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

Summary

---

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

Episode 237: Your Dark Side and Control Over Your Life | Robert Greene

Date: March 23, 2022
Host: Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Guest: Robert Greene (Author of "The 48 Laws of Power", "The Art of Seduction", "Mastery", etc.)

---

Brief Overview

This episode features a deep-dive conversation between Dr. Jordan Peterson and best-selling author Robert Greene. Their discussion centers on human nature, power, manipulation, the role of the “shadow” (dark side) in personality, ambition, agreeableness, psychopathy, cultural taboos around aggression, and integrating one’s darker impulses towards productive ends. They explore why Greene’s books—which often discuss controversial or “amoral” strategies—are both scandalous and invaluable, drawing on personal experiences, psychological theory, and the necessity of facing uncomfortable truths about human motivation.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Intentions Behind "The 48 Laws of Power" (05:09–13:00)

• Peterson voices initial discomfort with the manipulative tone of Greene's work, wondering about its motivation.
• Greene explains that his books fill a void—the lack of honest discussion about real-life power dynamics:
  • “A great deal of the 48 laws of power… are not manipulative, have nothing to do with deception… but there are definitely some laws that are quite manipulative.” (05:38)
  • Draws on Nietzsche's "will to power" as every individual's drive to expand, control, and influence their circumstances.
  • The reality of workplace (and life) politics is rarely addressed in self-help literature, which he found naive compared to his own varied and at times hostile job experiences.

2. Control, Power, and Passive Aggression (10:10–14:32)

• Peterson relates contemporary survey results: 40% of millennials feel powerless over their lives (10:10).
• When natural striving for influence is thwarted, it "goes underground" and emerges in resentment, passive aggression, and manipulative behaviors.
• Both Peterson and Greene discuss the psychological costs of being unable to manifest personal power, and how frustration and confusion about this are widespread but seldom acknowledged openly.

3. Agreeableness, Shadow, and Manipulation (20:06–24:22)

• Peterson analyzes Greene’s personality traits—agreeableness, openness, competitiveness—linking these to his sensitivity to workplace politics and victimization by “disagreeable” types.
• Discussion of the "shadow": The repressed, often aggressive, side of one’s personality, referencing Carl Jung.
• The risk that highly agreeable or “nice” people are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and manipulation by more psychopathic or disagreeable individuals.
  • “If you put one person in there who has psychopathic traits, he just takes over everything.” (23:02)

4. Real-World Implications of Power Dynamics (29:24–33:15)

• Power games happen everywhere, not just in Hollywood or entertainment (nonprofits, government, academia).
• In environments where success cannot be clearly measured (e.g., nonprofits), politics and manipulation flourish.
• Absence of meritocracy gives rise to nepotism, infighting, and environments where competence is punished.

5. Trauma, Naiveté, and Resentment (33:15–36:18; 55:06–60:23)

• Being naive about power games can result in trauma—when reality demolishes rosy beliefs.
• Failure to recognize and integrate the shadow side leads to internal resentment, “explosions” of maladaptive behavior, and self-sabotage.
• Both discuss real-life anecdotes (clients, children, jobs) illustrating how suppressed anger or aggression inevitably leaks out, often in unhealthy or indirect forms.

Notable Quote:

“You don’t get rid of your… aggressive part, by pretending it doesn’t exist. Quite the contrary—that just doesn’t work at all.”
—Jordan Peterson (64:54)

---

6. Integrating the Shadow: Aggression as Creative Force (42:11–52:00)

• Integrating the shadow is essential for psychological health and societal functioning.
• Both speak candidly about their own anger, competitive drives, and how they've learned to channel these into creativity and productivity.
• Greene: “A lot of that anger kind of seeps through the material that I write. And I find I can only write when I have that kind of anger. But I don’t rant… I channel it into something productive.” (49:08)
• Peterson: Anger, when integrated, helps overcome fear and fuels action, discipline, and resilience.

---

7. The "Bad Boy" Paradox and Real vs. Mimicked Fearlessness (68:39–72:24)

• Peterson and Greene discuss the difference between true inner fearlessness (as seen in 50 Cent after surviving being shot) and the bravado of pseudo-reckless individuals.
• Many young women confuse bravado for authentic courage; over time, wisdom distinguishes real from mimicked strength.

Notable Quote:

“Those reckless, fearless people mimic real fearless competence... what the women are really after, in their heart of hearts, is that fearlessness that does go along with true generosity and competence…”
—Jordan Peterson (70:00)

---

8. The Pursuit of the Sublime (76:18–88:16)

• Greene is writing about the “sublime”—the powerful, awe-inspiring edge between order and chaos, pleasure and fear, life and death.
• Experiencing the limit (whether through near-death, creativity, or religious ritual) gives life intensity and meaning.
• Post-stroke, Greene is more attuned to the fragility and immediacy of life:
  • “Now, unfortunately, I’m able to write about this in a way that’s actually very personal and experiential instead of just purely intellectual.” (80:02)
• The value in confronting darkness: “Through the darkness into the light.”

---

9. Culture, Awe, and the Need for Meaning (88:16–94:22)

• Greene laments how modern culture trivializes or ignores the need for awe and the sublime.
• Much of contemporary malaise stems from living in “banal, limited worlds”—people sleepwalk, missing the staggering improbability of life and existence.
• Both agree that music, ritual, and even collective experiences (for good or ill) meet deep-seated human needs for the sublime and awe.

---

10. Practicality, Change, and Advice (98:40–103:15)

• Eric (Producer) explains how Greene’s books helped him mentally prepare for the harsh realities of career and business, likening them to Jiu Jitsu for the mind (98:40–100:03).
• Peterson emphasizes the importance of translating insights into actionable steps and practical change—citing examples from clinical work: “Find the largest unit of change that you’re actually willing to do.” (100:03)
• Appreciation of the behavioral, psychoanalytic, and practical traditions in psychology.

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On why Greene wrote his books:

“All the self-help books were describing a world that I never saw existed. I saw people being very political, having egos and having problems with their egos…”
—Robert Greene (09:14)

On adversity and the workplace:

“If you’re resentful, there’s only one of two things going on. One is you’re whiny and neurotic… 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.”
—Jordan Peterson (34:41)

On integrating the shadow:

“The main thing is you have to be aware that you have this shadow side… You almost have to embrace it in a way.”
—Robert Greene (43:02)

On the paradox of group positivity:

“If it rises above 11 to 1, the relationship is also in danger… you want your partner to slap you down when you’re being stupid. If they don’t, out comes your inner tyrant…”
—Jordan Peterson (62:16)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 05:38 – Greene explains the intent behind “The 48 Laws of Power”
• 10:10 – The psychological toll of feeling powerless
• 20:39 – Personality traits, agreeableness, and vulnerability to manipulation
• 29:24 – Manipulation in varied fields (Hollywood, music, non-profits, politics)
• 33:15 – Trauma, naiveté, and the necessity of realism about power
• 42:11 – Integrating and channeling the “shadow” into creative force
• 55:06 – The consequences of suppressed aggression and resentment
• 68:39 – Working with 50 Cent, real vs. fake fearlessness
• 76:18 – The allure and function of the sublime in life
• 88:16 – Greene’s motivation: anger at cultural banality and lack of awe
• 98:40 – Eric's testimony: Power laws as frameworks for real-life challenges
• 100:03 – Peterson: translating theory into practical, behavioral change

---

Flow, Language, and Tone

The conversation is direct, candid, and strikes a balance between intellectual rigor and personal confession. Both Peterson and Greene use accessible and sometimes vivid language ("devouring mother," "integrated shadow") with a tone that is sometimes confessional (discussions of failure, trauma, anger), sometimes analytical, and always intent on practical relevance.

