Why Life Feels So Dull All The Time (and how to fix it) - Robert Greene - #1162

Robert Greene is an author and historian. Expect to learn why Robert chose to write about the ‘Sublime’, why you feel so miserable all of the time, and how to make life feel magical again, if we’re mistakenly trying to recover childhood through novelty, travel, drugs and stimulation, how you can access the sublime more readily, Why it’s so difficult for us to comprehend how people in the past genuinely experienced reality differently and much more… Sponsors: Get a free bottle of D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and more when you first subscribe at https://ag1.info/modernwisdom Get up to 20% off Timeline’s leading longevity and cellular health supplement at https://timeline.com/modernwisdom Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get 15% off your first order of my favourite Non-Alcoholic Brew at https://athleticbrewing.com/modernwisdom See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/deals⁠ Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠https://chatgpt.com Timestamps: (00:00) Why Write About the Sublime? (09:54) Did Our Ancestors Experience Life Differently? (13:40) What Is the Sublime? (20:11) The Mind-Blowing Probability of Human Life (27:40) Is Your Ego Blocking the Sublime? (32:00) What Is Your Daemon Trying to Tell You?( 40:24) The Arc of Transcendence (47:12) Is It Your Daemon or Just Impulsivity? (53:21) How to Know You’re on the Right Path (01:00:52) Don’t Let Fear Hold You Back (01:06:00) Why Understanding Scale Changes Everything (01:10:23) How History Changes Your Perspective (01:18:54) Does History Repeat Itself? (01:24:06) Has Science Made It Harder to Access the Sublime? (01:28:57) What We Get Wrong About Paganism (01:33:41) Are Supernatural Abilities Just Senses We Can’t Access Anymore?\ (01:44:16) How Your Environment Awakens Your Senses (02:01:39) How to Rediscover Your Sense of Wonder (02:08:59) The Biggest Lesson From The Law of the Sublime (02:19:31) Where to Find Robert Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/books⁠ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: ⁠https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom⁠ Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠ #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠ #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: ⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠ - Get In Touch: Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast⁠ Email: ⁠https://chriswillx.com/contact⁠ - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  People of the UK and Ireland, I'm coming to you live. Imagine that, me on stage in your city. Dublin is completely sold out, but everywhere else has got limited tickets left and you can get yours now at chriswilliamson.live. This is a custom-built live show. I absolutely adore it. I've spent over a year working on it. So if you're a fan of everything modern wisdom, come and see me on stage this October around the UK and Ireland. Chris Williamson.live. This has taken you 20 years to do this book?

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Wow, that would be a long time. I would be beat Robert Caro. No, it was seven years.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  Seven.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  So, so back in like 2000, I read a book on the sublime and I got really excited. I thought, this is, this is really interesting, but I knew there was no market for it. It was kind of a weird book. And I intended after the war book, this was going to be my next book was sublime. I was going to shock my readers with something totally unexpected. I hired a researcher, I started doing it and then 50 Cent trotted along and said, let's do a book together. And so I pushed sublime aside. I made the 10th chapter of the 50th 50 Cent book about the sublime, about how we nearly died from the gunshot wounds and, you know, his near death experience. And then I, from 50 Cent book, there was a chapter about mastery. So I turned that into the book mastery.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  And then, I don't know, human nature, anyway, I just got totally sidelined. And then, you know, I had my quote unquote, near death experience. And suddenly, you know, God was telling me, this is the time you need to write a book on the sublime, no more putting it off. Because it was a, it was a sublime experience to come that close to dying, you know?

• 1:43Speaker 00

  A lot of your work is focused on power, seduction, manipulation, human nature. But why get interested in writing about the sublime at all?

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Well, a lot of what happens with humans and what goes wrong with them is on a deep psychological level and level of consciousness. So the first three books are kind of the social game, the surface game that we all play, right? Cause we're a social animal and nobody really instructs us, even though we're a social animal, nobody even teaches us how to be social. And we make all these mistakes and we suffer. So that book came out of my experiences in Hollywood and all the suffering I had and all the 50 different jobs with the psychotic bosses that I had and all that. All right. But there's something deeper going on with human. It's something more than just the social game.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  It's how we experience life itself and how we relate to the world around us. And I'm just noticing a kind of deadness in people's experience, a kind of flatness. Like everything has been flattened out by social media in a way, you know? And people aren't experiencing anything on a deep level. There's nothing surprising anymore. You know, I, I look at my Instagram feeds, it's interesting and I see cat videos and they're great. And, and the first time I see it, it's wow, that cat's doing incredible things. And the second, the third time, it's all the same. It really, there's differences, don't get me wrong, but in the end, it's all programmed, it's all algorithms, it's all the same.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  And I think people are suffering, suffering deeply from it. I was taking a bike ride the other day in Griffith Park. I just had this epiphany that I'm living in a madhouse. Everyone's going insane and I'm, I'm going insane as well. And why is that? Why do people feel so cramped and so restless and turning to all these different things? And our politics and technology, everything is just going haywire. I feel like there's something deep, deeper, happening deep in our consciousness and a kind of disconnect from what it means to be alive. You know, when you come close to dying, you know what it really means to be alive.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  And so I don't know if I'm being too grandiose, but I really want to help people in their suffering and give them a roadmap for how you could possibly experience life on a deeper level. It has nothing to do with manipulation, it has nothing to do with power or seducing. It's on a deeper psychological level that I'm trying to, to reach you.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  It feels like you're talking about life having the color stripped away from it in some ways, that the, uh, the amplitude of the waveform has just been compressed down and everything's little wobbles. Nothing's that great and nothing's that deeply felt.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's a good way of putting it. I mean, the way I look at it is we all went through childhood, right? And we all had, it's a universal experience, seeing the world for the first time. Everybody went through that. Everybody had to go through learning language and discovering that you had an eye, that you were different from other people, that you had discovering who your parents were. And in your childhood experience, even if you had a bad parents, even if it was abusive childhood, your eyes were open, everything looked strange and weird and different and unfamiliar. Now that's shifting a little bit as adults are trying to introduce children into adulthood too early with technology.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  But it's still, even then, still you're looking at things for the first time and everything is exciting. And I read a book about the infant's brain and how, how different it is from our adult brain. Because the adult brain works by inhibiting, by filtering everything down so you don't get too much information, right? So you can survive, so you can walk through the streets and think about what you're doing tomorrow and plan and not get hit by a car and all these other things. It's inhibiting all the, all your sensory information. The baby, the two year old, the three year old has no inhibition. Everything is interesting. Everything is exciting. Okay?

• 6:06Speaker 01

  And then slowly you reach a point as you get older and older and older that, that, that disappears from your experience. Everything looks familiar. Things don't seem strange to you. Things don't seem unfamiliar. You don't look up at the night sky and go, wow, stars, wow, infinity, wow, how weird, how interesting, right? I remember I was a kid driving with my family on these road trips that were so boring. You know, I was going nuts with my sister next to me and I would look out the window and I would imagine all these things going on, like I was imagining Indians on the hills and what they were doing and animals and stuff. The, our imaginations were so vivid, everything was intense. And then you lose it.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Slowly you lose it and you're in your twenties and your thirties and you're not really aware of it, but you feel something missing in your life because you once knew this intensity that you have lost, right? That's how I, that's how I try to describe it.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I definitely resonate with the awe, wonder, sense of presence and excitement, sort of feeling like it's being stripped a little bit. And I, it seems to me like you're saying the fact that we have a to-do list and responsibilities and the necessity to plan for the future, that executive function strips some of the fundamental relating between our brain and reality that we need in order to be able to experience the sublime. Is that right? Like, why, why is it that we don't just naturally access this all the time? Why does our brain need to filter reality?

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Because, um, because there's too much information, right? And you have to, you have to plan and you have to, you have to have your life. And that we're all so busy and there are so many things coming at us that if we were paying attention to everything like the baby does, the child does, we wouldn't be able to function in our day-to-day life. So the brain has to filter for us. And Aldous Huxley, he calls it the small mind and the big mind. And our minds get smaller and smaller and smaller as we focus on the things that we need to survive. I know it myself. I'll be meditating and constantly the thoughts coming up about what am I going to do in an hour? What's going to happen?

• 8:27Speaker 01

  When I need to, I didn't do this phone call, I didn't return this email. My mind is just doing it naturally. I can't help it, right?

• 8:35Speaker 01

  The mind is trying to filter things down so you can survive, so you can get by, so you can schedule and plan your life, but it goes too far. It takes over our life. Everything becomes about survival. Everything becomes about getting by. And so you're missing. Now, I'm not saying this, the sublime has to be part of your continual experience, right? That you wouldn't be able to do your job. You wouldn't be able to get to work. It'd be too much. You have to have this filtering mechanism going on. But I look at people. I ride my bike up into Griffith Park, up into these hills that are pretty high up. There's no cars. It's incredibly beautiful, right? Peaceful. These people are like this. They're walking like this with their earphones. I'm like,

• 9:20Speaker 01

  god damn it, what the fuck's going on here? Right? You don't have to be living your life like that. When you're out in nature, you can put your phone away. You can start experiencing what life is. When you're interacting with people, you don't have to be like this. You can try and get into their world, what their thoughts are, what their life is like. When you're interacting with your pets, you can imagine like biology and evolution, and the strange consciousness that your dog has or your cat has. You can be experiencing these things all of the time, and it doesn't interrupt your ability to get by in this world.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  Hmm. Yeah, I, I think a lot of the time, people assume that the human brain is just built for survival and reproduction. Is it your suggestion that people in the past with fewer distractions and less need for executive function would have experienced life in a markedly different way?

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Well, it's not because we're aware of our death. We're aware of our mortality. And even if you don't think about it, it's in the back of your mind all the time. You're continually, it's there that you're going to die some point, and you see your parents die, you see friends die, et cetera. And so the sense of our mortality weighs on us very much. And why spend 20 years building up modern wisdom and doing all of this work and working like a dog when you're going to die? What's the point? It's meaningless, right? Why go through all that effort? Why not just go out and enjoy yourself, Chris? Right?

• 10:52Speaker 01

  So the sense of death poses a question on us. Why are we alive? What is the point of this? And our ancestors, thousands of years ago, were very much, much more aware of death than we are now. Like, death is hidden from us. We never see it. We don't see the animals that are killed for our food. People die in hospitals far away. We never, we can go through our entire life and never see somebody who dies, right? But our ancestors, it was there before them. Most children died in childbirth. Mothers died in childbirth constantly, right? It was all, the smell, the feel of death was all around.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  And so what, there must be some other reason, must be some point to our existence. There must be something greater. And so the need for knowing about our mortality is, what is greater than my individual existence? That I can attach myself to and not feel so small and helpless and vulnerable, that my death has no meaning. Okay, well, I could connect myself to the cosmos, to the stars, to spirits, to gods. And I have a story in this, in my book, where these people go into a cave, these cave explorers in France in the 1990s.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  And they come upon these cave paintings from the early Paleolithic period, 37,000 years ago. The most insanely beautiful paintings you've ever seen. You can watch a documentary by Werner Herzog about that, and you can see it for yourself. It's called The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. It's the Chauvet Cave in south of France. And there are all these rituals, these remnants of all these rituals that they're practicing, et cetera. So 37,000 years ago, they were trying to, this had nothing to do with survival. Being in these caves was dangerous. There were bears. It was dark. It, to them, represented like hell or like the underworld. There was no survival reason to go into caves

• 12:55Speaker 01

  and have these perform, have shamans perform these dances, these rituals, these cave paintings. They were searching for something else. And so humans naturally are searching for something else besides the day-to-day existence that they go through. If you try to repress it, it will come out in other ways. And I talk about that in the book. You'll go through the false sublime. You'll try to get it through drugs. You'll try to get it through action movies, through Marvel movies. You'll try to get it through online porn, through addictions, through all sorts of, through drugs, et cetera, you know, stimulants. If you're not searching for it in this real way, something happens to the human spirit, and you search for it in all these other

• 13:38Speaker 01

  counterproductive ways, if that makes any sense to you.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. What do you mean when you talk about the sublime? Come to define that for me.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Well, you're, you're not aware of it, but you live within these limits. Your mind is limited. So your culture that you live in, patterns, your thinking, and you're not aware of that. What we think of as reality in 21st century America is not what ancient Egyptians thought was reality. So your culture that you live in, ours is a technological culture. In 400 years, it'll be something else. Our culture conditions what we think of and what we take. Whoa, sorry. Behave yourself, Kane. All right. Our culture conditions what we take for being real, okay?

• 14:29Speaker 01

  And our metaphors now all have to do about technology and computers and AI, but that's going to change at some point. All right? So our minds are kind of limited by the cultural moment we live in, by the zeitgeist. As an individual, your brain is limited because, your reality is limited because the brain constructs reality for you, right? I have a story in the book of a woman who's suffering a stroke. She's a neuroscientist, and her stroke, it's a hemorrhagic stroke in the brain, different from mine. And the blood is shutting down her brain one by one by one, and she's experiencing what the world is like when the brain isn't filtering.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  She sees what the world looks like before the brain constructs visual information.

• 15:15Speaker 00

  What's that like?

