Tetragrammatin. Tetragrammaton. Tetragrammatin.

Nothing has really changed. It's the same story over and over again. I've been working in Hollywood, which I hated. And the games, the tactics, things people were doing were just like things I've been reading about in the pages of Machiavelli. People aren't as violent and overt, but it's the same hunger for power. They don't want to admit it. And so that book came from a lot of pain inside of me. Bad experiences of being on the wrong end of power and being kind of resentful that people got away with this. And nobody talks about these kinds, you know, in the music business better than anybody, what I'm talking about, because I've known quite a few musicians. One of my oldest friends was in a band, Mazzy Starr and David Robach. Do you ever know David?

I don't know David.

Okay.

But I love Mazzy Starr.

Oh, yeah, he was the guitarist. And how the music industry just destroyed him just as a person. He became an alcoholic. He died when he was just a couple years ago. And I love that guy more than he was. Wonderful human being. But the stories he would tell about the betrayals, the lying, the money games just broke my heart. So I had similar things in Hollywood, not nearly quite as extreme. So it came from that kind of power of kind of almost wanting revenge on that world to sort of expose things that I had seen. And that's where that book power came from, that initial spark and set off this insane journey.

Amazing. Of the bad bosses you had in Hollywood, were there certain behaviors that you saw over and over again?

Well, the worst behavior that I would see over and over again is the duplicity. So on the set in front of the actors, they would try and portray themselves a certain way, generally trying to hide their insecurities and their manipulative behavior. But they would be so mean to the people who worked for them that nobody would ever see this, that only the people behind the doors, before anything was ever shot. And so they felt this kind of license to vent all of the anger and frustration that the film business builds in you, naturally, by its design, by how it's structured, in fact, that they would kind of vent it on the lowest people. Right. And saw things that were humiliating sometimes for me. But I witnessed a lot of that. And so that was sort of the most common pattern. But the main thing was you had to disguise that. What you were interested in was having power and attention and fame. You had to make it appear like it was about art. It was about creating something. But the creating something was such a small part of it. Right?

Do you think they always knew it or not necessarily?

No, because the human being is. We're very good at deceiving ourselves. So people can know deep down inside that they're being hypocritical, that they have this side, but they convince themselves that it's a small part of them, that what they're really after is creating some kind of great art. But the thing was, most of these films in Hollywood in the 90s, they were such crap. There was no art involved. It was just conventions. It was just the same kind of cookie cutter ways of making a film, et cetera. There was no art or anything involved. And it was just raw commerciality. So that kind of disturbed me, because I grew up kind of someone interested in literature. I wanted to be a novelist. Sort of what I felt my calling in life was. And I never succeeded in that.

Did you write novels?

I tried. I lived in Europe for many years. I tried to write novels. I never made it. But it kind of hurt me that people weren't interested in creating something that lasted or something that was interesting. I was naive. Let's just put it that way. I was very naive, and I wasn't cut out for the film industry. And I wrote screenplays that just screamed my navite. And no one ever made any of them. Sometimes people were interested, but they thought you kind of write like somebody who writes plays in the 1930s. So I was very mismatched. But to get back at your question, I don't think they wanted to feel that aura of culture, et cetera, without doing the hard work of it kind of thing.

When you're doing research, you said you read history, you put yourself in it, you have an emotional reaction and then look for what caused the emotional reaction.

Yeah, it happens all the time. So I read a story that strikes me as od dramatic. It has a meaning. I don't know what it is, but I have to include it in my book somehow. And I have many, many examples of that. I remember, for instance, there was a story I worked in a hotel in Paris in the early 80s when I was very young. I was the receptionist there, and the owner of the hotel told me the story of Louis XIV and how his finance minister threw a party for him to honor Louis with the ulterior motive. So impressing him with this party that Louis would make him his prime minister, which is what he was hanging for. He was the finance minister, and it was at this chateau, which I have subsequently visited, and it was described as the most magnificent party ever in history. Incredible fireworks, a moligere play, all these other kind of dramatic things going on. And throughout the party, Louis was being very polite. People were coming up to him going, God, can you believe that Fouquet threw this magnificent party? This is brilliant. There was a kind of uncomfortable smile from Louis XIV.

And then the next day, I believe the next day, Fouquet, the finance minister, was thrown into prison for the rest of his life under the suspicion that he had been absconding with money. And so that story sat in my brain for, like, 15 years. And I thought it illustrated something very interesting, but I couldn't figure it out. Had to do with human ego, with envy, with not wanting to admit something about yourself, that somebody was more popular than you were. It seemed very human. And I like things that seem kind of very human, almost like we're children. And then when I came to write the 48 laws of power, I told that day, we were walking in Venice, I told him that story, and he was so excited. The Dutchman, he was going, wow, that's what your book. That has to be in your book. And I said, yes, of course, it ends up being the first story in the 48 laws of power. But things that seem dramatic and human, that reveal a primal side of human nature, or of people, they just attract me. And then sometimes I have to take months or 14 years to figure out what it really means for me.

I feel like most people read something that they don't understand and move on. You seem to lean in when you don't completely understand something.

That's very true. I recently had the thought that it has to do with anxiety. And I had this intuition that at the root of the creative impulse is anxiety. The sense that you're confronted with something that excites you, but you don't know what it is, and it gives you a twinge of anxiety. You have to figure it out right? And a lot of people can't sit with that anxiety. They have to solve it right away. They have to figure it out right away or move on. But the creative process is sitting with it and not letting it disturb you. In fact, enjoying the doubt, what they call negative capability, that you don't know the answer, and sitting with that. And then my process is, I'll come upon an answer, but it doesn't feel right. So I have to go through another, more anxiety, another layer, and I have to think about it more again, it could happen three or four times until I feel like I got close. I never quite reached the reality of what happened, but I've gotten closer to it than if I had stopped in that first instance.

It's an interesting choice of words, anxiety. I feel like in my version of it, it's not the case. When I can't figure something out, I'm excited and I lean forward. It's only a good feeling. It's like the puzzle. I like puzzles.

Well, that's great. Everybody's different. I think maybe my theory, my ideas, because I'm sort of an anxious person. Yes. But I did read a book about when I was writing mastery, and I had a chapter on the creative process, a book called the Emerging Goddess. I don't know if you've heard of it. It was a very interesting book, one of the more interesting books on creativity, because he was trying to link it to kind of jungian archetypes, et cetera. It's very well done. And he's a psychoanalysis. I highly recommend it. And he was the one that kind of talked a little bit about this idea of anxiety and how most people can't endure that in the process. That's why they short circuit a work of art. They want to create something. They begin it, but that blank piece of paper, that blank canvas, it fills them with some anxiety, right? And then they start, but then they can't deal with the feelings of doubt, et cetera, et cetera, and they don't push on. So I think that's where my idea germinated. But I'm sure there's very much validity to what you say, that maybe it's just people who have this kind of.

Because I have a lot of anxiety. That's why I mentioned.

Describe your anxiety.

I think it's slightly genetic or inherited, because my mother's a very anxious person, and she'll admit it. And so you absorb the energy patterns of people you were around with. When you're that young, you're just like a sponge. And I know my sister deals with that issue as well. And so it's kind of an anxiety about death, about things that have to get done, about scheduling. So I meditate every morning. I've been doing that for about 13 years now, and I'm very attuned to the thoughts that pop up out of nowhere. And 80, 90% of them have anxious thoughts that you don't control. And when you're meditating, you really see these patterns more than anytime else. And so, like, I've got to get this done did I upset that person when I said that? Why aren't they answering my phone calls? Why are they not calling me back? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. A lot of it's social things, I think, that has to do with it, and also, I've got to get things done, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Has the meditation changed it at all?

Very much so.

Oh, that's beautiful.

Very much so.

Have you tried any other types of therapy?

I've tried hypnotherapy, very. Just recently tried breath work, which I'm going to give another shot at. But I like meditation most of all. So I do Zen meditation, and my discovery is that it's not anything conscious that it does to you. You're not, like, in the moment suddenly, oh, I have to be this way. It's like it kind of invades you without you knowing it. So in the past, something would have triggered, you would have reacted, you would have become emotional, you would become anxious. And now it doesn't happen. I don't control that. I'm not aware of it, because if I were aware of it, it wouldn't work. Right. It gets into your blood, it gets into your system, it changes your brain, retraining your reactions. Yeah, it's totally helped me manage my anxiety and a lot of other things and not react as I used to. Always react. That's great. But I have a ways to go. I'm not there yet.

I think it's a forever.

It's forever for sure.

Yeah, for everyone. We can move in the right direction, but it can always be better.

Yeah. I mean, even in Zen, you reach enlightenment, and now the real hard work begins, because enlightenment is a trap. You have to go beyond that. Then you get there, then you have to go beyond that, et cetera. Yeah.

