Give Me 39 Minutes and I'll Make You Dangerously Confident

Simon Squibb: Robert Greene just sat down with me to share the tools you need to master yourself, seduce anyone, and build unshakable confidence. If you want to have confidence in life, it has to be built on something real. Most people feel stuck, trapped by fear, self-doubt, or a system that conditions them to play small. The problem is nobody teaches this. Nobody gives it to you. Our school system is completely ass backwards.

In this episode you'll learn how to transform anxiety into confidence and become a powerful individual that commands respect. We'll cover five fundamental steps. First, how to master yourself. Second, how to understand human nature. Third, how to build confidence. Fourth, learning by doing. And finally, how to reinvent yourself.

So the first and most important step is mastering yourself before anything else. But the problem in mastering yourself is a lot of it has to do with gaining discipline. If you just go out in the world without any sense of what other people are like, of what their needs are, you're going to say stupid things, you're going to offend people. So you have to understand the social game and how to master your appearance and how to make people like you in some way.

Robert Greene: But the other thing is you want to gain a sense of discipline -- self-discipline. It's no good if people tell you to do things. If people tell you to work, if they force you to do A, B, and C, it has to come from within. You have to have initiative. You have to be motivated to do things. And what I've learned over the course of writing my seven books and through my whole life is that you master yourself through learning, through learning something that you love, that interests you. That's how you develop discipline.

So if you're entering a career that doesn't suit you, that you don't really love, that isn't really your dream, then it's going to be very hard for you to master yourself. You're going to be tuning out. You're going to be distracted. You're going to be on your phone too much. You're not going to be focusing deeply, which is how you master yourself. To me, the key to life, the key to everything, the key to success is figuring out what you love. You've got to first figure out -- I call it your life's task -- what you were born to create in this world.

Everybody is born as an individual. There's something very unique about you. And I mean every single person out there -- I don't just mean people who have special talents. Everybody has this power within them. Everybody is unique in some way in their DNA and how they were raised in their early encounters in life. And the trick in life is bringing out your uniqueness -- bringing out what makes you weird, what makes you strange, what makes you different, and leaning into it and creating a business, writing a book, going into some field that reflects that uniqueness.

If you discover what that is -- hopefully when you're in your early twenties -- you're going to learn at a much faster rate. But if your parents tell you to go to law school and you go to law school but it doesn't really connect with you and you're tuning it out, you're not really learning. If you find something that you love, you're going to learn at a very fast rate. As you develop skills, as things improve in your brain, you're going to be gaining discipline, you're going to be mastering yourself. Because I believe that you master yourself in what you actually make and what you create. I only became who I am through writing my books. Writing my books changed me. It made me a different person.

Your work is going to make you a different person -- if it's something that you love, if it's something that excites you. So the key to everything in life is making that choice early on -- in your early twenties -- about what you were destined to create, what really suits you, what fits, what meshes with your uniqueness. Once you discover that, the whole game kind of opens up to you and everything will start to make sense.

Simon Squibb: And of course the main question people ask you is: how do I find that?

Robert Greene: I think a lot of young people today are sometimes afraid to be different, especially in school. You're not encouraged to be different. If you stand out, you get teased. Truly being unique in your work, in your ideas, in your thinking, in what you love -- that's something a lot of people are afraid of. And if you look at anybody who's successful in music, for instance, they're all unique. There's nobody else like them. Back in my day I was a big David Bowie fan. There's nobody like David Bowie. These are people who understood their uniqueness. They weren't afraid of it. They embraced it and they used it.

So the question I get asked a lot is: Robert, I don't know what my life's task is. I like A, B, C, D, E, F. I'm like at a supermarket and I can choose all these different things, but I can't figure out the one thing I'm really made to create. And the problem -- which goes back to mastering yourself first -- is that you're impatient. People today, everybody who's young -- I was like this when I was young. You want things right now. You want Robert Greene to tell you, "This is what you were meant to do. ABC. I give you these clues and you're just going to find it like on an Easter egg hunt." Doesn't work like that. You have to be patient.