The mood fluctuates between serious, humorous, and awe-struck, reflecting the gravity and strangeness of the themes ("the sublime," "orgasm as a little death," "totalitarianism and awe").

---

Summary Takeaways

• Power dynamics are real, ubiquitous, and rarely discussed honestly in culture or literature.
• Naiveté about manipulation and aggression leads to trauma, resentment, and victimization—it's better to confront and integrate one's own dark motives.
• The "shadow" (repressed traits) contains both danger and crucial energy for growth, creativity, and resilience.
• Authentic fearlessness, not bravado, is rare and powerful, and is best paired with self-awareness and strategic intent.
• Seeking the sublime—experiences at the edge of order and chaos—provides life with meaning and awe, an antidote to contemporary banality.
• Practical self-improvement is grounded in realism, self-honesty, and willingness to address even one’s smallest resistance to change.

---

Transcript

[Jordan Peterson]

Your home holds the story of your life. Renewal by Andersen Windows are built to weather every season with you. They frame the little moments and the big ones, from first steps to graduation to new beginnings. While life keeps moving, our windows stand strong through every chapter. Let Renewal by Andersen be part of your story. Windows Built to last. Visit renewalbyandersonhome.com to learn more. Welcome to episode 237 of the JBP podcast. I'm Makayla Peterson. In this episode, dad had a conversation with Robert Greene, the author of the New York times bestsellers the 48 Laws of Power, the Art of Seduction and the 33 Strategies of War and Mastery. Their conversation was centered around human nature and principles surrounding strategy, power and seduction, as well as psychopathy, manipulation, agreeableness, ambition, channeling your shadow, and many other topics. Robert's been on my podcast before and he is extremely interesting. Definitely going to enjoy listening to this podcast. Hi everyone. I'm pleased today to have with me Mr. Robert Greene. Mr. Green is the number one New York Times bestselling author of number of books. 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. He's an internationally renowned expert on power strategies. Living In Los Angeles, Mr. Green worked at an estimated 80 jobs, including magazine editor, construction worker, 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. Yeah, it's a. 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. Balthasar Grassian the feeling that someone else is more intelligent than we are is almost always intolerable. We usually try to justify it in different ways. Quote, he only has book knowledge, whereas I have real knowledge. Quote 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 quote. 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 reassure people that they are more intelligent than you are, or even that you are a bit of a. 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. 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? Do I want to. I don't get this. I don't understand this exactly. It's like, okay, this is very deceptive. And then I talked to my team who like your books a lot, and. And my daughter, who really liked interviewing you, and I thought, well, there's something going on here that I. That I don't quite understand, which is certainly possible. And then I thought, well, this is maybe a shadow exploration, something like that.

[Robert Greene]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

And then I thought, like, I was kind of a dimwit for not catching that earlier. But so. 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 were you trying. What are you trying to do with your books? And they've obviously been misunderstood. It says in the. In Wikipedia, Green's books are sometimes described as manipulative and amoral. And so clear this up for me.

[Robert Greene]

Well, it's a bit manipulative when people write that, because a great deal of the 48 laws of power, I'd say maybe 2/3 of them are not manipulative, have nothing to do with deception. They have things to do with common sense ideas about power, such as being generous with people such as creating compelling spectacles, such as entering action with boldness and how you present yourself, things about your image and your appearance. But there are definitely some laws that are quite manipulative. 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 grand thing, a political or war something. It's on a very individual level. The idea for me comes from Nietzsche and his idea of the will to power, which he explains as every organism has the desire to expand itself as a desire for expansion. I think that for human beings, the desire that 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 own career and learn more and develop greater skills and have more power and influence in our life. 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, 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 the victim's kind of leverage power in a negative way. The problem is, and 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 butts up against codes of behavior that have gotten stricter and stricter and stricter, particularly in the 21st century, about what is acceptable, about what is politically correct. We're supposed to appear to be these paragons of virtue, these paragons of fairness and democracy, et cetera. At the same time, we're all trying to angle for different degrees of power in our work, in our relationships, et cetera. 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 xiv, where all of the courtiers, if they're too overt in their power moves, the king will disapprove of them and 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 what I would. Where the 48 laws of power came out 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. And it really kind of irritated me. All the self help books were describing a world that I never saw existed. I saw people being very political, having egos and having problems with their egos. I didn't see any books like they're describing what I encountered every day. Law number one is never outshine the master. 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, the. Okay, so I just, I, 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.

[Robert Greene]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So that is related to the first issue that you brought up. And, and you, you obviously consider that a 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.

[Robert Greene]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

And then, and that if, 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.

[Robert Greene]

Exactly.

[Jordan Peterson]

And then you, 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, of the organism.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Across species to some degree. And then you talked about the jobs that you've had. So why, why did. So I got that right. I hope, I hope I've got.

[Robert Greene]

That was very well put. Thank you.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. Okay. And so, 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. A fair amount of the time and that no one was really warning people about this or delineating out the strategies.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. So that, you know, that seems to me to be reasonable that. 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. Um, and he was certainly sensitive to the idea that people had a terrible shadow.

[Robert Greene]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

That they would clothe themselves in the guy garments of moral virtue.

[Robert Greene]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And act out a virtuous Persona. But because of the thwarted will to strive in some sense, that 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 that's the corruption of human relationships by a form of, 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. So then the last thing I'm confused about to some degree is you had 65 jobs. How come so many jobs?

[Robert Greene]

I was a very restless young man. It doesn't speak very well of me in 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, the. The variety of experiences were kind of giving me material and I couldn't. I never was really happy in, 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. I understand the pain that a lot of people have in the work world, which is 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so. 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 root tip drill bits. I worked as a beekeeper. I had a lot of. Oh, 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 and then it would light on fire and all the, the fire sprinklers would kick in and then the whole building, which was like a block square, would fill up with steam. Was really. So anyways, I worked in a lot of jobs and, and so, but I didn't. So this is something that, that's worth getting clear. I like 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 said that you had a harder time. I don't know exactly. Was it fitting in? You didn't like overt. 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 like political maneuvering. When I got into university and saw people in bureaucracies particular maneuvering politically to attain dominance, it just, I found it. I find it absolutely appalling, that underground power struggle. But it sounds like, it sounds like you had a harder time maybe than I did adapting. And that maybe is. And that became a conscious puzzle for you. Is that a reasonable way of thinking about it?

[Robert Greene]

I think so. It made me explore, think about myself, like maybe I'm doing something wrong. The natural reaction in these situations where things. No, 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 it may be 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. It wasn't that I felt uncomfortable, but I felt sometimes that trying so hard or being good at my job, which is often the case, was often a detriment, which was a very strange realization.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, that's a really good sign that you need to go get a different job. I mean, I worked with clinical clients a lot in career counseling. And my sense. One of the things we'd analyzed 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, 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. She had been a refugee from Albania, Eastern Europe. That was a rough damn country, man. And she came, yeah, yeah, like the worst of the Eastern European bloc 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 the. 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. 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. 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.