Tell me about living in Europe. What was that like compared to living here?

Well, I was very young, and I wanted to get away from my family life, etc. And I studied a lot of languages, so I went to France first. I lived there. I worked in a hotel, and I was going to write novels. I didn't have a lot of money, so I had to work every place I went to. So I was in Greece, and then I got very ill, and I was in a hospital, and I ran through all of my money. So I had to start working as a dishwasher on the beach, and then I had to work as a construction worker. And so I had the kind of jobs that gave me access to a whole other world to something that I came from a middle class background here in, you know, working in the hotel in Paris, there are these Tunisians and Moroccans who I was working with and their world. It's another side of Paris that tourists don't see the kind of underbelly of Paris. And in Greece, I got to see.

Describe that underbelly. I'd love to learn about that.

Well, so this is a hotel in the 6th, the Rendiss mall in the latin quarter. Beautiful old hotel from like the 17th century, where a lot of fashion models were staying. So the veneer was what could be sexier, more exciting. But these Tunisians, they were very low paid, and they felt french people were not respectful to them the least. Right. You never realize that when you're visiting that there's this class of people that just are disrespected. I don't know if things have changed that much in Paris. I'm not sure. I can't really say. So there's this one guy, Habib. And although I was friends with the owner, Habib was kind of resentful about how he was being treated. And we had these to do phone calls. It was the old system. We had to push the thing into a little hole and make the call for somebody for their room. It was beautiful old system, right? There was a counter there that would record each pulse, that would then translate into how much they owed. Habib knew how to wire that so that he could turn the counter off. Then he would call his family in tunisian speak for hours, and it never got registered.

And he taught me how to do that. And I did it. I called the people I needed to call the owner of the hotel. He passed away just recently. So anyway. But things like that, right? And then there was this argentinian who worked in the hotel. I just remembered him now. I'd forgotten about him. I forget his name. And he was like a, you know, growing up in LA, you never knew. Never known a communist. I mean, a hardcore communist. And his resentment was towards just the capitalists and the fashion models and the hatred of the bourgeoisie and everything. And he was very pleasant to the guests, but he was like, kind of had his sword hidden there. And I don't know whatever became of him, but I learned about communists working in that hotel. I had adventures in Paris. I could go on and on and on because I was young and I was a little bit know, but I had other similar things with other kind of weird subcultures in Paris and then Greece.

What did you do in Greece?

Was before Paris. I'd gone to Greece because I'd studied ancient Greek under the stupid idea that I could speak. Know, like, it'd be as if somebody had learned English from the druids and thought that they could speak English. Right. And I ended up on the island of Crete, which is a magical island. And I was young and I was backpacking, and I went to the south of the island. I met this german girl, and we lived in a cave for about two weeks. It was like a nudist beach on the south coast of Crete. Nobody ever goes there. It's like the libyan Oc, and we just lived in this cave and swam in the ocean and then go to the local know. I'll never forget that experience, things like that. And then hiking through that gorge in the middle of the island with all the owls and all the weird energy, and I just met strange people. And, you know, I don't know if young people are doing this as much because, man, it's so much fun to be young. I wish I were again.

The most interesting people are the people who aren't ordinary.

Oh, I know, but I'm not as open as I used to be. I just wanted adventure. I was, like, so into anything I could see that was different or interesting. I've kind of lost that a little bit, although I've sublimated it into something else. But I sometimes think about being young, and it's not what I think it is. It's like this energy that you have. It's a feeling in the air that life is kind of intoxicating, but you don't realize it at the time. It's something that I'm also writing about now, how in the past you had an experience, but you're not aware that it's going to pass, that it's going to be a memory in that moment, it's going to be a memory, and so you're not really understanding it. And then 20 years later, you're older and you remember it. And the meaning of it and the excitement of it is now wasn't so much then. It's very weird phenomena, and it's usually.

When you recognize it, it's too late to recapture.

Yeah.

Tell me about when you worked as a researcher.

I had several jobs, so I ended up at one point in London, and I worked for a television company as a trainee, and I was a researcher for that television company. It was a miserable job, though. It's a very wealthy woman in her beautiful house in Holland park, and she was this incredible snob. And she didn't really like me. And how do you deal with people who don't really like you?

Did she tell you she didn't really like you?

No, but I could tell that she thought I was sort of an american.

Might that be a story you're telling yourself?

It could be. It could be. But you can tell by the way people look at stood.

I don't think we know what people are thinking.

No. And we usually have a negative bias, and more often than not, they're not thinking about us at all.

At all.

That's what David Foster Wallace said. Yeah.

How old were you when you wrote the power book?

I was 30, 38 years old. That's when I started it.

What caused it to catch on in the way that it did?

I'm. I'm very, very lucky because I think it. It came out at the right time. You know, things beyond my control. But the fact that it's kind of extreme and kind of stands out there, it's not like other books, which was very conscious on my part, kind of gave it some legs. It caught on to certain cultures. So the music business was one of the first, believe it or not, hip hop in particular. Hip hop.

Why do you think?

Well, there were managers. I don't know if you remember Chris Lighty, of course. Yeah. Well, Chris told me that one of his bosses had found the book. Just when it came out, he kind of looked in the corner of his eye and he caught his eye, and he kind of stole the book and read it himself. And the idea was, I mean, his boss was white, but the idea was that hip hop was, at his moment, kind of tupac was sort of foreshadowing it where we want to take control of our music, of our future, of the money that's coming in. We don't want to be slaves. Literally. No, not literally, but metaphorically. And so I remember 50 telling me that when he got into the music business after the book had come out, like, in the early 2000s, he dealt with everything you can imagine on the streets, including being shot. But nothing prepared him for the music business. It was like, on the street, if somebody was hated you, you knew it, and you knew you better protect yourself.

And if someone gives you your word, they mean it.

Yeah, but the music business, people are smiling. They sing this, they promise that and the other, but they don't mean any of it. It was like a puzzle that he couldn't figure out, and it drove him crazy. And he said the book gave him, like, a roadmap to kind of understanding and controlling himself and figuring things out. And so it kind of got in that way. I think hip hop really helped it and gave it a big push. People like Jay Z started quoting it, and that kind of lit a little bit of a fire, because I don't think the Wall street crowd would have ever given it that kind of popular culture type taboo element. Hip hop had that slight, renegade, rebellious aspect to it. That kind of gave the book that aspect, which I think excited a lot of young men because they're the primary readers of the book, to be honest. And so slowly, by word of mouth, by notoriety, it's selling now much more than it ever has in the past. I don't know. I'm kind of humbled by that. I never expected it to have this kind of success. But I think the slight naughtiness of it attracts a lot of young men.

But also it's kind of realistic in a way.

It doesn't sugarcoat what it talks about.

Yeah. And so in a culture where people sugarcoat everything, I think it made it stand out and still sort of stands out.

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When did you start at the next one?

Well, pretty much right away. I knew that seduction was sort of a topic in the 48 laws of power, because my idea was, when you're soft and persuasive and indirect, and people don't know that they're falling under your spell, man, you've got power. Incredible power. So seduction was a sub theme in the 48 laws. It was also a subject that very much interests me. The psychology of seduction. Not actually getting a woman to sleep with you kind of thing. But if it's a woman that could be seducing a man. But it's what happens in the brain of the person who's being seduced. And the process and the kind of theater in the mind that's going on fascinated me, has fascinating me.

How would you describe seduction?

Well, seduction is opening up doors in people that are normally closed. And the way I look at it is when you were a very young child, you were vulnerable to your parents. You were open in a way that at some points could be a little bit scary because maybe they didn't love you, maybe they abandoned you. You had this vulnerability. And then life is a process of toughening yourself up, of closing off that vulnerability because you don't want the pain. But inside that little child, that little vulnerable parent still in there and wants to feel it and wants to have that experience of being completely open to another person under their spell, right, with mommy or daddy or member when you.

Explain under their spell. Because that's the piece of it I don't understand.

Well, when you're a child and you're facing these adult figures, you're three, four years old, they're much larger than you are, right? They have all this power, they have all this knowledge. This is like Zeus and Athena and Hera are your parents. And if they could be evil, too, in which case you have another problem, but they are these larger than life characters, and they have a spell on you. They have an aura that intrigues you, entrances. You're in love with them, you're dependent on them. Maybe you even hate them, but you never purely, ever really purely hate your parents. There's always ambivalence involved, and it's a kind of a magical spell that's going on in your brain in relation to them. And if it didn't happen, you couldn't be raised in a culture. You couldn't be educated. You'd be crippled for life. And a lot of people are crippled by that who didn't have that kind of spell. And so you carry around with yourself as an adult, this vulnerable part of you that wants to be taken outside of yourself, that wants to open up, that wants to have that feeling of somebody who has a story to tell, a drama thing that's going to give you that vulnerable feeling again, almost, but you're frightened of it.

