The Path To Power: How To Gain Respect & Influence - Robert Greene (4K)

> **Key Points:**
> - **Robert Green's journey** on the show and the discussion of his iconic book "The 48 Laws of Power."
> - The **importance of modern philosophy** and its relevance in today's culture.
> - Reflection on the **value of accumulating skills** and how they can shape one's destiny.
> - The significance of **reputation** and how it can determine success or failure.
> - The duality of **masculinity**, exploring both its positive traits and misconceptions.
> - Insights on **embracing individuality** and the importance of being unique in a conformist world.

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Robert Green, welcome to the show. 

Thank you for having me, Chris. My pleasure. We finally get to meet after all these years. 

The first time that you came on this show was episode 78. What are you at now? Five years ago. I’m on 820. 

Wow. The show is 400 times bigger than it was when you first came on.

So I wanted to say **thank you.** 

400? Come on, Chris. 

I know, I know, I’m disappointed. I know. I really did try to impress it. I wanted to hit that 500 number before we got to meet. 

It’s pretty good. I wanted to say thank you for coming on very early. 

You’re very welcome. You’re very welcome. 

I also wanted to say thank you for sending me the special edition of "The 48 Laws of Power," which is the coolest book. 

For the people that haven’t seen it, it’s leather bound, gold embossed, 48 on the front. And then as you look at the side, it’s gold, like just like a gold boundary on the outside of the paper. But as you splay the pages out in one direction, it’s your face, as you splay the pages out in the other, it’s that famous portrait of Machiavelli. 

So cool. So cool. 

I can’t really take total credit for it. My partner on my first three books did it. He’s an brilliant designer. He consulted me on it, but he’s really the genius behind that.

But it’s the sort of thing you can’t not take a photo of. 

Yeah, it’s so neat. I mean, it’s the most basic technology as well. 

Stuff that’s been around, you used to get it in cereal boxes to, you know, look at things from different angles to be able to make it work.

But no one’s ever applied it to a book before.

Well, he’s a very strange guy. He’s Dutch. He’s very interesting. We had a good combination; we had a good kind of rapport. And he researched it and found in the 18th century this was the technique that they would use on the edging of books, where you would flip through it and see an image. 

He studied how they did it and then he was able to replicate it through digital technology. But, you know, that's pretty genius. That's pretty interesting.

So…. Who is that guy?

His name is Joost Elers. You’ll see his name on my books, the Yo Aler's book, my first three books. And he’s the one that if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be here. I’d either be dead or I’d be still working in Hollywood and probably be dead. Anyway, he discovered me. 

I’ve told the story many times, but Tia basically gave me my first break. He subsidized me while I wrote "The 48 Laws of Power." He produced it; he designed it together. We designed it. 

So I have a lot to owe him and he’s still involved? 

Yes, he designed the COVID the Daily Laws, and I’m hoping he’ll be sure. 

What do you think is the problem with modern philosophy? Where did we go wrong? 

Well, I mean, it’s a huge subject, and there are lots of different aspects of philosophy, but like everything, it’s so much in our culture, it’s kind of lost its soul. So, you know, years ago we kind of somewhere went off on the wrong path. 

We lost faith in just our thinking, in our brains, in our minds. Right? 

So Socrates or Nietzsche, or if you know, skipping here 2,000 years, they didn’t sit there and go through scientific journals about the origins of consciousness and do studies and data and mathematical formulas to figure out how the brain works or what makes a human being. 

I’m doing a lot of things on Socrates right now because I’m writing about him. The stuff he’s saying about is absolutely brilliant. It’s mind blowing and it’s incredibly relevant to our world today.

But if he were around today, people would laugh at him. 

Oh, it’s all speculative, right? It’s just subjective. Where’s the data? Where’s the hard facts? 

Psychology is even more infected with this kind of mindset. But philosophy is like that. I can’t read that stuff.

You know, for me, philosophy has to have a direct connection to my life, to living, to my soul, to my day to day affairs, to what I have to think about when I wake up in the morning kind of thing. It can’t be all about this ethereal, abstract stuff. 

I can’t get my brain around it. I want to know how to live; I want to know how to think; I want to know how to breathe. 

I do a lot of, I’m heavily into Zen meditation and Zen philosophy. To me, that is like one of the most beautiful forms of philosophy and it’s all about how to ground your day to day life.

And you can say Zen can be described as the ultimate realistic philosophy, the realist philosophy. It’s taking you back to what is truly real. 

Okay, yes, the language could be very strange. Like they try and present these riddles to you to alter your consciousness, but the essence of it is very relatable.

And they want you to be able to take their philosophy and live in your day to day life and not have a separation between the two. 

So I can’t read that stuff that goes on now. I just can’t read it. 

I mean, there are some people whose things I like, but they're usually not considered philosophers. One of my favorite writers that nobody will have ever heard of, he died a couple of years ago. He’s sort of contemporary is a man named Roberto Calasso. 

He writes the most fantastic books. I would consider it philosophy. He’s Italian. He ran a publishing company for many years. 

But he writes books about the ancient world and he mixes it in with stories and anecdotes. He has a book called "The Ruins of Kas" that’s just one of the most brilliant books you’ll ever read. 

That to me is philosophy because it stirs my soul, it makes me think, it makes me imagine the world, makes me rethink about the life I’m living. 

But so many of this stuff, other stuff I just can’t read. I’m not saying it’s their fault, maybe it’s my own fault, but for me it’s kind of gone down this wrong path, down a rabbit hole. 

If you're having to work that hard to resonate with the entire world’s worth of philosophy, I don’t know, I feel like it’s probably not a “you” problem if there’s a lot of… You’re trying hard, you’re opening yourself up and you’re only finding small glimmers here and there. 

Yeah, yeah. I mean, so there’s a philosopher and you have to excuse me. 

My memory is not what it used to be. Maybe his name will come to me. He wrote an essay, a very famous essay, about what is it like to be a bat? I thought it was great. 

I was so excited about it, and I did. I bought the book that’s in. He’s a very famous philosopher. He’s actually quite smart. Very interesting. 

But the essay is, you’re looking up right now. 

I am Thomas Nagel. Yes, Thomas Nagel. He’s written some very interesting books, but they don’t grab me the way that Nietzsche or Schopenhauer or Heidegger even grabs me. 

But his idea about what it’s like to be a bat, he’s trying to essentially say, we can’t know, right? Because that kind of consciousness is so different from ours. 

Right? It’s echolocation. We have nothing to compare it to. 

Therefore get out of your arrogance. You can’t know it. And a part of me understands it, but a part of me disagrees with it. 

And because I wrote a chapter in my new book about animal consciousness and how we can put ourselves inside even something as strange as a bat or a spider. 

And I wrote a lot about how spiders think. 

