Robert Greene returns to Google to explore his latest and most monumental work yet, "The Laws of Human Nature". In the talk, Robert discusses how to detach from one's emotions to better understand intrinsic motivations in order to make better decision and master self-control.

In addition to his latest book, Robert has authored the 5 international bestsellers The 48 Laws of Power", "The Art of Seduction", "The 33 Strategies of War", "The 50th Law", and "Mastery".

Get this book here: https://goo.gle/2XfABcf

More information bout Robert here: http://powerseductionandwar.com/

And I hope you'll join me in thanking our panelist, and thank you for your time.

I've been a big fan of Google way back since the late 90s.

I even wrote a blog post many years ago comparing Google to the warfare of Napoleon Bonaparte and Sun Tzu.

So I've been a big fan for years, and it's always been a great honor for me to talk at Google.

So thank you very much for this opportunity.

Now today I'm going to be taking all of you inside my latest book, The Laws of Human Nature, because I believe it has the potential to change your life, to actually change how you look at the world.

But I want to begin by telling you a story that I relate in this book.

And the story concerns a man named John Blunt, a prominent English businessman in the early 18th century.

Blunt was a leading director of an enterprise called the South Sea Company.

And basically, at this time, the English government had massive debts, more than any other country in history, from financing all the wars they had been fighting.

It's basically valued at around 31 million pounds, which was enormous.

And the South Sea Company basically managed this debt in exchange for having a monopoly on all trade in South America.

But John Blunt, he came from the lower classes and he was an extremely ambitious man.

And so in 1719 he came up with an idea for a business idea that was worthy of this motto and that would earn him everlasting fame.

The idea was that The South Sea Company would completely take over this $31 million.

They would pay the government some money for that right.

And what they would do is, they would take this money and they would privatize it, and they would turn it into a commodity.

And they would share sales of the debt, shares of this debt to the public.

pounds equaling 1 share in the South Sea Company.

And the idea was that if they turned a nice profit, They would be able to pay down the English enormous debts.

They would be able to make a nice profit for themselves.

And they would take some of that money and pay very nice dividends to people who invested in it.

And so they initiated this in about May of

People didn't really understand it, but they thought it was an amazing idea.

It was their patriotic duty to invest in this.

And quickly the share prices rose within a month to 200 pounds a share, within 2 months to 300 pounds a share.

The King of England, King George the First, plopped down a hundred thousand pounds of his own money into the scheme.

Servants and maids were taking their life savings and investing it and cashing out and making a fortune.

1 day this woman, who was aristocrat, very wealthy, was in the theater and she looked up and she saw her former maid occupying a seat, a balcony, a box in the theater that was much more lavish and expensive than her own.

It was like things were going upside down.

But about 6 months into the scheme, or 7 months into the scheme, Mr.

Basically what he was running was a glorified Ponzi scheme.

The money that people were investing in the South Sea Company, he was actually sending back to them in the form of dividends to entice more and more investors.

But at some point people panicked and stopped buying shares, the whole thing would collapse.

So he had to keep trying stoking interest in it, giving people even better and better and better terms of investing in it.

But finally, the panic that he worried about occurred in September of

and the whole thing collapsed in the most spectacular fashion.

Thousands of English people lost their their their life's savings.

Hundreds of people committed suicide including Mr.

It's estimated that it took the English government over a century to recover from this debacle.

And this was the everlasting fame that, ironically, John Blunt earned as the initiator of the infamous South Sea Bubble.

Now, many famous Englishmen had invested in this, including writers, architects, politicians, etc.

But none more famous than the great Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist of his age and 1 of the most brilliant men that ever lived.

When the scheme started, he took his own life-saving 7, 000 pounds and he put it in to the South Sea Company.

And he watched as it quickly doubled and then troubled to nearly 20, 000 pounds.

Newton realized that what goes up could easily go down, so he cashed out and he collected his

But in August of 1720, as Blunt was giving out these incredibly favorable terms, and Isaac Newton saw that other people had made much more money than his 20, 000 pounds, he decided he was gonna take that money and reinvest all of it in the South Sea Company.