Robert Greene: Figuring out who I am, figuring out what I love, figuring out what I was meant to do -- it's going to take months. It could take years. You have to be patient. You have to be open and willing. It's an adventure. It's a journey. So I say: first, you have to be patient. Then it's a matter of going into yourself and being introspective -- which is an incredibly important skill -- to withdraw from the group, withdraw from your phone, withdraw from your friends, be alone, listen to yourself, and write things down in a journal. Go: these are my thoughts, this is what I like, this is what I love, this is what I hate. When I was five years old I really loved this activity. And then I kind of lost track of it and forgot about it.

You're going to be going deeply, deeply into yourself. Not listening to what all your friends are saying, not listening to what people on Instagram are saying. Just yourself, your voice. You have a voice inside your head that speaks to you about what you love, but you're hearing all these other voices from other people. Get rid of all those voices and listen to yourself. And when you go through that, something will happen. A click will happen. You'll go: I'm actually really attracted to science. I was forced to go in this other direction, but I have a kind of logical brain. This is what I was meant to do.

Could be anything. I don't know what it is. And I tell people often -- when you were very young, when you were seven or eight, you actually knew it, but you lost it. So it's a process. It's like archaeology. We're digging in the ground and we're going back into your childhood and we're figuring out what it is that makes you unique and what you were meant to accomplish in life.

Simon Squibb: I think to follow your point -- a lot of people aren't asking themselves what their factory setting is and they're not saying to themselves: what is it I enjoy doing? And then maybe get really good at that. To your point -- mastery, right?

Robert Greene: Yeah. The problem is nobody teaches this. Nobody gives it to you. When you go to school, they force you to do algebra, math, sciences, English. Doesn't suit you. You get turned off by learning. And then that haunts you the rest of your life. But I can tell you learning is actually the most exciting thing in the world. It's almost as exciting as sex. I know you don't believe that, but it is.

Simon Squibb: That's a big statement. But I know the learning feeling -- it's like nothing else. But why aren't people tapping into this?

Robert Greene: Because in school it's all just like a buffet. You have to learn all these different things. You're not focusing on that one thing that really excites you. And school isn't geared towards finding those things. If you get a D in something, they make you do it more. Because people are illogical. Because our education system is a bureaucracy. When groups build something, it's inevitably irrational and stupid. So our school system is completely ass backwards. If you're never encouraged to go in the direction that excites you, then for the rest of your life you're going to be haunted by the feeling that learning is boring and tedious.

Let me tell you a story. My parents wanted me to be very successful. They were very ambitious. They were pushing me toward law school, medical school. And I was a literature person -- into books, learning, reading, novels. I wanted to be a writer. I wandered through life in my twenties. I've told this in many interviews -- I had fifty different jobs by the time I was in my mid-thirties. You could definitely say that Robert Greene was kind of a loser. I never made really good money. I went from job to job. I wasn't a complete failure, but I hadn't figured anything out. My parents were really getting worried. And then I discovered what I love. I found writing -- these kinds of books that I wrote. I was never interested in money. I was interested in doing what I loved. And now I've made more money than my father ever made in his entire life. More money than I would ever have made if I'd gone to law school or medical school -- because I pursued what genuinely excited and fascinated me.

Simon Squibb: Delayed gratification -- you're partly talking about that, aren't you? You just followed the dream and then eventually all the wealth comes -- whatever wealth is these days.

Robert Greene: So what do we need to know about human nature? People are tricky. They're not easy. Learning a math problem or coding -- that's kind of simple and linear. People are not linear. People are weird. They're difficult. They never say what they really think about you. "Robert, I love your book. It's wonderful." But really they're thinking, "God, what a sellout." You never know what they're thinking. You never know what they're up to. It's tricky. It's deceptive. And it can drive you crazy. If you enter the work world at twenty-two, twenty-three, they never teach you these things -- and it's all political and people have their egos. You can take it personally and get very upset and emotional. It can ruin your life.

So I want you to think of understanding people as a skill as necessary as learning business, as learning coding, as learning anything in life. And the only way you're going to learn about people is by interacting with them. If you're too virtual, if you're doing everything on your phone, you're not interacting with people -- that skill will atrophy. It's like a muscle you have to develop.

Robert Greene: You have to get to this point where you really want to understand people. You want to read them. You want to be able to know what's going on. So the first thing is to get down on your hands and knees and go: I don't understand people. They're a mystery to me. They cause me problems. Now you can take the next step, which is to observe people. And the problem most of us face is we're more interested in ourselves than we are in other people. I make the point in Laws of Human Nature that we are all self-centered -- all narcissists to some extent. But actually other people are much more interesting than you are. Your thoughts are going round and round in circles. The same boring ideas. People are weird. They're strange. They have different experiences than you. They come from different cultures.

