117: Robert Greene | Discovering The Laws of Human Nature

Transcript for Robert Greene | Discovering The Laws of Human Nature (Episode 117)

Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFillippo. About half a decade ago, I managed to book and interview with Robert Greene. I was super excited about the show because his work helped me make it to and through my career on Wall Street as an attorney as well as in my business. His work has not only been a perennial seller, but has stamped its influence everywhere from the Russian parliament to the US prison system. When I interviewed Robert for the seventh anniversary of my last show, he strongly encouraged me to keep going and really master the craft. I took his advice to heart, and now I'm more proud than ever to bring Robert back on the show for his new book, The Laws of Human Nature. If you haven't heard of this book everywhere yet, you will.

[00:00:44] Today, Robert and I cover some deep insight into our own nature as humans. What makes us so easy to control, take advantage of and manipulate, and how our dark side built as the result of our upbringing, creeps into everything we do as adults. If you've ever been manipulated or have seen some deep dysfunction in others or possibly even in yourself, then this episode will really open your eyes. By the way, if you want to learn how I book some of these amazing guests like Robert Greene, check out our Six-Minute Networking course. I'm teaching you networking skills, how to reach out and engage with people, and maintain relationships with a lot of people at scale. It's free. I just want everybody to know this stuff at jordanharbinger.com/course. Also, we've got worksheets for today's episode. If you want to make sure you've got all the little key takeaways here from Robert Greene, go check out the worksheets at jordanharbinger.com/podcasts. Those worksheets are always in the show notes. There's a lot to cover, so let's get started.

[00:01:40] Here's Robert Greene. So I already told you why this is a special episode for me. I really appreciate the fact -- we're sitting here in your house, which is kind of a little surreal and like I said, exactly the type of house -- this is the place I sort of imagined you writing these books.

Robert Greene: [00:01:53] How so?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:01:54] You know what? I don't know what it is, but I've been to several writers’ homes, and first of all, of course, there's books everywhere because you're researching everything. Usually there's some other form of creative expression like a piano, like you've got in the corner, whether you use it or not.

Robert Greene: [00:02:08] Oh we do. My wife is, she sings and plays the piano.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:11] There you go. So they're often married or with other creative people. And then, I figured you must do a lot of -- your books are, you know, as big as a phone book half the time, or at least a ‘90s phone book. I don't know if they still make those. Maybe they're thinner now. And so I know that there's a lot of research and so I know that there's going to be books, records, outdoor space for you to walk around, is kind of exactly how I imagine.

Robert Greene: [00:02:36] Some people come over and they're a bit surprised because they expect, they think of me as this kind of extremely wealthy sort of asshole who has a really big, obnoxious, modern home and they're kind of surprised that it's like this. They’re expecting that I'm some Hollywood celebrity with a large, glass house, you know, modern and everything.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:59] Well, that's flattering, and that’s because they enjoy your work so much, they assume you sold so much that you live in a lair now.

Robert Greene: [00:03:05] Yeah, I guess so.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:07] I think The 48 Laws of Power might have branded you a little bit as like “Wow, if he's using all of these, he lives in a cave with like nuclear missiles.”

Robert Greene: [00:03:13] Oh, is that right?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:14] I think that might be part of it. You live in a volcano lair kind of thing. Yeah.

Robert Greene: [00:03:18] Okay.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:18] It could be The 48 Laws of Power. I'm just throwing that out there. No longitudinal study.

Robert Greene: [00:03:24] Oh, I like your description of what you were anticipating, that was pretty, pretty accurate.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:28] Yeah. So I'm just sort of patting myself on the back for having guessed that of you.

Robert Greene: [00:03:32] Okay.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:32] I loved The Laws of Human Nature. I read the whole thing in about a week, devoured it, which is no small task on Audible. It's about 28 and a half hours long, 29 hours.

Robert Greene: [00:03:43] I'm sorry.

 

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:43] Yeah. You know, apology accepted. Everybody else, don't worry. 29 hours goes by like that. It's fine. What I loved about this, though, was not -- and I think a lot of people grabbed this from The 48 Laws of Power. They go, “Oh well, it's all about manipulation and stuff like that,” and you hear people, that book was big, I think in a lot of prisons, people were passing it around.

Robert Greene: [00:04:05] Rappers.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:05] Rappers, yeah, football players, and things like that, and kind of people that you would expect to be using those levers. When I look at The Laws of Human Nature, there is a lot of that, but I look at it as if we don't understand these laws, these are the fundamental concepts that push and pull us as humans.

Robert Greene: [00:04:23] Right.

Robert Greene: [00:04:24] We have to understand this about ourselves so that we're not taken advantage of by others. And we also need to understand our own weaknesses and vulnerabilities so that either we can find out when they're getting triggered, or we can possibly eliminate them. Does that sort of jive with your understanding of these materials?

Robert Greene: [00:04:42] Yeah. I like to poke holes in people's pretentions. I've been doing that for a long time. I did that kind of indirectly with The 48 Laws, but prior to that book I was working in Hollywood and everyone sort of likes to pretend they’re so liberal, so P.C., they’re so angelic in favor of all the right causes, and it's not true. Behind the doors, they're master manipulators, they're Machiavellian, they're pretty rough. And I was really irritated by that stupid image that people have of this film director or that actor. And I wanted to show, this is what power is really like, this is what people are really like, to sort of prick that bubble of pretentiousness, that air of superiority. And so this book comes from a similar place. We're all flawed, you know, we’re all evolved from the same roots and we can't control who we are into a large extent.

[00:05:46] So some of the things that are most obvious and egregious about that, like the fact that we feel very powerful emotions, they overwhelm us, and we act stupid when we're overwhelmed by powerful emotions often, is very human. And some people like to exempt themselves. They go, “Oh, I'm not narcissistic; that's the other person.” “I'm never aggressive; I'm just so sweet. It's other people who are aggressive.” “I never feel envy; that's other people,” on and on and on. And I just wanted to attack that because this is who we are. It's not to be depressing. It's actually, if you don't realize, if you don't have self-awareness, you can't possibly change yourself. Everybody wants to think they can change themselves. That's why self-help books sell so well. That’s why Tony Robbins can sell 120,000 books in one week, as Ryan told me.

[00:06:40] But the thing is, a lot of that I believe is nonsense. A lot of what's written, because it's not realistic. You're not seeing who people really are. You're not digging underneath and getting at what really motivates human behavior. So I wanted a very realistic, brutal look at the human animal. It's not all negative. We have some positive traits, but once you realize, “Oh, I am capable of feeling envy.” “Oh, I am irrational at times.” “Oh, I have a dark side.” With that awareness, you can actually finally start to change yourself instead of going around in circles or deluding yourself that you are changing when in fact you're not.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:19] Yeah, I think that --

Robert Greene: [00:07:20] Does that answer your question?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:21] Yeah, absolutely it does. I can very well attest to the fact that people are emotional and stupid. I feel like I have a lot of personal experience with that.

Robert Greene: [00:07:28] Well, so do I. Even I am not exempt from that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:31] And we're all pulled by our emotions. We're not relating to each other personally. We're sort of relating to each other based on this emotional feeling that we have that we've built up over decades prior. And in The Laws of Human Nature, you discussed, look, the person you're meeting, the person you're interacting with, they’re kind of this wad of coagulated emotional baggage, for lack of a better word, that's built up from their childhood through their teenage years, and then this is what we're projecting onto the world, and that's who we're meeting and our day to day lives. And you actually said this is liberating. Why do you feel like that's liberating?

Robert Greene: [00:08:08] What is liberating? The knowledge?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:10] The idea that we're just emotion balls bouncing around the world and not really relating to one another personally on a real level.

Robert Greene: [00:08:19] Oh, I see what you mean. Well, the liberating fact is, you go around thinking everything is personal. “Wow, that person was cold to me in that meeting.” “God damn, they don't like me. They're a bitch.” “I don't like -- something's wrong with her,” you know? You go around, everything is personal. “Oh, why did he say that?” “Why is my mom telling me this? Blah, blah, blah,” and I'm telling you, it's not personal. That's the liberating fact. People are wrapped up in their own emotions, their own traumas. They're reliving things from their childhood. They get angry at you, but you're not really the trigger. The trigger was something that happened to them when they were four or five or 20 or whatever. So to realize that it's not personal, that people are acting out of their own dramas, their own traumas, their own emotional problems from way back, it should kind of take all the burdens away from you so you don't have to react and can take things personally. It's extremely liberating to be rid of all of that emotional baggage that you assume from other people, thinking that they have something against you or that they're reacting about something personal.

[00:09:27] So that's the liberating aspect. But the thing is we're social animals to the core, right? You wouldn't be here talking without all the billions of people who created language before you, without your education, without your parents, without your teachers, they have molded you. They have made you who you are. So we are not really individuals. We are built by other people by being social. We're kind of a conglomerate of all these other interactions of relationships. And so we're really generally kind of bad at this aspect of life because we don't understand other people. We take it like a sort of a simple snapshot of people. They're nice. They're not nice. They're pleasant. They're not pleasant. They're smart or not smart. But people are infinitely complicated, complex. They have a wealth of emotions. They're going through things that you are not even beginning to see. And if you could begin to pierce their mask and get inside their psychology and understand where they're coming from, suddenly the whole game changes and what you say and how you act with them will change as well. And you will find your relationships are much more smoother, your bonds with people will be much deeper, and you'll be able to deal with those ugly, toxic types that inevitably cross your path.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:50] I think being in L.A. right now, which is kind of the West Coast headquarters of --

Robert Greene: [00:10:55] Toxicity.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:56] Lower human nature, if you will. Yeah.

