But nobody is coming to save them. If they want to get out of that hole, they are going to have to do it themselves. So what is it that people can do, and quite honestly, avoid doing, if they want to stop being aimless and make their dreams a reality?

Well, sometimes you have to get deep enough in that hole that you really, really want to get out. So the key factor in life is motivation, is desire, is the energy that you bring to it. So if you don't believe in yourself, if you only half-heartedly are reading my books or listening to Tom or listening to me and you go, yeah, I kind of want to change, it won't matter. It won't change anything. You'll just go back to your old habits, right? Because habits are very powerful. You're a product of the cultural moment. It's very hard to resist it. It's very hard to swim against the tide of the times that we live in. So if you don't have the motivation, if you don't have the energy, if you don't have the idea that, damn it, I'm going down fast. If I don't turn this around, I'm, you know, you're only alive once. It's, you know, YOLO. And it goes past really fast. I can tell you that as now as I get older, faster than you think. So you've got to be desperate. You've got to tell yourself, I've got to get out of this. I've got to change my life. I've got to swim against the tide of the times that I lived in. I have to change my ways. Because if not, when I'm 32, when I'm 35, all of my hopes, all of my horizons will narrow so much that it's going to look very, very bleak, right? So the younger you are, the better. And you have to have that desire. You have to look yourself square in the eye. And the number one thing to think of is you have much less time than you imagine, right? It goes past really quickly. Your 20s will go faster than you could imagine. Suddenly you're 30, you go, whoa, what am I going to do? Then you're 40, shit, it's too late. You know, okay, so just realize you don't have as much time as you think you have. Now, the other thing you have to realize is what builds strength, what builds character is resistance, right? So if you're trying to make your body physically stronger, you need resistance. You need weights because weights are natural resistance. You need to swim. Water is resistant. You need to run. Gravity is resistant, et cetera. That resistance builds muscle, builds strength, builds aerobic power, etc., etc. Life, mentally, it's the same thing. The times that you live in are providing incredible amounts of resistance towards success, towards power, towards a sense of fulfillment. They are flooding your face with all kinds of qualities that you have to resist. And to the degree that you're aware of these qualities, and to the degree that you resist them, you will build inner strength, you will build the kind of life skills that are necessary to survive and thrive in a very, very tough world. So one of these resistance factors is social media, is the level of distractions that we're all facing, right? It's never, ever, ever been so intense. And you have to realize you don't let everything into your body. You don't eat all this sugar, I hope at least. You don't eat all the pizza that you think is great for you. You understand that you have to limit your diet to be healthy, particularly as you get older. You have to limit your sugar intake, among other things, etc. Okay? You have to limit the amount of stuff that's coming into your head. You have to put your head on a diet. You have to go, I can't be distracted. I can't absorb all of this information. The human brain, we can only retain so much in our short-term memory, let alone our long-term memory. You're flooding it with too much, and what happens is you're losing the ability to focus on simple things, right? So to be successful, you have to have primarily the quality to focus, to concentrate. And that begins on small banal tasks. Like, I mean, this is, you know, a simple example, but if you're playing the piano or you want to be a chess master, you have to learn the basics. You have to learn the moves, the different games you can play. You have to learn how to do scales, et cetera, et cetera. You have to be very focused and attentive to it. So if you're trying to learn scales and learn how to play the piano, and your mind is in 20 different places, you'll never master it. You have to develop the ability to concentrate, to focus, and the times that you are living in are making it increasingly so difficult for you that it's splintering your brain and your attention into a thousand different pieces to the point where you can't even focus on your body, on yourself, on who you are, on what makes you strong. So you got to put your brain on a diet. And that means you got to limit how much social media you let into your life. You have to limit how many different sources you're listening to. You can't be listening to a hundred different podcasts every week, although you should be listening to Tom's podcast, right? So put yourself on a diet and say, what is it that matters? What is important? And then that brings you to the second question, which is tied to the first one, which is by far the most important step in your life with all of these things coming at you that are creating resistance that are going to make it hard for you, which is, who are you? What makes you unique? What were you born to achieve in this world? You have to be aware of that. And to be aware of that, you have to be able to focus. You have to introspect. Introspection is a skill. It's not given to you. The ability to tune out things and to look at yourself and go inward and go, this is what matters to me. This is what I hate. I realized early on, I've said this before, I hate politicking. I hate office politics. I hate working for other people. They annoy me. I feel like I can do a better job than they can. So I