← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
"This Is A Woman's Sexual Fantasy" - Stop Being The Nice Guy & Master Seduction | Robert Greene
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- [00:01]
Tom Bilyeu
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Robert Greene
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Tom Bilyeu
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Robert Greene
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- [00:43]
Tom Bilyeu
it done if you want to do well with women, you are going to have to understand it as an art. You don't need to be fake, but you do need to be strategic. Every move or non move that you make makes you more or less desirable, and if you're naive to that, you're not going to get anywhere. If, on the other hand, you come to understand women generally and how to be both artful and genuine in seduction, you've got a shot. To help in this effort, I'm joined by bestselling author Robert Greene. What should men learn from the fact that women fantasize about vampires and billionaires?
- [01:21]
Robert Greene
Seduction involves the desire to lose control, and men share this as well, which is why men are often attracted to women who are slightly dangerous, women who are either a little bit crazy, or women who have this incredible sexual energy that can almost dominate a man. So seduction involves crossing up closely to that border of something that's dangerous, where you might be overwhelmed, particularly in the day, in our world today, where things are getting more and more puritan and people are more constrained by political correctness and all these tenets that we're supposed to adhere to, that we lead rather dull, constricted lives. We're not playful enough. We don't Things are too ordered and conventional and regimented in our world, but secretly we want to get out of that. Secretly we are drawn to what is dangerous, to what we can't really control. Seduction is a sense of I'm letting go a little bit. I'm entering a world where the other person is leading me through an adventure, and that's the excitement. That's the kind of transgressive element a dangerous person is always going to have that a vampire I can understand. Billionaire is a different thing. I mean, billionaire has to do with security and comfort and money and the sense of A man who's made it, you know, he must have some quality that's. That got him into that position kind of thing. The fantasy of you can have any kind of object that you desire, like in a fairy tale, because this man has billions of dollars so he can afford whatever you want. I prefer when I'm thinking about seduction to deal with kind of real life situation scenarios. I understand romantic fiction, but romantic fiction isn't what aren't characters in real life that we're going to be encountering. So it's a little bit distanced from me.
- [03:09]
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting the way I look at that. And the reason I found the book A Billion Wicked Thoughts so intriguing is I think it is absolutely revelatory what men and women spend their time fantasizing about. It certainly gives you a sense of the underlying algorithm that's running in all of our brains. You know, the fact that male pornography and male pornographic searches are all around like body parts and things. Like it's basically just body parts that, that really there's not even an and there. It's just. That's what male searches are all about. They're describing the thing they want to see. So it's all like hyper visual. Whereas the fact that women are into a totally different kind of erotic stimulation, to me that was, that alone was already revelatory. That they like story based, they want to read, that their porn is read. Because what I'm hoping guys will get out of this episode is an understanding that there is an art to seduction. You're not being fake by acknowledging that. And the reason I wanted to start with where people's fantasies lie is because if you understand that, you understand the algorithm that you're trying to trip into now of course you're going to do it in a way that's far more real and grounded. I'm not saying to act like a vampire, but to. To just address your work as it relates to both the vampire and the billionaire, at least as I read it is you talk a lot about there. There is a type, and I forget what which name it is for the type of seduction archetype, but where they're playing with androgyny and that dandy. The dandy. Okay, so the dandy blends the two. So there's a familiarity for the woman of a vamp. I think of vampires as being somewhat androgynous. They are usually ultra refined. There's an aristocratic error to them. And so you have this, the, the dandy portrayal in that mixing the androgyny but then you need the, like, you talk a lot about Errol Flynn who had flashes of danger. And so to me, that's the vampire. The vampire is obviously in the extreme, obviously in the abstract. It's obvious fiction, but it really does hint at something real. And so getting people to understand this is the algorithm that's running in a woman's brain, that it is very different than the algorithm that's running in the male brain. And so your job is going to be, if you, if you're going to seduce somebody, again, this is me quoting you. You have to be them focused and not you focused.
- [05:39]
Robert Greene
Yeah, but then, you know, it's. What's a little bit tricky here is you have to think that each woman has their own separate fantasy. So first of all, it's a particular type of woman that's reading romantic fiction. Not all women are reading that kind of thing. But each person that you deal with has their own particular fantasies, right. And you want to be very sensitive to that. So if you come at this with this idea that women have these preset kind of ideals, then you're already in trouble because you want, as far as being you oriented, you want to drop everything and you want to enter their world and look at the signs that they're giving out as to what their fantasies are. If they happen to be reading that kind of fiction and they happen to be reading those kinds of stories, then great, a little red light goes on in your head. But you want to be looking at all the other signs that they're giving out as well. You know, the movies that they watch, the music that they listen to, the clothes that they wear. You know, if a woman seems to be particularly repressed, that's a sign that they're going to be attracted to that danger element. Right. So you want to be paying deep attention to the individual. This is a problem that men have in general that they need to address. They're thinking in generic terms. They're thinking that they don't individualize the woman. And the worst thing you can do in seduction is to give the other person the idea that you are coming at them and thinking of, of somebody else. You're thinking in terms of stereotypes, you're thinking in terms of your previous girlfriends. You're not looking at them as an individual. The kinds of things that they love, the kinds of things that they, that you can provide them, that they're missing in life. So the game is most, the most important game, as opposed to just thinking in terms of these categories, is dropping all that Stuff in your head and just looking at the woman and entering her world and seeing it for what it is, that's half the game of seduction. Because if they feel that you are individualizing your attention, that is absolutely the key to any kind of seduction. Because we don't get any kind of individualized attention in this world. We're hungry for it. And particularly women coming from men, because men don't seem to understand the fantasy element. As you say, a fantasy is kind of a story. It's like a drama. It's going. And. And so when you're seducing someone, it's a story that you're bringing them into. You're creating theater, you're creating drama. You're leading them into this world, just like an author will lead a reader through a series of steps, right? But you have to be very focused on them and who they are in particular. And seduction involves a sense of vulnerability, right? A sense of openness where you're letting the other person come into you. And the word vulnerable comes from the Latin meaning wound. So vulnerable means the willingness to be wounded, right? And the archetypal image of love and seduction was Cupid with an arrow and hitting you with an arrow and wounding you with love and creating blood from it. It's like there's pain involved because you're opening yourself to another person. You're willing for them to hurt you, and you know that you could be hurt. And so the origin of seduction actually comes from our relationship to our parents and oftentimes for a man or a woman. Jung talked about this in terms of an animus and an anima. And speaking as a man, you know, anima figures are those kind of women that inhabit your dreams. And I have dreams all the time of that kind of anima woman. It's usually a certain type, a certain look, certain kind of feel to it, okay? And that anima figure for the man comes mostly from these earliest relationships in childhood. Like, the mother figure generally could be a sibling. And when you're a boy and you're facing your mother, you're completely vulnerable. You're weak, you're dependent. And that sense of being dependent is a source of a lot of your erotic tension, but also a lot of your fears. Because men are afraid of letting go, afraid of being dependent, afraid of being overwhelmed, right? So you carry within you these images of the anima and the animus. You're vulnerable in those moments, right? But what you happen, what happens to you as you get older is you try and make yourself invulnerable because life is hard, it's harsh. People are coming at you with a million different things. You retreat into yourself, into your ego, into your little castle. You build walls around yourself, and you're afraid of letting someone in. You're afraid of letting go. You're afraid of losing your defenses. And in the 2023, it's worse than ever before because the world is very, very intrusive. People secretly want to be vulnerable. I just wrote a chapter about this in my sublime book in relation to the Idea of Love. People want to feel vulnerable. They're just afraid. And so it's, I think, very psychologically important for people today, particularly for young people, to be willing to be vulnerable and to experience what that's like, to experience letting go of your defenses if you're hurt. And how do you deal with that? Because inevitably you're going to be hurt. That builds life skills, that builds toughness, that builds kind of thickness in your, in you, where you can endure being hurt. Because life involves in all sorts of hurts, and you're able to function with it and, and, and actually invite it in. It's almost good sometimes to invite a little bit of pain in your life. When you want to get physically well and you want to exercise, you. You realize that getting well involves pain, involves repetitions. It involves running so far that it hurts a little bit, right? So you have, you want to be able to welcome a little bit of that pain. So I think where we are in our culture right now, seduction is incredibly important. And I must say that on all of my social media, when I do a little video about seduction, I get the most views of all. And the irony is that more than ever, that word seduction has, like, an element of ew. I don't like that. I don't want to be seduced. Oh, what an ugly book. Oh, Robert's really evil. But secretly, people are yearning to be seduced. So that's, that's my answer to your question.
