Voices in the Dark

Coercion is a dirty word; manipulation no better. But that's what social life is all about, down at its very core: we're all trying to get people to see our point of view, to join forces in some fashion, whether it's building a world-changing company or just going to the cinema together.

Brute force doesn't do the job, or certainly not for long. So how can we win people over effectively, and without the stench of coercion blighting our attempts?

Law 43 answers these questions and much more besides. Drawing together the threads of many of the previous Laws, this is a powerful exploration into the heart of emotional intelligence and how to calibrate yourself effectively to the world and people around you.

Along with Robert's historical examples, we highlight the ways in which Hillary Clinton transgressed this Law in her failed run for the presidency; just how deeply Facebook is controlling your mind; and why people get so mixed up about love and seduction.

We also overthrow the idea that millennials are entitled pricks; compare notes on our respective parental conditioning (which turns out to be a story of polar opposites); and unpick the myth of Steve Jobs.

There's also time to hear Dre's tales of early sexual dramas, and discuss the unhinged world of pun-based porn movies...

• The importance of having to wait
• How to raise your children to be more powerful
• Deciding whose hearts and minds it's actually worth winning
• The media's tactics to follow this Law – and how you can avoid being suckered in
• Grand Gestures and how to deploy them
• Is being yourself ever a good idea?
• Which is more important: the heart or the mind?

• Dre's latest obsession: Ultimate Beastmaster
• Jacque Fresco and the Venus Project
• The Beautiful South's song, Artificial Flowers
• Daniele Bolelli's excellent podcast, The Drunken Taoist
• Jon's article on offensive humour and how it works

Challenge: Pause. Breathe. And try to see where the other person is coming from. Then construct your plans around that: how can you win them over on their terms?

Join us as we continue our 48 Laws of Power review, exploring Robert Greene's provocative and compelling book, in which he lays bare the history, practice, psychology, and philosophies of power that ultimately shape all human relations. Often seen as a handbook for the 'modern Machiavelli', we take a closer look, beyond the hyperbole, and discuss how understanding and implementing these Laws can actually enrich your life personally, professionally and spiritually.

Jon and Dre aim to get to the heart of each of the Laws, grapple with their sometimes disturbingly amoral nature, and discuss what the Laws mean in everyday life (often revealing their own experiences – good and bad – when they've either observed or transgressed them).

Cory Allen is a man of many parts: musician, producer, podcaster, meditation expert, philosopher... and now a full-time Professional Cory. He's gathered a huge audience for his work, but his driving force continues to be the simple/complex mission to Reduce Suffering and Raise Awareness.

But what exactly does that mean in everyday life, away from the meditation cushion? Jon caught up with Cory in Austin, Texas, to find out. The result was a deep, fun, and enriching conversation about what it means to be human.

We talked about love, sex, and death; the tension between our often stress-making animal natures and our mental capacity to find lasting peace; and how we can grow and change without simply disowning parts of our self.

We explore the profound difference between emotional and intellectual understanding, how other people see you through the lens of their own TV Sitcom, and when spirituality and meditation just end up turning you into a vegetable.

Resistance is a factor in all our lives, but how can we experience is as something more than an enemy? Do we need to have an audience for our lives, or is that egotistical indulgence? And how far can we overcome the warping effect of subjectivism?

If that wasn't enough, we compare art to acts of friendship, explain why we need to let go in order to have anything... and tell you to go on dates with people you find obnoxious .

• Dealing with fear as we find our paths
• The multiple consciousnesses we each have and how they fight against each other
• Can we ever escape our own projections?
• The dangers of mistaking your worldview for your identity
• Existential paralysis
• How to know when to start something big
• Whether creativity have to involve suffering
• Teaching people to accept who you are

• On his Site
• On Facebook
• His podcast, The Astral Hustle
• The 6-week Meditation Course, Release Into Now

• Aubrey Marcus

Bad apples, shit-stirrers and fifth-columnists. It only takes one to disrupt and destroy your power, but how can you spot and remove them before it's too late?

Purging, banishment, shame and rebellion – Law 42 explores the enormous power of isolation and exile, but it's frequently more complicated than it seems to put into practice. How can you keep people on side without pandering to their whims, and how can you dethrone a power-player without fostering an eventual counterstrike?

