The Daily Stoic - BONUS: Ryan Talks with Robert Greene On Today's World

Episode Date: October 27, 2020

On this special bonus episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan speaks with Robert Greene about the irrationality that runs through our society, the increasing frequency of scams and cons and how to deal with them, and the best strategy for focusing your political participation.Watch Ryan's talk with Robert Greene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kM3MCxCqq5sThis episode is brought to you by Neuro. Neuro makes mints and gums that help you retain focus and clarity wherever you go. Made with a proprietary blend of caffeine, L-theanine, and other focus-building compounds, Neuro’s products are great for anyone who needs help focusing in these trying times. Try out Neuro’s gums and mints at getneuro.com—and use discount code STOIC at checkout to save 15% on your order.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow Daily Stoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicAnd follow Robert Greene:Twitter: https://twitter.com/robertgreeneInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/robertgreeneofficial/Homepage: https://powerseductionandwar.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stood Podcast early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wundery's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target. The new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. music or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient stoic, something that can help you live up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics.

We interview stowed philosophers, we reflect, we prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school. When we have the time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring. Hey, this is Ryan Holiday. Obviously, one of the perks of my life is that I get to have conversations with the great Robert Green,

I think one of the best living writers on the planet. You know, we have these phone conversations every couple of weeks. And so what he and I thought we would do is we said, why are we just doing this privately? What if we just got on Zoom and recorded and people could listen? Because maybe some of the things that we're going through

that we're thinking about, some of the stuff that's influencing his writing and so many of you are in the world. And I'm really looking forward to seeing you in the next few weeks. And I'm really looking forward to seeing you in the next few weeks. And I'm really looking forward to seeing you in the next few weeks.

And I'm really looking forward to seeing you in the next few weeks. And I'm really looking forward to seeing you in the next few weeks. And I'm really looking forward to seeing you in the next few weeks.

And I'm really looking forward to seeing you in the next few weeks. And I'm really looking forward to seeing you in the next few weeks. We talk about falling for scams and cons, which I think is a it's own pandemic these days. We talk about conspiracy theories. We talk about how one if one wishes to be politically or socially engaged. How one does that strategically? How one does that rationally? How one does that and actually has some real effect or impact on the world. Talk about all this and more.

I love talking to Robert. I feel like, you know, I've been, I've been having these conversations with him since I was 18 or 19 years old, and it has transformed how I see the world that's helped make me into the writer that I've been lucky enough to become. So I'm so excited to share this with you. Here is my interview with the Great Robert Green. Obviously, you should check out all of his books

and of course if you have checked them out and want to follow him online, he's at Robert Green official on Instagram. You can also go to his website, sign up for his email list at power seductiontowar.com. Really excited to chat. I feel like in a world that seems like it's sometimes tearing itself to pieces. There's this line from Churchill that I like where he talks about as World War II is breaking out.

He says, it felt good today to put a thousand years between me and the 20th century, meaning he was reading and writing about history as a way of calming himself down and getting perspective. And I feel like your books are a great opportunity for people to understand the present by looking at the past. Yeah, I agree with that. And I agree with the fact that it's kind of calming. It gives you perspective. It makes you realize that the bad days will end that we're in a particular cycle of history and that nothing lasts forever. In my last kind of podcast,

I was talking about irrationality and I brought up the story of Paracles and of the plague that hit Athens, kind of drawing a comparison a little bit with COVID. Although obviously I recognize the plague that hit Athens, kind of drawing a comparison a little bit with COVID, although obviously I recognize the plague is not the same thing as the coronavirus, but it was sort of as a metaphor for what we're going through and the kind of irrationality that erupted in Athens, kind of triggered by this very powerful plague, to give people a sense of 2000 years, essentially, of perspective on this, or more than 2000 years, of how these cycles occur,

and how outbreaks of irrationality occur, even in the richest times in history, which is fifth century BC Athens, the height of what we would call rationality, and that it led to a whole century, the fourth century BC in Athens, of incredible irrationality of superstitious beliefs. It's also the period of Plato and Aristotle, so it was very contradictory, but these things happen in waves. People go crazy, they go insane collectively. It's not just a pandemic of a virus, it's a pandemic of

emotions and irrationality that people can't handle. So very much I agree with you. History gives you a deep sense of perspective and can help you live some of the depression that comes from being mired in a moment that seems so chaotic Ovi. Well, it's interesting. Yeah, you read your books and it's filled with stories of irrational people and con men. And it's filled with stories from history. And I think maybe we look at those and we go, oh, that was a long time ago.

It's different now. And then we're surprised when we see those traits or those tendencies re-emerge in our modern world. Well, you know, it's hard for a human being to have respect, particularly on its own period of time, and you said this time it's different. That's the classic phrase that people used when there was like some kind of bubble like the South Sea bubble or the crash in 2008 or the Depret, you know, some new scheme comes for making money, which is clearly like an elaborate. No currencies and yeah, right. It's obviously an elaborate type of Ponzi scheme and everybody kind of points to,

well, look at the past. There were all these other kind of schemes going on and look how they ended. They go, no, this time it's different. But one thing I talk about in the 48 laws, I think it's very relevant, I talk a lot about how to form a cult, our latins and con artists. And the thing about a cult is when you're in a cult, you have no idea that you're in it.

So you might be in one right now, you ride holiday or me, Robert Green, but I wouldn't realize it. Because the nature of a cult is, it envelops you in the narrative. A narrative of, this is what the world is. These are enemies out there. This is our cause, this is what United says.

And it creates this kind of fake and very simple and vague narrative of what the world is like. And when you're in that bubble, you don't realize that you're in it because by the nature, if you did realize you were in a cult, you wouldn't be in a cult any longer. So that's the kind of danger that people are living in right now. You know, there, this is a time where conman and charlatans are proliferating. As I said in the book, when you go through a period of transition, where great big grand belief systems, such as Christianity or organized religion, particularly in the West, or communism,

or something like that falls apart, people need to believe in something. It's a deep human need. And when that disappears, we're going to start believing in these little microcosms, little mushrooms that emerge after the rain with all these little kind of belief systems that kind of combine technology and religion, et cetera.

I'm not sure I've ever been in a cult, but certainly, and I know you saw some of it, American apparel, Dave Charnie was able to create kind of a cult-like atmosphere inside the company. And one of the things I found to be most strange about it, and I kind of had one foot in, one foot out, especially towards the end, because I always was doing my own things.