Yes, there are limits to it, and that’s what the point of his essay. But so many times with I find, particularly now in the world today, particularly in academia, is the necessity to say you’re against something. 

You’re reacting, you know, he’s reacting against people who put too much empathy and anthropomorphize things. Okay, so I’m going to write a book that says the opposite. 

And I’ll get attention and I’ll get in the New York Times review of books and people will listen because I’m standing against something. 

So academia is all about like having some novel stance, usually from some cultural perspective, whereas the truth is more rounded. 

It's not so heart-set, just reacting and going in the opposite direction. You’re not arriving at the truth. 

So maybe it’s a combination of the two. Maybe there are limits to what we can know about a bat and how it thinks. 

But we have an amazing capacity to put ourselves inside of other beings and to kind of get a feel, not an intellectual sense, but a feel of what it might be like to echoing, echoing. 

You know, we can get a feel for that. 

And I talk about spiders and how their form of intelligence is all about vibrations. 

They feel in their eight legs, in the bottom of their eight legs. They feel the wind blowing, they feel the vibrations on the web, they feel the weather. They know a storm is coming. 

They can sense a creature that has landed on their web just by the vibrations. 

And elephants have a very similar power in their feet. They can sense an earthquake from 10 miles away. 

But we… we can sense that because we can feel vibrations. 

And I can’t really know a spider, but spiders are intelligent. And the idea that they’re intelligent and that they think is a radical idea. 

So I don’t know, I’m going off on some tangent here, but I’m trying to answer your question.

There’s this spirit of play, which is fun, I think, and I know you mean there is a sort of this odd, highly scrutinous skepticism. 

Yeah, I mean, there’s a lack of play. 

You said it perfectly. Thank you. 

You hit the nail right there. 

I learned something else that you taught Billy Oppenheimer. 

That said, above all else, **focus on acquiring knowledge and skills.** Knowledge and skills are like gold, a currency you will transform into something more valuable than you can imagine. 

It’s similar to one of your tweets, which is eventually the time that was not spent on learning skills will catch up to you, and the fall will be painful. 

What’s that mean? 

Well, you know, life can be kind of difficult, right? You don’t really know sometimes where you’re headed. Nobody gives you any kind of guidance in this world, right? 

And they don’t tell you when you graduate college. Go ahead, go, Robert. You go study this. This is what, and this is what your brain is suited for, etc., etc. 

You have to find your own path. 

And so for me personally, I spent years in the wilderness, so I’m going to give this a personal spin because I think that helps a little bit. 

Because what I can answer it inside my own body here. 

So I know I want to be a writer, but I can’t figure out what the hell I’m going to write. 

So I leave college and I try journalism because I have to make a living; I have to support myself. 

And I don’t really like it. It doesn’t suit me. He writes an article, and then a week later it’s forgotten. Nobody reads about it. 

And as somebody who studied ancient Greek and Latin in college, I think in terms of thousands of years and not in three days or a week. 

I want something that I write to be read in 30, 24, you know, sorry. 

So it wasn’t a good fit.

So I quit. I wander around Europe trying to write a novel with my backpack. 

I live in London, I live in Paris, I lived in Ireland, I lived in Greece, you name it. I taught English in Spain trying to write a novel. 

I had no discipline; I couldn't do it. It didn’t work. 

And I started to get depressed. Then my dad isn’t well. 

I decide I’m going to move back to Los Angeles. Hey, I’m going to get a job in Hollywood, right? I’ll make a ton of money and I’ll be writing, etc. 

How glamorous. How sexy. Movie stars knocking at my door, etc. 

Okay. Terrible, terrible fit. 

Because I’m a control freak. I don’t like people coming in and changing everything I say. 

And I don’t like conforming and I don’t like compromise. 

Sorry, that’s a bad thing about me, but I didn’t want to have to lower my standards to what they were asking me to do; it was a terrible fit. 

Alright, now comes the chance I meet this man, Yo Aler as we mentioned earlier in Italy. 

And he says, he asks me if I have any ideals for books. 

And I kind of improvised the 48 laws of power. 

The point of my long-winded story here is I had spent 18 years or so acquiring high levels of skill in writing. 

Okay? I learned in journalism how to write under a deadline, under pressure, how to make it dramatic, how to make the opening sentence exciting enough to make you read off further. 

Trying to write novels taught me about creating stories, which is a huge part of my writing. 

Working in Hollywood, I learned how to research, which is a huge element, and then the theatrical element, making things dramatic, also a story, okay?

All of that time, slowly by slowly, brick by brick, I had developed real-level skill. 

So when it came time to write the 48 Laws of Power, I could do it. 

I had learned all this discipline. I had learned how to write under a deadline. I learned how to make things entertaining, the whole bag, okay? 

And so the world opened up for me. 

Prior to that time, I was miserable. Really, really was. 

I mean, I had good moments too. You’re young; you’re always happy when you’re young. But a lot of times I was miserable and I didn’t know why, but I was acquiring skills, not even aware of it. 

And so the reason I write that is when you develop that skill, when you’re serious about it, because I was very serious about writing, you change your brain, you rewire your brain. 

It’s like… and this is a remarkable power of the human brain that people don’t realize something. 

I’m also writing in my new book, this one writer, his name is Schwartz, I believe he’s a UCLA neuroscientist. 

He wanted to help people who had OCD, right? Obsessive compulsive disorder. And usually, it’s drugs and it’s talking therapy. 

He wanted to find out something more effective. And he found that through certain strategies that he developed that they could use in their life, that they would get over their disorder. 

And the point isn’t what the strategies were.

The point was he did brain scans. And through the strategies that he gave them to do, which I can’t remember right now, the brain scans showed that they changed the brain. 

And his point was, through thinking, through developing skills, you literally change matter; you change your brain. 

So something non-material, like thoughts, can literally change material things like the wiring of your brain. 

You learn skills, you’re changing your brain, you’re changing the matter of your brain. 

Things are connecting that weren’t connected before. 

And slowly if you do it, if you’re serious enough, a point will be reached like it was reached in my life, where either you will start a business or someone will ask you to do something like write a book or make a film. 

And the world will open up for you, and you’ll be able to do it because you have that. 

You’ve laid the ground; you’ve laid the soil. Everything is there, it’s rich. 

And now something great, amazing will sprout up out of it. 

When you have no talents, you have no skill, life is a series of con… endless confusion. You hit this road, you go here, then something else, you go here, then you go here.

You end up in a circle and you don’t know where the file you are. 

When you’ve got skills, zoom, you know where to go. 

It’s not in zoom, it’s more like… but your head somewhere. 

Yeah, it’s not. I don’t know we’re being filmed, but so, yeah, so that’s my answer to your question. 

Isn’t it interesting that the accumulation of skills, period, at the time can be a little bit like being in the trenches? You have no promise of glory, you don’t know if this is even going to work, you have no idea whether this is worth it. 

