Your Dark Side and Control Over Your Life ｜ Robert Greene ｜ EP 237 (hgFX-ZsOscc)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=hgFX-ZsOscc

I’ve tried to remove the kind of taboo or the negative associations we have with the word like power or with the word ambition. You know, I try and say ambition is a good thing. It means that you have 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. So ambition is a positive thing, but so many people are just kind of embarrassed about being human being embarrassed about our primate nature, embarrassed about our own aggressive impulse. This is partly why boys are failing in our schools now at a disproportionate rate, you know, and I see this. of the sort that you’re describing on the better part of striving masculinity. And, 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 a concept that’s, you know, the cause of of historical horror. And you might say, well, no one takes that onto themselves to that degree. And that’s well, you can say that, but that you just don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. People take that onto themselves all the time. Hi, everyone. I’m pleased today to have with me Mr. Robert Green. Mr. Green is the number one New York Times bestselling author of number of books, the 48 laws of power 1998 the art of seduction 2001 the 33 strategies of war 2007 the 50th law which he wrote with 50 cent the wrapper 2008 mastery 2012 the laws of human nature 2018 and the daily laws. This book right here. So, he’s an, he’s an internationally renowned expert on power strategies and living in Los Angeles, Mr. Green worked at an estimated 80 jobs including magazine editor construction worker Hollywood movie writer before becoming an author. The Sunday Times referred to his first book, the 48 laws of power as the Hollywood backstabbers Bible, and it can be difficult to find people who acknowledge its influence because of its controversial nature. I was reading the daily laws before setting up this interview and I’m going to read one. Yeah, it’s a it’s a set of meditations 366 meditations on power seduction mastery strategy and human nature. And so here’s the one for June 7 and I think it’s relatively representative of the book. June 7 never impugn people’s intelligence. Then there’s a subtitle or an introductory idea the best way to be well received by all is to clothe yourself in the skin of the dumbest of brutes Baltisar grassian. The feeling that someone else is more intelligent than we are is almost always intolerable. We usually try to justify it in different ways. Quote, he only has book knowledge, whereas I have real knowledge. Quote, her parents paid for her to get a good education. If my parents had had as much money, if I had been as privileged, he’s not as smart as he thinks. Last but not least, quote, she may know her narrow little field better than I do, but beyond that, she’s really not smart at all. Even Einstein was a boob outside physics. Given how important the idea of intelligence is to most people’s vanity, it is critical never inadvertently to insult or impugn a person’s brain power. This is an unforgivable sin. But if you can make this iron rule work for you, it opens up all sorts of avenues of deception. The feeling of intellectual superiority you give them will disarm their suspicion muscles. And then daily law subliminally reassure people that they are more intelligent than you are or even that you are a bit of a moron and you can run rings around them. And this is the 48 laws of power from the 48 laws of power law 21. Play a sucker to catch a sucker. Seem dumber than your mark. So when I was preparing for this, I was reading these daily these daily meditations and I was actually shocked. I was really quite shocked by them. I was shocked by that one. And I was very unclear as a consequence as to your motivations. And so I was thinking, do I want to do I want to I don’t get this. I don’t understand this exactly. It’s like this is very deceptive. And then I talked to my team who liked your books a lot and and my daughter who really liked interviewing you. And I thought, well, there’s something going on here that I don’t quite understand, which is certainly possible. And then I thought, well, this is maybe a shadow exploration, something like that. And then I thought like I was kind of a dimwit for not catching that earlier. But so but, you know, it is shocking. These are very manipulative laws, let’s say. And so can you guide me through the rationale for producing material like that? What were you trying? What are you trying to do with your books? And they’ve obviously been misunderstood. It says in Wikipedia, Green’s books are sometimes described as manipulative and amoral. And so clear this up for me. Well, you know, that it’s a 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. They have things to do with kind of common sense ideas about power, such as 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. But there are definitely some laws that are quite manipulative. And then my other books don’t really go into things like that. So it is a bit of a distortion to write that. But where this comes from is basically I have a particular idea of power. So maybe I should explain that a little bit. My idea of power, it’s not about this kind of grand thing of political or war or something. It’s on a very individual level. And the idea for me comes from from Nietzsche and his idea of the will to power, which he explains as all every organism has the desire to expand itself as a desire for expansion. And so I think that for human beings, the desire that we we have this innate propensity for wanting to expand beyond our limits, we 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. The 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, kind of leverage power in a negative way. And so the problem is, and a lot of this comes from Machiavelli, who inspired a lot of the 48 laws. The problem is that we live in a world where this desire for some kind of power butts up against kind of codes of behavior. They’ve gotten stricter and stricter and stricter in particularly in the 21st century about what is acceptable, about what is politically correct. So we’re supposed to appear to be these paragons of virtue, these paragons of fairness and democracy, et cetera. At the same time, we’re all trying to angle for different degrees of power in our work, in our relationships, et cetera. And so because of that dynamic, we have to be extremely careful in this world. And 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. And so the game was to be sort of indirect, to be polite and ingratiating. And if you had an enemy to know how to kind of very quietly get rid of them. And so this is kind of what I would look, what the 48 laws of power came out from. So you quoted me, I had like 80 different jobs, probably more like 60, 65. But I saw all kinds of very deceptive games being played continually in the various different jobs I had. And I worked in every conceivable field. And I didn’t see any kind of honesty about this dynamic in the human world. And it really kind of irritated me. All the self-help books were sort of describing a world that I never saw existed. You know, I saw people being very political, having egos and having problems with their egos. And I didn’t see any books like they’re kind of describing what I encountered every day. So law number one is never outshine the master. And the idea is that if you try too hard to impress your boss or the person above you, you’re liable to make them feel insecure. You’re going to trip on their ego and something bad will happen to you. Right. And so this seemed like the fact that people have egos and operate with egos and you have to be careful with them seems very clear to me. But I didn’t find books out there that were describing it. So I hope this kind of gives you an idea a little bit of the context where the book came out. Yeah. Well, the OK. So I just I can’t remember who sent me this. I think it was Clay Routledge. Yeah, I think that’s right. He just sent me a survey that this organization he works with has completed, stating that something like 40 percent of millennials don’t feel they have any control over their life. Right. So that is related to the first issue that you brought up. And and you obviously consider that problematic. And 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 as a goal. Yes. And then and that if 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. It means it’s going to go underground and then it’s going to manifest itself in all sorts of deceptive ways. And 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 of the organism. Yeah. Across species to some degree. And then you talked about the jobs that you’ve had. So why? Why? So I got that right. I hope I hope I’ve got that. That was very well put. Thank you. OK, OK. And 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. Fair number of a fair amount of the time and that no one was really warning people about this or delineating out the strategies. Yeah. OK, 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. And he was certainly sensitive. To the idea that people had a terrible shadow. Yes, that they would close themselves in the garments of moral virtue and 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, rated 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 and certainly believe that’s true. I believe that that that’s the corruption of human relationships by a form of of severe deceit. And 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. I guess what I wonder is so then the last thing I’m confused about to some degree is. You had 65 jobs. How come so many jobs? I was a very restless young man. It doesn’t speak very well of me and the fact that I couldn’t hold a job for more than 11 months. I came out of college and I wanted to be a writer and I had all kinds of romantic notions of what that meant. And then I entered journalism and I worked in New York and I didn’t find that that was a very good fit. So 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. And I couldn’t I never was really happy in overtly political environments, to be honest with you. I’m kind of a born entrepreneur. I like working for myself. I didn’t like a lot of the games that were being played. And I’m not very good at them. I 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. I did wrong and I suffered for them. So 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. And so I was someone who was very restless and I never felt comfortable in any of the different jobs I had. And I was also trying to broaden my experience. OK, so I had a lot of jobs when I was a kid. I worked as a oh, God, I worked as a in a garage pumping gas. I worked as a dishwasher for years. I was a short order cook. I tip drill bits. I worked as a beekeeper. I had a lot of oh, I worked in a plywood mill, wow, plywood pieces through a huge dryer. We used to try to light the thing on fire. It was like a block long this dryer fired by natural gas. 