"No One Respects You Because You Don’t Know THIS" - Master Power & STOP Losing | Robert Greene

Robert Greene, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me, Tom. My pleasure. I am super excited. I love your work beyond all reason and measure. I have loved everything of yours that I've ever read. Um what I like about the approach that you take is you and I are obsessed with a very similar idea, which I think is critically important for people to understand, which is deal with the world the way that it actually is and not the way that you wish it were. And I think there are few people that are able to look unflinchingly at both sides of the human experience, the sublime, which you're getting into in your new book, which you certainly touch on in this one, uh and then the dark side, the you know, the power struggles and all of that. Um help us understand what the world is really like. What What do you think is that key thing that people misunderstand? Well, the key thing is it goes back to our nature and how we evolved as as conscious animals. The key thing is there's an animal part of our nature, which is we completely take appearances for reality. That's sort of the source of our problems and our misery, to be honest with it in life. So, the front that people present, the way they look, the way they talk, twist their words, we sort of take it face value. And although we might think or we might know from reading a book or whatever that you can't always trust appearances, it's kind of a cliché, we can't control ourselves. So, it makes us extremely vulnerable to charming people, to charlatans, to con artists, to politicians who say one thing, who do another, to relationships, terrible relationships where we fall in love with exactly the wrong person, to the worst kind of hires. You know, I do a lot of consulting work. I've been doing it for over 20 years now. The number one problem I deal with is I hired the worst person in the world and they're making my life hell, right? And why did you hire the wrong person? Cuz you judged them on their charming smiles, their appearance, their their smooth talk, their resume, which you can conceal a lot with your resume. You didn't look behind the facade and look at what's underneath the character. So, this is kind of ingrained in our nature. It goes back thousands and thousands of years. It's extremely difficult to overcome, right? And I have the problem, too. I deal with it all the time. And and I have to go through a process where I I step back and I say, "I don't want to be paranoid, but this person is so nice and pleasant. Is there something else going on behind behind the curtain that that's there?" You know, and then sometimes I tell myself, "No, I have ways of judging that there that there cons- there's a consistency between the face and the reality." But oftentimes there is not and I've become very good at that kind of [ __ ] detect- detection, which I've been doing my whole life. How do you get good at that? Well, you know, some things are hard to put into words, which is why I struggle so diff- much with my books. Um because a lot of human communication, I estimate it 95%. It's just a number, is nonverbal, right? So, we don't pay much attention to that because we're so word oriented, right? We're so embedded in language that we think everything in terms of what people say. But unconsciously, without even realizing it, we're continually judging people on their nonverbal behavior, right? So, there's their eyes, their smile, which are are different from what they actually say, but we're not really So, in a kind of a pre- a natural intuitive way, we understand that what we don't trust those kind of judgements, right? So we we rely more on what they say than on what the signals that we pick up from their body language. So years and years of training and being sensitive to it is probably something that has to go back to my childhood if you put me on a couch and psychoanalyze me right here. There was probably something in my childhood where I had to learn how to really read people not by what they said by but everything about them. And I have I have kind of a feel an intuitive feel for the energy, the vibrations, the mood that people give off not through what they say but through their body through particularly their tone of voice and all the other signals. That is a number that is the main way of judging, you know, what's going what's really going on. The other thing you look at are people's patterns of behavior. Right? Things that have happened in the past as I said in in Laws of Human Nature, nobody ever does one something just once, right? If somebody [ __ ] up and does something kind of hurts you in some way and they say, "Oh, I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me. That that's not me." Don't trust that. It'll happen again. For sure it will happen again a second, a third, a fourth time. What do you think is going on there? Cuz when you were going through the list of things, being in a bad relationship was the one that really jumped out of you know, you hear people ending in these just like horrendous cycles of being stuck in this abusive relationship and the person manages to reel them back in. What is going on on the side of the person who convinces themselves to go back into that relationship? Is there the need to be loved? Is there a wound or something that you're that they're trying to deal with? And how do you advise people that are stuck in a loop like that? Well, it's probably from some kind of primal wound. Right? So there's a perverse part of human nature which is often times in early childhood, something happened to us. Often something that didn't happen to us, like the love we didn't get or the feel the the nurturing that we didn't get. This is kind of wound, this emptiness, this lack, right? And we grow up and we're not really aware of it and kind of things grow over this wound. But what also happens, which is the perverse side of human nature, is that early on our kind of sexual excitement is sort of kind of grows up around that wound. Why? That is so weird and yet seems so self-evidently true. But why? Well, I I'd have to be like I'd have to go into something, you know, hit my go inside my own psychoanalytic you know, mindset here, but um you know, when you're when you're very young, you're extremely vulnerable. You're extremely open to the energies of other people in ways we don't understand right now, right? It's It's It's hard to imagine something what I'm writing about right now in my new book. When you're 2 years old, 1 year old, before you even had really mastered language, you're so dependent on other people, you're so open to them that their energy gets infused. It's completely internalized. And also children at at that age also have their their sort of sexual nature is being created at that moment at a very very early age, certain desires. You know, for us sex is not just a physical thing, it's an emotional thing. Right? We have psychological. So, things that we didn't get are charged with all of this kind of energy that then could later on turn into sort of desires. So, let's say for instance, you had a mother um who was very narcissistic, who really wasn't giving you the normal mother, nurturing, empathetic energy. It was more about her and you had to pay attention to her, right? Well, that kind of creates the sort of desire. This You're You're as an infant, you really want that love from that mother. You're trying to drag, you're trying to attract, pull it out of her as best you can. And your energy, your desire is is surrounding her with this kind of emotional charge, sexual energy. And you're going to find throughout your life you're going to be attracted to narcissistic women. It's going to be your your Achilles' heel throughout your life. Cuz you want to kind of re- heal that wound. You want to be able to play back that initial trauma and sort of rewrite the way it ended up. Where now you're going to find this narcissistic woman and she's going to give you finally what you never had before. Right? It's a very, very common pattern. Right? And so you're not even aware of this. And it's extremely difficult to break out of because your desire is for this type of person. So you might meet a woman, just doing it from a man's point of view, who isn't narcissistic, who's very empathetic and very caring. And she would be perfect for you and you may even have a relationship with her. But the excitement, the energy, that charge isn't going to be as strong as with that other type and you're going to fall back into the old patterns again and again and again. And the only way out of it is to go back and look at your early childhood and look at these wounds and confront them face-to-face and understand that you're a prisoner of this kind of of these kind of things that were ingrained in you at a very, very early age. And what does that process look like? Like how do you confront something like that well? How do you even develop the awareness of the problem? Well, you have to look at what's going on in the present right now. You have to be First of all, it depends on how old you are and how many relationships you have, but you have to see your own patterns. And if you have unhealthy patterns where you have that fallen again and again and again for the wrong person, you have to see a sort of a through line there. What ties it all together? What's going on, right? So, um you know, a common scenario that I wrote about in human nature is in this particular scenario where your mother is giving you the attention that you think you want, right? You have this feeling when you're a child, 3 or 4 years old, that that mother is abandoning you. That's almost your fault in that case, right? Because you don't want to believe that a parent could be wrong or flawed because it's too painful a thought. So, you want to think that you are flawed and she has abandoned you for some reason. It's very painful. So, what you're going to do throughout your life is you're always going to be the one cutting off a relationship before it gets too intense, so that you don't ever have to go through that abandonment feeling again, right? That's your pattern, right? So, after 6 months, the relationship is kind of, you know, growing, you'll find some excuse, she's not right for me, she's saying the wrong things, she's da da da da da, you'll break off the relationship blaming her when in fact you're afraid, deeply afraid that she's going to abandon you and you can't stand that. So, you've got to see these patterns and they're very painful and they're very difficult because they're touching upon things that go to the heart of who we are. You know, it's not just in your relationships, you're going to probably be doing that with your jobs as well. You're going to be quitting jobs before they, you know, before you get to the point where you have too much responsibility. They're very, very deeply ingrained in you. And you have to be able to look at them. So, awareness is everything. The ability to look at yourself realistically and understand you saying see things as they are see the world as it is. It begins with yourself seeing yourself as you are, right? And seeing that your adult self that's so confident and and has this you know this way about the world is covering over some wounds some vulnerabilities from your deep childhood. Not everybody but for a lot of people that's the case. You have to be willing to to rip away the skin and look underneath and see that wound and touch upon it. And then kind of analyze it. And sort of see the patterns in your life before you can begin to One thing that you do really well which I think is definitely part of your appeal is that you're able to write about these difficult things in human nature without needing to remove yourself. So you're not doing it as a spectator. Oh oh those humans over