- [12:06]
Tom Bilyeu
It's a great answer. So now the thing I want to know is, all right, vulnerability is about a wound opening ourselves up to being wounded. In going through that process, we learn a lot about ourselves and how to be in some sort of ironic sense, by being vulnerable, you're able to develop strength and a willingness to expose yourself like that. Why are people so hungry for it now? Why? As we get more puritanical, as we have to worry about political correctness, why is it that the desire to let go becomes a thing that we're crying out for?
- [12:42]
Robert Greene
Well, people are generally ambivalent. I try and make a case when I talk to people that your emotions are never singular. They're never one thing. We have many moves. Our emotions are continually passing like clouds in the sky. They're never set or fixed right. So as Jung points out and a lot of other psychologists, when you have a strong quality, let's say a man who's hyper masculine, who's so tough and rugged, you can bet that underneath it is an insecurity, is a feminine streak that he is afraid of revealing. So when people reveal a strong quality, such as defensiveness, such as resistance, such as puritanical things, such as virtue signaling, such as I'm the saint and everybody else is evil, you can bet that lurking underneath is a deep, deep insecurity of I'm actually the opposite. I'm hiding the opposite. And the sense of being inauthentic, of repressing a part of ourself, is very painful. That secret self, I call it the lost self. It wants to come out, it wants to play. It wants to be like that child and go out and play and be in the world. And so when somebody enters your life who touches upon that, who has a little bit of that dark energy, and you fall for it, it's because you've been repressing it, and it's secretly what you want. Very much so. I think people secretly want to be seduced now. And I see signs of it in our culture. I've seen signs of it in politics. You find a. What's the word? Well, like a charismatic politician. There's a word I can't seem to my mind is a little bit slow today that has this sort of strong
- [14:26]
Tom Bilyeu
quality, like a demagogue.
- [14:28]
Robert Greene
Demagogue. Thank you. Thank you, God. You have to be my brain today because sometimes it's like not clicking there. So the demagogue. We're attracted to the demagogue because secretly we want that kind of. Of power. We want that dark side to come out and to play. It's all through our culture. Entertainment is reeking with this stuff. You know, you have in movies, if you want to talk about vampires and going back to your vampire thing, all of the evil characters, the seducers, yes. In the movie, we may moralize them. We may say they're awful, they're horrible, we hate them. But, boy, all of our attention is drawn immediately to those dark, evil characters, to those seducers, to those people who have that dark energy. People are dying for it. You know, it's been repressed and it's what I wrote about in human nature, about the dark side, our shadow that we're trying to repress.
- [15:21]
Tom Bilyeu
Is seduction necessarily a dark energy?
- [15:27]
Robert Greene
It has to involve some kind of sense of danger of something that's a little bit naughty. So if I want to pick up a woman and I go to a bar, just throwing out a scenario here, and it's so easy, I don't even have to buy her a drink, she follows me. Oh, yes, of course, Robert, I'll go home with you. Yes, yes. You're so attracted. Blah, blah, blah. There's no interest there. There's no excitement, there's no spark. But a bit of resistance, a bit of, I'm not so interested. Oh, you know, I already have a boyfriend, blah, blah, blah. Oh, my interest is going like that. So we are by nature attracted to what we cannot have. And I explained why that is so in the laws of human nature on a chapter on the nature of our desire. Things that we can have or that we don't have excite our desire more than anything else. So a sense of resistance, a sense that we're not supposed to have this person or that they're not supposed to have us is exactly what entices us into it. So if there's no element of naughtiness, if there's no element of a slight taboo or transgressive nature, it's not going to get our juices going, Our erotic, our fantasy juices and all that other stuff.
- [16:40]
Tom Bilyeu
Like, my wife and I are very much in another era. My opening line to my wife was, you're not going anywhere. Sit your ass down. And when I said that I was her teacher, school for adults. I always feel important to say that, yeah, I was her teacher and my opening line was playfully aggressive, but aggressive. And it that our courtship was very much like textbook seduction. And it was awesome and amazing and also now so high risk that I don't know that I would have made that move now. And so, you know, look to your point, maybe over enough time this plays out that people push back against it.
- [17:25]
Robert Greene
And, well, they already are.
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Tom Bilyeu
But what do you say to people in this moment?
- [17:31]
Robert Greene
Well, yeah, there are boundaries you have to respect and you. And it is a cultural moment. And first of all, there is nothing in the art of seduction that ever even comes close to advocating violence or rape or forcing yourself or coercion. Yes, some of it's psychological, and I know it kind of teeters on that boundary where you're psychologically manipulating someone to a degree, but there's Never any element of physical force. Right. So I understand. Personally, I don't think that that is seductive to be forcing yourself on it to be that, you know, overpowering, I think is. Is not seductive because seduction is inviting the other person. And it's a gentleness that brings them in. Later on, the powerful stuff can come in, but you have to be able to. To see those codes and respect them. So there's nothing in the art of seduction that would ever violate that code, I think so. I know there's a chapter in the. In the strategy part, the second half of the book, that people point out as kind of evil. And I admit it's a little bit teetering towards that, which is about isolating the other person. So you kind of take them to a place where their family and their friends. There's nobody around. They don't have anybody else but you. Right. And it could be an island, it could be a place, or it could be just literally where you take. Get them away from their familiar surroundings. And when they're in unfamiliar territory, they become much more vulnerable. Now, I understand there's an element you would never, ever start out of seduction with that strategy. I have those in order. It's like strategy number 17 of 24. It's towards the end, it's towards. When you've gotten them, you cast a spell, and they're hooked a little bit toward. Okay, so in the beginning, you're respecting all of that, but as long as there's never any taint of force of coercion, because that's what the MeToo movement was about. Because men were exploiting, and in a bad way and not in a seductive way, were using their positions of power to get women to do sexual favors or to harass them in some way. There's nothing seductive about that. There's nothing in my book about that. So if you're reading the book, you don't have to be afraid of violating any of MeToo tenants. In fact, the opposite, because the fifth chapter or so is Enter their spirit. It's all about being incredibly, incredibly receptive to who they are as an individual. Right. And knowing how to give the right gifts and how to see them for who they are, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it's the reputation of seduction that some people are like, think, oh, I don't want anything to do with that. In fact, the book is banned. My book is banned in Germany. They pulled it off the shelf. German people are writing to me all the time. How can I get a Copy of
- [20:27]
Tom Bilyeu
your book, specifically the Art of Seduction.
- [20:29]
Robert Greene
Yes.
- [20:30]
Tom Bilyeu
Interesting. Do you have any sense of why
- [20:33]
Robert Greene
feminists in Germany were protesting it, feminists in France were protesting it. And I wrote a letter to my French publisher explaining why that's ridiculous. They published it and the whole furor died down because it is ridiculous.
- [20:47]
Tom Bilyeu
Did they say why?
- [20:49]
Robert Greene
Well, they found it psychologically manipulative. So a man who is like that. There's another word I'm missing. But who could be like that? This is a book that could help him figure out the various tactics for misleading a woman and leading her into, you know, like, grooming her for some kind of relationship she's going to regret. You know, first of all, that makes women seem like these weak little fragile little dolls from the 19th century that need all of this protection from the. From the evil man. But in fact, if you, you know, my book explains to you how a seducer works, and it gives you the knowledge for how to resist him, how to recognize somebody who might be using some of these tactics, and in a way that's going to be dangerous for you. And I've had women write to me and tell me that the book has helped them immensely in understanding that. Then I'm not weak. I can figure out, I can identify a seducer, et cetera, et cetera. I can protect myself. I have the inner strength to be able to do that. So I think the book kind of fed into this idea that I was giving instruction. But half the book is about women seducing men, which is the absurdity. I have gay seductions. I have a transgender seduction. It's not a book about men seducing women with their dark energy. It's about seduction in general. The whole psychological process. It's part of our culture where we're infantilizing people. Well, we don't think that they're adults. And I assume that my readers are adults, that they can use the book for whatever purpose they can. And a lot of it is to give them knowledge that will help them defend themselves against people who have bad intentions. Yeah.
