Your Dark Side and Control Over Your Life | Robert Greene | EP 237

I've tried to remove the kind of taboo or the negative associations we have with a word like power or with the word ambition. You know, I try and say ambition is a good thing. It means that you have, you believe in yourself, you have some self-love, and you believe you're worth something. You want to go out and achieve and create something worthwhile for other people. So ambition is a positive thing. But so many people are just kind of embarrassed about being a human being, embarrassed about our prim nature, embarrassed about our own aggressive impulses. This is partly why boys are failing in our schools now at a disproportionate rate. You know, and I see this; there's an assault of the sort that you're describing on the better part of striving masculinity.

You know, I had a friend who killed himself because he identified his ambition with, you know, the patriarchal force that's devouring the environment, let's say. And that's a con—that's, you know, the cause of his horror. And you might say, well, no one takes that on to themselves to that degree. And that's—well, you can say that, but you just don't know what the hell you're talking about. People take that on to themselves all the time.

Hi everyone, I'm pleased today to have with me Mr. Robert Greene. Mr. Greene is the number one New York Times bestselling author of a number of books, including "The 48 Laws of Power" (1998), "The Art of Seduction" (2001), "The 33 Strategies of War" (2007), "The 50th Law," which he wrote with 50 Cent, the rapper (2008), "Mastery" (2012), "The Laws of Human Nature" (2018), and "The Daily Laws," this book right here.

So he's an internationally renowned expert on power strategies, living in Los Angeles. Mr. Greene worked at an estimated 80 jobs, including magazine editor, construction worker, and Hollywood movie writer, before becoming an author. The Sunday Times referred to his first book, "The 48 Laws of Power," as the Hollywood backstabbers Bible. And it can be difficult to find people who acknowledge its influence because of its controversial nature.

I was reading "The Daily Laws" before setting up this interview, and I'm going to read one. It's a set of meditations—366 meditations on power, seduction, mastery, strategy, and human nature. And so here's the one for June 7th, and I think it's relatively representative of the book.

June 7th: Never impugn people's intelligence. Then there's a subtitle or an introductory idea: The best way to be well-received by all is to clothe yourself in the skin of the dumbest of brutes, Balasar Gracian. The feeling that someone else is more intelligent than we are is almost always intolerable. We usually try to justify it in different ways: "He only has book knowledge, whereas I have real knowledge." "Her parents paid for her to get a good education. If my parents had had as much money, if I had been as privileged!" "He's not as smart as he thinks." Last but not least: "She may know her narrow little field better than I do, but beyond that, she's really not smart at all. Even Einstein was a boob outside physics."

Given how important the idea of intelligence is to most people's vanity, it is critical never inadvertently to insult or impugn a person's brain power. This is an unforgivable sin. But if you can make this iron rule work for you, it opens up all sorts of avenues of deception. The feeling of intellectual superiority you give them will disarm their suspicion muscles. And then, daily law subliminally reassures people that they are more intelligent than you are or even that you are a bit of a fool, and you can run rings around them.

And this is the “48 Laws of Power” from the 48 Laws of Power. Law 21: Play a sucker to catch a sucker; seem dumber than your mark. So when I was preparing for this, I was reading these daily meditations, and I was actually shocked. I was really quite shocked by them. I was shocked by that one, and I was very unclear as a consequence as to your motivations. And so I was thinking, do I want to—I don't get this. I don't understand this exactly. It's like this is very deceptive.

And then I talked to my team, who like your books a lot, and my daughter, who really liked interviewing you, and I thought, well, there's something going on here that I don't quite understand, which is certainly possible. And then I thought, well, this is maybe a shadow exploration, something like that. And I thought I was kind of a dimwit for not catching that earlier. But you know, it is shocking. These are very manipulative laws, let's say.

And so can you guide me through the rationale for producing material like that? What are you trying—what are you trying to do with your books? And they've obviously been misunderstood, it says in Wikipedia, Greene's books are sometimes described as manipulative and amoral. So clear this up for me.

Well, you know that it's a bit manipulative when people write that because a great deal of the 48 Laws of Power, I'd say, you know, maybe two-thirds of them are not manipulative, have nothing to do with deception. They have things to do with kind of common-sense ideas about power, such as being generous with people, such as creating compelling spectacles, such as entering action with boldness, and kind of how you present yourself—sort of things about your image and your appearance.

But there are definitely some laws that are quite manipulative, and then my other books don't really go into things like that. So it is a bit of a distortion to write that. But where this comes from is basically I have a particular idea of power, so maybe I should explain that a little bit.

My idea of power—it's not about this kind of grand thing of political or war, something. It's on a very individual level. And the idea for me comes from Nietzsche and his idea of the will to power, which he explains as every organism has a desire to expand itself, a desire for expansion. And so I think that for human beings, we have this innate propensity for wanting to expand beyond our limits. We want to feel like we have some degree of ability to influence other people; that we can control our careers, learn more, develop greater skills, and have more kind of power and influence in our lives.

The feeling that I cannot have any power or influence over my children, my spouse, my colleagues, my boss, my career in general is deeply unsettling for the human animal and causes all kinds of attempts at what I call negative power, passive aggression, etc.—setting yourself up as a victim, kind of leveraging power in a negative way. And so the problem is a lot of this comes from Machiavelli, who inspired a lot of the 48 Laws.

The problem is that we live in a world where this desire for some kind of power bumps up against kind of codes of behavior that have gotten stricter and stricter in particularly in the 21st century about what is acceptable, about what is politically correct. So we're supposed to appear to be these paragons of virtue, these paragons of fairness and democracy, etc. At the same time, we're all trying to angle for different degrees of power in our work, in our relationships, etc.

And so because of that dynamic, we have to be extremely careful in this world. And I compare it to the courts of like Louis the 14th, where all of the courtiers, if they're too overt in their power moves, the king will disapprove of them. He will not banish them, but they'll be kind of excluded to the corner of the palace. And so the game was to be sort of indirect, to be polite and ingratiating. And if you had an enemy, to know how to kind of very quietly get rid of them.

And so this is kind of where the 48 Laws of Power came from. So you quoted me; I had like 80 different jobs—probably more like 60, 65—but I saw all kinds of very deceptive games being played continually in the various different jobs I had. And I worked in every conceivable field, and I didn't see any kind of honesty about this dynamic in the human world. It really kind of irritated me. All the self-help books were sort of describing a world that I never saw existed. You know, I saw people being very political, having egos, and having problems with their egos, and I didn't see any—but any books like they’re describing what I encountered every day.

So law number one is never outshine the master. And the idea is that if you try too hard to impress your boss or the person above you, you're liable to make them feel insecure. You're going to trip on their ego, and something bad will happen to you. Right? And so this seemed like—the fact that people have egos and operate with egos, and you have to be careful with them, seems very clear to me. But I didn't find books out there that were describing it. So I hope this kind of gives you an idea a little bit of the context where the book came out.

Yeah, well, okay, so I just—I can't remember who sent me this. I think it was Clay Routledge. Yeah, I think that's right. He just sent me a survey that this organization he works with has completed, stating that something like 40% of Millennials don't feel they have any control over their life.