hate that. Therefore, Robert, you need to be an entrepreneur. You're not meant in this life to be working for other people. So you have to be attuned to yourself. You have to look in and go, this is what I hate. This is what I love. And you have to be honest because you can fool yourself. You can think that you love rock music and that you're meant to be a rock star, but it's only that's because of the culture that you're living in and what your friends think is cool. That isn't necessarily who you are. You have to look at yourself. You have to focus deeply. You have to go through a process, being honest and going, what excites me? What do I feel like makes me unique? And the power that you have in life is mining that uniqueness, mining that individual quality in whatever field you go into, even in business or being an entrepreneur. And so you can't have that self-awareness if you can't focus, if you can't concentrate, if you can't be bored and take a notebook and start writing things out about your childhood, about who you are, about what you love and what you hate. If you can't do that, I'm sorry, but there's no hope for you. There's really no hope for you. So you have to be able to

put yourself on that information diet and go into that introspective process. really heavy. And I think a lot of people are going to hear that there's no hope for them. That's going to feel right. And before you and I started rolling, you said things really are bad for them. And if I grew up in their generation, I would probably be in the same boat. Why is it bad right now? What is it that's creating the sense of hopelessness? Well,

we live in a very nihilistic culture, and I find it in our entertainment. So the idea of having a set of principles that guide you in life, man, that seems so old-fashioned, it seems so fussy. So no, man, I'm just going to be who I am. And the values that are implanted in entertainment are completely nihilistic. They give you no focus. They give you no direction. They don't tell you what actually matters in life, right? They give you all of these faults, these illusions about what life is about. And so some of it stems from the kind of fractured society that we live in. Fractured in what way? Well, most cultures up until the 21st century had a kind of cohesiveness to it. There were certain myths that people ascribed to that set the boundaries. This is what unites us all. These are the things that are good. These are the things that we hate. These are the values that are good. These are the values that are bad. Now, sometimes those cultures, those conventions, those myths were not good. But then you had something to rebel against. So me as a product of the 60s and then the 70s, when I came of age, you know, in college, I didn't like the culture that was there, the kind of monolith, the myths and things. I wanted to rebel, but I had something to rebel against. What are you going to rebel against now? You don't even know what to rebel against now because there's nothing. It's just pure chaos. I can't point my finger to what are the guiding myths of our particular cultural moment. Maybe in 100 years, they'll be clear, but I think a lot of our myths come from technology. You know, so my study of history is every cultural moment has a kind of guiding metaphor for it, something I'm writing about right now. And so like in the 18th century, the guiding metaphor was theater. Life is like theater. We're all actors, we're all playing roles. Early in the 20th century, it was the unconscious and Freud and discovering the unconscious and exploring that, which had a huge impact on culture. There were other myths, but I'd point to those. Today, it's technology, it's AI, it's all those other things, right? And so, but that is like, that kind of devalues the human element. So, I recently gave couple of talks with a conversation with Ryan Holiday. And you can look at these on YouTube. It was like an hour and a half here in LA and in Seattle. And Ryan asked me my thoughts about AI. And I went on a kind of a rant. I'm not a Luddite. I understand and I use technology, etc. But my point was, instead of fetishizing AI and chat GPT, which I admit I've seen it, it's powerful how it goes like that. Whoa, it's like magic. Fetishize the human brain. Fetishize human powers. Fetishize our sociabilities, our theory of mind. Theory of mind is what makes humans human. And what that means is we have the ability to put ourselves in the minds of other people, to imagine what they're thinking, what they're doing. That's what makes us a preeminent social animal, which is the source of our power. is your power? Your power is your ability to be social, is your ability to navigate difficult social environments. Your second power is your brain and all the incredible things it has. One of them is the ability to focus. One is the ability to learn, is the plasticity of the brain. So the guiding metaphor, if it's all technology, it kind of makes us think that, you know, with your smartphone, you have all of these powers and you can't believe it. It makes you so impatient. Everything should be like my phone. Everything should be instant. Everything should be at my fingertip. If my internet service goes down for a few hours, I get so cranky, like a little baby whining and crying, right? No, what really should matter is not, you don't have those powers. You can't press a button. Your brain isn't designed that way. It takes years to develop true skill, to be a master at something. You need to go back to these elemental primal human qualities. Our sociability, so get out of the virtual realm, learn social skills, which is what my book, The Laws of Human Nature, will kind of help you and ground you in as well as the 48 Laws of Power. And you need brain skills. You need to develop skills, actual skills that you can use in this world.

