human nature

Understanding The Laws Of Human Nature With Robert Greene – A Replay

TWS 57 | Laws Of Human Nature

 

If we get to know the laws of human nature, there is nothing stopping us from becoming the best in whatever we do. Patrick Donohoe has been mulling over this thought following a profound conversation with his 14-year old daughter about how we perceive ourselves and other people. In this episode, he revisits last year’s episode with bestselling author Robert Greene, where they talk about his book, The Laws of Human Nature. The interview was a deep and insightful take on how we manage other people’s behavior and, more importantly, our own behavior patterns, making it one of Patrick’s favorite episodes in the podcast. The value from this interview never gets old, so sit back, listen and learn.

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Understanding The Laws Of Human Nature With Robert Greene – A Replay

Thank you for tuning in. It’s going to be a solo episode and I’m going to be brief and then replay one of my most favorite interviews of all time with a man named Robert Greene. It is talking about the book he had released at the time called The Laws of Human Nature, which will stir you deeply so get that book. First, if you have not visited the Resources section of the website, we have some free courses on there. One specifically talks about the entrepreneur in a way in which an entrepreneur can set up their financial life. One talks about the wealth maximization account and another, which is specifically for real estate investors. Go check that out. They’re free to you.

Also, the book that I wrote called Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: A Financial Strategy to Reignite the American Dream. Go pick it up for free. It’s a PDF version. It also has an audiobook attachment to it. You can go on Audible and pay for it. You can go to Amazon and pay for the hard copy. You can go to Kindle and pay for the eBook there. This is the way in which you can get introduced to it for free. There are also other resources on there that I believe will be helpful to you. There’s been something I’ve been thinking about a lot, and this is why I want to replay the interview I had with Robert Greene.

I’ve mentioned on the show before a profound conversation I had with my daughter and she made the comment. It was an observation that she had. She said, “Dad, do you realize we’ll never see ourselves? We’ll never physically experience ourselves.” I thought that was insightful, especially for a young person. That’s my middle daughter and I continued to think about that. I’ve made some connections that I’d like to share with you. First off, she’s right. I don’t think we’ll ever physically experience ourselves with all of our senses. We can see ourselves in the mirror, like a reflection. We can touch ourselves, hear ourselves speak, but it’s a little bit different because when you hear a recording of yourself, especially if you’ve never heard one before, it sounds different.

It’s something that I find interesting as far as how we experience life, all the senses that we have, and how we take in those senses. The light, the sounds are all energy. That’s all processed in our mind and we make sense of it. The connection I made is that you go to old movies and when a person sees themselves in a reflection or a mirror. Maybe it’s an old movie, they don’t have mirrors around and somebody sees themselves for the first time. There’s a connection we make with the character about that experience of, in a sense, experiencing themselves.

I also look at why people are afraid of public speaking or having a picture taken. My sister-in-law hates her picture being taken for whatever reason. I’ve looked at what anxieties people have, and it’s not speaking in front of people. It’s more of the fear of what response you’re going to get because we live vicariously through the opinions of others. What do they say about us? What do they think about us? What do they validate? What do they confirm on the contrary? What do they criticize? What do they don’t like? You can have 100 complements and get all of those wiped out with one criticism.

I look at it as our innate desire to want to understand ourselves, and we do that through others. I look at our society and there are lots of signals going on. We identify ourselves without a person giving us their perspective and signaling is the cars we drive, where we live, the clothes we wear, where we vacation. There’s a lot of physical manifestation that it represents. Look at cars. If somebody drives a Hyundai, an old car, a truck, or a fancy sports car, those are all signals and we’ve used those to make a judgment about somebody else. I’m not saying that this is all good or bad. I’m saying if this is the case, then being aware of it is going to help us get closer to what we want.

I don’t think we want that. We don’t want compliments. We don’t want people to necessarily say certain things about us. We want to know that we have value in the world. That’s where I look at one of the things that I talk about in my book, which is one pillar of financial independence is the discovery of meaningful work and doing that as a full-time profession or career. Meaningful work, I believe is you discovering something that’s a value inside of you and providing that to somebody else.

TWS 57 | Laws Of Human Nature

Laws Of Human Nature: We don’t want compliments. We want to know that we have value in the world.

 

That demonstration gives a sense of value validation, meaning that it’s difficult to match based on having some physical thing that represents your value. I look at that as one of those things we discover over the course of time. If somebody can discover that about themselves, it clears the path to a level of financial independence. I would say in any investment, dollar amount, bank account balance could give you. Those things are important having liquidity, reserves as well as investments that are passive in nature and provide you income so you can exchange that amount of money for the life that you want to live. In the end, if you miss that third pillar, which is meaningful work, contributing who you are to society in some form or another and continue to grow that, then the level of independence and level of fulfillment is simply, in my opinion, not going to be there.

I look at Robert Greene and what he’s written. He has a number of books and they’re all thick. The Laws of Human Nature dives into how people are, how they act, what they think, what they believe. In the end, our life is short. Our experience of life is interesting, whereas I mentioned in the episodes, it’s paradoxical. The closer we get to understanding ourselves and understanding how to reach those levels, those states of fulfillment and feelings of fulfillment, the more wealthy we are. Wealth is to get a person to that state, or at least that’s what we’ve been conditioned to believe.

I believe you can get there in other ways. Money is a part of it. It’s a fast way to get there, but once you have the money, the financial wealth and material things, it does not create the wealth that we want. Read the interview with Robert Greene with that context. I hope you find value in that. Thanks for reading and paying attention and trying to learn about the episodes. I know it’s been unique and me going off. It’s to help me understand what I’m thinking and create some breakthrough moments for me. I hope you find it valuable. One of the things that I will say in relation to meaningful work is the idea of creativity.

This for me is fulfilling because I’m able to speak and express myself and, in the process of doing that, learn more about what I believe, what I think and what I want. Our society is also demonstrating that. They also want to know yet it may not be as channeled and focused as it can be. You see that in the diatribes, on social media where people go off and criticize people and make comments about political things and write these huge novels in relation to something that may not be that significant to anybody else. The act of doing that is this desire for us to express the uniqueness to discover who we are at a deeper level. That creativity, once you can connect it and channel it in a way where it benefits and helps others, there’s an exchange for that. That’s some of the most rewarding activities and experiences ever. I’m off my pedestal. Thank you for reading. Enjoy this interview with Mr. Robert Greene. That’s it for now. Take care and see you on our next episode.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode and our season around the topic of entrepreneurship. My guest is none other than Robert Greene. I’m fortunate to get to interview and learn from some fascinating individuals and Robert Greene is right there at the top. He boasts six New York Times number one bestsellers. Those titles are The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, MasteryThe 33 Strategies of War, and The 50th Law who he wrote with the rapper 50 Cent. He’s also the author of the book, The Laws of Human Nature, which we’re going to be discussing. A successful entrepreneur doesn’t exist without other people. I don’t believe a fulfilling life is possible without other people.

The nature of a human being, our drives, instincts, emotions, and behavior have been studied by millions, yet humanity continues to be ripe with the dark side, war, murder, abuse, bullying, infidelity, divorce, bankruptcy, corruption, depression, anxiety, and the list goes on. Even though we have made incredible strides in an array of areas that snare still remains elusive. What does that have to do with you and what do that have to do with entrepreneurship? It’s no secret that a lot of businesses fail. I’m sure that’s not the initial intention and the amount is much more than those that succeed. Those ideas without execution are worthless and that execution without other people, other humans assuming a successful investment is a lottery ticket. Get this book, The laws of Human Nature, by Robert Greene. Let’s go ahead and welcome my special guest, Robert Greene.

It is truly an honor to have Robert on the show. Thank you so much for joining us. This is one of those amazing interviews that I’ll benefit from and be excited about it.

You need to master people as a skill. If you offend people left, right and center, you’ll never get funded. Share on X

Thanks, Patrick. I hope I can live up to the hype.

You’ve made such a difference in the lives of my as well those that have influenced me. I found your book, The Laws of Human Nature, fascinating. You’ve written so much. This is your sixth book. The first thing that came to my mind, as far as what to ask you, is the circumstances that inspired you to write the book and some of the elements that perhaps weren’t in the previous books that you wrote. What was the backstory to that?

There are several channels that go into what influenced the book. In Mastery, I had a chapter, Chapter 4, on social intelligence. The basic idea was to, as a book, teach you to have to become a master in whatever field you’re in. You’re not going to be graded, whatever you do unless you also know how to get along with people because we’re a social animal. You could be technically brilliant, a consummate computer hacker, but if you offend people left, right and center, you’ll never get funded, etc. I wanted this to be an element of what you need to master. You need to master people as a skill. I got a lot of feedback from readers from that. They enjoyed that chapter, but the main thing was, “Robert, it wasn’t enough. It was juicy, it was tantalizing, but we need more.” I thought, “Maybe I’ll respond to my readers and I will expand this into an entire book.”

There were other things going on as well. My first book came out many years ago, The 48 Laws of Power. Since then, I’ve done a lot of consulting with powerful people in different fields. I’ve had a lot of experiences in helping people with their problems. I’ve seen these themes in which people don’t understand the basic elements of human psychology and it leads to all problems. They hire the exact worst employee based on their resume, charm, and looks. All problems ensue. They partner with the worst business partner who ends up being aggressive that they push them out or they get involved in intimate relationship with someone who ruins their life. Why are people bad at these choices? They’re not good at understanding people. They’re not paying deep enough attention. They’re only looking at the surfaces.

Based on Mastery and based on my experience with consulting, I felt a deep need out there to help people understand certain basics about human psychology and what governs human behavior. There are patterns that I’ve seen in my own life and in the people I deal with and these patterns are what I ended up calling human nature. Unconscious forces that govern a lot of what we do that we’re not even aware of. I want to make you the reader of these forces inside you so you can break your own bad habits. I want you to be able to see them in other people so you can understand others on a much higher level and be able to influence them instead of always being frustrated by the people you’re dealing with.

It’s one thing that I associate with what most people can because we tend to look at the world and assume other people look at the world the same way. Getting back to the premise of the book, when a person sits down to read it, what have you seen as the outcome, the result of somebody who has read it, and where it’s made an impact?

I haven’t gotten a lot of feedback, but I have been getting some. One of the main themes, which is not too surprising, but it wasn’t exactly what I expected is that it’s making people think a lot about themselves. They’re reading the book and they’re reading about narcissism, or they’re reading about envy or aggression. They’re going, “I have some of these traits in myself. I’m not as great as I thought I was. I thought that I was this nice person who’s always considered and thinking about other people. Maybe that’s not true. Maybe I need to reconsider some of my flaws, dark side and shadow sides,” as I call it.

