Your Dark Side and Control Over Your Life | Robert Greene | EP 237
What this covers
This episode was recorded on November 11, 2021.
This episode focuses on human nature and the principles surrounding strategy, power, and seduction with Robert Greene. We also discuss the motivations behind power, deceptive strategies, Robert’s many jobs before settling as an author, psychopathy, manipulation, agreeableness, feeling guilt over being ambitious, channeling your shadow, and much more.
Robert Greene is the author of the NY Times bestsellers The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law, Mastery, & The Laws of Human Nature. Robert has had over 80 different jobs and is considered an international expert on power strategies. On top of a strong following in the business world and Washington DC, Greene’s books are hailed by everyone from war historians to musicians like Jay-Z, Drake, and 50 Cent.
Follow Robert’s blog: https://powerseductionandwar.com His Twitter: https://twitter.com/RobertGreene Instagram: https://instagram.com/RobertGreeneOfficial & check out his books at: https://amazon.com/Robert-Greene/e/B001IGV3IS%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share
__________ Chapters __________ [00:00] Intro [02:58] Power, Motivation, & Manipulation [08:34] Deceptive Strategies [11:26] Robert’s Career [15:02] When to Change Jobs [17:37] Greene's Motivation & Personality [22:50] Great Manipulators [24:46] The Mask of Agreeableness & Psychopathy [30:43] Harsh Real World [34:50] Music Industry [38:02] Integrating Our Shadow [45:45] Guilt Over Ambition [50:36] Resentment & the Psyche. [58:03] Conflict & Growth [01:03:31] Partnership with 50 Cent [01:10:39] Channeling Our Shadow & Productivity [01:14:46] The Sublime, Pleasure, & Pain [01:22:04] Pagans & the Sublime [01:25:12] Today’s Writing & the Miracle of Reality [01:30:20] The Meaning of Music [01:34:13] Outro [01:36:14] Bonus Discussion with Our Producer Eric #Power #RobertGreene #DarkTriad #Writing #Motivation #Manipulation
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Robert Greene argues that understanding shadow dynamics—the repressed aggressive, ambitious, and manipulative impulses in human nature—is essential for psychological health, effective leadership, and cultural vitality; denying or shaming these impulses drives them underground where they manifest as destructive resentment, passive aggression, and trauma.
- People with unacknowledged shadow impulses suffer psychological harm and act them out destructively; integration through awareness, creative channeling, and confrontation transforms shadow energy into productive force
- Modern culture's attempt to eliminate competition, ambition, and aggression from childhood education and social norms backfires by creating naive adults blindsided by workplace manipulation and unable to set healthy boundaries
- The sublime—the experience of confronting limits, mortality, and power—is where meaning resides; accessing it requires integrating shadow forces rather than denying them
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Music is a source of meaning that is invulnerable to rational criticism—people can derive powerful, inarguable meaning from music in ways that intellectual argument cannot replicate, which suggests music accesses something fundamental about human consciousness.
“Music is meaningful and you can't argue the meaning away. Like it it's invulnerable to criticism. Isn't that so cool that there's a source of meaning that's invulnerable to criticism?”
People have a shadow side containing repressed aggressive impulses, sexual power drives, dominance, anger, and resentment, which are often clothed in garments of moral virtue; these shadow qualities pollute human relationships through severe deceit and require acknowledgment and integration rather than repression.
“he was certainly sensitive to the idea that people had a terrible shadow. Yes. That they would clothe themselves in the guy garments of moral virtue, right? 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 related dominance, um, 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.”
Peterson notes that Greene's personality profile shows high openness (creativity, entrepreneurship), high agreeableness (compassion, politeness), and likely high neuroticism sensitivity, which makes such individuals more vulnerable to being targeted by disagreeable, manipulative types—a chronic problem particularly in terms of selection of partners and management of relationships.
“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...agreeableness is that you're more likely to be a target for disagreeable types, and in terms of partner selection, women 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 and the manipulators at bay. And so it's a chronic problem for the human race.”
Anger serves psychophysiologically as an antidote to fear: it suppresses freezing responses, which means it can enable courageous action in situations where fear would paralyze; justified moral outrage can motivate productive work, and anger supplies the energy necessary to write and to maintain discipline, especially for creative people who are temperamentally 'all over the place'.
“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, right? 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...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, it does for lecture, but certainly to write, but 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.”
The ability to set limits, say no, and confront people directly requires toughness and willingness to risk confrontation or escalation; many people avoid this out of fear of conflict, but conflict and confrontation are how people actually grow and develop as persons.
“Well, the abil 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 etc., etc., etc. That takes a little bit of toughness on your part. A 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 they then you set no limits and who knows what they'll end up doing. But a lot of this permissiveness is people are just basically afraid. They're afraid of any kind of confrontation. 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.”