This episode we get controversial. We get into a tense debate about whether mercy can ever be a tool of power; why prison systems always undermine their own goals; and why democracy means representation, but not the rule of the people.

Jon's got plenty of examples from authoritarian Russia, but just how distant are they from our own 'democratic' systems? He rants about why he left his union while simultaneously thinking unions are a Very Good Thing; Dre reveals his grand plan for redesigning government from the ground up, before promoting strike action... and saying he would've crushed Gandhi. Are you ready for this one?

• Do events have their own momentum, or can we exert power over them?
• The power of exile
• How to identify and destroy the shit-stirrers
• Why punishment simply doesn't work... except when it does
• Who should have political power?
• Making and breaking unions
• When to burn your bridges

• Tom Hughes's mission to write a whole book in one year Starts Here
• Max Weber and charisma
• Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy
• Chris Ryan's podcast, Tangentially Speaking, and his book, Sex At Dawn
• Daniel Beer's superb book, The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars
• Our interview with Robert Colvile about The Great Acceleration in our lives
• The idea of 'Working Towards The Führer'

Challenge: Push the negative person out of your group; don't invite them to the party and see just how much of a better time everyone has. Allow others to realise the benefits of that person's absence... and see their toxic power diminish. Let us know what happened next...!

Join us as we continue our 48 Laws of Power review, exploring Robert Greene's provocative and compelling book, in which he lays bare the history, practice, psychology, and philosophies of power that ultimately shape all human relations. Often seen as a handbook for the 'modern Machiavelli', we take a closer look, beyond the hyperbole, and discuss how understanding and implementing these Laws can actually enrich your life personally, professionally and spiritually.

Jon and Dre aim to get to the heart of each of the Laws, grapple with their sometimes disturbingly amoral nature, and discuss what the Laws mean in everyday life (often revealing their own experiences – good and bad – when they've either observed or transgressed them).

You've got Daddy Issues. And you're going to have to deal with them if you want to find your way to Power.

Law 41 penetrates deeply into our psyches and draws back the veil on the automatic behaviours we go through life with – unconsciously playing out the patterns we inherited from our parents, whether by copying them or trying, naively, to reject them.

So how can we forge our own distinctive routes to Power? This week, we ask some crucial questions. What is real drive? Who has it; can it be learnt; and should you rely on your children to have it? Are rags to riches stories actually instructive, or do they simply warp and distort our sense of what's necessary to become the hero of your own movie?

We get psycho-philosophical and explain what it really means to kill the Buddha (and your parents) if you see them on your path; we explore the human inability to resist a pecking order; and we reveal what Bridezillas and Mothers-in-Law have to tell us about the Laws of Power.

Law 41 nuances many of the previous Laws, from what Law 1 (Never Outshine the Master) actually means in practice, to always remembering to Give Before You Take (the core lesson of Law 12). As well as drawing together more of the rich tapestry of the 48 Laws, we stop off to ponder some personal issues, too.

Jon reflects on his continuing life on the road and what the symbols of success really are for people in their 20s-30s these days; Dre describes how signal-to-noise ratios explain something absolutely fundamental about human nature... and what kind of lazy he really is.

And we reveal why Alexander the Great seriously needed to pull his fucking self together.

• The only way to effectively overcome a powerful predecessor and forge your own legacy
• Does comfort erode ambition?
• How to avoid playing out the unlived lives of your parents
• Why rebellion so often turns out to be nothing new
• Learning the dominant paradigm and when to subvert it
• Do you lose your choices by following in someone's footsteps, or are you more prepared than your peers?
• How to reinvent yourself and why you have to do so

• The HBO series on John Adams which Dre mentioned
• The infamous Indiana Jones sword vs. gun scene
• Our excellent interview with Robert Colvile on The Great Acceleration in our lives

Challenge: Write down a list of the qualities and achievements of both your father/mother and your idol... and then think of ways you could do the opposite. What does that reveal? What's the first thing you would change about your current lifestyle and trajectory?