[Robert Greene]

Right. It's very wise, you know, 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 kind of linger on in your mind. So having some clarity, I don't want to make people paranoid. In reading these books, I 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. 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, in that. That's another kind of motivating device behind the 48 laws.

[Jordan Peterson]

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, Franklin, 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, yeah, you. You don't look like a harsh person. And so not one of the. One of the dimensions. One of the cardinal personality dimensions. There's five of them. You may know this. Extroversion, which is a positive emotion, and it's associated with assertiveness and enthusiasm.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 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. That's compassion and politeness. Is that a reasonable. Is that a reasonable.

[Robert Greene]

I think that's fair. I think that's fairly spot on. I would. I couldn't have been fought. Yeah, I agree with you on that. Certainly.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay. Okay.

[Robert Greene]

So, I mean. I mean, people are a little more complex than that. I do have other sides to myself. I do have a shadow side that is. 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Would you describe yourself as compassionate, empathetic?

[Robert Greene]

Very much so, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Okay, so here's what I. 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 of.

[Robert Greene]

Certainly.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 extremely naive thing to think, especially because the Summer of Love blew up. And so, 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 and, and, 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.

[Robert Greene]

Yes.

[Jordan Peterson]

He just takes over everything.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And so the agreeable people always have the problem of how do you handle free riders, cheaters and psychopaths? And 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 no, psychopaths are always 3% of the population. They vary between 5 and so if you're in a. So. So is it possible. I don't want to push this interpretation beyond its reasonable limits, but I'm, I'm wondering, you're. 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.

[Robert Greene]

I think that's very possible. And yes, and I'm also very sensitive, so I'M kind of, you know, react a little bit more than most other people might react. But the odd thing is, 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh there's no doubt about it that, that it's not, I mean what I'm talking about at all.

[Robert Greene]

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 3 or 4 or 5 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

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. 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, 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.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah, I think Melanie Klein, she looked at infants 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 self selfish behavior only got worse and worse and worse. And she would like try and see if you could track that to someone who got, who became older. It was a type. And she ended up thinking that there was maybe a genetic component.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 in 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, 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 the 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, and the manipulators at bay. And so it's a chronic problem for the human race. Okay, so you're, you're doing all these jobs and you're seeing the politicking and 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 and you're definitely going to see that if, if you're, if you're being pushed around a lot, you know, and so you decided to make that an object of study.

[Robert Greene]

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 and that's when some of their ugly behavior will come out. They kind of hide it very well from, from, 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're mentioning, people will tend to be kind of united around single purpose. There won't be much politicking going on. Yeah, environment, an environment where Hollywood, so much of it is money and ego, etc.

[Jordan Peterson]

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, are more likely to be the way that you describe are high in extroversion, especially Assertiveness. And they're low in agreeableness. That's kind of the personality disorder access. High in extroverted assertiveness and low in agreeableness, especially compassion.

[Robert Greene]

And.

[Jordan Peterson]

And then if you add unconscientiousness to that, you gotta. You got someone who's bordering on psychopathic.

[Robert Greene]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And they could still be high in openness, they could still be creative and intelligent, but they'd be manipulative as hell and callous. 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 be 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. Yes, but. But it's. So do you. Is it possible that a lot of this you saw was a consequence of the form of industry that you were involved in, especially in Hollywood?

[Robert Greene]

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 nonprofits in San Diego, and this one was saying, boy, you described the nonprofit work. Politically, it is so, so perfectly. It is so political. It's so much about ego. So it's horrible.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's true of the nonprofit world. You know, I mean, that might have to do with that moral posturing, eh?

[Robert Greene]

Well, I. 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 perform better than others. It wasn't that your branch, your economic branch was. 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 that hierarchy maneuvering. Yeah. So when you have like a nonprofit world where it's not based on money or, you know, results, it's more on. It's. You get very political environments like that where there's no kind of quantification of what one is doing. Superior work than others.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, You Know, I talked to Woodridge Wooldridge, Adrian Wooldridge, and he wrote some books on the history of meritocracy and they're very, very interesting. He writes for the Economist and he. So you know that the idea of meritocracy is under assault now. I think the idea of merit per se is under assault. And what Wooldridge has done was look at how societies were structured in, in the absence of the meritocratic ethos. And 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, they do differentially benefit their immediate kin and, and hereditary aristocracy. So if you don't have meritocracy and if your hierarchies aren't predicated on competence, you don't get a utopia, A non competitive utopia.

[Robert Greene]

No, not at all.

[Jordan Peterson]

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

[Robert Greene]

Yeah. And you know, when I came out of university, I went to 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 your, the 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, 39, so I was already a bit older. But your parents don't prepare you for this, schools don't prepare you for this. University certainly doesn't prepare you for it. In fact, it leads you to believe the opposite. And so you enter the work world and if you're entering a place more like what we're describing here, not like what you were describing. Some of the jobs you had, you're blindsided. You had no preparation for it, nothing prepared you for it, and you don't know how to react.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, you know, if, if you're naive in that manner, two things, and I was naive. Yeah. 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, 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, well, they have their, their reasons.

[Robert Greene]

And so, yeah, yeah, I can remember I, 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, he was like having his second or third martini and he started to tell me that, 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 in it, I think he had set me up for this. I think that he was, had kind of commissioned this article knowing that it was going to have some problems with it, etc. And that he was deliberately setting me up in this situation so that he. And I think a lot of it came from envy.

[Jordan Peterson]

You know, envy is a bad one. 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've 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 try 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 just strategize like mad. So I had one client, for example, I really liked her. She was smart, smart man, very, very, very competent, honest, hard working, conscientious, diligent, attractive lawyer. And she'd move firms. And those firms can be pretty cutthroat. You know, they're full of prosecutors. What do you expect?

[Robert Greene]

Right, right, right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And, and, and one guy, when she went into the firm, basically swiped her biggest client through a series of manipulative actions.

[Robert Greene]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

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, 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 I love doing that sort of thing. It was such fun helping people who are.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah, I do. I do the same thing as well. Yeah, sorry.

[Jordan Peterson]

So why do you think this was so popular? You said the music industry was particularly pathological. At least this is the reports you got. So why do you, why do you think that is? Do you have any theories about that? And then why do you think your books got to be so popular among all rappers?

[Robert Greene]

Say, why do you think the music industry is the way it is? Or.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, I mean, I mean, do you think there's something specific about that industry that lends itself to that kind of.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah, 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, and people are. Producers of music are very, they have a very exploitative kind of model of business, which is they, they seduce a first time artist with a. With a lot of money, but the contract is. And eventually they 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 Machiavellian games that music industry people would play.

[Jordan Peterson]

Take a straightforward criminal over a psychopathic manipulator any day.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah, exactly.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, and you talked about money like, I'd rather deal with someone greedy, like honestly greedy than someone manipulative underground politicker.

[Robert Greene]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

Because at least with the greed, well, you can negotiate with someone like that, you know what they want. They're kind of unique, dimensional, and you might have your moral qualms about it, but I'd 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.

