Before the books

Robert Greene's first book came out in 1998. He was born in 1959, so he was 38 or 39 when The 48 Laws of Power reached the shops. Everything he knows about writing a book, he says, he learned before he ever wrote one, in a run of jobs he hated and projects that failed.

This chapter covers those years. It's built almost entirely from what Greene has said in interviews, because that's nearly all there is. He has told the same stories many times, to many hosts, over twelve years of tape, and the details drift. I've kept the drift visible. Where two interviews disagree, I give both and, when I can, the reason.

There's a reason to spend 8,000 words on a period when he didn't write a book. Greene himself treats it as the first stage of his method. Talking to Chris Williamson in 2024, he put it plainly: "I had spent 18 years or so acquiring high levels of skill in writing." Journalism taught him deadlines and openings. Failed novels taught him stories. Hollywood taught him research. The theatre taught him drama. If we want to know what an AI pipeline would have to reproduce (the question of chapter 11), this is where the inputs come from.

A rough timeline#

Greene almost never gives dates. He gives ages, and the ages move. This table is my reconstruction from the interviews plus his birth year from Wikipedia. Treat every row as approximate.

Two rows in that table clash. If he worked in Paris at 21, that's around 1980, but most of his tellings put the Europe years after New York. Either the Paris job came during or straight after college, before New York, or the age is off. He never sorts it out, and nobody has asked him to.

Los Angeles, and words#

Greene grew up in Los Angeles, in what is now Brentwood. Wikipedia adds Baldwin Hills and says he graduated from Palisades Charter High School. He didn't like it there. He told Ryan Holiday in November 2026 that it was a boring neighborhood, that he felt alienated, and that he was sent to Hebrew school to learn a language that had nothing to do with his life. Then he found books:

I discovered books and the books just took me into these other worlds [...] I'm 8 years old, you know, and I started ordering like hundreds of these tiny little paperback books that you could get for like a nickel, right? It drove my parents crazy.

He says it saved his life. He means it fairly literally: he connects that early escape to the fact that he's still alive and working.

Before the books, there were words. He has two versions of the first memory. To Andrew Huberman in 2023 he said that at six he was "obsessed with words," that he'd spell them backwards, take them apart, make anagrams, and loved palindromes. To Huberman again in 2026 he placed it in third grade, when a teacher wrote carpenter on the board and asked the class how many words they could make from its letters. "For some reason that just excited me so much," he said. He "knew I had to be a writer because I had that weird connection to words themselves." These can both be true. A six-year-old who already plays with anagrams would light up at the carpenter exercise.

Two other childhood interests show up in his late books. One is history, which he credits to his mother. "My mother is very, very interested in history, she's obsessed with history, and I probably absorbed her interest," he told Huberman. The other is early humans. In the same interview he said that at eight he wrote a short story from the point of view of a vulture watching the first humans appear (21:56). He was halfway through The Law of the Sublime at the time, writing about the Paleolithic, and said he felt like a kid again.

The third interest is the one that became his subject. To Steven Bartlett in 2023 he described himself as a child who was "left alone," an introvert shaped by books, and always fixed on "how people wore masks." He watched his parents and their friends and wondered what was really going on behind the social niceties. That's the first appearance of the angle he would take in all his books: the polite surface, and the animal under it. In the same breath he said he "got heavily into drugs" in high school, "because that was the time."

What he read#

Greene lists his teenage reading in detail in only one of the 22 interviews, and it's revealing. Theo Von asked him in 2024 which books shaped him. He named Machiavelli and Nietzsche first, then spent several minutes on Carlos Castaneda, the UCLA anthropologist whose books about a Mexican curandero called Don Juan were, as Greene put it, "really big in the 60s and 70s". He mentioned that "some people think he made it up." Then:

His book Journey to Ixtlan [...] had a big influence on me [...] I swear to God, that book had so much impact on me that a lot of the things in the 48 Laws of Power actually come from that book.

He said he read it at 16 (1:54:12). He also named Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha and Demian, which he called "quite radical," and Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange: "I like things that were a little subversive and radical and weird."

I haven't found Castaneda in any other interview or in any written source about the 48 Laws. That doesn't make it false. It means the claim is a single source, made 26 years after the book, in a loose conversation.

Nietzsche is better attested. In November 2026 Greene said: "I read him when I was 18 and it changed my life. He's probably the writer that had the biggest influence on me." To David Perell in 2024 he called Nietzsche "my favorite philosopher of all time" and the main influence on his style, because Nietzsche would argue a point from the opposite side. That habit became the "Reversal" sections of his early books (chapter 5).