Use your imagination. Be very attentive to people's nonverbal cues. But the most important thing about understanding human nature is that appearances don't matter. People create the appearance that they want you to see. So don't take the appearance people present to you at face value. Look behind the mask.

Simon Squibb: It's such an underrated point. I ask people in the street what their dream is and the answers blow my mind. There's so much more going on behind the eyes. People judge by the jobs someone is doing. We asked this guy who was digging in a bin -- you would normally walk past him, maybe with a little fear -- and we asked him what his dream was and it was incredible. We do judge a book by its cover. But how does learning this about other people actually help me?

Robert Greene: You're a social animal. At some point, however old you are, you're going to get a job and you're going to be dealing with five, twenty, two hundred strangers. If you don't understand them, if you're not interested in them, if you don't know what's really going on in their mind, you're going to be doing stupid things. You're going to be making mistakes. You don't realize that everyone has an ego and that you're going to be stepping on their toes and making them upset. Your life is going to be miserable if you don't take the time to try and understand people on a deeper level.

Once you understand that people present a front that's not reality, you kick into another gear and go: I'm going to try and figure them out. I can't read your thoughts. But I can sense your mood. I can sense if you're kind of hostile or open and interested. You want to develop this interest in other people. See it as a skill. In Laws of Human Nature I explain eighteen facets -- traits humans have had for thousands of years. One chapter is on envy. Envy is an incredibly important thing to understand. Everybody feels it. I feel it. Even Elon Musk feels it. The most powerful people in the world feel it. It's so ingrained in human nature. Our brains work by comparing things. If I'm on social media and I see people traveling to Tahiti with wonderful families -- I'm feeling envy. Even I'll feel envy. Ryan Holiday, my former mentee -- he's far more successful than I am. I can feel envy for Ryan. We're all prone to it.

I want to show you where it comes from, how you feel it, how you can overcome that feeling and turn it into something productive. Understanding human nature is also about identifying toxic people before you let them into your life and they ruin you.

Robert Greene: One of the things I talk about is how to use your envy: if there are people who have things you wish you had, use that as a spur -- something to stimulate you to get what they have, to become successful.

Simon Squibb: I think positive envy -- like ego -- can be powerful if it's a positive thing.

Robert Greene: One aspect of envy is schadenfreude -- which means we feel joy when other people have a bad experience. It's an ugly emotion but a lot of people have it. The opposite would be mitfreude -- having pleasure with other people. So when other people have success, feel joy about them. Force yourself to feel good about them. Force yourself to say, "That's great. I'm so happy for you." You won't realize how wonderful that feeling is, because it's not natural. Your first instinct when a friend suddenly sells something great is, "Why not me?" Instead, drop that and just go: I'm truly happy for that other person. It's a very wonderful emotion.

There are two kinds of confidence. There's the confidence that's just presenting a competent front. And then there's the quiet confidence that's based on the fact that you know what you're talking about, that you have skill, that you've had success in life -- so you don't need to brag, you don't need to create the performance of confidence. I can very quickly tell the difference when I meet people. What has the real one, what has the fake one. But the main thing: if you want to have confidence in life, it has to be built on something real.

In the realm of seduction -- one of my books -- being confident when you meet a man or a woman is very important. That sense of confidence carries over. They feel it and it's very seductive. It's like charisma. If you're trying so hard to feel confident, particularly women can see right through it. But if it's built on the sense of: I feel comfortable, I've been successful before in relationships -- it's based on something real, it feels real.

If it's like in your business world -- you're not going to have confidence until you actually create something. But it can come in small pieces. In the first three months of this process you find yourself learning skills. Okay, I'm going to start a business. It's been my dream. I can't start right now because I don't have the funds -- although you always do have the funds. You should start tomorrow anyway. But say: I'm going to spend the next few months learning the first steps of the process. That already will build confidence that you're doing something -- that you're not just living in your dreams and imagining it.