Robert Greene: [00:10:58] Oh, thank you!

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:59] Yes, very nice place you have here!

Robert Greene: [00:11:02] It's true.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:11:02] But we do see a lot of that here. We see it in every big city, of course. I think L.A. gets the rap for that west of the Mississippi, possibly. And the book actually helps us focus on our higher nature so that we can avoid succumbing to the -- I feel like the lower nature really pulls on us. It's sort of the default. If we just sit in our inner tube with our hands behind our head and crack open a six pack of beer, the river of dark nature takes us towards that waterfall of the shadow.

Robert Greene: [00:11:32] Yeah. Well, think of it this way. Say you want to make something in life. You want to start a business, you want to write a book, you want to create a podcast. It takes a lot of work and that work isn't fun, right? It involves a lot of tedious detail. It involves dealing with people who aren't listening to you. They don't immediately respond to your idea. You have to deal with frustration and you have to be disciplined. That's not fun, right? And our default position in life is to always want things to be fun and easy, right? We take the path of least resistance. So when we're children, if we weren't educated, if we didn't have teachers or parents telling us to study, we'd be these monsters. I think it was the poet Coleridge, that compared it to a garden that's never tended and it just turns into weeds. That's what children would become if there was nobody educating them. That's who we would become if there was nobody instilling in us a sense of discipline.

[00:12:31] So when you're working as a 12-year-old, 13-year-old developing a work ethic and discipline, you're actually tapping into what I call your higher nature. We admire the fact that great buildings were built, great bridges, and our cities are marvels of technology, and we have museums and all this, that was built by people who were masters at their field who connected to this higher nature. They were disciplined, they worked hard. They put their energy into their work, not into getting attention and not into their ego. And so that is the higher nature that all of us have as the potential. And whenever you stop thinking about yourself and start putting your mind into your work or put your mind into other people and their problems, you're tapping into that higher nature and it feels good. It feels fulfilling. It doesn't feel fulfilling to go home, smoke pot, and play a video game. It's kind of fun and it's kind of mindless. I don't deny that. But the next day you don't feel like -- there's no sense of accomplishment.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:13:34] Yeah, true.

Robert Greene: [00:13:34] There's no sense of, “Wow, I'm doing something. I'm building something,” and we want that feeling. So that is the higher nature that I'm talking about and I'm trying to bring that out in this book. At the end of every chapter, which you could sort of say is slightly negative: narcissism, irrationality, you know, on and on.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:13:53] The book is negative, you mean? I mean you could interpret it that way.

Robert Greene: [00:13:58] Well, I mean the chapter is about kind of a slight flaw in our chemistry, right? But at the end of each chapter, I show how you can take that and turn it around, how you can take the lower nature and turn it into something positive. To give you a simple example, I believe we humans naturally feel envy. Everybody feels envy. We don't like to admit it. I'm envious that Ryan sold more, you know, is listed higher on the business best sellers on Amazon than I am.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:14:27] Ryan Holiday, who was just here. Yeah.

Robert Greene: [00:14:29] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:14:29] And you kind of mentored him early on. He fixed your Wikipedia page. He was the kid. He’s still is, actually.

Robert Greene: [00:14:35] Now he's outshone me.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:14:36] Yeah.

Robert Greene: [00:14:37] So, yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:14:37] Maybe, maybe, debatable. Sorry, Ryan.

Robert Greene: [00:14:41] Anyway, I can admit that I feel envy and so I want you to get to that same place. And where it comes from is, it's the chimpanzee in us. It's been shown that primates are very attuned to other animals in their clan, and they're constantly comparing themselves. Who's the alpha chimp? Who has more than I have? By our nature, the way our minds work, we're continually comparing ourselves to other people who, you know, they have a better job. They're making more money. Their book is selling more, et cetera. And that's the source of envy, right? I mean that's deep underneath the source of envy. But that constant comparing to people, which is so endemic on social media, has the potential to be turned into something positive. It can turn into the desire to compete and instead of envying what that other person has, to actually achieve it for yourself and to emulate great people and try and, you know, instead of envying some really good writer, why don't I become that good writer and sell enough books so I don't have to feel envy? I mean I try and show other ways, how that comparing mechanism can actually tap into our higher nature.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:15:54] Envy was the chapter that hit me the hardest. I actually just scrolled way down in my iPad notes here because I thought, oh, we may or may not get to this.

Robert Greene: [00:16:02] Okay.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:16:02] This chapter really spoke to me, and I'm almost ashamed to admit it, which actually is something that you predict in the chapter on envy, is that it's this emotion where we're so ashamed of it and we're so good at hiding it because we're ashamed of it. That even when we feel it, we go, “Oh, I'm feeling anger.” “I'm feeling self-righteousness.” “My sense of justice wants to take this person down because they're bad.”

Robert Greene: [00:16:28] Right.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:16:29] Really, it's like, “Why does he have a jet and I don't?” But then I go, “That can't be it. I'm not a child. I don't feel that way. I don't think that way.” I must be reaching up for something else because I don't want to think of myself as this lowly, envious jerkface, you know? I want to think I'm above this. So it comes out as another emotion, which makes it harder for us to be aware of in the moment and shine a light on it and scrub it out. So it's particularly insidious and dangerous, I think, for a lot of people, especially people who are achieving something because we're the ones that really -- and I should just speak for myself -- we're the ones that really think we're above that, we've worked on that, that's not an issue for us, so we don't have to think about it anymore, and yet we're probably the people that feel that some of the strongest because we're just one rung closer on the ladder where that brass ring is just right within reach for a lot of us.

 

Robert Greene: [00:17:22] Well, leaders, people who have attained the heights of power, are constantly feeling envy. I talk in the book, I have a chapter that Michael Eisner is sort of the icon for grandiosity, and he was the man who was so powerful, who ran this mega mega entertainment conglomerate, who had everything he wanted, and he had somebody working for him, Jeffrey Katzenberg, who is the head of Disney Studio. And Eisner was riddled with envy for him because he thought that more attention was suddenly going to Katzenberg than to me, people suddenly saw him as the golden boy and yet he was his boss. So bosses are often feeling envy for people who are below them. So if people who are obtaining the heights of power are riddled with envy, you can imagine what's happening to everybody else.

[00:18:13] You know, oftentimes in life, somebody will do a kind of a surprisingly ugly, nasty turn to us. They'll sabotage our work, they'll say something ugly behind our back. They’ll literally manipulate us in some way, and we'll get drawn into the emotions of that. All of them. We’ll go, “What an asshole,” or you know, and then we don't really understand where it came from. And most of the time where it does actually come from is envy. And we can't unravel that knot because we didn't see it originally. So I try and show you in the book, I don't want to make you paranoid, but I make the distinction between active and passive envy. Passive envy is what we feel every day naturally, as we look on Facebook and we see other people are having a great vacation, we go, “God, their life is better than mine, damn it.” We feel that every day and we need to admit it. It's very human. And if we don't do it, it doesn't lead to anything bad, necessarily.

[00:19:12] Active envy can happen to anybody, but generally there are people who are envier types, and I describe them in that chapter. And they're prone to feeling such strong envy that they act on it. They not only just sort of feel it, they give you a comment that is targeted to make you feel bad.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:33] Right.

Robert Greene: [00:19:33] You know, like I remember early on when The 48 Laws of Power, people would say, “Boy, Robert, you know, that book must be selling really well. You must be making a lot of money with it.” And it was sort of a form of praise, but hidden behind it was this idea that I was kind of soulless, that I was writing it for money.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:54] Right. And they're deliberately cheapening your accomplishment by saying, by relating it to something base like, “Oh, congrats on winning an Oscar, now you'll get a lot of higher-paid roles.” It's like, “Well, I did a good job in that, but thanks for ignoring that part.”

Robert Greene: [00:20:10] Right. And so you know, a couple things will happen. You'll start to internalize it. You go, “Maybe they were right, maybe there's something -- something is wrong with me,” or you'll kind of attack them or whatever. But what you don't realize is that it comes from a place of envy. They actually envy you. And if you know that, you can prepare and make sure that you don't become friends with them and you can also not take it so personally. You can see where it's really coming from.

Jason DeFillippo: [00:20:37] You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Robert Greene. We'll be right back after this.

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:11] I had a friend, this is an example that you gave in the book as well. Somebody will praise something after you've lost it. And I had a friend who, back during the mortgage crisis, had an amazing place and I mean we used to go there and hang out and it was really, really nice. And then he couldn't pay the mortgage, he was underwater and kind of let that whole thing go. And one of our other friends said, “Oh, man, that was such an amazing house! What a shame.” And I thought, “How tone deaf are you, man? You know, you don't need to kick the guy when he's down.” And he’s like, “What? I was complimenting the house.” “The one he doesn't have any more that we used to hang out in all the time! You don't think that -- “ And then we sort of noticed this pattern with this guy where he was actually, he didn't enjoy doing nice things with us. He resented doing nice things with us and we had to quickly sort of surgically remove him.