A teacher#

One more person from his school years matters. In 2024 he told Williamson about a high school English teacher who "changed the course of my life." The teacher was odd, talked about writing and literature in an odd way, and was hated by the other students. Greene thought he was fantastic. To Huberman he went further: the teacher "taught me [...] how to write. I internalized his voice." He then listed his mentors in order: the teacher, a Berkeley professor who became "my surrogate father," and later "a man who was a book packager," Joost Elffers. Greene never names the teacher or the professor.

Berkeley and the six-week Greek course#

Greene went to the University of California, Berkeley, before finishing at Madison. He was there in the 1970s, and by his own account he took a lot of drugs. He told Theo Von they ate peyote at Berkeley "in the 70s" (39:19).

The Berkeley story he tells most often is about ancient Greek. He has told it at least twice in full, both times in 2023, and both times to argue against AI. Here's the Huberman version:

I was 19 years old. I decided one summer [...] I'm going to take this class in ancient Greek. In six weeks they teach you a year of ancient Greek. That means every day you have an exam, every Friday you have a final exam, eight hours every day of a dead language.

He said he chose it as discipline "after someone who had been doing too many drugs." Near the end of the course the class got a paragraph of Thucydides, whom he calls the hardest Greek author to read. He had the whole night. He thought he'd cracked it, turned it in, and the professor, a "hippie" classicist he remembers only as Dennis, told him: "Robert, I can see your thinking, but you need to go to another level."

At the live event with Holiday in Los Angeles the details shift a little. He spent "like 10 hours trying to translate one paragraph," and the professor said he'd "completely mistranslated this beautiful paragraph, but you were getting at something." Greene then drew the moral:

Whenever you face a problem that you don't quite understand [...] you have to think more deeply [...] I use that as a model for all of my work now when I'm writing a chapter.

In both versions the lesson isn't that he got it right. He got it wrong, he was told he was close, and he had to go deeper. That's the loop he describes for every chapter he has written since: a first draft he hates, then rewrite after rewrite until the thing clicks (chapter 6). He uses the same story to explain why he dislikes AI tools. If he'd had a translation or ChatGPT that night, he says, the "muscle in my brain that I have developed for 40 years" would never have formed. Chapter 9 takes up that argument.

The Greek classes left a second mark. To Perell he said that when he studied Greek, "you would have a passage of Thucydides and you yourself would write on the margins," the ideas and translations next to the text. He offers this, along with the Torah commentaries he saw at Hebrew school, as one source for the side columns of quotes and fables in The 48 Laws. A student's annotated Thucydides became a page design.

Madison: classics#

Greene finished his degree at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Wikipedia gives a B.A. in classical studies. He told Danica Patrick in 2022 that his major "was classics, ancient Greek and Latin." To Jordan Peterson he said "classics and literature." He was there "in the late 70s," he told Patrick, when Madison was a party town and a left-wing town. He loved it, cross-country skied to class, and took more or less every drug available.

He also studied French, for "three or four years," and then went to Paris and found he couldn't speak a word. In one month there he learned more than in four years of classes, because he had a girlfriend and needed to talk to her. He uses this as an example of learning when the emotions are engaged, a central idea in Mastery.

What did classics give him? He's measured about it. In 2014 he told NextShark there was "a vague link" between "the discipline that languages and classics taught me" and his later work, and that college otherwise taught him nothing about dealing with people, pressure or money. Two other things come up repeatedly. One is time scale. He says that someone who studied Greek and Latin "thinks in terms of thousands of years," which is why journalism felt wrong (Williamson 2024). The other is a feel for the ancient world that he can't explain. He told Patrick he sometimes writes about Athena "off the top of my head," then checks the research and finds he was right. That's an odd thing for a researcher to say, and it shows how much his method relies on instinct steered by reading, rather than reading alone.

New York: journalism, and a lunch#

After college Greene moved to New York and went into journalism, "because I needed to make a living," he told Theo Von. He was poor and had "a very low-level job." In 2026 he told Perell that he lived on "packs of ramen in a cheap, dingy apartment" in the East Village, and he now tells young writers that this is the time of life to live that way. Wikipedia, citing the author note in a 2000 edition of The 48 Laws, says he was an editor at Esquire. It also cites the 2006 New Yorker profile for a list of jobs including "magazine editor." Greene himself never names a magazine in the 22 interviews.

He gives one concrete assignment. In 2014 he told Joe Rogan that "when I was living in New York years ago as a journalist, they asked me to write an article about isolation tanks," in the early 1980s, when they were becoming a fad. He got hooked for a while.

His complaint about journalism is always the same: it didn't last. To Perell: "I hated the fact that what you wrote lasted for about three days. It was disposable." To Theo Von: "If it doesn't last more than 24 hours, what's the point? It should last like 12 years, 20, 100 years."

The martini lunch#

The story that ended his journalism career exists in two versions, and the differences are instructive.