And you don’t even have the context of how the journalism with the novel, with the Hollywood, with the interpersonal skills, with the guy that you meet in Italy…

It’s only in retrospect that you get to piece this entire arc together. 

And I think it’s one of the reasons why reserving judgment on whether or not the situation you were in right now is good or bad is probably a pretty good idea because you just don’t know what’s around the corner that you’ve been preparing for that you didn’t even know existed. 

Yes, but there are parameters to it. It’s not like you’re totally… it’s total mystery in the moment. 

So going back to what bothers me about philosophy, we’re so caught up in things that are rational, things that can be put into numbers, quantifiable data, no big data, AI, etc., etc. 

But the human consciousness is more subtle than that, is more fine-grained. 

No numbers can actually approximate what human consciousness is capable of. 

And what we have sometimes is we have an intuition about things in the moment. 

So maybe in retrospect I’m creating a story that didn’t really exist back then. 

But at the same time, I kind of knew of the future; I kind of knew that this would happen. 

I had a feeling of fate; it was always there. It’s weird, I know, it sounds woo woo, I’m sorry to say, but it’s very real. 

And I’ve studied millions of successful, famous people and a lot of them report the same thing. Sometimes you don’t realize it, but your body and your brain have a sense of even the future and of where you’re headed, but you’re not totally aware of it. 

So I knew that I wanted to be a writer. So if people don’t know that they want to be a writer, they don’t know they want to go into engineering, etc., they’ll never make those little connections that I was able to make. 

And having that sense that you want to be a writer, that you want to make films, that you want to start a particular kind of business, you’re interested… technology creates a framework in your brain that kind of changes how you make decisions.

You’re not totally conscious of it, but not everything in life you’re totally conscious of. Things are operating below the level. 

So it’s something. It’s the chapter I’m writing right now about my sublime book. There is something in you that is guiding you towards certain things. 

Right? Guided you towards podcasting. I don’t know your life, I don’t know your biography before then, but something inched you towards that. 

What is that? 

It’s interesting to find out it’s not all just chaos and random is what I’m trying to say. 

That’s beautiful. And I agree. 

Do not be the court cynic. The ability to express wonder and amazement and seem like… you mean it is a rare and dying talent, but one still greatly valued.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I can recall my own childhood, for instance, growing up here in Los Angeles. 

And I had a very vivid imagination, which I’m not unusual like that most children do, but I was always inventing games. 

I loved inventing sports games, games with you roll dice. And you created this whole world. I created war games, all these different things that my imagination was doing. 

And then when I take walks and stuff, I was like seeing. I was thinking about the world. I was going through all kinds of fantasies. I was dreaming about the future. 

Okay, I was innocent like children are supposed to be. 

And in their innocence, I was opening up to the world and I was experiencing the world as it is. 

Because the reality is we are born into a very, very strange and mysterious and wondrous world, which is the subject of my book. 

Right. You take everything for granted, but you don’t realize that to be alive, the odds against you being Chris Williamson are absolutely astronomical. 

To be around with all this technology, where we were as humans 20,000 years ago, something you can’t even begin to fathom. 

And when you’re a child, you ask these questions. 

Albert Einstein said the same thing. He said genius is able to keep questioning, to be that child, to keep wondering about things. 

Right? 

So your ability to wonder, to ask questions, to not feel like you know all the answers isn't a beautiful thing? 

It’s not just to make you more intelligent. It also makes you happier. 

So cynics start from a place where they know everything. 

The world is just so rotten. It’s just everybody is out for power. 

People will accuse me of saying that: but it’s not true. 

Everyone's out for power. Everyone’s got like an ulterior motive. It’s all just about these, you know, you’re really not interested in other people, Robert. You’re interested in making money. 

Right. 

Cynicism reduces everything to this one level. 

It has nothing to do with reality because reality is much richer and weirder and more mysterious than that. 

So when you’re a cynic, you’re missing the beauty of life. 

But also, people don’t like to be around cynics. 

The court cynic is to get back to your question because, yeah, people, like, maybe some sarcasm, I don’t deny that. 

But people want to feel that sense of innocence. They want to feel excited; they want to feel enthusiastic. 

And if you’re a Debbie Downer, if everything is like… that’s what’s really going on here. 

You’re not really about blah, blah, blah. People will like, yeah, they’ll laugh at your jokes, but eventually they’re going to push you aside because they don’t want to hear that kind of stuff. 

Play and enthusiasm. 

Play and enthusiasm again. 

Coming back to play. 

Yeah. 

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Yeah, I’m cultivating that sense. 

Similar to another tweet you had, which I loved. 

The stupidest people are always the ones who think they have the right answers. 

Yeah, yeah. 

So getting back to my studies of the ancient world, which is the main part of me, one thing that always excited me was this concept, the ancient Greeks, that more harm is caused in this world by stupid, incompetent people than by evil people. 

Right. 

And there’s a word in Greek called phronesis, which is a form of wisdom, to use your title here, but it’s a form of practical wisdom to be able to get things done, to navigate through life, navigate through people, to be balanced and get things done. 

Okay, so what makes people stupid? 

And right now we have a lot of stupid people in this world. There always have been stupid people because there are more people on the planet exponentially. 

There are more stupid people on the planet. 

What makes people stupid? 

And I’m sorry, I’m just going to tell it like it is. 

Is there certainty that they have all the answers? 

This is what’s going on with our government. This is what’s wrong with this or that. 

This is what people should be like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 

So you’re narrowing your focus to this little tiny little rail, something that you heard from somebody else. 

It’s not even your own stupid idea; you’ve absorbed it on the Internet, whatever, and you’re going down on this kind of monoail path. 

Meanwhile, the world is all around you and you’re just going like zoom like that because you’re so certain you have the answer. 

And when you have leaders, this is to get back to the Greek thing.

When you have leaders who are so certain, they enter a country into a war that they haven’t been thought out of because... 

And so the paradigm in ancient culture was the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, the war that ended up being the end of Athenian democracy and of their golden era.

Right. 

And it was the idea. And Thucydides, one of the greatest writers who ever lived, wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War. Living at that time he was saying that people, the leaders thought, “Oh, this will be so easy, and think of all the great things when we go and we take Sicily and we conquer that, the whole world and the Sparta will be destroyed.” 

Right, it wasn’t thought through. 

They were so certain of the answer that they didn’t think of the parameters. 

Right. 

They didn’t think really on a grand strategic level. 

So people who are certain of things are very stupid. And when they have power, they’re very, very dangerous. 

I’m not saying evil people aren’t dangerous, but incompetent, stupid people who are so certain, who haven’t thought things through are just as dangerous as evil people. 

I think there’s far more stupid people than there are evil people as well. 

Probably. 

Yeah. 

Yeah, it’s very interesting to think about where the Venn diagram intersects for people who are always cynical and people who always have the right answer or who always know. 