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 and then the whole building, which was like a block square, would fill up with steam. Oh, God. So anyways, I worked in a lot of jobs. And so but I didn’t. So this is something that’s worth getting clear. I like the jobs a lot, almost all of them, not all of them, but almost all of them. I got along with the people that I was working with. I didn’t have the same exactly the same experience that you’re describing. And you said that you said that you had a harder time. I don’t know exactly. Was it fitting in? You didn’t like overt the overt political elements, too. And like when I worked in restaurants, I didn’t really experience that. You know, like I got along with the guys that I was working with. There was a lot of joking around. 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, just I found it. 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. And that maybe is and that became a conscious puzzle for you. Is that a reasonable way of thinking about it? I think so. It made me explore and think about myself like maybe I’m doing something wrong. I think it’s a natural reaction in these situations where things know it wasn’t that I hated all of my jobs. Some of them were fun, so I don’t want to give the wrong impression. But when mistakes were made and I’m maybe inadvertently made of my boss or someone feel insecure, it caused me like months later to kind of question what had happened and maybe something I did that was wrong in that environment. And 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 is often the case, was often a detriment, which was a very strange realization. Well, that’s a really good sign that you need to go get a different job. I mean, I worked with clinical clients a lot, you know, in career counseling. And 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? Or 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. I mean, I had clients who were trapped in jobs. I remember one client in particular, she had been a refugee from Albania, Eastern Europe. That was a rough damn country, man. And then she came. Yeah, yeah, like the worst of the Eastern European bloc countries in terms of poverty and general oppressiveness. And then she came over to North America and got educated. She ended up working in a bank in Canada. And she was good at her job and she was smart. And her managers just hated her. And she sent me an email string one day. It was about 30 emails long that her manager had put together where the bureaucrats in the bank were discussing whether or not they were allowed anymore to use the word flip chart. I think they replaced it with easel board or some damn thing. Well, the reason for that was flip had been used at some point hypothetically as an epithet for Filipino people. And so it was it was politically incorrect. And it was just I mean, she was just being driven mad by this this kind of what you call it pointless moral posturing. She was a sensible person and questioned a lot of the bureaucratic stupidity. So my goal in situations like that was to help people figure out how to move laterally and find a place where, you know, their virtues would be rewarded instead of punished. Right. It’s very wise. You know, it can be managed. My 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. And 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. So having some clarity, I don’t want to make people paranoid in reading these books. I make it very clear that that’s not the point. I want you to be very realistic. But 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. It’s not my fault. That kind of clarity can be very, very empowering. I find in that that’s another kind of motivating device behind the 48 laws. Well, you also make me very curious about your personality. I mean, when I’m talking, I’m sorry, I’m going to. Yeah, well, you know, that’s OK. I’m a clinician and I snap into that mode sometimes. I’m very curious about this conversation. You have a very gentle demeanor and a very soft and kind voice. And you don’t look like a harsh person. And so one of the one of the dimensions, one of the cardinal personality dimensions, there’s five of them. You may know this extraversion, which is a positive emotion, and it’s associated with assertiveness and enthusiasm. And Trump is extroverted. Definitely. Negative emotion, that’s neuroticism. And that’s the whole panoply of negative emotions. And you’re not together and people differ in their sensitivity to them. Agreeableness, that’s compassionate, politeness on the high end and more like bluntness and competitiveness on the other end. And conscientiousness and openness, which is creativity. You’re obviously high in openness. You’re 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. Is that a reasonable is that a reasonable? I think that’s that’s fair. I think that’s fairly spot on. I would I couldn’t have thought. Yeah, I agree with you on that. Certainly. OK, OK. I mean, I 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. So it’s I think on the surface I have that kind of agreeable personality for various reasons. But yes, would you describe yourself as compassionate? Empathetic, very much so. Yeah. OK, so here’s what I’m wondering. OK, OK, OK. So that’s why 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. Certainly. And this is a really important notion. So I was talking yesterday. Who was it with? I can’t remember, but we were talking about. Oh, yes, it was Andy. No, we were talking about the establishment of this, you know, utopian community in the middle of Seattle. The 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. And so and, you know, that’s sort of a celebration of agreeable virtues. And so agreeable people are very generous and kind and they’re not backstabbing and they’re empathetic and they’re self-sacrificing. And and but there have been computer simulations, very sophisticated computer simulations by evolutionary biologists of what happens if you get agreeable people together. So imagine you have a population of people and all of them are agreeable. And so they’re cooperating away. It’s all very kind and nice. But if you put one person in there who has psychopathic traits, yes, he just takes over everything. Yeah. And so the agreeable people always have the problem of how do you handle free riders, cheaters and psychopaths? And, 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. But that ain’t going to cut it because psychopaths are always three percent of the population. They vary between five. And so if you’re so so is it possible I don’t want to push this interpretation beyond its reasonable limits, but I’m I’m wondering you’re you’re open and creative and entrepreneurial. And so that’s not going to suit you for managerial or bureaucratic jobs. You don’t have the temperament for that. And then you’re agreeable. And 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 have? I think that’s very possible. And yes, and I’m also very sensitive. So I’m kind of, you know, react a little bit more than most other people might react. But the odd thing is, is that the book came out in 1998 and it has resonated with lots and lots of readers. I’ve sold millions of copies of the book. And so there’s I think a lot of people share the trait that I have. Oh, there’s no doubt about it. That’s it’s not uncommon what I’m talking about at all. I mean, the great manipulators in the world, the three percent 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 three or four or five how to begin to manipulate. And their whole personality was kind of formed over these sort of tactics. They don’t need a book like that. What seems to happen there? We studied that, you know. So if you take two year olds and you group them together, two year olds, by the way, group together are the most violent of human beings. Oh, definitely. Age match groups. OK, so among two year olds, there’s a proportion of them who will spontaneously kick, fight, hit, bite and steal. They’re almost all males. And it’s about five percent of the males. Now, most of them, this goes to nature versus nurture, say most of them get socialized out of that by the time they’re four. Now, 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. Right. And they tend to be life course, anti-social types. Yeah, I think Melanie Klein, she looked at infants like that 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. It 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 like to try and see if you could track that to someone who got who became older. It was a type and she ended up thinking that there was maybe a genetic component. Oh, yeah. Well, there is a genetic component, too, because that sort of proclivity runs in families. But and also there’s a genetic underpinning to variation in agreeableness. Now, you know, if you have a tough kid like that and you’re very agreeable, the kid can run roughshod over you. It’s very difficult for you to do the socialization. And so like one of the 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. And 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. But 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. And so it’s a chronic problem for the human race. OK, so you’re you’re doing all these jobs and you’re seeing the politicking and it’s not going well for you. You decide to analyze the behavior of the people that are acting in these underground oppressive ways. You’re definitely going to see that if if you’re if you’re being pushed around a lot, you know, and so you decided to make that an object of study. Yeah, 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. I have this idea that I talk about in the book that, you know, people will always wear the mask of being agreeable and friendly. Even the most psychotic boss will always know how to be somewhat charming and present themselves. But 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. They kind of hide it very well from from from the public. So a lot of it was observing how other people were mistreated. And so when I worked in Hollywood, you know, in some industries, I have to say some industries are a lot worse than others. So when you’re working at that factory job that you’re mentioning, people will tend to be kind of united and around a single purpose. There won’t be much politic going on in the environment, an environment where Hollywood so much of it is money and ego, et cetera. The level and the desire for fame, you know, and that’s going to attract a disproportionate number. So it’s the people that are are more likely to be the way that you describe are high in extroversion, especially assertiveness and low in agreeableness. That’s kind of the personality disorder axis, high in extroverted, assertiveness and low in agreeableness, especially compassion. And then if you add unconsciousness to that, you got it. You got someone who’s bordering on psychopathic, right? And they could still be high in openness. They could still be creative and intelligent, but they’d be manipulative as hell and callous. And I would say that another thing I was going to ask you is because you worked in Hollywood and that is a place that that invites people who want to be to make a display of themselves, let’s say. And there’s some utility in that, right? We want people to be actors. We want them to be enthusiastic and entertaining. Yes. But but it’s so do you is it possible that a lot of this you saw was a consequence of the form of industry that you were involved in, especially in Hollywood? Well, definitely. But 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. And I found out that the music