[Robert Greene]

No, no, I agree with you on that. And so, you know, why are my books popular? I think there's a. It's a combination of things. First of all, I'm giving people something that's not out there, a 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 the people are trying to, you know, 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 you, 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 of 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 a notoriety around the book and people almost feel like it's something naughty when they have it. And so I think that's part of the appeal of it.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 under rather poverty stricken circumstances 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 like delinquents. He went into social work, oddly enough, and. And he ended up working with some of the worst delinquents in, 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 partly because he had a real integrated shadow. I mean, I'll give you an example of him. So one day, and I was living in this town called Grand Prairie. And it was at the height of the oil boom. And so it was a rough town and there were lots of rough bars in it and lots of young men in there with plenty of money and plenty of. They come in for, you know, three days after being out minus 40 weather, working on the oil rigs. And they were ready to party, man. And we had a party one night in this kind of frat house that I went to college in. And about way too many people showed up and some of them were real troublemakers. And one, we had a table that was pretty full of beer bottles and vodka bottles and so forth. And one guy just went over, like tore the leg off and knocked the table over. And then a bunch of us got together and chased them all out. And this friend of mine, he said, oh, they'll be back. And so he went upstairs and he put on some steel toed cowboy boots. It was just like a bloody western. He kept marching down the stairs and just as he entered the living room, there was a big knock on the front door. It was these hooligans coming back to cause grief and he, he just didn't break stride. He opened the door, he pulled open the door and there was a guy standing there ready to fight. And he kicked him underneath the chin with his steel tool cowboy boot. Knocked him right over the, the front porch and you know, and the battle was on. But that was exactly what he was like, you know, and he had. His shadow was integrated. You could. He was a great roommate. He. He reciprocated everything. I always knew if I bought groceries one week, he'd buy it the next. Like he was a straight shooter. You could trust him, but he was not naive, man. And that made him able to deal with delinquents and to help them. So that's part of that integration of that shadow.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah. I go very deeply into the shadow in a chapter in my last book, the Laws of Human Nature. And I try and talk about how one integrates the shadow because it's not an easy answer for that. People are kind of perplexed. Well, I have this dark side and I explain a lot of where it comes from and how a lot of your aggressive impulses, like the room of two year olds that you were talking about, you have that as well. I'm talking to the people that my readers. You have that aggressiveness when you were young and it got socialized out of you and then it got kind of got repressed and it's like a lost self that Lives inside of you and it's screaming to come out. How do you integrate it? And so the main thing is you have to be aware that you have this shadow side you have. You can't run away from it. You have to acknowledge that it exists. You almost have to embrace it in a way.

[Jordan Peterson]

A good parent too does everything he or she can not to repress that. Like what you want to do with children is you want to like, you want them to be forceful, you want them to have some power. You want them to integrate that, that capacity for aggression into, let's say, lucid conversation. You want them to be able to stand up for themselves in family discussions. If you just punish them for being aggressive, let's say for talking back or something like that, you don't guide that into more sophisticated development. You see this in schools too. Now you, you know, when my kids went to school, this was so dumb. We had a rule in our house which was, you don't have to follow stupid rules, that's a good rule. But if you get caught, you have to put up with consequences. But.

[Robert Greene]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So one rule was the school had, not only could you not throw snowballs, you couldn't make them. And so they were trying to. Yeah, exactly. You should shake your head, that's for sure. It's like, because their answer, and this was all politically correct nonsense, you know, non competitive games. We're only going to play non competitive games. It's like, first of all, you know, I studied Piaget.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

A hockey game is not competitive. Exactly. Because in a hockey game, well, everybody, no one brings a basketball, everybody plays hockey. So that's cooperation. And then on the team you have to cooperate. And like if you're the star, but you never pass, you're just a dumb son of a bitch, you're not the star. And so there's tremendous amount of cooperation in all those competitive games. They're integrated. And this idea that, you know, make children better by not allowing them to be competitive, it's so.

[Robert Greene]

It's disgusting.

[Jordan Peterson]

It is. It's that, well, that's the Freudian devouring mother, right? That's, oh, well, everyone's safe and no one's going to ever hurt anyone.

[Robert Greene]

And that's kind of where a lot of young people, you know, they enter the world world where they've been coddled, where they think that there are no winners, that everyone is, you know, it's just win, win situations. And that's where they get really shocked by the realities of the world. So all this coddling and this idea that there doesn't have to be a winner, we don't have to get prizes for first place, Everybody should get a prize. You know, all you're doing is setting your, your children up for,

[Jordan Peterson]

for shocks

[Robert Greene]

when they enter the world and they see that it's not like that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. And then they get disillusioned and depressed, you know, or traumatized by it. I mean, when my, my son's hockey team in his school, they won the, the city championship, which was a big deal, you know, and the school was pretty happy about that. To, to his credit, so was the coach. But the principal, who was this authoritarian empath. She was an awful person, I thought.

[Robert Greene]

Authoritarian?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, yeah, she liked virtue as a club. Oh no, it was. Yeah, well, there's people, plenty of those people around. She said, well, really, today we're all winners. And the coach had the. Yeah, exactly. No, it is sickening because it's. And you know, my son was just appalled by it. But the coach had enough guts. He said, no, no, the, the hockey team won. And it's not like the kids in the school were jealous. Some of them were, obviously, but most of them were really happy like you are when your sports team wins that.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

You know, and most people are generous enough so that they're able to celebrate someone else's victory without. And that's the same. I saw this with birthday parties. I just bloody well hated this. It's like, well, every child gets a gift bag. It's like, no, you know, they have their damn birthday. Every child doesn't need a damn gift bag. And it's this is this same, this same naive, trickly. And it's authoritarian too, because it imposes this kind of view of the world. It's like, no, it's this kid's data be special. That's why we're celebrating this kid. The rest of them, if they can't take that, it's like there's something wrong with the way that they've been treated and attended to.

[Robert Greene]

Well, a lot of my books, I've tried to remove the kind of taboo or the negative associations we have with the 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 and you want to go out and achieve and create something worthwhile while 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 primate nature, embarrassed about our own aggressive impulses.

[Jordan Peterson]

This is partly why boys are failing in our schools now at a disproportionate rate. You know, the, the. And I see this, there's an assault of the sort that you're describing on the better part of striving masculinity. And you know, I had a friend who killed himself because he identified his ambition with, you know, the, the patriarchal force that's devouring the environment, let's say. And that's a con that's, you know, the cause of, of historical horror. And you might say, well, no one takes that onto themselves to that degree. And that's. Well, you can say that, but that you just don't know what the hell you're talking about. People take that onto themselves all the time. And then they, they start to identify the best part of them that strives forward with the destructive impulses of humanity. And they're so ashamed because they can't do anything good then. But in principle, yeah, you know, he tried to be as inoffensive and harmless in every possible way as he possibly could and it just sucked all the life out.

[Robert Greene]

Well, you end up turning that aggressive energy on yourself is what ends up happening. And that's maybe leads to suicide. The ultimate kind of self aggression. I know that I personally have, as I said, I definitely have a shadow side. I'm very aggressive and extremely competitive and I have a lot of anger. So a lot of that. Those experiences in my youth made me very angry. But the way I kind of integrated my show, I'm not saying this is a model, but the way I integrated it was through my books. Yeah, so I kind of, that anger kind of seeps through the material that I write. And I find I can only write when I have that kind of anger. But I don't rant, I don't yell and kind of put people down. I kind of channel it into something productive and something creative.