Join us as we continue our 48 Laws of Power review, exploring Robert Greene's provocative and compelling book, in which he lays bare the history, practice, psychology, and philosophies of power that ultimately shape all human relations. Often seen as a handbook for the 'modern Machiavelli', we take a closer look, beyond the hyperbole, and discuss how understanding and implementing these Laws can actually enrich your life personally, professionally and spiritually.

Jon and Dre aim to get to the heart of each of the Laws, grapple with their sometimes disturbingly amoral nature, and discuss what the Laws mean in everyday life (often revealing their own experiences – good and bad – when they've either observed or transgressed them).

Freebies? Surely we want them... Actually, we don't. Law 40 explains the enormous psychological burdens involved in accepting the free lunch, and how rapidly this can draw you into a web of obligations and inferior power positions. This Law breaks down the different kinds of toxic people who try to manipulate you through emotional and financial blackmail – you'll know them when you hear them described, but how many times have you fallen inadvertently under their sway?

This week we explore how to successfully cultivate and nurture relationships so that you can call on those favours when you need them, but without making people feel beholden to you; the intense and damaging role your parents' behaviour continues to play in your life; and why humans' idea of justice often just translates into taking punitive actions against others.

Money figures significantly in this episode, but not in the way you'd expect. We get into the need to value your time ahead of counting the pennies, and why spending your money extravagantly is much wiser than you might think. If we can think of money as energy we can turn its power to our advantage so that the more you give away, the richer you become.

Jon and Dre recal the times they've seen powerful cons play out in real life; get into an intense debate about the nature of real love and 'the one that got away'; and Dre shares a masterful trick to get drinks bought for you without breaking this Law. Less powerfully, Jon reveals his escalating nicotine habit, how not to give him gifts, and his terrible history of being triggered by the National Trust. Do not buy him hats, and do not take him to stately homes. Seriously – just don't.

• Why you should never offer to buy someone coffee
• How this Law can solve classic relationship problems
• Why it's so hard to give anything away
• Why almost every internet coaching service and free webinar is total bullshit
• How to tell if you're unconsciously living out the echoes of your parents' lives
• How to act as you want to be treated
• How to cultivate non-resented debts
• Destroying wealth to generate more of it
• How to pay the bill the right way
• Why true love is like meth

• The ever-disturbing, BoJack the Horseman
• Trying to give away a Massive Yacht!
• The Great Gatsby – book and film
• Daniel Gilbert's superb book, Stumbling on Happiness
• The ultra-spiritual JP Sears

Challenge: Say no to free stuff and buy a few more rounds than you should. Start to value your time at $60 an hour and act accordingly...

Then let us know what happened next!

Join us as we continue our 48 Laws of Power review, exploring Robert Greene's provocative and compelling book, in which he lays bare the history, practice, psychology, and philosophies of power that ultimately shape all human relations. Often seen as a handbook for the 'modern Machiavelli', we take a closer look, beyond the hyperbole, and discuss how understanding and implementing these Laws can actually enrich your life personally, professionally and spiritually.

Jon and Dre aim to get to the heart of each of the Laws, grapple with their sometimes disturbingly amoral nature, and discuss what the Laws mean in everyday life (often revealing their own experiences – good and bad – when they've either observed or transgressed them).

Control. We crave it, we scramble for it, and we hate to feel under the control of anyone else. Law 39 is all about learning how to retain control without even trying, explaining how it's precisely by grasping for power that so many people lose it forever. Stillness and calm are the heart of power, but turning up your volume is the desperate resort of those who're losing it. When emotions and fear take the lead, you become laughable or pathetic to those around you; retaining discipline and poise can make all the difference, even if your material situation is dire.

Simple on the the surface, this Law is filled with surprisingly deep psychological analysis. We dig deep into how our parents imprint so much on us, and how to break out of those patterns which we otherwise unthinkingly default to. But to find out what other people's buttons are – to stir up their automatic reactions – can be an incredibly potent tool: stirring the waters can reveal their thumbscrews – taking us back to Law 33. As ever, this Law has a lot to say about relationships; passive aggression and trying to force others to do as you want can play an insidious but all too common role between couples.