The seducer opens up little tiny doors in your brain that kind of open that moment for you to be vulnerable again. And they know, he or she knows, by intuition or by calculation, how to kind of open those doors and create that aura that your parents had. I mean, Freud talks about how your parents seduced you. He literally used that word. And so it's a little bit taking off from that idea.

Is it always a person? Can a book seduce you? Can a film seduce you? Can music seduce you?

Well, there's a person behind that, but, yes, most definitely. So the book is about the process of seduction. So a film certainly can seduce you. A book can certainly seduce you. And it's the same process where you're drawn into a world, right? You're drawn into somebody else's world. And you have to let go. So if there's a film that you love that seduces you. And it's inviting you into this world. But you won't go, then that film won't seduce you. But they have to bring you in from the very beginning. And then, whoa, I'm in this other world, and you're totally seduced. And books do that as well. Philosophy can do that. Art can do that, et cetera.

For the seduce e, is it always the same as falling in love?

Well, I think there's an element of falling in love. I don't know if it's exactly. It's obviously not exactly the same. Because falling in love is stronger. And involves physical things that maybe aren't happening. When you watch a film, the feeling of vulnerability underlies it.

And it's a feeling of willing vulnerability sometimes. Not if you're not willing. Are you being seduced?

Yeah, of course you are. So a really great seducer can often seduce somebody who doesn't really want to be seduced. Now I'm going into the male and female. Or the two human being. Seduction can be sort of unwilling to be seduced. Or let's say I see a film. And I don't really want to enter that world. And I'm kind of reluctant. I don't know if I'm saying unwilling, but I'm reluctant, and then it breaks that down. I was a bit unwilling with your book. And then you seduced me. I don't know if I was unwilling, but I had defenses, right? So I think there is that sense of overcoming people's defenses and resistance. That kind of. So we don't walk around completely open to the world. Because it's too dangerous. Right. And even when we see a film or a piece of artwork. There's a little bit of distance inside of us. Because we want to protect ourselves. We want to keep our own self. Our own sense of self intact. And when you enter a great novel or a great film. You're letting go, in a way. And it could be a little bit scary.

And you could churn up things that you maybe don't want to confront in yourself or about the world. You have to let go. And the book makes you, allows you to let go. And it unlocks those little vulnerable locks that you have in your head, in your heart.

From the seducer point of view, where would the desire to bring in someone who doesn't want to be brought in?

Power? I mean, I'm not going to sugarcoat you here. Please tell me there are nefarious seducers out there. And so in the classic novel of seduction, a novel that I've loved for many years and was one of the inspirations for the book, is dangerous liaisons. And in that book, there's the main seducer, Valmont. And he's a rake. And he's been seducing women left, right and center. He's so good at it that he's kind of tired of it. And he meets this woman who's approved in the highest sense of the world, Prasidante Tourvell. The last woman that would ever fall for him. Because she knows his reputation, she hates him. He's disgusting, he's repulsive. He goes, that's exactly the woman I'm going to seduce. Because that's the ultimate challenge, if I can seduce her.

So it's more about a conquest in that case, yeah.

And that's not by any means all seductions. But sometimes the unwillingness of the person is precisely what spurs you on. I'm going to overcome that. I'm going to prove to myself that I can get anybody. And great seducers are often excited by that. They're excited by that young virgin who's deathly afraid of you kind of thing. And I'm going to overcome it. It's not the best part of seduction, obviously, because I think of seduction has a very positive edge to it. And I hate the kind of negative smell that envelops it now. But there is that kind of, as you say, conquest element in the power book.

Are the keys to power necessary to succeed?

I mean, it's a great question, and it depends on your circumstances and who you are. That's sort of why I wrote the book, mastery. So mastering your craft, or whatever it is. And becoming brilliant at it and creative at it is the ultimate form of power. If you are creative, the world will just bow down to you, okay? You'll get what you want. But we're social animals. So even if you're a very creative person, in music, in writing, in the arts, you have to deal with the political aspects of the field, and they're inevitable. And they exist in the art world as much as they exist in the business world. Right. A lot of artists are destroyed by that, as, unfortunately, my dear friend was very sensitive, beautiful soul, very poetic, had incredible imagination. A lot of artists are naive. They're sensitive. You point, you talk about it very brilliantly in your book. They have a higher level of sensitivity. Things bother them more. So they enter the art world, and they're not prepared for it. And they have more talent than anybody can imagine. They've worked on their craft, but they can't handle the political games.

So in that case, it's not like knowing the 48 laws of power would have elevated them to a great artist. No, but in that. Protect themselves in that moment, yes, it could protect yourself, as I had to try and do myself when I was in that world, and I wasn't very good at it. I recently got an email. I can share it with you later if you want to. Steve from I've been involved lately with. Prisons are censoring my book. I'm the most banned author in the United States. Prisons.

Really?

There's one other book that's banned more, but my books. I'm the most banned author.

When did this start?

Probably 1214 years ago. Wow. Anyway, so this woman sent me a letter, a three page letter of her joint journey. She's in a state prison in Texas, and she was with a very abusive boyfriend who charmed her, seduced her. She suspected him of being of it, but as a woman, she was trained to kind of ignore it kind of thing. She said, like in her church, they told women to kind of. That they were subordinates, whatever it was. And she noticed that he had the book, 48 laws of power on his shelf. She was intrigued, and she started to read it. And suddenly, all these worlds were opening up to her. These lights were going on. This is what he's doing to me. This is how he's operating. This is how I need to respond. I need to not get emotional. I need not fall for these various tactics. I need to protect myself. And she said it saved her life, and now she's in prison. I don't want to speculate what she got out of prison, but I think I know. And once again, she can't read the book, but she kind of memorized it, and it's helping her deal with a very, very brutal environment.

So in these cases, it's not like it's going to lead you to power. It's going to save you from being a victim in many ways.

And that's what originally sparked the idea for you.

Yes, it is. Now, I must admit, I have to be honest, because I like to be honest.

Please.

There is a naughty element in there. And the naughty element is, here are some of the really nasty things that people do. Right. I can't deny that. Like, her boyfriend read it and was probably using it, so it'd be very disingenuous of me to act like I'm a saint. I have a dark side as well. But there's a chapter in the book on play on people's need to believe to create a cult like following. And the idea is, I describe to you how you can create a cult. The essence of creating a cult is right here, but the idea is for the reader to go, that's how cults are created. This is a cult here. My job, I'm involved in a cult. Right. Kind of thing. So I was playing a double edged game sometimes, and sometimes that game could backfire a little bit.

So you purposely wrote it in a provocative way?

I did, yeah. I can't deny it, I own it.

But the benefit of it is it's the antidote. In reading it, you understand the methods, regardless of which side of the dynamic you're on.

Yes, but the sharky people in this world generally don't need a book like that because it's in their dna. They know how to manipulate people and I know that very well. I sort of examined that in my last book in human nature. Toxic People and how they've been trained since they were six or seven years old how to manipulate. So they don't need a book like that. Maybe it could confirm some of their ideas. But 95% of the emails I receive are from people who are like myself, who are innocent, who are naive. That's maybe just evidence, and maybe it's kind of biased because the sharky people aren't going to write me. So I understand I'm biased. And that might be biased, but I have this firm belief after so many years, that the vast majority of people who write, who read it, and I meet them all the time, are kind of like me. More like me than the sharks in the world.

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Tell me the story of the stroke.

It was in. In May of 2018, I finished the laws of human nature, and it was a very exhausting write. I was like, sometimes when I finish a book, I feel like I'm on death's doorstep. I felt so drained and tired. And the last chapter was about facing your mortality. And I don't know why I did that. Well, I mean, it's obvious why I did it, but maybe I had a foreboding. Who knows? And then a series of circumstances occurred, part my own fault, part serendipity. So I have high blood pressure. I went to New York in July, and I forgot my blood pressure medicine. So it was spiking a little bit. And then I came back, and I was taking a hike in Griffith park, where I live, and a wasp stung me in the neck, like, right here. I was like, well, okay. And I walked home, and, like, four or five days later, that whole area just became massively inflamed. It was like, the most painful itching. I couldn't stand it. So I went to the doctor. They prescribed me prednisone, which is a steroid which increases your blood pressure.

Were they not aware of your blood pressure issue?

God, I should have been aware. They weren't aware. I didn't know prednisone would do that. And I didn't know my blood pressure had been spiking. I mean, I could feel it, but I don't know. Stupidity. So about five days later, in the middle of August of that year, I'm driving in the car with my wife, and she notices, like, my face is like. It's like, falling apart. Everything's weird. She's saying, robert, pull over. No. Why? Everything's okay. No. Pull over. She got really insistent. She, like, grabbed the steering wheel. She pulled it over, and she tells me, I don't remember that I started getting out of the car, like I was hallucinating or something. And then she got me back into the car, and then I was unconscious.