And that's really interesting. So the idea of the guiding myths, it's something that's sort of been in the back of my mind, but I hadn't pulled forward. So thank you for that. Because now that you say that, I think one of the biggest issues that I see people struggling with, I would have used different words, but it's the same idea. People look at the world. They look at the here in the West, they look at the game that we're playing. They say capitalism, ew, this is gross, like it's predatory, whatever. And because they have such a negative view of the system, because the system right now isn't working for their generation, they just want to opt out. But it creates this incredibly cynical, incredibly aimless, incredibly hopeless vibe. And I think you and I agree that's dangerous. Now, I will say for my own sake, I think it's dangerous for them. I think the punchline of life is all about fulfillment. I think that's what people should be pursuing. I think fulfillment has an evolutionarily imbued formula. And that recipe maybe is a better, is you're going to have to work really hard to gain a set of skills that you care about for your own intrinsic reasons that allow you to serve yourself and others. If you do that, you're going to be fine. If you don't, you're going to have a profound sense of disease because people want to check out of the system. They are, to your point, they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. So they're trying to check out of a system, which by the way, I think is a phenomenal system. And I advise people not to check out of it. But anyway, even if you want to check out of that system, if you then just dive into any setup that isolates you, you're going to be in for a bad time because the brain works in a certain way. And so I've said many times on the show on my tombstone, I wanted to read, you're having a biological experience. And the reason I want people to understand that is because your brain works a certain way, there are certain things that you can do that will align yourself to feeling good, feeling engaged, feeling fulfilled, loving communication, connection, meaning and purpose, all that. And there are things that you can do that will lead you exactly away from this. And so rejecting the system, but without a cause, so rebel without a cause style is not going to move you towards anything. That's a pure move away from play. And if you're just moving away from something, you're going to find yourself accelerating that sense of aimlessness. And so there's a compounding variable here, which is people, there's a rising sentiment, burn it all down, and then we'll build utopia, for lack of a better word, in its place. And that is people that don't understand the absolute hellfire of chaos that will reign if your meaning and purpose becomes destroying instead of building because if they really do succeed in tearing down a system you don't have scaffolding left to build upon and that bad things happen in that vacuum well

first of all, it's not possible to tear things down because the world is larger than just individuals. It's larger than a movement. It's larger than your generation, I'm afraid to say. So you don't even have the power to tear things down because the world will go into its own kind of system. The human unconscious has moved us throughout history. Human nature has. It's going to continue. It's beyond. It transcends you as an individual. So you don't have as much power to burn things down as you imagined. So just get over that childish fantasy. But the second thing I would say is, I began by saying, what matters is your level of energy, your level of motivation in life. right? And when you're cynical and when you're nihilistic, it just drains you of energy. Why do anything, man? It doesn't matter, you know? 10 years down the road, it's climate change. We're all going to be dying anyway. What matters, okay? But I'm writing a book right now on the sublime in which I'm trying to say the world that you live in is not ugly, it's not horrible, it's not destructive, it's insanely beautiful. The fact of being alive is one of the most weirdest things. I even have a chapter called Awaken to the Strangeness of Being Alive. It's chapter number two. And so just the fact that you are alive now as a human being is an incredibly unlikely set of circumstances that occurred. So the world that we live in is utterly sublime and utterly weird. And a lot of that interesting stuff comes from science. So at the same time that technology is kind of making our brains into mush, scientists are uncovering things that just are so fantastic. They're extraordinary. What we're learning about the cosmos, what