2020-11-11-robert-greene.mp3

[00:00:00] I have to say how pretty this is, one of the most interesting interviews I've ever had, and I'm serious, you've asked questions that no one ever has asked. I find that interesting. And you have great style and your questions are really spot on. So I have to pat you on the back as well. So thank you.

[00:00:25] What's up, everybody? Welcome to the artists of Data Science podcast, the only self development podcast for Data scientists. You're going to learn from and be inspired by the people, ideas and conversations that'll encourage creativity and innovation in yourself so that you can do the same for others. I also host open office hours. You can register to attend by going to Bitly dot com forward. Slash a d. S o h. I look forward to seeing you all there. Let's ride this beat out into another awesome episode and don't forget to subscribe to the show and leave a five star review.

[00:01:21] Our guest today is the legendary number one New York Times best selling author of six books exploring topics ranging from the nature of power to strategies for war to seduction and the development of mastery for over two decades.

[00:01:37] His books have served as an apprenticeship in human nature and self-awareness while simultaneously acting as a mirror for your soul. His most famous book, The 48 Laws of Power, is one of the most requested books in the American prison system and one of the most frequently banned. If your mind is a dull razor than his books are the wetstone on which you can sharpen your insight and understanding of yourself and the people around you. They're powerfully revealing works that look at some of the most ignored, harder to look at and darkest aspects of human nature. So please help me. In welcoming our guest today, the best selling author of The Laws of Human Nature, the godfather of Power Dynamics himself, Robert Green. Robert, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to be here today.

[00:02:26] Thank you, Harpreet Sahota. That was one of the best interests I've ever heard. That was great. Thank you, Robert.

[00:02:31] I man, you absolutely deserve it. So I'd loved to learn a little bit more about you. Why don't you tell us a little bit about where you grew up and what was it like there?

[00:02:43] Oh, that's a good question. Well, I grew up in Los Angeles. I'm sixty one years old. So my formative years were really in the 60s and early 70s. And, you know, I had my parents I came from a middle 30 middle class background. My dad was just a salesman and door to door salesman. And Los Angeles back then was a very different city that it is now. It was more laid back. And it was it was quite it was a very beautiful place to grow up. And we grew up I grew up in a canyon in these hills and all. They had lots of friends on the street. We were constantly inventing all sorts of weird and bizarre games. And it was very it was very for my imagination was definitely developed in my childhood. I also spent a lot of time alone. I invented all kinds of games. I loved sports. I had all kinds of football and basketball games that I could play on my own. And I would play both sides, both teams. I invented all these different ways of calculating what the next move would be, and I wrote everything down. So I was really into strategy back then. And I also loved army men and war things. I had like little army men that I would align up in battle formations. So, you know, I have a very nostalgic about my childhood because it was it was a very interesting period for me. And I had two great parents and I have a sister that I'm very close to. So I'm very blessed that way.

[00:04:07] What kind of kid were you in high school when you're a little bit older than childhood?

[00:04:11] I was kind of slightly messed up. I mean, I did very well in school. I've kind of found myself academically in those years. I went to a certain high school where I didn't fit in really well. It was a high school where all the surfers went because it was right on the on the coast, on the beach. And I don't really like surfer culture. You know, I started taking drugs as a lot of teenagers do. And I was kind of slight, had a slight rebellious streak, Data very adventurous. So when we were seventeen, my best friend and I, we he bought a van and we traveled all around the United States. Our goal was to go to all forty eight states and we didn't make it because our car broke down. But it was for a 17 year old to take like a two month journey all around the country was, you know, pretty weird and pretty bold. And we had some very strange experiences. So I was a slightly alienated kid who really got into books and writing and things like that and also a little bit into drugs. I have I have to be honest.

[00:05:12] So it sounds a lot like me in high school. How far did you guys make it when you were traveling?

[00:05:19] Well, we we it was we had so many weird experiences. And then when we were kind of we came we got back east and we're coming back to California. And somewhere in Ohio, it was clear that the van was breaking down. We would buy a case of oil, motor oil in the morning, you know, like twelve cans of motor oil. By the next day, we had to buy another case. It was just leaking oil. And then finally in Nebraska, the middle of nowhere, the engine just exploded. And we just got out of the van and we just sat there in the road. So we started to cry and we had to get towed all the way to Wyoming. That was the closest place. So, you know, we didn't make it to all the other states. We probably ended up going to about twenty eight states, but we never got to forty eight.

[00:06:01] That's a pretty fair number. And I've had to spend the night in a parking lot in North Platte, Nebraska, so I can understand how desolate that gets better than any other weird experiences that happened on that trip that you like to share with us.

[00:06:14] Well, I never got into these things. It's really great. Well, you know, we were we didn't have a lot of. Money, so we were in New York, we had a book called See the United States on a dollar a Day. You know, that's sort of the budget that we had. So we were in New Orleans, these two naive 17 year olds, and we found a hotel in the French Quarter for a dollar a night called The Head In. And it was like really weird. They were having, like, orgies in there. It was just like that really freakish experience. They didn't have walls that were only like pieces of board. And you could see over the other side of the wall and all kinds of strange noises. And that was that was a weird experience. And then I was in we were in Washington, D.C. I never told the story. I know it's kind of embarrassing, but anyway, we met some people there who invited us to a party, and I just started getting really high. I was just like tobacco smoking pot, like crazy, you know? And then I started, like, throwing things at people. I started getting violent, which is not very normal for me. And the next thing I know, it's like three in the four in the morning. And I'm in the gutter of the street outside. I'm hearing music from like a nearby mall. They had, like, dragged me out of the house in the middle of the night because I was so violent and they put me in the gutter of the street to sleep. And then my friend woke up really early, said, Robert, we have to get out of here, is would you like, trash their house? You know, I had no memory of it. So, you know, things like that. I don't know how interesting they are for people, but they were very memorable for me.