- [22:37]
Tom Bilyeu
I also think it's important for people to understand the way the world works. And the reality is, while a lot of the human animal makes us uncomfortable, the human animal is what the human animal is. And while anybody listening, I will tell you it will blow your hair back. But I highly encourage people to read A Billion Wicked Thoughts. It is what people search for when they're searching for pornography is. Is hair raising. It is really pretty eye opening. It is shocking. And that's just who we are so under the hood is a monkey brain that is worrying and has had, you know, millions of years of evolution and we think that we've escaped all that, but we haven't. So. And I'll contextualize my own thoughts on this subject by saying I used to be the nice guy. And I'm very curious to know if you think nice guys finish last. I will say they do. I certainly did when I was, when I was playing, when I was using the tactics of a nice guy. Now, nice guy carries weird connotations today, probably rightly so, in that quote unquote. Nice guys, I think are powerless. They don't understand the game. You actually had a quote. I can get really close if I have to paraphrase. But the idea being that powerlessness corrupts more than power.
- [24:05]
Robert Greene
Yeah, it's a quote of Malcolm X, actually.
- [24:08]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, tell me more.
- [24:10]
Robert Greene
Well, so we all desire a degree of power and control in life. And you have to understand the word power is not just like about politics or about Elon Musk or anything. I'm talking about in our day to day lives, right? How we interact with people. The sense that I cannot influence my boss, my colleagues, my wife, my children, the people around me is deeply, deeply miserable for us, right. It makes us feel powerless. And when we're powerless, we either we turn in on ourselves, we end up hating ourselves and we get depressed, or we become passive aggressive and we start manipulating other people in ways in which we can justify to ourselves as, oh no, I'm not really doing that. I'm actually a good person. But it actually can be very, very harmful. So you have to admit that you want a degree of power, you want the ability to influence people. And you're not going to be hypocritical, you're going to be honest with yourself. You know, niceness is, okay, is a good quality if it's under control, if you understand it and if you use it and you know how to use it strategically and it's maybe it's a part of your personality and it's authentic, but it doesn't govern you. You are in control of it. And what happens is if you're the pleasing type, which is your whole strategy in life is pleasing other people, getting them to like you, which is, you know, a quality that a lot of people have, men and women, right. It doesn't come from a place of security. It comes from a place of deep, deep insecurity. And you're not, you don't understand really who you are. And so you can't control it. And so you're always trying to please people. And when we can sense, we can smell people's insecurities. And when it comes to like seduction with between men and women, women have a sixth sense of they can smell an insecure man, right? And you can, they can smell it in you. They can smell it in all kinds of ways. And trying so hard to please and trying so hard to be nice secretly indicates that you're actually very weak inside. And it's very much a turn off. It's very anti seductive. And so you want to be nice, but you want to be strategic about it. You want to know, sometimes I don't want to be nice. Sometimes I want to create boundaries, sometimes I want to pull back. I want to play the coquette. I want the woman to know she can't take me for granted, right? I'm not interested in her. The moment you show her that you're not interested in her, she's going to be much more interested in you. You're willing to play a little bit that tough part of it. You're in control, you're strategic. You know when to use absence and when to use presence, when to text them and call them and when to disappear for a couple, a week or so and make them feel like they don't, you know, they, they can't take you for granted. So know when to be nice and you can use it to effect. But you also know when I don't want to be nice in this world. And that pertain to all sorts of situations in negotiation, etc. If you're always so nice in business, you're going to be a doom, you're not going to survive very long.
- [27:23]
Tom Bilyeu
I come at this from a evolutionary perspective. And so the reason, because I was so bad with women for so long and then figured out how to quote unquote, play the game and it worked literally on a dime from what, literally from one day to the next, I could not be successful with women to. I felt like within my sexual market value, let me not oversell this, but within my sexual market value I could be successful sort of when I wanted to be. And it, it was so, it was such a set of rules that I was following that I actually had to laugh out loud. I was like, I cannot believe it took me this long to just figure out that, oh, I have to present myself a certain way, that you don't want to go for the clothes right away, that you really. This is about a strategic revealing of your Personality. It's about understanding what's going to get them exciting. You might hate this description, but it's marketing. Once you understand that you're a brand, you have to establish what your brand means. You have to make them feel some kind of way about you. The way that you're establishing your brand better be real. And one of the things I'm sure we'll talk about today is I take all of this. I've been married to the Same Woman for 21 years. We've been together for 23. To me, we had to seduce each other in the beginning. And then at some point that becomes a deep long term pair bond, which is a totally different game. And I really hope everybody can get good at both games because that's really how you end up having an amazing love life that will ride with you through the ups and downs. But seduction is real. People need to stop pretending that it's not. From my perspective, this is based on evolution that women. And it's interesting because I think you push back a little bit on looking at the 30,000 foot view of men and women. I'll make a case for it. If you hate it, tell me you hate it. But here's my case. There's a quote, I forget who it's by. Forgive me, whoever said this, this is a paraphrase. Any individual woman is a mystery, but taken as a whole, they're a mathematical certainty. It was technically said about men, but you get the idea. That makes sense to me. And so I. You're right. Like ultimately I had to figure out my wife. I didn't just have to figure out women as a general thing, I had to figure out my wife. But every time I think of my wife as thinking like me, I can't predict her behavior. The second I lump her in the mathematical certainty of women are like this, then I'm way closer to being able to predict her behaviors. And so I think it's very important to understand the distinction between how men think and how women think. What we fantasize about, how we approach sex, what we think of as seductive.
- [30:02]
Robert Greene
But you're not going to get that from a book so you can read all of the facts about this is how women think, etc. Etc. The best way to do that is by observing them. So if you pay attention to the person that you're trying to, if you take, if you start paying attention to women as young, at the earliest possible age, you will see these qualities in them. You will see the fact that they are interested more in Stories that, that they want, that they don't want to be, feel like it's just about sex and you're in a hurry to get them to that point. These aren't great mysteries that you need to read from a book. It's pretty clear if you pay attention, right? So I just want to get men out of the mo because we are so goddamn analytical. It's such a problem that reading a book, reading a text, having algorithms is the only way we can think. Get the fuck out of there and pay attention to the person. Develop your mirror neurons, develop your observational skills. Develop the human part of you that observes, that feels what the other person is feeling. If you depend so much on things that you've learned from the art of seduction or from a book, it's going to make you a bad seducer. But to the degree that you can click into those human qualities that we all possess, where you sense the emotional tone of the other person, you sense what their vulnerable vulnerabilities, you sense what they're missing in Life. Yes, maybe 60% of women are missing a similar thing. There are patterns to. And maybe reading about it can kind of click that into you. Okay, fine, I'm not going to say that that's all bad. But the main thing you want is to be getting out of your head and into your emotions and into observing and into feeling what the other person is feeling and not being so head oriented and not being so analytical, you know, that I think is the main problem that a lot of men face day or night.
- [31:55]
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- [32:53]
Tom Bilyeu
It's really interesting. My experience was I needed to understand it analytically because I didn't have the intuition for it. And it may be That I just didn't. Look, I don't believe people are born with intuition. I think that it develops over time. So for whatever weird reason, the intuition I developed was that if I wrote poetry and showed up with flowers on the first date, which I actually did multiple times, that that would get me somewhere, and it did not get me anywhere. I was actually once. This is where you asked any kids listening in the car to you turn the radio down, whatever. But this is a true story. I was in bed with a woman. We were getting naked. We were rounding third base. And I managed to mess that up because I displayed what I will call at a moment where I should have been confident and masculine. You might hate that word. But I displayed what I will now. God, I don't even like saying this out loud. But it's true. I displayed a more feminine trait and was like, let's not go any farther unless this means something, which isn't what I was feeling. Those exact words, which isn't what I was feeling. It was what I thought she wanted to hear.
- [34:05]
Robert Greene
Yeah.
- [34:06]
Tom Bilyeu
And it was not. And it put the brakes on the whole situation.
- [34:09]
Robert Greene
Well, it's very easy to explain why that would happen because that makes her think that, oh, maybe he's not so into it. Maybe I'm not that attractive. Women secretly want to feel that you desire them, that you're. That she is so attractive that you're going to lose control. And you didn't lose control in that moment and you blew it. You fucked it up. So it's very obvious why that didn't work.
- [34:29]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, obvious to you. Now, where were you back then, Robert Greene? Because I still want to punch myself in the mouth for that entire evening. Well, so, yeah, lesson learned.