there they've got problems. Um you're able to really look at it yourself. So as you think about this process of ripping the skin away I think was the the phrase that you said. Um and confronting that. How do you begin to to translate what's actually happening without the need for the ego to step in and say no no no you're it to not go in either direction quite frankly to either then say oh because you have this flaw you are a loser or to blind yourself to the flaw and say no no no that's it's not a problem. Like how do people find that middle ground of acknowledging it without succumbing to negative emotion around it? That's a great question. Um you know so sometimes you know you need help in these areas it depending on the depth of the wound. So sometimes you need a third person's eyes on it. You can't necessarily analyze it yourself. Which is why you might want to go into therapy or you might want a spouse or significant other or someone you love and trust who can tell you these things cuz sometimes it's very hard for you to have any kind of distance from them, you know? But, um the the the ability to detach yourself from your own emotions is extremely important in life. It doesn't mean that you become a cold, rational person at all. I don't believe in that at all. Emotions are extremely important for us. It's what makes us creative, it what feeds our imagination, gives us drive. But, the ability that you can gain over your life in this instant and in every other instant to have a degree of a detachment, not a it's only a matter of degree, where you can stand back and you feel something very powerfully. You feel attracted to something or a person. You feel excited or repulsed and to not react and to step back and analyze and go, "Why am I feeling this right now? Is it because of what somebody is saying right now? Or does it go deeper to that? Is it related to some other issue?" That is a skill that is not easy, but you can develop it day by day by day taking little steps. And so, if you're able to slowly detach yourself from your day-to-day emotional reactions, it gives you a little bit of distance between you and your ego, right? So, I meditate every morning. I've been doing it now for 11 years for like 40 over 40 minutes. It's a a ritual that if I don't do, I feel extremely depressed, something's wrong. Okay, and when I'm meditating, I become deeply aware, these thoughts start coming up, they bubble up, you can't control them. You become deeply aware of your ego, of certain patterns in your thinking, of certain anxieties, of certain kind of neurotic thought patterns, right? You're seeing it before your eyes, it's floating there. This is your ego, Robert, it's going here, there, and there. You can see it. And now, when you're in that state, you can almost see it as if it's another person. And it's very powerful and it's very liberating. Now, in the case of someone who's dealing with a deep wound, I don't know if you can go you can't go there like tomorrow and do this. I'm a realistic person. I'm very practical. I don't want to advise people something that's not going to happen. It's something that you're going to have to It's a life skill that you have to build the the the the power to to take take a step back and look at yourself with some distance and see that ego as if it's over there. It's floating in front of you. It's giving you signs of who you are. You know, you can develop that and it's very powerful and it will give you the ability to look at your own wounds objectively, but you're never going to reach a a degree of a 100% detachment. Me who's been practicing this for many years, I still get caught up in those wounds. I still get caught up in my ego. It's just a matter of degree. That That's all I'm talking about. This is such an insanely complicated issue. When I think about okay, so if the number one problem is people aren't aware that there's a game being played basically. You can't take things sort of at their surface and then understanding that as you were saying that self-awareness is also this critical part. Then there are the studies that have shown that your mind will give you a reason for something even when that reason is obviously not true. And I don't know if you heard about that study where people that have had the ability to form long-term memories damaged. So, they can do short-term memories, but you could reintroduce yourself to them every 3 minutes and they'd be like, "Oh my god." They'd greet you a new each time. And the doctor put a pin in his hand and he walked in and he shook hands and it poked the person. They jerked their hand back like, "You know, why'd you do that?" They leave. They come back 3 minutes later. The person does not remember meeting them at all. They stick out their hand and the person will refuse to shake it. And so, they don't remember ever meeting them before. And so, they'll say, "Why won't you shake my hand?" "Oh, well, you know, I've had a long-standing rule I don't shake the hand of people with white lab coats." And they come up with all these different excuses cuz the brain can't like sit there in this ignorance. And so, you have something that's clearly hardwired in us to to So, we I have heard humans referred to as meaning-making machines, which makes a lot of sense to me. We make meaning out of something. Right. So, if we have this hardwired propensity to come up with some sort of meaning something somewhere, and we have the psychological immune system, which doesn't want me to feel badly about myself, so now I have an inclination to lie to myself, basically, from some like deep-seated part of me that survives even damage to the ability to make long-term memories. And so, when I think about the deck being stacked against people in terms of really figuring out what's actually going on inside themselves, it gets a little scary. And this is where So, for me, when I think about okay, if all of the things that I just said are true, nested inside of all the stuff you've been talking about, the only path I see out of that is you cuz everyone needs self-esteem. So, your psychological immune system's trying to make you feel good about yourself, got it. So, you need to take conscious control of feeling good about yourself, but you need to wrap it around something antifragile. So, that for The only answer I've come up with in my own life is to be the learner. That way, if I do something stupid, I make a mistake, whatever, I can just go, "Hey, that sucks." And it does make me feel badly, but I only value myself for being a learner. And since recognizing how I actually am would be useful, then I'll face the truth of what this is. Right. And then I can learn and move on. Will you touch on an extremely important critical thing here, the element that I'm trying to hit at, which is your level of desire for change. So, if you're trapped in these patterns, and you feel a great degree of pain, and your life isn't going anywhere, and you're having bad relationships, bad work habits, and you say, "I can't deal with this anymore." You're extremely motivated to go through the process that you just mentioned, which is after every event that occurs, you go through a kind of an autopsy, right? And you analyze You can do this on a daily basis with a journal, or you can do it on a weekly basis. You know, what did I do there? What was the element of where I actually might have created the problem between me and another person? And I have to be reasonably rational, and I have to be reasonably realistic. You're right, if if we saw completely into ourselves, we would hate ourselves so thoroughly that we wouldn't get out of bed, we'd all be killing ourselves. You do need a degree of illusion. You do need a degree of self-esteem and confidence, right? And what happens is, you know, it's kind of like an internal thermostat. And so, you have like people who are what I call deep narcissists, who have no kind of sense no anchor inside of them, no real sense self-esteem to hold on to. And when that self-esteem starts going down, down, down, they have no way of dealing with it, and their only way of dealing with it is acting out in the way that narcissists act out. So, we all have If we're not a deep narcissist, we have that thermostat where things start hurting us a little bit, and we bring ourselves back up through the self-esteem mechanism, so we don't get too depressed and too down. There's an element of unreality to that, but it's very valuable, and I would never, ever, ever want to burst that. You need a degree of illusion in your life. It's very important. But, if you really want change, if you're really fed up, if you're not kidding yourself, if you're not going through this [ __ ] process, yeah, I kind of want to change my life, but you don't really mean it, then nothing you no words, no no therapy will ever get you to that point. You almost have to hit bottom. You almost have to tell yourself, I can't take this anymore. And now the motivation is so deep that you're able now to go through to begin the process of going through that kind of self-analysis because that's the only way you're going to get out of it. It's the only way. You know, a lot of the of our culture is making this worse in a way, unfortunately. I mean, there's good things in our culture now, but there are bad things. Give me some of the bad. Well, I think social media, for all the good that it does, makes it very hard to be self-reflective. Interesting. I I thought for sure you were going to say just leads us to compare ourselves. Why does it make it hard to be self-reflective? Well, it does Well, comparing yourself is not self-reflective. When you compare yourself, your standard is always what other people are doing, right? They're on these great vacations. He's got a great job. Tom has this amazing house where I'm living in this hovel in Los Feliz, right? That's not looking at myself. That's always having the other person as the standard. It makes us so out in the world in other people, what other people are saying, what other people are doing. It makes us continually think in the social sense and not able to turn inside and look at how who we are, what makes us different. We're so attuned to what's cool, to what other people are doing out there, what other people are saying, that we lose a kind of an intuitive grasp of who we are. Right? So, the psychologist Abraham Maslow talked of impulse voices. He said that a child of 1 year's old has this impulse voice that says, I like this fruit. I don't like this fruit. I'm going to it away, right? And then and then other things. These voices inside that make them that individual. This is what they like and what they hate, right? These are very, very important as you develop later in life. You know that this is what you love. These are the subjects that interest you. These are subjects you're not interested in. These are the people you like. These are the people you don't like. It's who you are in the deepest sense of it. It's your what I call your primal inclinations. It's you at its core. And if you're so attuned to what other people are saying and doing and telling you and thinking, that voice gets drowned out by a million other voices, and you're not able to hear yourself anymore. And it's very hard to take a step back and actually look at yourself and analyze yourself. So, I think that in some ways this this dilemma that we're talking about is getting more and more difficult because to be able to do what you're talking about, you have to be willing to be alone. You have to be willing to close the door in your room, write down and say, "This is what's going on. This is what happened. This is what I did. This is what they did." You can't be out there in the world and do this. It's impossible to do that process cuz you're going to be sucked into the social dynamic, and you won't be able to think about yourself. So, I think it's made