On this week's episode of The Jerks, the Jerks are joined by a guest who happens to be a whiny bitch. They talk about what it's like to live in a world where no one rides for free, and how Jesus would do it if he had to do it on a boat. Also, we talk about meatloaf and why it's not as good as you think it is. This episode is brought to you by Stamps, a service that allows you to print and buy U.S. postage, print it on your home computer, and then put it on packages and send them right there from your desk. You don't have to go to the post office. You just hand them to a postman and say, here you go, dude, and that's it. You're done. Go to Stamps.com, click on the Old Schoolie microphone in the upper right hand corner, enter the code JRE, and get our $110 bonus offer. It includes a free digital scale and up to $55 of free postage. Get in there, and you're done, dude! Plus, you get a $110 special bonus offer which includes... What are you looking for, Aubrey? That room? There you go! Get in that room and get your $110 Bonus Offer which includes a FREE digital scale, and up-to-date digital measuring device, and $55 worth of FREE postage! We're also here to help you save time, be convenient, save money, and maximize your minutes here on this earth. LegalZoom, and save you time and get the most out of your time on this planet! and your money back! If you're thinking about starting a business, you can also protect your family with a Last Will & Trust, or get a living trust, power of attorney, and more. That's right, Holla! And that's right you can do that for just $69, you re gonna get an A-Zoom. That s right you re getting an A+ Plus! You re not gonna get a lot of A-plus from the Better Business Bureau Bureau. And that ssssssss, right here! That s a lot more than you can spend an A.B. Plus, they've earned an A PLUS from the BBB. And they can do a ton of money and they can help you re not a third-party law firm.
00:00:24.000But if you were lost in the woods and you hadn't seen meatloaf for months, and you'd be living off frogs, fucking pond water, meatloaf would be awesome.
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00:07:08.000There's strategies that you can use, and one of them I've done that I saw in one of those silly movies, like The Secret, one of those movies, The Rabbit Hole or What the Bleep Do We Know, I think it was, where a guy was saying, go to every door that you walk through, and before you walk through it, knock on the wall and say,
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00:11:35.000Alright, ladies and gents, Robert Green is here, and we're going to get busy.
00:11:39.000We're going to talk about some shit, we're going to enhance your life, we're going to get you fired up, and you're going to fucking get shit done.
00:12:03.000I've heard many, many, many fantastic things about you, but this guy over here raves, rants and raves, and I know you were recently on the Warrior Poet Project podcast, which is his podcast, and he couldn't say enough good things.
00:12:18.000Have to learn some stuff, have to figure out what you've accumulated for all your years of research and writing books and Your books all seem to be about getting your shit together, about producing results.
00:12:32.000Yeah, starting with the 48 Laws of Power.
00:12:36.000I basically decided to enter the self-help genre with a lot of trepidation because I think it's full of a lot of bullshit.
00:13:12.000All sorts of things that aren't being discussed in these books.
00:13:15.000I know, for instance, when I started out in Hollywood, I used to work in Hollywood, I was really shocked by all of the power maneuvers and the passive-aggressive games that were going on.
00:13:51.000I see all sorts of weird games being played.
00:13:54.000One director, this one producer who wanted to direct his first film and basically it would look bad if he was the director of something that he had Sort of put together, just wouldn't look good politically.
00:14:08.000So what he did is he hired somebody he knew would do a terrible job, a director, a first-time director.
00:14:14.000He knew the guy would fail, and then he could go in and rescue him and become the director on the project.
00:14:19.000But in the meantime, totally destroying this other person's reputation.
00:14:52.000That's why I'm being thwarted in this goal that I have, you know?
00:14:57.000Because you go in with these good-natured intentions thinking, I'm just going to do my best, I'm going to wear my heart on my sleeve, and it's all going to work out.
00:15:13.000But a lot of times, if you're in a kind of politically charged situation or a situation with a lot of ego, his book was like this wake-up call of just sheer, unabated truth about what the fuck is going on.
00:15:26.000It's not so that I could do it myself, but at least so I could protect myself and see it and identify it.
00:15:32.000So this move that this producer did, did that surprise you at all?
00:16:09.000That business is ripe with that stuff, though.
00:16:12.000But what really annoyed the hell out of me about the Hollywood business is that people would pretend to be so liberal and wonderful and good.
00:18:00.000So you could read some of Robert Greene's books, like Strategies of War, maybe, and probably find some tactic in there that this guy was applying in order to weaken his people to gain power, probably, right?
00:18:11.000I mean, does anything come to mind, Robert?
00:18:16.000Creatively, though, that stuff is very ineffective.
00:18:19.000Because I firmly, absolutely, wholeheartedly believe that if you put your effort into diminishing others creatively, it diminishes your own creative ability.
00:18:28.000I also believe that performance-wise, if you try to diminish someone's performance, like as an actor, this is one of the reasons why this guy sucked.
00:18:46.000I shouldn't call him fat, even if he is fat.
00:18:48.000He was doing it to fuck with the guy right before his scene because he wanted to shine.
00:18:53.000He wanted to be the guy in the scene that was really on top of the ball.
00:18:58.000Yeah, so the key thing is to know these strategies so you can do what he puts in there is called the reversal.
00:19:03.000How to be aware of it and then reverse it.
00:19:06.000Well, the main thing is to never get emotional in these situations.
00:19:09.000If you're in control of yourself, And you can do like Joe did, you can sort of see the game behind the game, then you're in the position to do something that's strategic, like he did, to play the same game back at him.
00:19:22.000It's mostly like a warrior, I call it kind of a warrior pose, where if you're calm and centered...
00:19:28.000And you're aware and in the moment of what the other person is doing, then you've got strategic options to play the game back.
00:19:34.000But if you get emotional, you get angry, you get intimidated, then forget about it.
00:19:39.000Yeah, I would probably today respond very differently, but when I was in my early 20s, it was scorched earth.
00:20:02.000But that thing that people do seems to be not just calculated, but it seems to be something that's been going on since the beginning of time.
00:20:13.000As soon as people invented language and they invented the ability to deceive.
00:20:17.000You're touching upon the subject of my next book.
00:20:21.000It's tentatively called The Laws of Human Nature.
00:20:24.000And essentially I'm saying that somewhere around 10,000 years ago, maybe 6,000, Our nature was set because we started living in groups that were larger than 10, 20, 30, the size of a tribe.
00:20:37.000And once you put 100 people together, all sorts of political games start happening.
00:20:42.000And things like envy and passive aggression and basic irrational responses, they already occurred in the time of the Bible.
00:20:52.000And so there are these laws of human nature that are so deeply ingrained in us.
00:20:56.000They're ingrained just like I'm going to show you where these laws come from, why people are envious, why people are insecure, why somebody who has a certain exterior, a face that they present to the world,
00:21:13.000why it's generally hiding the opposite, on and on and on.
00:21:16.000So you have You can understand where people's behavior comes from and not be surprised by it anymore.
00:21:22.000So what you present is steps to recognize cunts.
00:22:44.000Does everyone have cunt in them because they're reacting to other cunts or do you think that everyone has a selfish aspect to them that's undeniable?
00:22:55.000What is it about people that you think everyone has a little bit of cunt in them?
00:23:04.000I suppose there might have been One saintly figure in our history who doesn't have any of this, maybe a Jesus or somebody.
00:23:12.000But pretty much the underlying philosophy of all my books, particularly the 48 Laws of Power, is that human beings have a primal need for power.
00:23:21.000And we've used that word power in the wrong way.
00:23:24.000When we think of power, we think of white men up in the White House controlling the world.
00:23:29.000I try and bring power down to an everyday level and say, The feeling that you have no control over your life, over your destiny, over the people around you, your children, your wife, is the most miserable feeling that any human can have, that you have no power over them, no ability to influence them.
00:23:45.000And so from the age of one, two years old, we have had this feeling of insecurity, of weakness, and we want to have control and power over the people around us, the events that go on in life.
00:23:58.000And that is the source For a lot of our manipulative behavior.
00:24:04.000Some people are overtly manipulative and very dangerous that way, but all of us, all of us engage at some point or another in something that teeters on manipulation.
00:24:14.000And my books are about, let's just be honest about who we are instead of trying to imagine that we were somehow descended from angels instead of primates.
00:24:50.000You know, where chimps have some strategy.
00:24:52.000Like, have you ever seen the videos where they chase monkeys, where they corner them on the sides, and then other chimps rush them towards them, and they climb up and they eat them?
00:25:16.000They engage in warfare against other chimps.