- [34:40]
Robert Greene
We've all made mistakes like that.
- [34:41]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, I'm going to guess that that one's pretty. So what I had to really begin to understand was what women actually were going to respond to and not the terrible assumptions that I had built up in my mind. And what I began to realize is that there are things that women want that don't. They are not the same as what I want. And so when I started realizing, okay, making that person, my, like what you just said, you're losing control making. And that's where I think you get like the billionaire archetype of, okay, this is somebody that has everything that is normally this. You actually talk about this in your book. You say, normally men get completely lost in what I think you refer to as masculine pursuits. And so I read that to mean hyper pursuit in Business being myopically focused on something, working yourself to death. Which certainly resonates with the life my wife is living right now, where I, I work an obscene amount. Now if you ask my wife what does she want, she'll say quality time. Which is another way of saying, I want this person who's made a ton of money, who's at the top of the business heap. I want him to stop all of that because I'm so irresistible that he's only going to pay attention to me. And the way that makes her feel when I'm just completely focused on her. I'm not touching my phone, I'm not. My mind isn't wandering. I am locked in on her. I'm making her feel physically attractive. I'm making her feel the truth, which is she is my mental equal. Like all of that, that she's a woman I have to contend with, that she's captured my imagination. That she has taken this wild stallion, as evidenced in. And I don't mean stallion, studly. I just mean this unbroken cult that is, you know, off running in the world of business. She's gotten a saddle on me, slowed me down, got me to pay attention to her. I mean, this is the Beauty and the Beast mythology where she is so special that she has been able to capture the attention of the person who's never had their attention captured before. Now, I've never thought about this before. I've only ever told my wife that I love you. I've never told that to another woman because I was never in love before. So for my wife it really was the what in literary circles they call, in erotic literary circles they call the magic hoo hair. So for my wife, she was the only one that was able to break me out of that. She's the only person that's ever gotten me to slow down on my ambition to pay attention to her. And once I could see it from not just my wife's perspective, but the general. That's what women are looking for, perspective. And I was like, oh wow. Like I really get now why she wants my attention. That that isn't something I should be frustrated by. That. Yeah, this is even now, 23 years in, it's a seductive tool that I can play, which is. You've completely captured my attention. Like if I see my wife and she's looking good, I'm going to stop whatever I'm doing and tell her and make sure she knows and feels it viscerally. And all of that required me to understand just the psychology of the whole
- [37:52]
Robert Greene
situation, I have no problem with that. Is this something that I seem to have disagreed with?
- [37:59]
Tom Bilyeu
No, not at all.
- [38:00]
Robert Greene
Okay.
- [38:00]
Tom Bilyeu
That's just me appealing to the nice guys out there. Of. I get you. Either may. It may be insecurity, which mine was certainly driven by that, or you may think it's a winning strategy. I get that. But it isn't.
- [38:16]
Robert Greene
Well, one thing that I think is very seductive that I can point out here, and it has a little bit to do with what you're saying, what I call generosity. Generosity is a very powerful, seductive quality. It doesn't mean money, as you might necessarily assume it can mean money, but it means that you're generous with your attention, you're generous with what you're giving to the other person. Right. So the main thing for a man who's. We tend to be very linear, focused, mono focused on this one thing, and there's an evolutionary reason for that. For tens of thousands of years hunting, we had to just focus on one thing. Women were focusing on many different things at the same time. You know, they could multitask. We can't. So getting out of that mono rail that you're in with your attention and being able to give to the other person and give them attention and in the initial phases, shower them with the attention that they're not getting from other people. Although you can go a little too far with that. So you sometimes you have to step back and kind of be absent for a little bit so they don't feel like it's. You're not like a stalker. You're not like. It doesn't come from an insecure place, you're in control of it. But the sense of being generous with your personality, with the time, with the attention you get is incredibly, incredibly seductive. The sense that you're not generous and stingy with money. You, like, take them to a cheap restaurant, you ask them to pay. You're kind of, you know, that's a sign that you're not generous in general. So maybe that's part of the billionaire appeal, where you assume that that person's going to be very generous, at least with their money. So the sense of being closed inside yourself and stingy and not wanting to give to the other person, give of your time, your attention, your money, all these other things, that is deeply, deeply anti seductive.
- [40:16]
Tom Bilyeu
What do you. Do you think that we're living in a time right now that is complicated in a negative way by changing gender norms?
- [40:30]
Robert Greene
I don't know if I want to get into that. That hornet's nest. But, you know, in seduction, I make it clear, and I made it clear in my Human Nature book, that we're a mix of qualities, that nobody is completely masculine and no woman is completely feminine. Men have feminine qualities, women have masculine qualities. Some men have more feminine qualities than masculine. Some women were a mix. It's a chemical thing, and there's no way to predict that. Right. And it's always been that way. But there's ways that kind of element of androgyny, for instance, can be very, very seductive and very powerful if you know how to use it. Right. So I'm not going to say that that's overly complicating things. In fact, the sense of kind of crossing boundaries with gender is actually a sign of some of the periods in history where things. Where things were the most open to seduction. So for centuries, women could not seduce men. And I can delineate that period, I mean, going through all throughout ancient history, and I talk about it in my new book, because to be interested in a woman so much that you wanted to give them attention and time meant that you were feminine. Right. And men were masculine, they were warriors, et cetera, et cetera. They weren't interested in the inner worlds of women. Women were there to clean the house and to make babies, essentially. So seduction was not something that really existed in the ancient world, except with some exceptions like Cleopatra, etc. So the idea that you're interested in a woman and in her world is already admitting there's a feminine element within you. And so I look at moments in history, and I just wrote about this, like in the Middle Ages, where our whole notion of love came from at least the Western notion. Or you look in the 18th century, the grand epic of seduction with Casanova and all those characters. You look at the 1920s in America and in Europe, a period of incredible sexual energy, freedom and seduction. These were periods where there was a lot of androgyny going on. So I don't necessarily think that that's something that's going to limit the seductive qualities and the energy that's in the atmosphere. I think what's hindering us is not the gender norms. It's more our kind of defensiveness, our closed spirit, our desire to be completely in control of our circumstances by withdrawing into our egos and being afraid of being hurt, being afraid of being wrong, being afraid of not being strong, et cetera, et cetera. I think that has more an inhibiting factor on seduction in the world.
- [43:22]
Tom Bilyeu
Why do you think young people are having so much less sex right now.
- [43:29]
Robert Greene
Well, for men, a lot of it has to do with porn. I mean, I'm not sure. I'm not a scientist, I'm not a sociologist, but that would be my estimation, where first of all, they're having a lot of sex, virtually. And second of all, their idea of sex and what is pleasurable, what a woman should be like, comes from those ideals in pornography and the look, etc. Etc. And so it's not as much of a need for them, et cetera, to kind of physically, we've become much more virtual in how we get pleasure in life. Also, I think there's an element of fear, as I said. I mean, young people have grown up in these periods of massive economic instability. They've had to deal with the 08 collapse, with the pandemic and everything that's happened there. So they've had to deal with circumstances that are very powerful and that are going to make them anxious, as well as all of the helicopter parenting that many of them had to live through. So they're filled with much more anxiety right now than I think in my generation. And that anxiety makes you want to kind of retreat into your own inner world and having sex, at least for a man. And you can probably relate to this. It's a feeling of you're almost like. It's almost like too much. You're almost like weak afterwards. You're almost like afraid of it. You're afraid of the power that a woman has over you. Right. You obviously get over that very quickly and you deal with it. But there's an element of fear involved. And especially when you're an adolescent, especially when it's when you're younger. And so I think the levels of fear and anxiety that young people are having in the world, and rightly so, I don't condemn that for that, is probably why there's less physical, sexual and psychological interactions with members of the opposite sex.
