There are some books that stick out in my mind that have had a very, very big impact on me. And so I'd like to answer that question by not the 3 greatest books ever, but the 3 books that have had the most impact on my life. I read, like, thousands, over the years, thousands of books for research. And so it's kind of like people love it ask you, who's your favorite child if you have a lot of children? And you'll inevitably say it's like the last one, etcetera. So it'd be like the last books I read are my favorites. But there are some that stick out in my mind that have had a very, very big impact on me. So I can remember when I was very young, I must have been 15 or so, I got a copy of Machiavelli's The Prince. Now I can assure you that I hardly understood a word of it.

I had never worked anywhere. I had no knowledge of power. I had never been in, like, a court like environment. I'd never been around anybody to be like a prince or anything, but I loved that book. I thought it was fantastic. It had no relevance to my life in high school, obviously, but what did I love about it? I loved the brutal realism of it. I love the fact that he was looking at human beings as if we are these animals that we are, and he was analyzing it without all the usual guilt, all the usual moralism that's going on in the world. He was just presenting us as we are.

I didn't really understand experientially what he was talking about, but the style of it, the clarity, the pragmatism, the beautiful language, entranced me. And so I probably read that book 6 or 7 times over the years in different formats. But that paperback, that really strange little spindly little tiny little paperback that I had when I was 15, Boy, that had a huge impact on me, and you can see obviously the influence on my books. The second book, I studied ancient Greek in college, and you'll think, that has to be the most irrelevant subject anyone could ever study in university, and you're probably right. But it taught me some great things. It's the ultimate mental discipline. And I remember when I was in my 2nd year, I believe, we were given Thucydides, we call it Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War. It took me 3 days to read one paragraph in ancient Greek.

The language was so difficult, so weird, I had to think about each word, sentence, etc. And I thought, I came out of that, I go, the style of this is so insane, it's so intricate, it's so brilliant, it's so it's so convoluted, yet logical in its own way. And I became an incredible fan of Thucydides. And obviously, I read it later on in English, the whole book, and it's the most beautiful thing you can ever read, because here you're reading about our history as humans some 25 100 years ago in ancient Greece, and you've got this narrator who's so modern, who's someone who could be somebody who's not sitting right next to you, who has this very clear perspective. And he's describing these events so far in the past, they're so dramatic, and they're so exciting, and he's analyzing it brilliantly. I wish we had a handful of writers to this day who could be like that, who could have that clarity, who could have that kind of logic, who could have that kind of analytical ability. But it existed 2,500 years ago, and this great historian, Thucydides, who wrote one book that I know of the history of the Peloponnesian War, but it's the most marvelous adventure you could ever go on. It's a fantastic book, had a huge influence on me, almost as powerful as the Machiavelli.

The third book is a very weird one. It's not something that most people know about or that I've ever really discussed, but it had a very large impact on me. And it's it's a series of books written in the sixties by a writer named Carlos Castaneda. He was talking about the teachings of Don Juan, which is the title of one of his book, and he had a book called The Journey to Ixalan. And if you ever pick up a copy of The Journey to Ixalan, I think it's in the early seventies that it came out, 1970, 71. You will understand where Robert Greene got a lot of The 48 Laws of Power, and The 33 Strategies of War. These are amazing books. They, you know, sometimes I wonder if they date so well because they come from the drug period.

And basically what it's about is the author is an anthropology student at UCLA named Carlos Castaneda, and he goes to study indigenous Indian practices. He comes upon this Yaqui Indian named Don Juan, who kind of initiates him in all of the ways of his indigenous culture. It includes eventually just a peyote, and learning to become a crow, and all these weird things that you think, wow that's that's too weird. But a lot of it is this stuff that's all about power. It's all about controlling yourself. It's all about confronting your mortality. It's all about becoming this great warrior in life. And, you know, if I read it now, I still love it.

It's not the same as when I read it when I was 16, and I was getting excited by all that stuff, but it's still very impactful. It's still a wonderful book, and I'm actually using a little bit in the law of sublime. So those are the 3 books that I think have had the largest impact on me. Of course, I'm leaving out Friedrich Nietzsche, who had probably the greatest impact on me of all, but there's not one book I can single out. There's, like, 8 books. And then, of course, there's my favorite novelist, Dostoevsky, who had a huge impact on me. I can't pick out one novel. I have 2, 3, or 4.

So that's my convoluted, long winded way of answering that question.