[Jordan Peterson]

And so, yeah, I definitely do that when I'm lecturing, you know, and people have commented, you know, some of the people who've criticized me, that I'm an angry person. And which isn't true, but it's definitely that anger. That capacity for anger definitely is something that gives you force and it can push and anger definitely. So psychophysiologically. So imagine that. This is obviously a thought experiment, but imagine you're chasing a cat with a broom. Well, the cat's going to run from the broom, but if you corner the cat with the broom, it will Attack you even though it's just a cat. Well, and the reason for that is that fear will facilitate either freezing or escape. But sometimes fear isn't the right response and anger will suppress fear. And so one of the tools that we have at our disposal psychologically is anger as a, an antidote to the terror that would otherwise freeze you. And you can integrate that. You know, that's, you know, if you have some justifiable moral outrage, let's say something really annoys you, or I shouldn't say that deeply violates your sense of moral propriety. I don't mean trivial things. Then the fact of that forceful response can motivate you to do things. Well for lecture, but certainly to write. It takes a lot of energy to write, man. You need all those sources of energy if you're going to be able to do it. Just even to turn it on yourself, to discipline yourself. You know, it's like I had to grab myself by the scruff of the neck when I was a young guy to sit down, sit down, God damn it, and write, you know, and, and there's a force that's necessary to, especially if you're open, because you're all over the place if you're creative to, to get yourself to sit down and focus.

[Robert Greene]

Yes, that's right. Yeah. And, you know, some of that anger, you know, I think Jung talks about this, is that that dark side contains a lot of energy, it contains a lot of power. Those two year olds are kicking and screaming, that's all this kind of force behind it. And when you sort of are ashamed of it and you push that down, you're kind of getting rid of an incredible well of energy that you can use for your creativity, for your work, et cetera. You can take that energy, like you say, and create discipline out of it, do something creative out of it, support some cause that you really believe in, you know, so that shadow side, when you, when you deny it, only negative things will happen. And it is extremely important for people to first recognize it in themselves, you know, and it's, it's very hard for a lot of people to do that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, I found, like I said earlier, that one of the best ways in there is resentment. You watch yourself like, well, because if you're, if you're resentful, you know, you're feeling like you're being victimized and mistreated. It's like, okay, well, you might, maybe you are okay, and you think there's no anger in that resentment. You're not looking hard enough. If you watch your fantasies, for example, if you're resentful and you watch the fantasies that flit through your imagination, like you might not want to attend to them because they can be so brutal.

[Robert Greene]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

But. But that the fat. Because if someone is, is oppressing you genuinely and you're not standing up for yourself, then there'll be these compensatory fantasies. Yeah. So one day I'll tell you a story about that. 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, had gas fittings in the upper floor, 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, it was stressful and difficult and the neighbors just, they called the city on us. They. 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 click. And the neighbors banged on the wall. And then that night I couldn't sleep and I had this. I would 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, you should probably go say something. So I took. Put on my park and I went outside about six in the morning and I just waited for them to come out. They never did. But I went knocked over 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. But like I. What we did was the mistake you talk about. We backtrack 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, and things went more smoothly after that. And, and that's a good example of, well, paying attention to those fantasies because I thought I better, like, deal with this straightforwardly, otherwise I'm likely to do something stupid.

[Robert Greene]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's the other thing you got to watch if that builds up inside you.

[Robert Greene]

Exactly, yeah. And a lot of times I look at people in, 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, that's not who I am. But that is exactly who you are. That is the 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're just caught doing something.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. So I, I watch people with their, their children a lot. Eh?

[Robert Greene]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And so when my son was a pretty assertive kid and tough, like, he had a real will and, you know, when he was nine months old and starting to crawl around, I taught him what no meant. And no. What no means is stop doing that or something you don't like will happen to you. That's what no means.

[Robert Greene]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And so when he was nine months, he was starting to take books off shelves and get into the plants and so on because he was starting to crawl around. And so to teach him what no meant, I just grab his leg when he wasn't doing something that I didn't want him to do. And you know, he would squawk and, and complain and I'd say, no, no, no. And I just hold him until he gave up. And sometimes he would cry. And the reason he was crying is because 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.

[Robert Greene]

Right?

[Jordan Peterson]

And 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 if I just said no, he would just stop and sometimes he would cry. And then the week later if I said no, he just stopped. So it took like two weeks say. And then, 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. 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 because you don't have a life. And we had another couple come over and they had two kids that were like 4 and 5 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 and, 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? You just met them 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, eh? 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 because you were embarrassed. And so you look at it and you think. 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. Yeah, 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 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 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.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Robert Greene]

Well, the ability. 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 et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, 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. Willing to take that risk. Because if you don't, then. 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. 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

So here's a cool, stout. 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 roll their eyes, there's like a 95% chance they're going to be divorced within six months, and that's Contempt they've got. So they've become so discon connected because they don't communicate, because the resentment has built up that they now have contempt for each other. But here's, 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 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 5 positive to 1 negative, the relationship is in danger. But it rises. You have five to one. And you can kind of see that because, you know, negative events are more memorable and, and, and more powerful than positive ones. And so you know that if you read YouTube comments, you know, yeah, but if it rises above 11 to 1, 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, out comes your inner 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.

[Robert Greene]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

So cool that it's above 11 to 1. So that means too much. Positivity is also. Is the death knoll 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 you want the person to be able to push back a bit.

[Robert Greene]

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, so real strength comes from the ability in a relationship or any kind of really 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Unless you want to repeat it stupidly forever. Right. I mean, that that's the alternative in a relationship is I don't like conflict. I've been in plenty of questions, conflicts, like, plenty, way more than is reasonable, but I don't like them. Like, I meet. Well, I meet people now and then. I went to talk to Douglas Murray in. In New York City about a week ago, and we were talking about conflict, and he said, you know, he. He doesn't mind to fight. And I've met lots of people like that, 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 gonna. You know, like, if. 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 gonna see that person again, you know? And you don't want a situation like that to escalate because they might have

[Robert Greene]

a gun or whatever.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, yeah, you don't. Just don't know what's up with them. They're really strangers. 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. They did. They sure did. Yeah. Yeah.

[Robert Greene]

They would be canceled now, probably.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, I don't think. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah. Because a lot of Schultz's characters. Lucy was actually not a likable character at all.

[Robert Greene]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

And she. She was really oppressive to Linus, who was a good character. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good humor always has an edge. But. Yeah, that. That. You don't get rid of your. The negative part of yourself, especially that aggressive part, by pretending it doesn't exist. That. That. Quite the contrary. That just doesn't work at all.

[Robert Greene]

Right. Yeah. I'm sorry, you're gonna say something.

[Jordan Peterson]

I was just gonna ask you about your new.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

I 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?

[Robert Greene]

Well, 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 a. 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 this reputation. Ended up. He was really nice and really interesting. Actually a very. Kind of sweet guy. Not what you expect. And we. I just finished writing my book on warfare and strategy, which is kind of my version of Sun Tzu's Art of War, how to strategize in conflicts, sort of like what you're talking about. And he has a very strategic mind. And he got. We got very. 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 they should. 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. And 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 there through a car window, kind of. One of the 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. I thought, 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 death itself, not being afraid of the reality of your situation. On and on. The book that we formed together was kind of a meditation on ten 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 in some ways a little bit bold and adventurous. But compared to him, I realized, no, I'm actually riddled with fears. 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 from.