- [45:29]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, I think it's inevitably going to be a very complicated issue. And like you, I'm not a scientist, but I am always willing to talk about things that I know nothing about, just to walk people through how I think about a problem. So looking at it, I think that a big part of the problem is what you were talking about with insecurity. I think that the way the world is set up right now, whether it's pornography, whether it is a society that's really spent the last several decades telling men that they. Their masculine impulses are bad, and for better or worse, I think that Sexuality, male sexuality is tied up in power. And I think sex itself is. Dances around power dynamics. It's one of the. The main things in female erotica is power dynamics. And it. Man, you want to dive into a hornet's nest like power dynamics. People get real weird about this subject. But with all of that, if men are either because the economy is weird and they're not able to get on the property ladder and they've got, you know, $180,000 in debt and they don't feel like they're going anywhere and they're lost in a sense of hopelessness. They have easy access to pornography. They're just not feeling powerful. And if they're not feeling powerful, then they're going to struggle to feel confident in the bedroom. And I mean, just to really put it all out there, I think a guy has to feel confident and powerful, not in a weird, like, I'm a dominant way, but strong and confident, rooted in his body and feeling good about himself to get and maintain an erection. Like, you're not going to see a lot of people who are insecure, scared, sporting erections. Those are sort of flip sides.
- [47:21]
Robert Greene
Take a lot of Viagra or something, I guess.
- [47:23]
Tom Bilyeu
But do you really think, I don't know, like, I would be surprised. It just. That puts you in. And also just bodies, right? So diet, nutrition now are so horrible that I have to imagine a lot of people are just physically not in a place where they're feeling good about themselves. You wrap that all up and you get to what I'm sure is the tip of a very large iceberg that I've grossly oversimplified.
- [47:46]
Robert Greene
But no, no, no, I think you, you touched upon a point that's very valid. And I didn't touch upon it, I think is very true, is that it's not a good time to be a man right now. It's very confusing. You know, our role models are very mixed up. We don't really know what is a positive virtue for a man. We think that we look at somebody like Andrew Tate as possibly an icon, at least a lot of young people do, which I don't at all. I think it's really gross and vulgar and full of all kinds of insecurities. A man like that, a kind of an icon, sort of a sense of strength from either a political figure, a leader or an actor or anything that used to be in the culture. We don't really have that. And men are seen as something kind of ugly in our culture. You know, it seems like ugly energy that comes from men. And every time I read the newspaper, I see that kind of. That kind of slant on things. Anytime a man is sort of revealing a kind of atavistic trait of being kind of dominant and strong. Ew. Ugly. Oh, he's, you know, he's awful. He's. He's primitive. He's not, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's very, very confusing. And I remember being a young man myself growing up. I'm such an old person that I can remember, like, the late 60s, you know, and it was kind of confusing then. And I was struggling, and I had a good role model with my father. He was very. He was very gentle, but he was also quite masculine, etc. And I remember being confused about it and kind of straining and trying to find a proper masculine role model. And it was a struggle. And I found it sometimes with my teachers and my professors in school and other people I later gravitated to. But the sense of this is what it means to be a man. These are good qualities. The quality of being a leader, of being strong, of even being kind of dominant and being able to dominate a group and dominate a room or to be so powerful that your voice can carry. These are all positive traits. We wouldn't be here right now, Tom, talking, you and I, if men didn't have those traits, right? If they didn't have the courage to face, you know, enemies with spears, etc. Etc. These are all positive qualities. Just have to be channeled in socially productive ways, which is what an Andrew Tate doesn't do. But if only we could craft a Frankenstein monster of what an ideal male figure would be like, it would be very, very helpful for young men. And I don't mean to craft it in a fantasy way. It would be great if there were really people like that, you know, in this world today. So, you know, to me, a masculine quality is a kind of inner strength, a confidence that doesn't need to yell, it doesn't need to scream, it doesn't need to bully people. It's just so strong that people are attracted to it. And it emanates. It radiates itself, and people can feel it, you know, so you don't have to yell at someone. I remember when I was at. On the board of directors of American Apparel and the CEO who we ended up firing, he was a good friend of mine. He's brilliant in some things, but he could. He was yelling at people left, right and center. He thought that's what power is. That's what being masculine is. And I thought it just showed incredible weakness, the ability to set an example, to tell people this is how you should be, by how I'm behaving, etc. Taking responsibility, that's a masculine quality, not blaming other people. We need to redefine what it means to be masculine and what are the positive aspects of it I think is very, very critical for our culture.
- [51:25]
Tom Bilyeu
Talk to me about aggression. I think men should have a gear that is aggressive, should be a gear. I don't think they should live there. What do you think?
- [51:37]
Robert Greene
Completely. I mean, and you know, my wife can attest to this. I'm an insanely competitive person, right? To the degree that it's almost maybe unhealthy, right? So like I'm bicycling up a hill and people pass me. God damn it, you can't pass me. I'm going to pass you. Even though right now I can't because I'm physically weaker. I'm still trying to do that on my stupid recumbent bike, et cetera. I'm very, very competitive. And that competitive energy I think a lot of men have, it's what directs us towards sports, you know, and I'm a sports addict, etc. Being competitive is allied with being ambitious and getting back to seduction. A man who seems ambitious is very, very seductive. And having no ambition is very unmasculine and very anti seductive. But we see the word ambition as being kind of ugly, as if it's like egocentric, as if it's selfish. But dammit, this world was built by people who are ambitious. They've created it, right? You wouldn't be here, you wouldn't have the Internet, you wouldn't have all your little tools that you whine and complain about if it weren't for people who were incredibly ambitious. Ambitious people have created the world. So men have aggressive energy. It's the testosterone flowing through us, right? You can't repress it, you can't get rid of it. It's there. And how you channel it is the key. You can become very self destructive, you can channel it towards violence, you can channel it towards pushing people around. Or you can say, I'm going to channel it towards being competitive, towards being the best person at what I'm doing. We talked, I think last time I was here, when I talk about the human nature, we talked about Kobe Bryant, a man who had a dark side. He is so competitive to the degree where it could have killed him. It was just awful. And he acknowledges it. He channeled it into the basketball court, and it made him fantastic, made him the one of the greatest players ever. It's how you take that energy, that testosterone, that aggression and what you do with it, that's the critical factor. And that's where I think a lot of men are confused about it.
- [53:47]
Tom Bilyeu
I think that if you want to do something extraordinary with your life, you are going to have to find that aggressive gear. You certainly, in the business world, if you want to do something, you are going to have to be able to create momentum. And creating momentum requires you to overcome the universe's tendency towards chaos. Everything is working against you. It just. It's. I mean, it's the second law of thermodynamics that everything moves towards chaos. And when you think about that chaos being your competitors trying to outperform you, one thing, if you're in the game long enough that generations change wildly. And so what worked 10 years ago, just psychologically, is not the right move anymore. And you have to constantly reposition yourself. And so things are always fighting against you. And. And the only way to overcome that, I have found, is to have a sort of maniacal, aggressive quality. And, you know, look, I'm well aware that Elon Musk is a very controversial figure, but he's somebody that understands how to channel the aggression to get things done. And if you read the biography written about him from Walter Isaacson, that's one thing that comes through real clear, is he's got that gear where he is aggressive, he's biting, he's going to fire people, torture room, like, whatever it takes to get on the other side of that. And there's an awesome quote by George Bernard Shaw, which is, the reasonable man conforms to the world. The unreasonable man insists on trying to get the world to conform to him. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. And that quote is exactly what I mean when I say people need to be aggressive. Like, you're going to have to be unreasonable, and you're going to have to find a gear in you to actually see it come true. Because you can't. Just like you were talking about with the CEO of American Apparel, you can't just run around yelling. That's not what it is. Yelling is a tool. And I would keep it in your arsenal because there are times. But just the ferocity. In fact, ferocity, that. That is the word that sings most clearly to my heart. Men have to be able to channel
- [55:54]
Robert Greene
that ferocity, and it has to be under control. So in life, you have to be a strategist. You can't just, you can't just depend on energy and domineering and aggression. It has to be something that you can control and that to channel it means that you have the willpower and the ability, the self awareness to know. I need to channel it, I need to put it into, into this direction or that direction. Sometimes in life I need to step back and do a kind of Chinese strategy of, of no. Of. I forget what the word is, but doing, taking no action at all. Sometimes you have to be like Bruce Lee and be formless, etc. Other times you need to have a form and be aggressive. The great leaders and a great masculine quality, and it comes from warfare is being strategic and is knowing what it fits the circumstance. So aggression has to be not just physical, it has to be intellectual, it has to be mental. And you have to. And part of that mental, part of that process is I have all of this energy. It's very powerful. I'm aware of it. How can I use it to best effect? You have to have some self detachment. Some of these leaders, like the man at American Apparel and even Milan Musk to some degree are not self aware. And it can be their Achilles heel. They can go too far. They don't know when to step back. They don't know how to put that, that iron fist inside of a velvet glove and be a little, you know, strategically, not in a weak sense. So to me, if I were to create that masculine virtue, that Frankenstein that I alluded to, it's a man who also knows how to be incredibly strategic about life and knows when to hit and when to pull back and when to be ferocious and when to be gentle and sweet, etcetera, and in control. In control of your energy. That is the key. You have it. So I compare it to a person who's riding a horse. I've. I've done this metaphor I don't even know on this show before, right? You are like a rider on top of a horse. The horse is your energy, is that aggressive, masculine energy. And horses are incredibly powerful animals, right? They have, they can, they can, they can go faster than any, almost any other animal. They're incredibly strong and powerful. You are the rider. If you let the horse just go anywhere, it's going to run off a cliff, it's going to throw you, it's going to kill you. But if you hold the reins too tight and you try and control everything that it does, the horse senses that you're weak and it won't follow you and it just Will sit down like, become stubborn like a mule. But if you know how to hold it kind of, and I used to ride horses, if you know how to hold it kind of firmly, but not too firmly, you know how to keep your thigh so it sense the horse knows that you're. They're directing it, then you have the power to guide it. And that is what I'm talking about. You have this energy, this strength, this ambition, this competitive desire. If you don't control it, it's going to run you into all kinds of problems. And Machiavelli, my mentor, talks about this a lot. What brings a man to power is often that. That id, that incredible undirected energy is so strong it makes. Makes him a prince, it makes him a CEO. But then once he arrives there and circumstances change and now he has to be a manager or now the world has changed, he can't shift. He only knows that one gear and it ends up destroying him. Machiavelli's ideal in mind as well is a man who understands how to shift with the times. Knows that what I was my aggressive energy isn't going to always work and I need to be able to take it a step back, etc. Etc. And that was what was wrong with the American Apparel CEO. He only had one gear. He only had to go one direction. He didn't know how to kind of deviate and how to move with the times. It wasn't 2006 anymore where everything was about sexy clothes and shorts. In the 80s, things were moving and changing. Adapt with the times being fluid and formless and having that water quality that Bruce Lee talks about. I mean, martial artists have probably the best way of channeling that aggressive energy. To me, that's almost perhaps in some ways the perfect metaphor here for it. Because you can't be a master in martial arts if you haven't mastered yourself and your brain and your energy. You have to master yourself and then you can kick butt in any kind of encounter or battle.