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Well, she thought, at first, it was kind of a little bit, what's going on here? But then, as it's happening, it's like, this is insanely exciting, right? She's dying. It's literally killing her. She takes a shower. You don't realize, but the brain constructs the fact that you are separated from everything else so that you can walk through a space and negotiate. It's the somatosensory, somatosensory part of the cortex. It kind of helps you deal with space and separates you from other things. It's shutting down, and now the water and the showers are a part of her, and there's nothing separating her from anything else.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  All that internal chatter shuts down. You don't realize, but your brain is always chattering and hearing things. Her brain goes completely silent. What bliss to have your brain silent. The world is so interesting and weird. And then seeing things, not as visual things, but as little pixelated dots. At first, the sensations are exciting. It's like, I'm free from the restrictions of my brain, and now I'm part of everything I see. It's like a mystical experience. She nearly dies. She somehow saves herself because she can't figure out how to even make a phone call. She somehow gets, survives, she survives.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  But she's like an infant in a woman's body. Now, when she comes out, she has no language. She can't speak. She can't understand what anybody's saying. And slowly, it takes her eight years, and she recovers her cognitive abilities. And she's depressed. She's going, when I suffered my stroke, and it shut down all those filtering mechanisms, I felt like I was in heaven. I felt like it was the most blissful thing. And now I can think, I can write, I have cognitive powers, but my life is hell. And she wants to go back to where she was during her stroke. And so she wrote a book about that called My Stroke of Insight,

• 17:21Speaker 01

  about how she found her ways somehow logically as a scientist, back to those sensations she had during her stroke. So my point is, by a huge tangent.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Your culture is limiting your experience. Your brain is limiting your experience. Your brain is constructing what you think is real, but it is not real. It is like a red pill. You think it's real what all this is? This is not what a bat's reality is. It's not what a fly's reality. It's not what a dog's reality is. Ours is no different. We think it's the only reality, but it's not. The sublime are experiences that take you outside these limits, this take you outside this circle that we live in. You're experiencing what alien, like what animals are experiencing. You're experiencing what the cosmos, it actually is like to be connected to something universal, to have actually

• 18:16Speaker 01

  be part of the Big Bang, because your body was formed, the same components that came from the Big Bang. It's getting outside that circle and exposing yourself to things that the brain doesn't normally allow you to experience. And when you touch, so let's say that the sublime is like a doorway outside these cultural and brain limits. And when you look at that doorway and you touch and you look through it, it's like a shock. It's like a shudder. Wow, you know, things are really weird. Things are strange. Life is amazing and it changes you. Like my, my death experience changed me. There's no going back. Once I now had this blast of, of death feeling inside my body,

• 19:01Speaker 01

  there's no going back. When you experience that, mountain climbers talk about this all the time because mountain climbers are continually experiencing the sublime. And I have several stories and there are people like that.

• 19:12Speaker 00

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• 19:57Speaker 00

  and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentus.com/modernd wisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash modern wisdom. A modern wisdom at checkout. Is it a surprise that humans aren't just walking around all the time, perpetually bemused at the fact that we're alive and how unlikely it is?

• 20:20Speaker 01

  That was like one of the chapters I wrote in there. And I said, I, I break it down this way. If you look at your body and what your body does, you don't have to think about breathing. You don't have to think about your heartbeat. If you have a, a, a scratch or a wound, your body heals itself. It has these antibodies. It's insane what the body can do. And when you're threatened with a life, like something's about to kill you or something, or there's a tiger right in front of you, the body produces these hormones that save your life. If you're a long-distance runner, you get all this dopamine and all these other effects that help you keep running, running and running.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  The, what the body can do is absolutely incredible, right? Where does this come from? Where does the brain come from? Where does consciousness come from? It's part of a evolution that goes back millions and millions and millions of years. And if you start thinking about this story, about how you have, your brain is actually part of, has a reptilian part to it. There's a lizard brain inside you right now. That there's layers to your experience that go back millions and millions of years. You go back to how life almost never formed on planet Earth, right? And it almost formed with creatures that looked different, totally different from ourselves.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  The main body form of all animals and all creatures is a, a body and a head and limbs. Back in the Cambrian explosion, 600 million years ago, there were 10 different other body types that nearly took over. And they have pictures of them. They're the strangest.

• 22:03Speaker 00

  What like, huh? What like?

• 22:05Speaker 01

  You can look it up.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  Right.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Opabinia hallucin, I, I, I write them down in the book. If you look at them, you go, my God, they're like something out of a nightmare. Right? And it was just by an accident that our body type became the predominant one. And so all these little, little bottlenecks in evolution could have occurred where we would, nothing would be what we think, what, what looks like today. And then if the dinosaurs hadn't gone extinct because of an asteroid hitting our planet 68 million years ago, dinosaurs would still be walking the earth and we wouldn't be here. If you think about this, you think about how life originated. If you think about the Big Bang and everything that happened, you, you can't take anything for granted.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  You can't take anything for granted, right? It's just an amazing story.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  I

• 23:00Speaker 00

  once manually, this is before AI, when I gave a TEDx talk, I had to try and reverse engineer what the likelihood was of you being alive. Your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, all the way back for as long as you can. And that's before you even factor in how many sperm there are. And that if only it had been, without getting too graphic, if it was the next pump and not that pump, when your great-grandparents were having sex, it's a different kid.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. And different gender, different everything.

• 23:29Speaker 00

  If you've got performance anxiety as a guy and you're trying to get your missus pregnant, one of the things to not think about is that each different microsecond of how you finish will probably result in a different kid coming out. There's probably quite a reliable way, I think, of making you feel a little bit uncomfortable about, about what's going on. But yeah, it's, it's unbelievably tenuous. And I guess it makes sense in one way because you think, well, if we were looking around just at wonder and awe, like the, the lady who was having the stroke, like me and the shower, the water from the shower head were one. The separation that I have perceived is, is a, a mere figment of the way that my brain constructs the world, but we are the same. Can you have a job? Can you drive through traffic whilst feeling like that? Maybe not.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  Yes, you can. Yes, you can. I mean, she's a functioning neuroscientist who writes books, who gives TED Talks. She's world famous. She has a beautiful life. She lives on a houseboat. She just swims in the, in this lake. She gets lots of things done. She has speaking engagements. Why not?

• 24:31Speaker 00

  Is she still feeling that now? Has she managed to re-access?

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I talked to her for this book like four or five years ago. Unless it's changed in the last four or five years, which I doubt. Yes, you can. You can go on functioning. So you go through your life and, and you're functioning and you're getting things done and you're working and you're going through your schedule and you're, and you're progressing in your career, right? But something is missing. Something is missing from your experience. You could go through your entire life like that. And by the time, and then you're going to die and you reach the point of death when you're in your seventies or whatever. And it's a terrifying experience like, cause you've not prepared for it. You've not thought about anything. You've been sleepwalking through your entire life.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  You maybe have made a lot of money, but you're not really happy. Right? Because your world is so limited. So it's not that you're always expanding and always looking at the sky and always like that, but you have moments like that constantly. You know, every, you go out into, when you travel or you just look outside, taking a walk. Everybody takes a walk, right? Except for me, because I can't walk. But when you're walking, you can look around yourself and, and be in awe of things and think about it. So

• 25:51Speaker 01

  some of the book, there's a lot of science in this book because I don't want to ground it in just your own emotions and your own imagination. There's a lot of science in there. And so when you understand the science behind the formation of life on planet Earth and you understand how multicellular organisms occurred by accident some three, four billion years ago, right? And how these body form, how the Cambrian explosion created life as we know it with brains and senses and, and a nervous system. If you know the science about how dinosaurs on, the world looks different to you, right? But it's not like you're thinking about it all the time.

• 26:34Speaker 01

  It just means you don't take everything for granted. Right? Like I was talking to Ryan yesterday about this and how Marcus Aurelius has this quote about a glass of wine. And he's talking about, you know, 200 AD or whatever. And you drink your wine. You're not aware that there were these purple grapes that grew, that took this, their time to grow and then ferment. And then people pressed it, then they created it. And they did all this work. You don't see or feel the work that goes into everything. So you're walking around, you don't know why they're glass buildings. You don't know anything about the food you eat. You're just walking around in a trance. You're not connecting to anything material.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Your senses are dead, I'm afraid. And this is about opening your senses. It doesn't make life impossible. It makes life that much richer and you can still go on and do your work. I wrote a fucking book. That's, that's 450 pages after a stroke, after I can experience the sublime. I got plenty of things done. I get a lot of things done every day, right?

• 27:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. How does the ego work against us accessing the sublime?

• 27:46Speaker 01

  Well.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  So you're you're kind of trapped in your in yourself, in your ego, in your own thoughts, and your thoughts kind of revolve around, what are people thinking about me? Why did my parents do this to me? Why am I so angry? You feel envy, you feel resentment, you have all these grievances, you feel excitement, you have hope, and all these other things going on. But you're inside your mind all of the time, right? You're inside your own world, and you're not connecting to anything else outside of it. And so sometimes, you know, look, I think you can't deny the fact that a lot of people are very miserable right now and unhappy.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  One out of six Americans is on some kind of drug to deal with depression, right? Pretty high number. And a lot of people are experiencing that are not taking these drugs, right? Something is missing in their life. And if you're, so what do you do? Well, maybe I need to have therapy, right? Maybe I go talk to a therapist about, or I talk to my spouse about my problems. And as you talk and talk and talk, you get further and further into yourself, you become the center of everything. That's all you think about. My childhood, who bothered me? Who oppressed me? Why didn't I get what I want? Why isn't the world more fair? You're locked inside your ego, and it's like a prison.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  And the sublime is taking you outside of your ego, taking you outside of that. And so I have a story in the book of a man, a therapist in Buenos Aires, and he has a patient named Miguel. And Miguel has a wonderful life. He's got a great job, he makes a lot of money, he's got a beautiful house, he's got a gorgeous wife, he's got three kids, he has everything that you could want in life. But something is missing, and he's talking to the therapist. They talk and they talk and they talk. And finally, the therapist has had enough of this. We're not getting anywhere. Here's what I'm gonna do. We're gonna go climb the highest mountain in the Southern Hemisphere, Mount Aconcagua

• 29:54Speaker 01

  in Argentina, in the Andes, right? The highest mountain in the Southern Hemisphere. We're gonna train for six weeks to climb it, because it's a very arduous climb. And then we're gonna do it. And I'm not gonna tell you why, just no more talking therapy, just shut the fuck up, we're just gonna train, and we're gonna climb this mountain, right? They train, they start climbing the mountain, and the, you know, the sight of the stars as you're climbing higher and higher, it's a high desert mountain, it's spectacularly beautiful, and the snow and everything, it's just an insane experience. It's a cosmic experience. They don't get to the top, because there's storms and it gets very dangerous, they finally retreat.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  But the man is transformed by this experience, more than all of the talking, because he was taken outside of himself, and he was exposed to something much greater. So he got out of his small, little ego world with his wife and his problems, why he's miserable, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. How can you be miserable when you're seeing what the world that we live in, right? And so your ego is the actual impediment to experiencing the sublime. And this is a way of kind of getting outside of that. In Zen Buddhism, they talk about ego attrition. That means thinning the ego. And as the ego, because it has a thickness to it.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  And as you get older, that your ego gets thicker and thicker and thicker and thicker. And you have no control over that, because you become more self-absorbed. Through Zen, through meditation, you're getting that ego thinner and thinner and thinner and thinner, to the point where it disappears, which most people don't ever experience, only a few Zen masters experience. But as it gets thinner, the world feels and looks different to you, right? Ego attrition. And so you can thin your ego at any age, and you can get, and it opens your mind up to something else than all of your, all of your petty concerns, and they are petty in the end.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  What is the role of the daemon? Because that, at least as far as I can see, is also residing inside of you to a degree, but doesn't seem to be working against you, connecting with the world or yourself, seems to be working toward it.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Well, what I've tried to do is, the daemon is an ancient concept, but it's in almost all ancient cultures, and the idea is you have a second self inside of you. And it's an interesting thought. So when I read about that, I'm going, a second self? What is that second self, right? The first self is the one you take for being who you are. It's your social self. It's what people have told you who you are. I'm shy, I'm an introvert, I'm an extrovert, I'm dramatic, I'm arrogant, I'm aggressive, you know? People define who you are as you get older, right? Your parents defined who you are, your teachers defined who you are.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  You no longer, you no longer are connected to who you actually are, you become a reflection of this social world that you live in. And that's the self that you take for being who you are, but it's not, it's false, it's fake, it's a creation, it's a social creation, right? But at the same time, there's something very real inside of you. You have your heartbeat, you have your particular moods, you have a temperament that's different from anybody else, and you can't verbalize it. Why am I attracted to this food? Why does this kind of woman always excite me and this other one doesn't? Why do I love this certain kind of books? What, these weird things that excite me, that I can't put into words, have nothing

• 33:44Speaker 01

  to do with the social realm, right? There's something deep, deep, deep inside of you. And in the ancient world, they called that a daemon or a second self. Ancient cultures had other words for it, the ancient Egyptians had a different word for ka. I talk about another African culture that had a different word for it, sunsum. But the idea is that when you're born, there's, there's something about you that's unique, that's different from anybody else. It's what also is called your soul. And the daemon is like a voice inside of you that is who you really are. And when you start doing things in life that have nothing to do with what you love or what

• 34:25Speaker 01

  you like, the daemon speaks to you and says, that's not, you're going in the wrong direction, something is bad, you need to follow who you really are. And if you listen to that voice, like Socrates did, or like a lot of artists do, or people who are truly creative, they hear that voice even when they're in their twenties, thirties, and forties, I hear it all the time. Something isn't right, something doesn't fit, it doesn't fit my physiology, it's not who I am. When you connect to that voice, when you connect to that daemon, wow, it's very powerful, right? And it is sublime, because it's connecting you to who you were at the moment of your birth. At the moment of your birth, you were something different about you, there was a unique, you

• 35:09Speaker 01

  were born, which is a strange thing to be born into, thrown into this world, it's connecting you to the very first days of your life, when the gods put a daemon inside of you. Okay, I know, that's not the words we want to hear right now, but that's how the legend is, right? And so what's sublime about that is that you have another self to you that is truly more authentic than the social self, and to explore it and to go into it is a very exciting and liberating feeling, you know? It's discovering something very primal about yourself that has nothing to do with what other people think about you.

• 35:49Speaker 00

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• 36:31Speaker 00

  Right now, you can get up to $350 off the Pod 6 by going to the link in the description below, or heading to eightsleep.com/ModernWisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T, sleep.com/ModernWisdom, a Modern Wisdom at checkout. Have you ever read His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman?