They go hand in hand. 

Correct. They totally overlap. 

Yeah. 

Correct. 

So one of your fellow countrymen from 200 years ago, exactly 200 years ago, a gentleman named John Keats, a poet, came up with a concept called negative capability. 

And negative capability, he wanted to answer the question was, why is Shakespeare, another one of your countrymen, why was Shakespeare so brilliant? 

Well, his characters were so realistic because he made them as real human beings. 

And what he could do was they weren’t stick figures. 

Shakespeare could think of a person and entertain two things about them at the same time. 

They could be both evil, but also have a strain of goodness inside of them. 

They were complex. Human beings are complex. 

A negative capability is the essence of being creative. It means you can hold two thoughts in your head at the same time. 

Two thoughts that apparently contradict each other, but you can entertain them and not grasp at one or the other. 

Not past judgment immediately. 

Yeah. 

So you’re kind of able to deal with ambiguity, and you’re able to say, life isn’t that. 

It isn’t that. 

It’s kind of both at the same time. 

That is creativity. That is real thinking. 

You know, I mean, I could go on and on about my ideas, about live ideas and dead ideas, but this is real live thinking. 

I have been playing with an idea that’s basically the same thing, just repurposed with a silly meme for me, which is **cognitive superposition.** 

So like how in physics… 

In physics, yes. 

And then when you decide, you collapse the superposition down. 

But that… 

I try to think in superpositions as much as possible. 

There’s a very good book written about like that. 

It’s not perfect. 

It’s a pretty good book called "The Possibility Principle." You can look that up. 

He tries to apply those kinds of ideas in physics to day-to-day life and psychology. It is interesting. 

It’s worth looking at. 

So much depends on **reputation.** 

**Reputation is the cornerstone of power.** 

Through reputation alone, you can intimidate and win. 

Once it slips, however, you are vulnerable and will be attacked on all sides. 

Never let others define it for you. 

Yeah, you know, so when I wrote the 48 laws of power, I tried to… 

I have somebody through my whole life loves playing games. 

I don’t mean that in the abstract. 

I mean literally like chess, backgammon, sports, poker, whatever. 

And I like the cleanness of a game. 

It’s like you do this and you can win…etc. 

But there’s also a psychological element in it. 

So particularly when you’re playing poker and you’re bluffing. 

And I was always fascinated by this. 

It’s a game of chance. 

You don’t really know what cards you’re gonna get. 

But that fellow over there, he’s been bluffing. He bluffed before. 

I’m sure he did. He’s gonna do it again. 

Right. 

So the psychology starts entering into the picture. 

In a game of chance, there’s certainly skill involved, but a lot of it is chance. 

And because he bluffed before and he’s got that look in his eye, it could be a woman. 

I don’t mean to generalize, all right, I’m going to fold. 

Okay, so you don’t realize that so much of the game of power has nothing to do with data and you being better person at something. 

A lot of it is pure psychology and intimidating people and winning before you even enter into a battle. 

So if you have a reputation, you carry it with you. 

And the reputation doesn’t have to be real. 

Personally, I don’t know how valid this is. 

I have this reputation now of being this Machiavellian character. 

And so if Robert is five minutes late for a meeting, it means he’s playing a game, even though it’s probably just the traffic. 

But my reputation now kind of puts people a little bit on the heels where it’s not necessarily true about me. 

But it kind of goes ahead of me and it makes influence muation proceeding. 

Yeah. 

And so it’s an extra form of power. 

So the idea, the overall arching idea to pull us out of the specific is power is pure psychology. 

Pure psychology. 

And what I mean by that is the CEO of a company, he doesn’t get there based on… 

It’s not like baseball. 

Whereas balls and star soccer. 

Sorry, you probably don’t even know because I’m a Texas Rangers fan, I’ll have you know. 

Oh, okay. All right. 

Well, it’s not like baseball where it’s balls, you have a good batting average or ops, all right? You’re going to get in the lineup, they’re going to bat you in the cleanup spot. 

Okay? Life isn’t like that. 

So the way somebody rises to the CEO, and I know because I was on the board of directors of a publicly traded company, it’s not about metrics. 

It’s not about things that they’ve actually done. 

It’s about psychology. 

Right. 

People rise to positions of power because they know how to play the game and they know how to play the game' psychology; they know how to appear; they know how to play the optics; they know how to intimidate. 

They know how to say less than necessary. 

They know all the psychological little gambits. 

And that’s why I wrote the 48 Laws of Power. 

It’s kind of like this is the game of life, the game of power. 

The rules are a little bit nebulous, but here’s how you play. 

You play by mastering these little psychological bits. 

One of them is your reputation. 

I’m fascinated by reputation and credibility, especially given what I do now. 

But my previous life, I was a club promoter. 

I ran. 

You were what? 

Club promoter. 

I ran nightclubs for a very long time. 

What do we call that here? 

It would just be a promoter. 

So marketing for nightclubs, essentially the guy stood on the front door with the guest list and the bands for VIP and all of the hot girls names. 

And then after a while, we owned a group of guys that did that. 

And then we owned a group of guys that owned a. 

And you start to build up this company. 

And every single nightclub that you’ve ever been to is the same thing. 

It’s people getting drunk in a room to music. 

It’ll never be anything else. 

You can dress this one up pink and give out inflatable flamingos on the door. 

Or this one’s really cheap or this one’s on a Wednesday and it’s sort of naughty that you shouldn’t be going out on a Wednesday. 

Dress it up however you want; it’s people getting drunk in a room to music. 

That’s all it’s ever going to be. 

And what I realized from doing that was the power of reputation. 

Now, this isn’t the reputation of a person; it’s the reputation of a brand. But if your company is known for always putting on good parties, then you get to benefit from that. 

And what happens is, when you have a reputation for putting on good parties, people come; more people come; you makes your better parties good. 

Yep. Correct. 

So this is this sort of odd. 

And this is the really important point. 

**Never let others define it for you.** 

And when you are vulnerable, you’ll be attacked on all sides because as it’s going up, it precedes you. 

It continues to do work for you, exponentially growing and growing. 

But when you’re starting to go down, even your best work will sometimes be derogated to be worse than it is. 

So you have done something that is good, but because of your reputation, you’re a liar, you’re a phony, you’re a grifter, you’re a shill, you’re a fake. 

That’s right. 

Yeah. 

Credibility is the one thing that you should never sell because you cannot buy it back. 

There is no return policy on your credibility. 

And people are so getting back to the word stupid. 

I mean, it’s a theme too. 

They post things on social media when they’re young, not realizing that five years later when they’re trying to get a job at a law firm, they’re like, you know, they’re doing incredibly ridiculous things on Instagram. 

And that part of their reputation, everything you do is reflected through the social world. 

Right? 

Nothing is in isolation. 

People are continually judging you. 