You didn't feel like anything was wrong?

I didn't feel like anything was wrong. There were some distortions going on. My vision was getting distorted. My sense of time was distorted because to me, I felt like 1 minute had passed. And she told me it was like, ten minutes. Yeah. And then it's all gone. And she called 911. Anyway, the long story short is the blood clot was in exactly the place where the wasp had stung me. So it's not proven, but the neurologist who treated me thinks it's pretty likely that it released a whole bunch of cholesterol in that area and that it clotted, created a blood clot in my neck that created the stroke. The paramedics got there reasonably fast and opened up that neck, and the next thing I remember, I'm sitting in a gurney. I thought I had died. I wake up, and I'm like, where am I? I don't know what happened. I'm like, I'm in a gurney in this thing, and I can't see anything. And for a moment, I did feel like maybe I had died. And I don't know why. I started yelling in Spanish. I started saying, swelter may, for swelta May. Let me go and release me.

And then I started saying other things in Spanish. I don't know why I'm Spanish.

It's really interesting.

And then finally, I'm wheeled up, and people start telling me what happened. I did have some weird kind of visions while I'm sitting in that gurney of, like, I don't know if they're out of body experiences, but, like, seeing. Looking down from above and seeing my mother and my wife together, I guess, at my graveyard, I don't know. And I had this sensation, everything's going to be all right. Everything's okay. Life goes on without me kind of thing, but that's it. I don't have the really overpowering sensations, but I'm in the hospital, and my left side of my body is completely dead. And I'm somebody who is very physically oriented. Hiking, swimming, traveling, et cetera. Suddenly it's all taken away from me. That was just, like, the most painful, painful part. It's still dealing with it. Every day is like a struggle with myself. It's a struggle of telling myself it's okay. Your world is okay. It has its other things. You're alive. But losing that half of my personality, what destressed me a lot besides the meditation, has been just such a painful journey. It's hard to describe to people who've not been through it, because, like, every day I wear this brace on my foot.

I'm aware of the pain of it, I'm aware of. I can't do things with my left hand. You can't get beyond. It's like if you have a heart attack, it's very awful. You nearly died, but then you recover, you have cancer, maybe it kills you. This. It just stays with you for years. I mean, I'm getting better. I don't mean to complain because I'm alive and I've had to create an inner world to compensate for my lack of an external world. And I'm mostly successful at it. I have moments. But writing the book on the sublime is like, saved me, because those four.

You'Re putting yourself in that state.

I do.

It's beautiful.

I do. I'll tell you one thing, Rick. I'd originally planned to write the book back when I was going to do the 50 cent book time as this thing where I was going to go swim with dolphins in the Caribbean, I was going to go to the Gobi desert. I was going to have all these sublime experiences. Now I can't. But fate is a weird thing in that it's probably going to make for a better book because I would just come off as, like, this kind of wealthy asshole who can do all these things other people can't do. Now I'm in the position, although I have much more money, of people who are kind of trapped, who can't do these things. And the sublime has to be something you can access from your chair, from your bed, in your daily life. It's on this grand adventure. It's like every little detail, every little piece of mosaic in life has a sublime quality. And so it's made me have to be like that and think like that, which I think has helped the book for sure.

It can't help but be a better.

Book, but it's funny how? I don't know. Do you ever have the feeling that there's some kind of guiding force behind things? Some kind of all the time.

Have you had any mystical experience?

Well, just this sense of fate, like so many things, could have gone wrong. As I told you, I was this very adventurous, open person since I was very young, to the point where I could have easily have been murdered or gotten in a bad place or suffered something traumatic that I'd never recover from. I always felt like something's protecting me. I got very depressed in the mid 90s. I'd say even suicidal at my lack of success, my lack of fulfillment in my life, my frustration. But something was saving me. I don't know what. And then I got a chance to write this book. As I said, it was serendipity, but there was maybe something else involved, and I could pour all of my things into it. It's almost like there's a reason for some of these bad things happening. And now they're all good, mostly except stroke. But I've always felt like something's kind of protecting me, and it might be completely whack. I don't know. It feels like fate or destiny. And so like this sublime book, which has been brewing in me for so long. And even though I say I originally had the idea 25 years ago when I was a child, I had all these moments, which children often do.

And I have a chapter in the book about childhood. So it's been in my mind for a long, long time. So I think it's fate that I'm going to be able to create this.

Since the stroke, how would you say your life has changed?

Well, it's changed in every level. So I was a very independent person, and now I'm a dependent person. I don't enjoy that. So my wife has to kind of do things for me that I used to do all of the time. Right? So there's that level, which is the not good level, but then you have to work on yourself in every aspect of life, and when an event like this happens, the work is double. So, all right, being dependent, maybe being so independent was not so great. It was kind of false a little bit, because you were kind of going a little too far with it. And maybe it's okay to feel a little bit dependent on another person and to feel grateful for them for being there and letting go of your need to always be in control, because independence is often really about the need to control. So turn it around and deal with your need to control. I can't hike, which is my major way of thinking, and I would swim. I was an addicted swimmer. I can't do any of that. I can't ride a bicycle. So I got a special bicycle, a recumbent bike that I can now ride up into the hills.

So that compensates. I'm a competitive person, which isn't a good thing so much. And so when I was biking, I'd like to be fast, et cetera. And now I'm going quite slowly because you're sitting in this bike, and, like, 70 year old women are passing me by, and I go, God damn it, I'm getting frustrated now. No, Robert, don't be frustrated. Going slowly means you're enjoying it. I'm actually going so slow when I'm going up a hill that I'm actually almost like people who are walking past me. So I'm able to having my hike. I'm able to hear the birds. Those cyclists are going so fast. They're not appreciating what you appreciate. I go through these compensatory things, like, I'm so jealous that people are walking by my office window with their dogs. Sort of things I can't do anymore. They're going, yeah, but they're not appreciating it. They don't even know what they have. You appreciate it as if you were doing it. You appreciate every little thing that you have, but they don't. I have to tell myself these stories all the time, every day.

Can you think of the competition as one with yourself? If you could bike further today than you did yesterday, is that a win?

Yeah. And it is like that. I mean, look, I'm going up hills and these bicyclists are passing me and they're going, man, you're amazing. I can't believe it. You're going up this hill, and they've never seen anybody in that kind of bike go up a hill like that. They're whizzing by me, but it's pretty impressive that I can get up that hill. Yeah, I do do that, but I'm not good at it. I'm fighting against my part of myself, so I'm getting better at it. Just recently, where I used to always do this stupid thing where I would count how many people passed me and there would be a couple of days where nobody passed me because nobody was out there. I was the only crazy person. Bicycling. Stop counting. It's so pointless. What are you doing? It's not a competition. It's not the Tour de France. So I'm not great at it, but I'm getting better at it. It's a struggle.

Is there a way to reframe it to see how many people can pass? You build the number. Like, see the numbers go up as a positive, not a negative.

Why?

Why not? It's all a construct. It's all just an idea. You can make up any idea.

And why would it be better the more people that pass me? Because there's more?

No, just because it's a higher number. It's like you're trying to get. Let's see if you could get to.

100 people pass me.

Yeah, you're trying to get to find some aspirational number and work towards it. You're counting something that's happening. That's all you're doing. Then you have a story associated with it. I'm saying have a different story.

That's a good idea.

The new story is, can I get to the point where I could see 100 people pass me? What would that be like? How cool would that be?

I'll try that. I'll try. That's a good idea.

See what happens. Can you go in water?

I can, and I was going to the gym to swim a lot. But I say, some days I was, like, crying because I would swim in this beautiful pool and I would go, like a mile and a half without stopping. It was so beautiful, meditative. Now all I'm doing is kind of walking in the water and flopping around. And if I can do half a lap, I'm winded. I can't raise my left arm over the water. It gets me so down that I don't enjoy it. But there are days I can enjoy it. I have a trainer with me, and she's very empathetic and all. Some days I enjoy it, but some days I'm like, it just makes me really sad because I see people in the pool and they're doing what I used to do, and I almost don't want to be reminded of it.

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In the days when you would swim a lot, would you not want to swim because there's someone who could go further?

No. But when I was in the pool, there was a little bit of competition sometimes because I'm an inveterately competitive person and I struggle against it. But most of the time it was just getting outside of myself and what would happen to the brain as it was going on and the sensuality of the water and the smell of it and the feel of it and gliding and so when you're in the water and you're trying to swim and your left leg is sinking and you're all out of balance, it's not fun.

It's not fun yet. I feel like it can be fun because you talk about the sensuousness of the water. The water is just as sensuous.

Yeah, I know. I'll get back into it. I originally thought after a year, I'll be swimming again. I didn't realize it. And I still have this slight hope that I will at some point, I'm going to buy a house and we're going to have a swimming pool, and then I can do it like every day. Great thing.

