Ep. #47 Mastering the Art of Seduction with Robert Greene

[Angel Donovan]: Angel Donovan here back with another episode of Dating Skills Podcast. We are at Episode 47. If you've been listening to us for a while, you know that something that we're really big on here at Dating Skills Review is getting as close to reality as possible. We don’t want to be pulling any punches here. We just want to get to the truth what works no matter how ugly that truth may be.

Now, today’s guest says this about his work: “It is what I call radical realism. I want the idea of really deeply understanding what life is about, how people operate in this world, and not only being realistic and understanding it but accepting it in a very deep way that this is what the world is like and actually loving it and embracing it and working with reality.”

So I love what he said there, is like working with reality, because to get success with this dating, sex and relationships or any other aspect of your life, you have to work with reality—you can't ignore it—and the first step is looking at reality and understanding how it really is. This is really nice. I really like the way he says that. I love it. So we're going to be looking at applying radical realism to the art of seduction and learning or mastering of a subject.

As you know, we're also huge on learning effectively to save time and frustration here, so for me today’s guest is really hitting a sweet spot for us. He also happens to be pretty, pretty big. He's got five international bestsellers including The Art of Seduction, Mastery, 48 Laws of Power, The 50th Law, and 33 Strategies of War. Since all of these he's also become a high-level adviser to companies, celebrities and the rich on these subjects.

His name is Robert Greene. His books have been pretty controversial because of their radical realism, but at the same time they are hugely influential in business, love, politics, and they are extremely well-researched. So it's really a great moment for me to have him on the podcast.

Robert, it's great to have you on the show today. Thank you very much for calling in.

[Robert Greene]: Oh, thank you so much for having me, Angel.

[Angel Donovan]: No problem. Before we get started and we get into The Art of Seduction and Mastery and 48 Laws of Power, I'd really like to introduce you a bit better to our audience and get to know you a little bit better, just give a bit of background. So where are you living today? Where do you hang out and what are you up to at the moment?

[Robert Greene]: Well, I live in Los Angeles. This is where I was born and raised.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Robert Greene]: Lived all over the world but I came back here about 20-some years ago.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: So that’s where I am. I travel all over the world. Right now I'm in between projects. I'm about to begin work on my sixth book…

[Angel Donovan]: Wow.

[Robert Greene]: …I wish we can discuss later but that’s pretty much where I'm at right now.

[Angel Donovan]: Great, great. Yeah, because I saw one of your interviews with London Real, I think it was, and you mentioned the book but you weren't allowed to talk about the subject or you didn't want to. Are you kind of at the point where you want to talk about it yet?

[Robert Greene]: I think I'm at that point. I actually didn't know what it was, so I was being kind of coy.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Right.

[Robert Greene]: But now I pretty much know, so yeah, I'm free to discuss it. But it's not that I'm trying to hide what it's about, it's just that it's very preliminary and I'm just shaping it.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Robert Greene]: But at any point if we want to talk, we can talk about it, yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Great, great. Let's talk about that a bit at the end. Other than that, so I guess you're spending a lot of your time writing today still. That’s the main focus of your time.

[Robert Greene]: Yeah, so I mean, I've had, you know, I do a fair amount of speaking engagements and consulting work, and sometimes people are trying to put one of my books into television. And so I have other things that I do, but I've decided as I've gotten older that I want to like concentrate my forces obeying one of my own laws of power, and what I enjoy the most is actually writing.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: It's probably what I would be best at. So that’s what I'm giving maybe 90% of my time to.

[Angel Donovan]: Wow, great. I'd like to talk a bit about where most of your insights and ideas have come for your books because I guess that’s kind of a large part of what you do. I guess the writing kind of comes after all of this ideas formulation, the insights and stuff you have.

[Robert Greene]: Mm-hmm.

[Angel Donovan]: So does this come from observations from your life? Does it come from research, a mix, or does it come from other areas? Where would you say most of your ideas and insights are coming from?

[Robert Greene]: It's like a confluence of several things. It's not just one or the other.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: So for the 48 Laws of Power, which was my first book, I had had a lot of different jobs, I traveled all over the world and I had been in many different power situations in Hollywood, in New York, in journalism, and then in just lots of other kind of more banal jobs, and so I had a lot of experience to draw upon and think about. But then I read a lot of history, so I'm constantly thinking of things that have happened in the past and how they're relevant to what’s going on now.

I'm an observer. I have that kind of a writer quality - I like to stand back and really dissect and analyze what people are up to. Ever since I was a kid, I never really trusted the appearances that people gave out. They say they're nice, they're good, and you watch what they do and that’s not… there's sort of a disconnect between what they say their intentions are and their behavior. I've always been skeptical of that and looking at people and dissecting and analyzing them. So with all of those things, the history, the reading, the observing, and the experiences, they just kind of all funnel together into a book.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right.

[Robert Greene]: One last thing is now in the last some 17 years or so I've been a consultant to people who are quite powerful, some of them, so personally on that level I've seen a lot of my ideas confirmed. And that’s kind of also the thing with 50 Cent and stuff. That sort of has enriched my knowledge and what I bring to the books too.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, yeah, I can imagine. Just out of interest, would you have changed anything of some of the books based on… like I guess your first ones, 48 Laws of Power and The Art of Seduction, are there things that you might change now based on the 10 years or more experience you had after that?

[Robert Greene]: No.

[Angel Donovan]: No?

[Robert Greene]: No, I'm a believer in looking back, not regretting, not thinking… It's against my main philosophy of life to even entertain such a thought.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay. [Laughs]

[Robert Greene]: I gave that book everything I had. I poured a lot of blood and energy into it.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right.

[Robert Greene]: I made it as complete as possible. You know, maybe here or there on the edges there might be something I would alter or whatever, but I believe in like The 48 Laws of Power I hit at a basic truth about people, and that basic truth I believe will stand the test of time and I really wouldn't change anything.

[Angel Donovan]: Great, great. And so as you were alluding to earlier, I've read in several interviews that you're really trying to get at the reality of the situation. You've mentioned truth and if kind of it's reality…

[Robert Greene]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: …no matter what it looks like and if we don’t like what it looks like, you're just trying to reveal that to the world. Is that what you kind of see your mission is with all of these books or…?