- [60:29]
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- [60:59]
Tom Bilyeu
That's one thing I like about the Bruce Lee quote. His whole quote Is, well, the ending part of the quote that people often quote. They truncate it and they just say, be like water. But what he says was, be like water. It can flow or crash. And so the idea that, yeah, there are times where you need to be gentle, and then there are times where you really do need to be forceful. And we have. There's a cultural message that says being forceful, like you said, is icky. It's gross that the natural tendencies that men have are bad and they need to back off. I. Yeah. Public service announcement. Don't do that now. Don't be a. Don't lose control, as you're saying. You really do have to know when to yield what weapon. And I'll quote something that Jordan Peterson said. I think this is really smart, even if it doesn't end up being the literal translation. But he said the Bible says the meek shall inherit the earth. And he could never wrap his head around that, as neither could I. If you interpret meek as weak, and it's like, that's just not how life works. The weak will suffer as they must, and the strong will do what they will. And he said there's an ancient Greek translation of the word meek that basically means the person who is good with a sword but keeps it sheathed. So. And this is something that an MMA trainer, Faras Zahabi, who used to train George St. Pierre, may still train him. He said to me was, you know, I. I wanted to get good at fighting so that if I ever backed down from a fight, it was my choice, and I wasn't doing it out of cowardice.
- [62:38]
Robert Greene
Yeah, yeah.
- [62:38]
Tom Bilyeu
And I was like, whoa. So, yeah, if you are good with a sword, can defend yourself, have that aggressive killer inside, but keep it tamed, keep it under wraps, then you've really got a shot. But even just looking at. And I don't know if you watched any of the footage, and I am certainly not encouraging people to. But I saw some of the footage of October 7th, and, bro, like, just realizing death is violent. Death is a tearing of the body. Like it. There. There is just a moment where you may encounter violence of such high consequence, such terror, such violent ending of life, that if you don't have a gear of, like, I'm here to up like you, you are in real trouble. They're. They're. Unfortunately, we are not at the end of history, and it is entirely possible that someone bad comes for you and you better be ready.
- [63:37]
Robert Greene
Yeah, I mean, geez. I mean, I. I couldn't look at that footage and you know, being Jewish and all that, it's just.
- [63:44]
Tom Bilyeu
It's.
- [63:44]
Robert Greene
I can't even go there.
- [63:45]
Tom Bilyeu
I get it.
- [63:46]
Robert Greene
But more likely I go Back to the 48 laws of power in that most of us aren't going to face that kind of Flight 91 type scenario where we're confronting, although in America now with all the guns, you never know. But most of us aren't going to confront that. What you're going to confront is that ugly energy that you find in the office, that you find in business, where you find people who are duplicitous, who have bad intentions, who want to fuck you over in some way or other, right? But they're smiling, they seem to be on your side, they've got money, they've got funding, they seem like a legitimate person. And then you find out that they're not what you thought they were. And so if you enter life being naive, thinking that appearances are what people are, that people aren't necessarily so tricky. If you're not willing to look behind and see what's behind the mask, then you are in for a life of pain. And so the violence that we're facing in the world today is not the violence that ancient Romans faced on the battlefield. You know, with knives, with swords going directly into your chest. I mean, come on, who could face that now? But we face veiled violence. We face people who don't. Who don't want to hurt you physically, but they're going to hurt you mentally. They're going to play with you, right? And so you have to be strong, strategic. You have to understand the game. You have to understand the laws of power. You have to understand that there are some people who have bad intentions. And I say the percentage of them are like 5%. They're certainly not 95%. Most people are decent, are meek in a way. You know, they're not lions. They're more like sheep. But those 5% can ruin your life. And they're everywhere around you and, you know, have. You have to be strong and you have to defend yourself. So you're not going to maybe face the terror, but you're going to face a kind of psychological terror that if you enter the world and you're 22 and you're not prepared for it, and you think everything is just sweet and nice because that's how you've been brought up. You know, everyone is. If they appear to be virtuous, they are virtuous, which is you're gonna. You're gonna be in a lot of pain. And you're gonna suffer for it, and you're gonna be fired, and you're gonna end up being 35, and you don't know where your career is going. You don't realize you took a wrong turn because you were naive. So, to me, it's more the psychological terror and dangers that we face more than the physical ones.
- [66:20]
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting to me, it is a similar part of the psyche. You said that. Who could deal with that now, the getting stabbed in the chest. I'm very grateful that at least here, that's so rare, that we effectively just don't think about it. But I do worry that that is a void that will be exploited by people that are more than prepared to come and actually stab you in the chest. How do you think about that? Do you. Do you ever allow yourself to think on the darker side of things and say, men really need to get back to that kind of core strength? Or. Or are you glad that that has quote, unquote, passed?