00:25:18.000They engage in a very strategic sense.
00:25:22.000They have lines where they're not allowed to cross, and when they do cross, they take action.
00:25:27.000This is actually an interesting topic, because if you read Chris Ryan, he proposes a theory that this behavior that they've observed, the chimp warring, was created by the artificial...
00:26:04.000And after that, it created this zero-sum game where the chimps were competing for a limited resource of food, which actually goes to the argument that when you create a civilization, and it's not just tribal, and it becomes a zero-sum game, that's when the war and the strategy gets to a peak because you're creating a zero-sum game.
00:26:22.000There's a limited amount of resource, a limited amount of crop, or in the case of the chimpanzees, a limited amount of food that was coming out of this box.
00:26:48.000Right, but there's more resource you can go to.
00:26:51.000You're not competing for one specific section.
00:26:55.000You can go to more acres, more hectares of land and find the grubs or the fruits or whatever of that area rather than competing over one to find.
00:27:04.000I don't want to argue with somebody I haven't read, so maybe he has a very valid point and I haven't read him, so it's not fair for me to...
00:27:09.000But it doesn't affect your theory that once you're in civilization, these games begin, and the tighter the resources in that civilization, i.e.
00:27:17.000bigger cities, and the more closely people are working together, the more fever pitch these games develop.
00:27:25.000On a tangent here, but there's a writer, a scientist named E.O. Wilson, a biologist, and he's pretty much demonstrated that our earliest human ancestors, going back to Australopithecines, were engaging in forms of warfare.
00:27:41.000So he wants to sort of debunk the notion of the happy, peaceful savage that goes back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, etc., that we do have very violent roots.
00:27:54.000It becomes zero sum if there's overpopulation and they're fighting over smaller territories, which we humans were doing as we became more populous.
00:28:02.000So he was trying to debunk the notion that it's only at the advent of agriculture, where we started living in settlements and became civilized, that warfare began.
00:28:11.000And he shows very clearly that the beginnings of warfare go back hundreds of thousands of years.
00:28:32.000Sables with those crazy big horns that they have, they fucking, they spear each other and they kill each other.
00:28:37.000I had Louis Theroux on the podcast yesterday and he, one of his documentaries, he had this African hunting camp.
00:28:46.000Where they, there's sort of these canned hunts where they have these high fence operations and they breed all these animals and they have these sables and they're fucking murdering each other.
00:28:54.000They just run into each other and gouge each other when, you know, when the females are in heat.
00:29:42.000I've always felt that when we look at the time frame between now and 6,000, 10,000 years, whatever it was, when we started having these civilizations, We're in a very small window between then and now,
00:29:57.000and such radical change has taken place between then and now, but yet genetically, not much.
00:30:05.000A few variations have been observed between us and people that lived thousands of years ago, but God, not that much when it comes to...
00:30:13.000When it comes to need, when it comes to sexual desire, when it comes to greed, when it comes to all the motivating factors and all the reward systems that are in place.
00:30:23.000The other thing being that we don't have release anymore.
00:30:46.000I think people are essentially leaky batteries of aggressive energy.
00:30:50.000I mean, when someone's in their car and they start fucking freaking out because you got in front of them and fucking honking their horn, that's a leaky battery of aggressive energy.
00:30:58.000The other day, this mild-mannered woman in her 40s or 50s cut me off and she just turned around.
00:31:04.000I'd never seen a woman show that kind of absolute chimp-like, aggressive, burying my teeth at me in a car.
00:31:39.000You know, people do that all the time.
00:31:41.000I've seen people cut in front of each other and race down the street and get in front of each other and just madness that you wouldn't see in a line.
00:31:48.000You wouldn't see if you were waiting in line to go to a movie.
00:33:04.000Online, it's the beautiful thing about being online is that everyone gets to say something, and it's the horrible thing about being online is that everyone gets to say something and do so anonymously, which is another part of what's weird about our progression from this ancient society Where,
00:33:20.000you know, we hunted and gathered to eventually agriculture and then civilization, in quotes, to where we find ourselves today.
00:33:27.000So your books essentially, and this new book especially, is sort of recognizing these traits so that you can move away from them?
00:33:38.000Well, you're talking about my new book that hasn't been written yet?
00:33:43.000The point of the book is that this is human nature and it's an animal nature.
00:33:48.000And to be truly human, we have to overcome these traits in us.
00:33:53.000To be truly rational, reasonable, empathetic creatures, we have to overcome these various aspects of our own nature, which are embedded in each one of us biologically, genetically, such as our propensity to feel envy.
00:34:09.000The propensity to feel envy is basically at its root the fact that we humans are constantly comparing ourselves to other people.
00:34:16.000Look at your own life on a day-to-day basis and be honest with yourself and try and calculate how many times during a day you're actually comparing yourself to another person.
00:34:31.000That's like so completely human for various reasons, which I'll explain in the book.
00:34:37.000To reach a higher nature, which is the goal of my book, you have to be aware that that's happening in you.
00:34:42.000And you have to find a way to disengage yourself from that need, to constantly compare yourself to others, to find your own Your own self-worth from within.
00:34:52.000These are all kind of cliches, but I'm going to show you in a very real fashion how you can overcome them once you're aware that they're inside of you.
00:35:14.000So when you started reading all of these self-help books and started recognizing that there was all this horse shit going on, was your immediate reaction to try to write something that you thought was more realistic and beneficial?
00:35:44.000There'd be books in the business section about management, how to manage people, which is a very primal topic of discussion.
00:35:52.000You have a group of people and you're a leader.
00:35:53.000How do you manage all of these insecure egos who are thinking of themselves?
00:35:58.000And these books were essentially dishonest.
00:36:00.000They weren't confronting the fact that when you put 10 people together, those people generally have their own agendas.
00:36:07.000They're thinking first and primarily of themselves and their future and their careers and what they can get for themselves.
00:36:13.000And if you start from a basic false premise, you're not going to get anywhere.
00:36:17.000So I was dealing with, I wanted to cut my sword through all of this thick bullshit and say this is what really happens in business, in the music industry, in Hollywood, among lawyers, in politics, And if some of it was a little brutal,
00:36:34.000maybe I gave myself a little bit of literary license to exaggerate ever so slightly.
00:36:39.000But for instance, I have a chapter in there about how to create a cult.
00:38:36.000Giving a sort of mystical edge to what you're doing.
00:38:40.000You're trying to make people think that you're creating a religion without a religion.
00:38:46.000I show you the steps that people go through, five steps in order.
00:38:52.000And you can pretty much, if you see those steps happening, you know that this person is creating a cult-like following.
00:38:56.000And one of the steps towards near the end is creating an us versus them dynamic.
00:39:01.000It's us 1,000 followers against the whole world that doesn't believe in our theory of how aliens landed on the planet and started the human race.
00:39:12.000So whenever they're creating this false dichotomy of us versus the non-believers, then you know that you're on your way to a cult.
00:39:19.000Yeah, that cult of thinking is very common, isn't it?
00:39:26.000And that goes back, I'm going to say in my new book, which hasn't been written yet, that that goes back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors where we're separating ourselves very violently from us, from them.
00:40:32.000Like, look at this map versus this map, creating this antagonism that actually probably helps both sides.
00:40:38.000And they're all just shaking hands like that plane ride where the Republicans and Democrats were playing Yahtzee with each other and having a big laugh.
00:43:02.000A Yale professor had people come in for an experiment where they were made to give electric shocks to other people if they didn't answer a question correctly.
00:43:30.000So these are things embedded deeply in us as a social animal for a good thing, our ability to cooperate, but also it's a very dark and negative side, which is our ability to engage in groupthink and our...
00:43:54.000Or is it they finally have some power over something?
00:43:57.000Because I feel like there's a lot of people out there that feel incredibly powerless and frustrated, and they feel like they have this backlog.
00:45:40.000And I remember that mentality, being very clear, the us versus them mentality.
00:45:46.000The key to avoiding these dark characteristics is you have to be honest, number one, which I think he's very good at doing, but then also understand and identify them, not be able to look and say, I think?
00:46:14.000They give you the power back by saying you're not just a leaf at the mercy of the wind of these forces of human nature and the forces of other people wielding these power games and the forces of seduction by these people you're desperately trying to date and how they've got you all wound up inside.
00:46:30.000You're no longer powerless because you can see, aha, this is what's happening.
00:46:35.000And you can take some of that back and then chart your course with your own intent, with your own morality, how you want to do it.
00:46:51.000I did a book with 50 Cent, the rapper, called The 50th Law.