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Who, what?

• 36:49Speaker 00

  Philip Pullman, it's a kid's book series called His Dark Materials. It had The Subtle Knife in it, the golden compass. So it's, it must be 30 years old, the first book must be at least 30 years old now, because I was listening to it when I was 11, 12, 13, and it'd been around for a while. I remember I used to go to the library in Norton, in the northeast of England, with my mom, and I would get the story tapes. And this is a big book, so I'd be coming back with a stack of tapes, like that, borrowing them from the library for two weeks, and we'd have to take them back before, else we'd have to pay a fine of one pound or something. And it's one of my favorite book series, and I actually read it, listened to it, I guess, in the wrong order. So I listened to The Subtle Knife first, which is the second book, and it kind of makes

• 37:34Speaker 00

  sense, the third one makes no sense at all, so you have to listen and read the first two. But anyway, in this world...

• 37:41Speaker 00

  The children are born with daemons and the daemons take the form of-

• 37:46Speaker 01

  Does he use that word?

• 37:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Fantastic. I have to look this up.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  It's wonderful and they take the form of an animal, like little animals. It represents animals that are around. And when the kids are still children, the animals can change. They can cycle through, they can be a bird and fly ahead and go and do stuff, or they can come back and be a dog and pet them, or they can be a wolf and scare people.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 38:08Speaker 00

  But when children hit puberty, the daemon settles into a final form and it never changes again for the rest of life. And there's these themes of sort of Adam and Eve, there's a male and female protagonist and they're both quite young and they fall in love. And as they fall in love, they hit puberty. And as they do that, all of this stuff happens in the universe. And these two daemons, these senses of self that were malleable, that were open, they're concretized and they're locked in for the remainder of their lives. And this is what happens across, across the universe. And it's so many of the themes from that series by Pullman and what you're talking about here.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  There's, you're young, you're innocent, everything is open, there's a kind of malleability, there's a flow that you have. And then over time, this rigidity comes in and things begin to look a little bit more sort of, not stale, but rigid and structured and procedural in a way. And, and why is that the case? And you have to sort of listen to this voice and a lot of the time, the animal sits on the shoulder of the person and it's sort of whispering, whispering in their ear, telling them what it is that they think they should do. It's cool.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  I'm totally, I'm totally enchanted by this. This is fantastic.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  Beautiful, beautiful series.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  But it's also sounds kind of dark and depressing in a way because you're giving children this idea that they're gonna, that this wonderful world is gonna end and it's gonna be concretized, it's gonna become this rigid, single form.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, to some degree. I think capacities are unlocked when that happens though. And a lot of the children want, they're excited to see what form their animal will take. And I think this is maybe to do with, where are your values going to come from? Like, who are you going to be? Cause when you're a kid, like, who are you? You're kind of a fireman one day and a postman the next day, an astronaut the day after that. You're not a person yet. So yes, you have all of the advantages of being open and freely formed and flowing through the world. My God, look, I'm imagining the Indians playing in the trees over the far side. But also like, you're not a thing yet. You don't really have that. What do you stand for? Like, ask a kid what their core values are. Like, what do you mean? But as an adult, you're all right, there's going to be a degree of structure that I have. And in some ways, that gives me something to push off against when the world starts to push into me.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 40:19Speaker 00

  So I think this, I can see how it would be both sort of beauty and, and challenge. I guess, thinking about the daemon, Plato brought this up.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  And then he was killed.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  Carl Jung-

• 40:30Speaker 01

  No, no, Socrates.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  Socrates, sorry. Plato brought this up, but he was pushed back against at least, I think, for, for using that as an analogy. Carl Jung brought it up.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:39Speaker 00

  And then he went insane a little bit.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  Carl Jung touched the edges of sanity a couple of times, would you not say?

• 40:48Speaker 01

  He had mystical experiences when he was in his like thirties and then he had a near death experience, which I write about in his forties. And then he went, you know, if you consider going into, into ancient cultures and his whole world that he creates in his books.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  Symbolism.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Sanity, maybe, but he was a very high functioning psychoanalyst.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  I would, that's, that's fair.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  My, my point being here, I think that a lot of people who go into the world of the daemon, it seems to be an arc. It seems to be quite a common arc for someone that is specifically interested in investigating human nature, psychology, history, philosophy, that world. Why is that going from ignorance to knowledge to something deeper, something more transcendent? Is that, do you think, a typical arc that a lot of thinkers go through?

• 41:42Speaker 01

  Well, I use for one of the archetypes of the daemon, the story of Friedrich Nietzsche. And if anybody went insane, he went insane. So that fits what you were saying more than Carl Jung.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  And the story of Nietzsche was, he, he's the son of a pastor who's extremely religious, who plays the organ in church. And as a boy, Nietzsche is extremely religious. He loves his father. He's gonna follow in his father's footstep. And his father dies of some neurological disorder and he, his father kind of goes insane. And then his brother, who's very young, dies of the same disease. He's got some kind of neurological mishap going in, on in his family. And it's gonna hit him at some point. So he's gonna study really hard. He's gonna be a Greek scholar. He's gonna become a biblical scholar. He's gonna become a pastor. He plays the piano. He'll play in the church organ. But he's restless and something isn't right. And the little daemon is speaking inside of his ear and saying,

• 42:39Speaker 01

  there's something else to you. And he's attracted to poets who kind of went insane. And, and, and his teachers say, don't listen, don't look at that poet, that's gonna infect you. And then he becomes a professor at the university. He's established his mother and his sister think he's on to a great career. He's got that kind of rigid, the thing that you talked about, the animal has transformed to something rigid. He's a professor now. He becomes friends with the most famous composer at the time, Richard Wagner. And everything is, looks great, you know? But then that little daemon, that little animal in him is saying, that's not you, that's not you, Friedrich, that's not you. And he quits his job and he quits the composer and he turns against everything and he just wanders through Italy.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  And he's trying to find out who he is and he discovers that weather has an important part of him. So the weather-

• 43:33Speaker 00

  The climate.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Climate. This is like one of the most interesting things about this man. So Germany has this climate, this coldness, this dams, the sun doesn't shine and it's made him who he is. So he goes to Italy and he sees this bright, intense light and these weird kind of storms. And he realizes, that's who I am. I'm, this is the climate that suits me. This is the geography that suits me. I become like an Italian and I change myself. And books explode out of him. He's suddenly who he, who he was meant to be. The, some of the greatest, most inspired books anyone has ever read. I know, I read him when I was 18 and it changed my life. He's the most, probably the writer that had the biggest influence on me.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  And then he went mad. He literally broke, went down one day as he's walking in Italy and he sees somebody beating a horse. And he grabs the horse and he feels so horrible. He identifies with the horse and then he collapses. And he's insane for 10, last 10 years of his life, he's a madman, basically. So the daemon taken too far can be a little bit dangerous like that, you know? He went a little bit too far. But it's not just thinkers and philosophers and weirdos. I have a story in there about an actress who had a daemon, Ingrid Bergman, the famous Swedish actress.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  And how she knew from an early child that she was, she loved to act, she loved to perform. And people kept trying to change her, people kept trying to push her off that course. And she just was so strong and she just pushed back and she became who she was. And finally, she, she gets this reputation as being this perfect woman, who's got a great husband, who's beautiful. And she just, she leaves it all to go have an affair with an Italian director. And now she's like this whore and everybody hates her and she's vilified.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  But it's who she actually is. She actually never was this kind of perfect creature. So it's not just philosophers, it can affect anybody. It's like something buried deep within you. And your question is, does it lead to something like transcendent? I believe it does. Because why are you unique? Why was it, why were you drawn to those stories when you were four? How old were you when you were reading them?

• 46:04Speaker 00

  Thirteen.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Oh, thirteen, you're older.

• 46:06Speaker 00

  Yep, yep.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Why were you so drawn to those stories? What is it about you that makes you like that? I mean, other children may be interested in it, but you were just drawn to it in some very powerful way. Maybe you, you intuited back then that you were gonna become something like who you are now. Somebody very unique with your own podcast, your own style. You know, you, I think, I don't remember what you were doing before you did this.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  Running nightclubs.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  Running nightclubs, right? You weren't you. That was, that isn't who you are. That isn't that animal that was on your shoulder that was changing shapes. It's like this, right? And now you get to be yourself, right? Who is that self?

• 46:48Speaker 01

  You were born and something different about you, your neurology, the way your brain is wired, how your body functions is different. Why is it different? What's the point? What's the purpose? The purpose was for you to be creating this podcast, Modern Wisdom, and teaching people and getting them outside of their narrow little worlds. Right? So it does have a transcendent function in that it connects you with something greater than yourself.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  How does someone recognize the difference between the daemon speaking their truth forward, the logos being projected and impulsivity, short-termism, their more base instincts, their coping mechanisms, the paths of least resistance, their fears masquerading as wisdom, but actually just being a compensation coming up inside of them? I can imagine in one world, a person could convince themselves that this is actually their inner truth, but is much closer to something like impulsivity.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, people will ask, well, Hitler, Hitler had a daemon, right? But I make the point in there that in the Greek ancient myth, the daemon was planted inside of you by Eros, the god of love. And so if what you use the daemon for has that element of love and excitement and something personal, then you have your soul, then you realize your daemon. But if that is not connected to anything having to do with love, the daemon turns into the demonic, the demonic. People who listen to that voice and they acquire power and they hurt people and they manipulate

• 48:30Speaker 01

  and they destroy and they're evil, they are truly demonic because their daemon is not connected to something kind of playful and spiritual and transcendent. But to answer your question,

• 48:45Speaker 01

  you hear all these voices in your head, right?

• 48:50Speaker 01

  We don't call them voices because we just think of it's just our minds are talking to us or they're saying things to us, right? You gonna smoke a pipe?

• 48:59Speaker 00

  It's an e-pipe. It's when I feel like I'm pontificating and getting really close to something that's a great, highfaluting idea, I like to sit here and do this.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Please. So my father smoked, oh, does it actually have something in it?

• 49:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  It's vaping?

• 49:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  My father smoked a pipe and it has very deep memories for me.

• 49:20Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Like the smell of tobacco and the look of a pipe. I just.

• 49:25Speaker 00

  I think this one is what peach and mango or something. It may be a slightly different smell to the one that your father was smoking. Bear and peach.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  He was doing hardcore tobacco. It's what I did. It's ended up killing him, but.

• 49:36Speaker 00

  What a shame. Well, I'm sure this will kill me too.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  No, it won't. No. Anyway, so you're hearing, you're hearing things about you. This is what I want. This is what I love, but it's not you. It's the voices of the culture. It's the voices of friends. It's the voices of peers. And so I talk in there how you can differentiate those kind of ancillary voices that are constantly playing in your mind of what you think you like, the movies you want to go see, the clothes you want to wear, the women or men you want to date, on and on and on. It's not who you are. It's a reflection of what other people, other people's tastes. But your voice has a different feel to it, right? It's a different kind of excitement, right?

• 50:19Speaker 01

  So the things that you don't like, there's things that you hate, but you do anyway. Right? That's what life is about. A lot of social life is about, right? You have to do things that you don't really want to do, but you do them anyway. When you hear that daemon, it tells you, fuck all that shit. I just want to be myself. I don't want to go to that party. I don't want to have to kowtow to this person. I don't want to have to do this horrible job as a, as a club, whatever you were doing, right? It's an angry voice. It's a rebellious voice. It's that childhood impudence. It's an impudent voice saying, fuck all that. Sorry, I don't know if I'm, I don't want, it's not for me, it's not who I am. That's real.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  That is definitely real. I mean, it could, there's, I'm sure, yes, you could say other people are telling you, you need to rebel and do this, that and the other. But it has a different feel to it when other people, when it's the voice of other people. As opposed to you, it's like waking up. It's like becoming who you were meant to become, right? And so when you feel an excitement about something that you cannot explain, like, why am I, Robert Greene, so excited by ancient cultures? Why am I so, if I read a story about Neanderthals, wow, wow. Neanderthals are related to us. They're very similar to us, the same brain.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  But they were evolving a different kind of language, a different kind of culture. They had a different relationship to death. They had different rituals and they, it's almost by accident that Homo sapiens survived and Neanderthals didn't because we nearly went extinct. What would the world be like if, so anyway, reading about Neanderthals, I can't explain why it gets me so excited about our ancient, ancient ancestors. When I happens, I know that that is me. That's not somebody telling me to be interested in that because I've been interested since I was eight years old, five years old, you know, kind of thing.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  In other news, have you ever noticed how some websites make it ridiculously easy to buy while some feel infinitely harder? Back in my day, I had to walk 10 miles to the local store. Aren't you younger than me? Yeah, but my dad got a DUI. Anyway, the reality is most businesses just get the website wrong. And if your setup is messy, you lose a ton of sales, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Shopify. They power 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including brands like Jimm Shark, Skims, ALO and Neutonic. Because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class. Their checkout's 36% better on average compared to other platforms. And with Shop Pay, it can boost conversions by 50%.

• 53:07Speaker 00

  So upgrade your business and get the exact same checkout that we use at Neutonic with Shopify. You can sign up for a free trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to Shopify.com/ModernWisdom. That's Shopify.com/ModernWisdom. I spoke to David Dida, Way of the Superior Man author. So illustrious, longtime author. And I did his first podcast interview in over a decade, I think, a few months ago. And I did a bit of research and I didn't know much about him before I sat down with him. And he just had this crazy, as far as I can see, illogical career, very illustrious, but totally illogical.

• 53:49Speaker 00

  He starts off in the eighties doing AI and computer science, writes a ton of papers.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  What's his name again?

• 53:57Speaker 00

  David Dida, writes a ton of papers.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Dida?