Rogan, 2014: an editor had lunch with him and said, "Robert, you're never going to be a good writer, you just don't have the chemistry for it, you're all over the place, you're not disciplined, maybe go to law school or something." Greene says it got him out of journalism because it made him realize he hated the people who worked there.

Peterson, 2022: Greene had written an article about Italy that he thought was great. The editor called him in for lunch, "having his second or third martini," and told him he'd never be a writer: "You don't have the discipline for it. You're just too wild [...] you don't communicate to the reader." Then Greene adds an interpretation that's missing in 2014: "In looking back at it, I think he had set me up." He thinks the editor commissioned a piece he knew would have problems, out of envy.

The 2022 version is richer and more Greene-like. It has a drink count, a specific article and a hidden motive. That's what eight years of retelling does to a story, and it's what Greene does to every historical anecdote he writes: find the detail that makes it vivid, then find the power move underneath. I don't think he's inventing. I think the story has been worked on, the way his chapters are. Envy, the motive he now sees in the editor, became a full chapter of The Laws of Human Nature.

Notice also what the editor said: no discipline, no connection to the reader. Those are the two qualities Greene now talks about most. He describes his notecard system as "bordering on OCD" (Rogan 2014), and he says he's always watching for the moment the reader will get bored. Whether or not the editor set him up, Greene built his later practice on answering that lunch.

Nicaragua#

The other journalism story is Nicaragua. To Bartlett in 2025:

I was a young man in 1983. I was on the left for sure, I don't deny it. I went to Nicaragua to report as a journalist on the war going on between the Contras and the Sandinistas.

He was in Managua, half of which was still rubble from the earthquake, when a huge crowd filled a plaza for a visit by the Pope. He describes feeling connected to hundreds of thousands of people, a joy he has "never had in my life again," and then, years later, seeing that crowd feeling as dangerous. To Peterson he tells the same scene but says "it's 1984, I believe."

The papal visit fixes the year. John Paul II said Mass in Managua on 4 March 1983, a visit the Sandinistas turned into a political event. So 1983 is right, and Greene was about 24.

He doesn't say what he wrote there, or for whom. What he took from it was the crowd: the pull of the group, and his later distrust of it. Both show up in his writing on group behavior, and in his warnings, in The 48 Laws and since, about how cults recruit.

Europe, four or five years#

Greene left New York for Europe, and stayed "about four or five years," he told Theo Von. Here's the itinerary in his words:

I worked in a hotel in Paris, I did construction work in Greece because I ran out of money, I taught English in Barcelona, I worked in a crappy television show in London, I led a tour guide thing in Dublin, Ireland, trying to write novels, and I was starving.

To Williamson in 2024 he gave the same list as places lived: London, Paris, Ireland, Greece, and teaching English in Spain, "trying to write a novel. I had no discipline. I couldn't do it."

Paris at 21#

The Paris hotel is the job he calls his best. He told NextShark in 2014 that at 21 he worked in a hotel "where all the models would stay when they came to Paris," and that he met "a lot of really weird characters" who later went into his books, especially The Art of Seduction. Ten years later he told Theo Von about one of them: Eduardo, a tall Brazilian who kept turning up at the hotel and seduced many of the models. "This is [...] where The Art of Seduction came from. I would watch this guy." Greene became friends with him briefly and decided the secret was that Eduardo was never defensive: relaxed, not thinking about himself, fully attentive to the woman.

That's the earliest documented case of a pattern in Greene's work. He sees a person who has an unusual power, gets close enough to watch, and turns the observation into a principle. He would do it again with 50 Cent, whom he followed to meetings for The 50th Law (chapter 7). In 2026 he also said seduction had fascinated him "since my 20s when I was a rake," reading the literature of seduction and meeting "great seducers." When his publishers and Elffers wanted a sequel to 48 Laws, that interest is why he wrote Seduction instead.

London, 1984#

The London job is the one with a date. To Bartlett in 2025: "I lived in London, had a job in London in 1984, I believe [...] my girlfriend at the time, the only thing we could eat was turnips and cauliflower. Cauliflower cheese was our main dish. But I was 25." The wage is garbled in the captions. Born in 1959, he would indeed have been 25 in 1984, so this one lines up. It's presumably the "crappy television show in London" from the Theo Von list, though he never connects the two.

The novels#

All through Europe he was trying to write novels. They didn't work, and he has a clear view of why. To Theo Von:

I don't think I would have been a good novelist because I'm too much into ideas, and my novels were just like these big sticks with a big idea on it that you were supposed to read about. It didn't have life.

That's a precise diagnosis, and it explains the form he later invented. His books are built around ideas, a law or a type or a strategy, but every idea is carried by a story. The novels had the ideas without the life. The 48 Laws format reverses the ratio: the story comes first and does the work, and the idea is pulled out after (chapter 5). He told Williamson that "trying to write novels taught me about creating stories, which is a huge part of my writing." It also taught him that he couldn't sustain an invented world. He has said lately that he's toying with fiction again (Huberman 2026).