00:46:57.000And basically what I did in that book was I wanted to figure out what made 50 so interesting, so powerful.
00:47:04.000And after hanging out with him, I decided that the guy was fearless.
00:47:07.000He had just an incredible fearless quality and philosophy of life.
00:47:12.000So the book that we wrote together was sort of a meditation on fearlessness.
00:47:16.000And the whole point of the book was, being fearless isn't a question of just going out there and saying, fuck you, I don't care what anybody does, I'm gonna, you know, push you around and I'm not afraid.
00:47:47.000Be aware that that's existing, that it's happening in your body before it even hits your mind.
00:47:55.000Now that you're aware of it, now you can start conquering your fears.
00:47:59.000So we say it in that book, for instance, Napoleon Bonaparte or General Patton, two men who were incredibly brave, who would be on the front line of battle, take bullets flying past them.
00:48:10.000These were men who were very afraid in the beginning when they first went into battle and were quite ashamed of the fear that they saw in themselves.
00:48:18.000And they became aware of it, and then slowly they overcame it by exposing themselves to the very thing that they were afraid of.
00:48:24.000So that's sort of the paradigm you're talking about.
00:48:26.000Becoming aware of the process of these sort of qualities we don't want in ourselves.
00:48:33.000Seeing how they operate inside of you.
00:48:35.000Instead of saying, oh, it's always the other person.
00:51:11.000You know, it just made you, it kind of connects you to reality, where there's things where you're just in a fog all the time because we're so conditioned to think in certain ways and to have something that draws you out of the same rut of thinking and confront you with really the real world,
00:51:29.000this amazing world that's around you, has had a huge influence on my writing.
00:51:35.000And I know This next book hasn't been written, but I have another book after that that has not even begun to be even thought of as written, and that's going to bring together all of my experiences on that level, a book on what I call The Sublime, which I've written about in The 50th Law and will write a whole book about at one point.
00:51:54.000So The 50th Law is the one that you wrote with 50 Cent?
00:52:15.000Well, Hollywood is kind of like kindergarten compared to the music business.
00:52:20.000The real sharks are in the music business.
00:52:24.000They are pretty nasty, pretty Machiavellian.
00:52:28.000And people like 50, Jay-Z, and their managers in the late 90s, early 2000s were coming to grasp with the fact that they wanted to control their own work.
00:52:41.000To have some power and some money and become entrepreneurs.
00:52:44.000And dealing with these sharks in the music business was something that not even any kind of street life prepared them for.
00:52:51.00050 would tell me he hustled on the streets dealing crack, saw people being knived and killed and dealt with a lot of danger, and nothing prepared him for the sharky, horrific games that he saw in the music industry with Columbia and Interscope, etc.
00:53:06.000So they were reading my book to help them deal with this.
00:53:09.000These are not people who went to Harvard Business School.
00:53:12.000They didn't have a book out there to help them understand how manipulative these people could be.
00:53:18.000And so they gravitated to the 48 laws of power.
00:53:58.000Like I told you about that Hollywood director.
00:54:00.000Most people in Hollywood were getting so angry with him and so angry about the games that they never took a step back to figure out, oh, this is the strategy that this guy applied.
00:54:11.000He said, I took a step back and said, this is what...
00:54:14.000The guy at Interscope is really doing.
00:54:16.000So we thought alike, and we thought, let's bring two minds together that think alike but from totally different backgrounds and see what happens.
00:55:19.000If you've ever read it, that piece that she wrote on the music business and how it really works and how they extract...
00:55:27.000Everything from your profits, everything, promotion, expenses, all these different things, by the time the artist gets paid for the records, they have all this weird way of doing math where it shows no money.
00:57:51.000So this business, this music business, is just an example, really, of what happens when power structures are created, when people who are in these power structures understand the game, and then take these people that are just coming into it fresh,
00:58:08.000and especially artistic types, People who are creative, people who are artistic types, oftentimes not very good with money.
00:58:16.000Not sound financial thinkers and just the opposite of these business sharks that are involved in Interscope or whatever the labeling.
00:58:26.000Well, they've dedicated themselves to the mastery of their craft.
00:58:29.000And this whole other craft, this business sharkiness, is this other whole skill set that it's challenging to be able to master both.
00:58:37.000So getting the cliff notes is awfully helpful to be able to sort that out.
00:58:43.000Because to be where they are at that point, and obviously he'll go into his book Mastery, but...
00:58:50.000That is a relentless pursuit of excellence in a well-defined niche that doesn't allow for a lot of time to explore these other things unless, you know, you're forming some bridge.
00:59:00.000If you were going to recommend your books to someone, what order would you recommend them in?
00:59:05.000Well, it depends on what business you're in and what point you are in life.
00:59:16.000Well, probably mastery in some ways, maybe to take you to the next level.
00:59:20.000But I don't know if you're dealing with a lot of political stuff.
00:59:23.000If you are, then you're going to want 48 laws or maybe the strategies of war.
00:59:28.000It depends on who you are, what your weaknesses are, what your strengths are, where you are in life.
00:59:33.000If you're 22 years old and you're just graduating college and you're about to enter the real world, I'd say mastery for reasons that maybe hopefully we'll get into.
00:59:44.000But if you're 25 and you're now working at Goldman Sachs, God bless you if you are.
00:59:51.000You're going to probably want the 48th Laws of Power because, man, that's a power-hungry, nasty, manipulative Machiavellian environment if you're in the music industry as well.
00:59:59.000If you're someone who's very afraid, you've got all sorts of great creative ideas, but you're never going to the next step and starting that great movie or project you have, maybe the 50th Law would be good for you so you can get over some of those fears that are holding you back.
01:00:12.000If you're some guy who just can't find a, you know, is really bad with women, Art of Seduction, obviously, would probably be your choice.
01:00:21.000So it depends a little bit on who you are.
01:00:23.000Now, you wrote The Art of Seduction to help people get laid.
01:00:28.000I know I'd probably have 8 million people buying the book tomorrow, and now I'm only going to get like 15. But the truth of the matter is The Art of Seduction is about how to seduce people, how to get them to like you or love you.
01:00:42.000So if you want to just get laid, you know, maybe Neil Strauss or the pickup artist, that's probably more your speed.
01:00:49.000They've got all sorts of gimmicks about...
01:00:51.000How to tell a woman something in a bar and melt her resistance, etc.
01:00:56.000I'm more about the long term, how you can take that woman, or it can be a woman seducing a man, obviously, and get and play a mind game on her.
01:01:25.000Because really the book is about casting a spell.
01:01:29.000Let's say this is the goal of seduction.
01:01:32.000When that woman leaves you after whatever night you had together, the date or whatever, or just an encounter, she's going home and thinking about you.
01:01:41.000Okay, now you're starting to seduce her.
01:01:53.000I'm getting you to play on psychology and melting other people's resistances, getting them to lower their guard because everybody's very...
01:02:00.000Got their guard up constantly, particularly in this modern world.
01:02:04.000Nobody is opening up to you or nobody wants to show vulnerability.
01:02:08.000You're just dealing with a million porcupines out there.
01:02:11.000I'm showing you how to get those resistance levels down and give room to...
01:02:19.000And the converse, of course, too, which is a lot of people are getting these things played upon them constantly.
01:02:25.000And again, it goes back to the same thing.
01:02:27.000If you're not aware of the tactics that somebody's using, you're defenseless against them.
01:02:32.000You're just completely vulnerable, and you'll get sucked into this lure, this spell that they're creating by this push-pull tactic that they're using.
01:02:41.000Whatever strategy that they're using...
01:02:45.000And you see guys fall for these all the time.
01:02:47.000You know, it's something that bums me and you out personally a lot when we see friends and people we love caught in this spell that someone's woven where they can't let go despite so many other things going bad in their life.
01:03:18.000Or do I want to just release myself, remove these hooks, these invisible hooks that you've created, and just be free to chart my own course?
01:04:23.000I'm trying to get away from all of the political stuff I've described in my previous books, and here I'm going to show you how we humans can attain excellence in this world, how we can...
01:04:32.000Be really, really the best at what we do because I think that's the highest form of power we humans can reach.
01:04:39.000When we're so good at what we do, then all the political games in the world can't topple us from where we are.
01:04:45.000And what holds a lot of people back is that they're really self-sabotaging.
01:04:51.000They're finding all kinds of excuses why they can't go through this process.
01:04:56.000They believe in the myth that people are born talented or geniuses are simply born that way, or that they didn't get to go to the right school, or their parents were mean to them, or yada yada yada, or my girlfriend is, you know, whatever.