things a little bit harder for people. That's really interesting, and oh man, the the human condition is utterly fascinating. It does not seem designed to make us enjoy it or, you know, it literally seems survival is like the only consideration. And that can be obviously very difficult for people. So, as people navigate the modern world, as they try to make their way through something like that, what are the tools and approaches um that you recommend to people? Well, it's kind of what the subject of sort of what the daily laws is about. There's there's two things. So, um you know, the the the source of your power in life is your attitude towards the world. And in in human nature, I kind of describe what I believe an attitude is. It's your lens. It's your way of looking at the world. Everybody's lens is different. You're not seeing things exactly as they are. You're seeing them filtered through how you look at them. Some people are so important. Yeah. Some people are optimistic and adventurous. Some people are anxious and closed. And you could put two people in the same circumstances visiting the same place. The pessimistic anxious person will find it unpleasant. People are rude. I don't like it. The adventurous exploring type will find the circumstances very exciting. But it's the same thing. It's just you're judging in a different way. So, the lens that you want you want a lens that clarifies things. You want a lens that's realistic. That you're trying to see things as they are, right? It's good to be excited, but sometimes if you're too excited and too adventurous, you're going to walk right up to that tiger and they're going to eat you alive. Sometimes you have to be a little bit wary of things. You have to see your circumstances for what for what they are. In military terms, they call it situational awareness. You're very aware, crystal clear about who you are, about who other people are, about what the world is like. So, that's the attitude that you want to craft for yourself in this world. And it's very difficult. As you've been saying very eloquently, the cards are stacked against you. A, because of how we're wired. You know, our brains developed 200,000 years ago in circumstances that certainly aren't the way things are now. So, we're So, there's kind of a a gap there between, you know, how how we're wired to think and what's going on in the 21st century. And B, we're dealing with technology that's making things harder. So, you your goal in life is to become more realistic, to be able to step back and look at things as they are. And how do you get there is the question. So, first you have to see that as your goal, and it has to be important to you, and it has to be something that you want. And it's not just something that's cold and dry and scientific. Really fast, why is that the right goal? Why is that the right goal? Yeah, to see I agree with you. I just want to see how you explain it to people, why it matters to see the world the way that it actually is. Well, okay, imagine it this way. So, there's yourself. Everything begins with you, right? You're filled with all kinds of illusions about who you are, about what you're good at, what you're bad at, what your weaknesses are, what your strengths are. If you're able to see inside of yourself with a degree of realism, you'll be able to understand this is what I was destined to be in life. This is what I call my life's task. This is the career that's that fits me, that suits me. So, if you're able to have that realism when you're 22 years old, you're not going to suddenly go off on this wrong career path that's going to make you miserable, make you an alcoholic by the time you're 30. You're going to have a degree of direction in life. It's incredibly liberating. It's incredibly powerful to be able to see inside of yourself and know what you were destined for and what makes you you. Other people Other people wear masks. They smile, but they doesn't Their smile doesn't mean anything. You There are toxic people out there. It's not everybody. I don't mean to make you paranoid. Maybe there's like 5% of the world that's truly toxic. Every single human being, I can guarantee you has had to deal with these toxic people in a way that's painful. And you don't see them, you know, they're very tricky. These are people who've learned to disguise themselves. You're going to get sucked into all these dramas and traumas with these people. Can make your life miserable. Imagine you had a realistic attitude and you could see through these people. You could catch before you get involved with them, signs of that they might be one of these types. Another thing that's incredibly liberating. The world that you live in, there's a zeitgeist, there's a spirit of the times, there are trends, there's things that are going on right now in your career, in the world at large. And we're fed with so much [ __ ] in the media, we have no idea what's really going on. The ability to see this is where the world headed is headed, this is where business will be in 2 years, this is where things are going to be, these are the trends. The power, so the power to see inside yourself, the power inside to see other people, to see the world. You know, you're Superman if you can do that. If you can have a degree of that, the world is at your feet basically. So, you know, I don't think there's any counter argument to that where you don't want that kind of realism. And it's not this ugly thing, it's incredibly sexy cuz it's incredibly powerful, right? So, we've now come to the point you and I, we agree that that's what you want. The person out there is going, "Yeah, I want that as well. Okay, Robert, that's fine. How do I get there?" Aha. Well, you have to be patient. You have to know it's a process. You can't get ahead of yourself, you can't get ahead of your skis. It's going to take a day by day by day by day, you have to build it up. You're working against your own nature, you're working against the times. So, be patient, be compassionate with yourself, and learn to take these baby steps. And in the book Daily Laws, I have a lot of different ways of attacking that. The main way of attacking it is uh learning the ability, as we talked about earlier, to be able to detach yourself from the immediate events going on, and to be able to look at yourself with a degree of dispassion and say, "This is what I did really did. What really happened here. So, just a simple example. Something kind of doesn't go the way you want it to, which will happen almost every day or every week, you know, with your children, with your spouse, with your boss, wherever. Okay. What is your normal reaction? Every single human, including myself, blame that person. They're not caring. They're not empathetic. They're an [ __ ] There's They're They're narcissistic, blah blah blah. Stop it. Stop it right now. Don't do that again. Step back and say, "What did I do?" Okay? If that person is toxic, why am I involved with them? There's something wrong about me. If that person got reactive and resentful and they had a bad tone of voice something that I said, maybe there was something in me that was projecting kind of negativity. Maybe my own mood wasn't really was kind of creating this atmosphere that made them react that way. Look at yourself instead of blaming other people. You know, these are parts of the process. There are many others, but yeah. Dude, that is so huge. People always So, I have a saying that I like that most people [ __ ] hate, which is everything is my fault. I love it. I It's so useful. So, uh fault is a word that gives people, I don't know, emotional distress or something and so they don't like when I use that phrase. Um but what I like to remind myself is that if I did something different, I could get a different outcome. And that's so powerful to me. To not by blaming somebody else, by making it their fault, I give away all my power and there's nothing I can do about it and now I'm sort of a victim of circumstance. But man, when you take 100% ownership and you look at your life and say, "My life is an exact reflection of choices that I've made." Now, if I want it to be different, then I just need only make different choices. Completely and and and one of the things that that's like that is if something went wrong, maybe and I'm to blame, just accept it. Just accept the fact that it happened. Don't try to change it, but just say that this has happened and I'm not going to fight it and this is just my fate in life, you know, it's okay, right? So, the ability to accept things is also taking ownership of them. So, if something bad happens and you can't really control it because let's be honest, there are times that you can't control things. They're just going to happen. Who predicted a a pandemic? You can't control that, right? So, your first reaction is to get all pissy and go, "Damn it, why did it happen? [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] I'm a victim, blah, blah, blah." Okay, that's just going to make you more depressed, more inward, more harder to act in the world. Whereas, if you say, "Okay, I can't control the pandemic. It's a terrible thing, but I'm going to roll with the punches. I'm going to accept the way things are. I'm not going to fight it. This is the way the world is. What can I get out of it? What kind of benefit?" Well, maybe I can reassess my career. Maybe before the pandemic happened, I was just headed in this path and I wasn't I was kind of blind. Maybe I'm not really happy with what I am. I'm not happy with my relationships, with my career. Maybe I need to reassess it. Maybe it's time for me to be alone and read books and and study and and learn new skills, etc. So, the ability to to accept things that you can't change and to see some benefit from them is also part of that. Mhm. I want to go back to emotions. So, we've talked about how emotions are incredibly powerful. You um I don't think you used this example in the book, but it was certainly along these lines that if you damage the region of somebody's brain that deals with the emotional centers, they can't make decisions. That's right. She's absolutely just insane to me. Um, and you also have a quote in the book though that I wrote down that I would like to share with people now. And for clarity sake, I actually agree with both sides of this. So, you've got the side that you talked about where if you damage the emotional centers of somebody's brain, they can't make a decision. And then you also had um, a quote and I don't know why my the app is crashed that I have the quote in. I can paraphrase it if I can't get this out. Here we go. I think I can get it now. Um, Nope, it's not opening. So, the paraphrase of the quote is that emotions are essentially a disease looking for a remedy. And I was like, yes. Yes, you can't just believe your emotions or maybe that's not the right way to think about it. But you can't just take them on board and because I have this feeling I'm going to act on it or it represents truth. Right. Help people understand. First, give us that. Like, what do you mean? How is it possible that my emotions aren't necessarily useful or true? And then we'll balance it with the idea of how important emotions actually are. Well, in in in a Japanese Zen way, your emotions are truth because you are feeling the way you're feeling, okay? So, that's real, right? But it can stem from a very false source as well. Okay, so, let's just go back to that example that I gave earlier of the young boy who was felt abandoned by his mother, right? And his whole pattern in his life is to be the one that's doing the abandoning so he's not abandoning himself. So, in the moment that he's with this woman within this relationship that's been going on, he's starting to feel something's wrong with her. She's bad. She's she's not right for me. She's going to, you know, I better leave this relationship, right? He's