We consider the vital difference between reacting and responding; why this isn't a Law worth using when you're not interacting with people of any relevant power; and when and how to take the reins in social situations – it's much easier than you might imagine. Jon provides some insights from his time in Russia into the politics, power and leadership cult of Vladimir Putin, and Dre recalls key moments when we took the lead – and was applauded for doing so.

And there's plenty more personal tales from when we've observed or transgressed the Law – resulting in both a public meltdown and in a gypsy curse...

• When Napoleon lost his shit... and thereby his power
• The key signs that you're losing power
• The difference between starting before you're ready and being goaded into foolish action
• What Putin's leadership style reveals about modern-day power
• How to turn the dial down on other people's emotions
• Getting the last word: useful or not?
• How to see past the immediate moment and retain the powerful long-view
• The positive and the negative ways of getting in touch with your inner child
• Power as a demeanour
• When and how you can feign anger strategically

• Cultural appropriation in Orange Juice form
• Cory Allen's brilliant podcast, The Astral Hustle
• What does Superman dream of...?
• Our deep interview with Peter Sage
• Our fascinating recent interview with Robert Colvile on The Great Acceleration in our lives

Challenge: Stir up some shit while retaining complete calm. What happens? Do you come out of things better? What did you learn? Let us know in the comments!

Join us as we continue our 48 Laws of Power review, exploring Robert Greene's provocative and compelling book, in which he lays bare the history, practice, psychology, and philosophies of power that ultimately shape all human relations. Often seen as a handbook for the 'modern Machiavelli', we take a closer look, beyond the hyperbole, and discuss how understanding and implementing these Laws can actually enrich your life personally, professionally and spiritually.

Jon and Dre aim to get to the heart of each of the Laws, grapple with their sometimes disturbingly amoral nature, and discuss what the Laws mean in everyday life (often revealing their own experiences – good and bad – when they've either observed or transgressed them).

From Bible-Belt town to living and then escaping the American Dream, Conner Moore can now be found exploring consciousness, making podcasts, lifting heavy, and changing lives at Onnit – a company dedicated to Total Human Optimization. After his first business venture as a gym owner began to fall apart, Conner found himself cleaning the gym listening to Alan Watts and starting to wonder if there wasn't more to life than he'd been led to believe. Three months of living hand-to-mouth, combined with some powerful psychedelic experiences, changed his perspective on the world, which he shares with raw honesty in this interview.

After several exchanges online, Jon met up with Conner in Austin, Texas, to get down to the business of life, identity, pleasure, struggle, profanity, and going for your win – whatever that may be. This was a beautifully easy conversation to have: deep but fun, with a lot of cool insights along the way.

We talk about the different stories we tell about ourselves as we go through life; reinventing ourselves, but never quite leaving the old pieces behind. We get into how psychedelics led Conner to better know himself and take a step back and really assess where he was in life; and we discuss how to take control while remaining in the flow of your life.

Conner's about to launch his own podcast – The Pleasure Monkey Podcast – so we chatted about finding your voice and then the confidence to share it without feeling like you're an egotist. We also demolish the 'everything happens for a reason' cliché to find something more meaningful and realistic; we explore how to become comfortable with pain, risk and uncertainty; and we think about how it's precisely in moments of instability that we need to completely let go of the storylines we cling to.

Oh, and Jon gets triggered by gratitude, while Conner announces his future publication, The Douchebag Manifesto. How can you resist?

• Conner's greatest accomplishment
• ...and his greatest fear
• Sacrificing stability
• Getting conned in his first business venture
• The 3 components to finding success in any field
• 'Networking' the natural way
• Starting a podcast and finding your voice
• How to feel like you deserve to succeed
• Not attaching yourself to end-goals and missing the point of the game
• How to love bad dates
• Love, loss, and how to learn and grow from them
• Turning experience into ways to help others
• Not retreating into your Fear Cave
• Responding rather than reacting
• Stress spirals and how to avoid them
• Why you should pretend you're on a podcast at least once a week