01:05:11.000As you said, they get involved in drama games and That so fill up their mind they can't think of anything else.
01:05:16.000So I'm going to make you, in this book as well, aware of what's holding you back and these fears that you're using to sabotage yourself.
01:05:24.000That is one of the most frustrating things to me when I'm talking to someone and they have these built-in excuses for why they can't do what they want to do.
01:05:31.000Like, give me some of these excuses that you hear.
01:05:34.000Well, I have a friend who wanted to be a comedian.
01:07:32.000And through a process I describe in the book, with her mother's help and a speech therapist, she slowly got at the age of four to be able to start speaking and going to schools.
01:07:43.000And I show the process that eventually led her to become a great scientist.
01:07:47.000Now, if somebody born with severe autism at the age of two is going to be institutionalized for their whole life, can become a master, then there's no fucking excuse for some 30-year-old who has nothing, no barriers like that at all to ever get to that point.
01:08:02.000That's really the reason I put it in there.
01:08:04.000If somebody like that can overcome their limitations, then there's no more excuses allowed.
01:10:14.000It's one of the most important things to have in this life.
01:10:18.000The ability to be yourself, to be by yourself, and why would other people like you if you don't even like yourself?
01:10:26.000You've got to do things in life that you would admire.
01:10:29.000You've got to be the kind of person that you would like.
01:10:32.000And if you're not, why would you expect anyone to like you?
01:10:35.000I have this argument with guys all the time where they talk about women and, you know, fucking girls want money, they want this, they want that.
01:10:44.000You know, women are always like, you know, I'm not so good with women.
01:10:47.000I always say this, would you fuck you?
01:11:27.000People who read a book and try to seduce are usually the worst seducers or who've taken some advice because they're not in the moment and they seem like they're kind of being cold and calculating.
01:11:39.000And the trick to seduction is to appear or to be as natural as possible and to at least appear natural.
01:12:46.000Well, it reminds me a little bit of what you're talking about in mastery, of going with your natural inclination that is going to be the best thing, like going with that vocation.
01:12:55.000Whatever makes you that unique individual, it's almost the same in seduction as it is in mastery.
01:13:01.000Pursuing that channel, that venue of what is going to bring you out your highest qualities is going to lead to the greatest success, no matter what it is, seduction or mastery.
01:13:11.000Yeah, I'm trying to make the point in mastery...
01:13:15.000That you're born with a key to success.
01:13:18.000Every single human being is born that way.
01:13:21.000This isn't some new age bullshit that I'm trying to peddle here.
01:13:24.000What that key is, is the fact that there's something unique about you.
01:13:34.000They've done these really interesting studies on newborns, infants one month to six months, and they've been able to show that at the extremely early age, infants are already Distinguishing between things that they like and don't like on very particular levels,
01:14:17.000If you're able to stay true to that or rediscover it when you're older and mind what's unique about you in your tastes, in your way of thinking, in your whole spirit, you are going to fucking succeed in this life.
01:14:34.000Have a podcast that reflects your weirdness, your uniqueness, and people will come to you because it's true, it's authentic, and there's nothing else out there like it.
01:14:47.000How do you figure out what your life's task is, as I call it?
01:14:49.000How do you keep connected to those primal inclinations?
01:14:53.000That's what the book Mastery is about.
01:14:55.000But you first have to be at least aware of what the root of your possible success in life is.
01:15:01.000And I try to make the point that if you aren't pursuing something that's personally and emotionally connected to you, you're never going to actually succeed in life.
01:15:10.000If you go into law and you were meant to be a writer, you might be able to bullshit your way for 10 years or so and be a pretty good lawyer.
01:15:17.000But eventually, because it's not something you were meant to do, you're going to disconnect.
01:16:05.000And I do think that that is a very important point, that people do sabotage when they're unhappy.
01:16:11.000And I find a lot of people that tend to work jobs that they find very unrewarding to be exceptionally materialistic.
01:16:19.000Because they're trying to reward themselves with these material items, and these material items become goals for plowing through another day doing this shitty job.
01:16:36.000But the goal of your life when you're in your 20s, for instance, should be learning as much as possible, developing skills in different areas, and not worrying about how much money you're making.
01:16:48.000Giving yourself the freedom to make mistakes, to explore, to have some adventures, to try things out that don't quite work for you.
01:16:56.000And then when you reach your 30s, you've got all these skills and experiences, and you're going to make that money eventually.
01:17:02.000But the path to mastery, you look at somebody like Steve Jobs, you can hate him or you can like him, you can think he's great or not.
01:17:08.000But he ended up being one of the wealthiest men that ever existed on our planet.
01:17:17.000He lived in a house that was hardly decorated.
01:17:20.000He just was never on his hierarchy of values, to quote Maslow there.
01:17:26.000So if you're obsessed with money, you're actually going to find all sorts of problems in life.
01:17:32.000You're going to become hooked to that paycheck.
01:17:34.000Let's say you're 32 years old and suddenly you're downsized or you're fired from your job and you've been addicted to that $80,000 or $100,000 years that you've been getting.
01:17:44.000Now you don't have the mental freedom to take a job for half that price where you can now maybe start learning some skills and moving on and really finding your way because you're addicted to To all that luxury, into the things, into the ego that you have connected to that paycheck.
01:18:22.000You're listening to other people and their values.
01:18:24.000You call that a counterforce in the book.
01:18:27.000It's things that work against you from finding what you call your vocation, which is what is going to make you the most happy in doing and being.
01:18:37.000And when you're in your vocation versus just doing a work, when you're in your vocation, you're passionate about it.
01:18:43.000And so you're going to naturally be more inclined to be great at it because you're going to put way more energy, way more passion into it.
01:18:50.000I mean, think about the people who have achieved, you know, greatness in any different field, all the people we know, you know, even the bow hunter, he loves it.
01:19:34.000The resistance to do what you actually want to do.
01:19:36.000I mean, I feel like a big part of my motivation in life and the strength of my...
01:19:43.000My resistance to getting other people happy or to doing what other people wanted me to do was that I was pressured in a way that I didn't...
01:19:53.000towards a direction that I didn't want to go in.
01:19:56.000Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I would hear all the time when I was starting out in stand-up comedy is my mom telling me that I wasn't funny.
01:20:04.000My mom was like, why are you doing this?
01:20:39.000It's good to have people fucking with you and saying you're not good at this, etc.
01:20:44.000I know, for instance, in my path to writing the 48 Laws of Power, I kind of knew I wanted to be a writer, but I went into forms of writing that didn't suit me.
01:20:55.000I started off in journalism, did that for several years, and really kind of hated it.
01:21:14.000And that got me out of journalism because it made me realize I really hate the assholes who work there who just got to stick up their butt and can't think about what real writing might be like.
01:21:23.000I got out of that and wandered around Europe and tried writing novels and all sorts of things that didn't work either.
01:21:28.000Then I tried Hollywood and I tried television.
01:21:31.000Through that process, I discovered what I loved.
01:21:35.000When it came to the chance to do a book, I suddenly...
01:24:05.000You know, we were talking before the podcast.
01:24:07.000I was saying that the sound of clicking, I was putting something on Twitter, and I was like, I'm going to miss that if they ever get rid of that.
01:24:14.000The sound of clicking is so, I don't know, rewarding to me or something like that.
01:24:20.000Woody Allen does all of his typing, all of his scripts on an old typewriter.
01:24:25.000And the way he edits, he takes pieces of paper and if he changes a scene, he'll print it on a piece of paper and then cut it and then staple it to the other thing or tape it to the other thing.
01:24:45.000Well, it's probably because he's fucking terrified to go on the internet.
01:24:48.000If he Googles Woody Allen, I mean, is a, I mean, you know, whoever you are, Jesus is a, first word's going to be cunt.
01:24:55.000You know, if Jesus ever gets online and Googles his name.
01:24:57.000But for Woody Allen, I mean, the fucking hate and the vitriol that that guy must experience on a daily basis, just looking people in the eyes at a restaurant must be, like, really pretty fucking intense.
01:25:15.000Because if you use this resistance of you're struggling, trying to get to the top, people telling you you're not going to make it, you'll never be a champion, you'll never start on the basketball team, you'll never do this.
01:25:26.000And then once you get there and once you achieve that, that kind of opposing force that allows you to bring out the best can kind of go away.
01:25:33.000It's why it's hard for teams to repeat championships and things like that.
01:28:28.000He can do all the mind games that he loves.