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Dida, D E I D A.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 54:04Speaker 00

  Dida. Way of the Superior Man is a very, very, very popular book from about 30 years ago, 20 years ago. Anyway, he starts off computer science, AI, and then he decides he is going to leave that and he pivots into writing for a while. Then he goes into Tantra and reworking emotions through sex.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:32Speaker 00

  Then he moves into yoga for a long time. Then he gets into masculinity and men. Then he goes back into doing hard, just hardcore, a decade of hardcore mathematics, like pure mathematics. Then he gets back into some AI stuff. And I asked him on the episode, this to me just feels like a kind of quite unwieldy, meandering trajectory. Can you explain to me how you tie all of these threads together? And he said, I have a very strong sense when something is no longer for me.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  And so, okay, well, that's interesting. But a lot of people have that. And, and it seems like you have just continually pulled the ejector seat button and fired yourself out the top of whatever aircraft you're in over and over again, without fear that, well, I'm near the top of my industry in this one domain. Maybe if I leave it behind, I'm not going to be as good in the next one. I'm not going to be as respected. I'm going to have to make a decision I regret in future.

• 55:28Speaker 00

  Yes, it's interesting that you've followed your own instinct and you've been interested in stuff. But what's more interesting to me is the decisiveness and the conviction that you've done about it. Like, that's what's rare, right? Not the meandering interests. Curious people are curious about lots of things. And he said something like, when I'm out of alignment, the pain of no longer following what I know that I should be doing is so much greater than the fear of anything else.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:56Speaker 00

  And that just stuck with me.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  That's beautiful.

• 55:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It really, really stuck with me that he is. I said, it sounds like bravery, but the way that he frames it from the inside is a kind of fragility. His fragility is against being out of alignment with himself.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 56:12Speaker 00

  It's like, it is so painful, like nails on a chalkboard, a thousand decibels, that I can't escape from. And if I'm in a situation that I don't feel aligned with, I can. Some people may be able to spit and sawdust and grip their way through this thing and just keep going. And for him, he says, I can last about five days and then I just need to change and do something else.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I believe that a lot of people would be going through something similar, but they're afraid. They're afraid that if they make such a radical shift, they'll look insane to people. They won't be able to make a living. You know, money becomes the primary interest. And I'm not as interesting as this gentleman, because it sounds fantastic. I'd love to meet him.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  I'll send you the episode.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  Okay, no, but I'd also like to meet him. Where's he live?

• 57:00Speaker 00

  He's in Florida. He's very, very reclusive. Interestingly enough, we had to do the episode. He wouldn't turn his video on. He wanted to just remain. He's like, Chris, I'm gonna do this. It's the first episode I've done in 10 years, but you're only gonna get my voice. So we had to AI some beautiful landscape that was sort of an imaginary hymn. And we put words over the top and stuff for a full hour long episode. And people loved it. We still did really, really. People, oh my God, I can't believe I get to hear David Data. Anyway, he's a kind of like a mysterious guy, which adds more to the kind of, oh, what a non-fungible human. Yeah, very much so, yeah.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not as interesting as that, but I feel that myself. So I wrote The Forty Eight Laws of Power when I was 39, essentially. And I'd been pretty much a loser up until then. Parents about to give up on me, their son, who can't seem to hold a job for more than a few months. I finally write this book. I get more money than I've ever seen in my entire life, right? And things are looking up pretty good. And so now it's time to like, write a second book. And the pressure on me is to kind of just kind of create another version of The Forty Eight Laws of Power.

• 58:16Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  And because it is, it's doing very well. And people, so I decide, I mean, seduction is kind of related to it, but it's not what my publishers wanted. It's not what my partner wanted me to do. But it felt like something I, it felt, it connected to my soul. It connected to something deep in me because seduction has been a subject that's fascinated me since my twenties, when I was a rake and I read a lot of books about literature of seduction and I met great seducers. So I had to write this book because it connected to me. All of my books have had that evolution where I don't repeat what was in the last book.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  I have to feel something very new, something very different, something very fresh. And when I don't, I have that painful feeling like, this doesn't fit me. This isn't who I am. And I remember I got to do that book with 50 Cent, which was, you know, an unusual opportunity, to say the least.

• 59:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  And the first version of the book was cancelled because it wasn't good. And it was also late, but I knew it wasn't good because the book was really about 50 Cent. It wasn't about me. It wasn't my taste, my interests, my desires. And I knew when I was writing it, I was uncomfortable with it. It was all about business and 50 negotiating this, that and the other and what his, what his empire was like. And it didn't feel comfortable. I was, I was feeling that pain that he's discussing there. And then finally, the book was cancelled and I realized it was cancelled because I wasn't in it. It wasn't something soulful for me. It didn't mean anything to me.

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  And so we pivoted and the book that became more my book, you know, a lot of 50 in it, but there was much more of me being put into it. My way of thinking, my ideas, what excites me. And then the book took off. So every book has to feel like I'm deeply, deeply engaged. Like, it has to be something new. And this, this new book, which is probably gonna shock people because they're used to me doing what, as you said, books on manipulation and, and human psychology. I had to do it, even if it's, even if it's an abysmal failure. Because my day mom was saying, this is what you have to do. So I understand that sense of discomfort and pain. It doesn't fit me. It's not right.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  It's nails on a chalkboard. I can't do it. I just can't do it.

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  What's your advice to people that wish they had more bravery when it comes to committing what they feel they know is true inside?

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  Well, I, I talked a lot about that in the book Mastery. So what I tell people is, you could go on through your twenties and your thirties following a career path that makes you money, that gets you a family, gives you stability, but isn't quite you. And then you get into your forties and that sense of discomfort kind of grows. And maybe you get a little disengaged from your work. And maybe you go have an affair with your secretary and some kind of drama happens. Maybe you start taking this kind of drug or something like that, or you gain a lot of weight. Then you're in your fifties and you're kind of locked into this and Jesus Christ, where am I going?

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Well, it's too late to change. I'm just gonna settle into it. You're on, then you're like, it's too late, right? It's very, very painful, very, very painful to kind of wake up and realize that you headed in the wrong direction in life. And so what I tell people is, particularly if you're in your twenties, you don't want that to happen to you. And so you think that money and stability is the only thing that matters, but it's not. You have to have a sense of adventure. You have to have a sense of exploring. You have to have some courage in this world to pursue something that suits you and isn't necessarily gonna make you as big an income as this other career path, you know?

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  And so you have to realize that you're gonna pay a price for violating this law, for violating this need, this law of who you actually are. You're gonna pay a price and that is, you're gonna disengage from your work. You're gonna start having habits and addictions and things because your body will, your body tells you the truth. You know, I know physically I feel uncomfortable and this man David probably would tell you the same thing. It's a physical sensation. Your body is gonna rebel at some point. You're gonna get illnesses. You're gonna become diabetic. You're gonna start gaining weight. You've disconnected from the reality of who you actually are. You will pay a price.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  I try and hit people in the brain with that and say, look, you, you don't want that fate. I was talking, this is slightly related. I was talking to a man who's a basketball coach of a G League team, which is the league before you get into the NBA, very successful. And he was now offered the head coaching job of this NBA team because, and he's in his thirties. And he, and he was expressing that fear of, I have this really comfortable job and I made all these great relationships. And now I'm gonna enter this world where people are, everyone's gonna see me, everyone's gonna judge me. I can easily fail.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  You know, my reputation will be ruined and I won't have this chance to go back to where I was. And I told him, take the job, don't look back. You're gonna learn so much more. Being young and excited will be an advantage for you over all these other kind of retread coaches in the NBA. It's gonna be the best thing you have, but don't be afraid. Your fear is holding you back. Just go for it. He, he did and, and his team won the NBA championship.

• 1:04:23Speaker 00

  No way.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, not last year, but the year before.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  It took him like five years to get there. Don't get me wrong. It wasn't like the next first season, they won championship. But your fear is holding you back and your fear is making it seem like you're being reasonable. But in fact, you're just afraid and you're just listening to the voices and you're just listening to your spouse or whomever who's trying to tell you to take the safe route. My wife can tell you this story. Years ago in the nineties, my mother, I had, because I told you I was a loser. I had, I was jumping, I couldn't hold a job for more than five months. I finally had a job in television in Hollywood, right? Looked like stability finally landed on Robert's shoulders. And I couldn't stand it. I hated it.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  It was like the most miserable period of my life. And I was gonna quit. And my mother tried to convince my then girlfriend to tell Robert, he's gotta keep this job. I mean, what's, he's crazy. What's he doing? And I, you know, I had to ignore that completely and incur their disappointment and everything else. And just, I quit because I couldn't stand it, you know? But I could have listened to my mother. I could have listened to voices that told me, you're 35 years old. Time to settle down, Robert. Time to get into a job, trying to get into that niche in Hollywood, become a television writer. And you make a good income and yeah, I'll make a good income, but I'll kill myself in 10 years.

• 1:06:01Speaker 00

  All right, getting back to the

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Sublime.

• 1:06:03Speaker 00

  Sublime.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  Please.

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  What's the importance of scale? How can vastness contribute to the way that we process life?

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  Well, uh, the idea of scale is, is very important to me because, you know, animals, God bless them, they have their, their interesting, strange consciousness, but they're not aware of anything outside of their immediate environment. They don't know what's happening outside what they can see or smell, right? They're not aware of here, I'm in America and what's going on in China. Okay. No animal has that. We have consciousness and we're aware of things on the other side of the planet, on the, what's going on in the sky, with our sun and, and beyond that, right? And so when you open your eyes to that and you literally take it in,

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  the first thought is, my God, am I insignificant? I am so small, right? The universe is 13.8 billion years. I live maybe, if I'm lucky, 80 years. You try and, and divide 13.8 billion by 80 and you go, Jesus Christ. My life is like nothing. It's like a, a life of a fly. It's like passes by enough time. You think of the distances and how immense things are. You are so small. You also, there are 8 billion people on earth. You're one of 8 billion people. You're, you're, you're meaningless. You're so small. Okay?

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  That sense of scale and being aware of how small you are and how infinitesma, how you're like just a piece of dust, has two effects on you. Number one, it's kind of, oh my God, I feel horrible. On the other hand, that's insane that I am aware of this vastness, that I am aware of time, that I am part of this incredible drama, right? That I can be aware of endless time. I can be aware of a limitless universe kind of thing. Children have that sensation. It's kind of dizzying to feel that, to be aware of it, to be aware of the vastness of things. It puts everything in perspective.

• 1:08:23Speaker 01

  It makes you realize that the little bitty concerns that you have in the moment aren't really that important in the long scheme of things. In fact, they're incredibly unimportant.

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  When you're a child, that smallness is very apparent because you literally are small. You literally are weak and vulnerable. And because of that, you're curious, you want to know. Everything seems interesting and exciting and weird. And you look up at the night sky and it like, it has that sense of terror and excitement, which is the sublime in essence, a mix of these two powerful emotions. And that's what gives you the intensity of your experience, that sense of scale of, of how small you are. But then you get older and your ego takes over and you, you become the center of the universe instead of you being this tiny little insignificant ant, right?

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  And everything revolves around you and your desires and your needs and, and all that. You don't, you don't want to feel vulnerable. You don't want to feel that smallness, that weakness, that helplessness. But the price you pay for reversing the true scale of things is that life loses that intensity. It loses that little extra thing that happens when you're aware of how short your life is, when you're aware of, of how immense things are. And you pay a price and things get kind of flat, right? Because everything revolves around you and you go out, take a hike on a mountain and you're just thinking about your own problems and your own world. And you're not seeing things. You're not seeing the vastness of the landscape around you.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  And so having a sense of scale of, of what's truly matters, of how truly small and insignificant you are, to me is a very, very important part of becoming conscious of being a human being. And people lose that as they get older. And you want to return to that sense of scale. Does that make any sense?

• 1:10:23Speaker 00

  It does indeed. I imagine as well, you, you mentioned your penchant for history, obsession with history. All of your books have got huge historical content, maybe not usually as far back as Neanderthals, but still.

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  I imagine that reading history can give us greater perspective, access to the sublime as well.

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, um, so when you're of, history gives you several things. First of all, you think everything is new and everything is different and exciting, like AI and social media. Yeah, they didn't have AI. I, I grant you that. So that's new. But we've always had kind of versions of social media. People have always been gossiping about other people. People have always been sharing information. It's just now on a much wider level, but nothing is ever new. History runs in these cycles and you see them over and over and over again. I just read an article in the newspaper this morning about how there's this trend in Spain, where all the young people in their early twenties are rebelling against the socialist government.

• 1:11:29Speaker 01

  And they're wanting to become conservative and go back to the traditional Spain that they knew. And they all dress like preppies. They wear khaki pants and white shirts and starched shirts and very kind of English style of like English nobility kind of thing. And loafers, loafers with little, you know,

• 1:11:48Speaker 00

  Tassels and

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  Tassels and all that stuff.

• 1:11:50Speaker 00

  I can get down with that. Hey, the more English the world becomes, I'm happy with that.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  Okay. They're called Cayetanos because the name Cayetano is a very kind of, you know, upper class name that you give to a boy. And so they're all getting into this and the women are getting, it's like being dressed in traditional and loving bullfights and going to bullfighting and not liking immigrants and trying to go back. And even interested in Franco and in the fascist period of Spain. Well, it's a reaction. Young people are continually reacting against what is, is fashionable from their previous generation, right? When I was growing up, we were reacting, it was the seventies and sixties and we were rebelling. We were angry, hated every, all the conservative stuff, shit going on. We wanted to be hippies.