When resentment and repressed anger build up in a parent without expression or resolution, and the parent is hung over, stressed, or emotionally depleted, they can snap and do something brutal to a child who triggers them at the wrong moment; this is how child abuse happens—not from evil disposition but from accumulated, unprocessed resentment and rage.
“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, hell at 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.”
The Nazis were 'unbelievably good at' pulling out collective emotional response through spectacle and fire; Orwell was 'courageous enough to point out' that liberal democracies lack equivalent mechanisms to harness this emotional power for good; the implication is that without positive mechanisms to generate collective sublime experience, the power gap leaves people vulnerable to dark versions.
“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."”
In competitive relationships and healthy marriages, a ratio of 5-to-1 positive interactions to negative interactions is the minimum threshold for stability; ratios above 11-to-1 are also dysfunctional because the partner never receives corrective feedback or appropriate pushback.
“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 if it rises above 11 to one, the relationship is also in danger.”
Adrian Waldridge has written books on the history of meritocracy and argues that the idea of merit itself is now under assault; his historical analysis shows that in societies without meritocratic principles—without belief in productive competence—hierarchies become structured by nepotism and hereditary aristocracy rather than by talent or effort.
“I talked to um um Woodridge Waldridge Adrien Waldridge and he wrote some books on the history of meritocracy and 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 has done was look at how societies were structured in the absence of the meritocratic ethos and so 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”
Greene's concept of power derives from Nietzsche's 'will to power'—the idea that all organisms have an innate propensity to expand themselves, influence others, and develop greater capabilities; this is not a pathological drive but a fundamental feature of human nature.
“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 a 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 u propensity for wanting to expand beyond our limits.”
Beethoven's symphonies, particularly the Fifth and Ninth, contain a kind of overwhelmingly powerful aggression and force that is sublime—the Ninth Symphony's Ode to Joy integrates terrible power with beauty, and listeners describe feeling physically overwhelmed by the experience.
“Well, when I was a kid, one of the first albums 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 God there's there's a kind of a an aggression and violence like to the fifth symphony and the ninth symphony. It just kind of you know like they used clockwork orange. There's something so overwhelmingly powerful about it, right? It just you can't section in the ninth is like that. It's so to joy.”
Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago is an example of great literature because it is 3,000 pages of sustained, screaming anger that functions like a windstorm—the emotional force is overwhelming and this force is what enabled the book to contribute to bringing down totalitarianism.
“Screaming out is exactly right. That's a great book. Screams like Souljier Nitsson's Goolag Archipelago. That's like 3,000 pages of screaming anger. It's like you sustained screaming anger for 3,000 pages. It's unbelievable.”
Competitive games like hockey integrate cooperation and competition simultaneously: all players must cooperate as a team, but the team competes against other teams, and within the team, individual contribution matters; the idea that competitive games are non-cooperative is a category error that reflects ideological fantasy rather than actual game structure.
“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 [ __ ] You're not the star. And so there's tremendous amount of cooperation in all those competitive games. They're integrated.”
Young children (around 9 months) must be explicitly taught what 'no' means through consistent behavioral training; teaching that stopping prohibited behavior results in unpleasant consequences allows parents to later give the child genuine freedom because the child understands and respects limits.
“So to teach him what no meant, I'd just grab his leg when he wasn't doing something that I didn't want him to do. And you know, he would squawk and [ __ ] and complain and I'd say no, no, no. And I'd just hold him until he gave up... 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 is if I just said no, he would just stop... And so then I could let him explore. I could give him a lot of freedom.”
Boys and men are reliably, cross-culturally less agreeable than women; this is especially pronounced in egalitarian societies where agreeableness is valued, creating a chronic mismatch between female preference for agreeable men and the need for men disagreeable enough to resist psychopathic manipulation.
“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... 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 and the manipulators at bay.”
Good parenting avoids repressing aggression and instead integrates a child's capacity for aggression into more sophisticated forms—encouraging children to be forceful, to stand up for themselves in family discussions, and to channel aggression into lucid conversation rather than punishment that simply represses the drive.
“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 like you want them to be forceful. You want them to have some power. Exactly. 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 in 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.”
The dark shadow side contains tremendous energy and power; when you deny and repress it, you lose access to that vital energy source needed for creativity, work, discipline, and authentic living; denying the shadow only produces negative consequences.
“and um you know, some of that anger, you know, I think Young talks about this is that that dark side contains a lot of energy. It contains a lot of power. those two-year-olds that 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 deny it only negative things will happen”
Deferred conflict escalates over time; it is better to address conflict directly and immediately than to avoid it, because avoidance allows resentment to build; in ongoing relationships, the cost of avoidance (escalating resentment) exceeds the cost of confrontation.