Right. So that is related to the first issue that you brought up, and you obviously consider that problematic. And you said that, well, we need to—it's good for us to have some control over our destinies, and also to feel that that's a possibility, to see it at least as a goal.

And then if we feel consciously thwarted in that goal or believe that it’s impossible, that doesn't mean we're going to give up our striving. It means it's going to go underground, and then it's going to manifest itself in all sorts of deceptive ways.

Exactly. And then you said that you were interested in Nietzsche’s idea of Will to Power as, in some sense, the central motivating—the central motivation of the organism.

Yeah, across species to some degree.

And then you talked about the jobs that you've had. So why—so I got that right, I hope?

I hope I've got that very well. Thank you.

Okay. Okay. And so to some degree. And then you said, well, you had all these jobs, and you found that people were engaged in manipulative and deceptive strategies a fair number of the time, and that no one was really warning people about this or delineating out the strategies.

Yeah, okay. So that seems to me to be reasonable. I mean, I'm a big admirer of the work of Carl Jung, which everyone listening to this knows more than they even want to know. And he was certainly sensitive to the idea that people had a terrible shadow—that they would clothe themselves in the garments of moral virtue, right, and act out a virtuous persona. But because of the thwarted will to strive, in some sense, they have all sorts of motivations: sexual, power-related, dominance, aggression, anger, resentment—that aren't admitted thoroughly and that are snakes under the carpet or elephants under the rug or skeletons in the closet. And they pollute human relationships.

And I certainly believe that's true. I believe that that's the corruption of human relationships by a form of severe deceit. And I also think it's reasonable to warn people against that and also to alert them to the fact that such things operate in their own souls.

I guess what I wonder is—the last thing I'm confused about to some degree is, you had 65 jobs. How come so many jobs?

I was a very restless young man. It doesn't speak very well of me, and the fact that I couldn't hold a job for more than 11 months. I came out of college and I wanted to be a writer, and I had all kinds of romantic notions of what that meant. And then I entered journalism and I worked in New York, and I didn't find that that was a very good fit. So I moved to Europe, and I wandered around for four or five years writing—trying to write novels and working in hotels, doing construction. Kind of the writer's life where the variety of experiences were kind of giving me material.

And I never was really happy in overtly political environments, to be honest with you. I'm kind of a born entrepreneur; I like working for myself. I didn't like a lot of the games that were being played, and I'm not very good at them. I mean, I've gotten better at it, but a lot of the things that I write about in the 48 Laws of Power, such as never outshine the master, are things that I did poorly, I did wrong, and I suffered for them. So I understand the kind of the pain that a lot of people have in the work world, which is sort of hard for a lot of other people who don't have that kind of experience to understand how deeply frustrating it can be when you have a job that you're not satisfied with.

And so I was someone who was very restless, and I never felt comfortable in any of the different jobs I had, and I was also trying to broaden my experience.

Okay. So I had a lot of jobs. When I was a kid I worked as a—oh God, I worked as a—in a garage pumping gas. I worked as a dishwasher for years. I was a short-order cook. I re-tipped drill bits. I worked as a beekeeper. I had a lot of—I worked in a plywood mill, running plywood pieces through a huge dryer. We used to try to light the thing on fire; it was like a block long, this dryer fired by natural gas. If you worked really hard, you could stuff it so full it would get crammed up in the middle, then it would light on fire, and all the fire sprinklers would kick in, and then the whole building—which was like a block square—would fill up with steam.

Really?

Oh God. So anyways, I worked in a lot of jobs. But I didn't—so this is something that's worth getting clear. I liked the jobs a lot—almost all of them. Not all of them, but almost all of them. I got along with the people that I was working with. I didn't have the same—exactly the same experience that you're describing.

And yeah, you said that you had a harder time. I don't know exactly. Was it fitting in? You didn't like the overt political elements too? And like when I worked in restaurants, I didn't really experience that. You know, like I got along with the guys that I was working with.

There was a lot of joking around. I—and it's not like I liked political maneuvering. When I got in the university and saw people in bureaucracies particularly maneuvering politically to attain dominance, just—I found it—it’s—I find it absolutely appalling, that underground power struggle.

But it sounds like you had a harder time maybe than I did adapting, and that maybe became a conscious puzzle for you. Is that a reasonable way of thinking about it?

I think so. It made me explore and think about myself, like maybe I'm doing something wrong. The natural reaction in these situations where things—you know, it wasn't that I hated all of my jobs; some of them were fun, so I don't want to give the wrong impression. But when mistakes were made and I maybe inadvertently made my boss or someone feel insecure, it caused me, like months later, to kind of question what had happened and maybe something I did that was wrong in that environment.

And so, you know, I felt—not that I felt uncomfortable, but I felt sometimes that trying so hard or being good at my job—which was often the case—was often a detriment, which was a very strange realization.

Well, that's—that's a really good sign that you need to go get a different job. I mean, I worked with clinical clients a lot, you know, in career counseling. And my sense—one of the things we'd analyze right away was, well, can you actually do your job well and be recognized for it and have a pathway to something approximating success? Or are you around truly toxic people who will punish you for your virtues? In which case, well, let's get your CV together, you know? Let's get you prepared to get the hell out of there and find a place where you can actually thrive.

I mean, I had clients who were trapped in jobs. I remember one client in particular—she had been a refugee from Albania, Eastern Europe. That was a rough damn country, man. And then she came—yeah, yeah, like the worst of the Eastern European block countries in terms of poverty and general oppressiveness. And then she came over to North America and got educated, and she ended up working in a bank in Canada. And like, she was good at her job, and she was smart, and her managers just hated her.

And like, she sent me an email string one day; it was about 30 emails long that her manager had put together, where the bureaucrats in the bank were discussing whether or not they were allowed anymore to use the word flip chart. I think they replaced it with easel board or some damn thing.

Well, the reason for that was flip had been used at some point hypothetically as an epithet for Filipino people, and so it was politically incorrect. And it was just—I mean, she was just being driven mad by this, this kind of—what would you call it—pointless moral posturing. She was a sensible person and questioned a lot of the bureaucratic stupidity.

So my goal in situations like that was to help people figure out how to move laterally and find a place where, you know, their virtues would be rewarded instead of punished.

Right. It's very wise, you know, if it can be managed. My experience is—and what I wanted to help people with 48 Laws of Power when these things kind of happen—you get very confused, and they create a kind of trauma in your life where you sometimes blame yourself or you wonder maybe you did something wrong, and you become a little bit skittish, and you get a little bit afraid in your next job.

And these things linger on in your mind. So having some clarity—I don't want to make people paranoid in reading these books. I want to make it very clear that that's not the point. I want you to be very realistic, but the idea that you could have some clarity—that maybe what really happened is that I inadvertently triggered the insecurities of this boss or maybe there are these strict, kind of moral-puritanical codes in place and I somehow violated them—it's not my fault; that kind of clarity can be very, very empowering, I find. And that's another kind of motivating device behind the 48 Laws.