Robert Greene: [00:24:58] How did you notice this?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:24:59] We started to be aware of the pattern because I remember that comment in particular, even years later. And the guy who lost his house was pretty offended by that because he was feeling a lot of emasculation from not being able to pay his mortgage. And he was dating a girl at the time who, then, they broke up and he suspected, “Oh, is it because I lost the house?” And I thought there's probably a million things there, but you're focused on that. And this guy made a comment about that relationship and then I would go and date somebody and he'd be like, “Oh, I didn't know that Mr. Confident dated ugly women. Ha-ha!” And I was just like, you know, he's always kind of just digging right out from underneath you.

Robert Greene: [00:25:40] And people like that will tend to disguise it. To disguise it as, it's just their humor. They're just a sarcastic type. “Oh, you took it personally, can't you take a joke?” You know, but it doesn't come from just a jolly joie de vivre. It comes from, you know, an ugly place, a place where they want to hurt you. And you know, we might say, well this is kind of minor stuff, but you let somebody like that around you a lot with their little barbs all the time, it gets under your skin, it starts to weigh you down. It kind of gives you some emotional baggage. That can be kind of toxic. And then there are people who do nasty things from a place of envy that can ruin your life for years, you know. In The 48 Laws of Power, there’s a chapter on envy, it was called Never Appear Too Perfect. And I have this story of this writer, whose partner was so envious of him and his success because they were both wanting to be writers, it was Joe Orton. They ended up murdering him.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:26:40] Geez. Okay that’s extreme.

Robert Greene: [00:26:41] I know that's a little extreme.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:26:42] Yeah.

Robert Greene: [00:26:43] But you know, I had the example in this book of the relationship between the writer Mary Shelley and her friend, Jane Williams, who kind of ruined everything in her life, her relationship with her husband and her friends, out of envy. So this can be kind of dangerous.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:27:01] One of the examples in the book about how to spot envy in others that I thought was really good was when somebody gives you advice and it sounds really well-reasoned, but it's a really bad course of action and you kind of go, “That doesn't sound like a good idea. But he's so convincing.”

Robert Greene: [00:27:18] Right.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:27:18] And sometimes it's just counterintuitive advice maybe, but other times, maybe it's designed to make you fall down the stairs, but it's just really well-polished.

Robert Greene: [00:27:28] Well, people who are envious, I trace it to some, to childhood. There's a great writer, Melanie Klein, a psychoanalyst who said that there are children who are envious children. They're greedy, envious children. They envy attention that other siblings are getting, right? And they go through life becoming enviers. But people like that have learned over the years to disguise their envy. They have to disguise it in some way because if they show it, it'll turn people off and they’ll be very limited in what they can get in life. So these are masters at disguising the signs of their envy. So they'll do things like that. They'll tell you, give you advice that is meant to kind of confuse you, or throw you off, or lead you down the wrong path, on and on. There are other, you know, there are myriad disguises that enviers have, and I try and show all of them.

[00:28:26] I mean, one thing that I think is really critical is that I talk a lot in this book about nonverbal communication because I think it's a huge area in social interactions that we normally don't pay attention to. People give off a lot of information by their body language, by their looks, by their tone of voice, and enviers often can be unmasked by their micro expressions, by their tone of voice. They may be praising you and saying something good, but their tone of voice is kind of cold, and it's made to make you wonder whether there's something else going on. So I have an example here of a way to test this, whether you're dealing with an envier. If you tell them some good news about yourself, you'll see a flash of disappointment in their eyes. It only lasts like half a second, and they’ll quickly cover it over. Or if you say something bad that has happened to you, you'll see a slight smile that crosses their face. Or people who gossip a lot. That's another kind of disguise of envy. You know, they're saying bad things about other people and we all love gossip, and it's kind of juicy and fun. But it's a way to disguise the fact that they really envy the people that they're trying to bring down.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:29:45] Yeah, I think there is kind of, maybe it's not a fine line, but it seems like there's a lot of people who say, “Hey, did you hear that Jim got his car towed last week?” And it's like, “Oh, that's kind of funny.” But then I guess there's sometimes people who go, “Hey, did you hear that Jordan, his wife is really ill or something?” And it's like, “Wow, that's bad news for just all around.” There's no kind of glimmer there. But then you do find some people that they love spreading the really nasty stuff and it's a little uncomfortable, I think, if you're not that type of person because it's just a little bit too bad of news, well to be shared widely.

Robert Greene: [00:30:24] well think of it, if you have a friend and you heard that their podcast or book, whatever, got some negative reviews, nasty reviews, would you be the first one to go and tell them? What would be your first reaction? Your first reaction would be, “I want to kind of shelter them. I don't want them to hear about this,” or “I want to break it to them in a nice way.” Your first reaction isn't, “God damn, I’ve got to share this piece of bad news with them.” You feel bad for them.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:30:52] Yeah, I guess it's, it depends on how bad the review is, but yeah. If it's a new show and somebody writes, “This guy shouldn't be doing a show,” I'd probably say, “Look, you're going to see this eventually. Don't listen to this idiot.”

Robert Greene: [00:31:05] Okay.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:31:05] “There's going to be 800 people that love what you're doing. You're only going to hear the negatives.”

Robert Greene: [00:31:06] Well, you can tell the difference between that and an envier by the fact that they don't qualify it like that, and that the fact that there's a slight, almost slight bit of joy that they have in reporting this bad news to you, right? So I got that. I get that all the time where people, when somebody is in a hurry to tell me bad news, I think there's something else going on.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:31:30] That's interesting: in a hurry to tell you bad news. I'm thinking of all the people in my life right now that call me on Saturday night to go, “By the way, did you hear about either someone else,” or, “Hey, guess what? I've got something that I could have told you on Monday that's going to be disappointing, but I thought I would deliver it to you at 8 p.m. on a Saturday night, just because you're probably in the middle of your dinner.”

Robert Greene: [00:31:49] Who are these people?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:31:50] Yeah. I mean, I know some people like that, you know? And now I'm like, “Hmm, what other things are they doing?” Because usually these same people, they've got kind of clumps of behavior where I go, “Why do I put up with this guy? This is the guy who barfed in my car for the third time because he can't control his drinking. What is with this person?” Or, “This is the guy who's always late. They clearly don't respect my time, and it just so happens to be the same guy who might do the 8 p.m., “Here's some bad news” call. And it's strange because they're the same people -- some of these same people are super generous in other ways, but I think they can't help themselves. Is that possible?

Robert Greene: [00:32:30] Yes. I think that's possible. And a lot of that I would call more like the passive envy type. First of all, people are complicated, so no one ever really feels pure envy, right? It's always mixed with other things. I want you to get over your simplified idea of people. Their anger is not just purely anger. Their love and affection can also be mixed with a bit of resentment and hatred and envy. So people are more complex than you think. And I have the story that I used in the book of a woman who befriended this writer in order to kind of sabotage her in the end, but mixed in with her desire, her envy, was actual admiration, was actually a bit of affection. So that can be doubly confusing.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:33:15] That’s so strange.

Robert Greene: [00:33:16] And in fact, envy is most common among friends and among people in the same profession. And you don't really expect it from friends, you expect something else. Yeah, so the friends who are telling you these things, they can still be your friends. They can still be nice and generous. But there's also an undercurrent where they're envying your success. And in that kind of situation, I kind of preach tolerance. I don't think you should necessarily break off a relationship, or you know, think that this person is going to ruin your life in some way unless you have signs that there's something else going on. I believe you should just sort of accept it, this is what we were talking about, the liberating aspect. “I'm doing really well, me, Jordan Harbinger, my show's doing well. I'm successful,” et cetera. And maybe they're not doing so well or maybe they have things in their life that's not clicking and they're feeling some envy. All right, I'm not going to take it personally. I'm going to appeal to my higher self. I'm not going to get drawn into their drama and getting all emotionally perturbed about it. So that's another aspect of it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:34:24] You have the five envy types in the book. I thought these were fascinating. We don't have to go over all of them. People can buy the book. We're going to link to it in the show notes. It is a long book. We can't possibly go over everything. But I love the idea that there are these different types of envious people, or enviers. I don't know if that's a noun.

Robert Greene: [00:34:43] It’s the word I used.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:34:44] Enviers?

Robert Greene: [00:34:45] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:34:45] Okay, great. Good. Then we're on the same page there. The one that really struck me was the leveler, where it's, “I'm just trying to make sure everyone's getting their fair shake by bringing down the guy who got to the top in some unfair way.” And I'm like, crap, that, sometimes, when my envy comes out, it sometimes comes out like that, where I love busting frauds and scammers, especially if they're taking people for a ride. But I think the origin of that is, “Look at this guy who got a jet by screwing people over.” I'm not just trying to protect the little guy. There is a lot of that. Part of it is, “Look, if I work, I could have gotten a jet if I was just an unscrupulous bastard, but then I'd be an unscrupulous bastard.” So I've got it out for that guy.

Robert Greene: [00:35:29] Right. So what you're doing there is you're looking at yourself and you're digging underneath and seeing maybe that the root of it was this little pang of envy that you were feeling. And that's very important to be able to do that, and it's not easy, if you have to be kind of brutally honest with yourself.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:35:45] It's uncomfortable.