“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 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 don't just don't know what's up with them. They're really strangers. Yeah. 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 Lionus in the Peanuts cartoons...you know, if you're dealing with someone day in and day out...it's like okay, well, let's get your CV together.”
Naively dismissing the importance of collective emotional experience and spectacle as 'just superstition' is extraordinarily naive; if we pretend this human need doesn't exist, we're not eliminating it, we're leaving it unmet and vulnerable to capture by malevolent forces.
“And to think that we don't need that or that that's just superstition that's extraordinary naive. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I know. I agree. Yeah. Yeah.”
The repression of legitimate aggressive and ambitious impulses in modern education and parenting does not eliminate those drives; instead, it forces them underground where they emerge as passive aggression, resentment, and destructive psychological symptoms.
“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, etc. Setting yourself up as a victim's kind of leverage power in a negative way.”
When young people enter the workforce unprepared for hidden power dynamics and covert aggression, two things happen: they become more likely to be exploited, AND they become psychologically traumatized because the workplace reality demolishes their prior beliefs about fairness and meritocracy.
“If if you're naive in that manner, two things happen. And I was naive. Yeah. 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 you trauma sort of occurs in proportion to how much of your belief it it demolishes. And so if you have a 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 and they often will too.”
Shame about ambition and about being human—about primate nature and aggressive impulses—is partly responsible for boys failing in schools at a disproportionate rate; there is an assault on 'the better part of striving masculinity' that characterizes ambition and male assertiveness as toxic.
“So many people are just kind of embarrassed about being a human being, embarrassed about our primate nature, embarrassed about our own aggressive impulses. This is partly why boys are failing in our schools now at a disproportionate rate. You know, the the and I see this there's an assault of the sort that you're describing on the better part of striving masculinity.”
Ancient pagan religions were not based on mythology or whimsy but on creating powerful emotional experiences designed to simulate confrontation with death and the underworld; they were serious systems for helping humans face existential vulnerability and cosmic insignificance.
“There's a li that limit and experiencing the limit gives you that sense of excitement and fear at the same time. Well death is the ultimate limit... The elinian mysteries because there are mysteries because nobody ever wrote about it. There's no text. There's nothing written that we can go to... 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 the initiates to the edge of death. You made them experience death in life... And that created a whole new relationship to life.”
Two-year-olds in age-matched groups without adult supervision are the most violent humans by age cohort; approximately 5% of males at that age spontaneously engage in kicking, hitting, biting, and theft; most are socialized out of this by age four, but a proportion do not and become lifelong antisocial types.
“So, if you take two-year-olds and you group them together, two-year-olds, by the way, grouped together are the most violent of human beings in age match groups. Okay? So, among two years, 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 5% of the males.”
Psychopaths comprise approximately 1-5% of the population; agreeable people in a group setting with one psychopath will consistently be exploited because the psychopath lacks empathy and compassion constraints while the agreeable people assume good faith.
“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 3% of the population. They vary between one and five.”
Contempt between partners (manifested as eye-rolling or dismissive gestures during couple therapy) predicts divorce within 6 months with approximately 95% accuracy; contempt indicates that resentment has built up to the point of complete disconnection.
“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% chance they're going to be divorced within 6 months. And that's contempt. They've got so they've become so discom connected because they don't communicate because the resentment has built up that they now have contempt for each other.”
Neuroticism as a personality trait measures the amount of psychophysiological upset caused per unit of stress or danger; in rough environments, low neuroticism can be protective, but it is not universally advantageous because sometimes heightened reactivity (high neuroticism) saves your life.
“Well, that that dimension neuroticism, you know, if 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 uh upset caused per unit of stress. Yeah. And some or unit of danger. And some people overreact and some people underreact. Sometimes the overreaction saves your life. Sometimes the underreaction gets you killed.”
The best way to help clients find purpose is to ask them what angers or bothers them, because anger points to their values; people have limited things that violate their moral sense, and discovering those reveals their actual purpose.
“Well, that anger again, that's, you know, one of the things I did as a clinician is to help people find their purpose was to to help them find out what they're angry about... 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, right? There's something that stands out for you as, you know, something that violates your sense of moral propriety.”
Permissive parenting that avoids setting clear limits and saying 'no' does not create happier children or parents; instead it forces constant parental surveillance, generates parental resentment (which is then covertly expressed through withdrawn attention and coldness), and paradoxically trains the child for failure in settings with rules.
“So I had a lot of jobs when I was a kid... And I would have people come over to my house with their 2-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 non-stop monitoring this child and you're mad cuz you don't have a life.”
Resentment is a diagnostic signal that either you are being victimized and need to take action, or you are being neurotic and need to take responsibility; it is the key to discovering your purpose because your resentment points toward what you believe should be different.
“I had kind of an axiom, which is, well, 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 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.”
