In this episode, Dr. Jordan Peterson sits down with Robert Green, the author of The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, and The 33 Strategies of War and Mastery, to discuss human nature and the principles surrounding strategy, power, and seduction, as well as psychopathy, manipulation, agreeableness, and channeling your shadow. Dr. Peterson s new series on Depression and Anxiety provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you re suffering from Depression or Anxiety, please know you are not alone. There s hope and there s a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywire Plus now and start watching Jordan B. Peterson on Depression & Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Dr. B.P. has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling. . With decades of experience helping patients with Depression and Anxiousness. With a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series, , Dr. P.B. Peterson offers a unique approach to understanding why you may be feeling these ways, and offers a roadmap toward healing. In this series, he s offering a unique perspective on how to find a way to feel better. and a path towards the better you deserve a brighter, more positive future you seek . Let this episode be a beacon of hope and a place where you can find a brighter future that s better understand why you are worthy of a brighter you deserve it . . Let s talk about what you deserve to be happy, not less alone. , and a better you, not alone and a better future you are a better version of yourself. ... Thank you for listening to this episode of the JBP Podcast. - Michaela Peterson of the Daily Wire Plus Podcast. Thank you so much for listening, - Dr. Michaela, and I hope you re not alone, and that you ll join us in this journey to a better, brighter future, and a more positive, better place in the next episode of JBP - Thank you, - Jordan Peterson, and keep sharing this podcast with others.
00:06:01.480Well, you know, it's a bit manipulative when people write that, because a great deal of the 48 laws of power, I'd say, you know, maybe two-thirds of them, are not manipulative, have nothing to do with deception.
00:06:13.400They have things to do with kind of common sense ideas about power, such as being generous with people, such as creating compelling spectacles, such as entering action with boldness and kind of how you present yourself, sort of things about your image and your appearance.
00:06:31.020But there are definitely some laws that are quite manipulative.
00:06:34.060And then my other books don't really go into things like that.
00:06:37.400So it is a bit of a distortion to write that.
00:06:41.620But where this comes from is basically, I have a particular idea of power.
00:06:48.300So maybe I should explain that a little bit.
00:06:50.780My idea of power, it's not about this kind of grand thing of political or war or something.
00:06:57.820And the idea for me comes from Nietzsche and his idea of the will to power, which he explains as every organism has a desire to expand itself, has a desire for expansion.
00:07:10.200And so I think that for human beings, the desire that we have this innate propensity for wanting to expand beyond our limits.
00:07:18.700We want to feel like we have some degree of ability to influence other people, that we can control our own career and learn more and develop greater skills and have more kind of power and influence in our life.
00:07:34.140The feeling that I cannot have any power or influence over my children, my spouse, my colleagues, my boss, my career in general, is deeply, deeply unsettling for the human animal and causes all kinds of attempts at what I call negative power, passive aggression, et cetera, setting yourself up as a victim to kind of leverage power in a negative way.
00:07:57.480And so the problem is, and a lot of this comes from Machiavelli, who inspired a lot of the 48 laws.
00:08:06.340The problem is that we live in a world where this desire for some kind of power butts up against kind of codes of behavior that have gotten stricter and stricter and stricter, particularly in the 21st century, about what is acceptable, about what is politically correct.
00:08:25.120So we're supposed to appear to be these paragons of virtue, these paragons of fairness and democracy, et cetera.
00:08:32.420At the same time, we're all trying to angle for different degrees of power in our work, in our relationships, et cetera.
00:08:40.620And so because of that dynamic, we have to be extremely careful in this world.
00:08:46.160And I compare it to the courts of like Louis XIV, where all of the courtiers, if they're too overt in their power moves, the king will disapprove of them and will not banish them, but they'll be kind of excluded to the corner of the palace.
00:09:01.900And so the game was to be sort of indirect, to be polite and ingratiating.
00:09:07.600And if you had an enemy, to know how to kind of very quietly get rid of them.
00:09:12.360And so this is kind of where the 48 laws of power came out from.
00:09:18.740So you quoted me, I had like 80 different jobs, probably more like 60, 65.
00:09:23.540But I saw all kinds of very deceptive games being played continually in the various different jobs I had.
00:09:31.260And I worked in every conceivable field and I didn't see any kind of honesty about this dynamic in the human world.
00:10:41.540He just sent me a survey that this organization he works with has completed, stating that something like 40% of millennials don't feel they have any control over their life.
00:10:55.600So that is related to the first issue that you brought up.
00:10:59.380And you obviously consider that problematic.
00:11:05.000And you said that, well, we need to, it's good for us to have some control over our destinies and also to feel that that's a possibility to see it at least as a goal.
00:11:16.640And that if we feel consciously thwarted in that goal or believe that it's impossible, that doesn't mean we're going to give up our striving.
00:11:27.120It means it's going to go underground and then it's going to manifest itself in all sorts of deceptive ways.
00:11:32.300And then you said that you were interested in Nietzsche's idea of will to power as, in some sense, the central motivating, the central motivation of the organism across species to some degree.
00:11:48.580And then you talked about the jobs that you've had.