[00:07:45] That's absolutely wild. At least you were in the gutter of a country where they spoke the same language as you. I had something similar like that happened to me when I was in Paris and nobody saw that happened. I just got incredibly drunk and caught the scene inside of a club. Yeah. So what did you think your future is going to look like when you're a 17 year old kid in high school?

[00:08:07] Well, you know, I didn't know. I mean, I was very ambitious. I'm what I know I wanted to be a writer. I wrote a lot. I wrote stories and poems and all sorts of things. And I didn't know exactly what would happen to me. I thought maybe I'd end up being like a novelist or something like that. But I was a little bit a little bit of anxiety because my parents wanted me to, like, be able to make a lot of money, you know, so there was pressure to go to, like, become a lawyer or a doctor or something like that. And I'm Jewish. It was very common in Jewish culture. And your son is going to do that kind of stuff. And it just wasn't my cup of tea. I had no interest in those things. I really wasn't that interested in business or law or medicine. I love the humanities. I love literature. And so, you know, I knew I was probably going to study something like English at university, and I ended up going more into like languages, foreign languages and literature in that thing. But, you know, there's not much of a career out of that. So there was some anxiety attached to it. I didn't know how I was going to make a living, but I knew that that was my path. And I was very, as I said, a very rebellious, very independent streak. So, you know, for a lot of children and teenagers, it takes it takes some inner something to resist the influence of your parents who want you to do something. You know, and I was very much like that. I was listening to what I wanted to be. And I could even be a little bit rude or nasty on that front. So I. I ended up finding my way over the course of twenty years of wandering to where I am now. But I could say definitely I had an idea of where I wanted to be. I couldn't imagine that I would be writing the book that I ended up writing, to be honest with you. But you know, life is full of surprises.

[00:09:51] And it's interesting that you went on to write books that have touched millions of people and really changed the perspective of myself and a lot of people that I've talked to that read your books. So that's that's quite interesting to hear you talk about that journey. And it's interesting to see the parallels between your parents and kind of like the Punjabi culture, parents like you could either become a lawyer, doctor or failure. Those are your three options.

[00:10:15] Are you going to be have I opted for number three, I guess.

[00:10:20] Do you ever get jealous or feel envious of people who don't have ambition?

[00:10:25] No, I feel that feels like feels like that would be the worst thing. I mean, for all the stress that I have in my life and there's a fair amount because to write a book with all the research, everything, it's very you don't have a lot of free time. You know, you never really quite ever relax. So, you know, there's some bad side. But the feeling that I know when I wake up in the morning what I want to do, I have a goal, a purpose. It in energizes me every single day of my life. I'm waking up and I go, wow, I'm going to do this. There's some hard parts of it. And days when I'm not uninspired and where I want to just say, God damn it, this isn't working, I'm a failure or whatever, but I would never, ever want to be someone who wakes up who doesn't really know what they want or just sort of settles for things. I mean, I have nothing against that. People don't have to create something or make something large in order to be fulfilled. And I understand that I'm different. I'm not saying it's superior, but one thing I tried to say in Mastery, my book Mastery, is that I think everybody wants to in some way fulfill their potential. When you're a child four or five, six, seven years old, you have dreams.

[00:11:36] Everybody every kid has that right. And to to sort of lose that sense and to settle for something for a job that has no connection to you. I feel I think is a great source of depression. Now, you can find purpose in life, in raising a family. So you have a job that doesn't mean much to you, but your energy and your love goes into raising your family. OK, that's your ambition. That's fine. I have nothing against that. I think would be a very beautiful thing. But there's got to be some connection to some kind of higher purpose to something that energizes you. So the other thing is people this kind of a bad smell around the word ambition as if it's evil or as if it's a negative trait, as if you're being selfish. But, you know, if people weren't ambitious, you wouldn't have your smartphone, you wouldn't have your car, you wouldn't have your public transportation system, you wouldn't have all the pleasure. You wouldn't be able to fly a plane. The world was built. The world that we all take for granted was built by people with ambition. And so there's nothing selfish about it. It's the desire and the want to create things to contribute to society. So I like to take away that kind of negative connotation from the word ambition.

[00:12:45] Absolutely love that. I mean, there's I guess I was having a bit of a moment of weakness earlier today because I kill myself with the work that you have, you know, feel stretched so thin with everything I do. And I drained so much out of me. But simultaneously, I just feel so recharged from it as well and trying to achieve something big, because I know right now, like, I'm not everything that I could be and I know it. And there's a bit of agitation. And I just wonder what it would be like to be someone who is not ambitious and is just content with where they are.