not reacting on what she's doing. His emotions are not coming from what she She could be perfectly fine. She could be totally loving. He's projecting onto her his own emotions. What he feels is genuine. He genuinely feels that something is wrong, but it doesn't come from the truth itself. It comes from some deeper, much deeper pain. So, your emotions you're feeling them, but the source of them you have no idea what the source is, right? So, you know, you explode at somebody in your office tomorrow because of something, and then you don't realize that in the morning you were already put in a bad mood by something that somebody else said, and that kind of made you prone to like exploding later on in the day. You are seeing that other person that triggered you, but you're not seeing what happened earlier in the day that set the tone for it, that planted the seed for you being triggered, right? So, you don't have access to the source of what's really causing your emotions. Now, I'll be honest, you're never going to get true access to the actual source of it because there's something there buried very deep inside. Who knows where it came from. Who knows how young you were. Who knows really the unconscious processes that were going on. Okay? So, you're never going to get at the core, the real truth, but you can get closer to it. You can And you cannot react in the moment. You can say, "If this year this young man who's trapped in this pattern, it's very difficult to thing to go, but am I being Am Is it true that she's actually being like that? If I actually step back and analyze her words, they're totally neutral. She's not being mean or vicious. She's not about to do leave me, right? Or she's not betraying me in any way. It's totally neutral, right? And I often go through that process. I've been in a relationship for a long time where I get a little bit upset and angry and I'm blaming her and blah blah blah. And I have to go back like takes a couple hours for the microwave to kind of cool down, right? And you go Now, wait, man. She Why does she feel the way she's feeling? Well, it probably comes from me, but I'm I'm totally projecting onto her, right? So, just the idea that you're projecting your emotions onto people, just the idea that you're reacting to something that's an illusion, that's a mirage is liberating enough cuz it's going to prevent you from doing stupid things. How many times I've had this problem? Do you get angry and you send that angry email voicing all of your upset and displeasure? And then 2 hours later you go, "Shit, I wish I hadn't said that. I wish I hadn't revealed my vulnerability. I wish I had Maybe I was it was I overreacted, right?" So, the ability to to write that email and then put it in the draft folder and never send it. And you know, I have this thing in my in my own computer where in my email that draft folder is getting larger and larger. It's got 12, it's got 20, it's got a 80 things in it. That shows me 80 times I have put that thing into the draft folder and I have a degree of control. So, Yeah, the idea that there one, that you don't have full access to everything that led you to react the way that you did. And two, that to some extent it's an illusion. So, you call it attitude, I call it frame of reference. I've given my entire professional life to the idea that frame of reference may be the single most important thing in the determining the outcome of your life. So, looking at right now in much of the developed world, your zip code is the number one predictor of your future success. So, were it your IQ, I could understand that. But the fact that it just is where you happen to grow up, that's really really distressing to me. And so, having worked in the inner cities a lot and seeing up close what the problem is, you encounter people with incredible intellect, but as you watch them process the data, they're processing it through a filter. And that filter is what you call attitude. And when it encounters an attitude that isn't helpful, you get an outcome that's like a funhouse mirror. And you're like, the way that you're looking at this doesn't make sense in the following way. You have a goal, and the way you're thinking about things, either your goal makes no sense, it won't optimize for fulfillment or joy, um or you have a goal that makes sense, and the way that you're parsing the data does not lead you to take actions that will actually move you towards that goal. Right. And so, it becomes this really um distressing question of, okay, somebody gets to adulthood, they have an attitude or a frame of reference that isn't helping them accurately it isn't helping them process data in a way that will move them towards a useful goal. That's the the cleanest, most truthful way to say it. So, then the question becomes, what can you do to begin reformulating that attitude, that frame of reference in order to get you where you want to go? Do you think at all about the like, what is the atomized thing that makes up the attitude? For me, it's beliefs. Your frame of reference is is a reflection of I'll call it roughly 25 beliefs that you have. Get those beliefs right, you're A-OK. Get those beliefs wrong, and you've got a real problem. But the atomized thing for me is a belief. What's the atomized version of an attitude for you? Well, I'm not quite sure I understand the beliefs part, but I I'm trying to um Do you want me to explain it? Do you want me to explain it? Yeah. All right. So, the most important one, so I've actually written down the 25 that I think make this up, but there's one that's really important. It's what I call the only belief that matters, which is that in fact you talk about this in your book. Mastery is essentially about this idea. That if you put time and energy into getting good at something, you will actually get good at it. Right. And that thing has utility in the real world. Now, if you believe that, then you'll pick up the guitar and you'll start practicing. You'll sit down at the typewriter and you'll start writing. If you don't believe it, it wouldn't make sense to pick up a guitar. You're either good at it from birth or you're not, and so why would you bother? Right. That one belief will bifurcate your entire life because you're either going to lean into just the things you think you're already naturally gifted at and your life will be limited by whatever that is, or you will spend a massive amount of time and energy gaining mastery. Right. And those two, same person, but those are wildly divergent outcomes. Yeah. Uh I I think that's that's that's very true. Um I don't know that atomizing, I think I might just basically be in agreement with you. I would maybe say the stories that we tell ourselves, which comes down to the same thing. Because I've discovered in my meditation that the way the brain works is continually telling us stories about the world, about ourselves, about the way people are. And I don't mean stories in It's literally what I'm saying. It's like constructed like a story. It has a narrative arc to it. Right? This is what happened to me and and the story is constructed and this is the result. And what the story I'm telling myself might not be the correct story at all. Right? So, being able to understand what really happened, what is the actually the story that that occurred there, is extremely important. And so you're hitting on the bedrock, which is extremely fundamental, which is do you believe that you're capable of change? Do you believe that good things happen when you go through a process of learning and taking steps? Do you believe, going back to your belief, that you can actually get out of your patterns? Cuz you can be fooling yourself, you can be bullshitting, you can be saying, "Yeah, I kind of do." But deep down inside you don't really want to do it because, believe it or not, your bad patterns give you a degree of comfort, right? It's something that you know. And to get out of them, you're suddenly thrust into the unknown, and that could be very frightening. So, you could be holding on to these bad patterns. So, the belief that "I can change. I can actually do something different in my life. I can actually recreate myself. I can actually learn things. I can actually rewire my brain." Cuz the brain is incredibly plastic. Even at the age of 40, 50, you can change your career, you can learn new skills. You know, I've reached 60. I'm constantly learning as well. The brain is insanely plastic. Do you believe that? Do you believe that you have the possibility to change yourself, to alter your patterns? That's probably the single most important thing right there. And to get people to believe that, as I said, there's two levels. There's the people who will shake their head, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." They'll read Mastery, but it won't mean anything to them because they're afraid of the change. They're comfortable with a degree of failure, I hate to say. Because if you don't try things, you never have to deal with the responsibility, the pain of failure, right? So, you don't really want to change deep down inside. You don't really believe in Tom's number one bedrock belief, right? You're kind of fooling yourself. So, it's not a fairy tale. It's not a bunch of a myth that we're creating. It's true that you have the power. The brain if you just understood this one thing that the brain is like a landscape. It's like a landscape out in the world that you see where things can be lush and tropical or they can be completely arid and dead. You create that landscape yourself. You create the brain that you have by the degree of how you're open to experience, by the degree of how much you learn, by the degree of how many different sources of information you take in. You can create this incredibly alive brain that's very creative, imaginative, and how much more fun will your life be if you're open and and you let things come in and new ideas come in. So, it's up to you. You're the one that's creating your misery, it's creating your patterns, it's and it comes down to that bedrock one belief that you just mentioned. I think we touched on it a little bit the last time we spoke. It's an incredibly interesting idea that you feel like the right person to explore, partly because you do take a certainly a darker look at life than I do. And for some reason I find myself completely drawn to that flame uh of the way that you look at the world, maybe because it's good sort of disconfirming evidence for me. It doesn't just put me in my own loop. Um but the guy who people say some people say that, you know, uh Robert, you shouldn't write these books. This is like evil Machiavellian content. The world is better off not, you know, sort of turning a blind eye to this, um which I hardly disagree with, but for that person to now be touching on the sublime, what drew you to that? Well, um it's it's I could go on forever about this. I'll try and keep it reasonably short, but I've been interested in this idea for 15, probably 20 years. I don't know. I read an article, I read a book about it a long time ago. Really excited me. And I meant to be my fourth book after I finished war. I started researching it. And then I got distracted by the 50 Cent book that I did. Then came mastery and then came human nature. And finally I took a breath and said, all right, this is the time for the sublime. It's going to be my next book. And the 18th chapter of the law of human nature is about confronting your mortality. And I talk about that, the sublime in that chapter. And the idea is that here's how I explain the sublime. It's kind of like a circle. If you can imagine human life as a circle, social life. To be a human means in any time period, the culture that we live in creates a circle. And in that circle is a limit to what you're you're allowed to believe in, what you're allowed to think, your behavior. There are