So you have to be aware. 

You have to think before you post. 

You have to think, how are people going to take this? 

If I say this stupid, rude thing that comes right out of me because I don’t control my tongue, it’s gonna ruin me. 

One false step will ruin your reputation. 

There’s a British MP who is receiving on the receiving end of a tweet from 2009 which has come back around. 

Think I read about this time. You get these Estonian retards out of my house right now. 

So I don’t mean to laugh about the… it’s terrible. 

Go. 

Estonians are very smart people. 

Get these Estonian retards out of my house right now or I want these whatever.

And she’s had to do this groveling apology.

But I mean, you know, when was Twitter? When did Twitter stop? Probably 2008 or this is their early. 

This is the equivalent of the big bang, you know. 

This is the whatever it is, microwave cosmic background of tweets. 

And yeah, I just love that. 

I really, I really think that the reputation point can’t be overstated. 

And you know, I’ve got to see in this industry as well both whether it’s authors, podcasters, YouTubers, there are some people who have traded reputation and credibility for money or for short term trades that didn’t make sense, and they’ve not ended up coming off in one form or another. 

They’ve tried to cash it in. 

Now give me an example. 

Like going to Spotify and… 

No, no, not name names. 

No, not that. 

Interestingly with Joe’s move to Spotify, that was something that he got an awful lot of credibility for. 

And that’s one of the interesting things: had it have been with a different platform that didn’t carry as much weight. 

Gravitas. 

They have their own reputation. 

It becomes multiplicative as opposed to sort of subtractive. 

Yeah, I know. 

Of course like getting a Nike sponsorship is cool. Hooray for you. 

That’s not you selling out, but getting a sponsorship with some brand that everybody thinks is lame, that is selling out. 

You’re obviously only doing it for the cash. 

But there’s a ton of guys that have held political positions or have swayed with the wind, just blown with the whatever. 

It goes this way whenever it goes that way. 

And the interesting thing is even if they’ve made a ton of money from it, even if it’s been advantageous in one domain, I actually think that if you gave them the opportunity they would give all of it back and some to be able to regain their reputation. 

I think they would give anything they could to be back in the cool kids club. 

And there’s no return policy on credibility. 

Well the other thing about reputation and credibility is it has to be consistent. 

So you have to like… 

It’s like a brand. You’re known for something. 

You’re known for being strong, you’re known for being self-confident, you’re known for being Machiavellian or whatever it is: funny or light-hearted or... 

And there’s a certain kind of shape to it, and if you’re like all over the map and you’re going over here, your reputation is about that, it’s about this. 

It looks weak; it makes it look like… because we want to feel like people judge on appearances. 

They don’t judge on the reality of who you are. 

They don’t know who I am or who you are. 

They judge on what they see and how we appear. 

And if those appearances, they want to have something consistent that they can grab onto. 

They want to say something simple. 

**That guy is funny, and that’s who he is.** 

This guy’s… they want a very simple formula. 

And if you can’t be consistent, if you’re all over the place, if you’re changing your ideas, you’re conservative, then you’re liberal, blah blah.

And you’re trying to tack with each wind to get power. 

Yeah, you’ll get some power that way but it’ll make you look weasely, it’ll make you look distrustful, and people won’t like that. 

And your reputation will be one of somebody who has no soul, who has no core. 

So reputation also has to have a consistency, a core to it, a soul that binds it all together. 

Especially if it seems like it’s being done for a contrived reason. You know, I think people are fine with people changing their mind as long as… 

Show me you’re working. Explain to me how you got from that position to this one. 

Don’t do it beyond the sort of tolerance level that we all have of this is a little bit too much. 

I’ve updated, I used to be pro this, now I’m anti that. 

Yeah, I really do think an awful lot about the value of a reputation. 

And in another way, it’s very: **Never let anybody else define it for you.** 

Allowing that sort of vacuum to seep in loses you your power over your reputation and allows other people to derogate it. 

On the other hand, if you’re a very Machiavellian person, poke holes in your enemy’s reputation and you will destroy them. 

Bring up things that are inconsistent with the reputation and you will have ruined. 

It’s like popping a balloon. 

It’ll just go woo like that. 

When I talk about how in P.T. Barnum played that game to ruin other people's reputation and make people wonder is he really like that? 

I guess not because I just saw this fact that contradicts it. 

So I’m giving you some very evil Machiavellian advice out there. 

If you have enemies, one of the meanest things. 

And I’m not a mean person. 

I don’t like being mean. 

Yeah, sure, it’s true. 

But I spent a thousand nights on the front door of nightclubs with drunk people. 

So you need a few defense mechanisms. 

And what you realize, especially when people have had alcohol, is that people fall into only a small number of buckets, and behavior is usually pretty predictable. 

And one of the things that we realized is kind of a script that we could run when somebody was getting a little bit mouthy, remembering that we were flanked by big British gorillas. 

Right, you’ve got doors, staff all around you. 

No, not me. 

I was the guy that… I was the dude in the skinny jeans with the clipboard. 

I had, you know, six foot six dudes with leather gloves on either side of me. 

There were, give me your id, etc., etc. 

And one of the things that used to work, it was so mean, but it worked so well. 

If somebody started, they’d been ejected or they hadn’t been allowed into the club or something had happened, we’d always say “mate, sorry, you need to get away from me, your breath stinks”. 

And it’s completely unfalsifiable because unless someone's gonna come over and smell it, they can’t say no, it doesn’t. 

And it just immediately enters this person into this… do you just watch the color drain from them?

So yeah, I oddly breath apparently halitosis reputation as well. 

Or just body odor. 

Yep, that’s great. 

Any smell, it’s just, it’s so… I’m gonna remember that; it’s really good. 

Your breath stinks. 

I need to just… can you give me a little bit of room? 

Oh, it’s just used to pull people apart. 

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Always stick to what makes you weird, odd, strange, different. 

That’s your source of power, which is similar to occupy your niche, embrace your strangeness, identify what makes you different, fuse those things together and become an anomaly. 

Yeah, well, you know, in this world if you’re replaceable, you will be replaced, right? 

So if you’re in your 20s and you’re doing something that other people could do by the time you become 28, they can hire somebody. 

24, when they hired you, but for less money, they will do that right away. 

It’s a brutal world, so if you’re replaceable, you will be replaced. 

So the only defense against that is to be **irreplaceable** in this world. 

And the good news is that you are at your core irreplaceable. 

There is something strange and weird about you. 

Once again, I hate to say it, but it’s a chapter that I’m writing right now for my Sublime book, okay? 

And so I explain in Mastery where that comes from biologically, your DNA, how you are marked as a unique individual at birth, the combination of variance in your chromosomes, it’s mathematically impossible for it to ever be replicated. 

Yes, the variations are marginal. The differences aren’t great between you and me, but those little differences are the differences between me liking this kind of hip hop music and you liking a different kind of hip hop music, right? 