TWS 57 | Laws Of Human Nature

The Laws Of Human Nature

One of the main effects is it’s making people reassess who they are and rethink some of their own behavior patterns. I went through that in writing the book. I’m writing a chapter on narcissism and I’m going, “You’re more narcissistic than you think.” It’s an eye-opener as I was seeing traits that I was writing about in myself. The number one thing that stood out in people reading the book so far is that it’s held up a mirror to them and made them focus on themselves instead of always pointing blame at other people. Always blaming others for the problems in their life. Looking at themselves and saying, “Maybe in some ways, I’m the source of some of these patterns that are going on.” That’s been the main impact.

If you become aware of yourself at a deeper level, you form conclusions based on an understanding of what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s good or what’s bad. Does that change? If your frame of reference, as far as what life is about, hasn’t changed and you’ve become more aware of yourself and maybe more of your flaws and anything else, that’s going to be somewhat disappointing. This is one of the things I got from it. It is more understanding of the context of life and what life is about, which oftentimes is one of those things that we’re not always aware of, at least on a short-term basis. Does that resonate with some of the feedback you’ve gotten?

It’s not intended to make you depressed, hate yourself, or dislike yourself. It’s meant to have the opposite effect, which is a lot of the feedback that I’m getting. Now that you’re aware of some of these tendencies that are innate to all of us, you can start to begin to change yourself and you can start getting out of denial. For instance, I have a chapter on envy and where I say that this is rooted in human nature is that the human brain operates by comparing. That’s how our knowledge is formed. That’s what neuroscientists have discovered. As a social animal, what this means is, not only are we comparing information from the environment, but we’re continually comparing ourselves to other people around us.

If you look at yourself in the course of a day, you’d have to admit that you’re continually comparing yourself to your peers, to how much money they make, how much respect they’re getting, how much attention they’re getting on social media, etc. You can’t help it because that’s how the human brain works. That’s where envy stems from. If you are continually aware of what other people have, and it looks like they have more than what you have, you’re going to have feelings of envy, but you’re going to disguise it to yourself. You’re going to disguise it in the form of, “That person doesn’t deserve his success. He’s not worth it. He’s not good.” You’re going to criticize them, or maybe you’ll even take action against them without ever realizing that envy is the source of your emotions.

I want to tell the reader, there’s nothing wrong with feeling envy. There is nothing wrong for being a human being, feeling aggressive, or being self-absorbed. I want to take the guilt out of all of this. I simply want to shine the spotlight on who you are, so that you can maybe take that mechanism of comparing yourself to others and turn it into a positive, which is what each chapter in the book ends with. It’s how you can take this quality and turn it into something productive and positive. If that’s the moral or the goodness component, then that maybe it. Instead of constantly comparing yourself to others who are better than you, why not compare yourself to others who have it worse than you, so that you can feel some gratitude for the success that you’ve had, for the family that supports you?

Look at people who have less. Sometimes the people you are envying, if you got to know them, you would realize that their life is quite miserable. They’re not as happy as they seem. On social media, people always give the impression that they’re taking the most wonderful vacations. They’re meeting the most fabulous people but if you got to know them, their lives are as boring as you could possibly imagine. Maybe there’s no need to envy them on and on. How you can take this comparing mechanism and make yourself a better human being out of it?

In your experience in writing the book and researching, was there anything that you became aware of that made an impact on you or maybe changed the direction of the book?

You’re more narcissistic than you think. Share on X

I always go into books with an open mind. I have a bias. My bias tends to be somewhat negative. I have a somewhat negative view of human nature. If you know my books, you recognize that, but I didn’t want that to govern this book that I wrote. I want it to be open-minded. I wanted to read books like Steven Pinker’s book who’s much more optimistic than I am. It’s to shed a light onto some ideas that I don’t necessarily share, but that I don’t end up writing a book that’s pure confirmation bias. There were things in the process of opening it up that did surprise me. I did a chapter on aggression and I read a lot about anthropology and the sources of aggression in human beings. It was quite surprising for me to realize that our hunter-gatherer ancestors going back many years ago were violent and aggressive.

This notion of the happy tribe member living off the land and being happy and all that. There were extremely high murder rates. There were wars going on, constant skirmishes, high degrees of envy, murder and violence within the tribe. I had that predisposition to maybe think that, but this was quite shocking for me to realize. A problem that we have is we tend to want to think of us humans as being this ultra-sophisticated creature who created the internet, who are sophisticated and so far removed from our primitive past. I don’t believe that. We’re still much a slave to this primitive past. I kept an open mind, but a lot of the research that I had confirmed these ideas.

I looked at how DNA and what we’ve come to understand as far as it’s concerned. There is a degree of sophistication that’s different than our predecessors. At the same time, our instinctive nature seems to be similar. In this day and age, it seems like the accountability factor to who we should be, how we should be happy, or what we should wear is much higher than it was before. We’re driven more in a sense, but at the same time, there are these natural things about us that are there. Oftentimes, we consider that a flaw. Do you consider that a flaw or do you consider these natural attributes, tendencies or drives to be what they are and not necessarily good or bad?

Nothing is good or bad. It’s human nature. The problem that we face is that things evolved back hundreds of thousands of years ago for a purpose or a reason. We evolved as social animals that had to have an extremely tight cohesive group in order to survive because humans are physically weak and we could only survive by working within numbers and groups. We developed extremely high empathic powers. Before the invention of language, we could sense the emotions of other people around us without ever having to say anything. This viral vulnerability that we humans have, it was part of our survival. It is not adapted to the 21st century in life.

What it means is we’re open to the ideas and opinions of other people. We see that on social media. It becomes hard for us to detach ourselves and think for ourselves and think rationally instead of always being moved by the tribes that we belong to, by the heated political discussions of the people we always agree with. It’s hard for us to divorce ourselves because this has bred into us and wired into our brains. It served a function thousands of years ago, but we no longer are living in groups of 30 people. A lot of the things that evolved early on aren’t adapted to 21st century life and that’s what causes us many problems.

You mentioned about your interactions with high-level influential people and you see a lot of these elements of human nature at the highest or lowest levels and in between. In the end, an understanding of this, what does that give someone? They become aware that they’re an individual. They become aware of themselves and it’s not necessarily part of an abstract group but it’s the individual, their character, makeup, desires and so forth. When a person becomes aware of that, how does life change?

It revolutionizes them. That’s the whole point of the book. It should change everything that you do and everything that you think. It should have a radical effect on the reader. I don’t write books that are a soft little, “Maybe, I’ll think about this.” I want to go inside your head and change how you look at the world. Take, for example, law number seven, about how to influence people. I have argued that people are naturally defensive. If you go up, normally you’re locked inside of your mind. You’re always thinking about your desires, wishes, and you want them to fund your startup for instance. You think, “My startup is wonderful. I’m going to give them a great pitch and they’re going to love it and that’ll work.” You’re working against human nature because people are naturally defensive. They don’t have any reason to support you. They’re not naturally your ally. There has to be something in their own self-interest.

TWS 57 | Laws Of Human Nature

Laws Of Human Nature: Compare yourself to others who have it worse than you so that you can feel some gratitude for the success that you’ve had.

 

We are all overworked. We’re all over tasks in the world and have one more person coming at us, trying to influence and telling us about our idea and go, “I can’t take it.” You’re never going to realize this. You’re going to go give them your pitch and say, “That’s wonderful.” Two, three days or you don’t hear anything a week, two weeks. Finally, you realize they’re not interested at all. It’s because you didn’t understand something basic. The people you deal with have an opinion about themselves. I go into this in the book and I explained how that opinion is formed. We all have certain basics about how we think of ourselves. We think of ourselves as morally good, as autonomous that we control our own lives, and as intelligent. At least relatively intelligent for the field that we’re in.

There’ll be other aspects of that opinion that might depend on the individual like, “I am super self-reliant or I’m a rebel. Nobody tells me what to do.” If you go in there with your pitch or idea, and you somehow challenge that idea, you make people feel that maybe they’re not intelligent or maybe they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s not your intention, but you’re implying it. You’re going to make them defensive. Instead of lowering their resistance, it’s going to make it harder for you to try and get to them. You have to understand that you need to set things up before you hit people with your idea. You need to lower their resistance. You need to validate who they think they are.

It’s not necessarily crap. People are generally good. They do have good qualities. If you validate them, if you make them feel that they are intelligent, that they are moral, they’re not going to be as resistant to you. Simply getting outside of your mindset and your own self-absorption and thinking about the other person’s needs and what they’re missing in life, give them validation. Already the whole game has changed 180% right there. You’d be shocked at how many high-level CEOs, powerful people in the entertainment industry that never used this basic idea. They were violating that law continually. It’s understandable because we’re wrapped up in ourselves that it takes an effort to think inside the mindset of the person we’re dealing with and try and get inside their way of looking at the world. If you’re able to do that to some degree on all of these laws that I talked about, it will change everything that you do.

Our life, in large part, is our relationships. Most satisfaction and happiness come from that. I want to make sure we hit on this. I would say one of our instrumental relationships to happiness is our partner. Would you maybe talk about the section in the book where you go into masculine and feminine, men and women?

I’m glad you asked that because that’s the chapter that people ask the least about. Essentially, I’m trying to cover all aspects of human nature and one of the key aspects is our gender, our sex, and how we relate to it. I was deeply influenced by my research by a famous psychologist named Carl Jung, who talks about an anima and an animus. I’m thinking of this in reference, and so is he, into the intimate partners that we choose in our love relationships. It also affects our work relationships. In the work world, we all have to deal with men and women, where men are working for female bosses, but women have always been working for male bosses. It also influences the work world. What Jung discovered was, start with a man. In his earliest years began in relationship to his mother most often. Those first two years, 98% of his contact is powerfully, physically only with the mother. That female feminine presence, her female feminine energy, which is different than a man’s.

I don’t care how politically correct we want to get, men and women are biologically different. That energy from the woman, the mother he takes inside of himself, she becomes a part of him, has a deep impact. When you’re 1 or 2 years old, you are vulnerable. You were open to influence. It’s amazing. A young boy interjects that presence of the mother, and it becomes a part of who he is. It becomes a part of perhaps some of her qualities, if she’s a gentle, loving person or she’s maternal. Not all mothers are alike and they don’t have to be. That becomes a part of him. He carries that within himself. As he goes through life, Jung called that part for a man an anima. It’s a little woman that lives inside of the man that came from the mother. It can also be influenced by siblings and sisters as well but primarily from the mother. He carries that little mother figure within him.

It influences forever throughout his entire life, his choices in the women that he wants to partner with. He may be looking for someone like that mother figure, who has that nurturing quality that he has in himself that he never developed, or if his mother didn’t pay him attention. This is a common pattern. Let’s say she was narcissistic and was more self-absorbed and not such a good mother. He’s going to spend his life looking for a woman who is similar to his mother. Oddly enough, who is self-absorbed in the perverse idea that he will be able to turn it around and make that relationship work as if you could go back in the past and rewire his mother.