[Robert Greene]: Yes. So in The 48 Laws I had the idea that people really have like a deep-seated need for power.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: And we have a wrong concept of power. We think of it as people in Washington or in business who are planning and conniving and doing all these things to get ahead – kind of an ugly view of power.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: But in fact every single human being, even a little infant of 3 months old, is struggling for power. We don’t like the feeling of not being in control. We hate the feeling that we're dependent or we can't somehow influence something. So people are constantly, constantly, constantly finding a way, trying to find some degree of power or influence, and if they're not conscious or aware of it, which is 95% of the time, they're unconsciously vying for power.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: And I've really felt that. I've seen it in my whole life, in my family, in my personal relationships, certainly in my jobs. And nobody likes to talk about it. They want to present the human being as if we're, like your name, like we're born angels…

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: And that we're not descended from chimps and that we all have this better nature that governs us. And I personally was sick of it because that’s not been my experience in the work world. It's not been the experience of most of the people I talk to. It's a dishonesty that really annoys me.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: I wanted to sort of aim my cannons and blast this kind of falsehood as best I can and show you that there's nothing to be ashamed about. It's not like the fact that we want this degree of power or control – there's something wrong with it, I don’t have a moral judgment.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: But let's be realistic. This is who we are. So in all of my books—seduction was similar—we want to sort of reserve the element of sex and love as if it's this romantic little corner of the world where all of our nicest instincts come out, and yet again I believe that seduction involves kind of a dark side of our personality and I didn't want to avoid that. I want to actually embrace it.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: All of my books, I'm kind of overcoming some taboos that people have and showing you what I think is really going on.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. So those two ones you mentioned, power and seduction, are a lot more controversial, if we want to use that word, from that perspective, and they get people more riled up I guess, and it'll be great to hear just like a couple of examples of where people have resisted this. But you see, when I was looking at those two books I was thinking, well, first that I guess seduction could float quite naturally from power, and also that both, as you said, it's about control, right? Are they both really books about control and seduction as just applied to one context but it's pretty much the same thing?

[Robert Greene]: Well, control is a loaded word and it's just a word, and so what are we really talking about? You don’t really control things to a large extent. So much of what happens in life, we are somewhat powerless. We don’t control where we're born, who our parents are, what some of our own limitations might be, whom the people that we meet, accidents that happen in the world. There's a lot that we don’t control, and in the seduction the same is true. What I'm trying to say is that we don’t like that feeling, and so we're struggling in some way to gain a little bit of control either passively or actively, and I want to make it so that you're more aware of this so that maybe you can consciously gain a little bit more control over your life, increase that slight margin of control that you possibly could have. It doesn’t really mean controlling other people. That’s where it gets kind of loaded and sounds sort of manipulative.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: If you are overt in trying to control—the worst people in the world power- or seduction-wise are those who really try to overtly control everything around them and the people around them because it just stirs up a lot of resentment. People hate you. You look ugly.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: So the game as I've showed you is to be indirect, to be subtle, to make it so that people want to do your bidding. That’s the seduction game.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: If people are pleased, are under your spell and they end up doing what you want to do, that’s sort of the highest form of kind of indirect control that you have. But really the most powerful form of control is over yourself, and that’s a theme that I batter into your head in all of the books including the book I wrote on warfare and strategy. It's the degree of controlling your own emotions to some extent and controlling your own weaknesses, etc. That’s really where true power lies.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, and in Mastery you emphasize a lot social awareness and social intelligence, which kind of flows on from that, right? So you're kind of building the same. You saw that as important to learning the self-discipline, the self-awareness as it was to executing on the laws of power and the rules you define in seduction.

[Robert Greene]: Yes. I mean, Mastery is a little bit different from the other books. It's not so much oriented towards the social game. It's more about you and how you master your craft and develop skills. But then I wanted to add into this component that we're social animals, we're social creatures. You can't divorce power and mastery from the ability to work with other people.

And then it actually, we'll get to it later, is the subject of my next book, but that ability to stand back from situations and observe people and not get caught up in your emotions, and look at them with a degree of objectivity and not get angry or upset or judgmental but say, “Ah, this person has this problem, this issue, this insecurity. It's like an animal that has a tail that’s shaped a certain way. That’s just who they are. I'm going to observe that and I'm going to see how I can best either use their weakness or protect myself.”

And that kind of detachment is very liberating because you don’t go through life taking everything personally, which is so much a problem that we have. We're such emotional creatures. And it's not that you become cold or ruthless or ugly in that sense. It's actually kind of a tolerant feeling where you accept people as they are. But that ability to stand back and observe people and gain knowledge about what motivates them and then act upon that is a form of mastery. You're not only mastering your craft whatever it is, you also have to master the social realm. So that’s why I put that very important chapter in that book.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. And you talked about openness to ideas in a way there, because that’s one of the topics I felt that was very important. It kind of connects with in a way you're pushing this harsh reality in your books of power and seduction out there to the world. And I assume you've seen some resistance and it'd be interesting like, have you seen less or more for power or seduction? Was there one theme that you saw a little bit more resistance when it got published and so on, in the press perhaps or otherwise?

[Robert Greene]: I would say probably, weirdly enough, there was more resistance to seduction than to power.

[Angel Donovan]: Actually, that doesn’t surprise me at all.

[Robert Greene]: Yeah, I mean there were people who were upset about the immorality and… But I was actually surprised that I didn't get more anger about that.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: But when it came to seduction a lot of people were very upset, I'd say more women than men, but there were men who were upset that the idea is… this is just… “Shouldn't love and romance be about being natural and being who you are?”

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Robert Greene]: “And why do we have to read a book on it and why do we have to try so hard? And why do you use the word victim? I mean, victim is such an ugly word for that.”

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Robert Greene]: I say, you know, I'm talking about the person that you're seducing as your victim, and it'll have a chapter called Choose the Right Victim. “Why do you use that word? It's such an ugly word,” and on and on and on and on.

