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July 21, 2025 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
01:20:05
20250721_our-brains-are-turning-to-mush-robert-greene-on-po
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Finding Your Unique Voice 00:09:38
Young men are having a crisis in the United States.
And yes, there are things that are working against you as a young man.
Things like masculinity are no longer seen as a virtue.
But you can't think of yourself as a victim.
This is my one chance in life.
I'm not going to screw this up.
I'm going to make this either get rich or die trying to quote 50 Cent.
The idea that it's just about talent and genius, oh, I'm not born that way.
Oh, I'm not an Einstein or a Mozart.
It's just it's hard to be a leader these days because you're listening to so many voices and you have to deal with the media and social media.
I don't know if we could have a Churchill or a Lincoln anymore.
Robert Green is an international best-selling author and one of the world's most respected thinkers on power, seduction and war.
His cult books are beloved by billionaires, CEOs, and rappers like Jay-Z and Drake.
He's so admired at hip-hop circles, even wrote a book with 50 Cent about strategy and fearlessness.
Green's powers of persuasion are considered so potent that his books have even been banned in prisons.
He recently said that he'd most like his legacy to be creating more bold lions in the world, as there are currently too many timid hares.
Obviously, I assume that this was aimed directly at me and quickly invited him to make his first appearance on Uncensored.
Robert Green, welcome to you.
Thank you for having me, Pierce.
I wasn't thinking about you when I said that.
I could safely say, Robert, nobody has ever called me a timid hare.
So that was a little bit of British humor to kick us off.
But I totally agree with your basic premise.
And I also think that we are in a very strange world right now.
And in a way, when I read Jonathan Haight's book about smartphones, you can almost chart it back to 2010, where young people seem to be gripped in a sort of epidemic of anxiety and lack of confidence.
They've become really a group of timid hares.
No, I'm generalizing, not all of them, but many, many, many of them have.
I mean, do you agree with Haight's premise that a lot of it is driven by smartphones?
Are there other reasons why we've got so many young people so anxious?
I think there's several things going on here.
There was the 2008, the great banking crisis.
There was COVID.
There's been a lot of hard things that they've had to deal with.
But when people tell me that, I talk about, you know, my parents living through the Depression and World War II.
So there are always crises and things that people have had to live through.
But yes, I agree with Jonathan Haidt about the smartphone being a lot of the reason for that.
So in my book, The Laws of Human Nature, I talk about conformity and tribalism as something very much baked into human nature, right?
We want to believe what others around us are believing in.
And social media has become like the nuclear option in that because we are so attuned to what other people are having for breakfast, where they're vacationing, their boyfriends, their girlfriends, all the great things they're doing, et cetera, that we're losing a sense of what makes me unique, what makes me different, what makes me stand out from the crowd.
And people are more and more afraid.
They're more timid.
They're more conformist.
And so I try to maintain when I talk to young people and give them advice, I say that the source of your power in the world, the source of anyone's power that makes you successful, that makes an Elon Musk or any entrepreneur successful, is being different, is mining what makes you a unique person, what makes you stand out, right?
And that often means going against what other people are doing and maybe even embarrassing yourself and maybe even taking an opinion that other people don't like, right?
But if you're going to get rid of that, if you're going to just simply do what other people are doing and think what other people are thinking, you have no power in this world.
You're going to become like everyone else and you're easily replaceable.
So, yeah, I think social media has played a huge role in this, a very detrimental role.
And when I advise people, I say being fearless, not being afraid to do something unconventional.
You know, my first book, The 48 Laws of Power, was pretty much a very unconventional book and was condemned by a lot of people for being amoral.
But it was something that reflected something very deeply about myself.
And it has been by far my most successful book.
We've sold over 8 million copies in the United States because I was not afraid to do something that hadn't been out there before, to take a stand, to be an individual, to be different.
You know, it's so interesting you say this.
As you're rattling off a few names there, I'm thinking about the people that are probably the ultimate non-conformist, people like Donald Trump, people like Elon Musk.
The reason that they've become so successful in their chosen fields, I think, is because, I mean, they've got a degree of shamelessness, no doubt about that, but they're not afraid to take chances and risk failure.
And I think that is the bedrock, really, is having the self-confidence to actually go for it in life.
So many people now are resistant to that.
I'm convinced it's exactly why you say it's because they are drawn to the conformity of social media.
And it also encourages very tribal behavior, you know, in the sense of, you know, you see it on with the left or the right on X.
It doesn't really matter.
It's the same kind of thing, a refusal to adjust opinions according to changing information or facts when they evolve into something else.
A refusal because you're somehow betraying your tribe.
All of that plays into this, not, you know, this conformist view, doesn't it?
Yes, very much so.
I mean, I make the point when you're very young, when you're a child, you kind of know what makes you different.
You know what your tastes are.
You know what you like, what you don't, what you hate, the kind of things that you're attracted to.
And then as you get older, you start hearing these other voices.
You start listening to what people are saying on social media and you become alienated from yourself.
You're no longer listening to your own voice.
You're no longer hearing what makes you stand out, what makes you different.
And you become afraid.
You become embarrassed if you do something like that.
So social media has this role of kind of drowning out all of that, what makes you different, that voice that says, this is what I'm attracted to.
This is what I'm different.
This is what interests me.
And it makes you listen to what other people are doing.
And you no longer have a sense of who you are, right?
Of what makes you different from everyone else, what makes you unique.
Everybody is born with a set of DNA that will never be reproduced again in the future or ever in the past.
You are truly, truly, truly a unique person genetically.
You are unique by the parents that raised you.
Nobody else has parents that raised you in the exact same way.
Your early experiences are unique.
All of this separates you from everybody else.
And to lose that is tragic.
To lose that is the saddest thing that you could do to yourself.
Are you worried that with the explosion of artificial intelligence, the kind of predictions from people like Elon Musk that we're going to end up, you know, in a few years where humans will become part robot because you'll be able to repair organs and things that would otherwise have killed you with, you know, with little sort of robotic engines and so on.
Are you worried that as part of that inevitable move into a more robotic world, that we will literally become more robotic as a people?
Well, I'm very afraid for AI for various reasons.
Yes, I am afraid about that.
But I like to make the point that what is truly magnificent about being a human being is our brains.
The human brain is the most complex organ in the universe.
The number of connections, neuronal connections is astronomical.
You can't even begin to calculate it.
Our creative powers are absolutely immense.
And what you're seeing with things like AI is that our brains are turning to mush.
We're no longer doing, we're no longer exercising it.
So students, young people now, are no longer doing any kind of mathematical calculations on their own.
Everything is through the computer.
Everything is through AI.
They no longer have to think.
They no longer have to use kind of their own logic in solving problems.
Like when you were a child and you had to do algebraic formulas that kind of developed your mind and made you think.
You know, I'm somebody that has studied a lot of foreign languages and I speak several languages.
And it has completely enriched my brain.
It makes me think on a different level.
It makes me understand other cultures.
We're now going to be growing up in a world where people don't learn other languages because you can instantly translate something through AI, right?