[Jordan Peterson]

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?

[Robert Greene]

Well, well, there's. There's a. There's a kind of a 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

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're talking about this Machiavellian personality triad, the dark triad, the Del Pollo's ubc. Yeah. Okay, so here's something really interesting. It's the Bad Boy Paradox, they call it that young naive 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 Bus to see if I was way off on the wrong track, is that those reckless, fearless

[Robert Greene]

people

[Jordan Peterson]

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. 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. 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.

[Robert Greene]

So, well, a Lot of those people who display that kind of what you call mimicking fearlessness.

[Jordan Peterson]

That's the macho. That's the macho.

[Robert Greene]

They're actually hiding the opposite. They're actually very, very riddled with insecurities. They're not, you know, and they're. They're 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 that's their way of dealing with it. But someone like 50 Cent, he was 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, that, that dimension, neuroticism. You know, if. 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.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And some or unit of danger. And some people overreact and some people underreact. Sometimes the overreaction saves your life, sometimes the under reaction 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 temperamentally. That's a more masculine temperament, by the way.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah, I agree.

[Jordan Peterson]

But if you, 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?

[Robert Greene]

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

[Jordan Peterson]

That's cool because it's so interesting that so many rap fans are young white guys. I know, I know, yeah, yeah, but that's, that's really psychologically interesting. Right. Because if, if they've been coddled and their ambition has Been squelched. 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 and in a creative form in rap, it's not surprising that they're going to try to imitate that. It's part of that. That desire to bring that shadow out of the shadows and into the light.

[Robert Greene]

Well, 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. But what I really enjoyed about his music is it just seemed very real and. 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. And 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 as 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, nearly died, you know, just kind of added to that aura. But there was something very real about 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 50s music. And when I was writing the war book, I was trying to get myself in 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

In Beethoven, what do you like? From what Beethoven do you like? What pumped you up?

[Robert Greene]

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 an aggression in violence, like to the fifth Symphony and the ninth Symphony. It just kind of, you know, like they use Clockwork Orange. There's something so overwhelmingly powerful about it. Right. It just.

[Jordan Peterson]

You can't. In the ninth is like that.

[Robert Greene]

It's the Ode to Joy.

[Jordan Peterson]

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 is, you know, in. 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.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And when it, when that, when that choral bit kicks in, it's just overwhelming.

[Robert Greene]

It's like a blow and makes you tingle. It's so exciting. And I've heard it maybe thousand times since then. 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 Night Symphony on and some of the other ones,

[Jordan Peterson]

like encountering the terrible force of Good. You know, you think about Moses in the burning bush. It's. Or. 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? Why do you get hurt? It's like, well, because good, in its full force has this unbelievable. What has this integration of power. And it's no wonder it terrifies people because it just burns everything away in comparison.

[Robert Greene]

Right, Right. Yeah. I mean, a lot of the. The new book that I'm writing about, which is the Sublime, is the. As 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, 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. I've just written a book that I'm going to publish next year that's called An ABC of Childhood 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. Those. That paradoxical juxtaposition of dark and light emotions. There is something sublime about that, that's. And something awe inspiring about that. I guess it's part of bringing what's dark into the light or subsuming it under the light, maybe. So why did you get. Why the sublime? What are you pursuing there?

[Robert Greene]

Well, the reason, you know, the ultimate and sublime is to me. So 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, what lies beyond that limit, it's just part of our nature. It's a first part of it. And when we explore beyond the social limits and codes and things we're supposed to do in ways we're supposed to act, it's deeply exciting and thrilling. There's also that element of fear involved. Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

See, I think that's a better. What would you call it, formulation than Nietzsche's idea of will to power is the desire to exist on that side sublime edge. And that is the border between order and chaos that you're describing. Right. And the thing and that is the source of meaning itself. I mean, that's why I think music is so powerful, is because it plays with predictable forms, but continually adds that level of unpredictability. A beautiful. You know how in any kind of music, the simplest music, someone who's good at it. Country music. No. There'll be a key shift or a twang on the string or something that.

[Robert Greene]

Or something discordant.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes, exactly. And, and then. And integrated within sort of a higher. What? A higher unity. And it's deeply meaningful. It puts you on that edge of the sublime. And, and, and we are. 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.

[Robert Greene]

Well, so, and so the ultimate thing beyond that limit is. Is death itself. And the word sublime means up to the threshold of a door or subliminal being the limit.

[Jordan Peterson]

Right. Like subliminal.

[Robert Greene]

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 experience, 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 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

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

[Robert Greene]

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 paid a price, but I'm alive.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, and it was so interesting that that was, it was in the aftermath of that devastating experience that you decided to turn particularly to the sublime.

[Robert Greene]

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.

[Jordan Peterson]

So why that, why make that as I'm not disputing it, I don't, I just don't understand. Like, I mean, you Talked also about $0.50 brush with death. But why does the sublime in your estimation, why is it tangled up with the, with the idea of death?

[Robert Greene]

Well, because there's, there's a limit. That 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 period, as far as

[Jordan Peterson]

far as near death experiences go relatively minor.

[Robert Greene]

Well, you know, my, my coma, my coma lasted an hour or something. Some people, you know, there, that's nothing, man.

[Jordan Peterson]

Experts, they have comas for like three years.

[Robert Greene]

Well, okay, all right. I could have had a, you know, a more intense near death experience, but it was pretty intense anyway.

[Jordan Peterson]

It was sufficient.

[Robert Greene]

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 razor edge so much that we can live. But if you think about 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 things that you don't want to confront is very, very, very powerful. And I'm sorry, Siri just keeps hearing me. I'm 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, they call in French the orgasm, le petit mort. Right, 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Now, you see that in the ease in which laughter and tears can be interchanged.

[Robert Greene]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

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, right. Where these. And it's so interesting to see the opposites touch at that level.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah. So. 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 the right conception of ancient religions. They're actually very different from what we think. We have these kind of cliched notions of kind of mischievous gods cavorting in clouds and doing all kinds of naughty things that are very human and just kind of almost a silliness to it, like, whoa, we're so beyond that. But actually, pagan religions were extremely serious. And they were based on creating Go away Siri. And they were. 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 there 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. We're like making them feel as if they had gone to the underworld itself. And that created a whole new relationship to life. But I wanted this idea that religion isn't this kind of milk toasty thing that people think about nowadays. It was initially extremely powerful reaction 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.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, it's really interesting to me that, you know, you've. 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, in the. The little stamp that I'm using for these kids book, which I'm doing with this illustrator named Juliet Fogra, 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.

[Robert Greene]

Wow.

[Jordan Peterson]

You know, and 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. Part of the looking into the dark side of you yourself is you find the power that enables you to deal with mortality. And there is something sublime about that. It's so cool that, you know, all your work investigating and trying to integrate the shadow has led you to this. To this. What, what, what? That your intuition has been gripped by the idea of the sublime.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Where you think you'd end up.