codes and conventions and rules that we all ascribe to. They're not the same as that they were in ancient Egypt 3,500 years ago. But back then they had a circle, it was just a different circle, right? Okay. So, you're not supposed to think these thoughts, you're not supposed to do this, this, that. This is the circle that we live in. Just outside that circle is the realm of the sublime. It's something that we're not really ever supposed to think about or not really supposed to ever do. It's something that's filled with a slight transgressive energy, a level of excitement. Because deep down inside in human nature, we don't like limits. We rebel against them. We want to be free. Our spirits are yearning to be free. And that sense of these are codes that you have to abide by is very restricting. It feels like a prison almost. So, we're inevitably attracted to things outside of that. And that is the realm of the sublime. And it's incredibly exciting. It contains so much energy. Because in that circle all of your energy is kind of crushed, compounded inside of you. It's kind of you have to feel this, we have to do this. When you let go and you go explore outside of it, it's like suddenly you're tapping into something that's in the cosmos. Incredibly energizing. It's what Maslow called a peak experience, right? Okay. So, the ultimate form of going beyond that circle is death itself. Death is the ultimate limit obviously to our lives. And people who have peered through that door, because the word sublime literally means up to the threshold. That's the Latin. Up to the threshold of a door. So, imagine that circle has all these little doors in it and you're peering through it. This is something that I haven't thought of before, right? Um the ultimate door is death, right? And people who peered through that door have had a near-death experience a little bit to some degree. It changes you. It's like that is the biggest blast of the sublime that you can get. That's the strongest form of the drug imaginable. You no longer look at being alive anymore the same way. You no longer see the trees, the birds, the the people that you love in the same way. Do you think it's universally that people see something better than they did before? No. It's not true. It's good point. There have been studies of near-death experiences. I don't remember the percentage, but there is a percentage, a smaller percentage, that has a negative experience. It's very painful and ugly and demonic and hellish. And no, they're not having this. So, thank you for bringing that up. That's true. But most people, for most people, it has this effect where uh and there are reasons why the people have the hellish view. There are other things going on. It's not That's just not normal. Um is you know, you you came very close to death and you're alive. So, everything has a different meaning to you, right? Things that you took for granted before no longer have that same sense. And there other things that go on. Well, anyway, that to to my story here, I wrote that chapter with those ideas in mind. And then two, three months later, I came this close to dying myself. So, what had been this intellectual abstract argument about near-death sublime, blah blah blah, became very real, right? I was in a coma. I was driving my car. If my girlfriend hadn't stopped, made me pull over, if the medics hadn't come quickly, I would have permanent brain damage or I would be dead. I came very close. I was in a coma. I didn't have like visions of of, you know, angels, etc., and all the other things that people sometimes claim they have. But I had some very strange things, some feelings in my body that it not as often anymore, but I still sometimes get a feeling that my bones were kind of melting from the inside. There was kind of like I was sort of dissolving. What was solid about me was dissolving, right? And then a sense of a very It's only for a brief second, and sometimes I'm not even sure if it's true or not, but I had an image of me up above looking down, and I had I had died, and people were talking about me, right? I'm not sure whether my brain in memory is playing a trick on me, but I seem to have that recollection. Anyway, it became very real to me, this subject, right? And so now, it wasn't just this intellectual thing about writing a book about the sublime. It was very, very real. The last thing I'll say is when I had originally planned the book back in 2005 or so, I was going to be jetting off to Tierra del Fuego to see, you know, the the the South Pole. I was going to go swimming with dolphins in the Caribbean. I was going to be going on top of, you know, Mount Everest. I don't know, whatever, that kind of stuff. Having sublime experiences. Obviously, I had a stroke. I can't even really walk outside my house and take a normal hike. I can barely walk a few blocks. I can't do any of these things. Right? So, what I've had to discover is cuz I can only write a book if I'm in the mood of the book. Right? So, I have to be feeling sublime to write the book. I have to find it in everyday things. I have to find it in the little garden in my house. I have to find it in the cats in my house. In my girlfriend, you know, and and how and in in her eyes. Looking outside my window, in the books that I'm reading. I have to suck the sublime out of every little trivial little affair that I goes on in my life. And putting that in the book, I think will So, if I had written that other book, people were going, "Oh, that's great, but this guy this is kind of rich white guy. He's able to fly off here. That has nothing to do with my life." I'm living as restricted of a life as you can imagine. Other people much more restricted than me, but pretty damn restricted. And yet I'm able to find this in my daily life. If I can find it, there's no barrier for other people, no matter if you're flipping burgers at McDonald's. The world is sublime. And it's all around you, and you don't have to go to Tierra del Fuego to to experience that. I want to get more into what the sublime is actually. So, I honestly, it's a word that I never really thought of. Okay. I feel like I have an intuitive understanding that it's something sort of surprising and wonderful, but with a not sort of big um amplitude is the wrong word, but there's there's something relaxed about it. Like a warm bath is sublime, you know? but this idea of it being a threshold, something that you're seeing beyond into something new, that's a new take on it for me, which is far more interesting. Well, it's it's the sublime is not a warm bath, quite the opposite. It's a mix of pleasure and pain. It's a mix of two opposing emotions, a sense of fear and a sense of awe, almost consecutively or at the same time. Right. So, if you go to see a horror movie or you're on a roller coaster, the excitement comes from the fact that you feel kind of at risk, that there's sort of danger there, but you're safe, right? So, you're feeling two things at the same time, kind of anxiety and kind of about the pleasure that you're actually not being threatened. So, neuro- neuroscientists have shown that the mixing of two sort of contrary emotions creates an incredible intensity of affect, much more than just a single emotion. So, the quintessential experience of the sublime when it was first written about in the 18th century was climbing uh the Alps, the Matterhorn, or whatever it was, right? And you got a sense of how small you were, how, you know, you could die very easily if there's an avalanche, and how, you know, how fragile you were in the face of this immensity, and yet the awesomeness of it, the beauty of it, was overwhelming. And so, they were fascinated with this idea of being able to feel these two contrary emotions at the same time. So, it's not at all a warm bath. Um I can only the the sublime is an experience. It's hard to It's something hard to put into words. So, Robert's trying to write a book about it. Yeah, I know. Believe me, believe me, I know. But let me give you an idea, give me one example of something that is so insanely sublime that you can't ever think the same about the world after you contemplate this. Okay? So, here you and I are sitting here talking in this incredibly high-tech, amazing house with all the insane technology around us. All right, consider this. Our planet's some 4 billion years old. Around 3.1 billion years in some little bit of pond, some kind of organic life began. We don't know how or why or what triggered all the scientists are getting closer. Some form of single-celled bacteria self-created itself out of chemicals that came from other planets, right? Carbon, etc. Okay? This single-celled bacteria dominated the planet for billions of years. It was the only form of life, right? Okay? And then sometime in the past, I I've forgotten the exact time frame in my mind. It's in my book. The first multicellular creature was created. Maybe that was 2 billion years ago or so. Okay? And it was a complete freak accident. One piece of bacteria swallowed another bacteria and created a multicellular organism. It's only happened once in the history of our planet, once. Contemplate that. We know that because there's only one line of DNA that we can trace back to the first time that it happened. There's not a second line of DNA, only one. So, it happened once. It's never happened again. It was a freakish example. If that hadn't happened, forget everything else that occurred on this planet. Okay, but it did happen. Okay, so these are called bottlenecks. Certain things occurred that created um evolution going in a certain direction, and it could have occurred differently. I'll skip to 60 million years ago when a an asteroid the size of New York City hit Earth hit in in the Yucatan Peninsula and it was the most insane explosion ever. Like the equivalent of all the nuclear bombs on our planet. It destroyed the dinosaurs. It destroyed 99% of the life on this planet, right? It was the holocaust of all holocausts. If it and this meteor almost missed the Earth asteroid very easily could have missed the planet because think of the emptiness of space and the smallness of Earth. It was a freak accident. If that hadn't happened dinosaurs would still be walking around here. Mammals would have never emerged the dominant creature. I'll skip to 80,000 years ago. Humans at that point were only like 10,000 humans left on the planet. If one single virus I'm talking about Homo sapiens. One single virus would have wiped us out. At that point we were extremely vulnerable. If that number had gone down further anything could have wiped us out, right? A change in climate, etc. Okay? If that had happened we wouldn't be here. And Neanderthals would have probably taken over the planet and who knows what that would look like right now, okay? Then think of your own parents and how unlikely was their ever meeting and and the service the faith that happened there. If they hadn't met, Tom wouldn't be here or you would be somebody else, right? There are 70,000 generations more or less going into you going back to the first Homo sapien. All right? That one time encounter between you and your parents multiplied by 70,000 chance encounters. So, to bring us to the present that you and I are sitting here together in this office with all this stuff around us. It's you and it's me. The odds against it are so unbelievably astronomical that you can't even compute. So, what does that make you think about the what you what's happening to you right now? If you really contemplate it, it will alter how you think about everything. Everything you see around you, the plants, the animals, they didn't have to be that way. It's extremely unlikely. It's a weird world that we live in, right? So, that is an example of a sublime thought. It's a little bit scary because it has to do with annihilation, holocaust, deaths, but it's also an awesome thought about the fact