And he lost his entire savings a month later in the crash.

And here was a man in his 70s at this point who was reduced to near poverty.

And in the aftermath of this horrible event in his life, he had a quote that I am particularly attracted to.

He said, quote, I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies, but I cannot understand the madness of men, end quote.

Here was this great genius who could understand the laws of gravity, the motions of planets, and all sorts of other things.

But when it came to himself, the closest thing to him, he could not understand himself.

He couldn't understand the laws that govern human behavior.

like some 300 years later, more to the present time, and I'm, me, Robert Green, I'm working as a consultant to many powerful people in all sorts of enterprises.

Athletes, hip hop artists, politicians, business people.

And they're coming to me, particularly after I wrote the 48 Laws of Power, with their own problems.

And these problems basically revolved around the fact that they couldn't control the people that they were dealing with.

There was 1 man who had partnered with some guy who he thought was rather mild-mannered, and this man was in the process of stealing the company from him.

There were other people who had made really disastrous hires of lieutenants and other people that were literally destroying their company and destroying their lives.

There was 1 gentleman who had a board of directors that he lost complete control over.

There was another person who had started this product line that he was certain was going to succeed, and then it failed miserably, and he blamed all of his associates for not knowing how to execute these plans.

I had 1 famous musician who had took all his investment, all of his savings, and put it in the Bitcoin craze about 4 years ago, and he lost everything in that, quite similar to Sir Isaac Newton.

And so what all of these people had in common was they were all, like Mr.

They could calculate the movements of global markets, the very complicated economic things.

But when it came to the basics of just dealing with people, you would think the most important skill you would have.

And in understanding themselves, they were actually quite helpless.

And in the aftermath of all of these experiences that I was having, rather powerful experiences, I also thought of myself.

I thought of myself in the sense that I, too, had had many failures.

I, too, had had problems dealing with people, particularly before I wrote The 48 Laws of Power, problems that inspired that book.

I had violated law number 1, never outshine the master.

So I was thinking about my own problems as well.

And about 7 years ago, I decided to set out on a quest.

I was going to try to get at the root of all of these problems that these people had and that I had.

And what I thought that the root of this problem was the basic ignorance or misunderstanding of human nature, of the laws that govern human behavior, much like Sir Isaac Newton was looking at the laws that govern the movement of stars.

I was gonna write a book about this subject because startlingly enough, this is a subject that we all need.

We all need to know, because as a social animal, we spend all of our time dealing with people.

I don't care how technically brilliant you are in your field, how well you are at coding, or whatever it is.

If you don't understand people, you're going to neutralize all of your powers.

And yet nobody was writing a book about this subject.

So I determined I was going to be the 1 to do it.

And so I started devouring literature on the subject, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, psychology, psychoanalysis.

And in the course of this research, I came upon 3 kind of discoveries that were very fundamental that sort of grounded the book that came out of that.

The first 1 was I read that in neuroscience, people estimate that

In other words, 95% of what we do never reaches the level of consciousness.

We're not aware of what actually motivates our behavior.

It's as if we possess a stranger inside of ourselves who's governing our behavior.

The second fact I uncovered was that there are many kind of forces that came from our evolution, hundreds of thousands and millions of years ago that are wired into our brains and how we operate.

And a lot of these things came about evolutionarily for very adaptive purposes for where we were 500, 000 years ago, but that don't have much purpose for where we are right now in the 21st century.

These elemental forces that are very primitive, I call human nature.

These are the forces that basically determine a lot of what we do.

And so much of this very primitive stuff is actually intersecting us in the 21st century and determining a lot of the problems that we're encountering now.

The third thing I discovered is that basically the human brain that all of us possess is remarkably similar, each of us.

In other words, there's very little difference between the brain you possess and somebody in some other country who has a different cultural background.

And the reason is that we all evolved from the same origins, the same source, hundreds of thousands of years ago, well before the spreading out of humans all around the globe.

So the qualities, these forces that I'm talking about here now about human nature, they are within all of us.

And so as I started writing the book, I got kind of excited, and I kind of had a weird sensation.