Robert Greene: Okay, so you fail. You don't get what you want. You're a little bit frustrated. Something didn't go right. I need to learn some more. And you don't give up. Giving up will screw the whole process up. You go back to square one. You read more. You think about it. And then you try again. And now you get it. Your confidence level is starting to rise. You don't want it to go from here to the sky because that's grandiosity -- that's not going to go anywhere. Confidence must be built step by step, by action, by success, by success, by success. So you're here, now you're here. Wow, I got the funding. Now you're starting the business. Starting a business is hell. It's so complicated, so difficult. It's not going to be as easy as you thought. So you don't give up. You keep trying. As you get any kind of success, you move on to that next level, on and on and on -- you build it.

Then, inevitably in life, you're going to have failure. You're going to fall down. Your confidence is going to waver. But in the back of your mind you will always have that memory of how you pushed past it, how you didn't give up, how you learned, how you got past the first failure. And it'll still give you a level of confidence that you can always fall back on. But the main point is it has to be built slowly on things that are real, on things that you do. And if you do that, it's confidence that will last you through your whole life.

Simon Squibb: That's the best explanation I've ever heard of why it's good to fail -- because if you fail, you learn something. Go again and again until you learn something, and then you get the confidence because you've failed so many times. You've got all the knowledge now to not fail.

Robert Greene: Failure is the entrepreneur's school where you learn. I have the story of Henry Ford in Mastery. His first company failed completely. Everybody said: "Henry Ford's a failure. We're not going to give you money." He somehow convinced somebody into giving him money. Tried a second time. It was even worse -- an even bigger failure. Now he's totally ruined. No one will go near him. He found some naive Scottish investor. Got the money. And now he understood exactly what he needed to do. He understood why he'd failed. He understood he had to create a factory system with a certain kind of scale. He understood what the customer wanted. He learned so many lessons that his third attempt became Ford Motor Company. He said: "I only learned how to be so successful through all of my failures."

It's hard to learn things when everything's just an idea, when it's abstract. We're concrete people. We're animals. We live in our bodies. If you're only in your head it's really hard to learn. But if you're doing it, you learn so much faster. If you want to start a business, you could spend five years pottering around -- I've got to get better at this, I've got to go to business school, I've got to read this book -- and you never start the thing. Business school drives me absolutely crazy. There are kids getting into serious debt, spending four years learning business. Just start a business. You'll learn sales quite quickly because you've got no choice.

Simon Squibb: We're helping a lady who wants to be a graphic designer. She was going to go to UCLA for four years at sixty thousand US dollars a year -- out-of-state tuition plus accommodation. So two hundred and forty thousand dollars and four years of her life to learn graphic design by doing it. I put this video up. People told me no, she should go to UCLA. That's the default everyone believes is the way.

Robert Greene: One of the people I interviewed in Mastery is Paul Graham. In the seventies he was into hacking early in the computer era. He went and studied AI at MIT. Then he decided he wanted to be a painter, left school, went to Italy, studied painting. Then one day he was in New York in a loft trying to paint -- no money -- and he heard an ad on the radio that the internet, which was just starting, would be where people buy things. Nobody thought of that. He went: "With my coding skills and my design skills, I'm going to create that." He created it. Sold it to Yahoo for five million. Then he started Y Combinator -- a school for entrepreneurs. The idea: we'll teach you how to start your business and own a share of it. Because he understood learning by doing, he created his own business by simply hearing an ad on the radio and having the guts to go do it. His incubator was based on the idea that you come to Palo Alto and build your business right there in the school -- no textbooks, just building. We watch you build it. If it's good, we'll fund it.

Simon Squibb: Airbnb was started in that incubator. Sam Altman came through it too.

Robert Greene: He would get five thousand applications a year. And as soon as a sheet said "Yale University," he threw it in the trash. There would be some kid somewhere who had done his own computer work entirely on his own -- he'd put that in the possible pile. People who went to those schools -- he thought they had no ambition. They were not self-starters. You want to be a self-starter. Learn in life to start things, to do it on your own. Not to wait, wait, wait -- but to just go out there and start it. Because if you start your business, you will learn more in two months than in twenty years of business schooling. And you'll probably fail, but your failure will teach you. So stop waiting and just go out and start it.

There's nothing wrong with university. There's nothing wrong with learning. But learning as a way of delaying actually building something is wrong. You can do and learn at the same time. That's the beauty of Y Combinator.