That'd be great.

And I will do that. The other thing about this pool that I go to is the water is very cold. And my physical therapist who works, but she came with me one day, she goes, this is half the reason you can't swim here, because when the water is so cold, I have what's called tone. All of the muscles on the left side of my body are super tight to protect me. When you're in cold water, they're just doubly contracting. And so I'm aware of the fact that I'm having to go against so many barriers here when I get in the water because of the coldness of it.

Are you aware of the audience when you're writing continually?

Well, it's a kind of a dance you're playing. So, as I said, I was doing this story about Borges because it's like, right on my mind right now. And on the one hand, it excites me. So I'm kind of writing it because I'm interested in it. And so I'm getting it out there, and I'm maybe not too aware of the audience as I'm writing it. Then I go, all right, I got to rewrite it because it kind of sucks. How am I going to make it relate to the reader? And I get very passionate about that because I want it to have meaning to them and I want it to relate to them. I don't like the feeling of like I'm writing for myself. I want to reach people, and I want to reach as many people as possible because I believe this is a very healing, therapeutic process to go through. So I have to think about them. And if it seems too distant, seems too academic, too abstract. I get very frustrated because the thing about the sublime, like book on creativity, is the books that are written out there are so academic, they're so abstract, they're so unsublime.

And I want this to be so the end of the book of each chapter, I'm giving the reader ideas about how to actually practice these things in your daily life. And so maybe initially I'm not thinking about the reader, but it comes in very prominently in the editing process.

How much of the first draft tends to be the book?

Well, the first draft is usually pretty bad because I'm getting out my thoughts, and there's a lot of research involved, and I'm anxious to get anxiety again, to get the whole thing out and to have it on paper, because I rewrite things a lot. And so the first draft is usually not very good. Then the second draft is where some of the magic use, that cliched word, occurs. And then that's where often the second draft will have the freshness that the third or the fourth one won't have. But this book, another thing that's very difficult is I can't type anymore. So I used to be a very fast typist. As part of my process, I would handwrite, and then I would type it in very quickly and edit it. I can't do that anymore. So now I handwrite, and then I handwrite again, and then I handwrite again, and then I dictate it into the computer. So the freshness aspect is a little bit different than in the past books. It's another added layer of resistance I have to overcome.

Do you think there's a chance that it could be better because of that?

Well, it could be. I mean, if someone saw my notebooks, they would think that I was totally insane. Because I'm rewriting and I write with a fountain pen because I like the kind of feel of it. And you can't, like in a computer, edit it. So I'm editing on the margins. I'm editing in every little corner of the page so the whole page is filled, and nobody would be able to decipher it except me. And sometimes I can't even decipher it. But it could be like my editor in New York thought that the last few chapters are the best things I've ever written. It could be. It doesn't feel that way because it feels like a struggle. It's got a level of humanness where I'm not kind of doing that. I have to be very slow and methodical and think and feel my way through the story. It might be improving it.

Have you worked with the same editor for a long time?

Worked with the same editor for about eight years now.

And it's good experience.

Yeah. Well, this is the thing of fate protecting me, because what I hated about Hollywood was you would write something that everybody would. You had no control. And I've had, like, total control over my work now for some years. So she leaves me alone. She's very hands off. She's very pleasant. I really enjoy talking to her. I trust her, but she doesn't meddle. I cannot complain. Yeah, I just realized recently, in fact, yesterday when I was going through the book again, that you did this with Neil.

Yeah, I did.

Our old friend Neil. Yes.

How did you meet?

Know. Evidently, my memory of how I met him isn't the real memory, isn't what really happened.

Tell me how you remember.

I remember it happening with this guy Tucker Max and with Neil being there. But Ryan says that's not true, that we met at this restaurant in Los Felas, where I live. Anyway, the gist of the story is that he was, like, 19. He was a student at UC Riverside, and he was a big fan of my books. And I do remember us briefly talking about it. And he was saying how he would love to work for me. And I get a lot of people who say that, and they don't end up being right. They don't have the right character. They're lazy, or they don't take criticism. So I was a little bit skeptical. And then he gave me a number, and either I miss dialed, or I don't think he wrote it down correctly. And I called this other number, and these people heard me. Ryan, you know, I was thinking about this, and they played along as if they were Ryan. And it was like this joke. I didn't understand what was going on. And finally he called me, like, a couple weeks later saying, robert, you never called me. And then we figured out know the number was wrong, and it was a misunderstanding, and I had given up on him.

And if he hadn't called me, then nothing would have happened.

Wow.

But he called me, and essentially, I'm much older, and I'm not very good with the Internet. I'm not technically oriented. I said, can you help me with these things? And if you want to help me with research, I'm doing the 50 cent book. And the most boring part of the 50 cent book are these hours of tapes that I have with, like, chris Lighty and other people in his group and with 50 himself, where you transcribe them like the shit work. Just wanted to see if he was detail oriented enough and whether he had an ego about it. And he was fine with it. He actually enjoyed it. I saw slowly but surely that the guy has good character, that he's reliable, that he takes criticism, that he doesn't matter doing small stuff, that he's very smart. I started working on my next book, and he's doing some research for me. And at the time, I was on the board of directors with American Apparel.

How'd that happen?

The CEO of the company, the founder, dove Charney, was a big fan of the 48 laws. He met me. We became kind of friends. I admired what he had done as far as the factory that he created, and it's pretty amazing place, this factory. And then we became friends. And then when it went public, he offered to put me on the board of directors. And I go, dove, I have no business experience. I don't even like. Says, it's all right. He basically wanted a yes man on his board. Okay. That's the role I play anyway. I didn't really enjoy it because, as I said, I hate business, but it had some perks that were nice. And Dove had a Wikipedia page that he hated that was filled with all kinds of vitriol, et cetera. And I said, well, Ryan fixed my Wikipedia page. And he said, who? I connected Ryan to Dove, and Dove was so impressed with him that he hired Ryan. And Ryan ended up becoming a very important person in their marketing department, which was the subject of his first book, which launched his career. And I essentially kind of taught him my way of organizing and creating a book, which he used, and he still uses to this day, kind of like your verlin, but in my own way, my note card system, how I create chapters et.

You know, we've been friends ever since, and he kind of helps me with what I'm bad at, which is social media. He connected to me to a lot of right people, and we have a nice rapport. I don't have any children, and he's kind of like a son almost, because he would be the age of my son.

That's great.

And I feel very proud of what he's achieved. And he's a great guy. I really love him. And we did a couple of events recently together. We've done now three of these events together, and we'll probably do some more.

Did you develop the note card system during the first book, or did you already have it? First book, yeah.

And I think I'd been making note cards when I was in elementary school or something, because I've always loved note cards. It's kind of an OCD part of my personality, like organizing things on cards. I had notebooks filled with ideas for the 48 laws, and it came very clear to me quickly that I could not organize all this material. It was going to kill me. I had to figure out a way. So I somehow gravitated to the note cards, four by six note cards, that I would go through a book and I would write down ideas, and then I would put a title at the top of the card of what the subject was. I kind of felt my way into a system that has now since become a little bit ironclad, a little too ironclad. I kind of shake it up every now and then. So I read a book, and I make notes in it on the margins, and then I go back, like, a few weeks later, and I put those notes onto cards. I don't put them in how the book goes. I put it in how my theme and how my book goes.

Great idea.

Yeah.

So you're further along in the process because it's already starting to be organized like your book, right from the notetaking stage.

Yeah.

That's great.

So I know I'm writing a chapter on love, in love sublime, in this book, and whenever I come upon a passage in a book that has nothing to do with love but they're touching upon it, then I can put it on that card and organize it that way. And then what's on page eight will now be followed by what's on page 118, because only on page 118 do they actually go back to this idea. I'm almost sometimes organizing their book for them. So in the end, I'll have thousands of cards that I can now organize into chapters. So the cards tell me what the chapters are.

So you've basically organized the whole book.

Before you start writing it, but I leave it open. So I've learned that if it's too tight, too structured, it has no verb, it loses its life. So I leave quite a bit of leeway in that. Okay, here are the 30 cards for this chapter. I look at them and I go, this isn't actually a chapter. This isn't working. I don't think this is good enough for a chapter. I'm going to fold it into another section. I'm going to move these cards somewhere else where there will be a chapter, or, this is two ideas here, or I need more research to make this a chapter kind of thing. So I keep it open ended. So when I start, like now, with this chapter on the historical supply or the next one on the Damon, I don't really know what it's going to be. The cards kind of tell me, and then I have to create it. Understood. So I actually keep it quite open, but it gives me a structure, otherwise I lose my mind.

Understood. How'd you get to 48?