- [67:04]
Robert Greene
Well, you know, it's easy to say because I don't have to go on a battlefield with the Roman legions and face that, even though I'm wearing some degree of armor, you know, so I can write about Napoleon and I can fantasize about all the drama, because Napoleon is a figure that I think is extremely exciting and interesting from a strategic point of view. And bullets are flying and people are dying and horses are there, and it's blood everywhere. It's chaos and smoke. You know, it's easy for me to say, sitting in my comfortable chair, you know, to write about that is one thing. What would I be like? And I often ask myself, would I be one of those cowards, or would I be someone who would face the bullets? And I. I'm under the illusion that I would be relatively brave on a battlefield like that. Because in life, when I have faced people who are dicks, who are trying to hurt me, I've been very. I know how to push back. I've been strong. It's not the same as a battlefield, but I feel like I have a degree of fearlessness in that I don't care what happens. In fact, I'm willing to die. You know, I don't care. So, you know, when I was writing the Laws of Human Nature, I had a feeling like I'm killing myself writing this book because it's too much. I can't make it. And in the end, I nearly did. I practically killed myself. I came this close to dying, right? But I did it. I didn't Pull back. I didn't follow my doctor's advice, didn't follow my wife's advice, because, damn it, I have to do this, and I don't care. So have an element of I don't care. And I think that's an important part of courage in life, where you're willing to. You don't really care about the consequences. You have to do something, and it's important that you do it. And if it hurts you physically, so be it. That's the nature of it. But I can romanticize that battlefield aspect of it, and I can think that really facing that physically really would strengthen you. It would be an insane experience. But I think of it like the. The toughness, the mental aspect is to me, the most important part of it, you know, so I'm very interested in sports. Kind of takes up a lot of my free time is watching sports because it's pure strategy. And I'm just love strategy. And I love watching football, and I love the violence of it. And I love getting my neuron mirror neurons hit and, oh, wow, I just got tackled. And I love the strategic part of it, you know? And these men are facing the almost the equivalent of what a Roman legion is, because one wrong hit and they're. They could be paralyzed for life, you know. But what I love about sports is it's the mental aspect that makes you a great athlete, right? Yes. There's so many people in this country who have incredible physical talents, but it's the mental part that separates you. The ability to learn, the ability to deal with failure, to develop kind of toughness, to know how to channel those competitive instincts, to know how to always bring full energy and focus to each moment. Right. And so I may not be able to identify with the legionnaires of Caesar, but I identify with football players and the fact that they have to be very attuned to the moment in the flow, thinking like a quarterback. I mean, if you put yourself in the shoes of Patrick Mahomes in that moment and the amazing things he does because he's absolutely like a wizard on the football field. He's thinking, but he's thinking so quickly. These are the kind of qualities that I think are amazing. And I. And I really admire and I really envy. I wish I had that.
- [71:00]
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting. A lot of what we just talked about goes back to what you said about ambition is seductive. Why? Why do women find ambition seductive?
- [71:10]
Robert Greene
I think you'd have to go to evolutionary reasons. I think it goes back to something biological almost. It shows That a man can provide. He's, he's going to be someone who's going to make a good living. He can provide for me, he can take care of me. You know, I don't know how much of that is still alive in human psychology, but I believe that is the root of it. That a man who doesn't have ambition, I can't lean on him for support materially and psychologically. But an ambitious man, he may be uncontrollable, he may be a little bit dangerous, but damn it, he's going to be able to survive in a very tough world. And women know it's a tough world. And you know, sometimes they need that kind of powerful figure as a support in their life, even though they're often the breadwinners now. And they still have that desire for a man that shows that he can take care of himself, he can take care of his world, he can provide for them if they need it, etc.
- [72:23]
Tom Bilyeu
What's the difference between the way that a man would seduce a woman and the way that a woman would seduce a man?
- [72:31]
Robert Greene
Well, it's, it's, it's very elemental. I mean, it's. Of course, it depends on the circumstances. But as I outline the art of seduction, women will use the visual sense factors, the senses that men are so vulnerable to. You know, how they dress, how their body looks, their perfume, the sound of their voice. I say in the art of seduction that a woman's voice is perhaps one of the greatest under undervalued tools that a woman possesses. Men don't realize it, they don't think about it because they so think that they only are looking at like the physical component. But a woman's voice is very, very powerful. And I relate it to the voice of the mother in a kind of a sing song. Equality. And I have known women in my life who go, wow, that woman has an incredibly seductive voice. It's a very powerful tool. So men are drawn to those sense cues and they're almost like you can't control them. And women have learned over centuries how to appeal to that. They also know that men have a desire to pursue, to hunt, to go after something if that's the kind of man. Because some men are not like that. And so they know how to play the coquette. The coquette was a feminine invention. There are now men who are coquettes for sure, but the original coquettishness is a female quality of I make the man interested and then I pull back, he has to chase me because they Know, men love to chase. And if I show that I'm not interested in him, that excites his interest. So those are the ways that women will seduce a man. A man will seduce a woman by things we've already talked about. The quintessential male seducer is the rake. Doesn't seem like he'd be very, very attractive because he can only have as many women as he can find in his life, right? He's not willing to settle down. But when a rake is. Is interested in a woman, he's 100% attend attuned to them. He's in their world. He's listening to them for the one month or two month that he's with that woman. She is his whole life, right. And not in a scary sense, but in a very interesting poetic sense. He knows how to give the right kind of gifts. He knows to take her to the right places. He's very attentive. His energy is focused on her, and he knows how to lead. So leading is not just forcing someone. It's like I'm leading you into the story that I'm creating. I'm taking you to certain places, even literally to certain places, but I'm leading you down a path, and you're excited by the adventure and the mystery of where this is going. And so, you know, those are two different kind of stereotypical strategies that men versus women will utilize.
- [75:35]
Tom Bilyeu
I want to go back to what you were saying about the female voice. So this twice now, at least twice, where you've made reference to. They do something that is modeled after the mom or like the mom. Obviously there's the old phrase that men marry their mothers and women marry their fathers. I've never really liked that. It. I've always thought it might be closer to something like men marry women who make them feel the way their mom made them feel. See that? But what is it about the mom? How. Why would that be a positive seductive trigger?
- [76:11]
Robert Greene
Well, it's not necessarily positive, but it's uncontrollable. So a lot of our erotic desires, what we're interested in are things we cannot control that go back to our first years in life, right. And we're not even aware of it. We're not even conscious of it. And so the mother figure for a boy, for a male, is extremely powerful. It's extremely great because if you think about it, unlike a girl, our first years of our lives are completely involved, dependent on a woman, the opposite sex, Right. And so that has an extremely powerful impact on our personality. And we Internalize her image in our head, and that turns into what we Jung called the anim and animus. You might believe that it's just nonsense, but I happen to believe it's very, very real. It's very amazing theory. Okay, so that female figure from your mother gets under your skin. And sometimes mothers are not good, necessarily good figures. Maybe they're narcissists. Maybe they were so much involved in their own looks that they didn't pay you much attention. So it's not always that they're a positive. It's a positive thing. But because it got under your skin in a way you're not even aware of, you're attracted to women who have that narcissistic quality because you want to replay a lot of that drama that occurred in those earliest years. And I know people are going to go, no, that's such bullshit. You're not even aware that's happening, I'm sorry to say, because it's occurring in your unconscious. But if you look at it, if you see the patterns in your love life and you see the kinds of women that you are attracted to, you will inevitably see an element of what I'm talking about, right? Sometimes it's a woman that has a physical resemblance to your mother. And that's an extremely common pattern, believe me. But sometimes it's more a psychological quality. The fact that she was very solicitous with attention and showered you and made you feel special. Man, I've never gotten that feeling again since I had with my mother. You're not aware of that, but you're looking for the. For the woman that will give you that feeling again. Or as I said, your mother was a narcissist. She was just completely involved in herself and her clothes and her look. I want to find a woman who's like that because maybe this time I can get that woman to really love me and give me the attention I never really got from my mother. So these early, early years have such a powerful impact on you, you're not even aware. And the flip side is the same for women with the father figure. And I think a lot of women will admit that the father figure had a very, very powerful impact on what they're attracted to. They're usually more honest about it because men find the whole issue of the mother kind of creepy. The sense of being so dependent on a woman being so weak that I'm after my mother. Oh, it's like a Freudian, Oedipal thing. Oh, my God, that's disgusting. I don't want to even admit it, but it's very true. It's very real.
- [79:26]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, that one's. That one's tricky. All right, you didn't convince you. No, that one I'm really just trying to sponge. I've never quite understood it. So you've given me another brick of information to lay down in my desperate attempts to map how this stuff all really works. Okay, like you and you said this at the beginning, really the thing you want to get to is what really works. Like where does the rubber meet the road on all this stuff. Not, not in fantasy land, but like for real.
- [79:54]
Grainger Advertiser
Real.
- [79:56]
Tom Bilyeu
Somebody's going on a date. They met them online, never met them before. There's like a screen check process. You guys have had to do this sort of dumb. Some of the guys here will show me the way that they have to flirt on the apps in order to get to the first date. So how one, how do you set it up in the flirtation to get to the date and then how do we be maximally seductive on that date?
- [80:22]
Robert Greene
Well, you know, I didn't grow up in the era of Tinder, so it's, you know, it's hard. I don't really know. I've never had to deal with it. Right.
- [80:32]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you think it's going to be a different set of rules? I have a feeling it's going to be the same set of rules, but it's a different playing field, I will give you that. But.