industry was even worse than Hollywood. And then I was in Washington for a book tour for the 48 Laws. And this woman came running up to me who worked in Voice of America. She was saying, You have no idea how the the 48 Laws of Power exactly describe the environment I’m in. And then I was in a conference with people who were in nonprofits in San Diego. And this woman was saying, Boy, you describe the nonprofit work politically. It is so so perfect. It is so political. It’s so much about ego. So it’s so that’s true of the nonprofit world. You know, well, I mean, that might have to do with that moral posturing. Well, the way I look at it is you had a place like the Soviet Union where your degree of power wasn’t based on any kind of statistics. It wasn’t that you perform better than others. It wasn’t that your branch, your economic branch was outperforming others and therefore you were elevated to a higher position. It was pure politicking. It was pure manipulation. How close could you get to the dominance hierarchy maneuvering? Yeah. So when you have like a nonprofit world where it’s not based on money or results, it’s more on you get very political environments like that where there’s no kind of quantification of what one is doing superior work than others. Yeah, you know, I talked to Woodridge, Wildridge, Adrian Woodridge, and he wrote some books on the history of meritocracy. They’re very, very interesting. He writes for The Economist. And he so you know that the idea of meritocracy is under assault. Now, I think the idea of merit per se is under assault. And what Woodridge has done was look at how societies were structured in the absence of the meritocratic ethos. And he writes that’s in the absence of a belief that there is such a thing as productive competence. And he talked about nepotism, which by the way, psychopaths practice nepotism. They’re not only selfish. They they do differentially benefit their immediate kin and hereditary aristocracy. So if you don’t have meritocracy and if your hierarchies aren’t predicated on competence, you don’t get a non-competitive utopia. No, not at all. Yeah, exactly. Nepotism and and this political infighting and that is like it’s no wonder that affected you because that’s that’s absolutely toxic. It’s just sickening. And it does produce a situation where the worst people can the worst people torture the people who are competent for their competence. And it’s really ugly. Yeah. And you know, when I came at university, I went to University of Wisconsin and I had, you know, my degree in classics and literature, et cetera. And I wasn’t expecting this. I expected that the harder you tried, the better the work that you produced, the more you tried to, you know, get results. That’s what mattered. Right. And then to suddenly be blindsided this because nobody in our culture tells young people that this is what the world is going to be like. And that’s sort of a lot of where this book came out of. I wrote it when I was 38, 39. So I was already a bit older. But your parents don’t prepare you for this. Schools don’t prepare you for this. University certainly doesn’t prepare you for it. In fact, it leads you to believe the opposite. And 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, some of the jobs you had, you’re blindsided. You had no preparation for it. Nothing prepared you for it. And you don’t know how to react. Well, you know, if you’re naive in that manner, two things. And I was naive. One is that you’re much more likely to be exploited. That definitely happens. The 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. And 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. And they often will too, because while they have their their reasons and so. Yeah. Yeah, I can remember I had a job in journalism and I wrote this article about Italy and I thought it was a great article. And then the editor brought me in for lunch and he was 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. You don’t have the discipline for it. You’re just too wild. You don’t communicate to the reader, et cetera. You need to get out of this business. It’s not for you. It was very painful. And then in looking back at it, I think he had set me up for this. I think that he was had kind of commissioned this article knowing that it was going to have some problems with it, et cetera. And he was deliberately setting me up in this situation so that he and I think a lot of it came from envy. You know, envy is a bad one. Envy and resentment, man, those are corrosive. They’re their soul and culture destroying emotions. You know, when I worked with my clients, we talked a lot about resentment a lot. And I had kind of an axiom, which is if you’re resentful, there’s only one of two things going on. One is you’re whiny and neurotic and it’s time to grow the hell up and take some responsibility. And so you’ve got to ask yourself that. And the second is someone is taking advantage of you and you have something to say or do that you’re not saying or doing. And so we 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 just strategize like mad. So I had one client, for example, I really liked her. She was smart, man, very, very, very competent, honest, hardworking, conscientious, diligent, attractive lawyer. And she’d move firms and those firms can be pretty cutthroat. You know, they’re full of prosecutors. What do you expect? Right. Right. And one guy, when she went into the firm, basically swiped her biggest client through a series of manipulative actions. Right. And, you know, kind of lulled her into a false sense of security, sort of started to cooperate with her and then shunted her out. And then when she started to complain about it, he started distributing rumors that she had mental health issues. And, oh, it was absolutely awful. So we spent about six months strategizing how to deal with him. And so it was successful, you know, and I love doing that sort of thing. It was such fun helping people who are. Yeah, I do. I do the same thing as well. Yeah, sorry. So why do you think this was so popular? Or you said the music industry was particularly pathological. At least this is the reports you got. So why do you why do you think that is? Do you have any theories about that? And then why do you think your books got to be so popular among all rappers say? Why do you think the music industry is the way it is? Or, yeah, I mean, I mean, do you think there’s something specific about that industry that lends itself to that kind of question? And I’ve had a lot of people give me the same kind of feedback. There’s a lot of money around, right? Huge amounts of money around. And and people are producers of music are very music. They have a very exploitative kind of model of business, which is they they seduce a first time artist with a with a lot of money. But the contract is eventually they own all of the work, et cetera. So it was a very exploitive business model, particularly for African-American musicians who were historically very exploited. And so it’s it’s like Hollywood, where so much of it is about pleasing people and having the right demeanor. So so 50 Cent, who I wrote the book with, he said, you know, he said he dealt crack on the streets of South Side, Queens. You know, he’s was a hustler at the age of nine. He saw everything, but nothing prepared him for the kind of Machiavellian games that music industry people would write. Take a straightforward criminal over a psychopathic manipulator any day. Yeah, exactly. Well, and you talked about money like I’d rather deal with someone greedy, like honestly greedy than someone manipulative underground Politicker, right? Because at least with the greed, well, you can negotiate with someone like that. You know what they want. They’re kind of dimensional and you might have your moral qualms about it. But I’d still I think that’s partly why I’m an admirer of capitalism. It’s like greed is not the worst of the vices by any stretch of the imagination. No, no, I agree with you on that. And so, you know, why are my books popular? I think there’s a combination of things. First of all, I’m giving people something that’s not out there, a kind of realism. And 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. The people are trying to perpetuate this myth that it’s all about cooperation and getting along and that business is kind of this world where people are all on the same page trying to create the best product possible, et cetera. And they kind of have the same kind of illusions that I had. And so the kind of the harshness of the book that first kind of shocked you sort of excites people. It appeals to their shadow side, if you will. You know, and that shadow side is very much repressed in our culture. And I think artists and writers and people who produce work, they kind of then some of that shadow, some of those darker emotions that people have. It has a very attracting pull on them. So 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. And so I think that’s part of the appeal of it. So 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. I mean, he grew up in a 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 the next military guy. Good guy, his father. But this guy grew up and he is tough. He worked in lead smelters and he wandered around Western Canada. He was my roommate when I went to college and is still a good friend of mine. And he ended up working with like delinquents. He went into social work, oddly enough, and and he ended up working with some of the worst delinquents in in Canada. And he’s a really good guy and he likes to help people get better. But he isn’t naive at all. And then part of the reason that he was good at working with delinquents was because there were no tricks they could get up to that he couldn’t see right through. And that was partly because he had a real integrated shadow. I mean, I’ll give you an example of him. So one day I was living in this town called Grand Prairie and was at the height of the oil boom. And so it was a rough town and there were lots of rough bars and lots of young men in there with plenty of money and plenty. They come in for three days after being out minus 40 weather, working on the oil rigs, and they were ready to party, man. We had a party one night in this kind of frat house that I went to college in and about way too many people showed up. And some of them were real troublemakers. And one we had a table that was pretty full of beer bottles and vodka bottles and so forth. And one guy just went over like tore the leg off and knocked the table over. And then a bunch of us got together and chased them all out. And this friend of mine, he said, they’ll be back. And so he went upstairs and he put on some steel toed cowboy boots. It was just like a bloody Western. He kept marching down the stairs. And just as he entered the living room, there was a big knock on the front door. It was these hooligans coming back to cause grief. And he he just didn’t break stride. He opened the door. He 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, knocked him right over the front porch. And the battle was on. But that was exactly what he was like. And he had his shadow was integrated. He was a great roommate. He reciprocated everything. I always knew if I bought groceries one week, he’d buy it the next. Like he was a