The human brain operates by comparing that’s how our knowledge is formed. Share on X

It doesn’t make logical sense, but Jung who studied thousands of married couples found this pattern over and over again. The woman has the same thing with the man. It’s called the animus. It’s the father figure. That energy isn’t as direct early on, as powerful as the boy and the mother, but it’s still powerful. She takes the side of herself. She internalizes the presence of that man and that male can become a voice in her. A lot of animus figures that women carry are critical because a lot of father figures or men will tend to be critical of the woman. She’ll internalize these critical voices that you’re compared to a bunch of judges in her head, always judging her for her looks and for not being good enough at this or that. She’ll make odd choices based on her relationship with her father.

I talk in the book about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. She is one of the classic figures in this. She had a father who was a total seducer, a total rake. He could never be faithful to any woman. Her parents, in fact, divorced but she loved him and he loved her and they were devoted. They were extremely close. Throughout her life, she constantly was partnering with men who were the mirror image of her father, John F. Kennedy, who cheated on her left, right and center. Aristotle Onassis, who cheated on her left, right and center, powerful men like her father. She couldn’t break that pattern.

The other element of the chapter that’s important is to make you realize that men have a deep feminine part of their personality that comes from the mother figure. Women have a masculine side of their personality that usually comes from the father figure. You’re either in deep denial of that aspect of who you are, in which case you repress it and it comes out in weird ways, or you’re able to integrate that part into your character and make it something strong and powerful. A man who can still be manly and masculine but use his empathetic side who can use some of that kindly maternal energy from the mother will be a better person, a better man for that, for integrating all of these parts of his personality. I can go on and on, but that’s to give you an idea.

Going back to when we first started talking on this topic, the male and female relationships that exist, whether it’s the workplace or in social circles or you’re into your intimate relationships and they’re biologically different. It’s not instinctive that a man can empathize to that level with a woman. You’re essentially saying that because it’s not instinctive, becoming aware of it, observing, understanding and learning about it is going to improve the way in which you embrace your feminine and masculine side, and then vice versa and the person that you’re engaging with.

I know your time is super valuable and I appreciate the time you spent. What’s the significance of not necessarily observing yourself and your nature and what compels you, but also in all the different environments that you’re in being aware and observing others? If you were to sum up it in one sentence, it’d probably be along those lines from what I’m assuming. What does that give you? Why is that important to somebody?

There are many ways to answer that question. First of all, as a social human, it’s essential that you develop the skill to cut off your internal monologue and observe the people around you. A lot of people in the world, instead of supporting this are not only finding problems, dealing with people, but there’s a lot of loneliness in our culture. You may be doing okay in your career, but your relationships are brittle. They’re not deep and they’re not sad, fulfilling. A lot of it is because you’re not paying deep attention to the people around you. You’re not understanding them. You’re more about yourself and what your own needs are, and other people can sense that. It creates these lukewarm relationships.

Also, because you’re not paying deep attention, you’re making all mistakes in your career. Being able to get outside of yourself and observe people is essential to surviving in the world, to building better relationships and to have more success in your career, because everything depends on your social and political skills if you’re working in an office. The moment you put three human beings together in a room, politics intervenes. You have egos and you have to think in these terms. You need to be able to observe people and understand that. Some scientists estimate that 95% of human communication is nonverbal.

TWS 57 | Laws Of Human Nature

Laws Of Human Nature: We’re so wrapped up in ourselves that it takes an effort to think inside the mindset of the person that we’re dealing with and how they look at the world.

 

The way people smile, they’re fake smiles. How to differentiate a fake smile from a real smile? How to sense when people are smiling, but they resent you? There’s some underlying resentment there. It’s powerful, or how people, when you first walk up to them, their body language reveals whether they’re excited to see you or not. You’re missing all of that information. You’re walking around as if you had blinders on your eyes. What’s the point of being a social animal if you’re not observing? If you’re not seeing this language of nonverbal communication, you’re continually misreading people. You think that smile that they give me is they like your project or your idea, they like you but in fact, they don’t, and you’re missing that. It’s not that difficult to learn how to develop the skill.

The other element of it is that being self-absorbed is depressing. You’re always wrapped up in your own problems and it becomes a sinkhole that you go deeper and deeper into. Being able to observe people is like therapy. You get outside yourself, your little problems, world, obsessions, and you involve yourself more deeply with other people. You won’t feel as depressed as you were. Also, you’ll find that people are quite interesting. A lot of the reason that you’re not paying attention is you think that you are more interesting than other people. Your thoughts and desires are more important than others, but if you reverse this and you start becoming a better observer in life, a little light bulb will go on in your head and you’ll go, “That person who works at Starbucks and serves me coffee every day, they’re much more interesting than I think they are.”

They have an inner life, weirdness, dreams that are strange. They’re doing things on the side that are interesting. People are interesting. They’re like characters in a book or a movie and that’s how I want you to think about it. We go to movies because we were voyeurs and we get to go inside the lives of other people and go, “What is that person thinking that’s an interesting character? Is he a psycho killer or not?” We’re fascinated. Think of the people you deal with like characters in a movie. They might be a psycho killer for all you know, or they might not be but they’re interesting.

Getting outside yourself will make you a better person, feel happier, and will make your life easier. It will also contribute greatly to your creative skills because the ability to get outside of yourself and inside of other people loosens the mind up. You no longer have all of your preconceptions about, “This person is good. This person is bad.” You learn to relax and be in the moment and go, “I’m not going to judge this guy that I’m talking to. Instead, I’m going to listen.” It has an overall effect I talked about in Mastery. people who are socially aware are often more creative. They don’t have these rigid mental categories. I could go on and on, but the benefits of becoming a better observer in life are in new infinite.

I’d like to end with this last point, which you weren’t aware of. We’ve focused the show and guests and interviews and topics around the idea of entrepreneurship, as well as the environment of capitalism. The reason why I was adamant to have you on is that for me, at least, you have success and failure in business, as well as in society due to your understanding of relationships as far as what I have experienced. With what you’ve observed with the entrepreneur, startup, business world, and the success and failure there, how do you see your bookmaking an impact and those who either are in the process of running a business, starting a business, or bringing on partners? What do you see as the impact of your book on the success of ventures in general? 

It should have a huge impact. I could go through the laws. Law number one should make you more aware of how emotions govern your decision so you can become more rational and make better decisions. The laws about how to judge people, how to judge their character, I have this chapter that will mean you won’t hire exactly the wrong person to partner with. You can’t believe how many times people hire the wrong person to be their partner and the misery that causes. This goes back to the Bible. It’s much ingrained in human nature. You will start making bad choices. I have an important chapter on grandiosity, and this is a problem that affects entrepreneurs. I know because I worked for one. I was on the board of directors of a publicly-traded company and the CEO was a classic entrepreneur who started from scratch. He’s charismatic and brilliant, but he wouldn’t listen to other people.

He thought he knew he had all the answers himself. He was a bit of a narcissist and it ended up that inability, that idea that your God, that you can do anything is what destroyed him. It’s a little bit of the complex than Elon Musk has. This chapter will make you realize that success is the worst thing that can happen to you in many ways. It makes you think you have the golden touch and makes you think that luck wasn’t involved, that other people didn’t help you, that you’re some God-figure that can snap your fingers and get whatever you want. It’s an illusion. It’ll help that way. I have a chapter on the authority. I maintained that humans respond to a certain primal type of authority figure. It almost goes back to chimpanzees. It’s rooted in who we are.

Nothing is good or bad. It’s human nature. Share on X

I layout for you the paradigm for the 21st century of how we relate with authority figures and what we will consider a powerful person who has traits. This is a person who is empathetic, believe it or not, that cares deeply about the employees, that involve them creatively, that leads from the front, that leads by examples, not expecting people to do the work that he or she is not willing to do. That is the person that has a vision. Having a vision is essential to being a leader. You can have a vision like Elon Musk and not be able to execute it and that’s another problem. A lot of leaders in the world with quarterly reports and all the pressures we feel in the stock market are a pure, publicly-traded company that is only reacting to things that happen month by month.

A true leader, and what people want and desperately needed in a leader, is the ability to see 1, 2 years down the road, to have an overall vision for where the company is headed. I preach this over and over again to that entrepreneur that I talked to you about, “Where’s the company headed? What is a brand? This brand has to adapt because tastes have changed from a few years ago.” They never listened to me and then the ship went down. I’m not saying, “I would have saved this, the sinking ship, but it was a key element.” All the chapters are important, but another chapter deals with knowing the zeitgeist, knowing the spirit of the times so that your idea, your startup, think of the times that we live in.

It’s a way that’s cresting and then falling. A lot of people are riding that wave or they’re behind it a little bit, and then they fall back. You want to be ahead of that wave and where the times are. You want to be 5, 6 months to a year ahead of where people are going. That’s a genius level. That’s true vision. You create something like Steve Jobs created the iPod that revolutionizes the tech world, because you’re thinking 1, 2 years ahead down the line. I have a chapter on how to read the zeitgeist to understand the spirit of the times. I could go through all the chapters, but to an entrepreneur, that should be a big juicy steak for them.

TWS 57 | Laws Of Human Nature

Laws Of Human Nature: Building better relationships is essential to surviving in the world today and to be more successful in your career.

 

Robert, this has been incredible and thank you for your valuable time. I loved it. I can see how much you enjoy having these conversations. I want you to enjoy writing and talking about things that make a difference. I’m excited for our readers to read the book, but can you maybe give out ways in which they can also follow you to be aware of other things that you’re working on? If you’re active on social media, what’s the best way?

I have a website. It’s PowerSeductionAndWar.com. The titles of my first three books, 48 Laws, The Art of SeductionStrategies of War are there. I have links to the book that I did with 50 Cent. I co-wrote a book with 50 Cent and to Mastery, my new book, and then to my Twitter and Instagram accounts. That’s probably the best resource. There’s also a link for if you need and want to try and email me as well.

Robert, thank you again for your time. I hope to talk to you some other time.

I would love to, Patrick, whenever you want to. I enjoyed it.

Thank you, Robert. Have a good one.

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About Robert Greene

TWS 04 | Laws Of Human NatureRobert Greene is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law, and Mastery.

In his sixth book, The Laws of Human Nature, he turns to the most important subject of all – understanding people’s drives and motivations, even when they are unconscious of them themselves.

 

 

 

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A Conversation Around Politics, Entrepreneurship, And The Dynamics Of Capitalism with Peter Wehner

TWS 14 | Dynamics Of Capitalism

 

Capitalism is the greatest economic system in human history because it’s lifted more people out of poverty than any system in human history and allowed for the conditions for great human flourishing and great technological advancements. This is according to Peter Wehner, a New York Times contributing Op-Ed writer covering American politics and conservative thought and a popular media commentator on politics. Wehner is also a veteran of three White House administrations and author of the books Wealth and Justice, The Morality of Democratic Capitalism, and The Death of Politics. In this episode, he dives into the aspects and dynamics of capitalism.