So it's making us lazy.
It's going to have a very neutralizing effect on the human brain, on our powers, on our confidence in the brain itself.
And yes, we're going to becoming more and more marginalized and the robots are going to be taking over.
Yes, it concerns me deeply.
You had, I read 50 jobs when you were younger before you became this gigantic selling writer.
Embracing Life's Many Adventures 00:10:44
I mean, give me a flavor for some of the weirder jobs you did.
And then how did you work out that your real mission in life was going to be telling us how we should try and save our lives?
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Well, I lived in Europe for about five or six years and I had every kind of imaginable job there.
I was a tour guide in Dublin.
I worked for a television company in London.
I worked in a hotel in Paris as a receptionist.
I taught English in Barcelona.
I lived on an island in Greece and I got so sick that I couldn't pay my way off the island.
So I had to do construction work pulling nails out of boards.
So I've had all those kinds of jobs here in Los Angeles.
I worked for detective agency as a skip tracer and I've worked in Hollywood.
I've had some of the worst bosses that you can imagine, some of the most manipulative psychotic bosses, and they all inspired the 48 laws of power.
But basically, I saw my life as a kind of an adventure where I was going to try everything, right?
I was going to live everywhere.
I was going to try every kind of job.
And I knew all along that I was going to be a writer because that's the only thing that I'm good at.
I'm not good at basketball.
I'm not good at sports.
I can't build anything with my hands.
The only thing I ever was good at was writing.
I just couldn't figure out what kind of writing I was meant to do.
I tried novels.
I tried journalism.
I worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter.
I was a failure at all of these things.
And basically, I was 38 years old.
My parents were getting very worried about me.
What's Robert going to be?
You know, is he really looks like a loser at that point in my life?
And so I had a chance.
I was in one of my 50-60 jobs.
I was in Italy working on the opening of this new media school.
And I met a man there who was a book packager.
And he asked me out of the blue if I had an idea for a book.
And suddenly everything in my brain just clicked.
All of my bad experiences, all of my horrible bosses, all of those terrible jobs that I had.
I read a lot of history and I saw that everything kind of repeats itself.
So in Louis XIV in Versailles, you had the courtiers.
Everyone was being so careful and, you know, trying to impress the king.
And if you didn't impress the king, you were thrown into prison.
And I thought, it's the same world that has existed in the 16th, in the 17th century as now.
It's just you don't get thrown into prison.
You don't get beheaded.
You get fired.
And so I thought there are these kind of timeless laws about power.
And that was the book I could write.
And he got so excited about that.
He said, Robert, I'll pay you to live while you write this book.
It was the turning point in my life.
And essentially, at moments, I had been so depressed and so despondent that when he gave me that opportunity, I go, this is my one chance in life.
I'm not going to screw this up.
I'm going to make this.
It's either get rich or die trying to quote 50 Cent.
I was either going to make this happen or forget it.
You know, I'm a failure.
So, but mostly the lesson for me was I never lost faith in my ability to write.
And when the opportunity came and I was 38 years old, I took it and I used all of my experience in life and poured it into that book.
Do you think that everybody has a talent, but most people probably don't find out what it is?
Yes, I'm very much egalitarian on that.
So in my book, Mastery, in which I describe the kind of path you must take in order to master any field, one of the examples I have in the book is this woman, Temple Grandin.
Temple Grandin was born with high-level autism.
She was basically going to be sent to some kind of a home where she'd have to live her whole life.
She was non-functional.
And she found, she had a teacher who didn't believe any of that.
And slowly she pulled Temple Grandin out of her prison that she was locked in in her mind and taught her language, etc.
And as she got older, she developed this interest in animals because a lot of autistic people feel very, they're more comfortable with animals than with people.
And she developed herself, she became a scientist.
And now she's an extremely high-level scientist who studies animal behavior, who designs facilities for slaughterhouses, et cetera, and who writes about autism.
And I say, if someone with deep, deep autism, who has severe brain damage from birth, can become a master in a field, that means any of us, I believe, can achieve that.
It's just that we don't believe that anymore.
We think that people are born talented.
It's not that everybody is born with a talent.
Everybody is born with the possibility to achieve that.
It's just that you don't mind what makes you different.
You don't mind what excites you.
She became successful because she had a deep love of animals and that pulled her out of it.
And she wanted to study zoology and biology.
You out there, you have some deep love, something that you had when you were very young.
You've just not listened to it.
You're not attuned to it.
And so you go through life.
You're 21 years old and you know you have to make a living and you go to law school because your parents tell you that.
But it's also something that connects to you deeply and you go down a path that's that's not who you are.
And so I truly believe that if you find what that path is, what makes you unique, what makes you different from everyone else, you have a chance to become a master in any kind of field.
Yeah, 100%.
I was watching a clip on TikTok, I think, and it was a Manchester United football player, soccer player, as you would call him, called Phil Neville.
And he used to play with Cristiano Ronaldo, who is, for me, the best to ever play the game.
And he was talking about when he first came to United as a young kid.
And he said, people keep calling Ronaldo someone with a God-given talent.
He said, he definitely had a lot of talent.
He said, but what he had was an unbelievable work ethic.
He'd identified that he had a talent.
And he said he used to spend hours and hours more at the training ground every day than everybody else.
Then he would go home and he would get onto YouTube and he would study the tricks and the moves that were being made by the people he most admired in football.
And then he would work hard at the training ground to replicate them.
So his point being, yes, he obviously had a great talent, no question.
But there are so many very talented footballers who never make it.
What differentiated Cristiano Ronaldo?
And I've become good friends with Cristiano, and I've talked to him about this.
He just had this incredible drive to be the absolute best at his talent that he could possibly be.
And that drive has propelled him to become arguably the greatest to ever play the game.
But this wasn't something he was necessarily given by God on a plate.
Here you are.
You're going to be the greatest to ever play the game.
He took what he believed was his talent and made it an incredible thing.
Yeah, we fetishize the world genius and talent.
But, you know, the classic example would be like a Mozart, for instance, or an Albert Einstein.
But if you study these people deeply, you learn that actually they develop these talents.
They weren't just born that way.
Mozart was listening to music when he was four years old, three years old.
His father was a great pianist, right?
So it was in his blood.
He was hearing it all of the time.
But nobody worked and practiced harder.
You know, you have the proverbial 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell talked about.
He had put in those 10,000 hours by the time he was 10 years old because he loved playing the piano and he loved music so deeply.
So that by the time he was 18 years old, he had been practicing so long, he'd been composing so long that his genius could absolutely flourish.
But it was a function of the hours of practice.
You can do the same thing for Albert Einstein.
Yes, he was very brilliant, no doubt, he had a high IQ.
But when he came up with his first theory of relativity, it took him 10 years to develop that theory.
And the hours he spent in day in, day out, thinking about it over and over and over again, trying every possible permutation.
It was a function of the hours that he put in and the practice that he put in.
So the idea that it's just about talent and genius, oh, I'm not born that way.
Oh, I'm not an Einstein or a Mozart is just bullshit.
You know, it's not true.