[Robert Greene]

Well, yeah. A lot of the impetus for the book is another little bit of anger as well, because I always have to have some anger in order to feel the impulse to write and just discipline myself. And my anger now is about how people's worlds have become so tight and so banal and so limited, where they're just kind of disappearing into their phones and their world is just sort of programmed for them by Facebook or social media, and they're sort of told what they're supposed to think, and they're kind of programmed. And at the same time, what science is discovering about the universe and about where we live and about who we are is just so insanely mind blowing. It's just absolutely almost sublime, in my opinion. And yet so many people are just living like, as if they're sleepwalking, as if that. You know, I talk in one chapter about the unlikeliness of any of us being alive, any of us actually being here right now on Earth, and how just to. Just to be who we are. The odds against it are like 8 trillion to 1. Even more than that. But people aren't thinking about this. They're not aware of the awesomeness of just the fact of being alive, of the cosmos as it evolved, as. As things on Earth evolve the way they are. And so I'm kind of. Kind of angry A little bit about how about how people are just not aware of this.

[Jordan Peterson]

That anger. Again, that's. You know, one of the things I did as a clinician is to help people find their purpose was to. To help them find out what they're angry about. It's like, well, what's your problem? You know, you say that, what's your problem? But actually you want to know. It's like, because if you have a problem, then. Because there's lots of things you could be bothered about, but you're not bothered about by all of them.

[Robert Greene]

Right.

[Jordan Peterson]

There's something that stands out for you as, you know, something that violates your sense of moral propriety. Let's say that's your problem. You think, well, I don't want to have a problem. It's. Yes, you do. You want to have your problem, and then you want to go try to solve it. And if you're looking for meaning in your life, it's like, well, what bugs you? Well, I'm annoyed at this and that and, and, you know, it's pretty naive and low resolution and formulaic to begin with, but you could zero right in on that. And then you find the purpose of your life. And that's. That's in that anger. It's in that anger, at least to some degree.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah. And as I said, I can't write without it. I don't know why. Every day I have to feel a little bit. A little bit of pinch of it or like a little bit of edge of that knife in me. And sometimes.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, well, you have to be. That's right. I mean, I find when I'm sitting down to write a chapter, because it's hard. Hard to sit down and, and write a chapter. It's a lot of work, man. And, you know, writers always whine about that, but it is hard to. It's hard to do. It's as hard as clinical work, which is the hardest work I ever did. And so. But I have to be. It's like, there has to be a reason for this, you know, to get me going to do it. It has to be important. And that means it has to be dealing with something weighty. And if it's weighty, it's gonna. It's gonna act. It's gonna. What. What. What's going to call out of you all your emotional responses, including the. Well, certainly including anger. Certainly that's a tremendous form of energy.

[Robert Greene]

Well, I don't know if you have the same experience, but I read so many books for my research center and that's the main thing that I fault them with. There. There's no kind of energy behind it. There's no human behind it. There's no voice that's kind of screaming out.

[Jordan Peterson]

Why they have to say screaming out is exactly right. That's a great book. Screams like Solzhenitsyn school, like archipelago. That's like 3,000 pages of screaming anger. It's like you sustain screaming anger for 3,000 pages. It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. It's like being caught in a windstorm reading that book.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And that's. That greatness is terrifying.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah, yeah. And that's. That's kind of channeling the dark side in some ways. Yeah, yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, I mean, that man brought down a totalitarian state, at least in part. It's like you have to have a lot of force, and you think that it's not going to be anger in part to. To push back against. That's all. That kind of petty tyranny that you were talking about in. In its.

[Robert Greene]

In its.

[Jordan Peterson]

Most. What would you say, most rigidified and universal form. And one man, you know, who decided he was going to tell the truth and. And. And. And harness that passion to his words changed the world.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know if I'll have that kind of effect. I'm sure I won't, but that's sort of. I want people to. I kind of want to spark a sense of almost the religious awe without an organized religion behind it, because I think we have changed a lot in thousands of years, but there's something in our nature that kind of craves those kinds of experiences, and nothing in our culture is providing it.

[Jordan Peterson]

It's the definition of crave. I don't think nothing. Music does. Yeah, music does, man. Music does. And that music was such a mystery for me when I was a young psychologist. Like, music is meaningful, and you can't argue the meaning away. Like, it's. It's invulnerable to criticism. Isn't that so cool that there's a source of meaning that's invulnerable to criticism? And then it's this harmonious interplay of beautiful patterns, predictability and unpredictability and. And the integration of passion and movement. Right. Because. Because it compels movement. You see, think of people dancing to a Strauss waltz, right? They're harmonizing themselves with the sublime patterns of the world. That's music. It's something, man. And it's no wonder young people are so desperate for music, because. Well, that's where we have the sublime in our culture.

[Robert Greene]

Well, that's why they go to things like raves or astroworld and concerts like that. They want that kind of collective experience, you know, that you used to get from, like, initiation rituals or kind of things in pagan times. I remember once I was in Nicaragua, I was a journalist. I was covering the civil. The revolution, the civil war going on. And the Pope was visiting Nicaragua at the time, it's 1984, I believe. And there was like 100,000 people crammed in this one square. And, you know, I'm not by any means a Sandinista. I had no sympathy for, particularly as it is now, but the feeling was that I experienced. I've never experienced anything else like it. Of that crowd and that group emotion. It can be frightening, too.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, yeah.

[Robert Greene]

Something turned like.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, that's it. That's the thing that Nazis were unbelievably good at pulling, bringing that up. Right. And so you might say, too, that if we can't figure out how to harness that force in a positive way in our culture, we pretend it doesn't exist. It's going to come up in these underground ways because the craving for it is so deep. And the Nazis were masters of spectacle and fire. They were really good at that sort of thing. And Orwell was courageous enough to point that out. He said, well, we don't have anything within that power to combat that terrible, dramatic evil. But, you know, you do see it in a concert. You do see it in that. In that collective. Well, you said you saw it in relationship to the Pope, and that's. Well, hopefully that's something good, or at least it's certainly a lot better than Nuremberg.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

And to think that we don't need that or that. That's just superstition. That's extraordinary.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah, I know, I know. I agree.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, look, it was really good talking with you, man.

[Robert Greene]

Very nice talking to you. I really enjoyed it. These are things I never get to cover in all of my eight, you know, hundreds of interviews. So I'm very, very grateful for it. I've explored territory that I've never explored before. So thank you.

[Jordan Peterson]

Isn't that fun?

[Robert Greene]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Usual experience for me.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, I enjoyed it a lot, man. Yeah. Sorry.

[Robert Greene]

I must say, your Maps of Meaning was a very important book for me. I read it, actually, to help me with my war book, believe it or not, your notion of conflict and integrating internal conflict and external conflict. So I just want to thank you and let you know, nobody knows about that. Because I haven't really spoken about it, but that book was very important for me.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, thank you. I'm amazed you read it. It's a hell of a slog, that book.

[Robert Greene]

Six, seven hundred pages. And I can honestly say I don't think I understood everything in it, at least at the time, but it was very amazing book.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, thank you very much. I'm glad to hear that. And yeah, it took me. I wrote that book. It took a lot of anger, man. I wrote that book every day, three hours a day, every day for 15 years.

[Robert Greene]

Jesus. Wow.

[Jordan Peterson]

I had to put my hands around my neck and say, you sit, God damn it. You sit down. Write this goddamn book. I had to quit drinking. I had to quit having fun.