He came back to Los Angeles because his father wasn't well. To Perell he said he was "teaching English in Spain at the time."

Counting the jobs#

Every interviewer asks about the jobs. The number has a life of its own. Here is every figure I found, in date order.

So the range is 50 to 80, and Greene has given both ends within a few weeks of each other in 2026. The pattern in the middle is clearer. When he's asked directly and has time to think, he lands around 60 and explains that he and his girlfriend sat down and counted, got into the 50s or 60s, and then "estimated upward" for jobs they couldn't recall. When the figure comes up in passing, he tends to use whatever round number the host used. The 80 seems to have started as his own upper estimate and then come back to him through introductions.

The other number is more stable: he never held a job longer than 11 months. He says it to NextShark in 2014, to Peterson in 2022, at the LA event in 2023, to Perell in 2024, and to Huberman in 2026. The only exceptions are in the November 2026 Williamson interview, where he says he couldn't hold a job "for more than a few months" (56:35) and "for more than 5 months" (1:04:02). Those read as loose talk, not corrections.

Across all the sources, these are the jobs that get named:

• construction work (in Greece)
• a hotel in Paris
• teaching English in Barcelona
• a television show in London
• leading tours in Dublin
• helping write an encyclopedia
• journalism in New York, and reporting from Nicaragua
• translator and magazine editor (Wikipedia, citing The New Yorker); an editor at Esquire (Wikipedia, citing the book's author note)
• skip tracer at a detective agency in Pasadena
• in Hollywood: writer, assistant to a producer, assistant to a director, researcher, story developer
• researcher on a television show
• writer at Fabrica in Italy

That's about 16. The other 35 to 65 are unnamed.

Why so many? Greene gives two answers, and they don't quite fit together. One is temperament. "I was a very restless young man," he told Peterson. "It doesn't speak very well of me." He hated bosses, egos and office politics, and calls himself "a born entrepreneur" who can only work for himself. The other is strategy. To NextShark: "I wanted to be a writer. So I wanted to try all sorts of different things [...] I felt like that's how you become a writer, is you have experiences." To Bartlett in 2023: "A writer needs experiences. I just was hungry for weird experiences."

The second answer is partly hindsight. A man who quits every job within a year has a reason to tell it as research. But the outcome supports him. When The 48 Laws came, "I'd seen everything," he says. The jobs gave him the one input no library could: first-hand scenes of people using power on him.

The skip tracer#

The job he describes most vividly is the worst one. To Theo Von:

I was what's called a skip tracer, and it was one of the worst jobs I ever had, where [...] some guy in Wisconsin jumps bail or owes this company this amount of money. I'm sitting in an office on the telephone trying to find him.

It was a private investigation firm in Pasadena. The firm gave him scripts. "You call his mother up and you pretend to be a high school buddy of his. You do some research." He was good at it. To NextShark in 2014 he told it the same way: the scripts, the relatives in Wisconsin, the pretending to be a friend of the family. "It was so dirty and ugly. And I was really good at it. So I hated that job."

Look at what the job actually involved. You research a stranger, build a false identity that fits their life, read the listener's reactions, and steer them into revealing something they would otherwise protect. That's a short course in the manipulations The 48 Laws describes, run from the manipulator's side, by a man who felt awful doing it. He also had "the worst boss there." Theo Von again: "All of those people went into the 48 Laws of Power. I [...] got my little digs into them because they [...] inspired some of these awful laws that I ended up creating."

The skip-tracing story also explains something about the book's tone. Greene says he wrote 48 Laws from "that schlemiel perspective" (Modern Wisdom 2021), as the outsider who keeps getting played. He's also the man who was good at the phone scripts. The book's voice, which he describes as "disguised anger" and "violence veiled in the words" (Perell 2024), comes from someone who has been on both ends.

Hollywood#

Back in Los Angeles, Greene went into the film business. He thought it was "the golden path," he told Theo Von: money, writing, glamour. To Perell he explained how he got in:

Through my sister, who was like a typist for a film director, I got a job pretty quickly in the business. I was an assistant to a director and to his wife, who was a screenwriter.

He liked them both ("very nice, very wonderful people"). His plan was to write screenplays. But he was also asked to research. The screenwriter wanted to write about coyotes, the smugglers who bring people across the border from Mexico and Central America, and asked Greene to dig into it. "I'd go to UCLA library and, you know, honed some of my researching chops there."

That's the start of the skill that defines his books. He would spend the next decade in Hollywood in various roles. To Rogan in 2014: "I wasn't horribly successful. I was a writer, I was assistant to a producer, assistant to a director, a researcher, a story developer. I [...] did everything." In 2024 he summarized it in four words: "working in Hollywood, I learned how to research."