Hip-hop/rap resonates with young people (particularly young white males) who have been coddled and had their aggression and ambition shamed, because rap provides a creative outlet for the shadow energy they cannot express directly; listening to aggressive rap is a way of vicariously accessing that dark fantasy.
“That's that's really psychologically interesting, right? Because if if they've been coddled and their ambition has been squaltched 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? 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.”
A competent social worker or counselor working with difficult delinquent youth needs an integrated shadow—they must be able to see through manipulation because they have similar capacities and have integrated rather than repressed them.
“And he's a really good guy, and he likes to help people get better, but he isn't naive at all. And that part of the reason that he was good at working with the delinquents was because there were no tricks they could get up to that he couldn't see right through. And that was partly because he had a real integrated shadow.”
The world is structured so that people must navigate codes of behavior that have become increasingly strict and morally puritanical in the 21st century, while simultaneously trying to gain degrees of power and influence in their work and relationships, creating a dynamic similar to the courts of Louis XIV where courtiers had to be indirect, polite, and ingratiating to avoid the king's disapproval and subsequent banishment.
“we live in a world where this desire for some kind of power butts up against kind of codes of behavior that have gotten stricter and stricter and stricter in in particularly in the 21st century about what is acceptable about what is politically correct. So we're supposed to appear to be these paragonss of virtue, these paragonss of fairness and democracy, etc. At the same time, we're all trying to angle for different degrees of power in our work, in our relationships, etc. 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 the 14th 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.”
Peterson argues that one should prefer dealing with straightforward greedy people to manipulative underground politicians, because with greedy people you know what they want, they're 'kind of undimensional,' and you can negotiate; this is partly why Peterson admires capitalism—greed is not the worst vice.
“I'd rather deal with someone greedy, like honestly greedy than someone manipulative underground politicker because at least with the greed, well, you can negotiate with someone like that. You know what they want. They're kind of undimensional. 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.”
Milton Erickson is a figure deserving serious respect; his work on creating change and his patience and strategic employment of therapeutic techniques represent genuine wisdom that modern psychology should take seriously.
“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. And 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.”
Laughter and tears are readily interchangeable at the level of instinct; children switch from laughter to tears in no time; you can laugh so hard that you cry, and sorrow can suddenly become laughter when someone says something funny; these opposites touch at the instinctual level.
“you see that in the ease in which laughter and tears can be interchanged, right? 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 way down at the level of instinct, right? Where these Right. And it's so interesting to see the opposites touch at that level.”
Ambition is fundamentally a positive trait because it reflects self-belief, self-love, and the conviction that one's efforts can create value for others, yet modern culture teaches shame about ambition and striving.
“I've tried to remove the kind of taboo or the negative associations we have with a 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 you believe in yourself. You you you have some self-love and you believe you're worth something and you want to go out and achieve and and create something worthwhile for other people. So ambition is a 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 impulses.”
When people cannot distinguish between reckless bravado and real fearlessness, they are susceptible to being attracted to psychopathic types; young women particularly struggle to distinguish mimicked fearlessness (which hides insecurity) from genuine fearlessness (which comes with competence and generosity).
“So, here's something really interesting. Um, it's the bad boy paradox they call it that young naive women are attracted to those Machavevelian 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... is that those reckless, fearless people mimic real fearless competence. And young women aren't good at distinguishing between the two.”
A competent behavioral psychologist can break down complex behavioral problems into implementable units; this is the strength of behaviorism, which focuses on decomposing large problems into small, actionable steps.
“Well, all of his work. I just I'm 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... The behaviorists were great at decomposing something complex into implementable units, man.”
School policies preventing children from throwing snowballs or playing competitive games, framed as promoting safety and inclusivity, actually undermine both psychological health and resilience by preventing children from learning to manage aggression, competition, and conflict.
“You know, when my kids went to school, this was so dumb. I 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 right, 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... 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 PG. Yeah. A hockey game is not competitive. Exactly.”
Contemporary literature and written work often lacks energy and force because the author is not writing from genuine anger or conviction about something important; great work requires the author to be screaming, not merely describing.
“I don't know if you have the same experience, but I read so many books uh for my research, etc. And that's the main thing that I fault them with. There 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 do they have to say. Screaming out is exactly right.”
A 48th law (not fully stated) states that in a school environment where a team wins a championship, the principal who tries to claim 'we're all winners' undermines the legitimacy of accomplishment and prevents the non-winning students from having the generous experience of celebrating others' success.
“When my my son's hockey team in his school, they won the the city championship, which was a big deal, you know, and the school was pretty happy about that. to to his credit, so was the coach. But the principal who was this authoritarian empath, she was an awful person. I thought authoritarian said empath. Yeah. Well, yeah. She used more virtue as a club... She said, 'Well, really, today we're all winners.' And the and the coach had the Yeah, exactly. No, it is sickening cuz it And you know, my son was just appalled by it”
The word 'sublime' comes from the Latin root meaning 'up to the threshold of a door,' with 'sublimen' being the limit itself; thus the sublime is the ultimate limit, and death is the ultimate limit, so the sublime and death are etymologically and conceptually linked.