Robert Greene: [00:35:46] It's uncomfortable. But the leveler is a type that generally is quite sarcastic, can have a very good sense of humor, and they seem to have a high sense of justice. They're always after the big guy, therefore the underdog. They want to right this wrong, et cetera. And there are people who are genuinely like that, who are good at that, but it doesn't mix with this kind of savage humor, this kind of sarcasm. And so a lot of people like this, they're just -- enviers wear disguises; this is a disguise of, “I just want everybody to be the same. I don't like people who are successful because I think they're ripping people off,” and it can seem kind of like a good appearance, that's a good person, therefore, the underdog. But really at the root of it is some ugly, ugly envy, and they can cross your path and you'll find that that sarcasm is suddenly directed at you and it can kind of have an effect -- a bad effect.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:50] I've got to keep it in check a lot. Luckily I --

Robert Greene: [00:36:52] Oh! For you.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:54] Yeah.

Robert Greene: [00:36:54] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:55] Yeah. I've got to keep it in check, myself in check a lot, I guess. And my wife does a good job of that too, where sometimes she'll be like, “You've just crossed the line.” She says this in a more tactful way, but it's kind of like, “You just crossed the line from being like, ‘Look at this thing that this person is doing that's bad’ to you're kind of obsessing over this thing that this person is doing that's bad. It doesn't affect you. Maybe you should go take a cold shower on this one.”

Robert Greene: [00:37:17] But the thing is, what I want is, I don't want people to be weighed down by this book and to feel guilty. “Oh, man, I'm such a bad person, I’m feeling envy.” The fact that that happens to you is totally human and totally natural, and it shouldn't depress you or make you feel like you've got to completely change yourself. Just by the fact that you are aware of it is almost enough. You know? So it won't turn into this sort of ugly, active envy that I'm talking about. But most of the people around you who are ugly enviers have no self-awareness. They don't think of themselves as ever feeling envy. They feel that their sabotaging you is justified because they've convinced themselves that you're an asshole that deserves something bad. But the fact that you can recognize the root of it is already enough to prevent you from going into that deep, ugly place.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:07] So if we can't really get rid of it, we can just become aware of it. How do we get closer to what we envy to generate that awareness? Do you have any idea how we can implement this? Like there's somebody listening right now, or watching right now, that's going, “Oh shoot, I've done this to my brother's sister, niece, nephew, child, husband, coworker. This is me.”

Robert Greene: [00:38:32] Yeah. Well, what do you exactly ask?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:35] I would love to find out how people can shine a light on this and generate self-awareness. Is it just looking or reading the book, looking at this interview and going, “Okay, I do that,” because I feel like there's another step in there where people go, “I'm not doing that. That person really is bad. I'm not envious. He’s a scumbag. Why would I envy him?”

Robert Greene: [00:38:53] Well, you have to be first willing to be honest with yourself and to want to change this part of your character. But look at these sort of strong moments in your life where you really hated somebody and maybe you acted on it, or you said something kind of insulting to a person. We've all done that, and you will tell yourself originally they triggered it by their actions.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:39:17] I was just going to say, I haven't done that, but they deserved it.

Robert Greene: [00:39:19] Right. I want you to go back and start seeing what might've been a different scenario, where you might've felt a pang of envy. So as you say, even with the con artist who cons people, there's a degree of “God damn, that guy got away with it.” That's pretty interesting, you know? There's always usually a root of that. Even with somebody that you hate, or really despise for some reason, there's a little spark of envy where you kind of admire the fact that they got away with something that you couldn't get away with. So you've got to dig back and look at the actual causes of it. But look at those moments in your life in which you felt a very powerful negative emotion towards a person, and try and see if, instead of going and kind of reverse engineering it, you can go back to the moment and see the original sense of envy that you might've had.

[00:40:11] Keep this in mind. An ancient writer going back to seventh century BC, Hesiod said, “The potter envies the potter. The writer envies the writer.” And what it means is you're going to envy people who are in the same situation or boat as you. I don't envy my carpenter who got a great new job working on a house because I'm terrible with my hands, I couldn’t care less. I'm happy for him. But a writer who’s suddenly 55 on Amazon while I'm at 77, I'm going to feel envy for. So look at the people in your profession, your dislike of that fellow artist or that other podcaster, 99 percent sure that it comes from a place of envy, right?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:40:55] For sure, yeah.

Robert Greene: [00:40:56] So those are kind of signs of it. And then from there, from that place, and that degree of honesty, I should give you tips and strategies for how to alter that envy into something, another dynamic. So for instance, you're always envying people who have more than you, who are doing better than you, but there's billions of people on this planet who are doing a lot worse than you, right? The opposite of envy is gratitude. Where you feel grateful for what you had as opposed to envying what other people have. And without getting too Pollyannish about it, you can always feel grateful for the fact that you're alive, that you're healthy, that you've got your brains and your wits about you, that you've got a decent job, that you have some people in your life. Why don't you look at the people who have a lot less than you, and instead of feeling envy for those who are better, why don't you feel grateful for what you have?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:52] So we downward compare instead of upward compare.

Robert Greene: [00:41:55] Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:55] That will trigger the gratitude. Because I think for a lot of us, especially in the social media age, we're just comparing our, I know I say this a lot to the audience, that we're comparing our blooper reel to their highlight reel. We're comparing us sitting on the toilet feeling sick, you know, on a hangover Sunday with someone's Instagram feed where they’re in Bali surfing and the picture's been airbrushed and color corrected. We’ll go, “My life sucks!’

Robert Greene: [00:42:21] Well, that's the other thing I try to say. That's another tip in there in that chapter. People are not nearly as happy and successful as you think they are. They only present those happy moments on Bali on their Facebook feed. They're not showing the angry little bitter fight that they had with their girlfriend two hours before in which she left, you know, saying, “You asshole! I’m leaving you!” kind of thing. They're doctoring their image that they present to show the best parts of their life. I talk in the book about how we envy really wealthy people, and who was the wealthiest person in the world in the 1960s? It was Aristotle Onassis, and I read about him in this Jacqueline Kennedy biography. He was the most miserable man on the planet. He was so fucking insecure. He was just a nightmare to deal with. So if his billions couldn't buy him just an ounce of happiness, then these people that you envy aren't really worth envying, right? They're not really as happy as you think they are.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:43:24] Yeah, yeah. I've talked to a lot of people, usually I'll get a couple of whiskeys in them or something and I'll say, “What are you struggling with right now?” And they usually hesitate to answer, but if you get somebody on a good day and you get an honest answer out of them, it snaps you right out of your envy box a lot. And it could be something as simple as, “I'm really worried about my mother's health,” and you go, oh, geez, well I'm not, so that's good that I don't have to worry about that. Or just something like, “Yeah, my business isn't doing that well,” and I'm thinking, I'm on your yacht right now. What are you talking about? And you know, but there's people who will worry about all of these things and you have no idea because they're not going, “Here's all this stuff that's going wrong in my life.” You know, you're sitting on their boat, they don't want to bore you with it. They don't want to bring that out.

[00:44:08] And I think that's been important for me personally to realize, especially as we rebuild the business from zero this year, that I'm going, oh, the progress is so slow. It's quick, but it's slow. And there's other people that have been doing business for eight years instead of eight months that are thinking, I wish I could be at the level where you are right now.

Robert Greene: [00:44:25] That's right.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:44:27] That's important, the downward comparison is important, because we think, why would I downward compare? I’m trying to get there, not there. Why am I looking backwards, not forwards? But you have to do that to stay grounded.

Robert Greene: [00:44:37] Well, it's a balance. It's a game because you could downward compare and get complacent like, “Well, you know I'm actually doing fine.” You want to be challenged. You want to see people who are doing better and to emulate and to get up to their level, but you don't want that to crush you and to be the only thing that motivates you because that can be kind of ugly and soulless. You need to get satisfaction from the work itself. But emulating people who have more can be a positive thing as long as it leads to action, as long as it leads to pouring your energy into your work and not into bringing other people down, right?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:11] Right. Yeah, I completely agree and I love this concept. Again, that was the chapter that hit me the most, and it all goes back to the concept of rationality that you discuss in The Laws of Human Nature, which is we cultivate rationality to avoid being led around by our emotions, and I'm kind of imagining my emotions as this entity that kind of takes you by, what's that thing they used to do in the old days at school? They’d like, stick their fingers up your nose and sort of drag you along, it’s like a --

Robert Greene: [00:45:38] Well, what elementary school did you go to?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:39] Not at my school! I feel like this is some sort of like 17-1800s Catholic school thing where they would drag you by your nose.

Robert Greene: [00:45:46] Wow.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:46] You’ve never seen this?

Robert Greene: [00:45:48] Through your nostrils?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:49] Yeah. Am I making this up? I feel like this was a thing they did to punish kids.

Robert Greene: [00:45:54] I’ve never heard of that.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:55] Oh, my God. I could be making this up.

Robert Greene: [00:45:56] Never read about it. Never happened to me.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:57] Well, we're going to have to do a little Google on that one. Maybe I just saw it in a movie and I thought it was real, but we do this. We cultivate rationality to avoid being led around by our emotions, which are kind of like this bratty child that seems to be --

Robert Greene: [00:46:09] That kind of takes you by the nose.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:46:10] Takes you by the nose. Yeah, exactly. And the problem is we think we're rational, a lot of us do anyway, but we're not. And it's a learned and practiced skill. I think a lot of people think, “I'm rational. I'm very calm, I'm not emotional. I'm very measured.” And sometimes those are the most emotional people around, because they have no awareness around this.