that you're just alive. So, that's that's sort of and it's something I went into in in the second chapter of my book. I find this so interesting. So, how how do we make use of that? And why is it so useful? Well, the reason it's so useful, and this is what I just did in my third chapter, is it's wired into our nature. So, a lot of things are wired that aren't so good that we could talk about, but the need for transcendent experiences, the need to be taken out of ourselves, which is the source of all of our religious, all of our spiritual beliefs, and all of art the art that we create, almost everything that we humans do, goes back to our earliest ancestors, right? And being the first conscious beings on this on this planet, conscious in the way that our brains are conscious, they looked at this world, and they saw things that go, you know, I'm talking about Aborigines in Australia. How did this world happen? How did this occur? How can it be that there are stars and plants and kangaroos? It's insane. And right? And they had these kind of sublime thoughts, and out of that they created gods and spirits and all sorts of forces, okay? But that awesome feeling, that feeling of why why are things the way they are? Why is there something and not nothing is very much wired into our nature. And to deny it is very painful. And so what I talk about in the book is if you're not going after the sublime, you're going to go after the false sublime. And the false sublime will be drugs, it'll be alcohol, it'll be joining some kind of ugly political campaign in which you get your all your yayas out and you feel angry and violent and blah blah blah, right? You know, on and on and on. It could be porn, you know, online porn, etc. The kind of drugs that take you outside of yourself but are kind of ugly and they're and they're addicting and they're not liberating. So if you're not going after this, you're going to find it in some other way and it's not going to be healthy. And you want this in your life because it gives you a kind of peace and it gives you a scale of priorities. You know, if if the Big Bang occurred some 13, 14 billion years ago and started this whole thing off, what does my little 80, 90 years of existence mean? This is like a flash. It's like a pop of a popcorn in in in this in in in in the eternity of time. It doesn't mean anything. It's it's so small. So why does it matter? So it's calming actually. It's calming you down. It's making you think the things that are happening right now aren't as big as I think they are. So you want this in your life. Then you asked me, how do you get it? That's your question. Yeah, so as you were explaining it, I thought, some people I think are going to brush it off. Maybe they don't and to really let that hit them. And so, when you were talking, I thought, "Okay, is this why So, I've never done psychedelics, but I have a feeling that whether it's a Zen koan, whether it's a psychedelic, whether it's using your ability to shape your own attitude to suck the sublime out of these simple moments, there's something to your point about we're hardwired for it. There's something necessary about jarring us out of our frame of reference Right. that is if evolution has selected for it, there's something necessary maybe to combat our ideas calcifying into dogma. There's something in there that's critically important. And so, I'm just curious for people that don't know how to suck the sublime out of the marrow of a simple moment, how they do it. Well, the how they do it is is is is through my book, I'm afraid. Because you haven't finished writing yet. Yeah, that I'm only fourth of the way through. You give us tidbits in in the daily laws, so I will I will thank you for that. Yeah, couple chapters are in there. Um the reason I say that, I'm not trying to hype myself, is there are lots of books written about the sublime, particularly in terms of art and in terms of like cultural history, but they're very academic. They're very kind of boring, which is very paradoxical. Cuz it's the last subject in the world that should be boring. So, the book that I'm trying to write is in obviously inspirational, but it's also very practical. So, each chapter, the last section, I include exercises for you to practice in your life that are going to make what I just wrote about actionable. And in the very end, I give you meditations, three things to meditate on every day that'll make this part of your daily life, part of your daily practice, right? So, I'm trying to make it as as practical as possible. So, for instance, the first chapter is about the cosmic sublime, which is in the daily laws, about the Big Bang, about the origin of stars, about our own sun and our own planet, and how insane all that is, right? And I talk to you about how you can have that feeling of the cosmos being created by doing certain things in your daily life. You can visit certain landscapes. You don't have to climb Mount Everest. You can just go to the nearest mountain around you. Put your phone away, right? Leave that behind. Go alone if you can, or bring somebody with you, and you don't talk. Interesting. And just so you can think. No, just immerse yourself in this world. I've given you now pages of how unlikely it is that a mountain exists. I've explained to you where that mountain came from. I've explained to you how unlikely the birds in the sky are, and how unlikely life is. And now you're you're in it. And now you're seeing at night, if you if you camp out, you're seeing the night sky. You don't have to have money to do that. You can go out anytime to the nearest mountain or hill and have that experience, right? There are other landscapes as well. Anything having to do with water. Water is the most weird thing if you ever think about it. Because as far as we know, we're the only planet that we know of that has the form of water that we have, and we're looking for other planets that have it. Form of water? Yeah. Well, there's no more water on Mars. It might be buried underneath underground. Do you mean they have liquid they have liquid on it's liquid gas on Jupiter and Saturn, but they don't have our form of water. There's certainly a planet out there that will have it, but water came to us from from the sky. It didn't So, it's not something natural to Earth. It came from rain. It came from comets and asteroids that left left it here. These are molecules that aren't natural to our planet. When you're swimming in water, you're like inside of it. It's the only element. When you're in a mountain, you're not inside the mountain. You're not inside the dirt and the stone. But you're in water, you're in it. It's part of your body. It's incorporated in you. And to imagine the vastness of water So, the cosmos is this vastness, this infinity. Water is a like a touch of that infinity. There's no beginning or end to water. There's no kind of limit to it. So, I'm giving you these places like deserts that you can go to where you can have a touch of that. I also tell you on the internet and I give you all the links. Here's where you can look at things that um uh what's it called? The Hubble telescope has photographed. It is insane the images that we can now look at. It is one of the most beautiful things about living in the 21st century. They have photographed a black hole. I describe in that chapter what a black hole is. To black hole is something you can't even imagine, and yet they have photographed it. But just photographing the farthest reaches of our galaxy, the thoughts that'll inspire. So, it is very practical, but you have to read my book. Mhm. I'm very open. All you have to do is publish it. Uh that's incredible. So, I find it very um I don't know the right way to frame this other than to say that while I wouldn't wish a stroke on anybody, the fact that you in particular are able to bring back the lessons from that. Um What are you doing on a daily basis to get those um joyful moments despite all the restrictions? Well, I have to be honest, it's a struggle. You know, some days I'm very successful. And I feel very excited happy. Some days it's like I've got Tourette's syndrome. I'm just walking around going, "Fuck, [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] fuck." I'm so upset. I'm so frustrated. And so I'm daily having to struggle with myself. And um so whenever I feel that level the frustration is very easy to explain. Imagine that you can't really button your shirt, that your left hand is so weak that you it it it takes you forever to button your shirt. To get dressed in the morning takes like 10 20 minutes. To like get my vitamins off the shelf is this kind of ordeal. I can't type. So just my hands. So you take for granted, you out there, you take for granted your use of your hands. Brother, I can tell you the hand or sister, that hand is a miracle. You have I no idea if you lost one of your hands what a nightmare it would be. Don't take it for granted the fine little things your hands can do cuz I can't do them anymore. You know, I can't walk in a normal way. I'm always kind of losing my balance. I have to hold on to things, etc. Like So the frustration is every single day. There's a tenseness. Like am I going to fall? Am I going to drop this? Can I hold on to this? Can I get this done? And it builds up until your your body starts getting tense before anything ever happens. So I have to fight that. And I have to feel it before it happens and I have to go through kind of a mantra of You are getting better. You're just not aware of it, Robert. It's something you can't see. It's so gradual that it's going to take three or four more years. Calm down. It's not like it's this is going to be you forever, etc. etc. Other times I don't believe my mantra and I get upset. So, it is a daily daily struggle. And I can go through weeks where the struggle seems great and I'm fine and then suddenly I'll fall through this hole where I'm just like damn it. You know, I see people walking by on the street taking a hike. Just three years ago that was who I was. It's not who I am now. I'm like a different person. I want to cry, you know? I can't do the things that gave me pleasure. So, sometimes I can't control it when I see things in the world that remind me of my past life. But I had to find compensations. So, I can't take a hike up into the beautiful Griffith Park, which is very beautiful with incredible woods up there. It's something I love doing. I can't ride a bicycle, but I found a recumbent bike. It's basically a tricycle a souped-up tricycle, right? But I got the top-of-the-line trike recumbent trike, right? The best you can get, the fastest, the lightest weight one. And now I'm able to go up these incredible hills. Hills I obviously slower than normal people a normal bike, but I can go up the biggest hill you can imagine and I do it and I go up into the hills in the woods and I'm alone and it's my therapy. And I know that it's ephemeral that it only lasts for like half an hour an hour. I'm suck every second of joy out of that being in the woods that I can, being alone and being away from everything. So, I've had to find compensations, you know? I had to look at the little things around me and find insanely beautiful things about them. Also, I had the kind of stroke that damages the right side of the brain, which has an effect on you many ways, but the main thing is it cre- you can't com- your right side of your brain isn't communicating to the left side. So, your left arm, your left leg isn't getting signals from the brain. That's why I can't do the things I can't do. But, it's saved my cognitive abilities. So, if it had struck my left side, which people have strokes, that's the kind of people that lose the ability to talk, they can't really think straight. I wouldn't be able to write a book. So, every day, 3:00, if I'm lucky after I've exercised, I sit down with my sublime book, with my notebook, I'm