Watch the episode here:

Listen to the podcast here:

A Conversation Around Politics, Entrepreneurship, And The Dynamics Of Capitalism with Peter Wehner

My guest is incredible. Probably the best top three interviews I’ve had. We are talking about entrepreneurship, but we also weave in capitalism. We talk about a lot of what the theme was in 2018, life, liberty and property. It was awesome to talk to this individual. He is super intelligent and very distinguished. Peter Wehner is my guest and he is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He also is a contributing editor at the Atlantic Magazine. He is also a contributing columnist for the New York Times. He is the former Director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives and Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush. He has authored a few books, Wealth and Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism and The Death of Politics. Welcome, Peter. It is amazing to have you on. I’m excited about this conversation and to talk to you about your book as well as some of the things that you’ve been preaching.

Thanks for having me on. It’s a pleasure to be with you.

I talked to you a little bit about what we’ve been doing, which is focusing on the topics that include life, liberty, property from some of John Locke’s writings. As well as what capitalism is, entrepreneurship, and the framework where most people want to be a part of. Not necessarily just in the US but around the world. I look at what you’ve written about and understood it for quite some time studying and looking at where our society is and what has made us successful versus other nations perhaps. How have you come to understand capitalism in general and the aspects and dynamics of capitalism?

My belief is that capitalism is the greatest economic system in human history because it has lifted more people out of poverty than any system in human history and allowed for the conditions for great human flourishing and great technological advancements. Capitalism unmitigated and unrestrained has some problems. Part of what democracies and free societies have to do is to soften some of the rougher edges of that. That’s a prudential judgment. What does that mean? What programs have to be done to do that? You have to weigh the costs and benefits in terms of the effects on economic growth and all the rest.

It’s my belief that capitalism works because it’s most consistent with human nature. I’m a big believer in the idea that you have to confirm your economic and political systems to certain realities about human nature. I think capitalism accords to that and aligns with that. It understands as Adam Smith talked about what selfishness rightly understood is. You have to take into account what drives and motivates people that you can’t believe simply altruism, even though altruism is a part of human life and human experience. People act in ways that advance their self-interest rightly understood. You have to create certain incentives that will lead human beings to act in the ways that are both expected of them but also advances the common good.

I think the American understanding of capitalism, by and large, is the right one. Limited government entrepreneurship, free markets, skepticism about the ability of the centralized government to dictate decisions and believe that it has the capacity to anticipate and direct all aspects of human life. It has improved and right. There’s an epistemological modesty that capitalism understands, which is that you can’t get a small group of very bright people who can run economies. The way that economies work best is letting people by and large to be free to act in ways that want to act.

Let me go into two things that you had said because I find this interesting. It sounds like there’s this altruistic pull of human beings to be charitable to help others, to contribute, give back. There’s also this invisible hand, maybe more self-interested. It seems like those two things are pulling against each other. Are they mutually exclusive or is it may be a mischaracterization of those two concepts?

I don’t think of them as mutually exclusive. I think that they can be complementary. They’re distinct and they’re part of human nature. Think about your own life, the lives of your friends and your family, you probably see both of those elements in them. There are times in which you see altruism, self-sacrifice, selflessness, acts of charity, sympathy and compassion. Those things are real and they exist. They should be encouraged where they can. On the other hand, all of us act in our self-interest as well. That’s the way we’re designed. That’s the way that we operate. Most of life is acting in our self-interest provided that it doesn’t run over the rights of other people, and none of us are completely selfless, self-giving, completely compassionate and completely sympathetic. You have to take that into account.

The way that economies work best is by letting people be free to act in ways that they want to act. Share on X

That’s not a bad thing as long as it’s channeled in the right way. The trick here is to try and take those human realities and direct them in a way that advances the common good. The founders understood this. Their view of human nature was correct, which is that people are capable of virtue and nobility but also acts of recklessness, irresponsibility and evil. You have to take both of those things into account. My own sense, I’m a person of the Christian faith. The Christian understanding of human nature is essentially correct. It’s that too, which is the advice and virtue are intermingled in people’s lives and in people’s hearts. It’s a complicated mix. People in different seasons in life lean in more of one direction than another. The challenge in individual lives, as well as a society, is to try and emphasize, give force and power to the higher things and to mitigate the lower things.

I do want to hit on a few of the things you said. Go to this idea of central powers dictating what people should do or taking care of them is the banner sometimes in which central governances is looked to as a virtue. What is it about that structure that people don’t end up liking? The ideal side of things that they push through or talk about sometimes is intriguing. I see why they would appeal to people, but when it comes down to it, why do people kick against that? Why does that impede human progress or does it?

Let’s take facts and circumstances. Sometimes when the centralized government, the national government who’s acted is advanced, great good, and sometimes, often it’s done the opposite. I’m somebody who believes in limited government and is wary of centralized government. I’m a lifelong conservative. That’s what’s shaped my beliefs in part because the way I understand conservatism is that it’s based very much on the human experience. It’s a negation of ideology, Russell Kirk and others have said. You have to take into account what works for the human condition. I’d say that there are several reasons for it in terms of why one is skeptical with centralized power. One is simply on the efficacy standpoint. Peter Schuck wrote a book about why government fails. He refers to himself in the book as a militant moderate.

He’s not an ideological person, but he’s an empirical look at what it is about a large government that doesn’t work very often, that fails where the efficiency is not what it ought to be. Anybody who’s worked there, if they’re honest, would concede that fact. How often these grand promises and hopes that are sincere and don’t translate into reality. I think you could look at much of the great society and see that. Even programs which have done some good but have also are themselves extremely inefficient like Medicare and Medicaid. I wouldn’t argue that no good comes out of them. I don’t think that’s sustainable, but those programs are not nearly as efficient as they could be.

TWS 14 | Dynamics Of Capitalism

Dynamics Of Capitalism: Most of life is acting in our self-interest provided that it doesn’t run over the rights of other people.

 

I’d say the inefficiency and lack of efficacy for centralized government is something that we need to be alert to. There’s the concern that the founders themselves had and many others who had, which is when you centralize power, there’s the danger of authoritarianism and even totalitarianism. That as the old maximum goes, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts. We’ve seen time after time that when people get a tremendous amount of power, when it’s unchecked and it’s on challenged, that can lead to some very bad conditions and situations. That was the worry of the founders. That’s the reason that they set up our system of government of checks, balances, and separation of powers because what they wanted was not an efficient government. They wanted a government that protected against tyranny.

I think that’s a second reason that people need to be wary about centralized government. The third reason is that if you go back and you read Adam Smith in a certain way and probably more specifically this idea about which is that there’s this mythology among Progressives, which is that if you get a group of wise men, wise women, they can oversee, conduct, and determine how human society can act and all realms that simply isn’t possible. They can’t do it. There are so many imponderables in lives, so many contingencies in life that the idea that a centralized state or a group of individuals would be able to make those judgments. I just don’t think works.

The fourth thing I’d say is George Will, a marvelous book that he wrote called The Conservative Sensibility writes about the American founding. He says, “That’s essentially what conservative’s need to conserve.” which is the idea of inalienable rights. Natural rights, rights that precede government. His argument and I think it’s a valid point that government, if it gets too large, too centralized, can undermine those natural rights. He makes the case in a pretty persuasive way that the belief in natural rights would tend to lead one toward a more limited government.

Let’s go to your book because you look at the idea of capitalism and just the word itself formulates a specific reaction in people as far as my experience is concerned. It’s not necessarily based on logic and thought through education debate where a person comes to an understanding. It’s more based on what has been heard. What society believes about that word? Talk about your best-selling book, Wealth and Justice: The Morality of Democratic Capitalism and weave that into the conversation. Talking about how that can essentially be a message that will hit on the principles that make capitalism good for society as opposed to what most people react to, which is that it exploits people and takes advantage of people. It’s all about the wealthy and them getting their own.

People are capable of virtue and nobility, but also acts of recklessness, irresponsibility, and evil. Share on X

I coauthor it. It’s a monograph of the American Enterprise Institute with Arthur Brooks, who was for many years President of an American Enterprise Institute. He left to take a professorship at Harvard. Arthur is very good in a very sober and thoughtful voice on this thing. We wrote this book and the situation is more acute than it was when we wrote it. One of our concerns was Americans in general and particularly young Americans were losing faith in capitalism as a system. We see that in polls, and you’re probably more familiar with them than I am. The support for socialism is higher than at any time in my lifetime, probably higher than at any point since the early part of the twentieth century.

You see this in contemporary politics with the Democratic Party who are two of the hottest political figures in democratic politics, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They’re both self-proclaimed democratic socialists. If you watch the democratic debates, you see Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren essentially taking an anti-private enterprise stance. There’s almost a reflexive hostility to anything having to do with capitalism or corporations. It doesn’t mean that those certain corporations don’t deserve criticism, but it’s a reflex. You’ve seen this rise in respect and to some of the enthusiasm for socialism and the decline in competence and capitalism. That’s a problem. Some of that is undoubtedly a result of the great in 2008. I think that the income gap between the most wealthy and the rest of the society probably had more of an effect on the general public than a lot of people on the right thought that it would.

It seems to have permeated society and the belief that the very rich are making out like bandits, the rest of us are not and so much of the gains in wealth, money from the market, that has happened. We’ve had wage stagnation from pretty much the entire part of the 21st century. Wages had been much flatter and it’s a complicated set of reasons for why that’s happened. I wouldn’t blame that on any single president. Certain deep trends are in play here, which I’m guessing you’ve covered. There seems to be a lack of faith in capitalism. That’s given rise to populism, which I’m wary about as a conservative. I think populism can often be antithetical to capitalism and it can be antithetical to reason itself.

I think it first goes to reason because I would say there’s less reason. It may be the delusion of information that’s all around us and individuals who can’t fit anything else into their head. Therefore they take the efficient approach and leverage the belief system of someone they feel is like them. It’s interesting to see how society has been wired to think a certain way and it’s not necessarily the beliefs associated with reason, debate and personal individual understanding. Its group thinking dictated by very persuasive people like your AOC and Bernie Sanders.

TWS 14 | Dynamics Of Capitalism

Dynamics Of Capitalism: It’s important for the defenders of capitalism and free-market to make those arguments and not to be dismissive toward the critics.