Well, I remember the Beatles.
I remember that book.
Yeah, I remember the Gladwell book and the story of the Beatles.
You know, everyone thinks the Beatles just came together and were just a fun band from Liverpool, whatever.
And they don't know enough about the story that the Beatles went to Hamburg in Germany and they played, you know, sometimes 10, 15 gigs a week and they really honed their craft where someone like Paul McCartney is known as a brilliant songwriter and a great singer.
But he's also reputed to be, by his peer group, one of the best bass guitarists that's ever been.
And that's down entirely to the thousands of hours that they played these shows in Hamburg.
So that's an example.
I think I would add also Tiger Woods.
I think he's in the Gloud War book too.
Tiger Woods' dad was a golf nut and he recognized his son, had good coordination and everything else.
So he harnessed that boy from a very young age.
But if his dad hadn't been a golf nut, would that have happened?
I mean, probably not.
I mean, Tiger would have probably done something completely different.
The Power of Deliberate Practice 00:02:30
So again, you know, part of it is finding your talent.
Part of it is finding people around you, I guess, that can help you nurture that talent.
Part of it is the drive, the single-minded drive.
You know, I say I've got four kids.
The one thing I try and instill in them is a self-confidence.
I think it's the one most important thing I can give my children, the ability to back yourself.
And, you know, whenever they ask me, Dad, you know, I've been offered this or I've got the chance to do this.
And I say, well, just back yourself.
Just do it.
And if you fail, but you give it everything you've got and it doesn't work or you try something, you know, even a school, like with exam stuff, sometimes they're not just not very good at something.
I wasn't very good at maths, for example.
I was very good at English or history.
But I used to try my best.
You know, on Sports Day, I wasn't a natural athlete.
I was very good at cricket, quite good at football, but I was no good at sprinting and throwing and those kind of things.
But I used to win the non-finalist race, which was for all the losers, because I was determined that I would be the best of the losers.
And that was a drive that I had, just not to just accept that I was going to be crap.
Right.
And so I do think a lot of it is just an ability to back yourself.
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Yeah.
Overcoming Fear of Failure 00:15:40
Well, you know, we go back to what we were first talking about, social media and young people being so afraid.
And the main fear that people have, particularly like I think in adolescence, is failure.
So if I fail at something, if I try to start a business or write a book and I fail, it's going to be a tremendous blow to my ego.
And so the best thing to do is to not even try.
If I don't try to be good at something, if I don't try to write that book, if I don't try to start that business, then I won't fail and then I won't have to deal with those consequences.
But you only grow by failure.
I failed at so many things I can't even begin to describe to you.
I was a terrible screenwriter.
I was not really very good at journalism.
The novels that I wrote basically sucked.
I failed over and over and over again.
But each time I failed, I learned lessons.
I learned why I was not good at this.
I learned that this is not something that I was destined to do.
There's something else for me, right?
And I talk in my book, Mastery, about Henry Ford, who created basically the modern factory and automobile industry.
He failed three times to start his own business, which in the automobile industry in the 1890s was, you forget it, you have no chance, no hope.
He said, The only way I succeeded was by kept trying and I failed, and I learned by each failure.
So, coming back to people's fear of trying things, it's only by trying and failing that you're ever going to learn, you know.
Well, I love the quote from Wayne Gretzky, the ice hockey legend, the greatest ice hockey player in history, Canadian.
And he has this great quote: You'll miss 100% of the shots you never take.
And then there's also the Michael Jordan one, where he talks about all the shots he's missed.
People talk about the great shots he made, but they don't talk about the shots he missed.
Thousands and thousands of times, he took a shot and missed, right?
But because of the ferocious work ethic, ferocious backing of himself, he also made more shots than he made.
And that's how greatness is done, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, I talk in my book about a man I interviewed for Mastery named Cesar Rodriguez, who was the last American Air Force pilot who's been decorated for his fighting in the Iraq, the First Iraq War, Desert Storm.
He was an ACE, the last ACE in the American Air Force.
And Caesar is very short.
He's not physically talented.
And when he went to the academy in Arkansas or wherever to become an Air Force pilot, he was not one of those golden boys as portrayed in like Top Gun, those people who were destined to be the best fighter pilots.
He was one of the worst, right?
And he was out of the 80 people in his school, he was ranked like number 79 or something.
Through sheer hard work, through sheer practice, because he loved flying planes and because he knew that this was what he wanted to be, he turned himself into the best fighter pilot at the school.
But what he did was he spent hours and hours and hours in front of the simulation, and he practiced and practiced and practiced.
While the golden boys, who thought that they were destined to be great fighter pilots, were lazy.
They didn't put in the practice.
And he became a much superior fighter pilot, right?
So, you know, when I did the book with 50 Cent, and you see celebrities, you see your Michael Jordan's, your Tiger Woods, or your Christian Ronaldo, you only see their success.
You only see the glory.
You only see all the fame that they achieve and all the glamour and glitter around them.
And the same thing with 50.
But when I was around 50, I saw how incredibly hard he worked, right?
He was one of these people like a Tiger Woods.
He was putting in hours and hours, hours, and hours, not just in learning music, but in learning the music business and what would create success in the music business.
He'd also say, I interviewed him actually for CNN once and really liked him.
I thought he was very thoughtful, very interesting guy.
But I remember asking him, you know, he was shot point blank in the face.
And I said, what was that like?
And he just looked at me and after about three seconds, he said, painful.
But I remember thinking that must give you that kind of experience, again, the kind of fearlessness that someone like him developed.
I mean, partly is probably surviving something like that.
A lot of people who have that slightly fearless streak.
I mean, look at Trump now, Mark II as a president.
I think that I've known Trump a long time, long before he was a politician.
But I think surviving an assassin's bullet has given him a real impetus to make his mark, to leave a legacy that matters.
And he feels like he's got another chance of life and the presidency and so on.
But without that, I wonder if we would be seeing the kind of Trump that we're seeing at the moment.
In other words, there's lots of stuff that will test you, right?
I mean, no, I always bore my kids with the rocky quote to his spoiled brat son when he says, you know, life's really tough.
It's not about how hard you can hit.
It's about how hard you can get hit and get back up and keep moving forward.
That's how winning is done.
I bet every single person that you've written about in your books, at some stage, that has been what they've had to do, right?
Everybody gets whacked over.
It's just how you deal with it.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you know, a lot of young people now, they complain about how hard they've had it with all the different crises that we mentioned and COVID and all this stuff.
But then I try and point out, look at the generation that grew up in the early 20th century and they had to deal with World War I and then the Great Depression and then Hitler and World War II.
I mean, think of all the things that they had to deal with and all the blows that hit them.
I'm thinking of my parents' generation.
So the idea that somehow I have it harder, oh my God, I've had to suffer so much.
I'm the victim.
When you start thinking of yourself as a victim, you become the victim, right?
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You feel like you have no agency.
So a lot of people now are talking about the crisis among young men, right?
And young men are having a crisis in the United States.
They're falling behind in a lot of sciences and school.
Excited in the UK, yeah.