01:28:30.000And he can give these years of experience.
01:28:33.000The reason why I consider this a model is it took him a path where he sort of looked like he was going downhill, where there was nothing left for him to do.
01:28:44.000And suddenly, just a chance encounter made him realize what his real task in life was.
01:28:51.000And all that experience that he had Now could be applied to becoming the greatest trainer, boxing trainer of our era and also a mixed martial arts trainer.
01:29:01.000And so people always say, well, you know, I can't make it.
01:29:12.000It's not a question of what age you are.
01:29:15.000You can always take the experiences and mistakes that you've had in life, and if you've still got some guts and you're not a whiner, you can find a way to apply those skills in a new way That's going to be something that more engages you personally and emotionally.
01:29:30.000Because, in fact, he really wasn't meant to be a boxer.
01:30:58.000Because the system is designed to steal money from people and get those dummies to spend all this money on a fucking lottery ticket.
01:31:05.000It's legalized gambling and the state profits from it not just once but twice because they don't just take the money, your tax dollars, okay, the money that you've, after you spent all your money on taxes and all that, what you've got left over, then you buy a lottery ticket.
01:31:50.000The way you appreciate money, whether it's a dollar or a million dollars, is when you earn it.
01:31:55.000You work hard, you experience the loss, you go through the trials and tribulations, and then you get it.
01:32:01.000When I look back at my path, I'll just say real quick, when I look back at my path, I got out of school and I didn't know what the hell I was going to do and already felt terrible.
01:32:09.000I had some idea that I was already going to be in my vocation doing something great by the time I finished college.
01:32:50.000I'd even get options in this company that was going to strike.
01:32:53.000They were fracking some gas or something like that.
01:32:56.000I didn't really understand it at that point.
01:32:58.000But if that would have been successful and worked, I would have made a huge amount of money.
01:33:01.000And that would have deterred me from this path I am now, which now I truly feel I'm in my vocation.
01:33:08.000But if I look back, all of these things that I was fighting for, for success, if they would have come, and they would have come lucratively, they might have deterred me from what my real vocation is.
01:33:19.000So all of these things, all these bashes on the head, like the universe taking a fucking hammer and saying, whack!
01:33:25.000Not going to work has kind of led me in this weird path to actually doing something that I truly now feel is my vocation.
01:33:32.000But those things are blessings, those failures.
01:33:34.000I think eventually you would have found your way because it's just who you are.
01:33:47.000My issue with the secret is they only talk to the ones who it worked.
01:33:50.000Like, I was hanging out at the comic store once, and my friend Kelly Kirsten, a very funny stand-up comic, had a friend that came with her to the comic show.
01:33:59.000She seemed like a very nice person, and she was talking about the secret.
01:34:05.000And she was going on about, you know, I'm going to have this, and I'm going to have that, and because I discovered the secret.
01:34:12.000And, you know, that movie where it tells you to manifest your own destiny with your imagination, you can make things happen.
01:34:18.000She had decided that because she had this belief in this system, this secret thing, that she was going to somehow or another be super successful and find the man of her dreams and be rich beyond her wildest imagination.
01:35:42.000Well, I mean, one of the things in the laws of human nature coming up is this idea that if there's something that's easy, that someone's trying to peddle, it's a deception.
01:36:00.000We humans want to believe in something quick and easy and simple.
01:36:04.000And if we believe in something, that means it can't really be real, if we believe it because of that.
01:36:09.000In other words, we want to believe that God will grace us if we perform certain rituals or that we can make a lot of money by just following the secret.
01:36:21.000The truth of the matter is that to get really successful, to make money that lasts, it takes hours.
01:37:45.000There wasn't much creativity involved, etc.
01:37:49.000But if you keep doing this for five years, ten years, suddenly you reach a level of pleasure That no video game could ever, ever begin to supply you.
01:37:59.000And I want to reorient your whole value system towards this other kind of pleasure that comes from conquering yourself, getting disciplined, getting skilled at something, becoming really good at it, and feeling incredible a sense of fulfillment,
01:38:16.000as opposed to all those immediate rushes that our culture tries to peddle.
01:38:21.000That's such a huge point for satisfaction in life.
01:38:25.000I feel most relaxed after I've worked out really hard.
01:38:29.000And not just physically because I've blown off all this steam, but because I did it.
01:39:19.000Why I'm enjoying it because I fucking suck at it.
01:39:21.000I like sucking at something, because you suck at it, and now I don't suck at it as much as I did three months ago, whatever the hell it is when I first bought a bow.
01:39:41.000Because I want to reinforce that in my head, to keep doing that.
01:39:44.000And also, there's a discipline involved in something that's very difficult to do that requires all of your concentration that clears the mind.
01:39:54.000And I think that you can get that in gardening.
01:39:59.000Whatever it is, when you're running up hills, you're not thinking about too much other shit.
01:40:03.000When you're absolutely exhausted and your heart's pounding in your chest and you know you've got 300 yards to go and you don't think you can make it, there's a beauty in that.
01:40:12.000Yeah, you're talking a lot about Zen philosophy almost, too, as well.
01:40:16.000Using some modality of movement, which often it is, or anything, to find a...
01:40:21.000A sort of presence of mind, you know, returning to that state of openness of consciousness.
01:40:27.000And, you know, archery is one of those main channels.
01:40:29.000Zen and the Art of Archery is a great book.
01:40:58.000Yeah, get in these flow states, which is really hearkening back to that old Zen philosophy of being of no mind.
01:41:05.000Well, that is the experience that best describes martial arts at its best as well.
01:41:11.000When you're fighting, when you're competing especially, if there's anything on your mind, anything else besides the task at hand, besides dealing with the other skilled person, you're gonna be diminished.
01:42:42.000In dealing with all these incredible egos on a team, as he did with the Bulls and later with the Lakers, that if he tried to get them all wired up before a game and emotional, which is what a lot of coaches would do, yeah, we're going to rip the guts out of them, let's go just kill the Lakers, whatever, that they would play much worse.
01:42:59.000So his job was to imbibe in them incredible peacefulness and calmness, and they would meditate before a game, which no other coach ever did before.
01:43:09.000And he wanted them completely to be mindful in the game so that they could focus on the task and not use all that anger to push them.
01:43:18.000And some players could use the anger a little bit, but most people, like Dennis Rodman, it would make them do all sorts of terrible mistakes.
01:43:27.000There's no coach who's had more championships or more success than someone like Phil Jackson.
01:43:32.000But the thing that I try and show in Mastery, because I have a story of a great Zen master, a man named Hakuin, Because I myself practice Zen meditation, have been for many years.
01:43:43.000This man, this was in 17th century, 18th century Japan.
01:43:49.000He was reacting against all the Zen practices that were going on in Japan that were trying to promise you enlightenment Through something very simple.
01:43:58.000All you had to do was sit in what's called Zazen, seated meditation, and enlightenment would come to you.
01:44:13.000You have to go through 10, 20, 30 years of torture, doubt, misery, the Zen master hitting you over a head with that stupid stick every time he saw that you weren't concentrating, and then you would be enlightened.
01:44:24.000And so I'm trying to show you, even if it's enlightenment, which seems like the most unmaterial thing you could think of, requires the same process of going through a practice of having pain Of having resistance, of having a teacher tell you that you're fucked up,
01:44:42.000you're wrong, hitting you on the head.
01:44:56.000No, I mean, what I try to say is I'm grounding you in what the human brain was evolved for, because our brains weren't wired for iPods and iPhones and Twitter.
01:45:09.000They were wired over hundreds of thousands of years of hunting, Of dealing with extremely radical, dangerous situations in which one moment, if we're not careful, a leopard will come and eat us.
01:45:21.000And early humans were being eaten quite often by large cats.
01:45:28.000Very dangerous environment in which your awareness, your focus, your ability to understand your environment as if it were on your fingertips, to know every square foot of that very dangerous African savanna that you're on, that's what the brain was wired for.
01:45:45.000Focus, seeing something deeply, understanding your environment, not being distracted here and there and looking over there.
01:45:54.000So all of these disciplines from boxing to Zen enlightenment to archery to music to whatever, They're all connected with the same brain process that we all have to go through in order to reach this point where we've mastered our environment,
01:46:25.000I used to go to a place where I was trained, and now I do it on my own.
01:46:31.000What's the difference between the two schools of thought?
01:46:33.000One of them is more a passive process where you're just sitting there trying to completely empty your mind.
01:46:41.000And that's sort of the easier, slightly easier path.