[00:13:17] I really I mean, you know, I practice a form of Zen Buddhism. I've been doing it for ten years. I meditate every day and a lot of that is kind of emptying yourself of thoughts, desires and attachments. And so a Zen monk who achieves enlightenment there at a stage where they probably don't have ambition so much or worldly ambition, they have spiritual ambition. But the path to getting towards enlightenment in Zen Buddhism is extremely difficult. You know, you have to have a fire within you. I know for myself there days where you just don't want to meditate, you just don't want to do it. It's a struggle, you know, and you have to overcome all of these mental barriers. So even people who are straining for some kind of enlightenment, some kind of spiritual contentment, there's still that ambition there that fuels you. It's part of human nature. You know, it's part of us that we have this restless mind. If you ever do meditate, you'll realize how incredibly restless your mind is. You try and still it and it's zooming off in a billion different directions. That's who we are. And so we want to fill that mind with activity, with actions, with things that we engage in. We don't want to just sit there with our own thoughts day in and day out. We want to make things. And so ambition is a way to channel all of that restless mental energy that we all have.

[00:14:39] Your books are just so well researched, so many stories and lessons from recorded history. It's clear that you're a really astute student and observer of human nature. There's the saying that history tends to repeat itself. And I guess that is because humans haven't really changed much on the timescale that we're able to observe. I'm curious, how do you see history repeating itself in twenty, twenty one and beyond?

[00:15:05] Well, it's not exactly that. History exactly repeats itself because things are always a little bit somewhat different. You know, they didn't have the Internet in ancient Greece or ancient India. So things were that changed things a fair amount. So there are elements and circumstances that alter what's going on, but there are patterns. So I like to see it as patterns and the cycles that we can notice throughout history. And I wrote about this in my book, The Laws of Human Nature. I discuss the generation phenomenon and how there's a distinct pattern in generations where you have one generation that is what's called like a revolutionary generation. They create some kind of new order, some new way of doing things, which is followed by a more conservative generation and then a third generation that's even more conservative and things start to get very kind of stale and boring. And then young people are frustrated by what they've inherited.

[00:16:03] And then they enter the crisis generation where people are very upset. They want change, but they don't know what it is. And then comes another revolutionary generation over and over and over and over again. Yes, it doesn't follow exactly that pattern, but we see it. Time and again, and so right now, it's not just my belief there are other people who write about this phenomenon who said it, that probably millennials fit the pattern of a crisis generation where they've had to grow up in a period where things have become kind of stale, where the boomers of which I'm kind of on the edge of, I'm I'm sort of straddling it, are sort of dominating the world. And it feels stale. It doesn't relate to them. They want something different. And so they're we're on the cusp of what we consider to be a revolutionary generation or something new and fresh and different will happen. Will bills will be generated because young people are the engines of something new and creative, new cultural trends and phenomena. And so when you read a lot of history, you have a perspective that's different. You kind of stand back and you see, well, it's not really worth getting so upset in the moment because things will circle back round. So right now in the United States, I don't I don't think it's the same in Canada. We are seeing an epidemic of irrationality, of people who have completely lucene themselves from science, from reality, from truth, you know, and it's frightening. It's very frightening because I'm a great believer in having a connection to reality.

[00:17:34] But you see these trends in history. So ancient Athens, like 5th century B.C., Athens, which is the paragon of human rationality, Socrates and his pupil, Plato and Pericles, and through crudities and all the great art and stuff that were created was followed in the fourth century B.C. by an incredible outbreak of irrationality and superstition. It all fell apart. So these things kind of go in cycles. And, you know, we're we're creatures of conformity. We're born in a cultural moment and we can't help it. And so once once some pattern starts to take over, we're swept up in the force. You can't escape your own historical moment. It has a stamp on you that is indelible. The only thing you can have is have some distance from it, which when you read a lot of history, you see that. And I think people don't read enough history because they don't have enough perspective. They think that everything that they've thought of or come up with is so interesting and new and they don't realize that people were doing things much more interesting three hundred years ago. People think, wow, the Internet, nothing like that ever existed. It's a whole new world. They don't realize that the same thing happened when the telegraph was invented. People were saying the same thing when the telephone was invented, when radio was invented, when television was invented, when cable television was invented. Well, we live in a new world. It's blah, blah. If you read history, you have some perspective and you know that really nothing is new.

[00:19:00] I remember reading or hearing you speak about it in a different podcast where there are some ancient stone tablets, no stone tablets were complaining about the generation that came before. It is pretty interesting. So which aspect of human nature is going to kind of send us off in this or has been sending us off in this direction of irrationality into this revolutionary type of age?

[00:19:24] Well, what is what has created the irrationality today?

[00:19:30] It's hard to pinpoint exactly because things are organic and they happen in a process. You know, you could point to certain things like I like to point out entertainment. So if you go back to one hundred and fifty years ago, what did people do for entertainment? Because you work during the day, you want to have interesting things outside of it. Well, no television. You'd go to the theater, we'd go socialize with friends, you would play cards, you would have parties and things like that. You would play music in the house. That was how you entertain yourself. But it was like not easy to do. Right. And you wouldn't be doing it all the time. So you'd have other time to, like, read books or spend time with your children. Suddenly, after World War two, the culture industry, the entertainment industry just absolutely exploded. And so we humans now had at our picking anything we wanted at our beck and call, we could get any kind of entertainment or distracted, which we desired, you know, started with television, sort of exploded. But look at it now. The video games, there's never a dull moment where your mind isn't filled with the images and products that other people have created invading your mental space. Right. And so to be rational, you need some distance from yourself and from the world. You need to step back and go, whoa, that space gives you the ability to analyze things, to think about them.