Yeah.
And then I say, my advice is, look, this is the culture that you live in.
You don't get to choose when you were born or what the culture is like.
And yes, there are things that are working against you as a young man.
Things like masculinity are no longer seen as a virtue, right?
Okay.
But you can't change that as an individual.
You can't change your culture.
That's just the way things are right now.
And they'll shift back at some point.
But you can't think of yourself as a victim.
You can't think of yourself, oh my God, I feel so sorry for myself.
The world hates me.
It's all about women.
It's not about men.
Oh, me, oh my.
Then you're going to become passive and you're not going to feel like you have any agency in this world.
And I advise young men to not think that way.
You have agency.
The masculinity that you feel is inside of you.
It's not going to come from the culture.
It has to come from inside of you.
It has to come through your own skills and through your own thinking, right?
So the moment you start getting passive and thinking that, oh my God, I'm a victim and I have to complain and I have to get on social media and blame this person or other person, you're already putting yourself three steps behind everybody else.
You're creating your own failure in a way.
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You know, it's interesting, as you were saying that, I was reminded of one of my favorite poems, it's tiny.
So I think it's a D.H. Lawrence poem called Self-Pity.
And it's about how a wild thing will never feel sorry for itself.
I'm paraphrasing, will never feel sorry for itself.
A bird will die frozen to the bow before it feels sorry for itself.
I can't remember the exact word.
It was something like that.
And the point being that in the wild animals, they don't have self-pity.
It doesn't exist as a characteristic.
Humans have become more and more self-pitying.
And we've also, oddly as a society, begun to celebrate failure and weakness and all these things with everyone now almost competing to tell the world about their failings and about how bad they are at things.
And, you know, like I see people, I joke about this, but you see people on Instagram saying, I just passed my driving test at the 10th attempt.
I'm so proud of myself.
And it's like, if I had taken 10 attempts, I would not be boasting about that at all, right?
And then you get all the people telling, oh, proud of you, babes.
You've done great.
But really?
You're obviously an absolute menace on the roads.
You shouldn't be allowed to menu.
But again, it comes back to this whole thing.
It's why, in a way, people like Andrew Tate, who I think are genuine examples of toxic masculinity, why they have such a grip on young men, because young men who are anxious and fearful and confused and don't really understand their place in the world anymore, they're always going to gravitate to strong people like Tate, who, for all his faults, and he has many faults, but he also, the kind of chest beating, believe in yourself, work out, get fit, be strong, be a man,
all that stuff resonates with young men because they're not really hearing that anywhere else.
All they're hearing elsewhere in their heads are, you're a failure.
We don't like you anymore.
Society is better off without people like you.
Yeah, I mean, what I always think of as masculine virtue growing up, basically in the 60s and the 70s, was kind of a quiet quality, an inner strength, a security about who you are.
You didn't need to put other people down to feel that you were a man, that you were masculine, right?
It was kind of a quality that was quiet.
You cared about other people.
You respected women.
You didn't get to feel superior by disrespecting women and seeing them as inferior.
You felt secure about yourself.
And there were icons like that in movies.
I remember like Gary Cooper and Montgomery Clifford, kind of in Westerns, you know, that kind of quiet inner strength.
To me, I grew up, that was sort of like what it meant to be a man, to feel secure in yourself and not feel like you have to put other people down.
So when I see that kind of performative masculinity of an Andrew Tate, all I see is a lot of inner weakness.
I see a child screaming out for pain.
I see a child that feels very insecure about themselves.
And the only way they can feel powerful is by putting other people down.
And to me, that's not what strength is.
That's not what it means to be masculine in this world.
Yeah, I completely agree.
You've talked a lot about powerful people from history, many of them very malevolent in the way they had their power.
Who wouldn't you think back in history is a great example of good power?
In other words, somebody that had a lot of power and utilized it in a really impressive and good way?
Well, they're fewer.
They're more of the malevolent variety.
But I think to me, one of the icons would have to be Abraham Lincoln.
Now, Lincoln is a very interesting man.
He's a lot stranger and weirder than people realize.
You know, he was very depressive.
He was very melancholic as a young man.
He thought a lot about death.
He had a very kind of poetic soul to become a president.
And so when he did become president, you know, he obviously faced the worst crisis that we've ever had in the history of our country.
And he was very wise in the sense that he understood that the power that he had, he had to think longer term.
He couldn't just react to things in the moment.
So he had a vision.
He had one idea, which was very simple, maintain the union of the United States.
I will do everything to maintain the union, even if it means offending some of the people in the North who think I'm being too soft in dealing with the South, right?
And so his idea of maintaining the Union, he kept throughout all the early years of the war, which were going very badly for the North.
And people were losing faith in him and they were saying he doesn't know how to prosecute this war.
He needs to change.
He needs to do something else.
He stuck to what his original belief was, which was everything is governed by the need to maintain the union even after I'm gone, even after I'm no longer the president.
I can't crush the South so deeply that their soul is created, that they're going to try and get revenge, right?
And people criticized him.
He could handle the criticism.
He didn't let it change him.
He was flexible enough, but he didn't let anybody kind of sway him from this one path that he had.
And he was so strong, but it was a kind of an inner strength where he didn't have to boast.
He didn't have to tell people how great he was.
And to me, he is an icon of how to use power correctly, of how to understand that the things that you do have consequences and that you can go too far.
You can prosecute the war so far that you create other problems in the wake of the success that you have.
So to me, he's kind of one of the icons of it.
And I could choose others, but he'd be the one that stands out the most.
Yeah, and I actually love Daniel Day-Lewis's performance as Lincoln in the movie.
I thought he captured him brilliantly.
I mean, I would say that the two for me, I would counter with one I never met, sadly, but wished I had.
He died about two months before I was born.
Sir Winston Churchill, who, a bit like Lincoln, prone to depression, drank way more than he ought to.
Very much.
Incredibly poetic again, very, you know, used to write extraordinarily poetic prose and stuff.
But also had an absolute inner conviction, an unwavering conviction that we would defeat Hitler and the Nazis when many were ready to literally throw in the towel.
So I think he's a good example of someone who actually, you know, had been sent to the wilderness of politics, really.
Gallipoli and all of that.
Yeah, he was a laughingstock before the war.
Inner Strength in Adversity 00:02:17
And then suddenly, bang, it all came, his moment arrived and he took it.
And the other one is someone I did meet and did interview, Nelson Mandela, who when he came out of prison after 27 years, the idea you could do 27 years in a six by six cell and come out as a true peacemaker who rather than preach all-out war on the white population that so many of his own supporters were willing him to do, he went completely the other way and preached unity and peace.
And I thought that was an extraordinary inner strength for the greater good of his country.
And as it turned out, the greater good for him too and his reputation and everything else.
But first of all, he did it because it was going to be great for South Africa.
So I think that was true greatness and a great utilization of power when he got it.
I wonder what makes somebody like a Mandela.
Why did he come out of prison not bitter and not seeking revenge?
Whereas anybody else would have?
What was unique about it?
I don't know.