“and the word sublime means up to the threshold of a door or sublimmon being the limit, right? Like sub. And so um I I've been meaning to write this book for 15 years and I got distracted. But then about three years ago, I nearly died myself.”
The Eleusinian Mysteries likely involved a drug element (mushrooms, arugot/ergot, or opium poppy seeds); all kind of pagan cultures had drug-related elements in their religious practices, suggesting that hallucinogenic experience was intentionally integrated into ancient religious ritual.
“No. And of course, the Elucini mysteries probably had that drug element as well because the drink they had was either mushrooms or arrog or or opium poppy seeds poppy. So yeah, it's been demonstrated that all kind of pagan cultures had some kind of drug thing going on”
Peterson suggests that the desire to exist on the sublime edge (the border between order and chaos) is a better formulation of Nietzsche's 'will to power' and is the source of meaning itself; this explains why music is so powerful—it plays with predictable forms but continually adds unpredictability.
“I think that's a better that's a better what would you call it? Formulation than Nichch's idea of will to power is the desire to exist on that sublime edge. And that is the the border between order and chaos that you're describing. Right. you you want and the the thing 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”
Modern cultural belief that there should be no winners, everyone gets prizes, and everyone is special is naive utopianism that sets children up for trauma; children are naturally capable of celebrating others' victories without resentment, and most people are generous enough to be happy when their peer wins.
“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 your children up for for massive uh, you know, shocks when they enter the world and they see that it's not like that... 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”
Melanie Klein observed that infants and young children display what she called 'greedy baby' behavior—grasping, self-centered drives for more and more—and she tracked this into adulthood, hypothesizing a genetic component to such greed and selfishness that worsens with age if not properly managed.
“I think um 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 breath 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 try and see if you could track that to someone who got who became older was a type. And she ended up thinking that there was maybe a genetic component to this.”
The Eleusinian Mysteries were so secretive that nothing was written about them, so we know little about what actually occurred; but they were based on creating an overwhelming emotional reaction where initiates were taken to the edge of death and made to experience death in life through the story of Demeter and Persephone, which created a whole new relationship to life.
“the elinian 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 the initiates to the edge of death. You made them experience death in life, which is the story of Deaner and Pphanany. You were like making them feel as if they had gone to the underworld itself. And that created a whole new relationship to life.”
Peterson's intention with his children's book project (in collaboration with illustrator Juliet Fogra) is to use the motto 'through the darkness into the light,' conveying the idea that if you look into darkness deeply enough, you'll find something that compensates for it and emerges greater and more powerful than the darkness itself.
“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. And wow, you know, and there's this old idea that if you look into the darkness enough, you'll find something that compensates for it, right? That emerges out of the darkness that's greater and more powerful than the darkness.”
The sublime is a psychological state combining simultaneous pleasure and pain, excitement and fear, occurring when humans confront something that both attracts and terrifies them—the ultimate sublime experience is confronting mortality and the edge of death.
“A lot of the the new book that I'm writing about which is the sublime is as I'm talking about it's a combination of two emotions of of both kind of pain and pleasure of excitement and fear at the same time. Um, so you're confronting something that kind of intimidates you but is 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.”
When hierarchies are not predicated on competence, the worst people can torture competent people for their competence, creating a toxic environment; this is an observable pathology of non-meritocratic systems.
“You don't get a uto a non-competitive utopia. You get nep Yeah, exactly. You get nepatism and and this political infighting and that is like it's no wonder that affected you cuz that's that's absolutely toxic. It 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. It's really ugly.”
Real strength in intimate and other relationships comes from the ability to accept criticism, welcome when people set limits on you, and then evaluate and assess yourself to improve; without this capacity, you repeat mistakes stupidly.
“real strength comes from the ability in a relationship or any kind of of rel 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?”
Many workplaces and hierarchies, particularly nonprofits and governmental organizations, operate without clear meritocratic measurement (sales figures, performance metrics) and thus devolve into pure political maneuvering and ego contests rather than competence-based advancement.
“So when you have like a nonprofit world where it's not based on money or or or um you know results, it's more on it's you get very political environments like that where there's no kind of quantification of what what one is doing superior work than others.”
Modern culture no longer provides sanctioned channels for experiencing the sublime (awe, confrontation with mortality, integration of dark forces); this creates a vacuum that drives people toward raves, extreme concerts, and online radicalization—manifestations of the suppressed need for collective ritual experience.
“Well, that's why they go to things like raves or Astroworld 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 in pagan times.”