It was making me understand myself in a way that was making me a little bit uncomfortable.

I was realizing some of the dark, irrational qualities in myself, some of the sources of my own bad habits and patterns.

It was also making me very aware of the things that I was observing in the people around me.

And I started to sense that there's incredible power in this knowledge, that it can help me break these habits, and it can help me get along with people on a much higher level.

But also, more importantly, at the time that I was writing this book, a lot of strange things were going on.

There was a whole transformation of social media into this giant feeding ground for trolls, et cetera, and all the stuff that we've seen happening in social media.

A new president was elected, and that was a very strange experience, and all the things that were going on around that, and the kind of tribalism in our politics, and the heated nature of it.

And I thought, what I was uncovering in this stuff about human nature is explaining, in many ways, all of the stuff that I was witnessing.

And I had this metaphor that I included in the introduction of the book that came to me.

And the metaphor was that human nature, the stuff that I'm talking about, that evolved very deep in our past.

It's like a puppet master, and we are the puppets.

And it's kind of moving us around and making us do things.

We're not aware that human nature is making us do these things, but the puppet master is there.

And we die, a new generation comes, and this puppet master is going to move them around in the same way.

And the only way to escape that is to understand these laws, to understand what is really going on.

So I want to take you now through some of these, I told you about these kind of powerful primitive forces that intersect the modern.

I want to take you inside 4 of these forces that kind of inspire or ground many of the chapters in the book.

And the first 1 has to do with chapter 1, which is basically the law of irrationality.

And the point of this chapter is that we like to think of ourselves as these rational, thinking, very strategic creatures, when in point of fact, we humans are deeply irrational.

And what I mean by that is that we are governed by our emotions more than anything else, which explains the kind of madness that overcame even the great genius Isaac Newton.

And I referred to neuroscience, once again, to explain this kind of madness that exists inside all of us.

And basically, what neuroscience shows is that the human brain evolved.

The brain has different layers, literally going from the top to the bottom to the top.

The bottom part of the brain is the oldest part.

It is where the autonomic functions that govern our hormones, etc.

You move up and then there's the limbic system that governs our emotions.

And at the very top is the frontal neocortex that developed very recently.

It's where our language and our reasoning powers came from.

And what this means is that these 2 parts of the brain, emotions and reasoning, are not in the same area.

They're separated by other layers, and they don't communicate with each other.

Now, this is a very powerful idea that I think we all need to understand.

So emotions are a very, very ancient system.

So this is something that goes back millions and millions, hundreds of millions of years.

And basically, emotions originate as a kind of hormonal and nerve signal that is sent to the brain.

And these signals are much stronger than any of the signals that the frontal cortex sends.

And what that means is emotions consume so much more of our attention than any kind of thought.

They grab our attention more because they're involving these very powerful physical forces.

The other thing that comes from this is that because they're in 2 different parts of the brain, we don't really have access to our emotions.

So it's very hard for us to put our feelings into words.

I don't know if you've ever experienced that, but the word depression doesn't really describe exactly sometimes the feeling of depression, or the same with anger.

The other thing is we have no access to the source of our emotions.

So we could be angry and depressed, but not really know consciously why we're angry or depressed.

And finally, because these are separated functions, we don't really realize to what extent emotions are infecting our strategies, our plans, our ideas.

We don't realize how much the ideas that we have are being infiltrated by our emotions.

And to make all of this more complicated and worse, I don't mean to overload you with all this information, excuse me, Our brains operate by simplifying information.

The human brain takes in so much stimuli in the course of a day that if we had to sit there and look at all of that, we would go crazy.

So the brain operates by simplifying the material that we receive and tells us a story.

So that, for instance, when you're feeling angry, your brain tells you, you're angry because of this person or that.

You're depressed because of this event or that.

So for instance, when Sir Isaac Newton is having this issue with the South Sea bubble and the South Sea Company decides to pour all 20, 000 pounds back into the investment, His brain is telling him, Isaac, this is a great idea.

Look at how much money you're going to make.

Whereas in fact, what was really motivating him was sheer greed, But the brain wasn't telling him that.