Robert Greene: [00:46:28] Yeah, it's law number one of irrationality. It's called master your emotions, because I think it's the most dominant trait of the human animal. I mean, basically, I don't want to bore people with science, but the neuroscience of emotions is kind of interesting. Emotions evolved among animals millions of years ago. Reptiles actually have a fear response, they’re the first sort of sign of the evolution of emotions. So there's a very, very ancient system and it's designed to make you aware of a danger or problem in your environment and take action. But animals feel an emotion. This is a chemical and bioelectrical process that goes on in the body, adrenaline, et cetera. And then it passes. They feel fear, and five minutes later it's gone.

[00:47:23] We humans inherited this emotional system. It's part of our brains, the lower part of our brain that governs it. But we also have thinking. And what ends up happening to us is we feel that emotion and we can't get rid of it. We feel that fear and it stays with us. And we think about that fear and we think about it, and it turns into an obsessional thought. This is what turns us irrational. So we think that we have a thought or an idea that just comes from some super or out-of-body type of idea that's just perfect and clear and rational when we came to it. But in fact, 99 percent of the time we feel an emotion, anger, joy, excitement, and that emotion causes us to think about it. And in thinking about it, we rationalize it, and we come up with something to justify our emotions.

[00:48:19] So when you think you're being rational, you're not being rational at all. You're feeling an emotion and you're thinking about it and you're trying to justify it in some way. You have no access to your emotions. You don't know why you feel anger. It comes up in a part of your brain that is not connected to the cognitive part of the brain. So when you feel that anger, it doesn't say -- your brain is not able to go, “Ah, I can see clearly down to the source of why I'm angry.” You have no idea why you're feeling angry. You have no idea why you're suddenly excited by things. It's a mystery to you and you grab things immediately in your environment to say, this is what triggered it, this is what caused my anger, this is what made me excited. But you don't know. You're not sure about the source of it.

[00:49:09] So your emotions are dominating you all of the time. You don't see the source of them. You're not aware of what's actually triggering them. You have a stranger inside of yourself. I call this person the emotional self. You don't understand this person, you're not seeing it, and it's kind of driving your behavior. People in marketing understand this more than anyone. People who deal with economic behavior. They know that people buy things irrationally and then later explain to themselves why they bought it. There's a standard bit of wisdom in psychology that if you liked something once or bought something once, you are continually prone to buying it again and again and again and again, but you'll justify it to yourself like, “I like that product, it's a better product,” when in fact it's not a better product but you are trained to like something once and feel like you were justified in liking it, and therefore you have to like it again.

[00:50:11] If you were suddenly confronted with the fact that what you bought was an inferior product, it makes you think, “Well, maybe I'm stupid. Maybe I didn't make a rational choice.” You don't want to think like that. So people in marketing know that if they can get you to like something once, you'll keep returning over and over and over again. We are irrational. Our buying habits, what we like, our political choices, are governed by our emotions. And if you're going around thinking that you’re rational, that this isn't the case, then that's very dangerous. The most dangerous people are those who are convinced that they know what is right and are not aware of how much they're being driven by something that they're not aware of. So I made this law number one because I want to drum it into your head: you are not a rational being. Rationality is something you earn. It's a struggle. It takes effort. It takes awareness. You have to go through steps, you have to see your biases. I cover in this chapter various biases. Being aware that you are irrational by nature, you can suddenly start becoming rational. You can suddenly start finding a different way of dealing with your emotions and not letting them govern your life.

[00:51:23] So for instance, we all have the confirmation bias. I have it as well. When you're trying to write a book or whatever like I do, I have a bias toward this is what I think human nature is about. So I will go and find the books that confirm what I already believe. If I'm a Trump supporter or a Democrat, I find the news or the information that will confirm what I already want to believe. If you're aware that you are suffering from this confirmation bias, then you can begin to operate against it. I know that I have a negative view of human nature, so what I need to do in my research is compensate for that and read books by people who are more optimistic about human nature. So I compensate for my confirmation bias. By being aware, you can start suddenly becoming rational.

Jason DeFillippo: [00:52:15] You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Robert Greene. We'll be right back after these messages. Support for the Jordan Harbinger Show comes from our friends at Rocket Mortgage by Quicken Loans, America's premier home purchase lender.

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[00:53:38] Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps us on the air to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard. Visit jordanharbinger.com/deals, and now for the conclusion of our show with Robert Greene.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:53:54] I can imagine that writing something like The 48 Laws of Power, you might have to come up and be like, “I need some good news today. Where can I go and see some people having fun or being happy and not undercutting and backstabbing each other?” when you're buried in that kind of research.

 

Robert Greene: [00:54:10] Yeah, actually I had a lot of fun writing The 48 Laws of Power. It was not depressing at all, because I was able to get out all of my spitefulness about people. I operate by a lot of anger. I have anger. Yes, I do. Anger and resentment about people, particularly as I said earlier, about people's holier-than-thou mentality where they think they're so superior. I really want -- I guess I’m a leveler. I really want to pierce that sense of superiority that people have. So writing The 48 Laws of Power was great fun for me.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:54:44] Yeah. So we're both levelers; that must be where we get along so well.

Robert Greene: [00:54:47] Yeah, that's true.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:54:47] I'm not trying to cut anything in front of kind of, where we're both trying to cut out other people. I got you. Yeah. It's good to be aware of that. It is so interesting and I love the the fact that animals feel fear and it goes away, that was like a brilliant switch that went off when I read that because humans, we dwell on that fear. Not only does it stay with us for a while and influence our actions and causes to do things, but we actually use it to write rules about the way we'll react to something the next time it happens. So when have this happen as a kid and we're afraid of, I don’t know, not being seen. It's like this little line that gets jotted. This line of code that gets jotted into your operating system shows up when you're a teenager and then you really lean into athletics so that you get some attention and since you're getting attention, you're using it to get women and such. Getting women is making you feel good, so you get addicted to that. And then dot, dot, dot, you're trying out for parts in NCIS Chicago in L.A.

Robert Greene: [00:55:42] I did follow all that. That was brilliant!

Jordan Harbinger: [00:55:44] That's where I took it. That's where I took it.

Robert Greene: [00:55:47] Interesting.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:55:48] Just because these little seeds get planted based on my dad was never home, so it must mean that I'm not worth seeing. Well, I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to prove that I’m worth seeing.

Robert Greene: [00:55:57] That’s right.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:55:58] “Look at me, I'm on TV now!” and your dad goes, “Why didn't you become a carpenter? Do something useful.” And then you're just -- the rift is still there.

Robert Greene: [00:56:04] Right.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:56:05] I can see that in a lot of people.

Robert Greene: [00:56:07] Yeah. I have an example in there that I used where, let's say you're a boy and your mother is kind of cold to you. Isn't as loving as you'd want. Is a bit narcissistic. And as a child you experienced that as she abandoning you. She wasn't giving you something that you wanted, and it created tremendous fear like you were talking about the three-year-old, like an adrenaline rush of fear that you are about to be abandoned by the one person who can keep you safe in the world. And then you grow up as this person who carries that deep within, this continual fear of being abandoned by other people, right? And that motivates everything that you do. And then later you're in a relationship with a woman and she just says something with sort of an edge of coldness. Maybe she's in a bad mood and you interpret it, “She's about to abandon me; she's losing interest in me.” And you overreact and you get emotional and you end up breaking up the relationship. You're not aware of all of these little hidden layers of things that are occurring inside of you. You're not aware of the source, that you are the one causing other people to flee you because you're afraid that they're going to abandon you. You have to abandon them first, so you feel like you're in control. It becomes the pattern of your life. It's irrational, but you don't see it that way. You see in that moment when she was acting cold, “Man, I'm the most rational person in the world. I'm anticipating her leaving me. What could be more rational than I realized she's going to abandon me, and I'm going to break it off?” But you don't realize that it's extremely irrational and that it comes from a very emotional place.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:57:52] I used to work with somebody that was abandoned by their mother as a child, and what he would then do is try to control everyone around him, which drove us all crazy. And as soon as someone started doing what he didn't like, he would try to socially isolate them, not invite them to things, make them feel bad. And when that happened to everybody turn by turn, we just decided we’d had it with this guy.

Robert Greene: [00:58:14] How did you know this about his childhood?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:58:15] He told us eventually, yeah, and I never really put those two things together, but when I read The Laws of Human Nature, I went, “This is what he's doing.” He's trying to control people so they won't abandon him. He's forcing them to feel abandoned when they don't do what he wants because he knows that's what hurts the most, or at least in his world. Then he uses that to control, but normal or healthier people, or people who don't have that programming, we don't respond well to that. We just go, “This guy is a crazy ass!”