I just don't know the answer, but I think it's what makes him so special in history.
And I think Churchill's resolve is what makes him so special in history because so many others, most people, I think would have just caved and done a deal with Hitler.
And to him, he just wasn't going to do it.
Yeah.
Well, it's hard to be a leader these days because you're listening to so many voices and you have to deal with the media, social media.
And so it's hard to have that kind of resolve.
I don't know if we could have a Churchill or a Lincoln anymore with so many forces, so many voices in their ear telling them about worrying about this or the consequences of that.
It's hard to have that kind of inner strength anymore.
I think it's possible, but I think you've got to trust your gut instinct.
Yeah.
Robert, there are just two things quickly just wanted to ask you before we finish.
One is you were raised Jewish in the United States.
You've got family members and friends who are impacted by the Holocaust.
But you've also had many interactions with Palestinians that had a big impact on you.
What do you make of where we are with the war in Gaza?
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Well, I lived in Europe for about five or six years and I had every kind of imaginable job there.
I was a tour guide in Dublin.
I worked for a television company in London.
I worked in a hotel in Paris as a receptionist.
I taught English in Barcelona.
I lived on an island in Greece and I got so sick that I couldn't pay my way off the island.
So I had to do construction work pulling nails out of boards.
So I've had all those kinds of jobs here in Los Angeles.
I worked for detective agency as a skip tracer and I've worked in Hollywood.
I've had some of the worst bosses that you can imagine, some of the most manipulative psychotic bosses, and they all inspired the 48 laws of power.
But basically, I saw my life as a kind of an adventure where I was going to try everything, right?
I was going to live everywhere.
I was going to try every kind of job.
And I knew all along that I was going to be a writer because that's the only thing that I'm good at.
I'm not good at basketball.
I'm not good at sports.
I can't build anything with my hands.
The only thing I ever was good at was writing.
I just couldn't figure out what kind of writing I was meant to do.
I tried novels.
I tried journalism.
I worked in Hollywood as a screenwriter.
I was a failure at all of these things.
And basically, I was 38 years old.
My parents were getting very worried about me.
What's Robert going to be?
You know, is he really looks like a loser at that point in my life?
And so I had a chance.
I was in one of my 50-60 jobs.
I was in Italy working on the opening of this new media school.
And I met a man there who was a book packager.
And he asked me out of the blue if I had an idea for a book.
And suddenly everything in my brain just clicked.
All of my bad experiences, all of my horrible bosses, all of those terrible jobs that I had.
I read a lot of history and I saw that everything kind of repeats itself.
So in Louis XIV in Versailles, you had the courtiers.
Everyone was being so careful and, you know, trying to impress the king.
And if you didn't impress the king, you were thrown into prison.
And I thought, it's the same world that has existed in the 16th, in the 17th century as now.
It's just you don't get thrown into prison.
You don't get beheaded.
You get fired.
And so I thought there are these kind of timeless laws about power.
And that was the book I could write.
And he got so excited about that.
He said, Robert, I'll pay you to live while you write this book.
It was the turning point in my life.
And essentially, at moments, I had been so depressed and so despondent that when he gave me that opportunity, I go, this is my one chance in life.
I'm not going to screw this up.
I'm going to make this.
It's either get rich or die trying to quote 50 Cent.
I was either going to make this happen or forget it.
You know, I'm a failure.
So, but mostly the lesson for me was I never lost faith in my ability to write.
And when the opportunity came and I was 38 years old, I took it and I used all of my experience in life and poured it into that book.
Do you think that everybody has a talent, but most people probably don't find out what it is?
Yes, I'm very much egalitarian on that.
So in my book, Mastery, in which I describe the kind of path you must take in order to master any field, one of the examples I have in the book is this woman, Temple Grandin.
Temple Grandin was born with high-level autism.
She was basically going to be sent to some kind of a home where she'd have to live her whole life.
She was non-functional.
And she had a teacher who didn't believe any of that.
And slowly she pulled Temple Grandin out of her prison that she was locked in in her mind and taught her language, etc.
And as she got older, she developed this interest in animals because a lot of autistic people feel very, they're more comfortable with animals than with people.
And she developed herself, she became a scientist.
And now she's an extremely high-level scientist who studies animal behavior, who designs facilities for slaughterhouses, etc., and who writes about autism.
And I say, if someone with deep, deep autism, who has severe brain damage from birth, can become a master in a field, that means any of us, I believe, can achieve that.
It's just that we don't believe that anymore.
We think that people are born talented.
It's not that everybody is born with a talent.
Everybody is born with the possibility to achieve that.
It's just that you don't mind what makes you different.
You don't mind what excites you.
She became successful because she had a deep love of animals and that pulled her out of it.
And she wanted to study zoology and biology.
You out there, you have some deep love, something that you had when you were very young.
You've just not listened to it.
You're not attuned to it.
And so you go through life.
You're 21 years old and you know you have to make a living and you go to law school because your parents tell you that.
But it's also something that connects to you deeply and you get in a path that's that's not who you are.
And so I truly believe that if you find what that path is, what makes you unique, what makes you different from everyone else, you have a chance to become a master in any kind of field.
Yeah, 100%.
I was watching a clip on TikTok, I think, and it was a Manchester United football player, soccer player, as you would call him, called Phil Nettle.
And he used to play with Cristiano Ronaldo, who is, for me, the best to ever play the game.
And he was talking about when he first came to United as a young kid.
And he said, people keep calling Ronaldo someone with a God-given talent.
He said, he definitely had a lot of talent.
He said, but what he had was an unbelievable work ethic.
He'd identified that he had a talent.
And he said, he used to spend hours and hours more at the training ground every day than everybody else.
Then he would go home and he would get onto YouTube and he would study the tricks and the moves that were being made by the people he most admired in football.
And then he would work hard at the training ground to replicate them.
So his point being, yes, he obviously had a great talent, no question.
But there are so many very talented footballers who never make it.
What differentiated Cristiano Ronaldo?
And I've become good friends with Cristiano, and I've talked to him about this.
He just had this incredible drive to be the absolute best, his talent that he could possibly be.
And that drive has propelled him to become arguably the greatest to ever play the game.
But this wasn't something he was necessarily given by God on a plate.
Here you are.
You're going to be the greatest to ever play the game.
He took what he believed was his talent and made it an incredible thing.
Yeah, we fetishize the world genius and talent.
But, you know, the classic example would be like a Mozart, for instance, or an Albert Einstein.
But if you study these people deeply, you learn that actually they develop these talents.
They weren't just born that way.
Mozart was listening to music when he was four years old, three years old.
His father was a great pianist, right?
So it was in his blood.
He was hearing it all of the time.
But nobody worked and practiced harder.
You know, you have the proverbial 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell talked about.
He had put in those 10,000 hours by the time he was 10 years old because he loved playing the piano and he loved music so deeply.
So that by the time he was 18 years old, he had been practicing so long, he'd been composing so long that his genius could absolutely flourish.
But it was a function of the hours of practice.
You can do the same thing for Albert Einstein.
Yes, he was very brilliant, no doubt, he had a high IQ.