It creates your inclinations; it creates your tastes. 

And so what the game of life involves is knowing your uniqueness, is knowing who you are, is knowing what makes you weird and what makes you odd, okay? 

And the problem is, is that we’re social animals and the pressure continually on us is to fit into a group, is to be like other people, to have their ideas, to have their values, to have their tastes, to dress like them, okay? 

And that happens when you’re young; you’re in your adolescence, we all go through that phase. 

I went through that phase. 

But if you keep on that track when you’re in your 20s and on, which is happening a lot today through social media, you’re going to lose that sense of what makes you odd and different. 

I compare it to a voice when you’re very young; that little voice in you is going, Robert, you should be a writer. 

Chris, you should be a blah blah, blah, blah. I don’t know what it is, right? 

It’s telling you something. 

And as you get older, you don’t hear it anymore because you’re hearing all the other. 

You’re hearing your voices of your parents, the teachers, the culture around you, your peers, your friends telling you this is what’s cool, this is what’s not cool. 

And that little voice comes completely drowned out. 

And so you don’t know who you are anymore. 

And you’re afraid. 

Particularly young people today. 

I mean, maybe it’s always been that way, so afraid of being different. 

They’re so afraid of being odd. 

But look at all the powerful people in this world. 

Look at your Elon Musk's. 

Look at your celebrities in entertainment, in business and politics. 

They’re one of a kind. 

They have like… I hate that word, but it’s like a brand. 

They’re different. 

They stand out for something that’s truly different. 

Even Albert Einstein. 

There’s nobody else like Hason. 

There’s nobody like D. Dava Vinci. 

O. 

That’s where your power lies. 

And you’ll go, oh, but Robert, those are people that were brilliant, that were talented. 

I’m not like that; I don’t have that. 

Well, ***bullshit.*** You do have that. 

It’s just you’re forgetting about it, and you don’t want to put the effort into it. 

I talked in Mastery of a woman named Temple Grandin, who was born with severe autism. 

And she was able to find her way to become a brilliant professor, academic writer, and about animals, animal behavior, and about autism itself. 

She found her way to it when she was three or four. 

She couldn’t even speak any language; she was going to be hospitalized. 

You have that potential. 

It’s just you’re not putting the effort into it. 

**You are lazy.** 

You want to fit into the group; you want to conform because it’s easy. 

But your oddness, what makes you weird, what makes you different, that little strange quirk in how you want to dress yourself, that little strange quirk in your musical tastes, that little quirk in the food that you like to eat, that is who you are. 

Those are signs from deep within, from your colal or from your soul. 

This is who you are. 

And if you lose that, not only are you not gonna be successful in life, you will also lose yourself. 

And you can get away with that when you’re young because you’re happy. 

You look good; you’ve got energy; things are going right. 

You get into your 30s and you’re like everybody else. 

You don’t know who you are and you don’t know what you like anymore. 

And you’re just following the trends. 

You start to get depressed and you start going down this rabbit hole and things can turn really ugly. 

So you need a bit of courage in life. 

You need to go, okay, I am weird; I am strange. 

You know, lean into it. 

So when I had the 48 laws of power first, when I first wrote the book without it being published yet, it was a very strange looking book. 

And it reflects my own strangeness. 

Things on the margins, stories, everything broken up, images, quotes here and there. 

It’s kind of how my brain is; a hodgepodge, kind of a mess that really…

And the publishers, they bought the book, but then they came back to us and they said, Robert, can you kind of maybe make this more like other books? 

Can you get rid of all those sections and everything? 

And I said, no, take it or leave it; this is the book as it is. 

It’s odd; it’s strange. 

They didn’t like that, because if it doesn’t fit into all the other books that I’ve had successful, it’s too big of a risk. 

If this movie isn't like the movies that were made last year, who knows? 

We'll go see it. 

People are so conservative. 

But because it was odd, it stood out and it was successful. 

If I had succumbed and I compromised and made it more like other books, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. 

So sometimes you need a little bit of cajones. 

You need a little bit of courage. 

You need to stand up and say, I’m okay being different. 

It’s fascinating that lots of people, maybe most people, want to be extraordinary in some way, but also don’t want to stand out in a way that allows them to be mocked. 

But the latter is the price of the former. 

You can’t behave the way that everybody else does and expect to not get the results that everybody else gets. 

It’s like… I think about regressing to a mean that doesn’t exist, that everybody is idiosyncratic and unusual in their own way. 

And we’re all imagining this sort of odd 50th percentile avatar that is the most acceptable. 

But when we think about why we love the people that we love, we don’t love them for how average they are. 

No one’s ever said, do you know what it is? 

I’m just besotted with how predictable all of her opinions are. 

No one’s ever said that. 

We love people for their eccentricities. 

And a friend, George, has the idea of **non-fungible people** like non-fungible tokens, that it’s irreplaceable. 

There is nobody else like them. 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

If you think about your favorite memories from your favorite people, it’s not from the things that are easily replaceable. 

It’s from the fact that they were just obsessed with football. 

And when the football was on the TV, you could talk to them and they wouldn’t even turn to you. 

Or was the fact that they hated violence or they loved dogs. 

Every dog walked into the room and they would be gone, they would be away. 

That’s what we love people for. 

And my favorite strange person from history, Salvador Dali, and I would take it one step further. 

You said you kind of have this… it’s advantageous and also psychologically healthy for you to embrace who you are fully. 

I actually think in some ways it’s a… maybe I would go as far as to say that it is our duty to humanity. 

I think it’s our duty to embrace the things that only you can do. 

Yeah. 

Well, in nature, the diversity of species in a habitat makes it vital, makes it alive, makes it sustainable. 

And that comes from mutations in the genetic code. 

Some insect has a mutation and therefore a whole new species, a whole new thing splinters off from that and it creates variety. 

Well, in human culture is like a habitat in a way. 

So you’re marked with uniqueness by your genetic code. 

Insects don’t really have individuality. 

We have individuality, and they are like mutations. 

And so your mutation, your difference, you being Chris, is for a purpose. 

You’re marked that way because by mining your uniqueness, your weirdness, your oddness, your little quirky tastes, you’re going to contribute something new to the culture. 

And then contributing something new to the culture, you enrich it and you keep it turning around and round and round. 

Cultures in the past that die on the vine don’t have any variety. 

You can look at the Soviet Union at its most decadent or when it was really at its worst phase, like in the 70s and 80s. 

There’s no change there, no variety. 

Early on there were all sorts of weird different voices. 

They ended up getting imprisoned and murdered. 

But a culture has to have variety. It has to have a diversity of voices, like a gene pool or an immune system.

Yeah. 

And so you, by being odd, you’re contributing to that; you’re contributing to the culture. 

By not doing that, you’re not contributing at all. 