Oh, well, similar to your thing, I had all of this research, and I kind of condensed them down to ideas and themes, and I had about 72. And then some of them didn't seem big enough, because my chapters are going to be longer than your chapter. Some of them didn't seem big enough for a chapter. Eliminate it or combine it somewhere else. And slowly, slowly, slowly, I came down to 52, and the publisher said, robert, we don't like the 52 laws of power. It sounds too pat. It doesn't have a nice ring to it. We like 48. Well, that's great, but that's not what I have. Then I worked with my partner, yoast, and he said, maybe they write 48 is a better number. I go, okay, I'm going to trick them. I'm going to create these chapters where there's two parts to them that are related, and I'll fold one of them into that. Right. And eventually I managed to fold those four extra chapters into other chapters, and I got down to 48, because the number 48 laws of power resonates better than the 52 laws of power, because.

Also 52, you think of a deck of cards.

I know. And the weeks of a year and things. Yeah, it's too pat.

Tell me about reading a story from history, the process of distilling the principle at play.

Well, sometimes you have the principle first, and you're looking for a story to fit it. And by now, I've read a lot of history, and I have a sense of where that could be. And I go searching for it, and sometimes I find it, sometimes I don't. But I'm pretty persistent. I'll keep finding. Sometimes I read a book, a biography or whatever, and it's really interesting, but I don't know where it fits or what it is. And so I think about it, I put it in my mind, I take notes on it, and eventually it creates its own chapter. So in my book on human nature, I read a book, a biography of Howard Hughes, which I liked a lot. And it was a book that was very critical, showing how really insane he was and not a very pleasant person and how his reputation was way overblown. As being this creative genius, and that people would kind of respond to the reputation and not to the reality. And in most of his business ventures, they would lose tons of money. He was a terrible businessman. And I'm going, this is a really great story.

There's something very human about it. There's something about sometimes people's reputation, like Dove Charney with american apparel, kind of creates a self fulfilling prophecy, but they're really not up to what their reputation is. I didn't know where it fit in my scheme of human nature. I had 20 some chapters which ended up being 18. And then I ended up creating a chapter kind of almost based on that story about character and compulsive patterns and how people have a character. And the word character comes from the ancient Greek, meaning something carved deep inside of you, something you can't really control. It comes from genetics. It comes from your early upbringing. And it creates patterns in your life that are compulsive, creates patterns in your work world, in being fired and getting not along with people. It creates patterns in intimate relationships, et cetera, et cetera. Your life conforms to these patterns, unfortunately, unless you become aware of them. And he had these patterns ingrained into him from his very strange childhood, and they kept repeating in each of his business ventures and kept the same story repeating over and over again. It's like, aren't you aware of what your problem is?

Can't you overcome it? He couldn't overcome it. And so that fascinated me. And so the fascination turned into a chapter that I think ended up being a very rich chapter. Sometimes a great book will inspire a new idea in mind that I create for it. And sometimes I have my ideas and looking for a story to illustrate it. So I was doing a chapter on animals that I mentioned, and I need a main story. And I had this chapter about octopuses, because octopuses are amazing. They're insane. And I love the story. I love the idea of octopus, but the story was weak. It was sentimental. I didn't want to create a book that's just about the sentimental, saccharine quality of our relationship to animals. I wanted to kept the kind of the weirdness that animals are and how different they are from us and the frontier between us. And I was unhappy, and I was looking, and I was looking through all my books, and finally I saw a reference to a book about a paragreen falcon. Well, I have no idea. So I just click on Amazon, and suddenly I see that it's Werner Herzog's favorite book.

And I'm reading about it. Sounds very interesting. So I order it and then I read it and it's like the best book ever. It's fantastic. Wow. It's got to be my main story.

Wow, that's great. Yeah, I can't wait to read it.

The peregrine or my book?

Your book.

Oh, okay.

The beauty is in your book. I get the stories of all the great books.

Yeah, you don't have to read them.

I heard somewhere that you like to be angry when you're writing.

Well, I have to feel an emotion. I have to feel emotionally connected to what I write. When I feel like it's not connecting to, like, who was it that said it? I think it was Robert Frost. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. So if you're not feeling something, the book will have a dryness to it. So I have to feel something. And even in the sublime, I have an level of frustration and anger that people are so banal that they're so closed in their narrow little worlds that they have no access to something larger. That I'm writing about history that people are so uninterested in their past, it pisses me off. I'm going to explode their stupidity about this very subject. So even in a book on sublime, I'm doing this. And I wrote a chapter on love. Now, whoa, you're not going to bring anger? Yes, I am. Our hookup culture, the fact that people can't feel vulnerable and love someone and give completely of themselves and surrender pisses me off. Right. It's a closeness. It's like the idea of romantic love between two people doesn't have to be a man and a woman just seems so past, so something out of date.

But it's like the greatest thing that we can have, right? And so I'm angry. So even my love chapter has got anger in it.

Would you say all of your books are essentially manifestos?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I wrote mastery because I remember I went into a hotel, I don't remember when, before I wrote mastery. And I was like, my God, who designed this place? Like, the sink is so close to the wall that you can't reach in and clean yourself. And the toilet was in the wrong place. It's like, how is this design? Then I look and I realize everything's designed on a computer. No, architects don't draw anymore. And because things are on a computer, it has a computer logic. And the computer logic is not related to human body. So parking lots and hotels, I'm going, we're facing a world where our knowledge is no longer embodied. It's all virtual. And we're going to create bridges that are going to fall down, buildings that are so poorly designed, they're not made for human beings. They're lighting how we navigate a space. What the fuck's going on with our future? And so I was so angry about how we're so disconnected from our bodies and how our brain operates. That's what mastery is. Yeah.

Wow. It's beautiful. It's shocking. It's a wild story.

Yeah, well. And I tell people, creative people. My wife's a filmmaker, and she knows it very well, that anger is a great emotion to put in your work, your dark side, the things that frustrate you, because it contains something very real and very authentic. Not to say that the other emotions aren't real, but there's something always. Anger comes up somewhere real. It may not be what you think it is, but when you put it in your work, people get very excited because we all are so repressed that when we see something. I grew up in the era of punk rock. That was what excited me. And that anger in punk rock and that, like, God damn it, this society is so screwed and so stupid. Wow, that's fantastic. I loved it. That's what drew me to that kind of music. It still draws me to music as well. So when you put it in your artwork, it has a visceral quality that translates. And it's not like it has to be negative. It also is a positive venting of emotion, like, yeah, this is something to be angry about. Yeah, I can release it. I can identify with it.

Tell me about Napoleon.

It's probably not a good thing because know is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, millions of young frenchmen in his campaigns. But there was a creative element to Napoleon that excited me as an archetype. And maybe I'm being too abstract and not human enough about it, but the stories seem so exciting to me. Here you have, because I like to feel my way into the character. Here you have somebody growing up on the island of Corsica. His family had had aristocratic background, but now they're poor. When you're a corsican, all the french people hate you. They think you're a slob. They think you're an ugly, dirty peasant. So he has this inferiority complex, right? He's not good enough. He can never make it in french society. No corsican ever rose to a position of power in the history of France. It was an italian originally, but when it became part of France. And so he gets into the military because it's like the only avenue, and he's scorned. He's short. He's a Corsican. He's got a funny accent. But he slowly learns that by being brilliant and understanding strategy and warfare and mastering every little aspect of it.

He became an artillery sergeant, so he learns everything about artillery. He learned every aspect of warfare. And he was incredibly brave. His bravery came from the fact that he had nothing to lose. If you're a Corsican, you're not going to get ahead anyway in life, so why not get yourself killed, but show yourself? And so I love the young aspect of Napoleon rising up during the French Revolution, where things are insane. They're the incredible chaos. And he starts proving himself in battle after battle with his bravery. And he starts organizing, and he's like a great leader of men. He's very inspiring. He starts rising through the ranks. And in the French Revolution, a poor Corsican can rise to a position of power. So during the revolution, France is being invaded from all sides by all these aristocratic countries that want to destroy it. One of them is Austria, and there's a campaign in Italy against the Austrians. He's put in charge of the italian campaign. He still could have been a disaster, but he was so smart, he was so organized. He had a brain like he can absorb massive amounts of information and figure things out and organize it in his head.

He knew every detail of a battle that he proves that he's like a strategic genius. And I'm kind of fascinated by that process. And he's very fluid. And so at a time, war is the most static, rigid of all of the arts, you can call it, of whatever. It's like these rules. This is how things are done. You have a general who organizes an army and brings it into battle. It's all top down. And Napoleon suddenly realizes, I'm going to create chaos. I'm going to create a bottom up structure where my field lieutenants have control over the army. I'm going to unleash this new beast on Europe that's chaotic, that's fluid, that comes at you from different angles. That kind of thinking is something right out of your book, although it's applied to killing humans, I'm afraid. And it's so brilliant that for ten years, he is the greatest general in the history of warfare, battle after battle. And then it all falls apart before that as well, starts going to his head. He starts imagining that he's Alexander the great. He has himself crowned emperor. His ego gets involved. He starts not being fluent and creative.