Well, you also make me very curious about your personality. I mean, when I'm talking—I'm sorry, I'm going to—yeah, well, you know, I'm a—that's okay. I'm a clinician, and I snap into that mode sometimes, and I'm very curious about this conversation.

I mean, you have a very gentle demeanor and a very soft and kind voice. And you don't look like a harsh person. And so one of the dimensions—one of the cardinal personality dimensions—there's five of them. You may know this: extroversion, which is positive emotion and it's associated with assertiveness and enthusiasm. Yeah, and Trump is extroverted. Definitely.

Negative emotion—that's neuroticism, and that's the whole panoply of negative emotions; they all clump together. And people differ in their sensitivity to them. Agreeableness, that's compassion and politeness on the high end, and more like bluntness and competitiveness on the other end. And conscientiousness and openness, which is creativity. You're obviously high in openness; you're an entrepreneur, you're a writer, you're interested in ideas, you're obviously creative.

But you strike me as someone who's very high in agreeableness, compassion—would that be reasonable?

I think that's fair. I think that's fairly spot on. I would—yeah, I couldn't have fawned more.

Yeah, I agree with you on that, certainly.

Okay, okay. So, I mean, people are a little more complex than that. I do have other sides to myself. I do have a shadow side that can be very aggressive and very—I'm very competitive. So it's—I think on the surface I have that kind of agreeable personality for various reasons, but yes, would you describe yourself as compassionate, empathetic?

Very much so.

Yeah, okay. So here's what I'm—okay, okay, okay. So that's—I'm very curious about that because one of the disadvantages of being high in agreeableness is that you're more likely to be a target for disagreeable types.

Certainly, and this is a really important notion. So I was talking yesterday—who was it with? I can't remember. But we were talking about—oh yes, it was Andy No. We were talking about the establishment of this, you know, utopian community in the middle of Seattle. The mayor described it and said, well, maybe it'll be the summer of love, which is an extremely naive thing to think. Especially because the summer of love blew up.

And you know, that's sort of a celebration of agreeable virtues. And so agreeable people are very generous and kind, and they're not backstabbing, and they're empathetic, and they're self-sacrificing. But there have been computer simulations—very sophisticated computer simulations by evolutionary biologists—of what happens if you get agreeable people together.

So imagine you have a population of people, and all of them are agreeable. And so they're cooperating away; it's all very kind and nice. But if you put one person in there who has psychopathic traits, he just takes over everything!

Yeah, and so the agreeable people always have the problem of how do you handle free riders, cheaters, and psychopaths? You know, you might be utopian and say, well, those people just don't exist, and they shouldn't exist, and we shouldn't structure our societies that way. But that ain't going to cut it, because psychopaths are always 3% of the population.

They very well might begin five. So if you're—so is it possible—I don't want to push this interpret beyond its reasonable limits, but I'm wondering—you’re open and creative, and entrepreneurial, and so that's not going to suit you for managerial or bureaucratic jobs. You don't have the temperament for that.

And then you're agreeable. And so is it possible that you encountered more of that bullying behavior or like a disproportionate amount of that bullying behavior and so forth in the jobs that you had?

Is that—

I think that's very possible. And yes, and I'm also very sensitive, so I kind of react a little bit more than most other people might react. But the odd thing is that the book came out in 1998, and it has resonated with lots and lots of readers. I've sold millions of copies of the book.

And so there's—I think a lot of people share the trait that I have. Oh, there's no doubt about it that it's not uncommon what I'm talking about at all. I mean, the great manipulators in the world, the 3% that you talk about—and I think that's about the right number—they don't need this kind of book, because they're born that way or they're not born that way, but they learned at the age of three or four or five how to begin to manipulate, and their whole personality was kind of formed over these sort of tactics.

They don't need a book like that. What seems to happen there—we studied that. You know, so if you take two-year-olds and you group them together—two-year-olds, by the way, grouped together are the most violent of human beings in age-matched groups.

Okay. So among two-year-olds, there's a proportion of them who will spontaneously kick, fight, hit, bite, and steal. They're almost all males, and it's about 5% of the males. Now, most of them, this goes to nature versus nurture, say. Most of them get socialized out of that by the time they're four.

Now, they would be more disagreeable boys, so they're not empathic and compassionate and polite by temperament, but they can still be socialized. But a proportion of them don't get socialized, and they tend to be life-course antisocial types.

Yeah, I think Melanie Klein, she looked at infants like that of that age and she said that there was something called the greedy baby. And the greedy baby was like sucking the mother's breast so hard it could never get enough milk. It was just so greedy for more and more.

And she saw that as the child got older, that kind of greediness and that kind of selfish behavior only got worse and worse and worse. And she would like try and see if you could track that to someone who became older as a type.

And she ended up thinking that there was maybe a genetic component to it.

Oh, yeah, well, there is a genetic component too because that sort of proclivity runs in families. But—and also there's a genetic underpinning to variation and agreeableness. Now, you know if you have a tough kid like that and you're very agreeable, the kid can run roughshod over you.

It's very difficult for you to do the socialization. And so like one of the problems that women face with men—so men are reliably less agreeable than women. That's cross-culturally, and it's true. It's even more true in egalitarian societies.

And so women have to be agreeable because I think primarily because they have to take care of infants, and that's an extremely self-sacrificing occupation, especially when they're under nine months.

But with men, they have to select men who are agreeable enough to be generous and kind and share, but they have to be disagreeable enough to keep the real psychopaths and the manipulators at bay.

And so it's a chronic problem for the human race.

Okay, so you're doing all these jobs, and you're seeing the politicking, and it's not going well for you. You decide to analyze the behavior of the people that are acting in these underground oppressive ways. You're definitely going to see that if you're being pushed around a lot, you know.

And so you decided to make that an object of study?

Yeah. You know, I wasn't—it's not so much that I was pushed around; some of it was also just observing how other people were being treated. I have this idea that I talk about in the book that, you know, people will always wear the mask of being agreeable and friendly— even the most psychotic boss will always know how to be somewhat charming and present themselves—but you look at how they treat other people when you're not observing them.

Behind closed doors, that's when some of their ugly behavior will come out. They kind of hide it very well from the public. So a lot of it was observing how other people were mistreated. And so when I worked in Hollywood, you know, in some industries, I have to say, some industries are a lot worse than others.

So when you're working at that factory job that you were mentioning, people will tend to be kind of united around a single purpose. There won't be much politicking going on in an environment where Hollywood is so much money and ego, etc. The level—and the desire for fame, you know—and that's going to attract a disproportionate number.

So it’s the people that are more likely to be the way that you describe are high in extroversion. Yes, especially assertiveness, and they're low in agreeableness. That's kind of the personality disorder axis: high in extroverted assertiveness and low in agreeableness, especially compassion.

And then if you add unconscientiousness to that, you got someone who's bordering on psychopathic. Right, and they could still be high in openness; they could still be creative and intelligent, but they'd be manipulative as hell and ruthless.

And I would say another thing I was going to ask you is, because you worked in Hollywood, and that is a place that invites people who want to make a display of themselves, let’s say. And there's some utility in that, right? We want people to be actors; we want them to be enthusiastic and entertaining.

