was saying that as an individual, you could change yourself. And I had brought up the example, because it was recently, I was writing about this with a 50-cent book, about the great African-American writer Richard Wright, who wrote this fabulous novel called Native Sons. Is that the name? There is a book called Native Sons.
I don't know if you wrote it. And how he had overcome incredible adversity in his life and had written this book. And then basically, it kind of went downhill from there, but he had resurrected himself through his work and he had overcome this horrific poverty that he grew up in the South, et cetera. And I was detailing the process of him as a writer, as an example of what I was describing about, through your work, you reach this level.
So there were two things. There was a snobbery element of this Los Angeles, because, you know, from L.A., people are appreciably dumber further south you go in California, right? If you're in the Bay Area, you're from Los Angeles. You already have a market against you.
Interesting. A self-help writer from Los Angeles. Okay. It's not as bad as I guess.
Yeah. All right. And then the other element of, it's not about culture. It's not about the superstructure of society.
It's not about some Marxist theory about, you know, your level of income and all the other things. I was saying, this person, this individual, overcame the worst kind of adversity, not through a government program, although I have nothing against government programs. I'm not one of those arch libertarians. I believe in necessity government.
I'm somebody who's educated through public schools for my whole life, and I love that. But he did it on his own in a process that was very arduous and beautiful. It's like, well, let's go against everything we believe in. That you can't do things on your own.
That you need an organization. You need a structure. You need politics. You need a group.
You need academics at Stanford to teach you how to get to that point, right? So I was nailed as the self-help writer from Los Angeles who was preaching about individualism. And it fit all the cliches about the American. American, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right?
And that's not the trend in academia. The trend is trying to move away. This goes back to the whole structuralist movement and deconstruction, et cetera. It's not the individual that creates a work of art.