Simon Squibb: I built a competitor to Y Combinator in Asia called Nest and we didn't do it as well. We used to get about three thousand applicants per accelerator program and could only bring eight companies in. What I loved about the model is that the whole thing is: you're doing. But every so often, as you're doing, maybe someone knows something you don't know that can allow you to do the doing better. That's what the old apprenticeships were about. Guidance. Mentorship.

Robert Greene: I had a mentee -- Ryan Holiday. He was nineteen, just a kid at University of California, Riverside. He was a big fan of 48 Laws. I needed somebody to help me and I'd had really bad luck. People are lazy. They don't take instructions. If you criticize them, they wilt. But I thought I'd give this nineteen-year-old kid a try -- he seemed very sincere. He was fantastic. I could criticize him and he didn't wilt. He didn't become a shrinking person. He understood it. He improved. He was very smart and he understood my thinking process. I can't take credit for him -- he's very motivated, very ambitious, extremely smart. But I helped him along the way. I got him a job at American Apparel where I was on the board of directors, which gave him the idea for his first book. And I taught him the bread and butter of how to write a book, how to organize it, how to create notes, how to research. And now he's a global phenomenon.

Simon Squibb: Learning by doing is an obvious thing, but people are scared to go and do it on their own. If people want to get a mentor -- what's the way?

Robert Greene: I have a whole chapter on it in Mastery. A mentor can watch you and go: you're doing it this way, but you should do it that way. That instruction can save you years of not getting it correct. It can be very valuable.

Simon Squibb: Adapt relentlessly and reinvent yourself.

Robert Greene: The world changes at a very rapid rate. A lot of people come to me -- older people -- who got into a career that was really comfortable and great. You don't know how many people in Los Angeles in the film business had a little niche job making a lot of money, and suddenly streaming came on and they lost it. Then AI came on and they lost it again. This world is ruthless like that. The pace of change has never been like this in the history of humanity. You can't let yourself get trapped in a career that's going to disappear. You have to be flexible. The gold in this economy is having a variety of skills -- not all over the map, but within a certain framework. You've learned four different ways you can go. And then when that change happens, you're able to adapt.

You always have to keep in the back of your mind that this whole thing could blow up. You're relying on social media. TikTok could be gone tomorrow. The social media world could be completely different. You have to be fluid in life. I know writing books. When I began in the late nineties, there was no internet really for books -- it was all mainstream media, magazines, newspapers. Then the internet started coming about and when I did the book with 50 Cent, you suddenly had to market yourself online. And every time my next book comes out, the landscape is completely different. Nothing is the same. I can't rely on what I did before. So I have to adapt to each new change.

Robert Greene: If you're rigid -- if you think you've figured it out, you've got the perfect career locked down -- you're going to be a dinosaur at some point. You're going to be extinct. The world will move on and you'll be left behind. So be open and willing to adapt. Be aware of what's going on in the world and how industries are changing.

Reinventing yourself is actually something you want to think of as exciting. In 48 Laws of Power I have the metaphor that we're all actors. Part of being a social animal is to act. People who are really successful are actually really good actors. They know how to perform in front of the people who work for them, in front of the public. They're not being exactly who they are. They're not being completely authentic. They're playing a role and they're good at it. So you're an actor. Take control of that and realize people are going to judge by how you appear. Reinventing yourself is like becoming someone else. It's like fun. I'm going to be someone else. It's a new role I'm going to play.

My own way of doing that is each time I write a book I do something very different from the last one. 48 Laws of Power -- Art of Seduction -- then a book on war and strategy -- then a book with 50 Cent -- then Mastery -- and now I'm writing a book on the sublime. I want to keep challenging myself. I want to be somebody different. To perform differently. Each book I have to talk about it in a different way and it excites me, because I am a bit of an actor. I have a kind of a ham side to me. It's exciting to feel like you have control over your identity -- about how people see you -- and that sometimes you like to mix it up.

Rock stars are really good at that. Michael Jackson was kind of the master of it. He was never quite the same person. He was always changing. I like the idea of never staying still, of always moving, adapting, and becoming a different person. If people get to know you too well -- if they know exactly who you are -- and this is later in your career when you're in your forties -- they tune you out because they're too familiar. They know who you are, they're bored with you, and they're going to move on to somebody else.