[00:20:51] But when your head is filled with all of these images, thoughts and forms of entertainment constantly bombarding, you have no space. And then you also begin to think that everything has to be entertaining. Everything has to have a plot. Everything is some kind of interesting thing that's going to happen to some mystery that needs to be solved, et cetera. So the outbreak of conspiracy theories, which is just like another epidemic in the United States with Q and on and all that other bullshit. Sorry. Speak that way. You know, it's like people want to believe that this is reality. Reality is like CSI Los Angeles or Miami, there's always these weird conspiracies going on. They don't want to think that coronavirus is just a virus. Right, because that's boring. It's just this non organic thing, a virus that spreads mathematically throughout the population, though. It's China. No, it's this conspiracy of thousands of people out to ruin Donald Trump's presidency. No. So that kind of thinking, the kind of insane irrationality is deeply submerged in their psyche. They don't see it, but it's years and years and years of absorbing entertainment, video games, images, YouTube videos, etc. It's like so ingrained in people that they have no space to be rational.

[00:22:10] Right. So it's roiling people up. It's making them very emotional. But what is that revolutionary generation to come? I'm not a prophet, but I think that what's will happen is that young people, perhaps it's Generation Z or whatever they call them, that Will is getting a little bit tired of this that feels this disconnection from reality that is happening because we live in a very culture, very disconnected from reality. And they're going to want something else. And there may be going to want different kinds of experiences that are not simply virtual, sort of what I'm writing about in my new book. You want a different form of experience. That to me is what the revolution will be like in 10, 20 years, that you don't want experiences that just have to do with your screen. You don't want to have experiences that are thrown at you by other people. You want to go out and create your own world in some way. And technology can definitely say that I'm not against technology at all, but I know that's very broad. But that's what I think the form of this generation, this revolution, will occur. And I think in business it'll be a major new trend is giving people the opportunity to have more life experiences as opposed to just passively going to some Club Med or something like that.

[00:23:27] So that's sort of how I see it when we're in this situation that you're describing, what would be the keys of power or the keys to power in this situation?

[00:23:39] Well, to be self aware and to know that there are other possibilities, you know, it's kind of something I'm also talking about in my new book. I keep it sort of sorry to keep mentioning it, but a problem that we have and it's it's very human is that we were thrown into a world who were born that already exist as the world of our parents. There's the television shows. It's the entertainment. There's everything, the buildings, everything. We're thrown into it. We don't build it ourselves. We inherited and we assume as we get older, that's just the way things are. This is just the way the world is. But no, it isn't just the way the world is.

[00:24:20] We create our own world. Somebody before us created this political system, created these forms of technology, created these businesses.

[00:24:28] So it's to imagine a source of power is in your imagination. That's what all great thinkers and entrepreneurs innovators are. They simply imagine something else. They imagine other possibilities in the world. Right. So to imagine that this doesn't have to be the way it is, you could take technology that's kind of deadening, etc. and turn it into something that's very much alive and will awaken you. Or it just any kind of invention is the process of imagining that what we have now could be different. There are other possibilities. So it's in your head how you look at the world. It's your attitude if you're full of fear and and and you want everything, you want to control everything, then you won't have the freedom of thinking in order to imagine other things like that. Right. So you have to be able to get outside of yourself and imagine that this world, if you think about it, it's rather insane. We live in a time of intense possibilities what the Internet can give you. And I know for myself as a writer, I'm sitting here earlier today writing something that has to do a lot about math, science and quantum mechanics. And I'm going, I don't know about that in three seconds. I Google whatever. And the answer is right there on my screen and I can just put it into my document. It's outrageous what we have, the possibilities, the ideas that are opened up to us. But you have to be able to exploit it and not just be a passive consumer. So it's your attitude. It's your attitude. I am a builder. I am a creator. I'm someone who's going to take what's there in the world and I'm going to create something new and different that reflects who I am, just something I discuss in mastery. That's where power will lie right now, as opposed to people who just whine and complain and go, Oh. This is the way the world is always, and it's so awful, oh, my job is this is where you are actually.

[00:26:26] It's going back to what we talked earlier about your ambition and your idea that we humans are builders.

[00:26:32] We're not passive consumers. So that's where I see power in the year twenty, twenty one, because think of it Harp the coronaviruses going to pass. There will be a vaccine at some point. It might take time. But a scientist I know said that it will be with us for 50, 100 years. The coronavirus will be like the flu or the measles. It is something that we have to deal with that you take a vaccine for. OK, but but the but the critical element that we're in now will pass and we're going to wake up in twenty, twenty two in a new environment. Right. Where so many businesses have been destroyed. It's like a landscape that a hurricane passed through and just leveled things that the travel business will have been decimated and others. And but within that devastated landscape, there's all kinds of opportunities for you, opportunities for creating something new. People are going to be hungry for something new to build it. So it's your attitude, your excitement that we live in this time where there is incredible opportunity. That's how I would say where power lies.

[00:27:34] Absolutely beautiful. I love that. And new I've heard you talk about before is the loss of if that's still the title.

[00:27:40] Yes, it is. It's a provisional title, but that's what it is right now. Yeah.

[00:27:44] My talking just a little bit about that. Like I remember, that is the final chapter of the fiftieth lives as well.

[00:27:50] Yes, it is. And it's also kind of the last chapter of the laws of human nature.

[00:27:55] Yes. Yes. Talk to us a little bit about the history, the inspiration for that book.