But it would be when there would be obvious flaws or faults. So you're being criticized, or it's being sued, or the front page of the New York Times is arguing flaws or faults. So you know, you're being criticized, you're it's being sued, or there's the front page of the New York Times is arguing this or that. What I noticed is that instead of that waking people up, it drove them deeper into the narrative. And obviously the scientific term for this is cognitive dissidents.

I'm curious how you see cognitive dissidents playing out these days. Well, cognitive dissidents is like the golden principle right now. And essentially what it means is you believe in something, you come to believe in something for whatever reason. And when evidence comes in that what you believe in is patent leaf faults, in that what you believe in is patent-leaf faults. It confronts you with a dilemma. Either you were kind of stupid in the beginning to believe in this in the first place. And as the philosopher Shopenhauer says, people will admit to anything, but they will never admit to being stupid or having less intelligence than another. Sure. So it's very difficult to admit that you were stupid, you know, other. Sure. So it's very difficult to admit that you were stupid. You know, it's like the last thing someone will will confess to. So the alternative is instead of believing the evidence, you double

down on your initial belief and you say, it's the other person who's wrong. And you see this all the time, like so for instance, there's this scare that Antifa is coming to Idaho, and it's coming to your small town. And it's just like Facebook hoax. It's a complete hoax. Somebody was pulling their leg. And so hundreds of people come out with their AK-47s to defend their little town in Idaho against the Antifa that are coming. And of course, they never come.

And then they say later on, it's clear that it was a hoax, but they say, no, we scared them from coming over there. Or that Congressman in Texas, go merit. He's ranting against masks, being the helping in the coronavirus. And then he catches the coronavirus, the ultimate irony. And then he says, it was the mask. Right. And to have it, these devices are's good to buy us as they're happening

at left, right, and center. And you know, if you, the main thing would be like, if you, and everyone's gonna see through this, but if you voted for a president, for instance, or a leader, and it ends up that that person is not what you thought he was or she, it's obviously a charlatan, a con artist. That's the ultimate thing you have to admit that you were con and nobody wants to admit that so you'll double down on your belief

that this person is right and you will, then you'll be even fiercer in your defense against these enemies that he or she is facing. Yeah, I feel like that's kind of the ultimate message through all your books, whether we're talking about planning strategy and 33 strategies or whether we're trying to build some power dynamic or we're trying

to achieve mastery in a field. I feel like the thread through all your books is sort of an unflinching commitment to reality, even when it's inconvenient, even when it means you have to go, oh man, that was so dumb, why did I do that? Or whether it's taking responsibility for a failure or a mistake, it seems like, and I think you say,

like we have to take to reality like a spider to its web. Right, I mean, you probably know this. I mean, you have to understand people. It's not like I'm a cue to the time somehow exempt from human nature. So I understand the process. But, you know, I often, I'm actually not as secure and certain of myself as people think I am. Whenever I hold a belief or I'm writing a book, I always, I always start with the premise that I'm probably wrong. I'm actually quite ignorant that my idea is pretty stupid. I look at the evidence on the other side and I examine it and I try and convince myself that my initial idea was right

and if it isn't, then I change it. But it's very painful because you want desperately to hold on to those beliefs that you had initially. So the number one thing about reality is confronting yourself, the fact that you are a limited human being with a limited cognitive abilities, you are emotion-based. And so your relationship to the world is usually through thick layers of illusions that come from the media, that come from your childhood, that come from your culture

that you live in, and that you have to cut through those layers, but you have to confront yourself and see yourself as the source of them. I mean, have you ever come to the ever realize that you made a terrible mistake about something and had to re-est as you, Ryan Holiday, and your own intelligence, isn't it quite painful?

Yeah, it's like we'll do just about anything to avoid having to do that. Right. So, I mean, the thing you want to do in life, I'm a great believer in looking at the evidence. So, and looking at facts and things that are happening information, historical context, etc. And it's the evidence and the facts. That's how I write my books.

It's probably how you write your books. It's the evidence and the facts. That's how I write my books. It's probably how you write your books. It's the evidence and the facts that tell me what reality is. That don't begin with my own preconceptions. I let the stories tell me what's going on. Sorry. And don't you think like from an individual in terms of like, who you're married to, who your friends are,

and then from a leadership perspective, who is on your board of advisors, who works for you, how information bubbles up through the hierarchy, I think the other thing, if our mind is inherently sort of not our friend in that respect and tries to deceive itself, it seems like we have to build systems and relationships that counterbalance those forces. So we have access to reality through somebody else's perspective.

It can be like Robert, you're being an idiot. What are you doing? Well, that's why you read books. I mean, it's great if you could have intelligent people around you to have discussions and tell you Ryan that idea is shit But first of all people will never do that because there are everyone is so political Everyone is so sick of fanatic. They'll say Ryan. I love your idea. You book is fantastic It's very hard to get objective criticism Sure

When you read Nietzsche when you read Mark Marcus Arraileus when you read Sukidides or any of these writers. You're getting a perspective on reality that is nothing to do with you personally, but they don't know you. So you don't have to get upset if they're bringing up facts and ideas to kind of challenge you. It's kind of an exciting process. And I often love the fact of reading great books from hundreds of years ago that literally challenge how I think, you know, I'm reading out for my new book, Things of Day Card, whose somebody I don't like, whose philosophy is very strange to me. But I'm forcing

myself to read it, I'm entering his world, and it's really having a profound effect on me. So entering someone's different reality, that's what books do to you. They enrich you and they show you that your own look on the world is limited. And you can look through it through the lens of another culture, another gender, another period in time. And if you're not reading books,

then you're gonna probably be in those layers of illusion are gonna be so damn thick, you're never even gonna realize it. Yeah, there's a quote I've liked from General Mattis. He says, if you haven't read hundreds of books, you're functionally illiterate. You know, we think like, oh, I can read, but the reality is if you're not reading,

what good is that skill? Right. Right. So I think, and I think we should talk about conspiratorial thinking, but that's so loaded that maybe I thought I'd start with something else that I think is equally prevalent and I was just writing about, I think we're also seeing a lot of magical thinking. So conspiratorial thinking is, you know, like these people are out to get us. This is how things are operating behind the scenes, but I think magical thinking is,

oh, the coronavirus will just disappear. Or, oh, a vaccine will happen and all of this will go back to normal. Or, my ex is going to come rushing back through the door any day now. She's going to realize what a mistake she made. It feels like people are living in a fantasy world of their own kind of magical thinking.