The screenplays#

His own screenplays went nowhere. Perell again: he wrote comedies and satires, "and they were pretty funny." People would read them and suggest he try writing for the theatre. He agreed, went home, and realized it was a dig: "You don't have a commercial sense [...] Robert, you're being too literary." To Brad Carr in 2018 he described himself as one of "the 10 million other salmon" trying to swim up the screenplay river.

He did learn one rule from screenwriting that he still uses. To Perell: "When you write a screenplay, you can't go into a person's inner mind. You have to describe it all through dialogue and action." His example is a story from The 48 Laws about a condottiere, a Renaissance mercenary captain hired to save a city. He saves it, they call him a saint, then they execute him, because he has become a threat to the duke who hired him. Greene says he cut all the inner monologue and showed only actions, and the lesson lands without being stated (59:57). He says the con-artist stories in that book have the same "filmic quality."

Control#

What he hated in Hollywood was the loss of control. To Olivier Roland:

You write something, and then eight other people get involved, and they give you your notes. By the time it's finished, it doesn't resemble what your idea was. It's just watered down.

"I'm a control freak," he told Williamson. That's not a side note for this report. A book was the first form in which he had complete control, and he has guarded it since: he refused to change the 48 Laws layout (below), and decades later he says he turns down every proposal to adapt the book for television. He puts the number of such approaches at "about 85" (Diary of a CEO 2024), and he says he has worked in film and television and knows how little power a writer has there.

The games#

Hollywood was also where he collected the material. To Rogan he told the story of a producer who wanted to direct his first film but couldn't be seen to grab the job. So he hired a first-time director he knew would fail, then stepped in to rescue the project, wrecking the other man's reputation on the way. "I could list 100 other [...] games like that." To Roland he described working for "a film director" who was "just like Cesare Borgia. People aren't getting stabbed or killed, but [...] he's still being extremely manipulative." He says he watched script meetings where everyone knew a project was bad and still pushed it (Modern Wisdom 2021).

The clearest line from a Hollywood job to a law is about credit. To Bartlett in 2025:

I worked at one point for a film director, and we had this process where we would sit in a room and we would talk about the story [...] I'm not saying half the screenplay, but at least a third or fourth were my ideas, my contribution, my dialogue. I never got a single credit for any of it.

He calls it "the law of the jungle," and it became the law "Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit." To Theo Von he called it "one of the nastier laws" and said "that's what happened to me a lot of times in Hollywood." In 2021 he put a number on it: it "happened to me 90 times in Hollywood." Ninety is not a count. It's how a man sounds 25 years later when the grievance is still warm.

He also says he wrote that law as a warning. "I wrote it in such a way that you wouldn't feel like [...] 'this is what other people are doing to me, I better be aware of it,'" he told Williamson in 2021. The skip tracer and the credit thief run through the whole book: Greene as the victim who learns the method so it can't be used on him again.

The television researcher and Law 1#

The job that produced Law 1 was in television. To Danica Patrick in 2022:

I was a researcher on a television show. I'm not going to tell you the name of that show because it's a little bit embarrassing [...] Your job was to find stories that would end up being produced for this program, and I was by far the best researcher there. I was getting like 90% of the stories, even though there was a team of like six or seven researchers.

Then he was fired. He had been clashing with his supervisor, who thought he "had a bit of an attitude." Greene concedes he was "a little bit cocky." Looking back, he decided the real reason was that he had made her insecure. "I had outshone the master," he said (6:17), and "nobody tells you, when you're fired for that, that you inadvertently tripped up this person's ego." It took him time to work out, and it was painful.

That became "Never outshine the master," the first law of the book. He told Patrick he put it first because so many people, including musicians, rappers and athletes, have told him the same story about their own careers. To Peterson he generalized: "A lot of the things that I write about in the 48 Laws of Power, such as Never Outshine the Master, are things that I did poorly, I did wrong, and I suffered for them." At Google in 2018 he said, "I had violated law number one, never outshine the master, and I had been fired for that." He told Patrick it happened "maybe about three times."

The detail I find most useful is the job description. Greene's work on that show was to find stories that could be produced. That's what he does now: he reads hundreds of books looking for the few stories with enough drama to open a chapter (chapter 5). He was doing it for a paycheck in the early 1990s, and he says he was the best on his team at it. "Research is something I've done for many, many years that I'm good at," he told Perell. "I'm good at finding things and recognizing a story."