So do you—do you think it’s possible that a lot of this you saw was a consequence of the form of industry that you were involved in, especially in Hollywood?

Well, definitely. But after the book came out, my first book, “The 48 Laws,” it became hugely popular in the hip-hop world among musicians, which is why I ended up doing a book with 50 Cent. And I found out that the music industry was even worse than Hollywood.

And then I was in Washington for a book tour for the 48 Laws, and this woman came running up to me who worked in Voice of America. She was saying, “You have no idea how the 48 Laws of Power exactly describe the environment I’m in.” And then I was in a conference with people who were in non-profits in San Diego, and this woman was saying, “Boy, you describe the nonprofit work politically; it is so, so perfectly, it is so political; it’s so much about ego.”

So it’s horrible, but that’s true of the nonprofit world. You know, I mean, that might have to do with that moral posturing.

Well, the way I look at it is you had a place like the Soviet Union where your degree of power wasn’t based on any kind of statistics. It wasn’t that you performed better than others; it wasn’t that your economic branch was outperforming others and therefore you were elevated to a higher position.

It was pure politicking; it was pure manipulation. How close could you get to the hierarchy, maneuvering?

Yeah, so when you have a nonprofit world where it’s not based on money or results, you get very political environments like that where there's no kind of quantification of what one is doing superior to work than others.

Yeah, you know I talked to Woodridge—Adrian Woodridge, and he wrote some books on the history of meritocracy, and they’re very, very interesting. He writes for The Economist.

So, you know, the idea of meritocracy is under assault now. I think the idea of merit per se is under assault. And what Woodridge has done was look at how societies were structured in the absence of the meritocratic ethos—so that's in the absence of a belief that there is such a thing as productive competence.

And he talked about nepotism, which by the way, psychopaths practice nepotism. They're not only selfish, they do differentially benefit their immediate kin and hereditary aristocracy.

So if you don't have meritocracy and if your hierarchies aren't predicated on competence, you don't get a utopian non-competitive utopia.

You get nepotism and this political infighting, and that is like—it’s no wonder that affects you because that’s absolutely toxic. It’s just sickening, and it does produce a situation where the worst people can torture the people who are competent for their competence. It’s really ugly.

And you know, when I came out of university, I went to the University of Wisconsin and I had, you know, my degree in classics and literature, etc. You know, I wasn’t expecting this. I expected that the harder you tried, the better work that you produced—the more you tried to, you know, get results—that’s what mattered, right?

And then to suddenly be blindsided this because nobody in our culture tells young people that this is what the world is going to be like, and that’s sort of a lot of where this book came out of. I wrote it when I was 38 or 39, so I was already a bit older, but your parents don’t prepare you for this. Schools don’t prepare you for this. Universities certainly don’t prepare you for this—in fact it lead you to believe the opposite.

And so you enter the world—the work world—and if you're entering a place more like what we're describing here, not like what you were describing, you're blindsided. You had no preparation for it; nothing prepared you for it, and you don't know how to react.

Well, you know, if you’re naive in that manner, two things happen—and I was naive. One is that you're much more likely to be exploited. That definitely happens. The other thing is you're much more likely to be traumatized because trauma sort of occurs in proportion to how much of your belief it demolishes.

And so if you have a too positive and too naive view of the world, and you especially if you encounter someone malevolent, they can really do you in psychologically.

Yeah, and they often will, too because they have their reasons.

And so, yeah, I can remember I had a job in journalism, and I wrote this article about Italy, and I thought it was a great article. And then the editor brought me in for lunch, and he was like having his second or third martini, and he started to tell me, “Robert, you’re never going to be a writer. You don’t have the discipline for it, you’re just too wild, you don’t communicate to the reader, etc. You need to get out of this business; it’s not for you.”

It was very painful, and then in looking back at it, I think he had set me up for this. I think that he had kind of commissioned this article knowing that it was going to have some problems with it, etc., and he was deliberately setting me up in this situation, so that he—and I think a lot of it came from envy. You know, envy’s a bad one.

And envy and resentment, man, those are corrosive. They're soul- and culture-destroying emotions.

You know, when I worked with my clients, we talked a lot about resentment. A lot. And I had kind of an axiom, which is, well, if you’re resentful, there’s only one of two things going on: one is you’re whiny and neurotic, and it’s time to grow the hell up and take some responsibility. And so you got to ask yourself that.

And the second is someone is taking advantage of you, and you have something to say or do that you’re not saying or doing. And so we tried to sort out which of those it was, and then if it was that they had something to say or do, to stand up for themselves, for example, then we’d just strategize—like for instance, I had one client, for example. I really liked her; she was smart, man—very competent, honest, hardworking, conscientious, diligent, attractive lawyer.

And she’d moved firms, and those firms can be pretty cutthroat, you know? They’re full of prosecutors. What do you expect? Right?

And this one guy, when she went into the firm, basically swiped her biggest client through a series of manipulative actions, right? And, you know, kind of lulled her into a false sense of security, sort of started to cooperate with her, and then shunted her out.

And then when she started to complain about it, he started distributing rumors that she had mental health issues. And oh, it was absolutely awful! So we spent about six months strategizing how to deal with him.

And so it was successful, you know? And then I love doing that sort of thing.

It was such fun helping people who are.

Yeah, I do the same thing as well.

Yeah, I’m sorry. So why do you think this was so popular? Oh, you said the music industry was particularly pathological; at least, this is the reports you got. So why do you think it—the music industry is the way it is, or do you think there’s something specific about that industry that lends itself to that kind of behavior?

Yes, and I’ve had a lot of people give me the same kind of feedback. There’s a lot of money around, right? Huge amounts of money around.

And people are—producers of music have a very exploitative kind of model of business, which is they seduce a first-time artist with a lot of money, but the contract is—they eventually own all of the work, etc. So it was a very exploitive business model, particularly for African American musicians who were historically very exploited.

And so it’s like Hollywood, where so much of it is about pleasing people and having the right demeanor. So 50 Cent, who I wrote the book with, he said, you know, he dealt crack on the streets of Southside Queens. You know, he was a hustler at the age of nine; he saw everything.

But nothing prepared him for the kind of mental games that music industry people would play. You want to take a straightforward criminal over a psychopathic manipulator any day!

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, and you talked about money; I'd rather deal with someone greedy—like honestly greedy—than someone manipulative underground because at least with the greed, well, you can negotiate with someone like that. You know what they want, right?

They’re kind of dimensional, and you might have your moral qualms about it. But still, I think that’s partly why I’m an admirer of capitalism. It’s like greed is not the worst of the vices by any stretch of the imagination.

No, I agree with you on that. And so, you know, why are my books popular? I think there’s a—that it's a combination of things. First of all, I'm giving people something that’s not out there—kind of realism. And I think a lot of people are inwardly very tired and very sick of all the kind of coddling that goes on with readers and in our culture where people try to perpetuate this myth that it’s all about cooperation and getting along and that business is kind of this world where people are all on the same page trying to create the best product possible, etc.