But when he came up with his first theory of relativity, it took him 10 years to develop that theory.
And the hours he spent in day in, day out, thinking about it over and over and over again, trying every possible permutation.
It was a function of the hours that he put in and the practice that he put in.
So the idea that it's just about talent and genius, oh, I'm not born that way.
Oh, I'm not an Einstein or a Mozart is just bullshit.
You know, it's not true.
Well, I remember the Beatles.
I remember that book.
Yeah.
I remember the Gladwell book and the story of the Beatles.
You know, everyone thinks the Beatles just came together and were just a fun band from Liverpool, whatever.
And they don't know enough about the story that the Beatles went to Hamburg in Germany and they played, you know, sometimes 10, 15 gigs a week and they really honed their craft where someone like Paul McCartney is known as a brilliant songwriter and a great singer.
But he's also reputed to be, by his peer group, one of the best bass guitarists that's ever been.
And that's down entirely to the thousands of hours that they played these shows in Hamburg.
So that's an example.
I think I would add also Tiger Woods.
I think he's in the Gladwell book too.
Tiger Woods' dad was a golf nut and he recognized his son, had good coordination and everything else.
Harnessing Natural Talent Early 00:02:41
So he harnessed that boy from a very young age.
But if his dad hadn't been a golf nut, would that have happened?
I mean, probably not.
I mean, Tiger would have probably done something completely different.
So again, you know, part of it is finding your talent.
Part of it is finding people around you, I guess, that can help you nurture that talent.
Part of it is the drive, the single-minded drive.
You know, I say I've got four kids.
The one thing I try and instill in them is a self-confidence.
I think it's the one most important thing I can give my children, the ability to back yourself.
And, you know, whenever they ask me, Dad, you know, I've been offered this or I've got the chance to do this.
And I say, well, just back yourself, just do it.
And if you fail, but you give it everything you've got and it doesn't work, or you try something, you know, even a school, like with exam stuff, sometimes they're not just not very good at something.
I wasn't very good at maths, for example.
I was very good at English or history.
But I used to try my best.
You know, on Sports Day, I wasn't a natural athlete.
I was very good at cricket, quite good at football, but I was no good at sprinting and throwing and those kind of things.
But I used to win the non-finalist race, which was for all the losers, because I was determined that I would be the best of the losers.
And that was a drive that I had just not to just accept that I was going to be crap.
Right.
And so I do think a lot of it is just an ability to back yourself.
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Yeah.
Breaking the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy 00:15:40
Well, you know, we go back to what we were first talking about, social media and young people being so afraid.
And the main fear that people have, particularly like I think in adolescence, is failure.
So if I fail at something, if I try to start a business or write a book and I fail, it's going to be a tremendous blow to my ego.
And so the best thing to do is to not even try.
If I don't try to be good at something, if I don't try to write that book, if I don't try to start that business, then I won't fail and then I won't have to deal with those consequences.
But you only grow by failure.
I failed at so many things I can't even begin to describe to you.
I was a terrible screenwriter.
I was not really very good at journalism.
The novels that I wrote basically sucked.
I failed over and over and over again.
But each time I failed, I learned lessons.
I learned why I was not good at this.
I learned that this is not something that I was destined to do.
There's something else for me.
Right.
And I talk in my book, Mastery, about Henry Ford, who created basically the modern factory and automobile industry.
He failed three times to start his own business, which in the automobile industry in the 1890s was forget it.
You have no chance, no hope.
He said, the only way I succeeded was by kept trying and I failed and I learned by each failure.
So coming back to people's fear of trying things, it's only by trying and failing that you're ever going to learn, you know?
Well, I love the quote from Wayne Gretzky, the ice hockey legend, the greatest ice hockey player in history, Canadian.
And he has this great quote, you'll miss 100% of the shots you never take.
And then there's also the Michael Jordan one where he talks about all the shots he's missed.
People talk about the great shots he made, but they don't talk about the shots he missed.
Thousands and thousands of times, he took a shot and missed, right?
But because of the ferocious work ethic, ferocious backing of himself, he also made more shots than he made.
And that's how greatness is done, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, I talk in my book about a man I interviewed for Mastery named Cesar Rodriguez, who was the last American Air Force pilot who's been decorated for his fighting in the Iraq, the First Iraq War, Desert Storm.
He was an ACE, the last ACE in the American Air Force.
And Caesar is very short.
He's not physically talented.
And when he went to the academy in Arkansas or wherever to become an Air Force pilot, he was not one of those golden boys as portrayed in like Top Gun, those people who were destined to be the best fighter pilots.
He was one of the worst, right?
And he was out of the 80 people in his school, he was ranked like number 79 or something.
Through sheer hard work, through sheer practice, because he loved flying planes and because he knew that this was what he wanted to be, he turned himself into the best fighter pilot at the school.
But what he did was he spent hours and hours and hours in front of the simulation and he practiced and practiced and practiced.
While the golden boys who thought that they were destined to be great fighter pilots were lazy.
They didn't put in the practice.
And he became a much superior fighter pilot, right?
So, you know, when I did the book with 50 Cent and you see celebrities, you see your Michael Jordan's, your Tiger Woods, or your Christian Ronaldo, you only see their success.
You only see the glory.
You only see all the fame that they achieve and all the glamour and glitter around them.
And the same thing with 50.
But when I was around 50, I saw how incredibly hard he worked, right?
He was one of these people like a Tiger Woods.
He was putting in hours and hours, hours and hours, not just in learning music, but in learning the music business and what would create success in the music business.
He'd also.
Well, I was going to say, I interviewed him actually for CNN once and really liked him.
I thought he was very thoughtful, very interesting guy.
But I remember asking him, he was shot point blank in the face.
And I said, what was that like?
And he just looked at me and after about three seconds, he said, painful.
But I remember thinking that must give you that kind of experience, again, the kind of fearlessness that someone like him developed.
I mean, partly is probably surviving something like that.
A lot of people who have that slightly fearless streak.
I mean, look at Trump now, Mark II as a president.
I think that I've known Trump a long time, long before he was a politician.
But I think surviving an assassin's bullet has given him a real impetus to make his mark, to leave a legacy that matters.
And he feels like he's got another chance at life and the presidency and so on.
But without that, I wonder if we would be seeing the kind of Trump that we're seeing at the moment.
In other words, there's lots of stuff that will test you, right?
I mean, no, I always bore my kids with the rocky quote to his spoilt brat son when he says, you know, life's really tough.
It's not about how hard you can hit.
It's about how hard you can get hit and get back up and keep moving forward.
That's how winning is done.
I bet every single person that you've written about in your books, at some stage, that has been what they've had to do, right?
Everybody gets whacked over.
It's just how you deal with them.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, you know, a lot of young people now, they complain about how hard they've had it with all the different crises that we mentioned and COVID and all this stuff.
But then I try and point out, look at the generation that grew up in the early 20th century and they had to deal with World War I and then the Great Depression and then Hitler and World War II.
I mean, think of all the things that they had to deal with and all the blows that hit them.