• On Instagram
• On Facebook

• Onnit and its CEO, Aubrey Marcus
• Aubrey Marcus's Go For Your Win course
• Not getting caught out when people play to your fantasies
• Ryan Holidays excellent books, The Obstacle is the Way and Ego is the Enemy – check out our article on Ego here!
• Onnit's Total Human Optimization Podcast
• Conner's quote about not being entitled to the fruits of your labour, but to its lessons seems to have come from the Bhagavad Gita
• Pema Chödrön's books, The Places That Scare You and Comfortable With Uncertainty
• Conner's deep and enlightening conversation with Cory Allen on The Astral Hustle, #67
• Mark Manson's excellent book, The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck
• Sarah Knight's The Life-Changing Magic Of Not Giving A Fuck

Behave like others?! Doesn't this contradict the very fabric of The 48 Laws of Power, a book designed to reveal the mechanistic, unreflective ways in which most people act and then give us the tools to escape the imaginary cage this seems to confine us in? How can we Create Compelling Spectacles or Keep Others In Suspended Terror without acting in ways markedly different from the norm?

But Law 38 is a complex affair, offering both a slap in the face to the idea of 'just being yourself' and expecting everything to work out, and simultaneously providing a nuanced way to retain your internal compass while navigating your way to greater power. It also vividly demonstrates why you shouldn't go round telling everyone they should be reading The 48 Laws of Power – for reasons we explore in depth in our E-Book, The 48 Laws of Power in Practice, free for a limited time HERE.

As ever, we relate the Law to real life: it explains precisely where professional provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos went wrong this month in his comments about underage sex; how we can and must stay closely in touch with the spirit of the times before making our move, as we explored in Law 35; and how to deal with the friction we all feel around people who hold views to which we strongly object. In so doing, we debate the complexity of whether true-believers really live out their values, be that militant vegans or evangelical Christians, and what happens when logical models encounter real life thinking.

Jon's made a career out of calling bullshit – but at what cost? And what of his tendency to cast his pearls before swine: why should we care at all what unimportant people think about us and our work? Dre recalls the times he's been thrown out of teams and groups for not following this Law, and we contemplate how it's possible to remain ourselves while being formless and flowing.

Is it truly to compromise your views if you keep quiet about them? And what about during times of authoritarian rule: can you be powerful if you're silent, or powerful if you speak out? Jon reflects on the experience of being gay in Putin's Russia and how he did – or should have – acted there.

And we sign off with the least-well advised invitation ever. Hit subscribe and let's get going!

• When and how to keep your cards close to your chest
• Tying your beliefs into your identity
• How the brain constantly creates a simulation of reality and how this must impact on how we make decisions
• Congruent people – are they powerful or not?
• The power of the Campanella Method
• The dangers of 'tunnelling'
• Casting your pearls before swine
• Pushing beyond your comfort-group: the virtues of spending time with people whose views you dislike
• How to avoid hypocrisy while being all things to all people

• Jesse Bering's book, Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us
• Robert Colvile's The Great Acceleration – check out our Exclusive Interview with Robert
• Robert Greene's book, Mastery
• Darwin's The Origin of Species
• The ever-disturbing, BoJack the Horseman

Challenge: Adopt the Campanella Method: give voice to a view you don't hold in front of those who hold it... but in a way that deftly highlights its flaws. What happened next? Let us know!

Join us as we continue our 48 Laws of Power review, exploring Robert Greene's provocative and compelling book, in which he lays bare the history, practice, psychology, and philosophies of power that ultimately shape all human relations. Often seen as a handbook for the 'modern Machiavelli', we take a closer look, beyond the hyperbole, and discuss how understanding and implementing these Laws can actually enrich your life personally, professionally and spiritually.

Jon and Dre aim to get to the heart of each of the Laws, grapple with their sometimes disturbingly amoral nature, and discuss what the Laws mean in everyday life (often revealing their own experiences – good and bad – when they've either observed or transgressed them).

Never got enough time? Always feel like you're spinning a dozen plates without a moment for yourself? Worried you're unable to remember anything without needing to Google it? You're right. The world is getting faster, faster. But is that necessarily a bad thing?