And they kind of have the same kind of illusions that I had. And so the kind of the harshness of the book that first kind of shocked you—sort of excites people; it appeals to their shadow side, if you will. You know, and that shadow side is very much repressed in our culture.

And I think artists and writers and people who produce work that kind of vents some of that shadow, some of those darker emotions that people have, it has a very attracting pull on them. So I think that’s part of the reason, because there’s a kind of notoriety around the book. People almost feel like it’s something naughty when they have it.

And so I have a friend, he’s a really good friend of mine, and I’ve known him since I was in college. And he’s a tough guy. I mean, he grew up in a—a rather poverty-stricken circumstance in Northern Alberta, really on a frontier piece of land—like it had only been broken 50 years before by his father, who was a longshoreman and an ex-military guy.

Good guy, his father, but this guy grew up, and he is tough. He worked in lead smelters, and he wandered around western Canada. He was my roommate when I went to college and is still a good friend of mine. And he ended up working with delinquents; he went into social work, oddly enough, and he ended up working with some of the worst delinquents in Canada.

And he’s a really good guy, and he likes to help people get better, but he isn’t naive at all. And then part of the reason that he was good at working with the delinquents was because there were no tricks they could get up to that he couldn’t see right through.

And that was part because he had a real integrated shadow. I mean, I’ll give you an example of him. So one day, I was—I’d been renovating my house and it took a long time. And the neighbors—this house was a complete derelict, and it was a semi-detached, like really a derelict. It hadn’t been touched since like 1927; it had gas fittings in the upper floor; it needed to be completely gutted.

And so we gutted it, and my daughter got sick at exactly the same time—really sick. And so it was stressful and difficult. And the neighbors just—they called the city on us; they did everything they could to make it difficult, even though they were attached to us and wanted to sell their house.

So we probably added like $25,000 to the value of their house because it was no longer attached to a derelict. And then just as we were finishing, my sister and her husband came to visit, and I was making tea for them. And I closed the cupboard, so it clicked. And the neighbors banged on the wall.

And then that night, I couldn't sleep, and I had this—I had really been pushed to my limit by these people. And I had these visions in my mind of burning the damn place down. And I thought, oh man, if you’re starting to think about burning the place down, you should probably go say something.

So I put on my parka, and I went outside about 6:00 in the morning and I just waited for them to come out. They never did, but I went and knocked on the door and I said, “I was making tea for my sister last night, and I closed the cupboard. You didn’t happen to bang on the wall because you heard my cupboard closing, did you?” And they said, “Yeah.”

And I said, “Okay, look, if you bug me anymore, I’m going to cause you so much trouble you cannot possibly imagine it.”

Yeah, and I meant it. It was like, because I knew it was brewing in the back of my mind because I was done. It was like, you want a war? You have no idea what you’re getting into. And so they backed into the kitchen, and like two hours later they came over and said, “Oh, you know, we’re sorry. And we won’t do it again.”

And but like, what we did was the mistake you talk about: we backtracked continually, trying to please them. You know, and every time they complained, we did what they wanted because we assumed we were dealing with reasonable people.

But we weren’t.

And the only way to stop them was with a show of force. It was like, you want to be malevolent, you want to play that game? It’s like, okay, no problem. But, you know, things went more smoothly after that.

And that’s a good example of, well, paying attention to those fantasies, because I thought I better deal with this straightforwardly; otherwise I'm likely to do something stupid.

Right, that’s the other thing; you got to watch if that builds up inside you.

Exactly, yeah.

And a lot of times I look at people in the public eye who get caught doing something really stupid, like you say, and their first thing will be, “Well, that wasn’t me that did it!” “I don’t know what came over me; that’s not who I am.”

But that is exactly who you are! That is a person who has been carrying this resentment and this kind of inner anger but not acting upon it. Then suddenly they do something really stupid, like having an affair with a 21-year-old or, you know, they just get caught doing something.

Yeah, so I— I watch people with their children a lot.

Hey, yeah. And so when my son was a pretty assertive kid and tough—like he had a real will, and you know, when he was 9 months old and starting to crawl around, I taught him what “no” meant.

And “no” means stop doing that or something you don’t like will happen to you; that’s what “no” means, right? And so when he was 9 months, he was starting to take books off shelves and get into the plants and so on, and because he was starting to crawl around.

And so to teach him what “no” meant, I just grabbed his leg when he wasn’t doing something that I didn’t want him to do, and you know, he would squawk and cry and complain, and I’d say, “No, no, no!”

And I’d just hold him until he gave up.

And sometimes he would cry, and the reason he was crying is ‘cause he was frustrated and angry that I was mucking about with him. It’s like, fair enough; he wanted to go explore. And you know, fair enough, kid; you want to explore, but you can’t tear out the plant and get dirt all over the rug, and you can’t go into the electrical cords, you know? Like “no!”

And so I had done a lot of behavioral training by that time, and by the time I did that for, say, six or seven days, and soon as I said “no” he would just stop.

And sometimes he would cry, and then the week later, if I said “no,” he’d just stop.

So it took like two weeks, and then I knew that if I said “no,” he would stop. And so then I could let him explore.

I could give him a lot of freedom. And then I’d have people come over to my house with their 2-year-old or 3-year-old, and because they had never taught the child what “no” meant, they never gave—because they didn’t want to impose on their freedom, let’s say—they couldn’t give the child any freedom at all; they had to wander around behind them all the time because they never knew what the child was going to get into.

And so then you start to hate your child, right? Because instead of having a bit of free time and just being able to say “no” to this kid while he’s playing around on his own and giving him some freedom, you’re just non-stop monitoring this child and you’re mad ‘cause you don’t have a life.

And we had another couple come over, and they had two kids that were like four and five, and they were just horrible. We sat down to eat; we wanted to have a conversation and we put a basket of bread out, and the kids just grabbed the bread, and they ate all the centers out of the bread.

And the parents were all embarrassed about it, but they didn’t do anything to stop it. And, you know, in their minds they thought, well, aren’t we permissive and nice? And we never say no to our children.

But they didn’t notice that they actually hated their children because how could you go to someone’s house and you want to have a conversation, and your children embarrass you to death?

And you think you’re not going to get resentful about that? Right?

And you think you’re not going to take—and so here’s how people would take it out on their kids. So imagine that happens, now you go home, and you’re pissed right off, but you’re not going to let yourself know that because you’re such a nice person.

Then your child goes off and draws a picture—maybe they put a lot of work into it—then they come running up to show you, and that’s a real good time to give them a pat on the head and say, “Look, isn’t that great?”

But you’re pissed off ‘cause you were embarrassed, and so you look at it and you think, “Uh,” and that’s all you have to do. It’s like, that’s not really worthy of my attention.

You don’t have to say anything mean; you just have to not attend in this manner. And then you got your revenge, and you think you won’t do that, man? You know nothing about yourself.

And you know you read in the paper sometimes these mothers or fathers they do something brutal to a child, and I know what that—I know how that happens.