I'm thinking of my parents' generation.
So the idea that somehow I have it harder, oh my God, I've had to suffer so much.
I'm the victim.
When you start thinking of yourself as a victim, you become the victim, right?
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You feel like you have no agency.
So a lot of people now are talking about the crisis among young men, right?
And young men are having a crisis in the United States.
They're falling behind in a lot in the sciences and school.
Exactly the UK, yeah.
Yeah.
And then I say, my advice is, look, this is the culture that you live in.
You don't get to choose when you were born or what the culture is like.
And yes, there are things that are working against you as a young man.
Things like masculinity are no longer seen as a virtue, right?
Okay.
But you can't change that as an individual.
You can't change your culture.
That's just the way things are right now.
And they'll shift back at some point.
But you can't think of yourself as a victim.
You can't think of yourself, oh my God, I feel so sorry for myself.
The world hates me.
It's all about women.
It's not about men.
Oh, me, oh my.
Then you're going to become passive and you're not going to feel like you have any agency in this world.
And I advise young men to not think that way.
You have agency.
The masculinity that you feel is inside of you.
It's not going to come from the culture.
It has to come from inside of you.
It has to come through your own skills and through your own thinking, right?
So the moment you start getting passive and thinking that, oh my God, I'm a victim and I have to complain and I have to get on social media and blame this person or other person, you're already putting yourself three steps behind everybody else.
You're creating your own failure in a way.
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You know, it's interesting.
As you were saying that, I was reminded of one of my favorite poems.
It's Tiny.
I think it's a D.H. Lawrence poem called Self-Pity.
And it's about how a wild thing will never feel sorry for itself.
I'm paraphrasing.
I'll never feel sorry for itself.
A bird will die frozen to the bow before it feels sorry for itself.
I can't remember the exact word.
It was something like that.
And the point being that in the wild animals, they don't have self-pity.
It doesn't exist as a characteristic.
Humans have become more and more self-pitying.
And we've also, oddly as a society, begun to celebrate failure and weakness and all these things with everyone now almost competing to tell the world about their failings and about how bad they are at things.
And, you know, like I see people, I joke about this, but you see people on Instagram saying, I just passed my driving test at my 10th attempt.
I'm so proud of myself.
And it's like, if I had taken 10 attempts, I would not be boasting about that at all, right?
And then you get all people telling you, oh, proud of you, babes.
You've done great.
But really?
You're obviously an absolute menace on the roads.
You shouldn't be allowed to be here.
But again, it comes back to this whole thing.
It's why, in a way, people like Andrew Tate, who I think are genuine examples of toxic masculinity, why they have such a grip on young men, because young men who are anxious and fearful and confused and don't really understand their place in the world anymore, they're always going to gravitate to strong people like Tate, who, for all his faults and he has many faults, but he also, the kind of chest beating, believe in yourself, work out, get fit, be strong, be a man,
all that stuff resonates with young men because they're not really hearing that anywhere else.
All they're hearing elsewhere in their heads are you're a failure, we don't like you anymore, society's better off without people like you.
Yeah, I mean, for what I always think of as masculine virtue growing up, basically in the 60s and the 70s, was kind of a quiet quality, an inner strength, a security about who you are.
You didn't need to put other people down to feel like you were a man, that you were masculine, right?
It was kind of a quality that was quiet.
You cared about other people.
You respected women.
You didn't get to feel superior by disrespecting women and seeing them as inferior.
You felt secure about yourself.
And there were icons like that in movies.
I remember like Gary Cooper and Montgomery Cliff, kind of in Westerns, you know, that kind of quiet inner strength.
To me, I grew up, that was sort of like what it meant to be a man, to feel secure in yourself and not feel like you have to put other people down.
So when I see that kind of performative masculinity of an Andrew Tate, all I see is a lot of inner weakness.
I see a child screaming out for pain.
I see a child that feels very insecure about themselves.
And the only way they can feel powerful is by putting other people down.
And to me, that's not what strength is.
That's not what it means to be masculine in this world.
Yeah, I completely agree.
You've talked a lot about powerful people from history, many of them very malevolent in the way they had their power.
Who wouldn't you think back in history is a great example of good power?
In other words, somebody that had a lot of power and utilized it in a really impressive and good way?
Well, there are fewer.
They're more of the malevolent variety.
But I think to me, one of the icons would have to be Abraham Lincoln.
Now, Lincoln is a very interesting man.
He's a lot stranger and weirder than people realize.
You know, he was very depressive.
He was very melancholic as a young man.
He thought a lot about death.
He had a very kind of poetic soul to become a president.
And so when he did become president, he obviously faced the worst crisis that we've ever had in the history of our country.
And he was very wise in the sense that he understood that the power that he had, he had to think longer term.
He couldn't just react to things in the moment.
So he had a vision.
He had one idea, which was very simple, maintain the union of the United States.
I will do everything to maintain the union, even if it means offending some of the people in the North who think I'm being too soft in dealing with the South, right?
And so his idea of maintaining the Union, he kept throughout all the different, all the early years of the war, which were going very badly for the North.
And people were losing faith in him and they were saying he doesn't know how to prosecute this war.
He needs to change.
He needs to do something else.
He stuck to what his original belief was, which was, everything is governed by the need to maintain the union even after I'm gone, even after I'm no longer the president.
I can't crush the South so deeply that their soul is created, that they're going to try and get revenge, right?
And people criticized him.
He could handle the criticism.
He didn't let it change him.
He was flexible enough, but he didn't let anybody kind of sway him from this one path that he had.
And he was so strong, but it was a kind of an inner strength where he didn't have to boast.
He didn't have to tell people how great he was.
And to me, he is an icon of how to use power correctly, of how to understand that the things that you do have consequences and that you can go too far.
You can prosecute the war so far that you create other problems in the wake of the success that you have.
So to me, he's kind of one of the icons of it.
And I could choose others, but he'd be the one that stands out the most.
Yeah, and I actually love Daniel Day-Lewis's performance as Lincoln in the movie.
I thought he captured him brilliantly.
I mean, I would say that the two for me, I would counter with one I never met, sadly, but wished I had.
He died about two months before I was born, Sir Winston Churchill, who a bit like Lincoln, prone to depression, drank way more than he ought to.
Very much.
Incredibly poetic again, very, you know, used to write extraordinarily poetic prose and stuff.
But also had an absolute inner conviction, an unwavering conviction that we would defeat Hitler and the Nazis when many were ready to literally throw in the towel.
So I think he's a good example of someone who actually, you know, had been sent to the wilderness of politics, really.
Gallipoli and all of that.
Yeah, he was a laughingstock before the war.
Finding Peace Amidst Conflict 00:05:26
And then suddenly, bang, it all came, his moment arrived and he took it.
And the other one is someone I did meet and did interview, Nelson Mandela, who when he came out of prison after 27 years, the idea you could do 27 years in a six by six cell and come out as a true peacemaker who rather than preach all-out war on the white population as so many of his own supporters were willing him to do, he went completely the other way and preached unity and peace.