I tell the story in the book of something that always, a story that fascinated me by a famous psychoanalyst named Heinz Kohut, who had a patient.

And this patient was a young man who had this pattern in life.

He would get involved with young women in different relationships.

And he broke each 1 of them off several months or even several years into the relationship.

He would say, well, this woman, I didn't trust her.

I don't think she was going to be faithful.

This other woman, she wasn't smart enough.

This other woman, I think she was just out for my money.

He would break the relationship off first.

And in discussing with this patient, Kohut discovered that this young man had a mother who was very kind of narcissistic.

She never quite paid very much attention to him.

And so this was a very painful experience for him that he didn't really remember.

But basically, he experienced her narcissism as a form of abandonment, as if she had left him.

And so his pattern in life was to always be the 1 abandoning other people, abandoning women, before they could abandon him, because he could not relive that experience again.

His brain was telling him this woman was not good, she wasn't smart, she wasn't worthy, etc.

He had no access to the actual source of the patterns of behavior in his life.

And I ask you to think of the possibility this could be happening to you.

There could be things in your life, things that are getting you angry or frustrated or depressed.

And there could be something very much rooted in the first 3 or 4 years of your life that you have no idea about that is actually motivating your behavior in the present.

In economics, writers like Daniel Kahneman, I don't know if you're familiar with him, he talks about, they talk about the effective heuristic.

And what that means is, what determines people's decisions in economics to buy something or invest in something is not rational, but is actually based on emotions.

We think when we buy a product we've done our research, we know what we're doing, we bought it for this or the other reason.

Because we're not aware of how emotions are governing our purchases, our economic behavior, this gives marketing people incredible room to manipulate us.

So they've done all the research on human nature, and they know that putting a little ping sound in your smartphone at a certain frequency has a very hypnotic effect.

And so You're drawn to constantly check your smartphones.

You think it's because of your own desire, but it's actually you're, in some ways, being hypnotized.

They know that the color red will grab your attention in a way that no other color will.

So they put things that will, they know how to manipulate your attention by using colors.

There's the exposure factor that they discuss.

So they know through lots of research that if someone is exposed to something first, they're much more likely to buy it.

The same thing goes with presidents that we elect or candidates.

If we're exposed to them, if we know them, just by the name, just by the recognition, we're prone to vote for them.

Back in the day when people still used to buy things in shops and stores, These people knew that if a shop assistant lightly touched you on the arm in a very non-threatening way, the chances of you buying the product went up like 50-60 percent.

So they would teach their employees to do this, on and on and on.

So the lesson here is that we're not aware of all of these things that are going on, of how much our emotions are actually governing and determining so much of our behavior.

And the solution that I give in my book, the solution for us humans to actually become rational like we imagine ourselves to be is to become aware of this phenomenon.

First, to not think that you're rational, to see the process.

So it's not easy, but when you're feeling anger or you're feeling depressed, don't just act on it and mope or lash out.

Could there be something else going on that I'm not really thinking of?

And you may not get to the answer, you may not uncover that thing in your early childhood, but just in asking that question, you're going to create a little bit of space between the signal you're getting from your brain and your reaction.

And that space, that time, that 10 minutes, that 1 hour that you don't react is actually what's going to make you a more rational person in the long run.

You'll be able to question, well, why am I really interested in buying this product?

Is it because I'm being manipulated, or is it something that I really need?

I talk a lot in my consulting with people who have to make important decisions.

I can bet you that 95% of your decision, the strategy you're coming up with, is infected with emotions.

You're always imagining the best case that will emerge from this, but you're not seeing all the potential pitfalls.

So you want to subtract all of these emotional elements before you make your decision.

Going through this process is what will, in the end, finally make you rational.

Talking about how emotions govern us, that's obviously something that emerged in our deep past that's not really adapted to where we're living now.

But there is a power that we evolved from in our deep past that's actually extremely well adapted to where we are now and will be very valuable for us.

And that quality is empathy, which is a major theme in my new book.

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Robert Greene | The Laws of Human Nature | Talks at Google