And my feeling is when you get that kind of level of a reaction, you sort of hit a nerve. Unconsciously, you sort of hit a sore spot in people. They want to believe very deeply that love and romance is this glorified realm, but deep down inside they know it isn't. And we all know that in relationships there are all sorts of power games being played.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: You also know that when you're trying to seduce or romance somebody that you can't just simply be who you are, that you're always trying, you're always molding your character, you're saying things depending on who they are, you're trying to impress them. Unconsciously, we're constantly doing things that belie this notion that romance and seduction is just this separate realm. So I just wanted to slap you a little bit what the reality I think is actually out there, and in fact seduction operates more when you use the kind of transgressive, dark side of it. That’s what really seduces us. So I think I got a little bit more resistance from that book, which was… it surprised me a little bit.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. I think something we've found also, like talking about openness to ideas, is that some of the ideas in the realms of like dating, sex and kind of relationships when you're trying to look at the pure reality of it, a lot of people resist, they're not open to those ideas…

[Robert Greene]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: And it interrupts the learning process. It becomes a barrier for a lot of people. So that’s actually something I want to talk about in a little bit with connection to the learning process and mastery that you discuss because you talk about openness to ideas. But to finish off with seduction, how does your approach… we talk sometimes about pickup artistry and we have some of those guys on the show sometimes, also known as the seduction community, so kind of relevant…

[Robert Greene]: Yes.

[Angel Donovan]: How does your approach to the topic of seduction differ to the approach taken by that community?

[Robert Greene]: Well, I'm aware of the community. I've had contact with them since. I'm good friends with Neil Strauss, who’s one of the main figures in the community. But I do think my approach is different. I'm geared towards I think something a little bit longer-lasting.

The game that I'm trying to immerse you in and educate you in is something psychological where you're… Think of the brain of the other person as this kind of defensive… this organ that has all these walls around it, that has all these defenses. People have resistance to change, to influence, to other people’s ideas. It's a natural state that we all have. And the game in seduction is to lower those resistances and those walls, and the more you lower them, the more power and influence and the more you can get somebody under your spell and they can fall in love.

So the pickup game is a little bit kind of momentary. It's more like there's this hot woman in a bar and how do I get her in bed? I mean, it's more subtle than that, but it's a more momentary kind of game. So there's not a deep, lasting psychological impact that you're trying to have.

My book, it could be used to help you do those more instantaneous pickups, but it's really about getting them to fall in love with you, getting them to fall under your spell, getting them to think about you when you're not there. And it can be applied to sex and it can be applied to your work and your job. It can be applied to politics, marketing. Yeah, but you're trying to lower people’s resistance.

And so my book is predicated on the longer you take to play that game and the more careful you are, the more power you have. So it could six months, a year, but if you do that—or one month, let's say—the longer you take, the more power that you're going to have. So I'd say that element of time and deep psychology is the main difference.

[Angel Donovan]: Right, right. So when you bring in the fact of time it sounds a lot more strategic in its approach.

[Robert Greene]: Well, I mean, the pickup game is very strategic but it's really almost more tactical. What is your endgame? We don't know. I guess your endgame is to have sex. Here my endgame, my grand strategy, is to get that person to be under my spell so that we have this relationship where they're not resistant to me in some way.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. It's almost more relevant to relationships because it is fair to say that a lot of the pickup advice and what they focus on is meeting, you know, just attracting and getting a girl into bed, and they don’t talk a lot about the relationship, although there is some advice out there. But it sounds like it's much more longer-term. I know there are some aspects of your book which talks about the short-term aspects of it, but it sounds, you know, when you're talking about getting the mind seduced it's a more long-term influence.

[Robert Greene]: Yes, and the approach that I am trying to say is the more that you play this psychological game, and it goes both ways…

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: If you're like the cold seducer, I maintain you're actually are going to have limits to your success and you're not going to enjoy it. The seduction has to be pleasurable or it's not really seduction.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Right.

[Robert Greene]: And so you're also equally opening yourself up to the influence of the other person and letting them have power over you. And I'm trying to say that the more you play that game and allow this kind of mutual lowering of resistances, the pleasure you're going to have in the sex, in the relationship, in everything that happens in your whole life as well, you're freeing yourself up emotionally. A lot of people I think are a little bit kind of cold that way and they're afraid of being vulnerable and they're afraid of letting down those walls, and this is about letting down the walls. And if in the end you're going to have a more interesting relationship, yeah, that’s probably true, but also sometimes a very powerful seduction doesn’t lead to a great relationship because there's too much deep emotions going on there. So that’s a whole other discussion.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, makes a lot of sense. One of the comments I saw you… like coming back to this kind of strategic emphasis, I saw this comment you did in Reddit AMA says, and it's almost a question about how you should approach a girl, you said you should treat each woman as a separate country and culture, stop applying the same techniques…

[Robert Greene]: Mm-hmm.

[Angel Donovan]: Actually it means stop applying the same techniques to different women and shut off your interior monologue and penetrate their way of thinking. Is that something that you still advise when you really think that you should take each person as an individual when you approach them?

[Robert Greene]: Well, not only would I say that, I'd say that if I lived a thousand years I would say that…

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

[Robert Greene]: And I would say that that like should be engraved in your brain and should be a philosophy of life in general, because first of all, A, it's true, everybody is an individual, is different. You don’t want to be going through life in this cookie-cutter approach and projecting onto them your own emotions and seeing the reflection of your mother or your first girlfriend in every woman that you meet, all these terrible things that men do.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: So to the degree that you can actually shut yourself, stop hearing that voice in your head and look at that woman there and see what makes her different and try and put yourself in her shoes and imagine what her experience is and get information that allows you to figure out what sets her apart from everyone else, not only will you be a better person –you'll be happier, but you'll be an incredibly powerful, powerful seducer. There's nothing more seductive than the sense that someone is giving you individualized attention. You can think of it right now in terms of your own life. If you're at a party or something and you're talking to someone, and they show by what they're saying that they understand you and what makes you tick and what makes you different, a single comment like that will just melt you. If you're able to have that power and that ability—and you're not going to have it 100%.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: You're not even going to have it 50%. It's hard in this world where we're so inundated with media and wearing our heads so much. You can have it 25%. I don't care. I don't know what the number is. You'll be lifted up into the stratosphere of seduction. You'll be one of the all-time greats. So yeah, I would never disagree with that, the phrasing of what I said.

[Angel Donovan]: Great. So listening is a key skill here [laughs] and observing.

[Robert Greene]: It's not just listening.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: A quibble here – it's not just listening, because some people make a mistake of thinking, “Well, just going to listen.” You can listen and hear people, but what you're really doing is placing yourself inside of them and trying to figure out what their experience is and getting inside of their head. And so you could listen but it doesn’t really like… you never get to that level because you're just hearing the words that they're saying.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: But if you're trying to go deeper than that, you're trying to figure out, why did they say that? What’s going on in their head? Why are they dressed this way?