Yeah, and that's very true. And it's obviously the source of falling for a con game or falling into a cult or believing in a conspiracy. Like I'm seeing it a lot where parents seem to think, like, oh, school is important. I know that. I remember. I'm seeing that these parents are like, school is important.

So I'm going to send my kid to school when it's like school is important, of course, but it's also the middle of a pandemic. So just because you like something or just because you need something, if I would have wanted to visit my relatives in Europe during the Second World War, my need for doing so does not change the fact that there are German U-boats patrolling the Atlantic, and I'm going to get sunk

if I try to go see them. Yeah, but if you say that, Ryan, like I tried to say on my last video about the plane, that people were going to be coming, are you you comparing the coronavirus, the World War II, people don't know how to think in metaphors anymore. Sure. What I was going to say was, I don't know if this is accurate. It's a thought that came to me and maybe I need to think it through more deeply.

But I think a lot of it comes from 60, 70 years of an entertainment industry that envelops us in these stories that have like drama and then a happy ending and a consequence and a conclusion. And it creates this kind of way of thinking that the world is just like this, right? Sure. And so we're kind of, and ideas have to be entertaining. So if I give, I noticed this one time when I gave a talk in Toronto, and I was one of the top speakers,

it was like 12 of self-help gurus, including Anthony, what's his name? Robin Robin, yeah. And they were like yelling, and it's stomping around the stage and yelling, and videos, and it was just like a clown show. Right. Andstomping around the stage and yelling and videos. And it was just like a clown show. Right.

And then I got on the stage and I had no video. And I'm just sort of talking about mastery. And then I realized you've got to entertain people. You've got to put your ideas inside these little sugar pills. You've got to make them titillate them and excite them. Shadans. You're going on through television, been going on through television, through radio, through television, through the internet, through social media.

And now people think that the only ideas that are legitimate are these ones that fill into these little capsules, like a log line for a screenplay. Right. What reality is, you know, the pandemic, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it arrives. It must be true. 5G. Yeah. You know, it's whatever it is. These little tiny tidbits of information that people come onto. It's very entertaining. It's sexy. It's

nice to believe in. And as you say, it's complete magical thinking. I don't know if my theory is totally wack, but it came to me the other day that that was sort of. No, I, I think, I think that makes sense. It's funny, Musoneus Rufus, one of the stokes, he was saying, if you see the audience, like if the audience is responding, it's assigned the philosopher is not delivering hard truths. He was like, they should be sitting there in complete silence because their mind has been blown.

But no, I think you make a good point. Like, we've lost the ability, or maybe we've never had it, but we're struggling with the idea that a lot of truths are uncomfortable, a lot of truths are complicated, and a lot of times an idea is maybe the difference between the path we should take and the path we shouldn't take, there might only be three or four percentage points of difference between the path we should take and the path we shouldn't take, there might only be three or four percentage points of difference between the two.

Like, you know, I think, like you're also seeing this in the pinnacle, there's got to be some magical drug that just treats it. Or there's got to be, you know, even mass, like, oh, so I'm wearing a mask. Now I can just go about my normal life as if everything is fine. It's like, no, actually, we're trying to chip away at this thing from all these different angles. And that there is no one silver bullet solution,

but a lot of bullets that you eventually kill this thing with. And we don't seem to be able to do that. We want to glom onto the one thing, and then that's the only thing. Yeah, I mean, the virus is a very boring thing, right? It's not a living organism. First of all, you can't anthropomorphize it. Right. We're gonna kill this thing.

It's not a living organism. And it's very boring. It simply lives by this rigorous math, right? Right. No, they have the number one, one point one. It infects more than one person to time. It can expand exponentially, right? And exponential increases are very hard for us to understand. Sure, very powerful, right? So, and then the solution is also really kind of boring. It's so simple, you know, like wearing a mask and being socially distant and putting up

with that kind of sacrifice for four months, how unmannedly, how unmask-ylin', where there's really little mass, I mean, you know, oh my God, no, it's much better to believe in something much a vast conspiracy that this was some nefarious Chinese person planted it so that it would destroy America that some cobble of people somewhere in Eastern Europe are doing this to destroy Donald Trump

or that, you know, on and on and on and that maybe, yeah, as you say, you know, one thing will solve it it's as if people can't think of two things at the same time. It's such, it's magical thinking, but it's also black and white thinking. Right. So if, if some reason it comes out that masks aren't the only solution that, you know, there are limits to mask, well, then that was totally false. Fauci was wrong. Trump is right. Masks are silly. No. There's nuance. Science is full of nuances, masks help, they don't do the whole thing, you have to do this other thing. It's not very sexier, exciting,

it's not like CSI, Miami. It doesn't have an exciting ending, it's not all masks, not people shooting with guns. It's very simple. People don't wanna believe in something so simple and boring as that, you know? They want more than that? I think this goes to the point of your book mastery too, which is like, people want to think that to become great at something it's 100% genetics, or they want to think it's 100% hard work,

or they want to think that it's, you know, it's, oh, it's 10,000 hours, so if I put in 10,000 hours, I automatically become this, you know, and the reality is it's complicated that I think a lot of these things are art more than they are a science. And we, we, the, what I like about your book is you're like, no, no, it's really, really hard. But if you follow these basic principles more often than not, you will get close to where you want to end up. And I think that's also with the 40 laws of power, I hear people do this all the time to go, but some of the laws contradict each other.

So therefore the whole book must be false. It's like, yes, life is complicated. Sometimes you have to do this and sometimes you have to do that. How is that hard for you to understand? Well, even taking it to step further, I said in the intro and I used the last law to say I am contradicting myself. Be formless. Don't listen to a writer, think sometimes it may be he's wrong and every chapter ends with a reversal saying that this law sucks that you have to look in from the opposite angle and still people go into that black and white thinking that, you know,

he's contradicting himself. The thing with mastery was I was actually worried that this book would not sell at all because the message is so kind of not what people want to hear, right? Particularly in an age where you've got your phone in front of you and it has such power and you can do whatever you want to a degree that nobody in history has ever experienced. And so it creates this belief that you can have the same kind of effect with anything in life that things should become easily, that you should be able to hack your way that things should become easily, that you should be able to hack your way quickly through, you know, some app that comes that you get or whatever, and get power really quickly and easily.