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  We wanted to take drugs. We were reacting. So every generation reacts to what happened before and goes in this new direction, thinking, God, we're so subversive, we're so new, but it's not new. It's what has happened for thousands of years. And even in ancient Babylonia, they were complaining about how the young generation, there's a tablet, one of the earliest tablets, about how young people are ignoring their elders and wanting to go off in some new direction. You read history, you realize it's a cycle. It just continually happens over and over again. It puts things in perspective. The other thing is, you don't realize, but you're walking around in a world of ghosts. Dead people are everywhere around you. They live inside of your brain.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  You don't, you, you don't, your language that you have was created thousands of years ago. It evolved. That's where your thoughts come from. Your thoughts aren't your own. They're built out of all these little, these little moments in language as it, as it evolved, right? Your brain is structured from all this evolution and things that happened earlier on. Your consciousness was something that was built over thousands of years. Your values, what you value as a human being, the fact that you feel envy, the fact that you're wary of strangers. These are all things that people felt 10,000 years ago. And so you're not, you're not, you think that everything is new and fresh, but you're actually, it's like a necropolis, I say, that we live in.

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  The dead are everywhere. They're all around us. They're in our values. They're in our clothes. They're in our systems. They're in our thoughts. They're in our music. They're in everything. Everything human is structured according to certain codes that have been invented, have been around for thousands of years. History makes you aware of all the dead that are around you. They're inside of you. It makes you aware that nothing is new. It's a liberating, sublime feeling to, to dip deep into history.

• 1:14:37Speaker 00

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• 1:15:19Speaker 00

  Right now you can get up to $50 off the RP hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below, heading to rpestrength.com/modernd wisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's rpestrength.com/modernd wisdom and MODERNWISDOM at checkout. How do you think that helps people to access a sense of reality around what their life is consisting of right now?

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, sometimes not everything has to be helping you in your job or your career. Sometimes there are things that you need to incorporate in your life that have nothing to do with your day to day survival. And that's why for thousands of years, people were interested in religion. And that's what the value that religion provided people, you know, a sense of something transcendent or something greater than your life, the sense of a collective belief system, sense of ethics, something greater than your individual life. And people hungered for that, right? You need that in your life.

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  So being aware of history is not going to make your career any easier necessarily. It's not going to make you more money. It's just gonna make, it's gonna make you more human. Because we are creatures of history, right? Everything that happens, it has context, comes back, goes back decades, hundreds of years. It's all part of a chain that is continuous. It has a context. There are reasons why we think this way. There's a reason why Donald Trump is the president now. You could explain going back to all sorts of other things happening in America,

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  going back to the 18th century, if you want, going back to ancient times, if you want. It's all part of a single chain. And when I see people who have no sense of history, who don't realize, who their only reference points are things that have happened since the year 2000, I think, God, you're not really human. You're not really connecting to what it means. It's not like you have to be a deep student of history, but you have to be aware that history has formed you, that history has formed your values, it has formed the world around you. So it's not gonna make you more money. It's just, I think it's gonna make, yeah.

• 1:17:46Speaker 00

  Do people become easy to manipulate when they've got no historical context, do you think?

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, very much so. I mean, so everything, everything is in the present. You know, everything you see, it's all like what social media is telling you, what the algorithms are saying. And it's making you angry and it's making you fascinated. You, you know, you see this thing on Instagram, God damn it, why is he doing it? And if you had any kind of context, if you had any kind of distance and if you had any sense of history, you would know that people that are playing on your emotions and they've been playing on your emotions in the 1930s, you know, with Hitler,

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  that there's a trend for, for, for demagogues and propaganda. You would have some distance from your own reactions. You would be able to see that people are manipulating you because you're not so tied into the images that are flashing before your mind here. And you would step back and you would go, maybe there's something else going on here than what I'm actually seeing.

• 1:18:54Speaker 00

  It is interesting to think, hey, human psychological bias hasn't changed that much over the last few thousand years. There are many, but not an unlimited number of ways for people that want to control you or manipulate your opinion or constrain what you think that you can do with your life or make you feel a certain thing, even though you're kind of maybe not that justified in feeling it, or stop you from feeling a thing when you are justified in feeling it. There are a number of ideological gravitational wells that have sucked in. And these will be the patterns that are used over and over and over again. And that history doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes thing.

• 1:19:37Speaker 00

  Like, I think history just straight up repeats a lot of the time, or at least individual actors and the tactics that are used to do. The wrapper that's around it. I remember seeing this concern that was written around the time of the printing press, that if people were able to read more freely, especially in the common language, that this would be the undoing of the brains. People would be so lost in, in books and in reading these words that they would become completely disconnected from the world around them.

• 1:20:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:20:09Speaker 00

  And I guess the odd lie that everybody tells themselves, it's almost a little bit like a Pascal's wager, that yeah, but this time it's different.

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:20:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, but this time it's different.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:24Speaker 00

  For some reason, and every single time, at least in my lifetime, smartphones felt different, the internet felt different. AI absolutely feels different.

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:36Speaker 00

  But you have this very long illustrious record of people saying, yeah, but this time it's different over and over and over again, and it not being different.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  No. So, okay, so let's say AI is not something we've ever seen before, right? And a smartphone is something we've never really seen before. But it's based on human psychology. Humans created it. It's something we have invented. And what I talked about in The Laws of Human Nature is human beings have a shadow, have a dark side. Everybody has a dark side. Even you, Chris Williamson, has a dark side, I'm afraid to say.

• 1:21:11Speaker 00

  British, no dark side.

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  What?

• 1:21:13Speaker 00

  I'm British, no dark side.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  I used to see a, pass by a theater in, in, in London. It said something, please no sex, I'm British or something. What was that? Do you remember what that was? It was like playing forever on the West End. You don't remember?

• 1:21:31Speaker 00

  I don't know what you're referring to, but it sounds, it sounds incredibly British.

• 1:21:34Speaker 01

  Sex, I'm British or something.

• 1:21:36Speaker 00

  It's none for me, thank you.

• 1:21:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Anyway, we repress it, we don't want to be aware of it, but it's there. It's deep inside. It's all the anger and resentment we've had to bury because we have to smile and say, I love you, you look great. Your screenplay is wonderful. I love what your ideas, boss. We bury all this anger and resentment. It's boiling inside and we have a dark side and it explodes, right? That is a history that goes back thousands of years. So you invent the internet, it's something new and it starts out and it's all exciting. And early 2000s, wow, I can communicate with people in China. I can use Amazon to find people who are interested in the same music I'm in. It's fantastic. It's this like new theater. It's amazing.

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  Then slowly by slowly it goes down, it gets degraded and degraded, degraded, until it just becomes like junk that nobody wants anymore. It's just a platform for selling things and for manipulating people. AI, wow, it's gonna create all the solutions to cancer. It's gonna, we're gonna solve all the world's problems. We'll be able to figure out how to end global warming because of these machines. And now it's like scammers and people creating biological weapons and it's gonna take over humanity, it's gonna destroy us. Because everything human ends up falling into this dark tunnel that we, are part of our nature. So criminals are gonna take over AI.

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  Who are these morons who don't realize that criminals are gonna get their hands on this weapon? And how are you gonna control that? And how are you gonna keep people, you know, every single day? This isn't on the level of, of anything apocalyptic. Every single day I get about 12 emails from scammers saying, Robert, I read, the 48 laws of power is wonderful. What struck me most about it was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I am the curator of a reading group in Greenwich, England, and I want to help get your, spread your book to my 10,000 readers. Every single day I read a variation of that. And it's like AI generates it, right? And it's a scam. Obviously they're gonna ask for money.

• 1:23:46Speaker 01

  But that's what happens with these things. Scammers, criminals, people of dark minds who don't have any inhibitions, they're gonna use these tools and they're gonna wreak havoc with it, right? That's what doesn't change. AI might be different, but human nature doesn't change. And it, they're gonna pervert this.

• 1:24:06Speaker 00

  Has rational and scientific revolutions made it harder to access the sublime and more primal emotions as well?

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  No, no, not at all. Science actually should be able to do the opposite. So you look at some of the most interesting scientists of the past several hundred years. And like Darwin had a very poetic nature and he had, learning about evolution and how all of life is part of a single chain was a very kind of almost religious experience for him. It was intense. Albert Einstein, I have many quotes in the book about Albert Einstein saying, when you study physics and you study the laws of the universe, it should fill you with this insane sense of awe. And if it doesn't, then you are as good as dead, right? All these other physicists, Schr ö dinger, Heisenberg,

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  they all had this sense that they were uncovering something weird and strange about the universe. And it made them shocked and it made them excited. Jane Goodall studying primates, like how insane was that? The best scientists, and there are many, many, many of them, even those neuroscientists are in awe of what they're discovering. So. You know, you you look in the paper like I read the other day that they're discovering the origins of black holes astronomers, they see these red dots on all the telescope, these powerful telescopes, and they now decided that those red dots are the earliest

• 1:25:42Speaker 01

  form of black holes and that they were formed in the beginning of the universe. Now, you could look at that and just say it's a fact. Okay, wow, black holes. Yeah, yeah. But then you could go with your imagination, go close to the beginning of the universe? You mean, like, like, a few million years after the universe, there are these things out there that they're seeing? And that scientists are able to like, take these red dots and extrapolate that they're actually black holes? And then what is a black hole? It's something so powerful that gravity is not powerful and light can't escape it? If you take the discoveries of science and you use your imagination, they're like,

• 1:26:27Speaker 01

  it's like insane. We're uncovering what our ancestors were up to. We're uncovering the origins of life, how life might have been invented in this soups of oceans four billion years ago. It's absolutely mind blowing, but people aren't thinking like that. They're not going, taking that next step and having a sense of awe about it. They're just facts.

• 1:26:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know how it would be obvious to maybe draw an analogy between scientism, rationalism, and a kind of sterility.

• 1:27:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:01Speaker 00

  A loss of the magic of life. And I think that's the sort of link that I'm, I'm sort of trying to, the thread that I'm trying to pull on. Because, yeah, the color, I think, for many people, maybe has been drained out of life. And when they were to point at it, maybe if the reality is, yeah, dude, you're distracted all the time and you scroll easily forgettable, largely gray, homogenous slop on a daily basis.

• 1:27:27Speaker 01

  Well put.

• 1:27:27Speaker 00

  Your body is made out of everything you put in your mouth, and your brain is made out of everything that you put into your eyes and ears. And if you think about what that consumption pattern is like, you are basically feeding yourself fast food for your amygdala on a daily basis.

• 1:27:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:41Speaker 00

  There is still, you know, you talk about sort of pagan time, pagan religions, this sense of so much more wonder, so many more unanswered questions, the opportunity to use story and narrative and personification. It's the gods fighting that's made the lightning, how much easier it must have been to have been accused by life. Should we all become pagans again? Is that the answer? Can we just do that?

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  I would love it if we would.

• 1:28:11Speaker 00

  I'm down. If you want to make a pagan, a pagan commune somewhere, I'll join.

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  I would, because I've always felt myself to be pagan. I've always, when I see, when I go to the British Museum, and I see that section on Assyria, and I see some of those massive sculptures of like, half-human, half-tig- lions, whoa, I feel like it's expressing something so powerful in me. I've always been deeply, deeply attracted to the designs, to the things of like, the, in the aborigines, their, their little paintings that they make of, you know, the waves, side of animals, something. It seems more alive. It seems like something so powerful and so direct. I don't, yeah.

• 1:28:57Speaker 00

  What do you think people get wrong when they think about pagan religions?

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  Well, I studied this quite deeply. And I have to say that my major in college was ancient Greek. And so I've been studying ancient cultures as part of my, my, my past and part of who I am. And so we think of ancient Greece, for instance, we see Zeus and Aphrodite and Athena and Hera, these kind of comical figures in the sky. It's almost laughable, like cartoons. They're like Marvel movies. They're arguing and bickering and how human and how silly they are. That's our modern projection on the past. It has nothing to do with the reality of Greek myths and what they thought the gods were.

• 1:29:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:29:44Speaker 01

  I sort of researched that. And the words for gods was like, a flash of light. And so the gods were not these entities, were not these characters, not these human forms. They were forces in nature. There were these powers. There was waves of energy. And so when you felt sexually drawn to somebody, Aphrodite was like inhabiting your body. It was a force inside of you that came outside of you. So in our modern sophisticated world, when I fall, when I'm sexually attracted to this woman, it's just my hormones are

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  acting up, right? You know, it's just me, you know, and whatever. But in fact, your sense of desire comes from something much larger than yourself, right? It comes from how we have to reproduce, how biology is operating in this. It's something transcendent. And the desire for atoms to, to, to meet and form matter, the, I have this story in there of, of perimysium in the water. And this scientist was seeing how the perimysium had this desire for one to go inside the other. That's not how perimysium reproduce. They reproduce by splitting. So it had nothing to do with reproduction. It was a desire

• 1:31:07Speaker 01

  to be combining with other perimysium. And he was saying that this is a force in nature, that nature is built around this desire for things to be attracted and to kind of incorporate the other thing. And so, so the sexual desire is actually you are being possessed by something greater than yourself. It could be Aphrodite. That might be the name you put to it 3,000 years ago. I still might even think that it could be Aphrodite. But the gods weren't like these funny creatures, kind of flappable, silly things. They were these forces that in, that in, that possessed you. And I describe in there, one of the oldest mysteries, the

• 1:31:50Speaker 01

  Eleusinian mysteries, that went on for thousands of years. And all of the greatest thinkers were initiated in it. And it changed them. They spoke of, it was the most incredible thing they've ever been to. It makes Burning Man seem like nothing. Okay, sorry, say. And so it was a way of making you feel that you had died, and then were reborn, just like the myth of Persephone and Demeter, who's, who has to go into the underworld, her daughter. And that's when winter happens, then she reemerges, and that's when spring happens. But the sense of feeling your, your death and being reborn, that's what these gods,

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  that's what the religious experience was. If we could go back to that, if we could incorporate that into our 21st century mentality, it would be awakening of human consciousness. I would be all for it. I would start welling pelts and horns. I'd be pagan as anybody. Because I'm all for the pagan world. Sorry. And you, and you know what? Take it one step further.