And that’s a real waste of what nature gave you. 

I always think again about Dali. 

I spent quite a bit of time researching him. 

And I think, as brilliant as they were, Michelangelo didn’t do Dali; Da Vinci didn’t do Dali. 

In fact, there’s that famous job application that Da Vinci sends, I think, to the king of Italy. 

And da Vinci’s sort of listing all of the different things that he can do. 

I can make machines for war and a trebuchet and a blah, blah, blah. 

The final paragraph he writes the sentence, **also I can paint.** 

I always think about “also I can paint.” 

What is the “also I can paint” that I don’t see in myself? 

What are the things that my friends really value? 

Perfect example, the guy that was talking about earlier on, George, I’ve been learning a little bit about myself and I discovered over the last year that I’m a people pleaser in some regard. 

And I was lamenting this to him over Christmas as we were driving to go and get food. 

And I sort of brought up something I’d done with him which was sort of being overly cautious that I would have done something that would have annoyed him or stepped on his toes in some manner. 

And he said, I just wanna sort of stop you there because I’m aware that to you, you’ve been able to frame that as people pleasing in this thing that is malignant and you want to get rid of. 

But to me, that’s you thinking about me first, which is actually one of the things that makes me love you as a friend. 

So be very careful, sort of labeling areas, creating an unnecessary value judgment and I think getting another perspective. 

And that really gave me pause. 

I just thought, yeah, I’m so agreeable with all of these things and I hate disappointing people and I think that other people’s emotional states are my responsibility and so on and so forth. 

And then I bring it up to a friend and he says, yeah, that’s why I love you. 

Yeah. 

And it was interesting. 

Yeah. 

I mean, it’s good to have a little bit of control over something. 

So if in certain situations, sometimes it’s good to be able to not be so pleasing. 

Because I’m a people pleaser too. It’s my nature, so I understand that. 

And sometimes you have the feeling that it’s not coming from the right place. 

Correct. 

You’re not choosing to, you’re obligated to by your nature and you’re feeling a little bit of fear involved in it. 

Fear of displeasing, a fear of rejection, a fear of being different. 

And it probably goes back to childhood into my parents. 

We probably have similar parental dynamics. 

But what’s good about what you’re saying is, and I completely agree, and I wrote about this, I think in human nature is that you have this quality. 

You can’t really control it. It’s who you are. 

It’s either genetic or it comes from those first couple of years with your mother or father. 

So make it work for you. Find the way that it’s a strength and see it as a strength and use it. 

And don’t have second thoughts about it. Use it for power. 

Right? 

And don’t be so conflicted about it. 

It’s all how you look at it. 

And it’s a reason why you’re a people pleaser. 

And you can… If you weren’t a people pleaser, you wouldn’t be doing podcasting. 

Should be this asshole. 

I would never have agreed to be a podcast. 

Right. 

So it’s just that in moments you wish you could control it a little bit. 

It’s kind of like the grass is greener thing that we were talking about before we got started. 

You know this assumption that the thing you don’t have is more valuable than the one that you do or that things would be fixed if only you could have that. 

But what else comes along for the ride? 

You know, if you got rid of your people pleasing nature, what are the little parasites that your lack of people pleasingness would also have attached to it? 

Are you sure? 

Are you really sure that’s the thing that you want? 

Exactly, yeah. 

Well, that’s where it comes down to knowing yourself and knowing what makes you different. 

And knowing these are things you can’t really change. 

So my wanting to be a writer or Tiger Woods wanting to be a golfer when he’s like 2 years old, there’s probably some genetic component in it, and maybe there’s some early bonding, but there’s probably a genetic component to it. 

You can’t control it; it’s who you are. 

And maybe that you can’t control it is a good thing. 

And maybe it’s there for a reason. 

And maybe if you wanted to do something else, that wouldn’t work out. 

So my knowing that I wanted to be a writer instead of a businessman or a lawyer like my parents wanted to be probably saved my life, to be honest with you. 

So knowing what makes you different is kind of gonna guide you past these dangerous moments in life to make you want to change who you are because you feel pressure, social pressure to change who you are, to regress to this imaginary mean. 

Yeah. 

Elements, I think of me that are genetically predisposed or at least very deeply embedded. 

The first one is I’ve always liked to talk and ask questions. 

And as a child, I always used to get in trouble in school because unfortunately, my voice appears to carry further than everybody else’s. 

So even though the naughty kids would be genuinely being naughty, poking other people with fucking protractors or something, I would be the one that was hurt. 

Even if I wasn’t misbehaving as much, I would be the one that was heard. 

You’re being nosy. 

You know, children should be seen and not heard. 

You’d stop being so not. 

Why are you asking all of these questions? 

Would be one of them. 

And the other one is solitude. 

I’m an only child. 

I spent a lot of time listening to audiobooks in my room, playing with toys on my own, throwing a ball off the wall and seeing if I could kick it off that wall and then catch it.

Hours, hours and hours and hours. 

Because I didn’t have anybody else for me to… 

Didn’t have anybody else to play with. 

And you think, oh, God, the things that you’re punished for when you’re a child are the things that you think are malignant when you’re a child. 

You’re often rewarded for if you can just find a way to alchemize them as an adult. 

So I’m sure that your ability to sit and read or go to a cabin or write in your room, and nobody’s coming and gone and you haven’t noticed. 

And you think, well, my solitude as a child was maybe something that I lamented or that I saw as a weakness or something like that. 

And yet it’s a superpower when I become an adult if I can find the way to channel it. 

And the same thing for the question asking or the listening to audiobooks. 

You know, what’s the 2024 Internet version of an audiobook? 

So? Podcast is… 

That’s what I’m doing right now. 

Yeah, yeah, and you know, it really just comes down to being aware of who you are, what makes you different, and being comfortable with it. 

And so you’re gonna have moments where you’re not comfortable with it, and you want to conform, and you want to be like other people. 

And you went through that, and I went through that in adolescence, in particular, on through the 20s.

You make some changes to things because you think it’s cool, but you keep coming back. 

You keep coming back to being alone. 

You keep coming back to throwing the ball against the wall in some metaphorical… 

No, no, no, no, no. 

I kid you not. 

The way that I like to relax now, in between obsessions of work, I get a tennis ball and throw it against a wall. 

It’s the most bizarre thing. 

I had the same thing, but because I’m American, mine was baseball, and I had a ball and I’d throw it against the garage door. 

And I would play all these different games with my glove on and I would catch it, and I would imitate the crowd cheering me. 

And I had… this was a home run, etc. 

And if I could do it today, I still would. 

So I understand that. 

But you come back to these things because they’re so strong in you and you can’t help it, and they give you relief and they give you comfort and then who you are. 

And so it all comes down to do you come back to these things or do you change because of the pressures of other people? 

And what is the difference? 