 

I think that’s right. There’s a rage at the system, the establishment of healing. It’s almost a quasi-nihilism. You see this toward capitalism and the politics in general, which is this idea that we have to burn down the village to save it. Things couldn’t be worse. Let’s just toss the whole thing aside. That’s what explains in part of the rise of Donald Trump. I’ve been a very strong and persistent critic of Donald Trump in large part on conservative grounds. What he tapped into is a sense that people wanted a wrecking ball to come in and shatter things. That’s deeply anti-conservative impulse, but he tapped into it effectively.

I’ve told friends of mine who were pro-capitalism and pro-free-market as I am. It is important to do a study or set of studies to understand what happened. What explains the loss of faith in capitalism, the rise in affinity for socialism. Both attitudes and specific episodes and incidents that explain it to understand in a thoughtful way what is driving it. What are the attitudes? What is associated with free-market and capitalism and to think through how do we tell the story? What’s the narrative? What’s the tale we have to tell to remind people why capitalism is a system that has brought so much human flourishing and then so much to encourage human dignity?

I think it was Orwell who said that the first duty of a responsible man is a restatement of the obvious. Sometimes you have to restate what’s obvious or what you thought was obvious. I’ve noticed this in life, in politics, and in economics and all sorts of realms, which is sometimes people forget to make the arguments in some fundamental way. Why is it that we believe what we believe? That’s understandable. You think that certain victories are one, that arguments are settled and you just act on that assumption. Sometimes without quite realizing it, the floor breaks and all of a sudden, that confidence that people had or that understanding those shared assumptions are gone.

I think when it comes to capitalism, it’s quite important for people who are defenders of capitalism and free-market to make those arguments. Not to be dismissive toward the critics, not to laugh at them, not to say these ideas are stupid. Therefore, it shouldn’t be repudiated. Don’t even engage in name-calling, just say socialist and hope that is enough. We have to do more fundamental work to make the case again, and in a sense to win the hearts of ordinary Americans. To explain to them why capitalism is an economic system worthy of their loyalty.

No matter how strong your argument is, it's never as strong as you think it is. Share on X

Let me use some way to abstract of an example as you may use to. There is a documentary that I saw called Behind The Curve. It was essentially about this millions of people that came together stating that the world is flat. That documentary was done by a non-flat-earther. It was interesting because he took this approach and it’s a very irrational thought, but yet millions of people were gravitating toward this. It was all driven by this emotional desire that they have to fit in within a group. Usually, a group of people that don’t believe what everybody else believes. What’s fascinating to the point you just made is the individual who was doing the documentary, they interviewed astrophysicists. They were saying, “Do you know that there’s this group out there, millions of people that believe the earth is flat?”

It’s fascinating because it takes you through this psychological urge of what I think you’re speaking to because the astrophysicists in the end said that, “These people don’t know what we know, so we can’t assume that they do and make an argument from that standpoint.” You have to meet them where they’re at and why they’ve come to that conclusion. If you start to make them wrong or make them feel stupid, it’s just going to strengthen their argument. That fits within the confines of what you’ve been talking about.

That’s a very interesting observation. I’m intrigued. I like to see that documentary. That whole area does fascinate me, I must say. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the work of Jonathan Haidt, who is a marvelous moral psychologist. He used to be at the University of Virginia. He’s now at NYU. He wrote a book called The Righteous Mind. He spends a lot of time with a group called Heterodoxy, which is an effort to defend free speech on campuses against speech codes and so forth. Jonathan himself has been on an interesting journey and interesting pilgrimage. He started out as a traditional person who laughed at Progressive and is much more of a centrist. In part because of what his research has taught him. I’ve learned a lot. He’s a very intelligent, thoughtful guy and a very good guy as well.

His work on confirmation bias and motivated reasoning is outstanding. I’ve learned a lot from it and it goes to the point that you’re making. I think a lot of us believe that the positions others hold and that we hold are derived through some disinterested analysis of the facts, reasoning, and that reasoning has brought us to what we believe, free of emotion and all the rest. What we know about brain science and human nature, the more we’re looking into these things. It is so much of what we believe is a product of transrational or subrational forces. We have dispositions, tropisms, and predilections were products of our families of origin, our life experience, the people we’re around, and the communities we’re a part of.

TWS 14 | Dynamics Of Capitalism

Dynamics Of Capitalism: There is a chance to get some deeper understanding when people feel safe and when they feel heard.

 

That sense of fitting in with communities is extremely strong. We know from brain science that when you get information that confirms what you already believe, it’s a dopamine effect or rush. On the flip side, when there’s information that challenges certain basic assumptions, your brain puts up often a shield to block those things out. It’s genuinely uncomfortable for people to hear information that challenges them. I’d say in my own life, politics and just human relationships, that’s one area where I’ve changed. In the past when I would have differences with people, I would often write long emails, fact base, point-by-point. People who know me would think I was built to respond to some of these issues in terms of debating. Empirical evidence, premise facts to support it, conclusion.

What I’ve discovered is no matter how strong your argument is and it’s never as strong as you think it is. Let’s just assume for the sake of argument. You and I were having a debate. The case I presented against you was overwhelming by any objective standard. The odds are not only that, you wouldn’t change your position if I overwhelmed your case. You would probably, as you were indicating, dig your heels and more. It’s quite rare to shift people. I’ve seen this in theology, in the world of Christianity, in the world of politics and all sorts of world. Where there is a chance to get some deeper understanding is when people feel safe, when they feel heard. When they believe that you know their arguments and at least can state them and understand them even if you disagree with them. If there are a human connection and a human relationship, if you have in a sense standing in somebody else’s life and that will allow them to let you in and to make their case, and vice versa.

Alan Jacobs, who is a professor at Baylor used to be at Wheaton, wrote a book called How to Think. He refers to a foundation that when they conduct debates, the first thing that they require is that the people are debating. Person A states the position of person B in such a fair-minded way that person B believes that it is a fair restatement of their views and vice versa. That is the precondition before the debate goes on. If that thing happened more often, we’d get a lot further along. We know this from the social science evidence. We are as polarized as we have been since reconstruction. It’s a deeply polarized society and when that happens, people tend to go into their own camps and they shut off people who have alternative views. I think that’s happening in all realms, including in the realm that we’re talking about free-market and capitalism. That goes to the larger discussions we’re having, which is how do you make the case in a way that the people who could conceivably be open to an alternative case are.

You’re hitting on everything that has been going through my mind. What you said was brilliant. That’s where I look at just my experience and what I was trying to get to with the whole idea of central governance. People don’t like to be told what to do. There’s this fighting response to it that I think goes into what you were referring to as our unconscious or what’s built into our wiring. That right there includes a lot of when we had to survive where we don’t necessarily have to survive anymore, but yet those instincts are still there. When a person feels attacked, I would assume that it’s very similar to being attacked by the sabertooth tiger or some animal.

Human life and experience is about learning things and recalibrating new facts and conditions that arise and trying to adjust accordingly. Share on X

That’s where I look at AOC and I look at Donald Trump in a way, especially where in a sense they understand psychology. They’re using what people will respond to as talking points and statements. People fall prey to it all the time. I look at the psychology side of things and going to where economics is and usually, the argument for capitalism tends to be rational thinking. I look at how human beings are wired. The majority of it’s emotional. That’s where I look at the values and principles approach has something that intrigues me as opposed to labels like capitalism, Democrats, Progressives or Liberals. It’s looking at principle as opposed to labels because the labels immediately there put you in that camp or excludes you. If you’re in the camp, you’re going to believe what the camp believes and if you’re excluded, you’re not going to believe it.

Labels exist for a reason because they label something. They identify world views, but I think that the labels by and large are probably counterproductive. Once the labels are cast out, then you’re putting people in categories, they’re putting you in categories. It becomes awfully neat, tidy and untrue. It doesn’t allow for flexibility and nuance, which is what human life and experience are about. You learn things, you refine your thinking, you recalibrate, new facts, new conditions arise and you try and adjust accordingly. If you’re in these ideological boxes, it’s very hard.

I’ve had these conversations with Trump supporters because I’m a lifelong conservative and I worked in three Republican administrations and in a Republican White House. I have a lot of friends who are Republicans. I’ve been so critical of Trump. They’re puzzled or upset by it. I’ve had a lot of conversations, many of them good. Sometimes it takes an effort to make sure that the relations don’t fray. It’s been helpful for me because I’ve been able to hear their perspective and understand where they’re coming from. I must say that there are times in which one makes an empirical claim as it relates to Donald Trump that is a criticism of him. Let’s say something about that he has lied and there’s demonstrable evidence that it’s a lie. It’s been fascinating to me how it just doesn’t breakthrough.

It is as if they think that that’s the thread and the whole thing can come apart. If they can see one thing that the whole project comes apart. I’ve experienced this throughout my life in politics, particularly when you’re in the White House. Many of the issues that you confront are complicated issues. They’re very intelligent people arguing different policies and different points of view. Often the decisions are 60/40 or 65/35. It’s not 100% arguments on one side and 0% on the other. That’s part of what discretion, judgment, prudence and wisdom is in governing. It’s the ability to hear these arguments which sound potentially equally persuasive thinking through we choose the one that is most appropriate given the circumstances we’re in. What are the contingencies that we have to anticipate but are unknowable? If you’re deciding a set of policies that you want to roll out, what’s achievable politically and not? What’s the composition of Congress? You might want to push some elements of privatization of Social Security, which you could believe is the right thing to do, but maybe it’s not achievable.

TWS 14 | Dynamics Of Capitalism

The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump

Maybe you have to do something ahead of that. These are all very complicated issues to take into account. Often they are choosing one set of policies over and against another one or 60/40, but then when you get into the actual discussion, those differences disappear and that weighing of pros and cons disappears. It’s as if all the arguments are on one side and not on the other. Once you settled on a position, there seems to be some reflex that we have that says, “I can’t concede a single point to the other side because if I do it, I weaken my case and I can’t possibly weaken my case.” You have people shouting, talking points at each other, talking past each other, and refusing to engage each other and saying, “That’s a valid point. I think you’re right. I just think that the other arguments on my side outweigh the good point that you’re making.” It’s all very complicated and very challenging stuff, but I think in part explains why our politics is as broken as it is.

For the readers, I love having these conversations. Hopefully, this is valuable to you. Some of the things you’re saying, it comes down to this relation to human connection. I think all people want to connect. They want to have a relationship. At the same time, there’s this instinctive protection that they have where they want to look bad. They don’t want to be wrong because what that does is it invalidates their identity to an extent, but when you break down those walls, it’s amazing what can happen. People, either value is a value or a principle is a principle or it’s not. Most people would concede to capitalistic principles if it wasn’t labeled capitalistic principles. These are principles of life in a sense. I’ll end with this and I’ll let you have the final word. There’s something I’ve thought about, which was interesting to me.