00:11:51.620So why, why did, so I got that right, I hope.
00:11:57.700And so, and so to some degree, and then you said, well, you had all these jobs, and you found that people were engaged in manipulative and deceptive strategies, a fair number of, a fair amount of the time, and that no one was really warning people about this or delineating out the strategies.
00:12:14.980Okay, so that, you know, that seems to me to be reasonable that, I mean, I'm a big admirer of the work of Carl Jung, which everyone listening to this knows more than they even want to know.
00:12:25.220Well, and he was certainly sensitive to the idea that people had a terrible shadow.
00:12:39.560And act out a virtuous persona, but because of the thwarted will to strive in some sense that they have all sorts of motivations, sexual, power related, dominance, aggression, anger, resentment, that aren't admitted thoroughly, and that are snakes under the carpet or elephants under the rug or skeletons in the closet, and they pollute human relationships.
00:13:05.100I believe that that's the corruption of human relationships by a form of severe deceit.
00:13:12.800And I also think it's reasonable to warn people against that and also to alert them to the fact that such things operate in their own souls.
00:13:32.600It doesn't speak very well of me and the fact that I couldn't hold a job for more than 11 months.
00:13:38.380I came out of college and I wanted to be a writer and I had all kinds of romantic notions of what that meant.
00:13:44.820And then I entered journalism and I worked in New York and I didn't find that that was a very good fit.
00:13:49.800So I moved to Europe and I wandered around for four or five years writing, trying to write novels and working in hotels, doing construction, kind of the writer's life where the variety of experiences were kind of giving me material.
00:14:04.120And I couldn't, I never was really happy in overtly political environments, to be honest with you.
00:14:15.480I didn't like a lot of the games that were being played and I'm not very good at them.
00:14:20.340I mean, I've gotten better at it, but a lot of the things that I write about in the 48 Laws of Power, such as Never Outshine the Master, are things that I did poorly.
00:14:32.000So I understand the kind of the pain that a lot of people have in the work world, which is sort of hard for a lot of other people who don't have that kind of experience to understand how deeply frustrating it can be when you have a job that you're not satisfied with.
00:14:47.540And so I was someone who was very restless and I never felt comfortable in any of the different jobs I had.
00:14:53.060And I was also trying to broaden my experience.
00:14:55.500Okay, so I had a lot of jobs when I was a kid.
00:14:59.680I worked as a, oh God, I worked as a, in a garage, pumping gas.
00:15:13.400I had a lot of, oh, I worked in a plywood mill, running plywood pieces through a huge dryer.
00:15:20.000We used to try to light the thing on fire.
00:15:21.680It was like a block long, this dryer, fired by natural gas.
00:15:25.440And if you worked really hard, you could stuff it so full, it would get crammed up in the middle and then it would light on fire and all the, the fire sprinklers would kick in.
00:15:36.620And then the whole building, which was like a block square, would fill up with steam.
00:16:19.740And I, I, and it's not like I like political maneuvering when I got in the university and saw people in bureaucracies particular maneuvering politically to attain dominance.
00:16:29.080It's just, I found it, I had no, I find it absolutely appalling that underground power struggle, but it sounds like, it sounds like you had a harder time maybe than I did adapting.
00:16:41.400And that maybe is, and that became a conscious puzzle for you.
00:16:46.680Is that a reasonable way of thinking about it?
00:17:01.880So I don't want to give the wrong impression, but when mistakes were made and I, it may be inadvertently made my boss or someone feel insecure.
00:17:10.360It caused me like months later to kind of question what had happened and maybe something I did that was wrong in that environment.
00:17:17.500And so, you know, I felt, it wasn't that I felt uncomfortable, but I felt sometimes that trying so hard or being good at my job, which was often the case, was often a detriment, which was a very strange realization.
00:17:34.340Well, that's a good, that's a really good sign that you need to go get a different job.
00:17:38.320I mean, I worked with clinical clients a lot, you know, in career counseling.
00:17:43.140And my sense, one of the things we'd analyzed right away was, well, can you actually do your job well and be recognized for it and have a pathway to something approximating success?
00:17:55.180Or are you around truly toxic people who will punish you for your virtues, in which case, let's get your CV together, you know, let's get you prepared to get the hell out of there and find a place where you can actually thrive.
00:18:08.580I mean, I had clients who were trapped in jobs.
00:18:11.100I remember one client in particular, she had been a refugee from Albania, Eastern Europe.
00:19:32.100My experience is, and what I wanted to help people with 48 laws of power, when these things kind of happen, you get very confused and they create a kind of trauma in your life where you sometimes blame yourself or you wonder, maybe you did something wrong.
00:19:48.940And you become a little bit skittish and you get a little bit afraid in your next job and these things kind of linger on in your mind.
00:20:05.960But the idea that you could have some clarity that maybe what really happened is that I inadvertently triggered the insecurities of this boss, or maybe there are these strict kind of moral puritanical codes in place, and I somehow violated them.
00:20:22.460That kind of clarity can be very, very empowering, I find, and that's another kind of motivating device behind the 48 laws.