[Angel Donovan]: Have you got any like kind of practical tips on that? Because I assume it's something you probably had to do a lot… I don't think it's kind of covered in your books at all, but in the whole processes you've kind of been through for writing your books, maybe this is something you've had to do quite a bit, you know, putting yourself in the shoes of Napoleon Bonaparte and whoever?

[Robert Greene]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Have you got any tips on how people could do that better?

[Robert Greene]: Well, it's quite a bit the subject of my next book.

[Angel Donovan]: Oh great.

[Robert Greene]: It's also covered in Chapter 4 of Mastery and social intelligence when I'm talking about those mirror neurons and empathy.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Robert Greene]: And so yeah, you're right to say that there's not… I don’t have like an ultimate practical primer on the subject, which is sort of the subject of the next book. But it's a skill. It's a skill we're all born with the materials for, the natural ability to do it, which is what I talk about in Mastery. The mirror neurons, our ability to think inside other people, to imagine what they're thinking, is a very powerful human trait that we're all born, with but we lose it.

So let's just say first it's a skill. It's not going to come to you overnight. It's not like one formula that I can give you that tomorrow you'll wake up and you'll have it. You have to build this skill.

And you can practice it. You can practice it in small beautiful ways because every day of your life you're in a conversation with people. And then they have different degrees. You're going to be conversing with strangers at work, people who are half strangers who are colleagues, and then there'll be people that you know very well, and all of those are very different relationships where there's different degrees of information.

And so if you have somebody for instance that you're in a long-term relationship with, how can I today in hearing them and watching them glean something, a new thing about them that I never thought about before? I'm going to try and do that every day. I'm going to listen to what they say. I'm going to observe them very deeply and I'm going to think, “Hmm, I never thought of them in this way. This is something new. This is some new bit of truth that they revealed inadvertently in what they said.”

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: And you know, I make it clear in all of my books that you're not just looking at what people say, you're looking at their body language and you're reading between the lines. People don’t overtly admit, “Hey, I'm lonely or I'm insecure.” They signal it through what’s in between the lines or whatever.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Robert Greene]: So these are like exercises that you will do. With the people that you know well, you're going to say, “I'm going to hear them and every day I'm going to try and see, have a new thought about them, see them in a new light.” And then there are other exercises with people that you don't know as far as trying to spend five minutes without hearing your own voice where you're focused in a meditative way, deeply entranced on what somebody has said and you're really 100% listening. I mean, I can go on. There are more exercises, and as I said in my new book I’ll make it clear, but these are just to give you a foretaste of what I'll be talking about.

[Angel Donovan]: Great. Yeah, that sounds like great stuff. That sounds kind of similar to some of the stuff I did in the past. I would say like 10 years ago I didn't really see a lot of the social signals around me. I got into the pickup artist movement way back 15 years ago, whenever it was.

[Robert Greene]: Wow.

[Angel Donovan]: That kind of brought that focus on social interactions…

[Robert Greene]: Uh-huh.

[Angel Donovan]: So I basically spent most days thinking about this kind of stuff, you know.

[Robert Greene]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Even I was a student at the time and I was at business school, and I was spending more time thinking about why the professor said stuff the way he did and that kind of stuff…

[Robert Greene]: Uh-huh.

[Angel Donovan]: …and other stuff looking at people and the way they acted. Actually, I think I learned more at business school about social interactions and all that kind of stuff than business.

[Robert Greene]: Uh-huh.

[Angel Donovan]: So I kind of used that time to study that. So it really helped me.

[Robert Greene]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: And it's kind of this process you said, but just it sounds like all you're saying is like you have to be willing to take notice and take the time to observe this and have that thing in the back of the mind, “I'm going to try and figure something out today.”

[Robert Greene]: It has to be pleasurable. We humans don’t do things unless we see a reward or which we feel like there's some good in it or it's fun.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Robert Greene]: It makes life so much better. It makes you less self-absorbed. You have less time to think about your own worries and problems.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: You're more outer-oriented. You have a greater sense of proportion of values and things like… So, “My problems really aren't that big at all because other people have these problems,” etc. It gets you out of your own little narrow world, so it's very therapeutic. And if you keep that in mind that every day doing this is like a 5-, 10-minute bit of therapy, you're more likely to do it as opposed to, “Shit, another thing I have to do with my life,” you know?

[Angel Donovan]: Right. [Laughs] Yeah.

[Robert Greene]: “Man, I just want to play a video game. Fuck,” you know?

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Robert Greene]: No, you’ve got to think of it like it's actually going to really improve all aspects. You'll be a better businessperson as well because, as you say, business is pure social… the social relationships.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, totally. Actually, like the MBA and the executive MBA, the difference they say is like the executive MBA is the whole personal organization, development…

[Robert Greene]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: The soft side of it.

[Robert Greene]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So they totally focus on that, and that’s for the more mature guys who are doing stuff already, and that’s the focus.

[Robert Greene]: Right.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. So I actually found it fascinating. That was what drove me as well. It was just like discovering the world and how it works.

[Robert Greene]: Uh-huh.

[Angel Donovan]: So I guess that’s where people would look for inspiration, is like really discovering about how life works and everything that’s going on around you.

[Robert Greene]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Moving on a little bit, you bring out some characters in Seduction. I think one of the most famous ones is a rake.

[Robert Greene]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: But there's quite a few of them in there. And I was just wondering if you have any kind of real-life examples that exist today. Most of the ones, if I remember correctly because it was a while already ago, historic examples, so I can't remember if there were any more modern ones in the last 50 years or so that you could reference that might give people something to relate to.

[Robert Greene]: Well, I mean I think if you can't personally relate to the idea of a rake, you haven't been out there much in the world, I mean a lot of Hollywood actors, I can't think of any that instantly come to mind, I mean Bill Clinton…

[Angel Donovan]: I've seen a couple of videos of Ben Affleck…

[Robert Greene]: Would he qualify? I wouldn't know, but I'm sure he probably would be.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, and there was… Russell Brand is kind of…

[Robert Greene]: Oh, Russell Brand…

[Angel Donovan]: Well, I don't know what you think of him as a rake-type character. Some people refer to him as a rake.