50 Cent's fearlessness is not reckless bravado but a deeply integrated strategic calm born partly from surviving a near-fatal shooting at age 20 that psychologically gave him the conviction 'I have nothing to fear, I almost died, bring it on.'
“He had been shot when he was like 20 years old. like nine bullets right there through a car window. Um kind of lod one of the 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.”
50 Cent, despite being a street hustler from age nine and dealing crack on Southside Queens, reported that nothing prepared him for the Machiavellian games that music industry people would play—suggesting that direct criminal experience is more intelligible and navigable than sophisticated corporate/industry manipulation.
“So, 50 Cent who I wrote the book with, he said, you know, he he dealt crack on the streets of Southside, Queens. You know, he's was a hustler at the age of nine. He saw everything, but nothing prepared him for the kind of Machavelian games that music industry people would play.”
Greene values cross-cultural and cross-status collaborations because cultural barriers between academic/popular, rich/poor, or different communities prevent communication and cross-pollination of ideas; his collaboration with 50 Cent was motivated by a belief that something interesting emerges from bringing together people from opposite backgrounds with similar minds.
“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 you never communicate and I thought it would be very interesting to write a book coming from two opposite um backgrounds. You know, me, middle-class Jewish boy from Los Angeles and him from Southside Queens, something interesting could happen from a collaboration, there's not enough of that in our culture, I believe, because even though our our circumstances were very different, our minds were very similar.”
Concerts and music provide a form of collective experience comparable to initiatory ceremonies or Nazi spectacle, but channeled toward positive ends; we have concert experiences and music but need to consciously recognize and support these as sources of the sublime.
“But the 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 Nerburgg. Yeah. And to think that we don't need that or that that's just superstition that's extraordinary naive.”
Peterson had a vision that shamanic experience—the use of hallucinogenic drugs in traditional contexts—was an antidote to 'icy northern totalitarianism'; many people currently go to the jungle and Amazon to use ayahuasca in a quest for such experiences; these practices were historically tied to primordial religions but are still poorly understood.
“I had a vision once that the the shamanic experience was an antidote to icy northern totalitarianism. You know, so many people are going to the jungle now to the Amazon to use Iawaska and that sort of thing. And there's I mean, and that certainly that drug use that hallucinogenic drug use was tied up with those primordial religions in some way. We don't understand any of that even a little bit.”
In industries where results and performance are measurable and quantifiable (like factory work), there is less politicking and people are more united around a single purpose; in contrast, in industries where success depends on money, ego, fame, and desire (like Hollywood), there is significantly more manipulation and a disproportionate concentration of agreeable-personality predators.
“So when you're working at that factory job that you're mentioning, people will tend to be kind of united around single purpose. There won't be much much politicking going on. Yeah. In an environment in an environment where Hollywood so much of it is money and ego, etc. 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 they're low in agreeableness.”
Greene's anger about how people's worlds have become tight, banal, and limited—disappeared into phones and programmed by social media—is motivating his book on the sublime; he is angry that despite the science revealing the universe's mind-blowing reality, people sleepwalk through life unaware of the awesomeness of simply being alive.
“a lot of the um impetus for the book is another little bit of anger as well because I always have to have some anger in order to feel the you know the impulse to write and 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 is just sort of programmed for them by 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 mindblowing. It's just absolutely almost in it's sublimed in my opinion. And yet so many people are just living like as if they're sleepwalking”
Peterson experienced ongoing neighbor harassment during home renovation, reached a breaking point where his fantasies turned to burning the house down, recognized this as a signal that he needed to confront the neighbors directly, went out early in the morning and made a credible threat of retaliation, and only then did the neighbors back off and apologize—demonstrating the necessity of clear assertion of force when dealing with malevolent actors.
“And the neighbors just they called the city on us. They they did everything they could to make it difficult...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 had 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 you should probably go say something." So, I took put on my park and I went outside about 6:00 in the morning and I just waited for them to come out...And I said, "Okay, 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...And so they backed into the kitchen and like 2 hours later, they came over and said, "Oh, you know, we're sorry and we won't do it again."”
The odds of any particular human existing given the improbabilities of evolutionary history and genetic combination are approximately 8 trillion to 1 or higher, yet most people live in unaware of the awesomeness of this fact and instead sleepwalk through life absorbed in social media.
“I talk in 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 just to be who we are, the odds against it are like 8 trillion to one. I mean even more than that. And but people aren't thinking about this. They're they're not aware of the awesomeness of just the fact of being alive, of the cosmos as it evolved, as as things on Earth evolve the way they are.”
Peterson had a client—a smart, competent, honest, hardworking, conscientious, diligent, attractive lawyer—who moved to a cutthroat law firm; a male colleague manipulated her by gaining her trust, then stole her biggest client through a series of manipulative actions, and when she complained, he spread rumors that she had mental health issues; Peterson and the client spent six months strategizing how to deal with him, and the strategy was successful.