straight shooter. You could trust him. But he was not naive, man. And that made him able to deal with delinquents and to help them. So that’s part of that integration of that shadow. Yeah, I go very deeply into the shadow in a chapter in my last book, The Laws of Human Nature. And I try and talk about how one integrates the shadow because it’s not it’s not an easy answer for that. You know, people are kind of perplexed. Well, 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. I’m talking to the people that are weak, my readers. You have that aggressiveness when you were young and it got socialized out of you. And then it got it kind of got repressed. And it’s like a lost self that lives inside of you and is screaming to come out. How do you integrate it? And so the main thing is you have to be aware that you have this shadow side. You have you can’t run away from it. You have to acknowledge that it exists. You almost have to embrace it in a way. A good parent too does everything he or she can not to repress that. Like what you want to do with children is you want to think you want them to be forceful. You want them to have some power. You want them to integrate that that capacity for aggression into, let’s say, lucid conversation. You want them to be able to stand up for themselves and family discussions. If 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. You see this in schools too now. You know, when my kids went to school, this was so dumb. We had a rule in our house, which was you don’t have to follow stupid rules. That’s a good rule. But if you get caught, you have to put up with consequences. But so one rule was the school had not only could you not throw snowballs, you couldn’t make them. And so they were trying to. Yeah, exactly. You should shake your head. That’s for sure. It’s like because their answer and this was all politically correct nonsense, you know, non competitive games. We’re only going to play non competitive games. It’s like, first of all, you know, I studied Piaget. Yeah, a hockey game is not competitive exactly because in a hockey game, well, everybody no one brings a basketball. Everybody plays hockey. So that’s cooperation. And then on the team, you have to cooperate. And like if you’re the star, but you never pass, you’re just a dumb son of a bitch. You’re not the star. And so there’s tremendous amount of cooperation in all those competitive games. They’re integrated. And this idea that, you know, children better by not allowing them to be competitive. It’s so it’s disgusting. It is. It’s that one. That’s the Freudian devouring mother. Right. That’s oh, everyone’s safe and no one’s going to ever hurt anyone. And that’s kind of where a lot of young people are. You know, they enter the world where they’ve been coddled, where they think that there are no winners, that everyone is, you know, it’s just win win situations. And that’s where they get really shocked by the realities of the world. So all this coddling and this idea that there doesn’t have to be a winner. We don’t have to get prizes for first place. Everybody should get a prize. You know, all you’re doing is setting your children up for for massive, you know, shocks when they enter the world and they see that it’s not like that. Yeah. And then they get disillusioned and depressed, you know, or traumatized. But I mean, when my my son’s hockey team in his school, they won the city championship, which was a big deal, you know, and the school was pretty happy about that. To his credit. So was the coach. But the principal, who was this authoritarian empath, she was an awful person. I thought. Authoritarian empath. Yeah, well, yeah, she used to more virtue as a club owner. Yeah, well, there’s plenty of those people around. She said, well, really, today we’re all winners. And the coach had the. Yeah, exactly. No, it is sickening because it’s, you know, my son was just appalled by it, but the coach had enough guts. He said, no, no, the hockey team won. And it’s not like the kids in the school were jealous. Some of them were, obviously, but most of them were really happy like you are when your sports team wins that, you know, and most people are generous enough so that they’re able to celebrate someone else’s victory without. And that’s the same. I saw this with birthday parties. I just bloody well hated this. It’s like, well, every child gets a gift bag. It’s like, no, you know, they have their damn birthday. Every child doesn’t need a damn gift bag. And this is the same, the same naive, trickly and it’s authoritarian too, because it imposes this kind of view of the world. It’s like, no, it’s this kid’s data be special. That’s why we’re celebrating this kid. 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. Well, a lot of my books, I’ve tried to remove the kind of taboo or the negative associations we have with the word like power, or with the word ambition. You know, I try and say ambition is a good thing. It means that you have, 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. So ambition is a positive thing. But so many people are just kind of embarrassed about being a human being, embarrassed about our primate nature, embarrassed about our own aggressive impulse. This 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. And, 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 a concept that’s, you know, the cause of historical horror. And you might say, well, no one takes that onto themselves to that degree. And that’s well, you can say that, but that you just don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. People take that onto themselves all the time. And then they they start to identify the best part of them that strives forward with the destructive impulses of humanity. And 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 it. You end up turning that aggressive energy on yourself is what ends up happening. And that’s maybe leads to suicide, the ultimate kind of self-aggression. I know that I personally have, as I said, I definitely have a shadow side. I’m very aggressive and extremely competitive and I have a lot of anger. So a lot of that those experiences in my youth made me very angry. But the way I kind of integrated my show, I’m not saying this is a model, but the way I integrated it was through my books. So I kind of that anger kind of seeps through the material that I write. And I find I can only write when I have that kind of anger. But I don’t rant. I don’t yell and kind of put people down. I kind of channel it into something productive and something creative. And so I definitely do that when I’m lecturing. You know, and people have commented, you know, some of the people who’ve criticized me that I’m an angry person and which isn’t true. But it’s definitely that anger, that capacity for anger definitely is something that gives you force and it can push and anger definitely. So psychophysiologically. So imagine that this is obviously a thought experiment. Imagine you’re chasing a cat with a broom. Well, the cat’s going to run from the broom. But if you corner the cat with the broom, it will attack you, even though it’s just a cat. Well, and the reason for that is that fear will facilitate either freezing or escape. But sometimes fear isn’t the right response and anger will suppress fear. And 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. And you can integrate that. You know, that’s you know, if you if you have some justifiable moral outrage, let’s say something really annoys you or or or I shouldn’t say that deeply violates your sense of moral propriety. I don’t mean trivial things. Then the fact of that forceful response can motivate you to do things well, because for lecture, but certainly to write, it takes a lot of energy to write, man. You need all those sources of energy if you’re going to be able to do it. Just to turn it on yourself, to discipline yourself, you know, it’s like I had to grab myself by the scruff of the neck when I was a young guy to sit down, sit down, god damn it and write, you know. And 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. Yes, that’s right. Yeah. And, you know, some of that anger, you know, I think Young talks about this is that that dark side contains a lot of energy, contains a lot of power. Those two year olds are kicking and screaming. That’s all this kind of force behind it. And 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. You 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, so that shadow side. When you when you deny it, only negative things will happen and it is extremely important for people to first recognize it in themselves, you know, and it’s very hard for a lot of people to do that. Well, I found, like I said earlier, one of the best ways in there is resentment. You watch yourself like, well, because if you’re if you’re resentful, you know, you’re feeling like you’re being victimized and mistreated. It’s like, okay, well, you might maybe you are okay. And you think there’s no anger in that resentment. You’re not looking hard enough. 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. Right. But 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. Yeah. Yeah. So one day I’ll tell you a story about that. So 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. It hadn’t been touched since like 1927 had gas fittings in the upper floor needed to be completely gutted. And so we got it. And my daughter got sick at exactly the same time, really sick. And so it was it was stressful and difficult. And the neighbors just they called the city on us. They they did everything they could to make it difficult, even though they were attached to us and wanted to sell their house. So we probably added like twenty five thousand dollars to the value of their house because it was no longer attached to a derelict. And then just as we were finishing, my sister and her husband came to visit and I was making tea for them and I closed the cupboard. So it click and the neighbors banged on the wall. And then that night I couldn’t sleep and I had this I would really been pushed to my limit by these people. And I had these visions in my mind of burning the damn place down. And I thought, oh, man, if you’re starting to think about burning the place down, you should you should probably go say something. So I took put on my park and I went outside about six in the morning. I just waited for them to come out. They never did. But I went knocked over on the door and I said, I was making tea for my sister last night. And I closed the cupboard. You didn’t have to bang on the wall because you heard my cupboard closing, did you? And they said, yeah. And I said, OK, look, if you bug me anymore, I’m going to cause you so much trouble you cannot possibly imagine it. Yeah. And I meant it. It was like because I knew it was brewing in the back of my mind. I said because I was done. It was like you want a war. You have no idea what you’re getting into. And 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. But like I what we did was the mistake you talk about. We 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. But we weren’t. And the only way to stop them was with a show of force. It was like, you want to be malevolent? You want to play that game? It’s like, OK, no problem. But. You know, and things went more smoothly after that. And that’s a good example of, well, paying attention to those fantasies, because I thought I better like deal with this straightforwardly. Otherwise, I’m likely to do something stupid. Right. That’s the other thing you got to watch if that builds up inside you. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And 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. I don’t know what came over. That’s not that’s not who I am. But that is exactly who you are. That is the person who has been carrying this resentment and this kind of inner anger, but not acting upon. And then suddenly they do something really stupid like having an affair with a 21 year old or or, you know, they just caught doing something. So I I watched people with their their children a lot. Yeah. And so when my son was a pretty assertive kid and tough, like he had a real will. And, you know, when he was nine months old and started to crawl around, I taught him what no meant. And no what no means is stop doing that or something you don’t like will happen to you. That’s what no means. Right. And 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. And so to teach him what no meant, I just grab his leg when he wasn’t doing something that I didn’t want him to do. And, you know, he would squawk and bitch and complain. And I’d say, no, no, no. And I just hold him until he gave up. And sometimes he would cry. And the reason he was crying is because he was frustrated and angry that I was mucking about with him. It’s like, fair enough. He wanted to go explore. And, you know, fair enough, kid, you want to explore. But you can’t tear out the plant and get dirt all over the rug. And you can’t go into the electrical cords, you know, like, no, no. And so I had done a lot of behavioral training by that time. And by the time I did that for, say, six or seven days and soon as if I just said no, he would just stop. And sometimes he would cry. And then the week later, if I said no, he just stopped. So it took like two weeks, say. And then I knew that if I said no, he would stop. And so then I could let him explore. I could give him a lot of freedom. And then I’d have people come over to my house with their two-year-old or three-year-old. And 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. They couldn’t give the child any freedom at all. They had to wander around behind them all the time because they never knew what the child was going to get into. And so then you start to hate your child, right? Because 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, you’re just nonstop monitoring this child and you’re mad because you don’t have a life. And we had another couple come over and they had two kids that were like four and five. And they were just horrible. We sat down to eat. We wanted to have a conversation. And we put a basket of bread out. And the kids just grabbed the bread and they ate all the centers out of the bread. And the parents were all embarrassed about it. But they didn’t do anything to stop it. And, you know, in their minds, they thought, well, aren’t we permissive and nice and we never say no to our children. But they didn’t notice that they actually hated their children because how could you go to someone’s house and you want to have a conversation? You just met them and your children embarrass you to death. And you think you’re not going to get resentful about that. Right. And you think you’re not going to take it. So here’s how people would take it out on their kids. So imagine that happens. Now you go home and you’re pissed right off, but you’re not going to let yourself know that because you’re such a nice person. Then your child goes off and draws a picture. Maybe they put a lot of work into it. Then they come running up to show you. And that’s a real good time to give them a pat on the head and say, look, isn’t that great? But you’re pissed off because you were embarrassed. And so you look at it and you think, ah, and that’s all you have to do. It’s like, that’s not really worthy of my attention. You don’t have to say anything mean. You just have to not attend in this manner. And then you got your revenge and you think you won’t do that, man. You know nothing about yourself. And you know, you read in the paper sometimes these mothers or fathers, they do something brutal to a child. And I know what that I know how that happens. It’s like no disciplinary strategies in the house. Yeah. The kid is driving the mother or father crazy. You know, and then maybe the mother or father, they’re hung over one day and maybe they just broke up with their boyfriend or girlfriend. Maybe they got, you know, hail it from their boss, who’s a tyrant and they haven’t stood up to them. And the kid does the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time. And maybe he’s actually pretty good at that by then. And it’s like out comes Satan himself and all hell breaks loose. It’s like, I wouldn’t do that. It’s like, yeah, there’s almost nothing you wouldn’t do. You just don’t know yourself very well. Yeah. Well, 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. That takes a little bit of toughness on your part. You have to be kind of willing to put yourself on the line. Maybe that person will get angry and hit you or something, or maybe the war will escalate. But you have to be willing to take that risk, because if you don’t, then you set no limits. And who knows what they’ll end up doing. But a lot of this permissiveness is people that just basically afraid they’re afraid of any kind of confrontation. Yeah, they’re afraid of any kind of conflict. And through conflict and confrontation is how you actually grow. It’s actually how you develop as a person. Hey, so here’s a cool stat. This is really interesting, man. So there’s been some great work on what predicts what behavioral markers predict divorce in couples counseling. Really solid work. OK, so here’s one predictor. If when the couple is talking in front of a therapist and one of them or the other or both roll their eyes, there’s like a 95 percent chance they’re going to be divorced within six months. And that’s contempt. They’ve got so they’ve become so disconnected because they don’t communicate because the resentment has built up that they now have contempt for each other. But here’s here’s another cool fact from that research. So if you have people track the number of positive and negative interactions with their partner, you can calculate ratios and then you can see what the ratio is that that lends itself to the successful maintenance of a relationship. And so you might think, well, the more positive interactions, the better. And that’s kind of true. So if it falls below five positive to one negative, the relationship is in danger. But it rises. You have five to one and you can kind of see that because, you know, negative events are more memorable and and and more powerful than positive ones. And so you know that if you read YouTube comments, you know, but if it rises above 11 to one, the relationship is also in danger. And you could imagine that what you want in a relationship is what you want support and love and you want most of your interactions to be positive. But you want your partner to slap you down then when you’re being stupid. Because and then if they don’t, out comes your inner tyrant. Right. You’re just going to dominate them if they don’t push back. And so if you have any sense to if you have a partner, you want to encourage them to put limits on you. You know, especially if they’re a little more timid than you temperamentally. It’s like you don’t want to run roughshod over them because they know some things you don’t. Right. So cool that it’s above 11 to one. So that means too much positivity is also is the death knoll for a relationship. And you know, you want someone with some spark, right? It’s like, well, what if I push you a little bit, even teasing? You want the person to be able to push back a bit. And you have to be able to accept it as well, because some people probably in those situations can’t stand any kind of criticism. They’re so fragile that if the other person pushes back, it kind of escalates into a battle. So real strength comes from the ability in a relationship or any kind of really intimate or otherwise is the ability to take that kind of criticism, to actually welcome it when people set limits for you and tell you that this kind of behavior is wrong. And then you can evaluate and assess yourself. Yeah, unless you want to repeat it stupidly forever. Right. I mean, that’s the alternative in a relationship is I don’t like conflict. I’ve been in plenty of conflicts, like plenty, way more than is reasonable, but I don’t like them. I mean, well, I meet people now and then I went to talk to Douglas Murray in New York City about a week ago and we were talking about conflict. And he said, you know, he doesn’t mind to fight. And I’ve met lots of people like that, that, you know, they like that combativeness. And I don’t really. But what I really hate is deferred conflict that escalates. It’s like it’s better to get it over with now. And 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, it’s probably better just to get the hell out of there because you’re never going to see that person again, you know, and you don’t want a situation like that to escalate because. They might have a gun or whatever. Well, yeah, you know, just don’t know what’s up with them. They’re really strangers. But, you know, if you’re dealing with someone day in and day out and they’re pushing on the top of your head to stop you from growing, which I think Lucy used to do to Linus in the Peanuts cartoons, they had a dark side. Those cartoons mandate the comics. They sure did. Yeah, yeah, it would be canceled now, probably. Yeah, I couldn’t do this now. I don’t think. Yeah, I think that’s right. Yeah, because a lot of Schultz’s characters, Lucy was actually not a likable character at all. Right. And she was really oppressive to Linus, who was a good character. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Good humor always has an edge. But yeah, that you don’t get rid of your the negative part of yourself, especially that aggressive part by pretending it doesn’t exist. That quite the contrary, you know, that just doesn’t work at all. Right. Yeah. I’m sorry. You guys, isn’t it? I was just going to ask you about your new book. I wanted to ask you about working with 50 Cent and the rappers. I wanted to ask you about your new book, too. So let’s start with. So how did you this partnership with 50 Cent come about? Well, the book was very popular with rappers, as I said, because of the nature of the music industry. And he reached out to me. He wanted to meet me because the 48 laws of power was sort of his Bible, as he expressed it. So I met him in New York, kind of in the back room of the steakhouse and sort of like a something straight out of The Godfather. I was kind of the one white guy amongst his whole group. There was a little bit intimidated, to be honest. I didn’t know what to expect because he has this reputation and did up. He was really nice and really interesting, actually very kind of sweet guy. Not what you expect. And we 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 in conflicts, sort of like what you’re talking about. And he has a very strategic mind. And he got we got very we kind of had a really nice connection. And I thought, you know, so much in our culture is creating these stupid kind of divisions and walls like you’re in academia. You only write academic books. You’re a popular person. You only write popular books. You know, you come from this community, you come from that community and they should never communicate. And I thought it would be very interesting to write a book coming from two opposite backgrounds. You know, me, middle class Jewish boy from Los Angeles and him from South Side, Queens. Something interesting could happen from a collaboration. There’s not enough of that in our culture, I believe, because even though our circumstances were very different, our minds were very similar. We were thinking at a similar plane that kind of transcended these sort of superficial differences. So I spent time with him and I was trying to figure out what is the essence of his power? What makes him such a compelling figure and made him not one of those people in South Side, Queens, who ended up kind of spiraling downward to ending up in prison? What saved him? And I determined that the quality he had was this kind of fearlessness. And it isn’t the kind of fearlessness where you go beating people up or something. It’s kind of an inner strength. He had been shot when he was like 20 years old, like nine bullets right there through a car window, kind of a lot. One of them bullets lodged in his mouth and he survived miraculously. And it gave him this kind of calmness like I have nothing to fear. I almost died. Bring it on. I don’t really care. And so I observed him in meetings. I 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. And 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. So the book that we formed together was kind of a meditation on 10 forms of fearlessness. And I found, you know, I thought that I was a relatively fearless person, which in some ways I am. I seem agreeable, but I’m actually in some ways a little bit bold and adventurous. And but compared to him, I realized, no, I’m actually riddled with fears. And 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. So that’s where that book came out. Yeah, it’s nice to have a model like that really close by, right, to contrast yourself with. Yeah, you can learn a lot from. So do you think you think that fearlessness that you saw in him, you think part of that was a consequence of that brush with death? How much of that do you think was temperamental to in him? Well, 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. And it gets them in a lot of trouble. Right. He has a very kind of strategic in under control. Fearlessness. Hey, I got something cool to tell you about that. So I was talking to David Buss. Yes, I believe it. And he’s an evolutionary psychologist, a good one. We’re talking about this Machiavellian personality triad, the dark triad, the Del Pollo’s UBC. Yeah. OK, so here’s something really interesting. It’s the bad boy paradox, they call it, that young, naive women are attracted to those Machiavellian types. But when they get older and more experienced, they start to be able to see through that. 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 and young women aren’t good at distinguishing between the two. And so they get sucked in by the sort of psychopathic recklessness because they think it’s fearless competence. And then, of course, the guys who are doing that, they’ll prey on that because they’re trying to ape competence. But 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. But they want that fearlessness that does go along with true generosity and competence and also the ability to keep real darkness away. Well, a lot of those people who display that kind of what you call mimicking fearlessness. That’s the macho. They’re actually hiding the opposite. They’re actually very, very riddled with insecurities. They’re kind of create this sort of bravado and this false front, and they go to an extreme to kind of project this machismo, when in fact they’re riddled with insecurities. And that’s their way of dealing with it. But someone like 57, he’s very comfortable with himself. He knows who he is. He knows where he came from. His mother was a hustler on the streets. So he knew the limits of the game. And I don’t know, I think there is maybe a slight genetic component to it. I can’t really put my finger on why he was able to have this kind of self-control where other people don’t. Yeah, well, that dimension, neuroticism, you know, if you’re in a rough environment and you’re low in neuroticism, that’s pretty damn helpful. Because imagine that what neuroticism is unit of psychophysiological upset caused per unit of stress or unit of danger. And some people overreact and some people underreact. Sometimes the overreaction saves your life. Sometimes the underreaction gets you killed. So it’s not like there’s a clear answer. So there’s variability there. Some people are much more calm, not volatile. They don’t withdraw temperamentally. And that’s a more masculine temperament, by the way. Yeah, I agree. But if you’re raised in a really rough environment and you happen to be emotionally stable, that’s the opposite of neurotic, let’s say, then you’re just not going to be as affected by it. And that can be a real blessing. So and then I’m also interested in that. You know, you said that you channeled a lot of your shadow, let’s say, into creativity. Did you see the same thing happening with 50 Cent? Oh, my God. His music is incredibly aggressive. And that’s and to an extent, it’s kind of violent. And I must admit, it really appeals to me. So when I was writing, why that’s cool, because it’s so interesting that so many rap fans are young white guys. Yeah, yeah. But that’s that’s really psychologically interesting, right? Because if they’ve been coddled and their ambition has been squelched and everything about them that’s aggressive has been shamed out of existence, it’s that’s part of that attraction of that dark fantasy. Right. And 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. It’s part of that that desire to bring that shadow out of the shadows and into the light. Well, I wasn’t really I was a little bit different in that I kind of understand my own anger. I wasn’t so much coddled. But but what I really enjoyed about his music is it just seemed very real. And it kind of the beat kind of catches you up in a primal sense and kind of the aggressiveness just seems very direct and very refreshing, by the way. And 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. And 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. And it’s not real. But if it really smelled authentic with him and the fact that he’d been shot and nearly died, you know, just kind of added to that aura. But there was something very real about and very authentic in a culture where so much isn’t real. I think that was the deep, deep appeal in a primal sense of 50s music. And when I was writing the war book, I was trying to get myself in a martial mood to write it. I would actually listen to his music to kind of put me in the mood to write some of the chapters. That and that and Beethoven. What do you like from what? What Beethoven do you like? What pumped you up? Well, when I was a kid, one of the first times I was first kind of raised on classical music, then I got into jazz and rock and everything. But I got a collection of his nine symphonies and got this. There’s a kind of an aggression and violence like to the fifth symphony and the ninth symphony. It just kind of, you know, like they use clockwork orange. There’s something so overwhelmingly powerful about it, right? It just you get the core section in the ninth is like that. It’s so to joy. Yeah. And it’s so isn’t that so interesting that the ode to joy has that primal aggressive force? And it makes joy. It makes joy is, you know, in the naive sense, it’s well, you’re happy. It’s like, no, this joy is that integrated, terrible power that you definitely hear in so many of the symphonies. Yeah. And it’s so that you definitely hear in superb music. Yeah. Yeah. And when that when that coral bit kicks in, it’s just overwhelming. It’s like a blow and makes you tingle. It’s so exciting. And I’ve heard it maybe a thousand times since then. It still affects me the same way. And now when I’m driving somewhere and I have to get myself in the mood, I’ll still put the night symphony on some of the other. Yeah, it’s like it’s like encountering the terrible force of good. You know, you think about Moses in the burning bush or or Jacob wrestling with God. It’s like, well, why is it a burning bush? Why is it terrifying? Why do you wrestle with God? Why do you get hurt? It’s like, well, because good in its full force has this unbelievable. What has this integration of power? And it’s no wonder it terrifies people because it just burns everything away in comparison. Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, a lot of the new books that I’m writing about, which is the sublime is 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. So you’re confronting something that kind of intimidates you, but it’s so awesome that you can’t you know, you’re just overwhelmed. And the confluence of two emotions, opposing emotions at the same time is very, very powerful for a human being. Yeah, I’ve just written a book that I’m going to publish next year that’s called an ABC of Childhood Tragedy, and it’s a combination of dark humor and beauty. It’s the same. We’re trying to we’re experimenting with exactly the same thing. Those paradoxical juxtaposition of dark and light emotions. There is something sublime about that and something awe inspiring about that. I guess it’s part of bringing what’s dark into the light or subsuming it under the light maybe. So why the sublime? What are you pursuing there? Well, the ultimate in 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, certain codes and conventions that we have to abide by. And we all do that. And the codes and conventions for 5th century B.C. China are not the same as what we have now, but there’s still that limit. And what humans are attracted to what lies beyond that limit. It’s just part of our nature. It’s the first part of it. And 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. There’s also that element of fear involved, right? See, I think that’s a better, 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. And that is the border between order and chaos that you’re describing. And that is the source of meaning itself. I mean, that’s why I think music is so powerful is because it plays with predictable forms, but continually adds that level of unpredictability, 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. Or something discordant. Yes, exactly. And then integrated within sort of a higher, what a higher unity. And it’s deeply meaningful. It puts you on that edge of the sublime. And we are we do find the meaning that helps sustain us in life exactly at that place. That’s that’s something more deeply real than anything else. Well, so and so the ultimate thing beyond that limit is death itself. And the word sublime means up to the threshold of a door or sublimin, limin being the limit. Right, like subliminal. And so I have been meaning to write this book for 15 years and I got distracted. But then about three years ago, I nearly died myself. I had a stroke and I came, you know, just an inch away from dying myself. I was driving my car. And 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. 