Robert Greene: [00:58:42] You see, this is the process that I'm asking you to go through when you're reading this book. This is how I'm hoping the book will change you. You probably already thought this way to a degree, but normally you go through life reacting to what just people give you. You see that boss who's a control freak and you get emotional and you get sucked into all the drama and you’re continually responding to the appearances that people present, not realizing that something else is going on in their head behind the mask. And when you suddenly start to peel away the layers and understand what motivates people and see that, at the root, could be some childhood trauma or some other issue they're dealing with, suddenly it changes, right? You now have options. You now realize, “I don't have to get emotional. Maybe this isn't somebody I want to work for.” You have options in life and that's the key to this game. Instead of always reacting to people, in which you have no options, that's the only thing you can do is get angry or resentful or envious. I'm showing you, you can go one of three or four ways. You can cut that person out of your life. You can not take them personally and say, “Oh, that's just who they are. That's fine.” You can find a way to kind of minimize the damage that they're doing by becoming strategic and taking certain actions to prevent them from harming on and on and on. You have options in life instead of always reacting emotionally.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:00:03] I love the idea of resisting emotional pull. This is from the book as well. It's like resistance training. When you feel, “I really want to do this with this person or I'm really excited about this. I really want to hire this person.” Maybe step back and resist it for a little while, because resisting our emotions is like lifting weights. It gets easier after a while. It's so tempting in the moment to go, “No, no, no, we're good. This is great. I'm going to sign on the dotted line. Let's get married in Vegas” kind of thing. And then that resistance that you build, that ability to resist your emotions, is actually quite a good skill to have.

Robert Greene: [01:00:39] Yeah. You know, I don't want to create a misconception that I suddenly think that I feel that emotions are bad.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:00:45] Of course. Yeah.

Robert Greene: [01:00:46] It would be ridiculous to say that, because our ability to think is interconnected with our emotions. Einstein discovers the theory of relativity because he's so excited and emotionally involved in solving this problem that he's able to think about it. So hour after hour, if you're not motivated and love something, you're not going to learn about it. Emotions play a very valuable part in our life. We are very emotionally rich animals. People like to think that what separates us from a dog or a cat is that we think, but actually you can say what separates us from the dog or the cat is that we feel a range of 20, 30 emotions that they're not even able to think, to process. And that's what makes us human.

[01:01:30] So emotions aren't necessarily bad, but who is governing the ship? There's a metaphor I use in the rationality chapter of the rider on the horse. The horse is your emotions. It is more powerful. The horse is more powerful than the human animal. It's faster, it's stronger, it's more powerful. We are the rider on top of it. Is it the horse that's governing it, taking us everywhere we want without us controlling it at all, making us get into porn and going into video games --

Jordan Harbinger: [01:02:04] That damn horse.

Robert Greene: [01:02:05] And dating the wrong people and making bad decisions? Or are we the rider that has the reins that can master that horse? Mastering that horse doesn't mean beating it to death and making it stand still. You want that horse to move. It's active, it's alive. It's powerful. Think of all the things that we've been able to do once we learn how to use horses, in war, et cetera. You want that animal to be able to move, but you want to be able to guide it. You want range, you want a degree of control. You want to be a bit of a master of your emotions so you can use them. You use that example of choosing the wrong person to marry, like, “I'm going to marry her in Vegas,” which you just met.

[01:02:46] One of the most important chapters in the book is about the ability to judge people's character, right? The ability to see deep within them and to see that core of their being and what governs their behavior, and what makes them repeat the same kind of patterns of behavior over and over again. And when you’re constantly going around just reacting to what people do, looking at their face and getting charmed by them or getting pissed off about them, you're not seeing what's really going on. And so you'll end up hiring people because they're charming or pleasing or have a good resume, or you'll end up marrying someone because they flatter you and they make you feel good about this or the other. And then you get into the relationship and you see something really ugly and dark that you hadn't anticipated and you blame them for deceiving you. But in fact, the source of the problem is you. You're not able to judge people's character. You're simply reacting to the appearances they present. So that's another bit of resistance training you're talking about.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:03:49] How do we assess or begin to assess character via someone's behavior? That's a huge question, I realize.

Robert Greene: [01:03:57] Well, understand that people, I say in this chapter, people never do anything once. We are compulsive animals that continually repeat the same behavior, right? I know in writing my books, I'm writing my fifth, this is my sixth book. I'm like, “Damn it, I'm not going to repeat this.” I'm not going to make 8,000 note cards with extraneous information, stop wasting my time. And what do I do? I do it again. I create even more note cards. I fall into the same pattern. I can't control it. It's compulsive. There's something deep within it. I could trace it back to something in my childhood, some insecurity, some need to do more than is required in my work, but I have patterns I can't control. Everybody around you has these kinds of patterns. I say that there's something genetic about it. It's in their DNA. It's how their brains are wired. They can't help doing certain patterns. And it's also their childhood, their parents, their upbringing, the level of attachment with their parents. There's something very deeply ingrained in their character and you want to have the ability to assess it.

[01:05:09] So first of all, particularly in a relationship, whether you're hiring a business partner or romantic relationship, you want to be able -- you looked at Jen!

Jordan Harbinger: [01:05:21] I’m looking at my wife just to see if she's paying attention. Hopefully she's not paying attention to this part.

Robert Greene: [01:05:28] You want to pay extra attention to patterns you've heard from them in the past. If Jen tells you that her last boyfriend was such an asshole who abused her and she got rid of him, but then you also discover the same thing about the prior one and the one before that, you might begin to think that maybe she's not telling the right story. Maybe it's something having to do with her own behavior that has been causing this, right? So you want to see patterns that people reveal. No one ever is completely opaque. You can see the patterns from what they've done in the past.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:06:03] You don't mean causing abuse, but filtering in people who are abusive, potentially?

Robert Greene: [01:06:09] Yeah. I guess I said that wrong, but let's say --

Jordan Harbinger: [01:06:11] I just wanted to clarify that so people aren't like, “Robert Greene thinks that people who are abused, it's their own fault!”

Robert Greene: [01:06:17] No, no, thank you!

Jordan Harbinger: [01:06:18] You're welcome. We've been down this road before, right?

Robert Greene: [01:06:21] No, and that's definitely not true, but there are some people who deliberately attract the wrong person in their life.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:06:30] For sure.

Robert Greene: [01:06:30] So that they can have lots of drama and can complain about it, and then you’ll only see the drama and you'll see them complaining. You won't realize that they're actually partially or completely the source of the drama that's going on, so thank you for that correction. I don't mean to imply.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:06:44] Of course. Yeah. I think most people understood that, but I just want to highlight it for everyone else.

Robert Greene: [01:06:50] Okay, okay.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:06:51] You do have different types of characters that you outline. I don't know -- is character the right word? It's kind of like spotting these different archetypes. Are these people dangerous? How do we identify our own? I would love to hear more about these archetypes, because I think whenever we have categories or characters we can assign, it's easier to put people in buckets than to have all these nebulous values that magnetize to them.

Robert Greene: [01:07:14] Well, I'm kind of obsessed with typology, with figuring out what kind of type of person is, and seeing commonalities with other people that I've known in life and that I've read about in history. And so I make the case that some people are toxic. And what I mean by that is they have deep levels of insecurity and issues stemming from a troubled, damaged childhood, usually. And they have patterns that are pretty negative and destructive. They have a need to sabotage other people or just sabotage themselves. And getting involved with someone like that can really ruin your life. You get sucked into their dramas, they kind of control the dynamic. They feed off of controlling you by all of the emotions that they can stir up. So I want to give you a kind of a roadmap for identifying some of these toxic types before they become entangled in your life. You know, see some classic signs of that.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:08:21] What's maybe the most dangerous or the most common/dangerous that you see?

Robert Greene: [01:08:26] You know, I talk in the narcissism chapter about the deep narcissist, and I maintain in this book that we're all self-absorbed by nature, and I explained why we're self-absorbed, why we are all narcissists. This is a concept that people don't automatically accept. In fact, I think a lot of people resist. We want to think, “That's the narcissist out there. Donald Trump. He's a narcissist, but I'm not.” No, we're all narcissists. We are all on that spectrum. We all think first and foremost of ourselves, but some people are so low on the spectrum, they're so deeply narcissistic that they cannot ever rise up, they can't think of other people. Their need is to constantly have attention. So normally our way of dealing with our own self-absorption and our own need for attention from other people is to create a self that we love, that we respect. We like ourselves to some degree. We think that we're worthy of something, and whenever something bad happens, we're at least able to revert to this idea that we're actually a person that is good, that we love.

[01:09:36] A deep narcissist doesn't have that sense. They can't get attention or validation or a feeling of security from themselves. It can only come from other people. So they become masters at getting attention from being very dramatic, from stirring up a lot of trouble, so that the attention comes to them. And they can be extremely dangerous once you get entwined with them, because people who are deep narcissists don't view you as a human being. They view you as an object that they can use to further their agendas, and so they can cause a lot of trouble in your life.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:10:16] Here's something that I picked up from the book that really kind of, what's that feeling called when you read something or you see something and an alarm bell goes off and you go, “Oh yeah, I've seen a lot of that and I’ve possibly done some of this.” It's like nostalgia --

Robert Greene: [01:10:30] An epiphany?

 

Jordan Harbinger: [01:10:31] Yeah. Maybe. It's almost like bad nostalgia, kind of --

Robert Greene: [01:10:34] I’m not following you. I wonder what this word is.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:10:37] Yeah. I don't know. Maybe I'm making this up. I'll tell you the example though.

Robert Greene: [01:10:41] Okay.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:10:41] You wrote that we always have to work with other people when we're influencing somebody or we're relating to somebody, we always have to work within their self-esteem or their concept of self, right?