00:20:29.620Well, you also make me very curious about your personality.
00:20:32.800I mean, when I'm talking, I'm sorry, I'm going to, yeah, well, you know, I'm a clinician, and I snap into that mode sometimes, and I'm very curious about this conversation.
00:20:41.920I mean, you have a very gentle demeanor and a very soft and kind voice, and you don't look like a harsh person.
00:20:50.080And so one of the dimensions, one of the cardinal personality dimensions, there's five of them.
00:20:55.620You may know this, extroversion, which is a positive emotion, and it's associated with assertiveness and enthusiasm.
00:21:06.320Negative emotion, that's neuroticism, and that's the whole panoply of negative emotions.
00:21:10.920They all clump together, and people differ in their sensitivity to them.
00:21:14.620Agreeableness, that's compassion and politeness on the high end, and more like bluntness and competitiveness on the other end, and conscientiousness and openness, which is creativity.
00:21:24.360You're obviously high in openness, you're an entrepreneur, you're a writer, you're interested in ideas, you're obviously creative, but you strike me as someone who's very high in agreeableness, compassion, that's compassion and politeness.
00:21:35.500Is that a reasonable, is that a reasonable observation?
00:21:44.660I mean, people are a little more complex than that, I do have other sides to myself, I do have a shadow side, that is, can be very aggressive and very, I'm very competitive.
00:21:55.060So it's, I think on the surface, I have that kind of agreeable personality for various reasons, but yes.
00:22:02.080Would you describe yourself as compassionate?
00:22:07.720Okay, so here's what I'm wondering, okay, okay, okay, so that's, I'm very curious about that, because one of the disadvantages of being high in agreeableness, is that you're more likely to be a target for disagreeable types.
00:22:23.720And this is a really important notion.
00:22:26.120So I was talking yesterday, who was it with?
00:22:32.080I can't remember, but we were talking about, oh yes, it was Andy Ngo, we were talking about the establishment of this, you know, utopian community in the middle of Seattle.
00:22:42.600The mayor described it and said, well, maybe it'll be the summer of love, which is extremely naive thing to think, especially because the summer of love blew up.
00:22:53.720And so, and you know, that's sort of a celebration of agreeable virtues.
00:22:58.300And so agreeable people are very generous and kind, and they're not backstabbing, and they're empathetic, and they're self-sacrificing.
00:23:05.180But there have been computer simulations, very sophisticated computer simulations, by evolutionary biologists of what happens if you get agreeable people together.
00:23:14.820So imagine you have a population of people, and all of them are agreeable.
00:23:21.760But if you put one person in there who has psychopathic traits, he just takes over everything.
00:23:28.360And so the agreeable people always have the problem of how do you handle free riders, cheaters, and psychopaths.
00:23:36.720And you know, you might be utopian and say, well, those people just don't exist, and they shouldn't exist, and we shouldn't structure our societies that way.
00:23:42.860But that ain't going to cut it, because psychopaths are always 3% of the population.
00:23:50.020And so if you're in a—so is it possible—I don't want to push this interpretation beyond its reasonable limits, but I'm wondering, you're open and creative and entrepreneurial, and so that's not going to suit you for managerial or bureaucratic jobs.
00:24:07.900And so is it possible that you encountered more of that bullying behavior, or like a disproportionate amount of that bullying behavior and so forth in the jobs that you had?
00:24:43.060It's not uncommon what I'm talking about at all.
00:24:45.600I mean, the great manipulators in the world, the 3% that you talk about, and I think that's about the right number, they don't need this kind of book because they're born that way, or they're not born that way, but they learned at the age of 3 or 4 or 5 how to begin to manipulate, and their whole personality was kind of formed over these sort of tactics.
00:25:05.460What seems to happen there, we studied that, you know?
00:25:08.020So if you take two-year-olds and you group them together—two-year-olds, by the way, grouped together are the most violent of human beings in age-matched groups.
00:25:17.680Okay, so among two-year-olds, there's a proportion of them who will spontaneously kick, fight, hit, bite, and steal.
00:25:26.100They're almost all males, and it's about 5% of the males.
00:25:30.080Now, most of them—this goes to nature versus nurture—most of them get socialized out of that by the time they're 4.
00:25:37.660Now, they would be more disagreeable boys, so they're not empathic and compassionate, polite by temperament, but they can still be socialized, but a proportion of them don't get socialized, and they tend to be life-course antisocial types.
00:25:51.720Yeah, I think Melanie Klein, she looked at infants of that age, and she said that there was something called the greedy baby, and the greedy baby was like sucking the mother's breast so hard, it could never get enough milk.
00:26:05.520It was just so greedy for more and more, and she saw that as the child got older, that kind of greediness and that kind of selfish behavior only got worse and worse and worse, and she would try and see if you could track that to someone who became older.
00:26:19.980It was a type, and she ended up thinking that there was maybe a genetic component to this.
00:26:23.380Oh, yeah. Well, there is a genetic component, too, because that sort of proclivity runs in families, and also there's a genetic underpinning to variation in agreeableness.