“I had one client for example, I really liked her. She was smart man. Uh very very very competent, honest, hardworking, conscientious, diligent, attractive lawyer. And uh she'd moved firms and those firms can be pretty cutthroat. You know, they're full of prosecutors. What do you expect? Right. Right. and and 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 rum rumors that she had mental health issues and and oh, it was absolutely awful. So we spent about six months strategizing how to deal with him and so it was successful.”
Greene's restlessness in early employment was not evidence of failure but a product of his temperament: he was a born entrepreneur who disliked overtly political environments and the indirect power games within organizations, and he suffered for violating rules like 'Never Outshine the Master.'
“I was a very restless young man... I came out of college and I wanted to be a writer... I'm kind of a 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.”
A friend of the host killed himself partially because he identified his own ambition with patriarchal destruction of the environment and could not separate his will to strive from guilt about masculine power; he repressed his ambition entirely, which 'sucked all the life out of him.'
“I had a friend who killed himself because he identified his ambition with, you know, the the the patriarchal force that's devouring the environment, let's say, and that's a con 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 on to themselves all the time.”
An editor in a journalism job deliberately set Greene up for failure by assigning an article he knew had problems, then publicly criticized him in a humiliating lunch meeting, likely driven by envy; this experience taught Greene that ostensibly rational professional environments harbor covert aggression.
“I had a job in journalism and I wrote this article um about Italy and I thought it was a great article and then the editor um 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... 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, etc. And that he was deliberately setting me up in this situation so that he and I think a lot of it came from envy.”
A client living at home with his mother at an inappropriate age set a vacuum cleaner in his doorway and walked over it daily for a week without putting it away or vacuuming, which the host interpreted as an expression of underground resentment and refusal to comply with therapeutic directives.
“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 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 put it back and he wouldn't bring it in his room and and vacuum.”
50 Cent's music is genuinely aggressive and violent in content, and this authenticity—combined with the aura of his near-death experience and survival—creates a primal appeal that is deeply real in contrast to much rap that seems performatively fake.
“And when I was writing the war book, I was trying to get myself in a Marshall 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 be that and Beethoven... there's something very real about and very authentic in a culture where so much isn't real.”
Peterson attended a mass papal event in Nicaragua during the 1984 civil war involving approximately 100,000 people in one square, which produced a collective emotional experience of unprecedented intensity; this experience was 'frightening too' because mass emotion can be harnessed for good (the papal event) or evil (Nazi spectacles).
“I remember once I was in um 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. It's 1984, I believe. And there there was like hundred thousand people crammed in this one square. And you know I'm not by any means a Sandinista. I had no sympathy for 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 too like well that's well that's it. That's the thing. that Nazis were unbelievably good at at pulling bringing that up, right?”
Greene's books work across different 'types of thinkers' because he shows principles throughout history with contemporary examples that everyone can understand; the structure allows people with different intellectual styles to extract what they need and apply it practically.
“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 thinker is reading it, you know, 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.”
Peterson and Greene's conversation traces from Greene's investigation of power and shadow to his pursuit of the sublime—the edge where order and chaos meet, where life and death touch; this progression shows that studying the darkness and integrating the shadow leads to the experience of meaning.
“it's really interesting to me that, you know, you've you've come through your analysis of the darkness and then a consequence of that was to be motivated to pursue the sublime. You know, it's and the 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.”
Greene's aggressive and competitive shadow side is real, though masked by his agreeable demeanor; he channels this dark energy through writing—the anger and force are palpable in his work, and he cannot write effectively without accessing this emotional state.
“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. Yeah. 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.”
Peterson's friend displayed integrated shadow by wearing steel-toed cowboy boots when dealing with troublemakers at a party, kicking one in the chin when they returned to escalate conflict, then becoming a responsible person afterward; he could stand up for himself and others without hesitation but was reciprocal and trustworthy in normal relationships.
“So one day and I was living in this town called Grand Prairie and it was at the height of the oil boom and so it was a rough town and there were lots of rough bars in it and lots of young men in there with plenty of money and plenty of they come in for you know 3 days after being out minus 40 weather working on the oil rigs and they were ready to party man and we had a party one night in this kind of frat house that I went to college in and about oh way too many people showed up 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 and 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 steeltoed cowboy boots... There was a big knock on the front door... 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 him underneath the chin with his steel toe cowboy boot knocked him right over the the front porch”
Greene's new book on the sublime will include a chapter on the Eleusinian Mysteries; he creates a fictional first-person account from a woman's perspective during the 1420s plague (historically inaccurate timing) going into the mysteries and experiencing them subjectively; he recently spoke with people knowledgeable about the mysteries and revised some inaccuracies, trying to combine historical accuracy with subjective emotional experience.