And so I thought, God, I am swimming against the tide because I'm telling you, I'm delivering some bad news. The human brain evolved millions of years ago, and, you know, over the course of you know let's say hundreds of thousands of years and in one generation you're not going to change the human brain because of technology. So you have to understand that our brains are designed to practice things to learn to be patient, develop discipline. What a bleak message. Oh, I've got to put in that many hours.

Oh, I have to be disciplined. Oh, I have to learn how to fail. Oh, my God, I don't want to hear that. But the good news is the book has sold well and it's really resonated with a lot of people. So I think in this culture of so much bullshit, of so many sugar pills, of feeding people so much crap, that I think a lot of people,

their human nature revolts against it, something in sight says, I don't want that anymore. I want a dose of reality. I want somebody to splash some cold water on my face. You think, I know you're fascinated with Eastern philosophy. I think Western philosophy tends to be so logical

and it tends to be so rational. Do you think there's maybe some additional merit then in the Eastern stuff where it seems like these sort of zen co-ons and these riddles and some of these questions they ask, it almost seems like they're embracing the paradoxical nature of reality and the contradictions and the unknowalness of it all.

Yeah, very much so where I found that the most interesting was when I did my war book and I got into strategy and Asian strategy. And you know, you would think strategy is a very kind of heavy western concept. You know, you do this and this results. It's very cause and effect. Concept, which will step A will lead to B, would lead to C, and you plan out and you map it, you know, bound on clouds of it, so remember. And then you go into Sun Sioux and it's like,

whoa, what is he saying? It's like this reality that we're dealing with is very nuanced. It's very hard to say. It's like an art, as you say. And you take action A, and it won't lead to B, it could lead to C, it could lead to D. So where do you go? And I was confronted with this. I decided I would read a version of the art of war that went through all of the Chinese characters. I obviously don't reach Chinese, but it explained literally what each character meant. So you were reading a much more direct translation. And then it made me realize that this is not how we think, right?

So to give you an example, he talks about potentiality of power. So you want to put, the art of war is to put yourself in a position this could be a business or any strategy where you have the potential of great momentum of great power, right? It's not about able lead to a stringing of a bow that bow has potential force behind it or a bowler on top of a mountain. And then he talks about how you can do that in warfare. And I thought, this is a whole other way of thinking. It's much more holistic. It's much more nuanced. It's much more artful. And it's more closer to reality. So to get back to your point, people think

of Zen as a kind of religion, and it is theoretically a religion, something that I'm relevant to very deeply, but more than anything, Zen is a philosophy of reality, is trying to connect you to what the world really is like, and it starts from the premise which Buddhism does, that your mind is inherently living in illusion because you're separating yourself from the world. And the world isn't like that. You actually are a part of the world that you're in. So that way of thinking deeply, deeply excites me

because it contains possibilities of things being the opposite. So something that's so extreme turns into its opposite, which is something very kind of a very powerful part of Chinese philosophy. And in the laws of human nature, I talk about how people who appear to be so one quality are actually disguised in the opposite quality, and they continually turn into each other, you know, the shadow side of human nature. These are things that I've, you know, the shadow side of human nature. These are things that I've, you know, absorbed from years of reading Asian philosophy.

I wanted to go back to this idea of sort of people have some of these irrational beliefs. They've picked up these stories, this entertainment sort of bias that we have. And the same Talab talks about, he's like, stories are powerful. And he says, the only way to beat a story is to replace it with another story. And I was curious, given your writing on seduction, which to me, I sort of expand seduction out from just, you know, sort of sexual

or relationship seduction. But it seems like what you're really talking about is if you want to combat this propensity for entertainment or this magical thinking, we have to combat it with a better story or something, you know what I mean? So how do you suggest leaders and people think about, like if you, let's say you knew someone who was starting to believe in pandemic, you can't just go, that's stupid, you're an idiot. How do you walk them back from that? Well, it's not easy if I had the magical answer to that,

there's no magical pill for that either. Right. But you have to kind of enter their world first a little bit to order to understand, you know, where, where these things come from. So, you know, part of that is you say is understanding their story. And you, you would have to maybe watch the pandemic, which I'm afraid I did, gave me a headache. You want to convince? No, I wasn't convinced. What I did see through was all the tricks, the music, the narrators' voice. I totally deconstructed it in my mind, all the little tricks that it used to create this illusion of some kind of menace, et cetera, but I watched it. And I could see its seductive power in the sense of what we're talking about where people

want to believe in stories. They want to villain. They want something simple and easy to digest. They want to kind of vey conspiracy, and easy to digest, they want a kind of vague conspiracy, which they can project their own little neuroses and problems. I saw it seductive appeal. And so maybe in that sense, what you're talking about is I would have to create a kind of counter narrative that also was seductive.

But I don't know how you do that. Sometimes people need to be confronted with reality. But they need to be confronted with reality in a way that doesn't offend and that doesn't say you're stupid. You know, I talk about that in human nature and I see that every day in the world. You know, there's somebody you disagree with, you think they're wrong. In fact, you're sure of it and you'd call them on it. All you're doing is making them more certain that they're right, because nobody wants to admit that they're stupid. So, you have to be able to understand people's insecurities and what led them to believe in pandemic in order to create a possible alternative scenario. So, I don't know what

that would be. I've had moments where elucid moments were I thought of a way to maybe appeal to people in the sense of creating a kind of narrative of the science of it and the virus and kind of the excitement that comes from, you know, actually, you know, because one thing that that irritates the hell out of me is people generally love and trust science. They do it tacitly. They do it because they drive a car and they assume that the technology is there. It's in a plane. They go to a doctor when they have a disease and they tacitly believe that there's an expert in their science and it will solve problems for them. But science isn't sometimes very sexy. It doesn't necessarily please you.

It's being in truth. And so you have to find ways to narrate the idea behind science, which is a lot of what I'm doing in my new book. I was just thinking, yeah, it's like if you're, I mean, what would be your counter narrative? Well, I don't know exactly, but like, let's say we're thinking and someone's a, someone lives in some rust belt town

in a, in a mobile home, you know, they're, they're not in good shape because they, you know, they don't eat well because they live in a food desert. Maybe their community has been decimated by opioids and the job market is not robust for someone who isn't educated. When you hear this idea, like, let's make America great again,

that taps into exactly how you're feeling. And I think the rational community, if you will, and I think that can include a whole swath of the political spectrum, has seems like it's not done a particularly good job. You know, I forget who said it, but the idea leaders are dispensers of hope. You know, there's not really a narrative that dispenses hope, that dispenses agency, that

dispenses anything worth believing in. I misunderstood your question. I completely believe it. I completely agree with you. And so like a mistake that the people and the Democratic Party on the left will make is not having a counter-slot into make America great again.