01:46:44.000And the concept is if you're able to reach a state where you're not thinking at all and you've emptied your mind, enlightenment will come to you.
01:47:14.000But the one that I've used for years is...
01:47:18.000The question is, does the dog have Buddha nature?
01:47:21.000And the answer from the Zen master is Mu.
01:47:24.000Mu meaning no, but it means more than no.
01:47:28.000It means like nothing, just nothingness.
01:47:31.000And it's the most powerful Zen koan ever written.
01:47:34.000If you ever try and think about it deeply, you will reach enlightenment.
01:47:38.000The different school of thought is you meditate on that koan, almost like a mantra, and you try and figure it out until it opens up a gate in your head.
01:47:48.000That's a simplified version of the two different types.
01:47:53.000So the idea being that this preposterous question becomes sort of a pattern that your thoughts go into and you become empty because this pattern becomes, you say it over and over and over and over again,
01:48:08.000you recite it, you think about it over and over again until you reach a state of mind.
01:48:14.000Until it becomes so absurd that the words fall off of you.
01:48:18.000Zen is trying to teach you something that's wordless.
01:48:21.000We're so trapped in language and words and thinking that it separates us from our natural state of original mind, of the non-thinking mind.
01:48:34.000I know that sounds a strange idea, but...
01:48:38.000Through words, you're going to realize the absurdity of words, that they're disconnecting you from reality.
01:48:45.000And so at that point, you realize that moo means everything.
01:48:49.000There's absolutely nothing real in this universe that can be encompassed by a word.
01:48:55.000My talking about it here is absolutely completely counterproductive and ridiculous because people are going to think, oh, I'll just repeat the word moo over and over again.
01:49:05.000Months of thinking very deeply about this is trying to cut you off from that chatter in your head, from thinking constantly linguistically about—it's a total physical form of enlightenment,
01:49:22.000It's the most physical form of enlightenment you could reach.
01:49:26.000I'm getting reminded of that Bill Bradley story that you told, and kind of repeating the same thing.
01:49:31.000Bill Bradley was a terrible basketball player at the start.
01:49:34.000Big, gangly, slow, not terrible, but he wasn't good.
01:49:38.000But he had the most relentless pursuit of improvement of anybody that I've ever read.
01:49:43.000You can probably pick up the story, but he You know, just dribbling the ball, you know, constantly, eight hours, nine hours a day, you know, again, over and over and over again.
01:49:54.000And that kind of repetition, you know, it's all part of this same pattern of doing the same thing over and over again.
01:50:28.000There's no way he'd become good at it.
01:50:30.000So he decided he was going to train himself from a very early age.
01:50:35.000And I call it, you know, they have a concept called deliberate practice, where you learn to practice what you're not good at.
01:50:43.000Because we often, if we're taking up archery or basketball, We find something that we're good at, and we tend to just repeat that, and then our practice becomes very one-sided.
01:50:54.000Deliberate practice is to practice on what you're not good at.
01:51:28.000He went on a cruise with his parents across to England and he wanted to build a practice there.
01:51:35.000He brought his basketball and below deck there were these incredibly long alleys that would go from one end of the ship to the other that were very narrow.
01:51:43.000He would put on his special glasses and he would dribble back and forth In this narrow area so that he could dribble with absolute, complete control.
01:51:51.000He devised all of these other exercises where he could train himself to see almost behind himself, or at least way over to the side, on and on and on until he became so good that by the time he got into college at Princeton,
01:52:07.000and then later he played for the New York Knicks in the 70s with all the great championship teams, people would look at Bill Brown and go, my God, This guy was born with a basketball in his hand.
01:52:22.000He can make a pass to Walt Frazier without even looking.
01:52:24.000They didn't realize that he had gone through the most insanely rigorous, painful, deliberate form of practice ever invented by a single athlete.
01:53:16.000Particularly nowadays when you're just so inundated with immediate pleasures and so many young people are disconnected from what I call, you know, The pattern that our brains were built for, if you're going against that pattern and trying to get things quickly or immediately,
01:53:50.000What you said is so important, and that story, the Bill Bradley story, is such a powerful story, because anyone can do that with whatever you're trying to do.
01:54:35.000And the cool part is that ultimately, we've talked about it before, any master that you meet, they're generally a real true pleasure to be around.
01:54:44.000They've worked through all of these cunty, egoistic attitudes that they may carry along, and it's through this almost overcoming this physical resistance in the very art of the mastery that they're doing.
01:54:56.000It doesn't matter, ping pong, bow hunting, comedy, basketball, whatever it is, You reach a certain place by pushing through that pain and going through those hours and doing those things that almost tempers your spirit as the main thing that's happening.
01:55:12.000And the skill kind of comes along with it, even though you're focused on the skill.
01:56:11.000And then I always say, even with Ty Cobb or Steve Jobs, they were probably miserable to be around, but he had a pretty hugely satisfying life.
01:56:26.000I'm going to use the bathroom real quick, please.
01:56:27.000It goes to kind of one of your final points, which is on that path to mastery, the final level is building bridges back to nature, back to different and making other connections.
01:56:38.000So if you stay too focused in that one thing and never look to build a bridge to anything else, you can probably result in some of these issues.
01:56:46.000Yeah, I mean, for those who don't know the book, essentially I've laid out kind of five or six steps towards this ultimate form of mastery.
01:56:56.000And it involves first discovering who you are, what you were meant to do, then going through what I call an apprenticeship in which you develop all of the proper skills.
01:57:07.000Later in life you have like a real firm basis for becoming creative and part of that apprenticeship involves working with mentors and masters and it also involves learning how to work with other people and deal with their weirdness and their political games and then showing you then how you reach the creative level and then the mastery level and it's a loose path,
01:57:30.000it's not like a straight line but I'm sort of showing you the various steps that get you there And as Aubrey points out, particularly nowadays, it involves a kind of a well-roundedness.
01:57:46.000You're not just some Asperger's guy in Silicon Valley who's great at logarithms and creating the ultimate Facebook or whatever.
01:57:58.000You also have to have social skills, and I have a whole chapter in mastery on social intelligence.
01:58:04.000You have to learn how to deal with people.
01:58:08.000You have to know how to be empathetic, how to understand what other people's feelings are, how to handle the assholes that will inevitably cross your path.
01:58:19.000Some of the people that Joe's talking about who are a little bit one-sided, they've kind of bypassed some of these other things that I'm talking about because I'm trying to get you to that well-rounded form of mastery.
01:59:44.000Maybe I actually saw it in junior high because it was 80. I wasn't in high school yet.
01:59:47.000But I got into isolation tanks when I first came to California because they had them here.
01:59:53.000And I never knew that there was a place where you could get into one.
01:59:57.000Through talking about it on the podcast, the entire industry has got this massive bump now.
02:00:03.000And there's isolation tank centers opening up all over the world that credit me talking about it on the podcast and YouTube videos that I talk about it.
02:00:48.000My brain seems to know when two hours is.
02:00:51.000Two hours seems pretty standard for me.
02:00:53.000If I don't have any time constraints, two hours seems to be what I really, depending on whether or not I'm sober or not when I go into it, never drunk, but marijuana is usually the intoxicant of choice, especially edible marijuana, which provides a much more hallucinogenic effect.
02:01:10.000I think it enhances the experience of the psychedelic state inside the tank.
02:01:21.000Because then, much like the stress of exercise or discipline, through the experience of complete freaking out, there's lessons to be learned.
02:03:04.000I mean, there can be sounds outside, but you're not paying attention to them.
02:03:07.000And you enter the state that's similar to what the isolation tank is.
02:03:12.000I can enter a state like the isolation tank without the isolation tank because I cut off all stimuli and I enter my own mental space and incredible things can happen.
02:03:22.000So you just ignore the stimuli until the point where it's not reaching the mind?
02:04:12.000That's one of the reasons they founded yoga, was to make it so that there was less stimuli coming from your seated ass, you know, and the way that your legs were folded when you're meditating, because all of that noise that an isolation tank filters out, and I love the tank,
02:04:28.000it's most effective for me, but, you know, they would do yoga so that they could sit in that pose and have less of that stimuli yelling for longer, so they could reach those states in which they could find that.
02:04:39.000Well, I also personally find that yoga releases some form of psychedelic chemicals in the mind.
02:04:45.000I've gotten high, like legitimately high from yoga to the point where not, I want to say intoxicated, like I'm diminished in some way or affected, like I can't form sentences or anything like that, but I feel like a chemical effect or a biological effect,
02:05:05.000some sort of a real tangible effect from yoga.