I have little kids, two teenagers and a five-year-old. We went to the Disney Aulani Resort on Oahu. When I was there, there’s this central pool section. There were these two guys that had these big earrings, big guys with these tattoos on their arms, hardcore guys. I was able to have a conversation with them. They were there with their kids. We were in this environment in which the walls were broken down and you can have that connection, yet if I went to their neighborhood and was walking down the street at night, the environment changes, walls are up and the outcome is not going to be the same. Human beings are wired in a certain way and we want certain things. They’re very similar yet because of these walls that come up and are reinforced, it’s difficult to have the connection that’s needed in order to make even more progress.

That’s a very interesting story and I think it touches on these deeper truths that we’re talking about. An awful lot of this is what you described, which is a sense of identity. That’s basic to human beings, feeling of belonging, and feeling of community. It’s pretty rare to find people who will take stands that will put them at odds with the community that’s most important to them. That explains a lot of the political tribalism, but we’ve got to find a way to try and break down these walls you’re describing. There’s some lovely verse in the New Testament about breaking down the dividing walls that exist between people. When those walls are up, it usually means that life is going to be harsher, less sympathy, more anger, more antipathy. People begin to view other folks not as individuals that you disagree with, but as enemies at the state, enemies of your cause.

We need other people with other experiences to help us see and to understand. Share on X

What can quickly kick in is the dehumanization, which is if you see things differently than I am. It’s not because you’ve analyzed things wrongly and you made an intellectual error, but you’re morally defective. There must be something wrong with you. If you don’t see things the same way I do, then you don’t value the same things that I do. In fact, you’re a threat to them. We see that in contemporary politics. We know from the data that the attitudes that Republicans, Democrats, Progressives and Conservatives have toward each other. It’s much more personal than ever before. There’s a feeling that these are not just differences of policy, but they are character flaws and faults. If you feel like you’re being attacked on that fundamental level, you’re an alien, a malicious force, a malignant force, that you want to hurt me and you want to hurt everything that I know and love. When that happens, a lot of bad stuff kicks in and we’ve got to break through that. We have to deepen the understanding and sympathy that we have for one another.

In the book that I wrote, The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump. I tell a story in one of the chapters about CS Lewis and Owen Barfield. CS Lewis was a great medievalist and scholar in England. He was probably the most important Christian apologist of the twentieth century. He started a literary group in England in the 1930s. He and JRR Tolkien were the mainstays of that, but there was a person named Owen Barfield who was a British philosopher and poet and somebody that Lewis knew for many years. Lewis in his book Surprised by Joy describes what he refers to as first friends and second friends. For him, it was a person named Arthur Greeves, somebody who knew since his childhood. He said, “First friends are the individuals that when you start the sentence, they’re able to complete it. They’re your alter ego. They see the world largely the same way that you do process it the same way.” We all need that. That’s part of what human community, human attachment, human relationships bring to us. Lewis described what he referred to as a second friend and that was on Barfield. He said, “The second friend is the person who’s not your alter ego, but your anti-self.”

That’s the person who describes who reads all the same books you do and draws all the wrong conclusions from those books. He has a section where he talks about these debates that he had with Barfield and they were pretty intense. They were esoteric debates, but they were about the role of imagination and reason. Lewis says that he and Barfield would go at it hammer and tong late into the night learning the power of each other’s punches almost unconsciously beginning to absorb what the other person was saying. Out of this dog fight, a community of affection grew. The punch line was that Lewis and Barfield both treasured their relationship precisely because they took all the world somewhat differently than the other. They felt that their aperture of understanding was grayer because they had each other in their life.

Barfield later said that, “When Lewis and I debated, we didn’t debate for victory, we debated for truth.” That’s just an entirely different way of approaching dialogue and conversation, which is, “Do you have something to say where I can learn?” “Can I come out of this conversation knowing something that I didn’t before? Knowing something about you, something about the nature of the world, something about the experience that helps me see things better than I would have?” That goes back to what we were talking about, which is epistemological modesty. Even if in some abstract sense you or I were 100% correct in our understanding of a particular issue, there’s still no way that we could know the full truth and reality of things on any number of issues. That’s not within our capacity. That’s why we need other people with other experiences to help us see and to understand. If we were able to take that to heart and to incorporate it in our lives and embrace it, a lot of things in life would be better than they are.

I’ll say something to that. There’s a concept and idea that I love to use, which is three sides of a coin. Most people look at coins with two sides. There’s the edge, which is the third side. The concept is heads is one opinion, tales is another opinion, but then your opinion should sit on the edge where you should evaluate. Where are the arguments? Where the perspectives are coming from and then rationally come up with your own. I tried to look at that because you’re hitting the nail on the head with a lot of stuff we’ve talked about when it comes to perspective, what truth is, how people come to truths, and then how people change and essentially go from one side of the spectrum to another. Everything you’re hitting on is fascinating. I’d love for our audience to learn about you. Would you mind talking about your book and where they can pick that up? Also, how they can follow you. I know you are contributing to The Atlantic as well as The New York Times. Maybe talk about those outlets so that the audience can follow you.

The book that I just wrote, which was published by Harper Collins is called The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump. It’s an account of my life in politics. What I’ve learned, why I believe politics is important. I think it’s a low moment and a dangerous moment, but I make the case that we need to do something about it because justice matters, and politics, it’s about a lot of things. It’s got its dark undersides as all professions do. It’s finally and fundamentally about justice. The book I wrote in less than a year, but it’s the product of a lifetime in politics. People can get that on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or any of the other outlets. I’m a contributing editor for The Atlantic Magazine. I’m a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. I’m a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. People can follow my work there. I’m on Twitter @Peter_Wehner. I write about all sorts of issues. I’ve written about capitalism, politics, faith and friendship, and then from time-to-time, I interview people for The Atlantic. I did a couple of interviews with David Brooks on his book, The Second Mountain, and then with George Will and his book, The Conservative Sensibility. For me, it’s a lovely way to earn a living, which is for me to write, think, talk to intelligent people, and try and learn along the way.

Peter, it’s been such a joy to speak with you. This has been an awesome conversation for me and I’m hoping readers got as much out of it. Thank you again for your time. Thank you for the good that you’re doing. We’ll have to connect in the future sometime.

I’d like to do it. I enjoyed the conversation a lot. Thanks. Take care.

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About Peter Wehner

TWS 14 | Dynamics Of CapitalismPeter Wehner is the author of The Death of Politics. He is a New York Times contributing Op-Ed writer covering American politics and conservative thought and a popular media commentator on politics.

Wehner is also a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and veteran of three White House administrations.

 

 

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Understanding The Laws Of Human Nature with Robert Greene

TWS 04 | Laws Of Human Nature

 

A successful entrepreneur doesn’t exist without people. However, sometimes, we tend to have a problem dealing with others. In reality, people are social animals and it is important to know how to get along with people. Robert Greene, an international bestselling author, talks about his recent book, The Laws of Human Nature. In his book, Robert walks us through to becoming a master in whatever field we’re in and teaches us how to manage our own and other people’s behavior. Moreover, Robert shares how this book will help us reassess who we are and rethink some of our own behavior patterns.

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Listen to the podcast here:

Understanding The Laws Of Human Nature with Robert Greene

My guest is none other than Robert Greene. I’m so fortunate to get to interview and learn from some fascinating individuals. Robert Greene is right there at the top. He boasts six New York Times number one bestsellers. Those titles are The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, Mastery, The 33 Strategies of War and The 50th Law who he wrote with the rapper, 50 Cent. He’s also the author of the book The Laws of Human Nature. A successful entrepreneur doesn’t exist without other people. I don’t believe a fulfilling life is possible without other people. The nature of a human being, our drives, instincts, emotions and behavior, have been studied by literally millions. Yet humanity continues to be rife with the dark side, war, murder, abuse, bullying, infidelity, divorce, bankruptcy, corruption, depression, anxiety and the list goes on. Even though we have made incredible strides in an array of areas, that snare still remains elusive. What does that have to do with you and what does that have to do with entrepreneurship? It’s no secret that a lot of businesses fail. That’s not the initial intention. The amount is much more than those that succeed. That ideas without execution are worthless and that execution without other people, other humans is like assuming a successful investment is a lottery ticket. Get the book, The Laws of Human Nature, by Robert Greene. Let’s go ahead and welcome my special guest, Robert Green.

TWS 04 | Laws Of Human Nature

The Laws of Human Nature

It is truly an honor to have Robert on the show. Robert, thank you so much for joining us. This is one of those amazing interviews that at least I’ll benefit from it and be excited about it. 

Thanks, Patrick. I hope I can live up to the hype.

You’ve made such a difference in my life, as well as those that have influenced me. I found your book The Laws of Human Nature fascinating. You’ve written so much. This is your sixth book. The first thing that came to my mind, as far as what to ask you, is the circumstances that inspired you to write the book and some of the elements that perhaps weren’t in the previous books that you wrote. What was the backstory to that?

There are several channels that go into what influenced the book. In Mastery, I had Chapter Four on social intelligence. The basic idea was to, as a book, teach you how to become a master in whatever field you’re in. You’re not going to be great at whatever you do unless you also know how to get along with people because we’re social animals. You could be technically brilliant. You could be a consummate computer hacker. If you offend people left, right and center, you’ll never get funded, etc. I wanted this to be an element of what you need to master. You need to master people as a skill. I got a lot of feedback from readers. They enjoyed that chapter, but the main thing was, “Robert, we need more. It wasn’t enough. It was juicy, it was tantalizing, but we need more.” I thought, “Maybe I’ll respond to my readers. I will expand this into an entire book.”

There were other things going on as well. My first book came out several years ago, The 48 Laws of Power. Since then, I’ve done a lot of consulting with powerful people, all different fields. I’ve had a lot of experiences helping people with their problems. I’ve seen these themes in which people don’t understand the basic elements of human psychology. It leads to all kinds of problems. They hire the exactly worst kind of employee based on their résumé, based on their charm and based on their looks. All kinds of problems ensue. They partner with the worst kind of business partner, who ends up being so aggressive that they push them out or they get involved in an intimate relationship with someone who ruins their life. Why are people so bad at these choices? They’re not good at understanding people. They’re not paying a deep enough attention. They’re only looking at the surfaces.

Based on Mastery and based on my experience with consulting, I thought about the deep need out there to help people understand certain basics about human psychology and what governs human behavior. There are certain patterns I’ve seen in my own life and I’ve seen in the people I deal with. These patterns are what I ended up calling human nature, unconscious forces that govern a lot of what we do that we’re not even aware of. I want to make you the reader of these forces inside you so you can break your own bad habits. I want you to be able to see them in other people so you can understand others on a much higher level and be able to influence them instead of always being frustrated by the people you’re dealing with.

It’s one thing that I’ve definitely associate it with that most people can because we tend to look at the world and assume other people look at the world the same way. Getting back to the premise of the book, what have you seen as the result of somebody who has read it and where it’s made an impact?