Right. The slow-gains, people love slogans. Is build back better, is so awkward. You know, it's not the same, doesn't have the same ring. So they're very, Democrats have always been so weak in that because they believe they're technocrats. They believe, they just tell people the truth about the economy, but it's not seductive.

And I always go back to the only Democrat in my memory who did this was John F. Kennedy. He was a genius at marketing on the level of Trump, because that is the one element that Trump is good at. Kennedy had the new frontier. He realized that we're emerging out of the boring eyes and how we're years, which really weren't so boring. He created this idea. And now we're returning to our pioneer myths. Our frontier is now outer space. We're going to go to the moon. We're going to be the first people to go to the moon. We're going to be so technologically advanced that we're like the pioneers in the 19th century. It was really powerful and seductive and it worked brilliantly. I agree with you completely,

you need us, you need to seduce people and you can't be afraid of doing that. You know, even, you know, like Bernie Sanders, he created a cult like following the myth, say it what it is. Bernie Sanders, he created a cult like following, let's say it, what it is. But he was actually pretty good at creating these kind of slogans and these kind of quick ideas that people could digest about the 1% et cetera. He might hate him, but he was good at it. But so many Democrats, particularly the ones that we nominate, suck at it. And they suck at it royally because they think they just need to deliver bullet, a list of things that we must do, must do this for education, this for health,

you can just see people falling asleep as they do it. I completely agree with you. I misunderstood your question. No, no, I think it implies the pandemic too. Like, I'll talk about that in a second, but yeah, I remember in the campaign in 2016, Hillary's response to Make America Great, which is actually, but yeah, I remember in the campaign in 2016, Hillary's response to Make America Great, which is actually, you know, as nationalistic and stupid as it is in a lot

of ways, it makes sense. There's a sort of an immediate, you know, that makes sense. And her response to that instead of a better story was, America is great because it is good, you know, and it's like good is not as good as great. That's what words mean. And second, you're telling people who are unhappy that actually they're wrong to be unhappy because America is already great. You know what I mean? Like, you're not, you have to tell a better story and it seems like we struggle to do that. Well, the thing is, you know, to be a leader today to win an election is extremely complicated because we're very divided.

Yeah. Right. Right. We have these little niche groups, these little beliefs, you know, identity politics or whatever you want to term it. And even on the right, they have their little niche groups. So to unite the country to win an election, you have to create a narrative. You have to tell people, this is what it means to be American.

Nobody ever does that. I can't recall in my lifetime, you know, you could say Trump's about some does a Ronald Reagan, perhaps did, is an example. But what does it mean to be an American in 2020? It's a very strange time we're going through. We're a very diverse country with all of these, you know, it's not the same in Wisconsin as in California and New York and we have these different isolated pockets.

What will unite us? What will create a grand sense of we are a country. We don't need to hate each other. I can actually appreciate that Trump, Father and Michigan. He's an American as I am. He has the same, you know same frustrations with the healthcare system that I do. What unites us?

How do you create a narrative that makes people emotional, that makes people actually want to think that this is the future of America? Dammit, if I could just get inside of politicians head to create that narrative, that's like the one thing that's so missing and there's so much potential power behind that. Well, no, I was very proud.

It's not like a Nazi type power. But it is very volatile power. I mean, we're recording this the day after the 19th anniversary of 9-11. And to think, there was all that energy, those planes crashing to those towers and government, the United States government has an opportunity. What story are we gonna tell ourselves about this event

and then how are we gonna direct that energy? You know, the war on terror is a story. It's just probably the wrong story and we ended up telling a story that, you know, cost America trillions of dollars, thousands of lives, and almost certainly made us less safe than we were before. And why is China ascending to America somewhat stagnant? China didn't spend several trillions of dollars for very little gain in the Middle East over the last 20 years. Yeah, I mean, the narrative that you create has to be reality-based to some to

spend, and it has to be pro-social, you know. So the reality, the narrative of this is our enemy, we must destroy them, the war on terror, was kind of the false way of uniting people. So I agree with you, there is a kind of cult like Nazi way of uniting people behind a cause. It is very evil, they can take the energy in a crowd and can make it very, very dangerous. So yeah, I agree with you.

But if I'm talking about a narrative nowadays that uniting people, it's, look, we're the most powerful country, we used to be, I don't know how long, we're more large and longer, we can say that. But in quotes, we're the most technologically powerful country in the world. Look, look, look, we've done, look at the science, look at we've created, look at our business, look at our culture, et cetera. And why can't we see this, this is our new forefurt, the new frontier to do Kennedy, to bring back to Kennedy?

We're going to solve all the incredible problems in the world through being a magnet for the greatest thinkers in the world. We're going to solve global warming and we're going to make it economically profitable. You can make that narrative pro-social. It doesn't have to be evil and cult-like. And I think Kennedy's was like that or even Reagan's to some extent, you know? No, I totally agree. How do you personally, when you see all this happening and it's aggravating

and it's frustrating and it's disappointing. How does one prevent themselves from giving into despair? I mean, that's something I think about. Like, how do you not just go, this is crazy. I'm going to be like Montenna and I'm just going to retire to my tower and read my books for the rest of my life. Well, that is kind of what I'm doing. I'm kind of being like Montenna. I am kind of retired to my tower and working on my next book. I mean, I'm an exception, so it's not really easy. Fair for me to say because, you know, thank God, I have books to write and I can absorb myself

in over 3,000 years of history and get outside of this time. But, you know, some perspective will help. over 3,000 years of history and get outside of this time. But, you know, some perspective will help. And, you know, I had a chapter in my laws of human nature about the generation phenomenon and how there's a great book called Generations by these two writers that came out of the 90s that show these incredible patterns through history that happen in sequences of four.

And are the four-terning, right? Is that what it's called? Yeah, I think so. I love the title of the book, it's very. And there's a kind of a crisis generation, which I believe is what is millennials, people who live through 20, this Crash of O-8, and now this, and then there's the revolutionary generation

where something new is created, where people are so tired of what's going on in the world, particularly young people, because it's only young people that ever really create change and change is very necessary in this world. And so the only hopeful thing is that I think young people are so sick of the narrative they've been fed about the world, particularly from boomers, about this is only hope is that people are gonna get tired of this

and that this is what has saved us in the past. That we've gone through these deep moments and sometimes these moments can last well over a hundred years. There can be the dark ages in our history that lasts four centuries or something like that. But at a point is reached where the human spirit rebels and returns to his origin and returns to something powerful and healthy.