It’s like no disciplinary strategies in the house; the kid is driving the mother or father crazy, you know? And then maybe the mother or father, they’re hungover one day and maybe they just broke up with their boyfriend or girlfriend. Maybe they got, you know, hell at from their boss who’s a tyrant, and they haven’t stood up to them.

And the kid does the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time, and maybe he’s actually pretty good at that by then. And it’s like, out comes Satan himself. Yeah, and all hell breaks loose.

It’s like I wouldn’t do that. It’s like, yeah, there’s almost nothing you wouldn’t do; you just don’t know yourself very well.

Yeah, well, the ability to set limits and to say “no” and to tell people that, you know, it’s not right for you to bang on my house at this hour, and etc., etc., etc. That takes a little bit of toughness on your part.

You have to be kind of willing to put yourself on the line. Maybe that person will get angry and hit you or something, or maybe the war will escalate, but you have to be willing to take that risk. Because if you don’t, then you set no limits, and who knows what they’ll end up doing?

But a lot of this permissiveness is people are just basically afraid. They’re afraid of any kind of confrontation.

Yeah. They’re afraid of any kind of conflict, and through conflict and confrontation is how you actually grow. It’s actually how you develop as a person.

Hey, so here’s a cool stat; this is really interesting, man. So there’s been some great work on what predicts what behavioral markers predict divorce in couples counseling—really solid work.

Okay, so here’s one predictor: if when the couple is talking in front of a therapist and one of them or the other or both rolls their eyes? There’s like a 95% chance they’re going to be divorced within six months.

And that’s contempt! Okay? They’ve become so disconnected because they don’t communicate, because the resentment has built up, that they now have contempt for each other.

But here’s another cool fact from that research. So if you have people track the number of positive and negative interactions with their partner, you can calculate ratios. And then you can see what the ratio is that lends itself to the successful maintenance of a relationship.

And so you might think, well, the more positive interactions, the better. And that's kind of true. So if it falls below five positive to one negative, the relationship is in danger.

But if it rises—you have five to one, and you can kind of see that. You know negative events are more memorable and more powerful than positive ones.

And so you know that if you read YouTube comments, you know? But if it rises above 11 to one, the relationship is also in danger. And you could imagine that what you want in a relationship is, well, you want support and love, and you want most of your interactions to be positive.

But you want your partner to slap you down then when you’re being stupid, right? Because—

And then if they don’t, outcomes your tyrant, right? You’re just going to dominate them if they don’t push back.

And so if you have any sense, too—if you have a partner, you want to encourage them to put limits on you, you know? Especially if they’re a little more timid than you temperamentally. It’s like you don’t want to run roughshod over them because they know some things you don’t, right?

So cool that it’s above 11 to one. So that means too much positivity is also the death knell for a relationship.

And you know, you want someone with some spark, right? It’s like, well, what if I push you a little bit? Even teasing—yeah, you want the person to be able to push back a bit, and you have to be able to accept it as well.

Because some people probably in those situations can’t stand any kind of criticism. They’re so fragile that if the other person pushes back, it kind of escalates into a battle.

So real strength comes from the ability in a relationship or any kind of—in any kind of relationship, intimate or otherwise, is the ability to take that kind of criticism, to actually welcome it when people set limits for you and tell you that this kind of behavior is wrong.

And then you can evaluate and assess yourself, yeah, unless you want to repeat it stupidly forever, right?

I mean, that’s the alternative in a relationship. I don’t like conflict. I’ve been in plenty of conflicts, like plenty—way more than is reasonable.

But I don’t like them. Well, I meet people now and then. I went to talk to Douglas Murray in New York City about a week ago, and we were talking about conflict.

And he said, you know, he doesn’t mind to fight; and I’ve met lots of people like that. You know, they like that combativeness.

And I don’t really, but what I really hate is deferred conflict that escalates. It’s like, it’s better to get it over with now. And you're a fool if you think that running away from it is going to—you know, like if someone cuts you off in traffic and they’re obviously really angry, it’s probably better just to get the hell out of there because you’re never going to see that person again, you know?

And you don’t want a situation like that to escalate because they might have a gun or whatever.

Well, yeah, you don’t just don’t know what’s up with them; they’re really strangers.

Yeah, but you know, if you’re dealing with someone day in and day out and they’re pushing on the top of your head to stop you from growing—which I think Lucy used to do to Linus in the Peanuts cartoons—they had a dark side, those cartoons, man.

They sure did.

Yeah, they would be canceled now, probably.

Yeah, I don’t think—I think that’s right. Yeah, because a lot of characters—Lucy was actually not a likable character at all, right?

And she was really oppressive to Linus, who was a good character.

Yeah, good humor always has an edge. But yeah, that you don't get rid of the negative part of yourself—especially that aggressive part—by pretending it doesn’t exist. That quite the contrary; that just doesn't work at all.

Right?

Yeah, I’m sorry, were you going to say something?

I was just going to ask you about your new—my wanted to ask you about working with 50 Cent and the rappers, and I wanted to ask you about your new book too. So let’s start with, so how did this partnership with 50 Cent come about?

Well, um, the book was very popular with rappers, as I said, because of the nature of the music industry. And he reached out to me; he wanted to meet me, because the 48 Laws of Power was sort of his Bible, as he expressed it.

So I met him in New York, kind of in the back room of the steakhouse. It was sort of like something straight out of The Godfather. I was kind of the one white guy amongst his whole group there. I was a little bit intimidated, to be honest. I didn’t know what to expect, because he has his reputation.

Ended up, he was really nice and really interesting. Actually, a very kind of sweet guy, not what you’d expect. And we got a—we kind of had a really nice connection.

And I thought, you know, so much in our culture is creating these stupid kind of divisions and walls, like you’re in academia, you only write academic books. You're a popular person; you only write popular books. You know, you come from this community, you come from that community, and then you never communicate.

And I thought it would be very interesting to write a book coming from two opposite backgrounds. You know, me, middle-class Jewish boy from Los Angeles and him from Southside Queens. Something interesting could happen from a collaboration.

There’s not enough of that in our culture I believe, because even though our circumstances were very different, our minds were very similar. We were thinking on a similar plane that kind of transcended these sort of superficial differences.

So I spent time with him, and I was trying to figure out what is the essence of his power? What makes him such a compelling figure and made him not one of those people in Southside Queens who ended up kind of spiraling downward, ending up in prison? What saved him?

And I determined that the quality he had was this kind of fearlessness. It isn’t the kind of fearlessness where you go beating people up or something; it’s kind of an inner strength. He had been shot when he was like 20 years old—like, nine bullets, right? They went through a car window.

Kind of one of them bullets lodged in his mouth. And he survived miraculously, and it gave him this kind of calmness, like I have nothing to fear.

I almost died. Bring it on; I don’t really care! And so I observed him in meetings. I observed that kind of calmness and how he could take over a meeting—not by being super aggressive but just by having this kind of dominant persona.

And I thought that there’s tremendous power in this fearlessness—not being afraid to be different, not being afraid to have conflict and confrontation, not being afraid of actually, of death itself—not being afraid of the reality of your situation.