00:26:32.000Now, you know, if you have a tough kid like that, and you're very agreeable, the kid can run roughshod over you.
00:26:38.680It's very difficult for you to do the socialization.
00:26:41.160And so, like, one of the problems that women face with men, so men are reliably less agreeable than women, that's cross-culturally, and it's true, it's even more true in egalitarian societies.
00:26:53.620And so women have to be agreeable because, I think primarily because they have to take care of infants, and that's an extremely self-sacrificing occupation, especially when they're under nine months.
00:27:02.560But with men, they have to select men who are agreeable enough to be generous and kind and share, but they have to be disagreeable enough to keep the real psychopaths and the manipulators at bay.
00:27:15.060And so it's a chronic problem for the human race.
00:27:17.380Okay, so you're doing all these jobs, and you're seeing the politicking, and it's not going well for you, and you decide to analyze the behavior of the people that are acting in these underground oppressive ways.
00:27:30.880And you're definitely going to see that if you're being pushed around a lot, you know?
00:27:37.680And so you decided to make that an object of study.
00:27:41.660Yeah, you know, I wasn't, it's not so much that I was pushed around, some of it was also just observing how other people were being treated.
00:27:50.600I have this idea that I talk about in the book that, you know, people will always wear the mask of being agreeable and friendly.
00:27:57.620Even the most psychotic boss will always know how to be somewhat charming and present themselves.
00:28:03.380But you look at how they treat other people when you're not observing them behind closed doors, and that's when some of their ugly behavior will come out.
00:28:10.600They kind of hide it very well from the public.
00:28:14.500So a lot of it was observing how other people were mistreated.
00:28:17.520And so when I worked in Hollywood, you know, in some industries, I have to say, some industries are a lot worse than others.
00:28:24.120So when you're working at that factory job that you're mentioning, people will tend to be kind of united around a single purpose.
00:28:30.800There won't be much politicking going on.
00:28:33.800In an environment where Hollywood, so much of it is money and ego, et cetera, the level is...
00:28:40.400And the desire for fame, you know, and that's going to attract a disproportionate number.
00:28:45.020So it's the people that are more likely to be the way that you describe are high in extroversion, especially assertiveness, and they're low in agreeableness.
00:28:56.280That's kind of the personality disorder axis, high in extroverted assertiveness and low in agreeableness, especially compassion.
00:29:02.920And then if you add unconscientiousness to that, you've got someone who's bordering on psychopathic.
00:29:09.920And they could still be high in openness.
00:29:11.720They could still be creative and intelligent, but they'd be manipulative as hell and callous.
00:29:16.400And I would say, another thing I was going to ask you is, because you worked in Hollywood, and that is a place that invites people who want to be, to make a display of themselves, let's say.
00:29:31.000And there's some utility in that, right?
00:29:48.720But after the book came out, my first book, The 48 Laws, it became hugely popular in the hip-hop world among musicians, which is why I ended up doing a book with 50 Cent.
00:29:59.340And I found out that the music industry was even worse than Hollywood.
00:30:03.540And then I was in Washington for a book tour for The 48 Laws.
00:30:08.700And this woman came running up to me who worked in Voice of America.
00:30:11.500And she was saying, you have no idea how the 48 Laws of Power exactly described the environment I'm in.
00:30:18.700And then I was in a conference with people who were in nonprofits in San Diego.
00:30:24.180And this woman was saying, boy, you described the nonprofit work politically.
00:32:39.040Yeah, and, you know, when I came out of university, I went to the University of Wisconsin, and I had, you know, my degree in classics and literature, et cetera.
00:33:17.900University certainly doesn't prepare you for it.
00:33:20.100In fact, it leads you to believe the opposite.
00:33:23.200And so you enter the work world, and if you're entering a place more like what we're describing here, not like what you were describing in some of the jobs you had, you're blindsided.
00:33:47.480The other thing is you're much more likely to be traumatized, because trauma sort of occurs in proportion to how much of your belief it demolishes.
00:33:57.880And so if you have a too positive and too naive view of the world, and you, especially if you encounter someone malevolent, they can really do you in psychologically.
00:34:16.480Yeah, I can remember I had a job in journalism, and I wrote this article about Italy, and I thought it was a great article.
00:34:25.280And then the editor brought me in for lunch, and he was, like, having his second or third martini, and he started to tell me that, Robert, you're never going to be a writer.
00:35:06.900Envy and resentment, man, those are corrosive.
00:35:09.700They're soul and culture-destroying emotions.
00:35:13.140You know, when I worked with my clients, we talked a lot about resentment, a lot.
00:35:18.840And I had kind of an axiom, which is, well, if you're resentful, there's only one of two things going on.
00:35:26.020One is you're whiny and neurotic, and it's time to grow the hell up and take some responsibility.
00:35:30.460And so you've got to ask yourself that.
00:35:31.920And the second is, someone is taking advantage of you, and you have something to say or do that you're not saying or doing.
00:35:39.200And so we'd try to sort out which of those it was, and then if it was that they had something to say or do to stand up for themselves, for example, then we'd just strategize like mad.