• 1:33:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:33:01Speaker 01

  Christianity, which is the, probably the most powerful religion on the planet Earth, is a pagan religion. It has roots in paganism that are extremely deep. And a lot of the ideas and a lot of the rituals. Dionysus was a Greek god who was, who died and then was reborn. And there's so many parallels between the myth of Dionysus and Jesus Christ. You can go on and on and on. The roots of Christianity are from paganism. So to make this sharp distinction between Christianity and paganism is totally bogus. There is no distinction. Paganism is still within our belief system today.

• 1:33:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it's one flow.

• 1:33:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. What was that story about the Russian explorer and the Siberian tiger?

• 1:33:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's one of my favorite stories. So, and they made a great movie out of it. The Japanese director Kirakura Sawa, I believe in the eighties, did a movie. It's called Der Sugusula. I highly recommend you see it. This Russian explorer, at the turn of the 20th century, his name is Arsenyev, he's exploring the Siberian taiga, which is this vast kind of wasteland of snow and, and, and, you know, it's just, there's indigenous tribes, et cetera. And he's exploring because there are parts of the Siberian saiga, the Siberian taiga, sorry.

• 1:34:25Speaker 00

  Siberian saiga.

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  Got that wrong. I'm getting a little punch drunk here. The Siberian taiga that had never been seen before. So he's sent out there to map it, right? He's a scientist, right? Very good scientist, a cartographer. So he's out there and he's going through this area that's, that's very wild, that no Russian has been before. And he's, there's this man, they're having a camp, they're sitting by the campfire, and this indigenous man named Der Sugusula asks if he can sit by the fire with them and smoke his pipe. And he was a trapper, a hunter, who's by himself. He belongs to this tribe called the Gold. But he's, lives mostly on his own. And, and, you know, occasionally he meets

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  other members of his tribe. But he's basically a hunter, a trapper. And Arsenyev invites him to sit by the campfire and they share a meal. And slowly, he falls under the spell of this man. And he says, will you join us on our expedition? We need somebody like you. And the man agrees, okay? He'll be their guide. He'll show them, you know, where to go. And slowly, he realizes that this man with his pagan beliefs is so much more powerful than they are. His body, first of all, he's in his 50s or 60s. He has 20 times the energy that they have. He can do feats that they can't even imagine, right? Because his consciousness isn't telling him, you can't do this, you can't do that. He's just open to everything.

• 1:35:56Speaker 01

  He knows every little detail of the forest. He can read like you can read a book. He knows by the tracks on the ground, what animal passed, what kind of mood they were in, whether they were in heat or not, and whether they were hungry. He can read everything by how the branches are broken. He can see the sky and say, a storm is coming, even though it's like two days beforehand. He smells the temperature, the weather. He says that the forest breathes and is alive, and he knows how it breathes and he can feel it. One day, they encounter a tiger. They hear the roaring of the tiger. And Arsenyev is terrified. He can't believe it. Tiger's gonna about to pants on them.

• 1:36:40Speaker 01

  And a Siberian tiger is, believe me, is something you don't want to encounter. So he picks up his rifle, he's about to shoot it. And the Dersu, the indigenous guy, could put that away. And he walks right up to the tiger. He starts talking to it. And he starts telling it. He says that the tiger is the soul of the jungle. And if you mess with the soul of the jungle, you're gonna pay a price. Nothing in this forest will ever cooperate with you. And he goes up and he talks to the tiger and says, "Ambo, which is the name of the tiger, to his group, don't be mad. We're here just walking around. We're not gonna bother you. Please be okay." The tiger walks away. And Arsenyev is like, my God, weren't you terrified? He goes, no, no, never, never.

• 1:37:26Speaker 01

  If you shot him, I would never be your friend. You would have violated the... Anyway, he comes to realize that this man has an intelligence and a spirit that humans have lost. That we once were so close to the environment that we could read everything, that our senses were so alive. We could feel the weather. We could feel animals. We knew the spirit of everything around us. And it ends up that Dersu is murdered a few years later by people who rob him. And he's so sad that this is a world that's disappearing. And he speculates, if only we had kept some of this with our scientific spirit, because he was a scientist, how powerful it would be.

• 1:38:10Speaker 01

  Because this man taught me everything about the jungle, about the Siberian tiger. So that's the story.

• 1:38:18Speaker 00

  How much do you think of what humans call supernatural abilities are actually just natural to humans, but we've lost touch with our subconscious so much that we don't have access to them anymore?

• 1:38:30Speaker 01

  Well, we are capable of so much more than we think we are. So I have stories in there of people kind of stretching the limits. So there's a story about a mountain climber, because I'm kind of very interested in mountain climbers and the sublime. And he climbs this mountain in Colorado. And he gets to the top and he's elated. And now he has to go back down. He could see that a storm is brewing, but he decides to go back down the other side and find some new areas that he hadn't climbed before. So he's descending, the storm is coming. It's getting a little bit sketchy out there. Suddenly, he's on this ledge and he falls. And as he's falling, his knee hits the rock

• 1:39:15Speaker 01

  and it cracks his knee open. And he lands on a ledge that's like a foot wide, okay? Maybe a foot and a half wide. And he lands on his crampons. So he's bleeding, his knee is cracked. He's sitting on this tiny ledge. He's somehow very lucky that he landed there. He fell about 30 feet. The storm is coming. He's alone. He's, I'm about to die. And he starts crying, he starts sobbing. And then a voice says, "Try to get to your feet. Just try to get to your feet." And it's really painful. As I say, his knee is cracked. He somehow manages to get to his feet. Then all of a sudden, as he looks, he can see that there is a slight way that the ledge can lead to another ledge.

• 1:39:58Speaker 01

  It's very precarious. But then suddenly, he feels this rush of energy. This like, he doesn't know what it is. And he starts descending onto these tiny ledges. You know, whatever the word is. He finally finds his way back down the mountain. And he's ecstatic. He's like, my God, I was like a mountain goat, the way I was suddenly able to descend this mountain. What happened to me? What were these powers that suddenly came to me? Right? I can't make sense of it. And then he goes to a hospital and it takes him months to recover. And he's going, what was that? What was that experience?

• 1:40:40Speaker 01

  I have to have it again, because it was so ecstatic. He spends the next 20 years of his life trying to have that experience again. And he fails, and he fails, and he fails. He climbs Mount Everest. It doesn't work. It's just, you know, leeches are eating it, hit his knees, and he's miserable. And there's, you know, storms, et cetera. He tries long distance, long distance running. He gets moments where there's some kind of ecstasy, but it's not the same. He reads about the neurology of the human brain, and he goes into indigenous cultures. And he realizes that shamans back then, people who had these initiation rituals, would put people to the brink of death and then bring them back,

• 1:41:25Speaker 01

  and that they would then have these experiences like he had. And he decided that they had mastered the neuroendocrine system. They could control their own hormones. Because what happened to him on that mountain was his body, his hormones, were creating these dopamines and these adrenaline effects that gave him that mountain goat power. Okay? So anyway, the lesson here is, he finally discovers that he creates this, his own, what he calls a mountain run. It's not the word, but he creates these runs. He takes a map and he makes a circle. And he's gonna run that circle no matter what comes into his path. Right? In these wooded areas, even if a mountain or a stream, he's gotta create that circle.

• 1:42:09Speaker 01

  And in doing this, he comes upon a cliff that he has to climb. He gets that experience again. Okay? But the point is, our bodies have these insane powers that we have. A lot of it is from our physiology, right? From our own hormone system for how things, when we're in a sense of danger. So if you took any stockbroker on Wall Street as rigid and tight and conservative and limited as anything else, as unsublime as any creature you can imagine on our planet, and you dropped him in the middle of an island alone, and he had to survive, his senses would start waking up.

• 1:42:52Speaker 01

  Some of these effects would happen. And he would discover some of these quote unquote supernatural powers that he possesses. Because when your senses are dead, you're not connected to your own body. You're not connected to these immense powers that we have, right? And I sensed a little bit when I was this close to death. And I could feel, I could feel like death inside of me. It was like something really powerful and really strong, not like anything else. And it was like a power that I can't even verbalize, but is out there somehow. And it's gonna happen to everyone when they die. You're gonna feel that.

• 1:43:36Speaker 01

  You're gonna feel like you're connecting to something cosmic, right? And so there's something. And then when you emerge from that, your physiology and your brain is slightly altered. And you don't have supernatural powers, but the world looks different. And that, you know, it's not without, I'm not taking LSD. I'm not taking, you know, wayoska, whatever you call it again. It's just there. It's my own brain. Your brain has these weird, weird, weird powers that you're not even accessing because you're not even connected to your body anymore. You're not connected to your own mortality. You're not connected to your senses.

• 1:44:16Speaker 00

  I have a friend who went to South Africa with one of the world's best rhino trackers.

• 1:44:24Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 1:44:24Speaker 00

  And he was out in the plains, off the van, out of the Jeep. And he said they'd been tracking this animal for ages. I don't know whether it was a rhino or not. And they'd realized that they were really, really close to it, but they couldn't work out where. They were next to this huge big bush and they're looking around. And then they heard this little... From the other side of the bush, they heard this sound and they realized that this animal that they'd been tracking, let's say it was a rhino, was 20 feet on the other side of a very large shrub. And he talks about this sort of rush of adrenaline and he told me this story and it always stuck in my mind.

• 1:45:04Speaker 00

  And then I went to go and film a documentary series in Zambia and the Zambezi River, I didn't realize, runs between Zambia and Zimbabwe, like it's literally five miles, four miles, three miles maybe wide. You can see, there's, hey, there's a different country on the other side of that thing. And I was taken out to do an old school style of safari. This is when, from the golden era of safaris in sort of the sixties, before some now are closer to side of a seven star hotel experience that's in the middle of the Masai Mara or whatever. And this was, if you want to shower, you need to warn them half an hour before so they can go and heat some water. It's a bucket that gets run through. You sleep under the stars, you're in a glorified. When is this? When was this?

• 1:45:49Speaker 00

  Two years ago, two and a half years ago. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, very recent. So I mean, you get a plane to Addis Ababa, Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, and then from there you fly in and then from there you get a little. Wow. Ten person plane, less, where I didn't realize this, but the fuselage, the bit, or whatever it is, the bit that's on the wing, that I assumed was where the fuel went, the sort of long bit where the wing goes over the top of it. No, that's where your bags go. So you put your luggage, your luggage in the, and I'm looking out of the window and I'm like, that is half open, like that latch is half open, just pairs of pants and trousers and stuff flying behind us, maybe if that had happened. It didn't, so we land and then you get a jeep and then we get on a boat and the boat's an hour and a half. And then they find this one bend in the river and this is where they'd set up camp and

• 1:46:33Speaker 00

  they do it every single year and it's not too dissimilar to Burning Man. But everything that they use while they're there is either from the local environment or gets taken away with them once they're done. So stuff's left to decompose and everything else just goes with them and they build it and take it down each season. And I was there at the final weekend of season, or the final week of season, it was about to start raining afterward. Anyway, guy that's there, Australian dude, was the main operator of this. It was his main site that he was looking after and he's gonna look after you. So typically with most safaris, you're in the truck and you're looking at the animals and we did a little bit of that. I'd done that previously, but the reason for this being more real is that you get to go and do it on foot.

• 1:47:18Speaker 00

  But if you're on foot, you need big man with big gun. So I think it's, I think it's called an elephant gun and it shoots just big slugs. Anyway, so I'm with this and the tracker and the video guy and there's drones floating around because they're filming it and stuff, which somewhat. It's a documentary. Somewhat detracts from the experience, the fact that there's a film crew with you, but whatever. And we see, I see a cheetah, lone cheetah, walking down the trail in front of us. That was amazing. Wow. You weren't afraid? Yeah. Well, you had the elephant gun. I've got big man, big gun and guy that said, but I mean, it was forever away and they're alone, right? And the jeep wasn't that far away. Anyway, we're getting toward the final day and one of the scenes they really wanted to get was of us canoeing, because one of the things that you do as a part of this experience

• 1:48:03Speaker 00

  is you can go down the tributaries that just come off the Zambezi River. Wow. In order to get there, you need to be in a boat and these boats are a fucking massive engine on the back of an upturned bit of tin, basically. So it's a very, very sparse and hippos everywhere. The Zambezi is filled with hippos, filled with them. They're like, like little rocks that sort of move, like, like, like playing whack-a-mole, but whack-a-hippo. And they're everywhere. Anyway, we're going along and I've got this thing in my mind, I'm getting up early, I have no idea what time it is, my body clock's all over the place, we've been filming like 12 hours a day, most days, sleeping in a tent, hearing the hippos and the sounds of the safari world out there as I'm trying to sleep.

• 1:48:46Speaker 00

  We're going along and this one hippo sort of pokes his head up and usually they have a little bit of a look and then as we go past it, it takes its head down. It misjudged how far away from the boat it was and as we went over the top of it, usually it's brought its head down, but it didn't bring its head down quite enough. You go over the hippos. And we heard like, pong! And I was like, oh God, well, I mean, the boat is probably more damaged than the hippo was, but anyway. So I'm like, okay, there's hippos, there's hippos in the water, I'm kind of used to that. I've seen a lot of elephants walking around, but the elephants are like, they seem kind of chill, hippos less chill, not so keen on the hippos. Cheetah, he was quite nice. We saw lions, but we saw them from the jeep. I'm like, all right, I'm feeling, you know, somewhat comfortable or whatever. But I had this, I had this story in, in my mind from my friend when he told me about

• 1:49:28Speaker 00

  the rhino thing, you know, that you're walking around and even though this is similar to the environment you were in in the past, you're kind of at the mercy of the wildlife. So we pull up, we get into this canoe and then the drones above us and the drones sort of tracking along and it's me and the guy that was leading it. And then there was the film crew in another canoe just behind us. And these tributaries are, you know, less wide than this table, maybe a little bit wider than the table, like twice the width of this table. Yeah, super, super thin. And obviously the depth, it can be either this or it could be super deep, but for us it doesn't really matter. Going down this tributary and at the end it kinks really hard to the left and then it sort of leads off into the distance and that's the way that we're gonna go. And at the end is just a set of eyes and a snout.