[00:28:00] Well, I had actually wanted to write it about excuse me, about fifteen years ago after I finished war. That was going to be my next project, because this is something I've been interested for a long time. And then I met Fifty Cent and I got to do the fiftieth law. And after that I thought mastery was more on my mind. So I did that and then human nature. So finally now I've reached a point where I'm going to go back to what I've always wanted to do. And the sublime, as is, is in the fifty cent book and in human nature, is actually in some ways related to our mortality, to the thought of death itself. And the way I like to describe the sublime is that it's kind of a circle and our minds are inside that circle. And humans, we like to create rules and conventions and thoughts and ideas that we have to abide by. We I talked about earlier, this is the way the world is and our minds are within that circle.

[00:28:57] Right. And we're not we're only supposed to think thoughts and entertain ideas and strategies that kind of fit within these patterns. The sublime is going up to the edge of that circle and go and glimpsing through a door what's outside of that circle, what's beyond it, and getting your mind outside of that and seeing this other world of possibilities and insane thoughts and getting outside of your banal existence and seeing how insanely awesome the universe is and confronting all of the limits that people put up and how we can think. And going beyond those limits and the ultimate limit, the ultimate form of that circle is death itself. Nobody escapes death. Right. So that's the most hard set limit on our lives. But if you confront your mortality, as I talk about in human nature, or 50 Cent, if you look at it square in the eye and you deal with it as I describe how you can do that in those books, you can actually go beyond that limit in your mind. You can accept your death, your mortality, and you can find it at the source of all kinds of amazing, beautiful thoughts and details what those are in the laws of human nature in the eighteenth chapter. Right. So confronting your mortality and death. So the word sublime literally means and from the Latin means up to the threshold, up to the threshold of a door.

[00:30:21] And that's what I meant by you glimpsing through a door. What lies beyond and the beyond is death itself is glimpsing some of that reality. And the weird irony, I don't know what the biggest irony of it all is. I wrote that in May. That was my last chapter that I wrote. I finished it in May of twenty eighteen, the sublime chapter, The Laws of Human Nature about death, etc.. And then exactly two months later, three months later, sorry, I had my stroke in which I came this close to dying. You know, I had my own near-death experience. I was in a coma. I was unconscious. I had very strange thoughts. And so what was sort of this intellectual exercise three months ago was now a very physical, visceral feeling inside my bones about the reality of death and my mortality and how it can transform you. So, you know, with that experience, yes, I need to be doing this sublime book. The other thing the final thing I'll say is. When I had originally planned it back in twenty twenty five or six, I was going to do all of these experiences, I was going to travel to Antarctica, I was going to go to this through the Straits of Magellan. I was going to visit all of these places and do things that would give me sublime experiences.

[00:31:36] Right. That was part of the book. And now with my stroke, all that was just as gone. I can't really even now, I can't even take a walk to this day. My walking is still very weak. Right. So I can't and with coronaviruses or travel. But even if I could travel, I can't do any of those things. But, you know, speaking of turning shit into sugar, which is one of the chapters in the 50s lore, you turn what's a horrible thing into a good thing. So what that means is I have to imagine the sublime. I have to imagine these experiences because my readers, people are reading the book. They're not all going to be able to afford traveling here and there and having all these experiences. They're going to be like I am right now, locked in their house or without them funds or whatever to do all of these things that only privileged people can do. I mean, their position right now. Right, because I'm so limited what I can do. So it makes me write the book more from a perspective of what my readers are going to be like. So this bad thing that happened is actually a way for me, I think, to make the book stronger.

[00:32:38] I'm really looking forward to that book. And Perdu, speak about how this impacted your life, you know, used to to take hikes and swim and be fairly active. And I've heard that you are getting better at it now. You're going out for walks or have still been kind of limited.

[00:32:54] You know, I can't really I have to walk with a cane. And so, you know, my wife and I, we try and take walks into the hills, but it's it's not fun because it's so limiting. I mean, I'm very unstable on my feet, so I have to look down and make sure I'm stepping this way. And I have to be I have to think about my walking. So I am getting better. But it's so slow there days like even this morning where I just feel like crying. I was like, man, you know, my my hand is a claw. I can't do things. I want to do a kid type, you know, and yeah, my other physical things I don't need to travel I want to do is to be able to hike into the hills like any normal person I can. So I had to work on I have to work on my mind. You know, it's I have to accept this. It's going to be like this for several years. I have to have faith that it will get better.

[00:33:46] And I am seeing a therapist and I see two hours of physical therapy every day. But I have to work on this part of it, which is the meditation is helping me a lot because you can get so down on yourself by how limited you are, you know, but it's getting better. It's just the swimming. I don't know when that'll come back. And I miss it so badly. I can tell you I'm not going to whine because I'm alive and I have my brain and I can write my next book, which is a blessing in itself.

[00:34:12] And I'm sure that book is going to be so much better for everything that you've been through. I'm really, really excited for that, too, to come out. And it's just, you know, everything you're telling me just reminds me of that quote from Marcus Aurelius. You know, you could live life right now that that determine what you do and say and think. Yeah, exactly. That's very well put. I'd love to get into your book, Mastery. I know that my audience of Data scientists would absolutely love to to hear you talk about some of the parts of that book. I feel like this book is really relevant for my audience because Data science is a career where you really can't go to school and learn to become a data scientist. There's certainly a phase after learning the basics where you need to be self directed in your learning. But before you jump to that, I wanted to talk to us about the discussions. You had 50 cents that kind of planted the seeds for this book. I know you had a chapter in 58 Law for Mastery. And then in the acknowledgments of mastery, you mentioned that you had a conversation. So I wonder what the nature of that conversation was like.