[Robert Greene]: Sure, sure. I mean, there's a simple way to qualify a rake, a simple way of measuring it, and that’s the degree to how much they're obsessed with women. If someone is just interested in sex and going to bed with 300 women but it's kind of cold and they're doing it out of something else, that’s not necessarily a rake. It's more the fact that this is a man who really, really is obsessed with women, their psychology, with who they are. He really likes them deep down inside. He likes their company. He's not necessarily a man’s man. In fact, most rakes have a slight feminine edge to them.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: They actually enjoy the company of woman but they can't be satisfied by one woman, and so there's game and their search is defined as many different ones as possible, but the fact that they are deeply interested in women is what makes them so devilishly seductive, and a lot of obviously rock stars are going to have that quality and Hollywood actors and Bill Clinton. I know there… I keep hearing people tell me of amazing rakes now in the world today and for some reason I'm drawing blanks. I'm hoping you would help me out.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs] Well, I saw one of your quotes…

[Robert Greene]: I would say like on the side of someone who you might think is rake but isn't would be like Tiger Woods because this is a guy who’s clearly sleeping with a lot of different women or has that need, but there's something else going on there. I wouldn't say he's someone who’s genuinely always thinking about women.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: He's got this sort of competitive thing where he's got to, you know… So that would be someone where I wouldn't say is that, but goddammit I can't think of like the rakes that are out there in the world.

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Robert Greene]: There are always hundreds of thousands of male rakes out there at any given time in history, including myself, although I have to qualify myself as a reformed rake.

[Angel Donovan]: Right. Well, I mean I've read some stuff about Mick Jagger for instance, some stuff that Eric Clapton said about him. He sounded like he fit into that character.

[Robert Greene]: Well, most definitely, and he's got that slight androgynous aspect to him. I know women who know Mick Jagger to this day and tell me about that. So he 100% would have to be classified as a rake. You'll find them a lot in people who are in the public eye like in the rock world, in music, etc., but they’re also everywhere. They're not just…

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. I think one, I mean obviously we always look for celebrities. It helps with this kind of thing because obviously we all know them. But one thing is like these are obviously people who are successful. Maybe they’ve gone through some of that mastery process, which is being open. And this is a long way of saying that becoming a rake-type character or one of these other seductive characters naturally means that you kind of let go of some of your inhibitions like the societal inhibitions and some things like this. So that might be a reason why there's more of these in that group of people than in the general population, for example. I don't know if you have any ideas on that.

[Robert Greene]: There'd be more of what, I'm sorry?

[Angel Donovan]: More seductor types, more effective seductors? Because you look at them and you're like, “Okay, it's just because he's a rock star that he's got loads of women chasing him.” Of course, but you also see these people acting different as well, and maybe in their first year of success they'd look a little bit different in the interviews and so on through the second year and the third year. It could also be through kind of an emotional freeing up and inhibition freeing up because they're more confident as time goes on and so on, so they can act like themselves. It's just some ideas there as to why there may be more of them there effective at seduction and it's not just the fact that they're a rock star or they're a celebrity or so on.

[Robert Greene]: Yeah, I mean, perhaps the fact that they have this quality is what ends up making them successful and powerful – they have these seductive qualities. I do now recall somebody that I would say is a very great modern seducer and I can say it because I've personally observed him in action.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: That’s 50 Cent. He's got all of the background material. He lost his mother in early age and he’s sort of obsessed with that mother figure a bit. And he's obsessed with women and he's really, really good around them, and he gives them this kind of attention that's very personalized and he's just… he's got lots of charisma. But this was obviously predating his success as a rock star. He had this power going on going way back.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: But I guess I'm not quite sure what your question is about, why there are more seducers out there. I'm not sure I understand that.

[Angel Donovan]: Well, I was just wondering if there's more of them… because beyond the fact that in People Magazine or whatever that there's always going to be like he cheated on her, etc., etc., and it just seems like it goes on more often there and the male stars are sleeping with more women than the average guy.

[Robert Greene]: I don't know if that’s not just an illusion. I remember I was in Paris when I was about 20 years old and I worked in a hotel all the models stayed, and I met this man who was sort of the first great seducer I've ever met and he kind of got me excited about the whole concept. And he was this Brazilian guy and nobody will have ever heard of him. That's why I say they're around you but they're not necessarily in the news.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: This guy was so insanely smooth. I have never seen anybody smoother than him even beyond 50 Cent. And he could repair any situation and he could charm any woman, and no one’s ever heard of him. And I encounter people like that all the time, stories about that, and in every office there will be someone like that. Certainly if you're going to be in the limelight and you're going to be a successful actor, whomever, you have a heads-up so that a woman is already intrigued without having to know anything about you personally. So that gives you an advantage. But it creates this illusion that that’s where all of the great seducers are and it's not. They're around us everywhere, believe me. Trust me.

[Angel Donovan]: So one of the kind of easier topics I thought that would be really helpful today for the audience in terms of practicality is that you talk about some of the anti-seductive qualities in your book.

[Robert Greene]: Yeah. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: And it's always easier I think to stop doing things than it is to try doing new things, so could we talk a little bit what are the anti-seductive qualities that you want to avoid?

[Robert Greene]: Well, I don’t have the book in front of me and I wrote it…

[Angel Donovan]: Uh-huh. [Laughs] Sorry about that.

[Robert Greene]: …13 years ago, but I mean clearly talking too much, being kind of, I call it the brute where you think that just sort of overwhelming the woman physically is what is seductive but it's incredibly anti-seductive because it shows that you're not seeing them as a different person, you're just brutishly applying tactics that you've used on other women. The windbag, the man who just talks and talks. I already mentioned that. The moralizer, somebody who's always judging and criticizing… seduction is sort of a realm where we let go of all of those needs to moralize and judge other people. It's pretty much going to be all tied to a single quality, which is the inability to get outside of yourself and listen to the other person, get outside of your own insecurities.

I think one of the types that I mention is the bumbler, and what that is is it's someone who won't quite consummate the seduction or is really bad at consummating it because he's always thinking of himself and his insecurities, but he masks it by thinking, “Oh, she's not ready for it,” or “I'm going to be more considerate and I'm not going to push myself at that right moment.”

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Robert Greene]: But actually it reveals that you're thinking about yourself and your own insecurities. You're not really being considerate, and a lot of times the woman really wants to be overwhelmed at that particular moment that's deeply tied to maybe her own psychological needs where at a certain moment all the pretenses are dropped and moves to the aggressive side. And an anti-seductive is the man unwilling to make that aggressive move because he's worried about hurting her feelings, but it just reveals that he's in his head. So all of these qualities reveal that you're thinking about yourself and not thinking about the other person, and that’s sort of what ties all the anti-seductive characters together.