00:37:22.480And people are producers of music are very, they have a very exploitative kind of model of business, which is they seduce a first time artist with a lot of money.
00:37:36.420But the contract is, and eventually they own all of the work, etc.
00:37:41.400So it was a very exploitative business model, particularly for African-American musicians who were historically very exploited.
00:37:50.080And so it's like Hollywood, where so much of it is about pleasing people and having the right demeanor.
00:37:57.600So 50 Cent, who I wrote the book with, he said, you know, he dealt crack on the streets of Southside Queens.
00:38:03.920You know, he was a hustler at the age of nine.
00:38:06.320He saw everything, but nothing prepared him for the kind of Machiavellian games that music industry people would play.
00:38:13.360Right, you want to take a straightforward criminal over a psychopathic manipulator any day.
00:38:45.260And so, you know, why are my books popular?
00:38:48.020I think there's a combination of things.
00:38:50.180First of all, I'm giving people something that's not out there, a kind of a realism.
00:38:54.560And I think a lot of people are inwardly very tired and very sick of all the kind of coddling that goes on with readers and in our culture, where the people are trying to, you know, perpetuate this myth that it's all about cooperation and getting along.
00:39:11.080And that business is kind of this world where people are all on the same page trying to create the best product possible, et cetera.
00:39:19.240And they kind of have the same kind of illusions that I had.
00:39:22.880And so the kind of the harshness of the book that first kind of shocked you sort of excites people.
00:39:29.960It appeals to their shadow side, if you will, you know.
00:39:32.980And that shadow side is very much repressed in our culture.
00:39:37.480And I think artists and writers and people who produce work that kind of vents some of that shadow, some of those darker emotions that people have, it has a very attracting pull on them.
00:39:48.960So I think that's part of the reason because there's a kind of a notoriety around the book and people almost feel like it's something naughty when they have it.
00:39:57.120And so I think that's part of the appeal of it.
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00:42:46.860So I have a friend, he's a really good friend of mine, and I've known him since I was in college, and he's a tough guy.
00:42:53.020I mean, he grew up under rather poverty-stricken circumstances in northern Alberta, really on a frontier piece of land, like it had only been broken 50 years before by his father, who was a longshoreman and an ex-military guy.
00:43:38.560And part of the reason that he was good at working with the delinquents was because there were no tricks they could get up to that he couldn't see right through.
00:43:44.940And that was partly because he had a real integrated shadow.
00:43:48.720I mean, I'll give you an example of him.
00:43:51.780So one day, I was living in this town called Grand Prairie, and it was at the height of the oil boom.
00:43:57.200And so it was a rough town, and there were lots of rough bars in it, and lots of young men in there with plenty of money and plenty of—they'd come in for, you know, three days after being out in minus 40 weather, working on the oil rigs.
00:44:07.840And they were ready to party, man, and we had a party one night in this kind of frat house that I went to college in, and about, oh, way too many people showed up.
00:44:15.680And some of them were real troublemakers.
00:44:17.620And one, we had a table that was pretty full of beer bottles and vodka bottles and so forth.
00:44:22.220And one guy just went over and, like, tore the leg off and knocked the table over.
00:44:26.480And then a bunch of us got together and chased them all out.
00:44:29.240And this friend of mine, he said, oh, they'll be back.
00:44:32.100And so he went upstairs, and he put on some steel-toed cowboy boots.
00:44:48.960He pulled open the door, and there was a guy standing there ready to fight, and he kicked them underneath the chin with his steel-toed cowboy boot,
00:44:54.980knocked them right over the front porch, and, you know, and the battle was on.
00:44:59.560But that was exactly what he was like, you know.
00:45:01.480And he had—his shadow was integrated.
00:45:22.860I go very deeply into the shadow in a chapter in my last book, The Laws of Human Nature.
00:45:28.440And I try and talk about how one integrates the shadow because it's not an easy answer for that.
00:45:35.760You know, people are kind of perplexed.
00:45:37.600Well, I have this dark side, and I explain a lot of where it comes from and how a lot of your aggressive impulses, like the room of two-year-olds that you were talking about, you have that as well.
00:45:48.000I'm talking to the people that I'm—my readers.
00:45:50.760You have that aggressiveness when you were young, and it got socialized out of you.
00:46:24.140You want them to integrate that capacity for aggression into, let's say, lucid conversation.
00:46:30.920You want them to be able to stand up for themselves in family discussions.
00:46:34.080If you just punish them for being aggressive, let's say, for talking back or something like that, you don't guide that into more sophisticated development.
00:49:32.860It's like, well, every child gets a gift bag.
00:49:35.600It's like, no, you know, they have their damn birthday.
00:49:39.200Every child doesn't need a damn gift bag.
00:49:42.040And this is this same, this same naive, treacly, and it's authoritarian, too, because it imposes this kind of view of the world.
00:49:50.940It's like, no, it's this kid's day to be special.
00:49:54.440That's why we're celebrating this kid.
00:49:56.300But the rest of them, if they can't take that, it's like there's something wrong with the way that they've been treated and attended to.
00:50:04.660Well, a lot of my books, I try to remove the kind of taboo or the negative associations we have with the word like power or with the word ambition.