we're learning about the origins of life, what we're learning about evolution, what we're learning about the brain. I mean, if you just think about it, it's staggering. And so being part of that wave of knowledge that's overwhelming us right now should be incredibly exciting. But if you have no excitement in life, if you think it's all just crap and it's better just to not care, and you know what that comes from, it's a common adolescent pose, and I probably had it when I was 16 years old. Man, I don't care. Yeah, let's screw It comes from insecurity. It's not strength. Being that kind of rebel without any reason against nothing is actually a sign of incredible weakness. And you know where it comes from? It comes from the fear of failure. So if I don't try to do anything, if I just say, oh, it's all going to hell, I'm just going to go in my van, I'm just going to tour around the United States, I'm just going to take videos and things, you know, what the hell? You know, as King Louis XIV said, après moi le déluge, after me, the deluge, I don't care. If that's your attitude towards life, you know, then that's what you're going to get. So it comes from a fear of failure. It doesn't come from strength. Because to try something, to try to build a business, to try and write a book, to try and make a film, you're putting yourself out on the line and you could fail. And with failure comes criticism. And with failure, you're exposing yourself. You're exposing your ambition. You're exposing that you weren't up to the task. Better to not even try and to just say, oh, I don't care, because then you're not exposing yourself. So that kind of pose is actually a form of childish insecurity that you need to get over. But you need to have a sense of excitement. And if you don't, if you think everything is just gray and equal and bad and we're all heading to hell in a handbasket, then that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I'm writing a book to just make you get that energy, that excitement again. And you know what? When you were a child, you had it. I don't care if you grew up in this culture now that is kind of, I think, deadening things. You're a child. Children have this energy that nothing can suppress. You actually live in a world of enchantment. Things are like amazing too. You want to learn. You want to read books. You want to explore. You want to explore, you want to adventure. You had it when you were a child, and you've lost it. You've lost it in adolescence, you lost it when you were 12, you lost it because the culture sucked it out of you. But it's there, it's still waiting to come back to you. But if you don't have that enchantment about life, if you don't see something really amazing about the one life that you have that can go by very quickly, then nothing will ever change. You're just going to end up, as I said, it'll be a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom. Okay, I agree with all that. It's easy, though, to step

into their shoes and look back at you and say, hey, listen, old man who remembers the late 60s, that worked because of the time you were in. And demographics are destiny. And the time that I'm born, it's just an absolute shit show. Baby boomers are hoarding all of the wealth. They refuse to leave the workforce. I can't buy a property. And when you were first getting on the property ladder, it was like a dollar 50 to buy a house in Beverly Hills. And so, yeah, it seems great for you. And OPS, uh, I've taken on $180,000 in college debt. It's non-dischargeable even in bankruptcy. Uh, so you found a way to put me in indentured servitude and I can't expect my, oh, I'm not done. I can't expect my social security to be there when i get there because you motherfuckers won't die uh so that's how they're going to look back at you what do you say to somebody with that frame of reference well

you know there's obviously some truth to that and i said i understand why people are the way they are, you know. But not every time is this sort of golden period in history. You know, I lived through the 1980s, which I thought was a really, really ugly period in history. I found it very bleak and very horrifying. And I didn't have this kind of golden thing that you might imagine. I did not have success until I was 39 years old. I struggled. I was more like how people are nowadays in that I wandered from job to job. I had 60 different jobs. I never held a job for more than 11 months in my entire life. Okay. So I know, and I got very depressed. I even had moments of being suicidal I lived in a crappy one-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica I know Santa Monica is very nice but back then