I've been in marriage for twenty-three years. I think it's because I keep reinventing myself. She keeps hearing a new person with a new story -- otherwise she would have left me long ago. You want to keep the public on their toes. They haven't quite figured you out. As opposed to: oh god, I'm so tired of that guy. I've been looking at him for months. Let's move on.

Simon Squibb: I think people do have that fatigue -- they see the same person and they're done. But reinventing yourself -- there's the innovator's dilemma too, right? People have something working. I see this in the middle class. People have a house, a car, a job. They can't suddenly stop being a lawyer. So how do you make sure you reinvent? Is there a reset?

Robert Greene: The world is working against you. It wants you to settle down. It wants you to have an identity. People want to know exactly who you are. But you're going to reach a point where life loses its flavor, its excitement. People have midlife crises. You want to anticipate that. You want to be fluid in life. My last chapter of 48 Laws of Power is called "Assume Formlessness." It's a military idea that comes from Sun Tzu. Being formless in life, being fluid and moving with things -- it's actually a much more enriching way to experience this world, because circumstances are constantly changing. So you want to develop this fluidity when you're young. Hold that openness, that spirit of adventure.

So if you're going into law and you're in your mid-twenties, look ahead at the people in their forties and how unhappy they are and how stuck they feel. Go: I'm not going to be like that. So what am I going to do? I'm going to think of a second career I can channel my law skills into.

Robert Greene: Lawyer skills are actually very valuable for other things. Because you understand the law, you can be very helpful in other contexts. Let's say you wish you'd been a musician -- you can become an agent, because you know law. So keep in your mind that at some point you're going to branch off from the one direction you're going in. Have a plan. Be fluid. Be excited. Don't have regrets.

Simon Squibb: Do you have any regrets?

Robert Greene: My only regret is that I'm not twenty-three anymore. But I have no regrets because everything worked out for the best. In Buddhism there's the dharma wheel and it turns everything. Everything kind of happens according to the dharma -- which is law. So the dharma wheel has spun and now I'm talking to you. That's just the way it was meant to be. I'm happy. I have no regrets.

Simon Squibb: And finally -- what's your take on AI and reinventing yourself?

Robert Greene: I'm not personally a lover of AI. I think it has positive aspects -- it could invent cures for terrible illnesses and things like that. Who would be against that? But in Mastery I talk about how the human brain works and how we have to be disciplined, willing to deal with tedium. We have to learn, and learning is something you have to enjoy and be excited about. And I think a lot of young people are getting too goddamn lazy. From what I hear from people in universities, they don't want to read a whole book anymore. They just read summaries. They get on AI. The AI kind of helps them with their essays. You think you're being clever. You think: I don't have to write an essay, I can just get AI to help me. But you're hurting your brain. It doesn't sharpen up.

One example is learning a foreign language. It has so many benefits. First of all, it's disciplining your mind. Each language has a different logic -- French has a different logic than English, German does too. Each time you enter that language your brain is learning a different logic. You're enriching your brain. Probably firing up new parts of your brain. It's also making it possible to go to a place and interact with people who are different, in their own language. And speaking another language makes you into a different person. People tell me that when I'm in Spain -- I lived in Spain -- I became Spanish. I was much more kind of aggressive and masculine and my hands were going all over the place. It changes you. But now with AI, people are just going to their phones and getting translations for everything. They sit down in a restaurant and they spit out a phrase in a really bad accent. You're cheating yourself.

Use it as a tool. It's a tool. Don't become a slave to technology. Be the master of it. I use AI when I'm facing a research problem that I've tried and tried and can't get. So I ask ChatGPT and sometimes it gives me a good answer and I use it -- but I select it. We fetishize technology so much. But what we really should fetishize is the human brain.

The human brain -- think about it -- fifty thousand years ago we didn't have language. Through the development of our brain we created language, which no other animal has, and our brains just exploded. Scientists have said the human brain is the most complex organ in the whole entire universe. The number of neurons in your brain that can connect is astronomical. It can't even be computed. Your brain is a wonder. It's sublime. You were gifted with this insane instrument at your birth. AI is great -- our brains invented it -- but let's celebrate the brain that invented it, not the actual tool.

Simon Squibb: Robert, thank you so much for taking time to share your knowledge with us today. I feel honored.