Robert Greene: [01:10:51] Self-opinion.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:10:52] Yeah. And if they think they're worthy or they're not worthy, we have to agree with this. So if someone thinks, “I'm not a good person, I'm not worthy, I have low self-esteem,” we can't convince them otherwise, and they'll be attracted to people who confirm this opinion of themselves. And I saw this when I used to go out a lot and I used to teach other guys -- men and women, for that matter -- dating skills and things like that. And we used to go out to bars early, 10 years ago, in my 20s. I actually found this truth out in kind of as -- it was sort of a sad truth for me because I realized that I would talk to a lot of healthy, cool, vibrant women, and we would have a really great time and I'd make great friends with them, and I'd also meet some very emotionally unhealthy women who clearly had bad childhoods, dated bad guys. And if I went there and I was nice and charismatic and did things for them and treated them like a normal human being, and was a good friend, it didn't work at all. What worked unfortunately, and I couldn't do this routinely because it felt too bad and too ugly, if you treated them poorly and you didn't show up sometimes and you didn't tell them why, and you didn't call them, and you weren't vulnerable, and you weren't emotional, and you didn't do anything for them. There was a certain group of women that would respond to that so strongly and I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is terrible for you. Why are you doing this?”

Robert Greene: [01:12:14] Right. Yeah, I see what you mean. Well, the idea that I have in there is that people have an opinion about themselves. And you must be extremely aware of this. This is one of the most critical laws of human nature. And I say that there are three universals for this opinion of ourselves. We usually like to think that we're autonomous and independent, that we make our decisions with our own willpower, that we're not forced to doing what we do. When I bought that new car, it’s because I loved it, not because of advertising. We also like to think that we're intelligent. We may not think that we're Einstein, but we know our field. We're not stupid. The sense that we're stupid or that people are making fun of our intelligence is pretty difficult for us to accept. And third, that we're generally a good person. We have good intentions, we're kind, we're angelic. We're not mean-spirited or ugly.

[01:13:09] People want to feel those three qualities about themselves. But then there's the flip side. There are people who don't have that, who feel that they're not worthy, that they're not so intelligent, that they're not a good person, right? They walk around with this opinion and it dominates their thinking. It becomes who they are. Your idea of yourself becomes who you are. Beyond those three universals, there are some other ones like you might think that you are really independent, a maverick, a rebellious type, and that's who you are, you know? Right? And that becomes kind of your attitude towards life.

 

Jordan Harbinger: [01:13:45] It's like a brand.

Robert Greene: [01:13:46] Yeah. Okay, so this defines you, and it determines what you choose in life, what you buy, the people you surround yourself with. If you believe in masculinity and in kicking ass and showing that you're tougher than other people, but you're also a Christian for whatever reason, because of your upbringing, you will glom into ideas of Christianity that reflect that. So you'll think Jesus is a warrior. God is a fighter. “I'm out there kicking ass for Christianity.”

Jordan Harbinger: [01:14:22] “Kick ass for Jesus!”

Robert Greene: [01:14:24] “Kick ass for Jesus!” So your self opinion will determine a lot of what you do. And if you go around in life challenging people's opinion of who they are, you're going to have a lot of misery and trouble. You won't get very far. So if you say something that questions their autonomy, it makes them feel like they were manipulated, or you say some remark that in an argument you make them feel like they're stupid, or you make a remark that makes them feel like they're not a nice person, a door will close to you that will never open again. You will have made a silent enemy. And with this other example with this person, this woman who has a negative opinion of themselves, if you are saying, “Oh, you know, you're really great, you deserve this, that or the other,” it won't jive with how they think about themselves, and they'll think you're a fool, that you're an idiot, right?

[01:15:13] We've all had the experience of feeling depressed and life isn't very fair and we're not doing very well. And then someone comes and says, “Oh, well come on, the sun is shining, everything's great, you're really wonderful.” And we don't like to hear that because that's not what we feel right now. We feel something else. They're trying to almost argue against the mood of the moment. So you need to be aware that people have their own inner reality, their own way of thinking about themselves. And instead of inadvertently challenging it, you want to validate their opinion of who they are. That gives you room now to influence and move them. So if you make them feel comfortable, if you make them feel that they actually are a good person, that they are intelligent, that they are autonomous and independent, they will lower their resistance to you. And now you have room to infiltrate another idea.

[01:16:05] So to take for an example, that person that has low self-esteem, if you don't fight it and you say, “You're right, people have not treated you well, you haven't gotten a lot of good things in life, your life has been really hard.” And then they say, “Yeah. Yeah.” And there's a connection. They feel like you're understanding them. Now, you can insinuate a comment that can help try and maybe raise their self-esteem. “Yes, that's true, but you know, you actually have done this, that, and the other in your life and it's not so bad.” If you begin by confirming that they have had a rough time and that it's right that they feel kind of bad about themselves, now you can start saying something else; they're not so resistant to you and they're open to another possibility.

[01:16:51] This is the golden key to unlocking people's natural resistance to you. If you always approach them as an individual with their own opinion about themselves, you try and unlock it and see how you can validate that opinion and how you can feed what they want to hear. There’s nothing ugly or manipulative about it because people do need this validation, this recognition. We're hungering for it, and you're giving it to them. It also gives you the power to influence them and move them in the direction that you want.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:17:22] A lot of people might think, “Oh, this is manipulative. Look, listen to him talk. He’s talking about infiltrating thoughts into people's heads. Even though he says it's for good, it can be easily used for bad.” I think one of the insights from the book that I gleaned was everybody craves influence or power in some way. There's a certain group of us, maybe the majority that think that that's maybe wrong somehow, and then there's a small number of people that think, “I'm going to do that, I deserve to have that.” And unfortunately, I think a lot of the people that would use this stuff responsibly are in the bucket of folks that say, “It's wrong to want to be able to influence people, to get under their defenses.”

Robert Greene: [01:18:00] Well, it's absurd. It's the height of stupidity for people to think that they don't want that. They're not being honest with themselves. You don't want to go through life unable to influence your children, to have no effect on them. You don't want to go through life not being able to influence your boss and to get them to give you a raise and get them to recognize your incredibly good work. You don't want to go around not able to influence your colleagues or people that you want to date. You fucking want influence. Stop being such a dishonest -- stop lying to yourself! Everything you do influences people negatively or positively.

[01:18:39] People are reading you day in and day out like a book. They're reading your moods, your emotions, and they're saying, “I like you.” “I don't like you.” You are influencing them without realizing you're doing it because we are animals that are responding to people in nonverbal ways, right? So whether you want to or not, you are influencing people. You might just be putting them off, that's your influence. You might be repelling them, that's the kind of influence that you have.

[01:19:06] So it's first of all, it's happening. You're just not in control of it. And second of all, you're not being honest with yourself. Do you want a child that you can't tell them what to do, that you can mold to some degree, that you can't get rid of their ugly habits? You have a spouse who has terrible habits. They ignore you all the time. You don't want the ability to somehow get them to change? Give me a break. You know, I really can't stand that level of dishonesty that people have. You want the power to influence people. It's an incredibly deep human need, so stop lying to yourself and admit it! And then you can use this for positive purposes.

[01:19:47] So if I'm telling you, Jordan, and you think I was being dishonest but I wasn't, “You're a really great interviewer. You have a really good sense of empathy. I can feel, like, a human connection with you. But there was that one moment in the interview where I felt you kind of lost it, sort of thing. And maybe next time you interview you can try that.” Well suddenly, okay, you think I'm being manipulative, but I'm trying to help you. I'm trying to tell you that there was something you did in the interview that wasn't quite right. Now if I directly said, “Jordan, I didn't like what you did that one time,” you said, “Fuck Robert is being -- you know. Fuck that. I’m not going to listen.” But if I say first, something real and true, is “You are a good listener,” that “you're a great interviewer, but here's one thing that you could have changed,” that might open you up to it. It might have an impact on you. That's the power I'm telling you, that anybody can have, and it's not ugly or manipulative.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:20:50] So was the hypothetical here that I'm a good interviewer, or the hypothetical was that I did something wrong? We’re figuring this out right now!

Robert Greene: [01:20:59] It was a hypothetical hypothetical, it was just a hypothetical. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:21:04] Stop explaining.

Robert Greene: [01:21:06] Sorry.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:21:07] That was perfect. That's the perfect answer to that.

Robert Greene: [01:21:10] Okay!

Jordan Harbinger: [01:21:10] In closing, there's a couple of really good practicals that I think I'd love to leave people with. One that, I don't even remember what this was in in the book, but this just stuck out so much, I recited it from memory in my notes. “If you need a favor, don't remind people what you've done for them in the past. Remind them of what they've done for you in the past.” So instead of saying, “Hey, you owe me one because X, Y, Z.” You actually say, “You've done all these great things for me,” and sort of programming, reinforcing that they're so generous, right? I thought that was a little counterintuitive and interesting.

Robert Greene: [01:21:45] Well, it's a theme in a lot of my books, typically The 48 Laws of Power. There's the African proverb that I quote in there that says, “When you see someone being grateful, you will also notice water running uphill.” I didn't quote it very accurately, but the idea is that gratitude is extremely unnatural for the human being. You'll find it as often as water running up hill. We don't like to feel grateful because in gratitude, there's a sense of inferiority. Like that person, “Oh, we're just this little child that they had to help and pat on the head and give us something,” that we don't, you know, that they're just patronizing as they're doing something, we’re not able to get it on our own. We don't like to feel that way. We like to feel that we can get things on our own. That if someone did us a favor, it was because we deserved it. That we're really a good person.