I haven’t gotten a lot of feedback, but I have been getting some. One of the main themes, which is not too surprising but it wasn’t exactly what I expected, is it’s making people think a lot about themselves. They’re reading the book and they’re reading about narcissism, they’re reading about envy or aggression. They’re going, “I have some of these traits in myself. I’m not as great as I thought I was. I thought that I was this nice person who’s always considered thinking about other people. Maybe that’s not true. Maybe I need to reconsider some of my own flaws, my own dark side,” my shadow side as I call it.

One of the main effects is it’s making people reassess who they are and rethink some of their own behavior patterns. I went through that in writing the book. I’m writing a chapter on narcissism and I’m going, “You’re more narcissistic than you think.” It’s an eye-opener as I was seeing traits that I was writing about in myself. The number one thing that stood out in people reading the book so far is that it’s held up a mirror to them. It made them focus on themselves instead of always pointing blame at other people. Always blaming others for the problems in their life, looking at themselves and saying, “Maybe in some ways, I’m the source of some of these patterns that are going on.” That’s been the main impact.

If you become aware of yourself at a deeper level, you form conclusions based on an understanding of what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s good or what’s bad. Does that change? Your frame of reference is as far as what life is about hasn’t changed. You’ve become more aware of yourself and maybe more of your flaws. Is there anything else? That’s going to be somewhat disappointing. This is one of the things I got from it, is more understanding of the context of life and what life is about, which oftentimes is one of those things that we’re not always aware of, at least on a short-term basis. Does that resonate with some of the feedback you’ve gotten?

You need to master people as a skill. If you offend people left, right, and center, you'll never get funded. Share on X

It’s not intended to make you depressed, hate yourself or dislike yourself. It’s meant to have the opposite effect, which is a lot of the feedback that I’m getting. You’re aware of some of these tendencies that are innate to all of us, you can start to begin to change yourself. You can start getting out of denial. I have a chapter on envy, where I say that this is rooted in human nature. The human brain operates by comparing. That’s how our knowledge is formed. That’s what neuroscientists have discovered. As a social animal, what this means is not only are we comparing information from the environment but also we’re continually comparing ourselves to other people around us. If you look at yourself in the course of a day, you have to admit that you’re continually comparing yourself to your peers to how much money they make, how much respect they’re getting, how much attention they’re getting on social media, etc. You can’t help it because that’s how the human brain works. That’s where envy stems from.

If you’re continually aware of what other people have and it looks like they have more than what you have, you’re going to have feelings of envy. You’re going to disguise it to yourself. You’re going to disguise it in the form of, “That person doesn’t deserve his success. He’s not worth it. He’s not good.” You’re going to criticize them. Maybe you’ll even take action against them, without ever realizing that envy is the source of your emotions. I want to tell the reader there’s nothing wrong with feeling envy. There’s nothing wrong with being a human being. There’s nothing wrong with feeling aggressive or being self-absorbed. I want to take the guilt out of all of this. I simply want to shine the spotlight on who you are, so that you can maybe take that mechanism of comparing yourself to others and turn it into positive, which is what each chapter in the book ends with. It’s how you can take this quality and turn it into something productive and positive. If that’s the moral component or the goodness component, then that may be it.

Instead of constantly comparing yourself to others who are better than you, why not compare yourself to others who have it worse than you so that you can feel some gratitude for the success that you’ve had or the family that supports you? Look at people who have less. Sometimes the people you are envying, if you got to know them, you would realize that their life is quite miserable. They’re not as happy as they seem. On social media, people always give the impression that they’re taking the most wonderful vacations and they’re meeting the most fabulous people. If you got to know them, their lives are as boring as you can possibly imagine. Maybe there’s no need to envy them. On and on, it’s how you can take this comparing mechanism and make use of a better human being out of it.

In your experience in writing the book and researching, was there anything that you became aware of that made an impact on you, or maybe changed the direction of the book?

I always go into books with an open mind. I have a bias. My bias tends to be somewhat negative. I have a somewhat negative view of human nature. If you know my books, you recognize that. I didn’t want that to govern this book that I wrote. I want it to be open-minded. I want to read books like Steven Pinker’s book, who’s much more optimistic than I am. It’s to shed a light on to some ideas that I don’t share, but that I don’t end up branding a book that’s pure confirmation bias. There were things in the process of opening it up that did surprise me. I did a chapter on aggression. I read a lot about anthropology and the sources of aggression in human beings. It was quite surprising for me to realize that our hunter-gatherer ancestors going back thousands of years ago were violent and aggressive.

TWS 04 | Laws Of Human Nature

Laws Of Human Nature: Compare yourself to others who have it worse than you so that you can feel some gratitude for the success that you’ve had.

 

There’s this notion of the happy tribe member, living off the land and being so happy and all that. There were extremely high murder rates. There were wars going on, constant skirmishes, high degrees of envy, murder and violence within the tribe. I had that predisposition to maybe think that, but this was quite shocking for me to realize. A problem that we have is we tend to want to think of us humans as being these ultra-sophisticated creatures who created the internet, who are sophisticated and far removed from our primitive past. I don’t believe that. We’re still slaves to this primitive past. I kept an open mind. A lot of the research I had confirmed these ideas.

I look at how DNA and what we’ve come to understand as far as it’s concerned. There is a degree of sophistication that’s different than our predecessors. At the same time, our instinctive nature seems to be very similar. In this day and age, it seems like the accountability factor to who we should be or how we should be happy or what we should wear or whatever is much higher than it was before. We’re driven more, in a sense. At the same time, there are these natural things about us that are there. Oftentimes we consider that a flaw. Do you consider that a flaw? Do you consider these natural attributes, tendencies or drives to be what they are and not good or bad?

Nothing is good or bad. It’s human nature. The problem that we face is that things evolve back in hundreds of thousands of years ago for a purpose. We evolved as social animals that had to have an extremely tight cohesive group in order to survive because humans are physically weak. We could only survive by working within numbers in groups. We developed extremely high empathic powers where we could sense, before the invention of language, the emotions of other people around us without ever having to say anything. This viral vulnerability that we humans have, it was so much a part of our survival. It’s not very adapted to 21st-century life.

What it means is, we’re so open to the ideas and opinions of other people. We see that on social media. It becomes hard for us to detach ourselves, think for ourselves, and think rationally instead of always being moved by the tribes that we belonged to, by the heated political discussions of the people we always agree with. It’s hard for us to divorce ourselves because this is bred into us, wired into our brains. It served a function thousands of years ago. We no longer are living in groups of 30 people. A lot of the things that evolved early on aren’t adapted to 21st-century life. That’s what causes us so many problems.

You mentioned about your interactions with high-level, influential people. You see a lot of these elements of human nature at the highest levels, lowest levels, and in between. In the end, in an understanding of this, what does that give someone? They become aware that they’re individuals. They become aware of themselves. It’s not necessarily a part of an abstract group, but it’s the individual and their character, their makeup, and their desires. When a person becomes aware of that, how does life change?

You're more narcissistic than you think. Share on X

Become aware of all of the laws of human nature in the whole book?

It’s how they become more aware of themselves as it relates to their human nature.

It revolutionizes them. That’s the whole point of the book. You should change everything that you do, everything that you think. It should have a radical effect on the reader. I don’t write books that are soft little, “Maybe I’ll think about this.” I want to go inside your head and change how you look at the world. Take for example, Law Number Seven about how to influence people. I argue that people are naturally defensive. Normally, you’re locked inside of your own mind. You’re always thinking about your own desires, your own wishes. You want them to fund your startup for instance. You think, “My startup is so wonderful. I’m going to give them a great pitch and they’re going to love it. That’ll work.” You’re working against human nature because people are naturally defensive. They don’t have any reason to support you. They’re not naturally your allies. There has to be something in their own self-interest.

We are all overworked. We are all overtasked in the world. We have one more person coming at us, trying to influence and telling us about our idea of, “I can’t take it.” You’re never going to realize this. You’re going to go give them your pitch and say, “That’s wonderful.” Two days later and three days later, you don’t hear anything. A week later, two weeks later, you realize they’re not interested at all. It’s because you didn’t understand something basic. The people you deal with have an opinion about themselves. I go into this in the book. I explained how that opinion is formed. We all have certain basics about how we think of ourselves. We think of ourselves as morally good. We think of ourselves as autonomous that we control our own lives. We think of ourselves as intelligent, at least relatively intelligent for the field that we’re in. Though the other aspects of that opinion that might depend on the individual like, “I am super self-reliant,” or “I’m a rebel. Nobody tells me what to do.”

If you go in there with your pitch or your idea and you somehow challenged that idea, you somehow make people feel like maybe they’re not so intelligent or maybe they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s not your intention but you’re implying it. You’re going to make them defensive instead of lowering their resistance. It’s going to make it harder for you to try and get to them. You have to understand that you need to set things up before you hit people with your idea. You need to lower their resistance. You need to validate who they think they are. People generally do have good qualities. If you validate them, if you make them feel that they are intelligent, that they are moral, they’re not going to be as resistant to you.

TWS 04 | Laws Of Human Nature

Laws Of Human Nature: We’re so wrapped up in ourselves that it takes an effort to think inside the mindset of the person that we’re dealing with and how they look at the world.

 

It’s simply getting outside of your own mindset and your own self-absorption. It’s thinking about the other person’s needs, thinking about what they’re missing in life, and give them validation. The whole game has changed 180% right there. You’d be shocked at how many high-level CEOs, powerful people in the entertainment industry, never use this basic idea. They’re violating that law continually. It’s understandable because we’re so wrapped up in ourselves that it takes an effort to think inside the mindset of the person we’re dealing with and try and get inside their way of looking at the world. If you’re able to do that to some degree on all of these laws that I talked about, it will change everything that you do.

Our life, in large part, is our relationships. Most satisfaction and happiness comes from that. I want to make sure that we hit on this. One of our instrumental relationships to happiness is our partner. Would you talk about the section in the book where you go into masculine and feminine, men and women?

It’s the chapter that people ask the least about. I’m trying to cover all aspects of human nature. One of the key aspects is our gender, our sex, and how we relate to it. I was deeply influenced by my research by a famous psychologist named Carl Jung, who talks about anima and animus. I’m thinking of this in reference to, and so is he, the intimate partners that we choose in our love relationships. It also affects our work relationships. In the work world, we all have to deal with men and women. Men are working for female bosses who might have been always been working for male bosses. It also influences the work world. What Jung discovered was, a man in his earliest years begins in relationship to his mother. In those first two years, 98% of his contact is powerfully physically only with the mother. That female feminine presence, her female feminine energy is different than a man’s.