00:50:14.380You know, I try and say ambition is a good thing.
00:50:16.500It means that you believe in yourself, you have some self-love, and you believe you're worth something, and you want to go out and achieve and create something worthwhile for other people.
00:50:30.440But so many people are just kind of embarrassed about being a human being, embarrassed about our primate nature, embarrassed about our own aggressive impulses.
00:50:38.500This is partly why boys are failing in our schools now at a disproportionate rate, you know, and I see this, there's an assault of the sort that you're describing on the better part of striving masculinity.
00:50:50.860And, you know, I had a friend who killed himself because he identified his ambition with, you know, the patriarchal force that's devouring the environment, let's say, and that's, you know, the cause of historical horror.
00:51:06.820And you might say, well, no one takes that onto themselves to that degree.
00:51:10.000And that's, well, you can say that, but you just don't know what the hell you're talking about.
00:51:13.400People take that onto themselves all the time, and then they start to identify the best part of them that strives forward with the destructive impulses of humanity.
00:51:24.860And they're so ashamed because they can't do anything good then, but in principle, you know, he tried to be as inoffensive and harmless in every possible way as he possibly could, and it just sucked all the life out of him.
00:51:36.520Well, you end up turning that aggressive energy on yourself is what ends up happening, and that maybe leads to suicide.
00:53:00.080But sometimes fear isn't the right response, and anger will suppress fear.
00:53:04.400And so one of the tools that we have at our disposal psychologically is anger as an antidote to the terror that would otherwise freeze you.
00:53:13.720And you can integrate that, you know, that's, you know, if you have some justifiable moral outrage, let's say something really annoys you, or I shouldn't say that deeply violates your sense of moral propriety.
00:53:29.120I don't mean trivial things, then the fact of that forceful response can motivate you to do things.
00:53:36.800Well, it doesn't mean for a lecture, but certainly to write.
00:53:39.800It takes a lot of energy to write, man.
00:53:41.660You need all those sources of energy if you're going to be able to do it.
00:53:46.520Just even to turn it on yourself, to discipline yourself, you know.
00:53:49.480It's like I had to grab myself by the scruff of the neck when I was a young guy to sit down.
00:53:54.580Sit down, God damn it, and write, you know.
00:53:57.880And there's a force that's necessary, especially if you're open, because you're all over the place, if you're creative, to get yourself to sit down and focus.
00:54:21.100Those two-year-olds that are kicking and screaming, that's all this kind of force behind it.
00:54:25.180And when you sort of are ashamed of it and you push that down, you're kind of getting rid of an incredible well of energy that you can use for your creativity, for your work, etc.
00:54:35.640You can take that energy, like you say, and create discipline out of it, do something creative out of it, support some cause that you really believe in, you know.
00:54:45.860So that shadow side, when you deny it, only negative things will happen.
00:54:51.220And it is extremely important for people to first recognize it in themselves, you know.
00:54:56.180And it's very hard for a lot of people to do that.
00:54:59.200Well, I found, like I said earlier, one of the best ways in there is resentment.
00:55:19.020If you watch your fantasies, for example, if you're resentful, and you watch the fantasies that flip through your imagination, like you might not want to attend to them because they can be so brutal.
00:55:29.800But, but that, the fact, because if someone is, is oppressing you genuinely, and you're not standing up for yourself, then there'll be these compensatory fantasies.
00:55:39.960Yeah, so one day, I'll tell you a story about that.
00:55:42.100So one day, I was, I'd been renovating my house, and it took a long time, and the neighbors, this house was a complete derelict, and it was a semi-detached, like really a derelict.
00:55:51.660It hadn't been touched since, like, 1927.
00:57:25.380You have no idea what you're getting into.
00:57:27.800And so they backed into the kitchen, and like two hours later, they came over and said, oh, you know, we're sorry, and we won't do it again.
00:57:33.780But like I, what we did was the mistake you talk about.
00:57:37.800We backtracked continually trying to please them, you know, and every time they complained, we did what they wanted because we assumed we were dealing with reasonable people.
00:58:34.500And a lot of times I look at people in the public eye who get caught doing something really stupid, like you say, and their first thing will be, well, that wasn't me that did it.
00:58:44.740I don't know what came over me, but that's not who I am.
00:58:50.500That is the person who has been carrying this resentment and this kind of inner anger, but not acting upon it.
00:58:56.320And then suddenly they do something really stupid, like having an affair with a 21-year-old or, you know, they're just caught doing something.
00:59:03.500Yeah, so I watch people with their children a lot, eh?
00:59:29.480And so when he was nine months, he was starting to take books off shelves and get into the plants and so on because he was starting to crawl around.
00:59:36.780And so to teach him what no meant, I'd just grab his leg when he wasn't doing something that I didn't want him to do.
00:59:42.880And, you know, he would squawk and bitch and complain.
01:00:30.540And then I'd have people come over to my house with their two-year-old or three-year-old.
01:00:34.220And because they had never taught the child what no meant, they never gave because they didn't want to impose on their freedom, let's say.