Because we know we don't like, you know, if you eat a lot of junk food, you feel sick, your body feels sick. Sure. If you consume a lot of bullshit information and things that are just entertainment on the internet, you kind of also feel sick, like you're disconnected from who you are, from your own body, from the world, you rebel, you're sick of it. And so we need, in some ways, I don't want to, the people are going to kill me for saying this,

but we also somewhat need a kind of second revolution in America, of bringing all of the great things of our country and updating them to where the world is right now. And my only hope is that young people are so sick of the way things are that they're gonna be the catalysts of change. I could be wrong and it may never happen, but that's what makes me not wanna kill myself right now.

So let's say that some of this energy does come together, what I think, and maybe there have been moments, right? There have been marshes in the streets, whether it's about George Floyd, or whether it's about the Parkland shooting, or whether it's about climate change, or the women's march, whatever it is, it seems like we get these moments of energy, but the way of crests before it has a chance to do anything. And I think part of the reason that that seems to happen is that the entrenched interests are so good

and so used to sort of parrying these blows that they don't end up landing. And so I'm curious, like what's your advice to an incipient activist movement that is fighting an enemy that is not playing by the rules? Like if you're a Belarus right now, and you are up against the full power of the state, what do you do? You do what you're doing, and those are brilliant, beautiful examples

that I'm following with great interest. I mean, look what happened in Ukraine. I was recently in Ukraine. Ukraine's an amazing, beautiful country. People are very smart there. There's a lot of great things of technology that are coming from Ukraine. They overthrew one of the most corrupt oligarchies

in modern times. Now, things aren't perfect there. There's still levels of corruption, there's still fighting it. But, you know, I was reading the paper this morning and the Washington Post about somebody I think you really need to include in your book on courage.

Okay. I think he's the most courageous person in the world today and that's Alexei Navalny, right? The guy who was poisoned by the Russian. Sure. Unbelievable. They brave, read the Washington Post article today. Okay. Unbelievably brave what he's put up with, completely incorruptible,

and his strategy for fighting the most in Trent, you think it's bad maybe in the United States, try fighting against Putin and Russia, and you'll see that you're hitting a block of cement more than anything. But it's not impossible. And the solution is, because I've researched this a lot and thought a lot about it, is visibility. You need to be out there in the streets, and you need to not let your energy dissolve, and you need to be constantly publicizing the corruption and you can't be naive. So what you're talking about is entrenched powers co-opting the anger on the streets. And so Citibank will have an

ad saying, we're all with you, you know, George Floyd blah blah blah, they're co-opting it. They're co-opting your energy and they're turning it into their own thing. You must call them out on that. You must not be seduced by these little crumbs that they try and throw at you. You need to keep your narrative together, which is there is rampant corruption in this country. There are oligarchs wherever country you're talking about. You need to be revealing that for what it is. And if you look at Alexian of Oli and why he's so brilliant, you talk about seduction, he creates these YouTube videos. I don't know if you ever watched any of them. Now, they have them with sub-titles.

They're fantastic. He has managed to create these, I don't know, 20 minute. I don't know how long they are. I don't remember videos detailing the corruption in Russia. He gets these, what do you call them, the flying the air, sorry. Drones. Drones. To pass over Oleg Arx mansions, and he films their ponds,

Philip Ducks and swans, and their tennis courts, and their swimming pools, and he puts it together. In a really powerful video, he says, look, Russians, this is what they're stealing. They're stealing your money. And this is how our president, Medvedev, has $1.4 billion put into his estate. Well, meanwhile, you are starving and you were dying from the pandemic, et cetera, et cetera.

They're powerful. So you have to be entertaining and you have to be constantly visible. If you're marching in the streets, you can't let the energy dissolve, and you have to create a narrative that's strong, and you can't be naive, you can't let yourself be seduced by these people who are trying to co-opt you.

And I've been fascinated about the civil rights movement lately and reading a lot about it. I think maybe one of the things we get wrong about it too is that we think it's like, oh, Martin Luther King just took people to the streets. And so we think like, oh, what we need to get changes just to have a lot of protesters or demonstrators. Like when you really think about what

like the Montgomery bus boycott was or some of his garbage boycotts, he wasn't just demonstrating, but he was exerting real pressure that the leaders had to alleviate and the only way to alleviate it was to get into his demands. And so I think that's what like, you know, we do this remember after 2016, there was a march for science in America or something. Like that's not exerting any pressure on anyone and there's no goals of that move. Do you know what I mean?

We just think that organization is key, but there has to be another component. Well, I mean, but Martin Luther King definitely had what I'm talking about. He definitely wanted to keep these things visible constantly in the presence. His gives. But what you're saying is true, you have to be strategic. That's the difference. And Martin Luther King was a brilliant strategist. So he understood that the goal of his campaigns were the white liberals sitting in front of their television sets in Jamesville, Wisconsin or in Illinois, right? They're gonna see images of children 12 years old being beaten by brutal black cops and with their dogs,

et cetera, and they're gonna be awakened to the reality of America. And to do that, he had to make things extremely visible. He had to be constantly out on the streets and he had to even provoke the other side. So one of the things that, you know, we tend to create these saints. And Martin Luther King was not a saint, which he was very human. But he had a decision in one of his rallies, whether somebody proposed letting school

children 11, 12 years old participate in the demonstration, which would probably end of violent. And people said, oh, Martin, you can't do that. That's terrible. That's not ethical. And this very religious man, this preacher, this priest, you know, said, no, that's the right idea. And he did it.

And it was very, very powerful. It was one of the key moments in the movement. So yeah, there are times when you can't exert pressure like you want police departments to change and you're out on the streets or let's say the election is, you know, there's fraud and there's like the 2000 movement where the book's brothers revolution could and they all, you know, tried to change the results in Florida, you know, I'm referring to. So the leverage in that particular case is only going to be by demonstration in mass numbers.

I mean, that's, so we're both components are important. And Beloruz is the fact that 100,000 people in a small country are in the streets of Minsk, basically running the risk of being beaten or killed. And that is incredibly powerful. It's remade that the people in the, it has a snowball effect where everybody wakes up. So visibility and being on the streets is one component

that's very important, but you have to also be strategic and do what you're saying. Yeah, no, no, I think that's right. And that does seem like something people who have kind of turned up their noses at your books right now, especially millennials, I think need to be reading because there when the other side is not playing by the rules, you have to, you, although you do have to maintain the moral high ground, which you talk about, it's like on the one hand, you gotta be kind of a Lyndon Johnson.