- [80:41]
Robert Greene
Well, the main thing is that I would say in a, in a kind of macro sense of pay attention to the non verbals. So seduction is a language that does not involve words. It involves what is not spoken. It involves your body language, your eyes, your smile, your face, how you compose your face, how you walk, how you present yourself, the places you take the woman to reveal who you are. If you take her to a. A pizza and beer joint, that probably that says something as opposed to an elegant restaurant. How you dress is part of that language. Are you just wearing your shorts and T shirt or do you present yourself in a nice. Maybe those shorts and T shirts for someone would work, but for a lot of women it shows you don't really care. So pay attention to all the nonverbal things, to the little signs that the woman is very, very attentive to be able to control that to some degree. So you want to present yourself, as they say, the most anti seductive qualities, insecurity. So it's hard to fake the non verbal secure cues that are in the world. And a Lot of that centers around the eyes and the face and the mouth and how you smile, etc. And there are weak ways of looking, kind of, and there are aggressive ways and confident ways that are directed through the eyes. But if you don't feel it, it's very hard to fake it. So you have to put yourself in a mindset, a kind of an as if strategy, as William James said, where you feel confident, where you feel strong, you talk yourself into that mood, etc. Etc. And you let the non verbals kind of communicate themselves. So you're strong, you're taking them to a place, but you're also attentive, sensitive, you're willing to reveal that slight feminine streak in you, but you're in control. You know what you're going to do, you know exactly where you want to take them. And of course you're going to let see how things play out. You don't have everything planned that would be very anti seductive as well. But you have a sense of this is who I am and this is how I'm going to present myself. The flirtation is not in the words that you say, but it's in the looks that you give, in the energy that you radiate, right? In the strength that you show and the fact that you're looking them in the eye, but not in a scary way kind of thing. And then mirroring behavior is extremely a sign of the other person is falling under your spell. So you smile in a certain way and you see if she responds in the same way, right. And you kind of learn how to kind of go with her energy in the moment as well. But one thing you have to be careful of is you have to use who you are. So what's flirtatious for one guy isn't going to work for the other guy, you know. So if you happen to be good with words, you know, I. I have to admit I'm. I'm weak at a lot of things. You know, I wasn't that quarterback in High School, etc. And all that stuff. But I had a way with words, you know, and I had a way of kind of weaving a world with the words that I said, with the metaphors, with the things that I said. And so I would kind of use my flirtatious style was to kind of envelop them in these kind of images that I would create. And that worked for me. Sometimes it didn't work because some women weren't interested in that. They wanted the quarterback. But for a lot of women that that was my style. What is your style? I don't know what it is, but it has to fit who you are.
- [84:46]
Tom Bilyeu
I think that is very good advice. The thing that I would put out there is there. The big click for me was when I realized that I needed to have absolutely no fear of loss. And so going into a situation, you met them online, you guys have had some flirtatious exchanges. They're one of the things that's really anti seductive, to use your phrase, is if you feel needy, if they're. You're thirsty at all, like, you really have to be what I call aggressively yourself. Good.
- [85:21]
Robert Greene
One thing you have to keep in mind, though, is if the woman seems to be resistant and then you just wilt at that moment, you, you, you cut it off and you go, oh, this isn't going to work. Man, they are so stupid. You are such a bad seducer. Women are testing you often, and by their showing you that maybe they're not interested, they might actually be interested, but they want to see are you willing to pursue them, Are you willing to deal with some obstacles in the way, you know, are you willing to, like, you know, move past their resistance, not physically forcing them, but if they don't seem so receptive to you on that first date, that doesn't mean you have to give up. It just means give it a second date and show that you're still interested in them is a very powerful message. It means I can deal with maybe your kind of somewhat pissy side or your sort of negative side or your kind of pickiness. You know, I'm still there. I'm still interested. Okay. That shows that you're willing to jump over this one hoop that I've set for you. So just immediately wilting is a bad sign.
- [86:31]
Tom Bilyeu
No, agreed. My advice would be if somebody is in that situation, somebody's displaying something they don't like. I mean, look, I'm not going to say it at everything that comes up, but for the most part, I would try to be playful with that. And if you can really stay centered, if you can be somewhat unflappable. And what I always have said about the way that I was with Lisa was I was aggressively myself, and so I wasn't afraid of losing her. Now I was still strategic about the way that I packaged myself. Like I said, this is a game of marketing. You are going to be who you really are, but you need to bundle that in a way that's going to communicate who you are. Well. And if I know that one of the things that people are going to be most attracted to is somebody that is confident, cool, then I'm. I need to be confident in who I am. And also, if you really want to get people's attention, be counterintuitive, be. Be interesting. Like say things that they couldn't have predicted that are real, they're true to who you are. But if you can find those things where it's like, oh, wow, I never thought about that. That's. You're coming at something from an oblique angle, then it's like, okay, you're not exchangeable. I can't. This isn't just. I'm trying on somebody that looks different but is exactly the same as everybody else. It's like you're. You one have the confidence to say something. You're like, I don't know how this is going to land, but it is true. And therefore I'm going to say it. And the way that I see dating is you're throwing the bat symbol up in the sky. You're not trying to win the person over. I mean, you're trying to seduce. Don't get me wrong, there's an agenda there, but you want to make sure you're seducing the right person. And so in the beginning of this, I'm just going to be. This is who I am packaged in a way that is meant to elicit a response from the right person. So I'm not going to make it hard to be interested in who I am and all of that, but I'm gonna be myself. I'm gonna say things that are unexpected. This was the same discovery I had with interviewing was in the early, early days I did. It was like my maybe fifth interview. And I did the whole interview. And at the end of the interview, I said, hey, do you mind if we start over? I wanna film this again because I'm either going to quit doing this because I was bored out of my mind, because I wasn't asking the questions I really wanted to ask. I was asking the questions I thought I was supposed to ask. And now I want to ask what I really care about. And he was game. And so we refilmed it. And that was the beginning of me actually having a career as an interviewer was when I was like, I don't care if this is the question people want me to ask. I'm going to ask the question I'm actually interested in. And bringing out that kind of intrigue, especially if you can focus in on them. So if I'm asking you questions, maybe other People haven't asked from an angle, people haven't asked it or I have a follow up question that is surprising and shows I'm really paying attention, I actually care. It'll get pretty interesting pretty fast.
- [89:24]
Robert Greene
Yeah, I mean a couple things that I would add to that. First of all, as I say in the art of seduction, any kind of moralizing, judging quality is very anti seductive. So you're very tolerant, you're very open, you're not there to judge the other person. And if they make a comment, you don't want to touch upon politics, et cetera, but just the sense that you're. It's a non judgmental environment is very stuck because we live in a world that's so partisan. But the other thing is, so when we talk about interviews, I've done hundreds of these over the years, podcasters, including yourself. You're one of my favorites.
- [89:59]
Tom Bilyeu
Thank you, sir.
- [90:00]
Robert Greene
And I notice a difference between interviewers. The ones that come with a preset agenda of questions, not just an opening question, but a whole set of questions, and they're not really paying attention to you and your answers and they're kind of in their heads and they're thinking about their next question, etc. They make me uncomfortable and I don't do as well. But if the person is interviewing me is in the moment, they're kind of responding, they're alive. They're giving me, you know, body language, verbal cues, their eyes, and we're interacting. Then I open up to them and then there's a nice flow. It's a similar thing between a man and a woman. You're in the moment. I can't say that enough. You're in the moment. You're not in your head going, does she like me? Am I going to have sex with her tonight? You know, do I find her that attractive? You're in the goddamn moment. You're alive, you're attuned, you're listening. And I can tell you my wife has said this, and I know it from other women before I met her, is I would listen very deeply and then I would hear something that kind of signaled to me a sign of something that they were interested in or something that said something about who they are. And then four hours later or the next day, I would bring it up again, wrapped in my own little way of wrapping things up. And they go, whoa, you don't have no idea how much that impresses a woman because it says, I was paying attention, I was listening to them, and I, and I brought back what they said later is very powerful. So be in the moment. Don't be thinking about your next question, your next step, how you're going to, you know what you're going to be doing next. But be alive and be attentive and be in the flow.
- [91:50]
Tom Bilyeu
I love that. Robert, where can people follow you?
- [91:52]
Robert Greene
They can follow me everywhere. I have my website, power seduction and war.com I have in my Instagram at Robert Green Official. I also have a YouTube channel you can subscribe to that.
- [92:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, boys and girls, it will be time well spent. So make sure you do go give a follow. And speaking of places, that will be well worth your time, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.