01:00:41.680They couldn't give the child any freedom at all.
01:00:43.500They had to wander around behind them all the time because they never knew what the child was going to get into.
01:00:49.460And so then you start to hate your child, right?
01:00:51.760Because instead of having a bit of free time and just being able to say no to this kid while he's playing around on his own and giving him some freedom,
01:00:58.560you're just nonstop monitoring this child.
01:01:02.140And you're mad because you don't have a life.
01:03:04.500Well, the ability to set limits and to say no and to tell people that, you know, it's not right for you to bang on my house at this hour and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
01:03:13.840That takes a little bit of toughness on your part.
01:03:17.540You have to be kind of willing to put yourself on the line.
01:03:21.600Maybe that person will get angry and hit you or something, or maybe the war will escalate.
01:03:26.120But you have to be willing to take that risk.
01:03:28.420Because if you don't, then you set no limits and who knows what they'll end up doing.
01:03:33.480But a lot of this permissiveness is people are just basically afraid.
01:03:38.220They're afraid of any kind of confrontation.
01:03:41.020They're afraid of any kind of conflict.
01:03:43.040And through conflict and confrontation is how you actually grow.
01:03:46.900It's actually how you develop as a person.
01:07:02.720But what I really hate is deferred conflict that escalates.
01:07:07.400It's like, it's better to get it over with now.
01:07:10.000And you're a fool if you think that running away from it is going to, you know, like if someone cuts you off in traffic and they're obviously really angry,
01:07:18.260it's probably better just to get the hell out of there because you're never going to see that person again, you know.
01:07:22.380And you don't want a situation like that to escalate because.
01:08:46.480He wanted to meet me because the 48 Laws of Power was sort of his Bible, as he expressed it.
01:08:51.120So I met him in New York, kind of in the back room of the steakhouse.
01:08:56.340It was sort of like something straight out of The Godfather.
01:08:59.300I was kind of the one white guy amongst his whole group there.
01:09:02.700I was a little bit intimidated, to be honest.
01:09:04.780I didn't know what to expect because he has this reputation.
01:09:08.420Ended up he was really nice, really interesting, actually a very kind of sweet guy, not what you expect.
01:09:13.340And I just finished writing my book on warfare and strategy, which is kind of my version of Sun Tzu's Art of War, how to strategize some conflicts, sort of like what you're talking about.
01:09:27.140And we kind of had a really nice connection.
01:09:31.040And I thought, you know, so much in our culture is creating these stupid kind of divisions and walls.
01:09:37.060Like you're in academia, you only write academic books.
01:09:40.400You're a popular person, you only write popular books.
01:09:43.340You know, you come from this community, you come from that community, and you never communicate.
01:09:47.900And I thought it would be very interesting to write a book coming from two opposite backgrounds.
01:09:54.220You know, me, middle class Jewish boy from Los Angeles, and him from Southside, Queens.
01:10:00.540Something interesting could happen from a collaboration.
01:10:03.760There's not enough of that in our culture, I believe, because even though our circumstances were very different, our minds were very similar.
01:10:12.160We were thinking on a similar plane that kind of transcended these sort of superficial differences.
01:10:17.540So I spent time with him, and I was trying to figure out what is the essence of his power?
01:10:22.780What makes him such a compelling figure and made him not one of those people in Southside, Queens, who ended up kind of spiraling downward to ending up in prison?
01:11:06.140I observed that kind of calmness and how he could take over a meeting, not by being super aggressive, but just by having this kind of dominant persona.
01:11:14.400And I thought that there's tremendous power in this fearlessness, not being afraid to be different, not being afraid to have conflict and confrontation, not being afraid of actually of death itself, not being afraid of the reality of your situation, on and on.
01:11:33.200So the book that we formed together was kind of a meditation on 10 forms of fearlessness.
01:11:38.360And I found, you know, I thought that I was a relatively fearless person, which in some ways I am.
01:11:45.020I seem agreeable, but I'm actually in some ways a little bit bold and adventurous.
01:11:49.960And but compared to him, I realized, no, I'm actually riddled with fears.
01:11:55.100And just being around him and kind of writing the book helped me a lot in my, you know, kind of overcome some of my own limits and some of my own fears.
01:12:23.320Well, well, there's a there's a there's a kind of a reckless fearlessness that a lot of people from the hood have, which doesn't really serve them very well.
01:12:57.380OK, so here's something really interesting.
01:13:01.320It's the bad boy paradox, they call it, that young, naive women are attracted to those Machiavellian types.
01:13:08.780But when they get older and more experienced, they start to be able to see through that.
01:13:13.480But the reason they're attracted to it, as far as I can tell, and I talked about this with Buss to see if I was way off on the wrong track, is that those reckless, fearless people mimic real fearless competence.
01:13:29.560And young women aren't good at distinguishing between the two.
01:13:33.460And so they get sucked in by this sort of psychopathic recklessness because they think it's fearless competence.
01:13:39.000And then, of course, the guys who are doing that, they'll prey on that because they're trying to ape competence.
01:13:46.000But what the women are really after in their heart of hearts, they might be out for an adventure, too, because there's that element of it.