02:07:48.000They have this word called makyo, which means a demon.
02:07:53.000And what it means is, after a certain point in meditation, demons start appearing in your brain, where you've cut out all sensory stimuli And suddenly, images start coming up that are just weird and random and somewhat frightening.
02:10:47.000But if you read books like about Buddhism, which I do voraciously, the history of it, Early people in meditation and early adherence to Buddhism were constantly talking about that chatter in their mind as if it were hell.
02:11:01.000It was like hearing this noise of thoughts was just awful.
02:11:05.000It was claustrophobic and frightening and they had to get into meditation and Buddhism just to calm the mind down and not hear that voice in their heads.
02:11:15.000Now this is a totally alien notion to us because we're so used to it and it's almost Not a good thing that we're so used to it.
02:11:23.000But I think that that's sort of the idea of the demons.
02:11:26.000Constantly hearing this voice, these things in your head that aren't...
02:11:58.000That's where I think this idea of demons is connected.
02:12:01.000This reminds me a lot of going through a psychedelic experience like ayahuasca.
02:12:06.000In that path, you reach this very visual point in the experience, which is generally, it can either be incredibly beautiful or it can be incredibly hellish.
02:12:19.000For example, I have different spiders going inside of me and laying eggs and exploding and bugs are coming out of me.
02:12:26.000There's eels coming inside, eating through my intestines and eating all my organs coming out.
02:12:32.000I'm sliding naked down a vine of thorns that's ripping up my flesh.
02:12:36.000These are all images that happen in an ayahuasca trip.
02:12:39.000Or incredibly beautiful, the most beautiful colors you've ever seen, the most beautiful lights, images.
02:12:46.000I get a lot of people asking me about these trips, and for them, who haven't done it very much, they focus very much on those visions.
02:12:55.000But those visions are almost like the fireworks and the chatter to what's going to come after.
02:13:00.000And what comes after is this kind of oneness with your thoughts and your highest consciousness and your highest being that is past all that.
02:13:10.000And maybe that brings up resistances, things you can overcome.
02:13:12.000Maybe it helps you with some thoughts.
02:13:14.000But the real value of it in ayahuasca or DMT or any kind of psychedelic is that period after where these demons or these visions or everything goes away.
02:13:45.000So it's not so much about the visions.
02:13:47.000It's about what happens after the visions.
02:13:49.000It seems to me very much like what you're saying.
02:13:52.000Yeah, that state after very difficult yoga sessions, it doesn't last very long.
02:13:57.000But there's a period of Intense relaxation and enlightenment that you achieve, where you kind of have a better perspective of things, but it only comes through this very difficult work of the hour and a half of yoga that you have to do to get to that spot.
02:14:12.000And if you half-ass it anywhere along the way, you don't reach that spot.
02:14:24.000I don't know if it's the same with archery or the things that you do like that, but When you start the meditation, you bring a mood and it's never the same.
02:14:33.000Someday, for no reason, it just falls into place.
02:14:37.000And some days, you don't know why, this anxiety is gnawing on your inside.
02:14:41.000You never can figure out what you bring to it.
02:15:49.000And then I'm not usually writing because my books require so much research So right now I'm in a research period where I'm reading voraciously books about human nature, psychology, etc.
02:16:03.000And then in about a year I'm going to start writing and then I go on to a kind of a different routine where I'm a little more crazed and hard to be around.
02:17:28.000I, with my cards, can organize all of his ideas and all of his thoughts and bring some order and show you the amazing pearls of wisdom this guy has gleaned out of his mad syphilitic brain.
02:18:36.000It's fascinating because I was trying to explain to my kids the plague because we were reading a book and my five-year-old and my three-year-old were sitting in bed reading before bedtime and the story involved the plague.
02:18:47.000A plague upon you was one of the lines in...
02:18:53.000I'm like, hmm, that's some shit before doctors.
02:18:56.000When they didn't really have doctors, when all doctors could do was cut off broken limbs, they had diseases that would kill giant chunks of people.
02:19:06.000Not that long ago, by the way, they wrote about it, so they had language.
02:19:11.000What we were talking about earlier about the evolution of civilization and the amount of time, the very brief window between us and when we were animals in relationship to the length of time that things have been alive on Earth.
02:19:27.000We're going through the most crazy and chaotic time pretty much ever when the wheel, you know, the description that McKenna used to use about the exponential growth of technology was about sending a ball around the top of a funnel, and that it takes a long time to get around the top,
02:19:45.000but that we're somewhere towards the bottom of the funnel now, where that fucking thing is going around the tunnel, going around the funnel so quickly.
02:19:54.000It's hard for us to really wrap our heads around, but when we talk to children about it, when I talk to children about it, it really sends it home.
02:20:01.000When I try to describe to my kids what a fucking plague is.
02:20:07.000I just reminded myself of when you read actual accounts of the true pirates, like Blackbeard and things like that, one of the things that they would barter with for the most, like when they were making deals with the British ships or different things and striking deals,
02:20:24.000Venereal disease medicine, like syphilis medicine.
02:20:27.000It'd be like, we'll give you all the gold, but you have to bring over a chest of medicine to cure the venereal disease.
02:20:35.000I think that was probably a much bigger problem in ancient history than, well not completely ancient, but in past civilization than we give it credit.
02:21:05.000Just like we were talking about the battle between discipline and success, the battle between being uncomfortable and doing things that are hard to do and reaping the rewards of that.
02:21:14.000There seems to be a battle in nature of trying to fucking kill us so we get stronger.
02:21:18.000We don't like to think that, but it's been directly proven that many plagues and many diseases, certain traits have risen through those diseases which have made the human race actually stronger.
02:21:31.000Although they say our Cro-Magnon ancestors, for instance, lived longer than we do.
02:23:09.000Nothing like the internet to be able to show that I'm wrong about something.
02:23:12.000Ten years ago, there was no way you would have been able to prove me wrong.
02:23:15.000We've had so many examples of people stating, and I know you're not doing it, but there's been a lot of people that have bullshitted us, unfortunately, and I've spread information, so now I have to be diligent about that.
02:23:46.000There is no life that's worth living if everything is like that Alan Watts video, if we could make everything absolutely perfect and nothing is a surprise and there's no resistance out there.
02:23:59.000It's not filled with the magic that life I mean, resistance is an intrinsic part of that.
02:24:04.000And the fact that nature is constantly looking to, you know, pick us off is part of that resistance.
02:24:10.000And the fact that all of these forces are aligned against someone who's trying to become a master, the pain, the sacrifice, whatever people are saying, all of that, that is required for a master to be created.
02:25:22.000Getting back to what you were saying there, in the preface to mastery, I try and say...
02:25:28.000First of all, I make the point that we need masters in the world now.
02:25:32.000This is a time where we have incredible opportunity, largely through the internet, where access to information, the ability to learn things, to develop skills, to have an isolation tank, to learn archery, to do all of these things,
02:25:48.000the world is open up and The ability to develop skills and master something and create something is just completely unprecedented.
02:25:57.000At the same time, the distractions and the resistance that we have to go through is equally unprecedented.
02:26:04.000With the internet, with iPhones, with all the other things that are making it so much harder for us to focus.
02:26:12.000And I want you to think of all of these things as the kind of the water that you have to swim against.
02:26:18.000And if you're able to swim against all of these distractions that the world throws at you, you're going to become a real kick-ass master in whatever it is because you've overcome Something that 90% of the people in this world just submerges them under because they're too weak.
02:26:35.000There's also the cliche, and it's very important to point out, that there is no end result.
02:26:40.000That it's a journey, and this journey does not...
02:26:43.000I mean, becoming a master, there's no end point.
02:26:46.000You continue to get better at everything you do, or you start to suck.
02:26:59.000You know, you take someone like Einstein, one of the greatest masters, he discovers the second theory of relativity at the age of 26 and nothing after that.
02:27:09.000You know, he tried to do his unified theory and it just never...
02:27:59.000That's the tongue of a fucking super genius with his own hair.
02:28:03.000That guy was a very unique individual, and that uniqueness, I'm sure there was some motivation behind that, not just the scientific motivation, but the actual natural motivation to be exceptional for breeding purposes,
02:28:20.000that women would find him exceptional.
02:28:24.000But you're right, it is a process so that you never can sort of rest on your laurels and say, ah.
02:28:29.000So the way I do it, I'm not saying that I'm a master, so don't misinterpret me, but the way I do it for myself is every book that I write, I'm back at square one.
02:28:47.000I have to make my next book work or I'm a total loser.