The job he quit#

There's a second television story, and I can't tell whether it's the same job. In November 2026 Greene told Williamson that "years ago in the '90s" he "finally had a job in television in Hollywood." It looked like stability. He couldn't stand it: "the most miserable period of my life." He wanted to quit. His mother tried to get his girlfriend to talk him out of it. He quit anyway, against the voices saying, as he put it (1:05:04), "You're 35 years old. Time to settle down, Robert. Time to get into a job [...] become a television writer." His reply, then and now: "I'll make a good income, but I'll kill myself in 10 years."

If he was 35, that's about 1994. In one story he was fired from a television job. In the other he quit one. It could be two jobs. With a count somewhere between 50 and 80, that's not unlikely.

The plays#

The last turn before Italy was the theatre. It appears in only one interview in detail. To Theo Von, Greene said that nothing was going right and he was getting desperate. His girlfriend told him to stop trying to have it both ways, with his creative work on one side and a living on the other:

So she said, "I always wanted to write plays and theater and stuff," so she said, "Go ahead and do that." And that was a turning point, where I'm going to stop trying to just be this person that other people wanted me to be.

The caption doesn't make clear whose wish it was to write plays, hers or his, reported in his own voice. The second "she said" suggests the wish was his and the push was hers. Either way, they wrote plays and put them on in Los Angeles. "I acted in them, she directed them, we did all the work ourselves. Very strange plays," he said (1:01:18). "Right after that I met this man in Italy."

Greene doesn't name the girlfriend in any interview I read. He lives with the filmmaker Anna Biller, his partner since the 1990s according to Wikipedia, whom he now calls his wife. In the same conversation he says of a table this girlfriend built, "we still have the table." That makes it very likely the theatre partner was Biller, but it's my inference, not his statement.

The theatre is the fourth item in his list of skills. To Williamson in 2024: "then the theatrical element, making things dramatic, also story." The plays didn't earn money. What they gave him, by his own account, was permission: the decision to follow what excited him whether or not it paid. Theo Von pointed out that this is the turn Mastery calls finding your life's task, and Greene agreed.

The low point#

All of this ends in the worst stretch of his life. He's consistent on the feeling and loose on the age.

• Roland, 2020: "I was very depressed in my mid-30s [...] I've been writing my whole life, but never had any success." Then: "Even my parents were beginning to get worried about me. And I'm 36 years old."
• Bartlett, 2023: "By the time you're 37, 38, my parents are starting to worry about me, I'm starting to worry about me, I'm getting a little bit depressed, even have moments [where] suicidal thoughts are floating in my brain."
• Bartlett, 2025: "Finally I'm 35, 36 years old. I was in Italy at the lowest point of my life."
• Theo Von, 2024: a "loser in your one-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica."
• Perell, 2024: "I know what it means to feel bad about yourself, to even feel depressed and suicidal."

Bartlett 2025 has the starkest version. Greene says he once asked his wife what would have happened if the book hadn't come through, and whether he would have killed himself. He doesn't answer the question. He imagines a hack job, weight, drink, an early heart attack, "or maybe I would have found my way to something else." The title Olivier Roland gave his interview, "How suicide led him to become an author," is the channel's framing, not a claim Greene makes in it.

The ages here range from 35 to 38. The Italy meeting happened in 1995, when he was 35 or 36. The "37, 38" in 2023 seems to fold the low point and the writing years into one period. Either way, the pattern is the same: the bottom came right before the break.

Italy, Fabrica and Joost Elffers#

In 1995 Greene was in Italy for work. Wikipedia, citing a 2011 Los Angeles Times profile, says he "worked as a writer at Fabrica, an art and media school," Benetton's art and media school, and met the book packager Joost Elffers there. Greene himself never says "Fabrica" in the interviews. He says "I'm in Italy for a job, one of my 80 different jobs, and I meet a man who's a book packager there on this particular job we're on" (Bartlett 2023).

Elffers is Dutch. He produces illustrated books: Elffers' own site lists The 48 Laws, and Penguin Random House's author page credits him with titles such as The Secret Language of Birthdays and Play with Your Food. A book packager develops a book, often designs it, and sells the finished concept to a publisher. That matters for what follows: Elffers wasn't a publisher taking a chance on an unknown writer. He was a producer who could pay for a book's development and own part of it.

The acknowledgments of The 48 Laws reportedly thank Michiel Schwarz for the introduction and say that "from our discussions in Venice, Italy, this book was born." I saw that only in a search result, not the book, so take it as a lead.

The walk in Venice#

Greene's account of the meeting doesn't change much from telling to telling. Elffers asked whether he had any ideas for a book, and he improvised one. To Jeff Goins in 2013: "I met this man who is a book packager. And he asked me if I had any ideas for books. And I ended up [...] improvising that day." To Theo Von, with more scene:

In Venice, we were walking, it was a beautiful day, I was in a good mood, and I pitched this book idea, and I pitched other ideas which he didn't like, but he liked that idea. Anyway, that's a slender, slender thread that the whole thing hangs upon.