[00:35:09] Well, I can't remember exactly which. It's very funny because I'm going to be talking to fifty later today and talk to him several months. But tell him I say hi, I will do that. I can't remember exactly which chapter it was, but it was basically a chapter about process, about not being afraid to take time and to work hard and be disciplined.

[00:35:31] Don't expect things to be easy. And the thing about 50 is we see him perform. We see him do his music or act in movies or do these various different things. But we don't see what goes on behind the scenes. We assume that he's just living the life of a rap star with all those millions of dollars and all that, all the women and all the exciting, more fun things he has. But you don't see that behind it. This guy is grinding. Always works very, very, very hard. I saw him once at a party that we went to at Floyd Mayweather Junior's house outside of Vegas as his wild party going on. He was just sitting there. People are drinking and smoking pot. He was just sitting there on the couch watching television. He's not a partier. He's very disciplined. So we talked a lot about the illusion that people had. Of celebrities or people who are successful, that they're just sort of simply born that way.

[00:36:24] You know, he had to work really, really hard to be incredibly disciplined in order to get where he where he wanted to go. He had to be very thoughtful and strategic.

[00:36:33] And so the idea that someone who everybody thinks is just born that way and has has this great life, but in fact, if you go behind the curtain, there's all these steps he has to go through everything all these things that he had to do, his apprenticeship with Jam Master Jay to learn about music, et cetera, to to get people to look behind the curtain and get over their illusions about power and creativity and show them the dirty work, the plumbing. You know, right now, people are remodeling one of my rooms in my house. They've torn away all the walls and you see all of the dirt underneath all these weird things that, you know, your house had. Well, that's what we're doing here, going taking them curtain when we're showing you all the nasty little plumbing and wiring and things that are required to master your subject. So that was sort of the inspiration in talking to.

[00:37:26] Yeah, there's one story in history that I would have absolutely loved to read about, if anything. That's your story. Talk to us about your path to mastery.

[00:37:36] Well, I have a TED talk, did I think about six years ago or so in which I discuss that. And basically the book Mastery is a path I wanted to reveal to the reader in a very specific form. This is the path you take. There are basically six steps. The first step is discovering what you want, your life's task, the most important of all, what you were destined to accomplish. The second was to go through a rigorous apprenticeship phase in which you spend seven or eight years learning all of the boring details, et cetera.

[00:38:11] The third phase is to connect to some kind of mentor will help you in your apprenticeship phase. The fourth is to develop social intelligence so that you're able to work with people because people, no matter even if you're a scientist, you're always going to have to work with people. Then comes the creative phase, where now suddenly you're free and you're going to use all of the knowledge you've acquired and make some incredible. And there's mastery where you're like thinking on another plane you were like Steve Jobs or you're like Bobby Fischer, the chess master, or you're like Michael Jordan, et cetera. OK, so my life, you know, I didn't I'm not going to toot my own horn here, but it did kind of follow the same thing in the sense of as I said earlier when I was 17, I wanted to be a writer. So I had figured out probably by the age of eight or nine that that was what I was destined to be, what I wanted. I have had a love for words, just the sound of words since I was a kid. So I knew that. OK, so I was clear on that most important idea, which is what are you destined to do? But I didn't know where what kind of writing I was going to do or how to to master it. So I after college, when I was twenty two, I and I traveled in Europe for a while. I came back to New York and I worked in journalism.

[00:39:26] I apprenticed at a famous magazine and I learned about writing there for four years. I was a journalist, but journalism wasn't a good fit for me. I didn't feel comfortable and it wasn't I didn't like the fact that everything was just day to day. My mind works in periods of hundreds of years, thousands of years to only be seen and focusing on trends in the moment, really depressed. So I left journalism. I was about twenty six. I traveled around Europe for two years. I worked all kinds of jobs. I do construction work. I taught English in Barcelona. I worked in a television company in London. I worked at a hotel in Paris and I wrote novels writing constantly, constantly, constantly. Nothing ever quite came together because I wasn't good at it. I was too young or something, but it taught me a lot. And then in the nineteen eighty seven or so, my father was not well. Here in Los Angeles I returned to L.A. I thought, I'm going to get into Hollywood, I'm going to become a screenwriter. And for five or six years, maybe seven years, I worked in Hollywood and that wasn't a good fit because I had no power, no control. You would write something and then 20 other people would come in and change everything that you wrote. I didn't I wasn't a good fit, OK? And then in nineteen ninety five I met a man named Boss Telfords when I was in Italy on a job.

[00:40:46] He was a package of books. He asked me if I had any ideas for a book and out of nowhere, I don't know. We were in Venice, Italy. I was in a good mood. I improvised what would turn into the forty eight loss of power. I told him what it could be like. I gave him the story that opens the forty eight lost power, the story of Louis the 14th and Nicolas. OK, he got very excited. But the point of my story is I went through a rigorous, rigorous apprenticeship phase that was more than seven years. It was essentially about four, double that about fourteen, fifteen years journalism. Taught me how to write with a in a disciplined fashion under tight deadline, writing novels taught me how to be self initiating, how to work on my own when there's nobody looking over my shoulder. Hollywood taught me how to make things entertaining and dramatic, to tell stories and how to research for them, etc.. All of that apprenticeship stuff went into being able to write the forty eight lost power, right? So I had followed that path. I had some mentors along the way and the man who was my package, it was definitely my mentor. And I had acquired incredible intelligence about people through the 60 different jobs that I had in that time period. So I was primed to write my book and I had acquired so many ideas over that time that sort of those creative instincts got pushed into gear.