On and on. So the book that we formed together was kind of a meditation on 10 forms of fearlessness. And I found, you know, I thought that I was a relatively fearless person, which in some ways I am.

I seem agreeable, but I’m actually—I’m in some ways a little bit bold and adventurous. But compared to him, I realized no, I’m actually riddled with fear. And just being around him and kind of writing the book helped me a lot in my, you know, kind of overcome some of my own limits and some of my own fears.

So that’s where that book came.

Yeah, it’s nice to have a model like that really close by, right, to contrast yourself with?

Yeah, you can learn a lot from. So do you think you think that fearlessness that you saw in him, you think part of that was a consequence of that brush with death? How much of that do you think was temperamental too in him?

Well, there's a kind of reckless fearlessness that a lot of people from the hood have, which doesn’t really serve them very well, and it gets them in a lot of trouble, right?

He has a very kind of strategic, under-control fearlessness.

Hey, I got something cool to tell you about that. So I was talking to David Buss—yes, I believe it—and he’s an evolutionary psychologist, a good one. We were talking about this Machiavellian personality type, the Dark Triad.

The Delpoos UBC!

Yeah, okay, so here’s something really interesting. It’s the bad boy paradox—they call it that. Young naïve women are attracted to those Machiavellian types, but when they get older and more experienced, they start to be able to see through that.

The reason they’re attracted to it, as far as I can tell—and I talked about this with Buss to see if I was way off on the wrong track—is that those reckless, fearless people mimic real fearless competence, and young women aren’t good at distinguishing between the two.

And so they get sucked in by the sort of psychopathic recklessness because they think it’s fearless competence. And then, of course, the guys who are doing that, they’ll prey on that because they’re trying to ape competence.

But what the women are really after—in their heart of hearts—they might be out for an adventure too, because there’s that element of it, but they want that fearlessness that does go along with true generosity and competence, and also the ability to keep, you know, real darkness away.

So, well, a lot of those people who display that kind of what you would call mimicking fearlessness or whatever—macho—that’s the macho—they’re actually hiding the opposite. They’re actually very, very riddled with insecurities.

They’re not, you know, and they kind of create this sort of bravado and this false front, and they go to an extreme to kind of project this machismo when, in fact, they’re riddled with insecurities.

And someone like 50 Cent, he’s very—he’s very comfortable with himself. He knows who he is. He knows where he came from. His mother was a hustler on the streets, so he knew the limits of the game.

And I don’t know; I think there is maybe a slight genetic component to it. I can’t really put my finger on it why he was able to have this kind of self-control where other people—

Well, that to mention neuroticism, you know? If you’re in a rough environment and you’re low in neuroticism, that’s pretty damn helpful.

Because imagine that—what neuroticism is: unit of psychophysiological upset caused per unit of stress, yeah? And some people overreact, and some people underreact.

Sometimes the overreaction saves your life; sometimes the underreaction gets you killed. So it’s not like there’s a clear answer. So there’s variability there.

Some people are much more calm, not volatile; they don’t withdraw temperament. That’s a more masculine temperament, by the way. I agree.

But if you’re raised in a really rough environment, and you happen to be emotionally stable—that’s the opposite of neurotic—let’s say, then you’re just not going to be as affected by it, and that can be a real blessing.

So—and then I’m also interested in that—you know, you said that you channeled a lot of your shadow, let’s say, into creativity. Did you see the same thing happening with 50 Cent?

Oh my God! His music is incredibly aggressive, and that—and to an extent that’s kind of violent, and I must admit, it really appeals to me. So when I was—

Why, why?

That’s cool because it’s so interesting that so many rap fans are young white guys!

I know, I know.

Yeah, but that’s really psychologically interesting, right? Because if they’ve been coddled and their ambition has been squashed and everything about them that’s aggressive has been shamed out of existence, it’s—that’s part of that attraction of that dark fantasy, right?

Then they see that aggression manifesting itself in a creative form in rap. It’s not surprising that they’re going to try to imitate that.

It’s part of that desire to bring that shadow out of the shadows and into the light.

Well, I—I wasn't really—I was a little bit different in that I kind of understand, you know, my own anger. I wasn’t so much coddled, but what I really enjoyed about his music is it just seemed very real and kind of—the beat kind of catches you up in a primal sense.

And kind of the aggressiveness just seems very direct and very refreshing, by the way.

You could tell, you know, I say in my book “Mastery” that by a person’s style, by how they write a book, by how they put language together or the music they create reveals something very, very deep about their character about who they are.

And so a lot of rap kind of comes across this sort of false—like someone is trying really hard to have that kind of thug persona, and it’s not real. But it really smelled authentic with him.

And the fact that he’d been shot and nearly died, you know, just kind of added to that aura. But there was something very real about it and very authentic in a culture where so much isn’t real.

I think that was the deep, deep appeal in a primal sense of 50’s music.

And when I was writing the war book, I was trying to get myself into a martial mood to write it. I would actually listen to his music to kind of put me in the mood to write some of the chapters!

That and Beethoven.

What do you like from—what Beethoven do you like? What pumped you up?

Well, when I was a kid, one of the first albums I was first kind of raised on classical music, then I got into jazz and rock and everything, but I got a collection of his nine symphonies, and God, there’s a kind of aggression and violence, like to the Fifth Symphony and the Ninth Symphony. It just kind of—you know, like they used Clockwork Orange—there’s something so overwhelmingly powerful about it, right?

It just—you—the choral section in the Ninth is like that; it’s so joyous!

Yeah, and it’s so— Isn’t that so interesting that the Ode to Joy has that primal aggressive force, and it makes joy? It makes joy!

You know, in the naive sense it’s, well, you’re happy. It’s like, no, this joy is that integrated terrible power that you definitely hear in superb music.

Yeah, yeah! So when that choral bit kicks in, it’s just overwhelming; it’s like a blow! And makes you tingle. It’s so exciting!

And I’ve heard it maybe a thousand times since then; it still affects me the same way!

And now when I’m driving somewhere and I have to get myself in the mood, I’ll still put the Ninth Symphony on and some of the others.

Yeah, it’s like it’s like encountering the terrible force of good! You know, you think about Moses and the burning bush—it’s—or Jacob wrestling with God—it’s like, well, why is it a burning bush? Why is it terrifying? Why do you wrestle with God?

It’s like, well, because good in its full force has this unbelievable power. It has this integration of power, and it’s no wonder it terrifies people because it just burns everything away in comparison!

Right, right, yeah. I mean, a lot of the new book that I’m writing about, which is the sublime, is I’m talking about it’s a combination of two emotions of both kind of pain and pleasure—of excitement and fear at the same time.

So you’re confronting something that kind of intimidates you but is so awesome that you can’t—you know, you’re just overwhelmed.

And the confluence of two emotions—opposing emotions at the same time—is very, very powerful for a human being.

Yeah, I’ve just written a book that I’m going to publish next year that’s called an ABC of Hood Tragedy, and it’s a combination of dark humor and beauty. It's the same; we’re trying to—we’re experimenting with exactly the same thing, that paradoxical fusion of dark and light emotions.

There is something sublime about that, and something inspiring about that!