• 1:50:12Speaker 00

  It's this hippo that's poking up toward the very, very end. And the guide says, we're just gonna dig in here, we're just gonna hold our oars in the ocean, in the, in the, the river and we're gonna let it stream away. And he'll, he'll leave at some point. Sure enough, he does, but I'm like, where's he gone? He's under the water. I'm, so I'm like, okay, there's me and this tiny little canoe thing with a big bloke, the jeep with the big man with the gun is a fucking kilometer and a half in that direction, like because he's gonna pick us up from where we've come around. But the boat, they're, they're no help, they're now back on the main Zambezi River. The guys with the cameras, they're no help either. The drone over the top, all I can imagine that's doing is pissing off and alerting all of the animals to where we are. So I'm like, all right, it's me and it's my mate and our canoe, that's it.

• 1:50:57Speaker 00

  Okay, so we're gonna keep going. I'm thinking, I'm thinking all about the hippo. You're rowing? Yeah, yeah, just do little canoeing on either side like this. Okay. Yeah. And I don't know the difference between canoeing and rowing. Well, we're paddling, thank you. Yeah, we're not doing that. So facing ahead and there's four elephants, one of them's drinking in this stream, from the stream where we're going to go to, that's kinked around to the side. And looking at these elephants, you're just sort of marveling and I hadn't been on my phone, I hadn't had a signal on my phone for three days and I'm really in it now. I've kind of got used to the, the sounds of the jungle, of the, I guess, coast to the plains. We're watching these and then the elephants for me were like kind of chill, but I knew that they were very territorial and very protective of their young and it's a two bigger ones and two smaller ones.

• 1:51:41Speaker 00

  I'm like, right, okay, this is interesting. They walk off and okay, they're, they're now tracking 300 yards on the left and we're gonna slowly row along. And one of the elephants, the biggest of the elephants, starts to sort of look at us and veer toward us ever so slightly. And it's just sort of looking and veering and looking and veering like that. And it's like, starting to bisect where we're going, it's looking as if it would come toward us. And I'm giving my guy that's in front of me a little bit of a nudge and like, are we okay? He's like, you know, 300 yards, 250, 200, 150, 100. I'm like, okay, that, that is really big. And he's like, that's the mum, she's just making sure that we're not gonna go anywhere

• 1:52:26Speaker 00

  near to her kids. It's all okay. It's like, it's everything's chill. And I'd learned that when looking at elephant body language, like head up, ears out, is I see you, stop what you're doing and head down, ears back is sports mode, like this, shit's about to get real. Yeah. So she's now 40 yards, 50 yards away from us. I'm like nudging him all the time, like mate, he's like, don't worry mate, nothing to worry about at all. I'm like, that is four, seven tons of animal, like whatever, three tons of animal staring at us. And we've now dug in to stop moving so that we're less of a threat.

• 1:53:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we've dug in, but there's maybe four foot high of bank between us in the little stream and the plane, so a little bit of a plinth. And then 30 yards, 40 yards, and then an elephant. And then there's the camera crew that's behind us and the drone that's still pissing everyone off above us. We've dug in and head up, ears out. And I was like, mate? He's like, don't worry mate, nothing to worry about at all. I'm like, fucking, oh my, heart rates through the roof, buzzing in my ears, like adrenaline sky high. And then head down, ears back, like starts towards us a couple of times, like kicks like this. And I was like nudging him and he's like, nothing to worry about at all. Jesus fucking Christ.

• 1:53:48Speaker 00

  And then backs up, like watching us and watching an elephant do that sort of reversing maneuver where she's still looking at us backing up and then puts her head down even further, ears back, just sets off full sprint towards us. I'm like, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. And he's like, nothing to worry about, like starts shouting it over the top of everyone. The guy, guys in the camera crew, they're, they're shouting and screaming about what's gonna go on and she gets 10 yards away from us.

• 1:54:14Speaker 00

  Like digs her feet in this big cloud of dust. It would have been her falling. She wouldn't, there's no way she'd have jumped. It would have just been her like tumbling over the top of this four foot dip into the thing. Looks at us, like gives one look and they're like, turns and walks away. And I like turned to look at myself and I had the awe in my hand like this. Like, what am I gonna do? It's me and this, I'm gonna bop her on the nose? Like, what am I gonna achieve with this? The reason I say this, my friend that had tracked that rhino told me that after he'd been through that experience for the next hour, two hours or so, he felt like he was superhuman. He said his senses were so sharpened. And this is the only other friend I've had that's done a similar experience. So that story from him was real formative for me.

• 1:55:00Speaker 00

  And I was thinking, wow, like, I wonder if I'm gonna notice something, this sort of like ancestral resonance between the environment that my ancestors evolved in for so long. And this activation of a seminal moment that brings it all online. And sure enough, after heart rates calmed down, the fucking guy, sorry, the camera guy behind us shit himself so badly that he turned it off. And I was like, man, that would have been so epic to have captured. The drone wasn't looking in the right direction. The bloke in the truck didn't see it. I like, like it was the ultimate mum watch this and mum wasn't looking. Anyway, um, for the next hour and a half, two hours or so, I could, it felt like I could hear everything.

• 1:55:44Speaker 00

  I knew the different birds, from what direction they were coming in, how far away they were. The colors were sharper, the lines were brighter. And I was able to, it felt like I was kind of the center of this environment and everything was coming into me. And it was this wonderful blend of like real formative experience, super high velocity adrenaline. And, uh, you know, a resonant environment that I was existing in. And it's just, that was such a formative experience for me to go, wow, that's what we were built for.

• 1:56:15Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:56:15Speaker 00

  That's what we were built for.

• 1:56:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:56:17Speaker 00

  And all of that together is still now, like thinking about it, I can see that elephant doing that. The scariest bit was when it did this, when it backed up, backed up, backed up, backed up, head down, ears back, set off and ran. I was like, wow, so cool.

• 1:56:29Speaker 01

  They can run fast.

• 1:56:30Speaker 00

  They can move, they can shift. Yeah, for a big girl, she could move.

• 1:56:33Speaker 01

  Wow, that's an incredible story.

• 1:56:35Speaker 00

  Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:36Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:56:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. So that, the opportunity for us to tap into uh, skills that we don't know that we have. You know, that's my, it's one of my experiences of that being the case.

• 1:56:47Speaker 01

  Did it, do you still, does it kind of change you? Are you still aware of it or did it have any long lasting effects on you?

• 1:56:55Speaker 00

  Downtown Austin or New York is not conducive to me, taking in all of the sounds around me. You know, the, the yelling crazy person on the street corner and the police siren in the far distance. But it's, it's certainly, I mean, I can see and still hear everything from that. You know, we talk about coasting through life and not really making memories about the passage of time seeming to speed up. Passage of time slowed down for me.

• 1:57:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:20Speaker 00

  I can tell you every single different memory increment all the way throughout that entire morning.

• 1:57:25Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 1:57:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The whole thing was encoded, like just tons of novelty, tons of intensity.

• 1:57:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:30Speaker 00

  And I can, yeah, I can tell you, but that particular, you can remember what it felt like, what it smelled like to be in the, in the little boat. I can remember how shallow it was, couldn't believe that we were dug in on this little stream. But a hippo was able to hide. It's like he's so big and so tall and he was able to hide underneath this.

• 1:57:47Speaker 01

  Hippos don't attack people though, do they?

• 1:57:49Speaker 00

  They're the second biggest killer of humans in Africa.

• 1:57:53Speaker 01

  What do they do? How do they kill?

• 1:57:54Speaker 00

  Uh, biting, plumping, stamping on the second, I think after mosquitoes. Can you have chat G P T this? What are the biggest killers, animal killers of people uh, in Africa? And where does the hippo rank? So the thing, the hippos aren't aggressive, their problem is they get scared. And the issue that humans have, hippos want to be in the water. In the water, they're nice and safe. Humans, a lot of the time are in between a hippo and the water. And if the hippo thinks it can't get back to the water, it's just gonna go straight through you to try and get back to safety. Cause it doesn't, it doesn't feel very, uh, very secure. So yeah, they, they're vicious and.

• 1:58:29Speaker 01

  They are?

• 1:58:30Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, you, where are we?

• 1:58:33Speaker 00

  Where's the hippo? Hippo's number 10. Okay, so mosquito, uh, interestingly enough, humans come in at number two. Snakes, dogs, assassin bugs, that doesn't count, freshwater snails?

• 1:58:46Speaker 00

  Okay, so like, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. So yeah, like mosquito, kissing bug, freshwater snail, tsetse flies. Like, and then, okay, crocodiles and snakes, humans, I'm not counting that. So elephants are second to dogs for me. Uh, sorry, uh, hippos are second to dogs. Aggressive attacks, especially on boats. Going, if you ignore direct disease transmission and count only animals attacking physically, physically attacking people. Crocodiles, hippos, elephants, snakes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this guy, don't get in the way.

• 1:59:18Speaker 01

  I had no idea.

• 1:59:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:21Speaker 01

  Hippos kill far more people than sharks.

• 1:59:24Speaker 00

  Despite not being predators, they get scared. They're big scaredy boys.

• 1:59:27Speaker 01

  Wow. God, it was still to see a hippo, this has been pretty intense.

• 1:59:32Speaker 00

  To see 50 or a hundred.

• 1:59:35Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:59:36Speaker 00

  Just out in the middle of this water. They're, they're too hot, they don't wanna be out, they can't cool themselves off very well. They get sunburned. They get sunburned, they're so pink.

• 1:59:44Speaker 01

  That's why they have to be in the water.

• 1:59:45Speaker 00

  They, it helps to protect them, I think, that might be part of it. But they still get sunburned in the water as well.

• 1:59:49Speaker 01

  Fascinating.

• 1:59:51Speaker 00

  What was your story? You said that.

• 1:59:52Speaker 01

  Well, no, no, it's not a story. This is something else, but I, you're saying about not in New York or Austin, but I was in my early twenties. I was living in New York and um, I was taking the F train back home. I lived in Brooklyn at the time and I fell asleep. And I, it came to the end of the line. And there were these four gang members surrounding me, looking at me. And one of them had a knife and it looked like this, something was gonna happen. I didn't have much money on me. And I woke up and I see these people there, they're gonna like either kill me or rob me. I don't know what's going on. And for some reason, this insane feeling of calmness overcame me.

• 2:00:37Speaker 01

  I was so calm, I guess maybe because I just woke up and I didn't, I wasn't nervous or afraid. And I spoke to them in a very calm voice and I took out my wallet. I said, look, I'm sorry, I don't have this much money. And I gave them over the head and they, they kind of looked at me and laughed and they left. But I'll never forget that feeling of insane calmness that overcame me, that protected my life basically in that moment. It wasn't a lion or an elephant, a hippo, it was a human predator. You know, I don't know if they were gonna kill me, but there was a knife in the guy's hand and I felt threatened. But um, something changed in, in my body chemistry that allowed me. And there are hormones that actually calm you in face of danger there. I forget which one it is.

• 2:01:21Speaker 00

  I think I'm deficient in those, at least in the face of an elephant, whatever the opposite of those hormones were. I didn't get the calming ones, I got the try to attack it with an awe ones.

• 2:01:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. But the point is, even in the midst of a city in face of danger, some things like that could, could pop into, yeah.

• 2:01:39Speaker 00

  Speaking tactically, how do you best advise people to access the sublime in their daily life more readily? Like, what's a, what's a strategic way that people can do this?

• 2:01:52Speaker 01

  Well, it's, um, I mean, obviously reading my book is gonna play a big role in.

• 2:01:58Speaker 00

  It's the number one, that's before anything else.

• 2:02:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I'm gonna, the book is, is organized to be very practical. So it has stories, it has things that are kind of make you feel, wow, that's weird. That's, I never thought of that before. But then they have exercises in each chapter about how to incorporate this into your daily existence. And then I have meditations that are a little bit weirder about how you can kind of make a sort of poetic way of accessing this. Um, and so for instance, um, you know, it's easy for people to talk about thinking about your mortality and your death, right? It's a kind of exercise that philosophers go through, Stoics, et cetera. But I always felt like it's kind of weak because you can't think about death. It's something beyond thinking.

• 2:02:46Speaker 01

  So I have an exercise where I literally take you through what it will feel like when you're dying. Based on my research and based on my own experience. And I have you lie down and I have you feeling like the world is going distant away from you, that your body is sinking into the ground, that your skull is getting heavier, it's sinking in, that your bones are dissolving, that everything is kind of moving away from you. And that maybe your mind is separating from your body at some point. And then to feel that sensation and to make it as visceral as possible. And then to take that feeling and then go outside and walk in the world and tell yourself, this is what I, I, I died and this is what the world looks like after I've died, right?

• 2:03:31Speaker 01

  And how different the world looks like after you've been through that experience. If you take it seriously enough and you go through it, then you will be able to have that kind of strange moment of how different things look like when you sense that you won't be there anymore. And how everything has an intensity that it didn't have beforehand. So the book is very practical. But the main thing is, as in everything in life, you have to feel the desire for it. So if your desire, if your priorities in life are just making money, getting by, doing your career, you're gonna read my book and it won't really have any long lasting effect. But I'm trying to hit you over the head.

• 2:04:16Speaker 01

  I'm trying to really make it clear to you that this is something that is gonna have a very powerful impact on your experience of life. I want you to take all of your emptiness, all of your restlessness, all your feelings like you're missing something in life. And I want you to bring them up like you're vomiting them and that you're feeling them coming up from the bottom of your and into your throat and you sense how, what you, what you're actually missing in life and you're not diluting it in any way. And I want you to feel the kind of ugliness that exists in the world with the social media, the pettiness, the polarization. And you want something else.