[Angel Donovan]: That’s great. I like the bumbler, the way… I mean, that’s a very common problem, but I like the different perspective you bring to that…

[Robert Greene]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: …that he's inside his head and that’s the problem where it's coming from. Okay, so in terms of healthy long-term relationships, is there anything you've found through your research that can support and improve the health of long-term relationships with some of the seductive material?

[Robert Greene]: Well, I mean, this isn't a book about long-term relationships. It's not called marriage or whatever. It's called Seduction.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah.

[Robert Greene]: So there's sort of a built-in shelf life sometimes for these things where… but there are relationships… I think a major complaint that a woman might have, and even a man, is that after all the excitement that is generated through the seductive process where there are surprises and drama and ups and downs and the sort of intensity, that it kind of just flattens out almost instantly that it becomes a relationship, and then it loses its flavor and then you find your mind wandering to somebody else. So I try and say in the book that you want to keep the seduction going.

It's not like it's as intense as it was in the beginning. You can't sustain a relationship for a few years at that level. It's going to have to taper off. Let's be realistic. But it doesn’t have to completely fall off the map where you no longer are trying, you're no longer dressing nicely, you're no longer taking them to interesting places, you're no longer buying them things that show you're thinking about them in some way. The moment you let go of all of that you're in trouble, and it's a common complaint that women have in relationships but I think men find it very oppressive to have everything settle into that.

So you are thinking about the seduction. You are thinking about occasionally generating drama. You are going to still have to go a little bit hot and cold at times and withdraw a little bit and keep an edge and keep some element of surprise going. Even a degree of tension is always good. It's mostly that you're not just sort of letting everything go and just being natural like you were before you started the whole thing, I think is the main way to kind of keep the seductive charge going.

The other thing that really kills a relationship is familiarity like you just know everything about them. It loses all excitement. There's no mystery anymore. You know everything. And so you have to be able to still generate a sense of surprise. There are qualities about you that they don't know yet. You do things that surprise them.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: And if you're able to keep that going, then they’ll probably respond and do the same. And if it's a person that doesn’t want that, that wants just the comfort and is afraid of continuing the seductive charge, that’s probably a problem unless it's something that you want yourself as well.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, those are certainly cool, great points there. I'm conscious of time so I'd like to move on to a bit of the mastery stuff.

[Robert Greene]: Okay.

[Angel Donovan]: I think some of that’s great and very useful. First of all, I don't know if you’ve thought about this, but is there a way that you would approach kind of the process of learning that you used for mastery to seduction? Like if you wanted to become a master of seduction, what would be the process you would go through to get there?

[Robert Greene]: Well, yeah, you could. You know, I never thought of that before, so this is a first time here, but I think it's an interesting proposition that you bring up there. So for instance, Chapter 1 in Mastery is Discover Your Calling, discovering what it is that you were meant to be or to do in life. And it's a critical question for everyone. It's going to be what will end up making you successful and happy. And you could say in terms of seduction it's knowing who you are as a seducer. Basically, Chapter 1 of Mastery is about knowing who you are, being self-aware so that you don’t end up becoming a lawyer even though you were meant to be a writer. In seduction it would be knowing who you are, what your strengths are, what makes you naturally seductive, which is the first part of the book.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: So yeah, I would apply that there. And then the apprenticeship, it would also be applicable. That’s the Chapter 2 of Mastery where you go through a seven-, 10-year apprenticeship gaining skills. And what the apprenticeship would mean in terms of seduction would be as many seductions as possible. The more experience and practice you have, the more women you interact with, the more you put yourself out there, the more you go into social situations, the more you're going to be developing a skill and a smoothness and a confidence and an ease. It's not you're going to become Mr. Smooth. It's good to have a little bit of vulnerability, to have some shyness, etc.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: But you want to have it a little bit under control so it doesn’t dominate your character. And so the more you practice it literally out there in the world instead of reading books on it and literally putting yourself into these interactions and failing, so as I say in Mastery, “to learn a skill you have to fail at it enough.” You have to fail at this, overcome your fear.

And then the next chapter in Mastery is finding a good mentor who can help you. That’s always a great step in the process, which there was a component in the pickup artist world. You know, and moving on to the creative, intuitive side of it it seems a little bit farfetched, but really if you’ve been doing this for a long time you're no longer thinking in each situation like, “Do I need to do this? Do I need to try this strategy? What should I say here?”

It comes naturally to you. You have a flow. You're not thinking so much and you're just in the moment, which is what happens to people who are great piano players or athletes, which is the end game of mastery that I discuss in the book where you have an intuitive feel for it. That’s what’s going to happen if you've been practicing the art of seduction for 10, 12 years. You're going to reach that level. So I've never thought of it before—it's a great question—but I think it is actually quite applicable.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, I think so too. One of the things you bring up is how important persistence is and failing to the learning process, and you just mentioned failing a bit.

[Robert Greene]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: Could you talk about how important those two attributes are? I see them as like pretty essential, and I think it's something that guys kind of run away from and they want to avoid, so I feel it's important.

[Robert Greene]: Well, I'm trying to debunk in Mastery some common concepts that we have about people who are great at something, who are geniuses, as if they were born that way. So Steve Jobs has this natural talent, Tiger Woods or whomever, they were just born that way and they have the raw materials that we don’t have and that’s what ends up… and they use it and they become great. No. In all of the stories that I… people I've read about, and then I interviewed nine contemporary masters as well, talent plays a very, very small or minor role. It's their level of persistence. It's how hard they try, how long they try something, how willing they are to spend five or 10 years learning a skill, how they're not afraid to experiment and put themselves out there in the public eye, and if they're criticized they can withstand it. That level of inner strength and persistence, if you have it, there's nothing that’s going to stop you.

And I know in Mastery one of the contemporary masters I interviewed is a guy named Paul Graham – very successful person in Silicon Valley who’s created a company called Y Combinator worth 5 billion dollars. And Paul Graham basically has a school for people who want to do their own tech startup. It's an entrepreneur system in which he takes a cut of if their company ends up being successful.

And he interviews every year thousands of people literally, 8000 people who want to become part of Y Combinator. He can recognize almost within three seconds whether they have the raw material or not when they come in for an interview. He can recognize that quality of persistence, whether they're going to keep beating against the wall and overcome it. He'll criticize their idea in the interview. Will they take that criticism and use it and say, “Hmm, yeah, maybe, right. I’ll do this or the other,” or are they going to kind of wither and wilt? Right then and there he knows that one person’s going to succeed and another’s not. He met Mark Zuckerberg, which you might love or hate, early, early on, and he said, “That’s the guy that has like 80,000 degrees of this level of persistence.”