“I [1:35:56] I really like the and I'm really curious about how you integrate your investigation of the Lucian Elucinian mysteries. I talked to some interesting people about that recently. And I know I had already written the piece when I heard them speak and then I I changed some things because I realized some things I written were inaccurate. But what I try to do in that is I try and I I create a character, a woman who's going to the mysteries and what it was like from her first person account. It's it's fictional, but I'm trying to actually, you know, give her a history during the the plague in the 1420s and then go into the mysteries and what it would feel like subjectively to be in there.”
About two-thirds of the 48 Laws of Power are not manipulative and contain common sense principles about power such as being generous with people, creating compelling spectacles, entering action with boldness, and managing one's image and presentation, while only some laws deal with deception; the characterization of the entire book as amoral and manipulative is a distortion.
“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.”
According to survey data, approximately 40% of millennials report feeling they have no control over their lives; this perception of powerlessness connects to Greene's thesis about the importance of experiencing agency.
“He just sent me a survey that this organization he works with has completed stating that something like 40% of millennials don't feel they have any control over their life. Right.”
Greene and 50 Cent collaborated on a book about fearlessness, distilled around 10 forms of fearlessness; the book's central insight is that 50 Cent's power comes from fearlessness, not overt aggression, and this is a quality Greene identifies as teachable and worth transmitting to readers.
“So the book that we formed together was kind of a meditation on 10 forms of fearlessness. And I found, you know, I 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.”
Greene's 48 Laws of Power was not primarily motivated by cynicism but by honest observation: having held ~60-65 jobs across diverse industries, he observed that people operate within hidden power dynamics and egotistical games that no self-help literature of the time acknowledged or prepared people for.
“I had like 80 different jobs. It's 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 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 um describing a world that I never saw existed.”
The music industry is even more pathological than Hollywood in terms of power dynamics and manipulative behavior because it combines enormous sums of money with exploitative business models—particularly of African-American artists—where producers seduce young artists with initial payments while claiming ownership of all their work.
“The music industry was even worse than Hollywood. And then I was in Washington for a book tour for the 48 Laws... people who were in nonprofits in San Diego and this woman was saying, 'Boy, you describe the nonprofit world politically. It is so so perfectly. It is so political. It's so much about ego. So it's horrible.'”
Greene experienced a near-death event (stroke) three years prior to the interview, during which he 'nearly died...driving my car...just an inch away from dying.' The experience has fundamentally altered his worldview and is informing his new book on the sublime.
“But then about three years ago, I nearly died myself. I had a stroke and um 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 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.”
Eric (Peterson's producer/team member) read the 48 Laws after seeing Greene on Tim Ferriss's show; the book helped him understand that business dynamics are similar to martial arts (which he practiced as a fighter), allowing him to recognize manipulative patterns when he entered the business world.
“Oh, man. [ __ ] Good question. Uh, that's tough. Um, there's been a few points in my life where so I I I was a fighter. Uh, that was my first career choice. I was a mixed martial arts fighter. Um, 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 cuz I've read this book and I understand this."”
Law 21 of the 48 Laws of Power states 'Play a Sucker to Catch a Sucker: Seem Dumber Than Your Mark'—the law operates by making people feel intellectually superior, which disarms their suspicion and allows you to manipulate 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... The feeling of intellectual superiority you give them will disarm their suspicion muscles.”
The host wrote a book titled Maps of Meaning, a 700-page work that required daily writing discipline for approximately 15 years and required him to quit drinking and stop having fun; the book was deeply difficult to produce.
“I wrote that book. It took me 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, Godamn it, you sit down and write this goddamn book.' I had to quit drinking. I had to quit having fun.”
Greene met 50 Cent in New York in the back room of a steakhouse as part of a collaboration, was initially intimidated by 50 Cent's reputation, but found him 'really nice and really interesting' and 'a very kind of sweet guy'—not what he expected based on 50 Cent's public persona.
“I met him in New York um kind of in the back room of the steakhouse. It was sort of like a something straight out of the Godfather. I was kind of the one white guy amongst his whole group there. I was a little bit intimidated to be honest. I didn't know what to expect because he has this reputation. Ended up he was really nice and really interesting. Actually a very kind of sweet guy. Not what you expect.”
Greene's Maps of Meaning by the host was an important resource for Greene's war strategy book, particularly the section on integrating internal conflict with external conflict; Greene read 700+ pages and found it valuable despite not fully understanding every element.
“Maps of Meaning was a very important book for me. I read it actually to help me with my war book... Your notion of conflict and integrating internal conflict and external conflict... nobody knows about that because I haven't really spoken about it, but that book was very important for me.”
The price of Greene's near-death experience was significant: he cannot take long walks, cannot swim long distances, or mountain bike—activities he loved; he is alive but at reduced capacity, with lasting physical limitations.
“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 I paid a price, but I'm alive.”