[00:42:06] And then over the 20 years of writing, I can't really say, but I think maybe I've achieved to attain that level of mastery that I write about in mastery. So I did follow that path. But it is kind of a weird meandering way. And the lesson is it's never going to be direct. You're never going to go, I'm 18, I'm going to be this kind of scientist and then resume. You just go straight to it. It's going to fall this distance, this. But don't be afraid of that. Don't be afraid to fail. Don't be afraid to get a little bit lost as long as you have an overall sense of direction.

[00:42:36] Thank you so much for sharing that, Robert. Really, really appreciating that mentorship is actually a really big thing in Data science culture to the point where it's offered as a service. I myself am a principle mentor for a very large mentorship kind of organization, and I think our audience would really love to hear you talk about the mentor dynamic. So when we are looking for a mentor, what type of mentor should we be looking for?

[00:43:02] Well, it's a great question. I address it in the chapter. Chapter three Mastery. But basically you have to realize, OK, you don't get to choose your own parents. And hopefully it was a fortunate thing and you have great parents sometimes don't.

[00:43:16] But think of your mentor as a second father or mother figure for you and you get to choose it because it's not just a straight teacher student relationship. It's one on one. It's an emotional relationship. It's like a parent to a child. And it goes both ways. You're kind of sense of of respect and maybe even worshiping of that older figure. And they're kind of excited by your youth and by your your openness to new ideas. So it's a mutually beneficial relationship, but it's emotional, OK? And you can't be afraid of that. So the worst thing you can do when you're choosing a mentor is just to choose someone who's got the best resumé, who's just the most famous person who you've heard a lot about because a lot of mentors can be bad. They can be the type of person that wants to control you. They only want to use you and your drudge work to help them in their day to day lives. They're not they're not wired to come to a point where they want to help you advance your career and be independent of that. They can play all kinds of mind games on you. They can manipulate you and they can hurt you emotionally over the years if you don't choose wisely.

[00:44:28] So what you want to look at is their character, not their glittering resume. You want to be able to say to yourself, that's a parent figure for me, that's where I want to be in ten years. I want to be like that person. And you want to sense whether this kind of rigid authoritarian type person who won't allow you to have any kind of freedom to be yourself. OK, so don't make an instant choice. Don't just simply go out there and choose the first person that comes along or the person that you've heard the most about. Think about it, put some intelligence behind it and realize that there's a back and forth dynamic and that you have to be able to emotionally connect to them because the way the human brain is, is wired is very important for people to understand. You learn the best when you're excited by what you're learning. We all know that it's been proven that neuroscience ideas are absorbed. You pay much more attention. Those synapses are firing when you're excited. I tell people the example of in college, I learned French for several years and then I went to Paris. I couldn't speak one sentence once I got to Paris after three years of college French. But then I met a French girl that I fell in love with and I had to learn French or was never going to happen because I was so motivated and excited.

[00:45:48] All my hormones were roiling inside me. I learned more French in two weeks and I did in three years in college because I was excited. Right. That's how the brain works. So if you get a mentor, the kind of deadens your spirit, the kind of doesn't excite you in some level that you just simply doing tasks for him or her. You're not going to learn. If you choose someone that you connect to that is interested in you as you are interested in them, then your mind will open up. And as they start telling you their ideas and they open to you, they're. Lessons of life, your mind opens in connection to them and then ideas start pouring in and they sink into your brain and you learn quickly. The thing to know is a mentor is the only way to speed up the process of the apprenticeship phase, their shortcutting the whole process for you, because they're teaching you things that you would never learn on your own. Right. But you have to choose this wisely. That's that's the main lesson that I give in mastery.

[00:46:46] And that mastery is probably my favorite books, that and the life. And I urge all the data scientists listening to pick up a copy of Mastery Right Now is a great book and thank you for sharing a little bit about your seductive ways. Raicu or rather, what would you say is the difference between art and science?

[00:47:08] Well, you know, the differences aren't as great as you think if you take a more global perspective on things. And so one thing that I tried to do in Mastery was to show I wanted to show the process that connects all forms of mastery, whether it's building something literally with your hands in carpentry or music or the sciences, that there's a process that goes on that's similar. I'm reading a lot about science right now because I'm doing a chapter in my new book that is very much has to do with physics. So I've had to immerse myself in the world of physics and I have no background in the subject. Right. But if you read about all of the greatest physicists of the modern era, Einstein, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Powley on the Feynman on and on and on, these were people who had a very artistic streak in their minds. They were very imaginative.

[00:48:01] The thought experiments that Einstein went through that led to both the special theory of relativity and general theory of relativity were incredibly creative. So and then I talk in mastery about, for example, Louis Pasteur and his discovery of the science of immunology, one of the great discoveries in the history of science. And I compare it to kind of like a writer like Flaubert. What Pasteur was able to do is he was able to see evidence of him, of I think it was chickens.

[00:48:31] I can't remember what he tested on the they had become immune to this disease, whereas in other people had seen the same phenomenon, but had never connected the two ideas to each other to have antibodies. It was imagination. His imagination could imagine other things. So there are less differences than we think, but the work of scientists is more disciplined. Obviously, you have to be patient.