You have to take the moral high ground here, but then in the smoke filled rooms or in secret, you gotta know how to grab somebody by the balls and twists, and I think we're lacking that. Yeah, I mean, I was thinking about it today, but I was reading the paper, I don't remember what the story is, where I'm seeing, you mean, I was thinking about today, I was reading the paper, I don't remember what the story is, where I'm seeing, you know, like, Republicans can play very dirty. Yeah. They play this kind of

asymmetric warfare where they're willing to do anything when it comes to limiting voting rights or working with the post office. They'll do anything to keep on power. And the Democrats, I don't want to get involved with that kind of nasty stuff. You know, it's too dirty. We're pure, blah, blah, blah, blah. Man, I've been hating that for my whole life. It makes me sick. You know, read about Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

one of our greatest presidents and one of our most liberal. That guy, the person who wrote the best biography called it the Lion and the Fox, he was Machiavelli incarnate. He was incredibly strategic. Nobody played more heart-ball than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He knew how to do it and he was successful at it. And so, you know, that's what the world is like.

And if you're gonna organize a movement, you have to realize that your hands are gonna to have to get a little bit dirty. And then even Martin Luther King was willing to get his hands dirty in a demonstration. And even Gandhi, I talked about in my war book, Gandhi was incredibly strategic. He knew that if he did passive resistance, and they were beaten up by white British people, policemen, those in England be seeing this, and they'd be revolted by it, disgusted by it. He was willing to have that happen. He was very strategic.

If Gandhi and Montlouzer king were strategic people who knew how to play tough and heartball, why can't you get off your high horse and be more strategic and be willing to get your fingers a little bit dirty and play a little bit dirty and calm? You're not going to lose yourself, you're going to win. Well, no, it's like Bill Belichick talks about the Patriot way and no ego and all that. And then, you know, he's also looking for every, you know, every possible thing he can do up to the line. and sometimes he's willing to to see if he can get away with crossing the line. You know what I mean? And that's what it takes to

be dominant at that level, I think. Or look at Churchill in World War II, you know, read the book, I recommend to you the body. The body implies a great book. You know, the levels of deception and this things that kind of cross and ethical boundary that you would normally never do in wartime, he was willing to do because the stakes were so high. Well, the stakes are pretty high right now. And sometimes you have to be willing

to go a little bit past that boundary. So I thought maybe we'd close with some of the, maybe to bring it full circle. It strikes me that there are some people who are just sort of being manipulated because they're uneducated, they're being manipulated because they don't have the training that we're talking about,

they're being manipulated because they're vulnerable, whatever. And then it, but it also seems like there's a part of this that it's people, it's like there's that quota, you can't con an honest man. It seems like some of the people that are following for this, they should know better. And in fact, why they don't know better is because they think they're the ones that are getting the better deal out of it. Do you know what I mean?

It's like manipulators are being, I think Machiavelli says like he who deceives is most easily deceived because you, it just, I'm just curious what you think about that. Well, I mean, look at Trump and Bob Woodward. Trump is the one who's incredibly deceptive, who likes to, let's just call us, pay us, pay us, he lies a lot. You know, I don't mean anybody even a Trump's quarter would deny that. And here comes Bob Woodward who kind of says, you know, I'm going to write a book. And Bob Woodward has 18 books behind him revealing what he does.

He like, take ribs, shoot a piece as he shows your innards. He makes you look as ugly as you can. And he agrees to it. The deceiver was deceived. Con artists are often conned. I have the story. In the 48 laws of the greatest conman that ever lived in America, yellow kid vile. And now he was conned by these two very beautiful women on a boat once. And he realized that I'm very much open to it.

The idea is, when we look at the world, we like to think of evil people and victims. It's part of our black and white magical thinking for evil people out there, and there are poor oppressed victims. And the thing about Kant, the re-I try to show in Kant artists, or with cults, is I'm fascinated by the psychology of people who fall for it. And it's not so much that they are victims in this particular instance. They want to believe in the con. There's an old Latin expression I wrote down here. Munda's Vult de Kippex, Ergo de Kippiator,

the world wants to be deceived. Therefore, deceive them is the expression. People want to be fed some convenient, beautiful truth. You're going to have easy money. We're going to do this little thing here. And you're going to get thousands of dollars without ever doing anything, right? Wow. Okay, I'll do it.

You know, or whatever the story is, whatever the con is, you want to believe in it. You're a sucker. You're a dupe because of human nature. And we all have that part of us, you want to believe in it. You're a sucker, you're a dupe, because of human nature, and we all have that part of us. You want to believe in this easy root to power and money, right? So the end thing is you have to be responsible for yourself. You can't be whining that you were the victim, that you were were conned or that you were deceived, of course, you'll very rarely ever admit that. You have to build rational

defenses in your mind. You have to be willing, and this comes from a lot of reading, to question everything, to question your own beliefs, to say, am I actually in a cult? Maybe I am. Have I actually been conned? Maybe I, I'm a green happy guy, and I actually been conned? Maybe I have a green happy kind and I have been conned myself personally. You have to look at yourself. That is the last line of defense for any kind of world we live in with so much deceiving and conning going on. Yeah, I remember you tell us during I think it's in 40 laws of power about this con they do where they approach someone and they say, hey, do you want to fix a boxing match with me? And then you think you're tricking other people and then they stage this elaborate ruse where one of the boxers gets killed

and then they flee with the money, but you don't ever tell anyone about it because you would have to admit that you were fixing a boxing match. Yeah, it's the old Russian trick of Compromot. So if you're compromised in the actual con, you're never going to come out and go to the authorities, because A, it shows how stupid you were and B,

you're admitting guilt on your own part. So that's one of the oldest cons in the book, yeah. Yeah, no, a compromise is a fascinating and very relevant in these days. And I think I was reading an interview with an FBI agent and they were saying, you know, it's not, people think that to be compromised means that you're a trader,

like you're somehow some double agent. And he's saying compromise, being compromised just means there's a reason that you can't be fully honest. It's like you have a secret or you have some shame or you have something you don't want to admit. And that's what it is. And I think when people talk about this election interference and all this stuff, it's not just politics. I mean, there's college professors who've been taking research money from China. We have, this is why I think ethical lines

and holding yourself to a high standard is so important. You don't want to be compromised because once you're compromised, you're not yourself anymore. Well, it's the chapter in 48 laws of power about your reputation. And there is an element that isn't maybe so ethical in that it's a power thing. But it is ethical in the sense that your reputation is your most important thing that you have. And if you solid in the least sense, particularly in this era, with so much visibility and social media, where one wrong step will resonate, you know, those ways will go in the matter of minutes across social media.