And I thought that was an extraordinary inner strength for the greater good of his country.
And as it turned out, the greater good for him too and his reputation and everything else.
But first of all, he did it because it was going to be great for South Africa.
So I think that was true greatness and a great utilization of power when he got it.
I wonder what makes somebody like a Mandela.
Why did he come out of prison not bitter and not seeking revenge?
Whereas anybody else would have?
What was unique about him?
I don't know.
I just don't know the answer, but I think it's what makes him so special in history.
And I think Churchill's resolve is what makes him so special in history, because so many others, most people, I think, would have just caved and done a deal with Hitler.
And to him, he just wasn't going to do it.
Yeah.
Well, it's hard to be a leader these days because you're listening to so many voices and you have to deal with the media, social media.
And so it's hard to have that kind of resolve.
I don't know if we can have a Churchill or a Lincoln anymore with so many forces, so many voices in their ear telling them about worrying about this or the consequences of that.
It's hard to have that kind of inner strength anymore.
I think it's possible, but I think you've got to trust your gut instinct.
Robert, there are just two things quickly just wanted to ask you before we finish.
One is you were raised Jewish in the United States.
You've got family members and friends who are impacted by the Holocaust.
But you've also had many interactions with Palestinians that had a big impact on you.
What do you make of where we are with the war in Gaza?
Well, it's horrifying for me because as I've said before, I can kind of see both sides.
I'm Jewish.
I grew up.
When I went to Hebrew school, Israel was just sort of this young nation.
It had so idealistic, the idea of the kibbutz and the kind of egalitarian society that was evolving.
It was kind of infused me with this sort of sense of idealism.
But then later in life, I've never been to Israel.
I never considered myself a Zionist, but I had those kind of sympathies.
And then later in my life, I've met Palestinian people and I listened very deeply to them and to their sense of sadness from what they have lost.
And I remember I met one woman who I will never forget when I was in Dubai for a festival of literature.
And she described to me in depth the incredible pain she was feeling at this beautiful country that she had grown up in, and that there seemed to be no options, right?
That it was hopeless for her.
She'd spent her whole life trying to create peace.
Her whole idea was a one-state solution.
She tried to tell me how that was like the only answer.
And I think obviously at this point in history, the one-state solution is not possible.
But she had a sense of hopelessness, that their whole life devoted to this cause was going to lead to nothing.
And then I worked, helped somebody who wrote a book about his experiences growing up in Palestine.
And so the idea of losing your country and losing this land that meant so much to you, that's so beautiful.
And the Palestinian people are extremely well educated in the Middle East, right?
And they don't just, this is not, this is not fair.
This is not just.
This is not the ideals of Judaism that I had grown up with with the ideals of Israel.
And so if you're a logical, rational person, the only possible thing that could happen is to create a two-state solution that you can live peace with these people, right?
Because if you don't, it's just like a gnawing wound that's going to go on year after year after year after you're going to be dealing with another Hamas that's going to come up, another Palestinian authority that fails.
It's never going to solve itself.
And when you take a large, when you pull back and you look at the larger picture, we're both Semitic, we both come from the same part of the Middle East, we're of the same blood essentially, and what divides us is only in our heads.
It's completely irrational, right?
We are related to each other, we are Palestinians and Israelis, we are broth, actually brothers and sisters.
So this madness has to stop and there has to be somebody else that comes to power that realizes that the only ultimate peace for Israel okay, it helps now that Iran may not, may no longer be such a threat, but the only hope for ultimate peace is to create a state for the Palestinians where they have their own power, their own independence, their own land, and that you solve it for good, and then Israel will be able to live in true peace.
Gratitude for What Remains 00:04:57
It's, it seems, intractable now, and maybe if, when Netanyahu's gone, there will be somebody else who will, who will actually put this into practice, if somehow, in all the madness going on right now in the Middle East and Iran, if that could be part of the solution where not only is it about Iran agreeing to to de-arm itself, to not have a nuclear program, but it also is about finding a solution for Gaza.
Then there will finally be some hope for that region.
I completely agree with everything you just said.
Um, I just want to end quickly.
You suffered a serious stroke in 2018, triggered by a wasp sting that gave you a blood cot put you in a coma.
It seems a totally bizarre thing.
I'm actually allergic to wasps, so I have a lot of sympathy and consider myself very lucky.
What happened to you?
Um, you still have, I think, some mobility issues, but i'm just curious really, as somebody who's spent your your writing life giving so much advice to people in that moment of incredible adversity for you personally, what was the thing that you sort of miss most about normal life and what was the great lesson that the whole experience gave you moving forward?
Well, it's it's kind of hard for me to describe because it gets it's so emotional, but I was somebody who was very physically active.
I'm not an athletic person, but I love exercise.
I was swimming every third day and long distance swimming, mountain biking, hiking every single day of my life.
Even if I was sick, I was always exercising and moving.
It was my way of overcoming stress and suddenly, you know I have a stroke and it totally um, kind of knocks out the left side of my body.
I can't do any of that right.
It's all taken away from me overnight.
It was horrifying for me, it was absolutely horrifying for me, and it spent, took years of you know.
You talk about, talk about self-pity.
I could have felt very sorry for myself.
Then why me?
If that wasp had just if a wind had come up and just going like past me, none of this would happen.
Why why, guy?
Why would this happen to me?
I could have fallen into that, but fortunately my brain wasn't affected.
I had yes, a little bit of brain damage, but not enough so that I can't write another book or appear on on Piers Morgan's show right now.
So thankfully, I could write this other book and I put all of my energy and all of that self-pitying into writing something else, into being productive.
And I'm writing a book now that I think is extremely important for the world and for people.
And it's kind of my mission in life.
And it's based on my near-death experience because I was driving a car in Los Angeles when I had my stroke.
And my wife noticed something and she forced me to pull over.
I came very close to getting in an accident.
It would have been the death of me, right?
And I was just, I went into a coma.
But if anything had gone wrong, if I'd been delayed by 30 seconds, I wouldn't be here talking to you.
And so the lesson I tell people is if only when I, before my stroke, I had realized what could be taken away from me, I would have appreciated every single moment when I was in that pool swimming, when I was hiking, when I was riding my bike.
I wouldn't take it for granted.
And I look out my window now and I see people running and biking, doing all the things that I cannot do.
And it's very sad for me.
And I go, they don't understand.
They don't appreciate.
They don't know that you're going to get older and it's going to all be taken away from you.
So every moment of your life, you have to have this incredible gratitude about your body, about what you can do, about what you have, the powers that you have, because they can be taken away from you in a moment, like it was taken away from me.
So please don't take any of this for granted is my main message and my main lesson.
What a great message.
Yeah, I think my ex-bio is my favorite quote, which is live every day as if it's your last because one day you'll be right.
Yeah, that is a great quote.
Robert, I could talk to you for hours and hopefully another time I will, but we've run out of time.
I've absolutely loved that conversation.
Thank you very much indeed.
Thank you.
I very much enjoyed it, Piers.
Yes, I'd love to be on again anytime.
You just let me know.
I will.
Thank you very much.
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