Why are some people like that and some people are not? 

And that’s the million dollar question. 

I think swimming upstream or swimming downstream is working against or working with your nature and trying to find a way to make it work for you as opposed to trying to change it.

So that you can find a way to make it work makes a lot of sense. 

Shan Puri, who does my first million. 

Very, very smart guy. 

I remember one of the first conversations I ever had with him on Zoom. 

He had a sort of small leather black basketball in his hand, and we were just talking, and he was a little bit further back in his desk and he was tossing it like this and rolling it along the desk and sort of throwing it in the air, like, what on… 

So it wasn’t like we were writing anything. 

It was a casual conversation between friends. 

I said, what are you doing? 

He says, I grew up playing basketball; I’m happiest with a ball in my hand. 

Yeah. 

And I thought, holy fuck, that’s me. 

Every time that I go to the park, there’s a tennis ball that’s now mine for the rest of it, and I’ll bounce it in my hands until we finish up. 

And then you know the tennis ball charity pool that it goes back; it goes back into the park. 

And I thought, holy fuck. 

So I came up with a name for that, which is a **weirdness role model.** 

And it’s somebody who does a thing that sort of breaks the ceiling on what you thought was acceptable behavior. 

You’ve seen this guy do a thing and you go, oh my God. 

Maybe I could have a ball on my desk. 

Maybe I could have a tennis ball or a cricket ball on my desk. 

And that means that I can, because I’ve seen this guy do it. 

And it’s a weirdo role model or a weirdness role model. 

Yeah, yeah. 

Well, I think we all need that in our life, people who were different. 

I remember in high school I had an English teacher who kind of changed the course of my life. 

And he was very weird; he was very different. 

His way of thinking was different. 

And how he talked about writing and literature was very odd and other students hated him. 

And I thought he was just fantastic. 

So it’s kind of interesting what you say. 

There was a role model I could see, and it was just a high school teacher, so it wasn’t like a career path for... 

But I could see that having that kind of quality was a good quality and I was attracted to it. 

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**You are your own worst enemy.** 

You waste precious time dreaming of the future instead of engaging in the present. 

Since nothing seems urgent to you, you’re only half involved in what you do. 

Yeah, well, I like to think of who the human animal is. 

I like to take this out of the little specific and go into the meta area here and what it meant to be human. 

We’re a very creative species, right? 

We have language; we have consciousness; we have immense power. 

Those powers developed under the pressures of necessity of having to get things done, of having to survive in a very brutal, ruthless world where a leopard could pop out tomorrow and eat me, where there were dangers all around, where food was scarce. 

And under the pressure, we had to think, we had to be creative; we had to be inventive; we had to be strategic. 

The human brain evolved under immense amounts of pressure, okay? 

That’s how the brain works. 

And I almost like to think of it in terms of barometric pressure. 

So in your brain, when you’re feeling that barometric pressure, it’s like, I gotta get this done or I’m gonna fail and this project won’t happen and people will laugh at me. 

You work like a fiend; your whole body responds, right? 

Your blood gets moving. 

You accomplish things that would normally take you months; you do it in days because you feel that pressure. 

You take away that pressure and you don’t know what to do. 

And I’ve got like three years; I could do this or that, that. 

You just wander around; you’re lost; you have no energy; you have no focus. 

You know, you’re maybe playing video games, maybe you’re watching porn. 

You’re kind of distracting yourself in the moment, but it’s… 

But your energy is just being dissipated in like 20 different directions. 

So your brain needs pressure; it needs constant pressure. 

And stress. 

And pressure is not a bad thing. 

We have this thing where we feel like stress is bad. It’s bad for you. 

No, you need to relax, man. 

You need to chill. 

Stress will kill you. 

No, being bored will kill you. 

Not having anything to do will kill you. 

It’s much more dangerous than stress. 

Yes, you can work too hard. 

You can work where there’s no soul involved. 

I work like a fiend. Because I’m writing a book. And it’s a very hard process for me; and I’m working far too much. 

But man, I love it; it’s fantastic, right? 

And it could kill me. The stress could kill me. It could give me a stroke, but I’d rather die under the stress than be bored and have nothing to do, okay? 

So feeling that pressure makes your eyes pop up, it makes your brain focus, it makes you alert; it makes you want to live; it makes everything seem exciting to you because you’ve got to get things done. 

So I’m writing a book right now. I could take 12 years to write it, but that wouldn’t be very… 

I wouldn’t feel good about it. 

So I give myself deadlines. 

I gave myself a deadline of finishing this chapter by July 31st. 

Here it’s August 17th; I haven’t finished it, but now I’m working double hard to try and finish it in time. 

Ca… because if I didn’t have a deadline, I would take forever, man. 

Manana, maniana, yeah. 

So create pressure for yourself is a good thing. 

I gave a talk recently in which I talked about Thomas Edison, the great inventor. 

And Thomas Edison was a young man who was in his early 30s. 

He had invented the phonograph and a new wave for the telegraph, but he hadn’t really had any major intentions. 

He had started Menlo Park, his industrial park, for doing research.

We’re talking about the 1870s, I believe. 

But he did something very interesting and very strange.

I don’t know how conscious it was, but he gave an interview with a newspaper and he said, I’ve been working on creating the incandescent light bulb. 

Now, before that there was the arc light, which was a light that was really powerful. 

It used far too much energy; you couldn’t use it in the house. 

The way houses were lit was with gaslight. 

Gaslight was dangerous; it was explosive. 

And the companies in America that had a monopoly on it. 

So the prices was very corrupt business. 

So he goes, I’m working on the incandescent light bulb. 

Reporters: That’s interesting. Oh yeah, I’m close to getting it; I’m close to nailing it. 

Wow. 

And he goes, yeah. 

And in five years, I’m gonna light the entire city of New York with the incandescent light, with electric light. 

Whoa. 

They go crazy. 

They publish this article and the stock prices of gas start going down, down, down, down, down. 

Money flows into his coffers because the cheapness of light of a light bulb, the profits are just insane. 

So money is pouring in. 

He goes back to his Menlo Park where he develops ideas and his employees who were reading about the school. 

Mr. Edison, what are you thinking? You had just tinkered with the incandescent light bulb. 

We’re not even near inventing it; we’re not even near creating it. 

And the idea of lighting New York, what were you thinking? 

What were you smoking? 

The equivalent thereof.

And he goes, well, gentlemen, I said it to this major newspaper. 

We better get to work. 

We better make it happen.

What happened? With all the money that came in, he could now hire the people to do it. 

But the pressure of getting that done in five years made him do it in five years. 

It was a monumental work of persistence and discipline and detail. 

But he had a deadline. 

He didn’t want his reputation; he didn’t want to disappoint the public. 

He had to get it done in five years. 

And he did get it done in five years. 

So he created his own pressure by using the publicity angle.

And people are gonna