You have to be very careful. And you have to see that there are all kinds of compromising factors out there. So yeah, I myself have been a position where people have been offering me money from somewhat dubious sources. And I say, no, no way, because I know it'll come out at some point, and people will go, oh, look, Robert Green.

How could we trust his books? He's actually receiving money from this somewhat corrupt group or that, some of corrupt group. You know, I'm not saying that I'm pure, but I'm very much aware that I myself have been the target of compromised campaigns before. And I take a step back and I go, no, my reputation is the most important thing that I have.

Well, no, and that's why controlling your ego is so important. I'm not the same level, but everyone, so you get a television request to be on RT or something. And on the one hand, you're like, oh, that would be good. And then you're like, ah, I know why this is happening, right? And, or we can also corrupt ourselves. Like, how many people get themselves in trouble because three years ago they said something

dumb on Twitter because they couldn't control their emotions and now they can't be president or whatever it is. But it's, we can under, it's hard. We tend to separate ourselves from other people and point fingers. And I know how easy it is to fall for these things. I know like if you're in a group situation, you're working in an office like we have when

we were in America, and apparently we recently discussed this, the pressures that you're feeling to conform and to maybe do things that you normally wouldn't do because you're being asked to do it. And the group pressure is very powerful. And then you'll let slip some of those ethical principles that you have. I know I felt that pull myself, and I maybe even at some points have slipped a little bit.

I'll admit that. I understand how difficult it can be. But as you say, at some point, you look at yourself and you go, this is who I am, this is what I stand for. It's more important than any kind of momentary friction I'm going to get from the boss or from ever. And I'm not going to go past that particular limit. No, I love it. Anything else we should cover that we haven't covered? I don't know. I don't know. I think we've covered the world as it is. How about you?

Yeah, I don't know. I think the thing I've struggled with that to be clear is it's so hard to know where we are in the levels of emergency. Do you know what I mean? When is this the early sign? And there's still something can be done about it? When is the, you know, it's like, let's say it's a just to take it out of the complicated political context. Let's say as they say, the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

And so there's this tricky balance of like, do you ride it up? And risk maybe taking it too far. Do you risk taking out your chips off the table too early? And so I think in a political and a social context were in this weird environment where, you know, where are we on the spectrum of like, create, where are we on the spectrum from, you know, America, the dream and, you know, Russia or Germany. And how do you

know? Well, if I had that answer, I would be the most powerful man in the universe, you know, we don't have perspective to be even to be someone who writes books more. If you have to have humility and realize there are limits to what you know. So I read a lot of history and I see a lot of patterns. And a part of me says that things are pretty damn dire that certain guardrails in our democracy are fridering away. But to be honest with you, what scares me more than anything is the levels of irrationality and magical thinking

and people not able to kind of look at themselves and be somewhat self-aware. And that disconnect from reality. And as I say, I kind of think it's from decades of being entertained and being kind of brainwashed is what frights me the most. Because even if, let's say Trump is gone, let's say people are coming in, they're fixing things, et cetera. That's not gonna change this consciousness that people have that is, you know, kind of like the equivalent

of eating junk food. So that thing, that part of it makes me a little bit depressed because you need to change people's consciousness more than anything on a deep level. And the other thing that's very frightening now that we've seen before in history, it's not the first time, is the extremity of the partisanship,

of the tribalism that we're going through. And, you know, I could point through other moments in history that have been equally tribal, of course, before social media, which is only exacerbated it. But it's kind of like this hall of mirrors that you enter. You can't argue with people anymore. Because the moment you say, this is what I think and you're challenging them, oh, you're just this, you're just a liberal, you're just a Trump supporter, you know, you've drunk the Kool-Aid. I get that all the way. Oh, Robert, you've drunk the Kool-Aid. Where's the fact you're the one that's drunk, but the people who drink the Kool-Aid think everybody

else are the ones that have drunk it. That's the nature of it, even in Jonestown where the expression comes, you drink the Kool-Aid. They thought everybody outside of Yomestown had drunk it their own Kool-Aid. That's the kind of world we live in. It's like Alice in Wonderland, which Jared Kushner was saying ironically enough kind of is the book that encapsulates the Trump presidency, but that's kind of the world we're living in. No gaslighting is the operative term too, not just because of what it means. Like it's rooted in the story of a man who's sort of flicking off the gas lights and slowly

tricking I think his spouse about it. But if you expand that out, it's like some gas is leaked into the room and it's made us all irrational. And we can't think straight. And the irrational. And we can't think straight, and the worst part is we can't think straight, but we think that we are thinking straight, and that about sums up the nightmare that we're in. I think that about sums it up you right.

I can't think of a better way of putting it. Well, it was amazing to talk to you, and let's do this again for sure. Yeah, and you have a book coming out, don't you? I do, yeah, Lides of the Stoics September 29th. I encourage all of my followers and readers, if you don't, I mean, I'm sure all of you read Ronald Howe holiday, but you really should go out.

This is gonna be a great book. When is it gonna come out? September 29th. Okay. Thank you, I appreciate it. Welcome. you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Ah, the Bahamas. What if you could live in a penthouse above the crystal clear ocean working

during the day and partying at night with your best friends and have it be 100% paid for? FTX Founder Sam Bankman Freed lived that dream life, but it was all funded, with other people's money, but he allegedly stole. Many thought Sam Bankman Freed was changing the game as he graced the pages of Forbes and Vanity Fair. Some involved in crypto saw him as a breath of fresh air, from the usual Wall Street buffs with his casual dress and ability to play League of Legends during boardroom meetings. But in less than a year, his exchange would collapse.

An SPF would find himself in a jail cell, with tens of thousands of investors blaming him for their crypto losses. From Bloomberg and Wondery, comes Spellcaster, a new six-part docu-series about the meteoric rise and spectacular fall of FTX, and its founder, Sam Beckman-Freeed. Follow Spellcaster, wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Prime members, you can listen to episodes ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today.