And then of course it involves failure. If you think about it in your own life, if you try something, a game, a sport, writing, whatever it is, when something doesn’t work it makes you think about why it didn't work, and when that reflective moment… you start going, “Hmm, instead of A I can try B, which is probably what will work now.” That is how you learn. You don’t learn unless something goes wrong because you keep doing what you were going to do anyway until you hit a wall, until there's resistance, until something fails. That’s what makes you stop and say, “Ah, I've got to do something different.” That’s exactly what learning is.

So the more you put yourself out there to fail, the quicker that learning curve will happen, the faster you will learn. And they’ve even documented that in studies. I quoted that in Mastery that the figure skaters who end up getting a gold or bronze or silver medal in the Olympics are the ones who fail the most in practice. They try the most difficult…

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Robert Greene]: I don’t even remember what they call [laughs]…

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Robert Greene]: Whatever, spins, moves, and they fell over and over and over again. They're not afraid of falling, and that’s literally what’s going to make you a good entrepreneur, seducer, whatever.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, I totally agree with that. Obviously it's not some favorite point of advice for guys listening to it first time. They kind of want to avoid all that. The answer is more just to get used to it and…

[Robert Greene]: Well, it's like, are you worried about your ego or are you excited about success? What’s more important to you, winning, succeeding, getting better or your own miserable little ego?

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Robert Greene]: I mean, I hate to put it that way, but if you want to be realistic and you want to have some degree of success, you have to understand it doesn’t come overnight. It's a process, a process I describe in Mastery, and that process can take several years and it's going to require setbacks and failures and hardships. And so you're toughening yourself up for life. A man should have to go through that toughening up process and not shrink from challenges and from things like that. You want to think of yourself as a man who’s independent and strong. Well, you can't get there unless you've had setbacks and hardships in life.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: Some of the most powerful people I have met as far as CEOs and businesspeople or someone like 50 are precisely the ones that have had the worst childhoods and youths, etc. where they faced incredible amount of obstacles and resistance, and that’s what’s made them tough and strong, and you want to go through that. You know if you like to exercise your muscles don’t get strong unless you have some resistance and you sweat and it's kind of painful. Well, it's the same thing with your skills in life. You've got to have some resistance before you get strong.

[Angel Donovan]: And one of the ways you've described that people get through this is that they get a reward from it. The way you described it is if a central theme in what you're doing is that you love it, then you are getting some kind of reward as you do it, and this gets you through the hardships and it enables the persistence, enables you to push through the failures because in a way you're getting this kind of immediate reward because you love it anyway.

[Robert Greene]: Well, I mean you can't sugarcoat it. Like I have in the book, the icon of this in Mastery is Henry Ford, the great automobile genius, and I talk in the book about how he starts his first automobile business in the late 1890s and it fails, and it's hugely expensive and his reputation’s in tatters. And then he tries to get a second company going, which was pretty difficult to do after you've had such a failure, and he manages to get a second company together because he's charming or whatever. And that fails, and now it looks like he's finished, he's ruined. You're never going to recover from that.

And throughout all of that this guy is like optimistic, he's happy, not down at all. People are like shocked at his attitude. And then he tries a third time. He manages to find some strange, weird man who’s never been in America before, who doesn’t know about his failures, somebody from Scotland who bankrolls his third company and now it succeeds.

And he says, “The reason I didn't get down was I knew that each failure just taught me so many things that I could not possibly have learned on my own or from a book or from school or from anything else. It taught me why it didn't work, what I needed to do that was different, and by the third time I had perfected it. And I knew this each time, so it didn’t get me down. In fact, I welcomed it.”

That’s hard. It's not going to be easy because in the present you're getting a big blow to your ego, people are thinking that you're a loser. But you're not thinking about yourself. You're thinking about your skill and about learning. You're focusing on that.

So it's a different approach. It's a different way of thinking. It's a different philosophy of life where you're outer-directed. You're outer-directed – you're thinking about your work and not about your ego and insecurities. And if you can make that switch, just that one switch, it makes a huge, huge difference.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, it sounds like it also connects with the idea, I think it came earlier in the book, it says trust in the process?

[Robert Greene]: Yes, that’s right. That’s a great point. I mean, I talk about that in reference to a fighter pilot who’s one of the people I interviewed, and that’s… you think your job might be stressful, well, you just…

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Robert Greene]: You try strapping yourself into one of those supersonic jets which your life could be over in a millisecond.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Robert Greene]: That’s high stress. And he was not naturally gifted for being a fighter pilot. He wasn’t a golden boy. He had to learn and overcome all of his fears and weaknesses. And basically he understood, because he had been in sports earlier on in life, there's a process involved, and that the more you do something, the more you learn it, the more comfortable you are, the less fearful you are. You have to kind of trust that process. And he was noticed in fighter pilot school that there would be people who would drop out who were infinitely more talented than him because they got frustrated and they didn't trust the process.

And that’s what happens to a lot of people. They don’t realize after the third year of playing the piano when they give up that if they just push through those frustrating moments, after five years some great breakthroughs will happen. So yeah, knowing that that’s how the brain works, which is a huge part of what I talk about in Mastery, and trusting that process and knowing you'll get there is a major way of overcoming your impatience or your momentary setbacks and disappointment.

[Angel Donovan]: It also sounds from that that there's a momentum involved which eventually enables you to kind of put that behind you, many steps of success if you like. Once you get halfway there… Also, you talk a lot about the brain adapting and getting this massive information, finally starting to see the picture…

[Robert Greene]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: So I guess also that critical point is when everything stops looking like a big puzzle and you know…

[Robert Greene]: Yeah.

[Angel Donovan]: It's confusing, but actually you start to see bits of sense here and there and from that point forward it looks a lot easier.

[Robert Greene]: Yeah, and that happens with everything. I mean, it won't happen if you choose the wrong field. If you go in to science and you weren't meant to go in science, you won't really be able to push past that barrier because you're going to get bored and you're going to tune out. So the key thing is, have you chosen a field that excites you in some way?

