Robert Greene: Why People Manipulate & How to Protect Yourself

And Doug. Here we have the limu emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Li Mu? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need at libertymutual.com. Very. Unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates excludes Massachusetts. If you haven't heard of the book, The 48 Laws of Power, well, you might be living under a rock. Today, I am privileged to talk to the man himself, the author of the 48 laws of power, Robert Greene. Robert, thank you so much for coming. Thank you for having me, Jefferson. I appreciate it. This is a conversation I'm very much looking forward to because I your book is one that often when I'm I make content or I'm speaking, there there will typically be somebody who comes up and says, oh, you have have you read the 48 laws of power? And I said, yes. I I have. And what I want to talk about and what the listeners are gonna get what you're gonna get in this episode is we're going to talk on, can you use power, and can you also maintain your own integrity? Because a lot of the times, people find those to be conflicting in some way of they they hear manipulation. They don't hear anything that is pres descriptive, prescriptive that can improve their life. Robert, how would you define power? What is what does power mean to you? Well, power is a tool. It's totally neutral. Like a hammer, you can use it to build a house, or you could clobber someone over the head and kill them with it. So power is simply a tool. It's neutral. It is neither good nor bad. It can be used for evil. It could be used for great good. But power is a sense of having control over the immediate environment over events that are occurring in your life. So to use this to flip it around to the negative, if you sense in your daily life that you have no ability to influence your children, your spouse, your partner, the colleagues at work, your boss, the people in your company. It's a miserable, miserable feeling. You have no power, you have no control, you have no influence. You can't tell people to do that. You tell people to do something and they don't listen to you, right? Or they do things to you that, that kind of block your path, and you have no way of of getting them to stop this. That feeling of powerlessness is is something that human beings cannot endure very well. And if you feel powerless for very long, you can somebody's gonna warp inside of you psychologically. You're gonna turn inward. You're gonna become resentful. You're gonna become angry. You're gonna have pools of anger, you know, developing …