Robert Colvile, author of The Great Acceleration, joins us as we try to get to grips with what this apparently endless speeding-up of life means for our mental health, relationships, careers, and even our ability to just sit down and read a good book all the way through. Robert's worked on the front lines of The Great Acceleration: in just a handful of years, journalism has shifted from 'winning the day' to 'winning the hour' as editors frantically compete to get their version of events out first, often at the cost of accuracy or the space for deeper reflection. As politics turns into a battle of soundbites, dating into a game of swiping and discarding, and adolescence into a full-time job of social media curation, is there still space for genuine human connection and honesty? Or even to feel that we have more than a finger-tip control over our lives?

Despite the undeniable stresses and personal costs of The Great Acceleration, this isn't a straightforwardly negative story culminating in an inevitable crash and burn. Robert is refreshingly optimistic, and not without cause. He's spent years talking with experts at tech giants (even sitting in on board meetings at Google), leading politicians, psychologists and more to get to the facts and figures which paint a surprisingly – at times dramatically – different picture.

• How we can (and if we should) step off the treadmill
• The mental health costs of The Great Acceleration
• The truth about dating apps and our ability to connect with other people
• Does speed breed creativity or conformity?
• Whether Universal Basic Income can ever really work
• What Brexit means for Britain and the EU's ability to develop and adapt in future

• Robert's website
• On Twitter
• And on CapX

• Ryan Holiday's book on media manipulation, Trust Me, I'm Lying
• Nick Bostrom's book, Superintelligence
• Carl Honoré's rather different view, In Praise of Slow

Words are wind, but images and symbols are unforgettable. Create a spectacle, tell a story, or imbue yourself with the resonant power of a symbol and you're well on your way to capturing the hearts and minds of your audience.

Kings, charlatans, mistresses and maniacs – Law 37 unpacks the magical thinking which forms an intrinsic part of how humans operate across the spectrum of society. Even if we can turn down the volume of these superstitious thought patterns, we can never escape their influence completely. Symbols are at the very heart of communication – they're the shortcuts our brains take to understand an extremely complex world, and in this episode we dissect how they work and how we can make them work for us.

Dre unleashes his theory of mind and consciousness; we reflect on how shittily society treats women as they grow older; and we set about redesigning the American classroom pledge of allegiance. How does mind control play into such rituals? And what can psychedelics reveal to us about the unconscious connections we make between experiences, ideas, and images?

We also talk about how we choose what we wear in order to say something about ourselves (even if only to ourselves); Jon reflects on his attempts to buy into symbol structures to find a sense of belonging; and then we casually redesign the nature of government. Oh, and we also each choose our personal symbol and contemplate the infinite allure of booty. Join us!

• The secrets of Trump's success
• The power of emojis and why they improve communication
• How faith-healing does and doesn't work
• How to keep a relationship alive well into old age
• The power of logos... or at least the power that we give them
• Why you should declare yourself to be whatever the hell you want to be
• Why having a sense of control over life can rapidly become a matter of life and death
• Writing or speaking as ways of playing the instrument of other people's minds
• Voting on the basis of value and intellectual kinship
• Is there a tyranny of experts in the modern world?
• Do you have a movement without a symbol?
• The disturbing reality of bodybuilding

• Jon's Ayahuasca experiences, which you can read about here
• Picasso's famous painting, Guernica
• Joe Dispenza's book, You Are The Placebo
• Andrew Weil's book, The Marriage of the Sun and Moon
• Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens
• The Stone of Destiny
• The hilarious and deeply insightful psychology book, Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
• The TV show Dre was in: The Audience
• CM Punk's logo

Challenge: Create your own symbol! How do you want to represent yourself to the world? Let us know what you choose (especially if it's rude).

Join us as we continue our 48 Laws of Power review, exploring Robert Greene's provocative and compelling book, in which he lays bare the history, practice, psychology, and philosophies of power that ultimately shape all human relations. Often seen as a handbook for the 'modern Machiavelli', we take a closer look, beyond the hyperbole, and discuss how understanding and implementing these Laws can actually enrich your life personally, professionally and spiritually.

Jon and Dre aim to get to the heart of each of the Laws, grapple with their sometimes disturbingly amoral nature, and discuss what the Laws mean in everyday life (often revealing their own experiences – good and bad – when they've either observed or transgressed them).