The other ideas, he said when Theo Von pressed him (1:13:58), were two. One was about "how weird, how different people were in the court of Louis XIV," their psychology. The other came from a theoretical book he'd read called The Philosophy of Nonsense, about how nonsense, words that seem to mean something and don't, can be revolutionary. He wanted to make a popular book of that. "That idea didn't fly."

The court of Louis XIV did fly, in a way: it runs all through The 48 Laws, and Greene told Peterson the whole book grew from the idea of a court where courtiers had to be indirect and polite and get rid of enemies quietly (8:24). The pitch that worked was the one that generalized it. To Bartlett in 2023:

Here we are in the late 20th century, and people don't dress like they did in the days of Machiavelli. They don't wear wigs and stuff, but it's the same damn thing, it's the same bloody battles going on, the same manipulations.

Louis XIV, the Borgias and modern CEOs: "a timeless game of power." He says that as he was talking, Elffers' eyes were lighting up. To Roland he called it "almost like a voice inside of me that I didn't even know suddenly pitched this idea." The material behind it was the two stocks he'd been building for 20 years: the bosses ("all of these really bad bosses, really mean, manipulative people") and the reading ("I read things like the things about the Borgias. I was obsessed with Machiavelli").

Wikipedia, citing a Forbes interview, adds a written seed: Greene had reread a biography of Julius Caesar, and Caesar's decision to cross the Rubicon inspired the treatment. He still uses the Rubicon as his model for bringing a historical figure to life (LA live 2023).

Note what happened. A 36-year-old without a published book pitched three ideas in an afternoon, two of them very hard to sell, and one landed because it matched the packager's sense of a product. The improvisation was real, but it rested on 20 years of reading and resentment. It's also the only time in the record that Greene pitched a book before researching it. Every later book started with the reading (chapter 7).

The treatment and the money#

What Elffers offered is the part that's easiest to miss. Greene was broke. Elffers would pay him to live while he wrote.

The terms vary a little:

• Bartlett 2023: "Look, Robert, I'll pay you to live while you write half the book, and then we'll sell it."
• Bartlett 2025: "I'll pay you to live while you write it."
• Roland 2020: "Robert, I will pay you to write this book [...] when you go home to Los Angeles."
• Williamson 2024: Elffers "subsidized me while I wrote the 48 Laws of Power. He produced it, he designed it, together we designed it."

And from the written record:

• Los Angeles Times 2011, via Wikipedia: Greene pitched a book about power, and "six months later, Elffers requested that Greene write a treatment."
• The Decision Lab: Elffers "offered to take care of Greene for six months while he completed a treatment."

These fit together if you read them as stages. The pitch in Venice. A gap, perhaps six months. Greene goes home to Los Angeles, borrows money from his parents ("because I was that poor," 2023), and writes a treatment. Elffers loves it. Then Elffers funds him to write about half the book, and they sell it on that. To Chris Williamson in 2021, Greene gave the one clean pair of dates: "I was 36 when I pitched it to the man who packaged it, Joost Elffers, then we sold it like a year and a half later, so it's probably 37."

That clears up most of the age spread. Thirty-five or 36 is the meeting. Thirty-seven is the sale. Thirty-eight or 39 is the writing and publication. "I wrote it when I was 38, 39," he told Peterson. "I wrote the 48 Laws of Power when I was 39 essentially," he told Williamson in 2026. "I didn't write 48 Laws until I was [...] almost 40 when it was published," he told Perell. When he says "I was 38" for when he "found his niche," he means the moment the work became real. None of these is wrong, they're just different moments.

Greene called this, in his words, his "get rich or die trying moment," borrowing 50 Cent's title for a time before 50 Cent had used it. Looking back, he describes that period with Sun Tzu's "death ground," the idea that an army with its back to the sea fights ten times harder. He wrote that idea up later in The 33 Strategies of War, and he still invokes it at the start of every book (chapter 6).

The sale#

Once the treatment and half the book existed, it wasn't hard to sell. Greene told Roland: "We had people offering, giving us money. We had publishers who wanted it." It went to Viking, then part of Penguin. The 48 Laws of Power came out in 1998, in hardcover, at 452 pages, according to the infobox on Wikipedia (whose lead paragraph says 1999, contradicting its own infobox). Greene's own date is 1998: "my whining-complaint card was taken away from me in 1998 when I published that book" (Bartlett 2023). A New York Times business bestseller list from 8 November 1998 is the first citation on his Wikipedia page.

The fight over the format#

After the sale, the publisher tried to change the book. Greene tells this as the moment he risked everything. To Roland:

We sold it to Penguin, but then the editor came back to me. She said, "Robert, we love the book, but we want you to change it a little bit. It's a little too strange for us. We want you to get rid of these sections that you have."