in heaven. Nobody bother me. Please don't call me. If you call me, I'm going to cuss you. I'm going to make you [ __ ] out of my hair. I'm only working on my book. I am the happiest little baby in the world, you know, because it that book is saving me. It's it's my therapy. So, I've found compensations. But, you know, we talked earlier about patience. I'm patient in some sense, you know, to write a book, but I'm also impatient in other sense, right? I'm impatient with my body, with my physical things. I want to be able to do things now. And so, I've had to learn a um different form of like a meta patience, at a whole other level of patience. And I and and it's a work in progress. That's all I can say. Talk to me about hope. How is it, you know, as you do physical therapy and try things and you make some progress, but not as much as you want? How do you continue to renew your hope? It's it's the most hardest thing and it's the most important thing I can tell you. Um because the moments that I don't feel hope, I'm just kind of ready to give up. You know, I mean, what's the point of this? So, I have to continually rekindle it. And it's been a roller coaster ride because in the beginning people will say, "Robert, you've got to try this. You've got to try um hyperbaric chambers. You've got to try this this Accuscope that this guy has. You have to try the stem cell research. You have to go this and that." I get my hopes up. They go, "Oh, all right. I'll spend thousands of dollars on this new form of therapy." I do it. A little bit of change, but nothing really happens. Then my hope sinks. It's like um well, I don't know what the expression is uh a god that dies every single time this happens. This is how I explain it. Like, I had this belief in something and then it got burst. It's very painful. And so, you know, people are constantly suggesting new forms of therapy. My hope rises. And I have to be able to control that and know there is no quick fix on this. The actress Sharon Stone had a stroke very similar to mine. Right. At an age at a comparable age. And I actually was going to try and contact her. It sounded like we had very similar experiences. She wrote that it took her 7 years Woah. to get back to a normal kind of life. I've done 3 years so far. So, I have to tell myself that there are no quick fixes. And she herself did every form of therapy imaginable. And believe me, people are well-meaning. And they come, they say, "Robert, you've got to try this. You got to try that." I've gotten to the point where like, "Please, don't tell me that anymore." You know? I I don't believe in quick fixes. I have to do this day by day by day. I have to retrain my body. Mhm. You know? So, I'm trying a new form of therapy right now. It didn't instantly give me results. Um it's something very interesting. It's based on Feldenkrais. Fascinating new way What is Feldenkrais? It's a whole different way of looking at your body, and I find it fascinating. It's just not hyper designed for a stroke victim. But I think somebody will come someday. It's based on this idea that the body is a whole unit, right? So, you can't isolate the parts. The body works as a whole. It's an complete organic whole. So, if you have back pain, doesn't stem from your back, it stems from your pelvis, it stems from your hamstrings, it stems from how you move your legs, stems from your neck, the whole body. And we have built-in tensions all over our body. We use muscles that we don't need to use, right? So, every time you're about to lift something or do something arduous, or even psychologically do something arduous, the chest muscles tense up as if that will help you somehow get over what you're doing. But you don't need the chest muscles, they're not you designed for that. You're using muscles that you don't need, they're expending energy. If only the muscles that were necessary to do the job were firing, everything would work so much better. So, the Feldenkrais, this is a called the Anat Baniel Method, she was a student of Feldenkrais, is there's an ideal of the body that I can sense when I do the lessons, where you're on a whole other level. You're like only using the muscles that are necessary. You're moving with this kind of grace and elegance and efficiency that wasn't existing before. All the bad habits with our necks, our shoulders, and and the psychological stuff that they put you through. It's very powerful. It's just not geared specifically for a stroke victim. Then I'm doing another form of therapy. Time, you have no idea how boring this physical therapy is, right? So, when I'm used to exercises that's kind of fun, I even lifting weights can be fun cuz you see your muscles building, right? You feel your heart pounding, swimming, running, it's all kind of fun. This is like little micro movements with your knee, with your leg. It's so boring. So, I have to like put music on, I have to watch the ball game, I have to do something to distract myself. So, I mean I'm going through all the the weeds here of of my process, but That's Well, so what I find interesting about it is just inevitably all of us are going to go through something or have gone through something and how we deal with that crisis is so telling in the fact that you've you know, we were talking before we started rolling that typing is hard and so here you have an author and you've taken away one of the ways by which they get that out and as somebody who's thought so I'm a late bloomer and I have this real sense of wanting to make the most of the time that I have. Late blooming meaning when? How how how late were you blooming? The the skills stack, right? So, I feel like I'm getting better, but like when I think about things that I'm I'm 45 now and I'm only just now getting confident in certain abilities. Thank you. What's your secret? Diet, Okay. exercise, sleep, meditation. That really there's nothing magical. I do not come from great genes. I'm very sad to report. Okay. Um so, when I think about the things that are just now beginning to click for me and I'm like, oh my god, like I see even people on my own team that are 10 years, 15 years ahead of where I was, it's very easy to be jealous that oh my god, you have this insight you know, so many years before I did and you know, how much more time will you be able to make use of, but very quickly you realize that's not a fruitful way to approach it and so I This was years ago now, maybe 5 years ago. I did this thing to celebrate I forget how many subscribers we had on Facebook or YouTube or something and I went live for 24 hours. So I was on camera for 24 hours without all I the only breaks I took were to pee. Wow. And then 3 days later I was in England and I gave a speech and I didn't have a microphone and so for 9 hours I was essentially yelling to this large crowd. And then I woke up and my voice was weird. And it didn't go away, didn't go away and I felt like I had a lump in my throat and then like when I would turn my head I could feel something click and I was like ooh. So then of course I'm like is this cancer? Like what is this? And you start thinking what would happen if I lost my voice? As a leader even just in business forget about being on camera. My ability to persuade, to galvanize a team, to get people excited and focused, I have learned to do it all with my voice. And so I started thinking what would happen if I lost my voice and it's like okay, like I would definitely have to mourn. I would have to go through a period where it's like I'm just going to feel badly for myself for a while. Um but then it's like you you make use of what you have. But it really made me take stock of I had taken my ability to speak for granted for at the time whatever 39, 40 years and now I don't and now I'm very thoughtful. And so getting the kind of insights of the struggle that you're having, it's very useful. Yeah, I mean it's unfortunately it's inevitable for everyone. You may not you may not go through a stroke but you're going to deal with some kind of adversity. Where the physical things that you took for granted are taken away from you. That just happens. It's the nature of life and it can occur at any age. Um so, these are skills that you have to develop and you But the main thing I try and tell people is I don't know how much how how powerfully I can I can implant this in your brain, but do not take for granted what you have right now. Because I can tell you I did. I thought I'd be swimming the rest of my life. It was my life. It meant so much to me. Do not take for granted what you have now. When you're doing these activities, feel insane amounts of gratitude that you have a body that can perform these things because it could be taken away from you tomorrow, right? So, that's the number one thing I want to tell people. It's not to get anxious and paranoid and fearful about the future. That's not going to help you at all. You need to have a joyful life, a happy life. So, but look at what you have right now and look at the marvels of the things you don't realize, as I said, what your hands and legs and brain can do. It's absolutely miraculous and awesome. So, just look at it that way and then if these things happen, we are creatures that are able to accommodate ourselves to things. We can be very good at that, right? You know, we find compensations for it. I mean, the other thing, you you know, being 45, I was uh even late more a later bloomer than you, I think. I mean, I didn't start writing the 48 Laws until I was about 36, 37. You were probably you were doing things well before that, I I remember. From a business standpoint, yeah. Yeah, it your story of late blooming is really extraordinary. Like it's amazing. Well, yeah. I mean, um so, you know, until I was 36, I I pretty lost. I wasn't like starting a great business like Quest and all these other things. I was a struggling, depressed, penniless screenwriter in Santa Monica in a one-bedroom apartment, you know, in this kind of run-down apartment building. Right? And then suddenly my life changed. So I'm as late a bloomer as you can get. But there's a reason why you bloom late, if you bloom at all, which is it comes at the moment that you're ready for it, right? So people who are 32, 33 that you might be envious of, they're not ready to create what you're able to create now with all of your experience and all the things you've learned with all the businesses you've started, all your entrepreneurial skills, all the people you've interviewed. You have that rich landscape of a brain that we're talking about. That 32-year-old, they may have more ex- you know, some more experiences than you had, but they have nowhere near the ability to to to exploit it like you have it now, you know? So Yeah, I like to run the brain in a vat experiment. And that I find it really useful. And every time I explain to this this to people, I never see the sort of spark in their eye that I want to see, but for me this has been really liberating, which anytime I find myself thinking, you know, "Woe is me." or whatever, I say, "Hold on. Imagine for a second that all of this is just the frame of reference that you need. Literally, you came into existence in this moment. You're a brain in a vat somewhere and all the trauma, sadnesses, um failings, all of that is the context to your point about emotions, is the emotional context that becomes necessary for you to make decisions and move forward. So rather than lament it, just like make sure that you're making decisions that propel you forward. And even though I don't believe that, I think my life was lived and it is exactly what I think it is and the traumas and all of that are all real and they're just a part of me. But there's something about running that thought experiment that allows me to recontextualize the purpose of you know, whether it's lamenting being a late bloomer or my big lament, which you talk about in the