it wasn't so nice and so I know what it means to struggle I didn't have debt but I didn't have any money I was very poor living in many most of my life I was very poor. So it's not as golden as you think for me individually, but I understand the baby boomer scenario and everything that you're facing. But so what? Stop whining. Stop whining about the circumstances. My parents grew up in the Depression. That's nowhere near, these times are nowhere near what they had to deal with. My grandparents really more, but even my parents to some extent. So stop your goddamn whining. It was pretty awful back then. They faced the stock market crash in 1929. They had to live through the depression of the 1930s. Then they had World War II. You think you have it bad? Try having to deal with the Nazis and the Japanese attacking you both at the same time. The 1960s, we had the Vietnam War. I was of the age where I had a draft number. My draft number was so low that I was certain to be drafted. Fortunately, the draft ended like six months before my age came of whatever. So, you know, you think it's the worst ever. It's not the worst ever. I could point to a hundred other periods in history that were equally incredibly bleak. The generation that came out of World War I, do you know the massacre that young people faced in World War I? That's why we had the 1920s where the flappers, because people didn't want, they wanted to drink themselves into oblivion. Mill of young men died for a senseless stupid war okay you have no historic sense you have no sense of proportion just because you live in the 2020s you think that this is the worst time you don't read history you don't understand that it's not the worst ever so stop your whining there are plenty of humans that have dealt with things far worse than you've ever dealt with. Our ancestors who were pioneers in the 19th century, they faced privations and poverty that you would have no conception over. You have it much better than a lot of other people in the past. So stop your goddamn whining. People had it worse in the past a lot of times. You don't have it so bad. Okay, you have a lot of debt. All right, you have to make a plan. You have to be strategic. But if you give up, if you just say, oh, it's the baby boomers. Oh, I can't own a home. If that's your energy, then that's going to be the fate that you have. There are always circumstances that are going to be resistant to you. I understand the resistance factors now are very powerful but are you going to meet them or are you just going to give in and surrender you can make that choice and that's fine if you want to live on a organic farm in oregon i have nothing against it and i'm not making fun of it because that is a good life that could be fine if that's your ambition. But maybe you can't make it that way because that's not an easy life either, right? So you have to make a choice. Do I want something else for myself or do I just want to wallow in self-pity and blame other people? And you can blame other people, and there's a lot of things to blame. Just as when I was growing up, I had a lot of things I could blame. But you have to look at it differently, and you have to say, that kind of energy is self-destructive. How can I get out of that energy? I can only get out of, I have to control what I can control. I have bad student debt. I have $100,000 in debt. All right, I got to make a plan for the next five years. First of all, you didn't have to get that $100,000 in debt. So you take a little bit of responsibility for that. I mean, I know they had little things that you signed that you weren't aware of, but for a long time, we've been aware of some of those predatory practices in lending. So it's partially your responsibility a little there. But okay, you have your $100,000 in debt. You make a plan. I'm going to have to work it off this way. I'm going to have to get a job that pays well. But at the same time, I'm going to be building other kind of life skills, et cetera. I'm going to get myself out of this hole. I'm going to have hope. I'm going to have energy. Fine, that's the alternate path. But if you don't have that, if you don't think that it's possible, then there's nothing really that I can say. I could just waste a lot of words. It won't mean anything. But don't think that you have it worse than other people because you have no sense of history. You're living in this bubble, this illusion of the present. You don't know what people are like. We're living in the Middle Ages, in the 18th century, in America in the 19th century, World War I, the Depression, the Vietnam War, Watergate era, the recession we had then. Stop it. You don't understand.