Robert Greene - Optimizing Your Reality

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:07)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of PositiveSum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:36)
My guest today is Robert Greene, author of many books, but perhaps most famous for his books, The 48 Laws of Power and Mastery. He has spent his life studying why people behave like they do and why some build great things.
I love his idea of finding your life's purpose, which we explore in detail. Please enjoy my conversation with Robert Greene.
So Robert, in preparation for our conversation today, I went back and reviewed all your books and the notes I had made in them over the many years and was trying to identify a common question that might have been behind all of them. And the only thing I could come up with was something about man and his dominion over his surroundings and his influence over his surroundings, both the earth and other people and other species. And I'm curious what your thought on this question is. Is there a common thread that you've been pulling?

**Robert Greene** (3:28)
I think so. I would call it the common thread is reality. So I think most of us are divorced from reality. We live in a social realm and we wear masks and we pretend to be something that we're not. We're constantly performing to others and playing games. And my books are trying to take a look a little bit behind that mask as far as possible and see what's really going on in the human psyche and our souls and decipher that.
So even mastery, which is the least Machiavellian of my books, if you will, I'm looking at the brain and trying to get behind what creates excellence in the world and even the social aspect of that, as opposed to the superficial ideas and the belief in you're just born a certain way, you're just talented or you can hack your way to being a genius, which is just bullshit.
So I'm trying to get at the reality as opposed to the received ideas that are so prevalent in our culture.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (4:24)
And if you had to rewind your own personal history to the very first seed of that interest in reality, the raw curiosity, is there some point that that brings you back to?