02:28:51.000That's exactly the same process involved in stand-up comedy.
02:28:56.000In stand-up comedy, you put out a new special and then once you have that new special, you throw all that material out and you start from scratch and you write all new material.
02:29:59.000You're gonna get old and you're gonna reach that point where you can't really work anymore, so you don't have to work anymore, and then you gotta watch your money.
02:30:06.000This selling point of one day you'll retire and everything will be groovy.
02:31:11.000It's like, if the motivation was just on his art, I think probably he'd be far more successful.
02:31:18.000But instead, the motivation is based on the green demon of looking at all these other people becoming successful and not being able to find out why he can't achieve it himself.
02:31:27.000I mean, attention is never the goal in mastery, and it's actually a negative.
02:31:39.000Yeah, and that need, the need for acceptance.
02:31:44.000It's the very opposite of what you should be striving for.
02:31:49.000We were talking about people that become really successful and then lose their way, and how you can learn so much from that.
02:31:57.000In comedy, my guide for that was always Sam Kinison, because I think that Sam Kinison was the greatest comedian of all time from 1986 to 1987. I mean, I'm not kidding.
02:32:09.000I think maybe before that, you know, I found out about him in 86. I mean, probably he was the greatest in 85 and maybe even in 84. But that's it.
02:32:59.000You know, we had Marc Maron on the podcast who was palling around with Kinison in the heyday at the Comedy Store when Marc was a young kid.
02:33:07.000And he told some amazing stories about just the amount of substances.
02:34:00.000It's a great book about Kinison, written by his brother, who was, I think, also his manager at the time, who wrote about how there was a...
02:34:08.000He wrote about the tangible drop-off in his writing.
02:34:12.000He didn't write new material anymore and was sort of like just partying.
02:34:17.000I talk in the book about this myth that drugs will just instantly make you more creative.
02:34:55.000Because to create something requires so much discipline and so much mindfulness and focus that you just can't do it if you're constantly drugged out.
02:35:09.000Coke and heroin are probably two of the worst.
02:35:12.000But there seems to be a connection between heroin and deep, soulful music.
02:35:16.000Maybe it helps them for a small time reach a state, but then ultimately the abuse of it destroys your body so much that you can't keep it up.
02:35:26.000Yeah, you mean like a Velvet Underground or something like that?
02:35:31.000Well, people will argue that Hendrix wasn't really into heroin, but if you look at that photo behind me of his mugshot, that is from the fucking Toronto Police Department when he was arrested for heroin.
02:35:42.000So, there's a little problem with that.
02:36:20.000I think it's in the 33 strategies and in the 48 laws.
02:36:23.000Well, basically, after he would be successful with the book, he would find that he was unable to really write and he didn't have that creative fire anymore to create another great work.
02:36:33.000So he would take all of his life savings and go to the casino and just gamble it away in a night so that he was desperate and hungry again.
02:36:58.000Putting yourself on death ground comes from Sun Tzu.
02:37:01.000He says a general would deliberately put his army on death ground, meaning he would deliberately put their back against an ocean or a mountain.
02:37:08.000And they either had to defeat the enemy that's confronting them or they would die because they had no escape route.
02:37:16.000Yeah, safety nets are something that I've argued against ever since I was a child, which was another thing that my parents instilled in me that I had to have a safety net.
02:37:23.000And I've always told everybody who would listen, don't ever have a fucking safety net, because if you have a net, you will fall, all right?
02:37:29.000You might not make it without the net, but you will not make it with the net.
02:37:38.000I had an interesting experience with mastery where, in writing the book, where I had written four of the six chapters But I was getting really late in delivering the final result.
02:37:49.000And the publisher basically said, you have like 11 weeks to finish the book or we're canceling the project or postponing it.
02:37:59.000And the two chapters left were the longest, the hardest, the most abstract, and the most important.
02:38:43.000And I was sitting there writing about creativity and intuition while this was happening to me.
02:38:50.000And it just demonstrated to me that the limits that I thought I had are just sort of self-imposed.
02:38:56.000And if I stopped complaining and stopped saying that I had these limits, I could explore beyond them and explore what I was capable of that I never thought I was capable of prior to that.
02:39:08.000You know, Hunter Thompson wrote Hell's Angels.
02:39:10.000He finished, like, the last X amount of chapters in, like, two days on cocaine.
02:41:14.000And his whole thing was like putting things off until the last minute and then this fury of fucking teeth gnashing, you know, slamming against the keys and this fucking...
02:41:25.000But it's almost like he forced himself into this back against the wall.
02:41:41.000You like following someone like Joey Diaz, who is hilarious, right?
02:41:46.000Because you've talked about how that would make some people a little bit scared and a little bit nervous, but you like it because it's going to bring out your best following somebody that's that great.
02:42:14.000They think that there's a lot of really...
02:42:18.000Selfish comedians out there, and one of the things that they like to do is they like to stack the deck.
02:42:23.000There's guys that are national touring headliners that bring the worst fucking comedians you've ever seen in your life to open for them.
02:42:29.000Because these guys go up there and eat dick for half an hour, and then you go on stage, this crowd has been tortured, waiting for actual entertainment, and you're the hero.
02:43:19.000The same shitheads like that actor that I told you that would go up to my friend and say he was fat right before he would go and read his lines.
02:43:25.000That's that same sort of thinking, that same sort of famine thinking.
02:43:29.000Another person's success should be inspirational to you.
02:44:27.000It's not because I want to put my back up against the wall.
02:44:29.000I want the audience to get their money's worth and I want to be around my friends.
02:44:33.000And I also want to support my friends.
02:44:35.000Part of the reason I'm bringing Joey and Ari and Duncan on the road with me all these years is it's selfish because I want to have a good time and I want to be with them and I want to enjoy myself.
02:45:03.000And my help, you know, helping get him out there in front of thousands of people that would never have had an opportunity to see him.
02:45:11.000And telling people as I introduce him, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the funniest motherfucker that ever stepped foot on earth, Joey Diaz.
02:45:18.000And I would bring him on stage like that all the time.
02:45:20.000I tell everybody he's funnier than me.
02:46:36.000Well, 48 Laws of Power just come out in 98...
02:46:39.000And Bill O'Reilly decides to have me on the O'Reilly Factory, which was big then, but not as big as it became later on.
02:46:45.000And so I'm like, this is like one of my first shows I've ever been on.
02:46:49.000You know, nothing like this ever happened to me before.
02:46:54.000And basically, you go to a studio in Los Angeles, where he's in New York, and you're in this room, and there's nothing around you, and they put an earphone in your head, and And you're staring at a camera.
02:49:28.000It's incredibly ridiculous that that guy got to interview Obama.
02:49:31.000Not that I think Obama is a particularly unique and special human being, relatively to what his position is and what could have been done by a guy like that in that position, but I think that having Obama being interviewed by this fucking buffoon,
02:49:47.000I think Obama has the most thankless job probably in the history of the world, and maybe the most impossible job.
02:49:52.000I don't think he's done the best That he could with it, but I don't think anybody can.
02:49:59.000The more I think about being a president, the more I think about dealing with the House and dealing with Congress and the Senate and all the fucking laws.
02:50:07.000Just look at what's happened to his hair.
02:50:11.000Yeah, well that happens to all of them.
02:50:12.000Preceding and gray, but like in this course of like a year, it just suddenly turned gray.
02:50:15.000I don't think we can even imagine the kind of pressure that you'd have to be to be the leader or the supposed commander-in-chief of the greatest superpower the world has ever known, which wants to consume the earth.
02:50:25.000You know, this crazy superpower that literally thrives on consuming the earth.
02:50:29.000I think we can gain so much from listening to Eisenhower's speech about the military-industrial complex when he was leaving office, that intense speech.
02:50:38.000Warning the people about the military-industrial complex and the dangers of it and the influence of it.
02:50:44.000I don't think we can even imagine what that is actually like when you're in office.
02:50:49.000I mean, I'd like to think that Obama one day will write a book explaining everything and we'll be like, oh, I get it.
02:50:57.000I don't get how he could have made the decisions that he's made based on what he said before he got into office.
02:51:02.000Unless he's totally full of shit, which I'd like to think that he's not...
02:51:06.000That said, him getting interviewed by a fucking buffoon like Bill Reilly, it's just like, it's watching that and just like, why is that guy talking?
02:51:15.000That he's one of the most popular people on television.
02:51:25.000Well, it's unnecessary, and I personally believe that that style of television is like fucking silent films, where you debate a very important issue on a split screen for six minutes, and people yell over,
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