I don’t care how politically correct we want to get. Men and women are biologically different. That energy from the woman, the mother, he takes inside of himself. She becomes a part of him. It has a deep impact. When you’re one or two years old, you are so vulnerable. You are so open to influence. A young boy interjects that presence of the mother. It becomes a part of who he is. It becomes a part of perhaps some of her qualities. If she’s a gentle, loving person or she’s maternal, not all mothers are alike and they don’t have to be, that becomes a part of him. He carries that within himself. As he goes through life, Jung called that part for a man an anima. It’s like a little woman that lives inside of the man that came from the mother. It can also be influenced by sisters. It’s primarily from the mother.

He carries that little mother figure within him. It influences forever throughout his entire life, his choices in the women that he wants to partner with. He may be looking for someone like that mother figure, who has that nurturing quality that he has in himself but he never developed or if his mother didn’t pay him attention. This is a common pattern. Let’s say she was narcissistic, was more self-absorbed and not such a good mother. He’s going to spend his life looking for a woman who is similar to his mother, oddly enough, who is self-absorbed in the perverse idea that he will be able to turn it around and make that relationship work as if you could go back in the past and rewire his mother. It doesn’t make logical sense but Jung, who studied thousands of married couples, found this pattern over and over again.

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The woman has the same thing with the man. It’s called the animus. It’s the father figure. That energy isn’t as direct and early on as powerful as the boy and the mother, but it’s still powerful. She takes the side of herself. She internalizes the presence of that man. That male can become a voice in her. A lot of animus figures that women carry are critical because a lot of father figures or men will tend to be critical of the woman. She’ll internalize these critical voices that Jung compared to a bunch of judges in her head, always judging her for her looks, judging her for not being good enough at this or that. She’ll make odd choices based on her relationship to her father. I talked in the book about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who’s one of the classic figures in this. She had a father who was a total seducer, a total rake. He could never be faithful to any woman. Her parents in fact divorced. She loved him. He loved her. They were devoted. They were extremely close.

Throughout her life, she constantly was partnering with men who were the mirror image of her father. John F. Kennedy cheated on her left, right and center. Aristotle Onassis cheated on her left, right and center. They’re powerful men like her father. She couldn’t break that pattern. The other element of the chapter that’s important is to make you realize that men have a deep feminine part of their personality that comes from the mother figure. Women have a masculine side of their personality that comes from the father figure. You’re either in deep denial of that aspect of who you are. In which case, you repress it and it comes out in weird ways or you’re able to integrate that part into your character and make it something strong and powerful. A man who can still be manly and masculine but uses his empathetic side, who can use some of that kindly maternal energy from the mother, will be a better person, a better man for integrating all of these parts of his personality. I can go on and on, but this is just to give you an idea.

The male and female relationships that exist, whether it’s in the workplace or whether it’s in social circles or your intimate relationships, they’re biologically different. It’s not instinctive that a man can empathize to that level with a woman. You’re saying that, because it’s not instinctive, becoming aware of it, observing and understanding and learning about it, is going to improve the way in which you embrace your feminine side, your masculine side, vice versa and the person that you’re engaging with. What’s the significance of observing? It’s not necessarily observing yourself, your nature and what compels you, but also in all of the different environments that you’re in, being aware and observing others. If you were to sum up in one sentence, you’ll probably be along those lines from I’m assuming, what does that give you? Why is that important to somebody?

There are many aspects and many ways to answer that question. First of all, as a social human, it’s essential that you develop the skill to cut off your internal monologue and observe the people around you. A lot of people in the world, are not only finding problems dealing with people. There’s a lot of loneliness in our culture. You may be doing okay in your career, but your relationships are brittle. They’re not deep. They’re not fulfilling. A lot of it is because you’re not paying deep attention to the people around you. You’re not understanding them. You’re more about yourself and what your own needs. Other people can sense that. It creates these lukewarm relationships. Also, because you’re not paying deep attention, you’re making all kinds of mistakes in your career. Being able to get outside of yourself and observe people is essential to surviving in the world, to building better relationships, and to have more success in your career. Everything depends on your social and political skills if you’re working in an office. The moment you put three human beings together in a room, politics intervenes. Already, you have egos and you have to think in these terms. You need to be able to observe people.

Some scientists estimate that 95% of human communication is nonverbal. The way people smile, their fake smiles. It’s how to differentiate a fake smile from a real smile, how to sense when people are smiling but there’s some underlying resentment there is powerful. How people when you first walk up to them, their body language reveals whether they’re excited to see you or not. You’re missing all of that information. You’re walking around as if you had blinders on your eyes. What’s the point of being a social animal if you’re not observing? If you do not see this language of nonverbal communication, you’re continually misreading people. You think that smile that they give means they like your project, your idea or they like you, but they don’t. You’re missing that. It’s not that difficult to learn how to develop the skill. The other element of it is that being so self-absorbed is depressing. You’re always wrapped up in your own problems.

TWS 04 | Laws Of Human Nature

Laws Of Human Nature: Building better relationships are essential to surviving in the world today and to be more successful in your career.

 

It becomes a sinkhole that you go deeper and deeper into. Being able to observe people is like therapy. You get outside yourself. You get outside your little problems, your little world and your little obsessions. You involve yourself more deeply with other people. You will find that you won’t feel as depressed as you were. You’ll also find that people are quite interesting. A lot of the reason that you’re not paying attention is you think that you are more interesting than other people. Your thoughts, your desires are more important than others. If you reverse this and you start becoming a better observer in life, a little light bulb will go on in your head and you’ll go, “That person who works at Starbucks and serves me coffee every day, they’re much more interesting than I think they are. They have an inner life. They have weirdness. They have dreams that are strange. They’re doing things on the side that are interesting.”

People are interesting. They’re like characters in a book or a movie. That’s how I want you to think about it. We go to movies because we are voyeurs. We get to go inside the lives of other people and go, “What is that person thinking? That’s an interesting character. Is he a psycho killer or not?” We’re fascinated. Think of the people you deal with like characters in a movie. They might be a psycho killer for all you know or they might not be, but they’re interesting. Getting outside yourself will make you a better person or make you feel happier or make your life easier. It will also contribute greatly to your creative skills. The ability to get outside of yourself and inside of other people loosens the mind up. You no longer have all of your preconceptions about, “This person is good. This person is bad.” You’ll learn to relax and be in the moment and go, “I’m not going to judge this guy that I’m talking to. Instead, I’m going to listen.” It has an overall effect. I talked about this in Mastery. People who are socially aware are often more creative. They don’t have these rigid mental categories. I could go on and on, but the benefits of becoming a better observer in life are infinite.

We’ve focused the podcasting guests, interviews and topics around the idea of entrepreneurship as well as the environment of capitalism. The reason why I was adamant to have you on is that you have success and failure in business, as well as in society, due to your understanding of relationships as far as what I have experienced. With what you’ve observed with the entrepreneur world, the startup world, the business world, and the success and failure there, how do you see your book making an impact in those who either are in the process of running a business or starting a business or bringing on partners? What do you see is the impact of your book on the success of ventures in general?

It should have a huge impact. I could go through the laws. Law Number One should make you more aware of how emotions govern your decision so you can become more rational and make better decisions. The laws about how to judge people, how to judge their character, I have his chapter on character, will mean you won’t hire exactly the wrong person to partner with. You can’t believe how many times people hire exactly the wrong person to be their partner and the misery that causes. This goes back to the Bible. It’s very much ingrained in human nature. You will stop making bad choices.

I have an important chapter on grandiosity. This is a problem that affects entrepreneurs. I know because I worked for one. I was on the board of directors of a publicly traded company. The CEO was the classic entrepreneur who started from scratch. He’s charismatic and brilliant, but he wouldn’t listen to other people. He thought he had all the answers himself. He was a bit of a narcissist. That idea that you’re God and you can do anything is what destroyed him. It’s a little bit of the complex that Elon Musk has. This chapter will make you realize that success is the worst thing that can happen to you in many ways. It makes you think you have the golden touch. It makes you think that luck wasn’t involved, that other people didn’t help you, that you’re some god figure that can snap your fingers and get whatever you want. It’s an illusion. It will help that way.

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I have a chapter on authority. I maintain that humans respond to a certain primal type of authority figure. It almost goes back to chimpanzees. It’s rooted in who we are. I laid out for you the paradigm for the 21st century of how we relate to authority figures and what we will consider a powerful person who has these certain traits. This is a person who is empathetic, believe it or not, that cares deeply about the employees, involves them creatively, leads from the front, and that leads by example. He’s not expecting people to do the work that he or she is not willing to do. It’s a person that has a vision. Having a vision is essential to being a leader. You can have a vision like Elon Musk and not be able to execute it. That’s another problem.

A lot of leaders in the world, with quarterly reports and all the pressures that we feel in the stock market, or if you’re a publicly traded company, are only reacting to things that happen month by month. What people want and desperately need in a leader is the ability to see a year down the road, two years down the road, to have an overall vision for where the company is headed. I preached this over and over again to that entrepreneur that I talked to you about. “Where is the company headed? What is the brand? This brand has to adapt because tastes have changed from a few years ago.” He never listened to me. The ship went down. I would’ve saved the sinking ship. It was a key element.

All the chapters are important, but another chapter deals with knowing the zeitgeist, knowing the spirit of the times. Think of the times that we live in like a wave. It’s cresting and falling. A lot of people are riding that wave, or they’re behind it a little bit. They fall back. You want to be ahead of that wave. You want to be ahead of where the times are. You want to be five or six months a year ahead of where people are going. That’s genius level. That’s a true vision. You create something like Steve Jobs created the iPad that revolutionizes the tech world because you’re thinking a year or two years ahead down the line. I have a chapter on how to read the zeitgeist and how to understand the spirit of the times. I could go through all the chapters. To an entrepreneur, this should be like a big juicy steak for them.

Robert, this has been incredible. Thank you so much for your valuable time. You could see how much you enjoy having these conversations, how much you enjoy writing and talking about things that make a difference. I’m excited for our readers to read the book. Can you give out ways in which they can also follow you, to be aware of other things that you’re working on or if you’re active on social media? What’s the best way for someone to follow you?

I have a website. It’s PowerSeductionAndWar.com. Those are the titles of my first three books, The 48 Laws, The Art of Seduction, Strategies of War. There I have links to the book that I did with 50 Cent. I co-wrote a book with 50 Cent, to Mastery, to my new book, to my Twitter and Instagram accounts. That’s probably the best resource. There’s also a link if you want to try and email me as well.

Robert, thank you again for your time. I hope to talk to you some other time.

I would love to, whenever you want. I really enjoyed it.

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About Robert Greene

TWS 04 | Laws Of Human NatureRobert Greene is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, The 50th Law, and Mastery.

In his sixth book, The Laws of Human Nature, he turns to the most important subject of all – understanding people’s drives and motivations, even when they are unconscious of them themselves.

 

 

 

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