It’s, I guess it’s part of bringing what’s dark into the light or subsuming it under the light, maybe.

So why do you get—why the sublime? What are you pursuing there?

Well, the reason, you know, the ultimate in sublime is—to me—the way I look at it is being a human being and being socialized is a kind of a world. There’s a limit—a circle that we have to live inside, certain codes and conventions that we have to abide by, and we all do that.

And the codes and conventions for 5th century BC China are not the same as what we have now, but there’s still that limit, and what humans are attracted to is what lies beyond that limit.

It’s just part of our nature; it’s ours as part of it. And when we explore beyond the social limits and codes and things we’re supposed to do and ways we’re supposed to act, it’s deeply exciting and thrilling. There’s also that element of fear involved, right?

See, I think that’s a better formulation than Nietzsche’s idea of Will to Power; it’s the desire to exist on that sublime edge.

And that is the border between order and chaos that you’re describing, right? You want and the thing—and that is the source of meaning itself.

I mean, that’s why I think music is so powerful: it plays with predictable forms but continually adds that level of unpredictability—beautiful, you know how, in any kind of music—the simplest music, someone who’s good at it, country music, you know, there’ll be a key shift or a twang on the string or something that—or something discordant—

Yes! Exactly!

And integrated within a sort of a higher—what? A higher unity. And it’s deeply meaningful.

It puts you on that edge of the sublime; and we do find the meaning that helps sustain us in life exactly at that place.

That’s—that’s something more deeply real than anything else.

Well, so—and so the ultimate thing beyond that limit is death itself.

And the word sublime means up to the threshold of a door or sub-lemon. Lemon being the limit, right? Like su— And so, I’ve been meaning to write this book for 15 years, and I got distracted.

But then about three years ago, I nearly died myself; I had a stroke. And I came, you know, just an inch away from dying myself. I was driving my car, and so some of the experiences, the near-death experience, and what it kind of taught me and how it sort of remained with me three years later, and how I kind of feel it in my bones and how it’s altered how I look at the world and everything around me is—to me the kind of the ultimate sublime experience.

So now, unfortunately, I'm able to write about this in a way that’s actually very personal and experiential instead of just purely intellectual.

And why unfortunately? Because of the price you had to pay for it?

Yeah, the price is I can’t take a walk, I can’t do the swim, I can’t do the things that I used to love.

So, you know, I’m kind of—I can I can, you know, I’m functional, I can walk around the house, but I can’t take a hike, and I can’t do my long-distance swimming or my mountain biking or anything like that, so I pay a price, but I’m alive.

Well, and then—I mean, it's so interesting that it was in the aftermath of that devastating experience that you decided to turn particularly to the sublime.

Yeah, well, it’s because I’ve been wanting to write the book for a long time, and I knew that it has to do a little bit with the feeling of death, you know?

And I don’t understand that, so why that—why make that as—I'm not disputing it; I just don’t understand. Like you talked also about 50 Cent’s brush with death, but why does the sublime, in your estimation, why is it tangled up with the idea of death?

Well, because there’s a—a limit, and experiencing the limit gives you that sense of excitement and fear at the same time.

Well, death is the ultimate limit. And to have gone up to that door and glimpsed to the other side and literally felt it in your bones and literally feel your bones melting away as you kind of go into a coma, you know, is like I went up to that door; I actually peered inside of it.

Now other people have had much stronger near-death experiences; mine was more of the milder sort.

But still, I peered as far as— as far as near-death experiences go, relatively minor.

Well, you know, my coma lasted an hour or something. Some people have been up there for—ah, that’s nothing, man. Experts have comas for like three years.

Well, okay, alright. I could have had a, you know, a more intense near-death experience. But it was pretty intense; it sounds like it was sufficient.

It is, but so—the sense of life is almost too much! It’s overpowering in its immediacy. And we humans try and kind of dull the—the razor edge so much so that we can live.

But if you think about, you know, your mortality on a day-to-day basis, and if you try and actually experience the immediacy of life and how dangerous it actually is and how it’s fraught with all of these, you know, these things that you don’t want to confront is—is very, very, very powerful.

And I’m sorry; Siri just keeps hearing me. So annoying!

So, you know, it creates—so when you have that, it’s—it’s like the ultimate—it’s a mix of—you know, they call it in French—the orgasm, right?

So an orgasm is almost like a little death, you know? So that sense of—it’s almost too much; it’s almost like death itself, like something so pleasurable can actually kind of morph into something a little bit frightening as well, something a little bit like you’re like you’re exploring something that you’re not supposed to.

Oh, you see that in the ease in which laughter and tears can be interchanged, right?

You see that with children; they can switch from laughter to tears in no time. And you know, you can laugh so hard that you cry.

And it’s often too when you’re crying about something sorrowful that someone can say something funny, and it’ll switch to laughter.

That's all way down at the level of instinct, right? Where these—you know?

Right, it’s so interesting to see the opposites touch at that level.

Yeah, so the reason why I’m doing the Eleusinian Mysteries—just to bring that back—is, I have a chapter on Pagan religions on what I call the Pagan sublime, and I’m trying to tell the reader that we don’t have a right conception of ancient religions; they’re actually very different from what we think.

We have these kind of cliché notions of kind of mischievous gods cavorting in clouds and doing all kinds of naughty things that are very human, and just kind of a silliness to it, like “Whoa, we’re so beyond that!”

But actually, Pagan religions were extremely serious, and they were based on creating, going away, and they were based on creating very powerful emotional responses in people.

And that was what primal religion was about, or ancient religion was about. It wasn’t based on texts, on dogma, on the written word.

So the Eleusinian Mysteries—because they are mysteries, because nobody ever wrote about it—there’s no text; there’s nothing written that we can go to.

Yes, there’s the hymn to Demeter that kind of maybe describes a little bit of what it’s based on, but we don’t know really what happened because nothing was ever written down.

It was simply about creating this overwhelming emotional reaction in which you took the initiates to the edge of death. You made them experience death in life, which is the story of Demeter and Persephone.

You were like making them feel as if they had gone into the underworld itself, and that created a whole new relationship to life.

But I wanted to—that this idea is that religion isn’t this kind of milk-toasty thing that people think about nowadays. It was initially extremely powerful reactions to human vulnerability to our weakness in this immense cosmos with all of these very powerful forces.

And the religious rituals were to actually mirror that, and give you a kind of compensatory sense that you could control it; you could contain it within these kind of powerful experiences.

Oh, it’s really interesting to me that you’ve come through your analysis of the darkness, and then a consequence of that was to be motivated to pursue the sublime.

You know, it’s in the little stamp that I’m using for these kids’ book, which I’m doing with this illustrator named Juliet Fogg, who’s a real genius in my estimation.

We made a stamp and the motto on the stamp is “Through the darkness into the light.”

And you know, there’s this old idea that if you look into the darkness enough, you’ll find something that compensates for it, right? That emerges out of the darkness that’s greater and more powerful than the darkness.

And that part of the part—part of the looking into the dark side of yourself is you find the power that enables you to deal with mortality.

And there is something sublime about that.