[00:48:57] The process that will lead to something exciting is not as instantly gratifying as writing a novel or writing a book or painting or something like that. It's very intense, detailed work. Right. And you're depending much more on the work of thousands, hundreds of thousands of other people who've come before you. So all of the great physicists who will now exist, they're building up on all the incredible discoveries over the last hundred years excuse me. And this is accumulation of knowledge that allows it's like building higher and higher, higher that allows you to now make new kinds of ideas, the arts.

[00:49:37] You don't really have that process of building so much on what other people have done before you. You're more independent, you're freer, be able to work on your own. You don't have to sit there and absorb hundreds and hundreds of different ideas and theories that other people before you have done. But the whole point of creativity, that fifth point I talked about in my path to mastery, once you get to the point, once you're at the level of an Einstein or a Feynman or of of I forget her name, one of the great Foldit Sarandos, she's a great physicist. Now, you're able to be incredibly, incredibly creative. Right. And the process becomes similar.

[00:50:16] I read books now by physicists like Lisa Randall, and they're like novels and they're like something from Kurt Vonnegut. There's so weird string theory and multiverses, you know, who could ever think of such a thing? They're coming up with ideas that are mind blowing, which is what I'm trying to write about in the Love Sublime, because we're discovering that we actually live in a quantum world, that classical physics is going to it's going to be superseded and people are going to realize that the universe is actually quantum, not classical. So these people are very creative. It's just it takes so much more minutia, more it's more arduous process to get to that stage of creativity.

[00:50:57] Thank you very much for sharing that. And I'm even more hyped up for the new book. Now, I reminds me of a like I had long said to me every day, and he talked about the difference between science and art, saying that if you can't replicate the work and get the same outcome, that it's not science. If you can replicate the work and get the same outcome, it's not art. So I thought about parallels what you said quite nicely to Robert, last formal question before I jump into real quick random round, it is 100 years in the future, assuming the planet is still around, there's still humans around. It's twenty one twenty. What do you want to be remembered for?

[00:51:36] Well, I want to be still read by people. I want people to think this guy understood things that are timeless so I can apply the 48 laws of power to my work in some virtual office that I'm now living in on some other planet. Who knows where we are?

[00:51:52] You know, the 40 lost of power is still relevant because people are still goddamn manipulative. Right. And men and women are still seducing each other, you know, so and there's still strategy and people are struggling and businesses need that. You know, that there's that there's a timeless quality and that I understood something about reality that transcends me being born in the 20th century.

[00:52:15] You know, that would be the legacy because it's a kind of immortality. I won't be around. Obviously, I'll be under the ground rotting wherever I am. But I know now that my thoughts and my ideas are going to be influencing people long after I'm dead. And it's a very interesting thought to have. So the fact that I pierced or got connected to reality in a way that transcends my time, that's what I would like my legacy is. And second of all, that reading my books can actually change who you are, can change how you think and how you look at the world. And it's still happening 100 years from now. So that would be my legacy.

[00:52:56] Absolutely, Robert. So we're going to do a quick random round here. First question, what song do you have on repeat?

[00:53:03] I listen to the songs is good. Definitely age me. I have a song because I'm writing about the Cosmos by the Grateful Dead called Darkstar. It's from the album Live Dead. It's one of those insane 20 minute improvizations, but it is the weirdest, most druggy, most interesting. I've listened to a lot of that when I was a kid. I'm not into them very much anymore. But that song is pretty intense and I listen to that fairly frequently. That's on repeat. Definitely. I have to go listen to that album Live Dead Darkstar. It'll blow your mind or you'll think I'm an idiot.

[00:53:41] But after there, definitely like post that in the show notes and give it a listen. I'm also going to quickly open up a random question generator. Let's see what we got for you here. Robert, what is your go to dance move?

[00:53:55] My go to dance move is silliness. I like making people laugh. I kind of like to make fun of other people's dance moves. So before my stroke, I would see how you were dancing and I kind of danced the same and sort of make fun of it and make people laugh. I'm a very silly dancer.

[00:54:13] I'd have to say you would have a hell of a time at a Punjabi wedding. What's an unpopular opinion you have?

[00:54:22] It's an unpopular opinion that I have. I don't know. I like I like to watch old movies instead of new movies, you know, I mean, I have nothing against new movies that I'm even involved in some ways from them. But I find that I like them better. It's like how I like literature, classical literature better. So I like watching from all cultures. You know, I love seeing movies from Japan, from the 30s or 40s, from India, from that period, from from China, from Russia. I love Russian cinema, from the thirties and American. But I find it's also something I'm going to write about in the new book that when you watch, it's a weird thing because people in the past never had this. We're able now to watch movies from eighty years ago and to see a world that's different from ours that feels different. There's a different gestalt by a different emotion to it. And you can connect, you can travel, time travel. I call it time travel. I'm literally able to see what it feels like to be in Russia in the nineteen thirties under Stalin when I watch and Eisenstein movies. So my unpopular ideas that I kind of prefer old movies to new ones, I find the more interesting, stimulating and I love this kind of time traveling aspect.

[00:55:42] Robert, I wish we had more time. There's so much more I want to talk to you about. Hope I can get you back onto the show and Love Sublime comes out. Thank you so, so much for taking time out of your schedule to chat with me today.

[00:55:52] I really appreciate this is one of the most interesting interviews I've ever had. And I'm serious. You ask questions that no one ever has asked. I find that's interesting and you have a great style and your questions are really spot on. So I have to pat you on the back as well.

[00:56:08] So thank you. Thank you very much, Robert. I really, really appreciate it. My pleasure. Take care and have a good day. You too. Bye, everyone.