He starts being rigid, just like the generals that he hated. And it destroys him, the drama of it. The uniforms, the colors of the uniforms. Crowning as an emperor with his wife Josephine, who was pretty much also like him, kind of a despised woman from one of the colonies. It's so dramatic. How can you not be interested in.

It is arrogance what brings them all down?

Well, success is most often your undoing in life for almost anybody. And certainly I've saw that with the hip hop artists in my talks with 50, and that success is like the worst thing that can happen to you because it makes you think that you have the golden touch that anything you do is right. It surrounds you with sycophants and, yes, people who tell you how brilliant you are, and you slowly lose contact with your source of. You know, he thinks originally that being fluid and creative is what's going to win on the battlefield. And now he's got all the power. He's conquered almost all of Europe, and now he's starting to think, I've got to hold on to what I have. I can defeat these enemies with sheer numbers and firepower, the reverse of his prior strategy. So he loses contact with his youthful energy. What was the source of his power? That could happen to me. I could lose contact with what I was when I was 20. And I don't, I make a very big struggle to keep that same spirit alive and keep some of that chaos in my work, et cetera.

But I think success leads to the hubris and arrogance and is the undoing of 95% of people who make it in life. Dove Charney at american apparel is a classic example. He completely lost touch. He surrounded himself with people who wouldn't tell him the truth.

Tell me the history of warfare.

Well, there's asian forms of warfare and there's western forms of warfare. So asian forms of warfare have always been much more fluid, reflecting things like Taoism and Sun Tzu, who was immersed in that kind of taoistic buddhistic culture, where things are more fluid and formless. And the whole idea is to win through strategy and not through brute force. In the west, it was mostly through brute force. There were some creative people early on in the history of warfare. So one of the classic examples, one of the most dramatic and beautiful is the defeat of the Persians by the ancient Greeks in the first series of the persian expeditions by Xerxes and Darius before him. And they invade with a huge army that vastly dwarfs the Greeks. But the Greeks learn to be fluid and they trap the persian navy, which is humongous compared to their own, in this narrow strait near Athens, near Salamis. They trap them in this area where they can't maneuver and their swift little greek boats can do all this damage, and they defeat them. If that hadn't happened, Greece would have been overrun by Persian. All of our history would have been rewritten, maybe for the better, I don't know, because Persians were pretty interesting.

So there were certain avatars of fluidity early on, but mostly war was a very rigid process of certain tactics of meeting the enemy, of trying to take them by the flank, et cetera, et cetera. The other great brilliant innovator was Genghis khan. And the Mongols, who were also very fluid, and they created this kind of chaos on horseback because they were masters of horse, of riding. So you have these moments in history where there's this credible asymmetry in time between an army that's very modern and one that's locked in something in the past. So the Mongols meeting the Europeans was this insane asymmetry, and they overrat all these areas, and they were brilliantly effective, and they almost conquered all of Europe. If Genghis Khan himself hadn't died, then everything goes back to where it was. And by the time we reach Napoleon, it's more rigid than it's ever been, like King Frederick of Prussia has created this army that's so disciplined that the soldiers are like robots. They have no independence, no free will. They're so disciplined, the kind of prussian way of fighting. So by the time you arrive at Napoleon, the rigidity is almost at its maximum it's ever been.

So him breaking that is the greatest revolution in modern warfare. And then once he was defeated, the Germans, the Prussians, who were very practical oriented people, wanted to learn from Napoleon what made him so successful. And a man named Karl von Klausevitz, probably the greatest academic thinker on warfare in the west. He was involved in the napoleonic wars, and he said, this is what made Napoleon brilliant. Let's take the best parts of his strategy and incorporate into the german way of fighting. And then the Germans became the best fighters in the continent, and they kept defeating the French, and they were becoming the great military power. And then it gets all rigid again in World War I. So there's this kind of back and forth dynamic of things loosening up. And then by the time we reach World War I, and there's so much at stake that that kind of fluid form of warfare is gone. And also firepower is so much more powerful, that you can't be fluid anymore, as fluid because artillery is so strong, et cetera. And so then World War I, the butchery of World War I. And then we get to World War II, and suddenly fluidity comes back.

And maneuver warfare. It's called maneuver warfare. What the Asians did and what Genghis Khan did and what Napoleon did, suddenly it comes back in the deserts. The Germans are fighting that way again in the deserts of North Africa, and some of the Americans are learning how to fight that way. And then we apply some of that to fighting the Japanese. And suddenly the maneuver form of warfare becomes very much indoctrinated into the american way of warfare, which it still is to this day, believe it or not, despite some of our disast, despite the Vietnam war. So it's a back and forth dynamic because hundreds of thousands of lives are at stake, and the tendency to want to be conservative and to want to do what worked in the past and to save lives and know, just bomb the hell out of someplace, as opposed to being creative and strategic is much more difficult in the modern world. But the Russians now versus the Ukrainians, the Russians are that rigid form because it's a top down culture. Putin controls everything, and the Ukrainians are that maneuver style. And in the beginning, it was very, very effective.

So it's like this continual struggle through history of people who see the power in letting go and being more fluid in their approaches to strategy.

Are the asymmetries always ideas, or can they be technological?

They're technological, definitely. But the Vietnam War is a classic example of the asymmetry of a country with the most modern fighting capacity. The United States, versus a country that fought basically in a 19th century form of warfare. Pretty backward. They kicked the hell out of us because they were more motivated, and they were more fluid in their approach, and they were more political. They understood, as Clausevitz said, that warfare is politics by other means. And so the Vietnamese knew that by reaching the american public, they could defeat the United States army. That was what was behind their ted offensive. But there are not only asymmetries in technology, there are asymmetries in ethics, which something has interest me recently. When you're fighting an army that doesn't care so much about the ethical consequences, but you do. They have this incredible advantage that you have to overcome.

The one who don't care about ethics has the advantage.

Yeah, right. They're willing to try anything. They're willing to throw hundreds of thousands of people into the meat grinder. They're willing to do any kind of cyberattack on your country. They're willing to do suicide bombers. They're willing to kill. They have no ethical compunctions at all. And you've got your politics, you've got all the little nuances, the things you can't afford to do, what they do. So you have to fight them in a different way. It creates an asymmetry of ethics, which is something not many people talk about but kind of interests me.

It's very interesting.

It's also in politics, when you're dealing with the Republicans and the Democrats, when one party is willing to go much further than you are, it creates a dilemma in strategy. Like they're willing to gerrymander the hell out of the United States. They don't care even though they're in the minority, they're going to create a permanent minority. But you don't want to do that because that's not your know, that's against all your principles. Well, if you don't do it, they're going to dominate the country politically, state by state, forever. How do you deal with that kind of asymmetry sort of thing?

If one country attacks another country using methods that we would consider war crimes, does the country that got attacked fight back with war crimes? Is it a war crime if you're fighting back?

Well, we're dealing now with the situation in Israel. I suppose it's very sticky because you're no longer fighting the war just on the battlefield. You're fighting it in the media. You're fighting public opinion. So if you want to keep it strictly on the ethical level, then you should not go down to the enemy's level, but you're at a disadvantage. So when you're talking about Israel's response to Hamas, I don't want to be so analytical that I'm ignoring the horrific human element here. So please, please don't misinterpret me. But looking at it on a level of strategy, it brings up precisely that question. And so if you're going to go in and not care about it so much about how you respond, if you're going to go down to their level, that's what they want. That is what a terrorist attack is trying to do. It's trying to drag you to overreact. So the smart strategic thing is to step back and go. Actually being ethical is a much better strategy. It's going to help me politically. It's going to help me keep my allies together, et cetera. So I have to be creative here. And some of the things that I'm reading about, the response to what Hamas did, if Israel was smarter, and I hate to say they're not, they would put a strategy in that's not so brutal, that would destroy Hamas in the long run, but at a different kind of cost.

Now, that's easy for armchair Robert to say, but I've read some very interesting articles about how that could be accomplished. The problem is people want vengeance. They're angry. So the strategy that I'm talking about would mean starving Hamas, letting as many civilians go to the south as possible, keeping them isolated in the north and barricading them so that they can't get fuel and they can't get the things that they need to fight, which will take a year, and starving them to death. They can't get any of their weapons from Iran or Qatar. You've blockaded them. So that strategy is more ethical. It's also more effective in a way, because being brutal in your response is going to now ruin the chances for creating peace in the long run. Right. So you've defeated Hamas, you've killed so many people and Palestinians, they're not going to want to negotiate anymore. They're so angry. Right. So you've got to think larger picture. And that's where the kind of sun Tzu strategy of war, of winning without killing his people, is something that I think is the most brilliant way to go about it. But as I said, I'm being an armchair.