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: But I call it the cycle of accelerated returns. And they have an expression in chemistry called autocatalytic in which things start generating on their own of their own momentum once you reach this kind of tipping point. And what I mean in the cycle of accelerated returns is once that practice reaches a point where it starts to be a little more fun, then you practice harder because you see the reward. And as you practice harder you see more rewards, it becomes more fun.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Robert Greene]: And then it just starts generating this momentum that's so exhilarating and so powerful, but you won't get there if you give up after a couple of years. So yeah, I agree with you.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm. Yeah, something that we tell the guys here is to focus on easy wins first because there's a lot of issues with trusting in the process of getting better in the area of dating, sex and relationships. It seems a lot more intangible and I think there's a lot of, you know, there's this societal confusion we were talking a little bit earlier about how people don’t talk about the reality and so on. So there's a bit more confusion there, so I think a lot of people get demotivated and give up. I'm not sure if it's more than in other areas of life, but it seems to me it could be.

[Robert Greene]: Yeah, I agree with the idea of easy wins, and I talk and in the book I have examples of people in their apprenticeships who find a way to master one very specific small-level skill, and that is what is like an easy win.

[Angel Donovan]: Right.

[Robert Greene]: You can find instead of taking on, you know, you're learning the piano, instead of taking on a hugely complicated piece in the beginning which you're certain to fail, you try something simple that you're able to conquer. It gives you an empowered feeling. It makes you know that it's going to work. It's very powerful. Yeah, definitely. I definitely agree with that.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay, I want to end this session with something that we ask everyone.

[Robert Greene]: Uh-oh.

[Angel Donovan]: So I'd really, really be interested in kind of your perspective on this.

[Robert Greene]: Okay.

[Angel Donovan]: It might be different to many of the other people we've had before. For someone who’s starting from scratch, from zero, so he's a complete beginner to dating and relationships, hasn’t had any success in this area of his life, what would be your top three recommendations to learn how to become a master of this area of his life as fast as possible?

[Robert Greene]: [Breathes deeply]

[Angel Donovan]: [Laughs]

[Robert Greene]: [Laughs] Well, you've got to want to do it. You have to reach a point where you're frustrated and you're unhappy and you want to… If it's something that you're doing just because you think it's cool or other people are like that but it's not really who you are or you don’t feel comfortable, it's not going to work. You're not going to have the wherewithal to stay with this long enough. So it's got to be something that you really want and you've reached a point in your life where you want to change or you want to get better at it.

The thing is it's very simple, really. We've already discussed it. The more you put yourself out there, the better you're going to get at it. Look, I've noticed it in my own life as well in the very banal level. As a writer, I’ll go through a period of a year literally in which I don’t see practically anybody because I've disappeared into my book and I'm writing. And then I'm suddenly thrust into the public eye when the book comes out and it's kind of a, “Whoa, I haven't been around people!” It kind of takes me like a couple of weeks to get my feet back and like, you know, nights and social and etc.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: And I know that once I'm in the whirlwind and I'm doing it month after month, wow, I get so much better at it and it's easier. It's the same thing for you. It's like you've got to get over that barrier of not trying, of standing back, of reading books instead of going out there and doing it. The more you do it, the more you try and interact—

It doesn’t have to be, you know, don’t set your bar that high. You don’t want to say, “Oh, I'm going to go now and try and seduce this great-looking model,” etc. It's more like just talking, just being able to be comfortable and talking to a woman and being able to interact with her and feeling comfortable is half the game. So don’t be sitting there thinking, “It's all about sex.” It's more about feeling confident and a degree of ease, and that really, really comes through a lot of exposure and putting yourself out there and interacting with women, and just in even the level of a conversation.

And then the other aspect that I mentioned earlier, which I think would be the third one here, is something that you love. You’ve got to want this. You can't be doing it for some bad motive. You have to put yourself out there. And that’s number two.

Number three is you have to outer-oriented to the degree that you can focus deeply on the other person, think of them as an individual, find that kind of an exciting process, practice it, getting out of your head, getting in their head. You're going to be a great seducer if you play it that way for a couple of years and be patient and acquire the skill of having that kind of focused attention on people.

[Angel Donovan]: Mm-hmm.

[Robert Greene]: It will not only improve your chances with women but it'll improve you in business, etc. So I guess those would be my things.

[Angel Donovan]: Thank you. Great points and all of them were kind of new perspectives, so that's really great to have on the show. I don’t want to forget about your new book and what you have going on there.

[Robert Greene]: Well, in Mastery I had a chapter on social intelligence, which a lot of readers said was, you know, I got a good feedback from that chapter that it helped them a lot. But they said that they kind of wish that there was more information.

And basically what I did in Mastery is I said you must look at being in social situations as a form of intelligence that you have to acquire, and it's a two-pronged process. It's learning how to read people in the moment in an intuitive way and understanding what makes human beings tick, what motivates them, knowing human nature. And so I go into that in that chapter.

Well, I'm going to expand that into a book and it's basically about human nature. I'm going to kind of give you a primer, a code book that will allow you, if you practice this and go deep into it, to decode the mysterious behavior of people around you. You'll understand in a much deeper way what is really going on behind the mask that they're wearing, how to look at them and see signs of their motivations, of their childhood, of their unmet needs, etc. Also, with that skill of being in the moment, it's going to be a book about how to read people on a much higher level, mastering what I call these sort of elements or laws of human nature that are very timeless. So that's pretty much the…

[Angel Donovan]: That’s a fascinating and very challenging subject.

[Robert Greene]: I give myself Mount Everests to climb otherwise.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. Well, you've already climbed a lot of big mountains, so why not build a bigger one?

[Robert Greene]: Exactly.

[Angel Donovan]: I'm really looking forward to that because that sounds like something that will really help our guys. You know, a lot of people get confused… I think one of the bigger challenges they have is they read all this advice but they don’t understand the reactions of the women around them, so in a sense it leaves them kind of blind and they don't know what to do with the advice because they don't know what’s going on. More help to understand how the human world is interacting around them, great.

[Robert Greene]: Yeah. Well, just give me a couple of years.

[Angel Donovan]: Okay. [Laughs] Will do.

[Robert Greene]: [Laughs] Alright.

[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, so good luck with that. I really look forward to it.

[Robert Greene]: Oh, thank you. [Laughs]

[Angel Donovan]: And thank you very much for this fantastic interview. It's been very, very interesting and lots of new perspectives on some of the aspects there. Thank you, Robert.

[Robert Greene]: Thank you very much, Angel. I really enjoyed it, thanks.