He told her that if she insisted, "we're walking away. We're tearing up the deal. We'll go somewhere else." To Williamson in 2024 he described the book as it stood: "things on the margins, stories, everything broken up, images, quotes here and there. It's [...] how my brain is, a hodge-podge." The publishers asked him to make it "more like other books" and he said, "No, take it or leave it" (50:58). He credits that refusal with the book's success: "because it was odd, it stood out."

He didn't stand alone. "My partner, he backed me up on it," he told Roland (18:45). Elffers was a co-owner of the concept and a designer. Greene says of a later leather-bound special edition that "my partner on the first three books [...] did it. He's a brilliant designer" (Williamson 2024). Who designed which part of the original layout, sidebars, quotes, red ink, isn't documented anywhere I could find. Greene says "together we designed it."

The 1990s Hollywood lesson is visible here. The one time a large organization tried to rewrite his work, he had a partner with leverage and a deal he could walk away from. The layout survived for three books. After that, he says, deadlines and printing costs won (chapter 5 covers the page design).

Two years, a laptop and a cat-proof table#

Greene wrote The 48 Laws of Power in about two years. "In the course of a couple of years it just came out of me," he told Roland. To Theo Von: "It took two years to write. Now it takes me five years to write a damn book [...] I don't know how I did it." To Perell: "I was in my late 30s [...] I wrote that book so fast, I can't even believe it."

The research was done in libraries. To Perell he described going to the section on power, or on con artists, "like 200 books. I'm like in Disneyland." The key find was an out-of-print book, The Power of the Charlatan, written in the 1930s by a German watching Nazism rise and writing about 17th-century charlatans (5:17). The volume of material, read "in a very condensed period of time," was what made him formalize his notecard system (6:20). He says he'd used cards since childhood, and his mother once showed him a drawer full of them. But the 48 Laws project is when cards became the method. Chapter 3 covers the reading and chapter 4 the cards.

He wrote on a laptop. The one domestic detail he gives comes, again, from Theo Von, who asked whether he changed his habits to write it:

I had good work habits, and I had learned how to research. But one thing my girlfriend did was, I had this cat who would never leave me alone [...] She created this table, this very thin table that would fit right in here on the chair. I could put my laptop on, he couldn't get on it.

"That allowed me to write the book," he said. She painted it with backgammon markings. "We still have the table" (1:07:36).

It's a small story, but notice the sentence before it. Greene's own summary of what he brought to the book, at the moment it mattered, is: good work habits and knowing how to research. Not talent, not a theory of power. Those two things came from the jobs.

What happened next#

The book sold slowly, by word of mouth. Greene went on Bill O'Reilly's show soon after publication and says he was torn apart (Rogan 2014). In early 1999 he was invited to Italy, "the land of Machiavelli," where paparazzi followed him (Theo Von). A couple of years later Jay-Z quoted the book in a Playboy interview, the first time Greene saw it quoted in print. Then came the rest of the hip-hop world, 50 Cent, and people asking him for advice. Chapter 7 takes the story from there.

What the years gave him#

Greene's own summary, given to Williamson in 2024, names four sources of skill. Pulling in everything else from the interviews, the map looks like this.

Some of this is retrospective tidying. Greene has a theory, set out in Mastery, that a person's scattered early experiences are an apprenticeship whose shape only shows later, and he naturally reads his own life through it. The jobs he names are the ones that fit. Still, several links don't depend on his theory. The television job was literally story-finding for production. The Hollywood research literally happened at the UCLA library. The credit story and the Law 1 story are specific, repeated across interviews years apart, and tied to named laws.

What this means for the machine#

This report's second question is whether AI agents could reproduce Greene's process at scale. This chapter is a reminder that the process started long before the notecards.

Some of what Greene brought to The 48 Laws can be handed to a model in some form. A research habit can be written as a procedure. A template (story, then moral, then interpretation) can be written as a schema. A voice can be approximated, and linted (chapter 11 builds a Vale style from his rules).

Other inputs are harder to hand over. The Eduardo observation, the skip-tracing scripts and the director who stole his dialogue are first-hand material that doesn't exist in any book a pipeline could read. They aren't the anecdotes in The 48 Laws, which are historical. They're the reason Greene recognized those historical anecdotes as true when he found them. He read about Cesare Borgia and saw his boss. A model that has read every biography of the Borgias has never had a boss.

The other input is the anger. Greene says repeatedly that he can only write with a certain anger, controlled and turned into structure (Peterson 2022). He traces it to these years: the bosses, the credit, the fake warmth of Hollywood, the editor at lunch. Chapter 9 asks what that means for anyone trying to shortcut the work. Here it's enough to note that the first book took about two years to write, but it rested on about 18 years of inputs that were never written down.

Sources#