[Robert Greene]

I know. Believe me, I know all about that. It took me five years to write my life last book. I can't imagine what 13 years would be like. But, yeah, I know all about that.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, good luck with your book on the sublime. I'm looking forward to it.

[Robert Greene]

Let's talk. Thank you very much.

[Jordan Peterson]

Let's talk again when it. When. Well, I would love to, but maybe when it comes out. That would be good. I really liked it. And I'm really curious about how you integrate your investigation of the Elusinian Mysteries. I talked to some interesting people about

[Robert Greene]

that recently, and I know I had already written the page piece when I heard them speak. And then I changed some things because I realized some things I've written were inaccurate. But what I try to do in that. So I try and I create a character, a woman who's going to the mysteries and what it was like from her first person account. It's fictional, but I'm trying to actually, you know, give her a history during the plague in the 1420s and then go into the mysteries and what it would feel like subjectively to be in there.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, I had a vision once that the. The shamanic experience was an antidote to icy Northern totalitarianism. You know, so many people are going to the jungle now, to the Amazon to use ayahuasca and that sort of thing. And there's. I mean, and that certainly that drug use, that hallucinogenic drug use was tied up with those primordial religions in some profound way. We don't understand any of that even a little bit.

[Robert Greene]

No. And of course, the El Cine Mysteries probably had that drug element as well, because the drink they had was either mushrooms or ergot or. Or. Or opium poppy seeds. Poppy. So, yeah, it's been demonstrated that all kind of pagan Cultures had some kind of drug thing going on and. Yeah. So.

[Jordan Peterson]

All right, well, good luck to you writing this book and thank you very much talking to you. And I certainly am much more clear about you, everything that you're doing. I'm so glad I decided to talk to you and.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah, me too. Me too. Yeah. I hope I brought a little bit of clarity there.

[Jordan Peterson]

Oh, absolutely. It was a really good discussion.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah, thanks.

[Jordan Peterson]

Thanks again. Thanks again.

[Robert Greene]

Thank you so much again. Say hello to your daughter.

[Jordan Peterson]

I will. I will do that, definitely.

[Robert Greene]

Okay.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah, she's a big fan and so is my producer, Eric.

[Robert Greene]

Oh, Eric. This Eric?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes, this Eric.

[Robert Greene]

I had no idea.

[Jordan Peterson]

Hey, Eric. Yeah, if you want.

[Eric (Producer)]

Yeah.

[Jordan Peterson]

Big fan.

[Eric (Producer)]

Big, big.

[Jordan Peterson]

Yeah. Well, I was all shorted out when I was reading the Daily Laws. I thought, I don't know what to do with this. It's like, it's this. What the hell's going on here? And. And Eric, he said, well, he really liked your books and my daughter really liked your interview. And I thought, well, I'm obviously missing. Missing something, you know, And I did. I didn't spend as much time when I was deciding about this conversation, reading it to, but I had some sense that maybe you were doing a shadow investigation, but I wasn't clear about it, so. But they were big defenders of you. It's like, oh, that's good to talk to him.

[Robert Greene]

Thank you, Eric. Thank you.

[Eric (Producer)]

I. Yeah, of course.

[Robert Greene]

Anything I can do for you. Thank you.

[Jordan Peterson]

No, Eric, why were. Why were. Why were these books helpful to you?

[Eric (Producer)]

Oh, man.

[Jordan Peterson]

Fuck.

[Eric (Producer)]

Good question. That's tough. There's been a few points in my life where so I was a fighter. That was my first career choice as a mixed martial arts fighter. And so to me, knowing from reading the 48 laws of power, it's very similar to Jiu Jitsu. So when I got into business, it was like, oh, I've seen this behavior before because I've read this book and I understand this. So it started as like a very interesting. It started just as an interest, like, oh, this seems cool. I think I saw you on Tim Ferriss show or something like that. And when I started to see those things come into play, it then completely hooked me and I got all the rest of the books.

[Jordan Peterson]

So it prepared you.

[Eric (Producer)]

Yes. And one of the things, Robert, that I like so much about what you're doing is you're taking these principles you're showing it to throughout history and you're giving examples of how this plays out today. And so it's like across the Entire spectrum of what type of thinker is reading it. You have to be the type of thinker that's going to read, which is in everybody. But across that spectrum, everybody gets a little exactly what they need to hear in it. So it makes it very practical. You can then go off and be very practical with it.

[Jordan Peterson]

The same thing that practice. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's really important. Like, one of the things you learn as a coach, cognitive behavioral psychologist, is that you have to nail this down to changeable behavior. You know, one of the things I was always doing with my clients was, and I've recommended this to people many times in my lectures, is find. Find the largest unit of change that you're actually willing to do. Like, maybe you won't clean up your room. I. I stress that. It's like, well, then will you move one thing off your desk today? One thing? Just one. Or if you can't do that? Because sometimes clients would come back and say, I couldn't even move one thing. Said, well, why don't you look at one thing and think about moving it? And they're embarrassed because, you know, they're so unable to perform this task, which is a simple task in some sense, that they're ashamed to admit where they are to themselves, but they can't move forward. I had one client. This is so funny. He lived at home with his mother, and he shouldn't. He was. Was too old for that. And his room was a complete bloody catastrophe. And he knew it. And he was probably mad at his mother for, like, coddling him. And. And so he was. Needed to vacuum the carpet. So the deal for the week was, you go vacuum that carpet. And he brought the vacuum cleaner into his room, but he left it in the doorway, like, on a slant. And every day for a week, he had to walk over that vacuum cleaner. He wouldn't put it back, and he wouldn't bring it in in his room and. And vacuum. And that's a good example of that underground resentment. You just think how angry you have to be at your situation to put a vacuum cleaner. You know, it's probably a middle finger to me, too. It's like, I'm not doing what that goddamn therapist says, you know, that kind of resentment. But he. He literally walked over that damn vacuum cleaner for a week, you know, and we talked a bunch about. That's like, well, what are you doing? It's like, obviously you're angry. Like, why can't you do this? What are you angry about? Well, man, he. He was angry about plenty of things, let's put it that way. So, yeah, so that practicality that's real necessary to nail the highest to the lowest and to get all that organized all the way down to practical, implementable.

[Robert Greene]

Are you familiar with the work of Milton Erickson?

[Jordan Peterson]

Yes. What are you referring to specifically?

[Robert Greene]

I just. All of his work, I just. I'm just enamored with his work because his ability to create change in his patience and the strategies he would employ, I just think are so brilliant, you know? I don't know. I don't know if he's respected in the field or not anymore, but I just thought his story.

[Jordan Peterson]

Well, all those. My experience with all those great clinicians was, you're a fool if you don't take what they knew seriously. I mean, those people had a reputation for a reason. And there's. You know, I. I really learned a lot from the great behaviorists. I learned a lot from the psychoanalysts, from the Rogerian type. Like, they all had their. They all had something to say. The behaviorists were great at decomposing something complex into implementable units, man. And the psychoanalysts were great at high level conceptualization, archetypal analysis. You know, the big story, the big picture. Yeah. So. Hey, Eric, maybe we'll keep that discussion with you in the video. Okay.

[Robert Greene]

Yeah, I like that. Yeah. Yeah.

[Eric (Producer)]

Sorry for cursing right away.

[Jordan Peterson]

No, no, that was perfect.