• 2:04:57Speaker 01

  You have to have a desire for something else, otherwise this won't mean anything to you, right? Because we're emotional creatures. We're not, we think we're rational and cognition is everything. But really it's emotions that determine that are the most powerful thing. Just like when you had the experience with the elephant, it wasn't your mind suddenly coming into place, oh, I've got to do this, that and the other. It was this powerful feeling that affected your emotions, right? You have to feel, want to feel the sublime before anything else. You wanna have to get rid of all of your baggage and just have like kind of, I hate to use the word, but like a mental enema. And just like get rid of all this other stuff.

• 2:05:39Speaker 01

  If you don't have that desire, if you think your life is fine, the sublime won't have any appeal to you. But I'm trying to make it, hit you over the head with the idea that there's something deeply, deeply missing. And your life will have an intensity. You will be experiencing things on a different level if you let this in. Once you have that, you've gone to that level where you say, you've had your come to Jesus moment, you go, yes, I need this in my life. Yes, it's important to me. Then the things that I try and sneak into your brain will have the effect. Cause I'm, I'm always trying to like instill a little bit of a poison into you and make you look at the world differently. But you have to have the desire and you have to realize

• 2:06:23Speaker 01

  that you're restless and you're bored for a reason. You're not getting something. And this world is making you passive. It's making you dependent on algorithms. It's making you dependent on food. It's making you dependent on what other things people are doing for you. The sublime is where you finally become active with your own experience. You take it over, you're the curator of your own experience. Not meta, not Google, not chat GPT. But you are now the agent of your own experience. You're gonna create, curate your own experience. And this book is gonna help lead you there. And so just feel that need to get outside of the kind of bubble and the emptiness that you're experiencing in your daily life.

• 2:07:08Speaker 00

  How to feel alive again, I think, is a search term that more people would put into Google or chat GPT if they realized how badly they needed it.

• 2:07:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:19Speaker 00

  There's this sense that, yeah, life's amplitude's just been flattened for some reason. The color's been sapped out of things, they're a little grayer. I'm not as deeply connected, I don't feel the highs quite so much. And even the lows, they don't have this sort of romantic, majestic, large quality to them, they're more sort of dour and sapping and sort of low and sluggish.

• 2:07:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:07:43Speaker 01

  You know, so for instance, to take an example, I have, I talk about childhood experience and the writer, Russian writer Nabokov and how he tried to recreate his childhood as an adult. And he remembers that when he was on a train as a child, he felt the speed of the train in his body and the speed was intoxicating. So, you know, I fly an airplane here to Austin and now we fly and we're not even aware of flying, we don't even feel, we don't understand what it is. The shades are drawn and we're on our computers.

• 2:08:17Speaker 00

  But the movement of the plane is an inconvenience to what I want to do while I'm on the plane.

• 2:08:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But when you were a kid, you opened that up and you were like, whoa, the Grand Canyon, wow, these mountains. I'm flying, you're literally flying. Do you know what that would have felt like 200 years ago? You're literally in the air, it's like magic.

• 2:08:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:08:36Speaker 01

  And you can, like Nabokov, you can feel that sense of speed and power inside your body.

• 2:08:41Speaker 00

  How to rediscover a sense of wonder again.

• 2:08:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And these are simple things. It's, you're flying, you're in a, it won't be in your car really, but or a train or climbing a mountain. How you can climb a mountain with a different set of priorities than how you normally do. And I take you through that in many numerous exercises.

• 2:08:59Speaker 00

  What do you think people will not pay as much attention to in the book as they should do? What is the most effective but initially unsexy insight or strategy that you think people might gloss over, but actually you, you think they should pay more attention to?

• 2:09:22Speaker 01

  It's a good question.

• 2:09:26Speaker 01

  Well, so a lot of the book, I'm kind of criticizing as directly as I can, the modern technological world that is flattening your experience. And you're gonna be kind of rebelling against it. You're gonna be going, God, Robert, you're so old fashioned. What's your problem? Yeah, get with it, you know?

• 2:09:48Speaker 00

  Get on TikTok.

• 2:09:49Speaker 01

  Huh?

• 2:09:49Speaker 00

  Get on TikTok.

• 2:09:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they're gonna be a little bit annoyed with that. And, you know, why can't I just incorporate social media? Isn't social media sublime? Can I incorporate that into my life? Why are you so critical of these things? I don't want you to stop all the technology in your life. That's not possible. And I'd be a hypocrite to say I don't, I, you know, use chat GPT sometimes to look up certain things. But I want you to be aware of how it's, it's deadening you, how it's having a negative effect on your experience of life. You don't have to get rid of it. We are, we think too much in black and white terms. It has to be either this or the other. You can still use the internet, you can still use AI if you have to.

• 2:10:35Speaker 01

  You can still be a modern person doing your modern things. But you can exist also at the same time in this other realm. You can explore it and you can see. So I was thinking about myself the other day. I was meditating and I was realizing that I'm kind of programmed. My ideas are kind of programmed and I'm following Instagram and it's kind of having an effect on me. I could see the effect it has on me.

• 2:11:07Speaker 00

  What is that effect?

• 2:11:08Speaker 01

  Well, I watch one cat video, cause I have a cat. Wow, this is amazing, it's incredible. I happen to love animals. They have these videos of this man who has a tiger and he's like wrestling with the tiger and yet they're kind of.

• 2:11:22Speaker 00

  You've already upgraded from cat to very big cat.

• 2:11:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:26Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:11:27Speaker 01

  And like, wow, you know, and then, and I'm thinking, it's not, it's an emotional thing that it's playing on. It's playing on, you know, sort of raw, basic emotions of not just fascination, but just kind of curiosity or just sort of images. And I'm weak, I'm, I'm falling into this trap. It's part of me, I can feel, I can sense the intoxication, the addiction and why it works. And it worked on me. And being able to look at myself and see that it was happening to me, that I was falling into these traps, now allows me to kind of step back and, and, and have some distance from it and control it

• 2:12:09Speaker 01

  and not fall into that and stop watching these videos. So you're probably gonna be a little bit repulsed by how I look at the modern world and you're gonna think, I can't live like that. I'm not telling you to change your life, I'm telling you to expand your life, to expand your mind and get outside of these little bubbles that you exist in.

• 2:12:33Speaker 00

  So much of what people are trying to achieve is using

• 2:12:39Speaker 00

  the modernly socially accepted and rewarded modes of reward.

• 2:12:47Speaker 00

  Accomplishment, status, respect, money, commercial opportunity, access, materialism, in an attempt to feel the way that you're trying to give them a more direct source of access to, like the wonder that you feel when you finally sell the business for a billion dollars or something, like, might be more easily accessible, might be more easily accessible by going for a long hike up a very difficult mountain without your phone.

• 2:13:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:16Speaker 00

  Like, it might, it might be. And if you were to look at the amount of time that, at least in the modern world, people have apportioned their efforts out to, tens of thousands of hours trying to build the business for this one moment, like, have you given the mountain a crack? That might be, that might be one way. So there's this recent essay I read by Adam Mastroianni, who's fucking wonderful. He runs Experimental History on Substack. And he says, "Incentives are for losers," is the title of this new piece. And what he's saying is, he uses this analogy of when he used to play baseball as a kid, and the posh kids would have their own helmet and their own kit, and it would be really shiny and really nice.

• 2:14:01Speaker 00

  But if, like him, you didn't have your own helmet, you'd be given one of the rec room helmets, and it would be sweaty and smell like it was worn by 10,000 10-year-olds before you, because it had been. And it would put it on, and it probably would disintegrate if it got hit by the ball or whatever. And he uses this analogy, he says, "If you don't arrive into the world with your own set of values, you are forced to put on somebody else's, you're forced to put on everyone else's in that same kind of a way." And the reason he says incentives are for losers is that, and this is like, kind of, I still don't know how I feel about this, but I'll put it to you. His position is, standing at the bottom of a ladder, or a number of ladders, like status, respect, acclaim, money, and looking at the top, you assume that the people at

• 2:14:43Speaker 00

  the top got there by choice, not by necessity or blind faith, that this is the thing that's going to fix it. But as you begin to kind of ascend it, you realize that these people are, as he says, spiritually chinless. So it's a lot of the people that have won the games that are widely accepted to be played, have played the games that are widely accepted because they didn't arrive with their own helmet. They just put on the helmet that everybody else was wearing. So he's quite critical, he's not saying you can't try and achieve mastery in something or success and acclaim and money, but that many of the people who do decide to make that their entire life's pursuit, didn't choose to do it. That's his sort of, that's his theory.

• 2:15:23Speaker 00

  And it makes me feel that, almost like anarchistic, middle finger rebellion thing, gives me the same kind of sense as when you're speaking about your new book, which is, hey, there's something deeper out there, and it's not for most people. There's a very, kind of, I'm sure, large, meaningfully large for selling books, but like, minority cohort of people that are like, yeah, I actually want to do this myself. I'm pissed off enough at the fact that life feels flat and empty and gray, that I'm gonna go and decide to pursue this thing. And it's the same with, with Adam's insight around incentives. Most of the incentives are kind of puppeting you. They're not taking you towards something that you want, they're hijacking a reward

• 2:16:07Speaker 00

  system that you're not aware of. And, uh, yeah, I think people getting pissed off at the fact that their life isn't as colorful as they would like it to be is a good first step.

• 2:16:17Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I wrote a book on human nature, Laws of Human Nature. It's about 560 pages, kind of dense, no imagery. It's kind of, at first glance, it's incredibly intimidating. And the point of the book is that you're an awful person. You've got these 18 dark qualities and you're not aware of. You are a narcissist, you are irrational, you have a dark side, you think in short term, you have tendencies to feel envy and grandiose, et cetera. Who's gonna want to read that book? That book has sold a one and a half million copies so far, and it hasn't been out that long.

• 2:16:54Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 2:16:55Speaker 01

  So I think people are hungrier than we imagine for these kind of things, because we're being spoon-fed the same crap over and over and over again. I see so many self-help books out there that it's just, that they're not gonna change your life, they're just falling into the same grooves on the record, that there's nothing new or different or surprising anymore in so many of aspects of our culture. Our films kind of look the same, everything kind of feels the same. I'm putting something out there that shouldn't feel the same, right? And maybe it'll surprise you, and maybe it'll shock you, because I tell you in the preface that the sublime is a shock.

• 2:17:36Speaker 01

  And there, if there's no shock, there is no sublime, right? You're awakening to something strange, exciting, weird, and even a little bit terrifying, right? And so you want that shock. You go and see horror movies that other people are playing around with your emotions, and have you, and have learned all the tricks for getting you, ah, for doing all that, right? And this is giving you that kind, same kind of shock, but it's real. It's your own experience, you're your own agent. It's not somebody making a film to, to kind of manipulate your mind, right? You're gonna get these shocks, these surprises.

• 2:18:17Speaker 01

  Who doesn't want surprise in their life, where everything is sort of the same? But you don't have to have surprise by necessarily going down the Zambezi River, right?

• 2:18:30Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:18:30Speaker 01

  I, I couldn't, I initially intended to write a book like that, but I can't, because I can barely walk out my front door. But sitting in my backyard, I'm seeing hummingbirds. And I go, wow, what a strange creature that is, a hummingbird. And I started researching them, and I started looking into how their physiology, and how they move, and how they hover, and how they go from flower to flower, and what the flowers must taste like and feel like, and what the world, how their eyes and how the world must look like to a hummingbird, and how Aztecs thought hummingbirds were gods, and if a soldier died, he was reborn as a hummingbird.

• 2:19:10Speaker 01

  I could have that experience of a shock of like, this is in my backyard, and how wondrous it is, and how insane it is, and how, how many, there's, there's a million hummingbirds out there of different species, you know? So you don't have to go, I mean, I would love to go down the Zambezi River, don't get me wrong. If I could, I would. Anyway.

• 2:19:31Speaker 00

  Robert Green, ladies and gentlemen. Robert, you're great. I appreciate you. I, you were maybe episode 45 or 60 or something on the podcast seven years ago, and then we-

• 2:19:42Speaker 01

  I thought I was one of your first.

• 2:19:44Speaker 00

  You were? Well, I mean, that was super duper early still for me, or maybe it was in the 20s. I can't remember. Can you search when, what was the first?

• 2:19:51Speaker 01

  Oh, it was before that, because we got introduced by our friend, our common friend, and she was trying to get me on your, this was like, over Skype.

• 2:19:57Speaker 00

  Abby. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember. I think it was, it might have even been early, it might have been in the 20s. It was a long time, it was at least seven years ago. It was at the very least seven years ago, and I appreciate you and your time and your preparedness to stare into the abyss and have it stare back to you as you keep on writing these things.

• 2:20:15Speaker 01

  Well, thank you.

• 2:20:15Speaker 00

  And trying to survive. Um, where should people go to keep up to date with whatever it is that you've got going on?

• 2:20:20Speaker 01

  Um, well, I have a website, it's kind of one I've had for god knows how long. It's called powerseductionandwar.com. The "and" is spelled, powerseductionandwar.com. There you'll find links to Instagram, TikTok.

• 2:20:35Speaker 02

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• 2:21:05Speaker 01

  All the things I tell you not to pay attention to. I'm here guiding you to, and my YouTube channel and all that stuff. And then the book will be out, I don't know when you're gonna post this, but the book will be out, I believe, November 10th.

• 2:21:18Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 2:21:18Speaker 01

  So look forward then.

• 2:21:20Speaker 00

  You're the best. Appreciate you, Robert. Until next time.

• 2:21:22Speaker 01

  Thank you, Chris. Thank you so much, can't wait.

• 2:21:23Speaker 00

  All right. Goodbye, my beauties. Dude, yes.