01:13:51.460But they want that fearlessness that does go along with true generosity and competence and also the ability to keep, you know, real darkness away.
01:14:41.160I think there is maybe a slight genetic component to it.
01:14:44.060I can't really put my finger on why he was able to have this kind of self-control where other people do.
01:14:50.000Yeah, well, that dimension, neuroticism, you know, if you're in a rough environment and you're low in neuroticism, that's pretty damn helpful.
01:14:57.440Because imagine that what neuroticism is, unit of psychophysiological upset caused per unit of stress or unit of danger.
01:15:08.820And some people overreact and some people underreact.
01:15:11.880Sometimes the overreaction saves your life.
01:15:15.160Sometimes the underreaction gets you killed.
01:15:16.980So it's not like there's a clear answer.
01:16:14.380Because if they've been coddled and their ambition has been squelched and everything about them that's aggressive has been shamed out of existence, that's part of that attraction of that dark fantasy, right?
01:16:25.860And then they see that aggression manifesting itself, and in a creative form, in rap, it's not surprising that they're going to try to imitate that.
01:16:33.900It's part of that desire to bring that shadow out of the shadows and into the light.
01:16:49.700But what I really enjoyed about his music is it just seemed very real.
01:16:55.860And kind of the beat kind of catches you up in a primal sense.
01:17:00.500And kind of the aggressiveness just seems very direct and very refreshing, by the way.
01:17:06.260And you could tell, you know, I say in my book, Mastery, that by a person's style, by how they write a book, by how they put language together, or the music they create, reveals something very, very deep about their character, about who they are.
01:17:22.740And so a lot of rap kind of comes across as sort of false, like someone is trying really hard to have that kind of thug persona.
01:17:31.580And it's not real, but it really smelled authentic with him.
01:17:36.160And the fact that he'd been shot and nearly died, you know, just kind of added to that aura.
01:17:41.140But there was something very real about it and very authentic in a culture where so much isn't real.
01:17:46.220I think that was the deep, deep appeal in a primal sense of 50s music.
01:17:50.400And when I was writing the war book, I was trying to get myself in a martial mood to write it.
01:17:55.520I would actually listen to his music to kind of put me in the mood to write some of the chapters.
01:19:47.040I mean, a lot of the new book that I'm writing about, which is the Sublime, as I'm talking about, it's a combination of two emotions of both kind of pain and pleasure, of excitement and fear at the same time.
01:20:01.800So you're confronting something that kind of intimidates you, but is so awesome that you can't, you know, you're just overwhelmed.
01:20:11.000And the confluence of two emotions, opposing emotions at the same time, is very, very powerful for a human being.
01:20:19.360Yeah, I've just written a book that I'm going to publish next year that's called An ABC of Childhood Tragedy.
01:20:24.940And it's a combination of dark humor and beauty.
01:20:48.580Well, the reason, you know, the ultimate and sublime is, to me, so the way I look at it is being a human being and being socialized is a kind of a world, there's a limit, a circle that we have to live inside.
01:21:02.380Certain codes and conventions that we have to abide by, and we all do that.
01:21:06.660And the codes and conventions for 5th century BC China are not the same as what we have now, but there's still that limit.
01:21:14.600And what humans are attracted to what lies beyond that limit.
01:21:21.060And when we explore beyond the social limits and codes and things we're supposed to do and ways we're supposed to act, it's deeply exciting and thrilling.
01:21:29.240But there's also that element of fear involved, right?
01:21:32.180See, I think that's a better, what would you call it, formulation than Nietzsche's idea of will to power, is the desire to exist on that sublime edge.
01:21:41.000And that is the border between order and chaos that you're describing, right?
01:21:46.340And that is the source of meaning itself.
01:21:51.000I mean, that's why I think music is so powerful, is because it plays with predictable forms, but continually adds that level of unpredictability, a beautiful, you know how in any kind of music, the simplest music, someone who's good at it, country music, you know, there'll be a key shift or a twang on the string or something.
01:23:02.740And so some of the experience, the near-death experience and what it kind of taught me and how it sort of remained with me three years later and how I kind of feel it in my bones and how it's altered how I look at the world and everything around me is to me the kind of the ultimate sublime experience.
01:23:19.500And so now, unfortunately, I'm able to write about this in a way that's actually very personal and experiential instead of just purely intellectual.
01:23:51.740Yeah, well, and it was so interesting that that was, it was in the aftermath of that devastating experience that you decided to turn particularly to the sublime.
01:24:02.560Yeah, well, it's because I've been wanting to write the book for a long time, and I knew that it has to do a little bit with the feeling of death, you know, and kind of that's...
01:24:20.160Like, I mean, you talked also about 50 cents brush with death, but why does the sublime in your estimation, why is it tangled up with the idea of death?
01:24:29.720Well, because there's a limit, that limit and experiencing the limit gives you that sense of excitement and fear at the same time.
01:24:41.360And to have gone up to that door and glimpsed to the other side and literally felt it in your bones and literally feel your bones melting away as you kind of go into a coma, you know, is like I went up to that door.