[01:22:38] So gratitude, we are always going around life thinking people should be grateful for what we did for them. We lent them money, we did this favor for them. And then we don't get it and we're disappointed. But it's an extremely rare and uncommon emotion to have. But the opposite factor is if you're trying to influence somebody, so you want them to get to do you a favor instead of reminding them, as I said, of what you've done for them, you remind them of what they've done for you. So you're fed their self-opinion. Their self-opinion is, “I'm a great, generous, kind person. I did something good for you. Now I'm motivated to keep up that opinion you have of me and keep doing good things for you.” Do you see the logic in that?

Jordan Harbinger: [01:23:24] Yeah, this makes a lot of sense, right? Like you said, reinforcing their opinion of the opinions, the type of opinion they want to feel about themselves, right? So you're giving them an opportunity to reinforce the person they want to be, which is generous and giving.

Robert Greene: [01:23:39] Right. As opposed to, “Look, I did that favor for you.” Meaning, “I was so much better than you. I helped you when you were a weak, dependent person,” and you don't want to feel like that. You want to feel like, “Oh, all right, I owe my success or anything good because of what you did for me, so now I have to do that again; I have to feel grateful again and do something for you?” Nobody -- that's really a turnoff. But if you do the opposite way, then it's extremely powerful. Of course, you have to set this up so that people have done you favors in the past, you know?

Jordan Harbinger: [01:24:15] Yeah. I think that is the Benjamin Franklin effect?.

Robert Greene: [01:24:18] Benjamin Franklin! Very good. Wow. You’re smart. Mastery.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:24:23] It’s all because of you, yeah. Is that where I got that from? Mastery?

Robert Greene: [01:24:25] Yeah, you’ve got that from Mastery.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:24:25] Yeah, I remember that.

Robert Greene: [01:24:26] So Benjamin Franklin had this inveterate enemy in Congress or wherever it was, who hated his guts, and was going to make life miserable for him. And he knew that this guy was a great collector of rare books, et cetera. And so he went and lent this book to him, right? And now that made the guy think that, “Oh, Benjamin Franklin isn't such a bad person, because he likes me, and because he likes me, maybe I should try and like him,” you know? So it's a counterintuitive kind of thing. Instead of trying really hard to please this man and do things, say things to ingratiate him, he lent him this very nice book and made the guy think that his opinion of Benjamin Franklin was wrong.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:25:13] Right. It was, “You've got all these great things, you've got these great books. I really look up to you. I would love if you'd be generous and show me this,” and the guy did. And then of course, then he has to rationalize the rest of his opinion based on the fact that he did this nice thing for him. “I must have done that because I liked him, so I guess I like him. Maybe I should act in accordance with me liking him.”

Robert Greene: [01:25:32] That's what will happen if you do favors for other people instead of the other way around.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:25:37] So all these favors that we're doing for other people are secretly trying to earn their goodwill. It's what this whole show's about! You know, I'd be lying to myself and everyone else if I didn't admit that there is a level of, I love doing the show because I love the conversations. I do love helping people, but I also really like the idea that I'm able to provide this and other people kind of can't get it anywhere else in that, you know, it's sort of projects this idea that there's a source of wisdom that I've created with my team here, and that sort of like, I guess the dark side of it.

Robert Greene: [01:26:16] That's your self opinion.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:26:17] Yeah. Yeah. And I like that, but it really did get highlighted when I read The Laws of Human Nature, I was looking at all these things I was doing.

Robert Greene: [01:26:25] Oh, you mean it maybe doesn't come from the best place?

Jordan Harbinger: [01:26:28] Yeah. I don't know if it doesn't come from a good place, but reading The Laws of Human Nature will get you to look at the good things you do and think, why do I do this? But it will definitely get you looking at the bad things you do, the vices that you have, the guilty things that you do, the things you're thinking about when you're shaving in the morning that you know you can't tell anyone else about because it makes you look bad. It'll make you put those under a microscope too.

Robert Greene: [01:26:52] But you know, I don't want people to think that that's like this, something really heavy. The sense of knowing, being honest with yourself, at first, it might be painful. And some people who've reviewed the book on Amazon, they say it's kind of painful because it makes you confront things about yourself, you don't want to necessarily confront. But I think not being honest with yourself in the end, being someone who feels envious, being passive aggressive, you're not really happy. It's not really fulfilling. You're not really getting what you want. When you do passive aggressive digs at people or you're manipulative like that, you might get something in the immediate present from it, but people are pissed off. You've made enemies and it doesn't feel good to be acting in this way. So when you're kind of being a hypocrite and pretending that you're so superior and smarter and nicer, I feel you pay a price for that. I feel that causes secret depression. I feel it causes you to alienate people that you don't mean to alienate so that you don't have as many friends, that the friends that you have, the bonds aren't very deep, right?

[01:28:00] So being honest with yourself will make you happier. I believe in the long run, acknowledging that you have a dark side, that you have a shadow, that you're not such a great person as you think, can actually be a very liberating feeling, you know? And there are ways to take that shadow and that darkness and kind of turn it into something else. But the sense that “I'm happy with who I am, I acknowledge that I'm this complete person, that I have these qualities that aren't necessarily the best qualities,” that kind of acceptance is, I think, a really deep and positive emotion. It gives you the chance to work on them, to kind of smooth out some of these rough edges that you have, and it'll make you a better person. It'll make you easier to deal with.

[01:28:53] We humans are really good at smelling out people who are hypocritical, right? Who pretend to be all holier-than-thou, saintly, and they're not. And it's a put off. We're attracted to people who are authentic. We feel, “That person may not be a saint, but they're really who they are.” We see that in our culture, we're attracted to people who are authentic, who are not disguising, they show their dark side and their good side. It's very positive, kind of an attractive quality. So that's what I'm trying to create in this book. I'm not trying to weigh you down with making you feel, “Oh, I'm such a miserable worm.” You might be a worm, but it's better to admit that you're a worm and to kind of move from that. And I think people will smell that on you. They'll smell that you're being more honest and being more who you really are.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:29:48] Even worms crawl out of the ground when it rains, right? So maybe this book is the good rain shower that we need.

Robert Greene: [01:29:54] That's a good metaphor, yeah!

Jordan Harbinger: [01:29:56] If there's one thing I'm good at, it's metaphors, and the rest of my skills are pretty mediocre.

Robert Greene: [01:30:00] I didn't say that! You did.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:30:01] Robert Greene, thank you so much.

Robert Greene: [01:30:03] So thank you, Jordan. Thank you.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:30:06] Jason, epic interview. First of all, we got to go to Robert Greene's house, which is kind of cool. It's kind of like you're sitting in the presence of like this master, right? That you've read for so long and literally hanging out in the living room and talking about their new book. I don’t know. That was, that was pretty bad ass.

Jason DeFillippo: [01:30:23] It was one of the highlights of the year so far, definitely. As someone who's read all of his books multiple times, sitting in his living room, checking out his library, looking at his piano, and all his music and everything. I was just like, “This is pretty cool. I kind of dig this.”

Jordan Harbinger: [01:30:37] This is where the magic happens. Exactly.

Jason DeFillippo: [01:30:38] Yep, yep.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:30:39] Exactly. And awesome guy. Some of the stuff he's working on now, which I don't think we're probably supposed to talk about, sounds really cool.

Jason DeFillippo: [01:30:47] Yeah, I wouldn't, I wouldn't mention that right now. He might send his people after you.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:30:50] That's right. That's right. You know he's got people, for sure. So great big thank you to Robert Greene. The book title is The Laws of Human Nature. It is, it's epic in every way. Great content. It's about 30 hours on Audible, which means it's about a bajillion pages long on paper. So if you need a really heavy duty doorstop and you also want it to educate you on all things human, then grab the book. Otherwise, I highly recommend downloading it on Audible and spending the next six years reading it.

Jason DeFillippo: [01:31:20] Yeah, or if you need to kill a man, you can also use it for that.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:31:23] That's right. That's right. And if you want to know how we manage to book all of these great people and manage relationships with them at scale, it's all about systems. It's all about tiny habits stacking up over time. You can't make up for lost time on this stuff. Check out the Six-Minute Networking course we made for you. It's free. It's at jordanharbinger.com/course. Get it started now, really. The digging that well before you're thirsty is going to pay dividends in the long run. How do you think we end up with so many great people on this program? And it's just a few minutes per day. So quit crying and go over to jordanharbinger.com/course. And speaking of building relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Robert Greene. I'm @jordanharbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. I'm telling you this book as a game changer.

[01:32:06] This interview gave you a little taste, and if you want to learn how to apply everything you heard here today from Robert, make sure you go grab those worksheets. Those are on the show notes at jordanharbinger.com/podcast. This show is produced in association with PodcastOne, and this episode was co-produced by Jason “The Leveler” DeFillippo and Jen Harbinger. Show notes by Robert Fogarty. Worksheets by Caleb Bacon. And I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger.

[01:32:31] The fee for the show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful, which should be in every episode, especially this one. So please share the show with those you love and even those you don't. We've got a lot more in the pipeline. So many great things going up. We've got a lot more going on with our channels all over the place. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time.