book, um you know, just not being as smart as I want to be. Like when I see people I can really process data quickly, oh, I get so jealous to this day that everybody has their thing. That's my thing. And uh but realizing that with if you look at it from just a slightly different angle, all of a sudden it's like, all right, I'm good. You process data very quickly. You think that because you're talking to me about subjects that I've already thought about. Oh. If you were talking to me about a subject that's totally new, uh it it certainly startles me every time how long it takes me to really like I would never be a debater on national television. I would just tell you that. So, that does not speak to my strength. skill. That I wish I had. Oh, really? Definitely. Yeah, I mean, I've been around. I've been at social gatherings for the B uh uh this one person I know who has these meetings with the smartest people around. And then these these whippersnappers who are 25, 26, and they're doing what you're doing. They're they've got all this information, all the snappy stuff, all these anecdotes. Damn, where does that come from? You know, I'm just not like that animal, right? I'm slow. I'm deliberate. I need to read about I need to process things. And I go slowness is a good thing. Right? They may be a whippersnapper, but they may be not being able to like go into depth about anything. They're on the surfaces. They're kind of regurgitating ideas and beliefs that are kind of on the surface that they're good at at fooling people, but they're not going into the depths. People who go into the depths are slow, are deliberate, take time to think, who are more thoughtful, you know, and are more patient. So, I wouldn't want to be that fast, you know, that high-speed processor that they have. Cuz I don't think that's where great things come from. It's interesting. That's a very good way to think about it. The harder way to think about it though is to say, "What if they really are just better than me?" And now facing that. So, the one that I always pose to people is I want you to imagine that someone you really respect doesn't respect you. That's hard. Now, if you can deal with that, like if I can stare nakedly at my own inadequacies, compare myself to somebody who just objectively is better at something that I want to be good at. So, not not even discounting, like sure there might be tradeoffs, but can I look nakedly at somebody who is truly better than me at something that I want to be great at and still find joy and fulfillment in my life. That to me is like that's the question. And so, I've tried to get myself to a place you talked earlier. I thought this is so brilliant. That your ego gets knocked down, but you have these mechanisms like a thermostat to reset your sense of self. That to me is the juice. You have to get good at that. And so, I used to really get in emotional twists over this stuff, but I have learned some very useful techniques to keep my emotional equilibrium. So, I can say that I'm envious of people that have that without diminishing my sense of self or, you know, losing time and energy to worrying about it anymore. I used to. I don't want to paint that this was easy. But, that to me is is the trick. Okay, but I still think your process of that they're so much better than me is a bit of an illusion or the reason for being envious. Okay, so you combat your envy, all right? But, I'm trying to tell you I don't think there is a reason for your envy in the first place. So, people they're not as brilliant as you think they are, right? People are good at faking things generally, right? And then maybe they're not as happy as they seem to be. Maybe their life you're just seeing them on television or with their snappy answers, but they're covering up everything else that's going on underneath, right? You're not seeing the full picture there, right? So, there's generally your envy is always kind of exaggerated because you're beginning from a place of insecurity. You're beginning from a place of inferiority where you're primed to feel envious of people like that. So, it's almost starting with you. You're almost projecting onto them their superior qualities. You know, and I find myself doing that. Yes, there are people who are better than me. I certainly know that. There's a writer I deeply admire who passed away recently. He's a much more of an academic and intellectual. His name is Roberto Calasso. He was an Italian writer, wrote a lot about ancient Greece. That guy is far more brilliant than I am. He's amazing what he wrote about. I'm in awe of it and I really mourned his passing. But I think it's important to feel for that, not envy, but just disinterested and admiration for people who are superior to you and to recognize it. I know there are plenty of writers and thinkers who are superior to me. And if they are genuinely that way, they're not bullshitting, all my hats off to them. We need people like that. It It It reaffirms my faith in humanity when I see someone that I think is vastly superior or great at what they do. I wish I could be like them. Okay, there are other humans on this world. It's not as bad as we think it is who are absolutely brilliant. And you know, I feel that way about great scientists as well. I'm kind of a a scientist manque in a way. So, um What's a manque? Oh, sorry. No, I love it. You're teaching me something new. It's a French word. Uh manque means a failed, you know, I wanted to be a wannabe. I'm a scientist wannabe sort of thing. I missed the boat. It literally means missed. Um So, you know, I deeply admire it. And um And if I detect creativity in people in their work, I'm in awe of it. You know, and there are people who can do creativity that I can't even begin to imagine. That's where I feel awe and genuine admiration. I never feel envy. Believe me, I feel envy all the time, but not for people who are incredibly creative. Mhm. Yeah, it's interesting. That's a great frame. I love that I like you, when I meet somebody that blows me away, I love it. Like I'm stoked. I'd be lying if I said that I didn't want it also for myself, but I'm stoked that it exists in the world. Um yeah, that is very exciting when you see what humans are capable of. And then when you take us as a collective, it's really interesting. So, I just I was interviewed by a guy named Brian Keating yesterday who wrote a book about um I think it's called Into the Impossible. Uh but he talks Oh, no, sorry. His book is about um beyond like getting rid of the Nobel Prize. I forget the exact title. Brian, forgive me. Um but he was talking about how the Nobel Prize has like caused some of the greatest scientists on planet Earth to commit suicide and like all this crazy [ __ ] And I was like, "What?" And he was like, "Oh, yeah, you you um get these guys are nominated for a Nobel Prize, but because they never win, it becomes so devastating that they can't live with it." And I'm like, "You're nominated for a Nobel Prize, something that like 0.00001% of humanity will ever, you know, achieve." Uh but he was like, yeah, it's like a really a devastating thing for people. And he he, of course, remembered all the people that had won. And I guess you have to sign this book when you win. And so in the book, you see like Albert Einstein and all these other people. And he said, you know, Feynman was like, well, I'm never going to be an Einstein. Einstein was like, I'm never going to be a Newton. Newton was like, I'm never going to be a Galileo or whatever. And it was like, you know, that all of these people were just like we look at them and like, oh my god, like that would be insane to hit that level. And each and every one of them had someone that they were like, well, but I'll never be that person. So fascinating. Well, that's that's that's human nature in a nutshell because I talk about that in in the laws of human nature in the chapter about envy. That our brains operate by comparison. That's how it operates on the most basic level. Two piece of information comes through our senses and our brain immediately processes it by comparing it to previous things that we that we've experienced. So the brain only operates by comparing. So when you create a social animal that has a brain that operates that way and is conscious, obviously they're going to be primed to continually compare themselves to other people, right? So Albert Einstein was comparing himself to Niels Bohr, to other people who he had insecurities as well. People who were into quantum mechanics and making these great discoveries. He felt that kind of little wound of envy as well. And it's been written about. So yeah, it's impossible to get over. The most powerful person in the world is going to feel that envy. And in fact, the higher up you go, the more insecure you might tend to become. You know, and you wonder, do I still have it? I'm getting older. A lot of scientists reach their prime when they're 30, 35. Now they're 45 and they're 50 and that Nobel Prize slipped through their hands, even though they're absolutely brilliant. So, they're going to be feeling envy. Envy is deeply, deeply human and nobody wants to talk about it. It's the most common human emotion and it's the least common uh topic that we ever discuss. Except in your books, where you go into it beautifully, which I love and that's part of the fun of your books is it's all the things that nobody wants to talk about and talked about well and articulately with stories and evidence. I mean, it's really fascinating and for anybody that wants to, you know, do what we were talking about earlier and develop that self-awareness, just hearing about it talked about so clearly is very helpful. Oh, well, thank you. Very helpful. Dude, I love your work. I It has been a joy to have you on the show as many times I have. I cannot wait for the next one. Yeah, this is what, my fourth time? Three or four, yeah. And hopefully there will be five, six. That's incredible. Yeah, I love having you on the show. I cannot wait for the Thank you for being here. Where can people follow along as you write the next one? Well, we have the the new book out, Daily Laws, which came out last week. Which is amazing. Okay. I did the audio version. I highly recommend it. You You make multiple appearances. I did, yeah. How do I sound? Fantastic. Okay. Now, secretly I wish you'd read the whole book. Was there a reason that you didn't? I was the other person. Great. But wonderful, but when I mean, I want Robert Greene. Well, um it's it's a bit stressful. Um I I love it. I would have done the whole book, but just to do the parts that I did took about 3 hours. And that's about 5% of the book. So, you know, you do the math, it would have taken like two solid days. No doubt. And um I'm not a trained actor. I'm going to do the Sublime book. That would be amazing. that cuz do enjoy it. It's kind of fun. Because I wrote it, I think I kind of give it an extra flavor. So, yeah. Um, so you can I have a new website. It's at robertgreeneofficial.com. I hope I have that right. I'm really Robert Greene official? Your socials are at robertgreeneofficial? Yes. And there you will find Instagram. I have TikTok, believe it or not. My man. Yeah. That's good. That's good. Sun generation generation needs to know. Okay. So, I have Tik If I need TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, uh Twitter, and then uh website where you can get links to all of my books and some of my ancient blog posts and things like interviews. It's on my YouTube channel. Incredible. Well, as always, thank you for being here. It was wonderful. I can't wait to read this enjoy my discussions with you. Thank you. Guys, trust me when I say you don't want to miss a single word that this man says, so be sure to check it out. And speaking of Speaking of things you don't want to miss, if you haven't already, subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.