It's easy for me here to say these things.

What is guerrilla warfare?

Well, guerrilla warfare is you have a disparity. You're facing an enemy. It's what the Vietnamese did. You have a disparity in firepower. You have fewer numbers, but you're fluid. You work with in a country that, you know the territory is yours, you've been invaded and you have the population on your side. Okay, well, I'm going to irritate the invading army. I'm going to pinprick them here and here and here and here and force them to chase me and force them to waste weapons, force them to lose men and kind of starve them to death and kind of pinprick them to Mao. Seitung says. You think I'm here? Well, I'm there. You think I'm over here? Well, I'm not there anymore. Okay? And you just madden them through your mobility, through your ability to do things they cannot do until they just finally give up. Because politically it's no longer feasible to be attacking a country, invading it for years and not winning them. So it's a very creative know. Mao was part of the genius of it. But guerrilla warfare actually started, literally, the term guerrilla warfare started in Spain in the napoleonic wars, where Napoleon invaded Spain and the Spanish were so outmaneuvered, but they knew the terrain, they had the population behind them, and they just irritated the hell out of Napoleon's armies and they ended.

It was called the spanish ulcer. It was one of the things that led to his inevitable downfall.

How have the things that you've learned studying history, impacted your view of the world today?

It's given me a perspective that's very much different than the daily headlines of the news kind of thing. It gives me a sense of how does this fit into the large fabric of history? What is going on now? How is it going to be viewed in 50 years? I'm not Nostradamus, and a lot of times I predicted things that have been wrong. But I have a sense of where this might be seen in the future and what might be going on and what the spirit of the times are. And so if we live in a massively polarized world right now, where everybody is at each other's throats and everybody is so angry, we've lived through moments like that before. So there's context. It's not new. It's not. It's happened before. The religious wars in Europe in the 15th and 16th century were as polarized as anything. Protestants versus Catholics and all the different sects involved. But the thing that's different now is social media. So you can get too caught up in history and say, well, that's just like the 16th century. But no, they did not have instagram and Facebook in the 17th, 16th century.

So there's a different factor here. So you have to kind of put things like that into context and then extrapolate. But it gives you a larger sweep of the moment and how things could possibly play out and where the real dangers lie right now. And we are living in a very, very dangerous moment, I'm afraid. Are you interested in war?

No.

Oh. Why were you asking me about it?

I'm interested in you.

Okay.

I'm interested in you, and you're interested in war.

Okay.

It's the least interesting thing to me.

Oh, that's interesting.

And anyone who's interested in anything who studied it and talks about it is interesting.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

What are some of the most counterintuitive things you've learned?

I don't know if it's counterintuitive, but the intuitive thing would be to say, being free and open in the moment and kind of letting go of all the rules and just writing something and not worrying about the order and the structure, that's where you're going to be most creative. And to me, it's the opposite. When I'm grounded and disciplined in something and I have the rules which you've talked about, and I know something very well, and I've absorbed it deeply, and it almost becomes like a habit. Now I can be incredibly creative with it. I can go where I want to. What I like about your book is you ground creativity in something that's almost impersonal. It's almost like a force of nature. And when you get too wrapped up in yourself and you think your ideas and your subjectivity is so interesting, it's not connected to anything real. So when I'm so deeply immersed and grounded in my research, right, I'm actually hitting something very objective and real. And now I can play around with it. Now I can be interesting with how I approach it as opposed if I just let all that go and just kind of be free wheeling with it.

So to me, that's kind of a counterintuitive idea that I probably didn't have in my 20s, but I kind of developed in writing these various books.

That's a great answer.

No?

Great answer. Tell me the story of Margaret Thatcher.

It's a weird story because, first of all, I lived in London during the Thatcher era, and this was like when punk rock was know, and I was hanging out with that, and I was among some of the angry masses, and we hated Margaret Thatcher with a passion. She was like the devil incarnate. But then when I wrote my book on war and strategy, I wanted to let go of all of my personal animus and kind of just explore her as a strategist. And her strategy was very interesting and very novel and very interesting in the sense of kind of un English. So to go against your own culture and to create something different, it's an interesting phenomenon. England was always this polite civil society where you could be a Tory and you could be a conservative. But we're both English. We both went to Oxford. We all went to the same public schools, elite schools. We're basically all the same. She wanted to tear that apart. She wanted to create a real polarization, a dichotomy. You, the Labor Party, are extremely different from us, the Tory party. And I'm going to accentuate these differences, and I'm going to show the public how different you are and how we stand for something and they stand for something very different.

And she created as much polarization as possible.

Do you think this was a strategy or do you think it's how she felt?

It's a good question, and I don't know if I can remember back that part, but when people are in such moments, what we're using are just words. And the reality is people can be both at the same time. So the reality is she can be feeling this, but she sees a very effective strategy for it. And using it, I don't know, because I'm not in her head, but our tendency is with women in particular, is to not see them as being very strategic. Oh, she just was emotional. She was just feeling that way. It's nonsense. Women leaders can be as strategic as men. Women can often be better at strategy than men. So I think that's a little bit of a slight myth that, oh, she was just feeling that way. She was a very strategic, very tough, very forward thinking person, even though I hated her guts when I was living in England at the time. So her idea was to create incredible distinctions between the two sides so that the public had a clear choice. And she obviously weighed that choice in her favor. But it went against the kind of general conduct of english politics.

It inserted a level of animosity that hadn't been there before. I mean, there was still, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't all hugs and kisses among, in political realm, but this was something kind of new. It was almost a little bit vulgar in a sense. She didn't come from the aristocracy. She was the daughter of a man who owned a grocery store. She's a middle class person, didn't have all that upper class baggage, which is another interesting thing. So what interests me about people are people who don't fit in, who don't come from the circles where power is given to them. And I like the process of how they find their way to something that works, which is what attracts me to Napoleon. It's what attracts me to 50 cent. It's what attracts me even to Margaret Thatcher, in a perverse kind of way.

Do you think it's because you don't fit in?

Yeah, I've always felt I've never had a job for more than eleven months. I can't be consistent. I've tried every kind of imaginative job. I've tried journalism, I tried writing novels, I worked as a researcher, I worked in a detective agency, I worked in a hotel, I taught English, I was a researcher for tv shows. I couldn't fit in any of these places. Right. Basically because I guess I'm a little bit od. I don't know. So, yeah, I'm attracted to people who are odd, I guess.

Do you think of your books as history books or self help books?

Well, self help has a nasty feel to it. To me, it feels like a put down, in a way.

How would you describe it?

I think they're books to alter how you look at the world. Initially, they did try and categorize my book as self help, and I didn't like that because it doesn't fit into any real category, because self help books are not 60% of history and don't have all these images and weird things on the margins, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. But it's not history either, because it's got ideas about how to incorporate them. It's psychology, but it's not like a psychology book. I don't know. I never thought of it as a category. I just thought it was me.

Maybe it doesn't have a category.

Yeah. I mean, the war book could fit into books on strategy, for sure, but it's also about something much larger than that. Yeah. I don't want it to be self help because that sounds like kind of banealizes what I'm trying to do.

How have the way you looked at the world changed over the course of your life?

You change as you get older. Things that mattered to you when you were younger don't matter to you as much. You're starting to look at your own mortality, which for me, has been very real. Some of your values change. I think I've become more empathetic in a way. I haven't softened that much, but I've become more empathetic, I think. And because I've had success, I'm calmer. I don't feel insecure. I have moments of insecurity. It's natural. But I'm not as insecure as I used to be. So the success I've had with my books has been a positive, which could have been a terrible negative if I had gone about it the wrong way. I don't have to worry about money, which I had to worry about for a good portion of my life. So mostly it's good things, but I've lost some things that I wish I had back. I've lost my energy, and I've lost some of that weird creative oddness that I had when I was in my 20s. Wish I had back.

Do you think that that was just naive energy that now is replaced with wisdom from experience.

Yes, but sometimes the openness and the adventured quality was a form of wisdom. I wouldn't have been able to write the 48 laws of power if I hadn't had so many experiences, quite frankly. So sometimes the youth has a kind of wisdom. Childhood has a wisdom that we lose as we're adults. It has an openness to life. It has a fluidity. It has something that's not so language oriented, that's more open to just natural forces and things. We've lost it. That's sort of what my book on childhood is about. My chapter on it is that we don't think about this way. We actually look down on childhood as this phase of immaturity, as this thing that we've outgrown. You're weak. You're kind of dumb. No, childhood is a phase of actual incredible wisdom that you've lost. So I'm not so much believing that age has brought me this wisdom that I never had. It has brought me some wisdom, but I've also lost some things that I wish I had. Backyard.