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. And why, unfortunately, because of the price you had to pay for it. Yeah, the price is I can’t take a walk. I can’t do the swim. I can’t do the things that I used to love. So, you know, I’m kind of I can I can, you know, I’m functional. I can walk around the house, but I can’t take a hike and I can’t do my long distance swimming or my mountain biking or anything like that. So I paid a price, but I’m alive. 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. Yeah. 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 understand that. So why why make that as I’m not disputing it? I don’t just don’t understand. Like, 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 it with the idea of death? Well, because there’s there’s a limit that that limit and experiencing limit gives you that sense of excitement and fear at the same time. Well, death is the ultimate limit. And 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. I actually peered inside of it. No other people have had much stronger near death experiences. Mine was more of the milder sort, but still I peered as far as as far as near death experiences go. Well, well, you know, my coma, my coma lasted an hour or something. Some people, you know, there’s that’s nothing then experts for like three years. Well, OK, all right. I could have had a, you know, a more intense near death experience, but it was pretty intense. Anyway, it was sufficient. It is. But so the sense of life is almost too much. It’s overpowering in its immediacy. And we humans try and kind of dull the the razor edge so much that we can live. But if you think about, you know, your mortality on a day to day basis and if you try and actually experience the immediacy of life and how dangerous it actually is and how it’s fraught with all of these, these, you know, these, these things that you don’t have. These things that you don’t want to confront is very, very, very powerful. And I’m sorry, Siri just keeps hearing me. And so so so, you know, it creates. So when you have that, it’s it’s like the ultimate it’s a mix of, you know, they call in French the orgasm, the petit mort. Right. Right. So an orgasm is almost like a little death. You know, so that sense of it’s almost too much. It’s almost like death itself, like something so pleasurable can actually kind of morph into something a little bit frightening as well. Something a little bit like you’re like you’re exploring something that you’re not supposed to. You see that in the ease in which laughter and tears can be interchanged. You see that with children, they can switch from laughter to tears in no time. And, you know, you can laugh so hard that you cry. And it’s often, too, when you’re crying about something sorrowful that someone can say something funny and it’ll switch to laughter. That’s all a way down at the level of instinct. Right. Where these. Right. And it’s so interesting to see the opposites touch at that level. Yeah. So so the reason why I’m doing the Ellucinian mysteries, just to bring that back, is I have a chapter on pagan religions. I call the pagan sublime. And I’m trying to tell the reader that we don’t have the right conception of ancient religions. They’re actually very different from what we think. We have these kind of cliched notions of kind of mischievous gods cavorting in clouds and doing all kinds of naughty things that are very human and just kind of almost a silliness to it. Like, whoa, we’re so beyond that. But actually, pagan religions were extremely serious and they were based on creating go away, Syria. And they were and they were based on creating very powerful emotional responses in people. And that was what primal religion was about or ancient religion was about. It wasn’t based on texts, on dogma, on the written word. So the Ellucinian mysteries, because there are mysteries because nobody ever wrote about it. There’s no text. There’s nothing written that we can go to. Yes, there’s the hymn to Demeter that kind of maybe describes a little bit of what it’s based on. But we don’t know really what happened because nothing was ever written down. It was simply about creating this overwhelming emotional reaction in which you took the initiates to the edge of death. You made them experience death in life, which is the story of Demeter and Persephone. They were like making them feel as if they had gone into the underworld itself. And that created a whole new relationship to life. But I wanted this idea that religion isn’t this kind of milk toasty thing that people think about nowadays. It was initially extremely powerful reaction to human vulnerability, to our weakness in this immense cosmos with all of these very powerful forces. And the religious rituals were to actually mirror that and give you a kind of compensatory sense that you could control it. You could contain it within these kind of powerful experiences. It’s really interesting to me that you’ve come through your analysis of the darkness. And then a consequence of that was to be motivated to pursue the sublime. The little stamp that I’m using for these kids’ book, which I’m doing with this illustrator named Juliet Fogra, who’s a real genius in my estimation. We made a stamp and the motto on the stamp is, Through the Darkness into the Light. Wow. And there’s this old idea that if you look into the darkness enough, you’ll find something that compensates for it, right? And that emerges out of the darkness that’s greater and more powerful than the darkness. And that part of looking into the dark side of yourself is you find the power that enables you to deal with mortality. And there is something sublime about that. It’s so cool that all your work investigating and trying to integrate the shadow has led you to this. To this, what? That your intuition has been gripped by the idea of the sublime. Yeah. Isn’t necessarily where you think you’d end up. Well, yeah, a lot of the impetus for the book is another little bit of anger as well. So I always have to have some anger in order to feel the impulse to write and just discipline myself. And my anger now is about how people’s worlds have become so tight and so banal and so limited. Where they’re just kind of disappearing into their phones and their world is just sort of programmed for them by Facebook or social media. And they’re sort of told what they’re supposed to think and they’re kind of programmed. And at the same time, you know, what science is discovering about the universe and about where we live and about who we are is just so insanely mind blowing. It’s just absolutely almost sublime, in my opinion. And yet so many people are just living like as if they’re sleepwalking. You know, I talk in one chapter about the unlikeliness of any of us being alive, any of us actually being here right now on Earth. And how just to be who we are, the odds against it are like eight trillion to one, even more than that. And the people aren’t thinking about this. They’re not aware of the awesomeness of just the fact of being alive, of the cosmos as it evolved, as things on Earth evolve the way they are. And so I’m kind of angry a little bit about how people are just not aware of this. Well, that anger again, that’s one of the things I did as a clinician is to help people find their purpose was to help them find out what they’re angry about. It’s like, well, what’s your problem? You know, you say that, what’s your problem? But actually you want to know. It’s like because if you have a problem, then because there’s lots of things you could be bothered about, but you’re not bothered about by all of them. There’s something that stands out for you as something that violates your sense of moral propriety, let’s say that’s your problem. You think, well, I don’t want to have a problem. Yes, you do. You want to have your problem and then you want to go try to solve it. And if you’re looking for meaning in your life, it’s like, well, what bugs you? Well, I’m annoyed at this and that. And you know, it’s pretty naive and low resolution and formulaic to begin with, but you could zero right in on that and then you find the purpose of your life. And that’s it. That’s in that anger. It’s in that anger, at least to some degree. Yeah. And as I said, I can’t write without it. I don’t know why every day I have to feel a little bit of a little bit of pinch of it or like a little bit edge of that knife in me. And sometimes you have to be. That’s right. I mean, I find when I’m sitting down to write a chapter, because it’s hard to sit down and write a chapter. It’s a lot of work, man. And, you know, writers always whine about that, but it is hard to do. It’s hard to do. It’s as hard as clinical work, which is the hardest work I ever did. And so but I have to be it’s like there has to be a reason for this, you know, to get me going to do it. It has to be important. And that means it has to be dealing with something weighty. And if it’s weighty, it’s going to it’s going to act. It’s going to what what what’s going to call out of you all your emotional responses, including the well, certainly including anger. Certainly that’s a tremendous form of energy. Well, I don’t know if you have the same experience, but I read so many books for my research center. And that’s the main thing that I fought them with. There’s no kind of energy behind it. There’s no human behind it. There’s no voice that’s kind of screaming out why they have to say this. Screaming out is exactly right. That’s a great book screams like Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. That’s like three thousand pages of screaming anger. It’s like you sustained screaming anger for three thousand pages. It’s unbelievable. It’s unbelievable. It’s like being caught in a windstorm reading that book. Yeah. And that’s that greatness is terrifying. Yeah, yeah. And that’s that’s kind of channeling the dark side in some ways. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, that man brought down a totalitarian state, at least in part. It’s like you have to have a lot of force and you think that it’s not going to be anger in part to to push back against. That’s all that kind of petty tyranny that you were talking about in its most. What would you say? Most rigidified and universal form. And one man who decided he was going to tell the truth and and and and harnessed that passion to his words changed the world. Yeah, yeah. So I don’t know if I’ll have that kind of effect. I’m sure I won’t. But that’s sort of I want people to I kind of want to spark a sense of almost the religious awe without an organized religion behind it. Because I think we have changed a lot in thousands of years, but there’s something in our nature that kind of craves those kinds of experiences and nothing in our culture is providing it. It’s the definition of crave. I don’t think nothing music does. Yeah, music does, man. Music does. And that music was such a mystery for me when I was a young psychologist, like music is meaningful and you can’t argue the meaning away. Like it’s invulnerable to criticism. Isn’t that so cool that there’s a source of meaning that’s invulnerable to criticism? And then it’s this harmonious interplay of beautiful patterns, predictability and unpredictability and and and integration of passion and movement. Right. Because because it compels movement. You see, think of people dancing to a Strauss waltz, right? They’re harmonizing themselves with the sublime patterns of the world. That’s music. It’s something, man. And it’s no wonder young people are so desperate for music, because that’s where we have this sublime in our culture. That’s where they go to things like raves or Astral Worlds and concerts like that. They want that kind of collective experience, you know, that you used to get from like initiation rituals or kind of things in pagan times. I remember once I was in Nicaragua. I was a journalist. I was covering the the civil, the revolution, the civil war going on. And the pope was visiting Nicaragua at the time. So 1984, I believe. And there was like. Hundred thousand people crammed in this one square. And, you know, I’m not by any means a Sandinista. I have no sympathy for them, particularly as it is now. But the feeling was that I experienced I’ve never experienced anything else like it of that crowd and that group emotion. It can be frightening to. Well, yeah, we can think like. Well, that’s it. Well, that’s it. That’s the thing that Nazis were unbelievably good at at pulling, bringing that up. Right. And so you might say, too, that if we can’t figure out how to harness that force in a positive way in our culture, we pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s going to come up in these underground ways because the craving for it is so deep. And the Nazis were masters of spectacle and fire. They were really good at that sort of thing. And Orwell was courageous enough to point that out. He said, well, we don’t have anything with that power to combat that terrible, dramatic evil. But you do see it in a concert. You do see it in that in that collective. Well, you said you saw it in relationship to the pope. And that’s well, hopefully that’s something good. Or at least it’s certainly a lot better than Nuremberg. Yeah. And to think that we don’t need that or that that’s just superstition. That’s extraordinary. I know. Yeah, I know. I know. Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, it was really good talking with you, Ben. Very nice talking to you. I really enjoyed it. These are things I never get to cover in all of my hundreds of interviews. So I’m very, very grateful for it. I’ve explored territory that I’ve never explored before. So it’s not fun. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Usual experience for me. Yeah. And I must. I enjoyed it a lot. Yeah. Sorry. I must say your maps of meaning was a very important book for me. I read it actually to help me with my war book, believe it or not, for your notion of conflict and integrating internal conflict and external conflict. So I just want to thank you and let you know nobody knows about that because I haven’t really spoken about it. But that book was very important for me. Well, thank you. I’m amazed you read it. It’s a hell of a slog, that book. Six, seven hundred pages. And I can’t honestly say I don’t think I understood everything in it at least at the time. But it was a very amazing book. Well, thank you very much. I’m glad to hear that. And yeah, it took me. I wrote that book. It took a lot of anger, man. I wrote that book every day, three hours a day, every day for 15 years. Jesus. Yeah. Wow. I had to put my hands around my neck and say, you sit, god damn it, you sit down, write this god damn book. I had to quit drinking. I had to quit having fun. Believe me, I know all about that. It took me five years to write my last book. I can’t imagine what 13 years would be like. But yeah, I know all about that. Well, good luck with your book on the sublime. I’m looking forward to it. Let’s talk again. Thank you very much. Let’s talk again when it went well. I love you. I love you. But maybe when it comes out, that would be good. I really like the and I’m really curious about how you integrate your investigation of the Iliusinian mysteries. I talked to some interesting people about that recently. I know I had already written the piece when I heard them speak. And then I changed some things because I realized some things I had written were inaccurate. But what I try to do in that, so I try and I create a character, a woman who is going to the mysteries and what it was like from her first person account. It’s fictional. But I’m trying to actually give her a history during the plague in the 1420s and then going to the mysteries and what it would feel like subjectively to be in there. Yeah, I had a vision once that the shamanic experience was an antidote to icy northern totalitarianism. So many people are going to the jungle now to the Amazon to use ayahuasca and that sort of thing. And that certainly that drug use, that hallucinogenic drug use was tied up with those primordial religions in some profound way. We don’t understand any of that even a little bit. No. And of course, the Iliusinian mysteries probably had that drug element as well, because the drink they had was either mushrooms or arigat or opium poppy seeds. So yeah, it’s been demonstrated that all kind of pagan cultures had some kind of drug thing going on. And yeah, so. All right. Well, good luck to you writing this book. Thank you. Thank you very much. And I certainly am much more clear about everything that you do. I’m so glad I decided to talk to you. And yeah, me too. Me too. Yeah. I hope I brought a little bit of clarity there. Oh, absolutely. It was a really good discussion. Yeah. Thanks again. Thanks. Thank you so much again. Say hello to your daughter. I will. I will do that. Definitely. Okay. Yeah, she’s a big fan. And so is my producer, Eric. Oh, Eric. This Eric? Yes, this Eric. I had no idea. Hey, Eric. Yeah, big fan. Yeah, big fan. Big, big fan. Yeah. Well, I was all shorted out when I was reading The Daily Laws. I thought, I don’t know what to do with this. It’s like it’s this what the hell’s going on here. And Eric, he said, well, he really liked your books and my daughter really liked your interview. And I thought, well, I’m obviously missing missing something, you know, and I didn’t spend as much time when I was deciding about this conversation, reading it. But I had some sense that maybe you were doing a shadow investigation, but I wasn’t clear about it. So but they were big defenders of you. It’s like, oh, that’s good. You got to talk to him. Thank you, Eric. Thank you. I appreciate that. Of course. Yeah, of course. Anything I can do for you. Thank you. Eric, why were these books helpful to you? Oh, man. Fuck. Good question. That’s tough. There’s been a few points in my life where so I was a fighter. It was my first career choice as a mixed martial arts fighter. And so to me, knowing like from reading the 48 Laws of Power, it’s very similar to Jiu Jitsu. So when I got into business, it was like, oh, I’ve seen this behavior before because I’ve read this book and I understand this. It started as like a very interesting. It started just as an interest. Like, oh, it seems cool. I think I saw you on Tim Ferriss’s show or something like that. And and and when I started to see those things come into play, it then like completely hooked me and I got all the rest of the books. And it prepared you. Yes. Yeah. And one of the things, Robert, that I like so much about what you’re doing is you’re taking these principles, you’re showing it throughout history, and you’re giving examples of how this plays out today. And so it’s like across the entire spectrum of what type of thinkers reading it. Yeah, you have to be the type of thinker that’s going to read, which isn’t everybody. But across that spectrum, everybody gets a little exactly what they need to hear in it. So it makes it very practical. You can then go off and be very practical with it. The same thing that that practice. Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s really important. One of the things you learn as a cognitive behavioral psychologist is that you have to nail this down to changeable behavior. You know, one of the things I was always doing with my clients was and I’ve recommended this to people many times in my lectures is find find the largest unit of change that you’re actually willing to do. Like maybe you won’t clear up your room. I stress that’s like, well, will you move one thing off your desk today? One thing, just one. Or if you can’t do that, because sometimes clients would come back and say, I couldn’t even move one thing. So, well, why don’t you look at one thing and think about moving it? And they’re embarrassed because, you know, they’re so unable to perform this task, which is a simple task in some sense, that they’re ashamed to admit where they are to themselves, but they can’t move forward. I had one client. This is so funny. He lived at home with his mother and he shouldn’t. He was too old for that. And his room was a complete bloody catastrophe and he knew it. And he was probably mad at his mother for like coddling him. And so he was needed to vacuum the carpet. So the deal for the week was you go vacuum that carpet. And he brought the vacuum cleaner into his room, but he left it in the doorway like on a slant. And every day for a week, he had to walk over that vacuum cleaner. He wouldn’t put it back and he wouldn’t bring it in his room and vacuum. And that’s a good example of that underground resentment. You just think how angry you have to be at your situation to put a vacuum cleaner. You know, it’s probably a middle finger to me, too. It’s like I’m not doing what that goddamn therapist says, you know, that kind of resentment. But he he literally walked over that damn vacuum cleaner for a week, you know, and we talked a bunch about that. It’s like, well, what are you doing? It’s like, obviously you’re angry. Like, why can’t you do this? What are you angry about? Well, man, he he was angry about plenty of things. Let’s put it that way. So, yeah, there’s that practicality that’s real necessary to nail the highest to the lowest and to get all that organized all the way down to practical, implementable. I mean, for me, with the work of Milton Erickson. Yes. What do you mean specifically? I just all of his work, I just I’ve just enamored with his work because his ability to create change and his patience. And the strategies he would employ, I just think are so brilliant. You know, I don’t know. I don’t know if he’s respected in the field or not anymore, but I just thought the story. Well, all those my experience with all those great clinicians was you’re a fool if you don’t take what they knew seriously. I mean, those people had a reputation for a reason. There’s you know, I I really learned a lot from the great behaviorists. I learned a lot from the psychoanalysts, from the Rogerian types, like they all had their they all had something to say. The behaviors were great at decomposing something complex into implementable units, man. And the psychoanalysts were great at high level conceptualization, archetypal analysis, you know, the big story, the big picture. Yeah. So hey, Eric, maybe we’ll keep that discussion with you in the video. OK, yeah, I like that. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry for cursing right away. No, that’s good. That was perfect. Thank you.